Welcome back to the To the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. Oil prices are spiking at $100 a barrel.

The war continues to spread. Donald Trump is apparently decided he's going to lie about the bombing of the school children in Iran, meanwhile demanding unconditional surrender while declaring mission accomplished. Where are we and what kind of a week is this going to be?

And joining us to start off the week, our good friend Nicholas Grossman from the University of Illinois, the editor of Arc Digital.

Nicholas, how are you?

I'm doing pretty well, all things considered. How are you?

All things considered. Well, I'm going to spare everybody my rant about daylight savings time.

It's an annual event around here, but we have too many other things to start with. Could we start with something that I think that some people are going to think is relatively trivial?

And I wrote about this in my newsletter yesterday. There are things that are trivial, and yet the

triviality of mind of the people who are running this war is not trivial. We had a couple of incidents.

Donald Trump shows up at Dover Air Force Base on Sunday, wearing that Trump-branded USA cap.

Again, in the great scheme of things, not great, but as an act of just overwhelming disrespect.

But I want to remind people of something that happened last week, and I know you saw this, Nicholas.

The White House official account put out

these videos, these hype videos, Justice the American Way, captioned read of a video posted on

Thursday night, along with an American flag and fire emoji. Video includes clips from superhero

movies, Top Gun, Braveheart, you know, electronic music

underneath the clips. It ends with a voiceover saying, flawless victory, which is audio from the

victory from the game, Mortal Kombat. Then because they thought this was so funny on Friday,

they put out another video from, you know, Grand Theft Auto with the caption, Ah, bleep, here we go again.

You know, as Tammy Duckworth, you know, Iraq veterans, Senator from Illinois said, you know, war is not a fucking video game.

And just the juvenile mentality behind the fact that the White House would post that,

the official White House account.

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