U.S. war propaganda about Iran has sunk to the level of low-caliber lies. The U.S. empire is getting more and more bold about exposing its true tyrannical nature
Steve Witkoff, U.S. envoy to the Middle East, with President Donald Trump at United Nations headquarters in New York in September 2025. (White House /Daniel Torok)
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
Reading by Tim Foley
They’re not even trying anymore.
U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News in late February that Iran is “probably a week away” from having the materials necessary to make a nuclear bomb — a line that Iran hawks have been falsely repeating for over three decades.
It’s such a transparently bogus claim that even The Jerusalem Post dunked on Witkoff for making it, quipping that “The U.S. envoy left out that Iran currently has no access to its material, no machines to enrich it, and no weapons program to use it for any operational purpose.”
Lol even the Jerusalem Post is calling out Witkoff for his absolute bs here https://t.co/h5sdB9Wh5I pic.twitter.com/TDGf5S7Qth
— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) February 22, 2026
This is the guy supposedly assigned by the White House to the task of establishing peace in the Middle East, churning out the most fuzzbrained justifications for war with Iran you could possibly imagine.
The New York Post had an article going viral recently with the flamboyantly propagandistic headline “Iranian forces hack out wombs of female protesters to hide horrific sexual abuse,” which would sound absurd at a glance even you didn’t know anything about atrocity propaganda. Like they said “Let’s mutilate these women’s reproductive organs so that nobody thinks we horrifically abused them!” How does that even make sense?
The article is of course based on no evidence whatsoever, citing nothing but a NewsNation report full of anonymously sourced assertions. The central claim of The New York Post headline is attributed solely to “An Iranian refugee who spoke to NewsNation under a condition of anonymity.”
In a post-Iraq invasion world, these sorts of reports deserve nothing but a scoff and a dismissal. After all the lies we’ve been told about every U.S. war of aggression over the years, any claims made about a government that Washington wants to topple need to be flatly rejected unless they are backed by rock-solid, independently verifiable proof. That proof never arrives. U.S. wars are always justified by lies, psyops, and misinformation.
Iranian forces hack out wombs of female protesters to hide horrific sexual abuse: report https://t.co/PlbzoHzsXz pic.twitter.com/1qIYNA8VKo
— New York Post (@nypost) February 21, 2026
But these aren’t the usual caliber of lies. We normally get better-quality war propaganda than this. This slop is designed to appeal to the dumbest people in the dumbest parts of the United States, and to people who already want to go to war with Iran.
Consent for the Iraq invasion was manufactured by many months of high-energy media saturation designed to harness the power of post-9/11 hysteria about the possibility of foreign attacks on American soil. This is just a few propaganda rags and government officials farting into a microphone and calling us idiots.
And yet the war machinery is rolling out anyway, going to the brink of a horrific war of immense consequence which Americans overwhelmingly oppose, and they don’t even have the decency to tell believable lies about it.
It can’t say good things about the future that they’re not even pretending to care what the American people want anymore. The U.S, empire is getting more and more bold about exposing its true tyrannical nature, feeling less and less need to manufacture consent before engaging in mass military slaughter.
I guess we can still have hope that this will help open some eyes to the dire need for revolution in the heart of the empire.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from Caitlin’s Newsletter and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
How about :
War Is Strength
Tattoos maketh the man
All for one and One for all starts a war with The Three Musketeers .
When stockpiles run short .
Could you imagine a musket on a drone .
“Give me an adequate army ,,, and I will undertake, within 30 years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when if gets cold, or any other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the state. Of course, even when these beliefs had been generated, people would not put the kettle in the refrigerator when they wanted it to boil. That cold water makes water boil would be a Sunday truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted out in daily life. What would happen would be that any verbal denial of the mystic doctrine would be made illegal, and obstinate heretics would be ‘frozen’ at the stake. No person who did not enthusiastically accept the official doctrine would be allowed to teach or have any position of power. Only the very highest officials, in their cups, would whisper to each other what rubbish it all is; then they would laugh and drink again.”
–Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish.
Concerning Bertrand Russel’s comment”…not to be acted out in daily life…. “Evangelical Protestants I’ve worked with denied “works” altogether. They insisted that “faith only” was the creed of Protestants. I’m not one, so it’s tough to make *such a sweeping conclusion* as the one I just made. Also, I’ve never had a Catholic education either; although I believe the above “creed” is not so for Catholics.
So what, the Gulf of Tonkin was ‘High Quality Lies?’ That would appear to be the inference from saying that American war propaganda has ‘sunk’ to ‘low quality lies’. That we used to tell ‘high quality lies’, instead, before we sank to our current level.
When it comes to the fables told at the beginnings of America’s many wars, I believe that there were fights at Lexington and Concorde, and I believe that the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter. But, beyond that, America has a history of telling fables at the beginnings of wars.
Yes, what can we do to take advantage of war profiteers dropping the usual contorted lies and going for absolutely science-fiction reasons for menacing the entire world? A prop-less propaganda?!
The most succinctly rational discourse I have heard on this most sadly sordid day.
At the tender age of 71 living in the dankest hole of the Imperium….Wasilla Alaska, I doth thank the Gods that my parents were unable to afford me the privilege of a higher education. Having failed miserably in high school and dropping out before the horrors of Amerikanner “Civics” class was forcefully injected into my admittedly underdeveloped cranium, I was able to escape the Matrix. As a result I appear to be objectively less susceptible to the malign effects of propaganda thrust upon the denizens of “The Shining City on the Hill”. In closing I would admonish my fellow sojourners in their quest for truth, to believe your own lying eyes.
Comment on the “horrific sexual abuse” propaganda:
This kind of sick propanda, especially when there is a sexual theme, is most likely to come from the sick, preverted, depraved minds of Israeli genocidal propagandists.
A revolution in the Empire of War Greed and Hypocrisy?
Are you kidding?
Too many somnambulists.
“You supply the prose poems, I’ll supply the War!”
–‘Citizen Kane’, by Orson Welles, released 1941.
(although today regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time, at the time it was a commercial failure because an American Oligarch of the time blocked many theaters from showing the film in the Land of the Free.)