News Brief: Very Serious New Yorker Article Launders Biden Officials' Responsibility for Gaza Genocide

**Adam Johnson** (0:00)
Hi, y'all, this is Adam with a quick note before we begin this news brief. I wanted to let you know that I have an upcoming book tour in August in San Francisco in Chicago, and I wanted to let you know what those dates were. On August 10th, I will be at Book Passage in Corday Madera at 6 p.m. Pacific Time. On August 11th, I'll be at the Oakland Public Library. On August 12th, I'll be at Medicine for Nightmares in San Francisco at seven o'clock. And on August 13th, I'll be at the Middle East Children's Alliance Headquarters in Berkeley, California at 6 p.m. Again, all the royalties from the book do go to the Middle East Children's Alliance. So we are doing an event together on August 13th. But also a week from there, they also have an office in Chicago. So I'm doing another event with them on August 20th at Pilsen Community Books at 6:30 p.m. That's August 20th at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago. And that'll also be with the Middle East Children's Alliance. So if you can, please come and check those out. And of course, as always, you can get the book at finer bookstores everywhere. It's called How to Sell a Genocide. The Media's Complicity and the Destruction of Gaza. Thank you so much.

**Nima Shirazi** (1:07)
Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.

**Adam Johnson** (1:11)
I'm Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (1:12)
You can follow Citations Needed on Blue Sky and Twitter at CitationsPod, Facebook, Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com/citationsneededpodcast.
All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. We do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled episodes of Citations Needed. And today, we are going to talk about a blockbuster report, I'll call it a blockbuster reports, probably what they would want me to call it from the New Yorker magazine, which was published on July 20th, 2026 by New Yorker writer, correspondent David D Kirkpatrick. And the article, many, many thousands of words is headlined, quote, How Biden Enabled Israel's Aggression Toward Gaza and Iran. The sub headline is, quote, Top officials from the previous administration now express regret over their failure to reign in Netanyahu, end quote. Now, if it seems like that headline and sub headline was created in a lab to elicit a citations needed episode or news brief, or if you look back at our catalog for the past almost three years, many, many episodes and news briefs, that would seem to make sense because this article really does everything that we have been anticipating and discussing for many years now. And to discuss this, we are very excited to have back on the show Kaleem Hawa, writer and organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, a transnational independent grassroots movement of young Palestinians dedicated to the liberation of their homeland and people. Kaleem, thank you so much for joining us again on Citations Needed.

**Kaleem Hawa** (2:56)
Thank you both for having me.

**Nima Shirazi** (2:57)
So let's get rolling with this. There's so much to talk about in this article, how it launders the actual policies of the Biden administration acting as if, you know, how could we possibly have known what was going to happen? But before we get there, I want to ask both of you, Adam and Kaleem, if you had to guess, there's a single very important word that is missing from this entire article. It does not appear. Can you take a guess at what that word is?

**Adam Johnson** (3:24)
Well, I mean, it's genocide, but more importantly, or perhaps more revealingly, and the headline is Aggression towards Gaza. So there's sort of this aggression, this nebulous aggression, which really should signal to you what the MO of this article is. And we'll bring Kaleem in on this. And it actually happened to be that my blood was boiling over this article. And then he happened to reach out and said, hey, are you guys doing anything on this? And I said, can you come on and talk about it? And so kind of we're talking. Everybody was angry at the same time, because it's very clear what this is. And so we're going to lay out what I think it's clearly is, which is a reputation launderdob for Blinken and Sullivan in particular.
And probably John Finer as well.

**Nima Shirazi** (3:59)
Brett McGurk, incidentally, Biden's White House coordinator for the Middle East during the Biden administration, actually comes off as like a total psychopath.

**Adam Johnson** (4:07)
Right, because everything's being fed by Blinken and Sullivan. The article's very clearly curated by them.