So, I didn’t hold back in this 7-minute rebuttal video, above, in which I lay out why Shapiro’s movie is actually very Islamophobic and why the Daily Wire co-founder is totally wrong about the number of Muslim bad guys in Hollywood. I also break down the real reason why Shapiro and the Daily Wire are making films about ISIS right now: to distract from Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

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Watch the full video above to see me bring plenty of receipts on how this new movie is just the latest example of Hollywood’s overwhelmingly negative depictions of Muslims and Arabs.

We are making this video free to watch, without a paywall, but a free press isn’t. If you’d like to see more videos like these, please consider upgrading your subscription or donating to support Zeteo’s work and never hit a paywall again.

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Lindsey Graham, who never met a Middle East country he didn’t want to invade, “passed away from a brief and sudden illness” on Saturday night, according to a short statement from his office. Media outlets are reporting that emergency medical services offered CPR to a man suffering from “cardiac arrest” at a Capitol Hill home owned by the Republican senator shortly before 9pm ET last night.

The 71-year-old Graham, who was first elected to the Senate in 2002, had been scheduled to appear on NBC News’s ‘Meet the Press’ this morning, after returning from a trip to Ukraine. His sudden death, notes the New York Times, “comes less than four months before he was set to appear on the ballot as a strong favorite to win a fifth term.”

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Tributes have been pouring in for Graham, including from Donald Trump and genocidal Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who said: “Today, Israel has lost one of its greatest friends.”

A proud neoconservative hawk from South Carolina and a shamelessly sycophantic ally of the president, Graham was perhaps one of the most controversial, outspoken, and well-known Republicans in the country.

So here he is, Lindsey Graham, in his own very provocative, often offensive, and typically inconsistent words, on everything from “leveling” Gaza to threatening Cuba to fawning over Donald J. Trump to slamming Ted Cruz:

On Trump Then

“He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” (December 8, 2015)

“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.” (May 3, 2016)

“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. Oh my God, I hate it. But today, all I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” (January 6, 2021)

On Trump Now

“The greatest president of all time.” (January 6, 2026)

“They should change the Nobel Prize to the Trump Prize.”​ (May 27, 2026)

“Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.” (June 9, 2026)

On Trump’s Impeachment Trial

“I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.” (December 14, 2019)

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On 2020 Election Denial

“If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again. President Trump should not concede.” (November 8, 2020)

On Trump’s ‘Go Back’ Tweets to Four Non-White Congresswomen

“I don’t think it’s racist to say. I don’t think a Somali refugee embracing Trump would be asked to go back.” (July 18, 2019)

On Assassinating Putin

“The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.” (March 3, 2022)

On Pro-Israel Donors

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It’s a common tactic used by Israel and its supporters – launching accusations of lying and antisemitism against those who dare to call out their war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

But in his latest 60-second rant, Mehdi asks the question of who we should really believe about what’s happening in Gaza, and he lists them all against the clock!

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The 2026 World Cup in the United States is off to an unmistakably racist start. A Somali referee barred. An Iraqi player reportedly interrogated for seven hours. Uzbek players patted down and aggressively screened outside the stadium. And then there is Iran: exiled to Mexico, despite all three of its group-stage matches being played in the United States. “Our team is the most oppressed one in the whole World Cup,” Iran head coach Amir Ghalenoei said earlier this week.

On Friday, the Trump administration took that racism and xenophobia to the next level, but, thankfully, made a fool of itself in the process.

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The groypers apparently moonlighting as the Department of Homeland Security’s social media team tried to jump on the World Cup bandwagon with this far-right, anti-immigrant tweet, ahead of the USMNT’s clash with Australia:

Got that? “Our soil. Defend the homeland. One nation. One homeland. One team.”

First, what a bizarre slogan for a host nation of the World Cup to use while describing a home game: “Defend the Homeland”? As if other teams playing at the World Cup are… invaders? Second, notice how the DHS tagline bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“one people, one realm, one leader”). I have written elsewhere about the way in which the Trump administration’s social media accounts “can’t stop posting Nazi imagery and memes… and leaning heavily into fascist aesthetics.”

But the funniest part is that the image itself completely undermines the accompanying far-right message. It is a picture of three non-white American players (Chris Richards, Sergiño Dest, Folarin Balogun), one of whom (Balogun) scored twice in the USMNT’s 4-1 demolition of Paraguay at the start of the tournament.

Balogun is an American by virtue of.. wait for it… birthright citizenship.

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The Monaco striker was born in Brooklyn in 2001, but only by accident. His parents were visiting New York from the UK, where they lived. When Balogun’s mother, seven months pregnant with a self-described “massive” belly, tried to board the return flight, she was blocked by a “concerned airline staffer.” So Balogun was born in the U.S. before returning to the UK at 2 months old.

To be clear, if the Trump administration had its way, Balogun would not be able to play for the United States. He would either be playing for England, where he was raised, or Nigeria, where his parents are from. And, in the coming weeks, if the conservative-dominated Supreme Court accepts the Trump administration’s claims and guts the 14th Amendment’s long-standing guarantee of birthright citizenship to all children born in the U.S., there will be no more Baloguns in the future.

But it isn’t just Balogun. Consider the rest of the U.S. starting lineup for Friday’s game against Australia. Four other non-white USMNT players on that pitch in Seattle also made a mockery of the dumb DHS tweet.

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As Donald Trump prepares to sign off on a much-awaited and much-needed memorandum of understanding, or MOU, to end his war against Iran on Friday, a very simple truth needs to be recognized and acknowledged by each and every one of us: Donald Trump lost his war against Iran.

Yes, he lost. Badly.

He failed. Miserably.

He was defeated. Overwhelmingly.

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Don’t take my word for it. Take Donald Trump’s. Look at what he himself said were the goals of this war from the very beginning. On Feb. 28, the same day he launched his illegal and unprovoked assault on the Islamic Republic, the president posted an eight-minute video address to his Truth Social account.

Three and a half months later, only two questions matter: What did he promise in that address? And have those promises been kept?

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Do you want to know what total impunity actually looks like? Look at Israel. It got away with a genocide in Gaza, and now it’s unleashing a similar genocidal campaign against Shia communities in southern Lebanon.

Right now, hundreds of thousands of Shia civilians are being displaced, bombed, and forced to flee. Their villages are emptied. Their homes are reduced to rubble. And Israel’s defense minister says they cannot return.

Where is the anger in the West, or in the Global South, or even in the Muslim world? Where are the emergency summits, the outraged headlines, the moral indignation that we saw when, for example, ISIS was carrying out a genocide against the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria?

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Think I’m being hyperbolic? First, consider the relevant sections of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a “religious group,” including “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Next, consider the recent reporting from both the New York Times and Drop Site News, which reveal how Israeli forces have issued evacuation orders across large swaths of southern Lebanon, explicitly targeting Shia communities who make up the majority of the local population.

Wouldn’t this be labeled “ethnic cleansing” if it were any other part of the world? Here is an entire population, an entire religious group, being targeted, displaced, and massacred simply because of who they are and where they live. The current Israeli approach to the Shias of southern Lebanon is collective, indiscriminate, and chillingly familiar: a community of innocents conflated with a security threat. “Every home in southern Lebanon, the Shia homes, are command and control centers,” an Israeli military spokesman told LBC radio in the UK last month, without offering a shred of evidence.

But it gets even worse.

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Here at Zeteo, we thought we could perhaps get through one work week without Donald Trump’s White House – once again! – calling me a “moron” for publicly stating objectively true things.

We were wrong. What was my crime this time?

On Thursday, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, took to social media to claim that “Americans Agree that Operation Epic Fury Is an Overwhelming Success” – meaning the president’s disastrous war in Iran.

I pointed out that the senior Trump apparatchik was lying, and had in fact shared “an article showing only MAGA Republicans support the war.”

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In response to this, “@RapidResponse47,” a Trump White House propaganda account on Twitter blasted me as a “moron” and suggested I was “trembling too much at the idea that Americans support killing terrorists.”

Of course, that’s not what’s happening – civilians are suffering as a result of Trump’s regional bloodbath, and poll after poll shows this war is uniquely unpopular at home.

And the White House made clear how unpopular the war is with its own press release. In it, the administration pointed people to a relatively rosy Washington Post article that still notes more people “would prefer that the strikes stop than continue,” and that the paper’s average of recent polls show “Americans opposing US strikes 50% to 38%.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement!

The Iran war – started by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is now entering its fourth week. It has been an unmitigated disaster from the beginning, and it’s strangling the global economy. The president appears to be preparing to deploy US ground troops to Iran, for a mission that looks like sheer suicide.

As we’ve reported at Zeteo, the war is starting to tear apart the MAGA elite, and is already a political catastrophe at home for Trump and the Republican Party – and they know it. And America’s allies have decided not to join us on this so-called “excursion.”

The president and his party want to silence anyone in the media willing to admit what a colossal shitshow this all is. We refuse to be silent.

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In recent months, the Trump White House has called Zeteo “a fake news blogsite run by left-wing hacks that no one should take seriously.”

The White House issued a statement calling one of our political correspondents “a deranged hack who couldn’t even hold a job at Rolling Stone and is now writing for a Greta Thunberg blog.”

And the Trump administration routinely comes after me, and tries to smear me as a terrorist-loving “moron.”

Clearly, Zeteo is getting under their skin.

But the only way we can fight back is together.

So if you’re able, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Zeteo today to support us and help grow independent media. If you’re already a paid subscriber (thank you kindly!), you can also consider making a donation to Zeteo.

Every paid subscription, every donation, every financial contribution, big or small, sends a message to this authoritarian, warmongering administration and this country’s ruling party and its enablers that we won’t be bullied, we won’t be silenced, and we won’t stop telling the truth about fascism, genocide, illegal wars, and other moral and literal atrocities.

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The Trump administration wants to wear out everyone – in the media, in the opposition, in the electorate. They aren’t getting tired yet. Neither are we.

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My crime? Daring to point out that Donald Trump’s claim to reporters that Iranians are not only “among the most evil people ever on Earth” but that they also “cut babies’ heads off” is flatly false.

First, zero Iranians participated in the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, and while Iran does have a history of supporting Hamas, there is no credible evidence – as even then-US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken conceded in 2023 – that the Iranian government was involved in those attacks. In fact, the US intelligence community believes Iran’s leaders “were surprised by the Hamas attack.”

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Second, no babies had their heads cut off on Oct. 7 – by Iranians, Palestinians, or anyone else. The macabre claim that Israeli babies were beheaded has been repeatedly investigated and debunked by everyone from Le Monde to Haaretz to CNN. It’s pure atrocity propaganda, originally used to justify mass slaughter in Gaza and now being bizarrely deployed to defend similar killings in Iran.

Trump isn’t the first US president to push the ‘beheaded babies’ hoax - Joe Biden falsely claimed to have seen pictures of the (fictitious) decapitated Israeli infants. But Trump is the first president to illegally attack Iran. And he is also the first president to viciously lambast and threaten the media for daring to ask questions of the people in power.

Right now, Trump and his cronies won’t stop attacking my colleagues and me as the conflict in the Middle East escalates.

Why?

They want silence.

They want fear.

They want journalists and media outlets who fall in line.

I’m not one of them. Zeteo isn’t one of them.

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If you’ve followed my work over the years, you know I’ve never been afraid to speak truth to power – whether it’s presidents, prime ministers, or billionaires.

But here’s the reality: when powerful people come after me, it’s not really about me.

It’s about intimidating anyone in the media who dares to challenge their lies and gaslighting.

And the only way we fight back is together.

So if you’re able, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber to Zeteo today to support us and help grow independent media.

If you’re already a paid subscriber (thank you!), you can also consider making a donation to Zeteo.

Donate to Zeteo

Every paid subscription, every donation, every financial contribution, big or small, sends a message to this authoritarian, warmongering administration that we won’t be bullied, we won’t be silenced, and we won’t stop telling the truth about fascism, genocide, and illegal wars.

Thank you for standing with Zeteo.

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Tucker Carlson’s interview with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has gone viral, with 2.5 million views on Twitter and almost 3 million views on YouTube.

It has also provoked a major global diplomatic incident, with more than a dozen Muslim-majority countries issuing a joint statement describing Huckabee’s comments defending Israel’s “biblical right” to take over the Middle East as “dangerous and inflammatory.”

Carlson’s tough questioning of Huckabee was a massive indictment of our mainstream media. Why can’t Sunday show interviewers ask follow-up questions when US officials make fantastical claims on behalf of Israel, in the way that Carlson did? Why can’t nightly news anchors ask pro-Israel officials to justify Zionist claims to the land of Palestine, in the way that Carlson did?

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Nevertheless, over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour interview in Israel, Huckabee made multiple false claims that even Carlson failed to challenge or rebut. Sounding more like Israel’s ambassador to America than America’s ambassador to Israel, Huckabee produced fake statistics and bogus timelines while misrepresenting his own record.

So here are the top 11 lies that Huckabee told Carlson, debunked by yours truly:

1.

TUCKER CARLSON: “Jonathan Pollard. I’m just going to show the name to you and have you explain.”

MIKE HUCKABEE: “I’m glad you asked. Interestingly, there’s been a lot of things about it. You’re the first person who has asked me about it, which I find amazing. So I’m glad you did.”

TUCKER CARLSON: “Really?”

MIKE HUCKABEE: “Yeah. The very first person.”

A brazen, easily debunked lie from Huckabee, within moments of the interview beginning. As journalist Yashar Ali noted, Israeli reporter Neria Kraus had already confronted Huckabee in January over his controversial meeting with Jonathan Pollard – the former US intelligence analyst convicted of spying for Israel. That was just weeks ago. And what did Huckabee do then? Exactly what he did with Carlson: attack the New York Times for reporting on it, dodge the question, and change the subject.

2.

“They were attacked again in 1956. They won the war. They were attacked again in 1967 by five countries.”

In 1956, the Suez crisis was the result of a British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. The war began on Oct. 29 when the Israeli Air Force launched a series of attacks on Egyptian positions across the Sinai – and not vice versa.

In 1967, the Six-Day War began on June 5 with the Israeli Air Force mounting a surprise attack on Egypt’s airfields – and not vice versa. The Israelis claimed it was a preemptive war to prevent an impending invasion by Egypt. Yet, in 1982, in a speech to the National Defense College, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin admitted: “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that [President Gamal Abdel] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

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3.

“It was a declaration – an assumption and a declaration that was done by Lord Balfour in Great Britain. At that time, this land was under the British Mandate. And he said the Jews should have the land that was theirs from 3,800 years ago.”

The Balfour Declaration was issued by Lord Balfour, the then British foreign secretary and a card-carrying antisemite, in November 1917. The British Mandate, or administration of the territories of Palestine and Transjordan, did not begin until the San Remo conference in April 1920, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. When Lord Balfour issued his declaration, Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire.

It is also worth noting here that the Balfour Declaration did indeed call for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, but also added that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

4.

TUCKER CARLSON: “There are many more Christians in Qatar than there are in Israel.”

MIKE HUCKABEE: “That’s not true.”

It is true. There are almost double the number of Christians in Qatar (about 340,000 in 2020) as there are in Israel (about 182,000 in 2022).

5.

“Well, the only numbers we have come from this dubious entity called the Gaza Health Ministry. You know who that is? It’s Hamas.”

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Dear LeBron,

You have built a reputation, perhaps even a brand, on the idea that silence is complicity.

You made that clear in 2017 when you loudly condemned far-right violence in Charlottesville and dismissed Donald Trump as “the so-called president.” You made that clear in 2020 when you boldly wore your support for Black Lives Matter on your chest, as you took the knee with your teammates. You made that clear in 2022 when you passionately denounced the overturning of Roe v. Wade and said it was all about “power and control.”

You were right. Silence is complicity.

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So where has your voice been for the past two and a half years as tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been bombed, shot, and starved to death? As parents dug their children’s bodies out of the rubble with their bare hands? As doctors operated without anesthesia inside besieged hospitals?

Why have we heard nothing from you?

In fact, worse than nothing. This past weekend, we heard praise from you for the very same country that has been doing the mass killing and starving in Gaza. “Hopefully someday I can make it over there,” you said, referring to the state of Israel. “Like I said, I’ve never been over there, but I’ve heard nothing but great things.”

“Nothing but great things”... about Israel? Seriously?

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Quiz question: Which member of the Trump Cabinet has executed the most shameless series of political contortions – morphing from Trump critic to Trump sycophant – in a desperate bid to stay on the president’s good side?

Is it Vice President JD Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler”? Is it Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also compared Trump to Hitler and compared MAGA voters to the Nazis? Is it Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who described Trump as a “con artist” and mocked the size of his manhood?

My view? It’s Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence (DNI).

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On Jan. 6, 2021, after an armed mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol and tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, Gabbard took to Twitter. The four-term Democratic congresswoman had officially retired from Congress three days earlier, but she wasn’t willing to turn a blind eye to the violent insurrection that had just occurred at her former workplace.

“Those who stormed the US Capitol today are criminals who must be condemned and denounced,” she tweeted. “They are not patriots,” she continued, before adding: “Nor are those who encouraged them.”

A few weeks later, she again denounced the “mob who stormed the capitol to try to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional responsibilities” and called them “domestic enemies of our country.”

Got that? Gabbard was opposed not just to Jan. 6 insurrectionists but to those who “encouraged them” (Donald Trump!) and to their stated goal of preventing Congress “from carrying out its constitutional responsibilities.” Gabbard, who had publicly congratulated Joe Biden on his victory two months earlier, seemed to have no time for Trump’s election lies or MAGA’s conspiracy theories.

Fast forward to last week, and to Fulton County, Georgia. FBI agents searched the main election office there, seizing records and documents related to the 2020 election. And who should pop up in the background, in a baseball cap? Yes, Tulsi Gabbard.

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Tom Llamas – who replaced Lester Holt as anchor and managing editor of ‘NBC Nightly News’ less than a year ago – went to the White House for what NBC billed as an “extended interview” with President Trump ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl.

It lasted 49 minutes.

And yes, once again, I watched every excruciating second so you don’t have to. (NBC also posted a full transcript online, in case you want to witness what a journalistic surrender looks like in print.)

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure what required more discipline – sitting through Trump’s typical torrent of lies and nonsense, or watching Llamas repeatedly let him get away with it. By the end, I couldn’t even tell who I was angrier at: the serial liar in the Oval Office, or the professional journalist sitting opposite him, nodding along as if “truth” is something subjective, or worse, partisan.

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The most damning part of the interview, however, wasn’t what Trump said. It was what Llamas never asked.

Because somehow – somehow – NBC News managed to air a 49-minute sit-down with the president of the United States and didn’t ask him a single question about the biggest story in the country right now: the latest Epstein files dump.

Not. A. Single. One.

I couldn’t quite believe it when I watched it. I had to go and check the NBC transcript. The New York Times found that Trump, his wife, and his property are mentioned more than 38,000 times across 5,300 of the DOJ Epstein files. So how does a top TV journalist sit down with the president for almost an hour and not ask him about any of that? Not ask him, for example, about the document in the files that includes sworn testimony, under penalty of perjury, from someone who alleged that Trump threatened to kill her if she exposed Epstein’s sexual abuse? Not ask him about his well-documented and close friendship with the most notorious child sex trafficker in American history?

To be clear: there was a single moment towards the end of the interview in which Llamas did mention the word “Epstein,” but Trump immediately interrupted him, talked over him, and changed the subject to the Clintons, after which Llamas… just moved on.

TOM LLAMAS: The Epstein —

DONALD TRUMP: — the Epstein thing, which turned out that I have nothing to do – and they did – about Epstein. And they said, “Do you think it’s terrible what” – you know, with the subpoenas and everything and they’re disobeying the subpoenas. And I actually said it’s a shame. You have an ex-president and you have, you know, the president’s wife and secretary of state. And I said it’s a shame. It is a shame.

Then there were the softball questions. With Trump, they’re the journalistic equivalent of gifting an arsonist a box of matches and asking him for his “thoughts” on fire safety. As I’ve argued before, far too many anchors and reporters interviewing this president seem incapable of resisting what I call the “opinion question”: soliciting Trump’s take on the news of the day, as if he were just another cable pundit and not the most powerful man on Earth – a man whose record demands scrutiny and challenge, not deference and chumminess.

Consider this sample of actual Llamas questions to Trump:

• “Mr. President, speaking of Minneapolis, what did you learn?

• “You said ICE made some mistakes. What – what were the mistakes?”

• “What should Americans expect going forward?”

• “Which cities are you headed to next?”

• “Most Americans say they don’t like how you’ve handled immigration… How do you change their minds?”

• “What’s your response to [Joe Rogan]?”

• “Have you ever used ChatGPT?”

• “Will you endorse in the 2028 presidential primary?

There were hardly any challenging questions at all. Zero follow-ups that put Trump on the defensive or caught him off guard. The proverbial Martian landing on Earth and watching this entire 49-minute interview would have no idea that this president is a serial liar, in the midst of multiple controversies and scandals, and has spent recent weeks hurling vicious racial abuse at non-white Americans and posting deranged conspiracy theories online in the middle of the night. On Wednesday evening, a deeply abnormal president was, once again, normalized by our mainstream and supposedly “liberal” media.

NBC News later produced an online “fact-check” of the interview, highlighting and debunking what the authors of that fact-check described as Trump’s “false, exaggerated or misleading claims” to Llamas.

But, I’m sorry, what is the point of producing a separate fact-check after the interview is over? Why not fact-check him in real time? Why not have an anchor who is equipped with the facts and willing to tell Trump to his face, during the interview itself, that he is making false, exaggerated, or misleading claims? Why do it in an online article afterwards that will likely get 1% of the audience of the televised ‘Nightly News’ interview, and which won’t affect Donald Trump in any way whatsoever?

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As CNN’s in-house fact-checker Daniel Dale has pointed out, it isn’t actually that hard to fact-check Trump in real time. Why? Because he tells the same lies, again and again, from one interview to another. So Llamas should have been ready for these particular gems from the president:

• “I inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country.” (FALSE!)

• “We have 11,888 murderers that [Joe] Biden and his group led into our country.” (FALSE!)

• “They allowed to come into our country people from their mental institutions, people from insane asylums.” (FALSE!)

• “I won three times.” (FALSE!)

And yet, as CNN’s Dale also observed in his own fact-check of the NBC interview: “Over and over, when the president repeated lies that were debunked months or years ago, Llamas responded simply ‘right’ or ‘yeah’ – or didn’t acknowledge them at all.” (Llamas said “right” more than 30 times and “yeah” more than 130 times, over the course of the interview.)

At one point, Trump falsely claimed that “very few” prices had not fallen over the course of his second term, and Llamas… agreed with his false claim. “Yeah, very few, I get it.”

At another point, Trump brazenly denied that he said he wanted to “nationalize” our elections, when we all heard him say it, but Llamas didn’t push back at all.

It gets worse. Once the sit-down part of the interview was done, Trump and Llamas did a tour of the Oval Office while the NBC anchor delivered this zinger: “Do you think at one point people will talk about you when they talk about presidents like Washington and Lincoln? Is that something you think is gonna happen?”

To call this a journalistic dereliction of duty is an understatement of epic proportions. If you get the opportunity to interview the president and you can’t ask about Jeffrey Epstein but can ask about ChatGPT, then you have failed at your job. You can’t claim to be holding power accountable if you won’t even ask the obvious question everyone at home is already asking.

But this isn’t just about NBC’s Tom Llamas. Or CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, who also did a truly awful job interviewing Trump in November 2025. Or former ABC correspondent Terry Moran, who told the president they could “agree to disagree” about a clearly doctored image Trump was holding up during a White House interview in April 2025.

This is about our mainstream media as a whole protecting access, rather than practicing journalism. This is about TV networks mistaking “we got the interview” for “we did the journalism.” Above all else, this is about a free press that is directly threatened by the president of the United States but doesn’t dare call him out to his face. They don’t want to risk losing the next booking, the next scoop, the next “exclusive.”

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Less than three minutes into my November 2023 interview with Mark Regev, then spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on MSNBC’s Peacock streaming service, he became agitated and began interrupting me.

“The ‘Hamas-controlled’ Ministry of Health,” he interjected, after I cited figures from the Gaza Health Ministry on the number of Palestinians killed since Oct 7. “No, you can’t say that. You have to say the ‘Hamas-controlled’ Health Ministry… Please, tell the viewers the truth. That information is provided by Hamas.”

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Every time I tried to mention that 11,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza according to the Ministry of Health, Regev shouted back: “Hamas’s numbers! Hamas’s numbers!”

At one point, I noted how in two previous Israeli attacks on Gaza, in 2009 and 2014, “the Israeli military’s death tolls matched Hamas’s Health Ministry death toll, and the UN, human rights groups, all agree that those numbers are credible.”

“Those numbers are provided by Hamas,” the dead-eyed Regev replied. “There is no independent verification.”

That interview happened to be the first time I came up against this particular Israeli defense of their mass slaughter in Gaza: You can’t trust the Ministry of Health’s casualty figures because it is Hamas-controlled… it is Hamas-run… it is Hamas!

Nor, of course, would it be the last. Over the course of this genocide, I have debated supporters of Israel on cable news, on YouTube, on social media, and at live events. Former Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy. Ex-Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus. Retired US Army Major John Spencer. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.

Each and every one of them has pushed this line about the ‘Hamas-run’ Health Ministry in Gaza being unreliable, untrustworthy, unbelievable. Each and every one of them questioned, doubted, even dismissed the number of dead confirmed by the Health Ministry.

It was all a lie. A performance. Propaganda, plain and simple.

We now know that the casualty figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health are not just reliable, credible, and accurate – but that even the Israeli military agrees that they are.

Don’t take my word for it. Earlier this week, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported:

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Mehdi tries to thread the needle in his monologue, above.

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There was a time when Donald Trump believed the issue of Israel and Palestine could only be solved by Jared Kushner. “If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” he told his son-in-law on the eve of his first-term inauguration in 2017, before bizarrely appointing the then-36-year-old property developer to lead on the issue.

Now, a year into his second term, Trump is pinning his hopes for peace in the Middle East on a much more experienced but even more controversial figure: 72-year-old Tony Blair.

Yes, that Tony Blair.

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From the BBC on Friday:

“The Trump administration has named US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former UK prime minister Sir Tony Blair as two of the founding members of its ‘Board of Peace’ for Gaza.

Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner will also sit on the ‘founding executive board,’ the White House said in a statement on Friday.

Trump will act as chairman of the board, which forms part of his 20-point plan to end the war between Israel and Hamas.”

Sorry, what? Putting Tony Blair in charge of any kind of peace effort in the Middle East is like making the arsonist the head firefighter; the burglar the chief detective.

This is the man who allied with George W. Bush to illegally invade and occupy Iraq – a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, ripped an entire Middle Eastern country apart, and unleashed extremism and terrorism across the region. Remember: Blair didn’t just support Bush’s invasion back in 2002 and 2003. He was its chief promoter outside of the United States, enthusiastically peddling lies about weapons of mass destruction while cynically ignoring mass protests on the streets of the UK. He has never apologized for Iraq.

Then there is Blair’s record on Israel and Palestine itself, which should also disqualify him from this so-called “Board of Peace.” As the envoy to the Middle East for the so-called “Quartet,” a group comprising the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia, between 2007 and 2015, the former British prime minister achieved… basically nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Palestinian officials called him “useless, useless, useless.” Even friendly Western diplomats concluded he was “ineffective” in the job and had “no credibility in this part of the world.”

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By the time he quit his Quartet role, the Israeli settler population in the Occupied Palestinian Territories had increased by more than 100,000. Blair’s bank balance increased too, with the former PM rather conveniently launching a consulting career at the same time as he became envoy to the Middle East. The Financial Times reported in 2015 that his “corporate roster has included PetroSaudi, an oil company with links to the Saudi royal family, JPMorgan and Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi wealth fund.”

Blair spent his time as Quartet envoy not just cashing checks from authoritarian regimes in the region, but pushing pro-Israel talking points. “When it comes to security, I am 100% on Israel’s side,” he said in 2010. He even gave a eulogy at former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s funeral in 2014. And, in terms of actual negotiations, as senior Palestinian official Nabil Shaath said when he resigned in 2015, Blair “never proposed anything that the Israelis didn’t agree to.”

Last year, even the Washington Post noted Blair’s “warm” relations with Benjamin Netanyahu and quoted an Israeli official as saying: “The Israelis really like Tony Blair.”

So this is the man whom Palestinians should now trust to oversee the rebuilding of Gaza? As well as their own eventual liberation from Israeli occupation? Really?

Blair’s record on the Middle East is one of repeated failures, brazen bias, and mass slaughter. Why on Earth should the bombed and besieged Palestinians of Gaza have their fate decided by a man already drenched in Arab blood?

Blair’s arrogance, hawkishness, and deference to Israel also symbolize everything that is wrong with the West’s approach to the Middle East. Whether it was Arthur Balfour’s support for Zionism in 1917, or Tony Blair’s support for genocide in 2025, the truth is we need less British colonialism and more Palestinian self-determination. Handing Gaza over to a board of new Western viceroys, including Blair of all people, would be yet another provocative chapter in the long book of injustices imposed on the Palestinian people.

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The international community should be holding Blair to account for one of the worst crimes of the 21st century – the illegal and catastrophic attack on Iraq – not gifting him with another high-profile gig in the Middle East. The former British prime minister should be headed to The Hague, not Gaza.

The people of that blockaded strip have endured two years of genocide, famine, and ethnic cleansing. Their suffering continues, day after day, massacre after massacre.

You think they want Tony Blair to save them? No, they want their freedom.

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Join Mehdi, Swin, Ro Khanna, Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Sarah Matthews, and Miles Taylor for a special LIVE in-person event on Trump, ICE, Venezuela, Iran, Israel, and more, on Tuesday, Jan. 20 at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC.

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To understand why Donald Trump just (illegally) attacked Venezuela and kidnapped the country’s president and his wife, you only need to look at this chart, which is based on OPEC numbers.

Trump didn’t attack Venezuela because it produces fentanyl. It doesn’t. He didn’t attack Venezuela because President Nicolás Maduro controls the Tren de Aragua gang. He doesn’t. He didn’t attack Venezuela because Maduro is the head of the Cartel de los Soles. It doesn’t even exist.

It’s about the oil, stupid!

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Don’t believe me? Think it sounds a little conspiratorial?

Well, here’s the thing: Donald Trump, the self-declared ‘peace president,’ the serial liar, also likes to say the quiet part out loud from time to time.

In 2003, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney at least pretended their illegal invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein wasn’t about Iraq’s oil. It was about democracy! WMDs! Al-Qaeda!

Donald Trump, weirdly, shamelessly, and luckily for us, has been brutally honest on the subject of Venezuela and his motivation for regime change in Caracas.

Here he is in his own words.

1. “Return the oil”

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It has been more than 10 years since Donald J. Trump came down his golden escalator in New York to become the most consequential national political figure of our lifetimes, and yet, 10 months into his second term as president, our mainstream media still has no clue about how to interview him.

Frustratingly, over the past decade, there has been a litany of televised embarrassments and car crashes involving prominent journalists and this particular president. With the exception of Jonathan Swan’s award-winning Axios interview with Trump during the pandemic, it is difficult to think of a single on-camera sitdown in which Trump was truly discomfited by probing questions, tough follow-ups, or forensic factchecks.

On Monday, Politico added its own offering to the mix, trumpeting a “wide-ranging” 45-minute interview with the president in the White House conducted by the outlet’s White House bureau chief Dasha Burns. This is the same Burns whom Trump berated on Air Force One just a few weeks ago while calling Politico “fake news.”

So what was Trump doing sitting down with her? “I mean, I’m doing this because you picked me as the man for Europe,” the president acknowledged to Burns midway through their conversation. Yes, Politico FIFA-ed Trump into giving them an interview.

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Having flattered Trump into an interview, Politico then flattered him with a series of softball questions. “Is it time for Ukraine to hold an election?” “Is there anyone else in the GOP that can energize the coalition the way you did?” Or my favorite: “I wonder, sir, what grade would you give your economy right now?” You’ll never guess what grade Trump gave to himself.

During the so-called interview, the president went on a racist rant against the Muslim mayor of London, and Burns said… nothing. He went on a racist rant against Somali-Americans in Minnesota, ending his tirade: “The Democrats are running some bad ships.” Burns’s response? “Speaking of ships, I do want to talk about boat strikes.” (I. AM. NOT. MAKING. THIS. UP.)

Trump, the biggest fabulist in modern American history, lied and lied and lied, with no pushback whatsoever from Burns. And, remember, Trump’s lies are repeat lies: he tells them again and again, from interview to interview, from stump speech to stump speech. Anyone planning an interview with the president should obviously be ready for “rigged election” and “I settled eight wars” and immigrants coming from “mental institutions.”

Here are 15 brazen lies that Donald Trump told during his 45-minute interview with Politico – the equivalent of one every three minutes. Yet Politico’s Dasha Burns failed to challenge, question, or debunk a single one of them. Her response in almost every case was to stay silent or… change the subject. It was a dereliction of journalistic duty by Burns and a holiday gift from Politico to the Gaslighter-in-Chief in the White House.

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In the video above, I pay tribute to my dad and explain why his story matters at a time when politics on both sides of the Atlantic is dominated by bigots and nativists. I lay out the ways in which his entire life’s journey is a rebuttal of Trumpism and Farageism.

The ‘Prince of Darkness’ is gone.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney died at the age of 84 on Monday, his family said, surrounded by his wife and daughters.

Like fellow war criminal Slobodan Milošević, Cheney should have died alone in a prison cell at The Hague. But, like the rest of the gang behind the invasion of Iraq (George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, et al.), Cheney never faced any legal or even political accountability for his war crimes over the past two decades. In recent years, he even became a hero in some liberal and Democratic Party circles after denouncing Donald Trump and endorsing Kamala Harris for president.

Yet the Bush-Cheney administration, between 2001 and 2009, was one of the worst in American history, overseeing skyrocketing deficits and tax cuts for the rich, the abuse of executive power and politicization of the Justice Department, the Hurricane Katrina debacle, and, of course, the global financial crisis.

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But it was the so-called “War on Terror” and the illegal invasion of Iraq, based on lies about “weapons of mass destruction,” that Cheney must be remembered for. It was Dick, more than Dubya, who was the driving force behind one of the bloodiest wars of the 21st century. Cheney was a hawkish ideologue – one of the most belligerent politicians of our lifetimes, despite dodging the Vietnam draft on multiple occasions (“I had other priorities in the sixties than military service,” he later said). It was Dick, more than Dubya, who was also the unapologetic architect of America’s post-9/11 torture regime.

It is difficult to quantify just how many people are dead because of Cheney. Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? The legacy media won’t tell us. They will likely engage in hagiography when it comes to covering his death because that is what the legacy media does when the powerful pass away. Reputations are laundered; careers are whitewashed; crimes are ignored.

Let us remember who Richard Bruce Cheney really was.

Below are 10 quotes from the former vice president that should define his horrific, blood-stained legacy: a litany of shameless lies and false predictions, as well as a total lack of regret or contrition.

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“I think I’ve made the case that I’m much more of an American, and much more of a patriotic American, than you are, Matt, and you’re just going to have to go whine and cry about it.”

I have spent the past week being told online that I am not a ‘real’ American, and that I should be denaturalized and deported, by a motley crew of right-wing pundits, MAGA influencers, and even two sitting Republican members of Congress.

My crime? Telling a podcaster in Dearborn, Michigan, that maybe Muslims should be able to broadcast the call to prayer from mosques in the United States if churches can ring their bells, and then explaining on Twitter that Muslim slaves were here in the United States from the very beginning and helped build this country.

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Matt Walsh, a far-right shockjock at Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, got very triggered by all this and called me an “ungrateful little b**ch,” before producing a viral 13-minute video about me in which he called me many, many more names and claimed Islam and Muslims have nothing to do with America.

Above is my video response to Walsh, in which I educate him on the history of slavery, including Muslim slavery, in the United States; point out the many and varied contributions of Muslim Americans to this country; and debunk his lazy conservative talking points while laying out his own long history of odious, bigoted, and unhinged views. (Have you heard his ridiculous and racist hot take on Disney’s The Little Mermaid? Well, you’re about to!)

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As I discuss in my monologue above, who really is more of an American? Those of us who support free and fair elections and religious pluralism in this country, as intended by the Founders, or MAGA bigmouths like Walsh, who pine for Christian nationalism and (in his own words) “theocratic fascism” in the United States?

If you want to support the independent journalism here at Zeteo, and help us grow and continue to challenge the right-wing dominance of The Daily Wires et al, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber and getting access to all of our content. If you’re already a paid subscriber, you can also donate to Zeteo.

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