Noam Chomsky speaks about humanity's prospects for survival in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States in April 2017. Chomsky earlier popularized the concept of "manufacturing consent." (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Tin Can Economy | On manufacturing consent
- Published: July 13, 2025
“Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly, not skilled.” —Donald Trump via Twitter, 2013
Well, so much for that. Five months into his second term and on the heels of a “no new wars” campaign, President Trump ordered an unprovoked military attack on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday, June 21.
Washington’s weekend operation, codenamed “Midnight Hammer,” included more than 125 U.S. aircraft, dozens of aerial refueling tankers, a guided missile submarine and approximately 75 precision guided weapons. Armed with 30,000-pound “bunker-busting” bombs, a flock of B-2 stealth bombers hit enrichment sites at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow — the latter of which Trump said was his primary target, allegedly to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
Having inserted himself into the week-long war between Israel and Iran — now dubbed the “12 Day War” — Trump posted on social media the day after the attacks: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???”
Trump’s bestie and international war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu likely couldn’t agree more. Lebanon’s Hezbollah has been weakened, Assad is out of the way in Syria, and Gaza has been all but decimated in an ongoing genocide. Now, it’s time for puppet-subservient Israel to invent external threats, wage war, violate the U.N. Charter and depose a sovereign government to get a foothold in a resource-rich region for “strategic” imperial and capital gain.
It’s a familiar playbook, right? Think of the United States’ past and present meddling in South Korea, Greece, Burma, Egypt, Iraq, Guatemala, Indonesia, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Libya and on and on. Lord, does the list go on. When is the “mission” ever actually “accomplished”?
Already, some pundits have rightly pointed out the analog between Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and the present beating of the drums against Iran — only this time, calls for war took about a week rather than 15 months.
One marked difference, though, between sending troops to Iraq and Trump busting bunkers on June 21 is the degree of public support in the U.S. A Gallup poll from August 2002 to early March 2003 showed support for the war fluctuating between 52% and 59%; a recent Economist YouGov poll taken between June 13–16 last month found that 60% of survey respondents, when asked if they think the U.S. should get involved in the Israeli-Iran conflict, said “no.” Over half of them were Republicans. What Trump did — and continues to do — was and is deeply, deeply unpopular.
Maybe that’ll change.
What comes ahead of any American-led regime change or “democratic” adventure abroad is a protracted campaign from mass media and the government to “manufacture consent” among the general public — a concept popularized by Noam Chomsky to characterize the moral imperative and urgency of foreign intervention.
This consent can be solicited through a litany of false narratives: that a given foreign population is a monolith with uniform beliefs and desires anathema to our own; that a country is surely stocking weapons of mass destruction; that a leader is holding his entire country hostage; that a place is just plain culturally backwards; that a country, against all verifiable evidence, is seconds away from creating a bomb.
Iran and its people have long been characterized by such ludicrous claims and racist navel-gazing, but it may be getting worse. The media drums are a-beating.
Take the wildly titled article, “Will Iran’s hated regime implode?” for example, which appeared in the June 21 issue of The Economist — the same publication that helped instigate the 1973 coup in Chile, and later supported coups in Venezuela and Iraq.
“Iran’s regime is often described as decaying, corrupt, bankrupt and despised by its citizens,” the article states. “On social media some Iranians have celebrated the assassination of their generals with emojis of barbequed meat. The humiliation … may trigger an uprising or a coup d’état, in turn creating chaos or national renewal. … An extended war with large civilian casualties could act to rally public opinion in an intensely nationalistic country, allowing the regime to survive and redouble its efforts to race for a bomb.”
Overlooking the absurdity and dishonesty of using emojis as a poll metric for political opinion, The Economist’s implication that the Iranian people may in fact welcome Israeli missiles and American bombs in the pursuit of national liberation is just plain wretched.
With similar broad strokes and dubious journalism, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and other outlets have, over the last few weeks, done dangerous work. Some reports describe Trump’s acts of aggression as “tactical successes” and others quote very few Iranians — the ones they have are often anonymous sources rooting for regime change, and seldom are there contrasting viewpoints. Sample kinds and sizes matter when you’re writing about a country of 90 million people.
The worst media offender, of course, is Fox News — and, by extension, the president, or the chief manufacturer-of-consent himself.
Fox writers and anchors continue to regurgitate Trump’s bombastic and factually untrue claims of having “crushed” and “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites. This notion has been debunked up and down by both foreign and U.S. military and intelligence agencies.
Paradoxically, Fox has, in the last few days alone, published a number of pieces waxing about Iran’s persistent lust for bomb-making — that the country is still closer than ever to weaponized nuclear enrichment. Which is it? Is Iran’s nuclear program wiped out or stronger than ever?
The point is that these war-starved media outlets and pathological huckster presidents should spur us to sharpen our media literacy and heighten our skepticism. It should be incumbent upon us to refine our abilities to ferret out propaganda and disinformation from even the sources that, in so-called times of peace, are typically copacetic with our ideologies.
We must be scrutinizing and discriminating in the information we choose to ingest, and remember that in all ways, global capitalism is dependent upon war-making. Just as it’s good for business and perhaps even setting the stage for a third presidential term, it also can really sell a newspaper.
*Tin Can Economy is an occasional column that reflects on object, form and scale. It considers the places and spaces we inhabit, their constituent materials and our relationship to it all. Its author, Reilly Dixon, works in production and as a reporter for the News.
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