@justinbaragona
Ragebait author at Zeteo Past: Senior reporter at The Independent, senior media reporter at The Daily Beast. Tips/hate mail: justin@zeteonews.com You can also hit me up on Signal at justinbaragona.85
NEW: A classified report by the National Intelligence Council, representing the collective wisdom of America's 18 intelligence agencies, found that even a large-scale assault on Iran would be unlikely to oust its entrenched military and clerical establishment 🧵
Remarkable: With support for the Iran war tanking, Trump is now throwing away the GOP's advantage on three core issues: Economy, immigration, national security.
A year ago it looked like he might be popular on all three. He lit it all on fire. 1/
(new piece)
newrepublic.com/article/2074...
just fwiw, here are the arguments being made, in order:
1. iran has apologized to its neighbors and admitted it lost
2. this is unprecedented and because of me
3. iran has not surrendered and will collapse if it doesn’t admit it lost
4. i am going to bomb iran more and worse until it surrenders
The MTV Loveline to crank pipeline is two for two, huh?
We live in a world where the binge-drinking Fox News weekend host who didn't wash his hands for a decade is openly boasting about committing genocide.
hands down the absolute *strangest* “on background” sourcing I have ever seen in the NYT. Completely bonkers stuff www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...
NEW: One of the most active hubs for sexually explicit AI "deepfakes" is hiding in plain sight. My latest takes a hard look at a 4chan board that's acting as a factory floor for online sexual abuse — where its users have victimized untold numbers of women and girls.
openmeasures.io/4chan-ai-dee...
“A DOJ source told the Miami Herald that agents found her to be credible—and that they would not have interviewed her four times if they thought she was lying.”
@jkbjournalist.bsky.social bringing it home
www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...
Veep couldn't even come up with this level of satire
Kalshi employees "kind of understand that without the tweets and the streamers and all of the social-media stuff that the traders do for them, usually just for free, their marketing would be a lot harder," said Jack Campion, 20, a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Kalshi affiliate. In September, Kalshi briefly signed up a 15-year-old videogame streamer who goes by vertid online to promote its brand on X as an affiliate. A week later, Kalshi ended the partnership. "Yo brother, legal team confirmed that we can't work with minors rn," a Kalshi employee wrote to the user in messages reviewed by the Journal. "Kinda sad tbh."
what the fuck are we doing
www.wsj.com/business/med...
The thing is, it wasn't just that the script was wrong, or she misread it.
The chyron also showed that jobs were added in February.
Newsmax's obedience to Trump makes Fox News look like the resistance.
"He said without being asked."
What, and I can't stress this enough, the fuck?!?!
(and yes, this is a real piece that was published this morning)
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
A few hours after NYT reported that the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing many children, the White House last night posted this video mixing airstrike footage with Top Gun, Iron Man, Gladiator, Halo, Breaking Bad, Star Wars, John Wick, Superman, Transformers and Dragon Ball Z
Also, apparently the White House thinks Walter White was a good guy.
Crude oil is now up 49.65% so far this year.
@cnbc.com
And these job losses in February were BEFORE the war and the shock in energy prices.
I'll also note that we still appear to be missing a ton of pages from this woman's file. There were at least *53 pages* missing (that we know about) and we still don't seem to have all of them — specifically the FBI's contemporaneous notes for these interviews
37 pages
This is the kind of journalist an editor yearns for at a time like this: A Persian-fluent reporter w/ deep experience covering Iranian politics and policies.
She used to work at the Washpost.
Then Bezos dismantled the international coverage.
Now she’s at the NYT
www.nytco.com/press/our-ne...
Anyway, like I said earlier today, we'll see how long Trump stays mad at Tucker and keeps him out of the MAGA club.
bsky.app/profile/just...
Tucker Carlson, to his Fox News producers in January 2021: "We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can't wait."
"I hate him passionately. ... I can't handle much more of this."
Of course, the whole centrist posturing is a scam, considering half the network’s roster hails from Fox News and Bill O'Reilly just guest hosted last night.
And Nexstar, the company that owns NewsNation, is cozying up to Trump to help push through its local TV merger with Tegna.
NewsNation, the supposedly centrist, non-partisan, down-the-middle network that only wants to report the news, is out here cheering on Karoline Leavitt for berating Kaitlan Collins and using that to promote themselves.
I continue to be gobsmacked at 1) how common this formulation is 2) how antisemitic and generally bigoted it is 3) and how for all the talk of anti-semitism this is never cited as an example even though it’s quite literally the original incarnation.
New: Army memo said Iranian intelligence was likely able to identify and track the American service members who moved to the tactical operations center in Kuwait that was struck by a drone killing six. Smaller drones were suspected of conducting aerial recon. www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-ap...
"Marine Corps veteran Brian McGinnis, whose wife is Palestinian, ‘has strong feelings’ about the Middle East, his mother told The Independent."
@justinrohrlich.bsky.social spoke to McGinnis' mom, who said she still couldn't bring herself to watch the video.
www.the-independent.com/news/world/a...
Donald, the Dove
In a lengthy conversation just now, President Trump hit back at Tucker Carlson who called the Iran war “absolutely disgusting and evil.” "Tucker has lost his way,” Trump told me. “I knew that a long time ago, and he's not MAGA. MAGA is saving our country. MAGA is making our country great again. MAGA is America first, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that."
We'll see if Trump fully boots Tucker out of his inner circle and keeps attacking him over Iran.
Last year, he called Tucker "kooky" after Carlson criticized him for the Iran strikes and saber rattling, only to welcome the ex-Fox star back into the fold in short order.
