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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re going to turn right now to ranked-choice voting. As New Yorkers head to the polls and the primaries for upcoming elections Tuesday, voters will have the chance to vote for not one but up to five of their preferred candidates for mayor and other races. Early voting actually is taking place now through Sunday. This is a brief explainer from the New York Board of Elections.

NYC BOARD OF ELECTIONS EXPLAINER: There’s a new way for New Yorkers to have their say in city elections, a way that gives voters more choices and can lead to more diverse winners. It’s called ranked-choice voting. 74% of New York voters chose to use it in primary and special elections for city offices. Mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president, and city council.

AMY GOODMAN: This is a relatively new system for New Yorkers. It was introduced following a referendum in 2019. It’s also in use in Maine and Alaska and is gaining interest across the country. Early voting underway now through the weekend ahead of Tuesday’s primary. I spoke to John Tarleton, editor-in-chief of The Indypendent, closely following New York City’s mayoral election and began by asking him how ranked-choice voting works and how it came to New York.

JOHN TARLETON: Sure. So, ranked-choice voting was first implemented in San Francisco in 2004, and it’s now used in about 40 cities and towns across the United States, including in Oakland; Boulder, Colorado; Minneapolis; Burlington, Vermont; Takoma Park, Maryland; and other places. And it’s also used statewide in Maine and Alaska. And like that announcement was saying, we had a voter referendum in New York that approved it in 2019, and we first implemented it 2021 in our last mayoral cycle here in New York.

AMY GOODMAN: And what’s the problem it’s correcting?

JOHN TARLETON: Well, the problem — OK, the problem it’s correcting in our kind of winner-take-all electoral system is that if you vote for a lower-performing candidate in a race where there’s a lot of candidates, your vote can be wasted or spoiled. An example I think many people could relate to in your audience is in Florida 2000, when Ralph Nader got 97,000 votes, and Al Gore ultimately lost the presidency by 537 votes. If there had been ranked-choice voting, Green Party supporters, who might have wanted to keep, you know, a Republican from getting in the White House, they could have made Al Gore their second choice.

AMY GOODMAN: They could still do Ralph Nader first.

JOHN TARLETON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: But they would make Al Gore second.

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah. And so, all those debates about, you know, spoilers and wasted votes that we get every four years in presidential politics, if we had ranked-choice voting, people could vote both — it allows you to both vote for who you most want, but then to also make a second-choice selection for other candidates that you also like. And it prevents the dynamic if you vote for a low-performing candidate, that someone else that you would least want to win ends up prevailing. So it gives voters more choices and more power in determining the ultimate winner of an election.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, when was it first instituted here in New York? The election is Tuesday.

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah. It was first instituted in our city elections in 2021. Under our rules here in New York, you can vote in order of preference for as many as five candidates. So, yeah, it’s really changed the dynamic of the election here.

AMY GOODMAN: John Tarleton, editor-in-chief of The Indypendent. You can see the full interview online. Early voting goes through Sunday in the New York City primary for mayor. Primary day is Tuesday.

That does it for our show. We’re hiring a Senior Headline News Producer, a Director of Audience, and a Director of Technology. You can find out more at democracynow.org/jobs. Democracy Now! is produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, Maria Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robbie Karran, Hany Massoud, Anjali Kamat, Safwat Nazzal. Our executive director’s Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Jon Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, Denis Moynihan, David Prude, Dennis McCormick.

I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.

See full interview here

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. An Australian writer was recently detained for some 15 hours then deported from a U.S. airport for his writings about pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University. Alistair Kitchen was detained by border agents after he’d flown from Melbourne, Australia to Los Angeles. He reports a border agent told him, quote, “Look, we both know why you’re here.” When Kitchen said he didn’t know why, the agent reportedly said, quote, “It’s because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University.” Alistair had graduated from a master’s program at Columbia last year when the protests against Israel’s war on Gaza began. He’d written about the student encampments on his Substack page. PEN America said Kitchen’s detention and deportation was, quote, “Gravely concerning.” Jonathan Friedman of PEN America said, quote, “Kitchen’s account fits a disturbing pattern in which border agents appear to be screening visitors to the U.S. for their viewpoints. That is anti-democratic, and it must be halted,” unquote. We go now to Australia, where we’re joined by Alistair Kitchen. The New Yorker magazine published an account of what happened in a piece headlined, “How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to my Deportation.” Alistair, thanks so much for staying up late to talk to us. Tell us, the day this all happened, where you were and just what took place.

ALISTAIR KITCHEN: Well, I had flown 15 hours all the way to LAX, and frankly, I was prepared for something to go wrong. There’s been plenty of media here in Australia about tourists getting detained at U.S. airports for all range of reasons. I’ve written about the protests, and I’ve written critically about the Trump administration, so I went ahead and scrubbed my phone, scrubbed my social media feed. But just as I got to get into the passport queue for my ESTA, my visa waiver, I was detained and interrogated and told that the reason was, as you say, what I had written online.

AMY GOODMAN: So, explain what happened. You come off your plane. And were people waiting for you there?

ALISTAIR KITCHEN: Yeah, this is crucial. They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. I didn’t even make it into the queue for passport processing. Instead, the intercom went over the loudspeaker, and my name was called. I was asked to meet an officer at the back of the room, and he immediately took me away, immediately asked for my phone and then immediately asked for the passcode of that phone. I said, “I’d rather not hand over my passcode.” He said, “That’s fine, we will immediately deny you entry and deport you.” And that’s when I made the wrong choice to hand over the passcode to my phone, believing wrongly and hoping wrongly that they would see that I’m a writer, that I was writing about the protests in the capacity as a journalist, and that I certainly posed no threat to the country and that I have many loved ones in the U.S.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, describe the scene, where you were brought to, who else was there, both detainees like you, how long they’d been there. And then, the questioning took place over hours, is that right?

ALISTAIR KITCHEN: Yeah, that’s right. I was first taken to this back room. I was sat down. The questioning began immediately with this opening gambit about Israel and Palestine. I was asked questions about what my thoughts were on the conflict, how I would solve it, do I know any Jews, do I know any Muslims? I was asked to hand over the names of students, student groups I was involved with, WhatsApp groups with other protestors, all of which I refused to do. And then, after some time, after he was satisfied, he then began the process of downloading the contents of my phone. He went away, disappeared for some time, came back out and that was when I really knew I was in trouble because he said to me, “Mr. Kitchen, we’ve found evidence on your phone of prior drug use. On your ESTA visa waiver form, you represented to us that you had not consumed drugs before. That misrepresentation is grounds for denial of entry and deportation.” That was maybe one to two hours in of a 12-hour process. I was interviewed at that point, I was interviewed again maybe six hours later in a Groundhog Day moment where all of the same questions were asked. And in the meantime, I was held in a detention room with – there were five women in there. I was the only man when I arrived.

AMY GOODMAN: Can I just interrupt on the issue of drugs? In New York State, you can consume marijuana. Can you explain what they were talking about?

ALISTAIR KITCHEN: Yeah, so I’d previously – they identified that I had consumed, and I admitted to having bought, marijuana in New York state. This is very important for any international listeners of yours. If you buy marijuana in California, in New York, you are doing so legally by state law, but you’re doing so illegally by federal law. And therefore, in the eyes of Customs and Border Protection, you are breaking the law, and you’re misrepresenting your behavior when you said that you haven’t consumed illicit drugs.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can respond to what the U.S. government is now saying to various media outlets. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said, “Using the ESTA is a privilege, not a right, and only those who respect our laws and follow the proper procedures will be welcomed.” And they denied that DHS said that – they denied that they were targeting you for your political beliefs. That seems to run counter to what you were told when you were being interrogated. And tell us, how much into the conversation, into the interrogation you were questions and what the agent said to you about your political writing?

ALISTAIR KITCHEN: Yeah, it’s contrary explicitly to what they told me as soon as I arrived. And to this extent, I’m lucky. I’m lucky that they were so forthcoming in the moment and so brazen as to say, “Look, we both know why you’re here. It’s because of what you’ve written online. I’m going to interrogate you now about what you’ve written online.” Now, the DHS now wants to come out and deny that. Of course they do. And of course, they want to focus on the drug case as grounds for deportation. I’m not disputing that at all. Of course, what I’m here to say is that Customs and Border Protection are using the immense power and discretion they have to search and then to deny entry under politically motivated grounds and politically motivated reasons. They’re doing so clearly and explicitly in their own words because they disagree with some people’s speech. They didn’t like what I said, so they went looking for a reason to deport me.

AMY GOODMAN: So, your final takeaway from this detention and deportation, what you felt you would warn people about.

ALISTAIR KITCHEN: Yeah, the first is, this might sound severe, but if you don’t have a great reason to go to the United States, and you’re a tourist, this might not be the time. The second is that if you have anything sensitive on that phone, do not take that phone. Take a burner phone, buy it early populate it with some content so that it doesn’t look suspicious. And the third thing is, if all that fails, and you end up in the position that I was in, and you were offered, after getting off a 15-hour flight, a choice between deportation and having your phone searched and downloaded, my view is accept immediate deportation. Spend the 12 hours in detention and go home. Because by the time they’re ready to look through your phone, they’re never going to let you in anyway.

AMY GOODMAN: Alistair Kitchen, I thank you for being with us. Australian writer deported last week. Wrote about his experience for The New Yorker in a piece headlined, “How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation.” We will link to it at democracynow.org.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. I’m a six-to-three decision Wednesday, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender youth, paving the way for other bans on trans healthcare to remain in effect in 24 other states. According to the ACLU, over 100,000 transgender people under the age of 18 now live in a state with a ban on their healthcare. The Court’s right-wing justices rejected arguments on behalf of Tennessee trans kids and their parents, which claimed the ban on those treatments discriminated on the basis of sex because they remain permitted for other medical treatments for non-trans youth. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused her conservative colleagues of, quote, “Contorting logic and precedent and abandoning transgender children and their families to political whims,” unquote. Trans activists rallied at a Washington D.C. church after the ruling.

DEVON OJEDA: They can say I’m a woman, but I live as a man. I love as a man. I move through this world as a man. And nothing, nothing they say or legislate will ever change that.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now in studio by Chase Strangio, the ACLU attorney who argued the case known as United States v. Skrmetti before the Supreme Court in December. Chase made history by becoming the first openly trans attorney to argue at the high court, a story captured in the new document, Heightened Scrutiny. Chase, welcome back to Democracy Now!. Thanks so much for being with us. Explain what happened. Explain the decision of the Supreme Court this week.

CHASE STRANGIO: Thanks, Amy. So, in the decision, the Supreme Court, in essence, said that Tennessee’s law, which bans puberty blockers and hormone therapy when they are prescribed in a way that is inconsistent with an adolescent’s sex, that’s what the statute says, is not discriminatory. It doesn’t discriminate based on sex or transgender status, and therefore, the government of Tennessee has wide latitude to regulate in this area. Now, I think Justice Sotomayor got it exactly right in her dissent that they had to contort logic and precedent in order to reach the conclusion that a law that says you can do something consistent with your sex, but you can’t do something inconsistent with your sex is not a form of sex discrimination. But ultimately, the six-three conservative majority said that it was not discriminatory, as you’ve noted, paving the way for the 24 laws that ban this care for adolescents in the United States to remain in effect.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us the story of the family that’s at the core of this case.

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, so one of the most heartbreaking things about this moment is just thinking about the families and the parents, and as a parent, what it means to watch your child suffer. So, we represent three families. L.W. is one of the adolescents, and her parents, who we sued Tennessee on behalf of.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m going to interrupt for one second just to read about this case an excerpt from a New York Times opinion piece written by Samantha Williams, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care. Her daughter has only been identified by the initials LW. The op-ed is titled, “My Daughter was at the Center of the Supreme Court Case on Trans Care. Our Hearts are Broken.” She writes, “My daughter L.W. came out as transgender late in 2020. She was just shy of 13. Four and a half years later, she’s thriving, healthy, and happy after pursuing evidence-based gender-affirming care. I’ve devoted myself to finding our daughter consistent care in one state after another. The nightmare of our disrupted life pales in comparison with the nightmare of losing access to the healthcare that’s allowed our daughter to thrive. If one thing gives me hope, it’s my daughter. Even after all the emotions of today, L.W. has been texting me all day about her plans for how to continue the fight for young people like her.” Tell us more, Chase.

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, so I think Samantha hits it on the head is, these are parents who watched their children suffer tremendously for many years, looking for a solution, doing their own research, talking to medical experts. And then, what they found was that their children, who were experiencing this intense distress, began to thrive when they had access to gender-affirming medical care like hormones and puberty blockers. And these are not rushed decisions, these are careful decisions that parents are making with their children and their doctors. And what Tennessee did, what these other governments have done is come in and displaced the judgment of parents, and adolescents, and doctors and substituted their own ideological preferences for how people live and identify.

AMY GOODMAN: Clearly a blow to the transgender community. It was a six-to-three ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority, opening, quote, saying, “This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field. The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound. The Equal Protection Clause does not resolve these disagreements.” And again, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the high court, quote, “Abandons transgender children and their families to political whims,” as well as undermines the Constitution, saying the decision causes, quote, “Irrevocable damage to the Equal Protection Clause and invites legislatures to engage in discrimination by hiding blatant sex classifications in plain sight. In sadness, I dissent,” Justice Sotomayor said.

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, I think Chief Justice Roberts’s language there is just wrong in so many different ways. First, the medical debate that he is referencing was not a debate that the district court found in the court’s factual findings. It was a Trump-appointed district court judge who looked at the evidence and concluded that Tennessee’s arguments in support of their ban just did not hold up to scrutiny. But even more importantly, the question of whether or not the law discriminates based on sex on its face does not consider that medical debate. Looking at the plain language of the statute, it says you can do something consistent with your sex, you can’t do something inconsistent with your sex. If the Court starts importing their own ideas about what’s a good or bad sex-based distinction, we’re back to 50 years ago, when they’re allowing all sorts of discriminatory laws to stand.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s Bostock, and explain how it’s affected by this.

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, so as much as this is a devastating decision, I think it’s important to make sure people understand that it does not do some of the damage that people fear. So, Bostock is a 2020 Supreme Court decision in which the court held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex discrimination in employment, also prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ people. And that decision was a six-three decision from Justice Gorsuch, and in the Skrmetti case, the Court explicitly leaves intact that decision, and the Court says that they are declining to address whether that decision applies outside the context of Title VII. And that’s important because it means that litigation over things like discrimination in school, other forms of discrimination by the government remain open to fight another day.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the other cases in the last few weeks that have gone actually both ways? But before you do, the irony of conservative justices, or conservatives states, or states run by Republicans that have always insisted, for example, when it comes to abortion, a kid has to tell their parents when it comes to parental consent, etc. You have L. W.’s parents with a doctor in a room with L. W. They’re all hashing this out.

CHASE STRANGIO: Yes, you have this aligned judgment of parents, adolescents, and doctors, and the government is coming in and imposing their preference. The same governments that in every other context are spouting how important parental rights are. Parental right to not mask your child, parental rights to not have your child learn about LGBT people in school or the history of racism in the United States. So, this is hypocrisy at its most clear point, and I think we should really be watching for when the Supreme Court upholds the parental rights of parents to, for example, stop their children from accessing contraception or abortion. But when it’s the parents who love and support their trans children, all of a sudden their parental rights don’t matter.

AMY GOODMAN: Separately on Wednesday, Trump’s Health Department ordered the National Suicide Hotline for LGBTQ+ youth to shut down. In its announcement, HHS omitted reference to the transgender population, using the term, “LGB+ youth services.” One advocate called the move a potential death sentence for thousands of LGBTQ+ youth. It reminded me of erasing from the federal website around Stonewall, which is a federal monument now, that was led by trans women that launched the modern-day LGBTQ movement, taking out the T there. What about here? And what about the hotline itself, what it means?

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, this is a population that has a unique vulnerability to suicidality. This service was vital for LGBTQ young people, and what the administration is doing is making abundantly clear that their systematic attacks on the LGBTQ community are not about protecting anyone, they are about harming young people, taking away vital services. If you put this in conversation with the bans on trans people serving in the military, the bans on people going to the bathroom, participating in sports and now the decision in Skrmetti, you have a country that is prepared to not only fully attack us across all areas of life but take away our lifelines, quite literally.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Judge Young and the decision that came out of Boston?

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, so this is a decision in a challenge to the government’s attempts to cut off NIH grants any time they reference LGBT people or people of color. And Judge Young issued an injunction, in essence forcing the government to reissue those grants and said from the bench that in his 40 years on the bench, he has not seen such rank discrimination on the basis of race and that this is plain as plain can be that this government is invested in discriminating against people of color and LGBT people and ordered them to restart those vital grants. Because not only are we living in a moment that is anti-people of color, anti-LGBT people from this administration, but they’re also anti-science and cutting off vital research avenues that judges thankfully are stepping in and trying to restore as much as possible.

AMY GOODMAN: And Young was a Reagan-appointed judge. He said he’s never seen discrimination like this.

CHASE STRANGIO: Yes. And there’s another Reagan-appointed judge in the district of D.C. that ordered the administration to stop banning gender-affirming medical care for trans people in the Bureau of Prisons. This is an administration that is attacking us in every aspect of life, and judge after judge across the political spectrum, going back to Reagan-appointed judges, are stepping in and saying, “Absolutely not.”

AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to The New York Times piece that just came out, major hit piece against you, Chase, that was written by Nicholas Confessore. Its headline, “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost.” Confessore writes, quote, “Strangio and other advocates for trans rights have cast Skrmetti as the case they had to bring, and they also have set back their movement back a generation.”

CHASE STRANGIO: Well, I think that’s just absolutely wrong. This is a fight that extends back 100 years, and we will keep fighting for 100 more years. The piece absolutely gets it wrong in terms of what this decision does and doesn’t do. It’s a narrow decision. It leaves open many other avenues to fight back against discrimination on behalf of trans people. But for everyone that is saying that the movement got ahead of public opinion, that litigators got ahead of public opinion, the very purpose of the Equal Protection Clause, the very purpose of the Reconstruction Amendments, is to be a check on majoritarian discrimination. If the public’s opinion is that you deserve to have your constitutional right infringed, then the very purpose of the Constitution is to step in. That is the role of the federal courts, and that is the role of civil rights advocates, and we will keep fighting.

AMY GOODMAN: The hit piece comes at the same time as a major documentary on you, Chase. The document premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was also at DC/DOX, the new film festival in Washington D.C. It’s called Heightened Scrutiny. It shows you addressing trans community members and supporters outside the Supreme Court after you made history as the first openly trans lawyer to deliver oral arguments in front of the Court. The hearing back in December was for this case.

CHASE STRANGIO: We are the defiance of everything…

PEPPERMINT: [inaudible].

CHASE STRANGIO: Okay. Peppermint loves to give me advice about how to project, so I’m going to work on it. We are collectively a refutation of everything they say about us. And our fight for justice did not begin today, it will not end in June, whatever the Court decides. We are in this together. We are in it together. Our power only grows. I love being trans, I love being with you, and we are going to take care of each other. Thank you for being here. I felt it inside.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Chase Strangio, a clip from the new film Heightened Scrutiny. That will also premiere in Los Angeles next week at the Hammer Museum. Talk about what you’re hoping to accomplish with this film.

CHASE STRANGIO: I think one of the really important things about this film is that it offers a critique of mainstream media coverage of transgender people and our healthcare in addition to the vérité parts that are me preparing for oral argument. And one of the things the film really highlights is the ways in which the media’s outsized fixation on transgender people contributes to anti-trans policymaking. Media Matters reported that in the last four months, Fox News ran 400 segments on transgender athletes. If you think about the fact that we are less than 1% of the population, transgender athletes must be 1/100th of a percent of the population, and yet this outsized fixation with us and our lives is what is driving so much of the anti-trans policies that we’re seeing. And so, it’s so important that we challenge those narratives, that we make people aware of the misinformation that they’re receiving. Because if we don’t, we’re going to continue to see these attacks.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the decision also this week around passports.

CHASE STRANGIO: Yeah, I think it’s really important for people to know that we’re still getting good decisions in the lower courts. The judge said that in essence, Trump’s policy of forcing people have to have passports listing their sex assigned at birth is blocked, not just for our six named plaintiffs but for everyone across the country. People can reapply for both binary passports and X passports under the policy…

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean. Either you’re male or female, doesn’t have to match your…

CHASE STRANGIO: Your sex assigned at birth. So, if I…

AMY GOODMAN: Or you can do X.

CHASE STRANGIO: Or you can do X. And that was the policy on January 19, and in essence, the court says we’re back to January 19 with respect to the policy. And transgender people, nonbinary people, and intersex people can apply for the M, F, and X passports that match who they are, not what their sex was at conception, which is the Trump administration’s preference.

AMY GOODMAN: Chase Strangio, thanks so much for being with us. Co-Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, LGBTQ & HIV Project. In December, he became the first openly trans lawyer to argue in front of the Supreme Court when he presented oral arguments in the United States v. Skrmetti. Coming up, we speak to a Columbia University graduate who was just denied entry back into the United States because of his writing about pro-Palestine protests on campus. The authorities at the airport were very explicit about why they were deporting him. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, is set to hold talks with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom today in Geneva as Israel’s attacks on Iran enter a second week. A U.S.-based Iranian human rights group reports the Israeli attacks have killed at least 639 people. Israeli war planes have repeatedly pummeled Tehran and other parts of Iran. Iran’s responded by continuing to launch missile strikes into Israel.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians protested today in Iran against Israel. Meanwhile, President Trump continues to give mixed messages on whether the U.S. will join Israel’s attack on Iran. On Wednesday, Trump told reporters, “I may do it, I may not do it,” unquote. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt delivered a new statement from the president.

KAROLINE LEAVITT: Regarding the ongoing situation in Iran, I know there has been a lot of speculation amongst all of you in the media regarding the president’s decision-making and whether or not the United States will be directly involved. In light of that news, I have a message directly from the president. And I quote, “Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.”

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump has repeatedly used that term, “two weeks,” when being questioned about decisions in this term and his first term as president. Leavitt delivered the message shortly after President Trump met with his former advisor, Steve Bannon, who’s publicly warned against war with Iran. Bannon recently said, “We can’t do this again. We’ll tear the country apart. We can’t have another Iraq,” Bannon said. This comes as Trump’s reportedly sidelined National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard from key discussions on Iran. In March, Gabbard told lawmakers the intelligence community, “Continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” But on Tuesday, Trump dismissed her statement, saying, “I don’t care what she said.”

Earlier Thursday, an Iranian missile hit the main hospital in Southern Israel in Beersheba. After the strike, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei Thursday, saying Iran’s supreme leader, “Cannot continue to exist.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the hospital and likened Iran’s attack to the London Blitz. Netanyahu stunned many in Israel by saying, quote, “Each of us bears a personal cost. My family has not been exempt. This is the second time my son Avner has canceled a wedding due to missile threats.”

We’re joined now by William Hartung, Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new piece for The National Interest is headlined, “Don’t Get Dragged Into a War with Iran.” Can you talk about what’s going on right now, Bill, the whole question of whether the U.S. is going to use a bunker-buster bomb that has to be delivered by a B-2 bomber, which only the U.S. has?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah. This is a case of undue trust in technology. The U.S. is always getting in trouble when they think there’s this miracle solution. A lot of experts aren’t sure this would even work, or if it did, it would take multiple bombings. And of course, Iran’s not going to sit on its hands. They’ll respond possibly by killing U.S. troops in the region, then we’ll have escalation from there. It’s reminiscent of the beginning of the Iraq War, when they said, “It’s going to be a cakewalk. It’s not going to cost anything.” Couple trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of casualties, many U.S. veterans coming home with PTSD, a regime that was sectarian that paved the way for ISIS, it couldn’t have gone worse. And so, this is a different beginning, but the end is uncertain, and I don’t think we want to go there.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about the GBU-57, the bunker-buster bomb, and how is it that this discussion going on within the White House about the use of the bomb – and of course, the U.S. has gone back and forth – I should say President Trump has gone back and forth whether he’s fully involved with this war, at first saying they knew about it, but Israel was doing it, then saying, “We have total control of the skies over Tehran,” saying we, not Israel, and what exactly it would mean if the U.S. dropped this bomb and the fleet that the U.S. is moving in?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, well, the notion is, it’s heavy steel, it’s more explosive power than any conventional bomb. But it only goes so deep, and they don’t actually know how deep this facility is buried. And if it’s going in a straight line, and it’s to one side, it’s just not clear that it’s going to work. And of course, if it does, Iran is going to rebuild, they’re going to go straight for a nuclear weapon. They’re not going to trust negotiations anymore. So, apparently, the two weeks is partly because Trump’s getting conflicting reports from his own people about this. Now, if he had actual independent military folks, like Mark Milley in the first term, I think we’d be less likely to go in. But they made sure to have loyalists. Pete Hegseth is not a profile in courage. He’s not going to stand up to Trump on this. He might not even know the consequences. So, a lot of the press coverage is about this bomb, not about the consequences of an active war.

AMY GOODMAN: Right, about using it. In your recent piece, you wrote, “Israeli officials suggested their attacks may result in regime change in Iran, despite the devastating destabilizing impact such efforts in the region would have.” Can you talk about the significance of Israel putting forward and then Trump going back and forth on whether or not Ali Khamenei will be targeted?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah, I think my colleague Trita Parsi put it well. There’s been no example of regime change in the region that has come out with a better result. They don’t know what kind of regime would come in. Could be to the right of the current one. Could just be chaos that would fuel terrorism, who knows what else. So, they’re just taking – they’re winging it. They have no idea what they’re getting into. And I think Trump, he doesn’t want to seem like Netanyahu’s pulling him by the nose, so when he gets out in front of Trump, Trump says, “Oh, that was my idea.” But it’s almost as if Benjamin Netanyahu is running U.S. foreign policy, and Trump is kind of following along.

AMY GOODMAN: You have Netanyahu back in 2002 saying, “Iran is imminently going to have a nuclear bomb.” That was more than two decades ago.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Exactly. That’s just a cover for wanting to take out the regime. And he spoke to the U.S. Congress, he’s made presentations all over the world, and his intelligence has been proven wrong over, and over, and over. And when we had the Iran deal, he had European allies, he had China, he had Russia. There hadn’t been a deal like that where all these countries were on the same page in living memory, and it was working. And Trump trashed it and now has to start over.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the War Powers Act. The Virginia Senator Kaine has said that – has just put forward a bill around saying it must be – Congress must vote on this. Where is Schumer? Where is Jeffries on this, the democratic house and senate leaders?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, a lot of the so-called leaders are not leading. When is the moment that you should step forward if we’re possibly going to get into another disastrous war? But I think they’re concerned about being viewed as critical of Israel. They don’t want to go out on a limb. So, you’ve got a progressive group that’s saying, “This has to be authorized by Congress.” You’ve got Republicans who are doubtful, but they don’t want to stand up to Trump because they don’t want to lose their jobs. Risk your job. This is a huge thing. Don’t just sort of be a time-server.

AMY GOODMAN: So, according to a report from IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, released in May, Iran has accumulated roughly 120 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60%, which is 30% away from weapons-grade level of 90%. You have Rafael Grossi, the head of the IAEA, saying this week that they do not have evidence that Iran has the system for a nuclear bomb.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, well, a lot of the discussion points out – they don’t talk about, when you’ve got the uranium, you have to build the weapon, you have to make it work on a missile. It’s not you get the uranium, you have a weapon overnight, so there’s time to deal with that should they go forward through negotiations. And we had a deal that was working, which Trump threw aside in his first term.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the foreign minister of Iran, Araghchi, in Geneva now speaking with his counterparts from Britain, France, the E.U.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I don’t think U.S. allies in Europe want to go along with this, and I think he’s looking for some leverage over Trump. And of course, Trump is very hard to read, but even his own base, the majority of Trump supporters, don’t want to go to war. You’ve got people like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon saying it would be a disaster. But ultimately, it comes down to Trump. He’s unpredictable, he’s transactional, he’ll calculate what he thinks it’ll mean for him.

AMY GOODMAN: And what impact does protests have around the country, as we wrap up?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think taking the stand is infectious. So many institutions were caving to Trump. And the more people stand up, 2,000 demonstrations around the country, the more the folks sitting on the fence, the millions of people who, they’re against Trump, but they don’t know what to do, the more of us that get involved, the better chance we have of turning this thing around. So, we should not let them discourage us. We need to build power to push back against all these horrible things.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, if the U.S. were to bomb the nuclear site that it would require the bunker-buster bomb to hit below ground, underground. Are we talking about nuclear fallout here?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: I think there would certainly be radiation that would of course affect the Iranian people. They’ve already had many civilian deaths. It’s not this kind of precise thing that’s only hitting military targets. And that, too, has to affect Iran’s view of this. They were shortly away from another negotiation, and now their country’s being devastated, so can they trust us?

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung is senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new piece for The National Interest is headlined, “Don’t Get Dragged Into a War with Iran.” Go to democracynow.org, we’ll provide the link. This is Democracy Now!. When we come back, a major Supreme Court ruling. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, a Democracy Now! special on this, the newly created Juneteenth federal holiday, which marks the end of slavery in the United States. The Juneteenth commemoration dates back to the last days of the Civil War, when Union soldiers landed in Galveston, Texas — it was June 19th, 1865 — with news that the war had ended, and enslaved people learned they were freed. It was two-and-a-half years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

In 2021, President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The day after Biden signed the legislation, I spoke to the writer and poet Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. I began by asking him about traveling to Galveston, Texas, and his feelings on Juneeteenth becoming a federal holiday.

CLINT SMITH: As you mentioned, I went to Galveston, Texas. I’ve been writing this book for four years, and I went two years ago. And it was marking the 40th anniversary of when Texas had made Juneteenth a state holiday. And it was the Al Edwards Prayer Breakfast. The late Al Edwards Sr. is the state legislator, Black state legislator, who made possible and advocated for the legislation that turned Juneteenth into a holiday, a state holiday in Texas.

And so I went, in part, because I wanted to spend time with people who were the actual descendants of those who had been freed by General Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. And it was a really remarkable moment, because I was in this place, on this island, on this land, with people for whom Juneteenth was not an abstraction. It was not a performance. It was not merely a symbol. It was part of their tradition. It was part of their lineage. It was an heirloom that had been passed down, that had made their lives possible. And so, I think I gained a more intimate sense of what that holiday meant.

And to sort of broaden, broaden out more generally, you spoke to how it was more than two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and it was an additional two months after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, effectively ending the Civil War. So it wasn’t only two years after the Emancipation Proclamation; it was an additional two months after the Civil War was effectively over.

And so, for me, when I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both/andedness of it, that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.

And I think what we’re experiencing right now is a sort of marathon of cognitive dissonance, in the way that is reflective of the Black experience as a whole, because we are in a moment where we have the first new federal holiday in over 40 years and a moment that is important to celebrate, the Juneteenth, and to celebrate the end of slavery and to have it recognized as a national holiday, and at the same time that that is happening, we have a state-sanctioned effort across state legislatures across the country that is attempting to prevent teachers from teaching the very thing that helps young people understand the context from which Juneteenth emerges.

And so, I think that we recognize that, as a symbol, Juneteenth is not — that it matters, that it is important, but it is clearly not enough. And I think the fact that Juneteenth has happened is reflective of a shift in our public consciousness, but also of the work that Black Texans and Black people across this country have done for decades to make this moment possible.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you explain more what happened in Galveston in 1865 and, even as you point out, what the Emancipation Proclamation actually did two-and-a-half years before?

CLINT SMITH: Right. So, the Emancipation Proclamation is often a widely misunderstood document. So, it did not, sort of wholesale, free the enslaved people throughout the Union. It did not free enslaved people in the Union. In fact, there were several border states that were part of the Union that continued to keep their enslaved laborers, states like Kentucky, states like Delaware, states like Missouri. And what it did was it was a military edict that was attempting to free enslaved people in Confederate territory. But the only way that that edict would be enforced is if Union soldiers went and took that territory.

And so, part of what many enslavers realized — and realized correctly — was that Texas would be one of the last frontiers that Union soldiers would be able to come in and force the Emancipation Proclamation — if they ever made it there in the first place, because this was two years prior to the end of the Civil War. And so, you had enslavers from Virginia and from North Carolina and from all of these states in the upper South who brought their enslaved laborers and relocated to Texas, in ways that increased the population of enslaved people in Texas by the tens of thousands.

And so, when Gordon Granger comes to Texas, he is making clear and letting people know that the Emancipation Proclamation had been enacted, in ways that because of the topography of Texas and because of how spread out and rural and far apart from different ecosystems of information many people were, a lot of enslaved people didn’t know that the Emancipation Proclamation had happened. And some didn’t even know that General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox two months prior. And so, part of what this is doing is making clear to the 250,000 enslaved people in Texas that they had actually been granted freedom two-and-a-half years prior and that the war that this was all fought over had ended two months before.

AMY GOODMAN: During the ceremony making Juneteenth a federal holiday, President Biden got down on his knee to greet Opal Lee, the 94-year-old activist known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth. This is Biden speaking about Lee.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: As a child growing up in Texas, she and her family would celebrate Juneteenth. On Juneteenth 1939, when she was 12 years old, a white mob torched her family home. But such hate never stopped her, any more than it stopped the vast majority of you I’m looking at from this podium. Over the course of decades, she has made it her mission to see that this day came. It was almost a singular mission. She has walked for miles and miles, literally and figuratively, to bring attention to Juneteenth, to make this day possible.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is Opal Lee speaking at Harvard School of Public Health.

OPAL LEE: I don’t want people to think Juneteenth is just one day. There is too much educational components. We have too much to do. I even advocate that we do Juneteenth, that we celebrate freedom from the 19th of June to the Fourth of July, because we weren’t free on the Fourth of July, 1776. That would be celebrating freedom — do you understand? — if we were able to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: And that is Opal Lee, considered the Grandmother of Juneteenth. And, Clint, one of the things you do in your book is you introduce us to grassroots activists. This doesn’t come from the top; this comes from years of organizing, as you point out, in Galveston itself and with people like — not that there’s anyone like — Opal Lee.

CLINT SMITH: Yeah, no, absolutely. Part of what this book is doing, it is an attempt to uplift the stories of people who don’t often get the attention that they deserve in how they shape the historical record. So, that means the public historians who work at these historical sites and plantations. That means the museum curators. That means the activists and the organizers, people like Take ’Em Down NOLA in New Orleans, who pushed the City Council and the mayor to make possible the fact that in 2017 these statues would come down, several Confederate statues in my hometown, in New Orleans.

And part of — when I think about someone like Miss Opal Lee, part of what I think about is our proximity to this period of history, right? Slavery existed for 250 years in this country, and it’s only not existed for 150. And, you know, the way that I was taught about slavery, growing up, in elementary school, we were made to feel as if it was something that happened in the Jurassic age, that it was the flint stone, the dinosaurs and slavery, almost as if they all happened at the same time. But the woman who opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture alongside the Obama family in 2016 was the daughter of an enslaved person — not the granddaughter or the great-granddaughter or the great-great-granddaughter. The daughter of an enslaved person is who opened this museum of the Smithsonian in 2016. And so, clearly, for so many people, there are people who are alive today who were raised by, who knew, who were in community with, who loved people who were born into intergenerational chattel bondage. And so, this history that we tell ourselves was a long time ago wasn’t, in fact, that long ago at all.

And part of what so many activists and grassroots public historians and organizers across this country recognize is that if we don’t fully understand and account for this history, that actually wasn’t that long ago, that in the scope of human history was only just yesterday, then we won’t fully understand our contemporary landscape of inequality today. We won’t understand how slavery shaped the political, economic and social infrastructure of this country. And when you have a more acute understanding of how slavery shaped the infrastructure of this country, then you’re able to more effectively look around you and see how the reason one community looks one way and another community looks another way is not because of the people in those communities, but is because of what has been done to those communities, generation after generation after generation. And I think that that is central to the sort of public pedagogy that so many of these activists and organizers who have been attempting to make Juneteenth a holiday and bring attention to it as an entry point to think more wholly and honestly about the legacy of slavery have been doing.

AMY GOODMAN: During an interview on CNN, Democratic Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out the 14 Republican congressmembers — all white men — who voted against making Juneteenth a federal holiday.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO–CORTEZ: This is pretty consistent with, I think, the Republican base, and it’s — whether it’s trying to fight against teaching basic history around racism and the role of racism in U.S. history to — you know, there’s a direct through line from that to denying Juneteenth, the day that is widely recognized and celebrated as a symbolic kind of day to represent the end of slavery in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: If you could respond to that, Clint Smith, and also the fact that on the same day, yesterday, the Senate minority leader said they would not be supporting the For the People Act?

CLINT SMITH: Yeah, I mean, I think —

AMY GOODMAN: The Voting Rights Act.

CLINT SMITH: Absolutely. I think, very clearly, the critical race theory — the idea of it is being used as a bogeyman, and it is being misrepresented and distorted by people who don’t even know what critical race theory is, right? So we should be clear that the thing that people are calling critical race theory is just — that is the language that they are using to talk about the idea of teaching any sort of history that rejects the idea that America is a singularly exceptional place, and that we should not account for the history of harm that has been enacted to create opportunities and intergenerational wealth for millions of people, that has come at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people across generations.

And so, part of what is happening in these state legislatures across the country with regard to the effort to push back against teaching of history — 1619 Project, critical race theory and the like — is a recognition that we have developed in this country a more sophisticated understanding, a more sophisticated framework, a more sophisticated public lexicon, with which to understand how slavery — how racism was not just an interpersonal phenomenon, it was a historic one, it was a structural one, it was a systemic one.

AMY GOODMAN: I want you to talk more about your book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. Can you talk about the journey you took — you were just mentioning where you grew up, in Louisiana, the map of the streets of Louisiana — and why you feel it is so critical not only to look at the South, but your chapter on New York is something that people will be — many will be shocked by, the level of — when people talk about the South and slavery, that New York, of course, had enslaved people?

CLINT SMITH: It did. It was really important for me to include a chapter on New York City, and a place in the North, more broadly, in part because, you know, while the majority of places I visit are in the South, because the South is where slavery was saturated and where it was most intimately tied the social and economic infrastructure of that society, it most certainly also existed in the North.

What a lot of people don’t know is that New York City, for an extended period of time, was the second-largest slave port in the country, after Charleston, South Carolina; that in 1860, on the brink of the Civil War, when South Carolina was about to secede from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln, that New York City’s mayor, Fernando Wood, proposed that New York City should also secede from the Union alongside the Southern states, because New York’s financial and political infrastructure were so deeply entangled and tied to the slavocracy of the South; also that the Statue of Liberty was originally conceived by Édouard de Laboulaye, a French abolitionist, who conceived of the idea of the Statue of Liberty and giving it to the United States as a gift, that it was originally conceived as an idea to celebrate the end of the Civil War and to celebrate abolition.

But over time, that meaning has been — even through the conception of the statue, right? The original conception of the statue actually had Lady Liberty breaking shackles, like a pair of broken shackles on her wrists, to symbolize the end of slavery. And over time, it became very clear that that would not have the sort of wide stream — or, wide mainstream support of people across the country, obviously this having been just not too long after the end of the Civil War, so there were still a lot of fresh wounds. And so they shifted the meaning of the statue to be more about sort of inclusivity, more about the American experience, the American project, the American promise, the promise of democracy, and sort of obfuscated the original meaning, to the point where even the design changed. And so they replaced the shackles with a tablet and the torch, and then put the shackles very subtly sort of underneath her robe. And you can — but the only way you can see them, these broken chains, these broken links, are from a helicopter or from an airplane.

And in many ways, I think that that is a microcosm for how we hide the story of slavery across this country, that these chain links are hidden, out of sight, out of view of most people, under the robe of Lady Liberty, and how the story of slavery across this country is very — as we see now, very intentionally trying to be hidden and kept from so many people, so that we have a fundamentally inconsistent understanding of the way that slavery shaped our contemporary society today.

AMY GOODMAN: Clint, before we end, you are an author, you’re a writer, you’re a teacher, and you are a poet. Can you share a poem with us?

CLINT SMITH: I’d be happy to. And so, when you’re a poet writing nonfiction, that very much animates the way that I approach the text. And so, this is part of the — this is an adaptation or an except from the end of one of my chapters, that originally began as a poem that I wrote when I was trying to think about some of these issues that I brought up.

[reading] Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy was an ever-present fixture of my daily life. Every day on the way to school, I passed a statue of P.G.T. Beauregard riding on horseback, his Confederate uniform slung over his shoulder and his military cap pulled far down over his eyes. As a child, I did not know who P.G.T. Beauregard was. I did not know he was the man who ordered the first attack that opened the Civil War. I did not know he was one of the architects who designed the Confederate battle flag. I did not know he led an army predicated on maintaining the institution of slavery. What I knew is that he looked like so many of the other statues that ornamented the edges of this city, these copper garlands of a past that saw truth as something that should be buried underground and silenced by the soil.

After the war, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy reshaped the contours of treason into something they could name as honorable. We called it the Lost Cause. And it crept its way into textbooks that attempted to cover up a crime that was still unfolding; that told us that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man, guilty of nothing but fighting for the state and the people that he loved; that the Southern flag was about heritage and remembering those slain fighting to preserve their way of life. But, see, the thing about the Lost Cause is that it’s only lost if you’re not actually looking. The thing about heritage is that it’s a word that also means “I’m ignoring what we did to you.”

I was taught the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but I was never taught how the declarations of Confederate secession had the promise of human bondage carved into its stone. I was taught the war was about economics, but I was never taught that in 1860 the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory and railroad combined. I was taught that the Civil War was about states’ rights, but I was never taught how the Fugitive Slave Act could care less about a border and spelled Georgia and Massachusetts the exact same way.

It’s easy to look at a flag and call it heritage when you don’t see the Black bodies buried behind it. It’s easy to look at a statue and call it history when you ignore the laws written in its wake.

I come from a city abounding with statues of white men on pedestals and Black children playing beneath them, where we played trumpets and trombones to drown out the Dixie song that’s still whistled in the wind. In New Orleans, there are over 100 schools, roads and buildings named for Confederates and slaveholders. Every day, Black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be there. Every time I would return home, I would drive on streets named for those who would have wanted me in chains.

Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee, take a left on Jefferson Davis, make the first right on Claiborne. Translation: Go straight for two miles on the general who slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender, take a left on the president of the Confederacy who made the torture of Black bodies the cornerstone of his new nation, make the first right on the man who permitted the heads of rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas.

What name is there for this sort of violence? What do you call it when the road you walk on is named for those who imagined you under a noose? What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after people who would have wanted the bricks to crush you?

AMY GOODMAN: Clint Smith, author of the book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, speaking on Democracy Now! in 2021, the day after Juneteenth became a federal holiday.

Coming up, the pioneering musical artist Rhiannon Giddens. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her opera Omar, about Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar in Africa sold into slavery in the 1800s.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

ICE agents arrested the New York City Comptroller Brad Lander yesterday as he was escorting a family out of immigration court in Lower Manhattan. Lander is running for mayor. He was handcuffed and detained by masked agents after he demanded to see a judicial warrant from agents trying to detain the man he was accompanying.

BRAD LANDER: Do you have a judicial warrant? Do you have a judicial warrant?

ICE AGENT 1: Back up. Back up. Sir, back up.

BRAD LANDER: Do you have a judicial warrant? Do you have a judicial warrant? Can I see the judicial warrant? Can I see the warrant? I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant. Where is it? Where is the warrant?

ICE AGENT 2: I have it in my hand. Sir, I have it in my hand here!

ICE AGENT 3: You’re disrupting! You’re disrupting!

BRAD LANDER: Do you have a judicial warrant? I would like to see the warrant. I would like to see the warrant.

PRESS SECRETARY: Great. Can we see it? Show it. Let us see it. Let us see it. Let us see it. We want to see the warrant.

ICE AGENT 1: Stay back. Stay back.

ICE AGENT 4: Take him in! Take him in! Take him in!

ICE AGENT 1: Get back. Step back. Step back. Step back. Please, step back.

BRAD LANDER: You don’t have authority — you don’t have authority to arrest U.S. citizens.

ICE AGENT 1: Step back. Sir, step back.

BRAD LANDER: You don’t have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens.

ICE AGENT 1: Please, stay back.

ICE AGENT 5: Step back, guys. Step back, please.

BRAD LANDER: You don’t have the — I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway. I asked to see the judicial warrant.

PRESS SECRETARY: And you’re arresting the comptroller while he’s trying to help here?

COMPTROLLER BRAD LANDER: By asking for a judicial warrant?

PRESS SECRETARY: This is ridiculous.

ICE AGENT 5: Stay back, guys.

BRAD LANDER: You don’t have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens asking for a judicial warrant.

ICE AGENT 5: Back, please. Stay back.

PRESS SECRETARY: Press. We go, too. Sorry.

ICE AGENT 5: Stay back. No, ma’am, for your own safety. For your own safety.

PRESS SECRETARY: I’m safe.

BYSTANDER: Can’t believe you’re arresting the —

PRESS SECRETARY: Where are you taking him? Hello?

BRAD LANDER: You have no authority to arrest U.S. citizens. Where are you taking me? And with what authority?

AMY GOODMAN: City Comptroller Brad Lander was held for several hours before being released when the New York governor came down to demand this. She had said what had happened was “bull—.” She used the whole thing. He exited the courthouse building accompanied by his wife, as well as Governor Kathy Hochul. He spoke to supporters gathered outside the arrest and the man he was attempting to escort, who he named Edgardo.

BRAD LANDER: I certainly did not assault an officer. I engaged in an — anyway, so, but I guess I just think here’s the thing. Like, I know I will have due process, and I will have a good lawyer, and my rights will be protected. But Edgardo has no due process rights and no lawyer and is going to sleep tonight in God knows where, in an ICE detention facility. …

My goal was to walk Edgardo out of the building. I can’t tell you the bit of — like, we got to walk one family out today, and that’s this family of four that’s back at home. And nothing would have made me happier than to be able to get in that elevator and let Edgardo go about his business. That was what I came to do, and it is all I wanted to do.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in studio by the comptroller of the city of New York, Brad Lander.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!

BRAD LANDER: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: I last interviewed you when you were at a protest calling for the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, Columbia student who was arrested in Vermont. Talk about what happened yesterday.

BRAD LANDER: Yeah. I’ve been going down to immigration court now for the last three weeks, since Department of Homeland Security made this change and started basically stripping people of their status. It’s called “dismissing” their cases, which sounds good, except as soon as it happens, you’re subject to expedited removal. And so —

AMY GOODMAN: So, they say, “The case is dismissed,” the judge says it, and then ICE agents meet you at the door and arrest you?

BRAD LANDER: It’s even a little worse than that. You know, you think in the courtroom, “Maybe this is good.” People don’t understand what’s happening. The person before Edgardo is a person named Zed who speaks Yoruba, but the only translator they had for him was in French. And the judge asked, “Do you understand what’s happening?” And, of course, he said no.

So, your case is dismissed. You’re stripped of status. You walk out of the courtroom. You walk down the hallway. And then those masked ICE agents are waiting in the elevator lobby to grab you. And so, what I had done with five families previously, or individuals, is just meet them either in the courtroom or just outside it and just try to escort them down the hallway, into the elevator and out of the building.

And five times previously, including once yesterday, my wife and I were able to do that. And this family that was worried they were going to get deported, they only have one more week, but at least they have a chance to come back to court and present their case. But then, in this case, as I was asking to see the judicial warrant, they just grabbed them up.

AMY GOODMAN: But don’t you have a police escort of security? So, you have police versus ICE now?

BRAD LANDER: The previous time — so, you know, being comptroller, I’m a citywide elected official. It comes with an NYPD detail. The previous times, the officer accompanied me and the — you know, whatever, the family or individual I was walking with, this couple, Maria and Manuel, a father named Camilo and his son Brian. And I thought, “Great, here’s the NYPD joining the comptroller to escort these asylum seekers out of the building, to help them get due process and safety.” In this case, obviously, that did not matter. And look, I think what’s happening here — go ahead. Sorry.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and, Brad, it’s been a while since we talked, but —

BRAD LANDER: It’s great to see you, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — I wanted to ask you — you kept saying to the ICE agents, “Where’s your judicial warrant?” However, ICE is claiming that this was a public space, and they didn’t need a judicial warrant. What’s your understanding?

BRAD LANDER: I mean, I’ll leave this for the lawyers. I am not an immigration lawyer. What people have been instructed to ask is, “I need to see a judicial warrant.” And we’re trying to get good information to these families. What New York City should be doing is connecting people to lawyers and attorneys. And, you know, we’ve got a mayor here, Eric Adams, who sold New Yorkers out to Donald Trump and is failing to get people the information they need.

We could be talking to immigrant families in the schools, in the shelters, in the public hospital system. But yes, asking for a judicial warrant is a good idea for people to do. Having a lawyer is even better. And look, if they do proceed to charges here, I know I’ll have one. Edgardo doesn’t have one. Zed doesn’t have one. Thousands of people just trying to seek asylum don’t have lawyers or due process rights, and that is the tragedy right now.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this trend now throughout the country of federal agents basically roughing up and detaining or arresting elected officials — Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, and a congresswoman there in California, a U.S. senator, Alex Padilla, and now this situation with you?

BRAD LANDER: Yes, I mean, and Pam Bondi was very clear: They’re trying to wreak havoc in cities, they say, to “liberate” Democratic cities from their duly elected elected officials. This is part of what authoritarians do: strike fear into immigrant families and communities and try to undermine the rule of law and basic democracy by stoking conflict. And that is what they’re doing. Our challenge is to find a way to stand up for the rule of law, for due process, for people’s rights, and to do it in a way that is nonviolent and insistent, demands it, but also doesn’t help them escalate conflict.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you something. There was a rally as you were being held inside, and your wife, who’s a lawyer, she also spoke. She wasn’t taken like you were. Mayor Adams sent police to break up that rally. Did he ever support you? I mean, you had Zohran Mamdani there speaking out. He’s your competitor; he is running for mayor, as well. You had Adrienne Adams, even Andrew Cuomo spoke out for you, Michael Blake. But what about the mayor?

BRAD LANDER: Yeah, five mayoral candidates showed up, and I’m grateful to every one of them, including Zohran Mamdani, who I’ve cross-endorsed. Andrew Cuomo did not show up, but at least he issued a statement saying that my arrest was wrong.

Eric Adams, who has sold this city out to Donald Trump — to try to get his own pardon, let’s be clear. Like, it’s only himself he cares about, and he is putting New York’s immigrants in harm’s way. So, no, he did not call me. He didn’t do anything to help, and issued a just rude statement.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to that co-endorsement, because we want to get to ranked-choice voting. It is not known to most people in this country what it is. But we’re going to go to a clip right now of the two of you, Zohran Mamdani and you, Brad Lander, endorsing each other, what this means. You’re both running for mayor.

BRAD LANDER: We both love New York City.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: And that’s why it’s so important to not send scandal-ridden, corrupt Andrew Cuomo to City Hall.

BRAD LANDER: New Yorkers deserve so much better than a disgraced creep.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Agreed.

BRAD LANDER: Zohran, you’ve done a remarkable job building a historic grassroots campaign for a New York City all New Yorkers can afford.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Brad, you’ve been a principled, progressive leader in our city for years.

BRAD LANDER: Early voting stars tomorrow, and we both know what we need to do to save our city from Andrew Cuomo. You want to tell them?

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: You go first.

BRAD LANDER: Nah, you go first.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Let’s do it together.

BRAD LANDER & ZOHRAN MAMDANI: We’re cross-endorsing.

BRAD LANDER: In New York City, we have ranked-choice voting. That means you can rank up to five candidates for mayor.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Brad and I are officially telling our supporters, “If I’m your number one, rank Brad number two.”

BRAD LANDER: “Rank me number one, rank Zohran number two.” Let’s send Andrew Cuomo…

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: …back to the suburbs.

AMY GOODMAN: So, there, you have a very confusing ad. You’re both running for mayor. Explain ranked-choice voting and what this means.

BRAD LANDER: Ranked-choice voting, instead of just getting one candidate, you can rank your preferences up to five. “Here’s my number one candidate, my number two candidate.” So, we’re encouraging me, rank me number one, rank Zohran Mamdani number two. Don’t rank Andrew Cuomo anywhere. And that way, our votes would get combined, and whichever of us is ahead will face Andrew Cuomo with all of the combined votes. Most New Yorkers don’t want him to be mayor, and ranked-choice voting can help make sure that that happens.

AMY GOODMAN: In this last 20 seconds, New York for All Act, can you explain what it is, why you’re supporting it?

BRAD LANDER: New York City is a sanctuary city, but New York state needs to do more to protect immigrants, not to allow collaboration with ICE, and to provide more legal representation to people like Edgardo.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Brad Lander, New York City comptroller, Democratic mayoral candidate. ICE agents arrested him Tuesday for escorting a man out of his immigration hearing yesterday.

That does it for our show. We have job openings: senior headline news [producer], director of audience. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring in Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost. Akbar, your reaction to the events of the last couple of days in this Israeli attack on Iran?

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: I think, Juan, we’re seeing a really tremendous risk, as Professor Marandi is saying, of the U.S. being pulled in. And we have to remember that in addition to the bases, the U.S. partners, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, which are all major energy exporters, maybe not to the U.S., but to the global economy, to Europe, to China, to Asia — beyond that, there are 40,000 U.S. troops — right? — many of them in Iraq, many across the region. Donald Trump, while saying that he was a “peace through strength,” antiwar president, we haven’t seen him solve any of the wars that he said he would address — Ukraine, Gaza. In fact, now there’s a new war unfolding on his watch. And he hasn’t brought back any of these military deployments.

What this tells us, really, is that because he’s, A, kind of crippled the federal government, he’s undermined the State Department, there’s chaos at the top ranks of the Pentagon, there isn’t even capacity in the Trump administration to deescalate at this point, and, B, Trump didn’t really have a clear strategic doctrine, right? For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the goal of an attack on Iran, and, frankly, a joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, that’s been a long-standing goal. He’s wanted that for decades. Netanyahu, through the Biden administration, before Trump entered office, was able to amass more and more American support. And I think he looked at this and said, “This is my moment. Trump can’t stop me. I’ve had a clear goal.”

And so, I think that’s where we’re at a moment of immense danger. The only kind of restraining, deescalatory force could really be the U.S. You have regional governments, Saudi Arabia among them, the Qataris, Oman, which has hosted talks between the U.S. and Iran. All these regional governments are trying to deescalate. But what I hear from Arab diplomats is, while the Trump administration is issuing statements to them, even behind the scenes saying, “No, no, don’t worry. We’re not going to get the U.S. involved,” there’s a clear gap between that rhetoric, which matches Trump’s, again, “peace through strength,” antiwar claims, and Trump’s actual actions, which are indicating a very clear U.S. military buildup and an increasing likelihood of a hugely devastating U.S. war with Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: Akbar, if you can talk about this latest piece, “Israel’s War on Iran” — the latest piece that you wrote on who has got Trump’s ear?

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: Mm-hmm. Yeah, Amy, it’s really interesting, right? This is a team where the president has made personal fealty, personal loyalty, the main qualifying factor, right? You’ve seen him reject intelligence saying that Iran was not rushing towards a nuclear weapon. You’ve seen him devastate the State Department. You’ve seen him fire top military commanders, which means that the people around him are either really cowed or very weak, or thinking about their own careers.

Into that gap, the person that steps in, and who I highlighted in this recent piece, is someone called Erik Kurilla. That’s the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East. He’s a four-star Army general. He’s been in his position since 2022. And what was striking as I got to understand Kurilla’s deep influence over Trump was a couple of things. He’s — even by the standards of American officials, who work really closely with Israeli counterparts all the time, Kurilla is seen as extremely close. One former U.S. official told me, in internal deliberations, Kurilla often seemed to know what the Israelis were thinking and what intelligence they had before any other person in the American government. So, there’s that level of familiarity. He was in position under Biden, which was a period during which he worked really closely with the Israelis in the wars in Gaza, in Lebanon, and in Israel’s defense — right? — against Iranian barrages, which it did face in 2024. In that period, he began kind of joint planning with the Israelis for a U.S.-Israeli strike. And now it looks like the moment is ripe.

And there’s another just confluence of factors that increase the danger here. Kurilla is looking at his retirement date in the coming months, maybe even as soon as July. And the chatter among American and Israeli officials for a while has been, “We want to get this joint U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran done while Kurilla is in office.”

So, all these factors have come together, and we have to remember that’s happening under, again, a President Donald Trump, who, as one expert told me, looks at stars and badges, and he can’t say “no,” right? He hero worships the military. He sees it as a kind of expression of masculinity, of strength, of all these dynamics he’s obsessed with. So, is Donald Trump really going to tell a general, even one who, you know, necessarily — Kurilla is not necessarily — Tucker Carlson has talked about warmongers. I think Kurilla and other military leaders would say, “We’re very much thinking about the U.S.’s best interests.” But military leaders are battlefield leaders. They are not necessarily strategists for long-term stability, nor are they politicians who can win public support. When the American public has shown they are very war-weary, and when it’s not clear how a U.S.-Israeli strike would lead to a better strategic, long-term picture, instead of unpredictable chaos and violence, do we really want a military leader to be the most influential voice in Trump’s ear? That’s where we are right now with General Kurilla.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Akbar, I wanted to ask you — the Israeli government officials have kept claiming that they’re not interested in regime change in Iran, but yet this week The Jerusalem Post has an article about the eldest son of the late shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, talking about how he has a 100-day transition plan for — and that he will soon be back in Iran. Your thoughts on how — the impact of this kind of news on the Iranian people?

AKBAR SHAHID AHMED: It’s impossible to separate headlines like that from the last 22 years of U.S. foreign policy in the region, right? People hear that, and they think about regime change in Iraq, which led to chaos and the rise of ISIS. They hear that, they think about Libya, which, again, chaotic, a horrible human trafficking situation. So, I think the way that this is resonating for Iranians, I imagine, and also certainly for Americans and audiences around the world, is this is just so fantastical, right?

And Israeli officials, to your point, have said two things at once. They have said, “We’re not pursuing regime change. Our goal is to limit Iran’s nuclear development.” But we’ve also seen Israeli officials across the board — importantly, not just Netanyahu, but the leading opposition figures, political rivals of Netanyahu, really senior Israeli political figures — have come out and said, “You know, we’re not necessarily doing regime change, but, Iranian people, don’t you think this is a great time to have a revolution,” you know? And I think that kind of — there’s a lot in there that’s concerning, right? I think for Iranian activists who have been raising their voices and been really viciously repressed for it, they feel that their message, their calls for reform are being hijacked, in a way, by Netanyahu, who is deeply unpopular there. And I just say it’s very unlikely to work, right? There is not a — there’s not an indication throughout history, and certainly not in recent Middle Eastern history, that suggests local communities under bombing are going to say, “Absolutely, the people bombing us are the liberators. This is who we want to stand with.”

With regard to Reza Pahlavi and this idea of restoring the monarchy in Iran, the degree — you know, Pahlavi lives here in D.C. He’s very much a fixture in kind of hawkish circles, close to people here. But the kind of magical thinking that you’re seeing among D.C. policymakers, where they believe that someone who’s been out of Iran since 1979 is going to go in and understand the modern country, where most people are young, where most people have not ever lived under the shah, it’s just remarkable and stunning, right?

And you mentioned earlier in the show these congressional efforts that Senator Kaine is leading, some legislators in the House are leading, and I do think there’s a significant number of Democrats who are willing to stand up and question whether another clear attempt at regime change, or certainly a risk of mission creep, is worth it. But you aren’t seeing Republicans sign on. Only one Republican member of Congress so far has joined those resolutions. And that tells us a lot about the disconnect between the, really, again, magical thinking, hawkish thinking in decision-making and policy circles here in Washington and people in America, people in Iran, people around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Akbar Shahid Ahmed, we want to thank you for being with us, senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost. His recent pieces, we’ll link to at democracynow.org, “Israel’s War on Iran Bears the Echo of Past American Mistakes” and “The Pro-Israel U.S. General Quietly Influencing Trump on Iran,” speaking to us from D.C. Mohammad Marandi, thank you, as well, professor of English literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran, part of the nuclear deal negotiations of 2015.

When we come back, what’s happening in Gaza as the world’s attention turns to Iran? Then we’ll be joined by New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, arrested by ICE yesterday as he tried to protect an immigrant in court. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: [“Chardi Kala”] by Sonny Singh, performing in our Democracy Now! studio yesterday.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Iran. In a televised address, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has rejected President Trump’s calls for unconditional surrender and warned Iran will meet any U.S. military action in Iran with, quote, “irreparable harm.” Trump has directly threatened Khamenei by writing on Truth Social that the U.S. knows where he is, adding, quote, “We are not going to take him out… at least not for now.”

This comes as multiple reports indicate Trump is moving closer to ordering U.S. airstrikes on Iran. On Tuesday, he dismissed findings on Iran by his own intelligence agencies. In March, the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told lawmakers the intelligence community, quote, “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon,” unquote. On Tuesday, Trump dismissed Gabbard’s testimony when asked about it by reporters.

KAITLAN COLLINS: Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.

AMY GOODMAN: This all comes as Israel is continuing to attack Iran for a sixth day, forcing thousands of people to flee Tehran. More than 50 Israeli warplanes struck targets inside Iran in the early hours of today. Iran responded by firing ballistic missiles and launching drones at Israel. According to one count, Israeli strikes since Friday have killed at least 585 people across Iran and wounded over 1,300 others. Iranian strikes on Israel that have killed at least 23 people and injured over 630.

On Capitol Hill, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine called for his colleagues to support his War Powers Resolution to prevent a U.S. war with Iran.

SEN. TIM KAINE: I happen to believe that the United States engaging in a war against Iran, a third war in the Middle East since 2001, would be a catastrophic blunder for this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, there’s a growing split within Trump’s MAGA coalition over the prospect of the U.S. attacking Iran. Conservative TV host Tucker Carlson has railed against what he’s called warmongers within the Republican Party. On Tuesday, video went viral of him interviewing the hawkish Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

TUCKER CARLSON: If you don’t know anything about the country — 

SEN. TED CRUZ: I didn’t say I don’t know anything about the country.

TUCKER CARLSON: OK, what’s the ethnic mix of Iran?

SEN. TED CRUZ: They are Persians and predominantly Shia.

TUCKER CARLSON: What percentage?

SEN. TED CRUZ: OK, this is cute.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, there’s — no, it’s not even — 

SEN. TED CRUZ: OK.

TUCKER CARLSON: You don’t know anything about Iran. So, actually, the country —

SEN. TED CRUZ: OK, I am not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran —

TUCKER CARLSON: No, no, the —

SEN. TED CRUZ: — who says —

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re a senator who’s calling for the overthrow — 

SEN. TED CRUZ: You’re the one who claims —

TUCKER CARLSON: — of the government —

SEN. TED CRUZ: You’re the one who claims —

TUCKER CARLSON: — and you don’t know anything about the country!

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. In Washington, D.C., Akbar Shahid Ahmed is the senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, where his latest pieces are headlined “Israel’s War on Iran Bears the Echo of Past American Mistakes,” and another article, “The Pro-Israel U.S. General Quietly Influencing Trump on Iran.”

But we begin in Tehran with Mohammad Marandi, professor of English literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran, part of the nuclear deal negotiations in 2015.

We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! Mohammad Marandi, let’s begin with you. You’re in the capital of Iran, in Tehran, the capital where President Trump has said everyone should leave. Can you talk about what’s happening? Describe the scene on the ground. How are people dealing?

MOHAMMAD MARANDI: Well, the administration here has facilitated people leaving Tehran since a few days ago. Many government agencies are now allowing people to work from home or to take vacation. And university and school exams have been canceled for now, so that those who want to leave the city can do so. So, Trump’s warning, which is an act of terror, really didn’t have a huge impact. Many people had already left. People, like myself, are here in Tehran.

Actually, I’m in the Iranian National Television and Radio buildings, in one of the buildings that’s been evacuated. I’m here because the internet is a bit better, is better than outside. And as you know, the day before yesterday, they bombed the Iranian Radio and Television Network and murdered a number of journalists.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, we have all these reports of the targeted killings or assassinations of key leaders and scientists in Iran. To what degree do you feel that this terror campaign of Israel has destabilized Iran’s top leadership?

MOHAMMAD MARANDI: Actually, these terror attacks have united the country more than ever before, or at least since, in my opinion, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. Those assassinations were carried out during the first hours of this unprovoked attack, and they bombed apartment blocks to get people. For example, in one apartment block where they were seeking to murder one or two high-ranking military officials, they killed everyone, 65 people, including over 20 children. So, that was not — and Western media tries to celebrate this and to show how sophisticated such an attack is. It’s not sophisticated. My neighbors know where I am. Their neighbors know that they’re there. There’s nothing sophisticated about slaughtering everyone in a building, in an apartment building, to murder one or two people.

But that’s, of course, what the Israeli regime has done across the board. They destroy apartment blocks in Beirut, and, of course, Western media would call these Hezbollah targets in order to hide the crimes. And we’ve seen what they’ve been doing in Gaza for 21 months, this genocide, this holocaust, where they’re slaughtering everyone everywhere. So, we shouldn’t have any expectations for the Israeli regime to behave any different towards Iranians, because, for them, we are all Amalek.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And also, I noticed that in the last day or so, the Iranian government has urged its people to delete social media platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram. The government claims that these platforms are relaying information to Israel, geolocation information about individual Iranians. This prospect of these media companies actually participating or colluding with Israel, what’s your sense of that?

MOHAMMAD MARANDI: Yes, Meta is actively participating in the attacks on Iran. They are giving locations for academics, university professors. I, too, unfortunately, have WhatsApp. I do not have Instagram. My account was deleted by Instagram a long time ago. But I only have WhatsApp because many journalists are trying to contact me, and I don’t have any other means to stay in contact with some of these people. And, of course, people have asked me to give up my cellphone, but again, I have no option, because if I do, then I cannot conduct interviews. So I have to take this risk. But others are being encouraged to delete Instagram and to delete WhatsApp, and I encourage people across the world to do so, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your response, Mohammad Marandi, to first the Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei rejecting Trump’s calls for unconditional surrender, warning that Iran will meet any U.S. military action in Iran with “irreparable harm.” The significance of him speaking out and of Trump directly threatening him? We’ve followed this over a few days. Trump has gone back and forth, you know, U.S. officials saying that he stopped Netanyahu from targeting Ali Khamenei, but then threatening Ali Khamenei himself, and, ultimately, most recently writing, “We are not going to take him out… at least not for now.” Can you talk about the significance of all of this and the U.S. fleet moving closer to the Middle East, and Trump now, apparently, moving closer to getting directly involved, the whole issue of whether the U.S. would use something that they haven’t yet given to Israel, which is a bunker-buster bomb in Fordow?

MOHAMMAD MARANDI: Well, Trump and Netanyahu are are two sides of the same coin. They are both genocidal, and they have no red lines. And the Iranians, of course, will ignore their threats and continue to defend the country’s sovereignty against this unprovoked aggression and this war that’s been imposed upon us.

The Iranians have said very clearly that if the United States attacks, Iran will punish it severely. And Iran’s underground drone and missile bases across the Persian Gulf region and the Indian Ocean are prepared for war. And I think those tiny Arab dictatorships in the Persian Gulf that have oil and gas installations, those that host American bases — and all of them do — if there is war, they, these regimes, will be swept away, because those bases are on their territory, and ordinary Iranians believe that they are fully complicit in any aggression against Iran. So, in case of any act of war against Iran by the United States, I think that that will be catastrophic for the global economy. It will bring about a Great Depression worse than the 1930s in the United States.