Whenever the establishment left and the establishment right wholeheartedly agree on something, you know a large group of people somewhere will suffer. This appears to be the case with Iran. Rarely do we ever see a collective, war-mongering orgasm of these proportions. If America ever decides to look back on the aggressive pushing of a however remote Iran invasion, this orchestrated web of propagandist messages, statements, and op-eds will conveniently serve as a window into the world of 21st-century government propaganda.

Assuming America deems a potential Iran invasion a mistake, in 10 or 20 years’ time, the same media that has been aggressively pushing it since protests broke out in several Iranian cities will cry crocodile tears and bark whatever serves the agenda of their masters, like the good, obedient little government lapdogs that they are.

Trump, Clinton, McCain, and dozens of others — including journalists and politicians — from all sides of the political spectrum are suddenly filled with opportunistic concern for the Iranian people. McCain, who once infamously said: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” Hillary Clinton, who lit a fire in Libya, destroying a once prosperous country. Donald Trump who, instead of doing his job, keeps campaigning and feeding the cultist #MAGA crowd with what they crave — and they crave chaos disguised as order, sensation, machismo, and kitsch patriotism.

Outlets like the New York Times are not just in bed with neocon warmongers and intelligence agencies, they are neocon warmongers who propagandize, indoctrinate, preach and proselytize the American, and therefore, the global public.

The man who wrote this NYT op-ed, Reuel Marc Gerecht, is not just an “Israel-centric neocon,” as Glenn Greenwald puts it, he used to be a case officer at the CIA. This is public information, available on Mr. Gerecht’s Wikipedia page. Apparently, Gerecht is also a xenophobe who, in an interview with PBS Frontline said that “the Iranians have terrorism in their DNA.” Yes, “terrorism in their DNA.”

Of course, he was also a strong backer of the Iraq war, as well as the Afghan war. He has, however, managed to maintain and publicly display a sense of black humor throughout his long-lasting intelligence, pardon, journalism career, jokingly stating, at a Bloomberg conference in 2010, that he had “written about 25,000 words about bombing Iran. Even my mom thinks I’ve gone too far.”

How could the New York Times let a xenophobe write for them?

If a schooled dramaturg was to analyze the propagandist messages that the American public has been bombarded with since the protests erupted in Iran, they would probably mistake them for absurd fiction.

This Twitter message from the Department of State reads like a line from an obscure Theater of the Absurd play:

“When a nation clamps down on social media, we ask the question — what are you afraid of?” they say with a straight face. Just like Facebook says it is deleting accounts at the direction of the U.S. and Israeli governments. Not to mention social media platform and news aggregation giants, such as Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and others, who have, under the guise of social justice, gone down the path of postmodern neo-Marxist authoritarianism?

The world’s most renowned, and probably the most successful agent of chaos, Donald Trump, has managed to surpass every exaggerated lie he has ever told with this tweet. Strangely enough, this seems to be one of the few tweets the establishment media agrees with. How could they not, when, according to General Wesley Clark, a completely unjustified invasion of Iran has been in the works since 9/11.

In Mr. Clark’s own words: “So I came back to see him [one of the generals] a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, ‘Are we still going to war with Iraq?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s worse than that.’ He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, ‘I just got this down from upstairs’ — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — ‘today.’ And he said, ‘This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.’ I said, ‘Is it classified?’ He said, ‘Yes, sir.’ I said, ‘Well, don’t show it to me.’ And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, ‘You remember that?’ He said, ‘Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!’”

History repeats itself.

A couple of weeks ago, a memo was leaked from inside the Trump administration.

“The May 17 memo reads like a crash course for a businessman-turned-diplomat, and its conclusion offers a starkly realist vision: that the U.S. should use human rights as a club against its adversaries, like Iran, China and North Korea, while giving a pass to repressive allies like the Philippines, Egypt and Saudi Arabia,” Politico reports.

Doesn’t that sound familiar?

Most importantly, will the gigantic, orchestrated, and all-encompassing, albeit clumsy and transparent to anyone willing to see through it, propaganda machine succeed in manufacturing consent for the Iran invasion? To paraphrase a famous saying, “United they stand, divided we fall.”

It’s not a matter of “if,” it’s a matter of “when?” If history has taught us anything it is that these things happen in phases. Order out of chaos: create a problem, cause a reaction, present a solution. Where do we stand?

The same mainstream media that has been relentlessly bullying Donald Trump, the Jester, is backing his stance on Iran, along with his biggest political rivals. The surreal and exceptionally aggressive storm of messages, tweets, articles, columns, posts, and television reports makes up the ocean of pro-invasion propaganda and threatens to drown everyone consuming it. This is an orchestrated, elaborate propaganda campaign that has the fingerprints of the same, intelligence-coated, entity which engineered consent for all the previous invasions — invasions which have caused the death and suffering of many and benefited only a few.

This article was originally posted in Medium.