The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome back to the Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. So the US-Israeli war in Iran is now in its second month, and President Trump and his whole administration continued to lie and flip-flop and bluster their way through the morass that they’ve made. Trump has gone from claiming that we’ve quote won this war, to suggesting that a deal with Iran will be coming soon, to sending thousands of more troops to the Middle East in preparation for what many fear will be a disastrous ground invasion, to making desperate threats on social media about committing more war crimes and just taking Iran’s oil. And for people here in the Western Hemisphere, especially those of us in the United States, it is infuriatingly difficult to get accurate and honest information about what the heck is actually happening in this war. And that is why it is so important that folks like award-winning journalist, lawyer, and former real news board member, Dimitri Lascaris, have been on the ground in Iran reporting.

And Dimitri’s been reporting for his YouTube channel, Reason to Resist from the Strait of Hormuz to the Manab Children’s School where Tomahawk cruise missiles fired by the US military, our government, killed 168 students and teachers on February 28th. You absolutely need to see Lascaris’s coverage. And I’m so grateful to have him joining us now. Dmitri, thank you so much for coming back on The Real News, man. I really, really appreciate it. And thank you for the reporting that you’ve been doing. You were just wrapping up this big intense reporting trip in Iran. So I want to give you the floor and start with the big takeaways, and then we’ll focus on some specifics. But tell us what you saw in Iran and what people here in the West are not seeing.

Dimitri Lascaris:

Thank you so much for having me on, Max. Whatever I know about journalism, I learned at the real news. Let me just start with that. It is a privilege to have cut my teeth as a journalist at such a wonderful organization, and it’s a privilege to be speaking with you about this, I think, very consequential war that we’re all going through and sharing with you what I saw. So thank you for the opportunity to speak, and it’s good to be back on the real news. Let me just tell you quickly the trajectory of our trip, so you can sort of get a big picture of what we saw and in what time span. On March 20th, we entered the country by land from Turkey, Eastern Turkey. We converged, and when I say we, I mean myself and three other journalists from Turkey, the United States and Australia.

We converged in the city of Vaughn, a predominantly Kurdish city, one hour from the border with Iran. We took a taxi to the border and we got there at like 12:30 AM, immediately got on a bus after sailing through customs on both sides and traveled. It was like six or seven hours by bus to the city of Tabriz, which is in the Azerbaijani or Azeri part of the country in the north. We spent one night there, went to Tehran for two days. That was another, I don’t know, five or six hour bus ride. Then we went to Espahan, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, never seen it before, a marvel of history and culture. We spent two days there. We actually got a tour of the historic center by the governor of Espahan province. Then we went to the city of Shiraz, the fifth or sixth largest city in Tehran, which is sort of between Espahan and the Persian Gulf.

Then we went to the Persian Gulf and things got nasty there. Not surprisingly because there the American and Israeli drones and war planes are less exposed to the Iranian air defense systems. And so they’re more aggressive about striking targets on the coast. And also Boucher, where there’s a nuclear power plant there that’s been attacked repeatedly. And it’s 25 kilometers from Karg Island, through which up to 90% of the oil and gas exports of Iran passed. And there’s been a lot of discussion, as you know, over the last couple of weeks about whether US forces would try to take Karg Island. From there, we went down to Bandarabas, which is the major Iranian city on the Strait of Hormuz. As you also mentioned, we then went to Minab. And following that, we returned from Minab to Bandarabas. We went out into the street of Hormuz on a boat.

And then we took a train all the way to Tehran, 22 hours straight, and immediately got on a bus and went to the Turkish border, which was another 12 hours or so. And I am in a semi-comatose state ever since. I honestly didn’t want to sleep when I was there, Max. It’s not that I had much of an opportunity because it was such an intense schedule, but the few hours available to me, I just wanted to stay awake and keep absorbing what I was seeing and sharing it to the maximum possible degree with people in the Western world who, as you rightly point out, have so little insight into what is actually happening in the country. And I guess if I could summarize it all, it’s hard to do that. I have many sort of emotions that I’m just working through myself about everything that I saw and experienced.

It’s going to take some time for me to process it all. But the way I felt when I left the country is this is a wonderful people. I have a tremendous admiration of respect for the Iranian people, and they are rising to the moment. That’s the way I felt. They are now on the verge of assuming their rightful place in the world. They have been marginalized, belittled, demonized, misrepresented, persecuted ever since the Islamic Revolution. And whatever you may think about the Islamic Revolution, it was a reaction fundamentally to US Hegemony and to the usurpation of Iranian democracy in the 1950s when they overthrew Muhammad Mosedeg, the British and the Americans. That’s what it was. And it may not have turned out the way many people wanted it to, but it was a revolution and they’ve been paying the price ever since. And I think that this war, which is of existential importance, not simply to the Iranian people, but to all of us, to all of us, it could go nuclear.

It could result in a catastrophic, just a complete destruction of the global economy, but it is having the opposite effect of that which was intended. It is actually allowing the Iranian people to achieve their rightful place in the world thus far. And war is a chaotic thing. Who knows where this will all lead? But my sense was that this is a nation that has embraced its destiny and feels that this is its moment to be respected at long last. Now, this is not to say that I’m approving of everything that the government ever did or said. This is not about the government. It’s about the people of Iran and it is about them that I’m speaking here today.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and in terms of the people that you spoke with and the reporting you were doing on the ground in these places that you listed off there, and yeah, that’s one hell of a schedule. And again, folks need to go to the Reason to Resist YouTube channel and you can see all of Dimitri’s reports from these sites. But I wanted to ask, Dmitri, in terms of the regular working people and the folks that you met along the way in Iran, could you tell us more about who those people were and how were you guys getting around? Who was showing you around? How involved was the government in this trip to … I think like you said, you’re not reporting from the halls of government, but I guess for folks watching and viewing, if we could just say how much of the government was involved in a trip like this and how are people on the ground responding to, like you said, responding to the moment, could you just sort of point that at the things folks are hearing here like, “Oh, there’s going to be another uprising.” People don’t know what the hell the folks in Iran are thinking and feeling.

And I think most of the time we just forget that a lot of them are just people like us wanting to live their goddamn lives.

Dimitri Lascaris:

Well, most of the people I spoke to were ordinary Iranians who had lost family members in this criminal war of aggression. I’d say well over half this people I spoke to, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters. I spoke to children who had been wounded in what were, to my mind, and I say this as a lawyer, plainly war crimes committed against the children of the country. The most devastating moment for me was something which I brought back all the emotions that have accumulated over watching two and a half years of this horror in Gaza was when we visited a little three-year-old girl. We were at her bedside in a hospital. Her entire family had been wiped out and she was on a ventilator. She was unconscious. Her face was terribly scarred and she didn’t know that her family had died. And at that moment, I was overwhelmed with emotion and an Iranian journalist in the hospital room caught it on camera unbeknownst to me.

And then it was broadcast on national television. And from that moment on, I was constantly being asked to do interviews with Iranian media outlets. And by the time we got to the eighth day, I’d say of the 11-day trip, I still can’t believe it happened, but people were walking up to me in the street, people I’d never met on the train, a 64-year-old man came up and started hugging me and telling me he loved me. In cafes where we stopped on the way during these bus rides across the country, the same thing, people were asking to take their photographs with me. There was this outpouring of love because somebody from the West, it wasn’t just me, my colleagues were also receiving this profound affection and appreciation from ordinary Iranians because people from the West were finally treating them like human beings and showing their suffering to the world.

So they came from all walks of life and they uniformly, Max, uniformly, they said that they are prepared to die for their country. None of them criticize the government, although I’m sure in other times they might have been inclined to do that, some of them, certainly some of them. They think that this is a moment when national unity must take precedence over all else. And I think they’re right about that. The enemy that they confront is a ruthless, horrible, genocidal enemy. They understand that perfectly well and they were uniformly derisive, scornful of the notion that Trump and Netanyahu are trying to liberate the Iranian people. Nobody took that seriously. They have utter contempt for the son of the Shah, Palavi, and they express that in various colorful ways. I saw, I would say, 10 to 15 pro- government demonstrations. They were taking place in every city we went to.

Sometimes in Shiraz, we were driving around at about 10 o’clock at night and there were six separate, I would say six pro- government demonstrations we saw just in Shiraz at various intersections. And I’m sure that there are people to this day who want to express their opposition to the government. I’m confident of that speaking to people who are friends of mine in Tehran who lived for some time in the West and who went back to the country, but they don’t seem particularly inclined at this moment to get out into the public and express their opposition. And to some degree, that’s probably due to fear of reprisal, but I think it’s also due to the fact that they don’t feel that they can, in good conscience, support what is being done to their country and they don’t want to be taken to be supporting it. So they’ve decided to stay at home and let the pro- government voices occupy the streets, which is exactly what’s happening.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. It’s something we’ve heard many times on the real news here from folks that we’ve spoken to, from Ukraine to Gaza, to right here in North America. It’s just like, it shouldn’t be hard for people to understand that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I can be both opposed to my government and still need to fight to survive and I can prioritize those things and still proceed forward in my day-to-day life. But I wanted to ask you, Dimitri, a little more about the work hazards for a second. Could you say a little more about what it took logistics and security-wise to report from all these places? And did I hear right from one of your reports that sites that you were visiting were being drone bombed right after you left many times?

Dimitri Lascaris:

Yeah. So one part of your, excuse me, prior question I admitted to answer. We were accompanied by Iranian journalists who were in the employee of the state media outlet, which is their version of the BBC. It’s called IRIB. There was one person in our entourage who was a security professional and his function was not, he wasn’t there to be our minder. His function was to protect us, to provide us advice and to make sure that we didn’t get ourselves into trouble. There weren’t any people strictly speaking who were representatives of the government at Spartan I know. I had this interesting debate with somebody from the Washington Post. They wanted to use my material. I found some evidence about a war crime that the US forces committed, and they wanted to refer to the people who were with me as government representatives. And I said, “Well, would you refer to the BBC reporters as government representatives?” If you wouldn’t, then you shouldn’t call them that.

Okay, let’s just be consistent here. They are journalists, they work for state media, people can draw whatever the conclusions they want about that, but they do consider themselves to be journalists and they conducted themselves as such on this trip and they were our guides. But the itinerary that they gave us, which they told us about in advance, we asked for it to be amended at various points and they did it. If the security situation allowed it, they accommodated our requests. There were times where journalists in our entourage broke free and just went off and did their own thing. I walked the streets of Boucher one morning by myself for an hour filming, photographing, trying to find people to talk to. In any case, every single city we went to, Max, we saw civilian infrastructure, what was clearly civilian infrastructure level to the ground. We saw hospitals that had been put out of commission.

We saw an emergency center, a civilian emergency center, which had been demolished and where there had clearly been a double tap strike to inflict maximum carnage on civilians. And I know this because I spoke to family members of people who showed up to remove victims from the rubble after the first strike, and they were killed while they were trying to save people by a second strike. And I saw this as a pattern that repeated itself. In every city we went in, we heard bombs without exception, but it wasn’t like constant bombardment. It was anywhere from three to five bombs we heard a day. And sometimes we could hear them in the distance. Sometimes they were very close. There were various types of munitions being used, obviously. Sometimes they were probably a thousand pound or 1500 kilogram warheads based upon the power of the blast. Other times they were drone strikes using lesser munitions.

And we ourselves didn’t feel like we were being targeted, although we heard explosions and saw explosions everywhere we went until we got to Boucher on the Persian Gulf. And then things started to get a little bit crazy. In Boucher, we spent one day and we visited a hospital that had been put out of commission. There was a strike at that hospital near the hospital shortly after we left. We visited a meteorological station beside the airport that had been utterly destroyed. And for some insane reason, that was struck by a drone shortly after we left. There was nothing there to destroy. It was utterly wrecked. So that was a bit odd to us. And then they struck a target right across the street from the hotel we’d been staying out two hours after we left the hotel in Boucher. So we learned about this as we were on the road from Boucher to Bandarabas on the straight of Hormuz.

And when we get to Bandarabas, Minab is two hours to the south of Bandarabas. So our guide said, “We think now would be a good time for us to go to Minab, and then we’ll come back to Bandarabas and we’ll go out on the straight of hormones tomorrow.” So on the way to Minab from Bandarabas, we stopped at what was a civilian broadcast station for the national media and it had been destroyed. And as we’re out there inspecting it, there’s a drone strike like a couple hundred meters from us. And it’s like, wow, we didn’t even know what they were trying to strike. There was no obvious target out there. So we immediately evacuated the site. We go to Minab, we spent the entire day there and 10 minutes and Minab is also totally destroyed. There’s nothing there of any military value or not even a civilian target left.

It’s just rubble. And 10 minutes after we left, there was a drone strike on the Minab School, which made the national news. So as we’re on the road now back from Minab to Bandarabas, and the security official I mentioned who was there to protect us, he said, “They just struck Manab School. They’re clearly sending you a message. Get off the bus now, give me your devices, turn off your devices. I will deliver them to you in Bandarabas, but you need to get off this bus. Don’t stand together in the street, disperse, stand alone somewhere about get as far away from the bus as you can and wait until taxis come and the taxis will drive you separately there.” And so that’s what happened. And we managed to get back to Bandarabas in one piece. That night we had discussion among ourselves whether we wanted to go out on the Strait of Hormuz, which was the plan on the following day.

And that discussion didn’t last very long because I think there was a strong feeling that we needed to do it.

As concerned as we were, we weren’t going to allow ourselves to be intimidated if in fact that was the intention. I suspect it was, but who knows? So the next day, the plan had been that we’d not only go out into the Strait of Hormuz, but that we would visit two islands in the Strait of Hormuz belonging to Iran, Hormuz Island and Kemch, which is the largest island in the Persian Gulf. But when we woke up in the morning, we discovered that the Israelis had struck the port in the island of Hormuz. And so the governor of the province, who was himself, the person authorizing this trip, this excursion out into the strait, he said, “Look, I can’t allow you to go to the islands. It’s just too dangerous. And all I can give you is 20 minutes on the straight. So we have a boat prepared to take you out for 20 minutes.

They’ll take you a couple of kilometers from the coast and you got to come back. And even that’s a bit quite dangerous.” So that’s what we did. For some reason, we got out there and they actually allowed us to stay out on the water for an hour. But then we came back and the next day we got on a train and went all the way back to Turkey. So I personally, I do suspect that we were being targeted, that the intention was not to kill us, but to silence us. And the reason why I say that is some of our reporting ended up getting a lot of attention. The New York Times and the Washington Post both published and also other major media organizations in the United States like ABC News, published some of our video footage from a village in which US forces had dispersed mines and had killed people, obviously a war crime.

And there were appearances on national television, and then there was our report from the Minab School, which showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that this was not a military target. So I think that they were not happy with the evidence that was emerging from our trip, as I suspect. But I’ll tell you, Max, I never … At this stage of my life, as I explained yesterday in an interview, and I’ve learned this from the people of West Asia, having gone to Lebanon four times, Palestine during the genocide, I would consider it a privilege to die in the cause of justice, just to put it out there. I mean, at this stage of my life, I’m a very fortunate human being, and if that’s the price that I have to pay to talk about the crimes of our governments, I don’t think this is particularly heroic.

I really do feel privileged to be in the position that I am in, and it’s my minimum obligation to try to help these people because the people who speak in our name are killing their children.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s really beautifully and powerfully put, brother. And I know all too deeply in my own way what you mean. I don’t know what it’s like to be where you just were, but I echo that valiant sentiment. And I felt it myself when I was reporting on the Microsoft tech workers launching an encampment to stop Microsoft’s complicity with the genocide in Gaza and they got brutalized by the police and they were taking a huge stand risking their jobs, their immigration status. And as I’m walking away from, like you, being one of the only people there reporting, I see one of the drones following me to my car and it keeps coming back. And I had this chill going down my spine where I realized that this is exactly the sound that so many of our colleagues heard before they died, or maybe they weren’t even lucky enough to hear that.

And if they could, in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, if they can keep filming till the bitter end, so can we. Absolutely. Absolutely. I just really, really appreciate you for being out there on the front lines doing that work. And I wanted to ask a little more about that because there’s sort of two really critical functions, services that you’re providing with this on the ground journalism. You can’t put a price on being there on the ground in this God forsaken era where people are so starved for truth, but so rightly mistrustful of the media and what they’re seeing. And we don’t know in our warped reality bubbles what’s real and what’s not. And so having you there, even in the Strait of Hormuz saying, “I’m here, it’s not closed, counts for so much.” But at the same time, the truth that you’re showing with your camera is cutting through the language of lies here in the West.

And I wanted to focus in on that, the sort of journalistic stories that you uncovered by taking this trip that you really wanted to kind of highlight from Manab to the Strait of Hormuz to these other sites.

Dimitri Lascaris:

Well, let me talk about Manab. I think that would be a powerful example of what we learned through this voyage across the country. I had understood based upon not just media reporting in the corporate space, but also some alternative media websites who are limited in what they can say about the subject because they don’t have the means. Most alternative media or organizations, as you know, Max, don’t have the means to do on the ground reporting in places like Iran. And so the narrative was that this school was adjacent to a military facility. And although US forces, ultimately US officials acknowledged that it was destroyed by Tomahawk cruise missiles, they maintained that it was a mistake because of the proximity of a military base. They characterize it as being as a joining a military base. We show up there and as soon as we got out of our bus, we see a 12-foot high wall with barbed wire around it.

And it looks like a large complex on the other side. Just standing on the outside, it kind of looked like a military base. And the reason for that is it was a military base a long time ago. But then we walked around the facility until we got to the entrance and we went in and it didn’t take long for us to understand that there was no way in hell that anybody could believe this to be a military facility. There were four or five buildings on this complex, which once was a military base well over a decade ago. One was a school. Another one was a place that was kind of like for overfill if people wanted to go. If there was not enough space in the school, which was relatively small, they would go in there and they would have classes and there was some part in there.

There was a prayer room in there. They had hit that. Then there was another small structure that had been completely destroyed and we were told they were storing pharmaceutical products there. And indeed, we found nothing but pharmaceutical products in the rubble. We were sifting through the rubble, finding plenty of evidence that this was a storage space for pharmaceutical products. There was an antenna that must have been like 40 years old, this old rusty antenna, which I can’t really believe that it served any kind of a military purpose. It was just, I don’t even know if it was functional. And the place, the complex was divided into two parts. One was the school in the schoolyard, and the other part was just wheat, overgrown weeds. And it was quite obvious that they hadn’t been parking any military vehicles there because if they had, you would be able to see that in the vegetation.

But it was obvious that they weren’t even cutting the vegetation there. They had been allowed to grow wild for quite some time. So people can watch my report, but it’s absolutely clear that anybody with the surveillance and intelligence gathering capacity of the United States of America would have known that that was a school. There’s no doubt about it. If they can find the Supreme Leader and kill him and his family, if they can find all of these military officials that they’ve assassinated, how could they not know what this was? It was so obvious and notorious. And then we walked around the facility after we did the internal inspection and saw absolutely nothing that bore any resemblance to a military installation, anywhere near it. In fact, much of the area around it was undeveloped. It was just open space with wild vegetation growing. So I personally am convinced that they intentionally destroyed that school.

They intentionally killed those children. I don’t know as a lawyer what other conclusion to draw. I can’t believe they didn’t understand what they were doing and they hit it with several tomahawks, not just one. So you could say, okay, one, win off course, it malfunctioned, whatever, but three of them, four of them malfunctioned? No. It was decided by somebody up the chain of command. I don’t know who, that on the first day of the war, they were going to slaughter a bunch of children and send a message.

And that’s something that I saw not on that scale. There were 168 children and teachers killed on that day, but I saw that all over the country. I met with a little boy who was 12 years old who was playing at a sports complex in a city called Lamat and the thing was hit with a weapon, a ballistic missile by the US forces that had never been used in combat. And the thing was designed to explode above ground. It was packed full of tungsten pellets and on impact or when it exploded, those pellets radiated out at blazing speed, smoking hot pellets, and it was designed obviously to cause maximum carnage. And that boy who dreamt of being a professional footballer very likely will never play football again. I don’t know if he’ll even be able to run again. And as he lay in bed and we spoke to his mother and father at his bedside, they took us out in the hallway and they said, “We haven’t told our son yet that his coach was killed and his best friend on the foot Ball club was killed.

We don’t want him to have to deal with that horror at this point because he’s had three operations. He doesn’t even know that he’s probably never going to play football again. This is what I saw. I saw it over and over and over again. They are committing outright acts of terror, the United States and the Israelis right across the country because they have suffered, in my view, a military defeat.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I know I could talk to you for days about this, but you have been traveling for weeks and have yet to really get some sleep, so I can’t keep you for too much longer. But I did just want to, in the final minutes that I have you, sort of ask about the view of this war from the ground in Iran. I mean, it’s not the war in Iraq of 20 years ago when I, my family and so many in this country were cheering it on and saying, “We’re out there getting the bad guys. We’re spreading democracy.” That’s not the vibe here in the United States of America. This is a deeply unpopular war. No one wants this Trump’s base. A lot of them don’t want it or they’re not buying his lies about it. You’ve got people from no king’s protests to any other kind of protests I’ve been to with signs saying, “Why are we going to war when no one’s been held accountable for the Epstein files and tanking the economy?” So that’s kind of just a little snapshot of the grim view of this war from the ground here in the United States.

I wanted to ask, I don’t want to ask you to speak for Iran or Iranians, but just being there with them and talking to folks, how are they viewing this war and us, the people of the United States and Israel?

Dimitri Lascaris:

I didn’t get a sense that there was widespread hostility towards the people of the United States. I think people in the country are acutely aware of the fact that a majority of Americans want nothing to do with this war and that opposition to it is growing. People often spoke about that to us, but they have complete derision for the government of the country. I think there is a widespread belief in Iran that a big part of the reason why they’re going through this horror is because of the Epstein files and Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to conceal the true extent and nature of his connections to that depraved animal, Jeffrey Epstein. But they also believe that Israel has dragged the United States into this war, that Israel has hell bent on domination of the region and territorial acquisition, and that they may well have compromise on Donald Trump.

I think that is also a widespread belief. But hostility towards Americans, no, I didn’t sense that at all. And in fact, if you look at their messaging coming from the military and the government, they explicitly refer oftentimes to the fact that most Americans don’t want to be part of this travesty.

One thing that I think really impressed me, you know how people in the Muslim and Arab world are often portrayed as these bloodthirsty savages calling for death of this and this, that. There was very little of that. Their indignation was quite dignified, I found. And there was a certain solemnity to their defiance because they understood that it was going to come with a very steep price. And everybody in that country who has children, I mean, not just people that have children, the people who don’t have children, they’re worried about the children of Iran. They’re worried about their … I mean, that first event, the Minab School bombing, I think impressed the entire country with the reality that their children are going to be murdered in large numbers and that it was going to be very difficult for them to prevent that. So nobody there wants this war.

Nobody views this as some kind of a glorious opportunity. They don’t want this war. They hate war. They desperately want peace, but they are not going to capitulate. They’ve made a collective decision that they will die if necessary to defend their country. That was the overwhelming sentiment. I don’t think that we’ve really grasped the … When I say we, I’m talking about the people who purport to lead us. I don’t think they really have grasped what they’re dealing with here. This is an ancient people, a proud people, and they have been pushed to the limit and they feel they have no alternative but to fight to the death. And I’ll just close by saying this.

When I was traveling from Crete to Cyprus a few hours ago, the place where I was in Crete was right beside the Suda Bay Naval Base, which is the largest US military base in the Eastern Mediterranean. And there were US soldiers on that flight from Hanya to Athens. And then I connected from Athens to Cyprus. And we get into the terminal. As we’re entering the terminal, we all stop to look up at the departure board. And I hear a bunch of young soldiers talking to themselves about the strait of Hormuz being opened. So I kind of inserted myself in there to strike up a conversation. And I said, “Hey, man, you guys think that the US military is going to be able to open up the strait of Hormuz?” And one of the young guys, he goes, “Look, man, this is beneath my pay grade.

My rank is so low. I have no idea. I just do what they tell me. ” I said, “You guys going home?” And all of them looked at me and said, “Man, we wish we were going home. We really do. ” I said, “Where are you heading?” And they said, “We’re heading where they tell us to go. ” And my heart kind of went out to them at that moment. These young men, they don’t want to be there. At least that was my strong sense from this brief interaction. Others may want to be there, but they themselves, I think a lot of people in the US military feel this way. It’s not just a majority of the American people. They don’t even understand what the hell they’re doing over there. And I think that the Iranian people understand that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Love that. Ken, that’s the perfect spot to end the video. And let me just get the outro really quick for the podcast, but that was beautiful, brother. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real News Network Podcast. And thank you so much to our guest, Dmitri Lascaris, award-winning journalist, lawyer, and former Real News Network board member. Follow Liscaras’s reporting on the reason to resist YouTube channel and his social media pages, and we’ve linked to all of those in the show notes. If you want to hear more coverage and get more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News Now. Share this podcast with your people and your circles, your friends and family and coworkers. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and go to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. For the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.