What does it look like when a war is being pre-sold—not with one big lie, but with hundreds of small linguistic nudges?

In this live conversation, we walk you through a headline-level pattern based on ~230+ articles across multiple countries: Iran is framed as the actor (“threatens,” “refuses,” “days are numbered”), while the U.S. build-up is framed as reaction (“prepares,” “weighs options,” “responds”). 

If most people only skim headlines, the headline becomes the policy environment.

From there, the discussion widens into something darker: the idea that “information space management” isn’t a metaphor anymore—especially with NATO explicitly discussing “cognitive” domains as a theater of competition.

Then Reiner Rupp (Reiner Rupp)—a former insider who knew how alliances message and posture—adds the military-strategic layer: deterrence vs provocation, escalation risk, and why “baiting the first shot” is an old playbook that keeps resurfacing in new packaging.

This isn’t a “what to think” episode. It’s a “watch how your attention is steered” episode—where the tempo, the repetition, the missing voices, and the shifting justifications are treated as the real story.

Further Readings:
📌 Manufacturing consent before the bombs drop: https://karat.substack.com/p/manufacturing-consent-before-the

🧠 NATO cognitive warfare: https://karat.substack.com/p/cognitive-warfare


Time stamps:
00:00 — The “headline dataset” move: why headlines are the battleground, not the footnotes
07:40 — Defensive U.S. / aggressive Iran framing: how verbs do geopolitics for you
18:25 — The urgency drumbeat: “time is running out” as a perception hack
32:10 — IRGC designation + rapid synchronization: when policy steps and media tempo converge
46:30 — Hard constraints behind the rhetoric: missile-defense depletion, procurement limits, and escalation math

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