Wren Woodson

And so to kind of, now that Ren and I have done our own independent like investigations, just seeing how long this has spanned is kind of crazy.

I mean, it was kind of difficult for us at the beginning too, right, Ren?

Like when we would do analysis on this war, it sometimes came through a critical lens of the fact that we are launching ourselves into this other war.

And we had so many comments of people from Iran and Iranian Americans being very supportive of this.

And so we kind of learned...

about how to, you know, cover all views and have like a more nuanced perspective when we're covering it, just because it is complicated, I guess, more than we thought at the beginning, because we thought, you know, all Americans were against this war, or like a big, you know, chunk of them.

So we realized how much more complicated the issue is.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

I feel like the generation like before us, you know, around the times of the Iran revolution probably had a more negative view of Iran.

I read some poll, you know, that that's true with Americans like 50 and older have a very negative view of Iran just because of the way that we covered it, I guess, back in the day.

And now I think in our generation, it wasn't really something that we learned about that much in school.

Like there were so many other US adversaries that we had focused on.

And so I think the fact that this administration has launched into war with Iran is just less supported by young people who feel like it's very much out of nowhere because we weren't really there for when it was such a focus.

Yeah, I mean, there was reporting about how Lindsey Graham and Netanyahu kind of like conspired to manipulate Trump into launching this war because it was in Israel's benefit.

And the Wall Street Journal, I think, reported on it.

Lindsey Graham would just fly back and forth to Israel and they would talk about the best ways to lobby Trump.

And apparently Lindsey Graham was at the White House all the time golfing with Trump.

And the first time he ever brought on brought up attacking Trump.

Iran was when he was golfing with Trump and slowly, you know, these ideas of what can you gain from attacking Iran and launching this war and like your legacy and all of these, you know, like trigger points we know that Trump really responds to, you'd bring up and eventually those are, you know, those little things eat away at you and now we're in a war.

So that definitely had an impact, which we thought was really interesting.