The most common pro-war talking point about Iran is that they massacred tens of thousands of protesters in January of this year?—?but what's funny is that they never cite the same number. Because it's a completely fictional story, they can just make up any number they want.

In online discourse with empire apologists these past few months I've been told that the number of dead protesters is thirty thousand, forty thousand, fifty thousand, sixty thousand, seventy thousand, eighty thousand, ninety thousand, and a hundred thousand.

They really do seem to just throw out whatever number feels believable in a given moment. I recently saw an exasperated Glenn Greenwald ask an interlocutor on Twitter, "How do you decide when to claim that Iran killed 30,000 protesters, or 45,000, or 70,000? Does it depend on the day of the week or lyrical flow or something else?"

Iranian regime change muppet Reza Pahlavi claimed in January that 50,000 protesters had been massacred by the Iranian government that month.

Notorious Korean propagandist Yeonmi Park put the number at 40,000.

In February, President Trump said it was 32,000. By April he had inflated that number to 45,000, and then later climbed it up to 60,000.

Last month I saw The Australian's Cameron Stewart swelling the number to 80,000.

In February there was a viral tweet by a propaganda account called The Persian Jewess asserting that "90,000 protesters have been killed to date," while right wing influencer Nicholas Lissack said it was actually 100,000.

The other day someone commented on a post of mine telling me "Iran killed over 40k protesters standing up for freedom," and when I dismissed that claim another empire apologist came in and adjusted the number to 30,000.