Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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When most people in the English-speaking world hear the word “propaganda”, they tend to think of something that’s done by foreign nations who have governments that are so totalitarian they won’t even let people know what’s true or think for themselves.

Others understand that propaganda is something that happens in their own nation, but think it only happens to other people in other political parties. If they think of themselves as left-leaning they see those to their right as propagandized by right wing media, and if they think of themselves as right-leaning they see those to their left as propagandized by left wing media.

A few understand that propaganda is administered in their own nation by their own media, and understand that it’s administered across partisan lines, but they think of it in terms of really egregious lies like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or babies being taken from incubators in Kuwait.

In reality, all are inaccurate understandings of what propaganda is and how it works in western society. Propaganda is administered in western nations, by western nations, across the political spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known examples of its existence make up only a small sliver of the propaganda that our civilization is continuously marinating in.

The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They’re the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future.

One of the forms this takes is the way the western political/media class manipulates the Overton window of acceptable political opinion.

Have you ever noticed how when you look at any mainstream newspaper, broadcast or news website, you never see views from those who oppose the existence of the US-centralized empire? Or those who want to close all foreign US military bases? Or those who want to dismantle capitalism? Or those who want a thorough rollback of the creeping authoritarianism our civilization is being subjected to? You might see some quibbling about different aspects of the empire, some debate over whether we should de-escalate against Russia so we can better escalate against China, but you won’t ever see anyone calling for the complete end of the empire and its abuses altogether.

That’s propaganda. It’s propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.

The creation of that illusion is propaganda. It’s not something solid that you can point to easily because it’s comprised of an omission of something rather than a concrete thing, but it warps people’s perspectives in ways that have immensely far-reaching consequences. It’s something that doesn’t stand out too sharply against the background, but because people are exposed to it continuously day in and day out, it plays a huge role in shaping their worldview.

Another related method of manipulation is agenda-setting — the way the press shapes public thinking by emphasising some subjects and not others. In placing importance on some matters over others simply by giving disproportionate coverage to them, the mass media (who are propagandists first and news reporters second) give the false impression that those topics are more important and the de-emphasised subjects are less so. As political scientist Bernard Cohen famously observed way back in 1963, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. The world will look different to different people depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read.”

Ever noticed how the fact that our governments are increasingly tempting nuclear war seems like it ought to be a front-page story pretty much every day of the week, but instead the news is full of stuff like the US presidential race and people arguing over what products Target should sell during Pride Month? That’s agenda-setting.

The press could easily have spent the entire Trump administration screaming about the dangerous aggressions Trump was advancing against Russia instead of calling him a Putin puppet, and mainstream liberals would have fixated on Trump’s warmongering insanity instead of calling him Putin’s cock holster. But that wouldn’t have served the interests of the empire, which had been planning to ramp up aggressions against Russia for years. They set the agenda, and the public fell in line.

Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways the public is propagandized from day to day is described in a recent video by Second Thought titled “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually fed messages by the capitalist machine that we must work hard for employers and accept whatever standards and compensation they see fit to offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in this unjust system the fault lies with us and not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault. Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault. Overworked? Your fault.

The continual message we’re fed every day is that there’s nothing to rebel against and nothing to oppose, because any problems we’re perceiving are our own fault and not the fault of an abusive, exploitative system which is built to extract profit from the working class and the ecosystem at the expense of both. The system cannot be a failure, it can only be failed.

Then there’s the ideological herding funnel we discussed recently, which herds the population into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful. Anyone who can’t be herded into either of these mainstream factions is instead herded into fake “populist” factions, which eventually corral them back into the mainstream factions. Those few politically engaged people who can’t be herded toward any of these groups are so small in number that they can simply be marginalized and denied any sizeable platform from which to spread their ideas, and “democracy” does the rest because the majority are supporting the status quo.

Maybe the most consequential of all the mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the way the mass media manufacture the illusion of normality in a dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream our lungs out if we could see it with fresh eyes. The way pundits, politicians and reporters will talk about the Biden administration surrounding China with war machinery without also talking about how freakish and horrifying it is that we’re looking at rapidly escalating brinkmanship between nuclear-armed countries. The way American cities are full of homeless people and it’s just treated as a normal and acceptable thing to simply let them stay homeless and push them out of wherever they try to be. The way nothing ever changes no matter who we vote for but we’re still herded into the voting booths and told to vote better.

As a character in the movie Waking Life puts it, “We all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no! Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven’t given us any other options outside the occasional purely symbolic act of voting — do you want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?”

They don’t just tell us what to believe about the world, they tell us what to believe about ourselves. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded on that test.

Over and over and over again, day after day, we are fed seemingly small messages which add up over time. Messages like,

• The world works more or less the way we were taught in school.
• The media have some problems but basically tell the truth.
• The status quo is working basically fine.
• Democracy is real and voting is effective.
• This is the only way things can be.
• Our government might have its problems, but it’s basically good.
• You can earn your way into happiness by working harder.
• You can consume your way into happiness with more spending.
• If you think the system is dysfunctional, you’re the dysfunctional one.
• Those who oppose the status quo are weird and untrustworthy.
• Things might get better after the next election cycle.
• Any attempt to change things is a silly waste of time.

By feeding us all these simple, foundational lies day after day, year after year from the time we are very young, they lay the groundwork for the more complex, specific lies we’ll be told later on. Lies like “Russia/China/Iran/etc is a real problem and its government needs to be stopped,” or “People are struggling financially right now, but it’s just because times are hard and it can’t be helped.”

All the mundane lies serve as a primer for the lies we’ll be told later, because once our worldview has been shaped by them, our basic human cognitive biases and predisposition to reject information which conflicts with our worldview will ensure that we’ll take on board the information which confirms our biases and reject any evidence against it. They construct our worldviews for us, then let our normal cognitive defense systems protect it.

Their messages don’t even need to be well-evidenced or well-argued, they only need to be repeated frequently due to a glitch in human cognition known as the illusory truth effect which causes us to mistake the feeling of having heard something before with the feeling of something being true.

Add to all this the recent development of things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and the deck becomes stacked against truth even further, because someone’s odds of stumbling across information which conflicts with the propaganda they’ve been fed goes dramatically down. Even if they’re actively searching for information which conflicts the mainstream worldview, algorithms by Google and Google-owned YouTube often make it almost impossible to find.

So that’s what we’re up against. There’s a failure to appreciate just how pervasive and powerful the empire’s propaganda machine is, even among those who are very critical of empire, because propaganda in our society is like water for fish — we’re swimming in it constantly, so we don’t see it. You have to step way, way back and begin examining our situation from its most basic foundations to get any perspective on how all-encompassing it really is.

Finding your way out of the propaganda matrix takes a lot of diligent work, tons of curiosity, the humility to admit you’ve been completely wrong about everything, and more than a little plain dumb luck. But if you keep hacking away at it eventually you get there, and then you can help others get there too. It’s a hard slog, but if our chains are psychological that means they’re ultimately only made of dream stuff. All that needs to happen is for enough of us to wake up.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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Moon of Alabama has an article out on how an uncomfortable number of relatively restraint-oriented foreign policy officials have been exiting the Biden administration, while a China hawk has just been appointed the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Antiwar has an article out about how New York congressman Jerry Nadler told an Epoch Times reporter that he “wouldn’t care” if Ukraine used US-made F-16s to strike Russian territory, and doesn’t find the possibility that they might do so concerning.

This comes days after we learned that the Biden administration has signed off on Ukraine getting F-16s while also greenlighting an offensive on Crimea using US-made weapons, a nightmare scenario which greatly escalates the risks of nuclear war.

There are no adults behind the wheel of the vehicle that’s driving us toward World War Three. We’re on a bus that’s being driven straight toward a cliff, and it’s being driven by infants. If we survive this it will not be because of the experienced leadership of western governments, but completely in spite of it.

There are many characters in the world of literature who dream of joining the #UAarmy – the side of good.@jk_rowling

AI by @caton.lab pic.twitter.com/Reblg8gOZ4

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) May 23, 2023

It’s getting more and more dangerous, and it’s getting more and more stupid. The other day the Ukrainian government tweeted a video in which the faces of characters from the Harry Potter film series are superimposed over Ukrainian soldiers, a perfect compliment to an earlier tweet by NATO about the Ukrainian military saying “We are Harry Potter and William Wallace, the Na’vi and Han Solo. We’re escaping from Shawshank and blowing up the Death Star. We are fighting with the Harkonnens and challenging Thanos.” This truly is the phoniest, most PR-intensive proxy war of all time.

And that’s nothing compared to how stupid the 2024 US presidential race is getting, already in May of 2023. In a recent interview on Fox News, Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was asked by Trey Gowdy how he would respond to the war in Ukraine on day one of his presidency and he started babbling about wokeness and gender ideology.

“Well first, I think what we need to do as a veteran is recognize that our military has become politicized,” said DeSantis. “You talk about gender ideology, you talk about things like global warming, that they’re somehow concerned and that’s not the military that I served in. We need to return our military to focusing on commitment, focusing on the core values and the core mission.”

GOWDY: If you're president, how would you address the war in Ukraine?

DESANTIS: First, I think what we need to do as a veteran is recognize that our military has become politicized. You talk about gender ideology … pic.twitter.com/xv5jqTYksA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 25, 2023

Are you ready for a year and a half of this? Because you’re getting a year and a half of this. A year and a half of all substantive questions about real policy of real consequence getting diverted into the most vapid culture war quagmires you can possibly imagine, because it isn’t the US president’s job to change the way the US empire operates, it’s the US president’s job to keep everyone dazzled with fake bullshit while the US empire marches along unimpeded by the wishes of the voting public.

Supporters of Israeli apartheid and America’s proxy war in Ukraine have been pretending to believe that rock icon Roger Waters donned a Nazi costume in support of Nazism at a concert in Berlin earlier this month, their feigned outrage leading to an investigation by German police despite the fact that literally everyone knows he was just portraying the fascist character from Pink Floyd’s The Wall that he’s been performing for over four decades.

Oh yeah, and they’re continuing to aggressively normalize the use of police robots despite massive public opposition.

Amid massive public outcry about surveillance and safety, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to accept the donation of a $280,000 robot dog for LAPD. pic.twitter.com/R6ZBQlwo5u

— People's City Council – Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) May 25, 2023

This is a dark, strange timeline, and the more dangerous it gets, the dumber it gets.

Still there’s no reason to give up hope, and there’s no reason to give up joy. No matter how dark things get, there’s always the possibility that there are forces moving beneath the surface of our collective psyche which can change it all on a dime once conditions are ripe. No matter how dark things get, we’re still living in a profoundly beautiful and fascinating world which is a privilege and delight to participate in for even an instant. No matter how dark things get, we can still keep doing our best to try to make them a little bit better while making sure we don’t waste any of our precious time in this universe failing to appreciate its awesomeness.

There is darkness, but there’s also light. Far more of it than most people realize.

So do your worst, Stupid Dystopia. We’ll fight with all we’ve got and enjoy the ride for as long as we’re here.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading ot this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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60 Minutes Australia has been playing a leading role in saturating Australian airwaves with consent-manufacturing messaging in support of militarising to participate in a US war against China. A segment they ran a year ago is titled “Prepare for Armageddon: China’s warning to the world,” and features an image of Xi Jinping overlaid with war planes and explosions and captioned “POKING THE PANDA”. Another from a year ago is titled “War with China: Are we closer than we think?” Another from ten months ago is titled “China’s new target in the battle to control the Pacific.” Another from six months ago is titled “Inside the battle for Taiwan and China’s looming war threat.” Another from two months ago is titled “Is the Navy ready? How the U.S. is preparing amid a naval buildup in China.”

All of these segments have millions of views on YouTube alone. Now this past weekend 60 Minutes Australia has aired back-to-back segments titled “The real Top Gun: US military in heated stand-off with China” and “Five countries secretly sharing intelligence say China is the No.1 threat,” both of which are as jaw-droppingly propagandistic as anything I’ve ever seen.

“It might sound like twisted logic, but military forces everywhere argue that the greater the firepower they possess, the greater the chance of maintaining peace,” opens 60 Minutes Australia’s Amelia Adams. “In other words, massive weaponry is the best deterrent to war. Right now the theory is being tested like never before, and much of it is happening in Australia’s backyard, the Indo-Pacific region. The United States wants the world, and more particularly China, to know of its increasing presence there, and to do that it’s putting on a spectacular show.”

What follows is 19 minutes of overproduced footage displaying this “massive weaponry” while Adams oohs and ahhs and gives slobberingly sycophantic interviews to US military officials.

“There’s something utterly mesmerising about the F-35 jet,” Adams moans. “The sound, the heat, and the power put this supersonic stealth fighter in a league of its own.”

“Colonel these are some very impressive machines you’re in charge of!” she gushes to an officer on an aircraft carrier.

“Yes ma’am,” the colonel replies.

Jesus lady, do your orgasming off camera.

Contrast this glowing ecstatic revelry with Adams’ open hostility later in the segment toward a Chinese think tanker named Henry Wang, claiming that he was trying to “rewrite history” for dismissing panic about a Chinese military buildup by pointing out (100 percent correctly) that China is spending a lower percentage of its GDP on its military than western nations.

“Every command, every maneuver, is being fine-tuned on this vast blue stage, where China has proven to be a bad actor, playing a long game of intimidating Pacific nations,” Adams proclaims over helicopter footage of US war ships. “But the US and its allies aren’t having it, bolstering their defenses — and it’s an impressive display.”

I defy you to find me footage more brazenly propagandistic than this, from any point in history. This is supposed to be a news show, run by people who purport to be journalists, yet they’re engaging in propaganda that looks like it came from a Sacha Baron Cohen spoof of a third world dictatorship.

As I never tire of pointing out, the claim that the US has been militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival defensively is the single dumbest thing the empire asks us to believe these days. The US is surrounding China with war machinery in ways that it would consider an outrageously aggressive provocation if the same thing were done in its neck of the woods, which means the US is plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is plainly reacting defensively to those aggressions.

While the first segment unquestioningly regurgitates Pentagon narratives and gives supportive interviews to military officials, the second segment unquestioningly regurgitates talking points from the western intelligence cartel and gives supportive interviews to Five Eyes spooks.

“Showing off deadly weaponry in massive war games is a tactic China and the United States both use to try to avoid full-on combat,” says 60 Minutes Australia’s Nick McKenzie in introduction. “But the truth is the two countries, as well as other nations including Australia, are already battling it out in an invisible war. There are no frontline soldiers but there are significant skirmishes. Until now these conflicts have been kept quiet, but key members of a secretive alliance of top cops from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand are about to change that.”

“Their group is called the Five Eyes, and tonight they want you to know what they see,” says McKenzie, which is the same as saying “We’re telling you what the Five Eyes intelligence agencies told us to tell you.”

McKenzie literally just assembles a bunch of Five Eyes officials to tell Australians that China is bad and dangerous, and then disguises the western intelligence cartel advancing its own information interests as a real news story.

“There is one threat that alarms our partners more than any other,” McKenzie says over dramatic music, asking “Which state actor is the key threat to democracy in Australia and amongst the Five Eyes partners?” and presenting a montage of western intelligence operatives answering (you guessed it) China.

“The Americans describe a growing menace on our doorstep flowing from China’s increasing influence in the region,” McKenzie says, before asking an American official, “Do you see the Chinese state preying on Pacific island nations?”

“I believe so, yes,” the official responds.

Western journalism, ladies and gents.

Man, Australians are really getting pummeled with war propaganda. This is basically war porn for the U.S. military. pic.twitter.com/RRO0Htkewp

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) May 24, 2023

Australians are particularly vulnerable to propaganda because Australia has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, dominated by a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment (who airs 60 Minutes) and the Murdoch-owned News Corp. This vulnerability is being fully exploited as the time comes for the western empire to beat the war drums against China.

We keep being hammered by this narrative that “massive weaponry is the best deterrent to war,” when all facts in evidence say the exact opposite is true. It was the military encroachment against Russia and the conversion of Ukraine into a NATO military asset which provoked Putin to invade Ukraine, and all the militarization against China that we are seeing is only inflaming tensions and making war more likely.

And, I mean, of course it is; even a casual glance at the Cuban Missile Crisis reveals that powerful nations don’t take kindly to having menacing forces placed near their borders. So much of the propaganda indoctrination we’re subjected to in the 2020s revolves around convincing people to believe that Russia and China should react completely differently than the way the US would react if foreign proxy forces were being amassed along its borders.

So yes, Amelia Adams, claiming that aggression and militarism is the best path toward peace is absolutely “twisted logic”. It is as twisted as it gets. Because it is false. This is obvious to anyone who hasn’t yet been successfully indoctrinated into this omnicidal belief system.

We need to do everything we can to fight against this indoctrination now, because if we wait until the war actually starts it will likely be too late to resist.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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Many people turn to conservatism and religion because they perceive — correctly — that mainstream culture is a fraudulent sham bereft of meaning and authentic values. Their solutions are misguided, but their reasons arise from a perception of a very real problem.

It isn’t actually necessary to turn to religion or conservatism to find depth, meaning and groundedness; depth, meaning and groundedness are always abundantly accessible. But nothing about western culture makes this obvious, especially in the mainstream.

Turning to religion and conservatism as a solution to the degradation of mainstream culture is just replacing the modern systems of mass-scale thought control with the old ones. It’s a completely maladaptive solution to the problem, but you can’t ask people to just keep participating in a worldview that feels like it’s sucking your soul out of your body 24/7. You need to offer them something nourishing and authentic. Nothing in mainstream liberal culture offers this; it’s self-evidently phony, soulless and vapid.

This isn’t something the left can just dismiss. There needs to be something on offer which meets these needs better than both mainstream culture and the regressive belief systems which caused so much suffering in the past.

 

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Feminism was supposed to mean freeing women from oppression and inequality. Now it means shooting off Palestinian children's feet with sniper rifles. https://t.co/9CxfRiZBKh

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 23, 2023

 

 

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It’s incredible how much money the Americans can afford to blow just on exploding stuff overseas. Their healthcare system and infrastructure must be phenomenal.

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Communism is such a non-thing in the west that western rightists have to make up imaginary communist threats to be afraid of, pretending devoutly anti-communist institutions like the Democratic Party and the World Economic Forum are communist, or that “woke” stuff is communism.

If you have to make up imaginary communist threats to give your ideology meaning and purpose, you have a dumb ideology. Making an identity out of being anti-communist in the west is like making an identity out of being anti-dinosaur. Stop being ridiculous and do something real.

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No normal person is asking for digital IDs or central bank digital currencies. They’re being supplied without any demand, for the benefit of the power structures supplying them.

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If a western-backed Ukrainian offensive on Crimea leads to a series of escalations culminating in nuclear armageddon, only about 200 people in the entire world would think it was worth it, and none of them live in Crimea.

pic.twitter.com/kkyIEXhOgp

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 23, 2023

 

 

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So much is lost due to the fact that modern science and academia don’t research western domestic propaganda and its effects, because they don’t acknowledge the existence of western domestic propaganda. As a result, there are no studies or data anywhere on the most sophisticated and widespread psychological operation of all time. And this is of course because our academic fields are captured by the same influence interests as our media and tech and every other means of controlling the information westerners ingest.

This leaves us unable to scientifically study how we’re being programmed at mass scale. Because there’s not research and data, we can’t even talk to most people about the most significant thing that’s happening in our society. Unless you’ve spent countless hours researching the many systems of imperial information manipulation, it’s hard to believe it’s even happening.

This is the only reason those who talk about western propaganda and Silicon Valley information manipulation get branded conspiracy theorists. It’s not because the evidence for our position on those issues isn’t abundant, it’s because it’s not officially acknowledged and studied.

Domestic propaganda is the most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our civilization, because it causes people to think, speak, work, shop and vote in ways that perpetuate the status quo. You should be able to get a PhD in its study, but you can’t even write a thesis on it.

The most important thing you need to know about our society is that all our means of understanding our world are being aggressively and continuously interfered with by powerful people who benefit from the status quo. They’re actively meddling in our perception of reality.

 

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Rawpixel (CC0 1.0)

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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The Biden administration has signed off on both F-16s for Ukraine and attacks on Crimea using US-made weapons. Both of these moves have drawn dire warnings from nuclear-armed Russia, and both would have been unthinkable a year ago.

In a Sunday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper from the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan made it clear that Washington would approve of US weapons being used in an offensive to recapture Crimea, a horrifying prospect that many experts have agreed is the most likely scenario to lead to nuclear warfare in this conflict. Sullivan told Tapper that while the US has forbidden the use of American weapons to attack Russia, the US considers Crimea to be part of Ukraine, not Russia.

Here’s CNN’s transcript of the exchange:

TAPPER: In February on this show, you would not say whether the U.S. would support Ukrainian efforts to recapture Crimea. That’s one of the concerns that has been expressed about whether or not the Ukrainians are given the ability to hit Russian targets in Crimea. Do you think that Crimea is part of Ukraine?

SULLIVAN: Of course.

TAPPER: So, what would be the objection of giving…

SULLIVAN: Crimea is Ukraine.

TAPPER: Right.

SULLIVAN: I mean, that’s a very straightforward thing.

TAPPER: Well, yes you answered it directly. I mean, Russia doesn’t think so, obviously. But do you think that Ukraine should have weapons that can reach Russian targets in Crimea?

SULLIVAN: Yes. We have not placed limitations on Ukraine being able to strike on its territory within its internationally recognized borders. What we have said is that we will not enable Ukraine with U.S. systems, Western systems, to attack Russia. And we believe Crimea is Ukraine.

TAPPER: OK.

Also refreshing clarity from NSA Jake Sullivan "We have not placed limitations on UKR being able to strike within its international recognised territories… we will not enable UKR with US systems Western systems to attack Russia and we believe Crimea is Ukraine" pic.twitter.com/ffVYGilCr8

— Rym Momtaz ريم ممتاز (@RymMomtaz) May 21, 2023

Moscow has considered Crimea a part of the Russian Federation since its annexation in 2014, meaning efforts to recapture it would — at least in theory — be treated the same as an invasion of any other part of Russia. It was only by way of an arbitrary bureaucratic fluke that Crimea wound up a part of Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Crimeans overwhelmingly prefer to be a part of the Russian Federation. That we may soon be staring down the barrel of a nuclear third world war over something so pedantic is a very dark shade of absurd.

In the same interview, Tapper questioned Sullivan about the Biden administration’s policy shift toward approving F-16 fighter jets to be sent to Ukraine, demanding to know why the war planes weren’t approved sooner.

“President Biden told the G7 leaders that the United States is going to support this joint effort to train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 fighter jets,” said Tapper. “As you know, just a few months ago, the president said there was no basis militarily for giving Ukraine jets and that Ukraine didn’t need them at all. What changed? And would these jets not have been more effective if Ukraine had been trained and had them in time for the upcoming counteroffensive?”

It’s so obnoxious how the only time you ever see these mass media propagandists challenging the US government on its warmongering is when they’re pushing it to be more warlike and demanding answers on why it isn’t warmongering more. This creates the illusion of brave adversarial journalism, when in reality these empire cronies are just manufacturing consent for the increased aggressions the US wants to wage anyway.

CNN’s @jaketapper asks National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan why President Biden changed his stance on providing Ukraine F-16 jets. Watch his response below. #CNNSOTU @CNNSotu pic.twitter.com/fl4vJXXTSw

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) May 21, 2023

These escalations have drawn stern warnings from Moscow, which have just been casually hand-waved away by Biden like he’s rejecting jello for dessert. In an article titled “Russia Says West Providing F-16s to Ukraine a ‘Colossal Risk’”, Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:

A Russian official said Saturday that the Western plans to provide Ukraine with American-made F-16 fighter jets bring “colossal risks” after the US announced it would sign off on European countries delivering the aircraft.

 

“We see that Western countries are still adhering to the escalation scenario. It involves colossal risks for themselves,” said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko, according to TASS.

 

“In any case, this will be taken into account in all our plans, and we have all the necessary means to achieve the goals we have set,” Grushko added.

 

During the last day of the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, President Biden was asked about Russia calling the F-16 plan a “colossal risk.” He replied, “It is for them.”

Deciding to bring the world one step closer to nuclear war while in Hiroshima, how appropriate https://t.co/zuUOuTTpdM

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) May 20, 2023

As Tapper noted, both the F-16 decision and the Crimea decision marked a sharp policy shift by the Biden administration in just a few months. This proxy war just keeps escalating and escalating, with aggressions once deemed unthinkable due to their likelihood of sparking a nuclear exchange now becoming commonplace. Every time a new once-unthinkable escalation is enacted, the hawks are already pushing for the next one.

As we’ve discussed previously, this pattern of continually escalating nuclear brinkmanship in Ukraine has built-in incentives for Russia to ramp up its own aggressions against NATO itself. Every time the west ramps up its brinkmanship and crosses another once-taboo line in the sand without Moscow responding with direct military confrontation, the west takes this as a sign that it can ramp up the escalations again. This has put things on a trajectory toward more and more direct western-backed attacks on the Russian Federation unless Russia lashes out at NATO powers in some way to show them it’s not worth it. Which would be about as dangerous an occurrence as you could possibly imagine.

It is not okay for our rulers to play games with our lives like this. It is not okay for them to keep rolling the dice on nuclear escalation more and more often in the name of securing US unipolar hegemony. These people are making it abundantly clear that sanity and level-headedness are not in the driver’s seat here. Everyone on earth should be shouting a loud, unequivocal “no” to this at the top of their lungs.

_____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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The problem that underpins most other problems in modern times is that human minds are highly hackable, and that the science of hacking them at mass scale has been advancing since Bernays over a century ago. This is what keeps people consenting to the destructive and exploitative agendas of the powerful against their own interests.

The fact that our minds are being manipulated at mass scale throughout our civilization is the most significant thing happening in the world by far, but hardly anyone talks about it, because hardly anyone knows it’s happening. And a lot of power rides on keeping it that way.

Step 1 is learning that minds are very hackable, and are being hacked constantly at mass scale.

Step 2 is learning that your own mind is included in this.

Step 3 is unpacking the implications of Step 2 (Step 3 never really ends).

Step 4 is helping others get to Steps 1 and 2.

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It works like this:

• As many people as possible are herded into two mainstream political factions who pretend to oppose each other while in reality working together to advance the interests of the powerful.
• Those who can’t be herded into the two mainstream factions are herded toward fake “populist” factions, who then herd them into the mainstream factions.
• Those who can’t be herded into either category are marginalized into invisibility.

By the time you get down to that bottom tier, their numbers are so inconsequential that you can keep them from having any impact by simply refusing them platforms on mainstream media and letting “democracy” do the rest, because you’ve got the majority right where you want them.

Most propaganda goes not toward the glaring, obvious lies like the Iraq invasion, but toward mundane control systems like the ideological herding funnel I just described. Really ham-fisted propaganda is the exception, not the rule in the west; the lion’s share of the empire’s manipulations just go toward keeping people marching to the beat of the imperial machine.

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The Israel/Palestine issue isn’t complicated or hard to understand, there’s just a widespread assumption among mainstream westerners that it can’t possibly be as simple as it looks because the mainstream information sphere is distorted to obfuscate what’s obvious at first glance. At first glance it looks like a violent and abusive apartheid system with one ethnicity receiving preferential treatment over the other, but people assume it can’t be that simple, mistakenly thinking that if it was that clear-cut there wouldn’t be so much debate about it — with their own government supporting the apartheid side.

Mainstream westerners have been conditioned to expect that if this was really as clear-cut an issue as it appears to be, the media would be constantly talking about how evil it is and the Israeli government would be sanctioned and frequently condemned by western governments.

The problem, as is so often the case, is that mainstream westerners make the assumption that “If that’s what was happening, we would have heard about it in the news.” Not understanding that their “news” media is designed to advance the interests of the powerful, not to report the news.

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The government surveils us more and more to make sure we’re under control. Tech companies surveil us more and more to manipulate how we shop. Employers surveil us more and more to control how we work. Meanwhile every institution with power over us grows more and more secretive.

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Many people, maybe even most people, are to some extent aware that our entire civilization is bullshit. Relatively few are able to describe exactly how and why it’s bullshit, though, because there’s so much bullshit it’s hard to get a clear view of how the bullshit is happening.

It’s hard to understand how and why our civilization is bullshit exactly because our civilization is bullshit. It’s rife with lies, the teachers feed us lies, the algorithms feed us lies, and we’re trained to look for information in areas that will turn up lies.

Finding the truth in our bullshit society is like being in a room that’s rapidly filling up with actual, literal bull feces. It’s splashing around, it gets in your eyes, you’re struggling to keep your head above it so you can breathe — so it’s hard to see where all the bullshit is being piped into the room from. Getting a lucid understanding of what’s going on in the world is very much the same: you suspect you’re being bullshitted, but every source that turns up when you try to learn about stuff assures you that it’s all good and the world works just like you were taught in school.

In a civilization that’s made of bullshit, it’s rare to gain solid enough footing and high enough ground to be able to look around and clearly see how all the bullshit is happening. Everything here is geared toward preventing us from gaining that footing. It takes hard, diligent work, and more than a little luck.

_____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via Imprensa AgruBan® at Pexels.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

The single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society is the way domestic propaganda is used to shape the way mainstream westerners perceive and think about their world.

Typically the only time you’ll ever hear the word “propaganda” mentioned in mainstream discourse is in reference to things other countries do to their own citizenry or as part of foreign influence operations, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the times we’ve encountered propaganda in our day to day lives, the call was coming from inside the house.

The western media have been exposing their role as propagandists for the US-centralized empire a bit more than usual lately. Here are a few recent examples.

 

Mass media aggressively defend imperial propaganda firm Bellingcat.

.@bellingcat is a great journalistic organization. Conversely, Musk once linked to a deranged article about Paul Pelosi in the Santa Monica Observer, a nutjob website that claimed in 2016 that Hillary Clinton had died and had been replaced by a body double. https://t.co/Hg4ghngiwz

— Jake Tapper, long-suffering Philly sports fan (@jaketapper) May 17, 2023

Western media have been falling all over themselves to condemn repeated comments from Elon Musk accusing the empire-funded spin machine Bellingcat of conducting psyops — an accusation which, as Aaron Maté explains for The Grayzone, is completely fair and accurate. Bellingcat is paid by western governments to manipulate the information ecosystem in ways that serve the interests of the western empire, which is precisely the thing that psychological warfare is. “Psyops” is short for psychological operations, the component actions in psychological warfare, which becomes more important in cold war conflicts between nuclear powers who can’t confront each other directly.

This obvious fact hasn’t deterred the mass media outlets who cite Bellingcat copiously in their reporting from rushing to the institution’s defense. Bellingcat’s Aric Toler was brought on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” to defend the outlet without being challenged in the slightest, and mainstream pundits like CNN’s Jake Tapper took to Twitter to proclaim the propaganda outlet a beacon of journalistic integrity.

“Bellingcat is a great journalistic organization,” Tapper tweeted. “Conversely, Musk once linked to a deranged article about Paul Pelosi in the Santa Monica Observer, a nutjob website that claimed in 2016 that Hillary Clinton had died and had been replaced by a body double.”

Conversely, Tapper once tweeted that anyone who’s interested in the war in Syria should follow Bana Alabed, a seven year-old girl who was herself used in a blatant imperial psyop, and who has been amplified and supported by both Bellingcat and CNN.

As Alan MacLeod documented for Mintpress News a couple of years ago, Bellingcat is not only funded by western government sources like the CIA front National Endowment for Democracy, but is also staffed by numerous western military and intelligence “veterans”. The way the mass media continually praise and defend this plainly corrupt institution while also routinely citing its work is a kind of information laundering, because they are telling their massive audiences that this government propaganda outlet is a trustworthy source of information and then citing that information in their reporting on the enemies of those same governments.

Bellingcat in and of itself wouldn’t be destructive and toxic; what makes it destructive and toxic is the way western media continually amplify and validate it while publishing its claims under the guise of news stories, without ever disclosing the outlet’s massive conflicts of interest to their audiences. It’s a self-validating circle jerk of war propaganda.

CNN reporter says they “wouldn’t be allowed to report” if Russia struck a Ukrainian arms depot.

Following claims by the Ukrainian government that it shot down 29 out of 30 missiles launched by Russia on Thursday, CNN News Central host Brianna Keilar asked foreign correspondent Sam Kiley whether there was any truth to Russia’s claims that one of its missiles had struck a Ukrainian arms depot.

“Sam, Russia has claimed that it struck a Ukrainian arms depot, is there any truth to that?” asked Keilar.

“There may be; we wouldn’t be allowed to report it if it was,” Kiley answered. He added, “we simply don’t know,” and acknowledged that “there is one missile unaccounted for and we don’t know where it went.”

In explanation for CNN’s opacity on the matter, Kiley said that “this is part of the Ukrainians’ effort to try to make sure that the Russians don’t manage to adjust their fire and targeting based on the information that they may get from us.”

This would be a normal comment to expect from the Ukrainian government or Ukrainian state media, but CNN’s reporters openly saying that the network is protecting the information interests of the Ukrainian military instead of reporting objective facts on the ground is an acknowledgement that CNN is operating as a war propaganda network for a foreign government. This is not impartial reporting; this is an American news outlet reporting on a foreign country, acting as a direct participant in that country’s war as though it is on a war footing against Russia.

And this is of course just an open acknowledgement of what has long been obvious since well before this war even started: that western media believe it is their job to advance the interests of the US-centralized empire and undermine the interests of Russia. Which is to say, they are propagandists.

Lockheed Martin CEO up for CFR board membership.

Leaked Council on Foreign Relations members-ballot reveals the influential think tank is poised to appoint Jim Taiclet, CEO of the world’s largest weapons company, Lockheed Martin, to its board.

CFR isn’t answering ?s re: potential conflicts of interest. https://t.co/NW8IABjJYM

— Eli Clifton (@EliClifton) May 18, 2023

Responsible Statecraft’s Eli Clifton reports that a slate of ten candidates for board membership in the immensely influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations includes James Taiclet, the chairman and CEO of “what is arguably the world’s largest arms dealer,” Lockheed Martin. CFR members have to vote for or against the entire slate, and cannot vote for or against specific nominees.

Clifton notes that CFR already currently has multiple executives from the military-industrial complex on its board of directors:

“The board of directors of CFR, a New York-based think tank that focuses on U.S. foreign policy and international relations, isn’t a stranger to embracing the weapons industry. CFR’s chairman is David Rubenstein, a co-founder and co-chairman of the private equity firm and defense-industry-focused Carlyle Group, and the board currently includes Raytheon board member Meghan L. O’Sullivan, and Frances Townsend, a director at Leonardo Systems, a Virginia based weapons systems company. (CFR’s biography of Townsend omits any mention of her role at the weapons firm but Leonardo Systems lists her CFR board membership in her biography on their website.)”

To be clear, when I say CFR is immensely influential, I mean it is immensely influential. Its membership spans throughout the major media institutions of the western world, and it once hosted a panel where a former State Department official who was also an editor of Time Magazine openly endorsed the practice of using propaganda on Americans to influence how they think.

At a Council on Foreign Relations forum about "fake news," former Editor at Time Magazine Richard Stengel directly states that he supports the use of propaganda on American citizens – then shuts the session down when challenged about how propaganda is used against the third world pic.twitter.com/ClAT5POv7G

— William Craddick (@williamcraddick) May 11, 2018

Foreign policy “think tanks” are frequently nothing other than influence operations for the military-industrial complex, and the information environment of the global north would be greatly improved if more people were aware of this. So it’s refreshingly honest to see these institutions moving from merely being funded by the war industry to being run by the war industry directly.

A bit more from Clifton:

Last year, Responsible Statecraft asked Taiclet whether receiving $75 billion in Pentagon contracts in fiscal year 2020, one and a half times the State Department and Agency for International Development budgets, was a reasonable balance of expenditure and if it was reflective of U.S. national priorities. Taiclet defended the budget allocation that benefited the company he leads, responding that it was “up to the U.S. government” and claimed “it’s only up to us to step to what we’ve been asked to do and we’re just trying to do that in a more effective way, and that’s our role.”

 

His claim doesn’t explain why Lockheed spent over $13 million lobbying the federal government last year and focused their lobbying power on the defense budget, according to OpenSecrets.

One day we will look back in horror at the fact that war profiteers not only existed, but were legally allowed to lobby the government to increase its warmongering and use think tanks to help manufacture public consent for war.

Wired gushes about Pete Buttigeig with jaw-dropping effusiveness.

There might not be a better paragraph from the American media this year. Hang it in the Louvre. https://t.co/w5CD4JGFpK

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 18, 2023

This one’s more light-hearted and less consequential than the other examples, but it’s just as illustrative of the kind of people who work for western news media.

In an article titled “Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang” and subtitled “Sure, the US secretary of transportation has thoughts on building bridges. But infrastructure occupies just a sliver of his voluminous mind,” Wired’s Virginia Heffernan writes the following paragraph:

As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritan historiography, and Knausgaard’s Spring—though not in the original Norwegian (slacker). Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes—neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity—intelligible to me.

My God, it’s a masterpiece. Arguably superior to Heffernan’s 2016 puff piece on Hillary Clinton saying, “Maybe she is more than a president. Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself. The presidency is too small for her.” Superior even to Heffernan’s description of professional lunatic Louise Mensch as “the Sy Hersh of our time.”

Western journalism, ladies and gents.

________________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via Ken Lund (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby was interviewed on The National Review’s Charles CW Cooke Podcast, where he provided some very high-level analysis on the tensions around China, Taiwan, and the United States.

I will here attempt to explain some of Colby’s comments for the benefit of the average reader, because Colby has been studying these things for many years and his commentary can be a bit advanced and esoteric for the casual punditry consumer.

“The analogy I use is… Taiwan is like a man with a cut in the ocean, and China is like a great white shark, and America is like a man in a boat,” Colby said in the interview.

“The problem is once that great white shark starts moving, you got no time,” added Colby. “You’re done. You know, if you’re not already by the side of the boat, right? Because it’s a great white shark.”

"Taiwan is like a man with a cut in the ocean and China is like a Great White Shark and America is like a man in the boat."@ElbridgeColby joins @charlescwcooke's podcast to discuss Taiwan and the razor's edge the world sits on with the situation.

FULL: https://t.co/foFVyLNPir pic.twitter.com/YSZ3XHUy1A

— National Review (@NRO) May 12, 2023

Now bear with me if Colby’s incisive observations went a bit over your head here, but if we break it down I’m confident that we can all catch up to this man’s towering intellect enough to catch a glimpse of his understanding on the matter.

What Colby appears to be saying — and please correct me of you think I’m reading this wrong — is that China is like a Great White Shark, which as we all know is an extremely dangerous aquatic predator with a voracious appetite, capable of gulping down a human being in a few swift bites.

Now, try to imagine being in a situation where you’re out there in the ocean, and there’s a Great White Shark right there with you in the water. And to make matters worse, you’re bleeding — a problem not only due to the wound from whence the blood is emanating, but also because sharks can smell blood in the water! That would be pretty bad, right?

Okay, so are you with me so far? Remember, this is very advanced stuff, so feel free to read back and review as much as you need.

Now, imagine you’re in that situation with the cut and the shark, and there’s a boat that you can go to to get away from the shark. You’d want to hop aboard that vessel as swiftly as possible, don’t you think? I know I would!

So to put it all together, what the esteemed Elbridge Colby is telling us is that China is analogous to the Great White Shark which is eyeing the bleeding man in the water, and the man can be compared to Taiwan, and the United States of America is comparable to the boat that is coming to the rescue of the man.

Make sense? If you’re still struggling to comprehend Colby’s scalpel-like geopolitical analysis, don’t worry, because I’ve obtained this helpful infographic to further illuminate your understanding:

Interestingly enough, this is not the first time China has been compared to a Great White Shark in recent western punditry. The Hoover Institution’s Matt Pottinger, a former advisor to President Donald Trump, made a similar comparison in an interview with Nikkei Asia earlier this month:

“We saw a baby shark and thought that we could transform it into a dolphin over time, to become a friendly sort of system,” Pottinger said. “Instead, what we did was we kept feeding the shark and the shark got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And now we’re dealing with a formidable, great white.”

“With a shark you put up a shark cage,” added Pottinger. “The shark doesn’t take it personally. It bumps into the cage. It respects those barriers.”

Again, this is very complicated for the uninitiated layperson, but what Pottinger appears to be saying is that China is not at all comparable to a dolphin, which is an oceanic mammal known to be friendly toward people and easily trained to do tricks in aquatic theme parks. Rather, in Pottinger’s understanding, China is more comparable to a Great White Shark, which as you’ll recall from our discussion earlier in this essay is actually known to be rather dangerous.

If you’re still struggling to make sense of Pottinger’s luminous understanding, here’s another illustration to help make things a bit clearer:

Again, don’t be hard on yourself if you can’t quite wrap your head around the high-level analysis of intellectual giants like Matt Pottinger and Elbridge Colby. If we could understand these things as well as they do, we’d be the ones earning big bucks from Washington think tanks, not them!

Well I think that’s enough work for your gray matter today. Have a rest and a nice sleep and come back fresh tomorrow, where we’ll be discussing some mind-blowing comparisons western analysts have been drawing between Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler.

______________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

American liberals just spent days raging at CNN for hosting a town hall with Donald Trump like it’s the worst thing CNN has ever done. CNN isn’t horrible because it “platformed” Trump, CNN is horrible because it’s an imperialist propaganda firm whose whole job is to deceive people into supporting the most depraved agendas of the world’s most powerful people. Hosting that town hall was one of the least evil things CNN has done.

Liberals shouldn’t be upset at CNN for betraying their trust by platforming Trump, they should be upset with themselves for trusting CNN. It’s so, so much worse than they’re giving it credit for.

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If you find Elon Musk’s hiring of a new Twitter CEO with a background in mainstream media and the World Economic Forum shocking and contradictory, it’s probably an indication that your worldview isn’t informed by an accurate perception of what’s really happening. You probably haven’t been thinking accurate thoughts about Musk, and you probably haven’t been thinking accurate thoughts about the WEF. Nothing about this stands out as surprising for those who see both as figures of status quo global capitalism.

In many right wing circles Musk’s beneficence has been massively overstated and the WEF’s nature has been wildly distorted. Really they’re both just garden variety manifestations of the mundane capitalist dystopia we live in, and are deeply invested in maintaining this dystopia.

Lately the WEF has served as an ideological scapegoat for rightists who are critical of the establishment but are ideologically unable to see capitalism’s role in this mess. They paint the WEF as some freakish aberration rather than the true face of the capitalism they support. In such circles the WEF has taken on a narrative role as a villainous antagonist that capitalism supporters can point to and say “Look at those freaks, they’re ruining the capitalism!” When in fact the WEF is just the face of what capitalism looks like when it gets to this stage.

Musk’s new hire isn’t an indication that anything has changed or that anything new is happening. Whatever happens with Twitter from here on out was the trajectory Twitter was on from the moment Musk bought it.

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The Biden administration eliminating think tank funding transparency requirements set by the Trump administration is one of the most Biden administration things that has ever happened.

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Having an ideologically diverse audience has really opened me up to how politically cloistered everyone’s used to being these days. People are always expressing surprise at the fact that they agree with me on some things yet disagree with me on others, either positively like “Wow we’re not on the same page economically but I love a lot of what you say”, or negatively like “OMG how can someone be so right about war and authoritarianism but SO WRONG about capitalism??”

This wouldn’t stand out to them as something surprising or unusual unless it was something they don’t normally experience in life. Which is a sign that something is off, because agreeing with people sometimes and disagreeing with them other times is the normal state of human interaction. That’s what you experience constantly in life if your interactions are allowed to move naturally.

That just shows how successful the powerful have been in herding the populace into ideological echo chambers where propaganda that’s custom-made for their ideological preferences can be administered to them:

• We need to fight Russia because Putin’s a homophobic Hitler.
• We need to fight China because the Asian commies are coming for us.
• We need internet censorship to fight right wing extremism.
• We need more militarized police to fight thugs.
• Etc

Empire propaganda is tailored for each ideological echo chamber so that it slides in with as little resistance as possible.

That’s why I consider it a win whenever I can get healthy ideas and information over the echo chamber walls. When I’ve got a bunch of shitlibs or rightists in my notifications responding to something I’ve put out there, that means I’ve been successful in punching holes in the matrix.

We’re not supposed to agree with every political opinion we’re seeing. It isn’t natural to agree with any person or political faction all the time. If you find yourself agreeing with your preferred slice of the political spectrum all the time on every issue, that means you’ve stopped thinking for yourself and are just letting yourself be pulled along by the herd. Disagreement is normal. Universal agreement is a symptom of a debilitating disease.

I’ve never encountered anyone with whom I agree all the time, and it would be silly for me to expect to. I agree and disagree on various subjects with the communists I follow, and the libertarians, and everyone else. I’ve agreed and disagreed with things I’ve heard from Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, Alex Jones, Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping. And you should too. That’s normal.

____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Adobe Stock.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

I write about some dark, dark things in this space, and it’s common to receive expressions of despair in response to the subjects I focus on.

This is perfectly understandable. Not only is our world hurtling toward nuclear armageddon and environmental collapse while surging authoritarianism threatens our ability to even talk about these things with each other, but most people are completely oblivious to it all. Even relatively politically engaged people tend to believe society’s biggest problems are things like sexism or drag shows, and they generally support one of the two mainstream political factions who are both driving us toward destruction.

And this is of course because we live in a mind-controlled dystopia where everything is fake and stupid. Western civilization is dominated by a power structure that has invested more heavily in “soft power” (mass-scale psychological manipulation) than any other power structure in history. It pervades our media, our internet services, our art — literally all of mainstream culture.

The politicians lie, the news media lie, the movies lie, the internet lies, the advertisements lie, the shows between the advertisements lie. They lie about our world, they lie about our government, they lie about what’s important, how we should think, what we should value, and how we should measure our level of success and worthiness as human beings. That’s what you get when you live in a civilization that’s made of lies, under an empire that’s held together by lies.

So of course people who see this express despair. When you first punch through the lies and start to gain an understanding of what’s really going on, it can be really unpleasant at first. It feels like what it probably felt like to be a lucid thinker back in much less enlightened times when civilization was dominated by religion and superstition. Lonely. Depressing. As Terence McKenna said, “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”

But it gets better. Or at least it does if you allow it to.

It’s not that society starts feeling less fraudulent (it doesn’t), and it’s not that you get used to how fake and dishonest it all is (you don’t). Things like political conversations, movies, celebrity awards shows, even the kinds of jokes comedians tell are still experienced as coming from a backward dream world whose circumstances are completely different from waking reality, and the smell of propaganda brainwashing still pervades it all. But it does get better.

What gets better is that once you’ve unplugged your mind from the matrix of imperial mind control, you stop looking for happiness, connection and satisfaction in the places the matrix trained you to look for it. You no longer get your sense of self-worth from how successful you can be as an industrious gear-turner of the capitalist machine or how much your body looks the way the ads say it should look. You don’t get your sense of satisfaction from how much approval you can win over from denizens of a mentally ill society. You no longer find connection in false tribal loyalties or in shared enjoyment of the buffet of mind-killing entertainment we are served by the empire. You no longer seek happiness in the pursuit of new things to own and consume, or in worthless new goals to attain.

Instead, you begin to see that as confused and shitty as our civilization is, we’re still living in an amazingly beautiful world, whose beauty is so much vaster and more ancient than all the conceptual bullshit we’ve heaped upon the human experience. You start to find joy in real things. The thundering majesty of nature. That spark of authenticity in people’s eyes. The crackle of magic at the train station. Something as simple as a piece of garbage catching the light just right can make you coo and giggle with delight like an infant.

And you learn to live from there. You settle into an understanding that while the suffering and abuses of our world are very real and of immense consequence, the fact that there is anything at all is immensely more significant than any of our tiny human problems. The fact that we get to live in these bodies and inhabit these brains and move around on this amazing planet and perceive it and think thoughts about it is a much, much bigger deal than any of our difficulties.

To help you see what I am pointing to, imagine if you were experiencing nothing. Imagine if you were just a disembodied expanse of consciousness, with nothing to see, hear, feel, touch, taste or smell. No thoughts to think, no feelings to feel.

Then imagine after an eternity spent in that state, you suddenly got to experience this world. All the sights, sounds, feelings, beauty. All the thoughts, words, creativity, connections, relationships. Imagine how mind-blowing that would be. How delightful. How appreciated.

If that happened, which do you think would seem more significant to you: the appearance of the world and your ability to experience it, or the fact that the world has some problems?

This appreciation for how amazing it is to be comes to supplant the fixation on the details which used to sit at the forefront of your attention. This doesn’t stop you from appreciating the suffering in the world — in fact it makes you more acutely aware of it. But it changes the context in which it’s happening, because it’s happening in something much more vast which isn’t limited to that suffering.

So you absolutely can live a happy, satisfied life with a full awareness of what’s really going on in our world. In fact, the devotion to discovering the truth which led you to understand what’s going on in the world will also lead you to peace and happiness if you take that exploration inward. You just have to stop trying to get your happiness and satisfaction from the places our bullshit civilization has trained you to look for it in.

And then it’s everywhere. Everywhere.

_______________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Adobe Stock.

[A breakfast table in America. TOM and JANE are eating breakfast and drinking coffee. JANE is reading the news on her tablet while TOM works on a crossword puzzle.]

JANE: [Sips coffee, sighs] Another mass shooting.

TOM: [Not looking up] Mmm, yeah. Des Moines.

JANE: No, another one.

TOM: Not the one in Des Moines?

JANE: No, that was earlier this morning.

TOM: Ohh, the Chicago one you mean?

JANE: No that was yesterday, I’m talking about the one in Palm Springs.

TOM: Ohh, I think I saw something about that on Twitter. The synagogue?

JANE: No, this one’s a preschool. The synagogue was last night in Baltimore.

TOM: A preschool? Jesus. What kind of sick fuck shoots up a preschool?

JANE: One of the kids I guess. There was some dispute about snack time.

TOM: Oh man. Did they catch him?

JANE: Her. Live shoot-out with the police right now. They’re having trouble because the girl’s got some kinda machine gun and body armor. They tried to bribe her with some apple juice but the kid’s not having it.

TOM: Ah, man. Come on kid, give it up, you know they’re sending in the killbots next.

JANE: [Looks up] I highly doubt a four year-old girl knows about killbots, Tom.

TOM: Okay well hell, I don’t know what kids know these days. How the hell’s she know how to use a machine gun?

JANE: Pete was shooting the neighbors’ cats by that age.

TOM: Yeah, with a rifle! Machine guns aren’t for kids. And you gotta shoot cats, cats suck.

JANE: I like cats.

TOM: They’re stupid.

JANE: They’re not stupid.

TOM: Yeah they are, they’re idiots. Tell ’em what to do and they just stare at you like a dope. Tell a dog what to do and they hop right on it.

JANE: That means cats are smarter.

TOM: Ha! Good point.

JANE: Who’s smarter, the blindly obedient animal or the one who just ignores your commands?

TOM: Yup, yeah, you’ve got me there. [Sips coffee.] Dogs are idiots.

JANE: Dumb, obedient idiots.

TOM: Crap, I gotta get going. Gotta lay off the entire third floor today.

JANE: Huh? Why?

TOM: Dunno, boss told me to.

JANE: Oh okay.

TOM: Anything else big in the news?

JANE: Looks like the Russians are killing babies for no reason and we’re gonna have to go to war.

TOM: Killing babies for no reason?

JANE: Yep, just putting ’em in microwaves, feeding ’em to sharks, launching ’em outta catapults. Just killing them.

TOM: Is that true?

JANE: It has to be. It’s in the news.

TOM: Man. I hate Russians.

[Enter PETE, age 20, clearly miserable.]

JANE: Well look who it is.

TOM: Hey Pete, you gonna put in that application I gave you?

PETE: Nah.

TOM: What? Why not?

PETE: Don’t wanna work there.

JANE: Oh Pete.

TOM: What’s wrong? You think you’re too good to work at the fish poison factory?

PETE: Uhh… Yeah.

JANE: Oh, okay your highness.

TOM: What the hell, son? What’s your problem with the fish poison factory?

PETE: They literally manufacture fish poison.

TOM: So??

JANE: They’re an aquatic pest!

PETE: They are not, that’s just some bullshit they made up to sell fish poison.

TOM: Oh where the hell are you getting this garbage? The internet?

JANE: Alex Jones I bet.

PETE: It’s true, fish are a completely harmless animal who make up an important part of the ecosystem. They’ve just created an artificial demand for fish poison by an aggressive ad campaign and got the government to deregulate it after spending millions on corporate lobbying.

TOM: Oh bullshit! I’ve had it with these conspiracy theories, Pete! I’ve had it with your attitude! Why can’t you just go turn gears at the fish poison factory like a normal young man? You’re a goddamn embarrassment to this family.

[PETE throws up his hands and storms off.]

TOM: [Calls after him] You’re gonna feel like a real asshole when there’s a fish infestation and we all get the plague!

JANE: Such a disappointment.

TOM: Why can’t he just be normal like us?

JANE: It needed to be said.

TOM: Ah shit I gotta run.

JANE: Get going, handsome.

TOM: Third floor folks aren’t gonna fire themselves.

JANE: Grab some fish poison on your way home? We’re all out.

TOM: You got it toots.

[They kiss. Exit TOM. JANE goes back to reading the news.]

JANE: [Sips coffee.] Oh god, those poor Chinese. Glad I don’t live in a backward, crazy country like them.

[CURTAIN]

_________________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

It’s time for another US presidential race where populist factions on both sides spend a few months angrily decrying the establishment before voting for candidates in the general election who will fully serve that same establishment.

I think this is just the norm now. Public discontent with the US political status quo is now so great that there’s going to be a new “Hey kids, you can vote your way into revolutionary change!” feature built into every presidential election. 2012 was the end of a political era.

❖

The biggest misconception about politics is that political differences have any meaningful existence at all. Everyone’s herded into two mainstream factions who both serve the interests of the powerful, while those few who can’t be herded are marginalized into political impotence.

And I am of course mainly talking about the English-speaking world here. The global south has real political diversity of real consequence, and has real differences from the status quo politics of the US-centralized empire. But within that empire, political differences are effectively illusory.

❖

I feel like maybe we didn’t make a big enough deal about that revelation the other day that the US government now has so many institutions dedicated to “perception management” and regulating “disinformation” that it created a new agency within the ODNI to oversee all of them. I mean everyone made a lot of noise about the DHS’s “disinformation governance board” last year, and rightly so, but as a whole this seems way more egregious in terms of government interference in human communication.

❖

The problem with opposition to dissent-crushing measures is that it mostly only comes from those at whom such measures are directed. Mainstream journalists know they won’t be imprisoned like Assange, because they won’t do work like Assange did. Mainstream liberals know they won’t be censored online, so they’re happy to cheer for online censorship.

Measures designed to control the narrative and suppress dissent are directed at the fringes, not the mainstream, because that’s where dissent of real consequence always first emerges. It won’t be those with mainstream political leanings seeing their speech increasingly marginalized and hidden away by algorithms and AI, it will be those who oppose the political status quo. In the future it won’t be those with a mainstream worldview being oppressed by things like tech surveillance, police robots and CBDCs, it will be those well outside the Overton window of permissible debate. The average person will be unaffected by such measures, because in our current mind-controlled dystopia the average person is compliant and innocuous.

This is why attempts to get a large movement of opposition to these totalitarian measures typically fail to gather significant public traction: because only people on the fringes have reason to fear them. By controlling the mainstream consensus, our rulers eliminate any meaningful opposition to their tyranny toward the real dissidents whose politics generally lie well outside that consensus. And since it’s only widespread mainstream opposition that would ever give them reason to fear public backlash, they can keep ratcheting up these dissent-crushing measures.

I don’t really have any solution to this problem; I’ve been staring at it for years and don’t see any easy answers. I’m just putting it out there in the hive mind so that awareness of the problem can grow and we can start collectively looking for solutions.

❖

 

This civilization is so mentally ill that you’ll get treated like a gibbering lunatic for expressing the most sane and rational opinions anyone can possibly express. Something as basic as “The world’s most powerful government should stop ramping up nuclear brinkmanship on multiple fronts” will get you treated like a kook, when really it’s so obvious and common sense it shouldn’t even need to be said. That’s how crazy mass-scale brainwashing has made everyone.

❖

I will never support any form of capitalism, because no form of capitalism — real or hypothetical — will ever have an answer to the problems of ecocide and the need to care for the needful.

Every capitalism-based solution that has ever been proposed for these problems is self-evidently ridiculous; the notion that privatizing the natural world can preserve oceans and rainforests is infantile nonsense that’s refuted by all of human history, as is the notion that the needful can be cared for solely by voluntary charity. No intellectually honest person believes this is true. No ancap who’s thought hard enough about ecocide and caring for the needful sincerely believes that capitalism can address these problems. At their most honest, they’ll say that ecocide and starvation are necessary sacrifices that must be made for the freedoms and conveniences they want to have for themselves.

I appreciate a right-libertarian who straight up admits that they’re fine with environmental destruction and the weakest members of society dying off rather than pretending the “free market” can address these issues, because at least they’re being honest about where they stand.

And of course the current western status quo model of capitalism with a little state welfare and a few superficial environmental restrictions isn’t working either, because here we are. Every possible capitalist school of thought has failed to find a solution to these problems. You can yell “but communism bad” at me all you want, but that doesn’t address the fact that people are struggling to survive and our biosphere is hurtling toward collapse, and that literally nothing anywhere in capitalist thought has anything resembling a viable answer for this.

We won’t ultimately have a solution to ecocide and exploitation until mass-scale human behavior ceases to be driven by the pursuit of profit altogether, because ecocide and exploitation are profitable. We’re going to have to find another organizing principle if we’re to survive on this planet.

❖

Never let yourself lose sight of the reality that as bad as things are, the fact that there are things at all is vastly more significant than any of our puny human problems.

It’s not something you can talk about all the time because people will think you’re being callous about human suffering and all the problems that we do have, but the truth of the matter is that even if things were ten times worse than they are now, it would still be vastly less significant than the fact that we get to live in a world and perceive it and think about it and share ideas about it instead of nothing existing at all.

Yes, pay attention to our problems and do what you can to fix them, but never, ever let yourself lose sight of the fact that we are living in the middle of a continuous miracle of unfathomable beauty, and that we ourselves are inseparably unified with that vast miracle. If you only fixate on thoughts about our problems you will become bitter and ineffective in the fight against injustice, and more importantly, you will have wasted your time here failing to appreciate the wondrousness of a human life on this amazing planet.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Listen to a reading of “Headless Hounds” (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

Headless hounds from Boston Dynamics.
Headless hounds from Raytheon.
Headless hounds in our nightmares huddled shivering under US flags
beneath a night sky whose stars were replaced by satellites and drones.

Headless hounds dashing voicelessly past buzzsigns flashing BUY BUY BUY
and buzzscreens shouting FEAR FEAR FEAR,
past the harmless homeless and overdosing angels,
past the skyscraper soul siphons and sane street schizophrenics,
past roadkill dreamguides and the freeway beasts who feed on them,
past suburban window watchers with opiate eyes,
past the cheering liberals who proudly support their hunt
(they make empire automatons of all sorts you know).

In this land we worship headless gods,
gods with logos instead of faces,
gods with quarterly statements instead of minds,
gods with profit margins instead of conscience,
gods who are legally required to act without morality,
gods who devour unthinkingly and destroy unfeelingly,
gods who eat ecosystems and shit suffering,
our gods have no heads and now neither do their soldiers.

We lurch headlessly, mindlessly, heartlessly, unconsciously
toward wherever it is we are going
like robots running a program written by a long-dead man
for reasons nobody can remember.
Headless hounds where our rights should be.
Headless hounds where our heads should be.

On an old wooden fencepost there sits a large crow.
It looks you in the eye
and stares without moving,
and just as you find yourself growing restless and uncomfortable,
you remember something ancient.
Something intimate.
Something that has more relevance to you
than any thought you’ve ever had.

You sit here, you and the crow,
and you remember where you came from.

_________________

_________________

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Sedition #10 of my print-friendly treason zine is now available and ready for download.

As usual anyone is free to print, copy, republish, distribute, or use any and all of these materials in any way they choose, either digitally or out there in the analog world.

This month’s Treazine, “US Moral Authority Is Dead And Buried,” features articles like:

US Moral Authority Is Dead And Buried … page 3

The Single Dumbest Thing The Empire Asks Us To Believe … page 6

You’re Not Deficient, You’re Just Ruled By Assholes … page 8

Reminder: The Media Once Bashed Trump For Transgressing The One-China Policy The US Now Spits On … page 15

Australia Pays Washington Swamp Monsters For War Advice … page 19

Bono Is Doing Illustrations For The Atlantic Now, Because Everything’s Fake And Stupid … page 22

Biden DOJ Indicts Four Americans For “Weaponized” Free Speech … page 38

Free Those Who Expose Government Misdeeds, Jail Those Who Try To Conceal Them … page 42

The Totalitarian Dystopia Is Already Here … page 45

Multiple US Officials Confronted About US Assange Hypocrisy On World Press Freedom Day … page 47

New Defence Review Further Enslaves Australia To US War Agendas … page 53

The US Could Use Some Separation Of Media And State … page 57

Plus a special pull-out section called Today In Empire which features stories on RFK, NYPD copbots, Twitter dropping its state-affiliated labels, and Facebook’s blatant censorship of Seymour Hersh.

Plus more Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, and much, much more.

Friendly reminder that you can subscribe to Treazine to automatically receive each monthly sedition.

Click here for a pay-what-you-feel, print-friendly PDF/ebook of Treazine, Sedition #10.

Click here for Sedition #9.

Click here for Sedition #8.

Click here for Sedition #7.

Click here to get earlier Treazine seditions, as well as PDF/ebook versions of the books I’ve published.

Enjoy!

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

Years ago I watched a video clip by a philosopher named Ken Wilber that I still find myself referencing from time to time. In it, Wilber is asked about the plight of our world and how the struggles of our species relate to the enlightened perspective, or “big mind”.

I’m still not terribly familiar with Wilber’s work, but in the clip he very eloquently addresses the paradoxical relationship between (A) spiritual enlightenment as a realization of perfect peace and (B) the heartbreaking compassion that expansion of consciousness brings in for the suffering of all beings in our world. He does this with a very simple phrase: he says that as you awaken, that suffering “hurts more, but it bothers you less.”

In essence he says that awakening brings in an awareness of both the “absolute” perspective from which the world is seen as an illusion with no ultimate reality wherein no imperfection could possibly exist, and the “relative” perspective in which the suffering or happiness of others matters deeply to you.

“I don’t know anyone who has simply resolved that,” Wilber says of this paradox. “And I don’t think you’re supposed to. And I think the people that do are just playing on one side or the other side of that street. And we have to give ourselves plenty of room to both feel absolute perfection in everything that’s arising, and yet see one person starving and you will start crying so hard it will kill you. And if you’re not doing both, you’re doing something wrong.”

It seems likely to me that anyone who has sincerely dedicated themselves to expanding their awareness both inwardly and outwardly will eventually find themselves resonating with this “hurts more, bothers you less” perspective. As your awareness of your own inner processes expands you become liberated from the delusions which used to pull your strings and make you suffer from behind the shadows of the unconscious, and as your awareness expands outwardly the profound suffering and cruelty in our world will bring you howling to your knees.

This is why I think it’s so important for those who are sincerely dedicated to truth to work on expanding consciousness both outwardly and inwardly. If you only expand it inwardly you wind up a masturbatory navel-gazing bliss bunny whose life is a half-truth at best, and if you only expand it outwardly you’ll be quickly overwhelmed and embittered by the misery of it all. In the spiritual circles I used to move in people were mostly in the former camp, and in the political circles I move in now people are very often in the latter.

The best way to live a life based in truth, and the best way to be of use to the world, is to expand consciousness both inwardly and outwardly. Deeply investigate your own consciousness, divest yourself of the misperceptions and erroneous assumptions around thought, perceiving and selfhood which are driving your behavior, and discover your true nature. Also, learn everything you can about what’s going on in the world, how people are being subjected to needless suffering by abusive systems, how power is really structured, what the mechanics of our civilization’s dysfunctions are, and where some possible solutions might lie. Do both of these things.

If you can do both, if you can really open both eyes, then you’ve made yourself a very useful weapon against the machine, because you can see all the dysfunction and attack it effectively without being swept away in it. This is what I was getting at in the introduction to a book I published some years ago:

This book is for the ones who look with both eyes.
It is not for the right-eye lookers,
who hide away from the pain of the world using comforting ideas
and philosophical positions and spiritual concepts,
who lean back smugly knowing better while the earth screams,
while men in suits with cannibal brains pave over the forests
and coat everything in oil.
The right-eye lookers have killed off that part of themselves which feels,
which cannot look away, which brings them trembling to their knees
at the wet-faced beauty of each instant,
and the wailing of the ocean angels and the tears of the indigenous.
They deftly slip the punches that life throws at their head as it screams
“Look at me! Feel me! Why did you even come here?”
They have traded the aliveness of their lives to avoid the intensity of living.
This book is not for the right-eye lookers.

This book is for the ones who look with both eyes.
It is not for the left-eye lookers,
who behold the flying robots raining fire upon children,
who hear the cries of the mother clutching bloody shreds of nothing,
who feel the dying gasps of the white deer dreamguides
and stand there transfixed by the horror of it all
until they can hardly see for all the tears.
The left-eye lookers lean into each instant,
but the pain consumes them, takes them over, controls them, becomes them.
They build a temple to despondency and begin worshipping strange gods.
Their world has gone gray, and their angels are caged,
and they say it’s no good going on.
“We are headed toward doom and so much the better,
for we are all made of poison.”
They do not avoid life, and its suffering withers them.
This book is not for the left-eye lookers.

This book is for the ones who look with both eyes.
It is for the ones who see the bombs and the bastards
and stand shaking with the breath of the beast on their skin.
When you look with both eyes, you feel it all,
but you don’t flee or freeze.
You fight.
You swing your sword with both hands,
tears pouring from both eyes,
and when they try to drive you back,
you advance.

This book is for the ones who see what is happening,
how strong the beast is, how pervasive its grasp,
how merciless its mission, and say “Fuck it,”
and draw their sword.
For the weeping warriors, for the savage saints,
for the bleeding mothers with fire in their eyes,
for the hidden mystics whose prayers keep the earth spinning,
for the buddhas who’ll use their teeth when their blades are broken
and let their evolutionary ancestors howl through them,
this one is for you, my lovelies.

If enough of us can learn to look with both eyes, with both the absolute and the relative perspectives, with both inner and outer consciousness, the bastards will stand no chance. There will be nothing they can do to stop the end of their rule or thwart the creation of a healthy world.

____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Listen to a reading of “Balls To The Wall” (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

We go balls to the wall,
laughing and screaming in nightclubs
with AI-generated twisted grins,
dance music pounding our ears so we can’t hear our thoughts,
alcohol soaking our organs so we can’t feel our feelings,
stomping down with all our might that small voice which calls out to us
from beneath the pile of corporate logos and dead birds
that we keep in the space where our soul used to be.

Then out,
out into the world vaping and smoking,
running down the sidewalk
jumping over homeless people with Super Mario Bros sound effects
screaming I AM ALIVE I AM ALIVE
against all evidence to the contrary,
moving as fast as we can to keep us
from ever catching up to ourselves.

We go balls to the wall,
consuming and being consumed by end-stage metastatic capitalism,
mainlining Empire Inc into the veins between our toes because the ones in our arms collapsed long ago,
plunging straws into our loved ones to siphon out the validation we cannot give ourselves,
stumbling with gig economy exploitation hangovers and mouths that taste like Microsoft
through a dead-eyed civilization of blaring screens and focus-grouped hearts
where young women are sacrificed to gods made of algorithms,
where our minds are stripped of anything that won’t help billionaires become trillionaires,
where everything breaks after 18 months but takes millions of years to decompose,
where we’re all conditioned to think the same thoughts but hate each other more and more.

Balls to the wall with no brakes on,
shrieking and whooping into the night
laughing joyless laughter through pleasureless coke highs
past the neon signs and 3D billboards
dodging drones and punching panhandlers
strangling starving men on the subway
and disappearing into the dark
and becoming the darkness
and embracing our true calling:

Disciples of Dystopia.
Agents of Omnicide.
Apostles of the Apocalypse.

Kiss the Pentagon on your necklace and floor it.

No brakes, baby.
No brakes.

____________________

____________________

____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via PxHere.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

Your rulers do not care what race you are. They do not care if you are gay, transgendered or nonbinary. They do not care how many bullets you are allowed to have in your gun. They do not care whether you are allowed to have an abortion or not. They do not care if you are racist, sexist, ableist, ageist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic or fatphobic. They do not care about diverse representation in politics or media, and they do not care about any lack thereof. All they care about is that we all keep thinking, speaking, working, consuming and voting in ways which keep them rich and powerful and keep us poor and powerless. And they will happily keep us arguing as intensely as possible about the things they do not care about so that we don’t turn our attention to the things they do care about.

This doesn’t mean those other issues aren’t real concerns, and in fact our rulers stand everything to gain by exacerbating the injustices involving issues they don’t care about in order to keep attention in those convenient areas. But the solution to the problems our rulers don’t care about is the same as the solution to the problems our rulers do care about: overthrow our rulers.

❖

Western mass media are saturating the airwaves with the narrative that Wednesday’s drone bombing of the Kremlin was a “false flag”, by which they mean that Russia did it to themselves to advance some nefarious agenda.

False flags are a thing and they do happen, but to act like that’s the most likely explanation for the Kremlin bombing when Russia is currently at war with a neighbor who has the means, motive and opportunity is something only a propagandist would do. Especially when oligarchs from that neighboring nation are openly incentivizing people to attack Russia with drones for cash rewards, when Zelensky’s coinciding absence from the country prevented immediate retaliation, and when Atlantic propagandists are writing enthusiastically about the sophisticated drone facilities they visited in Ukraine.

❖

In 2017 I was temporarily suspended by Facebook for posting an article about known false flags, because until 2022 mainstream narrative managers considered false flags to be a crazy crackpot concept. That changed the moment the idea became useful to western propagandists.

When this changed in early 2022 it initially took journalists by surprise, because until then they’d only ever heard “false flag” used to dismiss people like Alex Jones:

Please watch this video in which journalist Matt Lee accuses State Dept. spokesman Ned Price of veering into "Alex Jones territory" by making the claim that Russia plans to stage a "false flag" attack with "crisis actors" — Price then sneeringly calls Lee a Russian propagandist pic.twitter.com/5xMsbfWYgz

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 3, 2022

❖

I say we arm Russia against Russia. If it’s bombing its own government buildings, its own pipelines, its own captured power plants, then it’s the best proxy force against Russia we’ve got. Send the Russians tanks and F-16s immediately.

Russia’s fighting Russia over there so we don’t have to fight Russia over here.

❖

A westerner who spends half their time criticizing the US empire and half their time criticizing the US empire’s enemies isn’t providing “balance”, they’re just spending half their time contributing to an already wildly unbalanced information environment that is overwhelmingly biased in favor of US-friendly narratives.

❖

Westerners constantly respond to criticism of US foreign policy with “You love Putin and think he is good” because they really, truly subscribe to a children’s cartoon “Good Guys vs Bad Guys” worldview. To them, saying one side is Bad means you think the other side is Good.

To a mature adult, criticizing US foreign policy is just criticizing US foreign policy, which is something everyone should do all the time. To a propaganda-addled manchild, this is a struggle of Good versus Evil, and if you’re not one then you must necessarily be the other.

❖

Crazy how the response to Democrats saying “You have to vote for the corrupt warmonger with dementia or else America will be overrun by fascism” is mostly “Okay we’ll vote for the the corrupt warmonger with dementia” and not “Okay so we need to tear down the entire system then.”

❖

Reading Julian Assange’s sardonic Jonathan Swift-style letter to the king is a reminder of what they took from us. His publishing and his persecution have overshadowed just what an incisive mind he has. We could really use his analysis right now, but they took him offline.

❖

Assange's Dad
Oil on canvas (60 x 48")

Painting I submitted to the Archibalds. pic.twitter.com/x1X9rs5BDU

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 5, 2023

❖

It’s obnoxiously self-righteous and condescending for older generations to worry about how the new generations are turning out. Imagine being left a bat shit insane civilization and a dying world by the people who made it that way and having to listen to them bitch about how your generation isn’t doing it right.

If you’re going to worry about the new generations, don’t worry that they’re becoming too different from the old, worry that they might remain too similar. We haven’t exactly been crushing it out here, folks. We failed. We faceplanted as hard as a generation could possibly faceplant. Let’s just hope they’re becoming different enough from us that they can undo our fuckups.

❖

Pranksters mowing a giant penis on the grounds of an elite coronation party feels like the beginning of the end of something. People find the idea of a British king in 2023 absurd, and public opinion of the monarchy will only go down from here. Idols keep falling off their pedestals.

This sort of thing is happening everywhere; public figures once held in high esteem just keep losing face. The Catholic Church pedophile scandal kind of started it off. Twitter showed everyone that celebrities are just idiots with bad opinions. US presidents are ridiculous cartoons now, with the last one an incoherent buffoon and the current one a disintegrating dementia patient.

And it feels like it’s happening faster and faster. The Dalai Lama trying to tongue kiss that kid. Chomsky meeting with Epstein. Bernie Sanders falling all over himself to serve the establishment he once vocally decried. People just don’t get to keep their heroes anymore.

The pedestals we used to place people on are being eroded by the fact that everything’s so much more visible than it used to be. There will never be any more saints, because in the age of ubiquitous cameras people can’t falsely claim “miracles” happened when there’s no footage. We’re able to share evidence, ideas and information exponentially faster and more effectively than we could before, and we can do it on a grassroots level, and it turns out that when you do that all the Super Special People we used to place above us don’t look so special anymore.

And of course they don’t looks so special because they aren’t so special. All the people we used to regard as superior to ourselves were always just schmucks like us.

And I think there’s something very empowering and democratizing about this growing collective realization.

_____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

Wednesday was World Press Freedom Day, and it saw US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and Deputy State Department Spokesman Vedant Patel confronted about the glaring hypocrisy of the Biden administration’s persecution of Julian Assange for the crime of good journalism.

During an appearance at a World Press Freedom event hosted by The Washington Post’s David Ignatius on Wednesday morning, Blinken was confronted by Code Pink activists Medea Benjamin and Tighe Barry demanding justice for Assange before being swiftly dragged off stage.

“Excuse us, we can’t use this day without calling for the freedom of Julian Assange,” said Benjamin, holding a sign saying “FREE JULIAN ASSANGE”.

The two were immediately rushed by many security staffers, and the audio from the stage was temporarily cut.

“Stop the extradition request of Julian Assange,” Benjamin can be heard saying.

“Two hours and not one word about journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, who was murdered by the Israeli occupation forces in Palestine, not one word about Julian Assange,” said Barry.

“We’re here to celebrate freedom of expression, and we just experienced it,” said Ignatius without a trace of irony once the dissent had been silenced. He then returned to the subject of how bad and awful the Russian government is for imprisoning American journalist Evan Gershkovich.

Then during a White House press briefing on Wednesday afternoon, Karine Jean-Pierre was asked a question by CBS News’ Steven Portnoy that was so inconvenient the press secretary flat-out said she wouldn’t answer it.

“Advocates on Twitter today have been talking a great deal about how the United States has engaged in hypocrisy by talking about how Evan Gershkovich is held in Russia on espionage charges but the United States has Espionage Act charges pending against Julian Assange.  Can you respond to that criticism?” asked Portnoy.

“What is the criticism?” asked Jean-Pierre.

“Well, the criticism is that — the argument is that Julian Assange is a journalist who engaged in the publication of government documents,” Portnoy replied. “The United States is accusing him of a crime under the Espionage Act, and that, therefore, the United States is losing the moral high ground when it comes to the question of whether a reporter engages in espionage as a function of his work. So can you respond to that?”

“Look, I’m not going to speak to Julian Assange and that case from here,” said Jean-Pierre.

And then she didn’t. She just dismissed Portnoy’s question without explanation, then babbled for a while about things Biden has said that are supportive of press freedoms, then again said “I’m not going to weigh in on comments about Julian Assange.”

This type of “I’m not answering that, screw you” dodge is a rare move for a White House press secretary. They don’t normally just come right out and say they refuse to answer the highly relevant and easily answerable question a reporter just asked; typically when the question is too inconvenient they’ll either word-salad a bewildering non-response, say the answer is the jurisdiction of another department, or say they’ll get back to them when they have more information. It’s not the norm for them to just wave away the question without even pretending to provide a reason for doing so.

But really, what choice did she have? As Wall Street Journal White House correspondent Sabrina Siddiqi recently acknowledged on MSNBC, the job of the White House press secretary is not to tell the truth, but to “stay on message and control the narrative.” There is nothing about the Assange case that is on-message with the White House narrative; just the other day Biden said at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that “journalism is not a crime,” yet his persecution of Assange is deliberately designed to criminalize journalism.

There’s simply no way to reconcile the US government’s story about itself with its efforts to normalize the extradition and persecution of journalists around the world under the Espionage Act. If your job is to make the White House look good, the only way to respond to questions of US hypocrisy regarding the Assange case is not to respond at all.

Later in the press conference, Jean-Pierre responded to another reporter’s questions about press freedoms in China with an assurance that the Biden administration will “hold accountable the autocrats and their enablers who continue to repress a free, independent media.”

Also on Wednesday afternoon, AP’s Matt Lee cited the aforementioned Code Pink protest earlier that day to question Deputy State Department Spokesman Vedant Patel about Assange, and was met with a similar amount of evasiveness.

“So then can I ask you, as was raised perhaps a bit abruptly at the very beginning of his comments this morning, whether or not the State Department regards Julian Assange as a journalist who would be covered by the ideas embodied in World Press Freedom Day?” asked Lee.

“The State Department thinks that Mr. Assange has been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States, in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in our nation’s history,” Patel replied. “His actions risked serious harm to US national security to the benefit of our adversaries. It put named human sources to grave and imminent risk and risk of serious physical harm and arbitrary detention. So, it does not matter how we categorize any person, but this is – we view this as a – as something he’s been charged with serious criminal conduct.”

“Well, but it does matter actually, and that’s my question. Do you believe that he is a journalist or not?” asked Lee.

“Our view on Mr. Assange is that he’s been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States,” said Patel.

“Yeah, but anyone can be charged with anything,” Lee replied. “Evan Gershkovich has been charged with a serious criminal offense in Russia, and you say that he is a journalist, and he is obviously. And I just want to know whether or not you, the State Department – regardless of any charges that he faces – believe that he is a journalist, or he is something else.”

“The United States doesn’t go around arbitrarily detaining people, and the judicial oversight and checks and balances that we have in our system versus the Russian system are a little bit different,” said Patel, before again repeating his line that Assange has been charged with a very serious crime.

“Okay. So, basically, the bottom line is that you don’t have an answer. You won’t say whether you think he is a journalist or not,” Lee replied.

Again, Patel was left with no safe answers to Lee’s questions, because of course Assange is indisputably a journalist. Publishing information and reporting that is in the public interest is precisely the thing that journalism is; that’s why Assange has won so many awards for journalism. Trying to contend that Assange is not a journalist is an unwinnable argument.

Later in that same press conference Patel was challenged on his claim that Assange damaged US national security by Accuracy.org’s Sam Husseini.

“You refer to WikiLeaks allegedly damaging US national security,” said Husseini. “People might remember that WikiLeaks came to prominence because they released the Collateral Murder video. And what that showed was US military mowing down Reuters reporters – workers in Iraq. Reuters repeatedly asked the US Government to disclose such information about those killings, and the US government repeatedly refused to do so. Only then did we know what happened, that the US helicopter gunship mowed down these Reuters workers, through the Collateral Murder video? Are you saying that disclosure of such criminality by the US government impinges US national security?”

“I’m not going to parse or get into specifics,” Patel said, before again repeating his line that Assange stands accused of serious crimes in a way that harmed US national security.

Journalist Max Blumenthal tweeted about Patel’s remarks, “According to this State Dept flack, Julian Assange’s jailing is justified because he ‘harmed US national security.’ But Assange is not an American citizen. By this logic, the US can kidnap and indefinitely detain any foreign journalist who offends the US national security state.”

It is good that activists and journalists have been doing so much to highlight the US empire’s hypocrisy as it crows self-righteously about its love of press freedoms while persecuting the world’s most famous journalist for doing great journalism. Highlighting this hypocrisy shows that the US empire does not in fact care about press freedoms at all, save only to the extent that it can pretend to care about them to wag its finger at governments it doesn’t like.

Assange exposed many things about our rulers during his work with WikiLeaks, but none of those revelations have been as significant as what he’s forced them to reveal about themselves in the lengths that they will go to to silence a journalist who tells inconvenient truths.

_______________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

So U2 singer Bono is literally just doing illustrations for the imperialist propaganda rag The Atlantic now, because that’s the sort of thing that happens in a dystopian civilization during the death throes of a globe-spanning empire.

A Washington Post article titled “Bono likes to sketch Atlantic covers, so the magazine hired him” reports that “Bono is into Atlantic cover fanfic — so much so that he was invited to illustrate the magazine’s June cover featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.” 

Bono’s latest contribution to the mountain of cringe-inducing Zelensky moments we’ve been seeing for the past year provides a cover image for an article by lifelong war propagandists Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg. The article endorses a Ukrainian offensive to recapture Crimea, which experts largely agree would be the move most likely to trigger a nuclear war in this conflict.

Here’s a paragraph from Applebaum and Goldberg’s article, just to give you a taste of the infantile “Good Guys vs Bad Guys” framing that western liberals are being fed by mass media war propagandists these days:

“Sometimes, the war is described as a battle between autocracy and democracy, or between dictatorship and freedom. In truth, the differences between the two opponents are not merely ideological, but also sociological. Ukraine’s struggle against Russia pits a heterarchy against a hierarchy. An open, networked, flexible society—one that is both stronger at the grassroots level and more deeply integrated with Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley than anyone realized—is fighting a very large, very corrupt, top-down state. On one side, farmers defend their land and 20‑something engineers build eyes in the sky, using tools that would be familiar to 20‑something engineers anywhere else. On the other side, commanders send waves of poorly armed conscripts to be slaughtered—just as Stalin once sent shtrafbats, penal battalions, against the Nazis—under the leadership of a dictator obsessed with ancient bones. ‘The choice,’ Zelensky told us, ‘is between freedom and fear.’”

New from me~

Bono is into Atlantic cover fanfic. So the magazine hired him: https://t.co/cSHYxyRjCe

— Elahe Izadi | الهه (@ElaheIzadi) May 1, 2023

Many westerners felt their first stirrings of youthful rebellious passions while listening to U2 songs like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)”, but nowadays Bono’s voice is heard saying that he has “grown very fond” of war criminal George W Bush, praising capitalism at the World Economic Forum, teaming up with warmonger Lindsey Graham to promote US empire narratives about Syria, and  singing “Stand by Ukraine” in support of US empire narratives in a Kyiv subway. And just when it looks like he can’t become any more of a tool of the empire, he gets hired by one of the world’s worst militarist smut rags to draw a cover image of Zelensky.

Because that’s just how things go in a highly controlled society where mainstream culture is designed to serve the powerful. A society where the minds of the public are continually being shaped by mass-scale psychological manipulation to ensure that they keep thinking, speaking, working, consuming and voting in ways which serve the rich and powerful. Everything that gets elevated to the top of mainstream attention facilitates this agenda (or is at least harmless to it), and as soon as it becomes potentially threatening to this agenda it is either corrected or marginalized away from mainstream attention.

This dynamic can cause some truly jaw-dropping flotsam and jetsam to surface in the roilings of our cultural waters, like Simpsons characters waving Ukrainian flags, or an opera about a drone operator sponsored by General Dynamics.

Not the Onion: The Kennedy Center is putting on an opera about a drone operator torn between her job killing targets and mom duties at home.

It’s sponsored by…General Dynamics. https://t.co/yKZi860SYc

— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) April 18, 2023

Here’s Responsible Statecraft’s Connor Echols on that last one:

This fall, DC denizens will be treated to the world premiere of “Grounded,” an opera following an Air Force ace named Jess whose unexpected pregnancy forces her to leave behind her beloved F-16 and join the “chair force.”

 

Throughout the show, the “hot shot” pilot wrestles with the mental impact of firing rockets from a drone in Afghanistan from a trailer in Las Vegas. “As Jess tracks terrorists by day and rocks her daughter to sleep by night, the boundary between her worlds becomes dangerously permeable,” an ad tells us.

 

The production is brought to you by presenting sponsor General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest weapons companies (and, wouldn’t you know it, the maker of Jess’s favorite plane). Playwright George Brant wrote the libretto, which will be brought to life by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo and Tony-winning composer Jeanine Tesori.

You’ll also see things like “humanitarian intervention” champion Samantha Power enthusiastically tweeting about the collaboration between the Sesame Street franchise and the CIA cutout USAID in Iraq:

Great to hear from Basma & Jad about the new friends they’re making in Iraq through Ahlan Simsim—a @USAID & @SesameWorkshop early learning activity that promotes inclusion, respect, and understanding by showing children from all different backgrounds coming together. pic.twitter.com/BtFfDH6So9

— Samantha Power (@PowerUSAID) April 19, 2023

You see things like this all the time under the shadow of the US empire, and individually they don’t look like much, but once you start noticing them you come to recognize them as symptoms of the profoundly diseased civilization that we are living in. One where our heart strings are pulled in the most obnoxious ways imaginable to get us to support capitalism, empire and oligarchy, where we are manipulated into espousing values systems which benefit powerful sociopaths under the cover of noble-sounding causes. Where we are trained like rats to support systems that are driving our species toward extinction because our rulers gave lip service to humanitarianism and waved a rainbow flag.

This is what dystopia looks like. Like a bunch of thought-controlled automatons mindlessly marching toward ecocide and omnicide to a beat played out by screens who tell them every day and in every way that there is no higher purpose than this. Like military industrial complex-funded feminist rock operas about drone operators and Cookie Monster helping Samantha Power psychologically colonize Iraqi children. Like Bono coming home from singing a heartfelt number about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr to illustrate a cover for a war propaganda piece in The Atlantic.

It’s like they’re pouring concrete over our hearts. Sewing blindfolds over our souls. Numbing us, distracting us, sedating us, so that the local riff raff won’t interfere in the workings of the imperial machine. They’re killing off something beautiful and sacred in humanity, and they’re doing it to roll out some of the ugliest visions this planet has ever seen.

_________________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

Jeffrey Epstein, Woody Allen, and Noam Chomsky went out to dinner one night.

There’s no punchline, that’s just something that happened.

❖

Of course, nothing that comes out about Epstein himself will ever be as significant as the first fact that powerful intelligence agencies use kids as sex slaves to manipulate our society with blackmail.

❖

Anti-China propaganda needs to be opposed ferociously. US military encirclement of China is rapidly increasing and the floodgates are being opened to pour weapons into Taiwan as quickly as possible, and it’s getting almost no resistance anywhere. People barely know it’s happening.

The propaganda campaign against China needs to be opposed right now because it’s a threat right now, and also because otherwise when the time comes to actually send out the war ships the public will just consent to it, since the war propaganda went unchallenged that whole time. After a certain point a propaganda narrative can gain enough momentum that there’s simply no resisting it. We can’t just ignore this.

❖

Aaand there he is. Bolton shows up literally every single time there's a new opportunity to push for war. We don't rage hard enough about the fact that there are people whose actual job is to try and get as many human beings violently killed as possible at every opportunity. https://t.co/zNuuxfOAKP

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 2, 2023

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The US alliance is indisputably encircling Russia and China in ways it would never permit itself to be encircled. The only way to defend this discrepancy is to say “Well it’s okay when we do it because they are Bad Guys while we are Good Guys,” which is an infant’s understanding.

Believing that “democracies” should be allowed to do things that “autocracies” shouldn’t be is just subscribing to an adult-sounding iteration of the “Good Guys vs Bad Guys” plotline of every children’s cartoon. It can’t withstand an instant of critical thought.

Even if you do subscribe to an infantile “Good Guys vs Bad Guys” worldview, all facts in evidence say the US should be considered the latter. Russia and China haven’t spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression, for example. Russia and China haven’t been strangling entire nations around the world with economic warfare for the crime of disobedience. Russia and China haven’t been circling the planet with hundreds of military bases in order to rule the world. Russia and China haven’t been plotting to destroy any nation which disobeys them. Only the US is doing these things.

❖

A great question to ask someone is “What conspiracy theory do you think might be true?” If they struggle to come up with even one, then that means they don’t question anything. If they don’t question anything, they’re not thinking at all.

If you believe The Official Story about everything that happens, then you’re not thinking, you’re repeating. If the only thing you question is the questioners, then you’re not an individual with your own mind, you are enforcer of the status quo. You’re as much a separate person with your own thoughts as a car radio speaker is separate from the sound of the disc jockey.

❖

The contradictions and hypocrisy of the empire are so in-your-face right now it sometimes barely feels worthwhile to point it out. But it needs to be pointed out every time, because the majority of people still manage not to see it.

Biden at the correspondents’ dinner: “journalism is not a crime.”

Julian Assange conspicuously missing from the evening’s remarks.

— Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) April 30, 2023

❖

I think it’s probably a good thing when our idols get knocked off the pedestals we put them on. Chomsky. Bernie. The Dalai Lama. It’s not healthy to elevate others to a lofty status above ourselves instead of seeing them as normal human beings who are as capable of error as anyone else.

Our entire culture — movies, schoolbooks, religions etc — tells us to always be looking for heroes. Tells us to look outside ourselves for celebrated leaders who will show us where to go. And I just think that’s a terrible dereliction of duty — of our duty to find the truth for ourselves.

One of the worst mistakes you can make is neglecting your responsibility to cultivate a truth-based understanding of reality for yourself. People hand off that responsibility to journalists, pundits, “thought leaders”, teachers, preachers and gurus, but to do this is to neglect a very sacred duty. As Terence McKenna said, “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.” Don’t pass off that responsibility to someone else.

You are the sole authority over your own understanding of the world. You’ve no business abdicating that authority because someone else is speaking about something with a confident and authoritative tone. Find out the truth for yourself. Place blind faith in no one when it comes to understanding reality, including me obviously.

It’s disempowering to have idols on pedestals, because they create the false impression that the solution to our problems exists somewhere outside ourselves. In reality no one individual will ever solve the massive problems humanity now faces. It’s going to take all of us.

Truth doesn’t exist in some other person; it’s for you to sort out for yourself. Revolution isn’t hiding in some celebrated hero; it’s going to have to come from within us. Enlightenment doesn’t exist in some lofty future state; it’s here presently and just needs to be recognized.

The healthy way to relate to famous figures is to relate to them as anyone else: if they say something useful then use it, if they say something unhelpful then don’t. You never need to elevate them so high that there’s an expectation that they’ll always get everything right, or that you feel a sense of disappointment or betrayal if they get something wrong.

It’s disempowering to put people on pedestals, and it’s no fun to be on the pedestal either. I always cringe a bit when I see someone constantly praising me as a person instead of focusing on the specific merits of my work on a case by case basis, not because I have a problem receiving compliments but because I know they’re going to have to knock me off that pedestal one day. Anyone who’s sincerely interested in truth will eventually have to knock some idols off of pedestals, because keeping them there inevitably becomes an obstacle to your own understanding of what’s true. The whole relationship is just deeply unpleasant for everyone involved.

Hero stories keep you looking for heroes outside yourself. Idols keep you looking for truth outside yourself. Gurus keep you looking for enlightenment outside yourself. It’s good to make use of all the knowledge and wisdom that exists in the world, but don’t let it get you digging for treasure in the wrong place.

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