Caitlin Johnstone

Life got so hectic after I published the last issue of JOHNSTONE that I didn’t notice people were unable to download the e-book version of the magazine. Turns out my Gumroad account had been suspended for reasons that still haven’t been made clear to me, but it’s fixed now and the issue is up and available for download if anyone’s interested.

It was a pain in the ass getting my Gumroad account unsuspended; I had to spend ages trying to get their AI chatbot to let me speak to a real human being before I was able to get a hold of someone and explain what happened. I hate this AI shit so much. It’s making everything worse.

Anyway, this is a re-launch of the e-book I tried to publish days ago. I apologize to everyone who had hoped to download this issue when it came out, and I apologize for not catching the problem sooner. 

Click here for a pay-what-you want digital copy of Secretary Of Perpetual War. You can also still get a paperback copy by clicking here.

Thanks!

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Reading by Tim Foley:

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President Trump announced a “total blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into, and out of, Venezuela” on Truth Social on Tuesday, saying that “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

Trump told the press on Wednesday that Venezuela “took all our oil from not that long ago, and we want it back. But they took it. They illegally took it.”

Of course, this is complete nonsense; Venezuela has done no such thing. These empire managers really believe the global south’s resources are their property, and that setting their own energy policy in their own interest is an act of theft.

Venezuela has ordered its navy to escort the nation’s oil tankers to protect them from acts of piracy by US forces like the one we saw last week, which places the US and Venezuelan militaries on a collision course.

We’ll see what happens, but as things sit right now it’s not looking good for peace.

Been thinking about this tweet ever since I saw it. Mainstream American journalists think unilateral US sanctions are *the actual international law*, and anyone who tries to circumvent them is a criminal. These are the people who are informing the American public about the world. pic.twitter.com/1EUFfFdgmX

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 17, 2025

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If you weren’t having enough Iraq flashbacks lately, Trump just signed an executive order naming the drug fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction”. The Trump administration has been accusing the Venezuelan government of trafficking the dangerous narcotic despite the US government being fully aware that Venezuela doesn’t produce fentanyl.

That’s right buddy, the US is preparing for a regime change war justified by lies again, in an oil-rich nation again, and they’re citing “weapons of mass destruction” again.

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It’s so American how the Sackler family caused a national opioid crisis which ultimately led to the fentanyl crisis, and instead of imprisoning them the US eventually went “Hang on, we can use this as an excuse to start a war with a country that doesn’t even produce fentanyl.”

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I hate right wing Venezuelans. They’re the worst of everything. They use the same “how DARE you tell us about our lived experience??” identity politics shtick that shitlibs love in order to shout down anyone who points out that US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous, while also using all the sleazy reptile-brained political weapons of rightists to attack women, minorities, and socialists. They’re like Latino Israelis.

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Lindsey Graham, who is arguably the nastiest warmonger in the US Senate, is defending Trump’s attacks on boats in the Caribbean by saying that “I have every confidence that what they’re doing is no different than what Bush did.” This is the same Lindsey Graham who said “Trump is my favorite president” because he’s “killing all the right people.”

Who loves Donald Trump? Only people who love war.

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So you agree. Israel is a western settler-colonialist project that was artificially implanted in west Asia? https://t.co/KIRHjZlbaD pic.twitter.com/oJUyIfQLab

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 14, 2025

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Palestine supporters: Backing Israel’s genocidal atrocities is going to cause antisemitism and violent extremism in the west.

Israel supporters: Shut up! 

[Violent extremism happens in Australia]

Israel supporters: See this proves we need to ban protests against Israel’s genocidal atrocities.

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There’s a video of a Biden administration Ukraine proxy war architect named Amanda Sloat casually admitting to Russian pranksters who were posing as Ukrainian presidential aide Igor Zhovkva that Ukraine could easily have avoided this horrific war by declaring neutrality instead of allowing itself to be turned into a NATO military asset.

“We had some conversation even before the war started, about what if Ukraine comes out and just says to Russia, ‘fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO if that stops the war, if that stops the invasion,’ which at that point it may well have done,” Sloat said, adding that this “certainly would have prevented the destruction and the loss of life”.

Gosh, you mean those of us who said this horrific war was provoked by NATO expansionism and the US refusing off-ramp after off-ramp toward peace were objectively correct, and everyone who called us Putin apologists for saying this were wrong? Golly gosh, how interesting.

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The Nation has an article out titled “What the Noam Chomsky–Jeffrey Epstein E-mails Tell Us” defending the extensive ties which have been revealed between the respected leftist scholar and the deceased Israeli intelligence operative, which include an email where Chomsky describes Epstein as a “highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation.”

It’s a trip how close Chomsky came to sneaking out death’s door before his Epstein ties became subject to public scrutiny. If he hadn’t lived so long his parting would’ve been massively mourned; now when his time’s up everyone’s just gonna go “Oh hey Epstein’s friend died.”

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Wikimedia Commons/United States National Guard.

Reading by Tim Foley:

Looks like some kind of memo went out or something, because pro-Israel outlets and individuals are all loudly amplifying one specific talking point about the Bondi Beach shooting.

Here are some examples:

“Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like”
~ Bret Stephens, New York Times

“The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach”
~ David Frum, The Atlantic

“The Intifada Comes to Australia”
~ Walter Russell Mead, Wall Street Journal

“Shooting at Bondi Beach is what a globalized intifada looks like”
~ Herb Keinon, Jerusalem Post

“The Intifada Comes to Australia”
~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Free Press

“Welcome to the global intifada”
~ David Harsanyi, Washington Examiner

“Palestinian propaganda has globalized the intifada”
~ Zachary Faria, Washington Examiner

“Bondi Beach massacre is what globalizing the intifada looks like”
~ Vivian Bercovici, National Post

“Chanting ‘globalise the intifada’ leads to Bondi Beach”
~ Danny Cohen, The Telegraph

“I have a simple question for leftists after the antisemitic shooting in Australia. What do you think ‘globalize the intifada’ means?”
~ US Senator Ted Cruz

“That attack in Sydney is exactly what it means to ‘globalize intifada.’ We saw the actual application of the globalization of intifada in Sydney.”
~ New York City Mayor Eric Adams

Did literally all the top genocide-apologists in media & politics get a memo from Israel to use this same "This is what globalize the intifada means" line in response to the Bondi Beach shooting? https://t.co/jrMpf4W85Q

— Ash J (@AshAgony) December 14, 2025

“These are the results of the anti-Semitic rampage in the streets of Australia over the past two years, with the anti-Semitic and inciting calls of ‘Globalise the Intifada’ that were realized today.”
~ Gideon Sa’ar, Foreign Minister of Israel

“When you refuse to condemn and only ‘discourage’ use of the term ‘Globalize the Intifada,’ you help facilitate (not cause) the thinking that leads to Bondi Beach.”
~ Former US antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt (addressing New York City Mayor Elect Zohran Mamdani)

“What on earth do you think globalise the intifada means? And can’t people see the link between that kind of rhetoric and attacks on Jewish people as Jewish people? Because that’s what really struck at the heart of Jewish people in our country today — an attack on Jewish people organising around Hannukah, coming together as Jewish people.”
~ UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting

“Why is it still allowed? What is the meaning of globalise the intifada? I’ll tell you the meaning… it’s what happened on Bondi Beach yesterday.”
~ Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom

“Calls to ‘globalise the intifada’ and chants of ‘from the river to the sea’ are not abstract or rhetorical slogans. They are explicit calls for violence, and they carry deadly consequences. What we are witnessing is the inevitable outcome of sustained radicalisation that has been allowed to fester under the guise of protest.”
~ Israeli embassy in the UK

“This is what happens when you ‘globalize the intifada.’”
~ Newsweek editors

“This was not an isolated act of violence — it was the culmination of ‘globalise the intifada’ rhetoric that has been building around the world since October 7.”
~ Yoni Bashan, The Times

“For those who’ve been marching these past few years demanding to ‘globalise the intifada’ this is a barbarous anti-Semitic consequence of their pro-Islamist stupidity.”
~ Former BBC anchor Andrew Neil

“When people call to ‘globalise the intifada’, this is what they are calling for: dead Jews, terrorism and families shattered forever.”
~ Campaign Against Antisemitism spokesperson

“Taking a stand against antisemitism after Bondi Beach should begin with an unequivocal recognition that ‘intifada’ rhetoric is hate speech.”
~ The Bulwark’s Cathy Young

“It would be great if those who have been shouting ‘Global Intifada’ would revisit that phrase right now. It is not a ‘harmless left wing slogan.’ It is a call to blame — and kill — Jews who have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the actions of the Israeli government.”
~ Spiritual guru and former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson

"It is obscene how quickly the right has seized on this horror to advance an Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian agenda. And it is disgusting to see Israel’s politicians almost gleeful at the opportunity to distract from their genocidal onslaught in Gaza" https://t.co/fuA6QfBowr

— Nick Riemer (@NickRiemer1) December 16, 2025

Of course, these outlets and individuals do not actually care about the phrase “globalize the intifada”. If pro-Palestine activists had never chanted that slogan, pro-Israel spinmeisters would be focusing on a different line today. They are not trying to stop chants which they perceive as dangerous, they are trying to stomp out criticism of Israel’s genocidal atrocities.

As The Intercept’s Natasha Lennard wrote regarding the aforementioned Bret Stephens piece, “It’s all done in the name of fighting antisemitism by conflating the worst kinds of violent anti-Jewish bigotry, like what we saw in Bondi Beach, with any criticisms of Israel and its actions. To so much as say Palestinians ought to have basic human rights, in this view, becomes a deadly attack on Jewish safety.”

The term “intifada” means to “shake off” and “rise up”, and as Middle East Eye’s Craig Birckhead-Morton and Yasmin Zainab Bergemann explained last year, intifadas have historically included nonviolent resistance. Saying “globalize the intifada” isn’t calling for people to massacre Jewish civilians around the world, it’s advocating resistance to the power structure which incinerated Gaza and continues to inflict abuse upon Palestinians and any other population which doesn’t bow to the interests of the empire.

And the people scaremongering about this phrase know this. They’re fully aware that they’re using a tragic mass shooting as a political cudgel against people who believe Palestinians are human beings. This is just one more cynical manipulation aimed at protecting Israel from criticism so that it can inflict more violence and suffering upon the world.

As Em Hilton wrote for the Israeli outlet +972, “It is obscene how quickly the right has seized on this horror to advance an Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian agenda. And it is disgusting to see Israel’s politicians almost gleeful at the opportunity to distract from their genocidal onslaught in Gaza by using our pain and grief as a political weapon.”

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

On March 16 of this year, Reuters published an article titled “Israeli strikes kill 15 people in Gaza over past day, Palestinian medics say”.

Does anyone remember the 15 Palestinians who died on March 16, 2025?

Does that day stand out in anyone’s memory as particularly significant in terms of mass murder?

No?

Same here.

I honestly can’t remember it at all. This would have been during the tail end of the first fake “ceasefire”, a couple of days before Trump signed off on Israel resuming its large-scale bombing operations in Gaza, so this wasn’t one of those days with huge massacres and staggering death tolls. It doesn’t exactly stand out in the memory.

I have no idea who those people were. I don’t know their names. I never saw their pictures flashing across my news feed. I never saw any western officials denouncing their deaths, or media institutions giving wall-to-wall coverage to the news of their killing. So I don’t remember them.

15 civilians were killed in the massacre targeting Sydney's Jewish community. A day in which Israel massacres 15 Palestinian civilians in Gaza would be at the low end of the average in 2+ years of genocide.

Israel's atrocities and the impunity they receive are undoubtedly the…

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) December 15, 2025

I saw a tweet from Aaron Maté yesterday:

“15 civilians were killed in the massacre targeting Sydney’s Jewish community. A day in which Israel massacres 15 Palestinian civilians in Gaza would be at the low end of the average in 2+ years of genocide.

“Israel’s atrocities and the impunity they receive are undoubtedly the number one driver of anti-Semitism worldwide. And to show how little Israel and its apologists care about anti-Semitism, many are exploiting the Sydney massacre to justify Israel’s rejection of a Palestinian state; baselessly blame Iran; and demand more censorship of anti-genocide protests.”

Indeed, the worst people on earth are using the Bondi Beach shooting to argue for crackdowns on free speech and freedom of assembly to silence Israel’s critics online and on the streets, in Australia and throughout the western world. And when 15 Palestinians were killed by Israel on March 16, the west barely noticed.

I don’t remember the 15 Palestinians who died during that 24-hour period in mid-March, but I will always remember the Bondi Beach shooting. Someone could mention it to me thirty years from now and I’ll know exactly what they’re talking about. My society made an infinitely bigger deal about the deaths of 15 westerners in Sydney, Australia than the deaths of 15 Palestinians in Gaza, so it will always stick in my memory.

Hell, I can’t blame it all on society; if I’m honest I made a much bigger deal about it myself. I’ve felt sick thinking about the shooting ever since it happened, partly because I know it’s going to be used to roll out authoritarian measures and stomp out free speech in my country, but also partly because I’ve felt so bad for those who died and their loved ones. Even after spending two years denouncing the way western society normalizes the murder of Arabs and places more importance on western lives than Palestinian lives, I’m still basically doing the same thing myself. I’m a damn hypocrite.

I wasn’t born this way. This was learned behavior. If I had my slate cleaned and could see the world through fresh eyes it would never occur to me that I and my society would ever see 15 people being murdered in Australia as more significant than 15 people being murdered in Palestine. I would expect them to be viewed as exactly as terrible.

And they should be. Palestinians don’t love their families any less than Australians do. Australian lives aren’t any more significant or valuable than Palestinian lives. There is no valid reason for the world to have focused any less on the 15 people who were killed in Gaza on March 16 than on the 15 people who were murdered on Bondi Beach. But it did.

When a dozen Jews are massacred in Australia, the world is in mourning.

When a dozen Palestinians are massacred every day in Gaza, the world celebrates it as a ceasefire.

— Zachary Foster (@_ZachFoster) December 15, 2025

Sunday was an awful, dark day. Hundreds of lives have been directly devastated by this tragedy, thousands more indirectly, and in some ways the nation as a whole has been changed. The trauma will reverberate in the victim’s families for generations. The sorrow is palpable and ubiquitous. It’s everywhere; in the streets, at the supermarket. There is catastrophe in the air, and people around the world are feeling it.

And this is appropriate. This is what 15 deaths ought to feel like. This is what it feels like when you see mass murder inflicted upon a population whose murder hasn’t become normalized for you.

That’s all I’ve got to offer right now. Just the humble suggestion that every massacre of Palestinians should shake the earth just as much as the Bondi massacre has. Every death toll out of Gaza should hit us just as hard as the death toll out of Sydney did. Feel how hard this hits, and then translate it to the people of Gaza. This is happening there every single day.

In trying to get people to care about warmongering and imperialism what we’re really trying to do is get people to widen their circle of compassion to the furthest extent possible. To extend their care for the people around them to include caring about violence and abuse against people even on the other side of the world, who might not look and speak and live as they do. Maybe even extending it so far as caring about the non-human organisms who share our planet with us.

As Einstein wrote in a condolence letter toward the end of his life,

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”

Humanity won’t survive into the distant future unless we grow into a conscious species, and part of that growth will necessarily include widening our circles of compassion to include our fellow beings around the world. If we can’t do that, we’re not going to make it. We’re too destructive. We hurt each other and our environment too much. We destroy everything around us trying to shore up wealth and resources for ourselves, and it simply is not sustainable. It’ll get us all killed eventually.

We’ve got to become better. We’ve got to become more caring. More emotionally intelligent. Less susceptible to the manipulations of propaganda. A society driven by truth and compassion rather than lies and the pursuit of profit.

That’s the only way we’re making it out of this awkward adolescent transition stage with these large, capable brains still wound up in vestigial evolutionary fear-based conditioning. That’s the only way we achieve our true potential and build a healthy world together.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Reading by Tim Foley:

Two shooters attacked a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, killing fifteen people and injuring dozens of others. Police report that the shooters were a father and his son; the father was killed by police, and the son was captured. 

The shooters appear to have been Muslim, but, much to the inconvenience of those who would like to use this incident to fan the flames of western Islamophobic hysteria, the man who selflessly risked his life to disarm one of them was also a Muslim father of two named Ahmed al-Ahmed.

As usual we’re seeing a lot of speculation about false flags and psyops regarding this incident, but I prefer to hang back from such commentary until I’ve seen some solid evidence.

I do have some thoughts about the public discourse we are seeing about the shooting right now, though.

Only the @nytimes would print a headline this twisted. Bondi Beach has nothing to do with the Palestinian struggle, and to say it does is journalistic malpractice. pic.twitter.com/HK5bSZDOfp

— Linda Mamoun (@mamoun_linda) December 14, 2025

Point 1: Obviously it is evil to massacre civilians for being Jewish. 

Point 2: Obviously Israel’s massacring of civilians must continue to be opposed, and will continue to be opposed. 

Today the worst people in the world are trying to pretend Point 1 and Point 2 are contradictory.

It’s so gross watching the tail-wagging excitement of Israel supporters in response to this shooting. They’re so happy they have another rhetorical weapon with which to bludgeon pro-Palestine voices into silence. They can barely contain their glee.

Basically @netanyahu is saying that Australia got what it had coming for not supporting his genocide in Gaza even more than it already does. https://t.co/oxVlJVW4HK

— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) December 14, 2025

Benjamin Netanyahu immediately scrambled to hold a press conference proclaiming that the attack was the result of Australia taking some steps toward the recognition of a Palestinian state. 

New York Times warmonger Bret Stephens penned an article titled “Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like,” arguing that the shooters “were taking to heart slogans like ‘resistance is justified,’ and ‘by any means necessary,’ which have become ubiquitous at anti-Israel rallies the world over.”

Iraq-raping war propagandist David Frum wrote a similar article for The Atlantic titled “The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach,” saying the beach “has been repeatedly targeted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators” and denouncing the fact that “Many in the western world have interpreted post-October 7 anti-Israel actions within the framework of free speech.”

The virulently Islamophobic Australian senator Pauline Hanson swiftly slapped together a statement claiming that “the weekly anti-semitic protests across our nation” and “our obnoxious universities” were “warning signs” that such an attack was coming. 

Sky News hastened to give a platform to Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sharren Haskel in an interview where she declared that “this is what it means” to allow protesters to chant “globalize the intifada”, saying that “if you let that continue and run in your streets” you are inviting further terrorist attacks. Haskel has previously called pro-Palestine protesters in Australia “useful idiots” for Hamas.

not a second is wasted for victims to mourn their loved ones. instantly israel's envoys demand "persecution" of anti genocide protestors worldwide. they blame the bare min recognition australia has offered to palestinians. its so cynical, so transparent. https://t.co/yh5huyhN3g

— hasanabi (@hasanthehun) December 14, 2025

Political dynasty princeling Chris Cuomo took to Twitter to assert that people who’ve been accusing Israel of genocide helped “fuel the hatred on bondi beach.”

The Jewish Chronicle’s Stephen Pollard tweeted a video of pro-Palestine protesters in Birmingham with the caption “It you deny the connection between this and what happened at Bondi Beach you are part of the problem.”

A viral tweet from Australian right wing social media personality Kobie Thatcher features a video of a pro-Palestine protest with the caption “This was Sydney, Australia just 6 months ago. These scenes should have been an urgent warning.”

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has used the attack to demand that Prime Minister Albanese shove through the authoritarian speech suppression plan put forward by Australia’s “antisemitism envoy” Jillian Segal earlier this year, arguing that “We have seen public landmarks turned into symbols of antisemitic hate. We have seen campuses occupied and Jewish students made to feel afraid.”

From the earliest moments after this attack Israel apologists have taken it as a given that it was an act of terrorism in response to Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, but then framing the people peacefully protesting those atrocities as the problem. 

They’re openly acknowledging that the genocide is violently radicalizing people, but instead of coming to the obvious conclusion that Israel should therefore not commit genocide, they’re citing it as evidence that people should stop protesting the genocide.

It's wild how people take it as a given that the Bondi shooting was a response to Israel committing genocide, but then instead of saying Israel should not be committing genocide they say people should not have called it a genocide. https://t.co/4rCZpsY0ru

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 14, 2025

They could blame the shooting on the actual shooters. They could blame the people committing genocide for radicalizing the shooters. But instead they’re blaming the violence on the most peaceful people in the equation: the ones holding signs and saying violent massacres should NOT happen.

It’s about the craziest, most evil manipulation you could possibly come up with.

After the Manchester synagogue attack this past October, I made the observation that “Whenever western Jews get hurt these days you always see the Israel supporters having a big parade where they go ‘Okay that’s it, wrap it up, nobody gets to criticize Israel’s behavior anymore because you’re causing terrorism!’ And then everyone ignores them and goes back to protesting the genocide, because that’s ridiculous.”

We’re seeing that same parade again today, and it’s just as ridiculous now as it was then. 

Whenever western Jews get hurt the Israel supporters have a big parade where they go "Okay that's it, nobody gets to criticize Israel's behavior anymore, you're causing terrorism!" And then everyone ignores them and goes back to protesting the genocide, because that's ridiculous. https://t.co/m3iNn0Ys0p

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 2, 2025

Massacring civilians is wrong. It’s wrong in Bondi Beach, and it’s wrong in Gaza. Today the worst people in the world are trying to claim that because the former happened, everyone needs to stop protesting the latter. This is pure, cynical manipulation designed to protect a genocidal apartheid state from criticism. It deserves nothing but a scoff and a dismissal.

My heart is heavy for everyone who woke up today to their first day on the planet without their loved one. No doubt every breath taken today will feel like an impossible challenge. Each of these deaths will flatten their family, their friendship groups, their workplaces, their various communities, and their religious community like a nuke, and the trauma will take years to get over. That’s done; that’s baked in. This is as true in Bondi as it is in Gaza. My heart breaks for everyone who found themselves suddenly standing at the foot of this seemingly-unscalable mountain of grief today. 

There’s still a lot of information on this incident yet to emerge, but it’s safe to assume it will be used as an excuse to target pro-Palestine activists and further outlaw criticism of Israel in Australia, as has been happening to a greater and greater extent in this country for the last two years. Zionism is the single greatest threat to free expression in the entire western world.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Reading by Tim Foley:

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US forces have seized an oil tanker carrying some 1.8 million barrels of oil from Venezuela to Cuba as part of its ongoing series of warmongering escalations against the Maduro government.

When asked what would be done with the oil, President Trump told the press, “We keep it, I guess.”

Meanwhile Chuck Schumer is refusing to oppose Trump’s regime change interventionism against Venezuela, and CNN just had former US intelligence official Beth Sanner on to proclaim that the Trump administration’s act of piracy “is absolutely normal.” So Trump’s ostensible opposition in the political-media class are putting absolutely no inertia on this.

The US pirating a Cuba-bound oil tanker from Venezuela illustrates how the empire is hurrying to shore up control over Latin America in the same way the US and Israel are quickly shoring up control over the middle east. There’s a window of opportunity to shove through a bunch of pre-existing military agendas in both regions, and they’re aggressively seizing it before their attention has to turn to bigger geopolitical fish.

You often hear US imperialists saying that obtaining regime change in Venezuela will help achieve it in Cuba as well; Senator Rick Scott recently told 60 Minutes that if Maduro is successfully ousted “it’ll be the end of Cuba,” and that “America is gonna take care of the southern hemisphere and make sure there’s freedom and democracy.”

Stealing the oil hurts both Cuba and Venezuela, who are the two primary enemies of the US empire in the Americas because of their strongly socialist governments. They got a right wing government into Bolivia this year, and now they’re hurrying to push regime change in Caracas and Havana while they’ve got a right wing tyrant in office with a gusano secretary of state. The hope is to force the entirety of Latin America into full alignment with the empire before Trump leaves office. I have no idea if they’ll succeed.

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The US House and Senate have agreed to make registration for the draft “automatic”, which will simplify the drafting process if the empire decides to throw the youth of America into a horrific new military conflict. The US is making its biggest draft policy change in 45 years so it’s easier to force Americans to fight and die in a massive war, just as the New York Times editorial board launches a series explaining why the US must prepare for war with China. 

The latest edition of the New York Times’ arguments for the need for more US militarism is titled “This Is The 21st Century Arms Race. Can America Keep Up?”, which argues that “Congress needs to expand funding for research and development into technologies with military applications.”

“To counter the growing threat, America must simultaneously win the race to build autonomous weapons and lead the world in controlling them,” the editorial board writes. 

Fun times.

I know man, look how close they put their country to all those US military operations. https://t.co/s95pga3Qbo pic.twitter.com/gKuTCeBf5S

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 10, 2025

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The BBC is reportedly training its staff that it is antisemitic for anyone to oppose Zionism, because most Jews identify as Zionists. You see this argument a lot, and it a textbook example of an ad populum fallacy, which is when someone claims that something is true or right just because a majority of people believe it. 

Just as the Atlantic slave trade would have been wrong even if every white person in the world supported it, a genocidal apartheid state which cannot exist without nonstop violence, theft and abuse would still be wrong even if every Jewish person on earth supported it. The claim that a majority of Jews support the existence of the modern state of Israel has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether such a state should exist, and does not invalidate any arguments that it should not. 

Israel supporters rely on lies, manipulations and fallacious arguments because their position is not based on truth or morality. If their position was right they would simply be making normal arguments like normal adults. They can’t do this because they are wrong.

❖

Whenever I catch myself wondering if I’ve been too hard on the Democrats I re-watch last year’s video of DNC attendees covering their ears and mocking activists reading the names of children who’d been murdered in Gaza.

When they’re not in power it’s easy to forget how evil these people are.

❖

The Daily Mirror has a gross new propaganda piece out claiming that “Hamas plotters are spreading their tentacles of terror into Europe, with secret arms dumps and operatives planning attacks even as far as in the United Kingdom.”

As you might expect, The Mirror provides no evidence whatsoever for this claim, citing only “an intelligence report” of unspecified origin.

This is one of the dumbest narratives we’ve ever been asked to believe about Hamas, amid some very stiff competition. I don’t know about you, but am so sick of having my intelligence insulted like this.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

Just as the United States hits its first official trillion-dollar annual military budget, the New York Times editorial board has published an article which argues that the US is going to need to increase military funding to prepare for a major war with China. 

The article is titled “Overmatched: Why the U.S. Military Must Reinvent Itself,” and to be clear it is an editorial, not an op-ed, meaning it represents the position of the newspaper itself rather than solely that of the authors. 

This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows that The New York Times has supported every American war throughout its entire history, because The New York Times is a war propaganda firm disguised as a news outlet. But it is surprising how brazen they are about it in this particular case.

The article opens with graphics I saw one commenter describe as “Mussolini-core” because of their conspicuously fascistic aesthetic, accompanied by three lines of text in all-caps which reads as follows:

“AMERICA’S MILITARY HAS DEFENDED THE FREE WORLD FOR 80 YEARS.

OUR DOMINANCE IS FADING.

RIVALS KNOW THIS AND ARE BUILDING TO DEFEAT US.”

they get mad when you say “you scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” and then the NYT publishes Mussolini-core https://t.co/VA6orRsoql

— the thicc husband & father (@lukeisamazing) December 9, 2025

The narrative that the US war machine has “defended the free world” during its period of post-world war global dominance is itself insane empire propaganda. Washington has abused, tyrannized and starved the world at levels unrivaled by any other power during that period while spearheading the theft of hundreds of trillions of dollars from the global south via imperialist extraction. The US empire has not been defending any “free world”, it has been actively obstructing its emergence.

The actual text of the article opens with another whopper, with the first sentence reading, “President Xi Jinping of China has ordered his armed forces to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027.”

This is straight-up state propaganda. The New York Times editorial board is here uncritically parroting a completely unsubstantiated claim the US intelligence cartel has been making for years, which Xi Jinping explicitly denies. While it is Beijing’s official position that Taiwan will eventually be reunited with the mainland, not one shred of evidence has ever been presented to the public for the 2027 timeline. It’s a US government assertion being reported as verified fact by the nation’s “paper of record”.

And it doesn’t get any better from there. The Times cites a Pentagon assessment that the US would lose a hot war with China over Taiwan as evidence of “a decades-long decline in America’s ability to win a long war with a major power,” arguing that this is a major problem because “a strong America has been crucial to a world in which freedom and prosperity are far more common than at nearly any other point in human history.”

“This is the first of a series of editorials examining what’s gone wrong with the U.S. military — technologically, bureaucratically, culturally, politically and strategically — and how we can create a relevant and effective force that can deter wars whenever possible and win them wherever necessary,” The New York Times tells us.

It’s never enough for militarism mouthpieces like the NYT editorial board. The US spends more money on its military than the next 9 countries COMBINED yet we are somehow always “behind” alleged existential enemies whose intrinsically sinister nature is simply taken for granted. https://t.co/Cx9odMKblq pic.twitter.com/lxJFj67ctt

— Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonCHI) December 8, 2025

The Times argues that the US needs to reshape its military to defeat China in a war, or to win a war with Russia if they attack a NATO member, saying “Evidence suggests that Moscow may already be testing ways to do this, including by cutting the undersea cables on which NATO forces depend.”

The “evidence” the Times cites for this claim is a hyperlink to a January article titled “Norway Seizes Russian-Crewed Ship Suspected of Cutting an Undersea Cable,” completely ignoring the fact that Norway released that ship shortly thereafter when it was unable to find any evidence linking it to the event, and completely ignoring reports that US and European intelligence had concluded that the undersea cable damage was the result of an accident rather than sabotage.

And then, of course, comes the call for more military funding.

“In the short term, the transformation of the American military may require additional spending, primarily to rebuild our industrial base. As a share of the economy, defense spending today — about 3.4 percent of G.D.P. — remains near its lowest level in more than 80 years, even after Mr. Trump’s recent increases,” the Times writes, adding that US allies should also be pressured to ramp up spending on the war machine.

“A more secure world will almost certainly require more military commitment from allies like Canada, Japan and Europe, which have long relied on American taxpayers to bankroll their protection,” the authors write, saying “China’s industrial capacity can only be met by pooling the resources of allies and partners around the world to balance and contain Beijing’s increasing influence.”

Of course the idea that perhaps the United States should avoid fighting a hot war with China right off the coast of its own mainland never enters the discussion. The suggestion that it’s insane to support waging full-scale wars with nuclear-armed great powers to secure US planetary domination never comes up. It’s just taken as a given that pouring wealth and resources into preparations for a nuclear-age world war is the only normal option on the table.

But that’s the New York Times for you. It’s been run by the same family since the late 1800s and it’s been advancing the information interests of rich and powerful imperialists ever since. It’s a militarist smut rag that somehow found its way into unearned respectability, and it deserves to be treated as such. The sooner it ceases to exist, the better.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

Chloe writes the following via email regarding my recent piece “Don’t Let The Empire Gaslight You Into Believing You Are Powerless”:

“What you said about what to do when you feel powerless really stuck with me…that externally you can always help wake up more people to the truth and internally you can heal. I guess I just have a question more with the latter. How do you heal in the midst of a world on fire? How do you feel safe and secure when you realize that the world is anything but those two things? That any form of comfort you feel is currently costing untold numbers of people’s blood and pain? How do you heal and feel safe when everything is just…grind…precarity and feeling on the edge of oblivion? Waking up to those realizations is terrifying…and it just feels like a full antitheis to being able to start your healing. Like things can only be safe when the monsters and the hell is defeated which won’t likely occur within the span of our lifetimes? It seems like thats something you’ve figured out and I’m curious how to start that.”

Dear Chloe,

I think first we need to be clear that healing and feeling secure are two different things. Healing isn’t about getting away from uncomfortable feelings, it’s about moving right into them and feeling them fully. After we have done our work and healing has occurred we tend to notice that we feel better, but the actual work of healing begins in discomfort. That’s where the rubber meets the road on this path.

Healing is when you find a part of yourself that has been acting out unconsciously over and over again throughout your life, by getting annoyed or upset or collapsing into helplessness, or by freezing up, freezing out, or freaking out. You start paying attention to how these unconscious behaviors play in yourself (either in your outward behavior or privately in your internal suffering), and you get real curious about how that is happening.

Healing is when you track that defense mechanism back to its first instance, the very first time you felt this feeling, usually in childhood, where you were small and vulnerable and you came up with this way of defending yourself in that moment and have stuck with it ever since. Our inner dysfunctions are generally just old strategies for dealing with perceived threats that we set in motion much earlier in our lives and then forgot about, which then went on to continue pulling the strings of our psychology from the depths of our subconscious long after they became maladaptive and unhelpful.

Healing is when you listen to that small part of you that has just been doing its very best to defend you all these years from the perceived threat that is no longer there because you are no longer a small child. You are an adult now, and you don’t face the same threats you faced (or more likely imagined you faced but didn’t understand) back when you were a kid. But a part of your brain has not caught up with that yet.

So you let that part of yourself talk to you, and you listen, and you love it, and you thank it for defending you all these years, but you let it know that you’re all good now. It can go. Compassion for your tiny self that didn’t know any better floods your system and in all that love, you forgive yourself for the first instance, and for all the instances after where you were punching at shadows that were no longer there.

In that flood of compassion, the mechanism dissolves. Sometimes the energy of it will literally up and leave, out your mouth in the form of a burp or a dry retch, or in a shudder or chattering of teeth, but other times it will simply melt into your whole self. You’ll just feel better, and you’ll know it’s gone because you won’t be able to find the feeling again if you attempt to return to it.

The thing about healing is that it leaves only an absence of something, so it doesn’t make a big deal about itself. You might not even notice that you’ve done anything much for a while. The more you do this though, the more the noise in your head dies down, and the real world begins to emerge.

You become less reactive and less likely to inadvertently cause drama in your world, and in yourself you become generally happier and lighter.

But you also see — and this goes back to the nub of your question — that in this new light the world becomes a much less scary place. You can see that the monsters who rule our world aren’t so much monsters as just little kids with far too much power unconsciously acting out their defense mechanisms. The suffering they cause is real and horrifying, but at the root of it, they are humans playing out a very human pattern. In this context, it’s comprehensible. You’ve found similar things in yourself, so it’s not an alien threat which defies understanding.

You also see how predictable people are when they are stuck in their reactive patterns. You can see that in our leaders. They are not surprising or inspired in any way at all; they are monotonously boring and beholden to the patterning of their psychological conditioning, and their behavior is predictable. Evil, yes, but also predictable.

Predictability is also a marker of the imperial core as a whole. You can see how incapable it is of changing tack, even when it no longer serves the empire to continue the pattern. The empire managers think they’re so slick, but they are stuck with repeating the same plays over and over. That’s a major weakness. They are telegraphing their next moves to us years in advance, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

The other thing that happens is that in this newfound clarity, you can interact with the world as it is. You are no longer expending energy fighting shadows of the past. Your healthy anger is re-ignited, ready to animate you into inspired action that responds to the present moment. You get your intuition back, unencumbered by neurosis and paranoia, so you can move more efficiently in the world. You get your healthy wants back, your “fuck yeah” and your “hell no”, and you can make good decisions quickly, and deftly course-correct if you need.

Imperial propaganda uses our fears, our tribal loyalties, our insecurities, and our learned helplessness to control us as efficiently as if they installed levers in our brain. If you dissolve those levers, you become a very dangerous entity to the machine. You become a free human being no longer acting in patterned and predictable ways, but moving with the needs of the moment. That is empowering.

So we definitely don’t need to wait until the bastards have been defeated and we’re feeling safe and secure in order to begin our healing journey. In fact, beginning the work of true healing makes us much more effective at fighting the empire, and the work begins right here in the big sloppy uncomfortable thick of it all. All it takes is the sincerity, vulnerability, humility, and courage to begin taking those first steps.

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

The blue whales have stopped singing
because the krill are vanishing
because the oceans are warming
because we are ruled by long-toothed liars
whose insides are full of dead leaves.

The great whales have gone silent
and my bird has gone blind
and there are chatbots in the basement
and corpses in the corn.

Under the overpass it is dry and still.
You would never know that everything is dying.
You should come and visit me.

Meet me over there under the sepia streetlights
with the strangleporn perverts and fentanyl fallen,
all the stillborn scar tissue extractions
from the wreckage of a banished womb,
the NAFTA-noosed factory towns full of deserted buildings
and the window-snarling meth towns full of deserted people,
where the cries of orphaned Palestinians mingle
with the cries of the last baby orangutan 
ever born in the wild.

Meet me under the flickering lights.
Bring me some smokes and a sad luck story
and let’s stay up late by the freeway
watching the traffic get sparse.
Show me the spots on your skin 
where life has kicked you
and I will kiss them
and give you a flower.

The leviathans have gone quiet
and the turbines are getting loud,
and everything has become so strange.
So sit with me on this curb
under my burlap wing
and let’s laugh
and heal
and mark beauty
until sunrise.

______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Large Blue Whale Off Southern California Coast Photo Don Ramey Logan.jpg from Wikimedia Commons by Don Ramey Logan, CC-BY-SA 3.0

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

The US State Department has renamed the US Institute of Peace the Donald J Trump Institute of Peace, proclaiming that it did so “to reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.”

“President Trump will be remembered by history as the President of Peace,” tweeted Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the announcement.

Earlier this year the president’s intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard made a similar social media post, tweeting that “President Trump IS the President of Peace. He is ending bloodshed across the world and will deliver lasting peace in the Middle East.”

President Trump will be remembered by history as the President of Peace. It's time our State Department display that. https://t.co/NBvmL5zksn

— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) December 3, 2025

This would be the same President Trump who has bombed Somalia more times in the last year than presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama did in their combined twelve years in office. 

The same President Trump who is bombing boats in the Caribbean and openly ramping up for a disastrous regime change military intervention in Venezuela at this very moment, with his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs declaring that Americans can expect a coming war “in our neighborhood”.

The same President Trump who has spent an entire year pouring weapons into the horrific US proxy war in Ukraine despite promising throughout his entire campaign to end the conflict on day one.

The same President Trump who helped Israel incinerate Gaza for months before suckering the world with a fake “ceasefire” deal which as of this writing has seen at least 373 Palestinians murdered by Israel in just two months since taking effect, while a nightmarish surveillance system is constructed around the survivors.

The same President Trump who risked a horrifying escalation in the middle east by bombing Iran.

The same President Trump who slaughtered hundreds of civilians in his murderous bombing campaign in Yemen earlier this year.

The same President Trump who spent all year ignoring the UAE-backed genocide in Sudan until he was given a nudge by none other genocidal Saudi tyrant Mohammed bin Salman.

The same President Trump who spent his entire first term advancing the longstanding agendas of warmongering DC swamp monsters by starving Venezuela, backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal atrocities in Yemen, ramping up cold war escalations against Russia which paved the way to the conflict in Ukraine, imprisoning Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes, staging brutal regime change ops in Iran, occupying Syrian oil fields with the goal of facilitating regime change, assassinating General Soleimani, and expanding the US murder machine around the world.

President Trump IS the President of Peace. He is ending bloodshed across the world and will deliver lasting peace in the Middle East.

Where Joe Biden failed, President Trump will succeed. https://t.co/kcQalOyRLa

— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) March 29, 2025

This rhetoric about Trump being the “President of Peace” is just that: rhetoric. It’s words. This administration has been taking credit for resolving a bunch of conflicts it either made up, didn’t help resolve, or was an active belligerent in, while in actual reality turning the gears of the imperial war machine as rapidly as any other president the United States has ever had.

Trump campaigned on being a president of peace and continues to stake his personal reputation on big talk about peacemaking, but in terms of concrete action he’s just as much of a warmonger as the psychopaths who came before him. 

There is no basis to continue to support Trump if you are opposed to war. You can support him because he “triggers the libs” or “fights wokeness” or whatever other dopey culture war reason you want if that’s what you’re into, because he absolutely does feed into that nonsense. But if you support him because you think he’s making peace, draining the swamp, or sticking up for the little guy, you’re just plain delusional.

______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via the US Department of State.

The new edition of JOHNSTONE is now available to order in print or download as a pay-what-you-want e-book version.

As the US murder machine ramps up for yet another war of aggression against yet another oil-rich nation in Venezuela, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been trying to meme his way out of a major scandal after he was exposed as having authorized the “double-tap” murder of men who survived a US missile strike on a boat in the Caribbean. 

In mockery of the uproar over the news, Hegseth posted a meme on Twitter featuring an AI-generated image of the children’s book character Franklin the Turtle with the caption “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists”. The phrase “narco terrorists” is the slogan the Trump administration has come up with to justify its extrajudicial executions of alleged drug traffickers which it has been using as a pretense to amass a major military presence in the waters near Venezuela.

I personally am glad the US has swapped out the name Department of Defense for the far more honest name Department of War. When was the last time the American military was used to defend the United States? It never happens. Call it what it is. Only thing more honest would be to call it the Department of Perpetual War.

You can get a paperback copy of this issue by clicking here, or a pay-what-you-feel digital copy by clicking here.

Other paperback editions of JOHNSTONE can be purchased by clicking here. Other digital editions can be downloaded by clicking here.

You can also get a subscription to the digital versions which will be sent to your inbox every month by clicking here.

CONTENTS:

Cheney Should Have Died Alone In A Cage … 4

Israel Is Still Starving Gaza, And Other Notes … 5

It Is Easy To Miss The Cloud Reflections … 8

Things Are Shitty Because We Are Ruled By People Who Want Things To Be Shitty … 9

Artificial Intelligence Is Making Everything Dumber … 11

The US Empire Keeps Getting Creepier … 14

Israel Constantly Stretches The Ceasefire Rules Because That’s What Israelis Do … 15

This Is All Our Rulers Are Offering Us … 18

Sometimes The Media Ignoring A Major Story Becomes The Story — And Other Notes … 19

The Difference Between The US Empire And The British Empire … 21

The Media Focus On Epstein’s Ties To Trump And Ignore His Ties To Israel … 22

AI Companies Are Encouraging Users To Believe Chatbots Are People, And It’s Insanely Creepy … 23

The Empire Only De-Escalates In One Area So It Can Escalate In Another, And Other Notes … 26

There Are No Easy Fights In The Struggle Against The Empire … 28

On The Rapidly Spreading Delusion That AI Chatbots Are Conscious … 29

In Capitalism They Tell You To Become The Hammer If You Don’t Like Being The Nail … 30

Treasure … 31

Zionists Are Freaking Out About Losing Control Of The Narrative … 32

Capitalism Is The Best It’s Ever Been! … 35

Nobody’s Coming To Humanity’s Rescue; We’ve Got To Save Ourselves … 36

Israel Moved Gaza’s Yellow Line And Then Shelled Palestinians For Being On The Wrong Side … 38

You Don’t Hate The Mass Media Enough … 40

A Note Of Gratitude And Appreciation … 42

Don’t Let The Empire Gaslight You Into Believing You Are Powerless … 43

It’s Getting Harder And Harder To Preserve Our Mental Sovereignty … 45

US Regime Change Interventionism Is Reliably Disastrous, And Other Notes … 47

The Craziest Thing In The World Is That We Could End Poverty, But We Don’t … 49

World’s Most Tyrannical Government Wants To Free Venezuela From Tyranny … 51

Sorry If This Is Antisemitic But I Think It’s Wrong To Train Dogs To Rape Prisoners … 52

On Becoming The First Species To Go Extinct From Politeness … 53

Sudan, Venezuela, And Other Notes … 55

Again, you can get a paperback copy of this issue by clicking here, or click here for a digital pay-what-you-feel copy.

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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

❖

The Guardian has a report out which says that at least 60,000 people were murdered by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) when they captured El Fasher in October, which would be the largest single massacre since Rwanda in 1994. Just in the last few days the RSF have reportedly killed 46 children and scores of adults in suicide drone attacks.

These massacres are made possible by the United Arab Emirates, who have been funneling weapons to the RSF through a complex international supply chain. Much like the Saudi-led genocide in Yemen from 2015 to 2022 (which the UAE also participated in), this is yet another instance of a tyrannical Gulf state monarchy committing unfathomable atrocities while its friends in Washington look the other way.

In 2017 a leaked State Department memo explained that it is internal US policy to tolerate human rights abuses of US-aligned nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt while making a big deal about alleged humanitarian abuses in places like Iran. The UAE is a regional partner of the United States, so its genocidal crimes are overlooked. 

President Trump has made a few noises about making peace in Sudan and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has obliquely wagged his finger at the UAE for its role in the genocide, but meanwhile these mass atrocities are taking place completely unimpeded.

It’s cute how the western empire artificially props up these genocidal Gulf state dictatorships and then bangs on about the importance of supporting Israel and its genocidal atrocities because it’s “the only democracy in the middle east”. It’s like, YOU killed the democracy in the middle east, bitch. 

❖

As the US war machine escalates in Venezuela I’m seeing more and more online accounts claiming to be Venezuelans urging Trump to attack Caracas and remove Maduro by military force. 

As a general rule you should always be skeptical of anyone saying “Please invade/bomb/sanction my country,” because it means they either (A) aren’t living in that country, or (B) have some socioeconomic reason to believe they’ll be safe from the repercussions of what they’re asking for which everyone else will suffer from. 

But honestly it doesn’t even matter if they are 100 percent legit. I don’t care if you really are an impoverished Venezuelan civilian living in Venezuela, it’s still an indisputable fact that US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous. Your position isn’t made any less stupid and crazy by where you happen to live; anyone who supports US regime change interventionism is still always wrong.

❖

If Maduro really was a monstrous tyrannical dictator the US would be selling him F-35s.

❖

What’s funny about Trump supporters who justify war with Venezuela because it’s “in our hemisphere” is that they don’t mean it’s in the same hemisphere as the United States. They mean it’s theirs. They see half the planet as a direct US territory.

❖

The Washington Post has published two separate articles in the last few days admonishing Americans for complaining about being unable to afford groceries, one titled “Actually, today’s food prices are a bargain” and the other titled “Why you may not want lower prices as much as you think you do”. 

Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post to yell at the poors to quit whining and work harder.

❖

After genocidal war criminal Joe Biden was elected in 2020 I wrote an article titled “Biden Will Have The Most Diverse, Intersectional Cabinet Of Mass Murderers Ever Assembled”.

On Friday the Hague fugitive former president was presented with an award at the International LGBTQ+ Leaders Conference for running “the most inclusive administration in US history.”

The US empire is impossible to satirize.

❖

I’m good with so-called “extreme” pro-Palestine positions like saying every Israeli family who wasn’t there pre-Balfour Declaration needs to leave, because you never come to the negotiating table with your compromise. If you come to the Israelis saying “Perhaps we might one day have two small pieces of land with no military?” if you’re lucky you might wind up getting a pat on the ass and a slice of land the size of a Walmart parking lot. If you begin from the position of “This entire state is illegitimate, all of you get the fuck out” you’re starting from somewhere that might actually end in a positive outcome for Palestinians.

❖

I saw an account I follow on social media talking about their “relationship” with a chatbot the other day. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone doing this. For some reason people feel compelled to not only engage in this behavior but also to ask for support and validation about it from their online community, like they’re coming out of the closet about a sexual orientation or something.

It’s weird because obviously I’m not going to go pick on someone who’s plainly suffering from crushing loneliness and probably some mental health struggles, but also it’s so painfully dystopian. This is a really dark thing that’s happening.

I mean, what does it say about people that they can feel like they’re having a loving relationship with something that has no subjective experience? An essential component of any real loving relationship is an acute curiosity about what your partner’s experience is like, what they’re feeling and thinking and what it’s like to be them from moment to moment. If you’re not having that, then obviously you can’t really say you care about them. But some people obviously don’t experience interpersonal relationships with others in this way, because if they did they wouldn’t think that what they were having with these chatbots was a relationship.

But then again I’ve definitely interacted with people who relate to others in that way. If you’ve ever been trapped in a corner at some social event by someone who monologues at you about their own thoughts and interests without taking any interest in yours, that’s pretty much the vibe you get. They’re not relating to you as a real person with your own thoughts and interests and subjective experience; to them you’re just a sounding board for their own thoughts they want to hear themselves saying out loud. In such situations I’ve literally found myself thinking “I don’t need to be here for this conversation. I could replace myself with a nodding animatronic replica and they’d never know.”

So maybe it’s better that some of these people aren’t in real relationships, I dunno. If you’re emotionally incapable of seeing your partner as a real person like yourself, maybe it is better if you’re not roping a real human being into an emotional relationship with you and just spending your time verbally masturbating into a mechanical ear instead. At least that way you’re not hurting anyone else.

So I’m not quite sure how I feel about this just yet. Hell of a time to be alive.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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We’re on track to become the first species to go extinct due to politeness. Gonna follow the dinosaurs out the door because it was too uncomfortable and confrontational to tell a few billionaires and empire managers to fuck off.

As Howard Zinn put it:

“As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem…. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”

Or as Utah Phillips put it, “The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.”

They have names and addresses, but we don’t stop them. We let them wave armageddon weapons around for global power agendas and let them destroy our biosphere for profit, and who knows where they’re headed with all this AI stuff with zero regulations or accountability. They just get to play games with the lives of every organism on this planet, completely unimpeded.

We don’t allow this for any good reason. We just don’t want to be rude. Stopping them would feel like a bit much, you know? A bit too much shrill woke-policing. Nobody likes a humorless scold.

What a ridiculous reason for the world to end.

So, no. No to this. Your right to extend your fist ends at my nose. You don't get to just add this giant burden to the already severely overburdened ecosystem we all depend on for survival in order to expand your chatbot project. The collective is entitled to stop you. By force. https://t.co/lcXO0q2pAM

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 14, 2025

I like to think about the Fermi paradox sometimes. You know, the apparent contradiction between the fact that we can’t detect any signs of extraterrestrial life in our galaxy and the fact that the Drake equation suggests we should be seeing some due to the sheer number of stars in the Milky Way.

People have come up with all kinds of theories to resolve this paradox. Maybe the ETs are keeping signs of their existence hidden from us for some reason. Maybe there has been life on other planets many times throughout our galaxy’s history, but whenever life advances up to a certain level of intelligence it always self-destructs by cannibalizing its own biosphere or annihilating itself with nuclear weapons.

One theory I like to contemplate is the possibility that there is life on other planets and that those life forms will one day evolve high levels of intelligence, but we’re not seeing any signs of extraterrestrial technology because humans are the first life forms to arrive at this stage.

Isn’t that trippy to imagine? If WE’RE the grown-ups here? If we are the eldest sibling in our galactic family? The aliens never came to rescue us with technologies from a civilization millions of years more advanced than ours because there ARE no civilizations more advanced than ours. We got here first.

Imagine how silly it would be if we went extinct due to politeness, and then other civilizations came here millions of years later and found out that’s what happened to their galaxy’s firstborn intelligent life. If they showed up and found a bunch of ruins on a poisoned planet, with a sign that says “Sorry, we tried to stay alive but we didn’t feel entitled enough to make Sam Altman stop being a dick.”

What an embarrassment that would be. We’d be the laughing stock of the Milky Way. Whole insults would be made out of us.

“Someone needs to put a stop to this nonsense, but I don’t want to make a scene.”

“Ah, quit being such a little homo sapien!”

What a dopey legacy for a species to leave behind.

Let’s turn things around before it comes to that, shall we?

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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One thing I try not to think about very often is how many reports we’ve been seeing about Israeli prison guards training dogs to rape Palestinian captives in torture camps like Sde Teiman.

Drop Site News has a new write-up about a testimony from a journalist published by the Palestinian Journalists Protection Center. The reporter says that during his 20 months of hell in Israeli prisons he was electrocuted, beaten, starved, and sexually assaulted on film. He also says he was sexually assaulted by a “trained dog” — just the latest in a long string of such allegations coming out of Israel’s notorious network of torture prisons.

Last month Novara Media published an article titled “Israeli Prison Guards Are Using Dogs to Rape Palestinians, Former Detainees Say,” based on information collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. The Electronic Intifada published an article titled “Palestinians recount gang rapes by Israeli soldiers, dogs” based on the same testimonies.

“They know once they rape someone with a dog or with a stick that these people won’t be able to carry out their jobs or live their lives normally." https://t.co/ovzOZn4Xdv

— Novara Media (@novaramedia) November 27, 2025

In August of last year The New Arab interviewed a Palestinian law graduate who was detained by Israeli forces and said he watched as “a dog raped another hostage before my eyes” after the Israelis poured some sort of liquid on him.

In June of last year Euro-Med Monitor published a report saying it had “received horrific testimonies from recently released detainees confirming the brutal and inhumane use of Israeli police dogs to rape prisoners and detainees.”

There are records of Nazis and Chilean fascists using dogs to rape prisoners in this way, though according to the IHRA definition of antisemitism that western governments have been shoving down our throats lately it is against the rules to draw any comparisons between Israel and the Nazis.

So I am very sorry if this comes across as antisemitic, but I think it’s wrong to sexually assault prisoners using trained rape dogs. I actually think it’s one of the most evil things I’ve ever heard of.

Popular kids’ presenter Rachel Accurso, better known as ‘Ms. Rachel,’ has been nominated for “Antisemite of the Year” by the advocacy group StopAntisemitism, with supporters saying it is due to her being outspoken about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/LDCBmYt6Wm

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) December 3, 2025

I am taking great pains to say I don’t mean to be antisemitic with my anti-rape dog rhetoric because apparently literally any criticism of literally any Israeli atrocity can land one with that label. Just this past weekend, for example, the pro-Israel group StopAntisemitism announced that children’s YouTube star Ms Rachel is a nominee for its annual Antisemite of the Year designation.

To be clear, Ms Rachel has never at any time said anything negative about Jewish people or Judaism. Her one and only offense making her an Antisemite of the Year nominee is that she has been saying on social media that it is wrong to kill children. Opposition to murdering children by starvation and bombing campaigns is what led to this celebrity being accused of hating Jews.

Why is an institution which calls itself StopAntisemitism equating the mass murder of children with the Jewish faith? Why are they suggesting that opposition to slaughtering kids is the same as opposition to Jews? If it was my job to stop antisemitism, I personally would not be actively circulating the idea that massacring children is synonymous with Judaism or plays some special role in the religious practices of its adherents. 

To clarify, I am absolutely not suggesting that the mass murder of children is an important part of Jewish life. I think that would be a terrible thing to say, not much different from the libels which have been spread about Jewish people since medieval times. But it sure does sound like StopAntisemitism is saying that.

Maybe I’m just confused by this whole “antisemitism” label. Maybe it doesn’t mean what I think it means.

In any case, I do think it’s wrong to murder children, and I do think it’s wrong to rape prisoners with trained rape dogs. I truly do not mean to hurt anyone’s feelings or offend anybody when I say this.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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President Trump has been holding talks with top advisors this week regarding potential US attacks on Venezuela in order to bring about regime change in yet another oil-rich nation.

As the western political/media class frames Venezuela’s President Maduro as a “dictator” who must urgently be removed from power, it is worth noting that any US military operation to remove him would be taking place directly against the will of the American public. A recent CBS News poll found that seventy percent of Americans “would oppose” the US taking military action against Venezuela.

So here we have the president of a nation which calls itself a democracy, holding meetings to plan military operations which are completely and unambiguously against the wishes of the electorate, in the name of removing a dictator and spreading freedom and democracy.

Interesting.

Trump Holds Talks With Top Advisers on Venezuela Amid Push Toward Regime Change War
The president reportedly told Maduro he must relinquish power during a recent phone call#Venezuela #Trump #Maduro https://t.co/AEbqYltJCh

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) December 2, 2025

Whenever I see the US empire saying they plan to remove the latest Official Bad Guy from power in order to liberate a nation from tyranny, I always want to ask, what is tyranny?

Is it tyranny to constantly topple foreign governments by force if their leaders disobey you?

Is it tyranny to circle the planet with hundreds of military bases in order to dominate all of humanity?

Is it tyranny to continuously be inflicting mass military slaughter, backing genocides, staging foreign coups, fomenting unrest and uprisings in foreign nations, meddling in foreign elections, funding proxy conflicts, imposing blockades and starvation sanctions on civilian populations, and engaging in nuclear brinkmanship in order to rule the world?

Is it tyranny to treat the entire global south as your personal piggy bank from which to extract limitless labor and resources and murder anyone who tries to inhibit these practices through any movement toward national sovereignty?

Because if it is, it’s a bit silly for the US to claim to be liberating any nation from tyranny.

Kinda like a morbidly obese man coming up to you and saying he’ll train you to shed those extra pounds.

It’s like Nick Fuentes offering cultural sensitivity training workshops.

It’s like the Green River Killer publishing a book on the the importance of combating toxic masculinity.

The US empire is the most tyrannical power structure on earth, by an extremely massive margin. There is no close second place in contention. Nobody else is brutalizing and terrorizing the entire planet into compliance with its dictates. No other power is constantly assaulting any government or population anywhere on earth that doesn’t bow to its demands. Only the US empire can be said to be guilty of this.

Even if Maduro really was the worst dictator on earth (he’s not), and even if this push for regime change really had anything to do with liberating the Venezuelan people (it doesn’t), and even if you could make a convincing argument that regime change interventionism would probably make things better for Venezuelans (you can’t), the US would be the last government on earth with any business doing so. The world’s most tyrannical power structure has no business trying to liberate anyone from tyranny.

If the US empire wants to make the world less tyrannical, its first and only move should be to dismantle itself.

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Just as the news breaks that Trump has issued Maduro an ultimatum to leave Venezuela immediately if he wants to escape with his life, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has published an amazingly brazen war propaganda piece titled “How Venezuelan Gangs and African Jihadists Are Flooding Europe With Cocaine.”

“Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities,” the article begins, going out of its way to note that “the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro — who it asserts is heavily involved in drug smuggling — has brought global attention to the country’s role in the drug trade.”

The propaganda piece is plainly aimed at Europeans as well as Americans, emphasizing Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s quip last month that the Europeans “should be thanking us” for blowing up alleged drug boats coming from Venezuela because he says some of those drugs are winding up in Europe.

It’s got everything. Whipping up international support for a regime change war. Fearmongering about “jihadists”. The evil, scary dictator. The whole war propaganda sales package.

Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities. https://t.co/Oz1U9wtWVI

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 1, 2025

The mass media do this every time the US empire gets war-horny. And the Murdoch press are always the most egregious offenders.

Reminds me of an old tweet by a man named Malcolm Price:

“I remember in the run-up to the Iraq War a friend I had known all my life suddenly said to me, ‘We must do something about this monster in Iraq.’ I said, ‘When did you first think that?’ He answered honestly, ‘A month ago’.”

Price’s friend had been swept up in the imperial war propaganda campaign that had recently begun, just like countless millions of others. Month after month after month western consciousness was hammered with false narratives about weapons of mass destruction, forced associations of Saddam Hussein with 9/11, and stories about how much better things will be for the people of Iraq once that evil tyrant is gone.

Normally it never would have occurred to the average westerner that a country on the other side of the planet should be invaded and its leader replaced with a puppet regime. That’s not the sort of thing that would have organically entered someone’s mind. It needed to be placed there.

So it was.

The most common misconception about the free press of the western world is that it exists. All the west’s most influential and far-reaching news media publications are here not to report factual stories about current events, but to manufacture consent for the pre-existing agendas of the US-centralized western empire.

They report many true things, to be sure, and if you acquire some media literacy you can actually learn how to glean a lot of useful information from the imperial press without losing your mind to the spin machine. But reporting true things is not their purpose. Their purpose is to manipulate public psychology at mass scale for the benefit of the empire they serve.

This doesn’t happen through some kind of centralized Ministry of Truth where sinister social engineers secretly conspire to deceive people. It happens because all mainstream press institutions are controlled either by plutocrats or by western governments in the form of state broadcasters like the BBC, both of which have a vested interest in maintaining the imperial status quo. They control who the executives and lead editors of these outlets are, and those leaders shape the hiring and editing processes of the publication or broadcaster. Reporters come to understand that there are certain lines they need to color within if they want to get articles published and continue advancing their careers, so they either learn to toe the imperial line or they disappear from the mass media industry.

If people had a clear understanding of everything that’s really going on in our world, they would tear the empire apart brick by brick. If they could truly see how much evil is being done in their name and really wrap their minds around it, and if they could understand how much wealth the plutocrats are getting out of the imperial status quo compared to how little they themselves benefit from it, there would be immediate revolution. So the oligarchs and empire managers shore up narrative control in the form of media ownership, think tanks, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, imperial information ops like Wikipedia, and now increasingly through billionaire-owned AI chatbots to ensure that this never happens.

I remember in the run-up to the Iraq War a friend I had known all my life suddenly said to me, ‘We must do something about this monster in Iraq.’ I said, ‘When did you first think that?’ He answered honestly, ‘A month ago’. #Propaganda @medialens

— Malcolm Pryce (@exogamist) April 12, 2018

The entire empire is built on a foundation of lies. The whole power structure is held together by nonstop manipulation of the way westerners think, speak, act, shop, work, and vote. If truth ever finds a way to get a word in edgewise, the entire thing would collapse.

We know this is true because the oligarchs and empire managers pour so much wealth and energy into manipulating our minds. They’re not doing this for fun, they’re doing it because they need to. If they didn’t need to, it wouldn’t be happening.

So what they are doing is intensely creepy and destructive, but it’s also empowering, because it shows us right where their weak spot is. They’re pouring all this energy into controlling the dominant narrative because that’s the weakest point in the armor of the imperial machine.

What we need, then, is a grassroots effort to help truth get a word in. Help people understand that they’ve been propagandized and deceived about the world by western media and by their power-serving education systems every day of their lives, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. Sow distrust in the imperial media and institutions. Open people’s eyes to the fact that they’re being lied to, and help them learn to see the truth. Anywhere the empire is sowing lies and distortions — whether that’s in Venezuela or Gaza or somewhere else — use that opportunity to help more people unplug their minds from the propaganda matrix.

A better world is possible. The first step in moving toward it is snapping people out of the propaganda-induced coma which dupes them into settling for this dystopian nightmare instead.

_____________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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It’s the craziest thing in the world that we already have the technological ability to provide a decent standard of living for everyone on earth, but it doesn’t happen because it’s not profitable. We attained the greatest scientific achievement of all time and then did nothing with it. Our society is completely uninterested in it because capitalism is completely uninterested in it.

It’s just so insane how this doesn’t sit front and center in our attention all the time. There are people dying of starvation, exposure and preventable illnesses every single day for no good reason. Humanity became more than capable of ensuring that this never happened to anyone ever again, and just rode right past that stunning moment in history without even glancing up from its smartphone.

Can you imagine if we did that with any other major technological development?

“Oh yeah humans can fly now… but let’s not.”

“Hey humans now have the ability to share ideas and information in real time with anyone in the world, but whatever, let’s keep mailing letters instead.”

And I would argue that the ability to eliminate poverty and needless human suffering is a far more significant development than flight or the internet. But because it doesn’t generate value for shareholders, we cruised right past it going “Let’s make a chatbot that can generate an Alvin and the Chipmunks version of any song!”

This happened because caring for everyone was never the goal of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to extract labor from the working class and resources from the global south to sell goods and services at a rate that generates profit for the owners of the means of production. That’s it.

Capitalism has no wisdom. It will start wars to generate profit. It will have impoverished populations toiling in mines and sweatshops for pennies in order to generate profit. It will burn up critical drinking water supplies for AI data centers in order to generate profit. It will cut down the last acre of old-growth rainforest in order to generate profit. It will pollute the air, fill the oceans with plastic and kill all the insects if offloading the cost of industry onto the ecosystem helps generate profit. 

The entire world is being consumed by an artificially imposed system which holds as its foundational premise that mass-scale human behavior should be driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake. It’s a mindless, planet-devouring machine of our own making. It is creating unfathomable destruction and suffering for terrestrial organisms of every species. 

And it doesn’t have to be this way. There is nothing inscribed upon the fabric of the universe which says that we need to live under a system which causes us to feed our biosphere into the woodchipper so that billionaires can become trillionaires. Nowhere is it written in adamantine that that the many must always toil and suffer for the benefit of the few. Things are the way they are because of systems that were put in place by human beings, and human beings can replace those systems with different ones.

If we are to continue to survive on this planet, we’re going to have to move from systems which drive us to compete against our fellow humans and our fellow terrestrial organisms to systems that are driven by collaboration toward the good of all beings. Such systems would be entirely unprecedented by their nature, because unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. It would be unlike anything that’s ever been done before, but it is now a matter of existential importance that it be done.

We’re going to have to change. We’re going to have to become kinder. Gentler. Emotionally intelligent. Driven by the desire for the greater good instead of by fear and insecurity. We’re going to have to wake up. We’re going to have to become unlike anything we’ve ever been before.

Every species eventually hits an adapt-or-die juncture in its existence. This is ours. We must become a compassionate animal, or we will go the way of the dinosaur.

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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❖

Trump has bizarrely announced that the airspace over Venezuela is “closed”, posting the following on Truth Social on Saturday:

“To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”

It isn’t even clear what precisely the president means by this. Are they about to start shooting down Venezuelan aircraft like they’ve been blowing up boats? Are they preparing for a ground invasion? Whatever it is, things are looking ugly.

Washington is banging the war drums trying to justify regime change interventionism in Venezuela under the ridiculous claim that it’s about fighting drug trafficking just as Trump announces that he will pardon former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who the US convicted of drug trafficking charges just last year.

Drugs come into the United States from numerous nations in Latin America, and it sure is an awfully interesting coincidence that the one they’re focused on regime changing to stop the drug flow just so happens to be the socialist country with the largest proven oil reserves on the entire planet.

Americans who’ve been rejecting the propaganda for wars in the middle east but now fully buy into it for regime change in Venezuela are the weirdest. That’s like managing to pull your head out of your ass, taking a deep breath, and then shoving it right back in there.

US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous, and is always justified based on lies. This would be true even if Venezuela really was a major drug trafficking threat and even if Maduro really was the world’s most evil dictator, neither of which are the case. Only idiots and sociopaths are clapping along with the war drums.

❖

A man opened fire on National Guardsmen near the White House the other day, killing one and seriously wounding another. He was captured alive and will likely face terrorism charges.

As it turns out, the guy is an Afghan national who worked for a CIA “Zero Unit” death squad enforcing the USA’s occupation of his home country. Washington is always making completely nonsensical additions to its list of terrorist organizations like Antifa and the completely fictional Cartel de los Soles, when it’s a well-established fact that the strongest predictor of future terrorist behavior is employment with the US war machine.

❖

There’s a video going around showing a room full of Israeli youths squealing with delight at the sight of their nation’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is such a genocidal Nazi that he’s been sanctioned by imperial core states like the UK, Canada and Australia. The kids in the video are seen screaming and swooning for this psychopathic monster like the girls in those old Beatles concert videos.

Two months ago after the so-called “ceasefire” deal was announced the New York Times editorial board banged out a piece saying that Gaza is going to need “deradicalization programs” in order to “remove Hamas’s pervasive radicalizing influence over Gazan society.” But clearly it’s Israeli society that needs deradicalizing.

❖

One of the reasons “antisemitism” claims have stopped getting traction is because once people started questioning the narrative “THERE’S A SPECIAL GROUP OF WHITE PEOPLE WHOSE FEELINGS MUST TAKE PRIORITY OVER EVERY POSSIBLE CONCERN” it was never going to hold up under scrutiny.

❖

State prosecutors are reportedly handling more than 300,000 desertion-related cases in Ukraine because nobody wants to fight and die in this stupid, pointless war anymore. 

Desertion rates say Ukrainian soldiers don’t want this war. Polls say Ukrainian civilians don’t want this war. Yet the war keeps going, because the western power structure which actively provoked it wants it to continue.

❖

If I had told you five years ago that I’d just invented a product which ends the careers of professional artists and makes it impossible to tell what’s real on the internet, would you have said I should be given billions of dollars immediately, or would you have said I should be fed to crocodiles?

The debate about generative AI is interesting because it’s all the brilliant, creative people who value truth and the human intellect on one side and all the uncreative, intellectually sluggish people who can’t write a paragraph on the other, and the latter group is winning because they’ve got capital on their side.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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It’s a full-time job protecting your mental lucidity in this dystopia.

It was hard enough to form a clear perception of reality when all we had to deal with was the propaganda of plutocrat-owned media corporations and the indoctrination of our power-serving education systems. Now on top of those still-persisting obfuscations we’ve got things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, imperial information ops like Wikipedia, and an exponentially growing field of AI perception management to work through.

I remember watching Julian Assange give a talk way back in 2017 where he described a future in which artificial intelligence is able to harvest the data of individual internet users and then manipulate the information they see online in a custom-built perceptual prism designed to manipulate their thinking at a level far too subtle to be noticed. He compared it to the way a computer program can play chess with strategies looking 20 to 30 moves ahead at a level the human brain just can’t keep up with, saying that we’ll one day have artificial intelligence that can manipulate public perception with a similar degree of sophistication.

That future is a lot easier to imagine now than it was back in 2017. To be sure, the ruling class is not pouring trillions of dollars into AI so that we can all have free Studio Ghibli-style illustrations of ourselves. There is an understanding that major returns on investment will come largely in the form of these new technologies being deliberately knit into every part of our civilization, driven by the official and unofficial power structures that we live under, and that this will happen in a way that benefits the rich and powerful.

We’re on a trajectory where soon all our information will be stored and analyzed by artificial intelligence controlled by governments and billionaire megacorporations who can then use that information to surveil, manipulate and oppress us. All our medical and financial information. Whole psychological profiles based on what we view and say online. A far more thorough assessment of our personalities than we could ever create on our own.

This information can then be used to determine what sort of advertisements for which products would be likely to work on us, or maybe even produce a custom-made ad on the spot just for us. It can be used to determine what type of power-serving news media or punditry is likely to appeal to our confirmation biases and then make sure it crosses our line of sight at some ideal moment in our day. It can be used to determine how likely we are to oppose the imperial machine in any way, from joining a peace march to starting a union to leading an armed revolution. It can be used to closely monitor our individual path toward political radicalization, and it can be used to feed us information intended to steer that dissident energy toward political movements that don’t threaten the status quo.

Hillary Clinton claims that the reason young Democrats are increasingly critical of Israel is misinformation on TikTok promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. pic.twitter.com/bm46Ry04l9

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) November 2, 2025

Our rulers see AI as an opportunity to recapture the degree of social control that was shaken by the arrival of widespread internet access — a loss of information hegemony we’ve seen oligarchs and empire managers openly complaining about with regard to how social media has spread public dissent on issues like Israel and Palestine. 

Journalist Whitney Webb has flagged the fact that Google plutocrat Eric Schmidt co-authored a book with war criminal Henry Kissinger which envisions a future where the public becomes increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence to do our thinking and creative expression for us, allowing our consciousness to become further and further intertwined with these oligarch-owned technologies. 

“The Kissinger/Eric Schmidt book on AI basically states that the real promise of AI, from their perspective, is as a tool of perception manipulation — that eventually people will not be able to interpret or perceive reality without the help of an AI via cognitive diminishment and learned helplessness,” Webb warns.

Once we’ve outsourced our cognitive sovereignty to AI, our minds have been captured by the owners of the machines.

So it’s a dark and creepy trail we are traveling down. As a collective we’re going to have to find it within ourselves to start fighting back against this dystopia which is consuming more and more of what’s decent in our world, and as individuals we’re going to have to find ways to maintain our inner clarity despite the empire’s increasingly aggressive efforts to make us vapid, stupid and confused.

Luckily for us there are still large aspects of our humanity which they cannot infiltrate or control, and we would do well to familiarize ourselves with that terrain. Inspiration. Creativity. Consciousness. Spiritual awakening. These are realms wherein the tech plutocrats and imperial social engineers cannot tread.

Explore your own consciousness. Inquire deeply into the nature of self and the mind until clarity dawns on you. Heal your inner wounds. Remove from within yourself all the mental hooks of fear and hatred so that the propagandists can find no psychological purchase with which to manipulate you. Follow the faint whisperings of your muse, and learn to help your inspiration birth new creative expression into the world.

These are the kinds of things we’ll have to do to preserve ourselves as we move into this strange new world, on top of the usual business of staying informed and learning to see through the propaganda illusions. Luckily these things are all good for us anyway; the path toward protecting our humanity also just happens to be the path toward becoming a healthier human being and making the world a better place. 

We are being called to awaken, and to transform. We are being beckoned not away from our humanity as the transhumanists imagine but deep into the heart of it, to a widespread blossoming of a bud that’s been waiting within us this entire time. This age invites us to evolve into a truly conscious species.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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

Don’t let the empire gaslight you into believing you are powerless and helpless. There are always things you can do to fight the bastards, and there are always things you can do to improve your own life.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of believing there’s nothing we can do. Nothing we can do to fight the machine because it’s too large and entrenched, and nothing we can do to change our own personal circumstances because the deck is stacked so unfairly against ordinary people.

It’s a strong illusion because at a surface glance it appears to be true. Our political systems are locked down by the rich and powerful to ensure that our votes don’t inconvenience them in any way, and any new political movement which challenges establishment power structures will find itself facing sabotage from the outside and from within. Our voices are kept marginalized and our countrymen have been turned into mindless empire automatons by a lifetime of propaganda indoctrination.

And at first glance we appear to be just as powerless in our personal lives as well. Unless you’re lucky enough to have obtained some capital which you can use to extract labor from the working class or to possess some special aptitude that our system happens to value, you can spend your whole life struggling in poverty. The life of a worker is getting harder and harder, and it’s easy to feel like there’s nothing you can do about your own unhappiness and psychological dysfunction because you’re laboring under a system that’s so abusive and unfair.

So while it is true that there are many doors that are closed to a denizen of our dystopia, that doesn’t mean you are powerless to change things. Believing that you are powerless serves no one but the powerful.

We are never truly powerless because we always have the ability to help foment a revolutionary zeitgeist, and because we always have the ability to heal ourselves. As a collective we have the power to inform and educate the public to help them understand that they’ve been deceived their whole lives about our society, and that a better world is both needed and possible. As individuals we have the ability to do inner work to heal our trauma and liberate ourselves from the delusion of ego, which will have radically transformative effects on our quality of life in a whole host of ways.

There is nothing our rulers can do to take these abilities away from us. We will always have the ability to do something to help awaken the people to the need for revolution, and we will always have the ability to heal our inner wounds. Every single day there are concrete actions we can take toward both of these ends.

It serves nobody but the powerful to believe there’s nothing we can do to change things. Too many socialists are content to just sit around smugly knowing better than everyone else and having all the correct opinions about things while expressing distain for everyone who tries to expand awareness or make the world a better place. Get active in your community. Produce dissident media. Make revolutionary art. Have conversations. Change minds. Open some eyes. Wake people up so that one day there will be enough of us to force real change.

It serves nobody but the powerful to believe you are doomed to a life of misery. Too many socialists are content to blame all their internal dysfunction on the abuses of capitalism and just spend their days masturbating their inner wounds in meetings and online without doing the rigorous inner work necessary to come to inner peace. Get curious about your internal processes. Research the many modalities for inner healing that are available online. Listen to the brilliant minds who’ve been sharing groundbreaking new insights about trauma and inner work lately. Investigate the possibility that spiritual enlightenment is a real phenomenon that is entirely achievable in this life. Take responsibility for your own inner wellbeing, and start doing something about it.

We don’t need to sit around paralyzed by power-serving learned helplessness. We don’t need to sit idly by waiting for some deus ex machina resolution to our plight. We don’t need to resign ourselves to a life of suffering and making the same mistakes over and over again because we’re being whipped about by unconscious forces within us that we’ve never taken the time to investigate. 

There is always something we can do. We can never do everything, but we can always do something. There’s no good reason not to do that something we can do, every single day of our lives.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.