Caitlin Johnstone

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

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One of the dumbest narratives we’re asked to swallow about Palestinians is that they are guilty of anti-Jewish prejudice which makes them comparable to Nazis. Palestinians didn’t choose the religion of their oppressors; any hatred they have toward Israelis is because Israelis are the ones oppressing and murdering them, not because of their religion. Expecting Palestinians not to hate the oppressors who hate them just because those oppressors happen to be Jewish is shitbrained thinking.

Every so often you’ll see the IDF plant a copy of Mein Kampf in a building in Gaza and then wave it around as though it would somehow justify what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and it’s just so stupid. The reason we’ve come to abhor hatred toward Jews in the west is because we know the west has an extensive history of committing atrocities against Jewish people because of their religion. 

Palestinians harbor no such prejudice and are guilty of no such crimes. Any violence they’ve inflicted upon Israelis has been in an effort to keep their land and resist tyrannical oppression, not because they have some weird European Hitlerite hatred toward Jews. Anytime you hear Palestinians talk about “the Jews” they’re always talking solely and exclusively about their oppressors in the context of the occupation; they’re not talking about some Jewish guy in Canada.

Palestinians would hate their oppressors whether the oppression was being inflicted by Hindus, Buddhists or Catholics. That’s normal. That’s how people’s minds and emotions work; we hate people who hate us, and we hate people who abuse us. Any failure to understand this is a failure to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagine what it would be like to live in their situation. It’s a sign that you lack normal human empathy.

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The world needs Israel. Without Israel where would sexual predators go for safety and protection? Where would we get our surveillance technology? Who would use human targets to field test new kinds of murder robots, military explosives and AI systems used to kill entire families?

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One of the most evil things happening in the world today is the way human beings in Gaza are being used as laboratory guinea pigs to field test new technology for the military industrial complex. https://t.co/yF3wY4WbV0

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 22, 2025

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Critics of Israel should familiarize themselves with Hitchens’s razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Whether it’s beheaded babies, mass rapes, Hamas bases in hospitals, or Hamas killing the Bibas kids with their bare hands, if it’s being asserted without evidence, it can be immediately dismissed.

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It is a well-documented fact that Israel and its supporters use lobbying, campaign funding and blackmail to exert influence over western nations. It is also a fact that the US empire has the power to stop Israel from doing this at any time, but chooses not to. The empire managers in the official elected government don’t do anything to stop these influence operations, nor do the empire managers in the far more powerful unelected national security state. Does anyone really believe Israel would still be exerting such massive influence over the US government if the CIA determined that this was impeding their agendas of global domination?

It follows that the Zionist influence operations exist because the empire wants them to. The artificially manufactured support for Israel has been deemed a necessary evil to help ensure constant violence, division and instability in the middle east and justify endless military presence in a crucial geostrategic region which, if left to its own devices, might unite and conduct its affairs in a way that is disadvantageous to western interests.

There are many other nations in the middle east who are aligned with the US and are used to advance its interests in the region, but none of them are fully dependent on support from the US government for their continued existence. It’s a completely artificial construct that was inserted into the middle east like a glass shard into a foot, and its continued existence benefits both the settler colonialists who live there and the long-term hegemonic interests of the US-centralized empire.

I say all this to point out that the west isn’t some passive innocent victim of manipulations by the big mean tyrant Israel. It is just as guilty of Israel’s crimes as Israel itself, because those crimes are inseparable from the western empire as a whole. You see some on the right trying to argue that the west would be this wonderful virtuous place if not for the malign influence of those nasty Jews, but this narrative is refuted by the entire historical existence of the western world. The west has always been a warmongering, genocidal civilization driven by conquest and domination, and the western settler-colonialist project of Israel is just one more manifestation of the dystopia we are living in.

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The only reason they keep framing this naked ethnic cleansing operation as a "war" is so that they can later say "Of course Palestinians lost that land, they fought a war and they lost" again, like they've been doing ever since Israel was founded. https://t.co/VrZCNMl6jL

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 21, 2025

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Defending Trump’s warmongering in the middle east by babbling about his peacemaking efforts in Ukraine is the same as saying it’s okay for him to torch Gaza because he’s not bombing Argentina. It’s nonsensical. You don’t negate your crimes by being less criminal somewhere else.

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Whenever I criticize Trump’s actions in the middle east I’ll get some Democrat going “I BET YOU WISH YOU’D SUPPORTED KAMALA NOW, HUH?”

That’s not what this is, idiots. I did this exact same commentary throughout the Biden administration, because Biden is also evil. I am simply criticizing the world’s most murderous and destructive power structure and whatever empire managers happen to be sitting at the front desk while it happens. This is just what it looks like when you apply scrutiny to the empire without being a partisan hack.

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Bernie Sanders has been such a worthless empire simp I sometimes wonder why the Democratic Party establishment even bothered sabotaging his primary campaigns. They would have gotten another Obama, selling people false hope while advancing the interests of oligarchy and empire.

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Our species evolved these brains of unprecedented sophistication only to use them to destroy our biosphere, invent new ways to blow each other up, and make ourselves miserable with our own thoughts.

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It’s not about hostages. It’s not about Hamas. It’s not about terrorism. Those aren’t the reasons, they’re the excuses. The excuses to expel Palestinians and turn more Palestinian land into Israeli land. That’s all this has ever been about. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

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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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Adobe Stock.

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

One major challenge is that Zionists benefit from abusing Palestinians and exerting influence in western governments, and they also benefit from people opposing these things — because it can be used to feed their victim-LARPing “antisemitism” narrative.

This dynamic allows Israel to go all-out in committing mass atrocities and apartheid abuses while Zionist oligarchs like Miriam Adelson openly purchase western governments without having to worry about the damage it does to their public image, because any response to the damage it does to their public image can be reframed as “antisemitism” and used to advance their interests even further by stomping out civil rights.

People demonstrate against Israel’s genocidal atrocities? That’s antisemitism — those protesters need to be silenced, arrested, and deported. People object to blatant Zionist influence in their governments? Antisemitic conspiracy theories; we need more hate speech laws and internet censorship. Palestinians take up armed resistance against their oppressors? Israel is the victim of unprovoked attacks from Jew-hating Arabs.

Even real anti-Jewish prejudice benefits the Zionists, because it strengthens the narrative about an urgent crisis of antisemitism which must be crushed by any amount of force necessary, as well as the narrative that Jews need a nation of their own where they can feel safe. So Israel can openly mass murder children while Israeli officials make overt statements of genocidal intent, and if someone blames all Jews for this because they see a state committing atrocities under the banner of the Star of David while claiming to represent all Jews, it only benefits Israel and its supporters.

(As an aside, this is why it’s so important not to blame this on “the Jews”. It’s not just that it’s inaccurate — not all Jews are Zionists, the majority of Zionists are non-Jews, and some of the most effective anti-Zionists in the world happen to be Jewish — it’s that you’re doing exactly what the Zionists and the empire propagandists want you to do. You’re doing their job for them. Don’t be a pro bono Israel propagandist. Make them work for that shit.)

Zionism therefore benefits from abuse and influence, and also benefits from any backlash against its abuse and influence. It is able to do this because Israel is backed by the propaganda machine of the western empire — the most powerful weapon of mass psychological influence ever devised. If the western political-media class were not constantly running cover for Israel’s crimes and helping Zionism spin all opposition to Israel as antisemitism, Israel would not be able to pull off this freakish cognitive straddle where it is simultaneously both the aggressor and the victim at all times.

And this is why it’s so important to fight against the western empire’s propaganda about Israel. Israel’s reliance on the imperial propaganda machine is the only weak point in this otherwise unassailable dynamic where any backlash against Israel’s abuses is harnessed and turned into a weapon to defend Israel. Propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you, so the only way to keep people from buying into the victim-LARPing of the Zionists is to open people’s eyes to the truth.

Once enough people see with sufficient clarity the lies and manipulations which go into protecting the interests of this genocidal apartheid state, Israel loses one of its most powerful weapons, because nobody’s going to buy into the narrative framework wherein Israel and its supporters try to frame themselves as the victims of the opposition to their abuses.

You fight against the propaganda by spreading truth and understanding about this dynamic in whatever way you can. Talk to people. Share useful information. Attend demonstrations. Distribute literature. Tweet, blog, make videos, make zines, make street art; whatever tools you have at your disposal to help people understand what’s really going on with Israel and the western empire.

All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Consciousness and dysfunction cannot coexist. All we need to do to bring health to this world is to spread awareness of the truth, so that the dysfunction which can only survive in darkness is unable to sustain itself.

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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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Adobe Stock.

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

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Trump is butchering children in Gaza, stomping out free speech in the US, bombing Yemen for Israel, and preparing for full-scale war with Iran in plans which reportedly include the possible use of nuclear weapons. 

And from what I can see, Trump supporters are mostly fine with it. Everything the so-called MAGA movement claims to stand for is a lie.

“MAGA” is just Republicans doing Republican things. Ten years ago the GOP started wallpapering over its shattered reputation from the Bush administration with a right wing populist message which purported to oppose neoconservative war agendas, support free speech, seek to drain the swamp, and put America first. In practice what we are seeing is Trump murdering and warmongering in the middle east just like Bush, rolling out freakish authoritarian agendas in the US just like Bush, advancing longstanding neoconservative agendas just like Bush, and putting Israel first just like every Republican for decades.

Trump is all the most evil things Bush was, but MAGA morons pretend he’s something different because he put on a red hat. Dumbest, most pathetic and fraudulent political faction in existence.

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As footage of dead kids in Gaza fills your social media timeline once again, keep in mind that the reason the empire has worked so hard to stomp out all criticism of Israel’s western-backed atrocities is because our rulers planned on sponsoring a lot more atrocities and murdering a lot more kids.

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Ever trip on how Israel and its western backers keep calling this a “war”? What’s happening in Gaza is not a war, it’s a few thousand guys with homemade rockets fighting an entire empire, and Israel isn’t even focused on them — it’s focused on the entire population of Gaza.

States often try to avoid using the word “war” to describe their actions due to people’s negative associations with it. The US likes to call its wars “humanitarian interventions”. Russia called its invasion of Ukraine a “Special Military Operation”. But Israel immediately rushed in to call its naked ethnic cleansing operation in Gaza a “war”, as did its western allies and their propaganda press. Why is that?

I will tell you why. It’s to justify permanently taking Gaza away from the Palestinians. Israel has an established track record of using the wars it has fought to grab up more territory, which its apologists then justify by saying things like “Yeah well they lost a war in 1967, you lose territory when you fight a war and lose.” They’re laying the narrative foundation to make sure everyone in the future will see Gaza in the same light after they annex it, purge it of Palestinians, and replace them with Jews.

That’s all this has ever been: not a war with Hamas, but another Israeli land grab. There are mountains of evidence that Israeli officials let October 7 happen on purpose in order to justify this land grab, and they’ve been framing this as a “war” ever since to make sure they can get away with it.

Framing this as a war has other benefits to be sure, such as framing the civilians and civilian infrastructure it has been deliberately targeting as “collateral damage” instead of systematic extermination and demolition. But first and foremost this is about the expansion of Israeli territory.

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A new Economist/YouGov poll has found that most Republicans believe protesting your government should be legal—except for protests against Israel. When it comes to protesting Israel a majority of Republicans either believe it should be illegal or are not sure.

I don’t even know what to say to this. Imagine being someone answering those polling questions and not taking your own answers as a call to do some serious self-reflection. Imagine coming right out and admitting something like this about yourself, and then not changing.

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It’s the people going “HAHA GAZA’S ON FIRE I BET YOU WISH YOU’D VOTED FOR KAMALA NOW” who really get to me. This is exactly why the Democrats lost: because they saw Gaza as nothing more than a political plaything to be ignored when inconvenient and gloated about when convenient. This is just a game to these assholes.

These freaks spent months shouting down everyone who protested against the genocidal atrocities of Joe Biden and dismissing anyone who had a problem with Harris refusing to put any daylight between herself and the president on this extremely important issue. Now that Trump is continuing Biden’s genocide they’re somehow acting like they’re on the right side of history? Fuck off you obnoxious shitstains.

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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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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

The Gaza holocaust has reignited with as much sadistic fury as it ever saw under the Biden administration. More than five hundred people have reportedly been killed by Israeli bombardment since the onslaught resumed early Tuesday morning, including at least 200 children and 112 women.

I will admit to having been hopeful. I know it’s illegal to express hope online, but I really did hope that by some miracle peace would find some way forward in Gaza in spite of the frenetic efforts by Trump and Netanyahu and their cohorts to sabotage it. I had hope, and now I have grief.

Now this constant mass atrocity has been fully reanimated. And the people who rule over us are actively supporting this, while working to imprison, fire, silence and deport anyone who opposes it.

This is a broken civilization. A warped and twisted dystopia. The waking nightmare we are witnessing in Gaza is the result of everything that we have become as a society. Those dead and mutilated children on your social media feed are the fruit on the tree of the western world.

Please understand that this is personal now. This isn’t only about some strangers in the middle east. It’s also about you. It’s about your rights. It’s about your freedom to speak out against the criminality of your rulers. It’s about the kind of society you want to live in. It’s about the kind of future you want for your children.

We are not separate from what’s happening in Gaza, as hard as we might try to make ourselves feel that way. Gaza is here. The waves of blood are lapping at your doorstep. The dead and mutilated children are strewn about your living room and kitchen. They were placed there by the powerful people who run your government and its allies.

There’s no getting away from it. Gaza has been brought right to you and laid at your feet.

And it’s up to you how you’re going to respond to it.

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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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Wikemedia Commons/UNRWA.

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

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has published an explicit statement of genocidal intent toward the people of Gaza, threatening civilians in the enclave with collective punishment in the form of “total devastation” if they do not find a way to overthrow Hamas and free all Israeli hostages.

Katz’s statement reads as follows:

“Residents of Gaza, this is your final warning. The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza, and the second Sinwar will bring upon it total ruin. The Israeli Air Force’s attack against Hamas terrorists was only the first step. What follows will be far harsher, and you will bear the full cost.

“Evacuation of the population from combat zones will soon resume. If all Israeli hostages are not released and Hamas is not kicked out of Gaza, Israel will act with force you have not known before.

“Take the advice of the U.S. President: return the hostages and kick out Hamas, and new options will open up for you — including relocation to other parts of the world for those who choose. The alternative is destruction and total devastation.”

This is a message to the residents of Gaza: The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza, and the second Sinwar will bring its complete ruin. Soon, the evacuation of the population from combat zones will resume, and what follows will be far more severe—you will pay the full price. Return the… pic.twitter.com/zkLCwXHX43

— ישראל כ”ץ Israel Katz (@Israel_katz) March 19, 2025

When Katz says “Take the advice of the US president,” he is referring to a statement made by President Trump earlier this month which made essentially the same threat addressed “to the People of Gaza,” saying, “A beautiful Future awaits, but not if you hold Hostages. If you do, you are DEAD! Make a SMART decision. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW, OR THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY LATER!”

When I criticized the US president for these remarks which explicitly threaten Gaza’s civilians, I got a deluge of Trump supporters telling me he wasn’t really talking about “the people of Gaza” as he said, but was rather speaking only about the ones who are actively holding hostages. Katz’s statement makes it abundantly clear that they were wrong, and that those of us who called a spade a spade at the time were correct. 

The Israeli defense minister is simply following Trump’s position and reiterating what everyone who isn’t a blinkered partisan hack knew Trump was saying two weeks ago. He is doing this in exactly the same way Benjamin Netanyahu followed Trump’s position on ethnically cleansing Gaza last month by enthusiastically endorsing the plan Trump put forward to permanently remove all Palestinians from the enclave. Trump puts forward the plan, and Israeli officials put it into action.

So you’ve got both the US and Israeli governments openly threatening the entire population of the Gaza strip with the war crime of collective punishment if they don’t somehow kick Hamas out of Gaza, and additionally announcing the intent to inflict “total devastation” upon that population if they do not. 

Is this the first time in history that a US president has explicitly threatened civilians with extermination in a statement addressed directly to them? https://t.co/36tZR02aZm

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 5, 2025

This is about as explicit an admission of genocidal intent as you can possibly come up with. 

In its genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, South African prosecutors compiled a mountain of evidence of Israeli officials announcing the intent to commit genocide in Gaza, such as Netanyahu describing Gaza’s population as “Amalek” in reference to a Bible story about a people who were completely annihilated on the orders of God, or former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant describing Palestinians in Gaza as “human animals” while declaring a “total siege” on the enclave.

Al Jazeera’s Raz Segal and Penny Green wrote the following regarding the ICJ case last year:

“The crime of genocide has two elements — intention and execution — both of which have to be proven when accusations are made… Intention is usually harder to prove when accusations of genocide are made; the petitioner has to be able to prove “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” in the language of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. But in Israel’s case, intention too has been laid bare by an ample amount of evidence — as the South African legal team pointed out.”

And Katz’s statement is probably the most clear and explicit admission yet. It’s hard to imagine a clearer declaration of genocidal intent than delivering a video statement addressed to a civilian population threatening them with “total devastation” if they don’t do as they’re told. 

We may be sure that these statements by Katz and Trump have been added to files held by those who hope to successfully prosecute these monsters for war crimes one day. We may also be sure that they will be recorded in what will eventually be seen as one of the darker chapters in our civilization’s history.

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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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image is a screenshot from Israel Katz on X.

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

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This is Trump’s genocide. Trump is just as culpable for what happens in Gaza as Netanyahu. Just as guilty as Biden was during the last administration.

Trump signed off on the reignition of the Gaza holocaust. He spent weeks sabotaging the ceasefire and then gave the thumbs up to the resumption of the genocide. He did this while bombing Yemen and threatening war with Iran for Israel.

I don’t know why Trump has done these things. Maybe it’s all for the Adelson cash. Maybe Epstein recorded him doing something unsavory with a minor during their long association and gave it to Israeli intelligence for blackmail purposes. Maybe he owed somebody a favor for bailing him out of his business failures in the past. Maybe he’s just a psychopath who enjoys murdering children. I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he did it, and he is responsible for his actions.

Trump supporters will justify literally anything their president does using whatever excuses they need to, but they are only revealing how completely empty and unprincipled their political faction is. They are unthinking worshippers of power who go along with whatever the president tells them to. By continuing to support Trump even as he continues Biden’s legacy of mass murder in the middle east, they are proving themselves to be mindless stormtroopers for the empire in full view of the entire world.

You can still support Trump if you hate immigrants and LGBTQ people and want lower taxes for the obscenely wealthy, but there is no legitimate reason to support him on antiwar or anti-establishment grounds. He’s just another evil Republican mass murderer president.

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Republicans in 2002: We need more authoritarianism and more wars in the middle east. Anyone who disagrees is a terrorist supporter.

Republicans in 2025: We need more authoritarianism and more wars in the middle east. Anyone who disagrees is a terrorist supporter, and antisemite.

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By the way has anyone checked on the western Zionist Jews? How are their feelings feeling today? Are they feeling nice feelings or bad feelings? Are their feelings feeling safe or unsafe? We need wall to wall news coverage of this supremely urgent issue; no time to cover any other story.

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I write so much about the fake “antisemitism crisis” not only because it’s being used to destroy civil rights throughout the western world, but because it’s one of the most dark and disturbing things I’ve ever witnessed.

It’s been so intensely creepy watching all of western society mobilize around a complete and utter fiction in order to stomp out all criticism of a foreign state. It’s about as dystopian a thing as you can possibly imagine, all these pundits and politicians pretending to believe that Jewish safety is seriously being threatened by an epidemic of antisemitism which must be aggressively silenced by any means necessary. All to shut down opposition to the worst inclinations of a genocidal apartheid state and the complicity of our own western governments with its crimes.

And we’re all expected to treat this scam seriously. Anyone who says the emperor has no clothes and calls this mass deception what it is gets tarred with the “antisemite” label and treated as further evidence that we’re all a hair’s breadth from seeing Jews rounded up onto trains again if we don’t all hurry up and shut down anti-genocide protests on university campuses. They’re not just acting out a fraudulent melodrama staged to rob us of our rights, they’re demanding that we participate in it by pretending it’s not what it plainly is.

It’s not just tyranny, it’s tyranny that orders people to clap along with it. It’s such a disgusting, evil thing to do to people. Such psychologically dominating abusive behavior. The more you look at it, the creepier it gets.

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The anti-imperialist left is what MAGA and right wing “populism” pretend to be. We ACTUALLY oppose the empire’s warmongering — not only when Democrats are in power. We ACTUALLY want to defeat the deep state — we don’t applaud billionaire Pentagon contractors like Elon Musk taking power. We ACTUALLY oppose the establishment order — because the establishment order is capitalist. We ACTUALLY stand up to the powerful — we don’t offload half the blame onto immigrants and marginalized groups.

The anti-imperialist left is also what liberals pretend to be. We ACTUALLY support the working class. We ACTUALLY stand up for the little guy. We ACTUALLY want justice and equality. We ACTUALLY support civil rights. We ACTUALLY oppose tyranny.

Everything the human heart longs for lies in the death of capitalism, militarism and empire, and yet both of the dominant western political factions of our day support continuing all of these things. This is because westerners spend their entire lives marinating in power-serving propaganda which herds them into these two mainstream political factions to ensure that they will pose no meaningful challenges to our rulers. All political energy is funneled into movements and parties which are set up to maintain the status quo while pretending to support the people, with the illusion of political freedom sustained by a false two-party dichotomy in which both factions serve the same ruling power structure.

Of course, what mainstream liberalism and right wing “populism” have to offer that anti-imperialist socialism does not is the ability to win major elections with successful candidates. This is because generations of imperial psyops have gone into stomping out the anti-imperialist left in the western world, and because only candidates which uphold the status quo are ever allowed to get close to winning an election. This doesn’t mean mainstream liberalism or right wing “populism” are the answer, it just means our prison warden isn’t going to hand us the keys to the exit door.

At some point we’re going to have to rise up and use the power of our numbers to force the urgently needed changes we long to see in our world. Everything in our society is set up to prevent this from ever happening. That’s all the two mainstream political factions are designed to do. That’s why they both have phony “populist” elements within them which purport to be leading a brave revolutionary charge against the establishment, while herding everyone into support for the two status quo political parties. And that’s why the anti-imperialist left is everything they pretend to be.

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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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

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The US is bombing Yemen again after Houthi leaders announced that their blockade on Israeli shipping would resume due to Israel’s siege on Gaza. 

Trump could have used Washington’s immense leverage over Israel to force Netanyahu to honor the ceasefire agreement and allow aid into Gaza. Instead he let the IDF lay siege to Gaza and started bombing Yemen for Israel, because he’s a warmongering Israel cuck.

Trump is bombing Yemen for Israel, rushing weapons to Israel despite its flagrant ceasefire violations, and rolling out authoritarian measure after authoritarian measure to stop Americans from criticizing Israel. Because that’s what you get when you vote for America First.

Do you want to know how much of a pathetic Israel lackey Trump is? Earlier this month his nominated hostage envoy Adam Boehler went on CNN and proclaimed that the United States is “not an agent of Israel”. Days later, the White House withdrew Boehler’s nomination.

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Known things:

1. Trump is a servant of Israel.

2. Trump is on the Epstein flight logs.

3. Epstein worked with Israeli intelligence.

4. Epstein was running a sexual blackmail operation.

5. Trump is obstructing the release of the Epstein files.

Question: 

Exactly how many kids did Trump rape?

❖

It’s cool how Republicans are finally dropping that phony “We’re populists fighting the Deep State” schtick and returning to their authentic “Anyone who opposes authoritarianism loves terrorists, let’s fight more wars in the middle east” roots.

Trump supporters would wipe their asses with the US Constitution and deport their own mothers if doing so would help their government send one more 2000-pound bomb to Israel.

❖

The other day I shared a report about Israel continuing its insanely evil practice of murdering children in Gaza with sniper drones, and I got multiple people in my replies commenting “Release the hostages!” as a response. 

Israel supporters are the worst people in the world.

❖

I have no sympathy for Israelis, nor for Israel supporters who say they “feel unsafe”. This isn’t because I am uncaring, it’s because I know any sympathy I might point in that direction will be harnessed and used to murder Palestinians, start wars, and destroy free speech rights.

❖

When you proclaim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism and then Zionism murders tens of thousands of children, you are naturally going to see a rise in “antisemitism” as you have defined it. That’s all this whole “antisemitism crisis” narrative has been from the very beginning.

Zionism is not a religion, it’s a fucking political ideology. It’s always legitimate to criticize a political ideology. Saying it’s evil forbidden speech to express disdain for Zionism is the same as saying it’s evil forbidden speech to express disdain for white nationalism. Zionism is the political ideology which supports the west’s decision to drop an apartheid ethnostate on top of a pre-existing population and maintain that apartheid ethnostate by any amount of violence and abuse necessary.

You can’t butcher children by the tens of thousands with the backing of the most powerful war machine on the planet in the name of supporting this political ideology and then legitimately cry victim when people have something to say about it. That’s not a thing.

❖

People tend to bluff the opposite of whatever hand they’re holding; newbies do it in poker, and everyone does it with their ego. Conservatives are afraid of everything, so they posture as hypermasculine tough guys. Liberals are bootlickers who act like heroes of social justice.

You see this dynamic everywhere, on the personal level as well as political. The person who feels small acts big. The person who feels dumb acts like a know it all. You see some bloke acting like he’s better than everyone else and think “That guy needs to be brought down a few pegs,” but really he’s only doing that because he feels inferior to everybody; you can’t bring him down any lower than he’s already brought himself. They’re all just bluffing the opposite of the hand they believe they’ve been dealt.

_______________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via Trump White House (Public Domain).

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

Muslims are not a threat to you.

Russia is not a threat to you.

China is not a threat to you.

Trans people are not a threat to you.

Immigrants are not a threat to you.

If you find yourself resisting anything I just said, that’s where they hooked you. That’s where your rulers duped you into blaming your problems on something other than them.

You will notice that I am not saying there are no enemies and nobody poses a threat to us; there absolutely are, and they absolutely do. It’s just that people are tricked and manipulated away from seeing the real enemies and the real threats where they are.

What poses a threat to you is the political status quo which robs your country of riches and resources to inflict military violence on innocent people overseas while strangling your civil rights and poisoning your planet. What poses a threat to you are the oligarchs and empire managers who uphold this status quo which is driving our species to authoritarian dystopia and extinction via environmental disaster or nuclear annihilation.

They want you blaming your problems on anyone else besides the actual source of your problems. They prefer to get you freaking out about their primary targets — the disobedient groups and nations they want to destroy to advance the interests of the empire — but if they can’t accomplish that then they’re happy to get you hating powerless groups who pose no real threat to you. Anything they can do to keep your eyes off your real oppressors: the billionaires, bankers, media barons, intelligence agencies, warmongers, ecocidal capitalists, military-industrial complex plutocrats, and all the empire lackeys in your official elected government.

They want us fighting each other, but we only pose a threat to each other if we buy into their bogus narratives of hostility and division. An immigrant is only threatened by a right winger because the right winger has been successfully duped into blaming his problems on the immigrant, and therefore elects empire lackeys who will make the immigrant’s life more difficult. But without that artificially manufactured enmity, it’s just two people being abused by the same pricks at the top.

Whenever I say stuff like this I’ll get people voicing objections like “No no Caitlin you don’t understand, we really truly ARE seriously dangerously threatened by The Trans Agenda” or whatever. But you’re not. That’s just you doing the thing I’m describing here. You’re just buying into the exact scam I’m talking about. You’re allowing your crosshairs to be moved from your oppressors to some irrelevant diversion in order to protect your oppressors.

At some point we need to stop falling for the scam. We need to wake up to the fact that we’re all just a bunch of normal people living in a highly abusive society, and that our abusers are benefiting immensely from our inability to see through their divide-and-conquer manipulations and unite against them.

Muslims are not a threat to you.

Russia is not a threat to you.

China is not a threat to you.

Trans people are not a threat to you.

Immigrants are not a threat to you.

The US empire is a threat to you.

Your own government is a threat to you.

Oligarchs are a threat to you.

Nuclear brinkmanship is a threat to you.

Ecocide is a threat to you.

War and militarism are a threat to you.

Tyranny is a threat to you.

Propaganda is a threat to you.

Your enemies are not in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. Your enemies are in Washington, Virginia, New York and Los Angeles. Your enemies are in London, Paris, Brussels and Tel Aviv. Your abusers are not some far away nation your own government doesn’t like, nor are they some marginalized group your government doesn’t care about. Your abusers are your government itself, and all its allies and assets around the world, and the network of oligarchs and empire managers who call the shots in this globe-spanning power structure from behind the scenes.

The sooner we get this straight, the sooner we can sort out all these problems we’re currently being duped into blaming on the wrong people.

__________________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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

President Trump has taken to social media to boast about his administration’s arrest of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil for leading Columbia University campus demonstrations against Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, proclaiming that “This is the first arrest of many to come.”

“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Trump said.

And judging from what I’m seeing online, and the responses I’ve been getting to my criticisms of these abuses, most Trump supporters seem perfectly fine with these measures. Many are actively defending them.

Words can’t express how disgusted I am with Trump supporters who defend their president stomping out speech rights for Israel after spending years wailing about the loss of free speech in America. It’s beyond mere political differences. I don’t respect them as people.

Of all the pathetic, groveling, bootlicking positions anyone could possibly espouse, it’s hard to imagine one more egregious than twisting yourself into cognitive knots trying to find ways to excuse a president crushing free speech in your country to advance the interests of a foreign state after spending years yelling “America First” and whining about freedom of speech, just because that President happens to be a Republican.

If you are doing this, you’re just admitting that you don’t stand for anything, and you’re just drifting along with the herd and supporting whatever the man in charge tells you to support. You’re unthinking human livestock. A mindless, useless, pointless NPC. You have wasted all of your time on this planet, because you did not use that time to mature into a sovereign adult with basic intellectual agency and integrity.

Republicans have this adorable story about themselves where they believe they have changed since the George W Bush administration, but that’s not what I’m seeing on social media today. I’m seeing the same shitbrained, power-worshipping sheep who cheered on every authoritarian abuse rolled out by the Bush administration. That’s all this so-called “populist” movement calling itself “MAGA” turned out to be: all the same authoritarian bootlicking, but with more presents for Israel.

https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1899232271426879977

I saw a tweet from Michael Tracey the other day, “GOP free speech: You can say ‘retarded’ again, but you can’t protest Israel.”

That’s the long and short of it, right there. When Trump supporters spent all those years yelling about the First Amendment, it turns out they weren’t talking about the need to stop the powerful from silencing inconvenient political speech — they just wanted to be allowed to say “retard” and “tranny” on social media. As long as they get those completely irrelevant concessions from the powerful, they’ll happily let their government set all kinds of speech-suppressing legal precedents, because they don’t actually have any values or positions which pose any kind of challenge to the powerful. They’re George W Bush Republicans LARPing as populist revolutionaries.

Someone who actually supports free speech says “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Trump supporters say “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death my government’s right to silence you as long as a Republican is in office.”

Worthless, spineless cucks. What an undignified way to live.

_____________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

❖

Acting on orders from the White House, immigration agents have arrested a Columbia University graduate for deportation due to his leadership of campus protests against Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza last year. 

Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil is reportedly married to an American citizen and had had permanent residency in the US, but his green card has been revoked by the State Department as the Trump administration works to deport everyone they can possibly get away with deporting for criticizing Israel.

This is the equivalent of the Australian government revoking the permanent residency of my American husband Tim and deporting him because of our work criticizing the Gaza holocaust. The suffering that can be unleashed by a policy like this in the United States is hard to fathom.

This comes as we learn that the US government will be using AI to compile lists of people suspected of expressing support for Hamas on social media, and as the Trump administration announces that funding will be killed for any schools which allow “illegal protests” in support of Palestinians on their campuses.

I have said it before and I will say it again: there is no greater threat to free speech in our society than Israel and the western governments who support it. Civil rights are being stomped out throughout the western world to shut down all criticism of Israel.

We’re now seeing escalations in western Zionism’s assault on civil rights on a daily basis. Pretty much every day I’m reading about at least one western government silencing criticism of Israel with some new authoritarian abuse. Zionism is the number one threat to free speech in our society.

Westerners need to understand that Israel and the west’s support for it are a direct threat to our personal freedom. This is about YOU now. If you didn’t have enough compassion to oppose Israel for its genocidal atrocities, you should at least now oppose it to protect yourself.

❖

Trump supporters are falling all over themselves trying to justify Trump’s assaults on free speech the same way Bush supporters fell all over themselves to justify the authoritarianism of the Bush administration. Republicans haven’t changed. They think they have but they haven’t.

❖

This happens as opposition to Israel becomes more urgently needed than ever. Israel has cut off all electricity to Gaza, which is expected to cripple Gaza’s water supply by killing power to critical desalination plants. Once again this genocidal apartheid state is targeting civilians with deadly force in order to advance its depraved agendas, but anyone who wants to criticize such things is being aggressively targeted by increasingly tyrannical measures throughout the western world.

❖

The most horrifying thing about all the footage of HTS thugs massacring people in Syria is not the violence itself, it’s how happy its perpetrators are in the videos. Grinning. Laughing. Joking. It’s deeply disturbing how easily people can be turned into monsters.

I’ve been on the receiving end of shrieking vitriol ever since I started this gig for opposing the western empire’s regime change operations in Syria. Got a good dose of it last December when the operation finally succeeded. Now look. Look where it landed. 

Always oppose the empire.

❖

"British troops should be in Ukraine, but I'm a conscientious objector"

Asking young British men if they'd fight in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/FGr5Xu97AA

— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) March 6, 2025

There’s a video going around of young British men at some kind of pro-Ukraine event advocating sending British troops to Ukraine, and when the interviewer asks them if they themselves would volunteer to go put their own boots on the ground they act shocked and start stammering about how they’re conscientious objectors and are not physically fit enough.

It’s fascinating how often you’ll see this sort of response from western armchair proxy warriors when you suggest that they should go and fight in this military intervention they’re so keen on perpetuating. They often cannot seem to comprehend why anyone would think it’s a compelling point that they are pushing the continuation of a war that they themselves would never agree to fight in, which is just so very revealing. It shows that they see the idea of other people fighting and dying in a war as a completely different and unrelated category to the idea of themselves fighting and dying in a war.

It shows that they don’t view the people who fight in wars as fully human, with dreams and fears and families just like they have, who don’t want to die a violent death any more than they do. It’s genuinely never occurred to them to put themselves in the shoes of the people who are fighting and dying and getting their limbs blown off, and to think about what it would be like if the same thing were happening to them.

It’s like a video game to these people. They don’t see it as real in the same way their own lives are real. A war is something they watch unfold on social media and cheer and boo like a sporting event, not something involving real people who are just as capable of suffering and loss as they are.

A majority of Ukrainians now oppose the war and want a negotiated settlement as quickly as possible. If you want this horrific war to continue and yet you are not on front lines serving in the Foreign Legion, then you should definitely shut the fuck up. If you want Ukrainians to keep throwing their lives into a war against their will when you yourself are unwilling to do the same, then you have failed to mature as a human being on this planet. You lack a functioning empathy center in your brain, and it’s a major character flaw, and you should go fix it.

_______________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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

People in politics and media who oppose the status quo often drift rightward, especially in the US. Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr are some clear recent examples, but you see it happen all the time. 

This is because the Trumpian political wing offers mainstream power and influence to those with an “anti-establishment” streak, while mainstream progressive politics doesn’t offer anything close. If you’re a right wing “populist” you can get elected president, while anyone to the left of Kamala Harris sees their campaigns sabotaged with smears and rigged primaries.

We see a similar dynamic play out in independent media; you’ll see many solidly leftist commentators drifting to the right as they find bigger numbers in attacking liberal institutions than attacking the Trumpian faction, because anti-establishment sentiment is much more mainstream on the right. A much larger audience pool has been allowed to amass there for hostility toward establishment institutions — because the right poses no threat to real power.

And therein lies the key point. Anti-establishment figures in politics and punditry aren’t drifting rightward because the right has better arguments or is more solidly grounded in truth and morality, they’re drifting rightward because the so-called “populist right” has been allowed to flourish while its mirror on the left has not. Right wing “populism” has been allowed to flourish by the very power structures its proponents purport to oppose, while the authentic left has been systematically dismantled by generations of aggressive imperial operations (look up COINTELPRO for example). That’s why you see Trump backed by oligarchs, empire managers and DC swamp monsters and see Trumpism uplifted by the Murdoch press, while anti-imperialist socialism can barely even be said to exist anywhere in the US-aligned world.

So while the power and influence offered by right wing “populist” factions can be tempting, that power and influence only exists because those factions are supported and defended by the empire itself. Public discontent is being corralled toward establishment-friendly political structures so that it doesn’t head anywhere that can threaten the mechanics of the empire, while authentic opposition to capitalism, militarism and empire building is viciously subverted by any means necessary. Bernie Sanders and AOC play the same role on the other side of the aisle, by the way, as do ostensibly leftist media like TYT who herd people back into support for the Democratic Party.

Real opposition to real power is not permitted to ascend to the presidency of the world’s most powerful government. It is marginalized, smeared and subverted, and kept as small as possible. That’s why some who begin with sincere opposition to real power find themselves drawn to the right: it’s larger and offers more opportunities, because it is more aligned with the ruling power structures of our day.

It’s fool’s gold. It sells you power and influence so that you can fight the power, but after you’ve made that bargain you find yourself on the same side as the power. You sold out for nothing. You might as well have skipped the middle part and gone directly to collecting the big bucks whoring yourself out to mainstream politics and media defending the empire without pretending to be something else.

Staying true and authentic can be hard. It comes at a price. You don’t get to see your favorite politicians win elections and take important positions in government. You don’t get to amass tens of millions of loyal followers who hang on your every word. You lose friends and alienate family members with your positions on war and capitalism and imperialism and Zionism. You can’t even watch a movie or a show without being frequently disgusted by the empire propaganda you’ll see. It isn’t pretty. But at least it’s real.

It’s another one of those red pill vs blue pill deals. Do you want disconcerting truths or comforting lies? If you want to be true to what’s true, you don’t compromise your values to support political factions which help prop up the very power structures you oppose. You stay focused on the enemy. You keep throwing sand in the gears of the machine, hoping that if enough people throw enough sand it will eventually come crashing down, but self-assured that you’re going to keep throwing sand either way, win or lose.

Sure it’s hard. Sure it entails a lot of disappointments and losses. But at least it’s real. At least it stands a chance at beating the bastards, however small. As weak and pathetic as you can feel throwing haymakers at a globe-spanning empire some days, it sure beats the hell out of collaborating with it. And that’s exactly what you’d be doing by joining up with fraudulent political factions which claim to oppose the empire.

_____________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured images via Wikimedia Commons.

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

❖

In a statement addressed “to the People of Gaza,” President Trump warned on Wednesday that “A beautiful Future awaits, but not if you hold Hostages. If you do, you are DEAD!”

Again, this was explicitly addressed to the entirety of Gaza’s population, not only to Hamas. US presidents kill civilians all the time, but it’s highly unusual for them to explicitly threaten a civilian population with extermination in a statement addressed directly to them; you have to go back to the leaflets President Truman dropped on Japan warning of nuclear annihilation in 1945 to find anything like this.

At the same time, Israel is reportedly preparing a “hell plan” in which it will resume its genocidal onslaught and cut Gaza off from electricity and water if Hamas refuses to accept Israel’s revised terms for the ceasefire deal in the coming days. The plan to cut off water is especially terrifying, as it would lead to mass civilian deaths relatively quickly.

❖

All of Trump supporters’ reasons for supporting Trump are invalidated by his positions on Israel.

“He puts America first” — he puts Israel first.

“He’s making peace” — he’s assisting Israel’s mass murder and tyranny.

“He supports free speech” — but not speech which criticizes Israel.

❖

The current Israel apologist line on the IDF’s siege on Gaza is that Israel isn’t obligated to feed people it’s at war with, which is idiotic in a couple of different ways.

Firstly, saying Israel doesn’t have to feed Gaza is like saying you don’t have to feed the people in a prison or a hospital. Yes you obviously do you psychopath, it’s an area you’ve enclosed and made fully dependent on outside aid. 

But also, Israel doesn’t even feed Gaza. They’re currently stopping other people from feeding Gaza, which is like putting security outside of a hospital or prison to make sure nobody can bring in the essential aid you’re not providing.

❖

Sixty-one Palestinian detainees have reportedly died since October 7 because of the cruel treatment they receive at the hands of their captors. Israeli hostages died because Israel was dropping bombs and laying siege on the place where the prisoners were, while Palestinian hostages are dying because Israel tortures, rapes, starves and abuses them. Israel kills Palestinian hostages and Israeli hostages.

❖

People tell me “Caitlin I like what you say about Gaza, but I hate what you say about Ukraine!” 

Okay well that’s because you’re only partially awake to the abuses of the western empire. Gaza is much, much easier to understand than Ukraine. You’ve still got a lot of learning to do.

❖

I can understand why some antiwar people backed Trump over Harris; there were arguments to be made that he was the lesser warmonger. What I cannot understand is how anyone who seeks peace can continue defending him now that he’s in office, though. It’s just bootlicking at this point.

Defending Trump by babbling about how bad Kamala Harris was is like defending the US invasion of Iraq by saying “Oh so I guess you wish Hitler had won WWII.” The election is in the past. It was four months ago. It has no relevance to current criticisms of Trump’s actions.

It annoys me how Trumpers will do this in anti-war circles. The other day I criticized the president’s actions in Gaza and got multiple MAGA people in my mentions babbling about Kamala Harris. It’s like, who? I’ve practically forgotten who Harris even is. I’m busy criticizing the actual empire as it actually presently exists. If Harris had won I’d be criticizing her, but she didn’t, so I focus on Trump. That’s what anyone who isn’t a blind partisan bootlicker would do.

They did this throughout Trump’s first term with Hillary Clinton. “Okay sure his Yemen veto was bad but I’d rather have him than Hillary.” Okay, so? Why are you interrupting important criticisms of the powerful to prattle about an irrelevant former Democratic presidential candidate? How could you possibly even think that’s something worth saying?

No matter how bad Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton were, it doesn’t magically make Trump good. That’s like thinking cancer is good just because heart disease is bad. It’s shitbrained thinking, and it’s become a real pet peeve of mine.

❖

In the west we have the saying “talk is cheap”, but what’s funny is that there’s absolutely nothing in western society that reflects this as our actual position. The politicians who talk the biggest talk are the ones who get into power. The promotions, investments and business loans go to the people who talk the best game. Our whole society is perpetually marinating in propaganda where skillful manipulators use words to influence the way people think, speak, vote, work, spend, and behave at mass scale.

Talk is not cheap in western society. Talk is highly valued and handsomely rewarded. Talk is our most prized product.

Interestingly I have read that in China the exact opposite is the case. Very little value is placed on talk. The politicians who are elevated to prominence are the ones who have proved themselves with accomplishments over the years. Western businessmen sometimes struggle in China because their whole careers they’ve learned that making big deals comes down to talking big talk, but Chinese businesses are only interested in whether you have a solid track record of coming through with the goods. Even between family members and romantic partnerships there’s a lot less emphasis on saying “I love you” and a lot more emphasis on showing your love with deeds, because in China, talk really is cheap.

And funny enough that’s how we’re seeing things play out on the world stage: the west pouring immense amounts of resources into propaganda, cultural domination and soft power influence operations while China quietly surges ahead in more and more fields every year. We’re talking while China is doing.

_______________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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

President Trump has made a post on Truth Social saying federal funding will be cut to universities which allow “illegal protests” on their campuses, obliquely referring to pro-Palestine demonstrations against Israel’s genocidal atrocities.

“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump said. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”

Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the UN, made it clear that this was the Trump administration taking a position on “anti-Israel hate.”

“Antisemitism and anti-Israel hate will not be tolerated on American campuses,” tweeted Stefanik with a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post.

Excuse me?

“Anti-Israel hate will not be tolerated”

Is the Trump administration working to outlaw protest and criticism of a foreign nation? https://t.co/SvjNaAOQJi

— Mel (@Villgecrazylady) March 4, 2025

Trump’s declaration follows a completely insane statement from health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr which makes the targeting of pro-Palestine protests much more explicit.

“Anti-Semitism — like racism — is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” said Kennedy. “In recent years, the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence. Making America healthy means building communities of trust and mutual respect, based on speech freedom and open debate.”

Leaving aside Kennedy’s ridiculous claim that antisemitism “kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues” in modern times and all the weird mental contortions he’s performing to turn this into a Health and Human Services issue, conflating pro-Palestine protests with antisemitism and then claiming it needs to be eliminated as a “pestilence” squarely contradicts Kennedy’s asserted support for “speech freedom and open debate.”

Kennedy’s bat shit crazy remarks align with an accompanying statement from Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who says, “Americans have watched in horror for more than a year now, as Jewish students have been assaulted and harassed on elite university campuses. Unlawful encampments and demonstrations have completely paralyzed day-to-day campus operations, depriving Jewish students of learning opportunities to which they are entitled.”

It's so perfect that RFK's first big initiative to "Make America Healthy Again" is cracking down on "anti-Semitic" political speech. Especially after we had to sit through all his melodramatic lectures about how he was joining the GOP because it was the new Party of Free Speech https://t.co/1xryFAuPZU

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) March 4, 2025

They are using the completely fictional narrative of “antisemitism” on university campuses to stomp out protests against Israeli atrocities in the United States. They couldn’t be more transparent about it. Which is why civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) immediately released statements denouncing this move by the Trump administration.

“It is disturbing to see the White House threatening freedom of speech and academic freedom on U.S. college campuses so blatantly,” said Cecillia Wang, legal director of the ACLU. “We stand in solidarity with university leaders in their commitment to free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent on campus. Trump’s latest coercion campaign, attempting to turn university administrators against their own students and faculty, harkens back to the McCarthy era and is at odds with American constitutional values and the basic mission of universities.”

“Today’s message will cast an impermissible chill on student protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” says FIRE. “Paired with President Trump’s 2019 executive order adopting an unconstitutional definition of anti-Semitism, and his January order threatening to deport international students for engaging in protected expression, students will rationally fear punishment for wholly protected political speech.”

There's a massive distortion of free speech doctrine being circulated to justify the Trump Administration's punishment of universities that allow "illegal protests" against Israel.

It's obviously a 1st Am violation to condition funding on holding or rejecting certain views. https://t.co/QqqHl85dp0 pic.twitter.com/ldlkLLSN9Q

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 4, 2025

If you support freedom of speech you now have an ethical obligation to oppose Israel, even if you didn’t before.

Western governments’ support for Israel is the biggest threat to free speech in our society today. Civil rights are being stomped out throughout the western world to protect Israeli information interests, and speech is being suppressed in support of Israel more aggressively than with any other topic. We’re not seeing this level of all-out warfare against free expression on any other frontline — not Russia, not vaccines, not “election security”, not on any kind of ideological front. The west’s support for Israel is the number one threat to free speech in the west today, and nothing else comes anywhere close.

Trump’s latest announcement about “illegal protests” against Israel on university campuses is just the latest escalation in what has been an ongoing assault on all criticism of the Zionist entity. We’re seeing journalists and activists persecuted and fired for opposing Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, protests violently shut down by police, new laws shoved through at alarming speed to help target pro-Palestine demonstrators, massive amounts of social media censorship across all major platforms — all while the mainstream press commit extremely egregious journalistic malpractice with obfuscations in their reporting and punditry designed to spin Israel’s abuses in a positive light.

Even if you’ve never cared about Israel before, you should be opposing it if you care about the existence of free speech in your society. Hell, you should be aggressively resisting this war on speech even if you support Israel. When civil liberties are being snuffed out one by one with increasing brazenness in defense of a foreign state, then everyone who claims to stand for freedom has an obligation to stand against it.

_______________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via Adobe Stock.

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

As the Trump administration pauses military aid to Ukraine and western liberals continue their shrieking meltdown over Trump hurting Saint Zelensky’s feelings, it’s probably worth reminding everyone that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was indisputably provoked by western aggressions. That’s why so many western experts and analysts spent years warning ahead of time that western aggressions were going to provoke an invasion of Ukraine.

Now, some may hear this and say “Okay but Russia still shouldn’t have invaded even though our western leaders were aggressively provoking them to.” But before you do that it might be a good idea to look inside yourself and ask where that impulse is arising from. Why are you so eager to skip past the part where you criticize your own rulers for their role in starting this war and focus solely on criticizing the leader of an eastern government who has no power over you? What is it inside of you that’s flailing all over the place trying to avoid any forceful scrutiny of the reckless warmongering of your own government and its allies?

The last time a foreign rival placed a credible military threat near the border of the United States, the US responded so aggressively that the world almost ended (if you want to know just how close we came to nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look up the name Vasili Arkhipov). Western liberals have been conditioned to insist that Russia should have responded differently to the US empire amassing proxy forces on its border than the US would respond to the same kind of threat on its own borders. The frenetic mental contortions needed to justify this ridiculous double standard are only possible because the west is saturated in domestic propaganda manipulating the way they think about the world.

It makes sense for there to be criticism of Russia for its role in this war, and for people to be horrified by the nightmare that’s been happening in Ukraine these last few years. What makes absolutely no sense whatsoever is for western liberals (or “progressives” or whatever they want to call themselves) to assign ZERO PERCENT RESPONSIBILITY to their own government and its allies for their extensively documented role in sparking this conflict and ONE HUNDRED PERCENT RESPONSIBILITY to a foreign government with no power over them. That’s pathetic, bootlicking behavior, and it’s utterly inexcusable.

Stop performing mental gymnastics to defend the abuses of your rulers. Have a little dignity for god’s sake.

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1700719253685678286

It is good that Trump appears to be moving toward ending an unwinnable proxy war that Ukrainians no longer want to fight. Anyone who disagrees with this is a dogshit human being.

I am not grateful to Trump for ending this nightmare, I’m just disgusted with anyone who’s against doing so. The proxy war in Ukraine was going to end sometime relatively soon anyway; the only way for NATO to reverse Russia’s steady gains at this point would be to intervene more directly in ways that would risk nuclear consequences that western leaders aren’t willing to receive. This was always a chess game for them; they’re not going to put their own necks on the line. So the war had to end to make way for other imperial projects — the Trumpists are just the faction that the empire has tasked with advancing this agenda.

I will not waste any gratitude on Trump rolling back a failed imperial bid to weaken Russia, but I will absolutely scream my fucking lungs out at anyone who insists Ukrainians should keep throwing their bodies into a war that Ukrainians themselves no longer support. If you want the Ukraine war to continue, then go enlist and put your body on the line so that Ukrainians don’t have to. The Ukrainian Foreign Legion is still accepting volunteers. If you want this horrific war to continue, either go and fight or shut the fuck up. Stop tweeting from the sofa in your safe, comfortable home and get your ass to the frontline. Bring along as many western liberals as you can convince to join your cause.

The western empire provoked this war. The western empire sabotaged peace talks in the early weeks after the invasion. They refused off-ramp after off-ramp in pushing Ukraine into this situation, and as a result Ukraine is going to be much worse off than before this all started. Wanting Ukraine to keep throwing human lives into the meat grinder in the hopes that they can recover all their lost territory is just sunk cost fallacy at this point. 

Ukrainians now recognize that it’s time to cut their losses and negotiate a peace. Western armchair warriors need to recognize this too.

_______________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/President of Ukraine (CC BY 4.0)

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

Israel has once again laid siege to Gaza, this time in full coordination with the Trump administration. All goods are being blocked from entering the enclave, including humanitarian aid. This comes after a 15-month US-backed Israeli bombing campaign deliberately made it impossible for people to survive in Gaza without extensive amounts of aid.

The move is an effort to pressure Hamas into changing the terms of the ceasefire deal they agreed to in January by shifting to a new Trump administration plan to extend the first phase of the deal instead of negotiating the second stage as scheduled.

So Israel is breaking international laws against collective punishment by laying siege to an aid-dependent population in order to force changes to a ceasefire deal. You might assume such a straightforward act of psychopathic criminality would be correctly conveyed by the headlines of the western press, but if you assumed such a thing you are adorably naive. 

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1896379009409417219

As we anticipated yesterday, the official western propaganda line is spinning this to blame Hamas for rejecting a peace deal, but some of the headlines have been even worse than I would have guessed.

“Hamas rejects extending first phase of Gaza ceasefire, ties hostage release to phased deal,” reads a headline from Reuters.

“Israel halts aid to Gaza as Hamas rejects revised ceasefire proposal,” says the Financial Times.

“Israel says it will block aid going into Gaza until Hamas agrees to ceasefire extension,” says CNN.

“Israel Halts All Aid Into Gaza as Cease-Fire Expires,” says The New York Times in its signature passive-voice framing.

“Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu presses for Gaza ceasefire extension,” reads a particularly obnoxious headline about the story from Australia’s state broadcaster ABC.

https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1896136761753116855

To be clear, it is Israel who is rejecting the ceasefire, not Hamas. Hamas already agreed to a ceasefire, and has been honoring it. It is Israel who is pushing to change the terms of the deal instead of moving forward with the deal as agreed. Israel is doing this because moving ceasefire negotiations on to their second stage would entail moving toward a commitment to lasting peace and the removal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

A new deal isn’t even necessary to extend the first phase of the ceasefire; as Muhammad Shehada noted on Twitter, phase one would renew automatically as long as phase two negotiations are ongoing. Phase one of the ceasefire isn’t the issue here: killing phase two is.

And it’s important to understand that Netanyahu never intended to move forward to the second phase of the ceasefire. As soon as the agreement was signed in January the Netanyahu-aligned factions of the Israeli press were already asserting that the prime minister would never allow the ceasefire to move on to phase two. In early February the Israeli outlet Haaretz reported that according to insider sources Netanyahu intended to sabotage the ceasefire before it could move to its second stage.

It’s important to be aware that Netanyahu always intended to sabotage the ceasefire because it shows that none of the reasons being given for Israel’s actions today are the real reasons. It has nothing to do with hostages. It has nothing to do with anything Hamas has done since the signing of the agreement. It has nothing to do with the Bibas family. Those aren’t the reasons, they’re the excuses. The excuses for Netanyahu to do what he always intended to do.

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1837886438903357920

It’s probably also worth noting at this juncture that Donald Trump has publicly admitted to being bought and owned by the world’s wealthiest Israeli, virulent Zionist Miriam Adelson. The president openly acknowledged on the campaign trail that the first time he was president, Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon were at the White House “probably almost more than anybody” demanding favors for Israel like moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and acknowledging Israel’s illegitimate claim to the Golan Heights, which he eagerly granted. Miriam Adelson gave the Trump campaign $100 million last year.

It used to be considered an antisemitic conspiracy theory to say that Trump is controlled by Adelson cash; back in 2020 Roger Waters was internationally denounced as an evil Jew hater for saying what Trump himself openly admitted to last year. Now here we are, watching Trump rush weapons to Israel and push to permanently ethnically cleanse Gaza of all Palestinians while Netanyahu happily commits war crimes in full confidence that he will be supported by the Adelson asset in the White House.

_______________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via Dan Scavino/The White House (Public Domain).

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

Israeli media are now reporting that Benjamin Netanyahu is considering “a brief resumption” of the onslaught in Gaza in order to pressure Hamas to make concessions and change the terms of the ceasefire agreement which was signed on the 19th of January. 

The Times of Israel reports:

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering a brief resumption of fighting against Hamas to pressure the terror group into making further concessions, according to an Israeli television report aired Saturday as he held high-level deliberations on the stalled negotiations to advance to the second stage of the hostage-ceasefire agreement in Gaza.

“Hamas has rejected Israel’s proposal to extend the first, 42-day stage of the deal, which formally expires Saturday night, insisting that the deal proceed with phase two, which Israel has largely refused to negotiate for the past month. Thirty-three Israeli hostages were released, eight of them dead, in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. Five Thai nationals held hostage in the Gaza Strip were freed separately.

“With the ceasefire expected to lapse at midnight, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz will meet Sunday, along with other security officials, to discuss preparations for a potential resumption of fighting in Gaza and a review of all potential war fronts, Channel 12 news reported.”

Headlines should not be that ‘Hamas refuses to extend the first phase of the ceasefire’ – they should be that ‘Israel refuses to begin talks on the second phase of the ceasefire’, which would bring a definitive end to the war. Israel has also repeatedly violated the ceasefire.

— Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) March 1, 2025

This framing that Hamas has “rejected” Israel’s proposed extension of phase one is just the current propaganda line from the US-Israeli PR machine. In reality the terms of the ceasefire deal say that Israel and Hamas were supposed to move on to phase two of the agreement this weekend, but Israel has been refusing to negotiate the second stage of the agreement this entire time because it would entail a withdrawal of Israeli troops and a commitment to a lasting peace. This idea that the first phase of the ceasefire should be “extended” instead of continuing on to the second phase is a brand new proposition the US and Israel just started pushing a few days ago.

It is therefore Israel who is rejecting the ceasefire as written and trying to write up new terms for the deal; Hamas is just insisting on the terms of the ceasefire it agreed to. 

But today we’re being hammered with this message that Hamas is rejecting peace. A tweet by Axios’ Israeli intelligence operative Barak Ravid reads as follows:

“Israeli Prime Minister’s office says Israel agreed to a U.S. proposal for extending the Gaza ceasefire in return for release of hostages but claims Hamas refuses.”

So that’s the official message we’re being fed by the consent-manufacturing machine, as the Trump administration sends even more weapons to Israel. The White House has just used its “emergency powers” to bypass congressional oversight for a $3 billion weapons transfer to the Netanyahu regime, right after posturing as a stern tough guy who cares about making peace in his controversial dustup with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Zelensky show was nice but doing this on the eve of the possible collapse of the Gaza ceasefire deal is absolutely despicable (article by @KyleAnzalone_) pic.twitter.com/THhdVSLvVz

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) March 1, 2025

As readers have no doubt already heard, the entire western political-media class has been in an uproar since Trump and Vice President JD Vance made international headlines by publicly raking Zelensky over the coals for his role in obstructing peace with Russia, even accusing him of “gambling with World War Three.”

Democrats are rending their garments over the public humiliation of Saint Zelensky and crying about the “bullying” behavior of Trump and Vance, while Republicans are applauding the whole ordeal as a sign that Trump is a strong and heroic peacemaker who doesn’t take any guff from Washington’s warmongering proxies. But the most immediate and glaring point about Zelensky’s public castigation is that this same administration doesn’t appear to be taking that same energy to Benjamin Netanyahu as he prepares to resume a genocide.

And of course it doesn’t. Trump has publicly admitted to being bought and owned by the world’s wealthiest Israeli, megadonor Miriam Adelson, while JD Vance is the protégé of virulent Zionist billionaire Peter Thiel. What we witnessed on Friday was Trump speaking to Zelensky in public the way Adelson probably speaks to Trump in private. We can certainly never expect to see him speaking that way to Netanyahu.

It is good that things are moving toward peace in Ukraine, but this war was never intended to be permanent. It was only ever intended to be a temporary quagmire to bleed and divert Russia as much as possible while advancing strategic objectives elsewhere, which we recently saw manifest in the empire’s successful regime change operation in Syria. Zelensky, like every other US imperial asset, was only ever intended to be used and then discarded. The gears of the imperial war machine roll onward.

____________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/The White House (Public Domain).

I publish my work in print form every month in a collection called JOHNSTONE magazine. The new edition is titled “We Are Ruled By Sociopaths Because Capitalism Elevates The Worst Among Us,” and it’s available to order in print or download as a pay-what-you-want e-book version.

In a system which elevates those who are willing to do whatever it takes to make the most money, it is only natural that we now find ourselves ruled by sociopaths. That’s why we’re seeing Pentagon contractor Elon Musk throwing his weight around in a presidential administration that he co-owns with Israeli billionaire Miriam Adelson.

Under capitalism we are ruled by the worst among us, while the living saints of our society toil without recognition in our hospitals, schools and slums. In our status quo systems there is no money in the pursuit of goodness and no goodness in the pursuit of money; it is those who pursue money above all else who wind up on top, and they have no goodness in them.

This, plainly, is unsustainable.

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.

INSIDE:

Tom Cotton Admits The US Doesn’t Actually Care About Spreading Democracy … 3

They’re Still Slaughtering Civilians In Gaza … 6

They Don’t Just Tell Us What To Think, They Train Us HOW To Think … 8

Fathoms … 10

How To Be Both Happy And Well-Informed … 12

Trump Goes All-In On Stealing Gaza For His Zionist Owners … 14

Only 3 Percent Of Jewish Israelis Think Trump’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan For Gaza Is Immoral … 16

The Nonstop Military Operation Known As Israel … 18

As The Gaza Agenda Moves Forward, The Imperial Narrative Shifts With It … 21

The Tiger Show … 22

Civil Rights Are Being Destroyed Throughout The West In Service Of Israel … 24

The Plan To Ethnically Cleanse Gaza Didn’t Start With Trump … 26

It’s Gross And Cringey To Love A State Like Israel Or The USA … 28

The Gaza Ceasefire Is Being Sabotaged By Israel, By Trump, And By The Media … 30

Israel Admits It Violated The Ceasefire And Hamas Did Not … 32

Washington Drops Ukraine, Israel Backs Down On Hamas Demands … 34

The IDF Didn’t Just Target Hospitals, They Destroyed Individual Medical Machines … 36

There Is No Antisemitism Crisis In Australia. It’s A Carefully Constructed Lie. … 39

I Write About Israel All The Time Because I Have To, Not Because I Want To … 42

Anyone Who Wants The Ukraine War To Continue Is A Monster … 44

Meditations On The Notion That Obama “Never Had Any Scandals” … 46

You Don’t Actually Need To Pick A Team … 48

Israel Pushes New Atrocity Narrative Just As Ceasefire Deadline Approaches … 50

Liberals Hate Socialists Because Socialists Are The Real Thing … 52

Israel And Its Apologists Weaponize Sympathy In Order To Facilitate Genocide … 55

When There’s No Money In The Pursuit Of The Good And No Goodness In The Pursuit Of Money … 58

The Empire At Its Most Honest … 60

They’re Fetishizing The Bibas Kids’ Red Hair To Sell Genocide To White Westerners … 62

All These Israeli Agendas Were Planned Long In Advance … 64

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

❖

A Palestinian man who was held captive by Israel for over a year has been released with horrific scarring all over his body. The man, Mohammed Abu Tawila, told local media that the marks came from his captors pouring acid and other chemicals onto his skin in order to torture him. One of his eyes was also destroyed, reportedly in a savage beating.

You think you’ve seen the worst thing you can possibly see in this ever-unfolding nightmare, and then you see something like this.

https://twitter.com/MosabAbuToha/status/1894986101959598219

And of course the western press has nothing to say about it. If an Israeli hostage were returned with these signs of torture the entire western political-media class would demand that everyone in Gaza be exterminated with poison gas. But he’s Palestinian, so they ignore him.

❖

It’s weird how Israel’s supporters will just pretend to believe complete nonsense in order to advance Israeli agendas. Oh yeah, Hamas strangled those redheads with their bare hands! OMG Hamas beheaded babies and roasted them in ovens! Oh no, Jeremy Corbyn is a Nazi! We totally believe these things!

And what’s even weirder is they expect you to pretend to believe they’re not pretending. If you come out and say something like “Okay but surely nobody actually believes Hamas has been hiding in every hospital in Gaza,” they’ll flip out at you. If you point out that it’s much more likely the Bibas family was killed by Israeli airstrikes in an area where women and children were getting killed by Israeli airstrikes every day than that the Israeli government is telling the truth about something they lie about constantly just as a critical ceasefire deadline approaches, you’ll be swarmed by Israel supporters not only pretending to be absolutely certain they were murdered by Hamas, but demanding that you pretend to take them seriously.

It’s just so silly. These freaks act out these ridiculous stage plays where they pretend to be outraged about bogus atrocity propaganda or pretend to “feel unsafe” because of some completely made-up antisemitism crisis, and everyone knows they’re fulla shit, but we’re supposed to pretend we don’t know that or we’re the worst person in the universe.

This is a bunch of grown adults rolling around on the floor having manipulative tantrums about made-up nonsense and then having tantrums at anyone who doesn’t take their tantrums seriously. It’s like, come on. Have a little dignity. Where is your self-respect? Is advancing Israeli information interests and facilitating foreign land grabs really worth debasing yourself like this?

Just about the cringiest, most embarrassing thing I’ve ever witnessed.

❖

Oh, and a humble observation: if people protesting genocide and ethnic cleansing makes you “feel unsafe”, then perhaps you are the fucking problem.

❖

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1895228722191704559

❖

Jeff Bezos has just come right out and announced that he’s making sweeping changes to The Washington Post’s opinion pages, saying, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”

In other words, he’s going to have his news outlet’s opinion pages dominated by people arguing in support of unfettered capitalism. One of the richest people in the world bought one of the most influential newspapers in the world to turn it into an even bigger capitalist propaganda rag than it already was.

❖

After four years and one month observing how Trump supporters behave while their cult leader is in power I can confidently say that they will justify anything their president does. Literally anything. They have a whole sequence of excuses they’ll make which they just flow through until they find one that makes sense to them. In justifying any ugly thing their president does, the excuses go as follows:

1. What Trump did is good.

2. If what Trump did is not good, then it was actually a brilliant strategic 4D chess maneuver designed to advance the greater good in the long term.

3. If no discernible good can come of it in the long term, then he was just trolling.

4. If he wasn’t just trolling, then the Deep State made him do it. You can’t just go against the Deep State, you know. What kind of naive idiot are you?

❖

Amnesty International has formally denounced Australian universities for adopting an insane and speech-stifling definition of antisemitism to assist Israeli ethnic cleansing agendas. So at least that’s something.

________________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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

President Donald Trump has shared a shockingly awful AI-generated music video envisioning a future Gaza that has been turned into an ostentatious resort town where everyone parties amid showers of cash while Trump and Netanyahu sip drinks by the pool.

The video is intended to reflect Trump’s plans for a Gaza Strip that has been permanently ethnically cleansed of Palestinians.

If you haven’t watched it yet you definitely should, because words can’t do justice to just how terrible it is.

This video is simultaneously the most American thing that has ever happened and the most Israeli thing that has ever happened. Fake. Gaudy. Sociopathic. Genocidal. Emblematic of all the ugliest values that both dystopian civilizations have come to embody.

They used the most artless art medium in existence to digitally dance on the graves of mountains of dead civilians. The most powerful government on earth celebrated the idea of Trump and Netanyahu presiding over orgiastic parties for the obscenely wealthy on a land that has been purged of its indigenous inhabitants following a year and a half of brutal slaughter. Twerking to shitty AI-generated techno music surrounded by golden Trump statues and hundred dollar bills, because you are so happy that you finally found a Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem.

It doesn’t get any more American than this, and it doesn’t get any more Israeli. This soulless, artless, conscienceless expression of egotistic masturbation lubricated with the blood of dead children is the empire at its most honest. This is the very best this globe-dominating power structure has to offer our world.

This entire civilization is diseased. Not just the United States and Israel but every nation on earth that is subject to the metastases of their cancerous influence. They’re making us all dumber, sicker, nastier, crueler. Less creative. Less artful. Less caring. Less insightful. They are poisoning our minds and turning our hearts into shit.

This video, in and of itself, is a sufficient argument for the entire US empire to be demolished and sold for scrap metal. https://t.co/18B1t2o2r7

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 26, 2025

I’ve always said that the only thing I like about Trump is that he puts an honest face on the empire. In terms of actual policy and actions he’s not much different from any other Republican president, but he has this compulsive inclination to constantly yank off the plastic smileyface mask of the empire and reveal the snarling blood-spattered face beneath. This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

That one video, all by itself, tells you more about what the US empire really is than every movie its PR agents in Hollywood have ever produced. This is the real America. This is the real Israel. This is the real empire.

And this is why we must defeat them.

______________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

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Israel has announced that it will continue to occupy parts of Syria and Lebanon indefinitely, and that the new Syrian government is forbidden to have a military presence south of Damascus. Israel has also sent tanks into the West Bank for the first time in decades, saying they will remain for at least a year. A week earlier, Netanyahu vowed to “finish the job” against Iran with the help of the Trump administration.

The middle east is being dramatically restructured in alignment with longstanding Israeli objectives. Gaza has been destroyed and Trump is pushing a plan for permanently removing all Palestinians from the enclave, and they’re already working on doing the same to the West Bank. Syria has been wholly regime changed allowing Israel to grab up large swathes of land and strategic control. Hezbollah has been significantly weakened and Israel effectively controls southern Lebanon. Who knows what awful things they’re working on with Iran.

And I guess it’s worth mentioning as all this unfolds that there are mountains upon mountains of evidence that Israel knew the October 7 attack was coming and intentionally allowed it to happen, thereby manufacturing support for the advancement of all these agendas. Just the other day a new Hebrew Ynet report alleged that Mohammed Deif almost called off Operation Al-Aqsa Flood at the last second because Hamas noticed Israel wasn’t mobilizing against the coming attack despite their immense surveillance capabilities, suspecting it could be a trap. Well it looks like it was a trap — just maybe not the kind Hamas officials suspected.

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The deputy speaker for the Israeli Knesset recently said during a radio interview that all adult men in Gaza should be exterminated and called Palestinians “subhumans”, saying “Who is innocent in Gaza?”

It’s almost a cliché to say “Imagine if this was said about Jews” at this point, but seriously: imagine if this was said about Jews. Imagine how hard the earth would shake if a parliamentary leader in your nation said this about Jews in Israel. It’d be the only story in the news.

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Giving Israel sympathy is giving it a weapon to murder innocent people. Giving Israel’s supporters sympathy is giving Israel a weapon to murder innocent people. When someone weaponizes sympathy to advance deadly agendas, to give them sympathy is to give them a deadly weapon.

Some Zionist victim-LARPer asked me “Why do you hate Israel?” as though that would be a barbaric position to hold. I told him I hate Israel because I’m not a fucking psychopath. It’s a genocidal apartheid state that exists in a constant state of war and has never at any time existed without extreme tyranny and abuse. If you support Israel you’re a garbage human being. Israel is not a victim.

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The US was always going to end its support for Ukraine. If it wasn’t Trump doing it it’d be someone else. This only looks like a shocking betrayal to people who thought the US really was backing Ukraine to protect democracy. It’s not okay for grown adults to believe such things.

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Everyone thinks of Elon Musk as the Tesla guy, the Twitter guy, the Mars guy, but he’s not: he’s the satellite guy. Musk owns most of the operational satellites in Earth’s orbit, and they’re being used to help the US military-intelligence machine rule the planet.

And this is the guy who MAGA pundits insist is fighting the Deep State. The unelected military-industrial complex plutocrat is fighting the Deep State you guys.

[Cracks Knuckles] https://t.co/aKLCpCYupc

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 25, 2025

Trumpism is history’s dumbest cult. The oligarchic Pentagon contractors are fighting the deep state. The plutocrat-owned president is leading a populist revolution. The conspiracy theories just so happen to benefit the Republican Party. Analysis of government agency malfeasance just so happens to begin and end solely with things that can be framed to make Democrats look bad.

The cult’s adherents believe they’re part of some exciting new movement which fights the power and defends the interests of the little guy, when underneath all the narratives they’re just garden variety Republicans defending a standard shitty GOP president who wants to cut taxes and regulations and give Israel everything it wants and militarize against China while inflaming diversionary partisan culture war tensions.

They’re power-worshipping bootlickers posturing as brave revolutionaries. Everything about their whole thing is fake and stupid. Anyone still buying into this scam should feel embarrassed.

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I’ve been watching the show Shrinking, which features a main character who was severely traumatized by his time in Afghanistan. About halfway through the second season, completely out of nowhere, that same character starts recommending that another character enlist in the US military and the other characters start talking about what a great life choice military service can be. It happens in a way that makes no sense for any of the characters, especially for the veteran who’s been struggling with his psychological trauma from the army the entire time.

It was like the Pentagon bought a recruitment ad right in the middle of the show I was watching. I can’t prove that that’s what happened, but I find it extremely suspicious that a show which made military recruitment look very unappealing in its first season suddenly shifted gears in its second season to convey the exact opposite message in a way that contradicts everything the show had told us about the characters and their motives up to that point.

And what sucks is I had been really enjoying the show; it was a very funny and emotionally intelligent exploration of trauma and growth. Now it’s gross and I can’t watch it anymore.

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Iraq was what permanently radicalized me. It should have permanently radicalized everyone. I always had a healthy distrust of the Americans and of my own government, but that was when it really hit that “Okay, this power structure is my enemy, and it needs to be brought down.”

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