Caitlin Johnstone

Video reading by Tim Foley:

The Pentagon plans to live-stream
the firing squad execution
of the Fort Hood shooter,
and my head is so very heavy,
and everything is covered in the ashes
of a burning planet.

I found the corpse of a water spirit
down by the creek where my parents live.
She used to play with me when I was small.
She was tangled in plastic
and mail-order clothes,
and someone had torn off her wings.
She would have been older
than the country I live in.

So hell, why not.
Why not live-stream the firing squad execution.
Run commercials for Kalshi and Crypto dot com
and recruitment ads for the US Marine Corps.
Let Joe Rogan host it with Kevin Hart,
and then auction off pieces of the body
to horny socialites from the Epstein files.
Let’s just go all-in with this thing.

My head is heavy,
and the earth spirits are dying,
and I feel so fucking old.

I get down on the ground
and place my hands on the dirt.

“Please, tell me what to do,”
I whisper.
“Please tell me what you need.”

_____________________

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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

I never asked to know what a dismembered child looks like. Israel imposed that knowledge upon me.

I never wanted to know what it looks like when military explosives blow an infant’s head off. I only know it because Israel forced me to know it.

The reason the Gaza holocaust hit westerners so hard is because it punched through the wall of our shitbrained western supremacist narcissism and our vapid mainstream culture and shook us violently awake to something real and terrifying.

All of a sudden the idea that our bombs are killing people in the middle east was no longer a vague abstraction sitting in the periphery of our awareness. It was a reality hitting us right in the guts in the middle of the day while we casually scrolled our phones, forcing us to run to the toilet to vomit up our lunch.

It made it personal. We were being kicked in the stomach over and over again by the state of Israel with the backing of our own western governments. The abuse of the Palestinians wasn’t something that was happening exclusively to the Palestinians; to a much smaller degree, it was also something that was happening to everyone who witnessed it.

Westerners aren’t accustomed to such confrontations. We are accustomed to bustling around in our mind-controlled dystopia with our first world problems and our neuroses and distractions, our attention going into treats and screens and our consumerist preferences and the petty dramas playing out in our respective social circles. Then all of a sudden we find ourselves in the bathroom puking up our sushi because our phone had just shown us the most unimaginably horrific thing we have ever seen.

And we were at all times aware that all the nausea and horror and rage and disgust we experienced when witnessing the Gaza holocaust happened because of the real material actions of real material people. The Israelis were deliberately causing as much devastation as possible to advance their longstanding goal of forcibly transferring all Palestinians out of Gaza. Our leaders were deliberately stalling and equivocating from behind their podiums to buy Israel enough time to make Gaza uninhabitable. We all understood that the waking nightmare we were witnessing was not some natural disaster that was passively occurring; it was being actively inflicted by people who were fully aware of what they were doing.

That’s the sort of thing that changes you as a person. Changes your whole worldview. Changes your politics. Changes your beliefs. The average westerner needs to do a lot of internal restructuring to truly reckon with the Gaza holocaust and all its implications.

That, I think, has been the biggest reason why the genocide of the Palestinians has gotten so much attention and sympathy. It’s because its live-streamed nature caused it to affect us in ways other acts of mass military slaughter usually don’t.

Westerners are so propaganda-addled and indoctrinated that we are largely apathetic to what our bombs are doing to human bodies on the other side of the world. It’s only when we are given some skin in the game, as in the Vietnam draft, that we start caring in any politically significant way. Gaza gave us skin in the game in the way it entered into our lives through our electronic devices and showed us things that were so jarring it left a permanent mark upon our lives.

Gaza forced us to look, and forced us to see, against all the efforts the propagandists have expended trying to keep us from noticing such things. That’s why this thing isn’t going away. People are only getting angrier and angrier. The empire has spent three years scrambling around unsuccessfully trying to get us to close our eyes again, and it keeps failing and failing and failing.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

No one gives a fuck about October 7.

No one cares. They used to, but then Israel spent three years showing the world why October 7 happened in the first place. After witnessing the cruelty and savagery of the state of Israel, people get it now. Everyone understands.

After Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on the morning of October 7, there was an outpouring of love and sympathy for Israel from around the entire world. Every major landmark from the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House to the Empire State Building were illuminated blue and white in solidarity with the Israeli people. Grown men wept. Bono permanently ruined “Pride (In The Name of Love)” by changing the lyrics to “Early morning, October 7, as the sun is rising in the desert sky, Stars of David, they took your life, but they could not take your priiiiide.”

Anyone who hadn’t been following the Israel-Palestine issue very closely was on Israel’s side that day. And then the bombs started dropping.

And dropping.

And dropping.

And dropping.

And as the bombs dropped, Israel’s approval rating dropped with them.

There are only so many children you can see shredded to bits by Israeli military explosives before you start suspecting that there’s something terribly wrong with the Zionist project.

There are only so many pictures and videos you can see posted by IDF troops dressed in the underwear of dead and displaced Palestinian women before you start wondering if there’s something terribly wrong with the culture of the Israeli military.

There are only so many Israeli polls you can see published showing overwhelming support for the Gaza onslaught before you start believing there is something terribly wrong with Israeli society itself.

There are only so many mainstream humanitarian institutions who can determine that Israel is guilty of genocide before you start recognizing exactly what it is that you are looking at.

There are only so many bombed-out hospitals, so many miles of completely flattened neighborhoods, so many grizzly accounts of Palestinian prisoners being brutally raped and tortured by Israeli soldiers you can see before all the excuses, justifications and spin stop working on you.

And once the hasbara stops working, it’s just you and the unadorned reality of the situation, staring each other right in the eyes.

The propagandists and spinmeisters have been falling all over themselves trying to frame the world’s plummeting support for Israel as an epidemic of “antisemitism”, but that’s not working anymore either. Everyone knows it’s a lie. Nobody’s buying it. It just feels like they’re insulting your intelligence.

The Gaza holocaust was the single worst thing I have ever seen in my entire life. Day after day, month after month, year after bloody year staring right down the barrel of that waking nightmare changed me forever, and there is nothing in me that will ever forget the horrors I witnessed. And the world is full of people who had the exact same experience I had.

Support for Israel is never coming back. When the lights flicker on and you see that the room you’ve been standing in is full of scorpions, you’re not going to forget what you saw when the lights go out again.

All of the events which occurred after October 7 showed the world what life was like for Palestinians before October 7. Israel threw a stone into the air and spent three years crying after the stone came down on its head.

The hasbarists have been flailing all over the place trying to erase everything that happened before October 7 and to justify everything that has happened since, but their words are just words now. They have no power anymore. And now it’s just a matter of time before the world turns against Israel to right the wrongs of the past and set everything back the way it ought to be. From the river to the sea.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

I judge Jewish people’s character based on whether or not they oppose the genocidal apartheid state of Israel. This is also how I judge the character of people who are not Jewish.

Ever since the UK Green party’s “Zionism is racism” motion we’ve been seeing this narrative circulating that Jews are somehow exempt from the basic human duty to oppose genocide and apartheid, just because support for Israel happens to be common among the Jewish community.

The British political/media class has been frenetically attacking the Greens’ objectively correct position as antisemitic, putting out statement after statement proclaiming that it is wrong to ask Jews to oppose a nakedly racist and destructive political ideology.

Fascinated by this idea that Jews are magical faerie elf creatures who are somehow exempt from the basic human duty to oppose genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. https://t.co/Q9YvJ44Jx5

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 5, 2026

The Campaign Against Antisemitism, quoted in the Financial Times, accuses the Greens of imposing an “extremist purity test” on Jews.

The Movement for Progressive Judaism, quoted in The Guardian, asserts that “Jewish self-determination is a right. Declaring it racist is an attack on Jews. The Green party has chosen to brand Jews who hold this belief as racists and make their equal participation in the party conditional on renouncing it.”

“The Green party’s anti-Zionism motion is yet another attempt to tell Jews how we should think,” reads the headline of a Guardian article by Jonathan Freedland.

“British Jews should not have to disclaim a belief in Jewish self-determination and the existence of Israel in order to be accepted by a British political party,” said shadow home secretary Chris Philp in a quote published by the BBC.

“Asking Jews to pass a purity test and renounce self-determination according to a perverse interpretation arbitrarily applied, isn’t just an extreme position, it’s a racist one,” adds Baroness Luciana Berger.

The Green Party has today voted that Jews are racists unless they explicitly adopt an extremist purity test set out by the Party. Under that test, Jews belonging to pretty much any synagogue in the UK would fail.

The Green Party Conference’s intentions could scarcely have been… pic.twitter.com/XLKoz865LR

— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) October 4, 2026

I am absolutely fascinated by this notion that Jews are some kind of magical faerie elf creature to whom the normal standards of human decency simply do not apply. If you happen to belong to this one particular religion, then it somehow becomes an abusive “purity test” to expect that you should oppose a fundamentally racist state premised on endless apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

It doesn’t work that way. We are all morally obligated to oppose genocide and apartheid no matter what our religion happens to be. You have a moral responsibility to reject racist political ideologies. If you don’t, then you are a racist. There are no special exceptions.

It is true that the majority of Jews support Israel. The argument that majority support makes it a valid position is a fallacy called argumentum ad populum; a position being popular among a given group says nothing about how correct it is. All manner of horrors were once supported by the majority of the public. At one time it was widely believed that it was perfectly legitimate to own a human being if their ancestors happened to be from Africa, but with greater moral clarity we all now recognize that that was wrong.

Zionism since its inception in the mid 19th century has been an explicitly racist, settler-colonial ideology. And Jews have no right to "self-determination" in the land of people who never oppressed them. The whole debate is disingenuous bollocks https://t.co/gu471vNcEd pic.twitter.com/VJxvro9jSq

— Nate Bear (@NateB_Panic) October 6, 2026

Zionism is no different; it’s a political ideology whose material manifestations have never at any time failed to include racist policies and ethnic cleansing. If you believe Jews have a right to return after being absent from the land for millennia but don’t believe Palestinians have a right of return after decades in exile, then you are obviously a racist. If you support an ideology which dropped a brand-new ethnostate on top of a pre-existing ethnic group who suddenly became subjected to ethnic cleansing and apartheid, then you are of course a racist. Your religion of choice does not magically exempt you from this.

Everyone should be asked to pass the “purity test” of renouncing a genocidal apartheid state. Jews are no exception to this self-evident moral reality.

________________

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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image by Jaber Jehad Badwan — Jaber Jehad Badwan, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160402418

Video reading by Tim Foley:

On Sunday the UK Greens adopted a motion asserting that Zionism is a form of racism, defining the ideology as “an ethnonationalist political project.” 

Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, was immediately banned by the Israeli government from entering the nation after the motion was passed.

As you might expect, Israel apologists are presently churning out hasbara trying to spin the new Green Party policy as an evil attack on Jews and arguing that Zionism is actually a perfectly lovely and normal thing that we should all support.

“Zionism is just the belief that Jews deserve a homeland and self-determination,” they’ll claim, often adding a suggestion that the real racists are those who would oppose such a reasonable position.

I am a Zionist.

I believe in the Jewish people’s right to a state in our homeland, in our right to live in peace and security.

As we prepare to mark three years since the October 7th massacre, the UK Green Party has chosen to side with terrorists and antisemites.

It is not…

— יאיר לפיד – Yair Lapid (@yairlapid) October 4, 2026

The problem with these arguments is that they have already been soundly refuted by objective reality. You don’t get to just make up your own pleasant-sounding definition of Zionism when there has been a Zionist state showing us in stark terms exactly what Zionism is for eight decades. Zionism means nonstop apartheid, ethnic cleansing, war, genocide, and abuse. That is what Zionism is. The evidence is in. This is a settled matter.

There is no way to implement Zionism without implementing fundamentally racist policies. As Richard Sanders put it, “If you can work out a way to create an ethnically defined political entity in a territory that, at the start of the process, was almost entirely populated by people of a different ethnicity, without resorting to ethnic cleansing and Apartheid, then you need to tell the Israelis. Because they’ve certainly never worked it out.”

The Palestinian author Mohammed El-Kurd summed it up eloquently with the following anecdote:

“At a recent closed-door meeting in London to discuss BDS with various publishers and writers, a well-intentioned, well-known author asked me if Zionism could hold a double meaning: To some, it is a settler-colonial movement motivated by expansion and racial elimination, and to others it is a movement for Jewish self-determination. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Zionism is best defined by its material manifestations — the most recent being genocide. It is irrelevant whether it could contain multitudes.’ “

In other words, Zionism is what it does. And what it does is visible to the entire world.

What remains of Gaza City?

Images show how neighbourhoods across Gaza's largest city have been levelled in recent months https://t.co/H6JaRHOAcG

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 13, 2025

There is no argument to be made that Zionism doesn’t necessarily entail racism, apartheid and abuse; if it did, the modern state of Israel would have existed without these things at some point.

If you think racism, apartheid and abuse are bad, then you necessarily oppose Zionism. If you support Zionism, then you necessarily support racism, apartheid and abuse. If you tell me you can have Zionism without racism, apartheid and abuse, then you are simply lying to me. And maybe to yourself as well.

Genocidal apartheid ethnostates should not exist, and it is racist to believe that they should. It’s amazing this isn’t obvious to everybody.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

❖

Biden insiders are still trying to redeem themselves in the eyes of history through a New York Times article titled “‘Ready to Blow His Stack’: How Biden Nearly Cut Off Netanyahu Over Gaza” about how the previous president almost nearly sorta kinda thought about not committing genocide.

I am so fucking sick of this. You don’t get any points for ALMOST NOT slaughtering tens of thousands of children.

Enough. For sixteen months we were inundated with bogus Biden PR about how the president is inches away from stopping the genocide so we should actually believe he’s a swell guy. Stop. He’s a genocidal monster. That’s his only legacy. End of story.

❖

Today in dystopia AI executives have become cultishly attached to the belief that their chatbots are actually conscious people, with The New York Times reporting that the leaders of Anthropic have been relating to their LLM “Claude” as a conscious being with a moral status on par with human beings.

Personally I refuse to even start entertaining claims that chatbots are conscious beings whose rights must be protected until I live in a society where all humans are treated as conscious beings whose rights must be protected.

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The more the world hates Israel the more we get told that “antisemitism” is some worldwide prejudice baked into every facet of our society like misogyny or white supremacy. Most non-Jews spend very little time thinking about Jews and Judaism (and spent even less prior to 2023), but we’re now being told that this is actually a massive condition which affects us all in ways we might not be fully conscious of.

And it’s so funny because, like, I’m me. I know my own thoughts and feelings. I know I rarely thought about Jewishness at all until a live-streamed genocide began and people started calling me an antisemite for opposing it. And the same is true of the overwhelming majority of non-Jews throughout our society. We all know we don’t “hate Jews” or have any special feelings about them one way or the other, but we’re being aggressively told to believe this is a major problem we all have.

We’re being told to disbelieve our own knowledge of our own thoughts and feelings, and trust that there is actually something closeted deep inside us which secretly hates the members of a small Abrahamic faith. It’s a really obnoxious form of gaslighting, if you think about it. It’s not okay to do that to people.

The best way to dispel your belief that antisemitism is a major problem in our society is to go online and publicly oppose well-documented Israeli atrocities. The people in your replies will explain to you that what you are doing is what’s meant by the word “antisemitism”.

Here’s what would need to change for me to believe antisemitism is a major threat that needs to be taken seriously:

1. “Antisemitism” would have to stop meaning “criticism of a genocidal apartheid state”, which is what Israel supporters have caused that word to mean by constantly accusing Israel’s critics of antisemitism.

2. I would need to see some actual, tangible reason to believe Jews are disadvantaged and discriminated against in our society in ways that are comparable to actual marginalized groups.

3. Antisemitism watchdog groups would need to stop pumping up their numbers on reported incidents of antisemitism by classifying instances of pro-Palestine speech as “antisemitic incidents”.

4. Zionist Jews would need to stop getting caught faking antisemitic hate crimes — an extensively documented phenomenon which is indisputably happening.

5. The push to “combat antisemitism” would need to stop manifesting as a push to stomp out pro-Palestine speech.

6. Israel would have to stop doing things likely to foment actual antisemitism, like committing genocide under the banner of the Star of David.

Change these six things, then get back to me.

Jewish Zionists are always going “I was hate crimed, someone screamed Heil Hitler at my synagogue,” but whenever they post actual video footage of an “antisemitic incident” it’s always something like an angry Israeli filming a Burger King employee telling them Free Palestine. 

This nonsense is getting a thousand times more energy and attention than it should.

❖

Black person explaining what racism is: It’s when we’re killed and systemically abused and deprived of opportunities because of our race.

Zionist explaining what antisemitism is: It’s when someone says Jews aren’t entitled to an ethnostate located in the region described in their ancient scriptures where thousands of years ago people who practiced a similar religion used to live, or when someone opposes sending missiles to that ethnostate.

❖

It’s good to enrage Zionists. It’s a sign of virtue to be despised by the supporters of a genocidal apartheid state. Make them furious. Ruin their day.

❖

We’re seeing more Israel apologia than ever despite Israel having an all-time low public approval rating, so this is an obvious propaganda blitz which is clearly tied to Israel multiplying its propaganda budget and Zionist oligarchs ramping up their narrative control campaign.

❖

When Zionists claim they yearn for “peace” they’re not using the normal definition of that word. They mean they want everyone who opposes Israel to be dead or disarmed. The “peace” they yearn for is the peace you experience in an empty room. The peace of a graveyard.

❖

The other day someone told me “You probably would’ve been opposed to the state of Israel after the holocaust.” I told him “Everyone who opposed Israel’s creation has been proven correct by the subsequent course of history. It’s a failed experiment. It turns out giving the Zionists everything they want results in nonstop war, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and abuse. This has been thoroughly established.”

❖

Every so often you see Left Twitter erupt into a venting session about the fact that leftists can be very neurotic and bullying toward other leftists. The discourse about this reminds us that something gets lost when we choose to blame all our stress and psychological dysfunction on the system.

While it is true that the financial stress, needless toil and pervasive sense of meaninglessness that people experience under capitalism does dramatically deteriorate psychological wellbeing, we all still have a responsibility to try our best to be decent people and come to a reasonable amount of peace within ourselves. People in leftist spaces who use conflict and puritanical moralism to masturbate their drama addictions and distract from their inner misery are not being responsible with their pain.

Part of growing up and becoming a mature adult is accepting that sometimes the problem is in you, and taking seriously your responsibility to fix that problem. If you’re experiencing a lot of conflict and drama in your personal life or online, then you’re the common denominator in that equation, and it means you could use some inner work. Take a break from social media, begin a disciplined practice which helps you come to inner peace, and find some methodologies which help you heal your inner wounds. It’s not okay for you to keep harming and distressing the people around you with your inner condition, no matter how correct your politics happen to be.

The tendency in some leftist circles to externalize all our problems and always make our distress about an abusive system or a politically imperfect comrade creates a kind of learned helplessness where we assume all our suffering is completely beyond our control. In fact it is entirely possible to come to a great degree of inner tranquility and joy even in the midst of this brutal dystopia, as long as you’re willing to take responsibility for your inner wellbeing and do the work necessary to get there.

Healing is very possible. I say this as someone who has needed to do a whole lot of it. If you take this reality seriously and accept your responsibility to do something about it, you can become a much more effective opponent of the empire, and a much more pleasant person to be around.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image by Jill Biden — https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1806486230084812937, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=198956653

Video reading by Tim Foley:

They botched another execution in Tennessee.

They stuck the prisoner full of seven different syringes, but she didn’t die. She just experienced extreme suffering, minute after excruciating minute, before eventually losing consciousness.

Her name is Christa Pike. As of this writing, she is still alive.

Pike committed a horrific violent crime as a young woman after a life of nightmarish abuse. She was physically and sexually abused by her mother’s live-in boyfriend, was raped by a neighbor when she was eleven, and attempted suicide at the age of twelve.

And now she is on a respirator in a hospital as doctors fight to save her life, presumably so that the state of Tennessee can try to kill her again.

It’s all so absurd. People are so cruel to each other.

We inflict pain upon our neighbors, and our neighbors pass that pain on to other neighbors, and it just goes on and on like that until one day you’re watching a woman strapped to a gurney flailing around in anguish as panicked executioners plunge needle after needle into her body to stop her outlawed heartbeat.

We are bound to each other so intimately like that. A rapist was abused by his father, who was abused by his uncle, who was abused by his priest, who was abused by his teacher, generation after generation of human trauma stretching back to our evolutionary ancestors frantically struggling to survive predation in the middle of the food chain. A baton passed from hand to hand through the sands of time in a vast relay marathon of suffering.

The course of my life has been directly influenced by my abusers, and by their abusers, and by the people who abused them, and it is only by sheer chance that this ancient stream of samsara carried me to be typing words on a laptop in Melbourne instead of fighting for my life after a botched execution in Tennessee.

You cannot make a deep study of trauma and human dysfunction and still sustain a belief in the death penalty. Once you’ve explored your inner depths enough to understand how many factors have contributed to your life being the way it is and caused your mind to operate the way it operates, you can’t really claim that anyone had sufficient control over the way their life unfolded to justify killing them for their crimes.

You can still form judgements about people regarding who you want to spend time with and form relationships with, but even in the most chaotic and destructive among us you can still see a fundamental innocence. I can keep my distance from wild crocodiles without believing they are evil. We can still immobilize dangerous people to protect our society without assigning ourselves the right to take their life.

As humanity moves more deeply into consciousness, this insight will become more and more brightly illuminated, and we will begin healing our trauma so that the relay baton of suffering stops with us. The vindictive, judgmental scales will fall from our eyes, and there will be a widespread recognition of the fact that, underneath all the savagery and sadism and exploitation and abuse, we were always ultimately just confused and damaged children stumbling through a giant universe that we did not understand.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image via Tennessee Department of Correction — https://foil.app.tn.gov/foil/details.jsp, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84373334

Video reading by Tim Foley:

Being forcefully pro-Palestine is the most efficient way to weed all the worst people out of your life.

It takes care of them all. Zionists. Islamophobes. Apathetic narcissists. Unthinking herd-minded right wing ideologues. Abuser-enabling “both sides” moral cowards. Emotionally stunted man-babies who turn every challenging conversation into an “allow me to play devil’s advocate” mental exercise to avoid feeling normal human feelings. Leaned-back, too-cool-for-the-current-thing victims of western meta-irony brain rot. It’s like spraying yourself with asshole repellant.

Supporting Palestine doesn’t automatically make you a good person; opposing genocide and apartheid is just the basic bare-minimum position we’re all morally obligated to take. But supporting Israel against the Palestinians absolutely does automatically make you a bad person.

Palestine is an interesting issue in that someone’s position on it doesn’t merely tell you about their politics, it tells you who they are as a person. If they can listen to you talk about all the horrific things Israel has done in Gaza and still have an objection to your position on the matter, then they’re not the sort of person you want in your life. If they can look at all those videos of shrapnel-shredded children and the satellite images showing entire neighborhoods pulverized to powder and then still think you’re the problem for opposing those things, then they’re showing you that there is something profoundly wrong with them as human beings.

I haven’t lost a single relationship I care about in these last three years. I’ve alienated a few obnoxious old acquaintances whom I’ve never liked, but all the people I actually value and want to keep in my life are fully on my side when it comes to hating Israel and supporting the Palestinians. Turns out I had done a pretty good job of surrounding myself with decent human beings in the years prior to the Gaza holocaust, but if I hadn’t I would have driven away the genocide supporters without a moment’s hesitation, and I would have been glad that circumstances forced them to expose their true nature to me.

You don’t even need to be that dramatic about it, though. Simply holding your position and refusing to be bullied out of it is generally all it takes to get such individuals to step away from you. If they know you think their whole worldview is wrong and that their values system is depraved, and they know they can’t talk you out of that perspective, then they’re probably not going to want to hang out with you.

In a world that has gone mad, it’s important to find little signposts of clarity to help you morally orient yourself so you don’t get swept up in the insanity with the herd. Palestine is one such signpost, because it’s such a blatantly obvious moral position to hold on to. But in a world that has gone mad, insisting on sanity will often turn the insane against you.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

It pisses me off whenever I see someone claiming that “AI music” is about to make normal music obsolete.

There is no such thing as “AI music” or “AI art”. AI cannot make music. It cannot create the experience of an artist using skill and intention to transport something from inside them into an audience through vibrations in the air. It can only mimic the noises of that encounter.

It’s like someone going “There’s no need to converse with anyone anymore because they’ve invented a machine which makes noises that sound like human speech!” You’d want to tell them “Hey, that’s not the same thing mate. You’re talking about a completely different experience which in no way satisfies what people are looking for in a conversation.”

Proponents of generative AI will sometimes say things like “I played an AI song for my friend who hates AI, and he loved it!” like that proves something, the argument being that if you can’t tell the difference then there is no difference. But that’s the same as saying there would be no difference between getting catfished by a chatbot and truly finding the love of your life.

When you’re talking about human interaction, which is what art is at its very nature, it absolutely does matter if there’s someone on the other end of it. Of course it does. There is not a species on this planet that produces art or music without doing so to connect or communicate with other members of its species. “AI art” does not meet the same needs as real art, in the same way a chatbot that generates friendly words would not meet the same needs as a real friend.

Tech dudes do not understand the purpose of art or why people enjoy it https://t.co/MbEmjFGaNR

— Pander (@PanderShirts) September 29, 2026

Sure generative AI can produce a noise that sounds a lot like the noise made when a fiddler runs her bow across the strings. It can even produce an effect that looks like a video of a fiddler playing a fiddle at the same time. But there is no fiddler, and there is no fiddle, so it’s not fiddle music. It’s just something that SOUNDS like fiddle music.

The same is true of all music, and all art, and the entire range of ways human beings connect to each other. Merely looking and sounding like something is not the same as being that thing. They can generate a chatbot effect for you that looks and sounds like your dead husband, but it will never be your dead husband, and it would not be healthy for you to pretend it’s the same thing.

Generative AI fans frequently display their aversion to exploring the depths of their humanity in the way they’ll stand in public saying “Look, this machine can mimic the sounds of a musician, so normal music is obsolete!” It’s like, what? What do you think music is, exactly? Just noises with a beat you can dance to? I mean I guess that’s all it is for some people, but those people are having a very shallow experience of the thing that music is, and probably a very shallow experience of life in general.

An effect that simply goes through the motions of imitating art can only appeal to someone who has just been going through the motions of living their life. If you don’t understand the significance of the difference between real human connection and something that merely looks and sounds like it, then that means your whole life is about the appearances of things rather the things themselves. It doesn’t matter if your boyfriend really loves you, it just matters that he never leaves. It doesn’t matter if your wife really enjoys having sex with you, it only matters that she puts out and makes it fun for you. It doesn’t matter if your adult children enjoy spending time with you, it just matters that they turn up to family functions and show you the respect you feel you are owed.

People like this are missing out on so very, very much of the human experience, but they don’t know it because they’ve never explored anything outside their immediate comfort zone. They want custom-made music feeding them “infinite personalized tunes” that sounds like the songs they already know they like. They want custom-made podcasts of artificially generated voices feeding them political opinions they already agree with. They want a robotic spouse that caters to their every physical and egoic desire, and they’ll buy them up as soon as they become available.

Don’t be like them. Don’t live like that. Don’t life your life running from true human connection. Don’t be a coward hiding from your own inner dimensions. Dive into the depths of this crazy human adventure. Explore. Expand. Be vulnerable. Be brave. Otherwise you’re just killing time and waiting for death in the shallow end of the pool.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

I hate it when people say humanity’s problems will be solved by “artificial superintelligence” as though all we need to fix the cruelty and abusiveness in our world is an AI that is smarter than a human.

Mark Zuckerberg voiced this talking point again today in a Twitter thread claiming that “superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses.” Last month he said the following in a statement titled “The Future is for Everyone — The Path to a Positive AI Future”:

“In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life. As we get closer to this moment, it is important to develop a philosophy for how we can best use superintelligence to ensure it improves all of our lives, work, communities, freedom and safety.”

We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses. Meta already serves billions of people at scale and helps hundreds of millions of businesses reach customers. Today we are starting the next major pillar of our business, Meta…

— Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd) September 28, 2026

These talking points annoy me because it’s an absolutely specious claim that artificial superintelligence will benefit everyone. Humanity’s problems are not caused by a lack of intelligence, our problems are caused by greedy plutocrats like Zuckerberg. It’s like a serial killer telling us we can stop serial killing by making serial killers smarter.

The argument hinges on the premise that humanity is suffering because we’re just not smart enough to come up with the right solutions, when in reality that hasn’t been the case for a very long time. Humanity has had the technology and resources to solve all its major problems for generations; we’ve just chosen to use our technology and resources making rich people richer instead.

We’ve long had the ability to end extreme poverty, to stop destroying our biosphere, to stop waging wars, to stop pillaging the global south at unfair prices, to stop imposing starvation sanctions, to end genocides, to remove money from politics, to institute true democracy, to create a well-informed electorate free from propaganda brainwashing, and to provide everyone with a decent standard of living. This hasn’t failed to happen due to our lack of superintelligence, it has failed to happen because the people with the power and the money actively stop it from happening.

No amount of added cleverness is going to make plutocrats less greedy, make warmongers less bloodthirsty, make politicians less corrupt, make empire managers less tyrannical, make imperial propagandists less deceitful and manipulative, or make capitalists less exploitative and ecocidal. Give them artificial superintelligence and they’ll just use it to grab up more money and control, just like they’re doing with the AI of the present day.

We can already see that AI is not making the world a better place. It’s already taking away jobs, facilitating war crimes and mass surveillance, poisoning art, and making people crazy and stupid. We’re already witnessing the results of more intelligent AI. Continuing to say we just need the AI to be more intelligent is like taking a pill to get healthy, having a terrible reaction to the medicine, and then deciding we just need to dramatically increase the dose.

Artificial superintelligence isn’t going to solve all our problems because our problems don’t arise from insufficient intelligence. We don’t need artificial superintelligence, we need basic human kindness. We need justice. We need ethics. No matter how much intelligence we add to the AI soup, it’s never going to magically add up to simple human morality. Which is what we’re actually going to need if we’re going to create a healthy world.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image by Anthony Quintano from Honolulu, HI, United States — Mark Zuckerberg F8 2018 Keynote, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72122390

Video reading by Tim Foley:

The Wall Street Journal has a new article out titled “Why Are So Many Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?” about the rising levels of family estrangement in our society.

“Many experts believe that estrangements between adult children and their parents are becoming an epidemic in the U.S., just like divorce in the 1970s,” writes Elizabeth Bernstein. “Much like then, the movement is driven by a convergence of large societal trends — this time the rise of social-media algorithms, changing therapeutic approaches and a broadening definition of trauma.”

As has become the fashion these days, Bernstein largely pins the blame for this phenomenon on TikTok.

“Last month, more than 138,000 new videos that mentioned cutting off or going low-contact with parents were posted on TikTok, up more than 10-fold compared with August 2020,” Bernstein writes, adding that “More than 82% of the posts were by women.”

What gets very little consideration in Bernstein’s article is the much more obvious contributing factor to this rising trend: the fact that many parents are horrible to their children.

Well, this is sad and terrible:

“Many experts believe that estrangements between adult children and their parents are becoming an epidemic in the U.S.”

“Psychologists say young adults’ definition of harmful parental behavior is changing.”

They “consider ordinary conflict to be… pic.twitter.com/SnieId4zEI

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) September 26, 2026

The reason divorce became an “epidemic” in the 1970s (though I would never use that word for it) is because people stopped feeling pressured to remain trapped in abusive and hurtful marriages. This rising trend in family estrangement looks very much the same.

It turns out that in a secular society without a lot of rigidly enforce patriarchal cultural doctrine, you actually have to be a decent person to your children if you want them to have a continued relationship with you into adulthood. Gone are the days where your progeny would feel pressured to maintain a relationship with you even if you choose to be an asshole to them, as much as that fact might annoy your average aging wealthy conservative Wall Street Journal reader. 

You can no longer force your kids to have a relationship with you, in the same way you can no longer force your spouse to stay married to you. And just as the normalization of divorce has meant that spouses can no longer be abusive to each other if they want to remain married, the normalization of estrangement now means we as parents need to step up our game.

Without any enforceable cultural leverage to coerce our adult children to maintain a relationship with us, we need to make sure we’re giving them positive reasons to come calling. We need to be decent. We need to be kind. We need to be respectful and pleasant to be around. Because if we’re not, there’s no guarantee our kids will stay in our lives.

And that’s as it should be. There is no other type of relationship in which someone is expected to remain in contact with a person who is cruel to them. If I refused to be decent to my adult children, I would expect them to stay away from me. That’s completely normal.

I said this on Twitter a few hours ago and got dogpiled by conservatives calling me the devil incarnate. My notifications are currently full of angry people furiously defending their God-given right to treat their children like garbage and expect zero repercussions of any kind. Apparently conservatives are all about personal responsibility until you suggest that they are responsible for their own behavior toward their kids, because it makes them collapse into a bunch of blubbering crybabies.

I’m right, though. Of course I am. Be kind to your kids or they’ll stop talking to you. That’s the most normal position anyone could possibly put forward.

I have heard it said that the way our adult children treat us is our performance review for our job as parents. I couldn’t agree more. 

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

More and more humans are suffering from empire psychosis.

People who can’t go ten minutes without checking their phones, losing hours a day to social media and mindless scrolling.

People talking to chatbots, learning about the world from them, learning about life from them, making friends with them, forming relationships with them.

Binging on podcasts, binging on streaming services, binging on video games, binging on apps, binging on vapes, binging on treats delivered to their door by underpaid workers from bombed-out countries.

The bread was designed in a lab to be furiously addictive, and the circuses track your preferences to serve you up all your favorite performances.

Empire psychosis keeps us in a constant state of distraction and escapism, always scrambling to avoid the here and now like we’re trying to climb out of our own skins.

It’s a frenzied discontentedness. A persistent delusion that satisfaction exists right around the corner after the next restless squirm. It’s an artificially manufactured mental disorder. And it’s worth trillions of dollars.

In the capitalist empire, there is no value to be generated by contented people. Our minds must be continually prodded and diddled to manipulate us out of our natural serenity so that we are in a constant state of toil and dissatisfaction, at all times reaching for the next fix of the next product. Clever manipulators have figured out how to generate vast fortunes by harnessing the restlessness they deliberately stir up within us.

We are psychologically hammered with advertisements and consumerist messaging from mainstream culture to convince us that we need more than we have and that we aren’t okay the way we are. That we’re not beautiful enough, not stylish enough, not successful enough, not abundant enough. The products are designed to be dependence-forming so we need to buy them, and they’re designed to quickly become obsolete so that we need to keep buying more.

They trick us out of our natural state of contentedness and then sell it back to us. They deceive us into leaving our home and then charge us an admission price to come visit.

Something went wrong. Humanity went off course. They enclosed the commons, colonized the new world, constructed a tiered society of haves and have-nots, and now we’re all living like space aliens on our own home planet.

We do not have to keep suffering from their man-made madness. We can do the inner work necessary to come back to our own contentedness, and we can do the outer work necessary to take back what the manipulators have stolen from us.

We don’t need to keep consenting to this abusive relationship any longer. A healthy world is our birthright. We will tear down the madness machine and stand at peace in the soil of the planet we were born on.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

Tech plutocrats are the high-budget expression of the “everyone is twelve now” theory. You wanna go to Mars? Of course you do, you’re twelve. You think you can merge your consciousness with machinery and unlock the key to immortality? Hell yeah my twelve year-old homie. You’re gonna invent an Artificial Superintelligence God who will solve all our problems? Bless your twelve year-old heart.

Their visions for the future of humanity are never particularly wise or intelligent. It’s just a bunch of drugged-up rich guys using their vast fortunes to chart a course for our species that would sound totally awesome to the average preadolescent boy.

You ever hear about Jeff Bezos’ vision for our future? He brings it up once in a while. He wants to ship most of humanity offworld and have us all living in these giant spinning space tubes called O’Neill cylinders while only a few lucky individuals get to remain on humanity’s home planet. It’s true, look it up.

This is the best these freaks can come up with. Transhumanism. Space colonization. Virtual reality. ASI. Immortality. These are all visions which revolve around escape. Escaping from the human condition. Escaping from our planet. Escaping from reality. Running, running, running away in a mad scramble to get anywhere but here.

These aren’t positive visions for the future, they’re signs of deep psychological immaturity. They’re the symptoms of an inability to be with what is. Whenever you hear these guys bloviating about transcending our humanity or colonizing space they’re just telling you they’ve got a lot of unresolved early childhood trauma which led them to construct an entire personality around avoidance and restlessness.

They don’t know how to be at peace. Not with themselves, and not with the world. These are very emotionally primitive individuals. They are not wise. They are not kind. They are not happy. They are not even especially smart. They just have a particular kind of cleverness which has enabled them to succeed as parasitic middle men siphoning wealth off of other people’s labor in the specific type of dystopia we happen to live in.

And yet these are the men we’re allowing to rule our world. These are the people to whom we have handed the steering wheel of human destiny. A bunch of emotionally stunted manchilds who are drowning in a nonstop internal deluge of shame and inadequacy and unresolved mommy issues.

These are the men who have become our kings, because capitalism elevates whoever is wounded enough to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top. 

You trust these guys to shepherd us into a healthy world? They can’t even be here now, at peace in their own skins. Mainstream culture worships these people because they have a lot of money, but they’re walking train wrecks.

This isn’t going to cut it. We can’t led these infantile narcissists lead humanity into the future. We’ve got to create a better system for ourselves.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image by Daniel Oberhaus — Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99823440

Video reading by Tim Foley:

Doordash has reached a historic $131.5 million settlement to repay workers in New York City for wages the food delivery app stole from them over the last four years, which sounds like a big win for the little guy if you don’t think about it too hard.

The Hill reports:

“Under the settlement with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), which New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) and city officials announced on Tuesday, DoorDash will pay $115 million to 260,000-plus workers it either did not pay at all or paid late. The food delivery company will also pay more than $16 million in civil penalties and costs.”

So all Doordash has to do is return the money it stole and pay a microscopic fraction of its $13.7 billion yearly revenue in penalties, and that’s it. Nobody’s going to prison. Nobody was threatened with jail time. It wasn’t even a criminal case; it was an administrative enforcement action by New York City regulators. Doordash’s billionaire CEO Tony Xu is as free as a bird.

A hundred and fifteen million dollars.

What do you think would happen to you if you stole $115 million from your employer? 

Can you imagine that not being treated as a crime? Can you imagine going “Haha, ya got me! I’ll return the cash. Can’t blame a guy for trying!” and then paying a small fine and just going back to your life like it was no big deal?

Of course you can’t. You know you’d be arrested, handcuffed, prosecuted for grand larceny, and then spend many years behind bars.

Under capitalism it is strictly illegal for employees to steal from their employers, but if employers steal from their employees it’s not even a crime. It’s not even a petty misdemeanor. It’s perfectly legal.

Which is so obnoxious, because stealing from workers is obviously much more abusive and destructive than stealing from billionaire corporations. The wealthy executives of a gig economy app would not have their lives affected in the slightest by an employee stealing from their company, but workers who are struggling to pay their bills can be devastated by even a few missing dollars in their paycheck. 

Employers stealing from employees is also plainly worse than the reverse because when an employer steals from an employee, they’re not just stealing their money. They’re stealing their labor. They’re stealing their time, which is the one thing you can’t make more of in this life. They’re stealing slices of your lifespan which you would otherwise be spending with loved ones and doing things that fulfill you. They’re actually stealing your life.

And yet it’s only illegal for employees to steal from their employers. Employers stealing from employees? That’s just business.

This glaring disparity between the rights of employers and employees exists because capitalism is all about using state power to protect the interests of capital. The most ardent proponents of our present system like to contrast capitalism with communism by claiming that communism can only be enforced through abusive excesses of state power, as though we don’t see state power dropping the hammer on the working class every minute of every day throughout our society. In practice the most significant difference between a socialist state and a capitalist one is whose interests state power is used to protect.

We live in a tiered society where the people actually turning the wheels of civilization through their sweat and toil are legally inferior to the parasitic middle men who skim the profits from their labor. This is not justice, and this is not equality, as hard as the propagandists of the capitalist empire might try to indoctrinate us into believing the contrary.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

I strongly disagree with the idea that it’s unhelpful to bully celebrities about their position on Palestine. On the contrary, I think we should bully them more.

We tend to underestimate the consequences of the fact that all the most amplified voices in our society are millionaires. Under capitalism the people with the largest platforms and the biggest audiences are all wealthy enough to have a vested interest in preserving the status quo, so they’re reluctant to rock the boat politically in any major way.

When all the most influential voices in our society are creating the illusion that the system is more or less fine the way it is by what they say and what they don’t say, it cannot help but significantly influence public political opinion. In this way celebrities function as a kind of goalkeeper preventing dissident thought from reaching the minds of the masses.

Oh the victim, who’s crying for sympathy because he couldn’t afford to hire a band, so he’s all alone, the poor poor sod- who’s worth $400MIL – we need to give him all the sympathy in the world…

Nevermind the children in Gaza who are continually being bombed during a ceasefire… pic.twitter.com/DbeSvsqeg6

— jelinaangel (@judgejellz) September 20, 2026

When you see Ed Sheeran bawling his eyes out onstage and playing victim because people are criticizing his muteness on the moral issue of our time, he genuinely does feel as though something is being taken away from him. He was enjoying being able to relax in the lap of luxury without having to go against the grain of establishment power in any way, never saying anything which upsets the Zionist billionaires or the media-owning class whose infrastructure he built his lucrative career on. Now that comfortable setup has been taken away from him a bit, and he feels victimized by the inconvenience this has caused him.

This dynamic is what holds the entire construct of celebrity in place in our society. If you make the billionaires happy you get to be a millionaire, and if you make the billionaires unhappy you get discomfort and loss. If you please the plutocrats you get the carrot, and if you displease them you get the stick. This is true whether you’re talking about pundits, news anchors, musicians or movie stars.

This system of carrots and sticks is the main adhesive holding the propaganda apparatus of the western empire together. As westerners we are taught that we live in a free society which is far superior to the “tyrannical regimes” of the global south, because under the tyrannical regimes the news is state propaganda and the entertainment is heavily censored. In reality westerners are consuming tightly controlled propaganda every day of their lives, because all their most influential voices are being aggressively regulated by the carrots and sticks of wealthy capitalists.

The only weakness in this system, apparently, is that it only works if the public plays along with it. If enough people decide to denounce and defund the empire’s celebrity goalkeepers for their complicity in imperial abuses, it turns out that we’ve got a stick of our own. Make it too uncomfortable to toe the imperial line and you’ll start seeing celebrities reluctantly follow the moral leadership of the public, thereby further weakening the vice-like grip of the imperial narrative control apparatus on our collective consciousness.

So we should do so happily and without hesitation. It is perfectly moral to ruin a millionaire’s day for both-sidesing a genocide. It is perfectly ethical to bully people with large platforms until they take a public stand against the abuses of the empire which has made them obscenely wealthy. It won’t solve all our problems, but it will weaken the power of the mass-brainwashing machine of the capitalist empire which has been manipulating the public into believing we don’t urgently need revolutionary change.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No AI in any works.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

The biggest AI threat isn’t artificial superintelligence wiping out humanity in a fit of mechanical vengeance like some digital Old Testament God, it’s the same oligarchs and empire managers as usual inflicting the same evils and abuses as usual upon their fellow man. 

We’re already presently watching the empire building AI into its killing machines and causing all kinds of horrifying problems while these technologies become more and more complex and unpredictable. 

CNN reports that US military AI “almost started a war” with China when it hallucinated intelligence showing a Chinese ship transporting nuclear weapon components to Iran; US military planes were apparently already in the air preparing to attack the vessel before human intelligence picked up on the error.

NEW: An AI-assisted intel report sent the military scrambling to intercept a Chinese ship in the Middle East it believed was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.

It turned out to be a hallucination. And it "almost started a war." https://t.co/xXZHEE64M6

— Katie Bo Lillis (@KatieBoLillis) September 18, 2026

A recent Pentagon report has officially concluded that an over-reliance on Palantir’s AI-powered command-and-control system Maven contributed to the bombing of a school in Minab which killed 120 children attending classes on the first day of the US-Israeli war with Iran.

We learned early on in the Gaza holocaust that the IDF was using AI to help it bomb suspected Hamas members when they are at home with their families rather than when they are out in the battlefield using a program called “Where’s Daddy?” — a bit of Israeli humor about the fact that they would be killing the children of Palestinian resistance fighters when their fathers came home.

We’re seeing politicians like Bernie Sanders voice concerns that “AI could soon be smarter than humans and function outside of our control,” but the most obvious and imminent threat right now is not that artificial intelligence will outsmart us and escape our control, it’s that it is being fully controlled by humans who are stupid and evil.

Scientists and industry leaders have been increasingly clear: AI could soon be smarter than humans and function outside of our control.

For the sake of all of humanity, Trump and Xi must negotiate a treaty NOW to pause AI and ban superintelligence before it is too late. pic.twitter.com/nL0Ias2fDb

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 21, 2026

Again, we know for a fact that powerful nuclear-armed military forces are knitting AI into all their systems. We’re watching them do it, right in front of our faces. An increasingly complex and confusing element has been added to an environment of already tense and dangerous military standoffs around the world as the US and its allies work to absorb the few remaining nations who have managed to retain sovereignty into the imperial power umbrella. And yet recent weeks have seen the mass media flooded with punditry speculating about possible scenarios under which AI might perhaps wind up leading to human extinction.

We already know the most likely scenario under which AI will get us all killed. If it happens, it will be because rich and powerful sociopaths knit these technologies into war machinery that is designed for killing humans at mass scale. Duh. 

These developments are unfolding in the context of a frenetic new arms race with China in which nobody’s willing to tap the brake pedal for fear of falling behind. Any talk of regulation or slowing things down before they get out of control is dismissed because the competition-based systems which currently govern human behavior have thrust us into a nightmare of constant military expansionism and brinkmanship instead of collaboration and harmony, all fueled by the fact that this paradigm makes tech plutocrats and war profiteers obscenely wealthy.

That’s clearly the most immediate existential threat that AI poses to our species right now. There’s also the only slightly less frightening threat of artificial intelligence enabling our rulers to use mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems to stifle any revolutionary political movement before it gets off the ground, locking us into this freakish capitalist dystopia until the planet is an uninhabitable wasteland.

In any case, this isn’t a new threat. It’s the same old threat with new toys. Capitalism must end, and the empire must fall. Our very existence depends on 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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No AI used in any works.

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

Every so often I like to write out an explanation of who I am and what I’m trying to do here, for the benefit of new followers and for my own mental clarity.

The Caitlin Johnstone project is actually run by two people: myself and my husband Tim Foley, who co-authors all my written works. Tim and I fell in love in 2014, started writing together in 2016 after we got married, and in 2017 we launched the audience-funded platform you see today.

Everything we publish is unconditionally free to view without any paywalls or advertisements; all our funding comes from voluntary donations from readers and viewers who feel inspired to support what we do. All our work is copyright-free, so everyone is allowed to republish, reuse, reappropriate, translate, or outright copy anything we put out without asking permission or providing attribution, so you’ll see things we wrote pop up on all kinds of platforms all around the world in many different languages.

I’ve lived my whole life in Melbourne with some brief stays in the UK. I received a journalism degree from RMIT in 2003 but didn’t do any news media work because I’d learned that the legacy press was too corrupt to do actual journalism in. So instead I focused on raising my kids, healing my inner wounds, and becoming a conscious person.

Tim was born in Philadelphia and lived most of his life in California, where he worked in healthcare. We met in an online discussion forum about spiritual enlightenment in 2011, we fell in love in 2014, Tim moved to Australia in 2016, and we’ve been falling ever since.

This project is basically just an outgrowth of that ongoing romance. We don’t have kids together, so we spend our time making creativity babies in the form of essays, poetry, paintings and books. We are each other’s muse so we’re rarely at a loss for inspiration, which is why we’ve been able to write so prolifically all these years. Our ultimate goal is to help create a healthy world so that we can live extremely long lives together in a harmonious future.

We have long conversations every day about what’s going on in the world and where we’re headed as a species, and our daily articles are generally outgrowths of those conversations. I function as the editor-in-chief of our project, determining the shape, feel, and ideological direction of our work, and having the final say in whatever gets published. Tim does most of the readings and videos because he’s good at reading aloud and I dislike appearing on camera.

Ideologically I sit well to the left side of the political spectrum; I am frequently called a communist, which is fine by me. I want a world where everyone has what they need, where plutocrats can’t leverage obscene amounts of wealth to manipulate our society to their advantage, and where we live in harmony with the global south instead of enslaving its people using military violence and economic coercion. I oppose tyranny, war, militarism, capitalism, imperialism, Zionism, the western intelligence cartel, mass surveillance, government secrecy, police brutality, censorship, propaganda, and the suppression of journalism. I despise racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, western supremacism, and all prejudices which harm marginalized populations.

I believe we live in a tyrannical mind-controlled dystopia at the center of an empire that is fueled by human blood, and that we ordinary people can change this by using the power of our numbers to force the creation of a just system. Westerners are currently too propagandized to understand the urgent need for revolutionary change, but I see signs that we are beginning to awaken from that trance. 

Ultimately what’s needed is a radical transformation of human consciousness away from our self-destructive egoic patterning. We know that this is possible on an individual scale in the process commonly known as spiritual enlightenment, so there exists within us the possibility of such a transformation on a collective level as well. Anyone who has ever had a spiritual awakening knows you can hear the same teaching or pointer a thousand times before it finally hits home and rips your mind wide open, so just because we haven’t yet become a conscious species doesn’t mean we can’t become one.

It’s all about helping humanity see through its various illusions and delusions so that we can wake up to reality and create a healthy world. Everything I publish is pointed at this in some way. That’s what this project is and will continue to be, and I am deeply honored that so many people have been eager to come along for the journey.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No AI used in any works.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

I still believe humanity is headed toward a mass awakening, as unfashionable as that is to admit here in the late 2020s.

The fashionable thing to say these days is that everything’s fucked and we are headed to our doom, and that if anything changes it will be because the insanity of our capitalist system causes our material conditions to deteriorate so drastically that we are forced into revolution to survive. That things are bad because we’re a rotten people with selfish hearts who haven’t forced the revolutionary changes the world needs because, deep down, we actually like things the way they are.

People who want to look cool and smart in revolutionary political circles tend to say that if a mass-scale transformation of human consciousness were going to happen, it would have happened by now. That everyone’s already basically aware that we live in an abusive, propaganda-saturated dystopia ruled by tyrants, therefore our continued compliance with status quo politics is a conscious and deliberate choice made by the overwhelming majority of the western world.

But here’s the thing: anyone who has taken a deep dive down the rabbit hole of human consciousness and come out the other side knows it doesn’t actually work that way. Not on a personal level, anyhow.

Anyone who has had an authentic transformational awakening after a prolonged period of spiritual seeking will have experienced a sloppy, awkward, tumble of a journey into eventual freedom from egoic delusion. It’s not pretty. It doesn’t happen the way the mind imagines it happening. It doesn’t unfold in linear fashion, and, while it might have significant climactic moments after which nothing is ever the same, it doesn’t unpack all at once. It’s a clumsy, two-steps-forward-one-step-back ordeal whose most prominent characteristic is an absence of control.

But it does eventually happen. After a chaotic, unpredictable, frequently uncomfortable internal adventure, there’s a freedom, clarity, gracefulness and joy the likes of which you never could have imagined before the avalanche began.

I see no reason to believe our collective awakening should be any different. It’s not going to be a neat and tidy affair. It’s not going to look like the hippies imagined back in the sixties, with a prevalence of psychedelic drugs leading to a swift societal movement away from egocentric psychology and dominator politics. But we’ll get there. We are in the process of getting there already.

We are already a much more conscious species than we were at the turn of this century. Our ability to network and share information has exploded in ways that have turned us into a fundamentally different sort of animal. Young people care about a genocide which poses no direct threat to them as passionately as their grandparents cared about a war in Vietnam which they were being personally drafted to fight in. Concepts like “trauma” and “inner healing” are now household terms that our parents and grandparents were only ever dimly aware of. Any skillful spiritual teacher who’s been helping people reach enlightenment for a few decades will tell you that humans are popping out of their egos far more readily and frequently than they used to be. I myself am seeing the people around me in my personal life awaken and heal in ways I’d never dared hope for a few years ago.

I’ve seen too much to believe we cannot become a conscious species. I am more convinced than ever that we are headed there already. It’s going to be a shambling, shuffling mess of a journey, but we’ll get there. 

The human potential for spiritual enlightenment has long been an unaddressed elephant in the room in our estimations of what we can achieve as a species, but that elephant has been loudly clearing its throat as of late. 

We can’t run from our true nature forever.

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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 feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No AI used in any works.

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Video reading by Tim Foley:

Julian Assange is officially back on Twitter, restoring to the world an important voice we were robbed of by the US empire’s years-long campaign to silence the WikiLeaks founder via lifelong imprisonment for forbidden acts of journalism.

Not everyone will remember it but there was a time when this was almost impossible to imagine. It seemed almost certain that this man was going to die in Belmarsh Prison or spend his remaining years in some hellhole in America. 

Now whenever my nephew catches me or my husband expressing pessimism about something working out, he tells us “Hey. Assange is free now.” It’s become our family code for “Anything’s possible. Don’t give up hope.”

We should really try to appreciate this. Never let hope die. A better world is possible. Anything can be.

I'm back. https://t.co/2e58azeJkt

— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) September 17, 2026

In other news, it’s good to see the world rejecting Ed Sheeran’s policy of feigned neutrality on the Gaza issue. “I don’t pick sides” is a fallacy when there’s a massive power imbalance and a clear aggressor, especially when your own country is partially responsible for what’s happening. If your husband is abusing your child and you do nothing, you’re not a neutral party in that scenario, and when your kid grows up you’ll probably be blamed just as much as the father. 

A modern military force hammering a giant concentration camp full of colonized people using high-tech weapons of mass murder with the help of your tax dollars is not a “war” that you get to be “neutral” towards. It’s a genocide, and you’re either for it or against it. There is no comfortable third option where you get to avoid picking a side and also avoid looking like an asshole.

One of the most idiotic talking points you’ll see these days is that it’s bad to criticize Israel without also criticizing Hamas. It’s like, what do you mean? You’re saying I can’t criticize a nuclear-armed high-tech military committing war crimes with the backing of my own country and its allies unless I also criticize a tiny group of besieged militants? You’re telling me I can’t say anything about the abuses of an apartheid state whose supporters are relentlessly assaulting my right to free speech and eroding civil liberties throughout the western world, unless I in the same breath also criticize a few thousand Palestinian resistance fighters who have done me no wrong? What the hell are you even talking about?

No I’m just going to criticize Israel, thank you very much. I am going to criticize the state whose genocidal atrocities are supported by the power structure under which I live and pay taxes, whose support network is systematically demolishing the rights of me and my countrymen. If you don’t like it, go fuck yourself.

If you want to enrage an Israel apologist, tell them you won't listen to the mountains upon mountains of verbiage they throw at you explaining why it's actually fine to drop bombs on buildings full of children. pic.twitter.com/61JI50IozZ

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 15, 2026

I have a few more thoughts for today.

Firstly, I love it when I see Israel apologists whining about people responding to their screeds with “I ain’t reading all that. Free Palestine.” All hasbarists have is endless mountains of verbiage explaining why it’s fine and normal to drop military explosives on buildings full of children, so it enrages them when someone takes away their only weapon. 

They don’t have truth and morality on their side, so all they have is words, words, words, words, words. Take that away from them and they’ve got nothing, and they know it.

Imagine if you will a world where every human rights group on earth is lying about one specific country. pic.twitter.com/QAQL24e6Dh

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 16, 2026

And finally, new rule: if you deny that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, then the onus is on you to provide a convincing explanation for why every human rights group on earth (including the Israeli ones) agrees it’s a genocide.

If you hold that there’s an antisemitic conspiracy between all human rights groups, then the burden of proof is on you to show that conspiracy taking place.

If you hold that there’s been an Islamist conspiracy to infiltrate all human rights groups, then you need to provide proof of that conspiracy.

If you hold that there is no conspiracy and it’s just a coincidence that all human rights groups happen to think Israel is committing human rights abuses, then you need to provide a convincing argument why every institution of human rights experts coincidentally came to the same conclusion and are still incorrect.

You can’t just say “I disagree with their findings” or “That one group made an argument I find weak” or “It’s not a genocide because blah blah blah”. You need to address the unanimous consensus, because that’s part of the debate now.

Even flat earthers and climate deniers who claim all the experts are wrong at least try to provide arguments for why there’s a secret conspiracy to amplify faulty conclusions in the scientific community, but deniers of the Gaza genocide somehow seem to think they don’t need to address their dissent with the overwhelming consensus of experts in the relevant field.

You don’t get to do that, guys. That’s not a thing. If you’re claiming the experts are lying about one specific country, then you need to provide a detailed and believable explanation for why that might be.

I’ve yet to encounter a single genocide denier who can do this, online or otherwise. Not one.

P.S. Claiming you can’t accuse Israel of genocide until the ICJ rules it a genocide is exactly the same as claiming you can’t say Charlie Kirk was murdered until his killer has been officially convicted of murder.

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

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Feature image by Kacy Bao / WikiPortraits, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=166320976

Video reading by Tim Foley:

There are some truly psychopathic ghouls in the Trump administration, including Trump himself, but as of today I am convinced that US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is the absolute worst of them.

As Israeli officials become more open about their plans for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip while the Macklemore controversy refocuses public attention on the abuses of Zionism, pro-Israel spinmeisters in both the mass media and the US government are falling all over themselves trying to regain control of the narrative.

During a frenzied ejaculation of propaganda on Newsmax about Macklemore and the pro-Palestine movement, Huckabee repeated long-discredited atrocity propaganda about the October 7 Hamas attack to explain why nobody should oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“These are the people that raped women in front of their own children,” Huckabee told Newsmax host Rob Schmitt. “That hacked off their genitals in front of their families. That lit elderly people on fire and burned them to death while they sat in wheelchairs. That did unspeakable things to children. That cut the heads off of babies and put other babies in an oven while they were alive. Now anyone who cheers that, they’re not just sick, they’re psychopathic.”

“Now if anybody says well that stuff didn’t really happen, well, we know it did, Rob, because Hamas taped themselves doing it. We have it on video,” Huckabee claimed.

To be clear, every single thing Huckabee says here is a lie. The claims about beheaded babies and infants cooked in ovens were soundly debunked in 2023, including in the Israeli press. There is zero video footage anywhere of any of the atrocities Huckabee describes. Israel apologists often make up all kinds of false claims about the video footage recorded on October 7 by Hamas GoPro cameras, trusting that the average member of the public will be too squeamish to watch the violent footage for themselves, but I assure you if you care to dive down that video rabbit hole you will find zero evidence of any of the acts Huckabee just listed.

It’s hard to find words to describe how evil this is. Huckabee knows he’s lying when he says these things. He’s 100 percent aware that he’s advancing atrocity propaganda to justify further Israeli atrocities. 

When Huckabee first repeated these claims in October and November 2023 you could say maybe he didn’t know he was spreading atrocity propaganda because it took a few weeks for mainstream outlets to debunk the claim and for awareness of its inaccuracy to spread into mainstream discourse.

When he repeated the claim in September 2025, you could argue that PERHAPS Huckabee was just living in a tightly insulated Zionist echo chamber and was somehow still unaware that the claim had been comprehensively disproven.

Mike Huckabee claims on Oct 7th there was “the beheading of babies in the presence of their mothers”

This did not happen – but babies were beheaded in Gaza by Israeli bombs, you can see it on your phone. Huckabee will never mention this, let alone mourn for the children of Gaza https://t.co/3gLs2XvU9R

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 2, 2026

But as he repeats this claim in May and again September of 2026, after being widely and repeatedly decried for spreading lies and atrocity propaganda, he is indisputably looking the world in the eye and lying to our faces with full and complete knowledge of what he is doing. 

Which shows you that he’s been knowingly lying this entire time. This is a Trump-appointed US government official knowingly lying to the public so they will continue to support Israel’s US-backed abuses of the Palestinian people.

Think about how fucked up you’d have to be inside to do something like this. And this freak has the gall to call Palestine supporters “psychopathic”.

In that same deceitful, propagandistic Newsmax interview, Rob Schmitt said it’s actually the opponents of genocide who are falling victim to propaganda.

“It’s amazing how effective propaganda can be, how blinding it can be to what you would think would be otherwise reasonable people,” Schmitt told Huckabee, adding, “I hate to say this but it feels like the Islamist crowd is winning this war of propaganda. It feels to me now that there is more of an anger and a fury towards Israel than there is towards the heinous things that we saw on October seventh.”

Right, so, according to Trump’s henchmen in his administration and in the right wing press, long-debunked atrocity propaganda about Palestinians is actually true, and it’s actually the people who think Israel is committing criminal acts who are propagandized, and it’s actually the people opposing genocide who are the psychopaths. Up is down, night is day. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

The western world is ruled by lying, manipulative criminals. Revolution can’t come soon enough.

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2