Caitlin Johnstone

And Other Notes

Reading by Tim Foley:

❖

An ongoing internal US military investigation has reportedly found the United States responsible for a Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian girls’ school which killed at least 175 people at the beginning of the US-Israeli onslaught.

Remember all the hasbarists and empire apologists who said it was a misfired Iranian missile that hit the school. Remember how aggressively and uniformly they all pushed this lie, including the president of the United States. Then understand that they’re going to keep lying like this throughout the entire war.

Remember Secretary of War Pete Hegseth boasting about how the US has gotten rid of “stupid rules of engagement” intended to protect civilians, tough talking about how “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

Those words land a bit different now that we know he was talking about mass murdering little girls.

In hindsight I guess it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that the guy who wrote a book called “American Crusade” immediately changed his title to Secretary of War and initiated a crusade against the Muslim world.

❖

Queensland police have begun making arrests of protesters who utter the now-illegal slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” with one demonstrator facing charges which could see him imprisoned for up to two years.

As I’ve said before, this new Queensland state law is the single most bat shit insane assault on free speech in Australian history, which is a very, very high bar. Zionism is poisoning our country and making everything crazy. There is no greater threat to free speech in our society than Israel and its supporters.

❖

Everyone on social media is making fun of the latest narrative that Iran is planning a drone attack on California, which many are calling an obvious setup for an impending false flag. 

This is an entirely reasonable assumption, but it’s worth mentioning that Iran would be absolutely within its rights to bomb the United States right now. It says so much about how divorced Americans are from the reality of the horrors their government inflicts upon other countries that the possibility of Iran bombing the United States while Tehran is being turned into a human slaughterhouse even raises an eyebrow. 

❖

For as long as I’ve been doing commentary I’ve been hearing experts and analysts say Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz if it comes under attack from the United States. This didn’t blindside anybody. They knew it would happen, and they chose to start this war anyway.

❖

It’s nuts how a huge segment of the Christian religion has been revised and restructured to now completely revolve around giving military support to a nation that’s younger than Dolly Parton.

Christian Zionism didn’t become a mainstream political force until the 1970s. For two millennia Christianity trotted along without any modern state called “Israel” to pay attention to, and even after that state’s whole-cloth creation in 1948 most Christians went decades without taking much notice. It wasn’t until freaks like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham began herding Christians into the belief that God commands them to vote for politicians who’ll send Apache helicopters to Tel Aviv that this psychotic worldview achieved meaningful purchase in public consciousness.

And at that point it actually transformed into an entirely different religion. For those branches of Christianity, the central figure was no longer Jesus, the Bible or the Church, but this brand new ethnostate run by western immigrants which cannot exist without nonstop military violence. They torched two thousand years of theology and tradition and burnt the whole thing to the ground, and in its place they built up a late-20th century religion which revolves around sending US war machinery to west Asia.

I’m not saying Christianity was a wonderful religion that did nothing wrong prior to the advent of Christian Zionism, but it was undeniably a completely different faith from one which places military support for the modern state of Israel as its central and foremost value. And it’s just plain bizarre how rarely people notice this and talk about it.

❖

There’s been another synagogue attack, this one in Michigan, reportedly by a man whose family members have been killed by Israeli forces in Lebanon.

Drop Site’s Ryan Grim reports, “The man who rammed his explosives-laden truck into a Michigan synagogue today was named Ayman Ghazaleh, according to a source familiar with the situation. Ghazaleh posted photos overnight of his family members, including young children, who were killed in a recent Israeli attack on the town of Mashghara, Lebanon.”

You know the drill by now.

Step 1: Help Israel murder children in genocides and wars of aggression. 

Step 2: Wait for blowback in the form of extremist attacks in the west. 

Step 3: Use the blowback to justify authoritarian domestic policies in the name of fighting terrorism. 

Step 4: Repeat from Step 1.

❖

They built an entire empire around extracting resources and labor from the global south to supply the citizenry of the imperial core with bread and circuses that are just barely cheap enough to keep them from guillotining the billionaires who own and run everything.

__________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Reading by Tim Foley:

❖

People tell me, “It’s possible to oppose this war AND oppose the Iranian regime. You can denounce BOTH.”

Sure you can. But you shouldn’t.

You should not do this. You should not be a pro bono Pentagon propagandist in the middle of a US war of immense consequence. You should not do the hasbarists’ job for them. Make them do their own job themselves.

This war already has a huge number of propagandists screaming “REGIME BAD” at the top of their lungs in order to ensure that the slaughter continues. You don’t need to add your voice to the chorus, and you shouldn’t. You should not help them manufacture consent for more human butchery. You should be using your voice solely and exclusively to end the butchery your government and its allies are inflicting on human beings.

All your “REGIME BAD” sloganeering accomplished was paving the way to the carnage you see before you today. Your self-righteous denunciations of the Iranian government failed to expand the rights of a single Iranian woman or LGBTQ individual. All you accomplished was helping to grease the wheels for a war of unfathomable horror, ensuring that all Iranians now live under more fear and misery than ever before.

If you live under the western empire, you have an ethical obligation to use your voice responsibly in that context. You don’t get to just irresponsibly feed into an active war propaganda campaign by regurgitating the same regime change narratives about an empire-targeted country as the US and Israeli governments, and then pretend this doesn’t make you culpable for the consequences of your actions. If your words help grease the wheels of the war machine, then you bear partial moral responsibility for what the war machine does with your assistance.

You don’t get to just pretend that responsibility doesn’t exist. The families who are being torn apart with the help of your pro bono war propaganda efforts do not care about your anarchist or Trotskyist “all tyranny is equally bad” political philosophy or how good your virtuous purity posturing makes you feel about yourself. All they experience is the consequences of your actions.

As a westerner, your one and only duty is to oppose the depravity of the western empire. That’s your only job. Don’t lean out the window of the Empire of Perpetual Bloodlust to wag your finger at empire-targeted countries in the global south. It’s obnoxious.

Curb the murderousness of your own government and its allies. THAT’S your job. If you get your job done, THEN come talk to me about how bad and wrong some random government in west Asia looks to you. Until then, shut the fuck up and do your job.

❖

The worst people in the world are currently pretending to believe Iran just went nuts and started randomly firing missiles at its neighbors in order to be evil. https://t.co/lLRObgjq3y

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 10, 2026

❖

Everyone’s always telling me to mind my own business and write about Australia instead of the war in Iran. Meanwhile Australia has added to its already extensive involvement in this war by sending war machinery to help defend against Iranian missile strikes in the United Arab Emirates.

So Australia isn’t just joining another American war, we’re also defending the fucking UAE — one of the most evil countries on earth. All that carnage you’ve been seeing in Sudan? That was backed by the UAE. Those emaciated kids you were seeing in Yemen a few years ago? Starved by the UAE in collaboration with Saudi Arabia, with the backing of the US and its allies. It was bad enough when we were selling these freaks mountains of weapons, now we’re actively defending them from the consequences of their ally’s unprovoked attack on Iran.

Our alliance with Washington poisons the soul of this entire continent.

❖

The 2015 Iran nuclear deal was working fine; anyone who says otherwise is a lying warmonger. Trump and his handlers torched the JCPOA in 2018 because it was the primary obstacle preventing them from getting to the war that is currently happening.

❖

What do I care? I yell that during sex. https://t.co/jY82jcEgZf

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 7, 2026

❖

Iran is reportedly preparing to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz to block shipping, which will surprise nobody who knows anything about why the US empire held off on waging this war in the first place.

Sean McCarthy writes on Twitter, “For literally 45 years US planners have discussed this exact scenario and always decided against war with Iran for this reason. It took an incredible combination of blackmail, graft, lobby money and end time prophecy lunatics for Israel to make the US commit imperial suicide.”

This is what’s so crazy about all this: every reason it was a bad idea to go to war with Iran in the past is still a very valid reason why it’s a bad idea to go to war with Iran.

It didn’t surprise anyone when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz; they always knew that would happen if this war started.

It didn’t surprise anyone when Iran started destroying US military assets in surrounding Arab states; they always knew that would happen if this war started.

It didn’t surprise anyone that Iran would dig in and rely on its powerful military and invasion-proof terrain to repel a US-Israeli offensive; they always knew that would happen if this war started.

None of this is catching anyone who knew anything off-guard. It’s playing out exactly how leaders, military officials and analysts on both sides have always said it would.

Nothing changed about the reasons not to attack Iran. All that’s changed is Washington’s willingness to try putting a very bad idea into practice.

_______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

Watching Amazon Prime while the Iranians burn.
Stuffing our mouths with cheesysugarbacon
while the sky turns black over Tehran.
Laughing without smiling.
Laughing with full mouths and empty eyes
while their water mixes with oil and blood.

“Hoho this will hurt Trump in the midterms”
the liberal chortles,
masturbating furiously
while ruined parents pull ruined schoolbags
out of ruined schools.
Frolicking on lawns with hamburgers in both fists
doing patchouli tai chi
in clothes made by slaves
as black rain waters gardens
of severed limbs and blown-out eyeballs.

This is our culture.
This is our religion.
Praying to Pornhub while children scream,
telling ourselves it will all be worth it
when Iranian women can do OnlyFans
to pay for boob jobs and butt lifts
and go to Capitalist Heaven when they die.
Jizzing Taco Bells and bail bonds firms
all over the global south,
our bellies full of the flesh of children,
our veins full of plastic
and our mouths full of Lexapro,
dancing at the ballroom covered in blood and brains,
gyrating to AI-generated music
cranked up to maximum volume
to hide the sounds of the explosions
and the gasps of our dying souls.

Oh I’m sorry, 
am I bumming you out?
Have a hamburger and a Xanax.
Everything’s fine.
This is all normal.
Let’s pick the bits of skull and teeth from our hair
and go party.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Reading by Tim Foley:

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe the United States wages wars to promote humanitarian interests and bring freedom and democracy to oppressed populations.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe that US soldiers fight and die to protect their country and its citizens.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe US military interventionism in the middle east has anything to do with women’s rights or making life better for women.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe good things come from the US military attacking middle eastern nations and toppling their governments.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe the US government tells the truth about its wars and the reasons it wages them.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe the US are the Good Guys who are fighting evil Bad Guys like the heroes in a children’s cartoon show.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe the US government is less murderous and tyrannical than the Iranian government.

It’s not okay for grown adults to swallow obvious atrocity propaganda about horrific actions allegedly perpetrated by a US-targeted government.

It’s not okay for grown adults to consume western news media about a war without extreme skepticism about all the information they’re being fed.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe the US fights wars for self-defense.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe the government that allows its own citizens to die of poverty and disease cares deeply about the plight of the Iranian people.

It’s not okay for grown adults to support this war because of some shit that was written in the Bible.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe the life of an Iranian matters less than the life of an American.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe the US military is used to make the world a better place.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe this war will make Iran more free and democratic.

It’s not okay for grown adults to believe this war will benefit anyone besides Israel and western oligarchs.

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

❖

The US soldiers who are getting killed in the war with Iran were not heroes. They did not die defending their country. They did not die fighting to protect Americans. They died advancing the geostrategic agendas of oligarchs and empire managers which benefit ordinary Americans in no way.

It’s important not to valorize these people for two reasons. Firstly, it assists US military recruitment by falsely portraying these imperial stormtrooper careers as noble and heroic. Secondly, it falsely frames the war they died in as a righteous cause which is making the world a better place, rather than as a war of aggression against a nation that posed literally zero threat to their homeland.

These are not harmless little white lies. They are extremely destructive propaganda narratives which facilitate acts of mass military slaughter on real human beings.

Don’t assist the warmongers in circulating these lies. Don’t pretend they are true to help people feel nice feelings about the dead soldiers. People should not be feeling nice feelings about the dead soldiers. People should be angry and upset, and they should be demanding that this horrific war end immediately.

Those soldiers did not die for any noble reason. They died for money, for power, and for Israel. They wasted their lives, and they died for stupid, unworthy reasons. Don’t let anyone claim otherwise.

❖

On February 28, President Trump told Axios that the war on Iran could end “in two or three days”.

On March 1, Trump released a video message saying the war would “take four weeks or less.”

On March 2, Trump said from the White House that the war is “projected four to five weeks”, adding the US military has the “capability to go far longer than that”.

On March 4, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the press, “you can say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight.”

On March 6, Politico reported that the Pentagon is planning for the war to run through September.

I wonder what they’ll be saying after September?

❖

Proportionate? Iran's not trying to be proportionate. Proportionate would be for Iran to kill Trump. Kill his entire cabinet. Kill his opposition. Bomb the shit out of New York and Los Angeles. Bomb a school full of American kids. Bomb some hospitals. That would be proportionate. https://t.co/3VzLZBrKJQ pic.twitter.com/6SqD2FlXNc

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 2, 2026

❖

The left’s resistance to the Iran war has been relatively muted and inadequate up to this point. One reason for this is because a lot of pro-regime change voices inserted themselves into the pro-Palestine movement and have been promoting their view for three years.

I used to follow a few pro-Palestine accounts on TikTok and Instagram who sound great when they’re talking about Gaza but suddenly transform into Lindsey Graham whenever they’re talking about Iran. I mean I’m exaggerating slightly — they dress it up in leftist-sounding language etc — but functionally their position hasn’t been much different from that of Marco Rubio. I don’t have time to get into a big flame war with minor internet personalities so I’m not going to call anyone out or cite specific examples, but the long and short of it is they wanted regime change and promoted the idea that we should all “center Iranian voices,” ie the voices of warmongering Iranian diaspora.

That’s been happening throughout the pro-Palestine movement, both online and off, and it’s put a wobble on people’s confidence when it comes to resisting Trump’s latest mass atrocity.

This idea that we need to defer to Iranian diaspora about the morality of this war is bat shit insane, and does not deserve to be taken seriously. Too many leftists have let warmongers of Iranian descent bully them into silence on this front, in exactly the same way they let western Jews bully them into silence about Palestine for decades. Their wholesome leftist sensibilities get exploited by cynical manipulators because they want to be receptive to what they perceive as a marginalized group, and it leads them to espouse the exact same foreign policy positions as the CIA and the US State Department.

This is stupid, and it needs to stop. Your instincts about the horrific nature of this war are correct. Anyone who told you not to oppose this is an asshole. Don’t let anyone shout you down and shut you up, regardless of where their family happens to come from. Shout right back at them. Tell them to shut up. You are right, and they are wrong. Get out there and start resisting this thing.

❖

Blumenthal: I am more fearful than ever after this briefing, that we may be putting boots on the ground pic.twitter.com/LYyNzE5yiH

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 3, 2026

I don’t understand people who fret about sending American boots on the ground in a war of aggression that’s already slaughtering hundreds of civilians every day. These people are like space aliens to me. I cannot for the life of me imagine what it would be like to inhabit a mind that sees bombing civilians as fine, and only becomes “fearful” of a horrific military conflict if it will kill a lot of soldiers from the same country as you.

❖

CNN has a write-up titled “One Tehran resident was hoping for war, but the death of a friend in a bombing raid ‘destroyed’ him”, which reports the following:

“A resident of Tehran who spoke with CNN on Friday said that he had been hoping for a war that would topple Iran’s ruling government, but the death of his friend in a bombing raid ‘destroyed’ him.

“‘I was waiting for war, I was begging for it,’ he told CNN. ‘I knew that there will be sadness and pain, but I didn’t expect to get involved so quick.’”

I’m sorry to be insensitive but what the fuck did pro-war Iranians think “please bomb our country” was asking for? What did they think that would look like in practice?

This is why you need to be dismissive of EVERYONE who supports this war. Even Iranian diaspora, and even Iranians in Iran. Nobody who wants the US and Israel to bomb the place where their family lives truly understands what it is they’re asking for.

They’re not interfacing with reality in their worldview; they’ve bought into the war propaganda and ingested a fantasy, just like all the shitbrained warmongering westerners. Nobody with a truth-based relationship with reality would ever ask for this.

Now they’ve got what they asked for, and they’re probably going to watch their country get bombed to rubble and then plunged into chaos and instability for the foreseeable future as the US and Israel try to create a gigantic Libya in west Asia.

Sometimes you need to tell people to shut the fuck up and stop demanding crazy acts of war, regardless of what country their family happens to be from.

_______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

Young people keep asking me if this was what the Iraq invasion was like. I’ve been telling them “Sort of, but this is way dumber and crazier.”

There were fairly intelligent people who bought into the Iraq war propaganda. Many anti-war folk assumed Saddam probably did have weapons of mass destruction — they just didn’t buy into the narrative that war was the answer. There really were interventionists who sincerely believed the war could do good things for the Iraqi people.

This is nothing like that. Only the most shitbrained of morons sincerely believe the narratives supporting the Trumpanyahu administration’s attack on Iran. Mostly it’s just liars and manipulators cynically pretending to believe the stories about nuclear weapons and massacred protesters and bringing freedom and democracy to the Iranian people, because they want Iran to be bombed.

This time they’re not even pretending to care about the will of the American people. They’re not even pretending to care about humanitarian interests or the future of the people they are bombing. They’re just spouting extremely obvious lies that get fact-checked and debunked by the mainstream media in real time, and then murdering people and bragging about it.

I’ve spent years, decades, obsessing over the Bush Administration’s Iraq WMD lies, writing about them, debunking them.

I can think of no lie about Iraq WMDs told by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al that comes even close to the enormity and absurdity of this lie from Donald Trump. https://t.co/fVR5sZT5ri

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) March 5, 2026

The Iraq invasion was an unforgivable mass atrocity of unfathomable evil, but looking back on it you can understand how a person acting in good faith could have been taken in by the post-9/11 hysteria and the uniform war propaganda of the mass media. There was an argument put forward that Saddam Hussein would be replaced with a government that serves the interests of the Iraqi people, and then the US coalition really did stay in the country and build up a new regime to run things. Compared to what we’re seeing now, it’s almost quaint.

This is just open savagery. The US and Israel are pursuing the Libya model with Iran: smashing and decapitating the nation and then leaving the people to pick up the pieces and deal with all the chaos, lawlessness and sectarian conflict that ensues. They intend to plunge a nation of 90 million people into mass-scale strife and potential state collapse or balkanization, and then casually stroll away from the wreckage in cool indifference to the suffering they just unleashed upon the world.

They make no claim to be replacing the Iranian government with a better one. They make no claim to be bringing freedom and democracy to an oppressed people. They’re selling WMD lies and atrocity propaganda, but only in the most half-assed and low-energy of ways, with no interest in whether anyone actually believes them. Mostly they’re just destroying an ancient nation because they can, and looking at the world saying “Yeah we’re thugs. What are you gonna do about it?”

This is the new George W Bush. Trump is what Bush metamorphoses into when it emerges from its red cocoon. The crazier the US empire gets, the more insane its managers are becoming.

_____________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Reading by Tim Foley:

Iran is better than the United States. The United States is worse than Iran.

This is true not because Iran is especially good, but because the United States is especially evil.

Iran isn’t blanketing a major metropolis with military explosives, killing over a thousand people including hundreds of children. The United States is doing this with its partner in crime Israel.

Iran isn’t continuously bombing and invading countries around the world, toppling governments, circling the globe with hundreds of military bases, targeting civilian populations with siege warfare and brandishing nuclear weapons at its enemies in the name of securing planetary domination. Only the United States is.

The US empire is the single most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth, by an extremely massive margin. No one else comes anywhere remotely close. Not Iran. Not anybody. Every government in the world is morally superior to the most evil government, and the most evil government is the United States.

Whenever I say this I get US empire apologists going “We’re only the ones fighting the wars and dropping the bombs because we happen to be the ones with the power to do so!”

But that’s false. The US isn’t the world’s most vicious government because it happens to be the most powerful, it’s the most powerful government because it’s the most vicious. It’s the power structure which was willing to do whatever it takes to rule the world, no matter how profoundly evil.

Genocides. Starvation sanctions. Nuclear brinkmanship. Imperialist extraction. The deliberate creation of failed states and humanitarian catastrophes. Policies designed to keep entire regions in a continuous state of division and strife. The United States and the globe-spanning empire structured around it have inflicted depravities upon our species which cry out to the heavens for vengeance. If you could truly comprehend the scale of the suffering it has created over the years, even for a second, you would never stop screaming.

Another objection I’ll encounter when I make these observations is “Well, I’d rather live in the US than Iran!”

And it says so much about the western worldview that people think this is an argument. Sure it’s probably nicer to live in the United States than Iran, especially now, and certainly ever since the US has been deliberately strangling the Iranian economy with the explicitly stated goal of making its citizenry so miserable they wage a civil war against their government. 

But it’s so revealing that westerners see someone saying Iran is better than the United States and think it’s a statement about where they personally would prefer to live, because it shows how completely invisible US warmongering is in their worldview. Washington’s acts of mass military slaughter simply do not count as immoral or abusive behavior in their eyes, because they are being inflicted on foreigners overseas. So they automatically assume the comparison is asking which country would make your feelings feel nicer to live in as an individual.

The fact that the US government happens to export the majority of its abusiveness to other countries outside its own borders doesn’t make it any less murderous and tyrannical, it just means the people bearing the brunt of its savagery happen to live in other places. Their lives don’t matter any less than American lives, and only a warped, American supremacist worldview would feel otherwise.

The US government is quantifiably morally inferior to the Iranian government. It is quantifiably more tyrannical, more murderous, more destructive, and more megalomaniacal. It is the very last power structure on earth that should have any say in who leads Iran and how the Iranians ought to conduct their affairs. It is not morally qualified to be making those decisions.

____________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

Drop Site News has a new article out which includes incredibly disturbing witness accounts of the carnage from a double-tap airstrike by the US-Israel alliance on a densely populated part of Tehran.

Here’s an excerpt:

“We were sitting here around 8:00–8:30 p.m. and suddenly there was the noise and explosion. We got up and a few people ran away. We turned around to get our belongings and we saw that blood was spraying everywhere. Someone’s hand had fallen on the floor, a head had fallen on the floor,” said Shahin, a witness who had been at the cafe and asked to be identified by first name only. “There were scalps torn off, hands severed, a few people were laying here all cut up and two people were martyred.”

…

“One hit and it wasn’t that bad but when the second one hit, suddenly everything exploded. The windows all shattered. Whoever had hookahs were thrown to the floor,” Shahin said. “One of my friends whom I don’t know that well he was sitting here. His hookah was in his hands until the last moment. He was severed in half. Half of him was thrown to the side. I put him back together and placed him where he was. A piece of his brain was thrown here on the floor.”

Eyewitness to double tap strike in Iran: "We turned around to get our belongings & we saw that blood was spraying everywhere. Someone’s hand had fallen on the floor, a head had fallen… There were scalps torn off, hands severed, a few people were laying here all cut up." https://t.co/ofWN1WdHkJ

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) March 2, 2026

War is the worst thing in the world. Westerners talk about it like it’s a fucking video game, like “hurr durr, we just go in there and achieve our objectives and win,” when really war means shredding human bodies to bits.

Children burning to death in front of their parents.

People holding their own guts in their hands as their life slowly slips away.

People getting trapped under rubble and dying excruciatingly slow deaths of suffocation or dehydration.

People picking up pieces of their beloved family members.

Westerners are able to hold this compartmentalized video game mentality about war because war isn’t something that happens to us. We’ve never had bombs dropped on our neighborhoods. We’ve never had the experience of seeing a severed hand on the ground after an explosion and trying to figure out who it belonged to. We’ve never had the experience of seeing our child’s shredded body after a blast and thinking about how we’d carefully helped them dress that precious body for school just hours before.

We just see the movies. The propagandistic war documentaries. The sanitized news reports.

It’s not real to us. It’s not personal. It’s just this cutesy Hollywood image of sexy Good Guys doing flips and spin-kicking evil Bad Guys off cliffs.

View this post on Instagram

You know this is true, because if it wasn’t then nobody would support US wars. If westerners had an actual, visceral understanding of what war really is and what it actually means, and if they could truly, deeply grasp that the people on the receiving end of those airstrikes are human beings just like them, there’s no way they’d support inflicting such nightmares upon their fellow man.

Which is why everything in our civilization is aimed at hiding that reality from us. War is made to look heroic and glamorous. Middle easterners are framed as deranged subhuman savages. The flesh-and-bone consequences of western warmongering are hidden from public view as much as possible.

They need to do this because the western empire depends on war. War is the glue that holds the empire together. They need the mass-scale bloodshed to continue, and they need the public to provide no resistance to the bloodshed. The empire cannot exist without war. Peace cannot exist without the removal of the empire.

You watch these bespectacled pundits and pampered politicians babbling about war the way they’d talk about their plans to remodel their kitchen or take a trip to Paris, and you just know if actual war ever showed up on their doorstep they’d literally soil themselves. They’d never recover. They’d spend the rest of their lives in shock and trauma, because what they saw would have shaken them irreparably to their very core.

It would impact them in this way because war is the worst thing in the world. Anyone with a functioning empathy center and a truth-based worldview would move mountains to prevent war from happening. And yet we are ruled by sociopaths who actively seek it out. War is the worst thing in the world, and we are ruled by the worst people in the world.

The world will never know peace until we cease to allow such creatures to rule over us.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Reading by Tim Foley:

❖

The US-Israeli war on Iran rages on. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed. Iran has been hammering US military bases in the region with missiles and drones, and oil prices are already beginning to rise as the IRGC cuts off the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the attacks.

US soldiers have already begun to die. US Central Command reports that three American service members were killed in combat, with five seriously wounded — and it should here be noted that “seriously wounded” can mean permanently brain damaged, comatose, or otherwise rendered severely handicapped for the rest of their lives. 

Trump said during an interview with The Daily Mail that he now expects this war to last “four weeks or so”, and that he expects US casualties to continue.

I have said it before and I will say it again: every single American soldier who dies in this war was killed by Trump and Netanyahu. The US and Israeli governments bear sole responsibility for their deaths.

❖

At least 153 people were reportedly killed in a strike on an Iranian girls’ school in the opening wave of attacks. Most of the fatalities were girls between the ages of seven and twelve.

Turns out “freeing Iranian women from the hijab” just meant killing girls before they’re old enough to start wearing one.

There’ve been viral claims on social media that it was a misfired Iranian missile which struck the school and that the Iranian government has admitted to this — both of which were swiftly debunked.

We’ve seen this play before. In October 2023 hasbarists were saturating the information ecosystem with claims that Gaza’s Al-Ahli Baptist hospital was hit by a misfired Palestinian rocket rather than by Israel. Israel has now bombed that very same hospital eight separate times, which tells you all you need to know.

❖

US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz used the word “unprovoked” to describe Iran’s retaliatory strikes on US military bases in the region, which is just plain hilarious.

“Indiscriminate and unprovoked attacks by the Iranian regime today against our regional partners — Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, and others — reinforce exactly why such actions are necessary,” Waltz told the UN.

Only the United States could bomb a country, kill its leader, massacre its children, declare the intention to destroy its military and topple its government, and then call that country’s retaliation against US military bases “unprovoked”.

❖

Iran has reportedly rejected Trump administration offers to make a deal after the initial rounds of attacks. Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi assesses that Iran believes it needs to impose severe costs on the United States before returning to the negotiating table, because they know if they make a deal now they’ll just be attacked again in a few months unless they establish clear deterrence. 

“Iran understands that many in the American security establishment had been convinced that Iran’s past restraint reflected weakness and an inability or unwillingness to face the US in a direct war,” Parsi writes. “Tehran is now doing everything it can to demonstrate the opposite — despite the massive cost it itself will pay.”

❖

Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi went on NBC News to discuss the war and was actually asked by co-anchor Laura Jarrett how Iran can justify striking US military bases in the region.

“Why is attacking US military bases abroad justified?” Jarrett asked after Araghchi said that Iran will not seek long-range missiles capable of striking the United States.

“Because they are attacking us!” Araghchi replied with a chuckle. “They are US military installations, facilities, bases who are attacking us. We are under attack. Why don’t you, you know, recognize this fact?”

“This is obvious,” Araghchi said. “This is a very simple fact, and I’m sure that people would understand that.”

It must be such a surreal experience to be a serious diplomat appearing on a foreign news show to speak to professional newscasters, and suddenly finding yourself having to explain to fully grown adults that your nation is fighting the US military because the US military attacked your nation.

The western press are a fucking joke.

❖

Israel has taken this opportunity to close Gaza’s border again, and the World Central Kitchen reports that its food supplies will run out in a week if aid remains cut off.

Israel is pure cancer.

❖

Imagine still being a Trump supporter in March 2026. Think about what a desolate wasteland of spirit you’d have to have inside you to keep supporting that ghoul after all this.

You’d have to stand for absolutely nothing. You’d have to have no values besides “triggering the libs” and lower taxes for billionaires.

You can’t lie to yourself and pretend he’s anti-war anymore. You can’t lie to yourself and pretend he’s fighting the Deep State and sticking up for the little guy. You can’t lie to yourself and pretend he’s making the world a better, more peaceful place.

His actions and his words have made that impossible; he’s been openly advancing longstanding neocon warmonger agendas after publicly admitting to being bought and owned by the world’s richest Israeli, Miriam Adelson.

You can’t lie to yourself about who he is anymore, so now all you can do is side with his depravity. You have to directly side with war, authoritarianism, corruption and abuse. You have to stand right out in the cold light of day saying loud and proud that you support Epstein’s BFF and love George W Bush’s foreign policy, and that you think it’s great to stomp out freedom of speech in America to defend the information interests of Israel.

What a pathetic, undignified way to live. It’s honestly about the most self-debasing thing I can possibly think of. It wouldn’t be any more degrading if you were actually licking his boots while he urinates on you and ridicules your meager net worth. It would just be a little bit more straightforward about the reality of the situation.

______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Reading by Tim Foley:

The US and Israel have launched their long-planned attack on Iran. President Trump said in a speech that the US military is engaged in “major combat operations” intended to cripple Iran’s military and topple the Iranian government. Iran has reportedly been retaliating with missile strikes on Israel and US military bases in the region.

This is going to get ugly, folks.

President Donald J. Trump on the United States military combat operations in Iran: pic.twitter.com/LimJmpLkgZ

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 28, 2026

I don’t even know what to write about this one, honestly.

What am I supposed to say? “Hey everybody, they’re lying to us about this war”? Everyone already knows that. Even the people who support this war know all the justifications for it are lies.

They know Iran isn’t building nukes.

They know Iran poses no threat to the United States.

They know all that bullshit about Iran cutting out women’s wombs and murdering tens of thousands of protesters was evidence-free atrocity propaganda.

Nobody needs me to tell them these things. Nobody needs me to tell them that this war is going to kill a whole lot of innocent people and inflict unfathomable amounts of suffering upon our species, both directly during these attacks and indirectly in the chaos and instability ensuing thereafter. Everyone already knows this.

Everyone already knows this, and it’s happening anyway. They’re just doing whatever evil things they want to do, without the slightest regard for public opinion or consent.

Explosions reported in Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Qatar, which all host US military assets.

The Iranians are retaliating.

The U.S. has just ignited a totally unecessary regional war.

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) February 28, 2026

They’re just going right ahead with a military operation to topple Tehran, after decades of inertia for fear of the horrific consequences it would unleash.

They’re just choking off Cuba using siege warfare, which previous presidents refused to do because it would be a monstrous act of war.

They just kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation, which previous administrations had refused to do because it’s plainly against international law.

They just helped Israel turn Gaza into a gravel parking lot and are now building a giant dystopian tech surveillance encampment to imprison the survivors.

They just designated an American company a “supply chain risk to national security” for the first time ever because the AI firm Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use its technology to operate autonomous killing machines and surveil American citizens — an open admission that the Pentagon plans on using AI to run autonomous killing machines and surveil American citizens.

One of the most shamelessly fraudulent presidential campaigns in American history: https://t.co/yksugk3s6d

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 28, 2026

There’s an old Frank Zappa quote that’s been popping into my head more and more lately:

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

We’re seeing a lot more bricks these days.

That’s all I can think to say about all this.

Fuck the USA.

Fuck Israel.

Fuck Trump.

Fuck Netanyahu.

Fuck Zionism.

Fuck Trump supporters.

Fuck the Republican Party.

Fuck the Democratic Party.

Fuck war.

Fuck everyone who helped make this war possible.

Fuck the western press.

Fuck warmongering think tanks.

Fuck the Israel lobby.

Fuck the military-industrial complex.

Fuck the western intelligence cartel.

Fuck the western empire.

I hate everyone who inflicted this nightmare upon my species. If you stand by this senseless US-Israeli act of depravity, then I consider you an enemy. And I will never stop reminding everyone of the psychotic agenda you supported.

You own this. This is on you. It’s on you forever.

_______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Reading by Tim Foley:

White House officials reportedly want Israel to provoke Iran into attacking US military bases in the region, because it will make Americans more willing to go to war.

Politico reports:

“Senior advisers to President Donald Trump would prefer Israel strike Iran before the United States launches an assault on the country, according to two people familiar with ongoing discussions.

“These Trump administration officials are privately arguing that an Israeli attack would trigger Iran to retaliate, helping muster support from American voters for a U.S. strike.

“The calculus is a political one — that more Americans would stomach a war with Iran if the United States or an ally were attacked first. Recent polling shows that Americans, and Republicans in particular, support regime change in Iran, but are unwilling to risk any U.S. casualties to achieve it. That means Trump’s team is considering the optics of how an attack is conducted in addition to other justifications — such as Iran’s nuclear program.”

“There’s thinking in and around the administration that the politics are a lot better if the Israelis go first and alone and the Iranians retaliate against us, and give us more reason to take action,” an anonymous White House source told Politico.

Report: Trump Advisors Want Israel To Attack Iran First To Provoke Iranian Retaliation Against US Assets
According to POLITICO, senior US officials think the 'politics' would be better if Israel started the war#Iran #Israel #Trump https://t.co/WI4tXk763Y

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) February 26, 2026

So according this report the plan is to let Israel initiate the war, draw out an aggressive Iranian response against Israel and US military assets in the area, and then let the media saturate American airwaves with photographs of slain US soldiers so that Americans will support a new war in the middle east. 

As a plan to drum up domestic support for war, it would probably work. Israel would certainly be all too happy to initiate another war. The US media would certainly be all too happy to drum up support for American retaliation. And many Americans, God bless them, would be dumb enough to swallow it.

We all saw how easily the American public can be persuaded to sign off on any US military operation after 9/11. We know the drill: Americans get killed, the imperial propaganda machine kicks into hyperdrive, and all of a sudden you’ve got every war plan and domestic surveillance agenda ever dreamed up by Washington’s nastiest swamp monsters being advanced at breakneck pace.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is already laying the groundwork for this narrative push, literally doing the “look how close they put their country to our military bases” meme during a press conference on Wednesday.

“Iran possesses a very large number of ballistic missiles, particularly short-range ballistic missiles that threaten the United States and our bases in the region and our partners in the region, and all of our bases in the UAE, in Qatar, in Bahrain,” Rubio said. “And they also possess naval assets that threaten shipping and try to threaten the U.S. Navy. So I want everybody to understand that, and beyond just the nuclear program they possess these conventional weapons that are solely designed to attack America and attack Americans, if they so choose to do so.”

He did the meme. https://t.co/wc5kMWEwPc pic.twitter.com/ArlQP3PKDS

— Harrison H. Smith ✞ (@HarrisonHSmith) February 26, 2026

They’re already blatantly lying to the American public about this thing. In addition to the propaganda narratives we discussed recently like Steve Witkoff claiming Iran is “probably a week away” from having the materials necessary to make a nuclear bomb and The New York Post publishing evidence-free atrocity propaganda about Iran cutting out the reproductive organs of female protesters, President Trump falsely claimed during his State of the Union address on Tuesday that Iran refuses to say it will never develop a nuclear weapon.

“We are in negotiations with them; they want to make a deal but we haven’t heard those secret words: We will never have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said during his speech before Congress.

As Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp pointed out, Iran has been explicitly saying they will never develop a nuclear weapon this entire time, and they literally said it again on the day of Trump’s speech. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi tweeted on Tuesday that “Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.”

Whether or not you believe Iran’s claims that it has no intention of developing nuclear weapons, it is an indisputable fact that Trump and his speech writers brazenly lied to the American public about Iran refusing to say the words “We will never have a nuclear weapon”. 

They say that all the time, and literally said it again today https://t.co/kU8bLvEtXY pic.twitter.com/rkc3aA7gr3

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) February 24, 2026

The fact that they would lie so blatantly about something so significant means they’ll lie about anything, and nothing these people tell us about Iran and its activities can be trusted.

Trump made other evidence-free claims in the same speech, as DeCamp explains:

“Trump also said that Iran was ‘working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,’ a claim that lacks any evidence, and repeated that 32,000 people were killed in the recent protests, an inflated number that lacks real sourcing and is far beyond the 3,317 acknowledged by the Iranian government.”

So let’s be very clear here: if any US troops are killed by Iranian missiles, the US and Israel are solely to blame for this. If any Israelis are killed by Iranian missiles, the US and Israel are solely to blame for this. Not Iran.

Iran didn’t surround itself with US military bases. Iran didn’t tear up the Obama nuclear deal. Iran isn’t flooding the region with a quantity of US war machinery you never see unless Washington plans on launching an attack. The US did these things.

The US is the one who bombed Iran’s energy infrastructure last June. The US is the one who is openly admitting that it deliberately crushed the Iranian economy with the goal of inciting a violent uprising. The US is the one whose National Endowment for Democracy smuggled Starlink terminals into Iran to help facilitate domestic unrest. 

If any foreign government had been doing these things to the United States, the US would have wiped them off the face of the earth a long time ago. Iran has been demonstrating superhuman forbearance in the midst of extremely aggressive provocations by Israel and the United States. If Tehran calculates that it can no longer sustain its policy of restraint and needs to push back to protect itself from an existential threat, then the blame for this will not rest on Iran. It will rest solely and entirely on the United States and Israel.

If any US troops die in the upcoming standoff, it will be Washington and Tel Aviv who killed them.

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

No bro this US war in the middle east will be completely different, bro. See, this time the regime we’re trying to get rid of is REALLY BAD!

No no, this is nothing like all those other times. This time military interventionism to topple an oil-rich government in west Asia will lead to peace and democracy. Our soldiers will be greeted as liberators!

You don’t understand, bro. This time the government and the media are telling us the truth! This time the regime really IS committing mass atrocities and they really ARE trying to build weapons of mass destruction.

Why are you acting so skeptical? If it turns out our leaders were wrong and this war was a bad idea, I’m sure they’ll admit their mistakes and course-correct immediately to set things right, and then implement major, sweeping policy changes to make sure they never repeat the same mistakes again. What could possibly go wrong?

I know you think this will be a disaster like all those other US military interventions in the region, but you see, unlike all those other times, this time there are many foreign policy analysts from highly respected think tanks and mass media outlets assuring us that it will go perfectly fine.

If bombing Iran was a bad idea they would have told us so in the news. The news isn’t allowed to lie about important things like this.

This time is completely different because this time there are people from the targeted country who say they don’t like their government. If that country didn’t need American bombs dropped on it, every single person from that country would love the government.

No this isn’t like all those other times. This time it’s about bringing freedom and democracy to a poor oppressed population, and it’s about fighting terrorism, and it’s about women’s rights, and it’s about bringing peace and stability to the region. Don’t you agree that those are good and worthy goals? Why do you hate freedom?

I’m beginning to suspect that you just love tyrannical regimes. There is no other possible reason anyone could oppose US military interventionism to topple a government in the middle east. Also you hate Jews.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

Anyone silly enough to believe the US wants to bring democracy to Iran should have a look at what the US is currently doing to sabotage democracy in Iraq.

President Trump has been aggressively threatening to cut off Iraq’s oil revenue if it allows the return to office of former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom the Trump administration views as too sympathetic to Iran.

And the threats appear to be working, as Antiwar’s Jason Ditz reports:

“Once and possibly future Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s candidacy is increasingly in doubt this weekend, with reports that President Trump’s demand he not be allowed to return to office increasing the possibility that the Coordination Framework bloc may withdraw him as their choice for premier.

“Last year’s Iraq elections ended with the usual deeply split parliament, though the State of Law Party’s fourth place finish with 6% of the vote was generally seen as enough to give Maliki the coalition leadership, since current PM Mohammed al-Sudani does not intend to return.

“Late last month, Trump demanded that Maliki step down from the nomination, but he refused at the time, saying that the US should stay out of Iraq’s internal affairs. Maliki was already Iraq’s PM from 2006 through 2014.”

Iraq May Drop Maliki as PM Candidate After US Threats
Report: US gave Iraq ultimatum to scrap Maliki’s candidacy by Sunday#Iraq #Maliki https://t.co/JiIQhL8o3T

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) February 22, 2026

Ditz explains that Trump is able to sway Iraqi politics with credible threats due to the US control that was imposed on the nation’s economy following the Iraq invasion:

“Underpinning this whole thing is that after the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the country was restructured such that all of Iraq’s oil revenue was paid in US dollars through the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Since that revenue is almost the entirety of Iraq’s government budget, that means the US can virtually seize Iraq’s treasury at any time and bankrupt the country on a moment’s notice.”

This is what US-imposed “democracy” looks like in practice: giving a nation the freedom to do what Washington tells them to do and elect the leaders that Washington allows them to elect.

You may recall that the narrative to justify the US coalition’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was the urgent need to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. The US literally titled the invasion “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. They then killed a million people, plunged the region into chaos and instability for years, and ensured that the Iraqi people would forever remain under the boot of the US empire.

There is no excuse for a grown adult to believe the US empire wants to bring democracy to Iran. The US consistently props up dictatorships and monarchies in the middle east exactly because they do not want the will of the people to determine the actions and policies of the governments of those nations. Truly democratic states in the region would see people using their votes to elect leaders who are hostile to Israel and the United States, and who set fossil fuel policies which advance the interests of their own people rather than the interests of the western empire. 

This is why the middle east is rife with wealthy monarchies who are extremely friendly with the US and its allies. That didn’t happen by accident; the west has been intimately involved with aggressively manipulating middle eastern affairs for generations. This includes Iran; the CIA staged a coup in 1953 to replace its democratically elected government with a US-aligned monarchy, who was then overthrown in the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

US military intervention against Iran in conjunction with economic warfare and support for sectarianism DOES NOT constitute a regime change operation. That hasn’t been the play for years.

Warhawks are hoping for deep destabilization and Balkanization. pic.twitter.com/tPhD1N9poh

— Greg Stoker (@gregjstoker) February 19, 2026

The plan isn’t to bring democracy to Iran, and there’s a convincing argument to be made that it’s not even to preserve Iran as a unified state. Influential Iran hawks have been pushing balkanization as the preferred strategy lately, with war propagandists now promoting the idea that an Iran fractured along ethnic lines might be in everyone’s best interest. This strategy would create unfathomable strife and horrifically deadly chaos, but it would allow for the toppling of the Iranian government without having to go to all the trouble of replacing it with a new government. They can just smash Iran to eliminate a disobedient regional power and let the pieces land where they may, with no fear of a future revolution replacing their puppet regime in a large and unified state.

The US does not seek democracy, it seeks planetary domination. That’s all these moves are ever about, and the empire doesn’t care how many people it needs to hurt along the way in order to get there.

____________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

Reading by Tim Foley:

They’re not even trying anymore.

US middle east envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News on Saturday that Iran is “probably a week away” from having the materials necessary to make a nuclear bomb — a line that Iran hawks have been falsely repeating for over three decades.

It’s such a transparently bogus claim that even The Jerusalem Post dunked on Witkoff for making it, quipping that “The US envoy left out that Iran currently has no access to its material, no machines to enrich it, and no weapons program to use it for any operational purpose.”

This is the guy supposedly assigned by the White House to the task of establishing peace in the middle east, churning out the most fuzzbrained justifications for war with Iran you could possibly imagine.

Lol even the Jerusalem Post is calling out Witkoff for his absolute bs here https://t.co/h5sdB9Wh5I pic.twitter.com/TDGf5S7Qth

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) February 22, 2026

The New York Post has an article going viral right now with the flamboyantly propagandistic headline “Iranian forces hack out wombs of female protesters to hide horrific sexual abuse,” which would sound absurd at a glance even you didn’t know anything about atrocity propaganda. Like they said “Let’s mutilate these women’s reproductive organs so that nobody thinks we horrifically abused them!” How does that even make sense?

The article is of course based on no evidence whatsoever, citing nothing but a NewsNation report full of anonymously sourced assertions. The central claim of the New York Post headline is attributed solely to “An Iranian refugee who spoke to NewsNation under a condition of anonymity.”

In a post-Iraq invasion world, these sorts of reports deserve nothing but a scoff and a dismissal. After all the lies we’ve been told about every US war of aggression over the years, any claims made about a government that Washington wants to topple need to be flatly rejected unless they are backed by rock-solid, independently verifiable proof. That proof never arrives. US wars are always justified by lies, psyops, and misinformation.

Iranian forces hack out wombs of female protesters to hide horrific sexual abuse: report https://t.co/PlbzoHzsXz pic.twitter.com/1qIYNA8VKo

— New York Post (@nypost) February 21, 2026

But these aren’t the usual caliber of lies. We normally get better-quality war propaganda than this. This slop is designed to appeal to the dumbest people in the dumbest parts of the United States, and to people who already want to go to war with Iran.

Consent for the Iraq invasion was manufactured by many months of high-energy media saturation designed to harness the power of post-9/11 hysteria about the possibility of foreign attacks on American soil. This is just a few propaganda rags and government officials farting into a microphone and calling us idiots.

And yet the war machinery is rolling out anyway. They’re preparing to unleash a horrific war of immense consequence which Americans overwhelmingly oppose, and they don’t even have the decency to tell believable lies about it.

It can’t say good things about the future that they’re not even pretending to care what the American people want anymore. The US empire is getting more and more bold about exposing its true tyrannical nature, feeling less and less need to manufacture consent before engaging in mass military slaughter.

I guess we can still have hope that this will help open some eyes to the dire need for revolution in the heart of the empire.

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Reading by Tim Foley:

Whenever you say anything online opposing the way the US is preparing for war with Iran or strangling Cuba to death with siege warfare, you’ll always get people whose family comes from the nation in question telling you to be silent and support the US war machine. Their family emigrated at some point because they didn’t like the government, so now they spend their time on social media telling everyone to support US operations to topple that government.

The correct response to such people is “Shut the fuck up.”

Tell Iranian diaspora warmongers to shut the fuck up. Tell Cuban diaspora regime change fanatics to shut the fuck up.

It’s so obnoxious how these assholes will show up in my replies all “Excuse me you’re not from that country so you don’t get to oppose dropping bombs on it.”

Uh, how about you shut the fuck up? I’m going to oppose the most evil and depraved agendas of the western power structure I live under, thank you very much. If you don’t like it you can go choke on a dick.

If you support yet another disastrous US military intervention to topple yet another middle eastern government, then you’re a piece of shit. You’re a piece of shit regardless of what country your family happens to come from.

If you support strangling Cuba until its infrastructure collapses and people start dying, then you’re a piece of shit. You’re a piece of shit regardless of what country your family happens to come from.

Don’t let these freaks bully you into silence. We get to oppose these actions. Your right to oppose the horrific abuses of our rulers doesn’t magically get canceled out because some gusano in Miami tells you to be silent. You don’t have to stop opposing a war of potentially global consequence because some monarchist wanker tweeting from his sofa in London tells you only people who come from Iran are allowed to express an opinion on this issue.

Tell them to shut up. They’re trying to silence you, so tell them to be silent.

Don’t fall for their phony shitlib standpoint epistemology where they try to shout you down for not deferring to their people’s lived experience or whatever the fuck. You don’t owe these scumbags anything. They’re trying to advance a profoundly evil agenda that’s supported by all the worst swamp monsters in the world’s most powerful government, and they are horrible people. Tell them to shut the fuck up, and then protest the empire’s abuses even louder and more aggressively than you were before.

US government-toppling military interventionism doesn’t magically stop having an extensively documented record of being reliably disastrous just because your family happens to come from the country being targeted. If you support these agendas then you are my enemy, and I find you personally disgusting. You’re a piece of shit and you should shut the fuck up.

______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. 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. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image by Mike Palmer (CC BY 2.0)