Caitlin Johnstone

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

The trouble is that there’s no money in the pursuit of the good, and there’s no goodness in the pursuit of money.

If you want to devote your life to doing good, then you will likely need to consign yourself to a life of far less material comfort than if you had not. Teaching. Nursing. Social work. Environmental work. The vocations which are typically sought out by people who feel called to dedicate their lives to helping are also notoriously low-paying for how stressful they can be and how much education is required to get into them. Many important callings like peace activism, environmental activism and community volunteer work don’t pay anything at all.

People who devote themselves to the pursuit of money wind up looking in the exact opposite direction. Think of all the surest ways to get extremely wealthy and you will find exploitation, ecocide and abuse at every turn. Extracting profits from the toil of the working class. Investing in surefire sources of profit like defense contractors and fossil fuels. Offloading the costs of industry onto the ecosystem and the developing world. War profiteering. Scams (both the legal and illegal varieties). Monopolistic practices which crush smaller businesses and lay waste to entire communities. The countless depraved manipulations that go into selling medicine for profit. 

The Sackler family amassed a fortune by creating an epidemic of opiate addiction. The Walton family got rich by deliberately destroying the local economies of small towns so that everyone would work and shop at the local Walmart. Elon Musk is a Pentagon contractor who’s helping US intelligence construct a planetary surveillance network. Jeff Bezos got rich with the help of contracts with the CIA and Pentagon, and Amazon’s aggressive campaign to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy is destroying whole industries and creating immense suffering for workers. Larry Ellison’s Oracle is intertwined with the US intelligence cartel and the Israeli genocide machine, as is Peter Theil’s Palantir. 

These are just a few examples of how depraved you have to be to amass immense amounts of wealth; beyond that there are all the ugly manipulations people engage in to protect the status quo upon which their wealth is premised. The extremely wealthy buy up narrative control in the form of media, think tanks and Silicon Valley platforms in order to influence public political opinion to their benefit. They influence the government through legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions and lobbying. Sometimes they even hop right in to the actual government itself like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. All to ensure the continuation of the unjust systems which allow them to amass wealth while destroying the biosphere and making everyone else poorer, busier, sicker, more exhausted, and more propagandized.

These are the kinds of people who rise to the top in our current system: the absolute worst among us. The more ruthless and underhanded you are willing to be, the easier it is for you to become obscenely wealthy and powerful. Our systems reward and elevate sociopathy, which is why we now find ourselves ruled by sociopaths.

And meanwhile the best among us toil in obscurity, swimming against the current of this sociopathic dystopia their entire lives before dying with nothing to their names but the love that they shared. These should be the people running the world and charting the course for our species, and instead they live and die unknown and unrecognized, because our system does not elevate such beings. Instead it elevates narcissistic plutocrats, vapid celebrity artists, and groveling pundits and politicians.

This is what you get when you have a system in place where mass-scale human behavior is determined by what is profitable instead of by what is right. This is what that looks like.

Is it working?

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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

Activist and author Yves Engler has been jailed by Montreal police for criticizing media figure Dahlia Kurtz and her support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza, after Kurtz said Engler’s comments made her feel “afraid for my safety”.

After Engler wrote about the charges against him, he reported that he was subsequently charged for “harassing the police” by drawing public attention to his case.

It’s fascinating how everyone who supports Israel always collapses into playing the victim at the earliest opportunity—even western police forces tasked with persecuting Israel’s critics. Israel models this victim-LARPing behavior, and its entire goon squad follows its example.

You can’t make this up. Initially the Montreal police accused me of harassing an anti-Palestinian media personality because I posted about Israel’s genocide. Now they are charging me for harassing the police for writing about the charges levelled against me.
At 9:30 AM tomorrow… pic.twitter.com/xRajDQfLAX

— Yves Engler (@EnglerYves) February 20, 2025

But what’s interesting is that being perceived as the victim has no value in and of itself — what has value is sympathy. It is sympathy that Israel’s supporters are after. Playing the victim is just a means toward that end.

If you’ve ever known anybody with a personality disorder that inclines them toward manipulative behavior, you may have noticed that one of the main things they manipulate in people is their sympathy. They do everything they can to draw as much sympathy toward themselves while working to kill off any sympathy that people might have toward their perceived enemies. They’ll sacrifice almost any piece on their psychosocial chessboard in order to control a bit more of the sympathy among the people in their life.

They do this because sympathy is a fundamental primer for narrative control. If you sympathize with someone, you are much more likely believe the things they say and trust their narratives about what’s going on. If you lack sympathy for someone, then anything they say is going to be viewed with much more skepticism.

This is just how humans are wired as a social animal. We’re evolutionarily conditioned to place more trust in people we perceive as belonging to our own tribe than we place in those outside it — those within our group are the ones with whom we sympathize. That’s why for example you’ll see Trump supporters start voicing opinions they’d never held before as soon as Trump and his MAGA pundits take a certain position on a given issue; they sympathize with the source, so they espouse its position on that issue.

Hello, @EnglerYves. I'm advising you in this one message only that you are harassing me. You're threatening and you're making me afraid for my safety. You must stop this harassment — and communication with me. Stop now. https://t.co/S3nIUjOguk

— dahlia kurtz ︎ דליה קורץ (@DahliaKurtz) July 5, 2024

A good manipulator understands this, so they do everything they can to make sure everyone is sympathetic toward them and unsympathetic toward anyone whose interests conflict with theirs. That’s why we’re still talking about October 7 even after 16 months of genocidal atrocities and ethnic cleansing plans. Israel and its apologists throughout western governments and media have been working diligently to draw sympathy toward Israel for those killed and abducted on October 7, and to stomp out all sympathy for the orders of magnitude more Palestinians who’ve been killed and abducted by Israel. This has allowed narratives which serve the interests of Israel to dominate the mainstream western consensus on this issue, thereby bringing in concrete material benefits like weapons, bulldozers, the weakening of Israel’s enemies, and the eventual replacement of Palestinians with Israeli Jews on what used to be Palestinian territory.

So you can see how victim-LARPing leads to sympathy, sympathy leads to believed narratives, and believed narratives lead to concrete material benefits. All skillful manipulators understand this dynamic and use it in their own lives; the only thing that differs is the specific narratives they use and the material benefits they’re trying to extract. One manipulator might use sympathy to extract sexual favors from women and deference from men. Another might use it to extract money or resources. Another might use it for status in their social circle. It’s on a different scale and has different objectives, but the dynamic is the same.

Normal people don’t typically understand this, so we’re highly susceptible to these kinds of manipulations because they tend to fly under our radar. Normal people place a lot more value on telling the truth and doing what’s right than highly manipulative people do, because normal people prioritize human connection much more highly than manipulators. Normal people use language to communicate and understand and connect with each other, while manipulators use it to extract material benefits. These are two drastically different ways of relating to one’s social environment, and normal people are often completely unaware that the other way of relating is even a feature for some of the people in their lives. This makes them ideal targets for manipulation.

That’s what you’re seeing when Israel cries victim about October 7 or Israeli hostages held by Hamas. It’s what you see when Israel supporters shriek about an entirely made-up crisis of “antisemitism” in our society. It’s what you see when the propaganda machine for the western empire frames its enemies as the evil perpetrators of “unprovoked” aggressions to which the empire is just an innocent passive witness, or when they try to generate sympathy for the poor oppressed people living under this or that evil dictatorship that happens to be sitting on top of a lot of oil. They’re manipulating public sympathy so they can control the narrative, so that by controlling the narrative they can advance their material agendas.

There’s a legendary video of Norman Finkelstein shouting down a sobbing young Israel apologist on a college campus for trying to play the Holocaust card to silence his criticisms of Israel. One of the reasons this video is so widely shared and resonates with so many people is because Finkelstein happens to be the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors and could therefore speak with great authority, but another reason is because it’s such a skillful shutting down of an attempt to manipulate sympathy for the benefit of the Israeli state. By taking sympathy off the table, he took away the Israel apologist’s primary weapon.

Israel and its supporters understand the power of narrative control better than most. That’s why they have a carefully cultivated discipline dedicated to narrative control with its own special name: hasbara. Hasbara is all about manipulating the narrative about Israel in mainstream public discourse.

The real currency of our world is not money or resources, nor gold, nor even weapons. The real currency of our world is narrative and the ability to control it, because if you can control the narrative, you can control everyone.

The average human life is dominated by mental stories, so if you can control the stories that humans are telling each other about their world, you can control the humans.

If you’ve ever tried to meditate, then you know how pervasively dominated human consciousness is by mental chatter. Our minds are constantly babbling about how things are, how we are, how the people around us are, and what’s going on. If you can exert control over how this powerful deluge of mental narrative is occurring for large numbers of people regarding an issue you’ve got a vested interest in, then you have a much better chance of advancing your interests than someone who does not. You have a lot of real power.

Mountains of abuses exist in our world because manipulators understand this dynamic while normal people do not. The strings of our sympathy are continually jerked around without our awareness, by which we are herded into belief systems which advance the interests of the powerful.

That’s why it’s very important to withhold sympathy wherever it’s being weaponized. If someone is using a weapon to hurt people, your first order of business is to take their weapon away from them. You really can’t cede any ground to Israel apologists when they try to tug at your heartstrings about the victims of October 7 or fake “antisemitism” emergencies in western society, because any sympathy you extend in that direction will be used as a weapon to murder and abuse people in the middle east who’ve never done anything to you.

This is something to keep in mind as Israel and its apologists work to whip up public sympathy using dead Israeli children in order to reignite the genocide in Gaza.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and whoever controls sympathy controls the narrative. Never give manipulators that power over people.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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

A new narrative is being aggressively pushed by Israel and its apologists to justify resuming the Gaza genocide, conveniently just as an important deadline for ceasefire negotiations draws near.

The IDF is now claiming that the Israeli children Kfir and Ariel Bibas “were both brutally murdered by terrorists while being held hostage in Gaza, no later than November 2023.”

IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari told the press on Friday that, “Contrary to Hamas’ lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered by terrorists in cold blood. The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys, they killed them with their bare hands. Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”

Anyone who has been following the events in Gaza over the last year and a half will be unsurprised to learn that Israel provided no evidence to support these incendiary claims.

Benjamin Netanyahu released a video statement in his signature American English waving around an enlarged photograph of the children and talking about what savage monsters the Palestinians are.

“Hamas murdered them in cold blood,” Netanyahu says, while the camera zooms in on the adorable little redheads. “As the prime minister of Israel, I vow that I will not rest until the savages who executed our hostages are brought to justice. They do not deserve to walk this earth. Nothing will stop me. Nothing.”

This happens just as Netanyahu has been working to sabotage ceasefire negotiations by adding new non-starter demands that were not in the original agreement, just as sources in Israeli media predicted he would do upon his return from Washington earlier this month. The six-week-long first stage of the ceasefire deal with Hamas is set to expire at the beginning of March.

This is obvious babies-on-bayonets atrocity propaganda, being released at the most convenient of times. After Israel has been caught lying about beheaded babies and mass rapes and so much more, only an idiot would take any of these claims on faith. 

https://twitter.com/IsraeliPM/status/1892904911375126852

But it’s doing the job. Now everywhere you look you’ll see Israel supporters calling to end the ceasefire and reignite the Gaza holocaust to avenge these innocent children. I just saw an article from Tablet Magazine titled “Their Time Is Up,” subtitled “The murder of the Bibas children caps off an 18-month catalog of horrors that has told us exactly who our Palestinian neighbors are. Backed by a friend in the White House, Israel must secure its future through strong unilateral action.”

All this despite the fact that we know the most likely cause of the children’s death was the fact that their own government was raining military explosives on places where hostages were being held during that time. Hamas reported back in November 2023 that the Bibas children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike along with their mother. In December 2023 it was reported in the mainstream press that Hamas had offered to return their bodies to Israel but Israel refused, telling the press that “Israel will not address propaganda-based reports coming from Hamas”.

You don’t need to trust Hamas or anyone else to deduce that a woman and two children being killed by Israeli airstrikes in an area where many women and children were being killed by Israeli airstrikes every day is a much more likely scenario than Palestinian resistance fighters spontaneously deciding to murder children with their bare hands instead of using them as negotiating leverage as planned.

https://twitter.com/SanaSaeed/status/1892860670074671305

As journalist Muhammad Shehada recently noted on Twitter, Israel already has an established track record of lying about Hamas killing hostages who were actually killed in Israeli airstrikes. In December 2023, Israel informed the families of three hostages that they had been murdered by Hamas. The mother of one of the hostages kept digging and eventually discovered that they had died of asphyxiation when IDF troops “gassed” the tunnel they were hiding in. Last September the IDF admitted that they killed the hostages in an airstrike and lied about it.

Three weeks ago Shehada correctly predicted in an article with Zeteo that Israel was preparing to use the Bibas deaths as an excuse to terminate the ceasefire, long before any of this started. Shehada noticed the way pro-Israel narrative managers had been pushing the line that great vengeance must be exacted upon Gaza if it turns out the Bibas children have been harmed, despite Hamas having announced their deaths more than a year ago. They knew those children were dead, so after the ceasefire was announced in late January they began circulating the narrative that discovery of their demise would be a valid reason to end it.

https://twitter.com/DropSiteNews/status/1893042058249805894

Israeli forces shot and killed two Palestinian children in the West Bank just today — both of them shot in the back. You could be forgiven for not knowing that this happened, because the western political/media class has been too focused on the deaths of two little white kids to pay attention to such trivialities.

Israel needs to keep “discovering” new Hamas atrocities from 2023 because otherwise it just looks like one-sided atrocities being committed by Israel this whole time. First it was beheaded babies, then later it was “We’ve discovered Hamas did mass rapes!”, and now it’s the Bibas kids. 

They need to do this because the Hamas attack was the last time anything happened where Israel could frame itself as the victim, so they’ve been milking it and milking it and milking it for as long as possible while committing orders of magnitude worse abuse in Gaza. It’s all designed to drum up outrage, and to draw sympathy toward Israel and away from the obvious victims who Israel has been abusing, displacing and mass murdering for a year and a half.

As calls to rain vengeance upon Gaza grow louder, remember this: the Bibas kids aren’t the reason, they’re the excuse. The excuse to advance pre-planned agendas against the Palestinians that have been in place since long before those children were born.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image is a screen grab from the IDF.

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

You don’t have to pick a team.

You don’t have to side with Democrats because Trump is bad.

You don’t have to side with Trump because Democrats are bad.

You don’t have to give Trump “credit” for anything.

You don’t have to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

You don’t have to buy into narratives that Trump presents some dangerous new threat that other US presidents did not.

You don’t have to trust right wing media just because the liberal mainstream media are liars.

You don’t have to like Trump just because bad people don’t like him.

There’s this weird assumption that Americans are under some kind of moral obligation to take a side side either with Trump or with his pretend opposition in the Democratic Party, and it’s just silly nonsense. You don’t have to, and you should not.

The US empire is the single most murderous and corrupt power structure on this planet, by an extremely massive margin. Everyone at the upper echelon of empire management is the sort of person who is willing to facilitate the incomprehensible atrocities and abuses that are necessary for the continuation of that empire. Thinking you need to choose a favorite empire manager is like thinking you need to choose a favorite Nazi.

A lucid mind does not look at the turmoil of corruption and psychopathy of the Washington swamp and start calculating which of the vampiric slime beasts are their friend. A lucid mind looks at all the managers of the US-centralized power structure as part of the same enemy.

Sure the swamp monsters bicker and contend with one another along various fronts; you’ll see that under any power structure. That doesn’t mean they’re not all devoted to advancing the interests of an empire that feeds on human blood, and it certainly doesn’t mean they are your friend.

No US president will ever be your friend. No Washington politician, empire manager or oligarch will ever be your friend. Donald Trump is not your friend. Chuck Schumer is not your friend. Elon Musk is not your friend. Hakeem Jeffries is not your friend. Marco Rubio is not your friend. Bernie Sanders is not your friend. JD Vance is not your friend. AOC is not your friend. RFK Jr is not your friend. Elizabeth Warren is not your friend. Tulsi Gabbard is not your friend. Joe Biden is not your friend.

These people have some differences, but what they all have in common is that they have all knowingly made careers out of serving the interests of a globe-spanning empire that can only be maintained by nonstop tyranny, abuse, and murder. That one quality rules them out as anyone you should side with, sympathize with, or support. The only reason this isn’t immediately obvious to everyone is that the entire western world is marinating in a highly controlled information ecosystem where such obvious facts are hidden from our perception.

Whenever I talk about how everyone in Washington is a corrupt monster I get called negative or “blackpilled”, but nothing could be further from the truth. I have plenty of hope for positive outcomes for our world, I’m just not delusional enough to believe those outcomes will ever come from the heart of the power structure most responsible for our world’s problems.

I have plenty of hope in humanity as a collective. Plenty of hope in the real revolutionary movements of the global south. Plenty of hope in the possibilities that could potentially open up with the rise of a multipolar world. I just have no hope in the one power structure on earth nobody should ever place any hope in, in the same way nobody should look to a rapist currently committing rape for solutions on how to curb sexual assault. They are the problem. They are what needs to be fought.

Real solutions will begin emerging as soon as there is sufficiently widespread understanding of our problem. Our task — and it is a difficult one — is to punch through the propaganda matrix of imperial narrative control by circulating as much true information as we can about our world, our rulers, their abuses, and their lies. In this way we can start opening eyes to the reality of our situation and begin organizing together to effect real change using the power of our numbers.

Is that easy? No. Is it harder than casting a vote for your preferred presidential candidate? Yes. But unlike voting and cheerleading for your favorite swamp monster, it stands a chance of actually bringing positive change to our world.

____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Adobe Stock.

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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❖

Liberals hate socialists for the same reason socialists hate liberals: because socialists are the thing liberals pretend to be. Socialists stand for truth, justice, peace and equality while liberals only pretend to stand for these things, and they both know it. Liberals know their favorite political party supports war, militarism, oligarchy and inequality and is rife with power-serving corruption, and socialists know it too, so they can critique these dynamics in ways that have the unpleasant sting of truth.

Liberals don’t mind it when some dopey right winger criticizes their ideological faction, because the rightist has no idea what they’re looking at and offers up the dumbest and least relevant criticisms imaginable. When a socialist critiques that same faction they do it in ways the liberal knows are true, and it causes the liberal to experience cognitive dissonance. If you love AOC it’s not going to bother you when a rightist calls her a woke commie terrorist lover, but someone to the left of you pointing out the various ways she serves the ugliest aspects of the US empire will grate against some of your most deeply treasured belief systems.

Most liberals secretly hate socialists more than they hate rightists, because while rightists attack their political agendas, socialists attack their egos. They expose core identity structures for the sham that they are. Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, and nobody enjoys feeling like they’ve been exposed as a phony.

That’s what liberal left-punching is really about. It’s not about “political pragmatism” or any of that nonsense. It’s petty, vindictive egotistic meltdowns dressed up in reasonable-sounding words. It’s never anything nobler than that.

❖

There are only two types of Israel supporters:

1. Those who know Israel’s existence is premised on continually abusing Palestinians and think this is fine.

2. Those who lie to themselves and others about Israel’s nature and pretend it could be a just and moral country someday.

Those in the first category are often categorized as “right-wing extremists”, while those in the second category are typically thought of as more “liberal” and “moderate”. But in reality they are the same category. They are not at all different in terms of the actual concrete abuses they will throw their weight behind and facilitate; they differ only in the narratives they lay on top of those abuses. Category 1 supported the incineration of Gaza while saying “Haha yes exterminate the Arab scum,” while Category 2 supported the incineration of Gaza while tut-tutting at Netanyahu and talking about how “tragic” the whole thing is.

It’s the same movie with a different soundtrack.

❖

Australian civil rights are being destroyed to protect Israeli information interests because of highly dubious “antisemitic attacks” which are being perpetrated by people with no ideological interest in Jews who appear to have been paid for their actions by foreign operatives.

It’s always okay to share your opinions about Israel. If civil rights in your country are being shredded to promote the interests of a foreign state, then you get to voice very strong opinions about that state and its actions. Anyone who disagrees with this is wrong.

❖

The unspoken premise behind the plan to keep capitalism going is that the world will be saved by sociopathic tech plutocrats like Elon Musk. The idea is to just continue the plan of infinite growth on a finite world until hopefully some tech company produces technology that makes such growth sustainable in a way that both (A) benefits everybody and (B) turns billionaires into trillionaires. 

That’s the assumption underlying the decision to keep capitalism in place even as we watch our biosphere disappear before our eyes, and it’s pure fantasy. As long as mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, you’re going to see the interests of humanity and the ecosystem subverted by that pursuit. The belief that capitalism will rescue us from the ecological disasters it creates assumes that the blind pursuit of profit for its own sake will somehow possess the wisdom necessary to preserve the delicate ecosystemic context upon which human life depends while also ensuring that we all have a decent quality of life (as long as we work hard enough, of course).

This is a religious belief. It’s blind faith dogma, based on literally nothing other than one’s desire to believe it. It ascribes a wisdom to the “invisible hand of the market” that is tantamount to claiming that capitalism is being steered by God. It’s something people want to believe because the alternative is falling back on some form of socialist system to ensure our survival on this planet, which we in the west have been indoctrinated into reflexively dismissing.

Market forces are not guided by wisdom, they are guided by greed and fear, and by the unresolved early childhood trauma of the Musks and Theils and Bezoses of this world. Capitalism is a great way to guarantee more production and consumption, but it is completely useless for curbing ecocide and restoring planetary health.

As long as ecocide remains profitable under a system where mass-scale human behavior is driven by profit, ecocide will inevitably continue. What we need, then, is a completely different system. One where we move from competing with each other at the expense of our biosphere to collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem. Collaboration-based systems are inherently incompatible with the competition-based ones we live under today — but they are also the only way we are going to be able to continue living on this planet.

And proponents of capitalism might here say “Aha! That’s what you are missing! We’re NOT going to continue living on this planet! Daddy Elon’s going to take us all to Mars!”

But that’s kinda my whole point here. This is a baseless religious belief. Proponents of capitalism rely on the entirely faith-based belief that technological innovations will soon make it possible for limitless space colonization to occur, thereby enabling the infinite expansion upon which capitalism depends.

But there is no scientific evidence that humans will ever be able to live outside the biosphere from which we emerged. The closest we’ve ever gotten are these glorified scuba excursions wherein astronauts pack up pieces of Earth’s biosphere and suck on them for a while before returning to their planet’s surface. Assuming this means we can colonize space and live permanently completely independent of Earth’s biosphere is the same as assuming you can one day flap your arms hard enough to fly into the clouds just because you are able to jump.

The assumption of space colonization as a reality in our future arises not from science but from the egoic delusion which pervades human consciousness that we are much more separate from our world than we actually are. The human organism is no more separate from its biosphere than a ripple in a teacup is from the tea. Assuming we can just pack up our bodies and permanently move them offworld is like assuming you can take a single ripple in a teacup and transport it into another cup of tea in a country across the ocean.

Science simply does not understand the many different ways in which the human organism is interconnected with Earth’s biosphere, and isn’t anywhere close to understanding it. Even if it is technically possible to someday have us survive on another planet (or in floating space cylinders as per Jeff Bezos’s plan) — and again it is a complete article of faith that such a thing is even possible — we have no reason to assume that we’ll be able to attain this goal fast enough to avert ecological disaster here on Earth. The technology to adequately replicate our planet’s living conditions to make human life and reproduction sustainable in the long term could be many centuries off, by which time capitalism will have long ago devoured the face off of this world.

So the belief that capitalism will be able to carry us into the future is entirely faith-based and premised upon many unknowns and absurdities. We can keep clinging to those baseless superstitions hoping our evidence-free gamble eventually pays off so we never have to change ourselves, or we can move into a mature relationship with reality and start building something different together.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Victoria Pickering (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Now that Trump is back in office I’m again seeing Democrats posting fondly about Barack Obama and how wonderful it was to have a president whose worst scandal was wearing a brown suit once. During the first Trump administration such sentiments were a great way to go viral on Liberal Twitter.

And the thing about this genre of tweet is that they’re kind of right — Obama didn’t have any “scandals” of the level we see from Trump. But the fact that the evil things Obama did weren’t considered scandalous says profoundly ugly things about the kind of society we are living in.

Obama committed all kinds of atrocities while president that would be considered scandalous if we lived in a world that is even remotely sane. Destroying Libya and leaving it a smoldering crater of humanitarian disaster. Tearing apart Syria with the dirty war that featured pouring weapons into the arms of al-Qaeda affiliates. Initiating the US-backed incineration of Yemen. Lighting the fuse for the ruination of Ukraine with the US-backed regime change op in 2014. His notorious drone program. The list goes on.

But none of that stuff registers for the average Democrat. They don’t care about it. They don’t think about it. It’s not even a blip on their screen. All they are interested in is the feelings Barack Obama made them feel inside about their favorite political faction. That’s all they’ve been trained to focus on.

The typical westerner inhabits a mental universe that is completely divorced from reality. Atrocities are only committed by foreign states that their government doesn’t like. Propaganda is something that only happens to people in other countries, or to people with different political ideologies. Scandals are whatever controversies the imperial media choose to focus on and inflame. The actual things that are happening in our world don’t register.

This happens because we live in a mind-controlled dystopia where public thought, speech, and behavior are aggressively manipulated by mass-scale psyops in the service of the powerful. The news is propaganda. The search algorithms are wildly slanted. The social media platforms herd us into isolated ideological echo chambers. Nobody who meaningfully challenges the information interests of the powerful is allowed to ascend to fame and influence. Hollywood is just a PR machine for the empire.

So most westerners are kept from forming an accurate picture of reality in their minds, which is what allows them to hold absurd beliefs like “Barack Obama never did anything bad.” They’re cut off from seeing all the immense suffering that’s inflicted upon the world by the empire they live under and the sociopaths who rule over it, and in its place a crude crayon drawing of a world which confirms their power-serving biases has been inserted into their minds.

They can’t see Libya. They can only see the feelings they felt while Obama was in office, and contrast them with the feelings they feel under Trump. This is the way they have been conditioned to relate to the world. Mass-scale psychological manipulation has turned them into drooling infants. And nobody benefits from this but the powerful.

We won’t be free until our minds are free. We can’t have a healthy world as long as we are thinking in the ways the powerful have trained us to think.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/whitehouse.gov (Public Domain).

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

Everyone from Rachel Maddow to Bernie Sanders is freaking out about the Trump administration’s moves toward ending the war in Ukraine. David Hogg, now the vice chair of the DNC, said on Twitter that “If we abandon Ukraine — Poland is next. You know what’s going to be a lot more expensive than finishing this war and forcing Putin out of Ukraine? A third world war and a second Marshall plan.”

These histrionics are as depraved as they are ridiculous. Obviously the war in Ukraine needs to end. Polls say Ukrainians themselves want the war to end. If you want Ukrainians to keep dying in this war against the will of the Ukrainians themselves while you sit safe at home eating snacks and posting on the internet, you’re a monster.

But saying this really doesn’t go far enough. We should all be raging at everyone who pushed things to this point, especially at the leaders of the western empire we live under. These psychopaths knowingly provoked an unwinnable war of unfathomable horror by first backing a regime change operation in 2014 and then amassing a proxy military threat on Russia’s border in ways the US would never permit on its own border, then refusing off-ramp after off-ramp both before and after Russia invaded. Everyone who paved the way to this nightmare belongs in a cage.

And that includes Trump. The sitting president is on social media right now trying to pin this whole thing on Zelensky, when Trump himself helped pave the way to this horror by becoming the first president to start openly pouring weapons into Ukraine while ramping up cold war tensions and shredding treaties with Russia. Trump, Obama, Biden, Boris Johnson, and all of NATO helped throw Ukraine into the meat grinder while countless western experts and analysts warned urgently that their actions would result in Ukraine’s destruction. They should all suffer immense consequences.

But of course we all know they won’t. None of the government officials, empire managers, career politicians, pundits and think tank swamp monsters who helped steer Ukraine into the inferno will suffer any consequences of any kind for their atrocities. Nobody will even lose their career.

And what’s worse is knowing that most of them will re-emerge like zombies from the grave to help manufacture support for the next imperial bloodbath. Many of the same people who drummed up support for the war in Ukraine were responsible for helping to destroy Iraq, when they should have been languishing in a prison cell at The Hague this entire time.

We are ruled by the worst among us. Our world will never know peace as long as these freaks are at the steering wheel.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image is a screenshot from the MSNBC YouTube channel (Fair Use).

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

❖

So Israel held a bunch of Palestinians in concentration camps without charge just for being Palestinian, and then they not only starved and tortured them but actually made them wear a Star of David on their prison garments. But remember kids, it’s evil and wrong to compare Israel to Nazi Germany — no matter how cartoonishly blatant they make the similarities.

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According to an Israeli media report, last May IDF troops strapped explosives to the neck of an 80 year-old Palestinian man in Gaza and used him as a human shield for hours. They then shot and killed him and his wife.

When the Gaza holocaust first started I used to read headlines like this and go “Holy shit that must be an exaggeration,” and then I’d read up on it and go “Fuck, nope, that’s exactly what happened.” Now I read them and sigh and just sort of wilt inside.

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People who are medically evacuated from Gaza are reportedly being forced to sign paperwork at exiting checkpoints saying they cannot return to the enclave. This revelation comes shortly after Doctors Without Borders informed us that Israeli forces have been entering hospitals in Gaza and methodically destroying all the medical equipment inside them. This is a cold, calculated move to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

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Someone accused me of being “obsessed with Israel” yesterday and it just blew my mind. Civil rights are being destroyed throughout the west to defend a state that’s committing genocide and ethnic cleansing with western backing, and we’re not meant to talk about that state and the things it’s doing? Huh?

I mean, do people think I like writing about this sleazy apartheid state all the time? Does it look like I enjoy it? Do you think it’s been fun having to look at videos of children with their guts ripped out by western-supplied weapons and getting called a Nazi when I say it’s wrong? Yeah man that shit’s like crack to me. I’m obsessed with it.

I’m not “obsessed” with Israel. I hate writing about Israel. I wish I never had to think about it. Israel just happens to be the focal point of the worst things that are happening in the world right now, all with the backing of the western empire I live under. I can’t just not talk about this; if I didn’t I’d be a shitty person. This is obvious to anyone with a working mind and a healthy heart.

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Israel apologists conflate all Jews with the actions of the state of Israel. They will deny that they do this, but they indisputably do. That is the message they are circulating when they accuse anyone who criticizes Israel’s actions of hating all Jews. They create antisemitism.

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Trump says he wants to mutually denuclearize with Russia and China and negotiate a mutual 50 percent cut to the military budget of all three nations. These would both be wonderful new developments. And, I’ll believe it when I see it. As always, ignore their words. Watch their actions.

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I’m harder on people who get close to the truth and then swerve than I am on people who are just completely asleep. Anarchists who wind up supporting NATO. Conspiracy analysts who wind up supporting Trump. Socialists who wind up supporting Democrats. These half-awake sleepwalkers annoy me in ways the average fully asleep member of the public does not, because they’re forming their dopey worldviews based on a lot more information.

I wouldn’t be mad at a blind person for knocking over my things, but someone who has one working eye and stumbles around wearing two eyepatches is just being a douchebag. They’re like a man who pulled his head out of his ass, looked around, and then knowingly re-inserted it.

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Someone recently tried to tell me that the “jury is still out” on Trump’s actions regarding Israel, because maybe he’ll wind up being not so bad on the issue. This is nonsense. The jury isn’t out on Trump regarding Israel. He’s sending Israel weapons while it’s murdering people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. 

These are not things Trump might do. These are not things Trump is saying he will do. These are things Trump is doing. Presently. Even if you choose to believe his ethnic cleansing plans for Gaza are actually brilliant 9-D chess maneuvers secretly designed to free Palestine and achieve peace (and they absolutely are not), you have to ignore hard material actions you are seeing right now right in front of your face in order to believe the jury is still out. You also have to ignore the fact that Trump has publicly admitted to being bought and controlled by the Adelsons.

There are arguments to be made that in terms of hard material facts on the ground so far Trump was the lesser evil on Israel, but there are no arguments to be made that he isn’t still very evil. The jury is not out on that. The jury is very much in.

And it doesn’t actually matter if Trump winds up being less destructive than Biden on Palestine. The election has been over for months. Trump is the president now. Biden is completely irrelevant. There is no excuse for defending the depraved actions of the president of the world’s most powerful and destructive nation.

The experience of talking to Trump supporters about Trump’s Israel sycophancy is identical to the experience of talking to Biden supporters about Biden’s Israel sycophancy. It’s exactly the same. These partisan livestock will make excuses for literally anything.

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Israeli Prison Service.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Caitlin Johnstone):

The Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph has been caught trying to orchestrate what can only be described as a mass media psyop to inflame public hysteria about antisemitism in Australia. 

In a project internally titled “UNDERCOVERJEW” supposedly designed to show “what it’s like being Jewish in Sydney”, a man wearing a Star of David hat and video glasses went around targeting Muslim and Arab businesses trying to instigate hostility from staff members trailed by a video producer and a Telegraph reporter.

The man, who is reportedly associated with the Australian Jewish Association, entered an Egyptian cafe called Cairo Takeaway and postured with his Star of David hat without getting any reaction from anyone. He then started making comments to cafe staff, who caught on to what he was doing and started recording him. Police were then called and it caused a big scandal.

It’s obvious that the intention here was to instigate something that could be framed as an “antisemitic incident” and provoke a national outcry and draw all the usual fiery denunciations from Australian officials, followed by arguments citing the incident as evidence that Australia needs even more aggressive speech laws to stomp out all criticism of the genocidal apartheid state of Israel.

And it should here be noted that The Daily Telegraph is owned by News Corp, the Murdoch media conglomerate which dominates the Australian press. Rupert Murdoch became the media giant he is with the help of his ties with the Ronald Reagan administration and US government agencies. Also noteworthy is that Murdoch is a board member and significant shareholder of Genie Energy, which holds a contract to drill for oil and gas in the Golan Heights — territory illegally occupied by Israel.

This is just the latest in a spate of incidents in which a narrative about an urgent epidemic of antisemitism in Australia is being marketed to the public based on false information. Just today we learned from The Sydney Morning Herald that the Dural caravan laden with explosive materials we were told a couple of weeks ago was intended for use in a “mass casualty event” targeting Jewish sites was not only full of unusable 40 year-old explosives with no detonator, but was involved in a scheme by underworld crime gangs to help negotiate reduced sentences with law enforcement. 

The entire Australian political-media class lost their minds about this story when it first came out. The words “antisemitic” and “antisemitism” were rife throughout the Australian press. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared that “There’s zero tolerance in Australia for hatred and for antisemitism, and I want any perpetrators to be hunted down and locked up.” The federal government’s special envoy on antisemitism, Jillian Segal, called the incident a “chilling reminder that the same hatred that led to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust still exists today”. 

And it had nothing to do with antisemitism. At all.

We saw a similar incident earlier this month when headlines blared about an “antisemitic attack” at Bondi Beach involving eggs being thrown at a group of young women. A couple of days later it came out that the egging was perpetrated by two teenagers getting up to teenage mischief and had nothing to do with anyone hating Jews.

Right now we’re seeing an uproar over two Arab Australian nurses who were baited by an Israeli influencer into saying on the website Chatruletka that they would kill Israelis if they came into their hospital. The comments by the nurses were obviously extremely ill-advised and unethical, but a police investigation has so far found that they’ve never harmed anybody, and if you watch the extended footage of the exchange it’s clear the influencer went out of his way to inform them that he served in the Israeli military and killed Palestinians. One of the nurses has reportedly lost 70 family members to Israeli atrocities in Palestine.

Without defending the irresponsible comments of the nurses, I don’t think anyone would expect a Jewish person who came in contact with a Nazi soldier in the 1940s to maintain their cool and avoid violent speech, much less so if that person had lost family members in the Holocaust, and even less if they believed they were having a conversation in private. These chat roulette sites are not intended as mass public broadcast forums; people participating in them tend to interact on the assumption that they are having a private conversation, so the exchange should be viewed as angry words being hurled at a perceived abuser, not as a public declaration of intent to harm others. I don’t condone a healthcare provider saying she’d kill Israeli nationals in her hospital, even if she has lost scores of family members in the Gaza holocaust. But I also wouldn’t confuse what I was seeing with evidence of an antisemitism crisis in Australia.

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1882247975201632352

There is a concerted effort to manufacture the illusion of an antisemitism crisis in Australia in order to protect Israeli information interests — and the call isn’t coming entirely from inside the house. Albanese has acknowledged that the perpetrators of a spate of allegedly antisemitic attacks in this country may have been paid actors working for foreign operatives. The prime minister refused to speculate as to which country might be sponsoring these incidents which just so happen to greatly benefit the interests of Israel, but you don’t exactly need to be Sherlock Holmes to narrow it down.

And some of these so-called “antisemitic” incidents are so obviously staged it hurts. When you see graffiti on a synagogue with “Free Palestine” written next to swastikas, it calls to mind the Mississippi man who notoriously claimed in 2015 that his driveway had been vandalized by black activists with graffiti that said “BLACKS RULE”. 

Apparently we’re all supposed to take very seriously the idea that either (A) Nazis are spray painting the words “Free Palestine” next to their swastikas, or (B) that supporters of Palestinian rights are spray painting Nazi symbols next to their pro-Palestinian slogans. And we are never meant to consider the possibility that this incident was staged by Israel’s supporters or by paid actors working for foreign Zionists.

It is always okay to express skepticism about dubious incidents of “antisemitism” in today’s political environment. Israel’s supporters are shitty, evil people who support genocide, and faking antisemitic incidents is a standard hasbara tactic with a well-documented history.

There is no antisemitism crisis in Australia. There is an anti-Palestinian crisis in Australia. An anti-Arab crisis in Australia. A pro-genocide crisis in Australia. The fact that our politicians and media have been shrieking their lungs out 24/7/365 about a made-up epidemic of abuse against Jews while standing with Israel and its American sponsors as they demolish Gaza and prepare to ethnically cleanse a Palestinian territory shows that there is indeed something deeply and profoundly sick about our society — but that sickness has nothing to do with antisemitism.

There are of course people with hateful attitudes and superstitions toward Jews to be found in any country, but they are a small fringe group whose beliefs have far less meaningful impact on people’s lives than prejudices against Palestinians, immigrants, or Indigenous Australians. The average Australian spends very little time thinking about Jews and Jewishness one way or the other, and we’d spend far less if we weren’t constantly being bombarded with false messaging about how our country is full of dangerous Jew haters. 

Antisemitism exists in the same way discrimination against divorced mothers exists; it used to be a major issue that did great harm, but in terms of how much it actually affects people’s lives in modern secular times it’s mostly just an obsolete relic of the past. As a divorced mother I might run into the occasional weirdo on the internet calling me a harlot if I mention my personal history, but life is infinitely easier for people like me than it was a century ago. Antisemitism is the same.

Generally when you hear people talking about incidents of antisemitism it falls into three separate categories which are too often conflated: 

1. People conflating support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews. This is the most common category by an extremely massive margin.

2. People conflating October 7 with a Holocaust-like event in which Jews were murdered simply for being Jewish. In reality October 7 was an act of desperation by the oppressed inhabitants of a giant concentration camp, and they would have killed their oppressors regardless of their religion.

3. Real hatred of Jewish people and real attacks on Jews because they are Jewish. This, while relatively uncommon, is being made more common by Israel’s practice of committing genocide under a Star of David flag while claiming to represent all Jews.

Israel apologists always go out of their way to conflate these three categories. The Anti-Defamation League officially made this conflation a standard practice in 2023 by categorizing incidents of pro-Palestinian activism as antisemitic incidents. The Anti-Defamation League recently drew controversy by saying that Elon Musk’s infamous Nazi salute was not antisemitic, while we’re on the subject.

There is no antisemitism crisis in Australia. As The Daily Telegraph and their agent provocateur found out, antisemitism is one crisis we don’t have. They tried to provoke an antisemitic reaction, and they failed. No one cared.

 The real crisis in Australia is that we are the kind of country that would sit and watch a live-streamed genocide without moving heaven and earth to stop it. We have a morality crisis. An apathy crisis. A crisis of our hearts, minds and souls. But what we do not have in this country, in any meaningful way, is an antisemitism crisis.

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Adobe Stock.

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

❖

Doctors Without Borders emergency coordinator Caroline Seguin reports that lifesaving medical equipment inside the hospitals in northern Gaza has been methodically destroyed, “smashed to pieces, one by one, to make sure no medical care could be provided anymore.”

“You have to ask: What is the motivation of such action? These machines are made to save people’s lives, mothers, fathers, children,” Seguin writes.

But we all know the motivation. The motivation is to make the Gaza Strip unlivable for Palestinians.

I mean, what excuses could the Israel apologists possibly produce for this one? Were Hamas hiding in the ventilators? Were the MRI machines being used as human shields? Was there a weapons stockpile in the defibrillator? Was the incubator moving in ways that made IDF troops feel unsafe? What’s the hasbara line on this, exactly?

Doesn’t look like there is one. After all the lies about Israel’s reasons for systematically destroying Gaza’s healthcare facilities, they’ve now dropped all pretenses and are openly targeting medical equipment itself for destruction. The goal was always to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable in order to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

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Those who say “Fuck anyone who didn’t vote for Kamala” because of this or that ugly domestic policy Trump advances simply ignored Gaza during the Biden administration. They ignored it with their eyes, their minds, and their hearts.

They avoided looking at the gruesome video footage of dismembered children and burning bodies. They avoided thinking about the daily massacres and imagining what it would be like if it was their own neighborhood being incinerated. They avoided feeling the unpleasant feelings you will necessarily experience if you allow your eyes and your mind to behold these things with unwavering attention.

They’ve been living in a different universe than those of us who have been looking at these horrors and contemplating them and feeling them. That’s the one and only reason they can say “Fuck anyone who didn’t vote for Kamala”. If they hadn’t spent more than a year keeping their eyes, minds and hearts tightly screwed shut, it would never occur to them to say such a thing.

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An important point that’s getting lost in the conversation about the Trump administration’s recent Ukraine moves is that polling now shows a majority of Ukrainians want the war to end. They don’t want to fight anymore. 

That should be the end of the conversation right there. There’s nothing left to debate. The very last argument the proxy warriors had — “The Ukrainians want to keep fighting” — died months ago. If you still want this proxy war to continue even after the Ukrainians themselves want it to stop, then you’re a monster. You want Ukrainians to keep throwing their lives into the wood chipper of an unwinnable war against their will just so you can feel nice feelings instead of uncomfortable feelings. You’re a psycho. Everyone should ignore everything you have to say about the world.

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The Trump administration has frozen funding for the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front which facilitates US regime change operations around the world. This follows the stripping of USAID, another US soft power operation. It remains to be seen how much of this is a lasting policy shift and how much is just a restructuring of the imperial manipulation machine.

I was excited to flaunt my told-you-sos at all the empire simps on social media who’ve been calling me a Russian propagandist for saying Ukraine is an unwinnable proxy war that should never have been started — then I realized most of them are probably offline now that they’re not getting paid.

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I’m still getting dopey Trumpists telling me their president is making heroic efforts to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians in ways no other president has. Yeah dipshit, he’s doing it by giving Israel literally everything it’s ever wanted by removing the Palestinians. That’s not solving a problem or achieving peace, that’s just using force to declare a winner and taking everything from the declared loser. It’s like saying you resolved an argument by murdering one of the participants. It’s like saying you can fix racism by eliminating everyone of a different race.

Trump’s whole plan is “No more Palestinians means no more Israel-Palestine conflict!” How stupid do you have to be to believe that’s what peace and justice looks like? You can end ANY dispute by eliminating the other side, but that doesn’t equal peace. In this case, it equals giving a genocidal ethnostate everything it’s ever wanted, which advocates of peace and justice have spent generations trying to stop.

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For an entire decade now American consciousness has been plagued by the delusion that fighting the power has something to do with Donald Trump. Democrats act like they’re being brave revolutionaries by standing against him. Republicans act like they’re being brave revolutionaries by supporting him.

In reality the fight against real power has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump. It’s got very little to do with opposing him, since the US president is just a figurehead and if it wasn’t Trump standing in that position it’d be some other ideologically identical empire goon. And it’s certainly got nothing to do with supporting him, since he’s completely unified with establishment power structures.

Progressives view Trump as a Hitlerian dictator who plans to end democracy in America, while rightists view him as a heroic populist who is leading a charge to dismantle the Deep State. In reality Trump’s record has established beyond a doubt that he is nothing other than a standard shitty Republican president. As far as his material policy decisions and governance are concerned he is not extraordinary, and he is not special. His few superficial differences from his predecessors are eclipsed by his similarities with them, which dwarf the differences by orders of magnitude. The only reason Trump is regarded as an aberration rather than a continuation of US status quo politics is because both sides of the imaginary partisan divide keep fueling that delusion with baseless emotion-driven narratives.

The network of plutocrats and empire managers who really run America have been in power since long before Trump, and could easily run things today without Trump, and will continue to run things after Trump. For the previous four years the United States had a president who was an actual dementia patient, and it made no difference to the functioning of the empire. Trump is the same. Anyone could be sitting in that figurehead position, and the tyranny and abuses of the US empire would continue uninterrupted.

To meaningfully oppose real power is not to take some special stance toward Donald Trump, or any other individual empire manager for that matter. The abuses of the empire aren’t the product of any one individual, but rather the inevitable fruits of the systems and practices that the empire is premised upon. Capitalism. Imperialism. Hegemonic control. Plutocracy. Militarism. Ecocide. Exploitation. Extraction. Authoritarianism. Propaganda.

Fighting the power means taking your stand against these things. You know this is true because while the powerful permit and encourage the partisan feuding for and against Donald Trump, they have violent conniptions whenever a robust movement against imperial war agendas or capitalist oligarchy emerges anywhere in the world. One need only look at how aggressively the FBI targeted antiwar activists, communists and black civil rights groups with COINTELPRO operations to stomp out any movement toward justice and equality in the United States, and contrast this with how freely opposition and support for Donald Trump is allowed to flourish in mainstream discourse, to see what real opposition looks like.

If you want to fight the power, take your stand against the empire itself. Help discredit its propaganda machine in the eyes of the public, so that people will stop consenting to its abuses. Help oppose its war agendas, so that its abuses will become harder to inflict upon the world. Help open people’s eyes to the injustices that are baked into capitalism, so people can see that a better world is possible. Help spread awareness of the way the empire really operates, so people can stop throwing their energy into the delusion that fighting real power has something to do with Donald Trump.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/IDF.

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

The two big stories in the news today are the Trump administration saying Ukraine is going to have to give up territory and NATO ambitions in order to secure a peace deal, while Israel appears to retreat from its ceasefire standoff with Hamas.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Wednesday that the US “does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome for a negotiated settlement,” and that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.” This comes as Trump announces that he is in talks with Vladimir Putin to bring the war in Ukraine to an end.

Both NATO membership and recapturing all territory lost to Russia have been the goal of Ukraine’s President Zelensky and the NATO enthusiasts throughout the western world who adore him. Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explains:

Restoring Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders has been a war goal of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, although there have been signs in recent months that he’s accepted that’s unrealistic. But he is still calling for strong security guarantees from the US that involve the deployment of troops, which Hegseth also dismissed.

“Any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops. If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission, and they should not be covered under Article 5,” he said.

“There also must be robust international oversight of the line of contact. To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine,” Hegseth added.

“Hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive had Biden been willing to say this three years ago,” Aaron Maté wrote on Twitter regarding Hegseth’s comments. “Instead, Biden refused, fueled a proxy war, presided over Ukraine’s decimation, and then turned around and said that Ukraine isn’t ready to join NATO anyway. It was all a bait and switch with one goal only: use Ukraine to bleed Russia. Whoever went along with this epic disaster — and that sadly includes progressive lawmakers and media — should ask themselves if it was worth it.”

And now the US treasury secretary is meeting with Zelensky to negotiate a deal granting the US access to Ukraine’s considerable rare earth mineral wealth — not to continue the war, but to pay for a post-war “security shield” that the US would be supplying under President Trump’s plan. Ukraine has been scorched, shredded and spat on by its buddies in Washington, and now it’s being strip-mined.

Everyone who knew anything about anything said from the very beginning of the war that this would happen. Professor John Mearsheimer warned back in 2015 that the west was leading Ukraine down the primrose path and that the result would be Ukraine getting wrecked. Many other experts and analysts warned that NATO provocations would lead to disaster for Ukraine, long before the war began. 

So much easily avoidable death. This war was provoked, and was provoked deliberately, solely to move a few pieces around on the grand chessboard to help the US secure planetary domination. The US and its allies refused off-ramp after off-ramp after off-ramp to this nightmare, both before Russia invaded and in the weeks immediately afterward. 

Imagine being a Ukrainian fighting on the front lines right now as the US secretary of defense says you’re going to lose your territory and you’ll never join NATO while Kyiv signs over your nation’s rare earth mineral wealth to Washington. I would desert so hard.

Other US-aligned proxies take note: this is what happens when you put your country on the line for the advancement of US strategic agendas. I hope Taiwan is watching these events closely.

Report: Israel Says Gaza Hostage Deal Can Continue If Hamas Releases Three on Saturday
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Gaza #Hamas #Israel #Palestinians #hostages https://t.co/W4GOrKFmLk

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) February 12, 2025

The other major story today is that Israel appears to be backing down on its ceasefire brinkmanship in Gaza. Barak Ravid reports for Axios that according to an unnamed Israeli official, Israel has told mediators that it will abide by the ceasefire terms as long as Hamas releases three hostages on Saturday as originally planned.

This would be a significant walk-back from the Netanyahu regime, who shortly beforehand had been insisting that Hamas must release “all” hostages on Saturday, which went against the terms of the ceasefire agreement.

Additionally, the aid requirements Hamas had been demanding now appear to be flooding in from Israel. Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed reports from the Gaza Strip:

Thousands of tents and caravans have entered Gaza. The situation is becoming more stable, and aid has been flowing in consistently over the past hours.

The same is true in terms of medical aid as local reports indicate that at least five medical aid trucks have gotten into Gaza during the last 24 hours.

The ceasefire will likely hold as Hamas gears up to release the three Israeli prisoners on Saturday in exchange for dozens of Palestinian hostages.

Israel is beginning to allow a surge of aid instead of a trickle.

It’s hard to see this as anything other than a win for Hamas. The ceasefire became jeopardized when Hamas announced it would be delaying the scheduled release of Israeli hostages until Israel began abiding by the ceasefire, and Israeli officials have been admitting to the press that Israel was violating the ceasefire while Hamas was not. Hamas demanded Israel hold up its end of the bargain and Israel made some threats, but apparently eventually backed down. Perhaps Tel Aviv was just practicing the Israeli tradition of “shitat hamatzliah” — just trying to do whatever you want to do and seeing if you get away with it.

So all is not lost. Amidst all the madness of this world, peace may yet get a word in edgewise.

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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

It’s so infantile and embarrassing to love a state like Israel or the US and spend your time defending its actions. It’s a sign of a feeble mind to feel emotional attachment to any power structure, but especially the ones that are doing the most evil things in the world right now.

Every day I am accused of “loving” this or that empire-targeted nation or group, depending on what’s in the news and who westerners are being told to hate by their pundits and politicians. Some days it’s Russia, other days it’s China, Iran or Hamas. Really I have no special emotional attachment to any of those entities — those who hurl this accusation are merely projecting their own internal values onto me: I hate what they love so they assume I must love what they hate.

I don’t love the western empire’s enemies, and I don’t defend them. In reality I am simply standing against the world’s most tyrannical and abusive power structure, whose imperial umbrella I happen to live under here in Australia. I would oppose that tyranny and abuse regardless of the nations it happens to be targeting on any particular day. I have nothing against Russia, China or Iran, but I also have no personal emotional relationship with them. They have nothing to do with me.

It’s impossible to have a real personal emotional relationship with any nation. You can have a personal relationship with people, with individual communities and neighborhoods, with a specific beach or forest or countryside, but nations are too large and full of too many people for you to have a meaningful relationship with them as an individual. In order to feel loving feelings toward a nation, you have to create a symbol of it in your mind and love that symbol instead of the actual thing that the nation is. You’re not loving the actual country, you’re loving a small mental representation of it that you have constructed inside your head. As George Carlin said, I leave symbols to the symbol-minded.

So the very idea of loving a nation in itself is absurd, but it’s exponentially weirder to then extend the positive feelings you have toward a nation to its government and their actions and military objectives as well. Then it’s just the same power-worshipping bootlicker mentality that has fueled all of history’s worst atrocities. You have abdicated your responsibility toward your own mature relationship with the world and signed it over to a giant conglomerate of forces whose operators you’ve never met, and whose material interests have nothing to do with your own.

People who love and defend a government are creating parental figures out of the state instead of growing up and taking their stand as mature individuals. And if you are doing this with the US and Israel or their allies, you’re not just handing your responsibility over to a single nation’s government — you’re doing it with an entire globe-spanning empire.

When your umbilical cord is cut you’re meant to begin growing into a sovereign being with a sovereign mind, and instead these empire simps are plugging the end of their umbilical cord into the Pentagon. It’s pathetic.

I have no respect for people who do this. People who grovel at the feet of the mightiest power structure on earth instead of learning to relate to life as free thinking individuals. People who abdicate their responsibility to figure out what’s true and right and how the world should be, and let a tyrannical empire and its interests decide these things for them. They have chosen to remain drooling infants in their minds instead of growing up. They have wasted their time on this planet.

________________

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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❖

I still can’t get over how absurd it is how everyone’s acting like the plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is some new idea that Donald Trump just came up with. “Wait, so you’re saying we make the Palestinians go away and replace them with Jews?? What bold, innovative thinking! By golly, that’s just crazy enough to work!”

This notion that removing all Palestinians from Gaza is a fresh new idea that was conceived of by Trump is one of the most ridiculous narratives we’re seeing pushed by the mainstream political/media class today. Israeli think tanks and intelligence services were pushing the plan to move Gaza’s inhabitants to Egypt within days of the October 7 attack. The Biden administration tried unsuccessfully to get Cairo to facilitate this agenda.

Kicking the Palestinians out of Gaza to neighboring Arab states has always been the plan; it didn’t just emerge out of nowhere when Trump became president. And yet you’ll see everyone on both sides of the mainstream partisan divide furiously pushing this narrative that this is all Trump’s idea, whether they support or oppose the ethnic cleansing agenda. If they support it they talk it up as some brilliant outside-the-box innovation nobody’s ever thought of before, and if they oppose it they completely erase from history the fact that it was being advanced under the Biden administration in the early days of the onslaught.

I just saw Alan Dershowitz babbling about how we should all “thank Donald Trump for coming up with the first new idea in many, many years about how to solve this problem.” But it isn’t a new idea, and Trump didn’t come up with it. Driving Palestinians out of their historic homeland has been the Zionist vision for the region since before Israel was even established as a state, and all of its actions from 1948 on have born that out. This has always been about ending the existence of Palestinians in Palestine.

And that’s all it has ever been about. Not October 7. Not hostages. Not fighting terrorism. Not self-defense. This is about driving Palestinians out of their homeland so that their territory can eventually be fully and officially absorbed by Israel.

❖

Israeli sources are telling Haaretz that Benjamin Netanyahu is planning to sabotage the ceasefire in Gaza to keep it from progressing to its second phase after the 42 days of its first phase are up. It’s entirely possible we’ll see things slide right back into the same nightmare we were looking at during the Biden administration in a few weeks.

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A member of the Zionist ultranationalist group Betar recorded himself handing pro-Palestinian academic Norman Finkelstein a pager the other day, a menacing reference to Israel’s terrorist attack in Lebanon in which beepers loaded with explosives were detonated simultaneously around the nation. 

Israel supporters can’t get enough of this pager schtick. They think it’s the most clever thing in the world. See the joke is that maybe the pager is explosive and you’ll be murdered for disagreeing with their political beliefs. Very subtle stuff. Really makes you think.

❖

Democrats are as happy as a pig in shit right now. Suddenly they get to pretend all the unfathomable evils their president inflicted upon our world never happened, just because there’s a different president doing bad things who people are feeling big feels about.

They wanted to lose. They’re overjoyed that they don’t have to be the face on the US empire’s depravity anymore, and that it’s no longer their job to make excuses for it. They’re getting everything they want out of the present arrangement, because liberals don’t actually care about fixing problems and making the world a better place, they only care about feeling good about themselves. Their politics is never actually about anything other than their feelings, and Biden was making their feelings feel bad. Trump lets them feel smug and vindicated and correct. He also lets them feel outraged and indignant, and they enjoy that too.

But it’s all bullshit. No matter what Trump says or does or how he and his goons make people’s feelings feel, it will still be a historical fact that Biden and his handlers spent 15 months facilitating a campaign of extermination and demolition in Gaza which could not have happened without US backing. It will still be a historical fact that Biden and his handlers pushed Ukraine into an unwinnable war that the US and its allies knowingly provoked in order to advance geostrategic grand chessboard agendas, sabotaging potential peace negotiations and threatening the world with nuclear annihilation along the way. It will still be a historical fact that Biden kept in place many of the ugly policies put in place during the first Trump administration and actively expanded and added to them.

It’s important to point this out because Democrats are posturing as opponents of tyranny and abuse right now, and they aren’t. They are allies of tyranny and abuse, who LARP as righteous defenders of truth and justice whenever the other tyrannical and abusive party happens to be in power. Their behavior during the Trump administration shows you how they wish to be perceived, but their behavior during the Biden administration showed you who they really are.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

❖

British journalist Richard Medhurst is once again being persecuted by federal law enforcement in yet another western nation for his reporting on the abuses of Israel and its western backers, this time in Austria. Austrian police and intelligence services reportedly detained Medhurst in Vienna on Monday, then searched his home and seized electronic devices, saying they did so on the suspicion that he is affiliated with Hamas.

In August Medhurst was arrested by British counterterrorism police under Section 12 of the UK Terrorism Act of 2000 and detained for 24 hours, reportedly for expressing political opinions that were deemed too sympathetic toward a proscribed terrorist group. 

In other words, a western journalist has been targeted and persecuted by law enforcement in multiple western nations for speech that is critical of Israel.

This comes days after journalist Ali Abunimah was jailed for two nights by Swiss police for expressing wrongthink about Israel, and continues a trend that’s been escalating since the Gaza holocaust began. 

Really sit and contemplate how creepy and frightening it is that civil rights are being systematically dismantled throughout the western world in the name of protecting the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state in the middle east.

On orders of President Trump a multi-agency task force has been launched in the US with the official purpose of combating antisemitism in schools and universities, and the unofficial purpose of targeting pro-Palestine activists.

It’s getting bad here in Australia as well. The other day a sports journalist was fired for retweeting factual information about Israel’s abuses and told that his termination was because his retweets had caused Jews in Melbourne to “feel unsafe” hearing his voice in their ears from the radio. The head of Australia’s state broadcaster ABC just said it’s antisemitic to use the phrase “unlawful occupation of Palestine” as he argued to justify the corporation’s termination of journalist Antoinette Lattouf, who was also fired for retweeting facts about Israel’s criminality in Gaza.

I recently noticed that I myself am being followed/monitored on Twitter by the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, which has played a leading role in stomping out criticism of Israel and targeting journalists in my country. It’s an uncomfortable sensation realizing these freaks are watching you.

❖

Former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant has admitted to the already long-established fact that the IDF caused much of the death and destruction seen on October 7 when its forces began firing on Israelis to prevent them from being taken hostage in enactment of Israel’s notorious Hannibal Directive.

That’s right kids, never forget October 7, that terrible day when a thousand Israelis were massacred by Israeli bullets and Israeli tanks and Israeli helicopters, and also by Hamas a bit.

❖

Everything we’ve been seeing in Gaza and the West Bank has been the result of an agenda to remove all Palestinians from Palestine via death or displacement. Everything. It was never about fighting terrorism. It’s not about rescuing the Palestinians from a ruined enclave. It’s never been about self-defense. It’s never been about hostages. It has always been about ending the existence of Palestinians in Palestine so that their territories can be fully owned by Jewish Israelis. 

This has been true of all of Israel’s abusive actions since October 2023, and it was true of all of Israel’s abusive actions before October 2023. This is what the Palestinians are resisting, and it’s why October 7 happened in the first place. We’re watching an indigenous population struggle against an agenda — an agenda which is backed by an entire globe-spanning empire — to end their existence as a people in their native homeland.

❖

It’s so obnoxious how Democrats are framing this ethnic cleansing plan as a push that emerged out of nowhere when Trump took office. Ethnic cleansing was ALWAYS the plan for the day after Gaza was demolished. I myself wrote about this constantly during the Biden administration, as did many others. That Israel was using October 7 as an excuse for another colonialist land grab was transparently obvious from the very beginning, and became more and more obvious as Israel systematically turned Gaza into an uninhabitable wasteland by deliberately destroying everything in it that’s necessary for human life. 

This all happened while Biden was president. Biden committed the murder, Trump’s just the guy who showed up to help dispose of the body. It’s just different parts of the same crime. You don’t commit a murder without a plan to dispose of the body, and you can’t dispose of a body without having first committed the murder. Democratic Party loyalists are pointing and shrieking at the mobster who’s sinking the body in the river saying “Look! He killed that guy, all by himself!” as though we didn’t all just watch the other mobster shoot the victim in the head.

______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acted shocked and appalled by questions from reporters about Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza on Wednesday, saying it was “evil” to suggest that these poor victims of Israel’s destruction should be allowed to stay somewhere that’s been completely demolished.

“Again, it’s a demolition site right now,” Leavitt said. “It’s not a livable place for any human being. And I think it’s actually quite evil to suggest that people should live in such dire conditions.”

Of course the question of whether or not it was evil for the US and Israel to deliberately create those conditions in the first place is never raised by the obedient press gaggle.

It’s been truly remarkable watching the official imperial narrative pivot from (A) claiming it’s outrageous to suggest Israel was waging a genocidal campaign of annihilation on Gaza, to (B) saying obviously everyone in Gaza needs to leave because the entire place has been annihilated and how dare you suggest otherwise. 

White House was asked to clarify if plan is to permanently or temporarily resettle Palestinians.

Leavitt: They need to be temporarily relocated for rebuilding…I think it’s quite evil to suggest people should live in such dire conditions

Is it evil to create those conditions? pic.twitter.com/GyoThqhc40

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) February 5, 2025

This comes as Donald Trump himself proclaims on Truth Social that under his plan the Gaza Strip “would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting.” Such a land transfer would require Israel to forcibly seize all of Gaza in order to cede the territory to the US. If Gaza becomes as a US territory it would of course no longer exist as a Palestinian territory, and would have already been purged of all Palestinians.

And it’s just so surreal how the narrative is changing now that the agenda has moved from destroying Gaza to ethnically cleansing it. It’s requiring some real Orwellian doublethink revisionism.

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: The IDF is the world’s most moral army! It’s a war of defense! They’re taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian lives!

Israel apologists in 2025: Well obviously Gaza’s an uninhabitable wasteland that’s been carpet bombed to oblivion, duh.

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel would never deliberately target civilian infrastructure!

Israel apologists in 2025: We need to move the entire population of Gaza to Egypt and Jordan because all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has been completely destroyed.

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: How dare you suggest that Israel is deliberately destroying healthcare facilities, you blood libeling antisemite!

Israel apologists in 2025: You can’t expect people to keep living in Gaza! Don’t you know there’s no healthcare there?

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel is only targeting Hamas! The only locations with civilians in them that have been bombed are the ones where they’re being used as human shields!

Israel apologists in 2025: These poor Gazans need to be evacuated immediately! The entire strip is a demolition site with hardly any buildings left standing!

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel is taking the utmost care with its airstrikes to only target terrorists with the most pinpoint precision.

Israel apologists in 2025: Gaza’s not safe for civilians, the whole place is covered with thousands upon thousands of undetonated ordinances!

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: This will all be over as soon as Hamas releases the hostages.

Israel apologists in 2025: Now that we’ve got our hostages back it’s time to end the existence of Gaza as a Palestinian territory and fill it with Jewish settlements.

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Blame Hamas! Hamas caused this with their unprovoked attack on October 7!

Israel apologists in 2025: The only possible solution to all the death and devastation that’s been inflicted on Gaza is to advance an ethnic cleansing agenda that we’ve been chasing for generations.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. When the needs of the empire change, so do the narratives.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

❖

Israel is demolishing residential buildings in the West Bank, burning homes in Lebanon and constructing military facilities in Syria, all while continuing to kill civilians in Gaza. 

This is what passes for peaceful times in the nonstop military operation known as Israel.

❖

My social media feeds are currently full of Democratic Party loyalists squealing with delight about Trump’s ethnic cleansing plans for Gaza, acting like this completely vindicates their apologia for the Biden-Harris administration’s genocidal atrocities in the months leading up to the election last November.

Nobody who’s saying “Haha you idiots should have voted for Kamala to protect the Palestinians” has ever supported the Palestinians. These are all the same people who spent last year telling everyone to shut up about Gaza and stop opposing an active genocide. They can get fucked.

They’re all like:

I bet all you stupid commies wish you’d supported Kamala now, huh? You could have had a president who merely wants to explode and incinerate Palestinians instead of ethnically cleansing them! But NO, you chose to stay home or vote for Jill Stein, so now you get mass expulsion instead of the sweet gentle embrace of nonstop military hellfire.

I bet you feel so dumb now. You could have had kinder, more polite mass atrocities. You could be sitting here feeling smug and correct like me, instead of sitting there feeling like a fool for insisting upon your ponies and unicorns pie-in-the-sky unrealistic fantasy of not supporting an active genocide. Now you have to sit there and watch them ethnically cleanse Gaza and cry, while I watch and masturbate.

Now you have to live with your decision you insolent, uppity peons. Soon you’ll be BEGGING for a chance to support an administration that spent 15 months turning Gaza into gravel, but it’s too late. Next election we’ll make you vote for a former IDF member who wants to nuke Iran, just to make sure you’ve learned your lesson. And then we’ll STILL spit on you.

Shame on you. Shame on you for failing to get on board the coconut train when you had a chance. You could have had a holocaust overseen by a competent and articulate woman of color. Now you get ethnic cleansing from an orange buffoon who tweets mean words. I hope you all get deported to the West Bank, and then I hope the West Bank gets obliterated — by a Democrat!

❖

An Australian sports journalist was just fired for retweeting factual information about Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza. He was told it was because the sound of his voice was now making Jews in Melbourne “feel unsafe”. I am not joking. This actually happened.

❖

The same people who say the middle east is always at war because there’s something wrong with Arabs or Muslims will go ape shit if you suggest the west’s unparalleled atrocities and abuses over the last five centuries occurred because there’s something wrong with white people.

❖

For those who don't know, Itamar Ben-Gvir is without exaggeration one of the most evil and destructive people in Israel. He is not meaningfully different from the officials of Nazi Germany, and the fact that he's so pleased with Trump says very, very bad things. https://t.co/DsZ9Go1bMq

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 5, 2025

❖

I hear some people saying Trump has lost a lot of his base with his freakish position on Gaza, but that’s not true. Trumpers will overwhelmingly support him no matter how bad he is on Gaza or anything else. At most they’ll get mad for a day or two and then come back around when right wing pundits start amplifying some story about a drag queen driving an ice cream truck or whatever.

❖

It’s so maddening hearing Trump administration officials wax compassionately about how devastated and uninhabitable Gaza has become like it’s been hit by a tragic natural disaster instead of an intentional demolition campaign that they all 100% supported the entire time.

White House national security advisor Mike Waltz was just on CBS saying, “I mean, you have literally nearly two million people living in a place that has thousands and thousands of unexploded ordinance and bombs. It’s in some places like a minefield. You have buildings that are collapsing and unsafe. You have no sewage, no running water. It has become completely unlivable with this war that Hamas started on October seventh.”

Waltz is a virulent warmonger who has supported all of Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza since October 2023. Now that the agenda has moved on from destroying Gaza to ethnic cleansing it’s “Oh no, look, the place is dangerous and uninhabitable! What choice do we have but to permanently move all these poor unfortunate souls to refugee camps in the Sinai desert?”

The millisecond the agenda changed, the narrative shifted from “The IDF is the most moral army in the world! They’re taking extraordinary precautions to protect civilian life in their righteous war of defense!” to “Don’t you guys know nothing is left standing in Gaza and all its civilian infrastructure has been completely destroyed? The whole place is covered with unexploded bombs! You expect people to LIVE there?? What kind of monsters are you??”

The only reason they can get away with this is because there’s been a change in presidential administrations, so they get to act like they inherited a disaster that had nothing to do with them and they’re just responding to it the best they can. In reality the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian territories has always been an Israeli agenda for generations before October 7, and both Biden and Trump have always been fiendishly devoted to giving Israel everything it wants. If you stop fixating on the two-handed puppet show of American partisan politics and just look at the US-Israeli power structure as a whole, this just looks like an empire scorching a stretch of land that it wanted to grab and then telling the survivors to leave. And that’s exactly what this is.

It’s interesting how the US empire advances interests based on which presidents are best suited for the job. Trump would have had a much harder time doing what Biden did because all the “Trump is literally Hitler!” liberals would have made opposition to the Gaza holocaust much more mainstream. Biden would have had a much harder time doing what Trump is doing because his faction needs to pose as the law-abiding upholders of the rules-based international order; saying “Yeah we’re just gonna get those people out of there and own Gaza so we can make some nice real estate” wouldn’t have jibed with their schtick.

All the Democrats trying to say “See you should have voted Harris because Trump is way worse on Gaza!” and all the Republicans saying “What else can Trump do? He inherited an impossible problem from Biden!” are (at best) completely missing the point. Biden and Trump are just the names and faces on the operation; the operation itself is one unified movement toward the permanent seizure of Palestinian land. When powerful people get what they’ve always wanted, it’s seldom a lucky coincidence. It’s the result of deliberate, calculating actions taken in that direction. The faces placed in front of those actions are irrelevant.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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A poll by the Jewish People Policy Institute has found that “more than eight out of ten Jewish Israelis support the plan” proposed by President Donald Trump to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of Palestinians by resettling them in Egypt and Jordan.

The poll also found that among the minority of Israelis who did not support Trump’s plan, only 13 percent opposed it because they viewed it as immoral. Among Jewish Israelis specifically, the number who oppose the ethnic cleansing of Gaza for moral reasons is just three percent.

Three percent. If that isn’t a sign of a morally diseased society, I don’t know what would be.

Trump’s Plan to ‘Clean Out’ Gaza Has Overwhelming Support With Israelis
by Kyle Anzalone@KyleAnzalone_ #Gaza #Israel #Palestinians #ethniccleansing https://t.co/qZTJWL1nyJ

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) February 4, 2025

To be clear, we are talking about permanently driving an indigenous population off of their homeland at mass scale so that their territory can be claimed by settlers. This is the sort of crime that even a half-formed conscience would immediately recognize as deeply immoral, but among Jewish Israelis, that figure is just three percent.

The moral degeneracy which makes such a large-scale lack of basic human empathy possible is the natural consequence of everything the state of Israel is and always has been. Jewish Israelis are indoctrinated from birth to view Palestinians as less than human, because otherwise modern Israel makes no sense. It makes no sense for an apartheid state where one group receives preferential treatment over others to have been dropped on top of a pre-existing civilization whose land, rights and dignity were then violently stolen from them — if you view all the parties involved as equal. So they are trained not to view them as equal.

This systematic poisoning of conscience has knock-on effects in all sorts of other areas, though. A 2011 poll published by Haaretz found that 61 percent of Israeli men don’t view forced sex with an acquaintance as rape, and that only seven percent believe marital rape is a real thing. Rape is abundant in the Israeli military and is almost never punished ; in 2022 The Jerusalem Post reported that 1,542 incidents of sexual assault complaints were received by the IDF in the year 2020, and that of these, only 31 indictments were filed.

Average Israeli ad: “Doing whatever we want until forcibly prevented, is actually part of our culture!”

If anyone else posted this it would be flagged for antisemitism. pic.twitter.com/07etDfPtVi

— Wyatt Reed (@wyattreed13) January 26, 2025

One need only listen to Israelis discuss values unique to their culture like “shitat hamatzliah” (just walking all over people and doing whatever you want to see if you get away with it) or the sin of being a “freier” (someone who plays by the rules and misses opportunities to cheat others) to understand that this is a nation of sociopaths. 

And it has to be. If Israelis were a deeply moral people with well-formed consciences, there would be no Israel, because the abuses necessary to maintain its existence as a state would never be democratically supported by its people. Israel cannot exist without nonstop violence, tyranny and injustice, so it is vital to the interests of the state that Israelis be the sort of people who would support these things.

And in case anyone is confused, this immorality isn’t actually about Jews or Judaism. Any group who is pervasively indoctrinated into believing a neighboring group must be treated abusively will be shaped into cruel and ignorant people — anyone of conscience who’s ever interacted with white South Africans above a certain age has likely had a taste of this. It’s got nothing to do with anyone’s religion or ethnicity, it’s just how the abuses of apartheid are upheld.

This is the depraved entity the entire western world is being told it must support unconditionally. An apartheid state which twists its own people into monsters so that they will participate in monstrous deeds. 

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