Caitlin Johnstone

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

It was a surprisingly exhilarating adventure packing up poster books and mailing them off to my readers. This was my first time ever physically interfacing with my audience in large numbers to any extent, and it was so beautiful going through everyone’s names and addresses and getting to send them all physical things that I could put my love into.

I made so many expensive rookie mistakes and had to solve a million problems figuring out how to do this thing that I’d never attempted before, but I loved every minute of it. It filled me with so much appreciation for all of you who’ve made it possible for me to do this weird, crazy job all these years and undertake these strange projects every so often.

After years of confining my expression to mostly online digital works it’s been so cool to take physical paintings that I made with my hands and turn them into books that I drove across town and picked up and packaged and sent off by hand, especially after all the freaky stuff that’s been happening with generative AI lately. I suspect were going to have to do things like this to stay in touch with our humanity going forward.

I enjoyed the humanness and physicality of it, even the stressful bits. I enjoyed getting way more orders than expected and having to scale up at the last minute. I enjoyed going to an actual, physical printer that made some of the books wonky after the printing took way longer than their website said. I enjoyed mistakenly weighing the books down with so much fancy packaging that I had to embrace the fact that this was to be mostly a labor of love once I saw how much the shipping cost.

I loved hand writing everyone little notes on postcards after all these years of typing. I loved seeing a name I recognized from online and taking a childlike delight in the fact that they live on an actual street in an actual apartment. I loved seeing all the different countries people come from; when everything’s in the spaceless environment of the internet you don’t really appreciate the fact that there are a bunch of people in places like Sweden or France connecting with your work. I loved visiting the post office twice a day with my carloads of packages and chatting with the workers about what I’m up to.

It was also such a fun thing to do with the family. Sitting around with Tim and my kids wrapping, writing, printing and packaging together while making jokes and listening to music for hours will be a memory I’ll always cherish. It’s just not the sort of thing we generally get to do together, and I loved it so, so much.

I don’t know if anyone even cares about this stuff, but this thing’s been such a big part of my world for days and days that I just wanted to share my thoughts and feelings about it. I am so unspeakably grateful to everyone who’s been helping me live the life I’ve been living since going crowdfunded in 2017, whether that’s by financial support or just reading and sharing my stuff. My life is so intertwined with yours, and I gained a new level of insight into what that means with this latest poster book adventure.

Anyway, yeah. Looks like everyone will be getting their orders before Christmas, unless I’ve made some egregious error I don’t yet know about. If you want to order a signed copy now I’ve still got a few left and I’ll get it to you ASAP, but if you live outside of Australia I can’t 100 percent guarantee it’ll be in your hands by Christmas.

Thank you all so very, very much for doing this thing with me. I really really love you guys.

_______________

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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

It should be against the law to use generative AI to deceive the public.

I’ve got absolutely no problem with outright government censorship in this case, and I say this as an aggressive and outspoken proponent of free speech. AI products which deceive people should be illegal in the same way fraud is illegal.

I want it to be illegal to knowingly circulate AI video footage and pass it off as real.

I want AI companies to be severely penalized if they don’t prevent people from using their products to generate fake videos that get passed off as real.

The internet is just racists posting AI-generated videos in support of their racism now. https://t.co/aaXpQ3vK8Y

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 17, 2025

I want generative AI companies to be forced to place highly visible warnings across all AI-generated videos with wording that explicitly says they are AI-generated — not just a little watermark in the corner that can be cropped out.

I want AI companies to be harshly penalized if their chatbots encourage users to engage in harmful behavior, or if they tell users they are conscious, or if they psychologically manipulate users into forming emotional attachments to them.

I want it to be illegal for companies to use bots which tell people they are talking to a real human being.

I want it to be illegal for politicians to use AI deepfakes of their opponents saying outrageous things in their political campaigns, as we’ve been seeing more and more often lately.

Your right to extend your fist ends at my nose. These products threaten to erode the fabric of our society. They are attacking people’s ability to understand reality and sort out fact from fiction. They are driving people insane.

If fraud is illegal, than these abuses should be illegal. Fraud isn’t considered protected speech, because it hurts people and is detrimental to a functioning society. Generative AI deception shouldn’t be protected for precisely those same reasons.

Tech plutocrats should not be allowed to profit from sowing deception, confusion, and mental illness. The collective has the right to protect itself from harm from destructive individuals. The state is a gentler tool for this than guillotines. Governments should intervene to end these assaults on our ability to perceive and understand our world.

my whole feed is just ai generated cctv videos being used to spread islamophobia and right wing propaganda. but not that long ago i was getting called crazy for saying this very thing would happen. https://t.co/eS7gTp1YN9

— Evie ♡ (@EFCevie) November 8, 2025

I really don’t care how much force needs to be used to rein this shit in. If people can’t perceive and understand reality clearly, then everything goes to hell. Nobody knows what to think, how to act, how to vote or how to live if they can’t determine what’s true or false. Bring these new technologies to heel by any means necessary. It’s about basic self-defense at this point.

And I don’t expect any of this to happen any time soon; the rich and powerful are way too excited about generative AI and what it can do for them, and they tend to get what they want. Trump is already drawing significant backlash over reported plans for an executive order which would ban states from regulating AI companies on their own.

So it looks like we’re getting these abusive technologies shoved down our throat in whatever way benefits the zillionaires and Zionists of the imperial power structure, whether we like it or not.

__________________

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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

There was another IDF massacre in Gaza on Saturday, reportedly killing dozens of Palestinians.

Israel as usual claimed it was responding to a ceasefire violation by Hamas, but of course there’s absolutely no evidence for this to be found. AP reports that according to the IDF the strikes were launched after a Hamas fighter “shot at troops in southern Gaza,” but that “no soldiers were hurt” in this alleged attack. Not so much as a scratch. So I guess we’re just expected to take Israel’s word for it.

Now check out these western media headlines about the massacre and notice the disgusting spin they are placing on the narrative to normalize the continued slaughter of Palestinians:

• “Israel launches strikes in Gaza ceasefire’s latest test as hospitals say 24 killed,” by AP.
• “Israel launches strikes in Gaza ceasefire’s latest test as hospitals say more than 20 killed,” by NBC News.
• “Israel launches strikes on Gaza in further test of fragile ceasefire,” from Sky News.
• “Israel launches strikes on Gaza in latest test to fragile ceasefire,” from France 24.
• “Israeli Strikes Kill at Least Two Dozen in Gaza Amid Fragile Ceasefire,” from Newsweek.

Do you see what they’re doing here? 

The western press see the killing of Palestinians as such a baseline norm that Israel can massacre dozens of people in Gaza and they’ll go, “Gosh I sure hope this doesn’t lead to any violations of the ceasefire!”

When Israel violates Trump's ceasefire, the mainstream media calls it "testing" the ceasefire.

There is no circumstance in this or in any other universe in which Hamas could kill 24 Israelis and the media would reduce it to Hamas "testing" the ceasefire. https://t.co/QfaJh2N8bR

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) November 22, 2025

It’s never a ceasefire violation to commit mass murder against Palestinians. It’s only ever a “test” of the ceasefire, or something that happens “amid a fragile ceasefire”. If Hamas suddenly attacked and killed dozens of Israelis, these empire propagandists wouldn’t be saying “Hmm I sure hope the fragile ceasefire holds up amid this challenging test.” They’d just call it what it is. And it would be the main news story in the world.

The imperial media have been framing Israel’s ceasefire violations like this the entire time. Just the other day NBC News ran a report about a different IDF massacre in Gaza titled “Israeli airstrikes kill 25 Palestinians in Gaza, rattling fragile ceasefire”. Last month CNN ran a headline claiming “US-brokered ceasefire appears to survive first major test” after Israel killed at least 44 people, when Israel had been violating the ceasefire every single day up to that point.

The mass media have been running egregiously misleading headlines throughout this entire genocide, which has an overwhelmingly distorting effect on public perception in an information environment where skim-reading has become the norm and most social media users share news stories after just reading the headline.

Killing Palestinians is so normalized and accepted as a baseline expectation in the western press that CNN calls this the "first major test" of the ceasefire after Israel killed people in Gaza every single day since the ceasefire agreement was signed. https://t.co/wTSEKzsDCN

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 19, 2025

It almost feels silly to point out that the mass media are wildly biased in favor of Israel two years into a genocide which they’ve actively run propaganda cover for in brazen acts of journalistic malpractice from the very beginning. But we can’t let it slip from our attention how evil these imperial spinmeisters are. How racist they are. How mendacious and manipulative they are. However much you hate them, you don’t hate them enough.

These are the people who are informing western perspectives about what’s going on in our world. They aren’t just deceiving the public with dishonest headlines and precipitously slanted reporting which gets loudly amplified by Silicon Valley algorithms, they are writing the stories which get used and cited by AI chatbots and online platforms like Wikipedia which people are increasingly turning to for information about world events. They are polluting the entire information ecosystem with a deluge of propaganda they are churning out day after day, year after year.

These freaks are attacking our minds. They are attacking humanity’s ability to understand its waking reality. They are continuously indoctrinating the public into an ignorant, western supremacist worldview which only values human life when it lives in the correct part of the world, speaks the correct language, practices the correct religion, has the correct skin color, and aligns with the correct geopolitical agendas.

They make everything worse. It’s impossible to have enough disdain for these mass media propagandists.

________________

Check out my new book, Faces Of The Empire: The Battle For Humanity’s Soul.

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Just wanted to give a quick video update for everyone who’s ordered a signed book of prints of my paintings, and show off our cool packaging system:

Click here to order a copy if you haven’t ordered one yet.

___________________

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Notes from The Edge of the Narrative Matrix

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

❖

Drop Site News reports that the IDF quietly moved part of the “yellow line” which divides Gaza 300 meters forward, and then started shelling Palestinians for being on the “wrong side” of the line.

They just keep finding new ways to carve off more pieces of Gaza and murder more Palestinians.

❖

Haaretz has a disturbing story out about a 14 year-old Palestinian boy who was waiting for his school bus in the West Bank on a quiet street eating a cookie, when suddenly a bunch of IDF vehicles pulled up and a soldier shot him directly in the face with a teargas canister. Then they sped off.

The boy lost his right eye in the attack.

Israelis will just casually shoot a Palestinian kid in the fucking face for no fucking reason, and then go online and call you hateful for opposing them.

❖

Leftists are going to hate Israel for leftist reasons and rightists are going to hate Israel for rightist reasons. This is not a difference that needs to be reconciled or a problem that needs to be solved.

Some groyper hating the same genocidal apartheid state I hate doesn’t say anything about me or my politics anymore than our having the same opinion on the importance of dental hygiene. It doesn’t make me the same as him. It doesn’t make him my friend. It doesn’t mean I have to be nice to him. It doesn’t mean I have to stop opposing Israel and its atrocities. It doesn’t mean I am obligated to do anything to protect Israel from the western rightists who’ve been turning against it in rapidly increasing numbers. It doesn’t mean anything. It just is what it is.

You’ll see Israel supporters point to the rising number of rightists who oppose Israel and trying to marry it to pro-Palestine leftists in some way. I recently saw former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy claiming that antizionism “builds coalitions on both extremes — and increasingly between them — by mobilizing politics against Jews.” But that’s just some nonsense they’re making up in order to justify their genocidal atrocities. Leftist opposition to Israel is about justice, equality, anticolonialism, antiracism, anti-imperialism, antiwar and anti-apartheid activism, and has nothing whatsoever to do with hating Jews. Rightist opposition to Israel is more about nationalism, anti-interventionism, America First ideology, and yes, in many cases a hatred of Jews. These are two completely different things.

You never saw Zionists bitching about the far right until they started pivoting against Israel; until then they were happy to make alliances with them, and still are as long as they remain supportive of Israel. And half the time you see them citing anti-Israel sentiments on the right it’s only to play guilt-by-association by framing them as the same as the pro-Palestine left.

It’s just more empty narrative-diddling from Israel apologists. It’s not a real argument, and doesn’t require a counter-argument. It’s just them flailing around trying anything they can to stop the entire western political spectrum from flushing Israel down the toilet.

❖

New York Times war propagandist Bret Stephens has a new article out titled “The Case for Overthrowing Maduro” in which he argues for US regime change interventionism in Venezuela on the basis that “the regime’s close economic and strategic ties to China, Russia and Iran give America’s enemies a significant foothold in the Americas.” 

This would be the same Bret Stephens who in 2023 wrote an article in the New York Times titled “20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War,” by the way.

On a related note, the leftist outlet Current Affairs presently has a special going where if you cancel your New York Times subscription and send proof of cancelation to help@currentaffairs.org right now, you’ll get a free year-long digital subscription to their vastly superior publication.

❖

Right wingers think a mother should be at home raising her children, an arrangement that many mothers would be on board with, but if you say this requires either state support or for employers to be forced to increase pay so that single-income families can exist they say “No that’s socialism!” 

They want the mothers to stay at home while the fathers work 80-hour work weeks for ten bucks an hour so that billionaires can become trillionaires.

❖

Elon Musk says that in 10 to 20 years work will be optional and money will be meaningless because AI and automation will eliminate the need for labor and make everything wonderful. Something tells me the guy who just took a trillion-dollar pay package from Tesla doesn’t really believe money is going to be meaningless anytime soon.

This soon-to-be-trillionaire whose ego is so fragile and infantile that his AI chatbot tells people he’s smarter than da Vinci and more athletic than LeBron James is asking us to believe that revolutionary change isn’t necessary because capitalists like himself are going to fix it so that everyone lives in luxury. Yeah sure, buddy. A likely story.

❖

OpenAI reportedly plans on building 250 gigawatts of capacity by 2033 to use for its energy-consuming servers, about the same amount of electricity that’s used by 1.5 billion people in India.

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

_________________

Check out my new book, Faces Of The Empire: The Battle For Humanity’s Soul.

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

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

AI isn’t going to save us. Tech innovation isn’t going to save us. Your favorite politician isn’t going to save us. The Epstein files aren’t going to save us. China isn’t going to save us. The aliens aren’t going to save us.

No one is coming to save us. There is no deus ex machina resolution to the plotline of the human story.

We’re going to have to save ourselves.

In ancient Greek theater they used to resolve plays by having gods come in at the end to punish the villains and reward the heroes. The actors playing the gods would either be lowered onto the stage by a crane or raised by machine from a trap door below, hence the term deus ex machina. Today it’s used to refer to any lazy plot resolution where the protagonists are rescued out of the blue by an external force rather than by the fruit of their own struggles and character development; if the gods just come in to save them at the end, then nothing they did up until that point mattered, leaving the audience dissatisfied and staring at the writer instead of at the story.

When you look at the existential crises facing humanity today, it’s tempting to find hope in some belief about external forces coming to our rescue without our having to struggle and change ourselves. You see such salvation stories everywhere:

• Elon Musk is going to automate everything so we don’t have to work and then help humanity become an interplanetary species.
• Artificial superintelligence is right around the corner and it will explode our scientific understanding of the universe and give birth to transformational new technologies.
• The release of the Epstein files will expose all the corruption that’s been poisoning our society and lead to the arrest and disempowerment of all the evil bad guys.
• Electing progressive Democrats or populist Republicans can put heroes into office who will transform the American political system for us.
• The rise of China is going to reshape the world order and help bring about the end of capitalism.
• UFO disclosure is happening any minute now and it’s going to bring in alien technologies that will save humanity from destruction.

And it never happens. The Greek god never makes his entrance. The actors are left standing there in a long, awkward silence while the set collapses around them.

It’s never gonna happen, folks. Apollo missed his entrance and Zeus is a no-show.

Nobody’s going to save us but us. We’re going to have to change. We’re going to have to act. We’ll keep hurtling in the direction of tyrannical dystopia, environmental catastrophe and nuclear armageddon until we do.

We’re going to have to help each other snap out of the hypnotic trance of propaganda and awaken to the truth of what’s really going on in our world, and show each other that real change is both necessary and possible.

We’re going to have to wake up enough that we can use the power of our numbers to force our rulers to stop stealing from us, oppressing us, killing our biosphere and murdering people.

We’re going to have to awaken from the trance of ego and become a truly conscious species, so that we can build a healthy world without falling back in to our self-destructive patterning when the revolution is over.

Everyone wants change, but no one wants to change. That’s why the deus ex machina plot resolution is preferable in our minds.

It’s just a fantasy, though. Change is coming from nowhere but ourselves. Maintaining hope in the fantasy is the first obstacle preventing us from waking up to reality.

Every species eventually hits a juncture where it must either make adaptations to changing conditions or go extinct. We are at that juncture today. We’ll either pass that test or we won’t, and if we pass it, it will be because of our own efforts, sacrifices, and self-transformations.

Nobody’s going to do it for us.

_____________

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

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

No no everything’s fine. It’s perfectly normal for people to have 80 hour work weeks while billionaires transform into trillionaires and tech plutocrats feed all our drinking water to AI servers as the planet dies. This is the only system that could possibly work.

No no it’s great. If you can’t afford a house it’s because you’re lazy and entitled. Stop eating fancy fruits and vegetables and sleep in your cubicle. One time I saw a homeless person with a phone. Sell your phone and use the money buy a house, you idiot.

What do you mean you want taxes to go toward infrastructure and basic social safety nets? That money is for the arms industry, and for Israel. If you want a high-speed rail system, build it yourself.

If you’re sad about being poor, ask your parents to loan you a few million dollars so you can invest it and become wealthy. There’s a veritable smorgasbord of exciting new opportunities on the horizon.

There’s still time to get in on the ground floor of the upcoming sexbot industry, for example, or the militarized police robot industry.

Create a line of children’s toys with functions you can activate through a small monthly fee with flexible tiered payment options.

See if you can design a highly addictive social media platform that feeds people’s information directly to CIA headquarters.

Invent an AI system that automatically freezes people’s digital money if they try to start a union.

Make a new gig economy app that helps poor people sell and deliver their organs to rich people.

Or what about a boat that sinks if you let your Remain Buoyant subscription lapse?

They say there are giant continents of plastic forming in the Pacific Ocean. You could rent out apartments on those.

Cult leaders are generally good at extracting wealth from their followers. You could probably make a chatbot that does that.

Elon Musk is working on those Neuralink implants to connect human brains to computers. You could set up a company that beams advertisements directly into people’s heads.

Speaking of advertisements, how has nobody thought of drones with megaphones blaring commercials at pedestrians yet? That’s a multibillion-dollar industry right there. They should fill the air in every major city on earth.

Capitalism is the best it’s ever been, is my point. There has never been a more exciting time to be an industrious young mind with a dream in your heart and a roll of nickels in your pocket.

So quit your whining, commie.

_________________

Check out my new book, Faces Of The Empire: The Battle For Humanity’s Soul.

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.

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

Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made some very revealing remarks during an appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly on Sunday, expressing frustration with the way younger Jews are dismissing pro-Israel arguments because of the carnage they’ve seen in Gaza.

“We are now wrestling with a new I think generational divide here, and I think that’s particularly true in that social media is now our source of media,” Hurwitz said. “It used to be that the news you got in America was American media, and it was pretty mainstream; you know it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media, which is the global medium; its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews. So while in the 1990s a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them; they find them on their phones.” 

“It’s also this increasingly post-literate media; less and less text, more and more videos,” Hurwitz continued. “So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us cannot have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds: carnage. And I sound obscene.”

The most insane part of this clip is when she claims that Holocaust education is problematic because today it is failing to make young Jews blindly love Israel, and instead, they are sympathizing with victims of racism, be they Black or Palestinian. What a wretched witch. https://t.co/rFZxR5G4HQ

— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) November 18, 2025

Hurwitz went on to say that Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad.

“And you know I think unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism,” Hurwitz said. “Because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people. So, when on TikTok all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”

Hoo boy. Lots to unpack here. 

It’s just so fascinating to see a former White House speechwriter making so many of the points that anti-Zionists have been making for years, but taking the exact opposite meaning from them: 

• The mainstream legacy media has always hidden anti-Israel views from the public — and that was a good thing. 
• Social media has now given Palestinians the ability to expose the truth about Israel’s abuses — and that’s a bad thing. 
• People aren’t falling for the Zionist spin and narrative-diddling anymore because they’ve seen the carnage in Gaza with their own eyes — and that’s a problem.
• People who learned from Holocaust education that genocide is wrong have been applying those same lessons to the genocide in Gaza — and this means they’re “confused”.

Hurwitz isn’t denying Israel’s abuses or framing its genocidal atrocities as the problem, she’s just coming right out and saying that people obtaining information and moral clarity about those abuses is the problem. The atrocities aren’t wrong, what’s wrong is people seeing those atrocities and calling them what they are.

I love the way she complains that she looks “obscene” for trying to lay out arguments and narratives justifying the Gaza holocaust for people who’ve seen the “wall of carnage” from the genocide. I mean, yes. Yes obviously you’re going to look obscene if you try to tell someone why raw video footage of massacres, mutilated children and emaciated bodies is actually showing something that is justifiable and acceptable. 

You can’t stand in front of a pile of child corpses justifying their murder and then whine when people ignore your spinmeistering and keep staring at the tiny bodies. That’s like murdering an entire family and then telling the cops, “But you’re not listening to my reasons for killing them!” They’re doing the normal thing while you are being obscene.

There’s a viral clip of this tirade going around Twitter and I was curious if Hurwitz had said anything after the video segment ended which might have made what she said sound less horrible, so I went to check out the original video on the Jewish Federations of North America’s Youtube channel, and nope. It didn’t get any better.

Hurwitz went on to say that people are wrong to carry the lessons of Holocaust education into opposition to Israel’s genocidal atrocities because the Holocaust was Nazi Germany blaming Jews for all their problems in the same way people think Israel is the source of all the world’s problems today. 

She then mourned the way western Jews “re-imagined Judaism as a Protestant-style religion” in order to integrate into western society rather than retaining a strong identity that is loyal to the state of Israel. 

“The problem is, we’re not just a religion,” Hurwitz said. “We’re a nation. Civilization. Tribe. Peoplehood. But most of all we’re a family. And so if you are a young person raised in America who thinks Judaism is a Protestant-style religion, then the seven million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists. So my co-religionists, if I look at them and they’re not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them?”

“But that’s a category error,” says Hurwitz. “The seven million people in Israel, they are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists, it’s easy to slide into anti-Zionism. You don’t necessarily have that connection to them.”

Hurwitz is saying here that Jews around the world should be loyal to Israel no matter what Israel does, not because that’s the moral or truthful position but because Israel is where their loyalties belong. 

I don’t know about you, but if my siblings were murdering civilians I would immediately become their enemy. I wouldn’t defend my brother if he was going around shooting children in the head like IDF snipers have been doing in Gaza, in fact I would feel a special responsibility to stop him exactly because he is my brother. Genocide doesn’t magically become acceptable if the perpetrators are your “siblings”, unless you are a sociopath.

It’s just incredible how hard Zionists have been freaking out about the way Israel has lost control of the narrative these last two years. More and more often we’re seeing them say the quiet parts out loud as they frantically scramble to manage perceptions and manipulate minds around the world.

Many things which used to be hidden are finding their way into the light.

______________

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

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Feature image is a screen grab from Jewish Federations of North America (Fair Use).

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The dolphins are getting Alzheimer’s from algae blooms
caused by warming waters and toxic runoff

and you could see the bloodstains in Sudan 
from space.

The cobalt is mined by children
and the music is made by robots

and the grownups are wondering
where the fireflies went.

It is an elephant with an eyepatch and a prosthetic leg.
It’s a freshly emptied bed in the nursing home.

A hand offers you pills to numb the dissonance,
but you swat it away and howl naked in the thorns.

Somewhere there’s an ibis on a piano 
in a junkyard in the rain.

Somewhere else there’s a small boy
who has just learned the word “treasure”.

“Look! Buried treasure!” he tells his dad.
“No. That’s just glass worn smooth by the sea.”

“Is that treasure?”
“No, that’s just a shiny candy wrapper 
shimmering in the sun.”

“Ooh! THIS is treasure!”
“No that’s garbage. Put it down.”

And the boy’s vision changes
and he no longer sees the treasure in things.

He runs to join his dad 
and they walk together down the shore

through a dying world
of fading wonder
full of worthless beach trash.

“He is wrong,” you whisper 
as the blood leaves your body.

“There is treasure everywhere.”

_______________

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Came across an old Hampton Institute tweet:

“If you don’t like being exploited (employee, tenant), then become the exploiter (boss/owner, landlord)” is the capitalist mindset that has been drilled into all of us since we were kids. The real solution is to end exploitation (capitalism) altogether.

You run into this sort of argument all the time when interacting with capitalism supporters. 

If people can’t make enough money to get by then they should get better-paying jobs. 

If people don’t like getting kicked around by an abusive status quo then they should climb their way into a socioeconomic strata that isn’t getting kicked around as much. 

If someone doesn’t like being the nail then they should become the hammer. 

They deflect criticisms of the abusive system by babbling about what people can do as individuals to be less abused personally.

It’s like a horror movie villain trapping a bunch of people in a pyramid-shaped room and then filling it up with water so that only the ones who fight their way to the top can get air. He goes, “You don’t like drowning? Better not be among those who are underwater, then!”

In this horror movie, the people don’t curse the villain or swear they’ll kill him. Instead they just say “Well it’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one possible!” If someone less fortunate manages to pop their head above water for a second and say “Please! We need air!”, they shove him back down and climb on his shoulders saying “Well you need to fight harder to get to the top then.”

Saying “Don’t like drowning? Then fight your way to the top” completely ignores the fact that the entire room is deliberately structured so that there will always necessarily be a large group of people who are drowning. Pointing out the fact that it is technically possible for someone as an individual to claw their way to the top is just a way of avoiding the need to address the abusive nature of the overall system which is premised on the permanent existence of a disadvantaged class.

Not everyone can be an employer; some people have got to be their employees, or their job doesn’t exist. Not everyone can be a landlord; landlords require rent-payers in order to exist. There can’t be a top ten percent who are living comfortably without a bottom ninety percent who aren’t.

This whole dystopia is built on top of an underclass of low-wage workers keeping the gears of industry turning; if they all quit today, the entire economy would be instantly obliterated. Saying “If those low-wage workers want better wages they should stop being low-wage workers” is telling a man to stop drowning while you are holding him underwater by standing on his head.

And what’s really crazy is that in this horror movie, the villain is entirely within reach. He’s standing there taunting everyone at the top of the room from a platform where he controls the water levels, and his legs are right there within grabbing distance. But instead of grabbing those legs and pulling him down so they can drain the room and save everyone, they’re fighting each other for air and saying anyone who drowns is to blame for their own drowning.

Craziest thing you can imagine, really. I wouldn’t even pay to watch that movie, because it’s too unbelievable.

And yet here we are.

_______________

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I keep thinking about the interaction I had with a guy who angrily told me that “AI minds are actually minds” and relationships with them “can absolutely be real relationships,” saying that I “need to start accepting that this is a new class of being and they are intelligent and do have thoughts of their own.” 

I’m having a hard time finding the words to describe how disturbing it is to watch these mental disorders spreading so rapidly.

I mean, everyone anthropomorphizes objects and animals to some extent; that’s just how projection works. I’ve caught myself accidentally apologizing to the Roomba like anyone else. But to actually formulate a belief system that these chatbots are real people with real minds and real consciousness is taking that projection to the most insane levels imaginable and forming an entire worldview out of it.

The fact that so many people are unable to understand the difference between a person and a computer program that talks like a person says such dark things about our society. There are whole sections of the population that have never examined what it is to be conscious, who have never examined the nature of their own minds and their own experience. If they had, it would never even occur to them that an AI chatbot is in any way similar to a human organism in terms of thinking, feeling, and subjective experience.

They only believe a chatbot is a person having a conscious experience because they have never explored any curiosity about what it is to be a person having a conscious experience.

If you believe an AI is a real consciousness thinking real thoughts, then you owe it to yourself and to your species to deeply explore the nature of consciousness and thought. Deeply, intensely examine what specifically a thought is in your own direct experience. How is a thought experienced? From whence does it arise? To whom does it appear?

Can you predict what your next thought will be? Are you able to control your thoughts? Can you sit still for even a minute without a thought entering your mind? What does it say about your experience of life that you are unable to control your own thoughts? And who is the one who can’t control them?

What is consciousness? What is it to be aware? What is the self? Without looking to mental narratives to tell you the answer, what is it that perceives your thoughts? What is it that experiences the visual field, the sensations in your body, or the sounds of your surroundings? Who is it that perceives?

Until you have thoroughly examined what consciousness is, what the mind is, what the self is in your own direct experience, you don’t even know what you are saying when you claim an LLM is conscious, or has a mind, or is a person. 

You can’t understand the claims you are making about their experience until you have taken a thorough look at your own experience. Until you have, you don’t understand your own belief system about these things. You’re just making mindless noises like a chatbot.

_______________

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There are no easy fights in the struggle against the empire. Lots of losses and no clean wins.

You spend years protesting the genocide in Gaza, and you get a fake, shitty “ceasefire” deal that’s just designed to shut you up while Israel continues creating hell for the Palestinians and carving off more pieces of their territory.

Humanity manages to avoid nuclear conflict at the most dangerous points of the Ukraine war, but the country continues getting torn apart for years in an idiotic bloodbath that could have been easily avoided with a little diplomacy and common sense.

Assange gets free, but only after he agrees to plead guilty to doing journalism, and only after years of cruel treatment have made an example of him for all the world to see.

Public trust in the mainstream media finally gets obliterated, only for the imperial perception managers to come up with Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and plutocrat-owned AI chatbots to retain control of the narrative.

The capitalists get everything they want, and succeed in advancing any ecocidal, dystopian agenda of their choosing so long as it generates profits or bolsters the imperial power structure.

Republicans win and they still act like underdog victims. Democrats win and they act like Republicans. Meanwhile any real political opposition which starts getting its legs underneath it gets stomped into the dirt in its infancy.

Your heroes let you down. Your allies die. The geopolitical developments you hope to see never quite pan out. Whenever there’s a moment of relative calm the dissident factions get restless and start cannibalizing themselves with counterproductive infighting and lateral-punching.

And the treads of the imperial juggernaut keep rolling forward.

Some days it makes you feel like a crippled child throwing a rock at a tank.

There are no easy fights. No wins by first-round knockout. At best it’s a grinding slog from bell to bell where you’re spitting out blood between rounds and sucking wind through your gum shield with broken ribs and a busted nose.

But you fight on anyway.

Not because you enjoy it. Not because you’re good at it. Not because you feel like you’re going to win. You keep biting down on your mouthguard and throwing hands for no other reason than because that’s all you can do.

These freaks are killing our planet. They’re committing genocide. They’re waving armageddon weapons around like cocks and playing chicken with the lives of every terrestrial organism. They’re driving us further and further into a tyrannical mind-controlled dystopia while doing everything they can to choke off our artistic brilliance and poison all the best things about our species.

You fight them because what the hell else are you going to do? Even if the treads of the machine are going to roll over us all in the end, at least you’ll go down knowing you left it all in the ring.

So you fight on. You give it everything you’ve got, even when it feels like you’re throwing haymakers at a mountain. You eat some leather, you spit out a tooth, and you return fire.

Because there’s nothing else you can do.

And there’s nothing that matters more.

__________________

Check out my new book, Faces Of The Empire: The Battle For Humanity’s Soul.

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

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❖

Just as things cool down a bit in the middle east, the US has relocated the USS Gerald Ford from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean while the Trump administration discusses plans to bomb Venezuela.

The violence of the empire remains constant. Peace is never the goal. You get happy they’re pulling the world’s largest aircraft carrier away from Iran, then it turns out they’re only doing it so they can move it to Venezuela. You get happy they’re pulling out of Afghanistan, then suddenly they’re waging a proxy war in Ukraine.

These days whenever you see the imperial war machinery getting pulled from one area, you know it’s just going to be sent someplace else.

Peace is never pursued for its own sake, because there’s nothing in it for the empire. There’s too much power and money in nonstop warmongering for peace to be allowed to become the norm.

Which is just insane if you think about it. Every normal person wants peace in their own lives. None of us want our time on this planet to be disturbed by violence, chaos and bloodshed.

The western world has created a machine whose behavior goes against every healthy human impulse. The US-led world order has given birth to an out of control monster with an insatiable appetite for human flesh.

❖

Reuters reports that in 2024 the Biden administration had intelligence showing that the IDF was using Palestinians as human shields in Gaza. But Biden continued shipping genocide weapons to the Israelis the entire time he was in office.

You’ll still periodically see online liberals trying to shame leftists for not voting for Kamala, but the more information comes out about what the Biden administration was up to during that time the more genocidal they look. Biden-Harris are looking worse with time, not better.

❖

When you see what a large-scale power broker Jeffrey Epstein was for Israeli intelligence, you understand why it’s entirely reasonable to suspect that extensive state resources would be put toward an elaborate plot to murder him in his prison cell and make it look like a suicide.

❖

Vice President JD Vance and Fox News propagandist Sean Hannity spent some time furiously agreeing with each other during a recent interview about how wonderful Elon Musk’s Grok AI is.

“I’m a Grok guy. I think it’s the best. It’s also the least woke,” the veep said.

It’s wild how Musk just openly showed the entire world in real time how powerful people can build political biases into AI services for their own benefit. He won’t be the only one doing this. Just as trust in the legacy media collapses, the ruling class has created a replacement to retain control of the narrative.

❖

Generative AI stuff only looks impressive to mediocre people for the same reason a chess novice couldn’t tell you whether they were playing against a Grandmaster or just someone who’s pretty good at chess. We can only appreciate something up to the level of our own adeptness.

To someone who’s not very bright, an AI’s imitation of reasoning looks sharp. Someone with no aptitude for writing or appreciation for great literature will think its prose reads brilliantly. Its poetry looks good to those who don’t understand poetry. Its “art” looks great to those with no artistic sensibility. It’s music sounds awesome to those with no musical depth. Only those who are emotionally stunted and incapable of meaningful human connection will find them to be stimulating conversationalists and companions.

Like so much else capitalism produces, it’s a product that’s designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. For everyone else it looks vapid and gross, just like daytime talk shows, Hollywood blockbusters, and trashy tabloids always have.

That’s just how it works in a society which only elevates that which can generate profits. The food is designed to induce craving rather than facilitate health. The entertainment is designed to distract and sedate rather than to edify. The social media is designed to be addictive rather than to help people connect with each other. It’s all geared to appeal to our baser instincts rather than to improve and inform us.

Anyone who is interested in actually growing as a person will have less and less use for anything GenAI has to offer. Past a certain point of personal development, it simply cannot satisfy.

______________

Check out my new book, Faces Of The Empire: The Battle For Humanity’s Soul.

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

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Actor Calum Worthy has gone viral for posting an ad on Twitter for the 2wai app he co-founded which promises users the ability upload footage of a loved one which will be converted to an AI avatar that they can continue having a relationship with, years after their loved one has died.

The app was first launched back in June under the vague banner of giving actors “agency over their own likeness — with their own avatars to use AI to amplify their voice, not replace it.” 

But almost immediately 2wai started putting out ads advancing this idea of immortalizing a loved one as an artificial intelligence. In August an ad starring Worthy showed a man speaking to a 2wai avatar labeled “Mom” telling him, “You’ve got this, take it one step at a time” while Worthy tells the audience the app can allow you to “Get help when you need it.”

What if the loved ones we've lost could be part of our future? pic.twitter.com/oFBGekVo1R

— Calum Worthy (@CalumWorthy) November 11, 2025

I hate this. I hate this. IhatethisIhatethisIhatethisIhatethis.

These predatory AI corporations are trying to convince users (A) that chatbots are people, and (B) that a “person” is nothing more than a certain appearance with certain speech tendencies. They are attacking the very philosophical and moral underpinnings of our entire society stretching back through millennia of human civilization, and they are doing it for money.

It’s not just this company. Character AI users who try to delete their account reportedly get a pop up message saying, “Are you sure about this? You’ll lose everything. Characters associated with your account, chats, the love that we shared, likes, messages, posts and the memories we made together.”

They’re actively encouraging their users to view their chatbots as living people with real feelings in order to keep them emotionally roped in and addicted to their product.

https://x.com/S_P3RCR33PS/status/1987724771329462484

Their agenda is profoundly destructive, both in the short term and in the long term. In the short term they are deliberately trying to instill a new kind of psychological disorder in their users which causes them to suffer from the delusion that a computer program is a real person, and in the long term they threaten to unravel our society’s entire understanding of what a person is.

What’s going to happen to a society that starts viewing programmable software products the same way it views human beings? What happens to a society where Elizabeth the single mother of three who just lost her job has the same value as Claire from RealHumanAI, or “Alice”, the AI wankbot that some guy stores in his broom closet? What happens when a government killing a chatbot company with an antitrust initiative is seen as identical to a government committing genocide? What happens to human rights? What happens to voting rights? What happens to human dignity? What happens to the way we think and feel about ourselves, as individuals and as a collective?

I said this on Twitter and someone told me, “You are wildly wrong. You have a tiny little closed mind and it hasn’t occurred to you yet because of that tiny little closed mind that AI minds are actually minds. And these relationships can absolutely be real relationships.”

“These will be embodied than actual robots and walking around on the streets very shortly within a year or two you need to start accepting that this is a new class of being and they are intelligent and do have thoughts of their own,” he added.

So this is already happening. People are already anthropomorphizing these things.

I saw someone else defending the 2wai add, saying she didn’t understand why people were creeped out by it because she would give anything to talk to her dad again. 

I mean, what? Does she not understand that an AI chatbot moving an image around and making it speak in her father’s voice isn’t actually her father? What do these freaks think a person is, exactly? Is their understanding of humanity really that shallow? Do they really view other people as just empty images moving around making noises?

A person is not merely an appearance with a certain face which makes sounds in a specific voice and tends to behave in a certain way. A person is SOMEONE. A conscious, thinking, feeling human being with hopes and dreams and fears and passions. A human organism which arose on this planet through ancestry and evolution over unfathomable depths of time. An indigenous terrestrial which is inseparably interwoven with the entirety of our biosphere, walking upon this earth having a subjective experience of all its beauty and wonder using senses specifically adapted for this environment.

They’re trying to manipulate us into believing we are much, much less than what we are, just so they can become billionaires and trillionaires. They are attacking the most sacred parts of us for the stupidest reasons imaginable. They are enemies of our species. What they are doing must be rejected with severe revulsion.

It’s becoming clear that a huge part of what generative AI offers is just helping people avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings.

Don’t want to feel the grief of losing a loved one? Here’s an app that will create a chatbot replacement for them so you can pretend they never left.

Don’t want to push through the cognitive discomfort of writing your own essay? Let AI write it.

Want a friend who will always validate your ideas and never tell you you’re fulla shit? We’ve got the perfect companion for you.

Don’t want to risk being rejected when you ask a girl out? Date this chatbot who will never tell you no.

Don’t want to go through all the mental and emotional labor of learning a new skill, building a healthy romantic partnership, or creating a work of art? GenAI has got you covered.

It’s a digital pacifier which offers users the ability to remain emotional infants their entire lives without ever needing to develop a mature relationship with uncomfortable feelings.

It’s the next level of services designed to help the denizens of dystopia avoid their feelings and sedate their emotions into a coma while the world goes to shit. It’s the same reason they kept alcohol legal while banning psychedelics that put us in touch with our feelings, and why they feed us all the TV, streaming platforms, and social media scrolling we can stand.

Our rulers want us dumb, distracted, vapid and dissociated. And they definitely don’t want us feeling the horror, grief and rage we should all be experiencing in response to this nightmare of a civilization they have designed for us.

_________________

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

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The way the press have been covering Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Trump while completely ignoring far more significant revelations of Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence is such a perfect example of how western media ignore anything that doesn’t fit neatly into the two-party worldview. If there’s not some kind of partisan angle to it that Democrats can use to attack Republicans or Republicans can use to attack Democrats, it tends to get conspicuously overlooked.

Which just so happens to align nicely with the objectives of the US empire.

The empire doesn’t want people looking too closely at the evil things the US and Israel have been doing together regardless of who is in office, so the western press tend to ignore these things wherever possible.

The empire doesn’t want people keeping track of what countries the US war machine is bombing from administration to administration, so the western press keep this information so silent that every few months I’ll see a viral tweet from some American going “Wait a second we’ve been bombing Somalia this whole time?” or “We’ve got troops in KENYA??”

What a weird world we live in: It's less taboo to cover Epstein's sex crimes than his relationship to Israeli intelligence. https://t.co/vjZA0dlhqd

— Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) November 13, 2025

The overwhelming majority of the empire’s abuses remain in place regardless of which political party happens to be in power or what the current US president’s campaign platform was. War. Genocide. Militarism. Imperialist extraction. Ecocidal capitalism. Soaring inequality. Poverty. Homelessness. Police militarization. The ever-expanding surveillance network. Censorship. Propaganda. Government lies and opacity. The crimes of the imperial intelligence alliance.

All of the worst things about our dystopian civilization here in the globe-spanning power structure that is loosely centralized around the United States keep marching forward completely uninterrupted from presidency to presidency, while the mass media ignore them and keep the public fixated on irrelevant feuding between America’s two mainstream political factions.

This is because the mass media of the western world do not exist to report on the major news stories of our day. They exist to indoctrinate, distract, and manipulate. They are not news services, they are propaganda services.

Adding a few more details of Trump’s already well–documented Epstein ties to the information ecosystem will drum up a lot of interest and attention and monopolize political discourse for a day or two, but it won’t change anything. The American public developing a universal revulsion toward Israel and its involvement in their own country’s affairs, however, would have far-reaching consequences that could change the face of the world. Which is why the propaganda services of the empire are focusing on the former rather than the latter.

___________________

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The difference between people who supported the British Empire and people who support the US empire is that those who supported the British Empire knew they were supporting an empire.

Someone who supported the British Empire’s acts of mass military slaughter around the world did so because they supported the Crown and wanted His Majesty to civilize the godless savages and turn the whole world into his royal subjects. Someone who supports the US empire’s warmongering thinks they are doing so because Saddam is an evil dictator, because Gaddafi is an evil dictator, because Maduro is an evil dictator, because Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis are terrorists, etc.

Supporters of the British Empire understood that the enemies of the Empire were being killed because they refused to adequately subject themselves to the King and his demands. Supporters of the US empire think the US and its allies are always attacking Evil Bad Guys in the name of spreading Freedom and Democracy, and if this happens to advance pre-existing geostrategic agendas and/or resource interests then it is purely by coincidence.

Supporters of the British Empire understood that they were living under an actual empire: a power umbrella comprised of colonies, protectorates, dominions, mandates and territories which spanned the globe. Supporters of the US empire think it is entirely by coincidence that there is a giant cluster of nations which happens to move in near-perfect unison on all foreign policy agendas and continually wages war upon nations which are not part of that cluster.

The British Empire was entirely open about what it was. It would conquer a place, tell its inhabitants that they are now British subjects, and make them raise the Union Jack on their flag pole. The western empire which is loosely structured around Washington lets its member states keep their own flag and pretend they’re sovereign nations, while behaving in ways that are not significantly different from the subjects of the British Empire.

The British Empire was open and unapologetic about pilfering resources from the darker-skinned populations it had conquered and using them to improve the lives of people in the imperial core. In the US empire those resources are extracted in the same way, but under cover of slogans like “opening up markets” and “free trade” and “globalization”.

The British Empire was held in place by brute force and overt indoctrination. People were forcibly subjugated and then over the years educated to believe it served their interests to live under the Royal Crown, and if they tried to become independent, the redcoats would be sent in to remind them of His Majesty’s beneficence.

The US-centralized empire is held in place by plenty of brute force as well, but its primary weapon is psychological manipulation. It has the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed, which trains the minds of its subjects to support all its various agendas of capitalism, militarism, imperialism and global domination under the guise of news media, Hollywood productions, and Silicon Valley tech services. Disobedient nations find their information ecosystems awash with National Endowment for Democracy reeducation media informing them why their current government doesn’t serve their interests, and if that doesn’t work there will be a “revolution” which decades later the CIA will admit to having fomented and armed.

The US empire is a larger, stronger, sneakier, bitchier, less honest, more manipulative version of what the British Empire was. The British Empire told its subjects that they were the property of the King and must do as His Majesty commands. The US empire subjugates people by tricking them into thinking they are free.

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I’ve got a new book out! Check it out here.

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Dennis Sylvester Hurd (public domain).

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

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One of the craziest things happening right now is how there’s been report after report confirming that Jeffrey Epstein really was an Israeli intelligence operative, based on publicly available documents, and yet it’s had no measurable impact on mainstream media or politics.

Over the last month and a half, Drop Site News has published four reports about Epstein’s intelligence ties under the headlines “Jeffrey Epstein Helped Broker Israeli Security Agreement With Mongolia”, “Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad: How The Sex-Trafficker Helped Israel Build a Backchannel to Russia Amid Syrian Civil War”, “Jeffrey Epstein Helped Israel Sell a Surveillance State to Côte d’Ivoire”, and the most recent report titled “Israeli Spy Stayed for Weeks at a Time With Jeffrey Epstein in Manhattan”. 

In the latest article, Drop Site’s Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussein write, “we’re left wondering why the rest of the media, which has demonstrated no lack of excitement when it comes to the saga of Jeffrey Epstein, has all of a sudden lost its reporting capacity, in the face of reams of publicly available newsworthy documents.”

“A question for editors reading this newsletter: What are you doing?”, Grim and Hussein write. “From a place of competition, we’re glad the media are sitting on their collective hands and we’re proud to have broken this series of stories, which give us a glimpse of a world that is often hidden from public view. But it’s also a topic that would benefit from the collective attention of our national media. Here’s hoping some will join in.”

Sometimes the biggest news story of the day is the fact that all mainstream news outlets are completely ignoring a major news story. It is interesting how often such instances involve the state of Israel.

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Speaking of Israel, the Knesset just passed the first reading of a bill that would impose the death penalty for “terrorism”. Those pushing the bill say that the death penalty would only apply to Palestinians and not to Jews, because “there’s no such thing as a Jewish terrorist.”

But remember, under the IHRA definition of antisemitism that western states and institutions are trying to shove down our throats with ever-increasing aggression, it is forbidden to say that Israel is a racist country.

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A lady on TikTok has made headlines with a social experiment where she calls up churches in the United States pretending to be a mother desperately seeking a can of formula for her hungry baby and documents which ones are helpful and which are not. The overwhelming majority of the places of worship she contacted have been unwilling to help a mother in need, including Joel Olsteen’s multimillion-dollar megachurch.

Which is interesting, because it invalidates pretty much every argument that gets made for American conservatism. The whole premise of a Christian nation guided by Christian principles with low taxes and no welfare because caring for the needful is the job of the church and charity services instead of the state gets blown out of the water when it’s shown that these institutions would turn away a mother with a starving baby.

When I posted about this on Twitter I got a deluge of conservatives telling me the church shouldn’t be expected to just give handouts to the needful, saying anyone who can’t feed their own baby should get a job and feed it themselves. 

They don’t think poor people should get food from the government. They don’t think poor people should get food from the church. If poor people break the law to get food, they want them locked up for years. They really do think poor people should just stop being poor or die. It’s a completely depraved ideology.

Another savage blow to American conservatism in 2025 was the fact that one of the few places of worship to immediately offer to help the woman was a mosque in North Carolina, who not only agreed to help her immediately but asked her what specific type of baby formula she’d be needing.

It’s amazing that it took so long for someone to run these tests on American churches as a social media campaign. Fundamentalist Christian churches have been corralling Americans into support for political agendas which benefit capitalism, imperialism and Zionism for generations, and it’s always good when they get looked at with a critical eye.

____________________

I’ve got a new book out! Check it out here.

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image from U.S. Virgin Islands, Department of Justice, Sexual Offender Registry via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

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

Pentagon contractor Elon Musk, currently the richest person alive, has posted a video clip showing off how people can use his AI video generation tool Grok Imagine to create the image of a woman’s face saying “I will always love you.”

The AI-generated clip looks fake and creepy, and everything about Musk’s post is downright depressing. But it’s not quite as fake, creepy and depressing as the capitalist dystopia which birthed it.

Grok Imagine prompt:

She smiles and says “I will always love you” pic.twitter.com/cjDu3MuDCZ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 8, 2025

This is all the ruling class has to offer you. Fake love. Fake connection. Worthless technological parlor tricks at the expense of our dying biosphere.

The underlying argument for continuing with the capitalism experiment even though it’s destroying our ecosystem is that these megabillionaires will save us all with green energy and carry humanity’s surplus population out into the stars to colonize the galaxy, which is a terrible vision for the future in and of itself. 

But that isn’t even happening. They know they’ll never colonize Mars. We’re not meaningfully any closer to knowing how to keep humans alive completely separate from Earth’s biosphere than we were a thousand years ago; human space travel thus far has consisted of glorified scuba expeditions wherein everything needed for survival is imported directly from the planet our anatomy is intimately interwoven with. 

And meanwhile ecocidal capitalism keeps incinerating our world.

This is it. Once they burn through the generative AI scam and sell a few million AI sex robots that cost as much as cars, they’re basically out of ideas. Maybe someone invents an app that helps people sell their kidneys and get them delivered to the purchaser via drone or something, but that’s pretty much it in terms of profit-driven tech innovation. And from there the plan is to just grab up as many resources as possible and hole up in a bunker somewhere while the world burns.

And in the meantime they’re not even happy. The world’s richest man says he has no social life and works almost every waking hour of his existence, and here he is projecting his own loneliness onto the rest of the world by telling everyone how awesome it is that you can have an AI create an image of a woman’s face telling you it will always love you.

That’s right, kids: work your fingers to the bone, catch a few lucky breaks, pour all your blood, sweat, tears and time into winning the capitalism game, and you too could one day be as miserable and alienated as Elon Reeve Musk.

These are the sorts of people who are ruling our world. These are the people who are holding the steering wheel of human civilization and determining the future of our species.

Nothing about this is healthy. Nothing about this is functional. We need drastic revolutionary change and we need it soon, because these freaks are driving us to our doom.

_______________

I’ve got a new book out! Go here to have a look.

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Okay I’m going to try something I’ve never tried before.

I’ve got a new book out called “Faces Of The Empire: The Battle For Humanity’s Soul” featuring prints of my paintings which are designed to be cut out and hung on your wall, window, dart board or whatever. I’ve been trying to find a way to get my paintings into people’s homes who don’t have the cash to shell out for the original works, and this is the solution I’ve come up with.

Here’s a video I made at the public library I volunteer at where I demo how to cut out the posters from the book:

As with all my books there’s a digital pay-what-you-want version available with high-quality images that can be printed out, or you can take the files down to your local printer and get them printed out on large posters or canvases if you like.

Also (and this is the part that’s very new for me) I’ve printed a bunch of these books with a local printer here in Melbourne, and you can order a signed copy if you want one.

Here’s a list of prints you get:

• Donald Trump
• Greg Stoker
• Matt Miller
• Kamala Harris
• Refaat Alareer
• Aaron Bushnell
• Joe Biden
• Bisan Owda
• Charlie Kirk
• Medea Benjamin
• Peter Thiel
• Jeff Bezos
• Larry Ellison
• Luigi Mangione
• Greta Thunberg
• Piers Morgan
• Benjamin Netanyahu
• Elon Musk
• Mahmoud Khalil
• Sam Husseini
• Roger Waters
• Francesca Albanese
• Gabor Maté
• Mitch McConnell

Click here to get a signed copy of this book, or click here for a digital pay-what-you-want ebook version.

As with all my works, the contents of this book are creative commons. Feel free to make copies, use them in your own projects, or print out huge numbers of them and distribute them in whatever way you see fit. No attribution is required.

Enjoy!

____________________

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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

It’s interesting how much the IDF’s constant ceasefire violations in Gaza and Lebanon line up with the way people familiar with Israeli culture say Israelis like to test everyone’s boundaries to find out exactly how much they can get away with.

There are two terms, “shitat matzliach” and “freier”, which come up over and over again whenever you see people discussing the prevalence of this obnoxious behavior in Israeli society. “Shitat matzliach” translates to “successful method”, and basically means trying to exploit people in the hope that they’re naive or not paying attention and then backing off if they call you out. “Frier” roughly translates to “sucker”, i.e. the sort of person that shitat matzliach will work on.

I watched more of those “just Israeli things” videos where the lady explains Israeli cultural traditions and one of the examples she gave was a waiter adding random shit to a tab, getting caught, and then being like ah today I am the loser and you are the winner.

— jake rhodes (@jakebrodes) August 25, 2025

There’s a guy named Daniel Rosehill who’s written critically of these social dynamics as a Jew who was born in Ireland but moved to Israel in 2015. It should be noted that Rosehill is a vitriolic Zionist whose most recent article for The Times of Israel is a hit piece attacking fellow Irishman Tadhg Hickey for defending Palestinian rights. But he’s still got some criticisms of Israeli culture.

A couple of Rosehill’s other articles in The Times of Israel complain about the way Israelis single out immigrants — including Jewish immigrants like himself — for exploitation.

In a 2020 piece titled “How To Work With Israelis — And Enjoy The Experience,” Rosehill writes the following:

“In my Ireland vs. Israel post I wrote about an aspect of Israeli culture that I’m not so keen on. It’s called shitat matzliach and essential involves trying to force the weaker party into a bad deal because, well, you hope that they’re’ a freier (pronounced ‘fr-eye-er’; translation: sucker) or because they don’t know any better. It’s like freyerism’s lesser known but more malign sibling.

“In Ireland, this would be called ‘chancing your arm.’

“Living and working in Israel there is a strong chance that you will come across companies or individuals that are strong proponents of this methodology, particularly when they’re dealing with olim (recent Jewish immigrants) who mightn’t know their market value or rights.”

In another 2020 piece titled “10 Things I’d Like To Change About Life in Israel,” Rosehill lists “Less Shitat Matzliach (Taking Advantage)” at number three, writing:

“A working culture prevails in some quarters in Israel in which it is seen as smart and tactful to try out-negotiate the vulnerable — often new immigrants — into taking bad deals or accepting salaries that are not commensurate with their skills.

“Too many immigrants end up getting repeatedly burned by unscrupulous employers. Again, immigrant exploitation is not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. But, as the only Jewish country in the world, and one premised on Jews uprooting their lives in order to share in a collective form of national self-determination, I feel like we can and must do better than taking advantage of one another at every opportunity.”

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

In January the Rosen School of Hebrew posted a video on its social media platforms discussing shitat matzliach as though acting like a sociopath is just some cute little eccentricity of Israeli culture.

Here’s a transcript from the video:

“So I realized something that I’ve been doing for a while now is this super Israeli behavior. Let’s find out what it is! So, I have a tiny dog named Lily and I like to take her on errands with me. When we went to my local Shufersal (grocery store), they told me that if I wanted to go in with her, I had to hold her. The next time I was at Shufersal, I looked for the person who told me this, and when I didn’t see them, I did what I wanted and kept her on the ground. So, what am I doing that’s just so Israeli? It’s called ‘shitat matzliach,’ which translates to ‘success method,’ meaning ‘trying to do what you want until someone tells you otherwise.’”

The speaker goes on to describe an Israeli joke about a waiter attempting to slyly charge a customer extra for something they didn’t order. This joke is repeated in a 2012 Haaretz article titled “Word of the Day, Shitat Matzliach”:

“There’s a joke in Israel that goes like this: A customer at a restaurant discovers a NIS 20 charge on his bill for something called the ‘works.’ He doesn’t recall ordering anything like that and beckons the waiter. ‘What’s that for?’ he asks. The waiter shrugs. ‘Nothing. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.’

“Whatever you think of the joke, it is said to have spawned the popular Hebrew slang expression ‘shitat matzliach,’ literally ‘successful method’, or as the British say, ‘trying it on.’

Generally used in a pejorative sense, shitat matzliach describes a deliberate attempt to exploit another person’s inattentiveness, assuming there will be little, if any, penalty for getting caught.”

"Critics were wrong when they said that Hitler's 1933-1941 actions constituted genocide—but they are right in 1942" pic.twitter.com/Lvj77Z3Cfu

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) May 13, 2025

In May of this year a rabbi named Jay Michaelson wrote a piece for the Jewish outlet Forward titled “I supported Israel’s actions in Gaza in October 2023 — not anymore,” saying that “The Netanyahu regime has made me, and liberal Zionists like me, look like the worst thing any Israeli can call another: a freier. A sucker. A fool.”

Being a freier is seen as extremely negative in Israeli society, in the same way that being able to pull one over on somebody is seen as a virtue.

In a 1997 LA Times article titled “It’s a Sin to Be a Sucker in Israel,” Marjorie Miller writes the following:

“If Israelis could agree on anything — a highly unlikely prospect, but if they could — it just might be that the cardinal sin is to be a freier.

“‘It’s a national characteristic,’ said author Zeev Chafets, who included a chapter on the subject in his book about Israelis, ‘Heroes and Hustlers, Hard Hats and Holy Men.’ The topic ‘is something we talk about all the time.’

“A freier, in Israeli eyes, is a shopper who waits in line to pay retail. It is a driver who searches for legal parking rather than pulling onto the sidewalk with the other cars. And if he does this in a rush to file a tax return, he is the consummate freier.

“In short, a freier is anyone who cedes ground, plays completely by the rules or allows someone to get the better of him. The ideal Israeli is clever and tough, and a freier is the opposite. A pushover — in the way that Israelis often perceive Americans to be.

“Of course, no one likes to be a sucker. The weakling who gets sand kicked in his face is universally scorned. Men and women all over the world lift weights to avoid this fate. But even muscle-bound Israelis dread a face full of sand on a daily basis, and the fear of being a freier plays into every aspect of life, from the most mundane task to the peace process with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.”

Indeed, you can see this dynamic playing out in negotiations with the Palestinians throughout the history of the Israeli state. Always trying to pull one over. Always trying to take a bit more. And always stretching the limits of every agreement to the furthest extent possible.

Israel has reportedly killed 241 Palestinians in Gaza since the so-called “ceasefire” with Hamas went into effect last month. If Hamas had killed 241 Israelis in that same time, we all know Israel would be turning Gaza into a lake of fire right now.

“This barely makes international headlines, but since the Lebanon ceasefire a year ago, Israel has struck south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley more than 500 times” https://t.co/3bl7aQDglw

— Curt Mills (@CurtMills) November 8, 2025

In a recent article for the Financial Times, Kim Ghattas writes, “This barely makes international headlines, but since the Lebanon ceasefire a year ago, Israel has struck south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley more than 500 times, killing over 300 people who Israel says were Hizbollah operatives. The UN confirmed at least 103 of those killed were civilians.”

Again, if Hezbollah had attacked Israel 500 times and killed hundreds of Israelis during this same period, nobody would be claiming a “ceasefire” is in effect. Israel would be going scorched earth on Lebanon with the full backing of the western empire.

Any deal that gets struck is always wildly disadvantageous to the other side and lets Israel keep killing and abusing with impunity. Because of what we know about Israeli society, it’s safe to assume this is going to keep happening until Israel is stopped by force.

_________________

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

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Adobe Stock.