Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

Revolutionary optimism is a skill that you learn over time. Like any other skill, it takes practice to get good at it. Like any other skill, it can seem very difficult when you first start trying. Reading by Tim Foley.

Our culture tells us that you do what you need to do to get the girl, and then once you've got her you just sort of coast along taking each other for granted until one of you dies. Because all the stories end before the real romance begins. Reading by Tim Foley.

They were killed by the oligarchs and empire managers whose decisions sent them to die in yet another middle eastern war based on lies, and who will never lose a wink's sleep over it. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Trump administration has announced a renewed crusade against "far-left terrorism," which sounds okay if you don't know that the word "terrorism" only ever means "behavior which goes against the agendas of the western empire." Reading by Tim Foley.

Oh for the day when the bombs stop falling. When the humans stop biting and stabbing each other and spraying everything with blood and oil. When the men remove their iron breastplates and stand tender and vulnerable in their original beauty. When the women retrieve their tongues from the lead-lined jars in the basement and sing feral and free beneath the streetlights. When we release the eels and arrows from our bellies and stop bracing for the impact of the fists of our fathers. When we vomit out the nattering humonculi in our skulls and live in our natural serenity. When we stop taking orders from the bank boys and money men and join hands with the cousins they trained us to snarl at. When we turn the gunships into gardens and make the robots work for us. When we come together as native terrestrials against the freaks with mechanical minds. That will be the beginning. That will be our birth day. That will be the dawn of a wild and wonderful adventure. Good morning. Reading by Tim Foley.

Have you noticed how the liberal establishment hasn't been nearly as emotional and outraged about Trump's second term as they were about his first? Now that he's the president who bombed Iran, the entire western political/media class is cool with him. Reading by Tim Foley.

Being a Trump supporter in 2026 is like staying best friends with a man who stole your wife. He's deceived and betrayed you at every turn and you're still swinging from his nuts? That's cucky, humiliating behavior. Reading by Tim Foley.

Caitlin and Tim discuss the importance of emotional maturity in the struggle against the empire.

The only positive thing about the Iran war heating up again is that Lindsey Graham won't be around to enjoy it. Reading by Tim Foley.

The story of humanity in the 21st century is the story of a race between revolution and the technologies designed to prevent it. A race between the awakening of collective consciousness to the urgent need for revolutionary change on one hand, and the technological ability to quash a people's rebellion on the other. We're all in this race, whether we realize it or not. We'd better pick up the pace. Reading by Tim Foley.

The experiment has been run, and the results are in. You can't conduct a socialist revolution using a party whose primary function is to suppress socialist revolution. This has been conclusively established. Reading by Tim Foley.

It is true that there is unfathomable cruelty in this world that will bring you crashing to your knees. And it is true that we are ruled by monsters with deeply entrenched power. But it is also true that we live in a mysterious universe whose ways are almost entirely unknown to us. And it is also true that we don't really have any idea where humanity's adventure is headed. Reading by Tim Foley.

The longer we wait for revolution, the more weapons they'll have in place to stop us. Reading by Tim Foley.

Normal people use language to communicate and connect, while manipulative people use language to control and extract. Reading by Tim Foley.

Western politics is mostly just empire managers making up fake problems to fight so they don't have to address the real problems. Can't stop waging wars or the western empire will collapse. So they make up fake threats from dictators and tyrants and take action to stop them. Can't stop inflating the military budget and circling the planet with more and more war machinery or the military-industrial complex will stop reaping profits. So they tell you to be afraid of Muslims and "terrorists" and Russia and China and take action to protect you from them. Can't stop polluting the world and destroying the biosphere or capitalism will perish. So they split us into two mainstream warring factions arguing about culture war wedge issues and promise to protect each faction from the other side. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel's mass atrocities in Gaza have always been about ethnic cleansing from the very beginning. Reading by Tim Foley.

I hold out hope because people aren't buying the propaganda like they used to. I hold out hope because trust in the imperial media is at an all-time low while our ability to attack and discredit the official narrative is at an all-time high. I hold out hope because more and more people are realizing that capitalism simply does not work. I hold out hope because empires don't last forever. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel was founded on the premise that the country's previous inhabitants need to be eliminated in some way. That's all this has ever been about. It was never about October 7. It was never about Hamas. It was never about hostages. It was never about terrorism. It was never about self-defense. It was never about any of the countless excuses the hasbarists and imperial spinmeisters have offered up over the last three years to justify Israel's monstrous abuses. It was only ever about eliminating Palestinians because of their ethnicity and replacing them with Jews. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Reading by Tim Foley.

Ask why there's been so much violence in the middle east these last three years and you'll be told it's because of October 7. Ask why October 7 happened and you'll be called an antisemite. Ask what specifically transpired on that day and you'll be called a conspiracy theorist. Reading by Tim Foley.

They're designing park benches so that homeless people can't sleep on them and placing metal spikes beneath overpasses so they can't be used as shelter. Jerry Seinfeld says Palestine doesn't exist and that sometimes socks go missing in the dryer, wocka wocka ha ha ha it's funny because it's a witty observation about life's everyday little goofy goofs. Fast food wrappers blow in the wind like the leaves used to do. Duct-taped gargoyles with garbage bag wings peer down at the din of civilization as we march over the sidewalk sleepers to our Jobs, stepping over dead bodies while staring at our phones and counting the minutes til we can go home to our sofas and watch wocka wocka comedians and shovel SSRIs into our faces from large plastic bowls so the crushing beauty of our world and the knowledge of our mortality doesn't topple us like Jenga blocks and make us weep like open fire hydrants. In this din they don't want you to feel. They don't want you to think. They don't want you to hear. They keep it all CLANG, CLANG, CLANG, BUY, BUY, BUY, WORK, WORK, WORK, WOCKA, WOCKA, WOCKA, so that you can't feel your body. So that you can't hear the songs. There's bird song and whale song and heart song and lung song. There's fire song and sea song and wind song and tree song. There's ancestor song and mountain song and sun song and wolf song, and lots of others I bet; I can't hear any of them. Oh, except thought song, which blasts through my head like a sonic homeless deterrent in a shopping center alleyway, and, like them, I have nowhere else to go. ____________ Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.

There are two types of racism in the west: the kind that's considered acceptable in polite liberal society, and the kind that's widely frowned upon. The acceptable type of racism is the kind which considers it fine and normal to drop bombs on Muslim families overseas. The kind which sees starvation sanctions as a minor issue whose pros and cons are assessed solely on the basis of whether they will be successful or unsuccessful in achieving regime change. The kind which views imperialist extraction from the global south as the natural order of the world, with centrists and progressives squabbling only about how evenly that plunder should be distributed among westerners. The unacceptable type of racism is the kind which affects other westerners. The kind whose consequences western liberals have to see. Reading by Tim Foley.

There are plenty of reasons why we should all avoid using AI, but the push to offload all the responsibility for the ecological consequences of data centers onto individual users instead of just regulating AI companies is typical capitalist power-serving bullshit. Reading by Tim Foley.

A spirituality that is uninterested in ending war, genocide, poverty and injustice is a dead spirituality. If you hold your time on the meditation cushion as something separate from the weeping mother clutching a small body in Lebanon, you're wasting your time. Reading by Tim Foley.

They keep saying I hate the guy because of his religion. I don't even care about his religion, I just don't like sharing my house with some random outsider who broke in here out of nowhere and took my stuff. Reading by Tim Foley.

If you can hear the whales through your glowing foot roots, then stand up. Open your mouth. Let their aria rip through you. Let it pound up and out so the others can find you. Burrrp! Now's not the time for politeness, my love. We're staring down mass extinction. We don't have time to be cool. Care! It's fine! There's a rumbling in your belly. Can you feel it? An inner ocean, still teeming with luminescent jellyfish, dulled by a thin coat of plastic, immortal but dying anyway. For so many their foot roots have withered away somewhere in between an Uber shift and a Door Dash, and besides, their heart, rick-roll racketed by rent scam subscriptions, beats too loud and fast to hear any stupid whales. Exhausted bodies hosting ghosts running on foodless food and godless gods, too sick and tired to look up to see, to know what's happening in our name, to understand that the cold blue eyes of the empire of whiteness stamped on our every dollar bill that we are forced to pray for fervently each night, “Please God please God Please may I pay my bills God Please may I feed my children God Please may we keep this roof God Please may you give me more money God Please oh money God Please oh please I don't want to die Please give me your demon dollars Made from the bones of African child slaves Pressed from the meat of the babies of Gaza Printed with the oil made from the blood sacrifices of Chevron Paper gods every one I know not where they come from Or how they are made And I might die of grief if I did Just give me some more of your green demon prayer cards So that I might live Another day, Amen.” That is not you. You pray of course (we all must), but you, you hear the whales. And there are others. You can tell us by the flowers of light sprouting from our eye stalks and noggin crowns, from our bellowing war cries roaring through us giving voice to our blue mama, her rainforest hair slick with oil but beautiful still. Reading by Tim Foley.

From all this melodramatic garment-rending and victim-LARPing you'd assume the four Israelis were killed in their beds in Tel Aviv, not traveling by tank through a foreign country they'd invaded. Reading by Tim Foley.

We're basically ruled by emotional toddlers who never learned to rein in their egos. They're trying to control the planet in the same way they tried to control their access to toys and candy when they were small. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US empire is the most destructive and tyrannical force on the planet, and it is good when it fails to accomplish its goals. Reading by Tim Foley.

Elon Musk is a military-industrial complex plutocrat who is balls deep in the US intelligence cartel and recently facilitated the US-Israeli regime change operation in Iran. You have infinitely more in common with the average person in Iran, Cuba, Lebanon or Palestine than you have with the world's first trillionaire. Reading by Tim Foley.

Caitlin and Tim discuss Trump, trillionaires and other tribulations. Caitlin paints the US Secretary of War and then sets fire to the painting. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixOiTYdMCLM

It's a war on the human conscience. Sentencing anti-genocide activists as terrorists. Working to deport mainstream foreign policy experts for criticizing an American war. They're actually punishing people for not acting like sociopaths. Reading by Tim Foley.

Under capitalism, humanity exists to serve the interests of the corporation. We are all livestock; beasts of burden used to carry margin expansion forward from quarterly statement to quarterly statement. Enjoyment of life has no value other than the extent to which it can be used to increase the net worth of the shareholders. Reading by Tim Foley.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday that the US is going to be launching major strikes in Iran, while President Trump says he'll "bomb the shit out of" the Iranians if they don't agree to a deal of his liking. Reading by Tim Foley.

One reason AI is being pushed so hard is because it's the last "humanity can capitalism its way out of all its problems" narrative that has yet to be fully discredited. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US is bombing Iran again after an American attack helicopter was downed over the Strait of Hormuz amid renewed escalations in the conflict. Reading by Tim Foley.

Raising kids who aren't allowed to say no to you is raising adults who don't think anyone should be allowed to oppose their rulers. Reading by Tim Foley.

We could just be taking care of one another and holding each other's hands as we hurtle toward the grave. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel's +972 Magazine reports that the Israeli military establishment has launched a training program designed to "influence public consciousness" around the world, with courses aimed at training hundreds of operatives per year in strategies for "actively disrupting or manipulating the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of target audiences." Reading by Tim Foley.

The 73 year-old activist barely grazes the clothing on Luna's arm with her hand while speaking, after which the US Air Force veteran Luna collapses into a pile of blubbering victimhood. Reading by Tim Foley.

Caitlin and Tim discuss this strange dark future we've all tumbled into and the things that make life worth living. Available as a painting video as well. This conversation can be found on every major podcast platform. Please send us your questions, comments and feedback so we can address them in the next show.

This is just what supporting Israel looks like: standing shoulder to shoulder with genocidal extremists and making common cause with them. That's what Israel is. Reading by Tim Foley.

The UK is getting crazier and crazier in its defense of Israel. Now they're canceling the visas of mainstream normie political pundits for criticizing the state of Israel, and investigating people for antisemitic hate crimes when they denounce Zionists who aren't even Jewish. Reading by Tim Foley.

The film's trailer depicts sympathetic protagonists being brutally victimized by Iranian authorities, and concludes with the image of fighter jets soaring overhead while an English-captioned Persian voiceover says "If Iran gets liberated, celebrate for me. Enjoy it for us!" Reading by Tim Foley.

If you believe Israel is worthy of disproportionately high levels of support, then you must necessarily also concede that it is worthy of disproportionately high levels of criticism. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

It is not okay to be a stormtrooper for the western empire. It is not honorable. It is not worthy of respect. If you are a westerner who is considering joining the military, you should choose a different career path instead. Reading by Tim Foley.

The empire's war on activism and journalism continues to escalate as the Trump administration targets left-wing streamer Hasan Piker and antiwar activist Medea Benjamin for the crime of bringing humanitarian aid to Cuba. Reading by Tim Foley

International flotilla activists say they were subjected to torture and sexual assault by Israeli forces after being abducted in international waters while attempting to bring aid to Gaza. Reading by Tim Foley.

Caitlin and Tim discuss Itamar Ben-Gvir, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Cuba, capitalist dystopia, and love. Please send us your questions, comments and feedback so we can respond to them in the next episode.

In a sign that the US is preparing for yet another evil war, Marco Rubio is now claiming that Cuba poses a "national security threat" to the United States, saying the likelihood of a peaceful agreement is "not high". Reading by Tim Foley.

Western and Israeli officials are currently wagging their fingers in faux outrage at Israel's national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir for publicly boasting about the mistreatment of flotilla activists attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. Reading by Tim Foley.