Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

One It sure is mighty convenient timing for all political and electoral energy in the United States to suddenly get sucked up into a single issue which affects the powerful in no way, shape or form. I wouldn't have thought it would be possible for everyone's attention to get diverted away from inflation and the looming likelihood of wage reductions and soaring unemployment or the economic war with Russia that's making everything worse for everyone while pouring vast fortunes into the proxy war in Ukraine, but by golly, the empire found a way. Reading by Tim Foley.

The New York Times reports that Ukraine is crawling with special forces and spies from the US and its allies, which would seem to contradict earlier reports that the US intelligence cartel is having trouble getting intel about what's happening on the ground in Ukraine. This would also, obviously, put the final nail in the coffin of the claim that this is not a US proxy war. Reading by Tim Foley.

"China is a strange, backwards nation ruled by tyrants," said the nation founded by Puritans who used to execute women for witchcraft and just killed reproductive rights protections because they think Jesus told them to. The world is dominated culturally, economically and militarily by a regime that just killed women's reproductive rights because they make Jesus mad. Reading by Tim Foley.

All of our world's worst problems are created by the powerful. The powerful will keep creating those problems until ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop. Ordinary people don't use their superior numbers to stop the powerful because the powerful are continuously manipulating people's understanding of what's going on.  Humans are storytelling creatures. If you can control the stories humans are telling themselves about the world, you control the humans, and you control the world.  Mental narrative plays a hugely prominent role in human experience; if you've ever tried to still your mind in meditation you know exactly what I'm talking about. Babbling thought stories dominate our experience of reality. It makes sense then that if you can influence those stories, you're effectively influencing someone's experience of reality. The powerful manipulate the dominant narratives of our society in approximately five major ways: propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy, and the war on journalism. Like the fingers on a hand they are distinct from each other and each play their own role, but they're all part of the same thing and work together toward the same goal. They're all just different aspects of the US-centralized empire's narrative control system. Reading by Tim Foley.

"Because the Cold War is in the distant past, most people, especially younger people, haven't thought a lot about nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence, and they tend to be quite cavalier in their comments about nuclear weapons, and this makes me very nervous," Mearsheimer said. It makes me nervous too. Especially when we've got a steadily escalating proxy war which the standoff in Lithuania could easily see spin out into a direct hot war between Russia and NATO powers, and when we hear the UK's top army general telling troops to prepare for World War Three.

Hey I've got a great idea, let's start World War Three over a NATO country that most Americans don't even know exists. Liberals learned the word "Lithuania" ten seconds ago and they're ready to nuke Moscow over it. Reading by Tim Foley.

Just for fun we all pretend to be strangers. Just for fun we pretend we don't know each other on the street, on the train, at the store, at the traffic light. Just for fun we pretend we aren't locked in ecstatic union and briefly ignore our intimate knowledge of the primordial secrets behind each other's eyes. We sit on the bus and try not to be the first to wink, or to burst out laughing at the silliness of our game, or to call out the goofy elephant in the room about how we're all pretending to be strangers just for fun. Two spouses pause mid-coitus to shake hands and introduce themselves. Two twins in the womb make awkward small talk about the weather. The thumb and the index finger avoid eye contact on the elevator. Two slimy babies squirt into the same universe, made from the same stuff, and then put on masks made of mind chatter so we can pretend that we don't know each other. My atoms are your atoms, and your atoms are mine. We have danced this swirling energy orgy since before the Big Bang. Playing positive and negative, playing stimulus and response, playing predator and prey, playing mother and youngling, playing enemies and lovers, playing strangers on the internet, just for fun. I apologize, my timeless sibling, for breaking character just this once. Let us return now to our little game. __________________ Reading by Tim Foley.

The Guardian has put out a smear piece on critics of the imperial Syria narrative that reads like propaganda made by seven year-olds without adult supervision. Reading by Tim Foley.

Extraditing a foreign journalist for exposing your war crimes is as tyrannical an agenda as you could possibly come up with. The US, UK and Australia colluding toward this end shows us that these are member states of a single empire whose only values are domination and control, and that all its posturing about human rights is pure facade. Assange keeps exposing the true face of power. There is in fact a strong argument to be made that even all these years after the 2010 leaks for which he is currently being prosecuted, Assange is doing his most important work yet. As important as his WikiLeaks publications were and are, none of them exposed the depravity of the empire as much as forcing them to look us in the eye and tell us they'll extradite a journalist for telling the truth.  Reading by Tim Foley.

The mainstream worldview is self-evidently bullshit. If our media and education systems were telling us the truth about the world and our "democratic" systems actually worked, our society would be arranged to serve the interests of the many rather than an elite few. You can tell the mainstream worldview is bullshit just by looking at its fruits. We're killing our ecosystem to serve an economic system that's creating greater and greater inequality while wars rage and nuclear brinkmanship threatens to wipe us all out and corruption rules the earth.  The world is as it is because the way the majority of people in the most influential nations think, act and vote is being continuously manipulated by the powerful, for the powerful. The mainstream worldview is just a giant bundle of power-serving lies and manipulations. Reading by Tim Foley.

If there is a purpose of human life, as near as I can tell from these severely limited sense organs and this very limited brain, it's to become as conscious as possible. Reading by Tim Foley.

The White House has officially confirmed reports that President Biden will indeed be visiting Saudi Arabia in contradiction of his campaign vows to make the nation a "pariah" for its human rights violations, and everyone's acting like visiting a murderous tyrant is somehow beneath the dignity of a US president. Reading by Tim Foley.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre came very close to committing the cardinal sin of referring to a US-aligned nation as a "regime" on Monday. Reading by Tim Foley.

My enemies are not in Moscow or Beijing. My enemies are in Washington, Arlington, Langley, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. And so are yours. The only question is whether or not you realize it yet. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US-centralized empire is a giant macrocosm of this entire dynamic. It pours vast amounts of energy into narrative control in the form of propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy, and the war on journalism. It weaves nonstop narratives about how great it is and how horrible its enemies are. And it fears being seen more than anything in the world. Reading by Tim Foley.

President Biden used the phrase "Putin's price hike" again in a reaction to Friday's Consumer Price Index report revealing continued high inflation, showing once again that the US government believes Americans are idiots. Reading by Tim Foley.

You can learn more about US foreign policy from a casual glance at a list of the world's largest proven oil reserves than you can from a lifetime of consuming mainstream news media. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Grayzone has published leaked email communications between faux-left British commentator and aspiring parliamentarian Paul Mason and a shady intelligence contractor named Amil Khan which plainly shows the two plotting to use state power to subvert anti-imperialist media outlets like Consortium News and Grayzone, as well as "far left rogue academics" and the broader left more generally. There will probably be a lot written about these leaks in the coming days, but for now I'd like to focus on the fact that, in these private communications between a media insider and an intelligence insider, the "independent investigative journalism" outlet known as Bellingcat is described as a "proxy" for western intelligence agencies and is said to receive “a steady stream of intel” from them. Reading by Tim Foley.

The more control you exert over your environment, the more your environment is destroyed. The more control you exert over your citizenry, the more likely they are to put someone else in charge at the earliest opportunity. The more control you exert over your employees, the more likely they are to want to go work someplace else. The more control you exert over your friends and coworkers, the more likely they are to turn against you. The more control you exert over your family, the more likely they are to avoid you. The more control you exert over your lover, the more likely they are to stop loving you. The more control you exert over life, the more likely you are to suffer. Reading by Tim Foley.

A recent article in Politico's Lockheed Martin-sponsored National Security Daily newsletter featured a quote from an empire think tanker who argued that the tyranny of Saudi Arabia's murderous crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) can be tempered by sending him to seminars. Reading by Tim Foley.

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.  The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for "Violating our rules against abuse and harassment," presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago which prohibits "content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent." "This may include references to such an event as a 'hoax' or claims that victims or survivors are fake or 'actors,'" Twitter said of the new rule. "It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters." That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising. Reading by Tim Foley.

Whatever ends up collapsing the US empire is far less likely to come from Russia or China than from the US empire itself. Reading by Tim Foley.

So in order to punish Vladimir Putin for his war crimes and his assault on freedom and democracy, Biden will be courting a tyrannical war criminal whose country has no freedom or democracy. Washington will be ending its brief diplomatic dry spell with a government that has been waging a horrific war against Yemen while suppressing any semblance of human rights at home in order to more effectively punish Putin for waging a horrific war against Ukraine which we're told threatens freedom and democracy throughout the western world. Reading by Tim Foley.

Many of the people you'll run into online or in person who defend imperial narratives from your criticisms aren't doing so because they believe the US-centralized empire is awesome and great, they're doing so because it's much more comfortable than confronting the possibility that their entire worldview is made of lies. Reading by Tim Foley.

A Ukrainian government official frequently cited as a source by western news media for her allegations of atrocities committed by Russian troops has been fired by the Ukrainian parliament, in part because of the unevidenced nature of those claims. Reading by Tim Foley.

British empire smut rag The Times has a new article out titled "Azov Battalion drops neo-Nazi symbol exploited by Russian propagandists," which has got to be the most hilarious headline of 2022 so far (and I'm including The Onion and other intentionally funny headlines in the running). Reading by Tim Foley.

The single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society is the fact that immensely powerful people are continuously working to manipulate the thoughts we think about the world. Whether you call it propaganda, psyops, perception management or public relations, it's a real thing that happens constantly, and it happens to all of us. And its consequences shape our entire world. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's so important that the public have no real say in US politics that the empire not only set up two oligarchic puppet parties which pretend to oppose each other, but also set up fake populist movements within each of those factions which pretend to be fighting the establishment within those parties. It's a very clever illusion that sucks up almost all real opposition. If you don't fall for the first kayfabe conflict and realize the game is rigged for the powerful, you can still end up buying into the fake populist movements set up to oppose them. I fell for them both early on in this commentary gig. But after a while of watching what they do (as opposed to just listening to what they say) and seeing where they actually stand and fight or refuse to fight, you see it's all an Inception-level fakery. The opposition is controlled, and so is the opposition to the opposition.  It's like when you dream you're waking up from a dream but you're actually in another dream; you awaken from the liberals-vs-conservatives puppet show and then turn to the fake progressive Democrats or the bullshit MAGA camp as a solution, but you're still asleep. This all sounds like an awful lot of work to go through until you remember that an entire globe-spanning empire depends on the ability to prevent the American public from either (A) voting in a disruptive government or (B) fighting a revolution. So much power rides on their ability to do this. Reading by Tim Foley.

While everyone's focused on the latest mass shooting in the US, The Washington Post published what may be the first major acknowledgement from the mainstream western media that Ukraine's war against Russia has not been nearly the cakewalk they've been leading the public to believe. In a new article titled "Ukrainian volunteer fighters in the east feel abandoned," WaPo reports that contrary to the triumphant narratives the western world is being spoon fed, many troops in eastern Ukraine have been surviving on one potato per day and deserting their posts because they feel their leaders have turned their backs on them and they're being sent to certain death. "Stuck in their trenches, the Ukrainian volunteers lived off a potato per day as Russian forces pounded them with artillery and Grad rockets on a key eastern front line. Outnumbered, untrained and clutching only light weapons, the men prayed for the barrage to end," The Washington Post reports, citing multiple named sources. "Ukrainian leaders have projected and nurtured a public image of military invulnerability — of their volunteer and professional forces triumphantly standing up to the Russian onslaught," the article reads. "But the experience of Lapko and his group of volunteers offers a rare and more realistic portrait of the conflict and Ukraine's struggle to halt the Russian advance in parts of Donbas. Ukraine, like Russia, has provided scant information about deaths, injuries or losses of military equipment. But after three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions." Reading by Tim Foley.

There's probably a correlation between the fact that the US is the only nation with a mass shooting epidemic and the fact that Americans are the most aggressively propagandized population on earth. If you took any armed population and psychologically pummelled them from birth with narratives about how mass military slaughter is fine while turning them into underpaid, alienated gear-turners and giving them an artificial culture mass-produced in Los Angeles, you'd probably see some mass shootings. Reading by Tim Foley.

US Senator Joe Manchin said at the World Economic Forum on Monday that he opposes any kind of peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. Manchin, who at the moment is one of the most powerful elected officials in Washington, added that only the complete forcible ejection of Russia from all of Ukraine is acceptable, that the war should ideally be used to remove Putin from power, and that he and the strategists he talks to see this war as an "opportunity". Reading by Tim Foley.

We're in the final countdown to British Home Secretary Priti Patel's decision on the fate of Julian Assange, with the WikiLeaks founder's extradition to the United States due to be approved or rejected by the end of the month. Joe Lauria has a new article out with Consortium News on the various pressures that Patel is being faced with from both sides of this history-making issue at this crucial time. And I can't stop thinking, as this situation comes to a boil, about how absurd it is that the US empire is working to set a precedent which essentially outlaws information-sharing that the US doesn't like at the same time western news media are full of hand-wringing headlines about the dangerous threat of "disinformation". Reading by Tim Foley.

April 2022: Zelensky speaks at the Grammy Awards May 2022: Zelensky speaks at Cannes Film Festival June 2022: Zelensky hosts SNL July 2022: Zelensky stars as himself in action biopic co-starring The Rock August 2022: Zelensky releases his own breakfast cereal and clothing line September 2022: Celebrities are flocking to the new Hollywood pop religion known as Zelenskyyology Reading by Tim Foley.

The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything at all, about what's happening on the ground there and get it uncritically reported as an actual news story by the mainstream western press. The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death. Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail and Yahoo News have all run this story despite no actual evidence existing for it beyond the empty assertions of a government who would have every incentive to lie. Reading by Tim Foley.

Twitter has published what it calls a "crisis misinformation policy" announcing that it will be actively reducing the visibility of content found to be false which pertains to "situations of armed conflict, public health emergencies, and large-scale natural disasters." If you've been paying attention to the dramatic escalations in online censorship we've been seeing in 2022, it will not surprise you to learn that the Ukraine war is the first crisis to which this new censorship policy will be applied. Reading by Tim Foley.

Oh my God. It happened. I can't believe it really happened. During a speech in Dallas at Southern Methodist University's George W Bush Presidential Center on Wednesday, the man himself, George W Bush, did the best thing ever. I am pretty sure it is the single best thing that has ever happened. I do not believe I am exaggerating when I say that. While criticizing Russia for having rigged elections and shutting out political opposition (which would already be hilarious coming from any American in general and Bush in particular), the 43rd president made the following comment: “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine." Reading by Tim Foley.

People who think Tucker Carlson is fighting the establishment are exactly the same as people who think "the Squad" is fighting the establishment. Exactly the same. Same people, slightly different bumper stickers. It's obvious that every member of the "populist right" who's now getting praise for being correct about Ukraine will function as virulent empire propagandists once the imperial crosshairs inevitably move from Moscow to Beijing. We know this because of their rhetoric about China today. Do you know what happens to mainstream media figures who provide real resistance to empire agendas? They get fired. Ask Phil Donahue or Chris Hedges. The fact that Tucker Carlson is a top pundit on imperial media (Murdoch media no less) means he's an agent of the empire. This belief that there are factions of the mainstream media working against the empire is as naive as the belief that there are factions of mainstream US politicians working against the empire. The empire doesn't platform people who pose a threat to it. This isn't complicated. The TV man is not your friend. I run into far too many people who oppose war and can't understand why I'm saying things about issues like China which disagree with what they're being told by their "populist antiwar" heroes on the right. The propaganda campaign against China isn't going to get better; it's going to get much, much worse, and it's important to start fighting it early. Because it's going to be bad. Reading by Tim Foley.

Really, when it comes right down to it, things are a mess because humans are in a very awkward and confusing stage in our development as a species. Our giant brains evolved faster than we could adjust to, and now we're these scared little apex predators stumbling around the earth with massive prefrontal cortices overlaying a bunch of deep primordial conditioning. A rapidly developed capacity for language and abstract thought strapped on top of a fear response that our distant evolutionary ancestors developed to help them run away from long-extinct monsters with big sharp teeth. Reading by Tim Foley.

NBC's Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran war games simulating a direct US hot war with China. CNAS is funded by the Pentagon and by military-industrial complex corporations Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, as well as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, which Antiwar's Dave DeCamp has described as the de facto US embassy in Taiwan.  Reading by Tim Foley.

Celebrities have been particularly odious empire sycophants these last few days, and it's probably worth taking a moment to reflect on what's going on when that happens. Reading by Tim Foley.

Public approval of the Israeli apartheid regime, like approval of the US police, has plummeted in direct proportion to the ubiquitousness of video cameras. In much the same way DNA testing vindicated prisoners who'd insisted on their innocence for years, a new technological development proved true what a marginalized population had been saying all along. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US House of Representatives has voted 368-57 to spend $40 billion on a world-threatening proxy war while ordinary Americans struggle to feed themselves and their children. All 57 "no" votes were Republicans. Every member of the small faction of progressive House Democrats popularly known as "The Squad" voted yes. The massive proxy war bill then went to the Senate, where it was stalled with scrutiny not from progressive superstar Bernie Sanders, but from Republican Rand Paul.  This is because the left-wing Democrat is a myth, like the good billionaire or the happy open marriage. It's not a real thing; it's just a pleasant fairy tale people tell themselves so they don't have to go through the psychological turmoil of acknowledging that their entire worldview is built on lies. Reading by Tim Foley.

All the Democratic Party's actions make sense when you switch from thinking of it as a political party whose job is to enact the will of voters to thinking about it as a narrative control operation whose job is to prevent the local riff raff from tampering with the gears of a globe-spanning empire. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Biden administration has asked top Democrats to decouple the federal government's Covid relief spending package from its much larger bill for funding of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, because one of those two things is too controversial and contentious to pass quickly. Guess which one. Reading by Tim Foley.

As we hydroplane toward the brink of nuclear armageddon while Bono and the Edge play U2 songs in Kyiv, it's probably worth taking a moment to highlight the fact that this entire war could have been avoided if the US had simply pledged military protection for Zelensky against the far right extremists who were threatening to lynch him if he enacted the peacemaking policies he was elected to enact. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-us-couldve-prevented-this-war?s=w

Allowing the world to come this close to nuclear war already makes Biden the worst US president since Bush. At least. History may well show his to be the single most depraved presidency of all time. Preventing nuclear war is a US president's single most important job. It's so important you shouldn't even really have to talk about it, because it's so self-evidently the number one priority. And this administration is just rolling the dice on nuclear conflict with increasing frequency every day. Reading by Tim Foley.

I've been watching The John Wayne Gacy Tapes on Netflix, which features previously unheard recordings of the serial killer known as "The Killer Clown" who murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men in the 1970s. I wasn't able to finish it because I don't have that kind of stomach, but what jumped out at me listening to him was the way he talked about how much he loved power and what an easy time he had manipulating his way up the ladders of political influence. Really makes you think about how many psychopaths who are just a little bit more functional must be in politics today, on all levels. Psychopaths who are deeply messed up inside but not quite so messed up that they enjoy strangling teenage boys to death after raping and torturing them. Or if they are that messed up they're clever enough to avoid getting caught. Or if they are that messed up and not clever enough to avoid getting caught, but their fetish for murder and suffering is satiated by something that's considered politically acceptable in our society, like war. Reading by Tim Foley.

Multipolarista's Ben Norton reports that Former Brazilian president Lula da Silva, who is still favored to beat Bolsonaro in the nation's election later this year, has announced plans to create a Latin American currency called the "Sur" (South) in order to "be freed of the dollar." Lula is also making headlines today for his position that presidents Zelensky and Putin are both equally to blame for the war in Ukraine, and that the US and EU also share blame for the conflict. This comes at the same time the Mexican government begins promoting the idea of a Latin American lithium alliance. Bolivia's Kawsachun News reports that Mexico's president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has expressed his intention to form an alliance with major lithium nations Bolivia, Argentina and Chile for the mutual benefit of all nations involved. This could have major implications for the future due to the use of lithium batteries in smartphones, laptops and tablets, as well as electric cars. Reading by Tim Foley.

Joe Biden doing a live infomercial for Javelin missiles while everyone who voted for him worries about women's reproductive rights is the most Joe Biden thing that has ever happened. Reading by Tim Foley.

The last few days in the United States have seen a parade of wealthy freaks fellating each other's egos and preening for the cameras in outlandish garb while ordinary Americans suffer more and more. Reading by Tim Foley.

I feel the need to reiterate once again that the censorship we're seeing about Ukraine is of a whole new kind than anything we've seen before. There's no pretense that it's done to save lives or protect democracy this time around, it's just "We need to control the thoughts that people think about this war." Once it was accepted that disinformation and misinformation must be curtailed from above, government and tech institutions took that as license to decide what's true and false on our behalf. We know this because now they're just openly propagandizing and censoring us about a war. You didn't know that you were granting government and tech institutions authority to decide what's true and false on your behalf when you agreed that it's fine for them to work together to censor and sanctify Official Narratives about Covid, but it turns out that's what was happening. Reading by Tim Foley.