Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

It's not okay to be a grown adult with internet access in August 2025 and still believe that what we are seeing in Gaza is not a genocide. It's not okay to be a grown adult with internet access in August 2025 and still believe this mass atrocity is about self-defense. It's not okay to be a grown adult with internet access in August 2025 and still believe that people in Gaza are not being deliberately starved by Israel. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

It wasn't that long ago when I sincerely wondered if we'd ever see Assange's face again, let alone in public, let alone in Sydney, let alone heading up what had to be one of the largest pro-Palestine rallies ever held in Australia. Dare to be encouraged. The light is breaking through. Reading by Tim Foley.

It was obvious in October 2023 that Israel intended to eliminate all Palestinians in Gaza, in part because you would never treat a population that way if you intended to leave survivors on your border. Because you'd know they'd seek revenge later on. Reading by Tim Foley.

A much more useful and interesting question than "What was Israel supposed to do in response to October 7?" is "What were Palestinians supposed to do in response to all of Israel's abuses prior to October 7?" Nobody's ever been able to give me a serious response to this question which doesn't entail mountains of lies and/or the dehumanizing expectation that Palestinians should accept conditions that none of us would willingly accept ourselves. Reading by Tim Foley.

This is humiliating for everything that passes for the "left" in mainstream US politics. Imagine being such a dogshit human being that you'd let Marjorie Taylor Greene be a better person than you. Reading by Tim Foley.

I will probably spend the foreseeable future periodically reminding the world that when everyone was angry at Israel for starving children in Gaza, Israel's apologists spent days loudly proclaiming that no, they were actually just starving SICK children. As their DEFENSE they said this. They actually believed this helped their case. Reading by Tim Foley.

People absolutely should admit that they were wrong, and they absolutely should be encouraged to do so, but they need to do it with humility, and with some outward expression of remorse. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel apologists use language the same way malignant narcissists do. It's never to communicate or connect or find out what's true, it's always to manipulate and get things they want. Reading by Tim Foley.

Dear Mr Dreyfus, Today I saw the skeleton of a young man in Gaza picked clean by dogs, his arms and head intact but the rest of his body was bone and gristle. The colour of the bones was still a bright fresh red. He had been shot only days ago but the cats and dogs had got to him already and gnawed his bones clean. I have never seen anything like it. Every single day brings fresh horrors to my screen. Each time I think I can no longer be shocked, I am proven wrong. The image of that man made me gasp. It literally took my breath away. I then had to sit with my hands over my eyes while I waited for my heart and breath to come back to normal. When I close my eyes at night, all I can see is skeletal babies, their little mouths gaping open like baby birds waiting for a worm. I have started to dream about it. Each night I carry a child, a new child, a different baby, trying to find food for them. I wake up with a shadow of an ache in my arms because in my dreams their bones are as brittle as egg shells and I have to be so tender and careful. This. Must. Stop. All the waffle of who-did-what-and-when burns to dust when babies are starving. No amount of words can make that right. No amount of words can extinguish the images from my eyes, the ache in my heart, and the alarm going off in my head for those babies. Please do what you can! I beg of you. Please make it stop. It's all I can think about and I am not alone. Every day the numbers of people like me are growing. Every day more eyes snap awake.

As western pundits, politicians and celebrities suddenly pivot to denouncing Israel's genocidal atrocities after two years of silence, it's hard to believe that just a few weeks ago we were being told that saying "death to the IDF" is a hate crime. Reading by Tim Foley.

We've been asked to believe a lot of intensely stupid narratives throughout this genocide, but "it's actually HAMAS who's starving Gaza" has got to be the dumbest one yet. The fact that Israel and its supporters tried to blame the UN and Hamas for Israel's extensively documented starvation campaign makes it clear that these freaks intend to keep lying about this thing until the last dying gasp of the last Palestinian. Reading by Tim Foley.

Just so we're all absolutely clear about what we're watching here, Israel is intentionally starving civilians in order to bring about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and steal a Palestinian territory. That's all this is, and anyone who says otherwise is lying. Reading by Tim Foley.

Those tiny skeletal bodies you're seeing on your social media feed are the fruits of the empire. The shredded, eviscerated, decapitated children you've been seeing in footage from Gaza since 2023 are the fruits of the empire. This is known now, and it can never be unknown. Reading by Tim Foley.

The mass atrocity in Gaza is a genocide, obviously, and is an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation. But it's also a lot more than that. Reading by Tim Foley.

A doctor in Gaza named Nick Maynard reports that Israeli snipers are now shooting starving civilians in different body parts on different days, based on the injuries people show up with for treatment. There's a head day, a leg day, a genitals day, etc. Reading by Tim Foley.

Gaza isn't starving, it is being starved. And the people who are starving it have names and addresses. Reading by Tim Foley.

Saying you support funding Israel's "defensive weapons" while opposing sending it "offensive weapons" is as nonsensical as saying you would never give a mass shooter guns and ammunition, but you would give him body armor to keep him safe from the police. You're helping him commit mass murder just as much as you would be if you gave him guns and ammo. Kings didn't arm their knights with shields and armor so that they could live long and fulfilling lives, they did it so the knights would live long enough to kill the people the kings wanted killed. Reading by Tim Foley.

Of course they'd try to silence our speech. Of course they'd try to send our kids off to war with Iran. Of course they'd work to manipulate our government. Of course they'd pollute the information ecosystem with mountains of lies. They support a live-streamed genocide. They're bad people. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's so funny how Trump has stopped even pretending to be a populist. As soon as he was re-elected he was just "Yeah okay so Israel comes first and forget everything I said about free speech and the Ukraine war is continuing and there will be no Epstein investigation, fuck you." Reading by Tim Foley.

The Israel apologists have lost the argument. They might not know it yet, but they have. Public sentiment has turned irreversibly against them as people's eyes are opened to the truth of what's happening in Gaza, and more and more propagandists are choosing to rescue what's left of their tattered credibility instead of going down with the sinking ship. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Good Guys are building concentration camps in Rafah and massacring civilians trying to obtain food. The Good Guys are circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and telling us we're not allowed to oppose genocide. Yesterday I saw a little girl playing and I thought how nice it is that she has all her limbs and that she is not lying still covered in gray dust while her father screams and cries and calls out to God while trying to kiss her back to life. The world is changed now. The moon is covered with powdered buildings. The pigeons are weeping and the wind sounds like drones. Sometimes I cough and gray dust comes out. Sometimes it's a child's shoe. There's a dead donkey lying in my backyard that nobody wants to talk about. The Australians chat about real estate investments and how you can knock down one house and replace it with two houses and then make believe that neither house smells like corpses. The news man tells us the corporations are just dumping the products directly into the Pacific now while clinging tightly to the edge of the screen so the black hole doesn't pull him in. Everything's fine, the news man yells, and the system is working perfectly. We are the Good Guys after all. We are, after all, the Good Guys. Reading by Tim Foley.

If you want to really live an awake and inspired life, you've got to blaze your own trail. You've got to unlearn everything you've been told about what a life properly lived would look like, and write your own rules. Because the rules everyone else has been playing by were written by madmen. Reading by Tim Foley.

It really is nuts how a young person can fly to Israel and go play genocide games in Gaza for a while and then just fly back to their own country and expect to be treated like a normal member of society like it's some kind of genocide summer camp. Reading by Tim Foley.

As Australia's dear friend Israel announces its plan to move Gaza's entire population into concentration camps to prepare them for deportation and murder them if they refuse, the Australian government is laser-focused on tackling the problem of  — you guessed it  — antisemitism. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US has imposed sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for using her position to oppose the most thoroughly documented genocide in history. At the same time, the US has removed Syria's Al Qaeda franchise HTS from its list of designated terrorist organizations, because its leader successfully carried out the regime change in Damascus that the western empire had been chasing for years. At the same time, the UK has added nonviolent anti-genocide activism group Palestine Action to its list of banned terrorist organizations for opposing the Gaza holocaust. At the same time, the Israeli prime minister who is carrying out that holocaust has nominated the American president who is helping him perpetrate genocidal atrocities for a Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time, Israel has continued its ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza, while also arresting the Israeli journalist who helped expose the IDF officials who cooked up fake atrocity propaganda about burnt babies on October 7. At the same time, the Trump administration has enraged its MAGA base by concluding that Jeffrey Epstein had no client list for any kind of sexual blackmail operation and definitely committed suicide. The western empire is one nonstop insult to our intelligence. The peace advocates are terrorists, the genocide architects deserve peace prizes, the journalists are dangerous, and Epstein was just a wealthy socialite who made a few mistakes. Reading by Tim Foley.

Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok has gone full Nazi after changes were made to its programming to give it a heavier right wing bias, sparking international headlines with its tweets praising Adolf Hitler's treatment of Jews and babbling about Jewish conspiracies to spread anti-white hate. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US has removed Syria's Al Qaeda franchise from its list of designated terrorist organizations just days after the UK added nonviolent activist group Palestine Action to its own list of banned terrorist groups. Reading by Tim Foley.

Welcome to the empire, where peace activists are called terrorists, where hospitals are called military bases, where facts are called blood libel, where people opposing genocide are called hateful Nazis, where genocidal soldiers are a protected group and chanting for their death is a hate crime. Reading by Tim Foley.

Everyone's still talking about Bob Vylan, and rightly so. A crowd full of westerners happily being led through a chant of “Death, death to the IDF” at the 2025 Glastonbury Festival was a historical landmark moment for the 21st century, and the group's persecution at the hands of western governments is once again highlighting the way our society's purported values of free thought and free expression go right out the window wherever Israel is concerned. But one thing that's not getting enough attention is the fact that many, many other acts also spoke out in support of Palestine at that same festival, and that the crowd was full of attendees waving Palestinian flags. Supporting Palestine and opposing Israel's genocidal atrocities is just what's cool now. This is a massive cultural development, because it means we are seeing the emergence of actual, meaningful rebellion in western counterculture for the first time arguably since the Vietnam War. The artists and their fans aren't just talking the talk of sticking it to the establishment anymore. Reading by Tim Foley.

Anyone who has had the misfortune of knowing a manipulative narcissist has seen all these patterns before. The self-centeredness. The hypocrisy. The horrific abuse, followed by collapsing into blubbering victimhood the second the abuse is called out. The aggressive efforts to control the narrative and frame all critics and rivals as evil monsters. It's a very familiar playbook. Reading by Tim Foley.

Honestly at this point they should just get Netanyahu his own room in the White House and a desk in the Oval Office. The prime minister of Israel is taking his third trip to the White House in the five months since Trump has been back in office. I have immediate blood family members who I love with all my heart and visit less often than this. Reading by Tim Foley.

Do something every day to help undermine public perception of the empire. Draw attention to its abuses in places like Gaza. Get people laughing at its absurdities and hypocrisies. Spread distrust in the imperial propaganda services known as the western press by spotlighting their deceptions and manipulations. Help people to recognize all the ways their government is screwing them over for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Facilitate the collective dawning of the realization that everything westerners have been taught about their society and their world is a lie. Help people to understand that it really, truly does not need to be this way. Use every means at your disposal to help open up the next pair of eyelids to the ugly reality of the empire. Cultivate a habit of daily acts of sabotage against the imperial machine. There is always something you can do. You cannot defeat the machine by yourself, but you can do something every day to help tilt our society's collective consciousness toward tearing it down together. Reading by Tim Foley.

Zohran Mamdani has won the Democratic Party primary in the New York City mayoral race after a frenetic smear campaign to portray him as an antisemite for his pro-Palestinian views, and now all the world's worst people are freaking out about it. Reading by Tim Foley.

The more exposed Israel's criminality becomes, the more absurd the arguments made in its defense are getting. Reading by Tim Foley.

If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, its crazy lunatic government will flip out and nuke us all. Watch out for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, those guys are a bunch of maniacal antisemites who want to attack Israelis just because they're Jewish. Oh no, Putin is invading Ukraine completely unprovoked because he's a madman who hates freedom and won't stop until he's conquered all of Europe. China is building up its military because the megalomaniacal Xi Jinping wants to take over the world; all those US military bases surrounding China are just a defensive measure to contain Beijing's insanity. Assad just went nuts one day and started slaughtering his own people out of nowhere. Gaddafi is a sexual sadist who's giving Viagra to his troops to help them commit mass rapes in Libya. Saddam Hussein is so crazy and evil he's trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction to give Americans another 9/11. The North Koreans used to be far too insane to be allowed to have nuclear weapons because they'd nuke San Francisco immediately, but after they obtained nuclear weapons they were miraculously cured of this rare psychological disorder. The stories of the western empire ask us to believe that everyone who finds themselves in the imperial crosshairs is an irrational actor whose loony behavior can only be attributed to some uncontrollable defect within their own minds, or who will soon snap and do something nutty if they are not contained by force. Reading by Tim Foley.

There is nothing you can say to me that will make me stop opposing Israel's western-backed atrocities. Call me an antisemite or a Nazi or any name you want. The name-calling stopped having any effect a long time ago. Babble about October 7 and Hamas and hostages all you wish. I've stopped listening to you. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US empire and Israel both exist in a perpetual state of war and attack other countries constantly; Iran never invades other countries and avoids war like Melania Trump avoids missionary position. But we're meant to accept that it's fine for the US and Israel to have nukes and do anything necessary to prevent Iran from getting any? Reading by Tim Foley.

It's like this administration is doing everything it can to vindicate those who accuse it of being Israel First instead of America First. Reading by Tim Foley.

He's rolling out the George W Bush playbook for regime change war and playing it note for note, while still trying to ride the support he garnered with his populist messaging about draining the swamp and ending the wars. Reading by Tim Foley.

I am really not looking forward to all the melodramatic victim-LARPing if and when Iran kills US military personnel stationed in west Asia. The US is the only nation on earth that can rival Israel in its ability to play the victim when the ball they've thrown at the wall bounces back. Reading by Tim Foley.

Do Israel's supporters know it's over for them? Like, they know they're going to be despised for the rest of their lives, right? That they will never, ever live down the fact that they supported a live-streamed genocide? And that it will only get worse for them as history clarifies things? Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

War creates a waking nightmare which any sensible person would want to avoid except in the direst necessity. And yet we are ruled by people who actively seek it out. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel and its western allies are crying and rending their garments about an Israeli hospital that was damaged in an Iranian missile strike. Western media outlets like the BBC and New York Times have suddenly remembered how to write headlines which assign blame to the attacker after deciding that hospitals getting bombed is a newsworthy event again. The Iranian attack didn't even kill anybody, and the damage to the hospital was reportedly the result of a shockwave from a strike on a nearby Israeli military facility. That's right: the Israeli military was using the hospital for human shields. As always, every accusation is a confession. Israel, as we all know, bombs hospitals constantly. Israel bombed an Iranian hospital just the other day to almost no coverage from the western press. Israel has attacked healthcare workers and healthcare facilities in Gaza around 700 times according to the World Health Organisation, and the IDF has repeatedly been documented entering the hospitals it attacks to destroy individual pieces of medical equipment. Israel, unlike Iran, is deliberately targeting healthcare facilities to make Gaza unlivable. Israeli defense minister Israel Katz is now saying that because of the hospital strike, Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "cannot continue to exist." Knowing what we know about Israel's track record, saying that people who bomb hospitals should not be allowed to exist can only be interpreted as an extremely antisemitic statement. Reading by Tim Foley.

Nuclear weapons and doomsday cultism are poor bedfellows. Reading by Tim Foley.

There is absolutely no excuse for buying into the war propaganda about Iran after what we all saw with Iraq. "OMG nuclear weapons!" Shut up, idiot. If you're a grown adult with internet access still swallowing this load of bull spunk in the year 2025 you're either stupid or evil. Reading by Tim Foley.

President Trump is reportedly returning to Washington early from a G7 summit in Canada and has told his national security council to prepare for an urgent meeting in the situation room, apparently to discuss Iran. Reading by Tim Foley.

Do NOT join the US military. Do NOT join the militaries of any nation which normally participates in America's wars. If you are in those militaries, you should get out by any means necessary, as quickly as possible. If further on down the track there is a draft for a war with Iran, you should dodge the draft. Because otherwise you will be throwing yourself into a war with one of the world's most formidable militaries, for nothing. Reading by Tim Foley.

It says so much about how comfortable Israel is with lying and how eager the western media are to help promote those lies that Netanyahu could go on Fox News and just casually assert that Iran "tried to assassinate President Trump twice," only to have the Murdoch muppet host invite him to expound upon this assertion rather than challenging the Israeli prime minister's evidence-free claim. Reading by Tim Foley.

It was only by the most tenacious of efforts by the very worst people in the world that we wound up here. It is only by those same efforts by those same terrible people that we continue along this horrifying trajectory instead of taking the final off-ramp. Reading by Tim Foley.