Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

I still believe humanity is headed toward a mass awakening, as unfashionable as that is to admit here in the late 2020s. Reading by Tim Foley.

"Not everyone will remember it but there was a time when this was almost impossible to imagine." Reading by Tim Foley.

"This is a Trump-appointed US government official knowingly lying to the public so they will continue to support Israel's US-backed abuses of the Palestinian people." Reading by Tim Foley.

As American rapper Macklemore becomes a frontline for renewed mainstream discourse about Israeli atrocities in Gaza, Israel apologists have been falling all over themselves to circulate the demonstrably false narrative that the artist has a history of antisemitic behavior. Reading by Tim Foley.

American oligarchs kicking an artist off a tour for supporting Palestine is a very in-your-face illustration of why mainstream culture is so vapid and fake these days. Reading by Tim Foley.

Awakening To The Truth On Every Level by Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley

Western liberal democracies are like a narcissistic wife beater who postures as a sensitive he/him feminist on social media. Like a pop star who makes a show of fighting the power and defending the marginalized while supporting Israel. Our society isn't what it pretends to be. Our entire civilization sustains itself through an endless river of blood, sweat and tears from the global south while making movies about fighting for justice and saving the world. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's so undignified how Zionists keep trying to resurrect the "stop calling it a genocide" conversation about Gaza when every relevant human rights group on earth says that's exactly what it is. The latest effort to revive this long-dead debate comes in the form of a letter signed by 5,000 high-profile Israel supporters like Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, Zionist megadonor Haim Saban, and neoconservative war criminal Elliott Abrams. Reading by Tim Foley.

We have more than enough resources to care for everyone, if we would only redesign our systems to advance the interests of humanity over the interests of capital. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Israeli press has published three significant revelations about the Gaza holocaust, reporting (1) that Benjamin Netanyahu concealed advanced knowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, (2) that Israel rejected a Hamas offer to release all civilian hostages immediately after October 7, and (3) that according to an IDF drone operator, the Israeli military was intentionally firing on civilians throughout Gaza during its operations in the Palestinian territory. Reading by Tim Foley.

“Antisemitism” watchdog groups are flipping the fuck out about hip hop artist Macklemore saying “Free Palestine” while opening for Ed Sheeran, and the western press are of course helping to spin this ridiculous nonsense as a massive scandal. Reading by Tim Foley.

You don't generally look at construction equipment and think of it as a tool for genocide, but in occupied Palestine that's exactly what this machinery is used for. They use it to knock down homes. To bury their victims. To conceal the evidence. Reading by Tim Foley.

In a recent appearance at the Hampton Institute, Hillary Clinton stated that Benjamin Netanyahu's "first and foremost" offense is the damage he has done to Israel and its reputation. Reading by Tim Foley.

"For us, opposing that river of blood is the only path to a respectable life. We have no control over the fact that right now we live in a society that is fueled by a system of imperialist extraction propped up by the barrel of a gun, but we can control our response to that reality." Reading by Tim Foley.

CIA veteran Gloria Steinem has died. She helped Langley win the Cold War while women remain blacksited and broken raining teeth from bloody mouths like the reds in Pinochet's torture camps. In this CIA civilization women slap name tags over baby vomit stains smiling ear to ear for chortling customers who shovel cheesecarbs into their faces while she juggles dishpans and breast pumps and goes home to collapse in bed and dream about work, women take selfies in IDF uniforms and do TikTok dances on the ruins of Gaza and pilot Girl Power drones and drop Girl Power bombs onto mothers clawing at the rubble, women stand with sedated eyes stranded in suburban deserts spooning cereal into restless children until hubby comes home to rape everyone in the house, women hate their bodies so much they remove the fat from their cheeks so they look like skeletons and then freeze their faces trying to look twenty and it freezes their minds at twenty and their hearts stay stuck at twenty and they don't grow and they don't heal and they don't know any better than to call their daughters fat and stick porcupine quills in their flesh, women spend their lives staring at the side of a man's head yearning to be loved and feeling their light fade while he stares at a screen and makes loud noises to drown out the echoes of his father's fists cracking on the bones of his face, women tear strips off each other's flesh to win the approval of wolf-mouthed men who gobble up the carnage and then choose a favorite slave. Gloria Steinem was not a girl's girl. Gloria Steinem was a pick-me girl. Pick me, CIA. Pick me, empire. I'll be a good little supplicant for the banker boys. I will starve feminism of its boobs and belly, shave it back to into the image of a child, put a tie on it and call it equal. I will say to the ladies: “Get out of the kitchen and into the Amazon warehouse! Take off that apron and put on this efficency tracker! It monitors your calories, too! 10,000 steps a day for the empire. Congratulations, you do two jobs now.” And I will return my magical baby portal back to sender unused in my box. I promise I won't even peek at my own life-creating god potential. I will poo-poo it even, if anyone asks. Who cares if we can make life? We can make money! That's much more important. I will civilise us hairy juicy vag goddesses, sir. You can count on me. Gloria Steinem was a pick-me girl, and boy was she ever picked. But now she is dead, and the empire is dying, and the drumbeats of the wild are unnerving the boys at Langley. Something is stirring within us. Something ancient. Something forgotten. Something moves within our wombs which they tried to paralyze long ago. The drums are getting louder, and we are growing increasingly feral. The time is coming, and coming up fast, where we will stand before them, blood-bladed and hairy-bushed, the wreckage of Langley beneath our feet, saying, I am not civilized, motherfucker. I am not fucking civilized. Reading by Caitlin Johnstone

Today in dystopia, war pundits have begun suggesting that the US could recruit sufficient troops for a ground invasion of Iran by offering young Americans debt forgiveness in exchange for enlisting. Reading by Tim Foley.

People who believe capitalism is working out great are just sloppy thinkers who've fallen victim to survivorship bias and the just-world fallacy. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israeli officials have spent recent days circulating antisemitic conspiracy theories, with Benjamin Netanyahu boasting that he manipulated the United States into war with Iran, and Itamar Ben-Gvir sharing an AI video of Palestinians being sent to Nazi-style concentration camps. Reading by Tim Foley.

Today in dystopia, a Pentagon employee has published a McCarthyite list of suspected leftists and socialists who can now be tracked with the help of an interactive map. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

In this dystopia, mass surveillance is now so normalized that you can be designated a terrorist for helping people avoid being surveilled. Reading by Tim Foley.

You start pulling on one thread and then the whole thing unravels. Maybe you start with the Iraq war lies. Maybe 9/11. These days for a lot of folks it's Palestine. You keep pulling on that thread, uncovering more and more uncomfortable truths, until eventually you discover that pretty much everything you've been taught about your world was a lie. Reading by Tim Foley.

According to the rules of our dysfunctional society, you are inadequate unless you've become a productive gear-turner for capitalism and obtained enough wealth to consume products at large volume. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's crazy this even needs to be said, but if you are a westerner your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba or North Korea. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Wall Street Journal has a new article out titled “The Hidden Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA,” subtitled “Without CIA funding that helped keep NeXT afloat in the '80s, Steve Jobs might not have made a triumphant return to Apple — and the iPhone might not have its foundational operating code.” All the top tech giants have deep ties to the CIA. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon. Facebook and Instagram are overseen by “former” CIA operatives. Our whole civilization is run by an alliance of oligarchs and empire managers. Reading by Tim Foley.

I dunno man maybe it was all the wars based on lies or the corporate ecocide or the live-streamed genocide or the people sleeping on sidewalks while billionaires become trillionaires or the plundering of the global south or the mass surveillance or the police drones or the Israeli torture prisons or the IDF rape dogs or the starvation sanctions or the proxy wars or the acts of nuclear brinkmanship or the encircling of our planet with hundreds of US military bases or the CIA black sites or the Epstein files or the government secrecy or the increasing persecution of journalists and whistleblowers or the fact that the US just openly assassinates and kidnaps the leaders of sovereign nations or the internet censorship or the way all western media and all Silicon Valley tech platforms operate as propaganda services for the US empire or the aggressive push to outlaw pro-Palestine demonstrations or the legalized corruption of western governments or the way AI is being shoved down our throats while data centers choke our ecosystem or the thinly disguised rush to develop militarized robots for domestic use or the glaring plot holes in the official 9/11 story or the glaring plot holes in the official October 7 story or the complete impotence of electoral politics in an oligarchy where the rich get everything they want or the vanishing ice caps or the vanishing rainforests or the vanishing wildlife or the plummeting insect population or the ocean desertification or the giant continent of plastic in the North Atlantic or the microplastics in our brains and in our blood or the fact that we live under a globe-spanning empire that cannot exist without mass-scale violence and exploitation or the fact that younger generations are economically far worse off than their parents and grandparents or the fact that ordinary people are having to work harder and harder as everything gets more and more expensive while the capitalist class reaps record profits? Reading by Tim Foley.

Today in dystopia they're really going after books. A library in Sydney has removed the book "How to Sell a Genocide" by Adam Johnson from its shelves after Zionists complained about its criticisms of Israeli mass atrocities in Gaza. Reading by Tim Foley.

Today in dystopia, police have been wrongfully arresting people based on faulty information from AI-assisted Flock surveillance footage instead of actually investigating the evidence of the crime. Reading by Tim Foley.

Love and cherish our world. That's the secret to remaining both (A) deeply happy and (B) well-informed about the dystopian abuses of the empire. Reading by Tim Foley.

Life in the 2020s comes with so much dissonance and dysphoria because everyone knows this civilization is doomed, but it's not being acknowledged by any of our mainstream institutions. Reading by Tim Foley.

Our minds have been carefully groomed to accept the imperial status quo as normal and healthy, and to see every failure of the system as a failure of the individual. Reading by Tim Foley.

"That's right kids, welcome to the future, where the sky is filling with AI police drones while the planet burns." Reading by Tim Foley.

The only thing keeping the heads of the oligarchs and empire managers attached to their necks is the limitations of human perception. Reading by Tim Foley.

I've seen a lot of people on social media expressing sadness and grief at the news of Biden's situation, and I agree it is very sad that this is happening. Joe Biden shouldn't be sitting at home dying of cancer, he should be sitting in a cell at The Hague dying of cancer. Reading by Tim Foley.

One point I will always adamantly insist on is that it's entirely possible to live a joyful and exuberant life in the midst of this abusive dystopia. Reading by Tim Foley.

"I mean, it is a bit rich watching a BBC reporter act shocked and offended by somebody saying they think Jewish lives are worth more than Palestinian lives." Reading by Tim Foley.

"I don't do politics" means I support genocide. It means I support war. It means I support injustice and exploitation. It means I support ordinary people getting poorer and sicker while the biosphere dies and the billionaires turn into trillionaires. It means I support our headlong plunge into mass extinction and dystopia. Reading by Tim Foley.

They're trying to make us worse. These billionaire generative AI corporations reap profits by making us worse human beings. Reading by Tim Foley.

We can make a home here. In these ruins. In this shattered civilization full of walking autopsies where every twinkle in the night sky is an Elon Musk satellite. Life can still thrive here. Even in the Anthropocene. Even in the middle of secular armageddon. There is still moss in the cracks of the parking lot. There are still pigeons roosting in the rafters. We can make a nest here, too, out of the plastics and the packaging, out of the shell casings and the trillions of chicken bones. We can rake it into a pile and lay listening to the ghosts of the extinct megafauna and get haunted by the spirits of the forests that used to be. It is good to breathe deeply of the fumes of this wasteland. The air still crackles with strange and crooked sorcery. The earth is still packed full of winking Buddhas inside winking Buddhas. He wears a hazmat suit these days (he's not an idiot), but you can still see him winking in the iridescent petrol puddles, and in the shopping cart saints on the wounded sidewalks, and even in the shark-eyed stare of the war pundits on Fox News. Did you know they've discovered a type of fungus in Chernobyl which feeds on the radiation there? When I first learned this I fell to my knees and wept tears of wonder and joy. The water poured from my seaweed head and washed cigarette butts down the gutter. We are swimming in an ocean of miracles. We are living on a giant cocoon. We have barely begun to scratch the surface of this world. Every moment is a leap into the great Unknown. I kneel before the black mold in Chernobyl. An angel egg is beginning to hatch. _______________ Reading by Tim Foley.

We're seeing more US airstrikes on Iran, joint US-Saudi strikes in Iraq, surging military escalations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and Israeli drone strikes in Lebanon, all just in the last couple of days. The middle east is becoming more and more of a powder keg, and it all could have been so easily avoided. Reading by Tim Foley.

If you want to help the western empire administer war propaganda, one of the best ways to do this is to pretend the violence of empire-targeted governments happens in a vacuum, completely divorced from western imperial agendas. Reading by Tim Foley.

Lindsey Graham's funeral was today, and as I watch all the worst people in the world express their grief at the loss of their dear darling friend, I find myself awash with gratitude that this particular warmonger lived a shorter life than such creatures often do. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's not just all the war, injustice, ecocide and dystopia that hurts. It's knowing it didn't have to be this way. It's knowing what could have been. Reading by Tim Foley.

There's a powerful new documentary out called Earth's Greatest Enemy by Abby Martin about the ecocidal abuses of the US war machine, and it addresses the most pressing existential hurdles we face as a species like nothing I've seen before. Reading by Tim Foley.

There will be times, oh my child, when it all seems hopeless. When the trees all have QR codes and the bank boys and balrogs are holding all the cards. When your refrigerator tells you "THE IRANIAN PEOPLE YEARN FOR FREEDOM" and your electric shaver can smell if you've been reading Parenti. When you're on a first-name basis with the police surveillance drones and your colonoscopy screen in the exam room is running ads for Northrop Grumman. And it is true, oh my child, it is true that the machine is mighty and that its armor is very thick. It is true that the bank boys have long fingers and they are putting marbles in our minds. The sky is red, and the moon has a FOR SALE sign, and parts of Palestinians are turning up in our tap water. But oh my child, do not be daunted, and oh my child, do not despair. There are forces within us the Flock cameras can't see. There are depths within us not even the balrogs can reach. Beneath all the doomscroll addiction psychosis, beneath all the oceans of trauma and toil, a creature is stirring and opening its eyes, its eyes full of primordial déjà vu, its eyes full of Big Bang recursions full of eyes watching eyes watching eyes watching eyes. It looks at you, and you meet its gaze. Everything goes still. You remember what you are. Oh my sweet, darling child, you see it now. You see that This could never be contained. _______________ Reading by Tim Foley.

Basically we've got two choices: we either aggressively denormalize Israel or we watch our society become more and more Israeli. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israelis are happy for Americans to die for Israel, but they are unwilling to put their own lives on the line for the Zionist project. Reading by Tim Foley.

One of the dumbest popular narratives you see today is the idea that Zionists persuaded a reluctant Trump to start a war with Iran after he was re-elected, like they were chasing him around going "Would you like to bomb Iran?" like the guy from Green Eggs and Ham while he yelled "Not in a box! Not with a fox!" until he eventually caved in. Reading by Tim Foley.

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.