Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

One bizarre thing about modern US presidential races is watching politicians in one of the most dystopian civilizations ever to exist warning people that the other candidate wants to lead them into a dark dystopia, which depending on the party they label "communism" or "fascism". Reading by Tim Foley.

Just like the ongoing mass atrocity we are witnessing in Gaza, this fondness for rape is just one of the many, many symptoms of the injustice and abusiveness that the state of Israel is founded on and built from. Reading by Tim Foley.

One reason westerners are so clueless about communism is because every four years the most influential western nation launches a massive months-long disinformation campaign about what communism is. People like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Lauren Boebert and Tim Pool have been claiming Kamala Harris is a Marxist for proposing price controls, a measure that was also put forward by noted communist Richard M Nixon. Republicans are so fucking stupid that every few years they start shrieking that they're under attack from "communism", and by "communism" they mean the opposing US party which supports the exact same capitalist status quo they support but with tampons in the boys' bathroom. God I wish Democrats were as cool as right wing idiots make them sound. Reading by Tim Foley.

Democrats Are Pigs Author Stephen King has a new viral tweet featuring a picture of himself wearing a Kamala Harris t-shirt modeled after an Obama campaign sticker captioned with the words “I’M SPEAKING” — a phrase with which she drew headlines and severe public outcry last week by using it to shut down anti-genocide protesters at a campaign rally in Detroit. That’s right: they’re using her condescending shutdown of pro-Palestine demonstrators as a fun girlboss campaign slogan now. God damn it I hate Democrats so fucking much. Reading by Tim Foley.

Americans are voting for Red War or Blue War. That's it. Those are the choices. Reading by Tim Foley. Article version: https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/peace-is-not-on-the-ballot-in-november

He had two babies. Twins. Aysal and Aser, a boy and a girl. Mohammad Abu Al Qumsan had two babies and a loving wife. Now he has nobody. An Israeli airstrike killed both his babies, and their mother, and their grandmother, while he was out collecting their birth certificates. They had just been born. Reading by Tim Foley. Article version: https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/he-had-two-babies

Israel has been loudly and melodramatically fretting about an impending retaliatory attack from Iran and Hezbollah which it claims will likely include strikes in the vicinity of civilian population centers. This is of course rich coming from the regime that has spent ten months turning Gaza into a flattened wasteland of rubble and civilian corpses. Reading by Tim Foley.

They bombed the Tabeen school in Gaza City with so much explosive force that not a single full body was recovered. Reading by Tim Foley.

“Far too many children have been eaten by hyenas,” the politician sobbed to the news camera while lowering more children into the hyena pit. Reading by Tim Foley.

This happens all the time these days: people who are inextricably intertwined with establishment power structures posturing as brave revolutionaries leading a resistance against the very establishment they themselves are a part of. Elon Musk is no more a part of any "resistance" than Joe Biden or Bill Gates, but his sycophantic fanboys will mindlessly gobble this garbage up like popcorn chicken. Reading by Tim Foley.

It is a well-documented fact that under the western empire not only are our political systems aggressively manipulated by the rich and powerful for the benefit of the rich and powerful, but public opinion is as well. Insane systems which rely on exploitation, injustice, ecocide, militarism and war are actively normalized via mass-scale psychological manipulation, and we are then presented with candidates and platforms which support those systems and told that anything else is fringe commie extremism. Reading by Tim Foley.

The last few days have seen the US ramping up its war on domestic political dissent in multiple ways, with US lawmakers petitioning the Biden administration to crack down on anti-genocide protesters it suspects of foreign influence, and a journalist critical of US foreign policy coming under the crosshairs of Washington's increasingly weaponized Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Reading by Tim Foley.

You'll never see western officials so enthusiastic about the idea of de-escalation as they are in those time periods when their side has just severely escalated tensions with an extreme act of aggression, but the other side has yet to retaliate. Reading by Tim Foley.

I can’t really find the words to express how depressing it is to watch the life get sucked out of the anti-genocide movement in the United States because one of the candidates running for president this year happens to come from the administration that’s been overseeing said genocide. Reading by Tim Foley.

Friendly reminder that all injuries and deaths of US military personnel in the middle east are always the fault of the Washington officials who put them there, not the middle easterners who are defending their own home. Reading by Tim Foley.

It seems pretty clear to me that the pressure westerners have been putting on their own governments regarding Israel's criminality in Gaza is the primary reason why the western empire couldn't just sign off on a swift final solution to the Palestinian problem back in October, and has had to settle for this awkward slow-motion genocide disguised as self-defense instead. It's not that the empire has a conscience, it's that it is sufficiently afraid of sparking mass-scale unrest on its own turf to need to disguise its own psychopathy a bit. Reading by Tim Foley.

People often object to criticisms of Israel's ongoing mass atrocity in Gaza by saying, "Well what SHOULD Israel have done in response to October 7 then?" They say it like the question should confound you, as though it's some kind of thought-terminating unanswerable Zen koan or something.  But it isn't. The question is very answerable, and the most correct answer is that Israel should have done what it always should have done: right the wrongs of the past and make peace. Reading by Tim Foley.

All they're doing here is trying to wash this administration's hands of the horrors that are being inflicted in the middle east with the direct facilitation of this administration. Reading by Tim Foley.

In the last few days Israel has assassinated leaders in multiple neighboring nations, assassinated multiple journalists, deliberately destroyed a water facility in Gaza during a polio outbreak, and had riots defending the right of IDF soldiers to rape Palestinian prisoners. Clearly the sort of country we should all want to send our sons and daughters to go fight and die for. Reading by Tim Foley.

In reality, the US isn't vowing to defend the state of Israel, the US is vowing to help Israel attack other countries. If you're pledging unconditional support to an extremely belligerent aggressor while it commits the most demented acts of aggression imaginable, all you're doing is condoning those acts of aggression and making sure it will suffer no consequences when it conducts more of them. A kevlar vest stops being a tool of defense when you wear one to prevent yourself from being stopped by police while conducting a mass shooting. Reading by Tim Foley.