Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

When opposing a genocide means you're a Nazi.  When opposing nuclear brinkmanship means you love Vladimir Putin. When opposing the looming global conflict with China means you're a sinister propagandist for "the CCP". When opposing the latest imperial escalations against the latest Official Bad Guy always means you're an appeaser of the Bad Guy and would have opposed fighting Hitler. When your skepticism toward government and media institutions who have an extensive record of lying and propagandizing means you're a crazy conspiracy theorist. When wanting to live in a society where everyone has enough means you're an evil authoritarian with a despised ideology. When believing it's possible to have systems where humans aren't killing the biosphere and waging insane wars while brandishing armageddon weapons at each other means you're a silly little child who doesn't understand how the real world works. When these things are happening in your society, it means your society has gone stark raving insane. It

"The Washington Post is one of the worst propaganda rags ever to exist in any country. If I'd published such an article for such a depraved empire propaganda outlet, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night." Reading by Tim Foley.

The moonlight caresses the missile silos in Russia and the blown out hospitals in Gaza. The garbage plays in the wind like children. The exhaust fumes and the sounds of traffic feel like sex in your senses. You can meet the divine here. Here in the city. Here in dystopia. Here amid the smell of piss and the sleeping bags on the sidewalk. Here in the heart of a dying empire, whose cancerous tendrils sprawl like ivy across the dying face of a dying world. You can let the LED lights dance with the light at the core of your being. You can drink from the Great Mother’s breasts beneath a billboard for the latest iThingy. You can raise up your heart to the pigeons, and to all the other animal species whose lives we have not yet succeeded in extinguishing. For us, this is Eden.For us, this is the only place in which Buddha can be born. In the future, if there is a future, maybe the humans figure things out and create a healthy world. But that world is not our world. That world is not where we clocked in to do

It's damn near impossible to keep up with all the warmongering of the western empire these days. Reading by Tim Foley.

Cynthia Vigil was never charged with any crime because anyone could see that violent force was an entirely understandable and legitimate response to having been kidnapped and subjected to horrific treatment. It never at any time occurred to anyone to say that she should have acted differently, and it most certainly never occurred to anyone to make her single act of desperate violence the major story instead of the fact that there was a serial killer who'd been abducting women and torturing them in his murder dungeon. Reading by Tim Foley.

The light of awareness makes it very difficult for an empire which is fueled by human blood to operate, which is why so much effort has been going into shutting off the lights. Reading by Tim Foley.

It clears up a lot of confusion when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run nonstop military operations, it's a nonstop military operation that happens to run a national government. Reading by Tim Foley.

Well it finally happened: Biden is now letting Ukraine strike Russian territory with US-supplied weapons. Escalations in nuclear brinkmanship which would have been unthinkable a few short years ago are becoming increasingly common as Ukraine loses more and more territory and runs out of soldiers to fight. Reading by Tim Foley.

For the last eight months people have been expressing frustration and confusion about the reluctance of celebrities to use their immense platforms to speak out against the US-backed slaughter in Gaza. But it's not really a mystery why this happens: celebrities are reluctant to criticize the US-centralized empire because they benefit from it directly. Reading by Tim Foley.

Remember kids, Israel HAS to bomb hospitals and starve Gaza and incinerate children and shoot people waving white flags and assassinate doctors and journalists and commit daily massacres of civilians, because if it doesn't do this the region will be dominated by evil terrorists. Reading by Tim Foley.

One by one, the US empire is discrediting all of its own arguments for why it should lead the world. All the violence, tyranny and injustice it claims to be keeping at bay with its globe-dominating leadership is being inflicted by the empire itself, in more and more brazen and egregious ways each year. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's hard to believe there was a time when I didn't know what a child's insides look like. That I didn't know how limp babies' limbs go when they are dead, when they are missing parts of their body, missing their head, limbs dangling lifeless as parents hold them in front of the camera, screaming, crying, pleading, desperate. There was a time when I didn't know how it feels to watch a man scream "Free Palestine" while burning alive, until there was nothing left to scream with and he lost his voice forever, but still by some power remained standing long after his voice was gone. I didn't used to know just how sadistic people can be, how hateful they can be, how apathetic they can be toward the suffering of human beings, or how heroic others can be in times of great need. I didn't used to know. Now I do. And now I sit here, head heavy like lead, tongue limp like a baby's corpse, hands feeling older than the stars, and I don't know what to do. There is nothing I can say to make this okay. There is nothing I can

Anyone who's been following the Gaza genocide on social media today will be seeing this phrase "legally killed child" alongside footage of children ripped apart by Israeli military explosives in a civilian displacement camp. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's actually amazing how stupid the propaganda has gotten. Bombing kids and hospitals is self-defense. An extremely blatant ethnic cleansing campaign is actually a war. A few western Zionist Jews saying they feel unsafe on campus is a more urgent concern than an active genocide. Reading by Tim Foley.

"That’s why you see US and Israeli officials raging and fuming about the actions of the ICJ and the ICC. It’s not because they’re worried those courts will be able to enforce the rulings they make, it’s because it weakens their control of the narrative." Reading by Tim Foley.

While the antiwar zeitgeist has been quite understandably focused on the genocide in Gaza, over the past few weeks we've been seeing some very disturbing reports about empire managers ramping up nuclear brinkmanship escalations in Ukraine that are worth going over. Reading by Tim Foley.

And this just says so much about the nature of this "democracy" - a word which literally means "rule by the people". If the people were actually in charge, there would be some option available to them to end the worst thing happening in the world right now. But the people are not in charge. When it comes to matters of the most importance, they never get a vote. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's important to understand that there's nothing unusual about the western empire's depravity in Gaza or the mass media's constant lies and distortions about it - they do these things constantly, year after year. What's unusual is that people are waking up to it. Reading by Tim Foley.

Our problem is not that more and more people are opposing Israel's empire-backed atrocities in Gaza with more and more aggression, our problem is that people are not opposing it aggressively enough. Our problem is that too many people still have their minds jacked into the mainstream worldview and ignore the most urgent matter of our time, letting their thoughts be preoccupied with frivolous garbage and trusting that our leaders are doing what's best for us. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's actually a brilliant self-reinforcing scam. It works like this: Step 1: Murder people in the middle east in the name of fighting "terrorism". Step 2: This causes people to hate you and your allies and to want to retaliate with violence. Step 3: Designate these people "terrorists". Step 4: Send more war machinery to the region to go fight "terrorism". Step 5: Murder more people in the middle east in the name of fighting "terrorism". Do you see how this cycle would repeat over and over again, leading to more and more US military expansionism in the middle east? That's exactly what we've been seeing, and it's exactly what the US empire wants. Reading by Tim Foley.