Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

It's interesting how much the IDF's constant ceasefire violations in Gaza and Lebanon line up with the way people familiar with Israeli culture say Israelis like to test everyone's boundaries to find out exactly how much they can get away with. Reading by Tim Foley.

Secretary of War™ Pete Hegseth said during a speech on Friday that the US is at "a 1939 moment" of "mounting urgency" in which "enemies gather, threats grow," adding, "We are not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing." Reading by Tim Foley.

Just today I saw two viral tweets that had received Community Notes from Twitter users warning that the posts featured AI-generated videos. Both were shared by right wing accounts with large followings, and both were used to spread Islamophobia. Reading by Tim Foley.

Our rulers want us to be stupid, misinformed, distracted, sick, struggling and suffering, because if we all had enough time, information and mental acuity to form an understanding what’s going on in our world, things would get mighty guillotiney real quick. They have a vested existential interest in keeping us all in a mental fog of propaganda, diversion, ignorance, illiteracy, and psychological dysfunction. Reading by Tim Foley.

It is easy to miss the cloud reflections in the puddles when the drones are perching on the telephone wires and boats are exploding off the coast of Venezuela. It's easy not to notice the flirtatiousness of the wind when there is black smoke over Palestine and everything's coated in oil. It's easy to overlook the electricality in our bodies when the billionaires and bank boys are trying to replace our minds with chatbots. Don't let them trick you into forgetting the moon, or the dragon eggs incubating in your ribcage. Don't let them trick you into exchanging your heartbeat for an algorithm and a memecoin. There are still birds in the skies of this world. There are accordion angels playing in the ruins. Though at times it may feel like a giraffe bleeding to death in an abandoned Presbyterian church in a forgotten factory town with faded billboards and faded eyes, beneath the click clack marching of the robot dogs, there is still birdsong. There is still birdsong. Reading by Tim Foley.

They're using bureaucratic red tape and arbitrary restrictions to put as much inertia on the effort to rush aid into Gaza as possible. Reading by Tim Foley.

Dick Cheney died far too old and far too free. The fact that such monsters get to pass away in their eighties surrounded by loved ones instead of alone in a cage is an indictment of our entire civilization. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israeli settlers were filmed torturing lambs which belonged to Palestinians in the West Bank. Gouged their eyes out. Smashed them with cinder blocks. Beat them to death in front of their mothers. Lambs. Reading by Tim Foley.

Massacre fetishist Lindsey Graham said "Trump is my favorite president" because "we're killing all the right people and we're cutting your taxes" during a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit on Friday. "We've run out of bombs; we didn't run out of bombs in World War II," the senator said. Reading by Tim Foley.

If the western press had not been aggressively protecting Israel and its interests this whole time, all their reporting on Gaza over the last two years would have looked very much like the reporting we're seeing on the genocide in Sudan. Reading by Tim Foley.

Generative AI is just high-tech brainwashing. It's the next level of propaganda indoctrination. It is there to turn our brains into useless sludge which cannot function without technological crutches controlled by the imperial plutocrats. Reading by Tim Foley.

What percentage of Americans even realize that Trump has bombed Somalia nearly a hundred times this year? I doubt it's even one percent. The mainstream press barely mention it. Americans have hardly any idea who their own country is bombing. Reading by Tim Foley. Thanks for listening! Subscribe to my Substack at caitlinjohnst.one for email updates on all my new stuff.

Do you notice how nobody's losing their jobs or getting deported for criticizing the genocidal atrocities in Sudan? Reading by Tim Foley.

The US can make threats, impose sanctions and amass war machinery, but you don't truly know they're serious about attacking a country until they start churning out Pentagon propaganda in the mainstream press. Reading by Tim Foley.

You think Hamas killed Israelis because they're a bunch of monsters who hate Jews? Of course you do, you're twelve. You think Trump is trying to get rid of Maduro because Maduro is an evil dictator who wants to poison Americans with fentanyl? Hell yeah homie, you're twelve. You think Putin invaded Ukraine because he hates freedom and democracy and wants to conquer the world? Bless your heart my twelve year-old buddy. You think the US and Israel have been attacking and eliminating rivals in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Palestine in order to fight terrorism, stop tyranny, and protect the world from nuclear weapons? Yeah, that checks out, you're twelve. The mainstream western worldview is like a children's cartoon, with the Bad Guys doing Bad Things simply because they are Bad, and the Good Guys striving heroically to stop them. It sounds like a shitty PG-13 summer blockbuster starring The Rock, but it's the consensus worldview of serious professional pundits and analysts who share this perspective on mai

People are getting dumber, sicker, lonelier, and more and more miserable. And the profit-driven systems we live under have no answers, besides throwing increasingly shitbrained technology at us so we can distract ourselves from how fucked up everything has gotten. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley. As usual, anyone who wants to set these words to music is free to do so.

The empire we live under is everything we're trained to fear. Our own rulers are the murderers. Our own rulers are the terrorists. Our own rulers are the tyrants. Our own rulers are the problem. Reading by Tim Foley.

While I was working on this painting of US oligarch Jeff Bezos I kept thinking about a speech he gave in 2019 where he laid out his nightmarish vision for the future of the human species. Bezos described a future where the overwhelming majority of humans are shipped off to space to live their lives inside “O’Neill colonies” — giant cylinders which rotate to simulate Earth’s gravity. Only a privileged few would get to remain on humanity’s home world, where the ecosystem would be able to repair and thrive now that it’s not being overburdened by more humans than it can handle. One doesn’t have to stretch the imagination to guess which side of the equation Bezos envisions himself and his family winding up on in this scenario. Press enter or click to view image in full size As I was painting I kept thinking about how horrific it would be if Bezos’ plan for humanity was ever put into place, because you know hardly anyone would leave this planet voluntarily. Billions of people would be forced onto space ships bo

Have you ever noticed how whenever you see someone promoting hatred toward Muslims, nine times out of ten it will be someone who supports Israel? There's a reason for that. Zionists promote Islamophobia because convincing westerners to hate Muslims is easier than convincing them to love Israel. Reading by Tim Foley.