Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

In trying to get people to care about warmongering and imperialism what we're really trying to do is get people to widen their circle of compassion to the furthest extent possible. To extend their care for the people around them to include caring about violence and abuse against people even on the other side of the world. Reading by Tim Foley.

Mitch McConnell just froze up in public again, the second such incident in the last few weeks. He just stood there silently -  a gentle, childlike smile flickering across his face, probably for the first time since the Truman administration. Reading by Tim Foley.

The most distinctly American fact you will ever learn is that the piercing cry you associate with the bald eagle is actually a Hollywood invention. The long, powerful cry you likely heard in your mind's ear when asked to imagine the call of a bald eagle is actually the call of a red-tailed hawk, whose voice Hollywood studios have been dubbing over footage of bald eagles for generations. You simply cannot fit more America into a unit of information than this. The symbol of the nation which sits atop a globe-spanning empire held together by mass-scale propaganda, and the sound of its voice is itself a complete construct of propaganda. Reading by Tim Foley.

A lot of empire sycophancy hides behind the fact that it's always permissible to retrospectively oppose US wars that already happened, but not the current one. It's permitted now to say the destruction of Vietnam and Iraq and Libya were mistakes, for example, but if you said it at the time people would treat you like a monster and call you all kinds of names. And it's important to understand that this is still happening today. One day it will be permissible to say in mainstream circles that it was wrong for the US empire to deliberately provoke the war in Ukraine and keep it going as long as possible to bleed Russia, but it's taboo to say that now, because the empire hasn't yet accomplished all its goals in Ukraine. They always act like the most recent interventionist disaster was the final one. They always act like the hawks may have been wrong all those other times but they're not wrong now. And then when they've killed everyone they wanted to kill and grabbed everything they wanted to grab and there's no

This artificially manipulated information ecosystem has made Australians so pants-on-head idiotic that they think the US empire is filling their country up with war machinery because it loves them and wants to protect them from the Chinese. That's as stupid as it gets. Reading by Tim Foley.

To demand that Russia and China tolerate foreign activities on their borders that the US would never even think about tolerating on its own borders is just demanding that the entire world lie down and submit to being ruled by Washington. It's American supremacism at its worst. Reading by Tim Foley.

The primary job of both Hollywood and the mainstream western press is to is to put a friendly, normal-looking face on a globe-spanning empire which dominates the world using nonstop violence and coercion. Their job is to continually normalize freakish tyranny. And if their job is to normalize the empire, then our job is to abnormalize it. Reading by Tim Foley.

There are many bootlicking simps for the US empire. It's not entirely their fault; the empire has the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever devised and most westerners have been marinating in its influence their entire lives. But it does happen, and it's good to bring awareness to it. Here then are 30 signs you might be an empire simp. Reading by Tim Foley.

CNN has a new article out titled “Newly declassified US intel claims Russia is laundering propaganda through unwitting Westerners,” and it's pretty much exactly what you’d expect if you’ve been critically observing the western mass media over the last several years. An anonymous source making vague and unevidenced claims of an unverifiable nature about a longtime target of the US intelligence cartel, based solely on information provided by that same intelligence cartel. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US is indisputably the most tyrannical regime on earth. Only the US is instigating wars around the world, circling the planet with hundreds of foreign military bases, starving populations with massive unilateral sanctions and blockades, and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it. No other government has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression; only the US has. Continually trying to destroy anyone in the world who doesn't obey your dictates is as tyrannical as it gets. If you point this out you'll get people telling you that if it wasn't the US doing those things it would be someone else, but that's ridiculous. There has never once been a unipolar planetary hegemon at any time in human history until three decades ago. People look at this freakish historical aberration and talk about it as though it's some immutable quality inscribed in adamantine upon human DNA strands.  A single power structure dominating the planet is very much the exception, not the rule. A m

It's no longer about nation versus nation, ruler versus ruler, group versus group, person versus person. It's about humankind versus extinction. It's a fight that can only have one winner, and it's a fight we can only win together. Reading by Tim Foley.

People assume there must be truth in the mainstream worldview because so many others are invested in the mainstream worldview, when really the only reason that worldview is mainstream in the first place is because so much wealth and influence has gone into making it mainstream. In reality the assumption that the truth exists anywhere in either of the two mainstream political viewpoints promoted by the managers of the western empire is an example of the bandwagon effect, which describes the cognitive bias in which humans tend to take on beliefs, behaviors, styles and attitudes solely because that's what the people around them are doing. Reading by Tim Foley.

One of the most brilliant propaganda maneuvers the managers of the US empire have pulled off lately is splitting the debate over US military policy along partisan lines, with one side supporting aggressions against Russia and the other preferring to focus aggressions on China. In this way they've ensured that mainstream discourse remains an argument over how US warmongering should occur, rather than if it should. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US government is far more abusive, destructive and tyrannical than the Chinese government and Americans are far more indoctrinated by propaganda than Chinese people. Americans don't even know they're continually ingesting US empire propaganda to inform their worldview, and they live under the most abusive regime on earth. There's this weird propaganda two-step being performed where westerners are being told over and over and over again that Chinese people live in a freakish backwards mind-controlled dystopia, but somehow we westerners do not. Reading by Tim Foley.

Most mainstream western reporting on Chinese military activity essentially amounts to "OMG you guys China isn't just passively sitting there while we militarily encircle it and prepare to attack it!" Reading by Tim Foley.

Western officials have been spending the last few weeks whining to the media that Ukraine's inability to gain ground is due to an irrational aversion to being killed. They've been decrying Ukrainian cowardice to the press under cover of anonymity, from behind the safety of their office desks. Reading by Tim Foley.

Basically the problem is that our whole planet has been gamified. All the Earth's life, resources and geography have been folded into this sick game where people commodify them into points called money, for no other reason than to score as many points as possible. Reading by Tim Foley.

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken tweeted in celebration of Pakistan's preparations for "free and fair elections" on Wednesday, a week after it was revealed that the US pressured Pakistan to oust its popular democratically elected prime minister Imran Khan last year. Reading by Tim Foley.

It really is nuts how there's now talk of Julian Assange being offered a "plea bargain" for rightly exposing US war crimes. What's he meant to plead guilty to? Good journalism? Reading by Tim Foley.

The 2024 presidential election will be THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF ALL TIME, because if Americans don't make the correct choice between the two candidates something terrible might happen to their country. The US might even turn into an abusive totalitarian dystopia where everyone's mind is controlled by propaganda engineered to shape them into unthinking gear-turners for a globe-spanning empire. Reading by Tim Foley.