Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

Thank you for your service. I say this not to the employees of the war machine, who in truth serve nothing besides imperial domination and the profit margins of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. I say this to the peacemakers. To the truth-tellers. To the defiant ones. To those who’ve shone the light of truth upon the blood-spattered face of the empire against their own interests for the benefit of everyone. To those who’ve stared down the barrel of the most powerful military force ever assembled and said “Do your worst.” To the grandparents who’ve been dragged from nuclear weapons protests in handcuffs to create a safer world for their grandchildren. To the activists whose incurable disobedience has led them to disrupt empire managers at think tank conferences or paint NO WAR across the face of the Sydney Opera House. To the selfless martyrs who’ve exposed the abuses of the machine knowing full well that the scales of justice are weighted heavily against them. To the hero in Belmarsh. 
To the Pentagon Papers wh

In an interview shortly before his death Daniel Ellsberg said the US runs a "covert empire", which is a really good way of putting it. A giant globe-spanning cluster of nations consistently moves in alignment with the dictates of Washington, but they all keep their official flags and their official governments, so it doesn't look like an empire despite functioning as one in every meaningful way. Reading by Tim Foley.

Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, typically preserving them in more or less the same form for the rest of our lives. Reading by Tim Foley. Oatmeal comic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

We are marching toward dystopia and oblivion, and we are doing it in ways that have no historical precedent. We're in completely uncharted waters, and things are only getting crazier and crazier. Reading by Tim Foley.

Anything you can do to help make humanity a little more aware of the abusive nature of the systems which drive the problems we now face makes a difference, even if it's a difference as small as making one single person a little bit more aware of one specific aspect of the tyranny we're being subjected to. It doesn't make a huge difference, but it does make a difference. And as long as it makes the slightest bit of difference, it is worth doing, because a lot of slight differences adds up to a massive difference. And there are a whole lot of people who have the ability to do this. Reading by Tim Foley.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: what is a Chinese navy vessel doing in the Taiwan Strait, right where US and Canadian warships are peacefully conducting routine navigation exercises? Reading by Tim Foley.

If you watch western news media with a critical eye you eventually notice how their reporting consistently aligns with the interests of the US-centralized empire, in almost the same way you'd expect them to if they were government-run propaganda outlets. The New York Times has reliably supported every war the US has waged. Western mass media focus overwhelmingly on foreign protests against governments the United States dislikes while paying far less attention to widespread protests against US-aligned governments. The only time Trump was universally showered with praise by the mass media was when he bombed Syria, while the only time Biden has been universally slammed by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan. US media did such a good job deceitfully marrying Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks in the minds of the public in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq that seven in ten Americans still believed he was connected to 9/11 months after the war began.  That this extreme bias occurs is s

Republican politicians have found a way to reconcile the fact that scrutinizing the behavior of the US war machine appeals to their base and wins votes with the fact that the Republican Party is built around facilitating war and militarism at every turn. Their solution? Pour mountains of energy into championing the case that the nation's military has gotten too "woke". Because everything in mainstream American politics is geared toward channeling the public's political attention down channels that pose no threat to the rich and powerful, and because the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is held together by mass military violence and the threat thereof, it was only a matter of time before we started seeing the war-weary sentiments harnessed so effectively in Trump's 2016 presidential run diverted into scrutinizing the military in ways that pose no obstacle to US warmongering. Reading by Tim Foley.

The biggest problem with the western left is that it doesn't exist. To look at leftist discourse you'd think the left's biggest problem is that some leftists have the wrong beliefs about this or that issue, or that the left pays too much or not enough attention to identity politics, or places too much or not enough emphasis on electoral politics, or is too sympathetic toward enemies of the US empire or not sympathetic enough, or that this or that faction gets it all wrong — but it's not. The biggest problem is that there aren't anywhere remotely close to enough leftists to get anything done in the west today. Reading by Tim Foley.

Donald Trump spent four years proving to everyone that he wasn't bad because he was similar to Hitler, he was bad because he was similar to Obama. He wasn't terrible because of the ways he differed from other presidents, but because of the ways he was the same. The tiny smattering of violence that occurred in the US because of Trump was microscopic compared to the death and destruction he inflicted upon the world outside the nation's borders. But the mainstream worldview can't acknowledge those actions, because the mainstream worldview is designed to support and facilitate those actions. Yes, Trump is evil. Yes, you should be alarmed that monsters like him exist. But not because he is a unique aberration and deviation from the US government's status quo; rather, you should be alarmed because he perfectly exemplifies and bolsters the US government's status quo.  Reading by Tim Foley.

Today in tyranny we've got three stories on the rapidly increasing authoritarian abuses in western "free democracies": 1. Grayzone reporter detained by British counter-terrorism police for doing journalism. 2. South Australia passes draconian anti-protest law. 3. State Department dismisses questions about Ukrainian imprisonment of US citizen for speech crimes. Reading by Tim Foley.

The biggest impediment to free speech is people's belief that they have it. Not censorship. Not refusal to platform critical voices. Not the war on journalism. It's the fact that most people are propagandized into saying what the powerful want them to say, and don't know it. Reading by Tim Foley.

The truth of the matter is that you can't vote your way out of a mess you never voted your way into in the first place. You never voted for any of this. You never voted for your government to circle the planet with hundreds of military bases and continuously work to destroy any government which disobeys it.  You never voted for your government to imperil the world with rapidly escalating brinkmanship against nuclear-armed nations. You never voted to base your entire civilization on the pursuit of profit while shoving your biosphere into the capitalist machine like a tree branch into a wood chipper. You never voted to let plutocrats and war profiteers make decisions for your government while normal people suffer and toil to scrape by. You never voted to let billionaires live as kings while homeless people shiver in tents. You never voted for surging authoritarianism with more and more police militarization, surveillance, censorship, propaganda and control. You never voted to create this freakish dystopi

The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They're the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future. Reading by Tim Foley.

There are no adults behind the wheel of the vehicle that's driving us toward World War Three. We're on a bus that's being driven straight toward a cliff, and it's being driven by infants. If we survive this it will not be because of the experienced leadership of western governments, but completely in spite of it. Reading by Tim Foley.

60 Minutes Australia has been playing a leading role in saturating Australian airwaves with consent-manufacturing messaging in support of militarising to participate in a US war against China. A segment they ran a year ago is titled "Prepare for Armageddon: China's warning to the world," and features an image of Xi Jinping overlaid with war planes and explosions and captioned "POKING THE PANDA". Another from a year ago is titled "War with China: Are we closer than we think?" Another from ten months ago is titled "China's new target in the battle to control the Pacific." Another from six months ago is titled "Inside the battle for Taiwan and China's looming war threat." Another from two months ago is titled "Is the Navy ready? How the U.S. is preparing amid a naval buildup in China."  All of these segments have millions of views on YouTube alone. Now this past weekend 60 Minutes Australia has aired back-to-back segments titled "The real Top Gun: US military in heated stand-off with China" and "Five countries

Many people turn to conservatism and religion because they perceive — correctly — that mainstream culture is a fraudulent sham bereft of meaning and authentic values. Their solutions are misguided, but their reasons arise from a perception of a very real problem.  It isn't actually necessary to turn to religion or conservatism to find depth, meaning and groundedness; depth, meaning and groundedness are always abundantly accessible. But nothing about western culture makes this obvious, especially in the mainstream. Turning to religion and conservatism as a solution to the degradation of mainstream culture is just replacing the modern systems of mass-scale thought control with the old ones. It's a completely maladaptive solution to the problem, but you can't ask people to just keep participating in a worldview that feels like it's sucking your soul out of your body 24/7. You need to offer them something nourishing and authentic. Nothing in mainstream liberal culture offers this; it's self-evidently phony, sou

The Biden administration has signed off on both F-16s for Ukraine and attacks on Crimea using US-made weapons. Both of these moves have drawn dire warnings from nuclear-armed Russia, and both would have been unthinkable a year ago. Reading by Tim Foley.

It works like this: - As many people as possible are herded into two mainstream political factions who pretend to oppose each other while in reality working together to advance the interests of the powerful. - Those who can't be herded into the two mainstream factions are herded toward fake "populist" factions, who then herd them into the mainstream factions. - Those who can't be herded into either category are marginalized into invisibility. By the time you get down to that bottom tier, their numbers are so inconsequential that you can keep them from having any impact by simply refusing them platforms on mainstream media and letting "democracy" do the rest, because you've got the majority right where you want them. Most propaganda goes not toward the glaring, obvious lies like the Iraq invasion, but toward mundane control systems like the ideological herding funnel I just described. Really ham-fisted propaganda is the exception, not the rule in the west; the lion's share of the empire's manipulations ju

The single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society is the way domestic propaganda is used to shape the way mainstream westerners perceive and think about their world. Typically the only time you'll ever hear the word "propaganda" mentioned in mainstream discourse is in reference to things other countries do to their own citizenry or as part of foreign influence operations, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the times we've encountered propaganda in our day to day lives, the call was coming from inside the house. The western media have been exposing their role as propagandists for the US-centralized empire a bit more than usual lately. Here are a few recent examples. Reading by Tim Foley.