I’m going to be auctioning off the painting I did of Julian Assange’s father for my entry into the Archibald Prize portraits contest as part of a benefit event for the campaign to free Assange.
All around the world there have been events organized for Julian Assange’s 52nd birthday, coming up July 3. Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton, along with the Melbourne for Wikileaks people and the Assange Defense fund, are putting on a party at a bar in Melbourne. I’m going to be displaying some of my series of Assange oil paintings, which are part of a series called The Disappearing of Julian Assange.
The show includes my entry for Australia’s favorite art prize, the Archibalds. It’s a wall-sized oil portrait of John Shipton, father and champion campaigner of Julian Assange, sitting in my favorite red chair, holding a photo of his son.
This painting will be auctioned off and all proceeds will go to the Assange Defense fund.
Here’s the blurb I wrote for the auction:
class=”graf graf–blockquote”>
Created for the 2023 Archibald portrait prize, Australia’s most famous art prize, “Assange’s Dad” is a portrait of John Shipton, the father of Australia’s most famous journalist Julian Assange.
The painting will be on show at the Sounds Of Freedom benefit event this coming Saturday July 1 at Bar Oussou where bids will be taken and the winner of the auction will be announced by Julian Assange’s brother and son of John Shipton, Gabriel Shipton.
class=”graf graf–blockquote”>
Assange’s Dad is the 15th piece in a series called The Disappearing Of Julian Assange. It’s a wall-sized 60″ x 48″ (152cm x 122cm) stretched canvas portrait of John Shipton holding a picture of his son Julian Assange. It comes ready-to-hang.
You don’t have to go to the event to make a bid. The auction is online from now until the close of the evening.
Details of the painting: Assange’s Dad, Oil on canvas 60″ x 48″ (1.5m x 1.25m)
In just a few years Democrats flipped from freaking out about Nazis, shrieking that Trump was going to start a nuclear war, and denying US election results to cheering for Nazis, demanding more nuclear brinkmanship, and accusing anyone who denies election results of treason.
❖
Putin’s just lucky he didn’t suffer a real coup attempt, like several wingnuts wandering around a government building for a few hours.
❖
The powerful haven’t been promoting the idea that control of speech is needed because they want to stop viruses, protect marginalized groups, fight foreign influence and curb domestic extremism. They’ve been pushing for control of speech because they want to control speech.
It’s a well-established fact at this point that western government bodies have been doing everything they can to infiltrate and influence Silicon Valley platforms where people gather to share ideas and information, because they understand that narrative control is real power.
Speech hasn’t gotten any more dangerous lately, yet control of speech by government and government-adjacent bodies has gotten more and more normalized in recent years. Every excuse to expand this control has been seized upon by those in power, from Russian bots to January 6 to Covid. The window of what constitutes “shouting fire in a crowded theater” keeps getting deliberately broadened in mainstream liberal consciousness, which liberals accept because it’s framed by empire propagandists as a weapon that can be used against the political enemies of liberals.
Western liberals are in effect being offered a political bribe by the empire: support the restrictions on political speech we are constantly pushing for, and it will undermine the interests of your political rivals. This bribery has made “liberals” far more tyrannical. Liberals play along because they’ve been convinced at every opportunity that restricting speech is the best way to fight hate, right wing extremism, health misinformation and malign foreign influence, but in so doing they’re supporting the most tyrannical regime on earth.
So now we’re in this bizarre situation where being “liberal” effectively means supporting censorship to silence your political enemies for the benefit of the most murderous and tyrannical people on this planet.
❖
I often see people who are skeptical of power calling this or that news story a “distraction” and implying that the powerful orchestrate entire events to draw public attention away from more inconvenient stories. From what I can tell that’s not quite how it works though; in practice we see distraction used more as a general mundane distortion that’s always happening, rather than grand conspiratorial plots involving the orchestration of specific individual news stories to manipulate public attention. Certainly government officials may sometimes release stories at specific times for their political convenience, but that’s generally about the extent of it.
We see the political/media class using distraction primarily in the form of agenda-setting, where emphasis is placed on some issues instead of others in ways that benefit the powerful. This can take the form of keeping people focused on domestic politics so they don’t pay attention to their government’s foreign interventions, or keeping people focused on culture war issues so they don’t focus on class war issues. As we’ve discussed previously, the employees of the mass media are all too happy to facilitate these distortions because they facilitate their own career and class interests as well as the interests of their employers.
❖
I respect leftist commentators who despise both the US empire and Putin and yet still do honest commentary on brinkmanship with Russia infinitely more than I respect those who act like it’s fine to mostly ignore this extremely dangerous conflict just because “both sides are bad”. It’s like, okay, fine, let’s say both sides are bad; let’s even say both sides are equally bad for the sake of argument. That’s still not a legitimate reason for a leftist to ignore their own government’s role in starting and perpetuating this increasingly dangerous standoff.
Only baby-brained morons break down conflicts into “Good Guys vs Bad Guys” frameworks. The fact that you don’t subscribe to that infantile framing doesn’t give you an excuse to just check out. Just because there’s no Good Guy doesn’t mean it doesn’t urgently need our attention.
❖
It’s okay if you haven’t found a political faction or leader who you can throw your support behind. At this point in time humanity is very lost and confused, so its political movements — even the better ones — will frequently get lost and confused too. In a world that is ruled by evil tyrants who manipulate politics and media to make everyone crazy and keep us all focused on issues which don’t threaten the powerful, confusion is to be expected in every facet of political engagement.
Speaking for myself I feel perfectly fine about mostly standing on my own and just throwing my weight behind any specific effort or movement I support on its own merit without joining up with any particular faction or party. I’ve found that having loyalty to political factions can cause one to fail to see the errors in their own faction, and in humanity’s current state of confusion there will necessarily be a lot of errors.
So I’m comfortable standing on my own for the time being to make sure my vision stays clear, with the understanding that that hopefully won’t be necessary one day.
_______________
All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
There’s a frenzied rush by the Australian political/media class to both propagandise Australians as quickly as possible into supporting preparations for war with China, and to ram through legislation that facilitates the censorship of online speech.
Australia’s Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is set to release draft legislation imposing hefty fines on social media companies who fail to adequately block “misinformation” and “disinformation” from circulation in Australia, a frightening prospect which will likely have far-reaching consequences for political speech in the nation.
Under the proposed laws, the authority would be able to impose a new “code” on specific companies that repeatedly fail to combat misinformation and disinformation or an industry-wide “standard” to force digital platforms to remove harmful content.
The maximum penalty for systemic breaches of a registered code would be $2.75 million or 2 per cent of global turnover — whichever is higher.
The maximum penalty for breaching an industry standard would be $6.88 million, or 5 per cent of a company’s global turnover. In the case of Facebook’s owner, Meta, for example, the maximum penalty could amount to a fine of more than $8 billion.
Those are the kinds of numbers that change a company’s censorship protocols. We’re already seeing social media censorship of content in Australia that the Australian government has ruled unacceptable; here’s what the transphobic tweets embedded in a right-wing article about Twitter censorship looks like when you try to view them on Twitter from Australia, for example:
These tweets were reportedly hidden from Australians on the platform at the behest of the Australian government. Australians could wind up seeing much more of this sort of Australia-specific censorship from social media platforms if this “misinformation” legislation goes through. Or they could just start censoring it for everyone.
The problem with laws against inaccurate information is of course that somebody needs to be making the determination what information is true and what is false, and those determinations will necessarily be informed by the biases and agendas of the person making them. I can substantiate my claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was provoked by NATO powers using an abundance of facts and evidence, for example, but there’s still a sizeable portion of the population which would consider such claims malignant disinformation with or without the supporting data.
When the government involves itself in the regulation of speech, it is necessarily incentivized to regulate speech in a way that benefits itself and its allies. Nobody who supports government regulation of online mis- and disinformation can articulate how such measures can be safeguarded in a surefire way against the abuses and agendas of the powerful.
Under a Totalitarian Regime, your government censors your speech if you say unauthorized things. Under a Free Democracy, your government orders corporations to censor your speech if you say unauthorized things.
At the same time, Australian media have been hammering one remarkably uniform message into public consciousness with increasing aggression lately: there is a war with China coming, Australia will be involved, and Australia must do much more to prepare for this war as quickly as possible.
Australians are remarkably vulnerable to propaganda due to the fact that ownership of our nation’s media is the most concentrated in the western world, with a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment and Murdoch’s News Corp controlling most of the Australian press.
Both of these media conglomerates have been involved in the latest excuse to talk about how more military spending and militarisation is needed, this time taking the form of a war machine-funded think tanker publishing a book about how we all need to prepare for war with China.
The “military expert” who warns of the need to prepare for an imminent war with China is a man named Ross Babbage, who as Knott notes is “a non-resident senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.” What Knott fails to disclose to his readers is that the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is funded by every war profiteer and war machine entity under the sun, the majority coming straight from the US Department of Defense itself.
As we’ve discussed many times previously, it is never, ever okay for the press to cite war machine-funded think tankers for expertise or analysis on matters of war and foreign policy, and it is doubly egregious for them to do so without at least disclosing their massive conflict of interest to their readers. This act of extreme journalistic malpractice has become the norm throughout the mainstream press, because it helps mass media reporters do their actual job: administering propaganda to an unsuspecting public.
All for a news story that (and I cannot stress this enough) is not a news story. A war machine-funded think tanker saying he wants more war is not a news story — it’s just a thing that happens when the war machine is allowed to pay people to be warmongers.
“War Machine-Funded Warmonger Wants More War.” That’s your headline. That’s the one and only headline this non-story could ever deserve, if any.
Propaganda and censorship are the two most important tools of imperial narrative control, and it’s very telling that Australia is ramping them both up as the nation is being transformed into a weapon for the US empire to use against China. Steps are being taken to ensure that the Australian populace will be on board with whatever agendas the empire has planned for us in the coming years, and judging from what we’re seeing right now, it isn’t going to be pretty.
_____________
All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
“You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can’t lead to a good conclusion.” ~ Julian Assange
‘The truth will set you free’ is an aphorism we’ve all heard so many times it’s lost a lot of its meaning and doesn’t sound especially profound when we hear it again, but it really does contain the answer to humanity’s most difficult problems. A truth-based relationship with reality is the only way to move into peace and harmony, whether you’re talking about the inner peace and harmoniousness of an individual or the peace and harmony of our entire species.
For the individual, you can’t generally come to inner peace and a harmonious way of moving in the world until you’ve done a lot of inner work and gotten extremely real with yourself about your experiences, your relationships, your ways of thinking about things, your behavior patterns, and your motivations. The deepest levels of peace and freedom open up when we have transformative insights into the truth of our very nature: the nature of consciousness, mind, and self.
It doesn’t come from trying to be a nicer person, from praying to the right god or espousing the right belief system. True and lasting peace and freedom comes from a penetrating realization of what is already the case. It comes from knowing what’s true.
This is a bit counter-intuitive, because our minds and our culture tell us that we get peace and happiness from getting what we want — the right accomplishments, the right job, the right belongings, the right romantic partner, the right circumstances. But none of those things will ever take us where we’re really trying to get to. Only the truth will.
And it’s exactly the same for a group of people, and for humanity as a whole.
Real widespread change can only come from knowledge of the truth — that’s why those who don’t want widespread change pour so much energy into keeping people from knowing what’s true. That’s why there’s such a frenzied push for more internet censorship and for the government to get more involved in regulating speech. That’s why our civilization is saturated with propaganda. And that’s why Julian Assange is in prison.
Real change will only occur when a sufficient number of people realize that we live in a profoundly unjust society held together by violence and lies, where our very existence is being imperiled by nuclear brinkmanship and environmental destruction. Because only then will enough people begin mobilizing to use the power of our numbers to force the changes we need.
Again, this is somewhat counter-intuitive, because we’ve been told all our lives by our schools and our media that we get change by voting for political candidates we like. But our electoral systems are stacked against change, and the candidates are controlled by interests who seek to keep things more or less the way they are. This means change can only be arrived at by widespread forceful rejection of the entire system, and widespread forceful rejection of the entire system can only come through truth.
So the truth will set us free, but those who don’t want our freedom are doing everything they can to obstruct, obfuscate and distort the truth. The good news is that there are a whole lot of us, and (for now at least) we do have the ability to share the truth about what’s going on with each other. And the more people understand what’s going on, the more people there are to help share the truth with others.
The first step is spreading awareness of the fact that our civilization is saturated in propaganda, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening. Helping people to understand that they’ve been lied to their whole lives about their nation, their government, their society and their world will help shake them free from their propaganda blinders, so that they can begin to figure out what’s true.
By working toward a collective understanding of what’s real in this way, humanity can come into a truth-based relationship with reality, one freshly opened pair of eyelids at a time. And, just as a truth-based relationship with reality inevitably brings peace and harmony to the life of the individual, a truth-based relationship with reality will bring peace and harmony to the life of our entire species.
Truth is its own reward. It’s not always pleasant when you get it, and it might not be obvious at first that it’s helping to move things in a positive direction, but every step toward health and harmony begins with truth. The more opportunities we have to experience this fact in our own lives, the more obvious it becomes.
_____________
All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Voting in a western “democracy” is like that bit in the opening intro of The Simpsons when Marge is driving with the baby and the baby has a toy steering wheel. The baby thinks she’s driving the car but it’s just a fake toy to keep her busy and let her feel like she’s participating.
❖
All the worst atrocities in human history have been perpetrated or permitted by the government of the people who perpetrated them. None of the world’s most evil people are in prison. The law isn’t there to protect you from bad people, it’s there to protect bad people from you.
That’s why you should always, always, always be distrustful of all efforts to extend the law and expand government power over you. It’s not happening because your government wants to help you. Your government is not your friend.
❖
Republicans push war with China while sometimes acting as skeptics on Russia warmongering, Democrats push war with Russia while sometimes acting as skeptics on China warmongering. This creates the illusion of opposition while giving the war machine everything it wants.
Which happens to be the job of the two-party system: creating the illusion of having a democratic choice between two opposing parties while ensuring that both parties advance the same overall agendas.
❖
The best advice I can offer about US-China tensions is to ignore the words and watch the actions. Ignore what officials say about wanting peace and supporting the One China policy, and just watch all the US war machinery that’s being rapidly added to the areas surrounding China.
The US empire is better at international narrative manipulation than any power structure that has ever existed in human history, but what they can’t spin away is the concrete maneuverings of solid pieces of war machinery, because they are physical realities and not narratives.
❖
Trump’s recent comments about taking Venezuela’s oil are another good illustration of the real reason major factions of the imperial blob dislike Trump. It’s not because he’s “anti-war” or “fighting the Deep State” (he isn’t) — it’s because he’s a sloppy empire manager who makes the machine look as ugly as it is and can’t be trusted to keep the quiet parts quiet.
❖
Gotta hand it to the empire for successfully duping rightists into believing anti-communism is somehow an anti-establishment position and not the exact same pro-establishment position that was propagandized into their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents.
“Oh you’re an anti-establishment rebel are you? What does that look like in practice?”
‘Hating communism, being mean to people whose sexuality is different from mine, and voting Republican.’
“Ah. So pretty much just being a conservative and supporting the establishment, then?”
❖
It’s actually kind of adorable how the Pentagon has gotten so comfortable sucking out funds for killing Russians that it’s now at a point where it just goes “Oh hey look, we just found a few billion dollars lying around on the ground! Oh well, might as well throw it at Ukraine!”
❖
❖
Many people who are suspicious of our ruling power structures hold an assumption that our world is being micromanaged by a shadowy cabal of elite “Them”s whose sinister plans dictate every major event in our world, but it really doesn’t work like that. Conspiracies among the powerful happen of course, but most of the ugly things we see are more the result of a blind confluence of mutually reinforcing forces like capitalism, the US empire’s push for unipolar hegemony, war profiteering, and partisan politics.
It’d probably actually be better for us if the world really was being tightly controlled by a small cabal of elites instead of being blindly driven by a convergence of unthinking power interests, because at least such a cabal wouldn’t be imperiling their own lives by pushing nuclear brinkmanship and environmental destruction like a bunch of idiots.
❖
Inner work is a social responsibility for everyone who is capable of it. Humanity’s evolutionary and historical heritage has left us all full of trauma and dysfunction, and if you’ve got the time and resources to help clear your share of that from our species you really should. I’m not saying you have to spend years in the Himalayas, or even go to therapy if that’s not where it’s at for you, but you ought to do something to bring consciousness and healing to your inner processes rather than just letting unconscious conditioning pilot your whole life.
It also happens that working on yourself and clearing your unconscious bullshit will make you a lot happier and lead to much wiser decisions and a much better life. So there’s really no reason you should keep coasting along and still be the same person ten years from now that you are today.
_______________
All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
People keep asking me to weigh in on the US presidential race and its candidates, which is what always happens whenever there’s a US presidential race on because media saturation makes it so central in the minds of Americans it’s often the main issue they want to talk about, even if they’re fairly aware.
I really don’t have anything to say about who Americans should vote for, other to repeat what I’ve said already about the fact that you can’t vote your way out of a mess you never voted yourself into in the first place.
But what I can do instead is offer my American friends some questions to ask that would probably be much more helpful to them and their nation than the question “Which presidential candidate should we vote for?”
Here are 15 such questions:
1. Why does nothing change no matter who we vote for?
2. Why does US foreign policy always continue along the same trajectory regardless of the president’s party or platform?
3. What keeps our voting population split right down the middle into two political factions of equal size, with neither side ever gaining enough of a majority to democratically change society in any meaningful way?
4. Why does the stalemate described in #3 always seem to benefit the rich, the powerful, and the war-horny?
5. Why is it that the most consequential US government policies like plutocratic influence, privatization, globalization, ecocidal capitalism and nuclear brinkmanship are never on the ballot? Why do these things keep happening, against our interests, without our ever voting for them or electing anyone who campaigned on the pledge to enact them?
6. If our federal government’s behavior never changes no matter who we elect, could it be that there are other bodies involved in government policy-setting whom we did not elect, and who remain in positions of influence regardless of the comings and goings of our official elected government?
7. If the above is the case, then who is it? Who’s really calling the shots in this country?
8. Could it be that everything we’ve been told about our country, our government, our political processes and our world is untrue?
9. If so, what are the implications of the fact that our schools and our media have been feeding us lies since we were small?
10. What forces would be responsible for keeping all these lies flowing throughout our society? What might keep an ostensibly free press spinning more or less the same lies throughout the western world day after day, year after year, generation after generation?
11. Is it possible that our entire electoral system is a sham designed to give the public the illusion of control so that they’ll let oligarchs and empire managers run the country undisturbed?
12. If the electoral system is a sham, then how do we enact the changes we so desperately need?
13. Is it possible that there are other ways to effect change in the United States which don’t involve casting a pretend vote in a fake election?
14. Could it be that those other means of forcing change are precisely what the charade of casting pretend votes in fake elections is meant to divert us from?
15. Should we perhaps spend less energy bickering about who should get sworn into the White House a year and a half from now, and more energy examining other possible avenues toward advancing meaningful change?
______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
They sent the soldiers back after a crazy, stupid world war which was the sequel to another crazy, stupid world war, sent them back with demons in their minds, with twisted corpses in their minds, corpses missing their parts, corpses with their inside parts on the outside, corpses still screaming because they did not yet know that they were corpses, corpses who just moments before were not corpses but trusted friends.
Sent them back from the war to live in the Levittowns, giant suburban sprawls with clean white picket fences for clean white families with clean white faces, tidy little houses with enough space in between that a man can live like a man, can drink enough to temporarily bury the corpses in his mind, can beat his children and rape his wife without troubling the neighbors, can comfortably scream PTSD screams from the depths of hell at night, can do some home repairs and work on his car on the weekend.
The suburbs still scream those screams of unburied war corpses, screams handed down from generation to generation by cruel hands and serrated words, cruel hands and serrated words doled out behind closed doors in private castles separated by fences and lawns, lawns of worthiness, lawns of salvation, lawns that if green enough will erase the sins of our fathers, lawns watered with the tears of warehoused wives, lawns watered with the sweat of the working poor, lawns watered with the blood of indigenous gods, overlooked by windows with snarling faces peeking through blinds or mothers with medicated eyes spoon-feeding grains into the bellies of crying children.
After the war they went to the suburbs and pretended everything was fine (it wasn’t fine) and spent the 1950s pouring emotional concrete over their pain and savaging their children and pretending everything was fine (it wasn’t fine), and now those houses are all haunted by ghosts pretending everything is fine (it isn’t fine) and haunted by living people pretending everything is fine (it isn’t fine) as we fill our oceans and our blood with plastic and laugh plastic laughs at screens full of plastic people pretending everything is fine (it isn’t fine), charging toward armageddon carrying the anguish of our grandfathers on our shoulders the way they carried their fallen friends on the battlefield on their shoulders before they realized that their friends were corpses and fell to the ground and cried out for their mothers, and then got up, and then went home, and never breathed a word about it to anyone.
__________________
__________________
__________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
❖
Our civilization is sick because all its systems ensure that human behavior is driven by profit, and health isn’t profitable. Nobody gets rich from everyone staying healthy all the time. The gears of capitalism will still keep turning if its populace is made shallow and dull by bad education and crappy art made for profit. Billionaires aren’t made by leaving forests and oceans unmolested, consuming less, mining less, drilling less, using less energy. The economy doesn’t soar when the world is at peace and nations are working together in harmony.
If you programmed an advanced AI to arrange human behavior solely around extracting the maximum amount of profit possible using existing technologies, its world wouldn’t look a whole lot different from the real one. We’re being guided by unthinking, unfeeling systems that don’t care about the good of our minds, our hearts, our health, or our biosphere, which will sacrifice all of the above to accomplish the one goal we’ve set them to accomplish.
It’s just a dogshit way to run a civilization. It doesn’t work. It’s left us with a dying world full of crazy morons hurtling toward nuclear armageddon on multiple fronts. Our systems have failed as spectacularly as anything can fail.
It’s simple really: we settled for capitalism as the status quo system because it’s an efficient way to churn out a lot of stuff and create a lot of wealth, but now we’re churning out too much stuff too quickly and society is enslaved by the wealthy. So now new systems are needed.
❖
So much of modern political life consists of the ruling class tricking the public into trading away things the ruling class values in exchange for things the ruling class does not value. Trading revolution for the feeling of being revolutionary. Trading actual freedom and democracy for the story of having freedom and democracy. Trading away the civil rights our rulers actually care about like unrestricted speech and freedom from surveillance in exchange for culture wars about racism and transphobia. Trading real labor for imaginary money. In every way possible we’re being duped into trading away real power for empty narrative fluff.
❖
One part of the problem is that in this mind-controlled dystopia people are prevented from knowing how deeply evil their government is, so the idea of their government surveilling them and regulating their speech and their access to information doesn’t scare them like it should.
This is why it annoys me when people say “Stop talking about the problems, we need to talk about solutions!” It’s like mate, we’re so far from ever being able to implement solutions — we haven’t even gotten to a point where a significant number of people know the problems exist. Step one is spreading awareness of the problems and their sources, because nobody’s going to turn and fight an enemy who they still believe is their friend. Systemic solutions are pretty far down the track from that point.
❖
It’s a pretty well-established fact by now that free will doesn’t exist nearly to the extent that most religions, philosophies and judicial systems pretend it does. Our minds are very hackable and propaganda is very effective. If you don’t get this, you don’t understand the problem.
Do a deep dive into cognitive biases and how they operate. Look into the research which shows our brains know what decisions we’re going to make several seconds before the conscious mind thinks we’re making them. You’re going to tell me these are organisms with free agency?
In order to understand what we’re up against you have to understand psychological manipulation, how effective it is, and why it works, because mass-scale psychological manipulation is the primary force preventing the public from turning against our rulers in our own interest.
❖
It seems like a lot of the inertia and self-defeating hopelessness that people have about fighting the machine comes from knowing the political awakenings of the sixties fizzled out, but I don’t think that would be the case if people understood just how much hard work the machine had to put into making them fizzle.
The amount of energy the western empire has poured into killing all leftist and antiwar movement is staggering, but people just think the acid wore off and the hippies turned into yuppies and the Reagan administration happened on its own. It didn’t. They had to work hard at that.
The revolution didn’t organically fizzle out, it was actively strangled to death. And what’s left in its place is this defeatist attitude where people want a healthy society but believe it can’t be attained, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We COINTELPRO ourselves now.
People think we can’t use the power of our numbers to force the emergence of a healthy society, and we don’t deserve one because we dropped the ball. But we didn’t knowingly drop the ball, we were manipulated out of it. And the manipulators had to work very, very hard to do so. Those movements died out because the machine understood very clearly that it needed to stomp them out with extreme aggression and knew exactly what it needed to do to accomplish this, while ordinary people did not. It’s not a fair fight if only one party knows it’s a fight.
The machine won one battle and everyone’s acting like they won the war. They didn’t. We can absolutely pick up the fight again, and we can overwhelm them with our numbers. If we had any idea how hard they had to work to win that one battle, this would be clear to everybody.
__________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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 whistleblower who today closed his gentle loving eyes for a final time.
Thank you for your service. For serving the highest interest over your own. For pouring everything you’ve got into the hope for a better tomorrow. For betting everything on the hope of a healthy and harmonious world. For creating a guiding light to help humanity steer its way home. For seizing your moment to help make things right instead of letting it pass like everyone around you. For somehow finding the strength to swim against the current when it would be so much easier to drift along with the madness. For somehow finding a higher calling in this wildly dysfunctional society where everything is pointed at selfishness and meaninglessness. For somehow cultivating something profound and authentic within yourself in the midst of a civilization of the vapid and fraudulent. For doing your very best to get a foot on the brake pedal when everything else is accelerating toward the cliff’s edge. For listening to that small voice within which can tolerate no more. For turning around. For taking your stand. For finding the courage. For doing what is right. For putting truth first. For lighting the way.
Thank you for your service. We will do our best to carry the torch forward, and finish what you started.
____________________
____________________
____________________
Featured image “Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023)”, oil on canvas, by Caitlin Johnstone.
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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.
We really don’t pay enough attention to the fact that all the most influential media platforms are owned and operated by extremely wealthy people who have every motive to keep us all focused on culture wars and electoral politics so we don’t focus on class war and direct action.
❖
It’s surreal how saying the FBI constantly grooms mentally ill people to get involved in terrorist plots makes you sound like a kooky crackpot, but it’s actually a well-documented fact that we just don’t talk about much for some reason.
❖
The only time Trump was praised by the mass media was when he bombed Syria. The only time Biden was condemned by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.
❖
The New York Times publishing an article which criticizes Ukrainian Nazis for wearing Nazi insignia, not because Nazism is wrong but because it’s bad war propaganda, was one of the most New York Times things that has ever happened.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
The decision by some Ukrainian soldiers to wear patches with Nazi icons threatens to reinforce Russian propaganda used to justify the invasion. It also could give the symbols mainstream life after the West's decades-long efforts to eliminate them.https://t.co/TdhO6pKpFG
The article even admitted that western reporters have been avoiding acknowledging the problem because they don’t want to play into “Russian propaganda”, and have actually asked Ukrainian soldiers to remove Nazi patches before taking photos. If you choose not to report something because it would hurt your side’s propaganda efforts, then you are not a journalist, you are a propagandist.
What’s funny about the “Nazis in Ukraine” controversy is that Nazis in Ukraine is not even the strongest argument against western proxy warfare in that nation. Western propagandists could just say “Yes Ukraine has a Nazi problem but we believe the benefits of protecting Ukrainian democracy outweigh the negatives of some skinheads getting rocket launchers here and there” or whatever, and most westerners would swallow it. The only reason propaganda outlets like The New York Times feel the need to keep diddling this issue and manipulating people’s minds and gaslighting everyone about it is because they’re so habituated to pushing for complete and total narrative control on US foreign policy, so it never occurs to them to cede even the slightest amount of ground or yield even the most obvious admissions to avoid looking ridiculous.
❖
The world is ruled by thugs and tyrants, the most thuggish and tyrannical of whom pour a tremendous amount of energy into convincing their populations that only other countries are ruled by thugs and tyrants.
❖
If people and digital records survive the Earth’s next act of nuclear warfare, let the record show that we were seeing clear warning signs every day and overwhelmingly ignored them.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus said that the country has started to receive nuclear weapons from Russia, a long-threatened provocation and the latest sign of the worsening relationship between Russia and the U.S. https://t.co/XrExrtoXoN
Saying “America didn’t bomb Nord Stream, Ukraine did!” is like saying “Will Smith didn’t slap Chris Rock, his hand did!” It’s a distinction without any meaningful difference, no matter how hard they try to spin it as an independent act that the US would’ve had no control over.
❖
There’s no basis for the belief that today’s CIA and FBI are any less depraved than they were in the days of Dulles and J Edgar Hoover.
Seriously, what’s changed since that time? There was a cold war back then? There’s a cold war now. The laws, rules and policies were drastically changed and the people who did those bad things were punished? They were not.
There’s no basis whatsoever for the belief that the CIA and FBI did bad things in the past but don’t do bad things currently. It’s believed because it is comfortable, and for no other reason.
We learn about bad things the CIA and FBI did “in the past” because they stand nothing to lose by us learning about bad things they wanted to do and already did. Later on what’s happening today will be “in the past” and we’ll learn what they were up to in this slice of spacetime.
All the conditions which existed during the most notorious acts of depravity by those agencies are also the case today. Cold war. Hot war. Dissident groups. The fight for US hegemony. That’s all happening currently, and there’s no reason to believe they’re any nicer and cuddlier about it today.
❖
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
US accuses Chinese warship of unsafe maneuver in the Taiwan Strait; China accuses US warships of being on the wrong side of the fucking planet. https://t.co/RtPFgXoW5e
If western governments need to keep ramping up censorship, propaganda and the persecution of journalists in order to defend western freedom and democracy, is it really freedom and democracy? And is it worth defending?
❖
The only way to get a good read on what manipulators are really about is to ignore their words and watch their actions, because they only use language to manipulate and extract what they want from people. Apply this to politicians and governments, and to narcissists in your life.
Example: if you ignore the US government’s stories about its love of freedom and democracy and rules-based order and just look at its actions, what you see is a violent and tyrannical regime which works continually to destroy and subvert nations around the world which disobey it.
❖
One of the hardest lessons I’ve ever had to learn in life is that projection cuts both directions. We project our bad qualities and motives onto others, wrongly assuming that they have the same character flaws as us, but we can also project our positive traits onto others who might not have them.
In a world full of narcissists, sociopaths and manipulators, this is important to be aware of — whether you’re looking at politicians, governments, or your own interpersonal relations. In the past I’ve suffered serious consequences for assuming that someone must have healthy and relatable reasons for their harmful actions toward me and projecting my own good motives onto them, when really all they wanted was to use and subjugate me.
You can’t assume that someone is operating from the same inner motivations as you, whether those imagined motivations are negative or positive. Some people just suck, and do things you would never do because of motives that would never even occur to you.
_________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
It’s not really deniable that western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes. Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the US empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought. Casual naked-eye observation of the way the mass media reliably support every US war, rally behind the US foreign policy objective of the day, and display overwhelming bias against empire-targeted governments makes it abundantly obvious that this is happening when viewed with any degree of critical thought.
To deny that these mass-scale manipulations have an effect would be as absurd as denying that advertising — a near trillion-dollar industry — has an effect. It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable. Manipulators understand this, and the science of modern propaganda which has been advancing for over a century understands this with acute lucidity.
By continually hammering our minds with simple repeated messaging about the nature of the world we live in, propagandists are able to exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.
Our indoctrination into the mainstream imperial worldview begins when we are very young, largely because schooling is intertwined with the same power structures whose information interests are served by that worldview, and because powerful plutocrats like John D Rockefeller actively inserted themselves into the formation of modern schooling systems.
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.
This is what makes it so hard to convince someone that their beliefs about an issue are falsehoods born of propaganda. I see a lot of people blame this problem on the fact that critical thinking isn’t taught in schools, and I’ve seen some strains of Marxist thought arguing that westerners choose to espouse propaganda narratives because they know it advances their own class interests, and I’m sure both of these factor into the equation to some extent. But the primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives actually has a much simpler, well-documented explanation.
Modern psychology tells us that people don’t just tend to hold onto their propaganda-induced belief systems; people tend to hold onto any belief system. Belief perseverance, as the name suggests, describes the way people tend to cling to their beliefs even when presented with evidence disproving them. The theory goes that back when humans lived in tribes that were often hostile to each other, our tribal cohesion and knowing who we can trust mattered more to our survival than taking the time to figure out what’s objectively true, so now we’ve got these brains that tend to prioritize loyalty to our modern “tribes” like our nation, our religion, our ideological factions and our pet causes.
This tendency can take the form of motivated reasoning, where our emotional interests and “tribal” loyalties color the way we take in new information. It can also give rise to the backfire effect, where being confronted with evidence which conflicts with one’s worldview will not only fail to change their beliefs but actually strengthen them.
So the simple answer to why people cling to beliefs instilled by imperial propaganda is because that’s just how minds work. If you can consistently and forcefully indoctrinate someone from an early age and then give them a mainstream ideological “tribe” with which to identify in their indoctrination, the cognitive glitches in these newly-evolved brains of ours act as sentries which protect those worldviews you implanted. Which is exactly what modern propaganda, and our modern political systems, are set up to do.
I often see people expressing bewilderment about the way the smartest people they know subscribe to the most ridiculous propaganda narratives out there. This is why. A smart person who has been effectively indoctrinated by propaganda will just be more clever than someone of average intelligence in defending their beliefs. Some of the most foam-brained foreign policy think pieces you’ll ever read come from PhDs and Ivy League graduates, because all their intelligence gives them is the ability to make intelligent-sounding arguments for why it would be good and smart for the US military to do something evil and stupid.
The Oatmeal has a great comic about this (which someone also made into a video if you prefer). Importantly, the author correctly notes that the mind’s tendency to forcefully protect its worldview does not mean it’s impossible to change one’s beliefs in light of new evidence, only that it is more difficult than accepting beliefs which confirm one’s biases. It takes some work, and it takes sincerity and self-honesty, but it can be done. Which is happy news for those of us who have an interest in convincing people to abandon their propaganda-constructed worldviews for reality-based ones.
Sometimes just being patient with someone, showing empathy, treating them how we’d like to be treated, and working to establish things in common to overcome the primitive psychology which screams we’re from a hostile tribe can accomplish a lot more than just laying out tons of objective facts disproving their believed narrative about Russia or China or their own government or what have you.
And above all we can just keep telling the truth, in as many fresh, engaging and creative ways as we can come up with. The more we do this, the more opportunities there are for someone to catch a glimmer of something beyond the veil of their propaganda-installed worldview and the cognitive biases which protect it. The more such opportunities we create, the greater a chance the truth has of getting a word in edgewise.
______________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which oversees the spy agencies of the United States, has admitted in a report requested by Senator Ron Wyden that the US intelligence cartel has been circumventing constitutional regulations designed to protect US citizens from government surveillance by simply purchasing information collected by commercial data brokers.
In an escalation in surveillance capitalism that should surprise no one but alarm everyone, US intelligence agencies have found that while the Fourth Amendment prohibits their directly wiretapping, hacking or bugging whomever they please without a warrant, there’s nothing stopping them from simply purchasing massive amounts of data harvested by Silicon Valley tech companies which can provide them with similar kinds of information. So that’s what they’ve been doing, because of course it is.
But remember kids, it’s important for you to be very afraid of TikTok because TikTok might harvest your information and give it to an authoritarian surveillance state.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
CIA: Can I have your personal information? People: No way! Google: Can I have your personal information? People: Sure. Google: Here's that personal information you bought. CIA: Thanks!
A disturbing new Responsible Statecraft piece by Branko Marcetic notes that the civilian leadership roles in the US government which have historically been responsible for reining in the more dangerous impulses of the US war machine have actually been far more hawkish and aggressive on Ukraine than the Pentagon’s professional warmakers. According to a recent Washington Post report, inside the Biden administration “the Pentagon is considered more cautious than the White House or State Department about sending more sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine.”
If only the war machine is responsible for placing checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine, that means there are no real checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine. If JFK had been more hawkish and aggressive than his own generals at the most perilous moments of the last cold war, it’s entirely likely that the world as we know it would not exist today. It is bone-chilling that we are relying on the better angels of the most murderous military on earth to see us through these increasingly close games of nuclear chicken.
As Marcetic discussed in another article last year, the insanely hawkish rhetoric we are seeing from the western political/media class around the subject of nuclear brinkmanship is demonstrably far more oriented toward reckless confrontation than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The people whose job it is to encourage restraint in these situations — the press, the diplomats, and the elected officials — are instead doing the exact opposite.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
Insane and evil–the AEI dips a toe in the idea that the US should give Ukraine nukes:https://t.co/qiI7UyXchZ
This as influential Russian foreign policy strategist Sergey Karaganov argues that Moscow has “set too high a threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and that “it is necessary to arouse the instinct of self-preservation that the West has lost” by “lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and “moving up the deterrence-escalation ladder.” Karaganov cites the fact that Belarus has begun receiving tactical nukes from Russia to show that Moscow is already moving in this direction.
This looks all the more disquieting in light of Michael Tracey’s observations in a recent Newsweek article titled “The Government Keeps Lying to Us About Ukraine. Where Is the Outrage?” Tracey discusses the way fighters from Ukraine and from NATO member Poland have been ramping up attacks on Russian territory, while the US government and news media deceive the American public about the fact that this is happening and how dangerous it is.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
I wrote an item for Newsweek about how the US government is systematically deceiving the American people about the nature of US involvement in Ukraine — and the deception keeps getting more and more extreme https://t.co/zexOTPTCMy
On top of all this you’ve got the empire’s increasingly ridiculous spin about the Nord Stream pipeline bombings. The mass media are now saying that Ukrainian special operations forces perpetrated the attack, and that the CIA had advanced knowledge of their plans, but tried unsuccessfully to tell them not to go through with it.
Which is a narrative that just so happens to fit perfectly into alignment with the information interests of the US empire. It contradicts reporting by Seymour Hersh that the US was directly involved in the attack, it pins culpability on a nation with whom the west highly sympathizes who can be framed as acting in their own defense against Russian invaders, and the US intelligence cartel gets to wash its hands of the whole ordeal by claiming it told the Ukrainians not to attack pipelines used by US ally Germany.
It’s also a narrative that is completely nonsensical. Saying “America didn’t attack Nord Stream, Ukraine did!” is like saying “Will Smith didn’t slap Chris Rock, his hand did!” Ukraine is completely dependent on the will of the US government to continue this war; if the US government draws a hard line and tells them not to do something or risk losing support, it will necessarily have to obey. It’s been public knowledge for a year now that the CIA is intimately involved in activities on the ground in Ukraine, and the CIA has been actively training Ukrainian special operations forces since before this war even began.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
It’s amazing how many revisions this “actually Ukraine did it” narrative has undergone ever since Hersh’s bombshell in February forced NATO spy agencies to plant a counter-narrative. It’s like watching a slow wiki page edit, revised & drip-dripped across major NATOland media. https://t.co/4lygcedysJ
So it’s a distinction without a difference to claim that Ukraine and not the US bombed Nord Stream — and that’s pretending for the sake of argument that we know the US wasn’t much more directly involved in the attack than it is admitting. There is currently no logical reason to assume that’s even the case, and there is never any valid reason to take the US intelligence cartel at its word about anything.
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.
What a wild world. What a time to be alive.
_______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
We can win this thing and create a healthy, harmonious world, and the work each of us does to help bring this about makes a real difference. The more I observe and learn about human behavior, the more convinced of this I become.
Let me explain.
Every positive change in human behavior is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. This is true whether you’re talking about positive behavioral changes in an individual or in a collective.
By “expansion of consciousness” I mean an increase in awareness — someone or a group of someones becoming more aware of something than they previously were:
Someone gaining a new perspective on the forces within themselves which drive them to seek out dysfunctional relationships.
An addict becoming more conscious of the inner dynamics that compel them to use.
A victim of abuse realizing that abuse is happening, and that a better life is possible, and that they deserve it.
A community becoming aware that their clergy have been sexually abusing children.
The US civil rights movement making Americans more aware of the injustice and destructiveness of racism.
Increased literacy and a greater ability to distribute the written word giving society a greater hunger for freedom and democracy and less tolerance for overt tyranny.
Etc.
Conditions don’t get better until the forces which give rise to them are clearly seen and understood. This movement from the darkness of unconsciousness into the light of awareness can create the illusion that things are getting worse, because they turn up so much ugliness.
After the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, his mother made the decision to hold an open-casket funeral to expose the world to the cruelty that black Americans were being subjected to by showing his mutilated body to the public. In that moment it looked like the world was being made more ugly, because an ugliness that had previously gone unseen by many people was being published in papers across the country. But it was later said that “The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till’s bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention on not only American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy.”
Similarly, the dawn of the internet has turned up a tremendous amount of ugliness and cruelty that had previously gone unseen and unknown to most people. This can lead to the mistaken impression that the internet itself is making people more cruel and ugly than they previously were, but it isn’t. It’s just turning up humanity’s longstanding inner demons that had previously functioned solely in the dark.
It looks ugly, it moves in a sloppy, clumsy, two-steps-forward-one-step-back shamble, but human consciousness is undeniably expanding. We’re getting so much better at sharing ideas and information with each other that we’ve arguably changed more as a species in the last thirty years than we did in the previous thirty centuries. We might outwardly look similar to the way we looked in our grandparents’ time, but billions of human brains connected to each other through the internet is something that is wildly unprecedented in the entire history of our species. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
So humanity is indisputably becoming more conscious, as awkward and sloppy as our situation looks right now. We’re becoming more and more aware of the problems our species faces, and our rulers are having to do more and more work to pull the wool over our eyes and keep us marching in a way that is convenient to them.
Police brutality. The abuses of Israeli apartheid. The agony of poverty. The ravages of ecocide. The ways we’ve been deceived and manipulated by the mass media. People are becoming more and more aware of these things than they used to be, because the truth about them is suddenly vastly more visible now than it previously was.
And what’s exciting is that we all have the ability to participate in, and facilitate, this expansion of consciousness. We each have the ability to help humanity become more conscious in our own small way, thereby bringing us that much closer to a positive shift in our collective behavior.
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.
What this means is that we each have the ability to directly and meaningfully participate in the creation of a healthy world, because we are each able to directly and meaningfully advance the only factor that ever leads to positive changes in human behavior. We can do this through the new technologies which have expanded humanity’s ability to share ideas and information like videos, blogs, podcasts, tweets and memes, and we can do this through older means like holding demonstrations, creating art, distributing literature, writing messages on walls, and just having conversations.
Anything you can do to help people become more aware of injustice, abuses, propaganda and tyranny, whether in your own community or in the world, makes a difference. Does this mean you will single-handedly save the day like the protagonist in a Hollywood movie? No. That’s not how real change happens, and it never has been. Real change is the result of sustained efforts of many, many people whose individual actions could never achieve much on their own.
I think the protagonist-driven storytelling models humanity uses in its legends, folk tales, novels and films often plays an unwholesome role in distorting people’s expectations about the efficaciousness of their own individual actions. Those storytelling models are designed to appeal to the human ego, which gets a tremendous amount of energy and attention in this particular slice of spacetime, but they are not accurate representations of the way real change actually happens in real life. In real life, change happens because a great many people put their shoulders up against the change that was needed and shoved in the required direction.
So that’s what we can all do: we can all lean our shoulders into the expansion of human consciousness and shove. Spread awareness of what’s going on in the world, make people more aware that we’re all being deceived and manipulated at mass scale, and help people to see that a better world is possible. The more people open their eyes to what’s happening, the more shoulders there are to help join in our collective shove toward consciousness.
Ultimately what we’re looking at is humanity’s journey toward becoming a conscious species. One that’s no longer driven by unconscious animal impulses and the flailings of illusory egoic constructs in our psyches, and is instead driven by a lucid perception of reality and a desire for the greater good of all beings.
We can all play a role in this achievement, both by expanding our own consciousness as far as it can go by bringing clarity to our own minds, our own worldviews and our own inner processes, and by helping others to become more aware of the world around them. It won’t often unfold in a way that is elegant and linear and egoically pleasing, but it will unfold. And if it unfolds enough, positive change becomes inevitable.
__________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
This is just a notice to let everyone on my mailing list know I’ll be taking a week off for some family events. Thank you so much to my patrons and to everyone who’s been traveling with me on this weird and wild adventure. I really appreciate you all. See you all soon!
As usual anyone is free to print, copy, republish, distribute, or use any and all of these materials in any way they choose, either digitally or out there in the analog world.
The US military has released video footage of a Chinese navy ship cutting across the path of an American Destroyer in the Taiwan Strait over the weekend, reportedly forcing the US vessel to slow down to avoid a collision.
A statement on the incident from US Indo-Pacific Command says the Chinese ship “executed maneuvers in an unsafe manner” in the presence of US and Canadian warships during a “routine south to north Taiwan Strait transit” by the naval forces of those nations, coming as close as 150 yards from the American vessel.
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?
Well I don’t know if this news will be as shocking to you as it is to me, but it turns out that China has somehow managed to place its country immediately adjacent to the Taiwan Strait, and is now only 100 miles from Taiwan itself. This narrow channel of water was the only space the US and Canadian navies were given to travel through, placing them dangerously close to Chinese warships, and to the country of China.
China has yet to issue a formal apology for menacing the US navy with the unsafe maneuverings of both its battleship and its geographical location.
BREAKING: The Navy has released video of a Chinese warship sailing dangerously close to a Navy destroyer in the Taiwan Strait on Saturday pic.twitter.com/jA0YNEgsnM
Noting in its statement that it was acting “in accordance with international law” at the time of the incident, US Indo-Pacific Command says that its transit “demonstrates the combined U.S.-Canadian commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” adding that the US military “flies, sails, and operates safely and responsibly anywhere international law allows.”
Which is of course true. These are international waters after all, and the Chinese navy should therefore stay out of the way of US military vessels traveling through them, just as the US navy would stay out of the way of Chinese military forces traveling a few miles off the coast of California or transiting between the islands of Hawaii. The US is only asking for the same freedom of navigation it would afford anyone else.
We saw another incident of China’s aggressive and dangerous terrestrial placement on the 26th of May, when a US spy plane was buzzed by a Chinese fighter jet during peaceful surveillance operations over the South China Sea. A statement by US Indo-Pacific Command called the incident “an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” which interrupted the “safe and routine operations” of the spy plane.
#USINDOPACOM Statement on #PRC Unprofessional Intercept: "We expect all countries in the Indo-Pacific region to use international airspace safely and in accordance with international law."
— U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (@INDOPACOM) May 30, 2023
What the hell is going on here? What is a Chinese fighter jet doing all the way over in the South China Sea?
Obviously Chinese fighter jets have no business operating in that region, especially when their movements endanger the US spy planes who are flying their peaceful missions there. But as with the Taiwan Strait, the imperialist aggressions of the Chinese Communist Party have been so expansionist in nature that the South China Sea now sits immediately adjacent to mainland China.
Here’s hoping that China stops with its brazen aggressions against the US military forces who are minding their own business in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, stops endangering poor defenseless warships and spy planes by moving through waters and airspace they have no business entering in the first place, and starts respecting the rules-based global sovereignty of the United States of America.
___________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband 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 self-evident and indisputable to anyone who pays attention, but why and how it happens is harder to see. The uniformity is so complete and so consistent that when people first begin noticing these patterns it’s common for them to assume the media must be controlled by a small, centralized authority much like the state media of more openly authoritarian governments. But if you actually dig into the reasons why the media act the way they act, that isn’t really what you find.
Instead, what you find is a much larger, much less centralized network of factors which tips the scales of media coverage to the advantage of the US empire and the forces which benefit from it. Some of it is indeed conspiratorial in nature and happens in secret, but most of it is essentially out in the open.
Here are 15 of those factors.
1. Media ownership.
The most obvious point of influence in the mass media is the fact that such outlets tend to be owned and controlled by plutocrats whose wealth and power are built upon the status quo they benefit from. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which he bought in 2013 from the also-immensely-wealthy Graham family. The New York Times has been run by the same family for over a century. Rupert Murdoch owns a vast international media empire whose success is largely owed to the US government agencies with whom he is closely intertwined. Owning media has in and of itself historically been an investment that can generate immense wealth — “like having a license to print your own money” as Canadian television magnate Roy Thomson once put it.
Does this mean that wealthy media owners are standing over their employees and telling them what to report from day to day? No. But it does mean they control who will run their outlet, which means they control who will be doing the hiring of its executives and editors, who control the hiring of everyone else at the outlet. Rupert Murdoch never stood in the newsroom announcing the talking points and war propaganda for the day, but you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of securing a job with the Murdoch press if you’re a flag-burning anti-imperialist.
Which takes us to another related point:
2. “If you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
In a contentious 1996 discussion between Noam Chomsky and British journalist Andrew Marr, Chomsky derided the false image that mainstream journalists have of themselves as “a crusading profession” who are “adversarial” and “stand up against power,” saying it’s almost impossible for a good journalist to do so in any meaningful way in the mass media of the western world.
“How can you know that I’m self-censoring?” Marr objected. “How can you know that journalists are-”
“I’m not saying you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
In a 1997 essay, Chomsky added that “the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway.”
3. Journalists learn pro-establishment groupthink without being told.
This “you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting” effect isn’t just some personal working theory of Chomsky’s; journalists who’ve spent time in the mass media have publicly acknowledged that this is the case in recent years, saying that they learned very quickly what kinds of output will help and hinder their movement up the career ladder without needing to be explicitly told.
During his second presidential primary run in 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders enraged the mass media with some comments he made accusing the Washington Post of biased reporting against him. Sanders’ claim was entirely correct; during the hottest and most tightly contested point in the 2016 presidential primary, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting noted that WaPo had published no fewer than sixteen smear pieces about Sanders in the span of sixteen hours. Sanders pointing out this blatantly obvious fact sparked an emotional controversy about bias in the media which yielded a few quality testimonials from people in the know.
Among these were former MSNBC reporter Krystal Ball and former Daily Caller White House correspondent Saagar Enjeti, who explained the subtle pressures to adhere to a groupthink orthodoxy that they’d experienced in a segment with The Hill’s online show Rising.
“There are certain pressures to stay in good with the establishment to maintain the access that is the life blood of political journalism,” Ball said in the segment. “So what do I mean? Let me give an example from my own career since everything I’m saying here really frankly applies to me too. Back in early 2015 at MSNBC I did a monologue that some of you may have seen pretty much begging Hillary Clinton not to run. I said her elite ties were out of step with the party and the country, that if she ran she would likely be the nominee and would then go on to lose. No one censored me, I was allowed to say it, but afterwards the Clinton people called and complained to the MSNBC top brass and threatened not to provide any access during the upcoming campaign. I was told that I could still say what I wanted, but I would have to get any Clinton-related commentary cleared with the president of the network. Now being a human interested in maintaining my job, I’m certain I did less critical Clinton commentary after that than I maybe otherwise would have.”
“This is something that a lot of people don’t understand,” said Enjeti. “It’s not necessarily that somebody tells you how to do your coverage, it’s that if you were to do your coverage that way, you would not be hired at that institution. So it’s like if you do not already fit within this framework, then the system is designed to not give you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of the incentive structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your colleagues that are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s a system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn’t go down that path in the first place.”
“Right, and again, it’s not necessarily intentional,” Ball added. “It’s that those are the people that you’re surrounded with, so there becomes a groupthink. And look, you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you want it to or not, that’s a reality.”
During the same controversy, former MSNBC producer Jeff Cohen published an article in Salon titled “Memo to mainstream journalists: Can the phony outrage; Bernie is right about bias” in which he described the same “groupthink” experience:
“It happens because of groupthink. It happens because top editors and producers know — without being told — which issues and sources are off limits. No orders need be given, for example, for rank-and-file journalists to understand that the business of the corporate boss or top advertisers is off-limits, short of criminal indictments.
“No memo is needed to achieve the narrowness of perspective — selecting all the usual experts from all the usual think tanks to say all the usual things. Think Tom Friedman. Or Barry McCaffrey. Or Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who’ve been proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.”
Matt Taibbi also jumped into the controversy to highlight the media groupthink effect, publishing an article with Rolling Stone about the way journalists come to understand what will and will not elevate their mass media careers:
“Reporters watch as good investigative journalism about serious structural problems dies on the vine, while mountains of column space are devoted to trivialities like Trump tweets and/or simplistic partisan storylines. Nobody needs to pressure anyone. We all know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in newsrooms.
4. Mass media employees who don’t comply with the groupthink get worn down and pressured out.
Reporter Quits NBC Citing Network’s Support For Endless War
"And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself — busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play."https://t.co/W4mpgxDQP0
Journalists either learn how to do the kind of reporting that will advance their careers in the mass media, or they don’t learn and they either remain marginalized and unheard of or they get worn down and quit. NBC reporter William Arkin resigned from the network in 2019, criticizing NBC in an open letter for being consistently “in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war,” and complaining that the network had begun “emulating the national security state itself.”
Arkin said he often found himself a “lone voice” in scrutinizing various aspects of the US war machine, saying he “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years.”
“We have contributed to turning the world national security into this sort of political story,” Arkin wrote. “I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.”
Sometimes the pressure is much less subtle. Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges left The New York Times after being issued a formal written reprimand by the paper for criticizing the Iraq invasion in a speech at Rockford College, realizing that he would either have to stop speaking publicly about what he believed or he’d be fired.
“Either I muzzled myself to pay fealty to my career… or I spoke out and realized that my relationship with my employer was terminal,” Hedges said in 2013. “And so at that point I left before they got rid of me. But I knew that, you know, I wasn’t going to be able to stay.”
5. Mass media employees who step too far out of line get fired.
Last week, CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill delivered a speech at the United Nations in support of Palestinian self-determination and equal rights. Less than 24 hours later, CNN was done with him. https://t.co/yUjw97fUb2
This measure doesn’t need to be applied often but happens enough for people with careers in media to get the message, like when Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for his opposition to the Bush administration’s warmongering in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion despite having the best ratings of any show on the network, or in 2018 when Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill was fired from CNN for supporting freedom for Palestinians during a speech at the United Nations.
6. Mass media employees who toe the imperial line see their careers advance.
If you're curious why NBC's Richard Engel is so upset about the US withdrawing from Afghanistan, he talks honestly in his book War Journal about how he knew the Iraq War was going to be great for the careers of people like him https://t.co/0KXEOCNuKLpic.twitter.com/yUGCVQwFxu
In his 2008 book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, NBC’s Richard Engel wrote that he did everything he could to get into Iraq because he knew it would provide a massive boost to his career, calling his presence there during the war his “big break”.
“In the run-up to the war, it was clear that Iraq was a land where careers were going to be made,” Engels wrote. “I sneaked into Iraq before the war because I thought the conflict would be the turning point in the Middle East, where I had already been living for seven years. As a young freelancer, I believed some reporters would die covering the Iraq war, and that others would make a name for themselves.”
This gives a lot of insight into the way ambitious journalists think about climbing the career ladder in their field, and also into one reason why those types are so gung-ho about war all the time. If you know a war can advance your career, you’re going to hope it happens and do everything you can to facilitate it. The whole system is set up to elevate the absolute worst sort of people.
7. With public and state-funded media, the influence is more overt.
Of course NPR is US state-affiliated media. It's funded by the US government, all its reporting advances the information interests of the US government, and its CEO's last job was running overt propaganda organs of the US government. If it doesn't deserve that label, no one does. pic.twitter.com/AXWAYwpYcm
So we’ve been talking about the pressures that are brought to bear on mass media employees in the plutocrat-run media, but what about mass media that aren’t owned by plutocrats, like NPR and the BBC?
Well, propaganda thrives in those institutions for more obvious reasons: their proximity to government powers. Right up into the 1990s the BBC was just letting MI5 outright vet its employees for “subversive” political activity, and only officially changed that policy when they got caught. NPR’s CEO John Lansing came directly out of the US government’s official propaganda services, having previously served as the CEO of the US Agency for Global Media — and he was not the first NPR executive with an extensive background in the US state propaganda apparatus.
With US government-owned outlets like Voice of America the control is even more overt than that. In a 2017 article with Columbia Journalism Review titled “Spare the indignation: Voice of America has never been independent,” VOA veteran Dan Robinson says such outlets are entirely different from normal news companies and are expected to facilitate US information interests to receive government funding:
I spent about 35 years with Voice of America, serving in positions ranging from chief White House correspondent to overseas bureau chief and head of a key language division, and I can tell you that for a long time, two things have been true. First, US government-funded media have been seriously mismanaged, a reality that made them ripe for bipartisan reform efforts in Congress, climaxing late in 2016 when President Obama signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Second, there is widespread agreement in Congress and elsewhere that, in exchange for continued funding, these government broadcasters must do more, as part of the national security apparatus, to assist efforts to combat Russian, ISIS, and al-Qaeda disinformation.
8. Access journalism.
Every time I watch a town hall like last night's, I'm blown away with how everyday people ask such better questions than professional journalists
Access journalism is my profession's greatest curse. Too many reporters fear getting cut off for one tough Q. Real people don't care
Krystal Ball touched on this one in her anecdote about MSNBC’s influential call from the Clinton camp above. Access journalism refers to the way media outlets and reporters can lose access to politicians, government officials and other powerful figures if those figures don’t perceive them as sufficiently sympathetic. If someone in power decides they don’t like a given reporter they can simply decide to give their interviews to someone else who’s sufficiently sycophantic, or call on someone else at the press conference, or have conversations on and off the record with someone who kisses up to them a bit more.
Depriving challenging interlocutors of access funnels all the prized news media material to the most obsequious brown-nosers in the press, because if you’ve got too much dignity to pitch softball questions and not follow up on ridiculous politician-speak word salad non-answers there’s always someone else who will. This creates a dynamic where power-serving bootlickers are elevated to the top of the mainstream media, while actual journalists who try to hold power to account go unrewarded.
9. Getting fed “scoops” by government agencies looking to advance their information interests.
"A US official told CNN" is not a "Scoop" but demonstrates the willingness of 'journalists' to stenograph unverifiable government disinformation. https://t.co/wr2u3xKtiI
In Totalitarian Dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In Free Democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!” and the news media unquestioningly publish it.
One of the easiest ways to break a major story on national security or foreign policy these days is to get entrusted with a “scoop” by one or more government officials — on condition of anonymity of course — which just so happens to make the government look good and/or make its enemies look bad and/or manufacture consent for this or that agenda. This of course amounts to simply publishing press releases for the White House, the Pentagon or the US intelligence cartel, since you’re just uncritically repeating some unverified thing that an official handed you and disguising it as news reporting. But it’s a practice that’s becoming more and more common in western “journalism” as the need to distribute propaganda about Washington’s cold war enemies in Moscow and Beijing increases.
Some notorious recent examples of this are The New York Times’ completely discredited report that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill US and allied forces in Afghanistan, and The Guardian’s completely discredited report that Paul Manafort paid visits to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy. Both were simply falsehoods that the mass media were fed by intelligence operatives who were trying to seed a narrative in the public consciousness, which they then repeated as fact without ever disclosing the names of those who fed them the false story. Another related example is US officials admitting to NBC last year — again under cover of anonymity — that the Biden administration had simply been feeding lies about Russia to the media in order to win an “information war” against Putin.
This dynamic is similar to the one in access journalism in that outlets and reporters who’ve proven themselves sympathetic and uncritical parrots of the government narratives they are fed are the ones most likely to be fed them, and therefore the ones to get the “scoop”. We caught a whiff of what this looks like from the inside when acting CIA director under the Obama administration Mike Morell testified that he and his intelligence cartel cohorts had initially planned to seed their disinfo op about the Hunter Biden laptop to a particular unnamed reporter at The Washington Post, whom they presumably had a good working relationship with.
Another twist on the intelligence cartel “scoop” dynamic is the way government officials will feed information to a reporter from one outlet, and then reporters from another outlet will contact those very same officials and ask them if the information is true, and then all outlets involved will have a public parade on Twitter proclaiming that the report has been “confirmed”. Nothing about the story was verified as true in any way; it was just the same story being told by the same source to different people.
10. Class interests.
Rachel Maddow, as a reward for feeding liberals demented conspiracies, was just rewarded by Comcast with a contract for $30m/year: $2.5 million/month.
Yet few journalists object or call her a "grifter". Why? Because she works for a huge corporation, so they see it as legitimate. pic.twitter.com/qKpjIViknf
The more a mass media employee goes along with the imperial groupthink, follows the unwritten rules and remains unthreatening to the powerful, the higher up the media career ladder they will climb. The higher up the career ladder they climb, the more money they will often find themselves making. Once they find themselves in a position to influence a very large number of people, they are a part of a wealthy class which has a vested interest in maintaining the political status quo which lets them keep their fortune.
This can take the form of opposing anything resembling socialism or political movements that might make the rich pay more taxes, as we saw in the virulent smear campaigns against progressive figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. It can also take the form of encouraging the public to fight a culture war so that they won’t start fighting a class war. It can also take the form of making one more supportive of the empire more generally, because that’s the status quo your fortune is built on. It can also take the form of making one more sympathetic to politicians, government officials, plutocrats and celebrities as a whole, because that class is who your friends are now; that’s who you’re hanging out with, going to the parties and the weddings of, drinking with, laughing with, schmoozing with.
Class interests dance with the behavior of journalists in multiple ways because, as both Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have noted, journalists in the mass media are increasingly coming not from working-class backgrounds but from wealthy families, and have degrees from expensive elite universities.
The number of journalists with college degrees skyrocketed from 58 percent in 1971 to 92 percent in 2013. If your wealthy parents aren’t paying that off for you then you’ve got crushing student debt that you need to pay off yourself, which you can only do in the field you studied in by making a decent amount of money, which you can only do by acting as a propagandist for the imperial establishment in the ways we’ve been discussing.
Universities themselves tend to play a status quo-serving, conformity-manufacturing role when churning out journalists, as wealth won’t flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy. Moneyed interests are unlikely to make large donations to universities which teach their students that moneyed interests are a plague upon the nation, and they are certainly not going to send their kids there.
The Quincy Institute has a new study out which found that a staggering 85 percent of the think tanks cited by the news media in their reporting on US military support for Ukraine have been paid by literal Pentagon contractors.
“Think tanks in the United States are a go–to resource for media outlets seeking expert opinions on pressing public policy issues,” writes Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman. “But think tanks often have entrenched stances; a growing body of research has shown that their funders can influence their analysis and commentary. This influence can include censorship — both self-censorship and more direct censoring of work unfavorable to a funder — and outright pay–for–research agreements with funders. The result is an environment where the interests of the most generous funders can dominate think tank policy debates.”
This is journalistic malpractice. It is never, ever in accord with journalistic ethics to cite war profiteer-funded think tanks on matters of war, militarism or foreign relations, but the western press do it constantly, without even disclosing this immense conflict of interest to their audience.
Western journalists cite empire-funded think tanks because they generally align with the empire-approved lines that a mass media stenographer knows they can advance their career by pushing, and they do it because doing so gives them an official-looking “expert” “source” to cite while proclaiming more expensive war machinery needs to be sent to this or that part of the world or what have you. But in reality there’s only one story to be found in such citations: “War Industry Supports More War.”
The fact that war profiteers are allowed to actively influence media, politics and government bodies through think tanks, advertising and corporate lobbying is one of the most insane things happening in our society today. And not only is it allowed, it’s seldom even questioned.
12. The Council on Foreign Relations.
Swiss Propaganda Research: "Executives and top journalists of almost all major US news outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations" #CFR#Bilderberg#TrilateralCommission (Click on link, then click to enlarge)
It should probably also be noted here that the Council on Foreign Relations is a profoundly influential think tank which counts a jarring number of media executives and influential journalists among its membership, a dynamic which gives think tanks another layer of influence in the media.
In 1993 former Washington Post senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood approvingly described CFR as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States.”
Harwood writes:
The membership of these journalists in the council, however they may think of themselves, is an acknowledgment of their active and important role in public affairs and of their ascension into the American ruling class. They do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it. Their influence, Jon Vanden Heuvel speculates in an article in the Media Studies Journal, is likely to increase now that the Cold War has ended: “By focusing on particular crises around the world {the media are in a better position} to pressure government to act.”
13. Advertising.
Politico is erasing evidence of their sponsorship from Lockheed Martin but won't answer questions about whether their Sunday puff piece about Lockheed's Skunk Works was advertorial or editorial content.
In 2021 Politico was caught publishing fawning apologia for top weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin at the same time Lockheed was sponsoring a Politico newsletter on foreign policy. Responsible Statecraft’s Eli Clifton wrote at the time:
There’s a very blurry line between Politico’s financial relationship with the largest weapons firm in the United States, Lockheed Martin, and its editorial output. And that line may have just become even more opaque.
Last week, Responsible Statecraft’s Ethan Paul reported that Politico was scrubbing its archives of any reference to Lockheed Martin’s longtime sponsorship of the publication’s popular newsletter, Morning Defense. While evidence of Lockheed’s financial relationship with Politico was erased, the popular beltway outlet just published a remarkable puff piece about the company, with no acknowledgement of the longstanding financial relationship with Politico.
Politico didn’t respond to questions about whether Lockheed was an ongoing sponsor of the publication after last month when it scrubbed the defense giant’s ads or whether the weapons firm paid for what read largely-like an advertorial.
Politico’s Lee Hudson visited Lockheed’s highly secure, and mostly classified, Skunk Works research and development facility north of Los Angeles and glowingly wrote, “For defense tech journalists and aviation nerds, this is the equivalent of a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory, but think supersonic drones instead of Everlasting Gobstoppers.”
Ever wondered why you’ll see things like ads for Northrop Grumman during the Superbowl? Do you think anyone’s watching that ad saying “You know what? I’m gonna buy myself a stealth bomber”? Of course not. The defense industry advertises in media all the time, and while it might not always get caught red-handed in blatant manipulation of news publications like Lockheed did with Politico, it’s hard to imagine that their money wouldn’t have a chilling effect on foreign policy reporting, and perhaps even give them some pull on editorial matters.
Like Jeff Cohen said above: the top advertisers are off limits.
14. Covert infiltration.
CIA's "mop up man" Ken Dilanian is the NBC 'reporter' used to channel claim about president Putin + US election https://t.co/GOci4EWwdv
Just because a lot of the mass media’s propagandistic behavior can be explained without secret conspiracies doesn’t mean secret conspiracies aren’t happening. In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird.
We are told that this sort of covert infiltration doesn’t happen anymore today, but that’s absurd. Of course it does. People believe the CIA no longer engages in nefarious behavior because they find it comfortable to believe that, not because there is any evidentiary basis for that belief.
There were no conditions which gave rise to Operation Mockingbird in the 1970s which aren’t also with us today. Cold war? That’s happening today. Hot war? That’s happening today. Dissident groups? Happening today. A mad scramble to secure US domination and capital on the world stage? Happening today. The CIA wasn’t dismantled and nobody went to prison. All that’s changed is that news media now have more things for government operatives to toy with, like online media and social media.
And indeed we have seen evidence that it happens today. Back in 2014 Ken Dilanian, now a prominent reporter for NBC, was caught intimately collaborating with the CIA in his reporting and sending them articles for approval and changes before publication. In his emails with CIA press handlers Dilanian is seen acting like a propagandist for the agency, talking about how he intended an article about CIA drone strikes to be “reassuring to the public” and editing his reporting in accordance with their wishes.
Lastly, sometimes the mass media act like state propagandists because they are actual state propagandists. Back in Carl Bernstein’s day the CIA had to secretly infiltrate the mass media; nowadays the mass media openly hire intelligence insiders to work among their ranks. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona.
The mass media also commonly bring in “experts” to provide opinions on war and weapons who are direct employees of the military-industrial complex, without ever explaining that massive conflict of interest to their audience. Last year Lever News published a report on the way the media had been bringing on US empire managers who are currently working for war profiteer companies as part of their life in the DC swamp’s revolving door between the public and private sector and presenting them as impartial pundits on the war in Ukraine.
I think it's awesome you can be a consultant for a company that manufactures certain missiles and go on NBC or CNN and say how important it is that we get more of those missiles shipped out, with no one saying btw this guy works for the missile company https://t.co/CHUb5drysd
So as you can see, the news media are subject to pressures from every conceivable angle on every relevant level which push them toward functioning not as reporters, but as propagandists. This is why the employees of the western mass media act like PR agents for the western empire and its component parts: because that’s exactly what they are.
_________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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.
Republican congressman Chip Roy published a press release on Thursday declaring that he has “called on Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to provide a full accounting of the department resources that will be used to impose woke gender ideology on America’s men and women in uniform during the month of June.”
I wish I was being sarcastic, but I'm not: to the extent these House GOP guys have any real interest in doing Pentagon oversight, their top priority is Trans/Gay stuff. (Huge portion of DOD budget 🙄)
More focused on "Drag Queen Hot Dog Eating Contests" or whatever than Ukraine pic.twitter.com/XcwHMSLMlI
“It has come to our attention that the Department of Defense (DoD) will once again divert American families’ tax dollars away from advancing its mission to ‘deter war and ensure our nation’s security’ to the promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) events during the month of June 2023,” Roy wrote. “Expending vital resources on this type of political maneuvering, most apparent during the month of June, is inconsistent with the national security interests of the United States and is an inexcusable use of taxpayer dollars.”
Sure, Chip, that’s what’s been causing all that vital resource expenditure in the US military: the promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion. Can’t possibly have anything to do with all that extremely expensive military equipment you’ve been moving into every corner of the earth now, can it?
Probably worth mentioning at this point that the debt ceiling agreement reached between President Biden and House Republicans insisted on only non-military cuts to spending and increased the US military budget to $886 billion, which GOP leaders have already slammed as “inadequate”.
HUGE VICTORY: The Department of Defense has CANCELED a scheduled "child-friendly" drag show after I demanded answers from @SecDef Austin and General Milley!
Drag shows should not be taking place on military installations with taxpayer dollars PERIOD!
Republicans everywhere are committing to this bit where they pose as brave populist heroes who aren’t afraid to challenge the US war machine by spouting gibberish about how the Pentagon is being too accommodating on LGBT issues. Last week Congressman Matt Gaetz made a big show of opposing the complete non-issue of “drag shows on military installations,” then took to Twitter the other day to proclaim a “HUGE VICTORY” when an air force base drag show was canceled.
During an interview on Fox News last week, Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was asked by Trey Gowdy how he would respond to the war in Ukraine on day one of his presidency, and he started babbling about wokeness and gender ideology.
“Well first, I think what we need to do as a veteran is recognize that our military has become politicized,” said DeSantis. “You talk about gender ideology, you talk about things like global warming, that they’re somehow concerned and that’s not the military that I served in. We need to return our military to focusing on commitment, focusing on the core values and the core mission.”
Which is, needless to say, not an answer to the question. It’s just a bunch of soundbytes designed to sound critical of the military and appeal to right wing sensibilities without actually saying anything meaningfully critical of the US proxy war in Ukraine.
GOWDY: If you're president, how would you address the war in Ukraine?
DESANTIS: First, I think what we need to do as a veteran is recognize that our military has become politicized. You talk about gender ideology … pic.twitter.com/xv5jqTYksA
Trump himself got in on the action at a Fox News town hall event on Thursday, gibbering in his signature incoherent manner about “the woke” in the US military and how it poses an obstacle to their fighting “bad people”.
“You know, our military is great. A lot of things going on with our military with the woke and all this nonsense,” Trump told Fox News pundit Sean Hannity. “They’re not learning to fight and protect us from some very bad people. They want to go woke. They want to go woke. That’s all they talk about now. I see letters that are being sent. It’s horrible.”
An April article by virulent anti-China propaganda rag The Epoch Times titled “Can a Woke Military Win Wars?” claims that America’s leaders “have injected the entire menu of radical ‘woke’ ideology into the tissues of the military establishment,” placing new recruits at risk of being “catechized by anti-American Marxists or apostles of sexual exotica.” It decries environmentalism, anti-racism and anti-bigotry in the military, before taking a moment to fearmonger about how Xi Jinping is “preparing for war” as though China would ever attack the US unprovoked.
Tucker Carlson's guest: "We don't need a military that's woman-friendly, that's gay friendly" we need men "who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls, but we don't have that now. We can't get women off of naval vessels, that should be step one but most are pregnant anyway." pic.twitter.com/9uNzdbx0ON
This idea that “wokeness” is hurting the US military’s ability to prepare for war with China has been gaining momentum in right wing punditry for a while now. Back in December 2021 a Rush Limbaugh wannabe named Jesse Kelly turned heads by proclaiming on Tucker Carlson Tonight that the US war machine needs men who want to “sit on a throne of Chinese skulls” rather than being accommodating to female and gay personnel.
“We don’t need a military that’s woman-friendly; we don’t need a military that’s gay-friendly,” Kelly said. “We need a military that’s flat-out hostile. We need a military that’s full of Type-A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls. But we don’t have that now.”
Last year Republican Senator Marco Rubio repeated the same talking point, saying “We don’t need a military focused on the proper use of pronouns — we need a military focused on blowing up Chinese aircraft carriers.”
From a speech @marcorubio gave yesterday. To a roaring applause. This is playing with literal fire. Republicans aren't anti war post Trump, they just got conned into shifting their focus to China, after OBAMA'S Asia pivot. This rhetoric cannot be accepted. pic.twitter.com/Md5rSLYzWU
Do you see how fake and stupid this is? Do you see how it lets Republicans posture as strong critics of the US war machine while actively facilitating all its top agendas?
This is a perfect illustration of what right wing “populism” looks like in the 2020s: phony, manipulative talking points geared toward convincing war-weary red staters who lost loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan to keep supporting war and militarism, but anti-wokely.
And it’s a good illustration of the function that both of the major “populist” strains serve in US politics, both on the Bernie Sanders/AOC “progressive” side and the Trump/MAGA side. Both branches appeal to the anti-establishment sentiments of their respective bases, and then herd their adherents into support for America’s two mainstream political parties — both of which are designed to serve the interests of the same depraved establishment these “populist” factions supposedly abhor.
Trump: You know, our military is great. A lot of things going on with our military with the woke and all this nonsense.. They want to go woke. They want to go woke. That's all they talk about now. I see letters that are being sent. It's horrible. pic.twitter.com/4MG1SR5Z6O
The oligarchs and empire managers who pull the strings of the US government not only control both parties, they control both of the major factions which purport to fight the mainstream establishment in those parties. It’s a redundant security measure designed to protect the globe-spanning power structure which depends on keeping everyone marching in accord with its interests. They control the opposition, and they control the opposition to the controlled opposition.
Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are designed to take power away from the people and feed it to the empire. Every attempt to draw you into supporting them is designed to disempower you, even when it flies the flag of “populism” and claims to oppose the same interests you oppose. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to turn you into a tool of the powerful.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband 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.
And by leftists I of course don’t mean Democrats or “progressives” or anyone who just wants a few adjustments to be made to the capitalist empire so that they can afford medicine or a college degree or whatever. I mean real socialists, communists and anarchists who oppose capitalism and imperialism and seek the drastic, revolutionary changes this civilization urgently needs. Those who understand that the system is not broken and in need of repair, but is working exactly as intended and is in need of complete dismantling.
This latter category has barely any meaningful existence in the western world. The “western left” in modern times is either controlled opposition or what amounts to a glorified online message board. That’s not our fault; the empire has poured vast amounts of wealth and effort into making that happen. But we do need to be real about it, and we do need to fix it.
And it’s just so strange to me that this doesn’t dominate all leftist discourse all the time. The fact that the western left is a tiny politically impotent minority with nowhere near the numbers needed to accomplish its goals is the single most significant thing about the western left, by a long, long way.
"Long Live the Communist International!" CPUSA meeting celebrating Lenin's birthday. Madison Square Garden, New York, 1931.
— Politsturm International (@PolitsturmInter) June 24, 2021
I mean, if you were a general who was setting off to war, and you only had a handful of soldiers to fight against an entire enemy nation, that would be the single most glaring fact in your attention. You wouldn’t be spending your time arguing about military strategies or the history of equestrian combat, and you certainly wouldn’t be wasting your energy fighting against those who are basically on your side. Front and center of your attention would be the fact that you don’t have enough troops to fight this war, and how can you get more.
If you’re an architect who’s been hired to construct a skyscraper, and your workforce shows up and it’s just one guy with a plastic toy hammer, that’s going to be the focus of your attention. You’re not going to be poring over your blueprints and books on architectural theory and musing about the finer points of foundational integrity, you’re going to be trying to figure out how to get more workers to build this damn thing.
So you’d think that would be the case with the western left as well, because we find ourselves in more or less the same kind of situation. But it isn’t. To look at the writings of a lot of western leftists you’d think the best way to enact your ideology in the world is to spend your time arguing with other leftists using esoteric Marxist jargon about obscure points that nobody outside your tiny echo chamber knows about or cares about, or to sit back smugly knowing better than everyone else while waiting for the contradictions inherent in capitalism to bring about its demise.
If you look at organizing and demonstrating it’s not much better. You’ve got sparsely attended meetings with increasingly atomized sects, antiwar protests with a handful of people and one banner, and some LARPers dressed in black punching racists and transphobes here and there to make believe they’re fighting a real revolution against real power. Which is the same as nothing.
The first and foremost goal of the western left should be to create more western leftists. You don’t do that by having all the correct opinions and reading all the correct books and proving yourself the most correct in argument after argument, and you don’t do it by waiting for western material conditions to deteriorate like a bunch of fundamentalists awaiting the Rapture. You do it by reaching out to people, winning hearts and minds, showing them that everything they’ve been taught about their nation and their world is a lie, and showing them that things can be better.
I don’t claim to have all the answers on how to address this dilemma, I’m just highlighting a massive, glaring problem that doesn’t get the tiniest fraction of the attention that it should get. I address this problem the best way I know how with my own work, but I’m just one person with one mind. I hope to see many more minds pointed at this issue in the future, so that we can all come up with solutions and fix this thing.
_________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
We’re already seeing a ton of ridiculous drama queenery about Trump’s second presidential run, claiming he’s grown even more extremist and fascistic than when he was president in what amounts to a repeat of the “Trump is a second Hitler” narrative that dominated US political discourse in his first run.
A Washington Post article titled “The deepening radicalization of Donald J. Trump” asserts that “Trump is sketching out the contours of a second term potentially more dangerous and chaotic than his first,” citing a New York University professor who says, “When authoritarian leaders lose office, they come back, like, 10 times worse — they never get less extreme, they always get more extreme.”
But when you look at the authors’ evidence that Trump is becoming more dangerous and evil, there’s nothing about assassinating foreign leaders, starvation sanctions, cold war brinkmanship, mass bombing campaigns or Trump’s Yemen veto, or any of the other horrors he unleashed upon the world as commander in chief from 2017 through 2020. Instead, the article talks about his attitudes toward the January 6 Capitol Building riot and his “grab them by the pussy” remarks about women.
All of which are in perfect alignment with the actions of both Trump’s predecessors and Trump’s successor.
“When authoritarian leaders lose office, they come back, like, 10 times worse — they never get less extreme, they always get more extreme,” @ruthbenghiat said. https://t.co/5778YvnPSZ
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.
The bad things about Trump specifically are dwarfed by the bad things about the US empire generally — not by a percentage, but by many orders of magnitude. The empire’s malfeasance is exponentially more significant than whatever face happens to be sitting at its front desk.
That’s what people should be freaked out about. Not that the front desk of the imperial office might be occupied by an obnoxious oaf for four years, but by the empire itself. That’s where all the real horrors are. They’re just invisible to the mainstream worldview. By design.
The US presidency can only be held by imperialist monsters. That’s the only kind of person who ever makes it through the security checkpoints on becoming president of the world’s most powerful and destructive government which serves as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by human blood.
Sometimes when I tell Australians who’ve been indoctrinated by our nation’s insanely propagandistic imperial media what I do for a living, they tell me “Ooh, it would be terrible if Trump wins the election!” I tell them “Yeah, it will be! Also it will be terrible if anyone else does!”
______________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Today in tyranny we’ve got three stories on the rapidly increasing authoritarian abuses in western “free democracies”.
Let’s dig in.
1. Grayzone reporter detained by British counter-terrorism police for doing journalism.
The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg was detained by “six anonymous plainclothes counter-terror officers” who “grilled him for over five hours about his reporting” upon returning to Britain on the 17th of May, according to a new report by Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal.
British police detain journalist @KitKlarenberg, interrogate him about The Grayzone
Counter-terror police detained journalist Kit Klarenberg upon his arrival in London and subjected him to a 5 hour interrogation about his political views and reportinghttps://t.co/RmxZGY8efppic.twitter.com/YftxSR1Cl0
Blumenthal reports that Klarenberg was asked many questions about The Grayzone and his work with the independent outlet, saying police “seized the journalist’s electronic devices and SD cards, fingerprinted him, took DNA swabs, and photographed him intensively,” threatening him with arrest if he didn’t comply.
Blumenthal writes that the police action was likely a retaliation for Klarenberg’s reporting for the outlet, which has angered British officials and establishment media figures with the inconvenient information it has reported about their behavior:
Klarenberg’s interrogation appears to be London’s way of retaliating for the journalist’s blockbuster reports exposing major British and US intelligence intrigues. In the past year alone, Klarenberg revealed how a cabal of Tory national security hardliners violated the Official Secrets Act to exploit Brexit and install Boris Johnson as prime minister. In October 2022, he earned international headlines with his exposé of British plans to bomb the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian Federation. Then came his report on the CIA’s recruitment of two 9/11 hijackers this April, a viral sensation that generated massive social media attention.
Among Klarenberg’s most consequential exposés was his June 2022 report unmasking British journalist Paul Mason as a UK security state collaborator hellbent on destroying The Grayzone and other media outlets, academics, and activists critical of NATO’s role in Ukraine.
Asserting that Klarenberg did nothing more nefarious than engaging in “the same journalistic practice that the West’s most prominent legacy newspapers, from The New York Times to The Washington Post, depend on to break news themselves,” Blumenthal says it appears that “British authorities did not detain Klarenberg for any legal breaches, but because he reported factual stories that exposed the national security state’s own violations of both domestic and international law, as well as the malign plots of its media lackeys.”
Blumenthal himself was subjected to legal harassment and intimidation in the United States a few years back, arrested and charged with having committed “assault” while reporting on imperial efforts to drive the Venezuelan government out of its embassy in Washington DC. The charges were later dropped.
The Grayzone has been doing some of the best independent reporting in alternative media over the last few years, and should wear its now-evident status as a thorn in the empire’s side with pride.
2. South Australia passes draconian anti-protest law.
Reacting to recent inconvenient demonstrations by environmental activists, the state of South Australia has just rapidly shoved through legislation — without consulting the public — to exponentially increase the penalties for unauthorized protesting. Demonstrators will now face up to three months in jail and fines of $50,000 if they are deemed guilty of the extremely vague offense of “obstructing a public place” with their protesting.
South Australia is the latest jurisdiction to impose severe penalties on people for engaging in peaceful protest, joining New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and Queensland who have passed anti-protest laws in the last five years. South Australia’s anti-protest laws carry the harshest financial penalties in Australia.
The Bill is excessive and will have a chilling effect on the right to protest in South Australia. The Bill is also potentially unconstitutional and in clear breach of well-established principles of international human rights law.
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas acted shocked and offended that anyone could possibly think life-altering penalties for vaguely-defined protest activities might have some effect on protest activities, saying, “One of the things that I have found rather disconcerting around some of the commentary on this piece of legislation is that somehow, it curtails or diminishes people’s right to protest, which is simply not true.”
Hilarious.
Now would probably be a good time to repeat my periodic reminder that Australia is the only so-called democracy in the world which has no national charter or bill of rights of any kind. A lot of attention went into the Australian government’s authoritarianism when its strict Covid measures were in place, but the fact of the matter is that this country has been diving headlong into tyranny since long before Covid, and continues to do so now that the lockdowns are long over. There simply aren’t enough checks and balances in place to prevent this from happening, and not enough will from the public to fight for them while fighting is still possible.
3. State Department dismisses questions about Ukrainian imprisonment of US citizen for speech crimes.
State Department refuses to say whether it will negotiate with Zelensky for the release of detained U.S. citizen Gonzalo Lira: pic.twitter.com/jTD58XjYnw
At a press conference last week the State Department’s new spokesman Matthew Miller flatly brushed off questions about whether the US government was doing anything about the fact that commentator Gonzalo Lira has been arrested and charged with what amount to speech crimes by the Ukrainian government.
QUESTION: Thanks. Liam Cosgrove with Epoch Times. So this was a couple weeks ago, but I haven’t seen an official statement on it. A U.S. citizen who is residing in Ukraine has been arrested and that he was a California-born man; he was in the past like a Business Insider contributor, and he had a YouTube channel. He was an outspoken critic of Zelenskyy’s regime. The Ukrainian SBU released a press release saying he was arrested for justifying Putin’s invasion. So ultimately, it added up to speech. And I spoke with Congressman Ted Lieu, a Democrat, and he said he urges the State Department to engage its authorities to work out some sort of negotiation to get him released. So are you guys aware of this? How do we feel about our allies detaining U.S. citizens for speech abroad?
MR MILLER: So I will say in general that we’re aware of the report. We obviously support the exercise of freedom of speech anywhere in the world, and I’ll leave it at that.
QUESTION: So you guys aren’t working to get him released?
MR MILLER: I’m going to leave my comments where I just left them.
It’s not every day a US spokesperson gets asked a question that’s so inconvenient that they just overtly refuse to answer it without even pretending to provide an explanation for doing so.
Lira, a US citizen, is reportedly facing five to eight years in prison for having “publicly justified the armed aggression of the Russian Federation” and “publicly justified the armed aggression of the Russian Federation,” per the SBU.
Are Americans okay with their government risking a very fast, very radioactive third world war to defend the freedom and democracy of a nation that imprisons US citizens for speech crimes? I guess we’ll never know, because nobody’s asking them.
If western governments need to keep ramping up censorship, propaganda and the persecution of journalists in order to defend western freedom and democracy, is it really freedom and democracy? And, is it worth defending?
_________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband 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.
What makes our dilemma so historically unique is that we live under an empire which makes extensive use of the post-Bernays science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to trick its subjects into believing that they are thinking, speaking, and gathering information freely. In this way our rulers suppress any revolution long before it starts, not by making people’s lives better, nor by violent repression, but by manipulating people into thinking there’s nothing to revolt against, because they have no rulers and they are already free.
In our civilization most people are thinking, speaking, gathering information, working, shopping, moving and voting exactly as our rulers want them to, because these mass-scale psychological conditioning systems have been imposed to keep human behavior aligned with the empire. We are trained to believe we are free while behaving exactly how our rulers want us to behave, and to look down on other nations and shake our heads at how unfree their people are.
What the average mainstream partisan really means when they say they want “free speech” is they want to be able to regurgitate the power-serving narratives that were put in their mind by the powerful. That’s not free speech, it’s deeply enslaved speech. But they can’t see it. By design.
This problem can be addressed simply by bringing awareness to it in every way we can. Manipulation only works if you don’t know it’s happening, so drawing attention to it and describing how it happens in as many ways as possible helps people start seeing through it.
❖
If the culture war looks like a psyop to you, it’s because it is. I’ve seen some people calling it a “distraction” — and to be sure it serves the powerful to keep everyone arguing about subjects that threaten the powerful in no way — but it actually goes a lot further than that. The imperial propaganda machine uses culture war wedge issues to herd us into mainstream political factions like a shepherd uses sheepdogs, always keeping us too evenly divided to accomplish anything and reinforcing echo chambers to aid in propaganda.
Culture war wedging is a big part of the way they herd people into the ideological funneling system I’ve been talking about lately, which keeps the overwhelming majority of politically engaged people thinking, speaking and voting in alignment with the empire. As many people as possible are herded into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful. Anyone who can’t be herded into either of these mainstream factions is instead herded into fake “populist” factions, which eventually corral them back into the mainstream factions. Those few politically engaged people who can’t be herded toward any of these groups are so small in number that they can simply be marginalized and denied any sizeable platform from which to spread their ideas, and “democracy” does the rest, because the majority are supporting the status quo.
Care about protecting trans rights? You get herded into this mainstream faction over here. Trans people freak you out a bit? You get herded into that mainstream faction over there. In this way people are corralled into political parties that are designed to serve the empire.
If you can suck someone who’s critical of militarism and empire into the culture war, suddenly they start believing absurd things like that opposing “the woke agenda” is as important as opposing war, or that electing Ron DeSantis would be a devastating blow to the Deep State. Now instead of focusing on the US empire’s nefarious behaviors and critically viewing all mainstream politics, that person is focused on Dylan Mulvaney and will throw their support behind any mainstream politician who says Target needs to stop selling rainbow shoelaces during Pride Month.
You see people herded into both mainstream political factions over and over again with this stuff they keep hammering day after day after day, thereby bolstering the power structure the parties which represent those factions are designed to support. They do it because it works.
None of this means the issues raised by the culture war psyop are unimportant, it just means it’s a psyop. It’s something the powerful leverage to their advantage, and it’s important for us to be acutely aware of that and direct our political energy and attention accordingly.
❖
The fact that US presidents are always murderous monsters regardless of party or platform becomes less strange and mysterious when you stop thinking of the United States as a good or neutral player on the world stage and recognize it as the hub of an empire fueled by human blood.
That’s why I just ignore US presidential elections these days except to point out what a sham they are. A lot of well-intentioned people still hold out hope that the US can be made healthy by the right president, but anyone who would do so will never get near the presidency.
The operation of a globe-spanning empire is too important to be left in the hands of voters. Nothing will ever be permitted to happen that could impede the operation of the empire as long as those who benefit from that empire are able to prevent it from happening. There’s just too much power riding on it.
❖
It’s so destructive and degrading how the products of mainstream culture (movies, shows, music etc) are produced not based on how edifying, transformative and adventurous they can be, but on how much money they can make. The arts which get the most traction in our society wind up being not those which call us into the higher aspects of our being and encourage us to explore the bounds of human experience and potential, but those which deliver a quick ego hit and pump the brain full of fast reward neurochemicals.
It’s been this way for generations, and it’s all people know. That everything is confined in this way starves the populace of all nourishment of mind and heart, and it narrows the scope among artists on their ideas of what is possible and what’s worthwhile. It has shrunk the confines of what artists have been willing to explore by orders of magnitude, and it’s resulted in a mainstream culture that is shallow, power-serving and uninspired from top to bottom.
Humanity would look much different and the world would be a much better place if this hadn’t been happening all these years. Capitalist culture is brain poison.
❖
Someday the leaders of ecocidal corporations will be put on trial for their crimes against our planet, and their defense that they did it to generate profits for their shareholders will be treated the same as war criminals saying they were just following orders.
__________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Well it’s that time again. Time for everyone to spend a year and a half pouring mountains of mental energy into arguing about who should be the next President of the United States of America.
Friendships will be shattered. Family dinners will be ruined. Social media activists will lose themselves in weeks-long flame wars. And, when all is said and done, the person sworn into office on January 2024 will oversee an administration which governs in more or less the same way as their predecessors.
As Tom Woods put it, no matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.
I’m writing this article now because I’m already getting a bunch of questions about this election and who I think is best and worst and why, and I know I’m going to get a whole lot more. Many Americans get so swept up in this thing it often looks odd to them seeing someone talking about their government without talking about the presidential race when it’s in season.
So to be perfectly clear I will not be supporting or cheerleading any candidate in this election. Not because I don’t think Australians have a right to involve themselves in US politics (we absolutely do), but because US presidential elections are a performance designed to trick Americans into thinking they have any meaningful control over the major decisions that will be made by their government. They’re the unplugged video game controller you give your baby brother so you can stop him from whining to play without actually letting him.
I am not saying not to vote. By all means vote if you want to; it gets you out of the house, gives you something to talk about, plus you get to have a sausage (I’m assuming Americans also get sausages at their voting sites).
And vote for whomever you please. Vote for Biden. Vote for Ronald DeSantrump. Write in Warwick Davis, star of the 1988 cult classic fantasy film Willow. Write in a pod of laundry detergent. It will make the exact same amount of difference to the large-scale operations of the US government.
So on election day, please do as you wish. How often to you get to make a decision that’s completely free of any consequences of any kind? Whoever you vote for or don’t vote for, you can sleep free and easy knowing that it made no difference to anything at all. Like eating a single cucumber slice with no dressing.
This is because the US presidency is too important to be left in the hands of the electorate. If you live in a western “democracy” and you want a road fixed or a school bus route changed, then you might find some recourse in electoral politics if you are lucky. But the position that is officially responsible for overseeing the operation of a globe-spanning empire is not something that you will ever be permitted to vote on. There’s just too much power riding on it.
That’s why any third party or primary candidates who might pose a challenge to the machine will never be permitted to get to the general election. If they look like they might put a wobble on things they’ll be demonized, marginalized, and otherwise pushed off course.
Only those trusted by the empire will be allowed to cross the velvet rope by the imperial bouncers — and yes I’m sorry Trumpers but this includes your guy; he’d never have made it through if he wasn’t trusted, and indeed he spent his entire term advancing longstanding empire agendas.
Only those willing to sign off on all the murderous, tyrannical things that need to be done to keep a globe-spanning empire on the top of the world order get to be president. They don’t really need to have any other qualities than that: a willingness to either actively facilitate the empire’s interests or passively allow the empire managers to do what they need to do.
The fact that a literal dementia patient sits in the White House currently is all the proof you could possibly need that this is the case. All that’s required of a US president is to not get in the way while the empire managers do their thing. A bottle of kombucha could do Biden’s job, and do it just as well.
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 dystopia where all political oxygen gets funneled toward vapid culture war debates which threaten the powerful in no way while any effort to effect meaningful change is ground into the dust.
None of those things were ever on the ballot, and they won’t be in November of next year either. What will be on the ballot is whether you want all of those things to continue under the office of someone with a D or an R next to their name.
This doesn’t mean there’s nothing anyone can do to make things better, it just means nothing will be made meaningfully better by the results of the US presidential election. If a building is on fire and everyone’s pushing on a fake door that’s painted on the wall, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to escape the building, but it does mean they need to stop pushing on the fake door and start looking for real exits if they’re going to get out.
______________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
When most people in the English-speaking world hear the word “propaganda”, they tend to think of something that’s done by foreign nations who have governments that are so totalitarian they won’t even let people know what’s true or think for themselves.
Others understand that propaganda is something that happens in their own nation, but think it only happens to other people in other political parties. If they think of themselves as left-leaning they see those to their right as propagandized by right wing media, and if they think of themselves as right-leaning they see those to their left as propagandized by left wing media.
A few understand that propaganda is administered in their own nation by their own media, and understand that it’s administered across partisan lines, but they think of it in terms of really egregious lies like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or babies being taken from incubators in Kuwait.
In reality, all are inaccurate understandings of what propaganda is and how it works in western society. Propaganda is administered in western nations, by western nations, across the political spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known examples of its existence make up only a small sliver of the propaganda that our civilization is continuously marinating in.
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.
One of the forms this takes is the way the western political/media class manipulates the Overton window of acceptable political opinion.
Have you ever noticed how when you look at any mainstream newspaper, broadcast or news website, you never see views from those who oppose the existence of the US-centralized empire? Or those who want to close all foreign US military bases? Or those who want to dismantle capitalism? Or those who want a thorough rollback of the creeping authoritarianism our civilization is being subjected to? You might see some quibbling about different aspects of the empire, some debate over whether we should de-escalate against Russia so we can better escalate against China, but you won’t ever see anyone calling for the complete end of the empire and its abuses altogether.
That’s propaganda. It’s propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.
The creation of that illusion is propaganda. It’s not something solid that you can point to easily because it’s comprised of an omission of something rather than a concrete thing, but it warps people’s perspectives in ways that have immensely far-reaching consequences. It’s something that doesn’t stand out too sharply against the background, but because people are exposed to it continuously day in and day out, it plays a huge role in shaping their worldview.
Another related method of manipulation is agenda-setting — the way the press shapes public thinking by emphasising some subjects and not others. In placing importance on some matters over others simply by giving disproportionate coverage to them, the mass media (who are propagandists first and news reporters second) give the false impression that those topics are more important and the de-emphasised subjects are less so. As political scientist Bernard Cohen famously observed way back in 1963, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. The world will look different to different people depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read.”
Ever noticed how the fact that our governments are increasingly tempting nuclear war seems like it ought to be a front-page story pretty much every day of the week, but instead the news is full of stuff like the US presidential race and people arguing over what products Target should sell during Pride Month? That’s agenda-setting.
The press could easily have spent the entire Trump administration screaming about the dangerous aggressions Trump was advancing against Russia instead of calling him a Putin puppet, and mainstream liberals would have fixated on Trump’s warmongering insanity instead of calling him Putin’s cock holster. But that wouldn’t have served the interests of the empire, which had been planning to ramp up aggressions against Russia for years. They set the agenda, and the public fell in line.
Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways the public is propagandized from day to day is described in a recent video by Second Thought titled “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually fed messages by the capitalist machine that we must work hard for employers and accept whatever standards and compensation they see fit to offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in this unjust system the fault lies with us and not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault. Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault. Overworked? Your fault.
The continual message we’re fed every day is that there’s nothing to rebel against and nothing to oppose, because any problems we’re perceiving are our own fault and not the fault of an abusive, exploitative system which is built to extract profit from the working class and the ecosystem at the expense of both. The system cannot be a failure, it can only be failed.
Then there’s the ideological herding funnel we discussed recently, which herds the population into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful. Anyone who can’t be herded into either of these mainstream factions is instead herded into fake “populist” factions, which eventually corral them back into the mainstream factions. Those few politically engaged people who can’t be herded toward any of these groups are so small in number that they can simply be marginalized and denied any sizeable platform from which to spread their ideas, and “democracy” does the rest because the majority are supporting the status quo.
Maybe the most consequential of all the mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the way the mass media manufacture the illusion of normality in a dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream our lungs out if we could see it with fresh eyes. The way pundits, politicians and reporters will talk about the Biden administration surrounding China with war machinery without also talking about how freakish and horrifying it is that we’re looking at rapidly escalating brinkmanship between nuclear-armed countries. The way American cities are full of homeless people and it’s just treated as a normal and acceptable thing to simply let them stay homeless and push them out of wherever they try to be. The way nothing ever changes no matter who we vote for but we’re still herded into the voting booths and told to vote better.
As a character in the movie Waking Life puts it, “We all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no! Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven’t given us any other options outside the occasional purely symbolic act of voting — do you want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?”
They don’t just tell us what to believe about the world, they tell us what to believe about ourselves. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded on that test.
Over and over and over again, day after day, we are fed seemingly small messages which add up over time. Messages like,
The world works more or less the way we were taught in school.
The media have some problems but basically tell the truth.
The status quo is working basically fine.
Democracy is real and voting is effective.
This is the only way things can be.
Our government might have its problems, but it’s basically good.
You can earn your way into happiness by working harder.
You can consume your way into happiness with more spending.
If you think the system is dysfunctional, you’re the dysfunctional one.
Those who oppose the status quo are weird and untrustworthy.
Things might get better after the next election cycle.
Any attempt to change things is a silly waste of time.
By feeding us all these simple, foundational lies day after day, year after year from the time we are very young, they lay the groundwork for the more complex, specific lies we’ll be told later on. Lies like “Russia/China/Iran/etc is a real problem and its government needs to be stopped,” or “People are struggling financially right now, but it’s just because times are hard and it can’t be helped.”
All the mundane lies serve as a primer for the lies we’ll be told later, because once our worldview has been shaped by them, our basic human cognitive biases and predisposition to reject information which conflicts with our worldview will ensure that we’ll take on board the information which confirms our biases and reject any evidence against it. They construct our worldviews for us, then let our normal cognitive defense systems protect it.
Their messages don’t even need to be well-evidenced or well-argued, they only need to be repeated frequently due to a glitch in human cognition known as the illusory truth effect which causes us to mistake the feeling of having heard something before with the feeling of something being true.
Add to all this the recent development of things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and the deck becomes stacked against truth even further, because someone’s odds of stumbling across information which conflicts with the propaganda they’ve been fed goes dramatically down. Even if they’re actively searching for information which conflicts the mainstream worldview, algorithms by Google and Google-owned YouTube often make it almost impossible to find.
So that’s what we’re up against. There’s a failure to appreciate just how pervasive and powerful the empire’s propaganda machine is, even among those who are very critical of empire, because propaganda in our society is like water for fish — we’re swimming in it constantly, so we don’t see it. You have to step way, way back and begin examining our situation from its most basic foundations to get any perspective on how all-encompassing it really is.
Finding your way out of the propaganda matrix takes a lot of diligent work, tons of curiosity, the humility to admit you’ve been completely wrong about everything, and more than a little plain dumb luck. But if you keep hacking away at it eventually you get there, and then you can help others get there too. It’s a hard slog, but if our chains are psychological that means they’re ultimately only made of dream stuff. All that needs to happen is for enough of us to wake up.
__________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Moon of Alabama has an article out on how an uncomfortable number of relatively restraint-oriented foreign policy officials have been exiting the Biden administration, while a China hawk has just been appointed the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Antiwar has an article out about how New York congressman Jerry Nadler told an Epoch Times reporter that he “wouldn’t care” if Ukraine used US-made F-16s to strike Russian territory, and doesn’t find the possibility that they might do so concerning.
This comes days after we learned that the Biden administration has signed off on Ukraine getting F-16s while also greenlighting an offensive on Crimea using US-made weapons, a nightmare scenario which greatly escalates the risks of nuclear war.
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.
There are many characters in the world of literature who dream of joining the #UAarmy – the side of good.@jk_rowling
It’s getting more and more dangerous, and it’s getting more and more stupid. The other day the Ukrainian government tweeted a video in which the faces of characters from the Harry Potter film series are superimposed over Ukrainian soldiers, a perfect compliment to an earlier tweet by NATO about the Ukrainian military saying “We are Harry Potter and William Wallace, the Na’vi and Han Solo. We’re escaping from Shawshank and blowing up the Death Star. We are fighting with the Harkonnens and challenging Thanos.” This truly is the phoniest, most PR-intensive proxy war of all time.
And that’s nothing compared to how stupid the 2024 US presidential race is getting, already in May of 2023. In a recent interview on Fox News, Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was asked by Trey Gowdy how he would respond to the war in Ukraine on day one of his presidency and he started babbling about wokeness and gender ideology.
“Well first, I think what we need to do as a veteran is recognize that our military has become politicized,” said DeSantis. “You talk about gender ideology, you talk about things like global warming, that they’re somehow concerned and that’s not the military that I served in. We need to return our military to focusing on commitment, focusing on the core values and the core mission.”
GOWDY: If you're president, how would you address the war in Ukraine?
DESANTIS: First, I think what we need to do as a veteran is recognize that our military has become politicized. You talk about gender ideology … pic.twitter.com/xv5jqTYksA
Are you ready for a year and a half of this? Because you’re getting a year and a half of this. A year and a half of all substantive questions about real policy of real consequence getting diverted into the most vapid culture war quagmires you can possibly imagine, because it isn’t the US president’s job to change the way the US empire operates, it’s the US president’s job to keep everyone dazzled with fake bullshit while the US empire marches along unimpeded by the wishes of the voting public.
Supporters of Israeli apartheid and America’s proxy war in Ukraine have been pretending to believe that rock icon Roger Waters donned a Nazi costume in support of Nazism at a concert in Berlin earlier this month, their feigned outrage leading to an investigation by German police despite the fact that literally everyone knows he was just portraying the fascist character from Pink Floyd’s The Wall that he’s been performing for over four decades.
Amid massive public outcry about surveillance and safety, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to accept the donation of a $280,000 robot dog for LAPD. pic.twitter.com/R6ZBQlwo5u
— People's City Council – Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) May 25, 2023
This is a dark, strange timeline, and the more dangerous it gets, the dumber it gets.
Still there’s no reason to give up hope, and there’s no reason to give up joy. No matter how dark things get, there’s always the possibility that there are forces moving beneath the surface of our collective psyche which can change it all on a dime once conditions are ripe. No matter how dark things get, we’re still living in a profoundly beautiful and fascinating world which is a privilege and delight to participate in for even an instant. No matter how dark things get, we can still keep doing our best to try to make them a little bit better while making sure we don’t waste any of our precious time in this universe failing to appreciate its awesomeness.
There is darkness, but there’s also light. Far more of it than most people realize.
So do your worst, Stupid Dystopia. We’ll fight with all we’ve got and enjoy the ride for as long as we’re here.
_______________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
“It might sound like twisted logic, but military forces everywhere argue that the greater the firepower they possess, the greater the chance of maintaining peace,” opens 60 Minutes Australia’s Amelia Adams. “In other words, massive weaponry is the best deterrent to war. Right now the theory is being tested like never before, and much of it is happening in Australia’s backyard, the Indo-Pacific region. The United States wants the world, and more particularly China, to know of its increasing presence there, and to do that it’s putting on a spectacular show.”
What follows is 19 minutes of overproduced footage displaying this “massive weaponry” while Adams oohs and ahhs and gives slobberingly sycophantic interviews to US military officials.
“There’s something utterly mesmerising about the F-35 jet,” Adams moans. “The sound, the heat, and the power put this supersonic stealth fighter in a league of its own.”
“Colonel these are some very impressive machines you’re in charge of!” she gushes to an officer on an aircraft carrier.
“Yes ma’am,” the colonel replies.
Jesus lady, do your orgasming off camera.
Contrast this glowing ecstatic revelry with Adams’ open hostility later in the segment toward a Chinese think tanker named Henry Wang, claiming that he was trying to “rewrite history” for dismissing panic about a Chinese military buildup by pointing out (100 percent correctly) that China is spending a lower percentage of its GDP on its military than western nations.
“Every command, every maneuver, is being fine-tuned on this vast blue stage, where China has proven to be a bad actor, playing a long game of intimidating Pacific nations,” Adams proclaims over helicopter footage of US war ships. “But the US and its allies aren’t having it, bolstering their defenses — and it’s an impressive display.”
I defy you to find me footage more brazenly propagandistic than this, from any point in history. This is supposed to be a news show, run by people who purport to be journalists, yet they’re engaging in propaganda that looks like it came from a Sacha Baron Cohen spoof of a third world dictatorship.
As I never tire of pointing out, the claim that the US has been militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival defensively is the single dumbest thing the empire asks us to believe these days. The US is surrounding China with war machinery in ways that it would consider an outrageously aggressive provocation if the same thing were done in its neck of the woods, which means the US is plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is plainly reacting defensively to those aggressions.
While the first segment unquestioningly regurgitates Pentagon narratives and gives supportive interviews to military officials, the second segment unquestioningly regurgitates talking points from the western intelligence cartel and gives supportive interviews to Five Eyes spooks.
“Showing off deadly weaponry in massive war games is a tactic China and the United States both use to try to avoid full-on combat,” says 60 Minutes Australia’s Nick McKenzie in introduction. “But the truth is the two countries, as well as other nations including Australia, are already battling it out in an invisible war. There are no frontline soldiers but there are significant skirmishes. Until now these conflicts have been kept quiet, but key members of a secretive alliance of top cops from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand are about to change that.”
“Their group is called the Five Eyes, and tonight they want you to know what they see,” says McKenzie, which is the same as saying “We’re telling you what the Five Eyes intelligence agencies told us to tell you.”
McKenzie literally just assembles a bunch of Five Eyes officials to tell Australians that China is bad and dangerous, and then disguises the western intelligence cartel advancing its own information interests as a real news story.
“There is one threat that alarms our partners more than any other,” McKenzie says over dramatic music, asking “Which state actor is the key threat to democracy in Australia and amongst the Five Eyes partners?” and presenting a montage of western intelligence operatives answering (you guessed it) China.
“The Americans describe a growing menace on our doorstep flowing from China’s increasing influence in the region,” McKenzie says, before asking an American official, “Do you see the Chinese state preying on Pacific island nations?”
“I believe so, yes,” the official responds.
Western journalism, ladies and gents.
Man, Australians are really getting pummeled with war propaganda. This is basically war porn for the U.S. military. pic.twitter.com/RRO0Htkewp
Australians are particularly vulnerable to propaganda because Australia has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, dominated by a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment (who airs 60 Minutes) and the Murdoch-owned News Corp. This vulnerability is being fully exploited as the time comes for the western empire to beat the war drums against China.
We keep being hammered by this narrative that “massive weaponry is the best deterrent to war,” when all facts in evidence say the exact opposite is true. It was the military encroachment against Russia and the conversion of Ukraine into a NATO military asset which provoked Putin to invade Ukraine, and all the militarization against China that we are seeing is only inflaming tensions and making war more likely.
And, I mean, of course it is; even a casual glance at the Cuban Missile Crisis reveals that powerful nations don’t take kindly to having menacing forces placed near their borders. So much of the propaganda indoctrination we’re subjected to in the 2020s revolves around convincing people to believe that Russia and China should react completely differently than the way the US would react if foreign proxy forces were being amassed along its borders.
So yes, Amelia Adams, claiming that aggression and militarism is the best path toward peace is absolutely “twisted logic”. It is as twisted as it gets. Because it is false. This is obvious to anyone who hasn’t yet been successfully indoctrinated into this omnicidal belief system.
We need to do everything we can to fight against this indoctrination now, because if we wait until the war actually starts it will likely be too late to resist.
___________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Too much interesting stuff happening in the life of the empire to cover in just one article today, so we’re doing a three-in-one wrap-up.
McCaul says war over Taiwan will be about controlling microchips — err, I mean, democracy and freedom.
Republican congressman Michael McCaul made a very interesting admission during a Sunday interview on MSNBC, which he hastily had to walk back after the host pointed out the implications of what he was saying.
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked the virulent China hawk McCaul to “make the basic case” for why Americans should be willing to go to war over Taiwan, and McCaul responded by saying it was about controlling the manufacturing of microchips. When Todd pointed out that this sounded a lot like justifications that have been made for US wars and militarism to control global oil supplies, McCaul hastily corrected himself and said that protecting Taiwan is actually about “democracy and freedom”.
“Make the basic case for why Americans not only should care about what happens in Taiwan but should be willing to spill American blood and treasure to defend Taiwan,” Todd said.
McCaul responded by talking about deterrence and protecting international trade, then said, “I think more important is that TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] manufactures 90 percent of the global supply of advanced semiconductor chips. If China invades and either owns or breaks up, we’re in a world of hurt globally.”
“Congressman, that almost sounds like the case that would be made in the sixties, seventies and eighties for why America was spending so much money and military resources in the middle east,” Todd responded. “Oil was so important for the economy. Is this sort of the 21st century version of that?”
“You know, I personally think it is about democracy and freedom. And we need to stand up for that, like we’re doing in Ukraine,” said McCaul, visibly uncomfortable.
Nearly as funny as McCaul’s hasty self-correction was Todd’s suggestion that US militarism and wars for oil in the middle east was something that was limited to “the sixties, seventies and eighties.” As though the destruction of Iraq and Libya, the militarization against Iran, the starvation of Yemen, and the occupation of Syrian oil fields are just things the US war machine has been doing for fun and giggles in the decades since.
Also funny is the suggestion that Taiwan falling under Beijing’s control would create a “world of hurt”, as though China has been reluctant to sell manufactured products to other countries, and as though the world has not been freely purchasing those products.
Mass media refrain from sharing Pentagon leaks after the White House told them not to.
"Fox News has agreed, along with other news organizations, not to publish the leaked highly classified documents"
What, just as a favor to the Pentagon or something? Being a team player? What reason would there even be to "agree" to anything in this situation? @JenGriffinFNCpic.twitter.com/SE6yMfkOty
The White House on Monday warned media outlets against publishing information contained in the top secret documents leaked from the Pentagon and other US government agencies that have surfaced on the internet.
“Without confirming the validity of the documents, this is information that has no business in the public domain,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
“It has no business, if you don’t mind me saying, on the pages of — front pages of newspapers or on television. It is not intended for public consumption, and it should not be out there,” he added.
That was on Monday. On Tuesday morning, Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin said that “Fox News has agreed, along with other news organizations, not to publish the leaked highly classified documents which were discovered last week.”
Griffin made no mention of which “other news organizations” had agreed to this.
Western journalism, ladies and gents.
NYPD adds copbots to its arsenal.
The NYPD is welcoming a new member to its ranks: a robot dog. The robotic mobile K-9 device is part of a number of technological rollouts the city said is "crucial" in keeping the city safe. https://t.co/mS7vk99Ys0pic.twitter.com/zyoYFbyc8d
— Geopolitics & Empire (@Geopolitics_Emp) April 11, 2023
NBC New York reports that the New York Police Department has added “a robot dog” to its force, along with other robots, after previously abandoning their use in the face of public outcry.
(Before we move on, it must be said that the press really need to stop calling these things “robotic dogs” like they’re some cute cartoon character from The Jetsons. They’re not “dogs”, they’re robots. Police robots. Calling quadrupedal copbots “dogs” is a marketing ploy by those who profit from them and those who want to use them.)
Reporting that the “robotic dog” will be used “in hostage negotiations, counterterrorism incidents and other situations as needed,” NBC New York notes that the robot’s use is being pushed through despite widespread public objections.
“Mayor Eric Adams said that although the robotic dog was previously introduced during a previous administration, leaders then took a step back after public outcry. However, he said that his top concern is public safety,” the report reads.
“This announcement is also another example of the NYPD’s violation of basic norms of transparency and accountability by rolling out these technologies without providing the public a meaningful opportunity to raise concerns,” The Legal Aid Society is quoted as saying in objection to the move.
Another piece of tech called the “K5 Autonomous Security Robot” is also being rolled out alongside the quadrupedal robot, which NBC New York reports “uses artificial intelligence to provide incident notification in real-time to first responders” and will be used to conduct “automated patrol in confined areas both indoors and outdoors, such as transit stations.” So surveillance. It’s a surveillance robot.
Every few months I’ve got to write a new article about new escalations in copbot normalization, because it’s being shoved through with such extreme aggression. It’s been decided that there need to be copbots, so the world is getting copbots.
Whenever a new story breaks about these escalations people always joke about movies where the robots turn against the humans, but that’s not the real danger here. The real danger is that these robots will be fully controlled by humans, and humans have a long track record of oppressing and abusing other humans. This isn’t Terminator or Black Mirror, this is garden variety police militarization, continuing along the same trajectory it’s been on for decades.
Every objection to police militarization as a dangerous slippery slope has been 100 percent vindicated by history, and there’s no reason to expect that to change as they start rolling out copbots. As John and Nisha Whitehead explained last year for The Rutherford Institute, this ongoing expansion of police robot militarization tracks alongside the steadily increasing militarization of police forces in the US more generally; SWAT teams first appeared in California the 1960s, by 1980 the US was seeing 3,000 SWAT team-style raids per year and by 2014 that number had soared to 80,000. It’s probably higher now.
The thing about slippery slope arguments is you can’t just dismiss them on issues where they have a proven and consistent track record of being correct. Police forces have been getting more and more militarized, especially in the US, and once they’ve secured an escalation in militarization it seldom de-escalates from there.
Since the dawn of history rulers have dreamed of having mindless obedient soldiers who will never turn against them, will never disobey orders, and will never hesitate to attack the civilians of their own country when told to do so. Copbots are the final solution to the ancient problem that there are always a whole lot more ordinary people than there are rulers, because once they’re fully militarized and fully rolled out they can be used to subdue a population of any size. Copbots are the anti-guillotine.
Humanity is in a race between the awakening of our consciousness on one hand and the plunge toward armageddon and dystopia on the other. I hope we can wake up and turn this thing around before we’re locked in to this sinking ship for good.
_________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
As usual anyone is free to print, copy, republish, distribute, or use any and all of these materials in any way they choose, either digitally or in the meat world.
(Readers sensitive to discussion of inappropriate adult behavior toward children may want to skip this one.)
There’s a really gross video going around of the Dalai Lama kissing a young boy on the lips and telling him to suck his tongue while an adult audience looks on approvingly. A tweet from Tibet.net last month shows a video clip of the Tibetan spiritual leader with the child and says the encounter took place during his “meeting with students and members of M3M Foundation,” though Tibet.net’s clip cuts out the sexually inappropriate part of the encounter.
Here is a hyperlink to a video of the interaction. For those who understandably do not wish to see such a thing but are comfortable with a text description, here’s a new write-up from News.com.au:
The Dalai Lama has raised eyebrows after kissing a young Indian boy on the lips and asking him to “suck” his tongue at a recent event.
Footage of the bizarre interaction, which occurred last month during an event for India’s M3M Foundation, has gone viral on social media.
The leader of Tibetan Buddhism, Tenzin Gyatso, was hosting students and members of the foundation at his temple in Dharamshala, India, where he lives in exile.
In the video, the boy approaches the microphone and asks, “Can I hug you?”
The 87-year-old says “OK, come” and invites him on stage.
The Dalai Lama motions to his cheek and says “first here” and the boy gives him a hug and kiss.
He holds the boy’s arm and turns to him, saying “then I think fine here also” as he points to his lips.
The spiritual leader then grabs the boy’s chin and kisses him on the mouth as the audience laughs.
“And suck my tongue,” the Dalai Lama tells the boy, sticking out his tongue.
They press their foreheads together and the boy briefly pokes out his tongue before backing away, as the Dalai Lama gives him a playful slap on the chest and laughs.
What is it with power-adjacent clergymen and child molestation, anyway? As Michael Parenti noted in 2003, sexual abuse was commonplace in the tyrannical environment of feudal Tibet, over which the 14th Dalai Lama would still preside had it not been forcibly annexed by the PRC in the 1950s. While the slogan of “Free Tibet” has long been used as a propaganda bludgeon by the west against China particularly and against communism generally, the truth of the matter is that Tibet was quantifiably a far more tyrannical and oppressive place to live back when it was supposedly “free”.
I went to see the Dalai Lama a long time ago when he came to speak at Melbourne, and I remember what stood out the most for me was how completely lacking in depth or profundity it was. As someone with an intense interest in spirituality and enlightenment I always found it perplexing that someone so highly regarded in the circles I moved in had nothing to say on such matters besides superficial, Sesame Street-level remarks about being nice and trying to make the world a better place. Probably no one alive today is more commonly associated with Buddhism and spiritual awakening in western consciousness than the Dalai Lama, yet everything I’ve ever read or heard from him has struck me as unskillful, unhelpful and vapid when compared to the words of other spiritual teachers.
That confusing discrepancy cleared up after I got into political analysis and learned that the Dalai Lama is probably not someone who should be looked to for spiritual guidance, and is actually far too messed up inside to have accomplished much inner development as a person.
Take an interview he did back in September 2003, a solid six months after the invasion of Iraq. The Dalai Lama told AP that he believed the US invasion of Afghanistan was “perhaps some kind of liberation” that could “protect the rest of civilization,” as was the USA’s brutal intervention in Korea, and that the US invasion of Iraq was “complicated” and would take more time before its morality could be determined. In 2005, years after the invasion, after normal mainstream members of the public had realized the war was a disaster, the Dalai Lama stillsaid “The Iraq war — it’s too early to say, right or wrong.”
This is plainly someone with a broken moral compass. These are basic, bare-minimum assessments that any normal person with any degree of psychological and emotional health can quickly sort out for themselves, and he still winds up basically on the same side of these issues as some of the worst people on earth.
I used to think it odd that the Dalai Lama has nothing to offer but vapid kindergarten pop spirituality, then I learned he was a well-paid CIA agent for many years.https://t.co/wBfqsLm3rtpic.twitter.com/2DmGsgll5B
But I guess that’s about the best anyone could expect from a literal CIA asset. His administration received $1.7 million a year from the Central Intelligence Agency through the 1960s, and it’s reported that he himself personally received $180,000 a year from the CIA for decades.
Many friends of Tibet and admirers of the Dalai Lama, who has always advocated nonviolence, believe he knew nothing about the CIA program. But Gyalo Thondup, one of the Dalai Lama’s brothers, was closely involved in the operations, and [CIA veteran John Kenneth] Knaus, who took part in the operation, writes that “Gyalo Thondup kept his brother the Dalai Lama informed of the general terms of the CIA support.” According to Knaus, starting in the late 1950s, the Agency paid the Dalai Lama $15,000 a month. Those payments came to an end in 1974.
The CIA is easily the most depraved institution in the world today, so it would be reasonable to expect the moral development of someone so intimately involved with it to be a bit stunted. Ten or fifteen years ago it would’ve surprised me to learn that I would one day type these words, but it turns out the Dalai Lama is a real asshole.
It’s rare to find a spiritual teacher who has expanded their consciousness inwardly enough to have useful things to say about enlightenment, and of those who do it’s extremely rare to find one who has also expanded their consciousness outwardly enough to discuss world events from a place of wisdom and understanding as well. The Dalai Lama is as far from this as you could possibly get: he has lived his life in cooperation with the most unwise institutions on earth, and he is less inwardly developed than most people you might pass on the street.
People should stop looking up to this freak.
__________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Responding to a war caused by NATO expansion by expanding NATO.
Fighting Russian authoritarianism by increasing censorship.
Fighting Russian propaganda by increasing propaganda.
Pursuing peace by rejecting diplomacy.
Defending Europe from Russia by bombing European pipelines.
❖
Twitter has dropped its entirely appropriate designation of NPR as “state-affiliated media”, instead creating an entirely new designation, “Government Funded”, which it has also now given to the accounts of outlets like the BBC and Voice of America. You still see establishment guard dogs decrying this new label for western propaganda outlets on nonsensical pedantic grounds, but really the problem is that they’re not receiving the same “state-affiliated media” label as outlets like RT and Press TV despite being equally propagandistic. The label is designed to provide the false impression that western propaganda outlets are not propaganda outlets.
It’s actually very revealing how huffy and indignant empire apologists are getting over the “Government Funded” label, because it shows that they see it as Twitter’s responsibility to facilitate western propaganda. Imperial spinmeisters have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that propaganda is something that only happens to other people, and any move that might disrupt that illusion even slightly is met with hostility.
❖
It’s one of the most shameful jobs in the entire world to spend your time doing critical reporting on the enemies of your government while ignoring your own government’s far more egregious crimes.
People talk about sex work as shameful, and in America they’ll even shame you for working a low-paying job like McDonald’s, when on all our screens every day we see people selling their own government’s ugly foreign policy in a line of work that is entire universes more shameful.
That’s why I dislike the use of the word “presstitute” to refer to these people. Not because it’s insulting to the press, but because it’s insulting to sex workers.
❖
Over and over and over again we see US officials talking very differently about a hot war with China over Taiwan than they talked about hot war with Russia over Ukraine. This is absolute screaming insanity, and it should enrage everyone.
Sending US troops to Taiwan is "on the table," says Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of the US Michael McCaul pic.twitter.com/b5EDQ7d3Rr
The US has no place flirting with the possibility of an Atomic Age world war over a longstanding inter-Chinese conflict that’s none of the west’s business. It should enrage us all that they’re talking about throwing our sons and daughters into the gears of that horrific war.
❖
China brokers peace deal in the middle east, CIA director flies in to babble about how this makes the US empire's feelings feel. pic.twitter.com/TqnE5gvmS3
China must be stopped before it imposes totalitarian diplomacy on Ukraine and authoritarian peace in the middle east.
We’ve got to stop China from achieving peace over there so we don’t have to stop it from achieving peace over here.
❖
It’s a completely false narrative that the US is “polarized” politically. On the most consequential matters both factions are always in enthusiastic agreement; the “divisions” are limited to superficial culture war issues whose outcomes will never affect anyone with real power.
Same old story. During elections, Republicans and Democrats scream that the differences between them are so seismic, civilization itself hangs in the balance. Then on the most consequential actions they can take — like hurtling into World War III — they behave exactly the same pic.twitter.com/SSDNZuDD0m
If anything the US could stand to be far more politically “polarized”, because it would mean actual political opposition happening in the world’s most powerful country instead of nonstop kayfabe combat while the empire marches on uninterrupted regardless of who’s in office.
❖
What would it mean if humans are the lone intelligence in the universe? If there are no aliens, no gods, no conscious AI waiting to emerge in the future? Well, it would mean we’ve got a lot more responsibility, for one. Nobody’s coming to the rescue. It’s on us to fix this mess.
And I think that’s probably a big part of what drives the belief that we’re not alone — not because the evidence is particularly strong, but because of how intimidating the prospect is.
That’s what I find when I look within myself, anyway. When I ask myself “What if we’re alone in this?” the very first response that comes up within me is, “Ah shit.”
Because think about what that would mean. Think about it and feel about it. Not only would it mean we’re permanently on our own when it comes to fixing all our massive problems, but we’ve also got a massive responsibility not to fuck this all up. If we’re the only intelligent life in the universe, then we’ve actually got a serious responsibility to try and preserve that life.
I mean, if we wipe ourselves out with nuclear war or environmental collapse, or with some other wonderful technology-based emergence we haven’t invented yet, then that’s bad enough by itself. But if on top that we also wiped out the only intelligent life in the universe, it’s almost infinitely worse, no? It means we didn’t just inflict that horror upon ourselves, we inflicted it upon the future of the entire universe.
And I just think that’s probably what drives a lot of the belief that there’s something else out there. The fact that we’re all kind of intimidated by the responsibility which would come with our being alone.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Sending US troops to Taiwan is "on the table," says Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of the US Michael McCaul 
(@AZgeopolitics) 
