radiofree.asia

Category: narrative matrix

  • It’s The Media’s Job To Normalize War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Exactly zero percent of the world’s worst criminals are in prison. Imperialists. War profiteers. Ecocide profiteers. The very worst of thieves are financial elites. The system isn’t designed to protect us from society’s worst, it’s designed to protect society’s worst from us.

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    I don’t write much about the specific individuals who drive the oligarchic empire because individuals are not the problem, the system is. Right-wing conspiracy analysts prefer to focus on specific corrupt elites because they like to think if you just got rid of them, capitalism would work fine. And it just wouldn’t. If you rounded up and executed all the sociopathic ruling elites today but left our current systems intact they’d just be replaced tomorrow. A competition-based model where war, corruption, oppression and exploitation remain profitable guarantees this.

    A lot of right-wing conspiracy analysis today ultimately boils down to “These bastards are ruining the capitalism!” But capitalism is already ruined, and ruinous. As long as it’s profitable to destroy each other and our ecosystem, the ruin will continue. That’s the real problem. Making it about individuals feeds into the false impression that the individuals are the problem, and absolves us of our collective responsibility to move out of our competition-based model to one in which we collaborate with each other and our ecosystem to create a healthy world.

    As long as we have systems in which it’s advantageous to be sociopathic enough to do whatever it takes to get ahead, we will find ourselves ruled by sociopaths. The names and faces on those sociopaths are ultimately irrelevant. They’re a symptom of the underlying disease.

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    It’s the mass media’s job to normalize war and abnormalize peace. It’s our job to do the exact opposite.

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    People who say cops are fine to kill people for disobeying orders are saying they believe in a death penalty without trial.

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    “The black man deserved to be killed because he disobeyed the authority figure” is nineteenth century slaver talk.

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    Sure I guess spending your nation’s wealth and resources on an endlessly expanding worldwide military campaign while impoverishing your citizenry at home and keeping them in line with an increasingly violent and militarized police force is one way you can choose to do things.

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    The fall of the US empire wouldn’t necessarily be a concern if its government hadn’t espoused the neoconservative doctrine that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved and prolonged at all cost. That last bit is what’s frightening.

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    I’ve been tripping on the frenzied propaganda campaign against China a lot lately because it’s so effective. People are swallowing it en masse, which means that when things get ugly (and they will get ugly), people will be easily manipulated into playing along with that ugliness.

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    I write about narrative control all the time because that’s ultimately what it’s all about. If you don’t believe that human life is dominated by mental narrative on all levels, sit down, close your eyes, and try to still your mind for a few minutes. Try as hard as you can. And watch what happens.

    Easy right? You can stop your thoughts and rest in stillness for as long as you like. Right?

    Of course not. Most people’s lives are dominated by a relentless deluge of thought stories from the moment they wake up in the morning to the moment they go to sleep at night. We say we think our thoughts, but in reality they’re more like something that happens to us whether we like it or not. Our entire experience of life is shaped by story. By narrative.

    Because humans are so pervasively dominated by mental narrative, whoever can manipulate the narratives about a given subject can manipulate humans at mass scale. That’s why so much energy goes into propaganda: narrative control is the real crux of power.

    This is how you can spot someone who prioritizes manipulation in their lives: they pour a tremendous amount of energy into influencing the thoughts people think about them and the stories they tell each other about them rather than making real changes to themselves and the world. This applies to people you know personally, all the way up to politicians and plutocrats.

    Narrative rules the earth. If we can free our minds we can free the world.

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    Your life touches so many others in more ways than you know. The more conscious you become, the more consciousness you bring to others through all those connections. You can become a light for the world by enlightening yourself. Awaken your mind. Heal your wounds. Shine bright.

    ____________________

    New book: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix.

    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • “CHINA BAD”, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The planet is ruled by a tyrannical oligarchy which uses governments as weapons to destroy disobedient nations while churning out news stories about how those nations needed to be destroyed because they were tyrannical and undemocratic.

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    The British royal family are murderous imperialists living on stolen wealth and dressing up like ridiculous Dungeons & Dragons characters and they deserve nothing but scorn, mockery and rejection throughout the entire world.

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    Saying Trump wanted to end the wars but the military industrial complex wouldn’t let him is the same as saying nothing.

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    When Bernie Sanders promoted the idea of shrinking the insanely bloated US military budget by a paltry ten percent, he was met with a solid steel wall of opposition. When presidents want to increase that budget, they are told “Yes sir, anything you say sir, we’ve got the papers all drawn up already.”

    A political establishment which thinks it’s crazy and extremist to reduce a massive military budget by ten percent, and that it’s sane and moderate to increase it, is a crazy and extremist political establishment.

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    It’s crazy how I still get people telling me I write too much about US aggressions against China even as the Biden administration is openly admitting that it is increasing America’s insanely bloated military budget in order to deal with China.

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    My American husband had a layover in Beijing years ago and was surprised to see so many perfectly happy people, laughing and clowning around like anyone else. He hadn’t even realized he’d been propagandized into expecting joyless conformity until he noticed his own surprise.

    The west has been propagandized about China for a long, long time. The propaganda initiatives being launched right now are so successful because they’ve got many decades of earlier propaganda acting as a primer. It’s so pervasive you don’t even know it’s been there all along.

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    China is “just as bad” as the nation that’s constantly bombing and destroying other countries? Sure, why not. All things are the same as all other things. Turning left is the same as turning right. Drinking water is the same as drinking bleach. That’s how we all live our lives.

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    I will criticize the escalating US aggressions against China. I will not include a “BUT CHINA ALSO BAD BAD BAD” disclaimer when I do this. If this bothers you, it’s because propaganda has conditioned you to expect any criticism of US warmongering to use mitigated language.

    There is no shortage of westerners saying “CHINA BAD BAD BAD” if you want to read that. If you need to hear about how China is bad, go turn on a fucking television or something.

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    When the empire wants to topple a government their first step is to psychologically uncouple it from the nation and its people by consistently using labels that make it look like an alien, occupying force to the public. “The CCP”, “the Assad regime”, instead of just that country’s government.

    This is why you now hear so many indoctrinated automatons constantly bleating the mantra “I don’t hate the Chinese people, I hate the CCP!” They’ve been trained to uncouple the nation’s people from its government, despite the overwhelming support they have for their government.

    This is all the alien-sounding word “regime” exists to do: to uncouple a government from its nation and its people in the eyes of the world. And the mainstream press is happy to do this, because the mainstream press is propaganda.

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    Propaganda is damaging not just because of the destructive and oppressive agendas it advances, but in and of itself. How can we address important issues while being blasted in the face all day with distracting nonsense about Russia and China? Stop meddling in our minds, assholes.

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    Unipolar hegemony never existed until three decades ago, but whenever you talk about the need to end the US empire’s iron-fisted domination of our entire planet people go “But who would take its place?”, as though there’s always been a unipolar hegemon. Like there has to be one.

    There is nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality that declares there needs to be a planetary unipolar dominator, and there’s no real evidence that China or Russia are trying to become one. All evidence says they want a multipolar world, which was the norm until 30 years ago.

    There’s no real reason we need to be subjected to governments flirting with nuclear war in the name of unipolar hegemony. There’s no legitimate reason we can’t all just get along and collaborate with each other toward a better world. Our current world order is not sane.

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    Internet porn is making men worse at sex. At least before Pornhub men had some humility about how bad they might be and there was a chance they might listen, learn and be led. Now they are bad but full of hubris about what they think they know, and very defensive about it.

    Hint: if your partner says she doesn’t mind not having clit orgasms, it’s not because she doesn’t like clit orgasms. You’re inept and you’re scary when you feel inadequate so it’s just easier to let it go. Confronting her with this will just scare her more. Get humble and learn.

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    Most modern mainstream media jobs pay dick, and you don’t get to do real journalism, only propaganda narrative management. All you get is a cool-sounding “I’m a journalist!” story that you can tell other people. The narrative managers now get paid in narrative. There’s some beautiful karma in that.
    __________________________

    New book: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix.

    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Opposing US Imperialism Shouldn’t Depend On Ideology: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The empire doesn’t get enough credit for propagandizing us into arguing with each other about whether our expensive new multifront cold war should prioritize escalations against Russia or China, instead of whether that cold war should occur at all. Truly a masterful manipulation.

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    Opposing US imperialism shouldn’t be about ideology. It shouldn’t matter if you’re a communist or an anarchist or libertarian or whatever; murder is murder, and the US is the most murderous regime in the world. Principled people oppose its murderousness regardless of ideology.

    It’s offensive how often people assume your opposition to US imperialism has something to do with the government it happens to be targeting today. When they’re ramping up against China you’re a commie, when it’s Russia you’re a Trumper. No, I just oppose the worst actions of the worst government on earth.

    If you only oppose imperialist warmongering against capitalist countries because you are a capitalist, then guess what? You’re a dick. Same if you only oppose imperialist warmongering against communist countries because you’re a communist. It’s not okay to murder anyone, asshole.

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    A government that is currently bombing other countries is worse than a government that isn’t. For fuck’s sake. For FUCK’S SAKE. How is this not extremely obvious to everyone??

    So much propaganda has gone into manipulating westerners into believing that dropping explosives on human beings is fine and normal. People fail to recognize the horror solely because they’ve been propagandized in such a way that they don’t think too hard about what bombs are.

    If people just had a really conscious understanding of what bombs do to human anatomy, how it’s impossible to prevent civilian deaths in bombings, and how bombs are actually being used in our world today, that alone would kill all public belief in the US empire’s moral authority.

    It’s stupid how often imperialists bleat the terms “whataboutism” and “false equivalency” in defense of US imperialism when the US empire is far worse than any government it targets. Yes, the US is not equivalent to empire-targeted nations; it’s far, far more violent and brutish.

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    “I oppose all governments, not just the US government.”

    If your opposition does not account for and reflect the fact that the US government is orders of magnitude more violent and destructive than any other government, you support the US government.

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    The US empire is indisputably far more violent, thuggish and destructive than any of the governments it targets, and the aggressions of empire-targeted governments are usually a response to US imperialist aggression. Commentary on international dynamics should reflect this fact.

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    “Why do you only criticize the US and its allies? There are other bad governments you know.”

    “Why do you only focus on the fact that your house is on fire? There are other problems with your house besides fire you know. Like, the decorating is bad. And the paint is chipping.”

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    You couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the way our minds are dominated by narrative than the fact that most politically minded Americans sincerely believe there’s been a major change in their country since January. Only the narratives changed, but they think reality did.

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    Childish idealists say we should move away from the systems that are killing our planet and pushing us toward nuclear war. Smart realists say we should keep destroying our ecosystem for as long as it’s profitable and when it’s gone we’ll just fly up to space and frolic among the stars.

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    The so-called liberal world order is a planetary status quo of nonstop murderous imperialism, exploitative neoliberalism and ecocidal capitalism running underneath a propaganda soundtrack babbling endlessly about how everything is fine and it’s going to get better any minute now.

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    In liberal free democracies you’re allowed to think, speak and vote however you want, but they train you how to think, speak and vote from birth, and they keep on training you until the day you die.

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    How to be a millionaire media pundit:

    • Never have any idea what the fuck you are talking about.
    • Be consistently wrong about everything.
    • Never admit when you’ve been proven wrong.
    • Only tell the truth when it serves power.
    • Never feature leftist or anti-imperialist guests.

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    Believing that mainstream perspectives are mainstream because they are better is as silly as believing mainstream music or movies are mainstream because they are better.

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    The credibility of US government agencies was so damaged by Iraq that all interventionist agendas since have relied on consent manufacturing from much more diverse sources; foreign governments, “independent” NGOs, “independent” narrative management firms like Bellingcat, etc.

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    At this point the labels “Russian bot”, “CCP propagandist”, “Assadist”, “conspiracy theorist”, “tankie” and “genocide/atrocity denier” all mean the same thing: “This person is disputing key imperialist narratives and the narrative management team would like you to ignore them”.

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    If you think the anti-China hysteria is bad now, wait til the propaganda campaign really gets going. It hasn’t even started yet. It’s going to get so much worse.

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    Condemning anti-Asian hate without condemning anti-China imperialist propaganda is supporting anti-Asian hate.

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    It sure was nice of China to start doing a bunch of evil things right when the US empire began ramping up its escalations against Beijing to prevent the upending of the unipolar world order.

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    Right wingers freaking out about China live in such tightly insulated echo chambers that most of them don’t even realize they’re parroting the CNN/Biden line.

    The idea of land ownership wigs me out. Oh, you own it? Who said? God? Get the fuck outta here Doug, you don’t own shit.

    You have a piece of paper whose fragile legality rests on the pillaging of pirates stealing land by force only a few hundred years ago, and now you reckon you can throw me out of my home because I can’t send you enough game points to your little bank app there? How about no.

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    So many secretly yearn for a direct experience of the divine while adamantly refusing to consider the possibility that they are already currently having one.

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    Spirituality, inner work, awareness of abusive dynamics, class consciousness, peace activism and revolution are all the same thing. They’re all an expansion of awareness into parts of humanity that have been lacking in consciousness, whether they’re in yourself or in the world.

    It’s all about making the unseen seen, whether that be internal dynamics within yourself which cause suffering or large-scale dynamics out in the world which cause suffering. Clear seeing and dysfunction cannot coexist, whether you’re talking about war, racism or substance abuse.

    Bringing consciousness to your inner childhood trauma is the same as bringing consciousness to the reality of imperialist propaganda. Bringing consciousness to your true nature is the same as bringing consciousness to economic injustice. It’s all the same expansion of awareness.

    Nobody owns this. Nobody has mastered this. No one person on earth sees all dynamics in themselves and all dynamics in the world. We’re all endarkened in some ways, trying to make things more enlightened in more ways. We’re all part of a collective expansion of consciousness.

    We’re all part of this movement from unseeing to seeing, whether we realize it or not. We’re either working to bring things into the light of truth, or we’re fighting to keep things hidden, or a little from both columns A and B depending on what we’ve got going on. Choose seeing.

    ____________________________

    New book: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix.

    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Corrupt Power Can’t Function In The Light: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Transparency for the powerful would solve most of our problems. Corrupt power structures and their corrupt systems simply cannot function in the light. This is what Assange and WikiLeaks have tried to address. This is why Assange and WikiLeaks have been so aggressively targeted.

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    Most of the legwork for rolling out a new imperial propaganda narrative is actually done long before the rollout itself. The bulk of the work was done in preceding decades: training civilians throughout their lives to trust the institutions that will be launching said narrative. Rather than fighting every single propaganda narrative that crosses your screen, your energy is therefore better spent attacking the foundation of trust upon which all propaganda narratives are built. Showing everyone how untrustworthy these institutions are at their very root.

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    A standard American libertarian who consistently opposes war and militarism is a better person than any western self-styled “leftist” who does not. We’re talking about mass murder here. It doesn’t matter how good your other positions are if you’re fine with mass murder for power.

    War is the worst thing in the world. It’s the most insane, most evil, most destructive, least sustainable thing humans do. Ending it is therefore the most urgent matter. Someone who consistently supports ending war, militarism and imperialism is better than someone who doesn’t.

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    Biden changing virtually nothing after all that shrieking about Trump seems surprising until you remember that Trump also changed virtually nothing during all that shrieking about Trump. If you take all the behavior of the entire US empire into account, the changes in that empire’s behavior from presidential administration to presidential administration are differences of a fraction of a percentage point.

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    It’s so stupid and undignified how everyone pretends the important decisions of the US empire’s operation are actually being made by that empty dried up husk of a man.

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    We really haven’t been making fun of the western empire enough for pretending to care about the lives of Muslims in China. The entire world should be pointing and laughing at that shit.

    The more you think about it, the more laughable it gets. The US-centralized power alliance spends two full decades killing millions and displacing tens of millions in Muslim-majority countries, then turns around and starts yelling “Won’t somebody please think of the Muslims??”

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    The US has been rounding up Italian Americans and systematically exterminating them in concentration camps. If you don’t believe me, you are a genocide denier. Questioning my assertion or demanding proof of my claim makes you guilty of genocide denial. You are basically a Nazi.

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    It would be better if interrogating the powerful was a rotating civic duty like jury service rather than something done by career journalists with a vested interest in maintaining good relationships with the powerful. The obsequious questions at press conferences make this clear.

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    A big part of Russiagate’s success was that it was a conspiracy theory marketed to people who had no experience with conspiracy theories, so when dots were connected for them by Rachel Maddow et al. they assume there must really be a connection. One with more experience in such things would know that conspiracy theories often fall through, that good conspiracy theory is as rare as good journalism, that those dots often don’t really connect, that things aren’t always as they seem and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

    So we wound up with all these liberal intelligentsia types going “Well that Russian talked to that Trumpy guy so there’s definitely a connection” and weaving this whole tapestry in their minds, when someone who’d been on conspiracy forums a few years would know to just relax and watch.

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    “Mental illness doesn’t discriminate.”

    Yes it does. It discriminates by income. The less you have, the more likely you will suffer from depression, anxiety, substance abuse and other contributing factors to mental illness. To promote mental health, promote economic justice.

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    We can’t stop killing our ecosystem because it’s some people’s job to kill the ecosystem. That’s bananas.

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    We’re so disconnected from ourselves, from the land, from our roots, from a real sense of depth, that we allow Hollywood and Washington to manufacture it for us. We let them tell us where the meaning is. What’s worth living for. What’s worth dying for. And it always serves power.

    It’s so hard to find meaning in a civilization that is saturated with power-serving bullshit from root to flower. Where so much of our “culture” is just fake plastic nonsense arranged to advantage the unacknowledged rulers of an unacknowledged empire. Where screens reach out pummel your consciousness with propaganda for capitalism and imperialism all day long.

    But there are deep rivers within us. We can know them.

    __________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Debunk And Discredit The Empire’s Propaganda: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The empire expends so much of its wealth and energy on mass scale narrative control via propaganda not because it wants to, but because it needs to. This tells us that the best way to oppose the empire is to help debunk, discredit and break public trust in the narratives it works so hard to circulate.

    If you say something seemingly innocuous to your friend and it triggers and upsets them, this tells you you’ve touched on a sensitive area they feel defensive about. Similarly, imperial narrative managers freak out at anyone who questions the empire’s Official Doctrine.

    What are they guarding? They are guarding imperial narrative control, that’s what they’re guarding. They’re aggressively protecting their utterly essential ability to control the thoughts people think in their heads at mass scale, and in so doing they are inadvertently telling you where to find the weak parts in the armor of the machine.

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    The most effective way to resist imperialism is to help debunk and discredit the empire’s propaganda narratives. The most effective way to help advance imperialism is to help circulate the empire’s propaganda narratives.

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    The problem isn’t that we are ruled by tyrants, it’s that we’re ruled by tyrants and don’t know it. If we weren’t being manipulated at mass scale by propaganda away from a clear seeing of what’s going on, we’d eliminate tyrants as easily as you eliminate a mosquito on your arm.

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    When a normal person does something wrong, they admit it, apologize, take action to fix it, and take steps to make sure it never happens again. When a sociopath does something wrong, they rearrange narratives to try and make it look like they did something right. How our rulers handled Iraq says which one they are.

    It’s nuts how the US is circling the planet with military bases, waging nonstop wars, sanctioning children to death and flirting with nuclear war and people are still like “We really need to do something about Cuba”.

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    People who call you a Russian agent or CCP propagandist for opposing US imperialism are admitting to being so fucking stupid that they can’t imagine any other scenario in which someone might oppose the worst behaviors of the most powerful and destructive government on our planet.

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    Mentally translate every single mass media news cycle into “Here are some reasons why you should believe it’s good for poverty and wars to continue while plutocrats rule over you with an iron fist.”

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    People don’t generally heal their inner trauma until they are in a safe, stable space which allows them to do so. Humanity as a whole desperately needs such a space to heal from countless generations of trauma. Socialism would be a good tool for providing ourselves such a space.

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    A big part of America’s ongoing mass shooting epidemic is due to Americans being the most propagandized population on the planet in the most warmongering nation on the planet. You can only twist and pummel the human psyche so much before it snaps, and you can only terrorize the rest of the world so much before you receive violence at home.

    Hint: if one power is surrounding another power with military forces, then that power is the aggressor. Anything the other power then does on the world stage in response to this aggression is called “defense”, not “imperialism”.

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    It is an indisputable fact that Biden has picked up exactly where Trump left off on anti-Beijing hawkishness. If you don’t know this, it’s because you live in an echo chamber.

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    Elon Musk has a very unusual type of narcissism which causes him to think the world revolves around Elon Musk and also somehow causes millions of other people to think that too.

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    For a brief time there lived a species which spent its final moments hurtling toward climate collapse and nuclear war arguing about whether or not younger generations had gotten too “woke”.

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    Half of western natsec news stories these days boil down to “Unnamed officials claim imperialism-targeted nation did invisible bad thing for which the evidence is classified”.

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    Ever noticed how people who call themselves “realists” are usually the most unrealistic people in the conversation? They’re like “Yeah I’m a realist, I support continuing a political, economic and military model that’s about to get us all killed. Pretty sure that’s the best way.”

    “I’m a realist, which means I support having the entirety of human behavior driven by the pursuit of imaginary numbers in a made-up economic system even if we have to destroy the ecosystem and nuke ourselves to death in the process.”

    “I’m a realist, which means I support trying to advance urgently needed revolutionary changes through a political party that is deliberately set up to prevent such changes.”

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    False spirituality offers sedation and escapism from reality; it is very convenient for the powerful. True spirituality means expanding consciousness of reality: consciousness of our inner dynamics and outer dynamics which lead to suffering. Nearly all spirituality today is false.

    False spirituality helps you hide the ugly truths within and without by offering comforting narratives and practices which help sedate your emotional body. True spirituality brings consciousness to those ugly truths, within and without, and brings them into the light to be seen.

    The powerful benefit from false spirituality. They say “Use mindfulness and deep breathing exercises to help you cope with the stress of a meaningless, exploitative job!” They glorify meekness, obedience and poverty, and extoll us to forgive those who have committed great evils.

    True spirituality is the last thing the powerful would ever want to go mainstream, because it means waking up to reality. It means no longer being able to tolerate untruth, in oneself or in society. The powerful thrive on untruth, on hiddenness: the opposite of of what true spirituality brings.

    Humanity embracing true spirituality would mean a transformation in our relationship with mental narrative, which would be impossibly disruptive to the propaganda techniques the powerful use to propagandize us, and it would mean getting real with ourselves about the nature of our persecutors.

    Dysfunction and consciousness cannot coexist. Where there is sufficiently deep awareness that something is dysfunctional, the dysfunction naturally moves toward health. True spirituality and corrupt power are therefore natural enemies, because true spirituality expands awareness.

    ___________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Debunk And Discredit The Empire’s Propaganda: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The empire expends so much of its wealth and energy on mass scale narrative control via propaganda not because it wants to, but because it needs to. This tells us that the best way to oppose the empire is to help debunk, discredit and break public trust in the narratives it works so hard to circulate.

    If you say something seemingly innocuous to your friend and it triggers and upsets them, this tells you you’ve touched on a sensitive area they feel defensive about. Similarly, imperial narrative managers freak out at anyone who questions the empire’s Official Doctrine.

    What are they guarding? They are guarding imperial narrative control, that’s what they’re guarding. They’re aggressively protecting their utterly essential ability to control the thoughts people think in their heads at mass scale, and in so doing they are inadvertently telling you where to find the weak parts in the armor of the machine.

    ❖

    The most effective way to resist imperialism is to help debunk and discredit the empire’s propaganda narratives. The most effective way to help advance imperialism is to help circulate the empire’s propaganda narratives.

    ❖

    The problem isn’t that we are ruled by tyrants, it’s that we’re ruled by tyrants and don’t know it. If we weren’t being manipulated at mass scale by propaganda away from a clear seeing of what’s going on, we’d eliminate tyrants as easily as you eliminate a mosquito on your arm.

    ❖

    When a normal person does something wrong, they admit it, apologize, take action to fix it, and take steps to make sure it never happens again. When a sociopath does something wrong, they rearrange narratives to try and make it look like they did something right. How our rulers handled Iraq says which one they are.

    It’s nuts how the US is circling the planet with military bases, waging nonstop wars, sanctioning children to death and flirting with nuclear war and people are still like “We really need to do something about Cuba”.

    ❖

    People who call you a Russian agent or CCP propagandist for opposing US imperialism are admitting to being so fucking stupid that they can’t imagine any other scenario in which someone might oppose the worst behaviors of the most powerful and destructive government on our planet.

    ❖

    Mentally translate every single mass media news cycle into “Here are some reasons why you should believe it’s good for poverty and wars to continue while plutocrats rule over you with an iron fist.”

    ❖

    People don’t generally heal their inner trauma until they are in a safe, stable space which allows them to do so. Humanity as a whole desperately needs such a space to heal from countless generations of trauma. Socialism would be a good tool for providing ourselves such a space.

    ❖

    A big part of America’s ongoing mass shooting epidemic is due to Americans being the most propagandized population on the planet in the most warmongering nation on the planet. You can only twist and pummel the human psyche so much before it snaps, and you can only terrorize the rest of the world so much before you receive violence at home.

    Hint: if one power is surrounding another power with military forces, then that power is the aggressor. Anything the other power then does on the world stage in response to this aggression is called “defense”, not “imperialism”.

    ❖

    It is an indisputable fact that Biden has picked up exactly where Trump left off on anti-Beijing hawkishness. If you don’t know this, it’s because you live in an echo chamber.

    ❖

    Elon Musk has a very unusual type of narcissism which causes him to think the world revolves around Elon Musk and also somehow causes millions of other people to think that too.

    ❖

    For a brief time there lived a species which spent its final moments hurtling toward climate collapse and nuclear war arguing about whether or not younger generations had gotten too “woke”.

    ❖

    Half of western natsec news stories these days boil down to “Unnamed officials claim imperialism-targeted nation did invisible bad thing for which the evidence is classified”.

    ❖

    Ever noticed how people who call themselves “realists” are usually the most unrealistic people in the conversation? They’re like “Yeah I’m a realist, I support continuing a political, economic and military model that’s about to get us all killed. Pretty sure that’s the best way.”

    “I’m a realist, which means I support having the entirety of human behavior driven by the pursuit of imaginary numbers in a made-up economic system even if we have to destroy the ecosystem and nuke ourselves to death in the process.”

    “I’m a realist, which means I support trying to advance urgently needed revolutionary changes through a political party that is deliberately set up to prevent such changes.”

    ❖

    False spirituality offers sedation and escapism from reality; it is very convenient for the powerful. True spirituality means expanding consciousness of reality: consciousness of our inner dynamics and outer dynamics which lead to suffering. Nearly all spirituality today is false.

    False spirituality helps you hide the ugly truths within and without by offering comforting narratives and practices which help sedate your emotional body. True spirituality brings consciousness to those ugly truths, within and without, and brings them into the light to be seen.

    The powerful benefit from false spirituality. They say “Use mindfulness and deep breathing exercises to help you cope with the stress of a meaningless, exploitative job!” They glorify meekness, obedience and poverty, and extoll us to forgive those who have committed great evils.

    True spirituality is the last thing the powerful would ever want to go mainstream, because it means waking up to reality. It means no longer being able to tolerate untruth, in oneself or in society. The powerful thrive on untruth, on hiddenness: the opposite of of what true spirituality brings.

    Humanity embracing true spirituality would mean a transformation in our relationship with mental narrative, which would be impossibly disruptive to the propaganda techniques the powerful use to propagandize us, and it would mean getting real with ourselves about the nature of our persecutors.

    Dysfunction and consciousness cannot coexist. Where there is sufficiently deep awareness that something is dysfunctional, the dysfunction naturally moves toward health. True spirituality and corrupt power are therefore natural enemies, because true spirituality expands awareness.

    ___________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • A Nation That’s Always At War Has No Moral Authority: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    A nation that has constantly been at war throughout its entire history has no moral authority to tell other nations how to be. This should be extremely obvious to literally everyone.

    ❖

    Liberals are much, much more comfortable thinking about the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes as a rise in white supremacism caused by Donald Trump than as the inevitable consequence of an aggressive imperialist propaganda campaign against China.

    Talking about the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes as just the result of white supremacism and not imperialist propaganda against China facilitated by white supremacism is a service to white supremacism. It’s like pretending the spike in hate crimes against Muslim Americans as the propaganda engines for Bush’s wars were fanning the flames of Islamophobia was just the result of a random spontaneous increase in white supremacism. It’s irresponsible, and it serves white supremacism.

    ❖

    Tucker Carlson is to China as Rachel Maddow is to Russia. He has some good guests and is occasionally correct on foreign policy, but watching him regularly will make you stupid.

    ❖

    It’s absolutely stunning how many people think “But China is really bad tho” is an awesome and insightful comment to post on the internet.

    ❖

    The US-centralized power alliance is the most powerful institution in the world. Helping it advance its narratives on the world stage (like smearing targeted governments) is as servile and power-worshipping as prostrating yourself before Joe Biden and calling him “Your Highness”.

    ❖

    It’s not that class is the only important issue and that race is unimportant. It’s that the imperial narrative managers consistently force the conversation into being about race instead of class because the race conversation can happen without costing the ruling class anything.

    ❖

    ❖

    The strategy of incrementalism (pursuing change in small, gradual increments over time) absolutely is effective. The problem is that when plutocrats control the government and media, the only incremental changes which actually occur are those which benefit the plutocracy. As long as the plutocratic class controls the political/media class, incremental change will only ever go one way. Politicians advocating incremental change for the benefit of the working class are actually advocating no change whatsoever, because that’s what they’ll deliver.

    Incrementalism is all you’re ever seeing when, for example, the minimum wage doesn’t keep up with inflation. Or when public programs are slowly privatized. Or when more and more money is allowed to influence politics. Or when industries become more and more deregulated. Things are fucked right now exactly because the ruling class has been using the strategy of incrementalism to slowly chip away at the working class for its own benefit. Incrementalism works. It just only ever goes one way, and always will until there is revolutionary change.

    Don’t say incrementalism doesn’t work. It does work. It works all the time. It just never works for you.

    ❖

    I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you will never, ever, ever succeed in converting me to capitalism or right-wing ideology. Trying to do this will only lead to frustration. You are free to frustrate yourself in this way as much as you like, it just looks uncomfortable.

    ❖

    If humanity miraculously survives the existential hurdles it has placed before itself as a species, future generations will scarce believe we used to actively stockpile armageddon weapons on purpose.

    ❖

    You can tell how sincere someone’s politics are based on how much time they spend up-punching versus how much time they spend down-punching or left-punching. If they’re in it for healthy reasons they’ll focus on the former. If they’re in it for ego and/or profit their emphasis will be on the latter.

    ❖

    Every insane thing humans have done has been the result of some dumb narrative that they believed in their minds. Some recognize this and help free humanity from its enslavement to mental narrative. Others recognize this and use this weakness to enslave humans to themselves.

    ❖

    You are pure beauty
    swimming in a yawning abyss
    of pure beauty.

    Only the mind obscures this.

    It is not hidden.

    It is not hidden.

    I love you.

    __________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • War Is A Rich Man’s Game: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    War is always powerful people making up fake reasons for poor people to kill each other.

    ❖

    Capitalism is working great if you ignore how it’s about to destroy our ecosystem and kill everything.

    ❖

    Socialism is the collective’s best self-defense against sociopaths.

    ❖

    In the old days the rulers would kill those who criticized the dominant power structure. Now they just make sure such people never ascend to prominent platforms or positions of influence.

    And, if that fails, they kill them.

    ❖

    Most of what gets called journalism today is really just advertising. Advertising imperialism, capitalism, status quo politics, status quo mindsets. All this fuss about journalists leaving for Substack and stuff is really just outrage over people leaving the advertising industry.

    ❖

    Imperialists see the American people as nothing more than local fauna who need to be kept from interfering in the business of the empire. That’s why keeping Americans poor and ignorant has so much institutional support; it keeps the local fauna away from the gears of the machine.

    ❖

    Supporters of western imperialism are always wrong because the western empire is always wrong. The western empire is always wrong because imperialism itself is immoral and requires the perpetration of great evils to maintain. It’s really a lot simpler than people make it seem.

    ❖

    The only way to justify support for western interventionist foreign policy is to believe that western interventionism is ever actually humanitarian in nature. The only way to believe western interventionism is ever humanitarian in nature is to be an intellectual infant.

    ❖

    Don’t buy into the narrative that Democrats are resisting leftward movement in order to appease Republicans. It’s so much worse than that: they’re not appeasing Republicans, they’re appeasing their own donors.

    ❖

    One hundred percent of the people who claim the Democratic Party has moved “too far left” think “left” means having pink hair and yelling about gender pronouns.

    ❖

    I don’t “equate” the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. I don’t equate Sauron and Saruman either; they are two separate and distinct characters. But they damn sure work together.

    ❖

    ❖

    All this ridiculous mass media gushing about the Biden administration’s pathetic, paltry relief package would make the propagandists of the world’s worst dictatorships blush.

    ❖

    People keep saying “It’s better than nothing” about Biden’s pathetic relief package. A roll of nickels would have been better than nothing, that’s not an argument. If I steal a hundred dollars from you and then give you back a dollar, “It’s better than nothing” is not a valid defense of my abusive actions. People are suffering under an abusive system that’s wholly controlled by Democrats. End the abuse.

    ❖

    You can tell how predatory a civilization is by how many other civilizations around the world speak its language.

    ❖

    The thing we don’t say enough about World War 1 is that it was completely meaningless and accomplished nothing beneficial and happened for no legitimate reason at all. The thing we don’t say enough about World War 2 is that it was essentially just a continuation of World War 1.

    ❖

    In a right-wing imperialist civilization that is nowhere remotely close to realizing a leftist revolution, putting a large amount of energy into arguing about who has the best brand of leftism is vapid intellectual masturbation.

    ❖

    Dear rich people, please choose one:

    A) End poverty by paying your workers more.

    B) End poverty by paying more taxes.

    C) Buy the political/media class and use it to keep your wealth and power.

    ❖

    To decide to “put down roots” is a privilege denied to us by the ambitions of landlords and the predatory class. No wonder so few people feel invested in what happens to the country beneath their feet. We are but itinerant workers without soil to plant trees.

    ❖

    Keep in mind when you declare that all humans are predators who are only motivated by competition, you aren’t telling us what we are, but you are telling us what you are. I hate competing but I love helping so I know you’re wrong about me, but you must be right about yourself.

    ❖

    Wikipedia is one of the most aggressively narrative managed parts of the internet, to the point where you can now look at it as essentially the oligarchic empire’s Official Doctrine of Everything.

    ❖

    Joseph Campbell says there is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it. In our society the same is also true of the words “democracy”, “liberal”, “freedom”, and “news media”.

    ❖

    The more your oppressors wear you down, the harder it is for you to work up enough energy and entitlement to say no to them. The privileged are not subject to such pressures, and are therefore able to maintain robust boundaries, while the rest of us are too tired to say no.

    Users and abusers understand this principle as well. Exploitative bosses, abusive partners, overbearing family members, they understand that they can wear you down in myriad ways leaving you too tired to say no to their demands just as well as the imperialists understand it.

    ❖

    The competition model does not work. People competing with each other for jobs and money, nations competing with each other for dominance and resources. It simply is not conducive to the thriving of our species or our planet, as evidenced by our current predicament.

    It’s just such a waste of energy. The competition model ensures that the near-entirety of innovation and effort gets lost in the inertia of pushing against our competitors, with only crumbs remaining for thriving. We’d completely eliminate that inertia with a collaboration model, and from there we could use all that free energy to create a beautiful world.

    ______________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Mainstream Journalism Doesn’t Exist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Journalists should be exposing inconvenient truths about powerful people in their own nation and its allies. Instead the people we call “journalists” criticize enemy nations, smear political dissidents, demand increasing amounts of censorship, and advance narratives that are convenient for the powerful.

    ❖

    The “war on terror” is a false pretext for interventionism in the Middle East and the “war on drugs” is a false pretext for interventionism in Latin America.

    ❖

    Lula being free and eligible to run again in Brazil is a very big deal with huge implications for US imperialism. This isn’t like some fake leftist getting into the Democratic Party or whatever, this is a real thing that will have real consequences in a nation with huge geostrategic significance to the US empire. The empire invested many years staging a coup in one of the largest nations on earth, and it’s not just going to let it be reversed without a fuss. I’m bit nervous about what will happen.

    ❖

    The Monroe Doctrine is literally just the US saying “Latin America is our Africa. You guys get those brown people over there, these are our brown people over here.”

    ❖

    I love how pundits talk about the Monroe Doctrine like it’s a real thing that has actual legitimacy. “Well we can’t have Russia and China interfering in Venezuela, that’s just the Monroe Doctrine.” No, how about you fuck all the way off from any country not named the United States of America.

    We could be collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem to create a beautiful, awesome, healthy world. Instead we’re all competing with each other working meaningless jobs creating pieces of landfill which serve no purpose besides turning millionaires into billionaires.

    The overwhelming majority of human effort goes into competing against other humans. We do have the ability to take all that lost energy and re-route it toward collaborating with each other toward health and thriving. There is no real reason we can’t do this. There are no hard obstacles preventing us from moving away from our failed competition-based model to a collaboration-based model. All that’s stopping us is plutocratic propaganda and our collective belief in it. We do have the ability to drop that belief and move toward sanity.

    Leftist thinkers who predicted that the inevitable decline in material conditions caused by capitalism would necessarily lead to its downfall failed to foresee just how powerfully effective capitalist propaganda would get at preventing revolution, and the US conclusively proves this. It’s like predicting that an abuser’s abuse will necessarily lead to the victim leaving; that’s simply not the case if the abuser is adept at manipulation, as many abusers are. The science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for over a century. It is very potent.

    Across nearly all sectors of thought, people consistently underestimate how easy human beings are to psychologically manipulate. The only sectors which are exempt from this rule are those which make manipulation their business: advertising, politics, and propaganda.

    The left simply doesn’t have the numbers to advance socialist and anti-imperialist agendas in the western world. We don’t have the numbers because mass-scale plutocratic propaganda actively works to keep us from having the numbers. Until we address this head-on, meaningful changes are impossible.

    It’s amazing how often leftists ignore this massive, glaring problem of not having enough numbers to accomplish anything real. You have to address it. You must find those numbers somewhere. Deteriorating material conditions aren’t doing the job for us; we need to do it ourselves.

    I mean the Green Party presidential candidate got 0.2 percent of the vote in the US last year. The Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate got 317 votes, total. Three hundred and seventeen, in the entire United States. That’s not even an average-sized Italian wedding. I don’t care what your reasons are, you can’t just keep trucking along like those numbers aren’t a huge problem. Something needs to be done, and that something begins with directly tackling the problem of plutocratic propaganda.

    Taking back the wealth that the plutocrats have stolen isn’t just valuable because it can be used to help the needful: it’s a defensive measure as well. Take their money and they can’t use it to buy politicians, buy up news outlets, fund think tanks, and propagandize the masses. The collective is entitled to confiscate any weapon that someone is using to harm the collective. If you’re using a rifle to fire upon a crowd, they’re entitled to disarm you for their collective safety. If you’re using your billions of dollars to exploit and manipulate, they’re entitled to disarm you for their collective safety.

    ❖

    Very upsetting how whoever’s the next high profile western anti-imperialist turned out to be a sinister Kremlin agent and/or evil anti-semite.

    ❖

    We are told that capitalism is responsible for accelerating progress, but capitalism’s version of “progress” is destroying the ecosystem, and is clearly progressing far too fast: the development of artificial intelligence without a thorough examination of the risks, medicines being released that haven’t been fully tested, etc.

    ❖

    A socialist who only criticizes the GOP is called a liberal.

    ❖

    In a world that is rapidly dying and at increasing risk of nuclear war there is no functional difference between a liberal incrementalist and a progressive who favors advancing change by slowly taking over the Democratic Party over the course of the next century.

    How many of people’s mental health diagnoses are really just them not coping well with capitalism?

    ❖

    If you’re a father to boys and you’re not having regular conversations with them about what consent is, what rape is and how important it is to not rape people, you are a big part of the problem. If you currently don’t know how to have these conversations in ways that are age-appropriate and informative then look it up, ask for directions, listen and learn. You are your kid’s only hope that he doesn’t cause irreparable damage to others. You need to take this seriously.

    Oh, your dad never did this for you? Well color me shocked. It shows. Your son will not have the same excuse of ignorance. The world is getting brighter with far less places for rapey behavior to hide. He needs your help to navigate this.

    ______________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Fuck All Royals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Fuck all royals. Take back everything they’ve stolen and give them minimum wage jobs and regard them with nothing but disdain forevermore.

    ❖

    Still can’t get over the fact that there’s a “queen”. She wears a crown and sits on a throne, like a fucking Tolkien character. Then a whole commonwealth full of LARPers points at her and goes “Ooh, it’s the Queen!” like a bunch of fucking nerds.

    “Oh hello, I’m the Queen.” No you’re not you ridiculous nerd, your name is Liz and you’re the most expensive LARP in the world.

    ❖

    Royals are just oligarchs who rub your face in it.

    Poverty is torture. The poverty that capitalist countries bake into their system is the worst kind of all because the victims are made to feel ashamed, and like it’s their fault, and like the way out is through simping for their persecutors and working even harder for them.

    ❖

    There’s a large faction of self-identified leftists who insist that the only path toward progress in the US is to continue slowly turning the Democratic Party into a leftist party. This is pushing on a fake fire exit painted on the wall in a burning building. That door will never open. This faction is joined by another functionally identical faction which in theory advocates voting Democrat to minimize damage while undertaking direct action to push real change, but in practice only ever does the voting Democrat part.

    Continuing to advocate pushing on the fake fire exit door is guaranteeing that you’ll never escape from the burning building. There are other escape routes, they’re just harder than pretending you can use a counter-revolutionary party to advance revolutionary agendas.

    “Using the Democratic Party is the easiest way to effect real change” is like the old joke about the man searching for his lost keys under the streetlight, then when asked if that’s where he actually lost his keys replies “No, but this is where the light is”. It seems like the easiest solution, but there are no actual solutions in that easiness.

    Corporate Democrats are not freakish aberrations in the party, they are the party. An entire global empire is built on their continuing to do what they do, with a proportionate amount of power going into keeping that happening. The few progressives in the Democratic Party are just garnish on a turd.

    You can’t vote your way out of a mess that you didn’t vote your way into. Nobody voted to let oligarchs control the government and tilt the entire political system to their advantage. Nobody asked your permission to steal your country; don’t ask their permission to take it back.

    The entire electoral system is rigged against real change. Only direct action at mass scale will work, which will only become possible when we begin prioritizing countering oligarchic propaganda.

    If any non-US aligned nation began circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, waging constant wars and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it, we’d immediately have a third world war. Only by global propaganda operations is this behavior from the US normalized.

    ❖

    The absurd difficulty in getting people to realize that most of their beliefs about the world are propaganda-implanted lies is their unexamined assumption that if mass-scale propaganda operations were happening in their country, they would have read about it in the news.

    ❖

    The most significant thing happening in the world right now is the fact that the global capitalist order which is destroying our ecosystem is held in place by a US-centralized power alliance whose aggressions are putting our planet at increasing risk of nuclear war. There is nothing more urgent or newsworthy than the fact that multiple forms of human insanity are imperiling the entire human species, and indeed the life of every terrestrial organism. The fact that this isn’t at the forefront of our attention shows how propagandized we are.

    ❖

    Joe Biden is imprisoning and torturing an Australian journalist because that journalist exposed US war crimes.

    ❖

    People have this weird prevailing assumption that their ruling institutions which did many evil things in the past just magically stopped being evil at some point, despite their never even declaring any intention to change. The FBI, the CIA, the monarchy, the Vatican.

    The US-centralized empire drops explosives on human beings many times per day and it hardly ever makes the news.

    ❖

    America would be unrecognizable if it had ordered the separation of corporation and state like it orders separation of church and state.

    ❖

    It’s always far easier to flow with power than push against it. That’s why all the wealthiest people are those who collaborate with dominant power structures.

    ❖

    An individual will keep repeating the same toxic patterns until they bring awareness to the inner processes which give rise to them. The same is true of civilizations, and of empires. Shining the light of truth on what’s happening in the world is like taking the world to therapy, or like sitting it down on the meditation cushion to look within.

    ❖

    Trying to heal your inner wounds without deeply loving yourself is like trying to hug someone with one arm while shoving them away with the other. Your traumatized bits won’t come into the light of consciousness if you don’t create a welcoming environment for them.

    ___________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • This Is Who Democrats Are: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Democrats cannot wait for the midterms so they can lose and go back to letting the Republicans play the bad cop.

    ❖

    This is who the Democrats are. It’s who they always will be. They let you have your Bernies and AOCs to create the illusion that progressives can win if they just vote a little harder, but the corporate elites will always have enough of a congressional majority to kill progress. Don’t let them spin this as some sort of freakish anomaly, as the result of not having the right kind of Democrats in office. This is the only way the Democratic Party will ever operate. It’s not broken, it’s working exactly as it’s meant to.

    ❖

    Left-wing Democrats who give the party the illusion of legitimacy are just as destructive as the right-wing Democrats who do the party’s actual dirty work. They’re simply different parts of the same corrupt vehicle, each just as essential to its operation as the other.

    ❖

    If you think watching Democrats fuck everyone over is depressing, wait til you see most of the people complaining about it completely forgetting it happened and giving them another chance.

    US progressives were desperate to stop a corrupt fascist president from destroying the country and terrorizing vulnerable communities, but they lost the primary so they voted for him anyway.

    ❖

    If you’d just been staring at a screen watching the movements of troops, weapons and money you would have no idea the US officially underwent a change of leadership in January.

    ❖

    “A second Trump term would’ve been worse” is (A) not a valid defense of Biden and (B) unfalsifiable and therefore logically fallacious. Bleating that phrase is just an admission that your position is garbage.

    ❖

    If you owed $2000 to any of the thugs running the Biden administration and had taken this long to pay them back they would have broken both your kneecaps already.

    ❖

    Sick of that fake Hollywood movie trope where Americans have lots of fun and free time and don’t live in an apocalyptic failed state.

    ❖

    Coming up next on CBS News, the uplifting story of a little girl who is constantly being kicked in the head by government officials and the small town that raised money to buy her a helmet.

    ❖

    You get a sense of just how fucked things are by the fact that they’ve got us paying for our own oppression. We pay cable and Netflix bills and buy movie tickets to be propagandized by Hollywood. We buy their surveillance systems and bring them into our homes. It’s like Trump’s “We’ll build the wall and Mexico’s gonna pay for it”, only real, and way more large-scale. We’re so far gone.

    ❖

    Think tanks are the marketing department of the oligarchic empire.

    ❖

    The best unintentionally hilarious people are those who present themselves as anti-establishment free thinkers and yet swallow every CIA/CNN narrative they’re fed about China with zero gag reflex.

    ❖

    The idea that China or Russia pose a threat to you is so self-evidently ridiculous, so transparently absurd, that the only way to make you believe it would be to propagandize you. And if you do believe it, that’s exactly what has happened.

    ❖

    Documentary filmmaking is an optimal vehicle for imperialist propaganda because its artistic presentation can suck viewers into a presented narrative far more easily than other vehicles, and because there’s no pressure to hold to truthfulness or journalistic integrity.

    ❖

    Leak publishers, investigative journalists and unbought media help spread awareness of predatory power dynamics, which gives predators less room to operate. It mows the tallgrass of the information ecosystem so the lions have a much harder time sneaking up on their prey.

    The most destructive force on our planet is human unconsciousness. Unconsciousness of the realities of large-scale human power dynamics, and unconsciousness of our own inner dynamics. The most compassionate desire you can have for the world is for the expansion of consciousness.

    Expansion of consciousness just means a growing awareness of truth. A growing awareness of the truth of our large-scale collective dynamics as a species, and a growing awareness of our inner processes as individuals. All of our problems trace back to a lack of this awareness.

    The most noble intention you can have for the world is therefore for everyone to become aware of the truth. The truth within, and the truth without, whatever that might be. If this happened, all our collective problems would vanish. Disharmony and full consciousness can’t coexist.

    ❖

    In moments of personal transcendence we see clearly that it doesn’t have to be this way, that collective sanity is possible, that we can build a healthy world. Then we come down and condescending knowitalls explain to us that we are wrong, and, for some bizarre reason, we believe them.

    _____________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Imperialism Is Capitalism’s Life Support System: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Just another friendly reminder that establishment propaganda is the single most overlooked and under-emphasized aspect of our society and the left will never accomplish any of its goals until it prioritizes countering mass-scale manipulation above all else.

    ❖

    Western imperialism is capitalism’s life support system. Without the US-centralized empire constantly sabotaging socialist governments, propping up global financial institutions and controlling commerce and currency at gunpoint, capitalism would’ve died long ago.

    Pull the plug.

    ❖

    Capitalism is collectivism in denial. Money only works the way it works and exists the way it exists because we all collectively agree to pretend that those made-up, imaginary conceptual constructs are real. The collective is free to change that collective agreement at any time.

    Capitalism is collectivism. If the collective wants to switch to another form of collectivism that doesn’t let people starve and die for not having enough imaginary numbers in their bank accounts, the collective is free to change the rules of its collective improvisation.

    ❖

    Becoming more conservative as you age isn’t maturity, it’s an admission that your values are based entirely on securing your own net worth.

    ❖

    Representation is important so that everyone can buy into the fiction that anyone can make it to the top in this system.

    ❖

    Silicon Valley coordinates its censorship of speech with the United States government, which is really just government censorship with a middle man. Government censorship outsourced to corporations is still government censorship, in the same way that a military occupation outsourced to mercenaries is still a military occupation.

    ❖

    We’re always just talking about different iterations of the same single event: the wealthy and powerful want more wealth and power, and stories are spun to advance this agenda. This same one event plays out in different forms day after day after day. That’s all we’re ever seeing.

    ❖

    The way Democrats constantly blame Republican obstructionism for their own obstruction of progress reminds me of the time I was drugged and raped in a hotel bathroom. I remember fumbling at the door latch trying to get it open and my attacker saying “Uh-oh, we’re locked in!” Then I looked down and saw his foot against the door.

    ❖

    Stop protecting sexual predators. All of them, not just the ones in the rival political faction. This sick dynamic where each side only criticizes the predation of the other side rests on the unspoken, bat shit insane premise that only the other faction has men who are predators.

    The way sexual predation by powerful men is only ever attacked by their political rivals proves that rape still in 2021 is not taken seriously by our society. Still in 2021 it’s “Yes rape culture is bad, half of us will deal with it when it is politically convenient for us to do so.” Still to this day it is first and foremost a weapon of political convenience, not an urgent problem which must be solved.

    If you want to protect the interests of your political faction, turn your political faction into a space where women are nurtured into strong people instead of destroyed by sexual predation. You’re protecting poison that is poisoning your own fucking party.

    ❖

    Being “on the left” can become a very treasured and aggressively protected part of someone’s identity. That’s why criticizing such a person’s perspective from the left can land you on their shit list for life: for them it feels like you’re attacking their core identity, as much as if you’d physically attacked them.

    ❖

    Too many seekers of enlightenment experience a significant shift in consciousness and then immediately ruin it by asking “Now how can I make this serve me?” instead of “How can I serve this?”

    ❖

    Anger is like strength: it can be used productively or destructively. It can be used in a very violent, irresponsible and unconscious way, or it can be used to push someone out of your sovereign area where they have overextended. The trouble for us as a collective is that at this point in time our anger is deliberately redirected everywhere except where it belongs.

    ___________________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Bullshit Spoken In An Assertive Tone: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Watching the slow, silent realization creep over online Democrats that Biden really isn’t going to do anything for them.

    ❖

    Americans: $2000 checks please

    Government: Sorry did you say airstrikes on Syria?

    Americans: No, $2000 checks

    Government: Okay, since you asked nicely here’s your airstrikes on Syria.

    ❖

    This latest Biden airstrike is being spun as “defensive” and “retaliatory” despite its targeting a nation the US invaded (Syria) in response to alleged attacks on US forces in another nation the US invaded (Iraq). You can’t invade a nation and then claim self-defense there. That’s not a thing.

    ❖

    If you’re uncritically repeating US government claims about its justifications for acts of mass military violence, you’re not doing journalism, you’re writing Pentagon press releases.

    ❖

    It’s like the Biden administration is actively trying to vindicate everyone who spent the last four years saying that as far as policy decisions are concerned there’s nothing unusual about the Trump administration.

    ❖

    The only way to see the Biden administration as significantly different from the Trump administration is to jack your mind into an alternate reality made of partisan narrative constructs.

    ❖

    The short-term plan to fix America: Get rid of Trump.

    The long-term plan to fix America: Mumble mumble diverse cabinet mumble mumble mumble I bet Trump is hatching some pretty bad schemes for 2024 mumble mumble.

    ❖

    The facts are in and the debate is settled. Those who claimed the Democratic Party can be used to move the United States toward sanity were wrong. The first step to escaping a burning building is to stop pushing on the fake emergency exit door that’s been painted on the wall.

    ❖

    Biden is doing to his campaign promises what MBS did to Jamal Khashoggi.

    ❖

    Yes what Mohammed bin Salman is doing to Yemen may be quantifiably hundreds of thousands of times worse than what he did to Jamal Khashoggi, but as a liberal I am more offended by the latter because Yemeni children don’t write for my favorite newspaper.

    ❖

    China’s success on the world stage benefits the Chinese people. America’s success on the world stage comes at the expense of the American people.

    ❖

    The second-most profitable ability is a knack for moving numbers around in a way that benefits the powerful. The most profitable ability is a knack for moving words around in a way that benefits the powerful.

    ❖

    You can convince people to believe absolute bullshit if you say it in a confident-sounding and assertive tone. If you say it when designated an authority figure it becomes even more convincing. Powerful manipulators are acutely aware of this, while the general public is not.

    ❖

    If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it is broke, spend billions of dollars in mass media influence convincing everyone that it’s not broke and doesn’t need to be fixed.

    ❖

    When everyone’s been marinating in propaganda their entire life, common sense is often non-sense.

    ❖

    Coming to a mature understanding of the world is the slow, humbling process of realizing that the socialists and anti-imperialists have been pretty much right about pretty much everything, and that everyone who calls them crazy or extremist is wrong.

    ❖

    Lord, please let me love myself the way western centrists love criticizing the brutality of non-western governments while ignoring their own.

    ❖

    They snatched the slingshot out of the child’s hand because he might hurt someone, then a few short years later they handed him an automatic rifle and gave him the power of life and death over people in a village overseas.

    ❖

    Alternate answer to Fermi’s paradox: we haven’t met the aliens because a civilization far more advanced than our own would have matured emotionally and spiritually beyond the need to sail around the galaxy molesting the natives like a bunch of fifteenth century Europeans.

    ❖

    Whether or not you will make the best decision in a given moment has a lot less to do with what’s happening in that moment than with how consciously you have lived each moment leading up to it.

    ❖

    Deep inner looking will reveal a kind of “event horizon” to your field of experience beyond which there’s only emptiness. Deeper looking will reveal that your perception of your field of experience is actually coming from that emptiness. That emptiness is therefore your true self. This is the only sensible place from which to take your stand.

    ❖

    Putting truth before all else makes it harder to be comfortable, but it’s also the only path to real lasting happiness.

    __________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The US Empire Is An Abusive Narcissist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Americans: healthcare please

    Government: Sorry did you say a new military base in northeastern Syria?

    Americans: no, healthcare

    Government: Alright you drive a hard bargain but here’s a new military base in northeastern Syria.

    ❖

    Sorry we’re not going to be able to do the $2000 checks thing, or the cancelling student debt thing, or the $15 minimum wage thing. Would you accept payment in the form of social media “dunking” on Senate Republicans instead?

    ❖

    Biden is so endearingly befuddled in his old age it’s easy to forget how many children he’s killed.

    ❖

    Electing a new US president doesn’t change the movie, it just changes the soundtrack.

    ❖

    Abusive narcissists are just as motivated to acquire allies as they are to acquire victims. They’re often well-liked in the circles they move in, because the clever ones work hard on manipulating the way they are publicly perceived. This is also the case with the US empire.

    ❖

    Things that should be done in response to the Capitol riot:

    • Charge the people who broke laws under those laws

    Things that shouldn’t be done in response to the Capitol riot:

    • Making new domestic terrorism laws
    • Continuing the military occupation of DC
    • Censoring the internet

    ❖

    It’s self-evident that Silicon Valley oligarchs conspiring to censor conspiracy theories will not eliminate conspiracy theories; the only thing that can end conspiracy theorizing is for the government to become transparent and cease conspiring.

    So naturally we’re going with the censorship via Silicon Valley oligarchs thing.

    ❖

    It’s hilarious how the government which continually rains bombs on other countries has a list of “designated terrorist organizations” which it solemnly adds and removes names from based on which groups it likes and doesn’t like in a given moment.

    ❖

    To design a secure prison, you’d want good locks, high walls, a lot of guards and tons of surveillance.

    To make it even more secure, you’d keep all of the above while also tricking the prisoners into thinking they are free.

    Anyway, that’s the history of western civilization.

    ❖

    One of the most consequential collective delusions circulating in our society is the belief that our society is free. Our society is exactly free enough to create the illusion that we have freedom; from that line onwards it’s just totalitarianism veiled in propaganda.

    ❖

    They don’t need to kill or silence socialists and anti-imperialists, they just need to keep us from gaining a critical mass and going mainstream. As long as they can prevent that, it actually serves their interests to have a few of us around creating the illusion of freedom.

    ❖

    The Republican Party is the vehicle for rightward movement. The Democratic Party is the obstacle to all leftward movement. If the Democratic Party weren’t deliberately thwarting all leftward movement, the entire world would look very, very different.

    ❖

    The problem with informing liberals that NED is a CIA cutout is that liberals think the CIA is good.

    ❖

    At a time of great need the US government is letting its citizens freeze, go broke, get evicted, and die of preventable illnesses, so obviously it’s of paramount importance right now for Americans to rise up with one voice and direct their righteous anger at China.

    ❖

    I’m developing a special disdain for people who mindlessly regurgitate US anti-China narratives, especially people who are normally skeptical of US government claims. There’s just no excuse for this nonsense. The geostrategic agendas are so obvious, and the facts are so readily available for anyone intellectually honest enough to look.

    “Caitlin, China’s completely different from all those countries the US empire has lied about before. This one’s real!”

    No you airhead, you’ve just been consuming western propaganda about China for a much longer period of time. That’s the one and only difference.

    People regurgitating State Department anti-China lines seem to think of themselves as these unique little snowflakes who are totally different from those who’ve supported every other US imperialist agenda, when they’re exactly the same in every way. Literally every single possible way. They’ll be like “I opposed the Iraq invasion, but China is different.” No, you were just right then and now you’re wrong. You saw one thing clearly and now you’re seeing another thing unclearly. The propaganda gun missed your head with Iraq, then scored a bullseye with China.

    “So you’re saying the CCP are the good guys??”

    Hollywood has conditioned you to look for “good guys” and “bad guys” in every conflict. Your impulse to assess whether a nation on the other side of the world which poses no threat to you is “good” or “bad” is itself the result of propaganda.

    ❖

    Lovers who are both (A) fascinated by each other and (B) dedicated to continual self-discovery can keep falling in love endlessly, because they’ll keep discovering new things about themselves for the other to love, and the other will keep uncovering new things in them to love. We are all bottomless, so as long as the discovery continues the honeymoon never needs to end. You’re both intensely curious about each other, so you’re both leaned into each other trying to discover new things to love. The adventure never ends, and it remains exhilarating.

    _____________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • It’s Not A Political Problem, It’s A Propaganda Problem: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    While we all fixate on electoral political solutions, the powerful focus on narrative control, because that’s where real power is at. The people who pose an actual threat to the machine are those who disrupt its narratives and narrative control agendas. Everyone else is harmless.

    If the majority of a troubled population believes their political system is operating in a way that is demonstrably very different from the way it actually operates, then that population doesn’t have a political problem, it has a propaganda problem.

    Berners watched the mass media actively sabotage the Sanders campaign day after day in two consecutive elections, and went “The problem is not enough progressives in government!” No, the problem is the billionaire media are constantly lying to everyone. Create a truth-based information ecosystem and politics will move toward health by itself.

    As long as the ruling class is successfully using mass-scale narrative manipulation, it won’t matter what political strategies you employ because they’ll just manipulate that too. Everything we try will be neutered by propaganda until fighting propaganda becomes our number one priority. The narratives around your insurgent third party will be manipulated to the advantage of the powerful. Your progressive takeover of the Democrats will be narrative managed into impotence.

    You can’t politics your way around narrative manipulation. You’ve got to make it the issue. You don’t measure how effective someone is against the machine by what their campaign platform says or what their strategies are, but by how disruptive they are to the narratives and narrative control of the powerful. If they’re not disruptive on that front they’re not effective.

    The good news is that manipulation only works if you don’t realize you’re being manipulated. Bringing mass media propaganda front and center will accomplish this. Right now it’s very far from the spotlight; it’s treated like a marginal issue when it needs to be the central issue.

    ❖

    The mass media do not exist to tell you the truth about the world, they exist to manufacture consent for the agendas of the ruling class. Any time you’re clapping along with their Most Important Story of the Day you are helping your rulers and overlooking more important stories.

    ❖

    Liberals for four years: Russia is sowing division in America!

    Liberals when red states freeze: HAHAHA TURN TO HICKSICLES AND DIE YOU TOOTHLESS COUSIN FUCKERS

    ❖

    The best part of Judas and the Black Messiah is the bit where modern mainstream America pretends that at some point between Fred Hampton’s assassination and today the FBI just stopped doing evil things.

    The mainstream consensus is that secretive government agencies have only ever done evil things in the past, no matter what point in time we happen to be in.

    In a few decades there will be revelations about profoundly evil things that were done in the early 2020s by the CIA, FBI and Pentagon. Liberals will express shock and outrage and yet still believe on no basis whatsoever that those agencies have since stopped doing evil things.

    ❖

    Deliberately starve a child to death and they call it abuse. Deliberately starve a nation of children to death and they call it diplomacy.

    ❖

    That time a bunch of dangerous extremists invaded the Capitol building and voted to advance murderous imperialist agendas year after year for generations.

    ❖

    Violently destroying weaker nations which disobey you is authoritarian. A government which exports the bulk of its authoritarianism is still an authoritarian government. The US is far more authoritarian than any government it criticizes.

    ❖

    Dear American leftists,

    As long as you ignore US imperialism, we will refrain from destroying you. We will even allow you to maintain a few delusions about one day having a real healthcare system. Remain innocuous and you’ll be safe.

    Love,

    Your Permanent Government

    ❖

    I criticize the Democrats more than the Republicans for the same reason you have higher expectations of an adult than a child. Obviously all my criticisms of Democrats also apply to Republicans; Republicans are just less polite and more honest about their awfulness.

    ❖

    It is necessary to have government secrecy in order to win wars. It is also necessary to have government secrecy in order to start wars.

    ❖

    Become a healthy organism by purging your mind of manipulation. Purging from your mind the manipulations of propagandists, advertisers, preachers and scriptures, and of narcissists in your personal life. Purging your own impulse to manipulate people and events from your mind as well.

    ❖

    You develop to the extent of your curiosity and no further. Remain endlessly curious about the world and your understanding will keep developing. Remain endlessly curious about yourself and your maturity will keep developing. Decide you know and your growth immediately stops.

    You avoid the stuffy, stagnating sense of knowing by consciously meeting each moment for the first time. This doesn’t mean meeting each moment as though it’s for the first time; this is a very real thing that is already happening, because your every encounter with every experience is entirely without precedent. It’s not a matter of creating anything new, it’s just a matter of being aware of what’s really going on.

    ❖

    Our story is that of a species struggling to break free of the gravitational pull of ego. Spirituality bursts free then sinks down into dogma. Movements spring forth then sink down into politics. Online platforms arise then sink into government censorship.

    One day, we break free.

    _________________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • When America Voted Out Fascism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Biden may be trying to extradite a journalist for exposing US war crimes, and he may be inflicting mass murder and starvation sanctions on disobedient governments around the world to ensure perpetual global domination, but at least America voted out fascism.

    ❖

    The “two” party puppet show is always fake. Always, always, always, always. When you get really into a movie you forget it’s a movie. You don’t see the screen, you don’t see the actors; you’re enthralled by the show. Getting caught up in the puppet show is the same: buy into any part of it and you lose sight of reality. As soon as you mentally reify it because you really like this or that Democrat or really hate this or that Republican, you lose your ability to see what’s happening. You lose sight of the puppeteers and the strings as you clap along with the performance like a child.

    ❖

    There is no meaningful difference between a government with one status quo-enforcing party and a government with two status quo-enforcing parties.

    ❖

    We inhabit two worlds: the real world and the narrative world. In the narrative world, the US drastically changed on January 20th. In the real world―the world minus its narrative soundtrack―all the money, weapons, troops and people are moving basically the same as they were on January 19th.

    ❖

    If President Biden had all the exact same policies and positions but an (R) next to his name, American conservatives would be ferociously defending him from liberal attacks. If parallel universes exist this is definitely happening in one of them.

    ❖

    The most dangerous predators are the ones you don’t see. It’s true in nature, it’s true in interpersonal relationships, and it’s true in politics.

    ❖

    Everyone makes fun of America for having no social safety nets for citizens who’ve fallen on hard times, but that’s not exactly fair. They’ve got the largest prison system in the world.

    ❖

    Capitalism cultists talk about earning money like you can just dig it up in your backyard or something. “If you need more money just go earn it!”, like we’re hunter-gatherers in an abundant forest instead of powerless subjects in an economic system rigged by and for the wealthy.

    ❖

    The leading cause of crazy conspiracy theories is not unregulated online speech but the fact that the world’s most powerful government does evil things constantly while keeping a massive amount of its behavior secret, and the fact that the mainstream media often promotes conspiracy theories.

    ❖

    It’s outrageous that people are allowed to tell lies on the internet and something needs to be done about it. The only ones who should be allowed to lie to us are the government, the news media, the education system and the church.

    ❖

    The US-centralized empire seeks narrative hegemony as urgently as it seeks global hegemony, and for the same reasons.

    ❖

    The mass media have been acting weird the last few years because the US is approaching post-primacy and various propaganda ops are needed to manufacture consent for the agendas which will be needed to try and avert the end of the empire. That’s pretty much all you’re seeing here.

    ❖

    One of the most frustrating things to deal with is the whole “well hey no one’s perfect” attitude people have toward mainstream politicians who literally facilitate acts of mass murder. It’s like “Yeah my husband kills and mutilates prostitutes, but who has a perfect marriage?”

    ❖

     

    Bush’s “war on terror” never ended, they just stopped calling it that. The only thing that changed was the branding; they just stopped using the “war on terror” label while expanding and normalizing the same protocols and operations. Now even relatively “anti-war” politicians openly support these massive military engagements on the other side of the planet which horrified peace activists in the Bush era.

    ❖

    “You don’t oppose imperialism, you only criticize western imperialism!”

    Show me the non-western power that’s circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, waging nonstop wars and orchestrating the destruction of any nation which disobeys it and I’ll criticize them too.

    ❖

    The best way to live is don’t. Don’t live. Don’t try to impose your will on life using the thinky me-mind. Get out of life’s way and let it live itself. Breath comes in and out on its own. Legs move this way or that on their own. Actions happen on their own. Life lives unminded.

    _________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Democrats WANT To Lose The Midterms: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Americans: We’re dying!

    Republicans: Good.

    Democrats: We hear you and we honor your experience.

    ❖

    The USA is the single worst human rights offender on our planet. The fact that most of its transgressions take place outside its own borders makes it more egregious, not less. So-called human rights watchdog groups which fail to acknowledge this fact are propaganda constructs.

    ❖

    By 2024 the only mainstream US political debate allowed will be about whether America should nuke Russia or China.

    ❖

    “Kindly let me help you or you will drown, said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.”
    ~ Alan Watts

    Interventionist foreign policy in a nutshell.

    ❖

    War is insanity. Unjust war is criminal insanity. One of the ugliest things about western imperialism is the way it gives extremely young soldiers whose minds have been warped by a criminally insane war machine the power of life and death over defenseless populations.

    ❖

    One very important thing you can do is keep finding new ways to help people see the horrors of imperialism with fresh eyes. It’s all so aggressively normalized and it’s been going on all our lives, so it’s easy to get used to it and lose sight of how unspeakably horrific it is.

    ❖

    Choosing to continue an immoral course of action is as immoral as initiating it. Presidents who continue the immoral policies of their predecessors are as culpable as the presidents who initiated them.

    ❖

    The Democratic Party is corrupt and murderous beyond the possibility of redemption and anyone who says otherwise is either deceived or deceiving.

    ❖

    I’m seeing US progressive/DSA types getting more and more agitated about the sudden increase in hostility toward the Democrats from the left. What did they think was going to happen when the Dems took control of the entire government? You’re the power now, buttercup.

    ❖

    The problem with warning that the $2000 check scandal will lead to losses in the midterms is that Democrats are fine with losing in the midterms. You think they like having to own all their right wing bullshit for themselves? Democrats hate being exposed and vulnerable like this. They much prefer to blame their corporate cronyism, austerity policies and warmongering on an obstructionist Republican congress. They’re happy to lose the midterms. They prefer to lose the midterms.

    ❖

    The easiest way to look cool is to fight the power. The easiest way to get rich is to serve the power. The easiest way to look cool and get rich is to serve power while appearing to fight it.

    ❖

    Democrats are absolutely correct that it is of paramount importance for the Republicans be held accountable for their atrocious crimes lest those crimes repeat themselves in the future.

    Start with the Bush administration.

    ❖

    Immense military and financial commitments are made to Israel on the grounds that it’s “the only democracy in the Middle East”, but also if you try holding it to the same standards as other democracies you’re a Nazi.

    And also Israel is not a democracy. Obviously.

    ❖

    If I saw someone criticizing the many, many horrible things the Australian government has done, it would never in a million years occur to me to rush to Australia’s defense. Yet I interact with people hastening to defend the US empire on a daily basis. These people are silly.

    ❖

    World peace and inner peace are not separate endeavors. Go deep enough into one and you’ll eventually find yourself working on the other as well.

    ❖

    If humanity can’t collectively transcend egoic consciousness it won’t matter if the revolution succeeds; even if we create worldwide utopia we’ll only end up destroying it out of boredom. Conflicts with each other and with nature will keep rebirthing until inner conflicts vanish.

    __________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Empire Must Die: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Q: What is a liberal?

    A: A liberal is a violent white supremacist extremist who supports and participates in the mass slaughter of brown-skinned human beings overseas while tweeting that white supremacist extremists are bad.

    ❖

    Q: What is capitalism?

    A: Capitalism is a wonderful economic and political system which has given us powerful technology, a wide assortment of breakfast cereals, and near term human extinction.

    ❖

    Q: What is China?

    A: China is a large Asiatic nation which westerners use as an emotional punching bag for their capitalism-induced rage, propaganda-induced confusion, and fears about the death of the US empire.

    ❖

    Q: What is Israel?

    A: Israel is a US military operation that is used to justify continual western military expansionism in a crucial geostrategic region, with some civilians sprinkled on top for cover.

    ❖

    Q: What is a “tankie”?

    A: Anyone to the left of you on foreign policy.

    ❖

    Q: Who is the biggest leak source of CIA documents to the news media?

    A: The CIA.

    ❖

    Q: What is the Republican Party?

    A: An organization which assures Americans of conservative sensibilities that the status quo is working fine.

    Q: What is the Democratic Party?

    A: An organization which assures Americans of liberal sensibilities that the status quo is working fine.

    ❖

    Q: What’s the difference between a prostitute and a mainstream media pundit?

    A: One gets paid handfuls of cash to do shameful and degrading things which tear apart the fabric of society, the other earns an honest living as a sex worker.

    ❖

    You’re allowed to choose between oligarchic warmongers who make you feel uncomfortable or oligarchic warmongers who make you feel comfortable. Those are your choices.

    ❖

    The main difference between QAnon conspiracy theories and Russiagate conspiracy theories is that one makes people do dumb things like alienate their families and riot at government buildings while the other manufactures consent for cold war agendas that may end all life on earth.

    ❖

    The difference between an anti-imperialist socialist and a Bernie Sanders progressive is far greater than the difference between a Bernie Sanders progressive and a Hillary Clinton liberal.

    ❖

    The first thing an authoritarian power does to quash protests nowadays is always to cut the internet, because it kills dissidents’ ability to organize and share information. Don’t think the increasing normalization of internet censorship in the west is about anything else.

    ❖

    I’m going to keep pointing this out until it catches on: Trump was targeted with accusations of subservience to Russia, hiding the fact that he was ramping up aggressions against Russia. Biden’s being hit with accusations of loyalty to China, hiding his escalations against China.

    They’re recycling the exact same script, and why wouldn’t they? It worked. The public have been enthusiastically consenting to world-threatening cold war escalations which benefit them in no way, shape or form. It’s a very effective psyop.

    This will continue. If you think Biden will be cuddly with Beijing, you are wrong. Please re-evaluate your worldview as the facts prove you wrong.

    ❖

    Just as a body will fight to eject any pathogen which threatens its survival, an empire will fight to eject anyone who threatens its survival. Whenever you see a person or government targeted by the full might of the empire, that’s what you’re looking at.

    Like a shark, the empire must keep advancing or it will die. Any government or leader which stands in the way of its continual expansion around the globe is seen, correctly, as an existential threat. Not to the US as a nation, but to the empire which must keep advancing or die.

    This is why you’ll never see a US politician actually slamming the brakes on imperialism. If anyone gets anywhere near a position where they might do so, they will be targeted and eliminated. It’s the one door you’re forbidden to go through, because it threatens an entire empire. They might let you advance a few mildly progressive domestic agendas, but they will never, ever let you anywhere near the possibility of ending western imperialism.

    In order to end the wars and move toward health, the empire will necessarily have to die. Not the United States as a nation, but the globe-spanning oligarchic power structure whose power, wealth and military might have been loosely centralized around Washington DC.

    And of course many of those who threaten the empire’s survival won’t be nice people; this isn’t a Hollywood movie about Good Guys versus Bad Guys. But only the US-centralized empire is waging a nonstop war upon the world with the aim of perpetual unipolar planetary domination.

    Ending the empire won’t solve all our world’s problems. But because the empire can only survive on a steady diet of death and destruction, its death is a necessary first step toward creating a healthy, peaceful world.

    ___________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Lesson Of The BLM Protests: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Remember when Americans shook the earth with massive protests demanding an end to the police state and the entire liberal establishment just kept saying “I hear you, I agree with you” and then did absolutely nothing to even reduce police brutality? It’s important to remember such lessons.

    People would ask me “Why are you supporting Black Lives Matter Caitlin?? Don’t you see all the corporations and corporate Dems support it? Why would they do that if it didn’t serve them?” This is why they did it. Empty words of support can defuse a situation far easier than open opposition.

    Imagine if all the plutocrats, pundits and politicians had just yelled at the BLM protesters and admonished them to stop? It would have only turned people against them with far more aggression, and it would have exposed the fact that they are the enemy. It’s much more effective to say “I hear you, I agree with you” with no intention of taking any real action.

    And really this is all institutions like the Democratic Party exist to do: defuse left populism and crush grassroots activism not with opposition, but with empty words of agreement that have no intention of action behind them. They’re just a bottomless pit that tricks people into pouring their energy into it, thereby stopping all leftward movement.

    A kid who doesn’t want to clean their room will tell their parents “No! I don’t wanna!” A very clever kid who doesn’t want to clean their room will say “Yes! I’ll get on that right away” and then enjoy hours of peace and relaxation without parental nagging, and without cleaning. It’s the exact same way with the powerful. It’s much more efficacious for them to pretend to be on your side than expose the fact that they’re not. In the end the result is the same: the kid doesn’t clean their room. But they don’t get the kind of pushback they’d get if they said no.

    Manipulators are good at manipulation. The people who make their way to the top in a corrupt system are manipulators. You can’t take their words at face value, mustn’t mistake vapid placation for victory. They’ll happily give you a mountain of words in exchange for your real treasure.

    ❖

    They’re so used to manipulating Americans into believing narratives that wildly differ from reality they were like “We’ll tell them $1400 is $2000, they won’t notice.”

    ❖

    The world would be greatly improved if Americans became far more powerful and their government/military/media became far less powerful.

    ❖

    Yemen alone, just by itself, is a sufficient argument for the dismantling of the entire US-centralized power alliance.

    ❖

    To be clear, Yemen isn’t some tragedy that we are passively witnessing. Civilians are being deliberately targeted and starved with the backing of the US, UK, Australia, Canada and France. Our governments are helping to inflict this horror upon innocents. And it may get worse.

    ❖

    A world order which can create something as horrific as the atrocities in Yemen or the unforgivable Iraq invasion is not a world order that will lead the world in a good direction. The facts are in. The US-led world order must end.

    ❖

    “You hate all US politicians Caitlin! You can’t name a single one you like!”

    That’s like wanting me to pick a favorite Nazi leader. It’s a system which only elevates assholes who will cooperate with a machine that is fueled by human blood. You just don’t see how ugly it is yet.

    ❖

    Anti-imperialism makes you look like a radical, because it makes you reject even the politicians who are considered “radical” in mainstream discourse since they are all imperialists. In reality there’s nothing radical about opposing the mass slaughter of innocents; it’s just being a normal human being. Basic human sanity is often painted as “radical” because most people have no understanding of how bat shit insane our current world order is.

    ❖

    The surest way to get rich in media is to spread lies which serve the interests of the powerful. The surest way to get labeled a “grifter” is to do literally the exact opposite of this.

    ❖

    It’s not enough to reject mainstream politics, we need to reject mainstream culture as well. The propagandists understand that politics is downstream from culture, so we should too. The culture manufacturers in New York and LA are not your friend; they are an extension of the empire.

    We who oppose the empire must reject its manufactured culture with the same disgust with which we reject its political lackeys and news media. We must create our own culture to outshine the manufactured garbage they are shoving down everyone’s throats.

    ❖

    If you want normal people to listen to an idea, you’ve got to make it easy to understand and you’ve got to make it interesting. No normal human being going about their life has any incentive to listen to you unless you do both of these things. The onus isn’t on them, it’s on you.

    Telling people to read theory doesn’t work. How narcissistic would you have to be to think you can just tell some stranger to read Marx or Lenin or whatever and they’ll go “Well that complete rando ordered me to invest my scarce time and energy in this so I’d better do it”? No. This is our job.

    Whenever I bring this up people say stuff like “It’s not a popularity contest Caitlin”. Yes it fucking is! You want your ideas to be more popular than the shitty, self-destructive, soul-crushing, world-destroying ideas which support the status quo. This won’t happen by itself.

    It’s not enough to be right. You can’t save the world just by holding the right beliefs in your obscure corner of the information ecosystem. That’s like believing life will reward you if you’re a nice person on the inside. Share the ideas. Make them simple, make them interesting.

    ❖

    One of the many advantages manipulators have over sincere people is that sincere people have no idea how very, very much better at manipulation a manipulator is than them, in the same way a chess newbie has no understanding of how many skill levels they are below a chess master.

    This is why it’s so important for us to have the humility to know that we can be manipulated, and that we can be manipulated in ways we hadn’t even thought of. Ways we wouldn’t think of in a million years, because we are not that sort of creature.

    ❖

    When you’re in an abusive relationship, leaving seems impossible. After you escape, you look back and see that most of the barriers to leaving which felt so real at the time were illusory mental constructs. Escaping our abusive relationship with our oppressors will be like that.

    Freeing ourselves and creating a healthy world is not impossible. There are no solid walls preventing us from leaving the abusive relationship. The door’s not even locked. The only thing holding us in place is mental manipulation via mass media propaganda. It’s all in our head.

    Image

    ______________________________

    Feature image via Wikimedia Commons.

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Crazy And So Is The Rest Of Congress: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    I really hope Americans get rid of that dangerous right wing lunatic in congress, by which I mean all of the people in congress.

    ❖

    Marjorie Taylor Greene is not more crazy than all the DC politicians who agree the US should maintain planetary hegemony using bombs, regime change ops, starvation sanctions and nuclear threats. She’s just a less popular genre of crazy.

    ❖

    There is an ideological struggle to determine whether the Republican Party will be the kind of bat shit crazy that believes in QAnon and Jewish Space Lasers or just the kind of bat shit crazy that believes in carpet bombing Iran and destroying the ecosystem for money.

    ❖

    Stop normalizing status quo politics.

    Stop normalizing ecocide.

    Stop normalizing imperialism.

    Stop normalizing mass murder.

    Stop normalizing nuclear standoffs.

    Stop normalizing starvation sanctions.

    Stop normalizing exploitation.

    Stop normalizing oppression.

    Stop normalizing the mainstream so-called “centrists” who promote these extremist evils.

    If people could really grasp how horrific our status quo is, wingnut freaks like Marjorie Taylor Greene wouldn’t stand out against the background, because everyone who helps bolster this murderous and depraved status quo is also a wingnut freak. And there would be just as urgent a push to cast out all the other freaks as there is to cast out her.

    ❖

    The ruling class keeps Americans as poor as possible so they can’t use their money to do naughty things like fund leftist political campaigns or sabotage hedge funds.

    ❖

    People are like two clicks away from burning Wall Street to the ground and setting up guillotines and mainstream analysts are still wringing their hands about how gamer trolls might be compromising the integrity of the market somewhat.

    ❖

    The Democratic Party has a big tent coalition ranging all the way from billionaires, to the lackeys of billionaires, to people who owe favors to billionaires, to people who have been propagandized by billionaires. The whole entire spectrum.

    ❖

    There is absolutely no way the Democratic Party makes the drastic changes we will need to avoid climate collapse or nuclear war. In policy it only promotes slow incremental change, and in practice it promotes no change whatsoever. You’re throwing money and energy into armageddon.

    People who think we can be saved by a counter-revolutionary party which never does anything but bolster the status quo have no understanding of how bad things are and how rapidly they are deteriorating.

    ❖

    The way liberals are falling in love with Jen Psaki is very Trumpian and ugly. Don’t celebrity crush on your government’s PR person, it’s gross.

    I could understand people being all gaga over Obama for a bit; first Black president, it’s historic and exciting. But the way libs are stanning an old white asshole president and adoring Psaki is just undignified worship of DC royalty.

    ❖

    My current pet conspiracy theory is that both the “Putin Puppet” allegations against Trump and the “Beijing Biden” allegations have their roots in the US intelligence community. Trump greatly ramped up tensions with Russia under that cover; Biden will do the same with China.

    Idiot rightists who keep bleating “Beijing Biden” while he ramps up aggressions on China are the new idiot liberals who kept bleating “Putin Puppet” while he ramped up aggression on Russia.

    ❖

    Amid the vast ocean of knowable and unknowable things, a grown adult has scarcely any more knowledge than a newborn. It’s easy to fall into the stale sense of having it all figured out, but in the relative grand scheme of things we’re just babies in a world we do not understand.

    ❖

    I know I’d be taken more seriously by the cool kids if I didn’t post spiritual stuff and kept my more out-there perspectives to myself, but to me that would be manipulative and dishonest. I prefer to just be up front about who I am and where I’m coming from, and you can make up your own mind about me from there.

    ______________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Nationwide Dementiafest: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Joe Biden. Joe Biden. Joe fucking fucking motherfucking Biden. In a country of 328 million people the guy that gets elevated to the top is literally one of the very worst human beings in the entire population. That’s the “democracy” you’re being told is under attack.

    And this isn’t even prime Joe Biden. This is coming out of retirement for a half-assed exhibition match Joe Biden. This is way past sell-by date Joe Biden. This is Joe Biden with missing pieces. That’s the sort of animal that rises to the highest elected office in US “democracy”.

    The inauguration was a whole internet of liberals performing amazing mental contortions to forget that Joe Biden is a disgusting piece of shit. Now everyone has forgotten who Joe Biden is, including Joe Biden. A nationwide dementiafest.

    ❖

    Obama campaigned on Hope and Change and delivered nothing but neoliberal oppression and imperialist mass murder. Biden campaigned on “Fuck you, no” and people think he’s somehow going to deliver something positive.

    People are so cute.

    You can do it Democrats! Just two years of stalling progressive change before you lose the House and Senate and can start claiming the lack of progress is due to an obstructionist congress!

    ❖

    I still can’t get over the fact that Dems consciously chose not to give Americans the amount of money they said they would. They discussed it, then said “Nah. Too much. Subtract that $600 from before.”

    ❖

     

    Leftist: There’s been a bombing!

    Liberal: Oh no! Where??

    Leftist: The Middle East and Africa mostly. Our government drops bombs there every day.

    Liberal: Ohh thank God. I thought you meant a bombing of real people.

    ❖

    Ask people if they believe all lives are of equal value regardless of where in the world they live and how much money they have, and most will tell you yes. But if you look at their worldviews and the lives those worldviews tend to snuff out, for most the real answer would be no.

    The majority of the people who rightly say Black lives matter give zero fucks about the people of color who are being butchered by the US empire in the Global South right now. Mass media punditry trains people to only values the lives in their own part of the world.

    ❖

    Being an anti-imperialist in this society is like being the black sheep of the family who never gets invited to holiday dinners because she always brings up the fact that Uncle Larry is a child molester.

    Every day Biden chooses not to move on ending the war in Yemen translates directly into many more dead children. This is not an exaggeration, it is a fact. It requires much, much more urgency than it’s getting.

    ❖

    Trump’s actions in Yemen alone make him a monster whose name should only be spoken with disgust. If you abhor Obama for his warmongering there’s no legitimate reason not to abhor Trump as well.

    ❖

    Trump was none of the things Democrats said he was and none of the things Republicans said he was and all of the things they both are.

    ❖

    There are already at least three likely 2024 presidential candidates against whom the Democratic candidate would be the lesser evil: Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, and Tom Cotton. This system is designed to feed you an endless river of evil so that you are floating in evil all the time no matter how you vote.

    The way to stop the rise of right wing extremism and conspiracy theories is to end government corruption and government secrecy, not to implement authoritarian measures under the banner of fighting terrorism. This is obvious to everyone who isn’t an idiot.

    ❖

    To stop fascism they’ll roll out Patriot Act 2, secretly implement more FBI programs, surveil, censor, militarize, anything except change the conditions which feed into the rise of fascism.

    Because their rule depends upon those conditions.

    And because they’re fine with fascism.

    ❖

    Socialists who promote socialism using esoteric leftist jargon that ordinary people don’t understand aren’t really interested in promoting socialism. It’s just a nerdy hobby for them. They’re the same as Star Trek nerds speaking Klingon.

    ❖

    Image

    One advantage the far right has over us is that the mainstream consent-manufacturing shitlib culture that is churned out 24/7 by Hollywood is so plainly artificial and cringey. The left needs to fight back by creating culture, real culture, authentic art and media that moves something deep in people, and by rejecting the establishment’s conveyor belt culture instead of just its politics.

    This is why something as simple as Bernie Sanders turning up in mittens captured everyone’s hearts and imaginations. It was such a glitch in the whole phony performance and such a nice break from being lied to all the fucking time. We need to give people that experience way more.

    Trust in the plutocratic media is at an all-time low and our ability to network and share information is at an all-time high. We absolutely do have a window to wake each other up from the propaganda and create a healthy world. But internet censorship is creeping forward, so means it must be soon.

    _______________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , throwing some money into my tip jar on  or , purchasing some of my , buying my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Your Sigh Of Relief Is Grounded In Delusion: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Ahh at long last America is returning to normality: the hub of a globe-spanning empire which rings the planet with military bases and destroys any nation which disobeys it while propagandizing the entire world into supporting its murderousness, without rude tweets.

    ❖

    Biden’s inauguration will be a huge relief for people who aren’t actually affected by US government policy.

    ❖

    Americans want to believe Trump was uniquely evil among recent presidents because they want to believe their government will become significantly less evil when he leaves. This is delusional and harmful.

    ❖

    The only way to find Trump’s presidency remarkably awful is to (A) greatly diminish the scale of Bush and Obama’s crimes and (B) believe foreign lives don’t matter. Saying Trump was the worst president, even since the turn of this century, is saying that you’re a shitty person.

    ❖

    Trump was a US president of fairly average depravity surrounded by an ocean of influential narrative managers LARPing about treason and sedition for four years.

    So many Trumpers told me he’d free Assange. They were 100% certain Trump was going to get re-elected, drain the swamp, end the wars, and free Assange. He did none of these things. If this is you, please overhaul your worldview and drastically change your media consumption habits.

    ❖

    Arguing that Trump wanted to pardon Assange but Republicans threatened him is just saying Trump wanted to fight the establishment but the establishment told him no.

    ❖

    It’s so crazy how the State Department has been led by a man who is even more evil and disgusting than Trump, and now that man is leaving office without the mass media having given him any critical attention at all.

    ❖

    I haven’t yet figured out how so many Americans manage the cognitive balance of simultaneously (A) thinking their country is the center of the universe and (B) thinking it odd that foreigners would have opinions about their country.

    ❖

    Super excited for America to finally get rid of its racist corrupt right-wing asshole of a president, hopefully by sometime in the next four to eight years.

    It’s easy to applaud Martin Luther King Jr when he is dead, when he exists as a legend and you don’t have to meet any of his imperfections and controversies. If you want to know if you would have supported King back in his day, don’t look at King. Look at whether or not you support Julian Assange.

    ❖

    Julian Assange has provided many explosive revelations about the malfeasance of the powerful, but none so explosive as the revelation that the US and its allies will imprison and torture a journalist for exposing US war crimes.

    ❖

    Just tell the truth. Just tell the truth. You will never out-manipulate a manipulator, either in personal relationships or politics. You can’t “capitalize on” this or “leverage” that; they’ll beat you every time. In the battle against the manipulators, truth is our only weapon.

    I see socialist groups get behind this or that mainstream liberal agenda like “Hey we can ride the momentum of this to socialist revolution!” No you can’t you sweet precious lamb. You’re swimming with sharks. They’ll take everything you put in and then let you have nothing.

    When you’re not a manipulator it’s hard to understand how much better at manipulation a manipulator is than you. They’re SO much better. If you’re a truth teller then you need to drag the battle kicking and screaming into truth like a BJJ black belt taking the fight to the ground.

    You’re not going to out-manipulate a globe-spanning empire that is backed by billionaires and powerful intelligence agencies. It will not happen. We make it a battle of truth versus truth, or we lose.

    ___________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , throwing some money into my tip jar on  or , purchasing some of my , buying my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • What ‘Democracy’ Is Under Attack? Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    To stop the exacerbation of Trumpism the talking heads are recommending internet censorship, regulations on media, new domestic terror laws, literally anything they can possibly think of except changing the conditions which gave rise to Trumpism.

    ❖

    The most imminent threat to US democracy is not Russia, nor fascist insurrectionists, but the fact that US democracy is entirely fictional.

    Saying US democracy is being threatened is like saying Grinches are a critically endangered species.

    ❖

    The previous president intervened in the primary to appoint his right-hand man as his chosen successor. That successor will be installed in a five-day, star-studded celebration surrounded by a sea of barbed wire and heavily armed soldiers. What “democracy” is under attack, exactly?

    ❖

    No, the Capitol riot was not “karma” for America’s international coups and regime change interventions.

    Karma would be the US actually reaping what it sows.

    Karma would be the US government toppled and replaced with a foreign puppet regime, and millions of Americans killed.

    Karma would be tens of millions of Americans displaced by widespread violence.

    Karma would be the US becoming a failed state where people are again sold as slaves.

    Karma would be nuclear bombs dropped on US cities.

    Karma would be Americans starved to death by crushing sanctions.

    Karma would be America’s forests soaked with Agent Orange.

    Karma would be mass executions of Americans in sports stadiums.

    Karma would be massacres of entire towns: men, women and children.

    Karma would be foreign soldiers raping and killing civilians with impunity.

    Karma would be foreign-backed extremists mutilating Americans to death and publicly displaying their corpses.

    Karma for US interventionism would be for America to collapse and burn in chaos and torture.

    That would be “karma”.

    That would be the chickens coming home to roost.

    I am not saying it would be a good thing if this happened. It most definitely would not.

    I am saying the US must cease brutalizing the world.

    ❖

    We now know for a fact that monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporations can be pressured by the plutocrat-controlled political/media class to silence political factions online. Good thing there’s no way this can possibly go wrong.

    ❖

    When you realize that corporations are America’s real government, the whole “it isn’t censorship if it’s a private company doing it” argument is seen for the joke that it is. It’s also completely specious, because the government is directly involved in the censorship.

    ❖

    Soon social media will just be an app that sends everything you say to the FBI and gives you regular notifications that the government is your friend, and then everyone will finally be happy.

    ❖

    Back before he was silenced Assange tweeted “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

    I think of this quote often.

    ❖

    The mass media have earned every bit of the contempt the public has for them. Every little bit of it.

    ❖

    Rightists suck at conspiracy analysis because their worldview requires an elite cabal planning and orchestrating all evil dynamics, whereas leftists understand that many (though not all) of those dynamics will unfold on their own in a system where human behavior is driven by profit-seeking. In situations where you are ideologically prohibited from blaming the obvious culprit capitalism, you’ll come up with all kinds of other wacky explanations.

    ❖

    The best most reliable way to accurately predict what will happen in a given situation is to ignore whatever laws, trends and dynamics everyone else is pointing at and just assume the most powerful people will find a way to get whatever it is they want somehow. Doesn’t mean elites always win, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should stop fighting. It’s just the most reliable way to accurately guess what will happen in a given situation, if you’re into that sort of thing.

    ❖

    Sectarian feuds in the online left always boil down to “the whole system is rigged against the people” lefties versus “we can work with the oligarchic empire to advance our interests” lefties.

    ❖

    The US empire has two faces: the plastic smiling one based in Hollywood, and the blood-spattered one based in DC, Arlington and Langley. If you live in wealthy western nations you’re presented with the former. If you live in the Middle East or the Global South you get the latter.

    ❖

    One of the weirdest things in my life these days is watching people enthusiastically arguing that they should receive less assistance from their government. Never until I began commenting on US politics was this ever a part of my life. The brainwashing there is out of this world.

    ❖

    If a political party always succeeds at advancing sick agendas and always fails at advancing healthy agendas, it’s because it only exists to advance sick agendas.

    ❖

    Victory for your revolutionary political goals won’t be a victory for the ego. If you are sincere about this, you want your marginalized viewpoint to become mainstream and mundane. You want your insight and understanding to become as common as grass. You can’t be in this for you.

    A lot of revolutionary-minded types get a sense of coolness and specialness from their marginalized ideology. It makes them feel good to be uniquely right about things. But that attitude will actually get in the way if your goals are attained and your views become mainstream.

    If you are sincere about this stuff and not just in it for egoic masturbation (many are), you can’t keep a lot of identity wrapped up in being the underdog, in being fringe and marginalized. Because the ultimate goal is to be the exact opposite.

    _________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , throwing some money into my tip jar on  or , purchasing some of my , buying my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • It’s Spelled ‘Dead Asshole’, Not ‘Philanthropist’: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Point of order regarding Sheldon Adelson: the correct term for someone who spent his whole life being an asshole and then died is “dead asshole”, not “philanthropist”.

    ❖

    The Capitol riot wasn’t the worst thing a US president has done.

    It’s not even the worst thing this current president has done.

    It doesn’t even come near his top ten.

    It’s not even the worst thing he’s done this month.

    This is clear to anyone who thinks non-American lives matter.

    Imagine a world where ordering the butchery of human beings in other countries would elicit the kind of outraged backlash we’re seeing over a riot that was quantifiably far, far less destructive. Imagine a world where the US saw those victims as human beings. It would be good.

    If your response to being told the US empire constantly does far worse things than the Capitol riot is to shriek “STOP MINIMIZING THIS!”, then it is you who is trying to minimize the horrors of US imperialism. Obviously the Capitol riot was bad. Now look at US military slaughter.

    ❖

    I wonder if we’re close to finding out how aggressively a civilization can be propagandized before it snaps?

    ❖

    The time to be critical of new authoritarian escalations is precisely the time that consent is being manufactured for them, not when it’s safe and makes you look cool in front of your friends.

    I see people bleating the “if you’re choosing this time to take a stand on free speech you’re a fash” line a lot, and it’s fallacious because (A) it pretends opponents of internet censorship just started doing it four days ago, and (B) times of intense emotion are when the most dangerous measures are rolled out.

    ❖

    The online left isn’t as worried about creeping internet censorship as it should be because it hasn’t been experiencing anywhere near the degree of censorship it will encounter if it becomes a real threat to power. And, if we’re serious about this, threatening power is the goal.

    “The left is already being censored Caitlin.”

    Not compared to what’s coming if we become a threat to power. Institutional censorship of our political speech is very different than being mass-reported by the KHive for saying mean things to a shitlib. It can get much, much worse.

    ❖

    A sane person standing against the mainstream consensus of a society that is bat shit insane will necessarily frequently look like a “contrarian”.

    ❖

    The Saudi-led mass atrocity in Yemen, the worst atrocity on our planet right now, could not take place without the blessing and support of the US and its allies. Right now the best thing anyone can do to help end it is pressure Biden to immediately honor his promise to do so.

    I will say again that there is no valid reason for Biden not to be grilled about his Yemen campaign promise and how he plans to implement it any time he’s in front of a member of the press. To my knowledge he’s never been asked one question about Yemen since the election.

    ❖

    Yemen is one of those things that gets more and more horrifying the more you look at it, but if you don’t look it just hangs out in the back burner of your consciousness as an ugly but unacknowledged reality like repressed childhood trauma.

    That’s why I’ve been writing about Yemen more and more often over the years. It’s not that it was any less horrifying a few years ago, my consciousness of it just wasn’t there yet. I should’ve been writing about it with extreme urgency this entire time but it wasn’t clearly seen.

    The empire couldn’t function without widespread psychological compartmentalization.

    ❖

    It’s so crazy how Israel’s constant airstrikes on Syria are just background noise that hardly anyone is aware of. Imagine a country in western Europe routinely bombing its neighbor and killing large numbers of people and the public being generally unaware that it’s happening because the press barely reports it.

    ❖

    As a gentle reminder, you can be manipulated, and so can I. We must keep this in our awareness if we want to form a clear picture of what’s going on in our world.

    ❖

    I haven’t done psychedelics in years but whenever I did I had a little ritual of sincerely saying to the substance, “Please show me whatever it is I need to see.” And it always did. Highly recommend.

    ❖

    Just because the system is stacked against you doesn’t mean the universe is. We’re up against the ephemeral agendas of a few mortals whose lives are tiny specks in a yawning infinity. There are mysterious forces at work in our species. Life is not against you. Don’t give up hope.

    __________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , throwing some money into my tip jar on  or , purchasing some of my , buying my new book Poems For Rebels or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Stop Trivializing The Term ‘Coup’: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Stop trivializing the term “coup”. It’s a real thing the US government really inflicts on other countries in a way that actually does topple governments and cause immense destruction. You cannot take over the US government with a small squadron of wingnuts. That’s not a thing.

    A coup attempt doesn’t have to be successful for that term to be legitimate, but it does have to have some possibility of success. Trump has no more likelihood of being in office after January 20th than I do; he’s got nothing resembling the kind of support from the military, political establishment, oligarchs and other backing he’d need to accomplish such a thing.

    I hereby declare the US election invalid and I, Caitlin Johnstone, am the new President of the United States.

    Have I just instituted a “coup”? Or does my complete inability to put such a claim into effect make the use of that term silly?

    And now Trump has conceded. My what a funny looking coup.

    ❖

    It’s very telling how fast the plutocratic media have been to use the word “coup” to describe some idiots interrupting congress for a few hours, since they bend over backwards to avoid using it when their government enacts blatant coups of infinitely greater destructiveness.

    Here are some of the headlines from when the US-backed coup in Bolivia was taking place:

    “Bolivian President Evo Morales steps down following accusations of election fraud” proclaims CNN.

     

    “Bolivia’s Morales resigns amid scathing election report, rising protests” reportsThe Washington Post.

     

    “Bolivian Leader Evo Morales Steps Down” says The New York Times.

     

    “Bolivian President Evo Morales resigns amid fraud poll protests” declares the BBC.

     

    “President of Bolivia steps down amid allegations of election rigging” we are informed by Telegraph.

     

    “Bolivia’s President Morales resigns after backlash to disputed election” says the Sydney Morning Herald.

    In reality Morales was forced from office by the military after winning a legitimate election, which is exactly the thing that a coup is. This has never been anywhere remotely close to a possible outcome for Trump, but since it doesn’t interfere with imperialist agendas they’re allowed to use it.

    Narrative managers have been falling all over themselves to tell us that conspiracy theories on the internet are going to get everyone killed. They want conspiracy theories censored, especially the ones about how the government murders people around the world and lies about it. FYI your government is many orders of magnitude more dangerous, deceitful and deadly than even the craziest conspiracy theories.

    Also, nobody who spent years saying the highest levels of the US government had been taken over by Russia has any business bitching about conspiracy theories.

    ❖

    Modern liberalism is just QAnon for people with diplomas on their walls.

    ❖

    The left is always the real target of pushes for more censorship and surveillance. They’re not worried about rightists, who support most of what the establishment wants and who can be manipulated into compliance with a simple 8chan psyop. They’re worried about the faction that wants to dismantle the oligarchic empire.

    Rightist wingnuts are always used to justify policies that are designed to neuter the left. That’s why any leftist who’s cheered internet censorship for the wingnuts has been applying their own muzzle on behalf of the authoritarians. Many still don’t realize this.

    Sometimes things happen that make people frightened and angry, and there’s a major push (always spearheaded by the plutocratic media) for more authoritarian government control to shut down the bad guys. You can choose to get swept up in that frenzy. Or you can choose not to.

    ❖

    Just so we’re clear, the policing lesson of the Capitol Hill riots was not that cops should have been more brutal with the Trumpers, it was that they should have been much more restrained during the BLM protests but chose not to be. Don’t let them troll you into cheering for police brutality.

    ❖

    None of Trump’s post-election shenanigans rank anywhere near the top ten worst things he’s done while president. Mass media coverage hasn’t reflected this fact because they regard imperialist warmongering as normal presidential stuff and don’t regard its victims as human.

    ❖

    It will never stop being hilarious when Americans rend their garments about the death of a “democracy” that does not exist.

    ❖

    Americans finally discover they can storm the Capitol to demand what they want, and they do it to defend a corrupt plutocrat.

    ❖

    Americans think only about America while their rulers think only about conquering the rest of the world.

    ❖

    What’s it going to take to get American progressives to understand that the Democratic Party is explicitly and deliberately rigged against progress? It’s simply not the tool for advancing progressive agendas. It’s like watching a kid try to open a can of beans using a sneaker.

    ❖

    FYI you don’t actually need to keep begging for the permission of condescending gatekeepers to push progressive agendas; you can just do it. They’re not the left’s supervisors, they’re just people who speak in a forceful and assertive tone. You are the left.

    ❖

    You’re trained to see one mainstream political faction with all its politicians, pundits and rank-and-file members versus the other faction with all its politicians, pundits and rank-and-file members. Really it’s the politicians and pundits of both factions versus everyone else.

    ❖

    While the poor have been inundated with religions glorifying poverty, meekness and obedience, the rich have been circulating their own private doctrines among themselves about why it’s fine for them to have so much while everyone else has so little. They have their own religions.

    ❖

    Feel free to reject anything at all about your society, your culture, or any traditional relic at all. Our species is now staring down the barrel as a result of everything we’ve done up to this point. The old ways have failed. They are demonstrably bad. Try something new.

    Unless we make drastic changes, and make them approximately now, we will likely go extinct due to climate chaos or nuclear war. Everything that brought us to this point has failed as spectacularly as anything can fail. Don’t cling to the old ways. Bring in the unprecedented.

    ❖

    Trust is a very simple thing: you can trust people to act out the behavior patterns they normally act out. Behavior patterns are generally pretty trustworthy. You can trust nurturing people to do nurturing things, and you can trust destructive people to do destructive things. As long as you’re trusting someone to do what they normally do instead of what they don’t normally do, your trust will probably be well-placed.

    ❖

    We’re so far from justice that even the table scraps of “You’re too crazy to extradite” are welcomed. You want justice? Free Assange, shower him with awards and compensation, and lock up everyone who helped persecute him. That would be justice. Then you’d be getting somewhere.

    ❖

    We fight on.

    Sometimes it knocks the wind out of us.

    Sometimes it knocks us down.

    And we lie there and blink a minute.

    Just lie there.

    And then, after a bit, the air begins sucking back into our lungs.

    And the strength returns to our limbs.

    And we get up.

    And we fight on.

    _____________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , throwing some money into my tip jar on  or , purchasing some of my , buying my new book Poems For Rebels or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Never Forget How The MSM Smeared Assange: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The frenetic mass media propaganda campaign against Julian Assange was easily the creepiest and most Orwellian thing I’ve ever witnessed. And now it is silent. It did its job and then disappeared, before the public could really notice what was happening. It’s absolutely stunning.

    You wouldn’t know it now, but between late 2016 and Assange’s arrest social media was full of blue-checkmarked narrative managers falling all over each other to be the first to come up with the day’s hottest smear painting a heroic journalist as a villain. Day after day after day. Smearing Assange was one of the easiest ways for an aspiring journalist to show current and prospective employers that you’re on the side of the empire. He was a soft target you could kick to signal that you’ll say whatever the Pentagon wants so you can climb the media ladder.

    The smear campaign pervaded every political faction in every part of the US-centralized power alliance. Where they couldn’t get away with openly smearing him they circulated rightist psyops about Trump and Assange secretly working together and the extradition actually helping Assange, which was effectively the same as smearing him. The overwhelming majority of mainstream opinions about Assange are the result not of his work or the life he’s lived, but of a concerted propaganda campaign the majority of which took place between late 2016 and Assange’s arrest in April 2019. People just aren’t aware they’ve been propagandized.

    The smear campaign went silent so quickly because it is now impossible to paint yourself as a brave up-punching journalist while smearing someone who is being openly prosecuted for journalism. So they’ve slinked off into the shadows, hoping we’ll forget what they did. Let’s not.

    ❖

    Our society is asking itself a very, very important question of the Assange case. The question we’re asking is this:

    “Should journalists be jailed for exposing US war crimes? Yes or no?”

    Our answer to this question will determine the future of our species.

    Make no mistake, this question is all the Assange case is and has ever been about. Do not let the narrative managers twist it into being about anything other than this, because it isn’t. This is the question.

    Do we want truth, or lies?

    Do we want light, or darkness?

    Do we want freedom, or slavery?

    Do we want the right to know what the powerful are doing, or do we want to give them a private space to abuse us in?

    Should journalists be jailed for exposing US war crimes? Yes or no?

    The empire is trying to claim the right to imprison any journalist anywhere in the world who exposes its malfeasance. Our response to this claim absolutely will determine the fate of our species. We’re choosing whether the bastards get to keep holding the steering wheel or not.

    ❖

    One of the weirdest mainstream political beliefs is that secretive government agencies who did evil things in the past just don’t do evil things anymore. This belief is based on literally nothing. It’s believed because it’s comfortable.

    ❖

    Many, many nations have bad human rights records. When you find your mind focusing particularly on the ones the US empire doesn’t like, it’s because of propaganda.

    ❖

    Western propaganda hasn’t gotten less advanced since the Iraq invasion, it has gotten more advanced. The Russiagate psyop and the smear campaigns against Assange and Corbyn make this abundantly clear. The idea that the lies and propaganda which led to the Iraq invasion were a one-off fluke is itself the product of propaganda. You need to be more critical of western narratives than with Iraq, not less.

    Manipulating public thought at mass scale is a science. Scientific fields don’t magically become less sophisticated over time, they become more sophisticated. Every time they run a new mass-scale manipulation, whether it succeeds or fails, they learn from it. And they evolve.

    ❖

    Psychedelics are beginning to get a fair hearing from science because neoliberalism is making everyone too crazy and depressed to turn the gears of the machine, so the machine is desperately looking for miracle cures to get the slaves functional again. Lucky for us this will work against them; if psychedelics had turned out to be a useful tool of social control they’d have remained legal, and the CIA wouldn’t have abandoned them decades ago.

    ❖

    On January 20th America’s coasts will heave a huge sigh of relief. This sigh will be based entirely on ignorance and narative spin. Nothing will fundamentally change.

    ❖

    People keep predicting coups, mass arrests and unprecedented upheavals in the US government because the mass media is acting very strange, which creates the illusion that the US government itself is acting very strange. Meanwhile the empire marches on completely uninterrupted.

    What people are misperceiving is that it isn’t the US government that’s changing, it’s the international world order. The US is approaching post-primacy and is unleashing tons of propaganda to roll out international agendas to prevent this, hence the bizarre behavior. The information ecosystem looks wild, so America-fixated Americans get the mistaken impression that it’s their government that is behaving wildly. Meanwhile great care is taken to maintain stability in the hub of the global empire, so all these prophecies of upheaval keep shooting blanks.

    In other words it’s not Trump or Biden who’s on the precipice of being unseated by a huge paradigm-shifting upheaval: it’s the US empire itself.

    ❖

    It would be so dumb if we kill ourselves with nuclear war. Imagine after all the other things we’ve been worrying about, we see the mushroom clouds and we’re like “So this is how it ends? With all those weapons we deliberately invented and stockpiled for the explicit purpose of ending it?”

    ❖

    The most powerful new year’s intention is to sincerely want to remove the blocks to your healing. Whether those blocks be mental, emotional, physical or out there in the real world, health is your natural state and you are safe to let go of anything impeding your health.

    ❖

    Humanity will never move into a healthy way of functioning in collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem until we relinquish our fear-based attachment to the status quo that is driving us toward armageddon. As André Gide says, “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

    ______________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , throwing some money into my tip jar on  or , purchasing some of my , buying my new book Poems For Rebels or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Nuclear War, Capitalism, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The life of every terrestrial organism is being threatened with the steadily growing possibility of nuclear war because after the fall of the USSR a few imperialists decided that US unipolar hegemony needs to be maintained at all cost.

    I’m growing a uniquely deep hatred for people who scoff at me for saying that nuclear war is a real risk. There’s no basis whatsoever for the belief that what the US empire is doing with Russia and China is safe. Your source is your own cognitive dissonance with the subject.

    To be clear, the risk is not that anyone will choose to have a nuclear war, it’s that a nuke will be deployed amid heightening tensions as a result of miscommunication or malfunction, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war. The more tense things get, the likelier such an event becomes. This new cold war is happening along two fronts, with a bunch of proxy conflicts complicating things even further. There are so very many small moving parts, and it’s impossible to remain in control of all of them.

    People like to think every nuclear-armed country has one “The Button” with which they can consciously choose to start a nuclear war after careful deliberation, but it doesn’t work that way. There are thousands of people in the world controlling different parts of different nuclear arsenals who could independently initiate a nuclear war. Thousands of “The Buttons”. It only takes one. The arrogance of believing anyone can control such a conflict safely, for years, is astounding.

    ❖

    The “Great Reset” will result in further widening of the wealth gap and more control for unelected oligarchs. Of course it will. Just like all the other steps in capitalism’s inevitable march toward dystopia. This isn’t a deviation, it’s a continuation.

    ❖

    Chortle, chortle, socialism is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy you silly child. Much more realistic to choke our planet to death chasing imaginary currency in an imaginary economy so we can pay to live on the planet where we were born.

    ❖

    “Socialism has never worked,” said the system that created the earth’s sixth mass extinction.

    ❖

    Capitalism is held in place by imagination, compartmentalization, violence, and a huge mountain of survivorship bias.

    ❖

    The unspoken premise of modern capitalism is that the world is about to be saved by union-busting tech billionaires who choose every day not to end world hunger.

    ❖

    Capitalism does not reward innovation in the way our world requires because:

    1. It constricts solutions to only those that can make money. All the crises our species now faces can be solved easily, but if the solution isn’t profitable it’s rejected.
    2. Capital buys up competitors’ solutions to shelve them.
    3. Stress inhibits creative thinking.

    ❖

    Life pro tip: 100 percent of the capitalism cultists who say you “don’t understand economics” are posturing. It’s an empty slogan they’ve been trained to bleat, and if you debate them for a bit you’ll soon find that all they can do is vaguely gesticulate at other people’s ideas which they clearly do not understand. They’re pure bluster.

    ❖

    “I need water.”

    Better go find some then.

    “All the water’s right there. You’re standing on the hose.”

    You’re just jealous of my success.

    “No I’m dying of thirst and you control all the water.”

    Better pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make some water then.

    ❖

    All the chipper articles and news segments you’ve been seeing in the US mass media about “tiny houses” are really just glorifying the re-emergence of shanty towns in America.

    ❖

    Obama gets a lot of criticism for killing Libyans, killing Syrians, killing US citizens, killing all kinds of people all over the world, but he doesn’t get enough recognition for also killing the anti-war movement.

    ❖

    Imperialist warmongering is by far the worst expression of white supremacism in the world, yet liberals and progressives virtually ignore it. We’ve seen millions of establishment-endorsed lynchings of brown-skinned people since the turn of the century, and it’s accepted as normal.

    ❖

    Progressives who say “We have to work within the Democratic Party because the only alternative would be tearing down the entire system” are so close to getting it.

    ❖

    The dumbest thing about the Democratic primaries was watching all the mainstream narrative managers pretending all the shitlib candidates were different from each other. “Ooh, this one has brown skin, but this one speaks better Spanish! Let’s write ten thousand think pieces about these crucial political differences.”

    ❖

    Rank-and-file Democrats have been trained for four years to only care about foreign policy if a president wants to withdraw troops from somewhere that Russia might arguably approve of. Which will work out nicely for the foreign policy agendas of the Biden administration.

    ❖

    Your favorite artist has great content but shit political opinions because they’re very talented but our society is saturated with establishment propaganda. Hope that helps.

    ❖

    People tell me they like what I say but they wish I’d say it more politely. Uhh I’m trying to help topple a psychopathic global empire here. People who are put off by a little crude language aren’t really my target demographic.

    ❖

    The abusers I’ve known have had an interesting feature in common: they always expect, and feel entitled to, a private space to abuse you in. They get outraged and indignant if you tell others about their abuse, acting like you’ve done something deeply immoral. I say it’s interesting because the powerful people who demand secrecy behave the exact same way.

    FYI your abuser is never entitled to a private space in which to inflict abuse, whether they’re a significant other or a globe-spanning empire.

    ______________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.