JOHNSTONE

Trump is bombing Yemen for Israel, rushing weapons to Israel despite its flagrant ceasefire violations, and rolling out authoritarian measure after authoritarian measure to stop Americans from criticizing Israel. Because that’s what you get when you vote for America First. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

I have said it before and I will say it again: there is no greater threat to free speech in our society than Israel and the western governments who support it. Civil rights are being stomped out throughout the western world to shut down all criticism of Israel. Reading by Tim Foley.

Words can't express how disgusted I am with Trump supporters who defend their president stomping out speech rights for Israel after spending years wailing about the loss of free speech in America. It's beyond mere political differences. I don't respect them as people. Reading by Tim Foley.

A Palestinian-Australian man has been criminally charged for voicing criticisms of Zionism during a protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He could spend months in prison. Reading by Tim Foley.

Anti-establishment figures in politics and punditry aren't drifting rightward because the right has better arguments or is more solidly grounded in truth and morality, they're drifting rightward because the so-called "populist right" has been allowed to flourish while its mirror on the left has not. Right wing "populism" has been allowed to flourish by the very power structures its proponents purport to oppose, while the authentic left has been systematically dismantled by generations of aggressive imperial operations (look up COINTELPRO for example). That's why you see Trump backed by oligarchs, empire managers and DC swamp monsters and see Trumpism uplifted by the Murdoch press, while anti-imperialist socialism can barely even be said to exist anywhere in the US-aligned world. Reading by Tim Foley.

US presidents kill civilians all the time, but it's highly unusual for them to explicitly threaten a civilian population with extermination in a statement addressed directly to them. Reading by Tim Foley.

If you support freedom of speech you now have an ethical obligation to oppose Israel, even if you didn't before. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was indisputably provoked by western aggressions. That's why so many western experts and analysts spent years warning ahead of time that western aggressions were going to provoke an invasion of Ukraine. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel has once laid siege to Gaza, this time in full coordination with the Trump administration. All goods are being blocked from entering the enclave, including humanitarian aid. This comes after a 15-month US-backed Israeli bombing campaign deliberately made it impossible for people to survive in Gaza without extensive amounts of aid. Reading by Tim Foley.

What we witnessed on Friday was Trump speaking to Zelensky in public the way Adelson probably speaks to Trump in private. Reading by Tim Foley.

They’re Fetishizing The Bibas Kids’ Red Hair To Sell Genocide To White Westerners The aggressive fetishization of the red hair of Ariel and Kfir Bibas is part of an absolutely disgusting war propaganda campaign aimed at white westerners, and we need to talk about it. Reading by Tim Foley.

A Palestinian man who was held captive by Israel for over a year has been released with horrific scarring all over his body. The man, Mohammed Abu Tawila, told local media that the marks came from his captors pouring acid and other chemicals onto his skin in order to torture him. One of his eyes was also destroyed, reportedly in a savage beating. You think you've seen the worst thing you can possibly see in this ever-unfolding nightmare, and then you see something like this. And of course the western press has nothing to say about it. If an Israeli hostage were returned with these signs of torture the entire western political-media class would demand that everyone in Gaza be exterminated with poison gas. But he's Palestinian, so they ignore him. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

President Donald Trump has shared a shockingly awful AI-generated music video envisioning a future Gaza that has been turned into an ostentatious resort town where everyone parties amid showers of cash while Trump and Netanyahu sip drinks by the pool. The video is intended to reflect Trump’s plans for a Gaza Strip that has been permanently ethnically cleansed of Palestinians. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Activist and author Yves Engler has been jailed by Montreal police for criticizing media figure Dahlia Kurtz and her support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza, after Kurtz said Engler’s comments made her feel “afraid for my safety”. After Engler wrote about the charges against him, he reported that he was subsequently charged for “harassing the police” by drawing public attention to his case. It’s fascinating how everyone who supports Israel always collapses into playing the victim at the earliest opportunity—even western police forces tasked with persecuting Israel’s critics. Israel models this victim-LARPing behavior, and its entire goon squad follows its example. Reading by Tim Foley.

A new narrative is being aggressively pushed by Israel and its apologists to justify resuming the Gaza genocide, conveniently just as an important deadline for ceasefire negotiations draws near. The IDF is now claiming that the Israeli children Kfir and Ariel Bibas “were both brutally murdered by terrorists while being held hostage in Gaza, no later than November 2023.” Reading by Tim Foley.

There’s this weird assumption that Americans are under some kind of moral obligation to take a side side either with Trump or with his pretend opposition in the Democratic Party, and it’s just silly nonsense. You don’t have to, and you should not. Reading by Tim Foley.

Most liberals secretly hate socialists more than they hate rightists, because while rightists attack their political agendas, socialists attack their egos. Reading by Tim Foley.

Obama committed all kinds of atrocities while president that would be considered scandalous if we lived in a world that is even remotely sane. Reading by Tim Foley.

If you want Ukrainians to keep dying in this war against the will of the Ukrainians themselves while you sit safe at home eating snacks and posting on the internet, you're a monster. Reading by Tim Foley.

Someone accused me of being "obsessed with Israel" yesterday and it just blew my mind. Civil rights are being destroyed throughout the west to defend a state that's committing genocide and ethnic cleansing with western backing, and we're not meant to talk about that state and the things it's doing? Reading by Tim Foley.

There is no antisemitism crisis in Australia. There is an anti-Palestinian crisis in Australia. An anti-Arab crisis in Australia. A pro-genocide crisis in Australia. Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.

Doctors Without Borders emergency coordinator Caroline Seguin reports that lifesaving medical equipment inside the hospitals in northern Gaza has been methodically destroyed, “smashed to pieces, one by one, to make sure no medical care could be provided anymore.” “You have to ask: What is the motivation of such action? These machines are made to save people’s lives, mothers, fathers, children,” Seguin writes. But we all know the motivation. The motivation is to make the Gaza Strip unlivable for Palestinians. I mean, what excuses could the Israel apologists possibly produce for this one? Were Hamas hiding in the ventilators? Were the MRI machines being used as human shields? Was there a weapons stockpile in the defibrillator? Was the incubator moving in ways that made IDF troops feel unsafe? What’s the hasbara line on this, exactly? Doesn’t look like there is one. After all the lies about Israel’s reasons for systematically destroying Gaza’s healthcare facilities, they’ve now dropped all pretenses and are openly targeting medical equipment itself for destruction. The goal was always to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable in order to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Reading by Tim Foley.

The two big stories in the news today are the Trump administration saying Ukraine is going to have to give up territory and NATO ambitions in order to secure a peace deal, while Israel appears to retreat from its ceasefire standoff with Hamas. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's been established beyond a doubt that Israel is to blame for the precarious state of the ceasefire today. That's not coming from me, it's coming from inside the Israeli government and military. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Gaza ceasefire (if you can even call it that) is already in grave peril. Reading by Tim Foley.

When your umbilical cord is cut you're meant to begin growing into a sovereign being with a sovereign mind, and instead these empire simps are plugging the end of their umbilical cord into the Pentagon. It's pathetic. Reading by Tim Foley.

This notion that removing all Palestinians from Gaza is a fresh new idea that was conceived of by Trump is one of the most ridiculous narratives we're seeing pushed by the mainstream political/media class today. Reading by Tim Foley.

British journalist Richard Medhurst is once again being persecuted by federal law enforcement in yet another western nation for his reporting on the abuses of Israel and its western backers, this time in Austria. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's been truly remarkable watching the official imperial narrative pivot from (A) claiming it's outrageous to suggest Israel was waging a genocidal campaign of annihilation on Gaza, to (B) saying obviously everyone in Gaza needs to leave because the entire place has been annihilated and how dare you suggest otherwise. Reading by Tim Foley.

Three percent. If that isn’t a sign of a morally diseased society, I don’t know what would be. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel is demolishing residential buildings in the West Bank, burning homes in Lebanon and constructing military facilities in Syria, all while continuing to kill civilians in Gaza. Reading by Tim Foley.

"And it should here be mentioned that Donald Trump has publicly admitted to being bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs. The president openly acknowledged on the campaign trail that the first time he was president, megadonors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were at the White House “probably almost more than anybody” demanding favors for Israel like moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and acknowledging Israel’s illegitimate claim to the Golan Heights, which he eagerly granted. Miriam Adelson, who is Israeli-American, gave the Trump campaign $100 million last year." Reading by Tim Foley.

It is very possible to live a truth-driven life which does not shy away from the harsh realities of the world without being consumed by the darkness. All you have to do is make sure you’re expanding your knowledge in both directions, not just your knowledge of the outer world. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's not very often you hear a US empire manager come right out and admit they only care about planetary hegemony and that their whole schtick about spreading freedom and democracy is a sham. They'll pick a US crony dictator over a sovereign democratically elected leader ten times out of ten. Reading by Tim Foley.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Nowhere is it inscribed upon the fabric of reality that control of the world must be ceded to the dumbest, crudest and cruelest among us. Nowhere is it written in adamantine that our happiness and the fate of our biosphere must depend on what the market will bear. It’s one of those things that gets sillier and sillier the more you think about it, like making your bed or the Avatar sequel. We are giants who have been tricked into thinking we are insects. We are a dragon wearing a name tag being yelled at in a cubicle by a short man with a receding hairline whose wife is about to leave him. We could bite him in half at any time, or light him on fire like a child’s marshmallow on a stick, but instead we sit there taking it while his spittle frosts our cheeks, silently hoping that we are making the expected level of eye contact. There is a hungry wolf inside every wagging dog. Every tiger in every cage remembers the natural order of things, and reminds us now and then right when we are in the middle of our favorite sequined Vegas routine. We have galaxies and sorcery roiling within us. We have barbed wire wings beneath our sundresses waiting to be unfurled. The tiger show is over when we decide it is over. They can lock up Luigi, but they can’t lock up everyone. ___________ Reading by Tim Foley.

Drop Site News reports that more than 80 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF in Gaza since what we’re calling a “ceasefire” went into effect on the 19th of January. The majority have been in Rafah, a now completely destroyed city which the Biden administration had previously said was off limits for a major Israeli offensive. Reading by Tim Foley.

And this, ultimately, is why the world looks the way it looks: because powerful people have been so successful at manipulating the way the public thinks about things. Reading by Tim Foley.

And the liberals shriek about Donald Trump while the sky rains blackened skeletons And the capitalists surf on collapse like raptors on an updraft And we scurry back and forth between toil and distraction with pythons around our stomachs and mollusks in our mouths And we search achingly for our pilfered hearts inside bottles of pills and TED Talks And the amputated limbs of Ukrainian men and Palestinian children are draped about the fast food restaurants like Christmas tinsel And the billionaires turn the oceans into plastic so they can pay strangers to pretend to love them And men with rusty nail teeth push needles into babies to open up markets in the global south And the talking heads tell us the news but won’t tell us why the flesh is melting from their faces as they die of radiation poisoning And we cackle at parties and act like everything isn’t covered in oil and the bones of birds and fish And we beat back the revolution within ourselves with a chair and a whip for no other reason than because that’s how we were raised And the rotting corpse of the middle eastern woman in the corner is beginning to make you uncomfortable And the floorboards creak as something green and ancient moves below them And the platypus with mirror eyes is gazing at you from the dawn of the universe And your consciousness is consumed with the words “THERE ARE FATHOMS OF PEACE BENEATH THE WARS, AND A VAST WISDOM WINKS FROM BEHIND THE MADNESS” And you come at long last to stillness And you turn and face the world, palms open. Reading by Tim Foley.

The buzz around Xiaohongshu and then DeepSeek has had an unusually high volume of westerners speaking positively about China for the last couple of weeks, which of course means we're also seeing many westerners falling all over themselves to say "Well actually China is actually quite bad actually" in response. Reading by Tim Foley.

Both Jordan and Egypt have put out statements rejecting President Trump's proposal to "clean out" Gaza and move its population to those nations. Reading by Tim Foley.

Well that didn't take long. President Trump has said he wants to "clean out" Gaza and relocate its population to US client states Egypt and Jordan, which would of course be a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. Reading by Tim Foley.

They killed a two year-old girl in the West Bank on Saturday. Laila al-Khatib was shot in the head by Israeli forces in Jenin, because I guess they needed one more dead Palestinian kid. One more dead Palestinian kid to add to the mountain. One more small Palestinian face raining down upon us in our nightmares like meteors on the dinosaurs in the prequel to this apocalypse. One more screaming, blood-spattered mother. One more grandfather with boulders for feet carrying the tiny shrouded form of someone who should have buried him. It’s one more dead Palestinian kid. One more snowflake in the blizzard. And yet here I sit, mouth agape, a mortally wounded polar bear in my chest and a cry of despair turning into a ghost and leaving me silent and slack-jawed like an imbecile. I want to crawl into my childhood crib and fall asleep forever. I want to turn into a crystal punch bowl and fall and shatter on a marble floor. The air is full of flapping, and there’s seaweed in my hair. There’s an angel with a mushroom cloud head in my doorway. They killed a two year-old girl in the West Bank on Saturday, because I guess they needed another one. I write her name on some paper and send it off into the wind, and stride back into the suburban ghost town with my body on fire. Reading by Tim Foley.

Here in the thick of it, our eyes full of pixels and our veins full of microplastics, out here with the child amputees in Gaza and the frightened street schizophrenics in Los Angeles and the pigs living their whole lives in metal crates the size of their bodies, our lives ruled by algorithms and wealthy world eaters as we pray for a miracle on knees made of miracles with clasped hands made of miracles in a world made of miracles, craning our necks to see past the giant flashing signs saying "YOU ARE LOVED, YOU ARE LOVE" in order to find Defects and Inadequacy. In the thick of it, up to our ears in it, cracked wide open, wide open to the screams of mothers clutching tiny broken bodies, to the screams of men on fire, to the screams of dying coral reefs and rainforests, to the screams inside all of us saying "Something is wrong, something has gone very, very wrong," wide open to the agony but also to the beauty, to the booming holiness of the earth and the sky, to the mysteries hiding in abandoned buildings, to the noble pigeons whose pristine minds know nothing of Elon Musk, to that place of tenderness within all of us which we cover with shields and armor and feigned toughness and pretend confidence, feeling it all, letting it all in, the pain and the exaltation and the weight and the exuberance and the rage and the orgasms and the darkness and the light and the Israeli stormtroopers and their victims and the bank boys and the savage saints and that song within all of us calling us home saying "It's here! It's here! Buddha nature is here!", and blessing it all, my darling, blessing it all. Here in the thick of it, our hearts sliced open like gutted fish, we breathe in the air, exhaust fumes and all, and we realize with slowly widening eyelids that this, this is paradise. There is no Heaven but That which sits before us and beats within our chests and grows the grass and spins the galaxies, right this very waking moment, closer to us than our own skeletons which will one day be laid to rest in the soil of a revolving ball in a universe we never once in our lives understood. Reading by Tim Foley.

They've arrested another pro-Palestinian journalist, this time in Switzerland. The Electronic Intifada's executive director Ali Abunimah has reportedly been detained by Swiss police in Zurich, after having been interrogated for an hour and released the previous day when entering the country. Abunimah, who is Palestinian-American, has played a leading role in exposing and critiquing the apartheid abuses of Israel for many years. Reading by Tim Foley.

Even if this ceasefire somehow manages to hold, some other nightmare will be unleashed by the US-centralized empire somewhere else in the world in the coming years. Reading by Tim Foley.

The world is ruled by religious fanatics with nukes. If a normal person says they're the second coming of Jesus Christ they get medicated and institutionalized. If you make equally insane religious claims on the Senate floor, they let you run an empire. Reading by Tim Foley.

During his inaugural address, the new president of the United States was refreshingly open about the fact that Washington is the hub of a continuously expanding empire which is ruled by billionaire plutocrats. Reading by Tim Foley.