JOHNSTONE

Smoke and sky spiders fill the air as missiles smash into Gaza and powerful men drive needles into the flesh of young girls. Turns out Chomsky partied with Epstein, so now I have to take up vaping and go fill a shoebox with polaroid photos of dead birds in car parks. I'll pretend I'm doing it ironically so no one mocks my prayer cards for a dying world. Sometimes the Buddha looks like the Buddha. Sometimes he looks like bleached coral reefs, or rapefinger plutocrats with pointy teeth. Sometimes he looks like a woman in her early fifties sobbing snot-nosed and red-faced at the cruelty of it all in pajama bottoms and a Pink Floyd t-shirt. The war drums are getting louder, and the bank boys are getting horny again, and the flesh of the innocent is so soft and so easy to digest, and the darkness hides so much, and the light makes so little difference. But we shine it anyway. We shine it anyway. Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.

The United States is the very last government on earth who has any business engaging in humanitarian interventionism. Literally dead last. Reading by Tim Foley.

I don't know what to say today. We are ruled by abusive monsters. The US is preparing for war with Iran. They're going in for the kill shot on Cuba. The latest batch of Epstein emails looks horrifying. The US is full of protests because ICE keeps killing people. Israel is still massacring civilians in Gaza as Australia prepares to host its president for an extended visit. Reuters has confirmed that Biden officials actively obstructed the circulation of internal USAID reports that Gaza was being turned into a nightmarish hellscape in early 2024. There's so much cruelty. So much abuse. Reading by Tim Foley.

I don't criticize Iran because I do not want to feed into an imperial war propaganda campaign for a horrific agenda that I do not support. I want to focus my criticisms on the power structure under which I actually live, because that is what one does when one is not a groveling bootlicker, and because the power structure under which I live happens to be the most abusive tyrant on the world stage. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's just incredible how quickly and aggressively the US is advancing longstanding agendas of global conquest under the Trump administration. Now they're racing to take out Cuba. Reading by Tim Foley.

It is not okay to be a grown adult in the year 2026 and still believe US regime change interventionism in the middle east will lead to positive outcomes. Reading by Tim Foley.

The justifications for war with Iran keep changing. First it's nukes, then it's conventional missiles, then it's protesters, and now it's back to nukes again. Kinda seems like war with Iran is itself the objective, and they're just making up excuses to get there. Reading by Tim Foley.

We live in a civilization that was built on lies, is made of lies, and is sustained by lies. As soon as the lies stop, the whole thing comes tumbling down. Reading by Tim Foley.

Michael Parenti has passed away after a luminous life advancing powerful ideas and insights about the abusive dynamics of human civilization and how best to address them. He did not die a wealthy man. The mainstream papers did not report on his departure from our world. Only a relatively small percentage of the population is aware he ever lived. But everyone knows who Elon Musk is. Everyone knows who Jeff Bezos is. Who Bill Gates is. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's so disgusting how these freaks are telling us right to our faces "Yeah well you guys don't have any rights, so I'm going to silence you and oppress you and I make no apologies about that." Reading by Tim Foley.

There was a segment in last year's Louis Theroux documentary The Settlers that stuck with me where Israeli settler leader Daniella Weiss refers to Zionism as a "magic system". Reading by Tim Foley.

Israeli president Isaac Herzog is expected to visit Australia at the invitation of the Australian government, with anonymous sources telling the Israeli press that he's scheduled to arrive on February 7, but so far Canberra itself has been very opaque about the time and nature of the visit. We can surmise from this that they're currently trying to come up with a strategy for how to sneak the president into the country without the spectacle of him getting confronted by throngs of anti-genocide protesters. Again: they're trying to sneak the president into the country for a visit to protect him from anti-genocide protesters. Really think about what that means, and what it says about Australia as a country. When you are doing things like this, you're on the wrong side of history. Reading by Tim Foley.

It is still legal to say "Fuck Israel, free Palestine." So we should say it loud and say it often, because we don't know how much longer we'll be allowed to do so without getting thrown into prison. Reading by Tim Foley.

For me the most illuminating insight into what these laws are actually designed to do came up in an ABC interview with Attorney-General Michelle Rowland on Tuesday. Over and over again throughout the interview Rowland was asked by ABC's David Speers to clarify whether the new laws could see activist groups banned for criticizing Israel and opposing its genocidal atrocities in a way that causes Jewish Australians to feel upset feelings, and she refused to rule out the possibility every single time. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's one thing to see a cruel government doing bad things on the other side of the world. It's quite another to be shown in vivid detail that your own society is ruled by monsters, and that those monsters have a vested interest in deceiving you and controlling your words and your actions in order to advance the most depraved agendas you could possibly imagine. Reading by Tim Foley.

I can't get over the fact that people were casting bets on whether the US would bomb Iran the other day. It just says such dark things about the type of civilization we are living in. Reading by Tim Foley.

Speaking together at the Israeli-American Council Summit on Saturday, billionaire Zionist megadonors Miriam Adelson and Haim Saban strongly implied that they are engaged in some extremely shady activities to manipulate the US government in advancement of Israeli interests. Reading by Tim Foley.

I'm all for overthrowing tyrannical power structures, I just think we should start with the worst one. Reading by Tim Foley.

A mentally disabled Australian woman is being prosecuted for antisemitic hate crimes after accidentally pocket-dialing a Jewish nutritionist, resulting in a blank voicemail which caused the nutritionist "immediate fear and nervousness" because she thought some of the background noises in the recording sounded a bit like gunshots. Reading by Tim Foley.

You can always tell how murderous the US empire is being from day to day from the expression on warmongering senator Lindsey Graham's face, and right now he looks like he just found his mother dead in the bathtub. Reading by Tim Foley.

Is there anything more undignified than “leftists” and “anarchists” who cheer on the fall of empire-targeted governments even as the empire moves war machinery into place? Ooh look at me I’m sticking it to the man by supporting the same agendas as the US State Department. I’m being punk rock by regurgitating the same war propaganda talking points as John Bolton. I’m fighting the power by backing the foreign policy objectives of the most powerful empire that has ever existed. Fucking embarrassing, man. Reading by Tim Foley.

Everyone's anti-war until the war propaganda starts. Every normal person will tell you they want peace and abhor mass-scale violence. Then the mass media start doing what they always do and churning out stories about atrocities in an empire-targeted nation, and all of a sudden people find themselves supporting airstrikes on that nation's capital, and believing they came to that position all on their own. This happens because most people are unaware that the western news media do not exist to report the news. They exist to administer propaganda on behalf of the western empire. Reading by Tim Foley.

You've seen this all before. They run the same script over and over again. You know all the beats. The formula never changes. Reading by Tim Foley.

The regime change supporter's favorite trick is to pretend the people in the targeted country are an ideological monolith. All Iranians hate their government, all Venezuelans wanted freedom from Maduro, etc. They do this constantly. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's just been a nonstop onslaught. As soon as they knock out one disobedient government or population, they're on the to next. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's incredible how rapidly the empire has been shoving through longstanding regional domination agendas in the middle east and Latin America since late 2023. Incinerating Gaza. Decapitating Hezbollah. Regime change in Syria. Bombings and regime change ops in Iran. Kidnapping Maduro. Now moving on Cuba. It's just been grab, grab, grab for the last two plus years. Reading by Tim Foley.

At this point it’s probably worth recalling that earlier this month Mike Pompeo tweeted that Mossad agents were intimately involved in the unrest, saying, “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.” Reading by Tim Foley.

The only unlocked door out of this dystopian nightmare is the people using the power of their numbers to force real change. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of the tyrants who are inflicting these abuses upon our world, and they know it, and they fear us. Reading by Tim Foley.

Pretty sure what's tyrannical is invading a country, murdering scores of people, and abducting its leader in order to steal control of its resources. Reading by Tim Foley.

After spending days enthusiastically applauding Trump's freakish act of imperialist aggression to oust the president of Venezuela on the grounds that he is a murderous tyrant, Republicans in the United States are falling all over themselves to justify the cold-blooded murder of a mother of three by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. Reading by Tim Foley.

The empire needs its skillful orators and apologists like Obama, but it also needs its iron-fisted overt tyrants like Trump. Reading by Tim Foley.

After all those months of babbling about fentanyl and "narcoterrorism" and freedom and democracy, the Trump administration has come right out and admitted that its regime change interventionism in Venezuela has always been a good old-fashioned oil grab. Reading by Tim Foley.

Their research has concluded that convincing westerners to hate Muslims is easier than convincing them to love Israel. Reading by Tim Foley.

Doctors and aid workers largely became the de facto journalists on the ground in Gaza when Israel banned international news media and began systematically assassinating Gaza-based Palestinian journalists. So Israel wants to get rid of those de facto reporters to hide its crimes. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

My name appears at the top of a list in a document the Israeli government released earlier this month in order to draw false associations between the Bondi Beach shooting and online criticism of Israel and its atrocities. Reading by Tim Foley.

If they weren't concern-trolling about "globalize the intifada" they'd make up some other excuse to express their concern, and they know it. Their objection is to criticism of Israel, not to the way those criticisms are being expressed. Reading by Tim Foley.

But of course it would be antisemitic to suggest that there's anything strange about the US president meeting with the Israeli prime minister more frequently than with any other foreign leader on the planet. Reading by Tim Foley.

Stop picking on poor little Israel. It's just sitting there minding its own business trying to do a little genocide in peace while aggressively lobbying your government to crush your freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and you're OBSESSING about it for NO REASON. Reading by Tim Foley.

The dumbest thing we are being asked to believe today is that pro-Palestinian protests caused the Bondi shooting. It's self-evidently moronic. No one sincerely believes it. They're just pretending to believe it to get protests banned and criticism of Israel outlawed. Reading by Tim Foley.

If the right to free speech does not include the right to oppose an active genocide using strong and unmitigated language, then there is no freedom of speech. Reading by Tim Foley.

You are allowed to subvert and undermine Israel's interests, because Israel is trying to subvert and undermine your rights. You are allowed to interfere in Israel's affairs, because Israel is interfering in your country's affairs. As Israel tries to exert more and more influence over western society and pushes western governments to crush our freedom of speech and assembly, we should be doing everything we can to make sure that western society turns against Israel, and that western governments alienate this freakish apartheid state on the world stage. And we should feel perfectly entitled in doing so, because Israel certainly feels comfortable coming after us and our rights. Reading by Tim Foley.

Not just hate speech against Jews. Criticism of a foreign state. They’re coming right out and saying it. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's so American how the Sackler family caused a national opioid crisis which ultimately led to the fentanyl crisis, and instead of imprisoning them the US eventually went "Hang on, we can use this as an excuse to start a war with a country that doesn't even produce fentanyl." Reading by Tim Foley.

Of course, these outlets and individuals do not actually care about the phrase “globalize the intifada”. If pro-Palestine activists had never chanted that slogan, pro-Israel spinmeisters would be focusing on a different line today. They are not trying to stop chants which they perceive as dangerous, they are trying to stomp out criticism of Israel’s genocidal atrocities. Reading by Tim Foley.

Palestinians don't love their families any less than Australians do. Australian lives aren't any more significant or valuable than Palestinian lives. There is no valid reason for the world to have focused any less on the 15 people who were killed in Gaza on March 16 than on the 15 people who were murdered on Bondi Beach. But it did. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's so gross watching the tail-wagging excitement of Israel supporters in response to this shooting. They're so happy they have another rhetorical weapon with which to bludgeon pro-Palestine voices into silence. They can barely contain their glee. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US pirating a Cuba-bound oil tanker from Venezuela illustrates how the empire is hurrying to shore up control over Latin America in the same way the US and Israel are quickly shoring up control over the middle east. Reading by Tim Foley.

Just as the United States hits its first official trillion-dollar annual military budget, the New York Times editorial board has published an article which argues that the US is going to need to increase military funding to prepare for a major war with China. Reading by Tim Foley.

We definitely don't need to wait until the bastards have been defeated and we're feeling safe and secure in order to begin our healing journey. Reading by Tim Foley.