JOHNSTONE

The blue whales have stopped singing because the krill are vanishing because the oceans are warming because we are ruled by long-toothed liars whose insides are full of dead leaves. The great whales have gone silent and my bird has gone blind and there are chatbots in the basement and corpses in the corn. Under the overpass it is dry and still. You would never know that everything is dying. You should come and visit me. Meet me over there under the sepia streetlights with the strangleporn perverts and fentanyl fallen, all the stillborn scar tissue extractions from the wreckage of a banished womb, the NAFTA-noosed factory towns full of deserted buildings and the window-snarling meth towns full of deserted people, where the cries of orphaned Palestinians mingle with the cries of the last baby orangutan ever born in the wild. Meet me under the flickering lights. Bring me some smokes and a sad luck story and let's stay up late by the freeway watching the traffic get sparse. Show me the spots on your skin where life has kicked you and I will kiss them and give you a flower. The leviathans have gone quiet and the turbines are getting loud, and everything has become so strange. So sit with me on this curb under my burlap wing and let's laugh and heal and mark beauty until sunrise. Reading by Tim Foley.

Trump campaigned on being a president of peace and continues to stake his personal reputation on big talk about peacemaking, but in terms of concrete action he's just as much of a warmonger as the psychopaths who came before him. Reading by Tim Foley.

If Maduro really was a monstrous tyrannical dictator the US would be selling him F-35s. Reading by Tim Foley.

Gonna follow the dinosaurs out the door because it was too uncomfortable and confrontational to tell a few billionaires and empire managers to fuck off. Reading by Tim Foley.

One thing I try not to think about very often is how many reports we've been seeing about Israeli prison guards training dogs to rape Palestinian captives in torture camps like Sde Teiman. Reading by Tim Foley.

Whenever I see the US empire saying they plan to remove the latest Official Bad Guy from power in order to liberate a nation from tyranny, I always want to ask, what is tyranny? Is it tyranny to constantly topple foreign governments by force if their leaders disobey you? Is it tyranny to circle the planet with hundreds of military bases in order to dominate all of humanity? Is it tyranny to continuously be inflicting mass military slaughter, backing genocides, staging foreign coups, fomenting unrest and uprisings in foreign nations, meddling in foreign elections, funding proxy conflicts, imposing blockades and starvation sanctions on civilian populations, and engaging in nuclear brinkmanship in order to rule the world? Is it tyranny to treat the entire global south as your personal piggy bank from which to extract limitless labor and resources and murder anyone who tries to inhibit these practices through any movement toward national sovereignty? Reading by Tim Foley.

The most common misconception about the free press of the western world is that it exists. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's just so insane how this doesn't sit front and center in our attention all the time. There are people dying of starvation, exposure and preventable illnesses every single day for no good reason. Humanity became more than capable of ensuring that this never happened to anyone ever again, and just rode right past that stunning moment in history without even glancing up from its smartphone. Reading by Tim Foley.

US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous, and is always justified based on lies. This would be true even if Venezuela really was a major drug trafficking threat and even if Maduro really was the world's most evil dictator, neither of which are the case. Only idiots and sociopaths are clapping along with the war drums. Reading by Tim Foley.

We're on a trajectory where soon all our information will be stored and analyzed by artificial intelligence controlled by governments and billionaire megacorporations who can then use that information to surveil, manipulate and oppress us. Reading by Tim Foley.

There are always things you can do to fight the bastards, and there are always things you can do to improve your own life. Reading by Tim Foley.

It was a surprisingly exhilarating adventure packing up poster books and mailing them off to my readers. This was my first time ever physically interfacing with my audience in large numbers to any extent, and it was so beautiful going through everyone's names and addresses and getting to send them all physical things that I could put my love into. Reading by Tim Foley.

AI products which deceive people should be illegal in the same way fraud is illegal. Reading by Tim Foley.

The western press see the killing of Palestinians as such a baseline norm that Israel can massacre dozens of people in Gaza and they'll go, "Gosh I sure hope this doesn't lead to any violations of the ceasefire!" Reading by Tim Foley.

Drop Site News reports that the IDF quietly moved part of the “yellow line” which divides Gaza 300 meters forward, and then started shelling Palestinians for being on the “wrong side” of the line. They just keep finding new ways to carve off more pieces of Gaza and murder more Palestinians. Reading by Tim Foley.

AI isn't going to save us. Tech innovation isn't going to save us. Your favorite politician isn't going to save us. The Epstein files aren't going to save us. China isn't going to save us. The aliens aren't going to save us. No one is coming to save us. There is no deus ex machina resolution to the plotline of the human story. We're going to have to save ourselves. Reading by Tim Foley.

No no everything's fine. It's perfectly normal for people to have 80 hour work weeks while billionaires transform into trillionaires and tech plutocrats feed all our drinking water to AI servers as the planet dies. This is the only system that could possibly work. Reading by Tim Foley.

Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made some very revealing remarks during an appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly on Sunday, expressing frustration with the way younger Jews are dismissing pro-Israel arguments because of the carnage they've seen in Gaza. Tim Foley.

The dolphins are getting Alzheimer's from algae blooms caused by warming waters and toxic runoff and you could see the bloodstains in Sudan from space. The cobalt is mined by children and the music is made by robots and the grownups are wondering where the fireflies went. It is an elephant with an eyepatch and a prosthetic leg. It's a freshly emptied bed in the nursing home. A hand offers you pills to numb the dissonance, but you swat it away and howl naked in the thorns. Somewhere there's an ibis on a piano in a junkyard in the rain. Somewhere else there's a small boy who has just learned the word "treasure". "Look! Buried treasure!" he tells his dad. "No. That's just glass worn smooth by the sea." "Is that treasure?" "No, that's just a shiny candy wrapper shimmering in the sun." "Ooh! THIS is treasure!" "No that's garbage. Put it down." And the boy's vision changes and he no longer sees the treasure in things. He runs to join his dad and they walk together down the shore through a dying world of fading wonder full of worthless beach trash. "He is wrong," you whisper as the blood leaves your body. "There is treasure everywhere." Reading by Tim Foley.

Saying “If those low-wage workers want better wages they should stop being low-wage workers” is telling a man to stop drowning while you are holding him underwater by standing on his head. Reading by Tim Foley

I keep thinking about the interaction I had with a guy who angrily told me that "AI minds are actually minds" and relationships with them "can absolutely be real relationships," saying that I "need to start accepting that this is a new class of being and they are intelligent and do have thoughts of their own." Reading by Tim Foley.

You fight them because what the hell else are you going to do? Even if the treads of the machine are going to roll over us all in the end, at least you’ll go down knowing you left it all in the ring. Reading by Tim Foley.

Just as things cool down a bit in the middle east, the US has relocated the USS Gerald Ford from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean while the Trump administration discusses plans to bomb Venezuela. Reading by Tim Foley.

Actor Calum Worthy has gone viral for posting an ad on Twitter for the 2wai app he co-founded which promises users the ability upload footage of a loved one which will be converted to an AI avatar that they can continue having a relationship with, years after their loved one has died. Reading by Tim Foley.

The way the press have been covering Jeffrey Epstein's ties to Trump while completely ignoring far more significant revelations of Epstein's ties to Israeli intelligence is such a perfect example of how western media ignore anything that doesn't fit neatly into the two-party worldview. Reading by Tim Foley.

The difference between people who supported the British Empire and people who support the US empire is that those who supported the British Empire knew they were supporting an empire. Reading by Tim Foley.

One of the craziest things happening right now is how there's been report after report confirming that Jeffrey Epstein really was an Israeli intelligence operative, based on publicly available documents, and yet it's had no measurable impact on mainstream media or politics. Reading by Tim Foley.

This is all the ruling class has to offer you. Fake love. Fake connection. Worthless technological parlor tricks at the expense of our dying biosphere. Reading by Tim Foley. Get my new book: https://caitlin-johnstone.myshopify.com/products/faces-of-the-empire-the-battle-for-humanitys-soul

It's interesting how much the IDF's constant ceasefire violations in Gaza and Lebanon line up with the way people familiar with Israeli culture say Israelis like to test everyone's boundaries to find out exactly how much they can get away with. Reading by Tim Foley.

Secretary of War™ Pete Hegseth said during a speech on Friday that the US is at "a 1939 moment" of "mounting urgency" in which "enemies gather, threats grow," adding, "We are not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing." Reading by Tim Foley.

Just today I saw two viral tweets that had received Community Notes from Twitter users warning that the posts featured AI-generated videos. Both were shared by right wing accounts with large followings, and both were used to spread Islamophobia. Reading by Tim Foley.

Our rulers want us to be stupid, misinformed, distracted, sick, struggling and suffering, because if we all had enough time, information and mental acuity to form an understanding what’s going on in our world, things would get mighty guillotiney real quick. They have a vested existential interest in keeping us all in a mental fog of propaganda, diversion, ignorance, illiteracy, and psychological dysfunction. Reading by Tim Foley.

It is easy to miss the cloud reflections in the puddles when the drones are perching on the telephone wires and boats are exploding off the coast of Venezuela. It's easy not to notice the flirtatiousness of the wind when there is black smoke over Palestine and everything's coated in oil. It's easy to overlook the electricality in our bodies when the billionaires and bank boys are trying to replace our minds with chatbots. Don't let them trick you into forgetting the moon, or the dragon eggs incubating in your ribcage. Don't let them trick you into exchanging your heartbeat for an algorithm and a memecoin. There are still birds in the skies of this world. There are accordion angels playing in the ruins. Though at times it may feel like a giraffe bleeding to death in an abandoned Presbyterian church in a forgotten factory town with faded billboards and faded eyes, beneath the click clack marching of the robot dogs, there is still birdsong. There is still birdsong. Reading by Tim Foley.

They're using bureaucratic red tape and arbitrary restrictions to put as much inertia on the effort to rush aid into Gaza as possible. Reading by Tim Foley.

Dick Cheney died far too old and far too free. The fact that such monsters get to pass away in their eighties surrounded by loved ones instead of alone in a cage is an indictment of our entire civilization. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israeli settlers were filmed torturing lambs which belonged to Palestinians in the West Bank. Gouged their eyes out. Smashed them with cinder blocks. Beat them to death in front of their mothers. Lambs. Reading by Tim Foley.

Massacre fetishist Lindsey Graham said "Trump is my favorite president" because "we're killing all the right people and we're cutting your taxes" during a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit on Friday. "We've run out of bombs; we didn't run out of bombs in World War II," the senator said. Reading by Tim Foley.

If the western press had not been aggressively protecting Israel and its interests this whole time, all their reporting on Gaza over the last two years would have looked very much like the reporting we're seeing on the genocide in Sudan. Reading by Tim Foley.

Generative AI is just high-tech brainwashing. It's the next level of propaganda indoctrination. It is there to turn our brains into useless sludge which cannot function without technological crutches controlled by the imperial plutocrats. Reading by Tim Foley.

What percentage of Americans even realize that Trump has bombed Somalia nearly a hundred times this year? I doubt it's even one percent. The mainstream press barely mention it. Americans have hardly any idea who their own country is bombing. Reading by Tim Foley. Thanks for listening! Subscribe to my Substack at caitlinjohnst.one for email updates on all my new stuff.

Do you notice how nobody's losing their jobs or getting deported for criticizing the genocidal atrocities in Sudan? Reading by Tim Foley.

The US can make threats, impose sanctions and amass war machinery, but you don't truly know they're serious about attacking a country until they start churning out Pentagon propaganda in the mainstream press. Reading by Tim Foley.

You think Hamas killed Israelis because they're a bunch of monsters who hate Jews? Of course you do, you're twelve. You think Trump is trying to get rid of Maduro because Maduro is an evil dictator who wants to poison Americans with fentanyl? Hell yeah homie, you're twelve. You think Putin invaded Ukraine because he hates freedom and democracy and wants to conquer the world? Bless your heart my twelve year-old buddy. You think the US and Israel have been attacking and eliminating rivals in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Palestine in order to fight terrorism, stop tyranny, and protect the world from nuclear weapons? Yeah, that checks out, you're twelve. The mainstream western worldview is like a children's cartoon, with the Bad Guys doing Bad Things simply because they are Bad, and the Good Guys striving heroically to stop them. It sounds like a shitty PG-13 summer blockbuster starring The Rock, but it's the consensus worldview of serious professional pundits and analysts who share this perspective on mainstream platforms with serious expressions on their faces, and anyone who calls any part of it into question is dismissed as an extremist or a deranged crackpot. Because everyone is twelve now. Reading by Tim Foley.

People are getting dumber, sicker, lonelier, and more and more miserable. And the profit-driven systems we live under have no answers, besides throwing increasingly shitbrained technology at us so we can distract ourselves from how fucked up everything has gotten. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley. As usual, anyone who wants to set these words to music is free to do so.

The empire we live under is everything we're trained to fear. Our own rulers are the murderers. Our own rulers are the terrorists. Our own rulers are the tyrants. Our own rulers are the problem. Reading by Tim Foley.

While I was working on this painting of US oligarch Jeff Bezos I kept thinking about a speech he gave in 2019 where he laid out his nightmarish vision for the future of the human species. Bezos described a future where the overwhelming majority of humans are shipped off to space to live their lives inside “O’Neill colonies” — giant cylinders which rotate to simulate Earth’s gravity. Only a privileged few would get to remain on humanity’s home world, where the ecosystem would be able to repair and thrive now that it’s not being overburdened by more humans than it can handle. One doesn’t have to stretch the imagination to guess which side of the equation Bezos envisions himself and his family winding up on in this scenario. Press enter or click to view image in full size As I was painting I kept thinking about how horrific it would be if Bezos’ plan for humanity was ever put into place, because you know hardly anyone would leave this planet voluntarily. Billions of people would be forced onto space ships bound for these giant spinning space stations, their hearts breaking at the unimaginable loss of their indigenous home world. It would be like a planet-wide Nakba. A Trail of Tears for our entire species. Press enter or click to view image in full size The freaks who rule our world do not have a healthy vision for humanity’s future. Their best ideas are a normal person’s worst nightmare. Jeff Bezos envisions ecocidal capitalism being allowed to tick along completely unrestricted and unhindered, with humanity rescuing itself from disaster at the last minute by shipping most of itself off planet to live inside giant Amazon space dildos. That’s his best and brightest plan. Press enter or click to view image in full size Our rulers are not good people. They are not wise. They are not compassionate. They aren’t even particularly intelligent. They just happen to be good at winning the capitalism game by moving the circumstances of our society around in such a way that the numbers in their bank accounts grow very large. This is not a healthy way for us to live. We cannot keep doing this. Reading by Tim Foley.

Have you ever noticed how whenever you see someone promoting hatred toward Muslims, nine times out of ten it will be someone who supports Israel? There's a reason for that. Zionists promote Islamophobia because convincing westerners to hate Muslims is easier than convincing them to love Israel. Reading by Tim Foley.

They're on the back foot. This has never happened before. We've got a real shot at winning this thing. Reading by Tim Foley.

They get everyone fighting a fake revolution so that nobody thinks about fighting a real one. Reading by Tim Foley.