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As per our standard business policy we are publishing our entire new book Babyhead for free on all our platforms, copyright-free. Anyone who wants to copy, republish or repurpose this book is allowed to do so free of charge. If someone wants to animate it, that would be awesome.

You can order a signed, locally printed copy of this book by clicking here, or you can order a cheaper unsigned copy by clicking here, or you can buy a pay-what-you-feel ebook version by clicking here.

(If you’re reading this as a newsletter in your email inbox you’ll probably need to click onto the actual article to finish it; the illustrations make it too long for email.)

Here it is:

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If you enjoyed Babyhead, you can order a signed, locally printed copy of the book by clicking here, or you can order a cheaper unsigned copy by clicking here, or you can buy a pay-what-you-feel ebook version by clicking here.

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US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent huffily denounced Iranian leaders on Friday after being moved to a US military base amid alleged security concerns from a threat linked to Iran.

“F the Iranian leadership,” Bessent said during an appearance on CNBC. He actually said the letter F, like a little kid describing something he heard a grownup say.

“I’m not gonna be cowered that they have initiated death threats against me,” Bessent added. “The other members of the cabinet, we’re not gonna be cowered, and it means that what we are doing with Operation Economic Outcast is working.”

“The IRGC, they’re like a dangerous cornered animal,” Bessent proclaimed.

“Operation Economic Outcast” is the Trump administration’s current slogan for its efforts to cripple the Iranian economy.

Bessent has repeatedly admitted to deliberately fomenting the violent unrest in Iran at the beginning of this year, saying the US actively crushed the Iranian economy with the explicit goal of driving a desperate, immiserated population to civil war against their government.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in January of this year, the treasury secretary said the following:

“President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under; the central bank has started to print money. There is dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the street. So, this is economic statecraft, no shots fired, and things are moving in a very positive way here.”

Bessent repeated the same claim when speaking to the Senate Banking Committee in February:

“One thing we could do at Treasury, and what we have done, is created a dollar shortage in the country. At a speech at the Economic Club in March I outlined the strategy. It came to a swift and I would say grand culmination in December when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. There was a run on the bank, the central bank had to print money, the Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”

So it’s kind of hilarious to see this mummified bureaucrat posturing as a tough guy for the cameras and acting like he’s being unjustly targeted by an evil regime. He and his own regime are the obvious aggressors here.

As Glenn Greenwald mockingly put it, “Oh my god I started a war against a country and killed their leaders and blew up their schools and bridges and massacred their kids and now I am morally outraged that I feel scared and moved to a military base because of what they might do in response.”

I always reflexively dismiss all claims that Iran is targeting US officials, just because the claims are always presented without any evidence and the US consistently lies about the governments it is targeting in order to justify its tyrannical warmongering. That which has been presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.

But for the record Iran would be completely within its rights to assassinate US officials, and those US officials would 100 percent deserve it.

You don’t get to start an unprovoked war of aggression, assassinate the leaders of a sovereign nation, massacre schoolchildren, deliberately target civilian infrastructure, deliberately immiserate the entire population with the goal of provoking civil war, and then posture as an innocent widdle victim if you get back what you dished out.

“F the Iranian leadership”?

Fuck you.

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We’ve got a new book! It’s a graphic novel called Babyhead, entirely hand-drawn by Caitlin. You can order a locally printed signed copy from Caitlin and Tim by clicking here, or you can order a cheaper unsigned copy from Amazon by clicking here. If you order now we can get it to you before Christmas.

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image is a screen grab from CNBC (Fair Use).

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We made a book! It’s a graphic novel called Babyhead, entirely hand-drawn by Caitlin. Watch our video announcement:

You can order a locally printed signed copy from Caitlin and Tim by clicking here, or you can order a cheaper unsigned copy from Amazon by clicking here. If you order now we can get it to you before Christmas.

We’re so, SO excited for you guys to see this one. We’ll be sharing more in the coming days, but we wanted to get this out there now so our readers can order early and be sure to get theirs before Christmas.

Big love,

Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

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The Financial Times has published a new article titled “Humanoid robot start-up backed by Eric Trump in talks with Israel’s military” which is exactly as horrifying as its headline suggests.

The article features photographs of bipedal armored robots which look like they came from the set of a post-apocalyptic Hollywood movie, and opens as follows:

“A company backed by Eric Trump is in talks with the Israel Defense Forces to supply humanoid robots to patrol Hamas tunnels beneath Gaza and potentially engage in combat.

“Foundation Future Industries co-founder and president Mike LeBlanc said he had met senior Israeli military officials for preliminary discussions in September and toured tunnels with the US start-up’s Phantom MK1.

“‘We’re in direct talks with the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces,’ the former US Marine told the FT, adding that his company was in discussions to supply up to 1,000 Phantoms.”

Foundation Future Industries is a San Francisco-based robotics company which is actively seeking lucrative contracts with US and foreign militaries. Financial Times reports that the two year-old company has already secured contracts worth $70 million from the American war machine.

In a July article titled “A Humanoid Company Backed by Eric Trump Is Preparing Its Robots for War,” Wired reported that Foundation robots are already operating on the battlefield in Ukraine:

“The war in Ukraine has served as a laboratory for the development and testing of many of these systems; Foundation says it has tested its humanoid, Phantom MK1, with Ukrainian forces.

“It’s unique in its targeting of the military market, and so far it’s been lucrative. The company has government contracts worth millions of dollars and high-profile backers to spread its message: Eric Trump, the president’s son, is both an investor and the company’s chief strategy adviser.”

I probably don’t need to explain to anyone reading this why it is insanely corrupt and dystopian for the president’s son to be making a fortune selling murderbot contracts to the US military while his warmongering father engages in reckless military expansionism around the world. But it really does highlight exactly where the US empire is at on the timeline of degradation and tyranny.

During an interview on Fox Business this past April in which Eric Trump appeared alongside Foundation CEO Sankaet Pathak, the American princeling gushed enthusiastically about how far the United States has come in what he describes as a robotics race with China.

“When you go up and you interact with these robots, and they fist-bump you, they high-five you, they follow your commands,” Trump said. “You bring in AI autonomy, it’s going to change industry, going to change military application, it’s going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited, and I think it’s a very beautiful thing, but we must win this race.”

I often see people wondering why AI is being shoved down our throats with little to no regulation despite the fact that it isn’t improving our lives in any meaningful way, but that’s because AI isn’t intended to benefit ordinary people. It’s intended to power autonomous military robots who will fire upon the citizenry if they attempt a revolution in ways human soldiers might refuse to do. It’s intended to re-centralize control of information, to replace expensive skilled labor, to destroy the collective bargaining power of the working class, and to facilitate mass surveillance throughout our society.

Humanity needs to wake up to what’s going on, because we are fast approaching the point where they have the technologies in place to lock us in this dystopia forever.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is claiming that anyone who opposes Trump’s warmongering hates “the troops”.

“If you want to take issue with what we did in Epic Fury or Rough Rider or NAB and Nicolas Maduro, you’re taking issue with the troops and what they accomplished,” Hegseth told the press on Monday.

If you’re too young to remember 2003, this was the line they used the last time the White House started an unwinnable war in the middle east. If you hate the war, you hate The Troops. And we all know you’re not allowed to hate The Troops. You MUST love the imperial stormtroopers.

It’s such shitbrained war propaganda. Yes, absolutely fuck the war. Absolutely fuck every single person who chose to enter into this ridiculously unprovoked war of aggression. And hey, fuck The Troops too while we’re at it. Fuck everyone who knowingly enlisted in a military force that is literally only ever used to inflict evil in modern times.

Don’t valorize employment in a murderous war machine. If you do, you’re only encouraging future waves of young people to enlist. Don’t be a pro bono recruitment advertiser for the US military. Stigmatize that entire line of work.

We’re not doing that shit anymore. You don’t get use “the troops” as human shields to hide the depravity of your military decisions behind. The fact that your mass atrocities are carried out by rank-and-file employees does not magically exonerate anyone involved. Not the people sending those employees off to war, and not the people who knowingly enlisted in a military force that is only ever used to murder human beings for power and profit.

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Senator Ruben Gallego took to Twitter on Monday to proclaim, “Ukraine can win. Thats why I back them. It’s a Russian talking point that Ukraine can’t win, cause Russia big blah,blah. If Ukraine kills enough Russians they will quit.”

When a commenter told him to join the International Legion and go fight the Russians himself, Gallego replied, “No that’s the beauty of this, we can pay the Ukrainians to kill the Russians.”

Propagandists claim it’s Russian propaganda to say those who support the war in Ukraine want to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” but that really is their position. Ukrainians keep telling pollsters that they want a negotiated end to the war while western proxy warriors chomp on cheesy carb snacks and tweet from their sofas about how great it is to throw Ukrainian bodies into the meat grinder.

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New rule: if you get to tell me that I hate Jews, then I get to tell you you’re just pretending to believe that in order to advance the interests of a genocidal apartheid state. If you get to tell me about my thoughts and feelings, I get to tell you about yours.

I get to tell you that you don’t believe a single word you are saying in our conversation. I get to tell you that you are lying about what you think and feel in order to marginalize criticism of the state of Israel. Those are your rules. We get to make sweeping assertions about one another’s internal conditions in an authoritative tone instead of making actual arguments.

If you whine about this, I will tell you, “This is the type of conversation you chose to have. This is the interaction you asked for, so this is the interaction you are getting. You’re just upset because you’re unaccustomed to getting back what you are serving.”

Give them back what they are giving, and don’t stop until they produce a real argument instead of dopey “antisemite” ad hominems.

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I ran into one of those liberal Zionists who poses as pro-Palestine but spends half their time concern trolling about “antisemitism” in the pro-Palestine movement. He tried to get me to engage him in this subject and I told him this:

“Address the fact that 99.9% of the time “antisemitism” gets mentioned it’s in reference to criticisms of Israel and Zionism. Address the fact that Israel and Zionism cause many orders of magnitude more damage than the 0.1% instances of actual antisemitism. Address the fact that the overwhelming majority of the 0.1% instances of actual antisemitism are caused by Israel’s genocide and warmongering and would go away if Israel stopped butchering children under the banner of the Star of David. Explain how it is possible to have a ‘serious discussion about antisemitism’ while these three things are happening.

“You will answer all four questions I asked you in their entirety if this conversation is to proceed. Until you have thoroughly addressed them all, the conversation you are trying to have is nonsensical.”

Back in 2021 I tweeted, “If I wanted to sabotage the pro-Palestine movement, I would make myself a part of the conversation by criticizing Israeli abuses and supporting Palestinian rights, then I’d start going ‘This rise in anti-semitism sure is concerning though, can we pause and focus on this please?’”

That’s exactly what these freaks are doing.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

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I keep thinking about a talk I listened to by Julian Assange back in 2017 where he warned that one day AI could be used to facilitate the propaganda interests of the powerful by manipulating news media and information in ways that are too subtle for the human mind to notice.

Assange described a future where AI-powered algorithms serve us a customized feed of information based on data collected about our search queries and interests, calculated to appeal to our biases and construct a worldview for us which advances the agendas of those who control the machines.

He explained that sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence systems could arrange this information with more subtlety and complexity than human perception can pick up on, in much the same way a computer can outperform any human brain at a game of chess.

Here’s an excerpt from Assange’s remarks, delivered via video chat at the Meltdown Festival in June 2017:

“What I think is probably the most important development that is happening as far as the fate of human beings is concerned is that we are getting close to the threshold where the traditional propaganda function that is employed by, you know, the BBC, the Daily Mail, etc… can be encapsulated by AI processes.

“Now, if you think about when you’re playing chess, already we’re in a situation where AI can do better than any human chess player. So you can see a certain number of moves ahead. And someone moves a piece onto the board and you go ‘Why did they put that knight there?’ And you start to think what is the intentionality behind it, and you try and look several steps ahead to work out what the intentionality was and then counter it: Okay, they want to manipulate me into moving here so this will happen and so I will lose.

“We take these considerations already when we’re — well, some of us — when we’re reading stories in the press. What is the intentionality of this story? Why is this particular information being pushed to the public and not some other form of information? Who’s the name of the author? What publication is it appearing in? What language? Etc. Well, possibly the reason is because someone wanted to promote a particular agenda, therefore we should read it in a different light.

“But when you have artificial intelligence programs harvesting all the search queries that people have on their phones, all the YouTube videos that human beings have uploaded etc, and it starts to lay out perceptual influence campaigns 20 to 30 moves ahead, this starts to become totally beneath the levels of human perception. And once a computer-augmented organization such as Google is able to engage in influencing human beings 20 to 30 moves ahead, keeping each move beneath the level of human perception, there’s nothing we can do about it, because we can’t see it.”

I keep thinking about these remarks nearly a decade later because this does seem to be the goal. It’s becoming clearer and clearer to everyone that these new technologies are not intended to improve the lives of ordinary people, but to serve the interests of the oligarchs and empire managers who rule our world. That’s why they’re being rammed into existence at breakneck pace despite the obvious fact that they’re making life worse for most people without advancing human quality of life in any meaningful way.

A big part of the agenda seems to be to re-centralize the control of information that was temporarily lost with the advent of the internet. Revolutionary sentiments are rumbling around the world as our species becomes increasingly discontented with the abuses of capitalism and the US-led world order, assisted by humanity’s unprecedented ability to network and share information around the world in real time.

Artificial intelligence’s usefulness in re-centralizing information in ways that can be easily manipulated has already been noted by the Israel lobby.

At an American Jewish Committee event this past June, Santa Clara University’s Maya Ackerman argued that generative AI presents an exciting new opportunity for imposing pro-Israel narratives on public consciousness, because AI companies can be lobbied directly to push pro-Israel narratives since their leaders can control what information people see.

Here’s a transcript of what she said:

“The really cool thing about AI is that while it can become a great ally for our enemies, if we act early it could be exactly the opportunity that we need after missing the boat with social media. AI is now becoming the dominant source of information — the main source of information. People trust AI more than anything else. They trust AI more than social media. They turn to chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini instead of using Google. And young people use these bots instead of Google in very, very very large numbers. So this is becoming the main source of information.

“And so when I say this, I still find Jewish people being discouraged, they say ‘Oh, but Wikipedia is already so antisemitic and social media is so antisemitic — why bother? The AI just learns from all of this data.’ So, you know, whatever, not much we can do.

“But that’s not true, because over the past two years the AI companies have been moving towards alignment. So instead of algorithms sort of honestly representing what’s in the data, we’re finding that these chatbots and the text to image models are increasingly showing us exactly what the companies want us to see.

“Okay, so it’s becoming intentional. Which means that instead of trying to control the whole world and trying to somehow manage what’s happening in this big blob called Wikipedia and social media, we can go directly to the companies with clear technical and advocacy solutions. For the first time, there is a path to correcting the digital world.”

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt recently confirmed that this was the Israel lobby’s new MO, saying the ADL has been “working with” all the top AI companies and pushing them to into alignment with the pro-Israel agenda.

Speaking at a Jerusalem Post conference last month, Greenblatt said the following:

“So we’ve been working with the Frontier Labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet the company that runs Gemini, Google, Meta who runs Muse, and others, X, who run Grok — testing their models and using the results to push them to do better.”

“Look, we’ve had excellent collaboration with Silicon Valley. These companies want to improve ChatGPT and Claude. We’ve got to help them. So we’ve run the tests and seen where antisemitism shows up and helped them develop strategies to tackle it right in the source code.”

If the Israel lobby manipulators are doing this, then we can assume that all the high-level imperial narrative managers are doing it as well.

In January 2018, Assange tweeted the following:

“The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control machines and machines that control humans.

“While the internet has brought about a revolution in our ability to educate each other, the consequent democratic explosion has shaken existing establishments to their core. Burgeoning digital super states such as Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are integrated with the existing order, have moved to re-establish discourse control. This is not simply a corrective action. Undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity.

“While still in its infancy, the geometric nature of this trend is clear. The phenomenon differs from traditional attempts to shape culture and politics by operating at a scale, speed, and increasingly at a subtlety, that appears highly likely to eclipse human counter-measures.

“Nuclear war, climate change or global pandemics are existential threats that we can work through with discussion and thought. Discourse is humanity’s immune system for existential threats. Diseases that infect the immune system are usually fatal. In this case, at a planetary scale.”

Anyway, just some things we should keep in mind as we make our way into this strange new future.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

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US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee claims that anyone who opposes Trump’s war with Iran is being blinded by Satan. Like, the actual, literal devil character from the Bible.

During an incredibly sycophantic recent interview on The Anchor Podcast, Huckabee was asked by the host if he believed European opposition to the US war on Iran was the result of mental problems.

“I think it’s a spiritual issue,” Huckabee replied.

“I know it sounds a little funny for an ambassador to be talking like this, but look, I see this as spiritual darkness, spiritual blindness,” adding that “Satan has blinded the minds of those and has captured their thinking.”

This is the same raving lunatic who said Israel is like America’s “wife”, and who got in hot water earlier this year for saying it would be fine for the Israelis to forcibly annex the territory of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia in addition to the Palestinian Territories because the Bible says so.

It says so much about American politics that this nut job has been elevated to such a high position in the US government. The US empire is a giant armageddon cult with nukes.

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As children die in floods because of Israel’s humanitarian abuses in Gaza, Saturday Night Live is using this moment to push the spiritually exhausting fake narrative that anyone who humanizes Palestinians must secretly hate Jews.

“Abdul El-Sayed made history as the first Muslim elected to the senate — well, first OPENLY Muslim,” SNL’s Colin Jost quipped in front of a photo of Barack Obama during the show’s Weekend Update segment.

“El-Sayed hinted that he would like to see Chuck Schumer replaced as senate majority leader, but if I had just gone through the campaign he did, I don’t think my first move would be get rid of the Jewish guy,” Jost said.

El-Sayed was aggressively smeared as an antisemite throughout his senate race due to his support for Palestinian rights and his criticisms of the state of Israel.

Palestinians in Gaza are being flooded out of their tents while Saturday Night Live tells jokes that sound like they came out of the Babylon Bee to silence their supporters.

SNL is such disgusting empire smut. It’s not just the American news media that’s propaganda; it’s all mainstream entertainment.

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It’s crazy how the western world went “it’s bad that our governments are backing a genocide in Palestine” and a few loud Zionist Jews said “this discussion should obviously center us and our feelings at all times and in all ways” and the west went “ah yes true, good point.”

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I’ve never seen a logically sound argument that it’s anti-semitic to deny that Jews have an extra special connection to the land of Israel. It’s where their religion comes from, so in that sense they have the same connection that Christians have, but beyond that the only arguments to be made are claims based on nothing but blind religious faith.

You can tell me that Israel is mentioned all the time in Jewish prayers and Jewish scriptures etc, but that’s just telling me about Jewish religious beliefs. Telling me I’m an anti-semite if I don’t accept those religious beliefs as true is exactly the same as telling me I’m an anti-semite if I don’t stay in my house and pray on Saturday. Jews can believe whatever they want to believe, but it violates my freedom of religion to demand that *I* believe what they believe. That’s the same as telling me I’m Islamophobic if I don’t wear a hijab.

You can tell me that all Jews everywhere are descended from the biblical Israelites, but that’s (A) another blind-faith belief based on nothing but religious assertion and (B) irrelevant since all westerners can trace their heritage back to many different countries they aren’t allowed to lay claim to.

So there’s really no case to be made. And yet “antisemitism” watchdog groups throughout the western world assert that it is an antisemitic offense to deny that Jews have a unique connection to the land of Israel. They have no argument. They are wrong.

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I sometimes see hear debates in feminist circles about why men are so disproportionately violent and abusive compared to women and what makes them act that way, but I don’t really think it’s that much of a mystery.

Like so many other questions about the illnesses of our society, the answer is “because of war.” Society conditions men to be cruel because for thousands of years civilizations around the world have needed men to go kill people in wars for the powerful. They were ordered to do horrific things to men, women and children using blades, spears, arrows and bludgeoning weapons, so everything kind and gentle in them needed to be snuffed out in order for them to do these things. We still have the vestiges of the culture which shaped men in this way living on in our civilization today.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

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It is said that history is written by the victors, but what’s interesting is that this is also true of the present story. Those who are winning the capitalism game get to set the narrative about what is currently happening in our world.

If you succeed in dominating the humans you share a planet with using our current socioeconomic systems of labor exploitation and resource extraction, then you get to buy up politicians, media outlets, online platforms and influence operations which allow you to determine the mainstream narratives about what’s going on in our world, in the same way the victorious armies of the past often had the power to shape the historical record in their favor.

The present is therefore written by the victors.

Those who’ve landed at the top of the heap have the power to circulate narratives which normalize the abusive system they benefit from, and to scare the public away from seeking to implement other systems of power distribution and resource allocation.

They have the power to shape public perception of world events, to reverse victim and perpetrator in their narratives about international conflicts, and to frame the western empire as a passive witness to the terrible things that are happening around the world rather than the primary driver of those horrors.

They have the power to determine which protest movements, mass atrocities and scandals receive widespread attention in our society, and which get conveniently overlooked.

They have the power to determine which political parties are taken seriously, and which parties are considered unrealistic vanity projects which steal votes from the viable candidates.

They have the power to make or break careers in media or politics, to choose which figures are elevated to celebrity status or marginalized to the fringes, and to fabricate antisemitism scandals out of thin air.

Power is the ability to control what happens. Absolute power is the ability to control what people THINK about what happens. Those who are winning the capitalism game are able to exert absolute power over our society.

The real source of power in our world is not money, nor resources, nor armies, nor weapons. The real source of power in our world is narrative, and the ability to control it.

Narrative is the only thing that determines what governments look like, how power works, how money operates, what laws there are, and why nations operate the way they do. They’re all completely made-up guidelines made of words which we have all collectively agreed to pretend are true. The only reason anything works the way it works is because enough of us believe the shared narratives saying it is so. It is our collective belief which gives those narratives their power.

That’s why our rulers pour so much energy into controlling the narrative. That’s what you’re seeing with all the news media consolidation, the centralization of internet activity into a handful of trillionaire apps, the aggressive artificial intelligence push, and the efforts to stomp out dissident speech throughout the western world. It’s because the powerful understand something most of us do not: that their power comes entirely from narrative.

They know that as soon as enough of us stop believing their narratives, we are free. We can decide to re-write the made-up rules of society whenever we choose to, and change everything about states, authority, money and labor which have allowed the plutocrats to live like kings at the expense of everyone else. We can stop playing the capitalism game they’ve been winning at any time, because the rules are completely made up, and we can just make up a different game.

As soon as enough people stop believing the stories of the dominant storytellers, we can use the power of our numbers to force the creation of a healthy world.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

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Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon is acting like it’s absurd for American voters to have gotten it into their heads that Israel had something to do with the Iran war that’s costing them so much money.

Asked by i24 News about JD Vance’s observation that American voters want a change in their country’s relationship with the Zionist entity, Danon framed Israel as an innocent passive witness to the Trump administration’s unprovoked attack on Iran.

“I think it’s unfortunate, and we saw it coming from different directions, that many made the linkage between the rising prices, mainly oil prices, to the situation here in Israel,” said Danon, adding, “We know that the decision to attack Iran was the decision of the United States. It wasn’t our decision. We supported the effort of the US. We think it was the right decision.”

“It’s very easy always to blame Israel for everything, but that is not the case,” Dannon said.

So it sounds like the new narrative from the Israeli government is that they were just sitting there minding their own business when the United States told them “We’re gonna bomb Iran, don’t try to stop us,” and then Israel was all like “WTF bro that’s crazy! I guess we’ll support you because we’re friends, but damn dude that sounds pretty reckless.”

Now that the war in Iran is costing Israel support from American voters, they’re trying to pretend they had nothing to do with that whole mess.

Which is wild considering the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly bragged about persuading the Americans to attack Iran, and the fact that the US State Department has explicitly said of the Iran war that “the United States is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally.”

But whatever.

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Hey remember when Charlie Kirk got killed and Republicans were like YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU HAVE UNLEASHED, TREMBLE IN FEAR AT WHAT’S COMING and then nothing happened and then they lost everything? That was funny.

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People should stop saying the Democrats will do nothing now that they’ve won both chambers of congress; that’s so unfair.

Democrats do a lot of things. Genocide, for example.

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If you’re wondering how things are going in Australia, it looks like they’re about to start fining universities millions of dollars for allowing criticism of Israel.

From The Jewish Independent:

“Australian universities could be fined up to $2 million if they do not deal effectively with antisemitism under new legislation to be introduced into parliament this month.

“The Education Minister announced last Friday that under the draft legislation, the maximum fine for universities will increase from the existing cap of $40,000 to $2 million — a 50-fold increase.

“The fine regime, which will be administered by the university regulator TEQSA, is the government’s response to the recommendation by the Antisemitism Envoy Jillian Segal, which proposed withholding funding or terminating grants from universities that fail to effectively combat antisemitic behaviour.”

As we discussed previously, Jillian Segal’s recommendations are completely geared around stomping out criticism of Israel and eliminating pro-Palestine protests, as evidenced by her stated position that pro-Palestine leftists represent “the most pervasive manifestation of antisemitism facing Australia today.” The plan is obviously to lean on universities to shut down anti-Israel speech in order to avoid millions of dollars in penalties.

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Tucker Carlson recently claimed that Trump is preparing to launch a nuclear strike on Iran at the urging of Benjamin Netanyahu, and I’m really, truly sorry if this comes across as antisemitic, but in my opinion it would be wrong for Trump to do that.

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The other day I saw an Israeli flag account on Twitter shrieking that her son got uninvited from a Halloween party because some of the kids said they didn’t want to attend a party with a Zionist. Somebody asked her how old her son is, and she said nineteen.

This is the “antisemitism” we’ve been hearing so much about. It’s grown adults whining that anti-genocide sentiments hurt their feelings. It’s people disliking a genocidal apartheid state and its supporters, and then some members of a religious group claiming those opinions shouldn’t be allowed to exist because it upsets their feelings. When you drill down on the actual complaints, that is almost exclusively what’s going on.

Ultimately the “antisemitism” narrative is mostly just an especially entitled group of white people demanding that governments and institutions use force to protect them from feeling the uncomfortable feelings they experience when someone says their beloved apartheid state is guilty of crimes against humanity.

This is self-evidently ridiculous, and it deserves nothing but a dismissive scoff. You do not have a right to be protected from uncomfortable feelings, no matter what your religion happens to be. You do not have a right to have the government protect you from the feelings of cognitive dissonance brought on by your own genocidal ideology. You do not have a right to silence others because because you find their opposition to mass atrocities emotionally inconvenient. That’s not a thing. Grow the fuck up.

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Zionists are like, “No no, it’s not true that antisemitism means criticism of Israel. You’re allowed to criticize Israel, you just need to memorize a very long list of rules you must follow and circumstances under which criticism is acceptable, make sure you’re only criticizing the current sitting government rather than the Zionist state itself, and be careful not to invoke any of the ten thousand obscure Tropes you’ve never heard of, or else you will lose your job and possibly go to prison. So go on ahead, criticize Israel all you want. It’s a free country.”

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I saw a BBC report from last month expressing shock and outrage about China forcing companies to stop selling people “AI companions” as a substitute for real human contact, speculating that Beijing is only taking these actions to trick Chinese women into having more babies.

Chatbots are turning western brains into pureed spinach while China bans AI “companions” and requires AI models to remind users they’re not talking to a real person, and the western press frame this as China pushing a suspicious agenda.

Everything about our civilization is making all of us dumber and dumber.

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Vice President JD Vance made the surprising admission on social media that Trump administration’s war with Iran was what caused the massive Democratic Party sweep of the midterm elections, stating plainly that “The reason we lost is the war.”

Saying “the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone,” Vance noted that a poll found Trump 2024 voters who ditched the president’s party in 2026 gave four main answers to the question of what the Republicans could do to win them back: “1) End the war, 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation, 3) Put America First , 4) Change our relationship to Israel.”

All four of these answers tie directly in to Trump’s decision to launch an unprovoked war of aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The war itself, failing to put America first, and Washington’s grotesque alliance with the state of Israel are all straightforward references to Trump’s warmongering in the middle east. Cost of living/inflation is also strongly related since the blockades resulting from Trump’s war have been costing every American household thousands of dollars in rising fuel and grocery prices.

That last one is the real story of this election. As is often the case, economic concerns ranked as the number one concern among US voters in the lead-up to the midterm elections, and one of the major reasons why Americans have been struggling economically is because of the war in Iran.

So the story isn’t that Americans spontaneously transformed into a country full of tender-hearted peaceniks in November 2026. The story is that Iran was able to impose an economic cost on ordinary Americans for the actions of their evil government.

The average American is a propaganda-addled empire zombie who has been indoctrinated into cold-hearted indifference to their government’s abuses in the global south. American voters didn’t reject the war in Iran because they believe it’s immoral to bomb schools and civilian infrastructure in depraved wars of aggression overseas, they rejected it because it was costing them more to fill up their pickup trucks and they were having to pay more money for their buckets of Mountain Dew and ranch dressing.

If Trump had won the war in four to six weeks as he initially claimed he would, his monstrous attack on Iran would have been no more consequential in the voting booths than his regime change interventionism in Venezuela. It is only because Iran succeeded in doing whatever it needed to do to retain the military strength needed to impose a financial toll on the American electorate that the Republicans lost the Senate for years to come. War with Iran is now officially political poison because of Iranian strength.

US officials love to whine and complain that Iran spends its money on its military instead of on the Iranian people (though the United States is literally the absolute dead-last country on earth who has any business airing such a grievance), and to this day they’re still weeping crocodile tears about the way Tehran aggressively smacked down the CIA/Mossad uprising at the beginning of the year. But Iran has shown the world that a nation must retain its strength if it wants to retain its sovereignty and avoid being turned into another resource extraction scam for the US empire.

Every country that retains the necessary muscle to beat back the US empire’s efforts to absorb it into its power umbrella invariably gets smeared by the imperial propaganda machine as a tyrannical and despotic rogue state, but it is the US empire who makes it necessary for governments to exert force if they don’t want to be replaced with subservient US puppet regimes. Western propaganda likes to frame the global struggle as free democracies versus oppressive autocracies, but really it’s just nations who wish to retain their sovereignty versus the empire who wants to take that sovereignty away from them. It is the fault of the US empire that the only nations who have thus far resisted absorption are the ones who retain enough military strength and domestic control to do so.

The United States didn’t retreat from Vietnam because the Americans suddenly developed a conscience, it retreated because the Vietnamese fought like lions and kept sending home coffins draped in red, white and blue. The Republicans didn’t lose the midterms because Americans dislike war, they lost because the Iranians beat the shit out of them.

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The New York Times has published a story about a supposed Iranian plot to use chemical weapons which nobody actually believes.

Not even the perpetually war-horny New York Times tries to frame this as a real news report, presenting it instead as a subject of tense division inside the Trump White House. Here’s an excerpt:

“Israel has shared intelligence with the United States asserting that Iran is considering the use of chemical weapons against its adversaries, information met with alarm by some American officials and deep skepticism by others, according to U.S. and regional officials.

“Some American officials see the Israeli intelligence as part of a pressure campaign by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to persuade the Trump administration to return to major combat operations against Iran.

“Other officials believe the threats should be taken seriously, given the recent array of warnings about Iran’s preparations to attack American interests.”

To be clear, not one single person anywhere on earth believes this is true. Israel doesn’t believe it. Washington doesn’t believe it. Nobody reading about it in the New York Times believes it. But we’re hearing about it anyway like it’s a real thing, because too many powerful people want more bombing in Iran.

Israel supporters are unique in the way literally all of them constantly pretend to believe things they don’t actually believe.

Over the years I’ve argued with members of every political ideology on earth, and I’ve never encountered any group who does this like Zionists do. Other ideological factions might hold idiotic and downright evil beliefs, but for the most part they tend to actually believe the things they are saying.

Not so with Israel supporters. I’ve been interacting with them for years, often over extended conversations just to understand their arguments and their worldview, and what stands out the most in these interactions is the way they constantly lie about what they think is true.

They’ll pretend to believe a given high-profile critic of Israeli atrocities hates Jews just to help marginalize their voice. They’ll pretend to believe Iran is on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons in order to help drum up support for war. They’ll pretend to believe antisemitism is one of the most urgent and dangerous threats to our society today in order to push for more laws against pro-Palestine protests. They’ll pretend to believe every human rights group on earth is lying about Israel committing genocide in order to help Israel commit more genocidal crimes against humanity.

In my time I have argued with many individuals who misrepresent my beliefs and the beliefs of other people, but Israel supporters are the only ideological group I’ve ever encountered who consistently misrepresent THEIR OWN beliefs.

I’ve seen it over and over and over again. I’ll corner them on one of the claims they are making about what they believe, completely dismantling their given reasons for why they believe what they claim to believe, and they’ll just shift to some other reason justifying the existence of their belief.

And this should not be surprising. If you would support genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, of course you would lie about your own beliefs to advance those agendas. Bad people do bad things. If genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid do not bother you, then you are unlikely to have ethical qualms about communicating without intellectual honesty.

These days I mostly just respond to such people by saying “You don’t really believe that. You’re just pretending to believe that in order to advance the interests of a genocidal apartheid state.” It’s the only way to deal with a group who literally never engages in good faith on any level.

Israel supporters need to do this because their worldview is not grounded in truth or morality. They don’t hold their position because it is morally or factually correct, they hold it to advance personal agendas like career advancement, ladder-climbing, getting into Heaven, getting those tasty hasbara bucks, or winning the approval of their Zionist friends and family.

In a healthy civilization, supporting Israel would be as culturally toxic as loving Adolf Hitler or advocating the legalization of child sex trafficking. But we do not live in a healthy civilization. We live under a murderous, globe-spanning empire that is held together by lies and endless bloodshed. Zionism is rewarded and amplified because its evils are shared with the evils of the rest of the western imperial power structure which is choking our world to death.

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The propagandists of the American press have been uncritically describing recent US airstrikes on Iran as “defensive” despite the US being the clear aggressor in this ongoing conflict, and despite the United States existing on the other side of the planet from Iran.

CBS News was the most egregious offender with its headline, “U.S. launches defensive strikes at Iranian targets near Strait of Hormuz.”

The title frames it as an objective fact that the attack was defensive in nature, without quotation marks around the word “defensive” and without even bothering to uncritically cite US officials as the source of this claim.

As a reminder, CBS News was recently acquired by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, who is one of the wealthiest people on the planet with a net worth of some $160 billion and who is also the largest single donor to the Israeli military. The Ellisons have responded to Israel’s genocide-induced PR crisis by frenetically buying up control over major platforms like CBS, CNN, HBO Max, Warner Bros and TikTok in order to drum up support for US-Israeli military agendas.

Other mass media outlets weren’t much better, uncritically regurgitating assertions from the US government which present the attacks as “defensive”.

The Associated Press headline on the story reads, “US has conducted defensive strikes on Iranian targets in the Strait of Hormuz, US official says.”

From The Washington Post, “U.S. forces launch new ‘defensive’ strikes in Iran on eve of election.”

From CNN, “US military conducts strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island in defensive operation, officials say.”

From Fox News, “US launches ‘defensive’ strikes on Iranian island as Tehran talks hang in balance.”

From Reuters, “US carries out ‘defensive’ strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island, officials say.”

From ABC News, “US carries out defensive airstrikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island: Officials.”

From Politico, “US has conducted defensive strikes on Iranian targets in the Strait of Hormuz, US official says.”

The first paragraph of the Newsweek write-up on the story reads, “The U.S. carried out defensive strikes against Iranian targets in the Strait of Hormuz, a U.S. official told the Associated Press (AP) on Monday.”

The story that these propagandists are spinning was first broken by The Wall Street Journal, who reported that the attacks on Qeshm Island were actually part of a series of secret strikes on Iran which have been going on for weeks now. Paragraphs four and five of the report contain claims attributed to anonymous US officials saying their attacks have been “defensive in nature” in response to Iranian aggressions, which the aforementioned other outlets then seized on as the most significant and newsworthy element in the story.

At no time is the assertion that US forces are “defending” themselves off the coast of Iran ever called into question by any of these outlets. At no time is the audience ever reminded that the US started this war of aggression without any provocation whatsoever. At no time is the audience ever encouraged to ask what the fuck the US military is doing “defending” itself thousands of miles from American shores.

I never want to hear another American compare their media’s malpractice to North Korean propaganda ever again. Westerners are more aggressively propagandized than any other population on earth.

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The most significant political reality of our time is also the most under-discussed political reality, and it can be summed up as follows:

There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and we can force revolutionary change whenever we want.

That’s it. There are a whole lot more ordinary people suffering under the status quo system of capitalism, imperialism, militarism and authoritarianism than there are people benefiting from it, and we can use the power of our numbers to overthrow that system whenever we decide to.

It’s self-evident, and so simple that you can sum it up in a single sentence. But because our society is so deeply indoctrinated and mind-controlled, it simply doesn’t show up in the normal every day conversations people have about politics and the problems we face as a society today.

We are encouraged to discuss elections and party politics with great vigor. We are rewarded with amplification on large plutocrat-owned platforms if we fan the flames of divisive culture war wedge issues or mainstream partisan punditry. But what we are absolutely never rewarded for and never encouraged to discuss is the fact that the oligarchs and empire managers who rule our society would be completely powerless to stop a people’s revolution of sufficient scale.

We could all stop working and paying for things. We could barricade all the roads, railroads and infrastructure. We could demolish every bank, police station and government building. We could literally eat all the billionaires.

Just, you know, hypothetically.

We could do anything we wanted to do. No one could stop us.

All mainstream politics, media, and schooling is designed to direct our attention away from this political reality, while the people who rule over us never stop thinking about it. It haunts them. It consumes them. It keeps them up at night. They obsess over it.

That’s why they’re rushing to implement militarized robots, autonomous drones, and AI-driven mass surveillance.

That’s why they’re pushing for easily controlled digital currencies and digital IDs.

That’s why they’re working to re-centralize control of information to reverse the large-scale decentralization brought on by the internet.

That’s why they’ve been hammering us with mass media propaganda for generations, and have been developing increasingly sophisticated mass-scale psyops in the age of AI and smartphones.

That’s why we are actively herded into two mainstream political parties deadlocked in a perpetual tug-of-war to give us the illusion that we are engaging in meaningful political action.

That’s why we are trained from when we are schoolchildren to believe we live in free democracies where people control the actions of their government using their votes.

It’s because the rich and powerful are at all times acutely aware that the masses could turn on them at any instant, and must be kept in a perpetual state of manipulation and distraction in order to prevent this from happening.

I dunno, man. Sounds kinda unsustainable if you ask me. Especially given how discontented people are becoming as the capitalist empire stumbles over its own contradictions and runs out of arguments for its continued existence.

We’re standing in a cage that isn’t even locked. The door’s not even closed. The only thing keeping us here is the recorded voice of the prison warden telling us “THERE IS NO ESCAPE” over and over again on repeat.

One day our gaze is going to turn to that door. And we will step out of it. And we will be free.

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As CENTCOM meets with Trump to plan more Iran strikes, the war propaganda is dumber than it has ever been.

Fox News is running stories about an Iranian “plot” to kill US military personnel in the middle east, as though a country planning ways to defend itself from hostile attackers is some sinister new development.

CBC ran a completely evidence-free report alleging that Iran has been paying gunmen to shoot bullets into empty buildings in Toronto, Canada. One of the dumbest things we are asked to believe about Iran is that it keeps taking time away from defending itself against US-Israeli aggressions in order to orchestrate random acts of arson and vandalism in mid-power western states for no discernible benefit to its strategic interests.

Former Israeli military intelligence officer Mordechai Kedar went on Piers Morgan to call Iran an “artificial state”, saying “its fate is to be dismantled, is to be shattered to pieces, as it should have been from the beginning.” Calling one of the world’s oldest civilizations an “artificial state” from inside a country that’s younger than Mick Jagger and has been propped up by nonstop western military aggression throughout 100 percent of its existence is, uh, certainly a choice.

Under Trump, the war propagandists don’t even need to try anymore. He’s just going to inflict all sorts of horrors upon the middle east and Latin America with blunt-force military aggression, and then when he leaves office they’re going to act like he’s carrying all the sins of the US empire with him on his back.

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British police arrested 325 people on terrorism charges for protesting in support of the proscribed activist group Palestine Action on Saturday. Sky News reports that 94 percent of all terrorism arrests this year have been made because of support for Palestine Action.

“There were 3,867 arrests for suspected terrorist activity in the year to June, of which 94% were linked to supporting the group,” Sky News reports, adding, “In the previous 12-month period, before the ban came into force, 234 terror arrests were made.”

Drop bombs on buildings full of children and the UK will call you an ally. Express support for activists who try to stop those bombs and the UK will call you a terrorist.

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I fucking, fucking, FUCKING HATE writing about “antisemitism”. I am so motherfucking SICK of it. I hate the word. I hate the rapey, gaslighting way all western institutions are constantly forcing this fake narrative down our throats that opposing genocide and apartheid and crazy wars means you secretly hate some random tiny religious group. Hate it, hate it, HATE it.

But I have to keep writing about it, because if you let them control the narrative it just takes over and becomes the consensus reality. So essay after essay after motherfucking essay I find myself writing “Uh no actually it’s not a hate crime to say you shouldn’t drop military explosives on buildings full of children” like a fucking moron, over and over and over again.

These freaks make me fucking sick. I hate the way they’re constantly trying to stick their gross, rapey fingers into our minds and convince us we think things we don’t think and feel things we don’t feel. They never stop. They’re like a cloud of gnats on a humid summer day constantly trying to fly into your nose, mouth and eyes. You swat them away and they’re back an instant later, swarming, suffocating.

Pieces of shit. Fucking disgusting, evil scumbags.

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No one supports Israel on principle. It’s always because they think they’re getting something out of it. Career advancement. A place in Heaven. Real estate in Tel Aviv. Acceptance from their family. Approval from their peers. The presidency of the United States.

People support Palestine because they sincerely believe it’s the right thing to do, but Israel supporters always believe they’re personally getting something out of it. It may have been possible for someone to sincerely believe Israel was on the right side of history once upon a time, but in 2026 nobody honestly thinks that. There’s always something in it for them. Always some skin in the game.

In that sense, they’re just plunderers. They’re taking from an abused population in order to get something for themselves. They’re throwing their support behind a genocidal settler-colonialist project in exchange for some personal reward in the same way vikings used to raid coastal towns and steal everything they had.

Pretty evil if you think about it.

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I hear people say things like, “I don’t understand why they’re pushing AI so hard when we can all see it’s making everything worse.”

That’s because it’s not being marketed to you; it’s being marketed to governments and plutocrats. They’re the real target audience for these products, not you.

You are not receiving the real sales pitch for AI, because the real sales pitch would not appeal to your sensibilities. The real sales pitch for AI isn’t “Hey check out this product, it makes some web searches slightly easier and it can maybe write your emails for you.” The real sales pitch for AI is “This product allows you to surveil the entire population of your country. It can be built into autonomous surveillance drones and killing machines. It can allow you to monitor and control every aspect of your society. It can reverse the decentralization of information brought on by the internet age. It can take away the collective bargaining power of workers and give you the skilled services your company requires. It can nullify strikes, civil disobedience, and even full-scale revolutions, and lock humanity into your capitalist dystopia forever.”

That’s the real sales pitch. It doesn’t sound appealing to any normal person, but it makes sense when you remember who these technologies are really being sold to, and why.

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The viral Red Baron Pizza worker and his $500,000 fundraiser is not a feel-good story, it’s a feel-bad story. Everything about it says horrible things about where our society is headed.

If you haven’t seen the video going around, here it is:

Some obnoxious prick films a guy working his fingers to the bone for a “prank” hoping to get social media clicks, and the worker flips out at him because his shitty, abusive job had stretched him a hair’s breadth from snapping. The video goes viral because people sympathize with a father shouting at a creepy live-streamer about how his shift was supposed to end an hour ago and he needs to get up at five in the morning to do it all again so his family doesn’t get evicted from the home he’s struggling to pay for, and then a fundraiser is launched which winds up giving the man half a million dollars.

Sounds like a happy ending, until you look at it. None of the other Red Baron workers are getting fundraisers to help them make ends meet; they’re all toiling and suffering along with everyone else in similar socioeconomic positions, just as the man in the video would have been if he hadn’t gone viral. Turns out the guy who set up the fundraiser for the Red Baron employee was himself a homeless veteran of the US military, who received his own far less successful fundraiser when this revelation came out. When you zoom out, this is just a story about how incredibly bleak life is for ordinary people in the heart of the US empire.

And yet capitalism proponents have seized on this story as an example of the system working perfectly while portraying it as a victory in their weird culture war theater. Conservative media platforms like The Daily Wire, The New York Post and Barstool Sports have framed the worker as a people’s champion standing up to an entitled Instagram influencer while working hard for his employer as Judeo-Christian God intended. Red Baron posted on social media that they are part of their employee’s “fan club” and that he is their “employee of the month”, causing conservative figures like Laura Loomer, Benny Johnson, Kevin Sorbo and Tim Burchett to swoon with approval.

They want you focusing on this one particular instance where it all worked out fine so that you don’t think about the exponentially greater number of instances in which it doesn’t. Billionaire corporations are exploiting workers around the world for appallingly meager wages, causing a combined amount of suffering too vast for the human mind to comprehend. People resonated with that worker pouring his heart out into that click slut’s Meta glasses because so many of us have been there and know what it’s like to be stretched to the breaking point just trying to feed your kids.

The capitalist class squeezes the life out of workers, and then they manipulate working people’s thoughts at mass scale so they don’t understand what’s happening to them. They tell them their suffering is because of immigrants, or welfare recipients, or an amorphous cabal of “elites” who always conveniently happen to belong exclusively to the opposite political party. They feed them media convincing them that the system is working fine and that if they can’t hack it it’s because something is wrong with them. They offer them the occasional “feel-good” viral story about someone who got lucky, like feudal serfs listening to fairy tales imagining that they too might one day marry a prince or discover that they are a member of the royal family who was lost at birth.

They pour all this energy into convincing workers to accept the status quo because they are at all times acutely aware that as soon as the workers stop accepting the status quo, it’s over for them. The most under-discussed political reality in the world is that there are a whole lot more people suffering under the status quo than there are people profiting from it, and that the sufferers are fully capable of overturning the status quo by force whenever they decide to.

Our entire society is built around the need to manipulate our attention away from this political reality. All our mainstream culture. All our news media. All our politics. All our education systems. It’s all designed to direct our gaze away from the reality that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that they need us infinitely more than we need them.

They don’t want us to look at this reality. They don’t want us thinking about it.

But we really, really should.

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Australia’s “antisemitism envoy” Jillian Segal has released a new report claiming that the primary threat to Jews in our country comes from left-wing pro-Palestine activists, which Segal hilariously labels “issue-motivated antisemitism”.

(Genocide. The “issue” is genocide.)

This, obviously, is an admission that Jillian Segal’s whole entire mission in Australia is to encourage government powers to stomp out pro-Palestine activism and protect the information interests of the apartheid state of Israel.

“Modern, progressive antisemitism is the most pervasive manifestation of antisemitism facing Australia today,” Segal’s report asserts. “It is often not a standalone hatred like the other sources. Rather, it serves to justify and legitimise antisemitism, providing it with intellectual and cultural credibility and, ultimately, making it fashionable. It does this by effectively laundering far-left antisemitism and Islamic extremism through a progressive lens, such as social justice and human rights, together with traditional antisemitic tropes, giving fundamentally extremist ideologies an apparently acceptable face.”

In a section titled “Far-left antisemitism or issue-motivated antisemitism,” Segal’s office complains that “Israel is portrayed as a colonial project that is inherently racist,” which she says “allows longstanding antisemitic motifs to be repackaged in the academic language of antiracism, decolonisation, human rights, social justice and intersectionality, often in service of a traditional Marxist revolutionary agenda.”

Here’s an excerpt:

“Over time, the language of human rights and its greatest crimes — apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, etc. — has increasingly been appropriated to portray Israel (and, relevantly, members of the Jewish community who support it) as morally evil, often to the point of being equated to Nazis.

“In contemporary Australia, elements of Australia’s historically fringe radical left have sought to appeal to well-meaning mainstream progressive Australians who may perceive the Palestinian cause as a matter of social justice. This ‘gateway’ issue, of sorts, has been used by far-left activists to magnify their appeal and prominence and to attempt to introduce traditionally moderate Australians to radical and anti-Jewish propaganda that would previously have been of little interest.”

Segal repeatedly warns that antisemites are guilty of the “conflation” of Jewish people with the state of Israel while also repeatedly going out of her way to lump Jews in with support for the Israeli state, complaining of the view that “anyone who identifies as a Zionist is themselves fundamentally wicked, notably including the overwhelming majority of Jewish Australians who, as an inextricable part of their Jewish identity, hold a belief in the right of Israel to exist.”

In reality, Israel lobbyists like Segal are the ones who are guilty of conflating all Jews with the actions of Israel. That is what you are doing when you claim that opposition to a genocidal apartheid state is hateful toward Jews.

To help curb the actions of the “issue-motivated” antisemites, Segal recommends the implementation of exclusion zones for protesters, a ban on face coverings for demonstrators, extra review measures for people who are in this country on visas, and extra oversight of public broadcasters the ABC and SBS to ensure fair and balanced coverage of Israeli atrocities.

Segal’s office also recommends incorporating the authoritarian, pro-Israel IHRA working definition of antisemitism into every level of the law, calling for “Facilitation by law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and judicial education bodies of ongoing, appropriate and tailored education to their members regarding antisemitism, its contemporary expressions and the application of the IHRA definition.”

Segal also recommends forcing online platforms to adopt “the IHRA definition into community standards and policies for content moderation,” which would see people banned from social media for such self-evidently correct actions as comparing Israel to Nazi Germany or saying that Zionism is a racist endeavor.

As you might expect, the Australian press are dutifully regurgitating Segal’s left-punching propaganda with zero pushback. The Australian ran the story on the new report with the headline “‘Pervasive progressive hate’: antisemitism envoy’s new blueprint,” while The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald went with “New wave of Australian antisemitism comes from progressive social justice critics, says antisemitism envoy.”

I have said it before and I will say it again: anyone who talks about “left-wing antisemitism” like it’s a real problem which presents a real threat is a lying manipulator and should be treated as such. They are pretending to believe things that no one actually believes in order to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state.

At a recent Senate hearing, Jillian Segal was confronted by the leader of the Australian Greens, David Shoebridge, for her false Royal Commission testimony asserting that the Gaza death toll has been “grossly inflated” according to the United Nations. The spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General directly refuted this claim earlier this year, saying, “For us the Ministry of Health in Gaza is a source we, and many others, often cite. Independent validation of subsets of the data has found no significant discrepancies in their numbers.”

Jillian Segal is an immoral, manipulative white South African whose job is to deceive the public in order to facilitate genocide and apartheid. That is the light under which her recommendations should be viewed, and any government which espouses them should be viewed as supportive of the most extensively documented crimes against humanity in the history of the human species.

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Humanity has the freedom to fail this test and go the way of the dinosaur. We’re allowed to take that path if that’s what we collectively choose to do.

We can allow a few massively outnumbered plutocrats and empire managers to drive our species to extinction via climate disaster, nuclear holocaust, or AI apocalypse if we want to. We are completely free to do that.

I don’t know about you, but I actually find this a comforting thought.

When you take a close look at the existential hurdles that humanity is faced with, it can feel pretty bleak. Global capitalism is destroying the biosphere we all depend on for survival. The western empire is getting increasingly comfortable engaging in reckless brinkmanship with nuclear-armed rivals. The AI arms race is shoving through wildly unpredictable technologies at a rapidly accelerating rate with alarmingly little institutional oversight or caution.

But when you notice that all of these existential threats are entirely man-made, you realize that this means humanity has the ability to un-make them as well. We have the freedom to do either. It’s up to us.

I find this a comforting insight because it puts the ball in our court. We can choose to rise up and use the power of our numbers to save ourselves from doom, or we can choose not to. The universe, apparently, is fine with either choice. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be holding the ball.

And who am I to argue with the universe? If the universe wants humanity to have the freedom to either go extinct in the near term or survive deep into the distant future, then I can make space within myself to allow that freedom, too.

Whether or not we make it is not up to me as an individual. I can control my own actions, but I cannot control the actions of my fellow homo sapiens as a whole. And if our species as a collective decides that revolutionary change is not desirable enough or too scary or too difficult to seize, then I can submit to the will of the collective. I can hold enough grace and compassion for my species to honor its sovereign decision.

“We’ll either pass the test or we won’t.” That’s what I tell myself when things are looking dark. I give humanity the freedom to make its decision, and in so doing I free myself. I do what I can to move the needle in whatever way my limited means allow me to, and then beyond that I submit to the will of our better angels.

I do my work, and then I let go. I let go and enjoy my time on this beautiful blue planet here. Because I don’t know how much longer it will last.

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Feature image via Adobe Stock.

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That story about Google killing hundreds of thousands of trees in Finland for its data center project is such a perfect microcosm of what capitalism is doing to our world.

Recent mass media headlines are saying the tech giant “illegally” cut down “250,000” trees, but both claims paint an inaccurate picture of what actually happened. Google killed 400,000 trees (250,000 near a town called Muhos and another 150,000 near the village of Otanmäki), and unless the company’s executives actually wind up going to prison for this, their actions cannot properly be described as “illegal”.

I don’t know who first coined the saying “If the penalty is a fine, then it’s legal for rich people,” but it certainly applies here. The Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority has reportedly ordered Google to suspend all “measures that significantly change the environment,” saying it will “consider enforcement proceedings and fines” if the megacorporation does not comply. Google’s parent company Alphabet has a net worth of around four trillion dollars; whatever paltry penalties Finland might impose for these ecocidal actions, it won’t have any meaningful effect on Google.

Giant corporations do this shit all the time. They calculate that the fines incurred by their abusive actions will be dwarfed by the massive profits they generate, issue fake apologies as needed, and leave it to their armies of lawyers to minimize the damage. That’s why the Sackler family is still worth billions despite all the fines Purdue Pharma was slapped with while creating the US opiate epidemic.

A 2017 Harvard study titled “The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market” contains the following paragraph:

“Although civil claims and criminal charges were brought against Purdue and its executives, the resulting penalties paled in comparison to extended-release oxycodone profits. In May 2007, the company and its president, chief counsel, and former chief medical officer pled guilty to falsely marketing extended-release oxycodone as ‘less addictive, less subject to abuse and diversion, and less likely to cause tolerance and withdrawal than other pain medications.’ As part of the plea bargain, Purdue agreed to pay the federal government $600 million and 27 states $20 million. The three executives agreed to $34.5 million in fines but avoided jailtime. By contrast, Purdue has earned an estimated $31 billion in total revenues from extended-release oxycodone since its launch. Rather than deterring fraudulent marketing, the penalties simply became a cost of doing business.”

A cost of doing business.

That’s how things work under capitalism. The law primarily exists not to protect people or the environment, but to protect the interests of capital. If you destroyed a Google data center you’d probably be charged as a terrorist and spend decades in prison, but Google can destroy the natural world around you and get off with a finger wag and a symbolic fine. If you stole millions of dollars from your employer you’d go to prison for grand larceny, but if your employer steals millions from its employees you need to win a class action lawsuit to get back what they stole from you.

Proponents of capitalism often pretend they support minimal government intervention in civilian affairs, but their entire model is at all times propped up by state power using force to protect the haves from the have-nots at every level of our society. Corporations are free to destroy the environment, destroy your health, rob you, exploit you, and manipulate your government to their advantage, and if you ever take action to stand up to this world-devouring onslaught, the state will lock you in a cage.

In school we are taught that that the law exists to protect ordinary people from bad people, but that’s not true at all. Under capitalism, the law exists to protect the very worst among us from everyone else. That’s why we are seeing our planet being turned into dust and ashes for no reason other than shareholder profit.

It’s an insane system, and it needs to end. These freaks are feeding our entire biosphere into the woodchipper.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.

Feature image by unknown author — https://www.technadu.com/google-removes-its-dont-be-evil-motto-from-the-code-of-conduct/29238/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=199866269

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There are Polymarket ads in fortune cookies.
There are pop-ups in our prayers.
There are paywalls on the monasteries,
and the monks are millionaires.

Well little Johnny’s gone to war.
He joined the McMarines.
The Iranians must be liberated
and blown to smithereens.

Light a candle in the chapel, John,
and pray to Western God,
and listen to the homily
the preacher wrote with Claude.

“Oh Western God, please guide our drones,”
the pious Johnny prayed.
“That we may safely bomb their schools
and turn their children gray.”

The candle disappeared from sight
a minute into Johnny’s prayer,
and was replaced with hologram ads
for DraftKings and Wayfair.

Johnny placed his hand upon his heart
with reverence and love
and worshipped the blood-soaked, hungry god
in the great big bank above.

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I’m still thinking about the admission in the UK’s “antisemitism” review contradicting widespread claims by the western political/media class that antisemitism is rising to dangerous levels throughout our society.

We discussed this yesterday, but as a reminder, the UK’s Department for Education released a review led by David Bell which the British press have been citing as evidence that rising antisemitism is an urgent problem in schools throughout the nation — claims which have been thoroughly debunked by outlets like Middle East Eye and Double Down News. That review contains the following quote:

“British attitudes relating to Jewish people and Israel show two broad trends. Anti-Jewish attitudes are typically less prevalent and have remained more stable, whereas anti-Israel sentiments are more prevalent and have been increasing.”

A few months ago I said, “You’re being told there’s a dangerous explosion of Jew hatred to cover up the fact that there’s actually a very healthy explosion of Israel hatred.” The Bell review is here admitting that my assertion is correct.

I just can’t get over what a massive admission this is. If we lived in a world where politicians and media cared about facts, THIS would be the leading story. “ANTI-ISRAEL ATTITUDES INCREASING, ZERO INCREASE IN ANTISEMITISM.” That’s the actual headline here.

The pro-Palestine movement has been so successful in separating opposition to Israeli atrocities from hatred toward Jews that there has been zero increase in public hatred toward Jews throughout three years of genocide. That’s an incredibly impressive achievement in activism and education regarding a mass atrocity we’re always told is a super duper complicated issue that’s almost impossible to understand.

This one fact, by itself, completely destroys just about every argument the hasbarists have ever made about the pro-Palestine movement. People who’ve been taking a stand against the Gaza holocaust have been absolutely impeccable with their messaging, taking great care to help the public understand the distinction between the religion of Judaism and the apartheid state of Israel.

If mainstream pundits and politicians actually cared about truth and morality, they would be falling all over themselves to apologize and correct the record on the narrative they’ve been pushing that the pro-Palestine movement is responsible for a surging epidemic of antisemitism in our society. They would be telling everyone that it turns out there is in fact no epidemic of antisemitism, and the pro-Palestine movement has conducted itself with saintly meticulousness in ensuring that hatred toward the Jewish faith gains no purchase within their ranks or their message.

But mainstream pundits and politicians do not care about truth or morality. They care about promoting the interests of a genocidal apartheid state, no matter how many lies they need to tell in order to do so.

This is why instead of seeing headlines about the Bell review’s finding that there has been zero increase of antisemitism among British people, we’ve been seeing headlines falsely claiming that British schoolchildren are evil antisemitic Nazis who must be brought to heel.

“Holocaust school lessons to be improved after ‘shocking’ antisemitism review,” reads a headline from the BBC.

“Report reveals vast scale of antisemitism in English schools,” blares Sky News.

“Education secretary promises change after report shows ‘shocking scale’ of antisemitism in schools,” says ITV News.

People who support Israel are disgusting, manipulative liars, and the western political/media class are the very worst among them.

Weaponized “antisemitism” allegations kill orders of magnitude more people than actual antisemitism in today’s world, because they are used to crush all resistance to wars and genocidal atrocities which have amassed a mountain of corpses since Israel’s founding. If our politicians and news media actually cared about facts and morality, they’d be focused on eliminating the exponentially more dangerous threat.

If anything this gives me so much hope for humanity. The fact that the general populace has managed to keep a religion and the acts of a genocidal ethnostate separate despite the barrage of propaganda attempting to conflate the two is truly astounding if you really think about it. As a whole, the humans are choosing what is right over what is egoically gratifying. The sway of propaganda is losing its hold. The humans are choosing to hold to the correct moral view when it would be so much easier to collapse into bigotry.

We can take enormous hope from all of this. We are waking up. Mark my words. We are waking up.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you feel inspired. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. No generative AI used in any works.