How does one define "awake"? One person's awake can be quite different from another's. We all have limited cognitive abilities and attention spans. One can be 'awake' about certain things and be completely ignorant about others.
Usually, personal experiences have a huge effect on radicalizing oneself (for example, if you ever experienced police brutality or racism, your perspective in these areas grows, your thinking evolves, and you are on your way to being radicalized).
The simplest definition of awake is the ability to notice how the policies always benefit the rich and hurt the poor. And to resist that trend as much as possible. If you can't at least align with that, you're still asleep.
Here's the problem with that. I have many friends/acquaintances (capitalist/bourgeois) that are WIDE awake and are well aware of all such policies. In fact, many such people are behind such policies themselves. Hence, being awake/aware about it is insufficient. There are many more elements to it like morality, ethics, belief systems, etc.
"At this point “What radicalized you?” is a much less interesting question to ask people than “Why aren’t you radicalized yet?" I would really like to know the answer to that question too. So many people I try to talk to look at me with a kind of superior look and they say "I don't read the news"
That's what I'm trying to understand too. I'm trying to understand WHY people are not yet radicalized and their many reasons and justifications for it.
I have talked to so many people (friends, acquaintances, family members) for whom the last 7 years have made no difference - they've ignored almost every event in the last 7 years because it doesn't affect them (other than Covid to a certain limited extent).
THIS is what I want to understand - why is it that some people are radicalized while others are not? What is the deeper psychology behind this?
IIf the brainwash is deep and thorough, it can be mentally disruptive and injurious to hear and believe something other than what one believes. I've also read that the jabs may have something to do with it.
The day I had to call my wife from a phone booth outside the draft induction center where I had just passed the army induction physical in my 2nd yr of grad school -- to inform her I'd become eligible for Viet Cong target practice.
Richard Gage has a movie about to come out on Building 7 and the NIST cover up. NIST has this insane theory that one steel girder failing led to a symmetrical demolition of a building. It should have fallen over if anything about their theory was correct, or not collapsed at all. 8 floors of the building all failed across all steel girders at the exact same time, hence they were exploded with timed explosives. It's a given.
It fell over because there was significant structural and seismic and fire impact very nearby, which would be completely unchallenged if 9-11 wasn’t marinated in a deep glaze of conspiracy. It’s only an ice bath if you forget to use your hot water.
According to NIST, this steel-framed structure fell, for the first time in history, due to FIRE ALONE. Believe whatever you want. I’m still trusting that my eyes aren’t lying to me.
Yeah, right. Fairytale physics-defying fed-slop is not just “challenged,” it’s ridiculed.
~~~
Try understanding the terminology you use. The events of 9/11, criminal in nature, due to sheer breadth & complexity, are quite obviously a result of conspiracy. Your puerile and ignorant attempt to use “conspiracy” in a sentence is of note. The fed-slop narrative of the events of the day is a “conspiracy theory,” and, along with the fed-slop “physics,” is a subject of ridicule as well. Arabs with knives, oh my!
JG Miller, there are too many conspiracy theorists in Caitlin's substack (and it doesn't help that Caitlin herself is on the borderline of critical skepticism and conspiracism - as evidenced by her comment on 9/11). There is a certain 'psychology' behind why some people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories than others (and it's quite interesting actually - and has been studied extensively).
The issue with many conspiracy theorists is they have trouble distinguishing between 'true conspiracies', 'plausible conspiracies', 'lacking-in-evidence conspiracies', and sometimes downright 'stupid conspiracies'.
Conspiracy theories have a very large spectrum, and often it is not the conspiracy itself that is the issue but rather the 'THEORY' behind the conspiracy that is the problem (hence the term conspiracy theorist).
There are several well-evidenced and empirically analyzed conspiracies that have sound theories behind them - these are not what is colloquially called a "conspiracy theory".
When there is insufficient evidence and the gap is made up by speculation based on arbitrary criteria (regardless of how many people believe and agree on such criteria), that is when the THEORY behind the conspiracy becomes suspect.
Here's some reading (that I know you won't do because what if you're wrong about your theories? how will that affect your psychology?)
We've had this conversation before Jim, hence I did not address my comment to YOU above, but to JG Miller. But it seems you could not resist responding to me.
For me, it was reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" years ago. Until then, I had just been a plain vanilla liberal. Zinn opened my eyes and the eyes of millions of people. I see him as a true American hero.
What took you so long? Obama was the corrupt, lying, smug, arrogant, entitled sob that radicalized me enough to vote for Trump twice. Dems stealing the primary from Bernie twice truly made them shit in my book.
My consciousness raising “radicalization” occurred in stages from the age of nine in 1964, through the “American War’s” end in April, 1975. Then my disgust with US imperialism became concretized in the Fall of ‘79 by viewing Peter Davis’ Academy Award winning documentary #HeartsAndMinds (1974) at the University of Florida’s Constans Theatre with my then, soon to be wife, KMS.
At age 16, reading the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. And achieving the enlightenment that “how the West was won” was through genocide. This would have been circa 1970, I believe.
Vietnam, of course. My father shouting “That son of a bitch!” every time LBJ appeared on the news.
Growing up Palestinian-American, I’ve known about the slow methodical genocide of my people for my entire life.
Wounded Knee, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, both in 10th grade English class.
Since then, radical reinforcement has come primarily through other books, largely recommended by writers I came to respect. Once the curtain is pulled back, the truths just come tumbling out.
And Caitlin gave great advice to always view incoming information through the filter of propaganda, narrative, and empire.
I didn’t read Malcolm until well into adulthood. But my older brother, a pre-med student at Flint Junior College, had the privilege of hearing him speak there 🙂
You certainly had a more progressive English teacher than I ever had!
Note 1: Das Bootlicker — The Mechanics of Weaponized Guilt
Has human civilization ever witnessed a display of moral gymnastics quite as grotesque, quite as obsessively bureaucratized, as the modern Federal Republic of Germany? History has known its fair share of ruthless empires and shameless opportunists, but none have ever managed to convert the absolute horror of their own historic crimes into a permanent diplomatic hall pass for someone else’s slaughter. Other vassal states hide their complicity behind quiet shame or clumsy geopolitical calculus—and while the French may capitulate quicker than a man suffering from premature ejaculation, Berlin does not merely surrender its moral autonomy; it collapses into pre-emptive, enthusiastic servitude. Let them be warned: not all people on this earth are such pathetic cowards.
Staatsräson, oh gift divine—
We wash our sins in coastal brine!
With tearful eyes and heavy soul,
We stamp the bombs and sign the scroll!
To watch German statecraft in action today is to watch a tragicomic pantomime of compulsive, pathological over-correction. They have elevated Staatsräson—their holy 'reason of state'—from a doctrine of historical atonement into a grotesque, weaponized fetish. In their desperate eagerness to prove they are no longer the monsters of the twentieth century, they have happily signed up as the enthusiastic mechanics for the atrocities of the twenty-first.
If Berlin truly harboured genuine care for Jewish people, it would grasp a fundamental moral truth: true friends restrain you from committing evil and destroying your own moral existence; they do not egg you on as you seal your own spiritual ruin. Yet state authorities routinely crack down on peace activists and anti-war dissidents under the transparent pretext of combating anti-Semitism—conveniently oblivious to the staggering irony that the very Arabs, and particularly Arab women, whom their police tackle and drag through the streets are themselves Semites. Most of the world's Semitic peoples are Arabs, yet Berlin's self-congratulatory elite—educated fools who pride themselves on academic pedigree—are far too dense to grasp basic etymology. They parade their intellectual credentials while enforcing state orthodoxy with the subtlety of a truncheon, entirely unaware of their own monumental ignorance.
This is, after all, an official apparatus where the concept of Ordnung has effectively replaced the human soul. This is a bureaucratic machine that considers waiting at a pedestrian crossing in an empty desert at three in the morning—simply because a glowing red light commands it—to be the absolute apex of civilizational achievement. They navigate international relations with the exact same terrifying rigidity. If an ongoing slaughter has been properly vetted by three parliamentary committees, certified by an administrative tribunal, and cross-referenced against five sub-clauses of European export regulations, then as far as Berlin is concerned, the blood on the floor is merely an unavoidable procedural side-effect.
Edmund Burke dryly noted, 'Servility to the great has its own compensation.' But modern Berlin has surpassed even Burke’s cynicism—their hypocrisy does not merely cost nothing; it buys them absolution. Indeed, they are the only state apparatus on earth capable of making Washington look sophisticated. Where Americans sell an imperial campaign wrapped in a Hollywood blockbuster, a fireworks display, and a catchy slogan, Berlin hands you an atrocity accompanied by a 400-page compliance manual, demanding you admire the uniform margins, immaculate filing, and proper waste-sorting procedures of the regime.
Covid, i made fun of anti-vaxers and then got myocarditis. How embarrassing. This got me watching RFKJr and I read his book on Pfauci. Watching RFKJr made me realize I knew nothing about Nov 22, 1963 and JFK. Two years reading on the JFK assassination radicalized me to some degree. After I solved that with 100% certainty, that it was a conspiracy driven by our gov't, i tacked 9/11 which I have been on a year.
Nothing is as the NPCs and normies believe it is. Nothing. Once you take the toothpaste out of the tube, you can't put it back.
Yeah, that is possible. When I say I solved it, what i meant is that LHO was a bogus story put forward by our gov’t and there was a conspiracy. I am certain LHO was a patsy, who thought he was involved in a blackops anti Castro mission. I am certain the Warren Commission covered up the truth. I am sure of all of this. I’m not sure of whether it was Israel, the CIA or LBJ as the alpha dog driving it.
Yeah, I agree, but I seriously can't imagine LBJ doing it. He would have been great if he had ended Vietnam instead of going all in. It could have been elements of our government under Izrshell's influence. Jack Ruby (Rubenstein) was Jewish fwiw.
We live in a country of 300 million meat puppets - ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ was a work of material, radical prophecy. The question isn’t why they’re not radicalised: it’s how they even put their socks on
Eyes and ears and a brain.
I don't see it as "radical". Just being awake, sort of.
How does one define "awake"? One person's awake can be quite different from another's. We all have limited cognitive abilities and attention spans. One can be 'awake' about certain things and be completely ignorant about others.
Usually, personal experiences have a huge effect on radicalizing oneself (for example, if you ever experienced police brutality or racism, your perspective in these areas grows, your thinking evolves, and you are on your way to being radicalized).
The simplest definition of awake is the ability to notice how the policies always benefit the rich and hurt the poor. And to resist that trend as much as possible. If you can't at least align with that, you're still asleep.
Here's the problem with that. I have many friends/acquaintances (capitalist/bourgeois) that are WIDE awake and are well aware of all such policies. In fact, many such people are behind such policies themselves. Hence, being awake/aware about it is insufficient. There are many more elements to it like morality, ethics, belief systems, etc.
The genocide against Palestinians has radicalized me and educated me about the Mideast, AIPAC, and Zionists more than I could ever have imagined.
Me too!
"At this point “What radicalized you?” is a much less interesting question to ask people than “Why aren’t you radicalized yet?" I would really like to know the answer to that question too. So many people I try to talk to look at me with a kind of superior look and they say "I don't read the news"
That's what I'm trying to understand too. I'm trying to understand WHY people are not yet radicalized and their many reasons and justifications for it.
I have talked to so many people (friends, acquaintances, family members) for whom the last 7 years have made no difference - they've ignored almost every event in the last 7 years because it doesn't affect them (other than Covid to a certain limited extent).
THIS is what I want to understand - why is it that some people are radicalized while others are not? What is the deeper psychology behind this?
I've read several articles on this since 2020.
IIf the brainwash is deep and thorough, it can be mentally disruptive and injurious to hear and believe something other than what one believes. I've also read that the jabs may have something to do with it.
Smh
The day I had to call my wife from a phone booth outside the draft induction center where I had just passed the army induction physical in my 2nd yr of grad school -- to inform her I'd become eligible for Viet Cong target practice.
They wanted to make you into a bullseye? Well, boot camp would have been easy.
That would do it!
WTC 7 was my ice bath that forced me to see this crooked mess of a world for the hellscape it currently is. Excellent piece Ms. Johnstone.
Richard Gage has a movie about to come out on Building 7 and the NIST cover up. NIST has this insane theory that one steel girder failing led to a symmetrical demolition of a building. It should have fallen over if anything about their theory was correct, or not collapsed at all. 8 floors of the building all failed across all steel girders at the exact same time, hence they were exploded with timed explosives. It's a given.
The infamous column 79. Utter rubbish.
It fell over because there was significant structural and seismic and fire impact very nearby, which would be completely unchallenged if 9-11 wasn’t marinated in a deep glaze of conspiracy. It’s only an ice bath if you forget to use your hot water.
write down the names of all the people in this video and see their writings on ae911truth.org - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6zKo2g5DWs
There is a new movie that god willing is going to be on netflix wrt 7 very soon. Deal is being negotiated right now.
According to NIST, this steel-framed structure fell, for the first time in history, due to FIRE ALONE. Believe whatever you want. I’m still trusting that my eyes aren’t lying to me.
“fell over”
“completely unchallenged”
~~~
Yeah, right. Fairytale physics-defying fed-slop is not just “challenged,” it’s ridiculed.
~~~
Try understanding the terminology you use. The events of 9/11, criminal in nature, due to sheer breadth & complexity, are quite obviously a result of conspiracy. Your puerile and ignorant attempt to use “conspiracy” in a sentence is of note. The fed-slop narrative of the events of the day is a “conspiracy theory,” and, along with the fed-slop “physics,” is a subject of ridicule as well. Arabs with knives, oh my!
Sigh.
Save your sigh. It looks bad on you.
JG Miller, there are too many conspiracy theorists in Caitlin's substack (and it doesn't help that Caitlin herself is on the borderline of critical skepticism and conspiracism - as evidenced by her comment on 9/11). There is a certain 'psychology' behind why some people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories than others (and it's quite interesting actually - and has been studied extensively).
The more things Chang, the more they stay the same. Ol’ Chokaski: Staunch Defender of Official Myths.
The issue with many conspiracy theorists is they have trouble distinguishing between 'true conspiracies', 'plausible conspiracies', 'lacking-in-evidence conspiracies', and sometimes downright 'stupid conspiracies'.
Conspiracy theories have a very large spectrum, and often it is not the conspiracy itself that is the issue but rather the 'THEORY' behind the conspiracy that is the problem (hence the term conspiracy theorist).
There are several well-evidenced and empirically analyzed conspiracies that have sound theories behind them - these are not what is colloquially called a "conspiracy theory".
When there is insufficient evidence and the gap is made up by speculation based on arbitrary criteria (regardless of how many people believe and agree on such criteria), that is when the THEORY behind the conspiracy becomes suspect.
Here's some reading (that I know you won't do because what if you're wrong about your theories? how will that affect your psychology?)
(1) Speaking of Psychology: Why people believe in conspiracy theories [https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/conspiracy-theories]
(2) Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories? [https://www.verywellmind.com/why-people-believe-in-conspiracy-theories-4690335]
We've had this conversation before Jim, hence I did not address my comment to YOU above, but to JG Miller. But it seems you could not resist responding to me.
Blah blah blah. WTC 7 is an obvious controlled demolition. Your constant defense of the official narrative is telling.
A typical response from a conspiracy theorist. I'm unimpressed by your argumentation abilities (but what else is new?)
I''d rather be in a corner with my blanky and binky thinking happy thoughts. But it has become quite impossible.
Jack Daniels can help!
It might, but I don't touch the stuff.
No! Thee Jack Daniels.
I don't get it
And many of us were radicalized long before the most recent imperialist rampage. It's hard to understand how people haven't noticed this stuff.
For me, it was reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" years ago. Until then, I had just been a plain vanilla liberal. Zinn opened my eyes and the eyes of millions of people. I see him as a true American hero.
What took you so long? Obama was the corrupt, lying, smug, arrogant, entitled sob that radicalized me enough to vote for Trump twice. Dems stealing the primary from Bernie twice truly made them shit in my book.
You voted for Trump twice? The Grab'em by the pussy, Lolita Express frequent flyer? And you're proud of it?
If my memory serves me tight, Obama’s first speech as president was at the request and benefit of Aipac, barely days after his inauguration.
If so, says it all!
Holy cow.
My consciousness raising “radicalization” occurred in stages from the age of nine in 1964, through the “American War’s” end in April, 1975. Then my disgust with US imperialism became concretized in the Fall of ‘79 by viewing Peter Davis’ Academy Award winning documentary #HeartsAndMinds (1974) at the University of Florida’s Constans Theatre with my then, soon to be wife, KMS.
At age 16, reading the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. And achieving the enlightenment that “how the West was won” was through genocide. This would have been circa 1970, I believe.
Vietnam, of course. My father shouting “That son of a bitch!” every time LBJ appeared on the news.
Growing up Palestinian-American, I’ve known about the slow methodical genocide of my people for my entire life.
Wounded Knee, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, both in 10th grade English class.
Since then, radical reinforcement has come primarily through other books, largely recommended by writers I came to respect. Once the curtain is pulled back, the truths just come tumbling out.
And Caitlin gave great advice to always view incoming information through the filter of propaganda, narrative, and empire.
Hi Tom
I didn’t read Malcolm until well into adulthood. But my older brother, a pre-med student at Flint Junior College, had the privilege of hearing him speak there 🙂
You certainly had a more progressive English teacher than I ever had!
The constant stream of lies radicalized me.
I had the privilege of being brought up that way.
Note 1: Das Bootlicker — The Mechanics of Weaponized Guilt
Has human civilization ever witnessed a display of moral gymnastics quite as grotesque, quite as obsessively bureaucratized, as the modern Federal Republic of Germany? History has known its fair share of ruthless empires and shameless opportunists, but none have ever managed to convert the absolute horror of their own historic crimes into a permanent diplomatic hall pass for someone else’s slaughter. Other vassal states hide their complicity behind quiet shame or clumsy geopolitical calculus—and while the French may capitulate quicker than a man suffering from premature ejaculation, Berlin does not merely surrender its moral autonomy; it collapses into pre-emptive, enthusiastic servitude. Let them be warned: not all people on this earth are such pathetic cowards.
Staatsräson, oh gift divine—
We wash our sins in coastal brine!
With tearful eyes and heavy soul,
We stamp the bombs and sign the scroll!
To watch German statecraft in action today is to watch a tragicomic pantomime of compulsive, pathological over-correction. They have elevated Staatsräson—their holy 'reason of state'—from a doctrine of historical atonement into a grotesque, weaponized fetish. In their desperate eagerness to prove they are no longer the monsters of the twentieth century, they have happily signed up as the enthusiastic mechanics for the atrocities of the twenty-first.
If Berlin truly harboured genuine care for Jewish people, it would grasp a fundamental moral truth: true friends restrain you from committing evil and destroying your own moral existence; they do not egg you on as you seal your own spiritual ruin. Yet state authorities routinely crack down on peace activists and anti-war dissidents under the transparent pretext of combating anti-Semitism—conveniently oblivious to the staggering irony that the very Arabs, and particularly Arab women, whom their police tackle and drag through the streets are themselves Semites. Most of the world's Semitic peoples are Arabs, yet Berlin's self-congratulatory elite—educated fools who pride themselves on academic pedigree—are far too dense to grasp basic etymology. They parade their intellectual credentials while enforcing state orthodoxy with the subtlety of a truncheon, entirely unaware of their own monumental ignorance.
This is, after all, an official apparatus where the concept of Ordnung has effectively replaced the human soul. This is a bureaucratic machine that considers waiting at a pedestrian crossing in an empty desert at three in the morning—simply because a glowing red light commands it—to be the absolute apex of civilizational achievement. They navigate international relations with the exact same terrifying rigidity. If an ongoing slaughter has been properly vetted by three parliamentary committees, certified by an administrative tribunal, and cross-referenced against five sub-clauses of European export regulations, then as far as Berlin is concerned, the blood on the floor is merely an unavoidable procedural side-effect.
Edmund Burke dryly noted, 'Servility to the great has its own compensation.' But modern Berlin has surpassed even Burke’s cynicism—their hypocrisy does not merely cost nothing; it buys them absolution. Indeed, they are the only state apparatus on earth capable of making Washington look sophisticated. Where Americans sell an imperial campaign wrapped in a Hollywood blockbuster, a fireworks display, and a catchy slogan, Berlin hands you an atrocity accompanied by a 400-page compliance manual, demanding you admire the uniform margins, immaculate filing, and proper waste-sorting procedures of the regime.
Covid, i made fun of anti-vaxers and then got myocarditis. How embarrassing. This got me watching RFKJr and I read his book on Pfauci. Watching RFKJr made me realize I knew nothing about Nov 22, 1963 and JFK. Two years reading on the JFK assassination radicalized me to some degree. After I solved that with 100% certainty, that it was a conspiracy driven by our gov't, i tacked 9/11 which I have been on a year.
Nothing is as the NPCs and normies believe it is. Nothing. Once you take the toothpaste out of the tube, you can't put it back.
Still wouldn't put JFK' s murder past Israel.
Yeah, that is possible. When I say I solved it, what i meant is that LHO was a bogus story put forward by our gov’t and there was a conspiracy. I am certain LHO was a patsy, who thought he was involved in a blackops anti Castro mission. I am certain the Warren Commission covered up the truth. I am sure of all of this. I’m not sure of whether it was Israel, the CIA or LBJ as the alpha dog driving it.
Yeah, I agree, but I seriously can't imagine LBJ doing it. He would have been great if he had ended Vietnam instead of going all in. It could have been elements of our government under Izrshell's influence. Jack Ruby (Rubenstein) was Jewish fwiw.
Sorry about the myocarditis! But welcome to the other side. 2020 and on started my big awakening.
We live in a country of 300 million meat puppets - ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ was a work of material, radical prophecy. The question isn’t why they’re not radicalised: it’s how they even put their socks on