Archiv: Caitlin Johnstone


04.08.2022 - 20:14 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

The US Military Was Just Used To Help A Dementia Patient Try To Start WW3

Here is a transcript of what Nancy Pelosi’s brain said:

“In our earliest days at our founding of our country, Benjamin Franklin, our presidency, said, freedom and democracy. Freedom and democracy, one thing, security here. If we don’t have- we can’t have either, if we don’t have both.”

Of course Benjamin Franklin was neither a president of the United States nor a “presidency”, and the quote Nancy’s floundering brain was reaching for was “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” These are not difficult things to remember or articulate for someone with functioning gray matter.

This is right up there with other famous neural malfunctions by the speaker, like her “Bernie loves hearing” gibberish from last year or her bizarre “Good morning, Sunday morning” restart in the middle of an interview a couple of years ago, and it calls to mind a DC pharmacist’s casual remark in 2017 that he had filled prescriptions to treat Alzheimer’s disease for some powerful decision makers on Capitol Hill.

13.11.2021 - 20:25 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Billionaires Are Not Morally Qualified To Shape Human Civilization

Take Bill Gates. He spends a fortune on narrative control ranging from immense contributions to The Guardian to tens of billions of dollars in grants, and he’s committed hundreds of millions of dollars to shady political influence groups as well. He’s been influencing Covid policies around the world, from intervening against the waiving of vaccine patent restrictions to facilitating the worldwide rollout of digital vaccine passports; he’s been giving countless media interviews about Covid-19 and vaccines despite having no medical degree or indeed any qualifications at all apart from a net worth of $136 billion. This is after falsely pledging to give his immense fortune away over a decade ago; his net worth has more than doubled in that time.

26.02.2021 - 16:50 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

US Bombs Syria And Ridiculously Claims Self Defense

The US is just taking it as a given that it has de facto jurisdiction over the nations of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and that any attempt to interfere in its authority in the region is an unprovoked attack which must be defended against. This is completely backwards and illegitimate. Only through the most perversely warped American supremacist reality tunnels can it look valid to dictate the affairs of sovereign nations on the other side of the planet and respond with violence if anyone in those nations tries to eject them.

15.02.2021 - 00:29 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Biden’s Iran Policy Is Just Trump’s Iran Policy With A Rainbow Flag Emoji

In a new interview with CBS Evening News, President Biden confirmed that his administration will not be lifting sanctions imposed upon Iran in order to bring Tehran to the negotiating table for the restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal.

15.02.2021 - 00:22 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Democrats WANT To Lose The Midterms: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

I’m seeing US progressive/DSA types getting more and more agitated about the sudden increase in hostility toward the Democrats from the left. What did they think was going to happen when the Dems took control of the entire government? You’re the power now, buttercup.

The problem with warning that the $2000 check scandal will lead to losses in the midterms is that Democrats are fine with losing in the midterms. You think they like having to own all their right wing bullshit for themselves? Democrats hate being exposed and vulnerable like this. They much prefer to blame their corporate cronyism, austerity policies and warmongering on an obstructionist Republican congress. They’re happy to lose the midterms. They prefer to lose the midterms.

29.01.2021 - 03:57 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

“The Coming War On China”  –  Watch John Pilger’s Powerfully Relevant Documentary

(March 23 2020)

“The aim of this film is to break a silence: the United States and China may well be on the road to war, and nuclear war is no longer unthinkable,” Pilger says in his 2016 documentary The Coming War on China, which you can watch free on Youtube here or on Vimeo here.

“In a few years China has become the world’s second-biggest economic power,” Pilger’s introduction continues. “The United States is the world’s biggest military power, with bases and missiles and ships covering every continent and every ocean. China is a threat to this dominance, says Washington. But who is the threat? This film is about shifting power, and great danger.”

15.01.2021 - 18:23 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Consent-Manufacturing For Patriot Act II Continues

As we discussed previously, Biden has often boasted of being the original author of the Patriot Act years before it was rapidly rolled out amid the fear and blind obsequiousness of the aftermath of 9/11. Now in the aftermath of the Capitol riot we are seeing a push to roll out new authoritarian laws around terrorism, this time taking aim at “domestic terror”, which were also in preparation prior to the event used to manufacture support for them.

In a new article for Washington Monthly titled “It’s Time for a Domestic Terrorism Law“, Bill Scher argues against left-wing critics of the coming laws like Glenn Greenwald and Jacobin‘s Luke Savage saying such “knee-jerk reactions” against potential authoritarian abuses fail to address the growing problem. He opens with the acknowledgement that “Joe Biden’s transition team was already working on a domestic terrorism law before the insurrection,” and then he just keeps on writing as though that’s not weird or suspicious in any way.

11.01.2021 - 10:04 [ Caitlin Johnstone. ]

Patriot Act 2, Censorship, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

“We need to stop fascism so let’s give massive sweeping powers to an elite alliance of unelected authoritarians.”

“Well I’m a leftist and I haven’t been banned on social media.”

That’s because the left is politically impotent in our society. Unless this is just a hobby for you, at some point you should plan on the left becoming a threat to the oligarchs and warmongers. What do you think happens then?

Do you really think if the left actually becomes a threat to the status quo the Neera Tandens and Rachel Maddows aren’t going to suddenly discover a reason why you’re dangerous and need to be censored? The only way to be fine with censorship is to plan on never challenging power.

07.01.2021 - 19:08 [ Caitlin Johnstone / Twitter ]

Maybe it’s because I’m Australian but I think the bar for when it’s okay for a cop to shoot someone, ANYONE, should actually be quite high. Sorry if that freaks you out.

07.01.2021 - 19:02 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

MSM Already Using Capitol Hill Riot To Call For More Internet Censorship

We will likely see many more such articles in the coming days, arguing for increased regulation of internet communication to prevent future incidents like today.

28.12.2020 - 10:51 [ Caitlin Johnson ]

Secret, Invisible Evidence Of Russian Hacking Is Not Actually Evidence

Imagine if I really was claiming that the Chinese government is arming Antifa ninja warriors to kill patriotic Americans in the coming Biden Wars. How crazy would you have to be to believe what I was saying without my providing hard, verifiable evidence for my claims?

Now imagine further that this is something I’ve made false claims about many times in the past. If every few years I make a new claim about some naughty government arming Antifa super soldiers in a great communist uprising, which turns out later to have been bogus.

20.12.2020 - 23:48 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

The Revolutionary Struggle Is A Fight Between Movement And Inertia

(16.12.2020)

The pandemic and a Democrat-controlled House presents a once-in-a-century opportunity to shove hard toward getting Americans the same healthcare rights afforded to everyone else in every major country on earth and forcing all House Democrats who oppose it to expose themselves to their constituents instead of passing the blame to the Republicans. With things getting more and more desperate, waiting for the next once-in-a-century opportunity to even begin pushing is a ridiculous proposition.

08.12.2020 - 01:10 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

In An Insane World, Revolution Is The Moderate Position

Simply advocating sanity over insanity gets you shoved out of sight and out of mind by the narrative managers responsible for preserving a world order that is stark raving insane from top to bottom. If you oppose the systems exploited by the ruling power establishment which murders, exploits and oppresses people at home and abroad all day every day while destroying the very ecosystem we depend on for survival, then you are branded a lunatic and your wrongthink quarantined so as not to infect the mainstream herd.

This dynamic is made possible by the fact that the powerful are constantly pouring their wealth and influence into manufacturing the collective delusion that madness is sanity and sickness is health.

23.11.2020 - 21:02 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Surprise! America Is Getting Another Psycho For Secretary Of State

The State Department was meant to be the counterpart to the War Department, focusing on diplomacy and peace. What ended up happening as the US government morphed into a globe-spanning empire dependent on endless violence and aggression is that the State Department wound up focusing more and more on manufacturing interventionist narratives on the world stage to gin up international support for starvation sanctions, proxy wars and war coalitions.

So in practice the US ended up with two war departments: the DoD and the State Department. Which is why you’ve seen the nation’s Secretaries of State becoming more and more jingoistic and psychopathic, to the point where some sort of antisocial personality disorder is almost a job requirement for the position.

23.11.2020 - 12:14 [ Caitlin Johnstone / Twitter ]

• 0% oppose war • 0% oppose oligarchy • 0% oppose sociopathic intelligence agencies • 0% oppose internet censorship • 0% oppose the drug war • 0% oppose the police state • 0% oppose mass surveillance • 0% oppose the prison-industrial complex • 0% oppose Israeli apartheid

14.08.2020 - 05:27 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Viral Fake Footage Of “Chinese” Atrocities Shows The Power Of Narrative Spin

The only sane response to a situation that is swamped with propaganda and disinformation is to hold tight to skepticism and agnosticism until presented with hard proof. Get comfortable with not knowing, and don’t forget that the power structures presenting you with these narratives have lied to you in the past.

Stay skeptical. Stay critical. Demand hard, verifiable proof about any claim about any US-targeted nation, and if it isn’t given to you, don’t swallow it. This is how you keep your head clear of the propaganda.

10.08.2020 - 05:50 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Once you realize that corporate power is America’s real government, it becomes clear that corporate media is state media. It’s just a tyrannical regime brainwashing its populace with propaganda, brutalizing protesters, and attacking anyone in the world who disobeys its dictates.

02.08.2020 - 10:53 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Don’t. Side. With. The. Powerful.

I’ve been thinking about it because it’s such an accurate reflection of how subservience to power actually manifests in our world. You talk about abusive power structures in our world, from police brutality to corporate predation to imperialist military interventionism, and many people are receptive. But you always wind up standing across from some freaky empire zombie saying “Well, what did you expect?”

It really is like a zombie infection, like a virus of the mind which spreads through propaganda and toxic ideologies and leads people to support the abuse of the disempowered by the powerful.

25.07.2020 - 14:57 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

So It Turns Out ‘Overpopulation’ Was Always A Stupid Patriarchal Myth

The mass media have been discussing these findings with shock and alarm, because such information is likely to be new and surprising to anyone who has never gone through the all-consuming herculean effort of motherhood. To anyone who has, the idea that most women would choose to have two or fewer children if given the resources, information and freedom to do so is just self-evident common sense.

03.07.2020 - 15:12 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Seriously, Get The Hell Out Of Afghanistan

With overwhelming bipartisan support, the House Armed Services Committee has added a Liz Cheney-spearheaded amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which throws severe roadblocks in the Trump administration’s proposed scale-down of US military presence in Afghanistan and Germany.

As The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald notes, both parties advancing the amendment cited in their arguments the completely unsubstantiated intelligence leak that was recently published by credulous mass media reporters alleging that Russia has paid bounties to Taliban fighters for killing the occupying forces in Afghanistan. Yet another western imperialist agenda once again facilitated by unforgivably egregious journalistic malpractice in the mass media.

03.07.2020 - 14:30 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

America’s Two Right-Wing Parties Keep Accusing Each Other Of Being Far-Left

The hashtag #ComradeTrump is trending on Twitter as of this writing because a well-funded Super PAC run by never-Trump Republicans put out an appallingly stupid viral video featuring footage of Trump splashed with red hammer-and-sickle symbols interspersed with images of Soviet leaders while an English-captioned narrator gushes about Mother Russia’s support for “Comrade Trump” in Russian. As of this writing the video has over two million views on Twitter alone.

This tactic of negatively associating Trump with communism and socialism, combined with the consistent pattern of attacking the president for being insufficiently warlike, would only work if it was directed at the members of a reactionary, jingoistic right-wing political ideology. And it does work, because that’s exactly the ideology of the Democratic Party.

14.04.2020 - 14:23 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

This Absolute Bullshit Would Not Be Possible Without Propaganda

Joe Biden has been a horrible, evil politician since long before his rape allegations went mainstream and his brain started turning to porridge. If people could gaze with fresh, unmanipulated eyes upon someone who’s dedicated his entire political career to neoliberal exploitation at home and neoconservative mass murder abroad, someone who openly boasts about authoring the foundational documents of the USA PATRIOT Act, someone who promises rich donors that “nothing fundamentally will change” if he’s elected and who they know from experience can be taken at his word, it would never occur to them that this is someone who should be running for any elected office anywhere, let along within spitting distance of the most powerful one in the world.

It is only by the ability of the mass media to manufacture the illusion of normality that this bullshit has been made possible.

04.04.2020 - 10:16 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

How To Tell Real News From Useless Narrative Fluff

Because the news media are controlled by plutocrats who have a vested interest in protecting the status quo upon which their kingdoms are built, almost everything in the news is useless narrative fluff. It doesn’t tell you what’s really going on, it rather tries to influence what’s going on by manipulating the perceptions of the audience. It does this by either (A) distracting from what really matters by focusing on what doesn’t matter, or (B) actively working to manipulate how the audience thinks about a given issue.

02.04.2020 - 07:49 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

People’s Skepticism About Covid-19 Is The Fault Of The Lying Mass Media

“This pandemic will be more consequential than 9/11. It probably already is. People just don’t realize it, because they still think—still feel—that once this is all over we’ll go back to the way things used to be. We won’t,” says The Bulwark, whose founder Bill Kristol was also the founder of the wildly influential think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC famously argued a year before the 9/11 attacks that the massive worldwide increase in US military interventionism they were promoting at the time would not be possible without “some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”. All of which miraculously came to pass.

24.03.2020 - 11:26 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Hollywood Celebrities Are Psyops Wrapped In Human Skin

It is an absolute guarantee that powerful people will use this pandemic to advance authoritarian measures which they have no intention of rolling back once the pandemic is over. They are working to do this currently. This is not a possibility, this is an absolute certainty.

03.03.2020 - 08:43 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Dems Converge Around Dementia-Addled Warmonger Ahead Of Super Tuesday

Sanders has not been pulling in anywhere near the numbers he’d need to pull to prevent a contested convention. This means that even if he gets more votes than any of his primary opponents, party leaders can still overrule those votes and appoint Biden as their nominee to run against Trump. Establishment spinmeisters as well as all Sanders’ primary opponents have been working to normalize this ahead of time.

The only problem? Biden’s brain is turning into sauerkraut.

25.02.2020 - 19:57 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Intelligence Sources: All Candidates Are Russian Agents But Pete Buttigieg

Today’s Caitlin Johnstone essay has been replaced by this breaking report by the National News Conglomerate. NNC: Obey.

22.02.2020 - 18:39 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

The Myth Of The Moderate Democrat: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

There is no such thing as a moderate mainstream centrist. There is nothing moderate about an ideology of endless mass military slaughter abroad and ever-tightening authoritarianism and economic exploitation at home. These people are violent extremists. They’re ISIS with nukes.

18.02.2020 - 13:58 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Op-Ed: Dems Should Do The Sensible Thing And Nominate A Moderate Rapacious Psychopath

If you can’t take it from me, take it from the cold, hard numbers: if Democrats want to beat Trump, they need to nominate a centrist. Someone who rejects the extremes of Bernie’s far left and Trump’s far right and instead espouses sensible, middle-of-the-road values like endless war and military expansionism, rapacious ecocide, corrupt plutocracy, crushing domestic austerity measures, new cold war nuclear escalations, continued deregulation of sociopathic financial and commercial institutions, police militarization, unprecedented levels of imprisonment, Orwellian surveillance programs, internet censorship, and ever-mounting authoritarianism.

You know, the moderate position.

16.02.2020 - 18:37 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Trump Supporters Are George W Bush Supporters LARPing As Ron Paul Supporters

Believing that a US president is going to save you is just as dumb as believing the FBI and CIA are going to save you. Republicans have been doing the former while Democrats have been doing the latter. Both have been duped by custom-made establishment propaganda into cheering for different aspects of the establishment, and the only one who wins is that very same establishment.

15.02.2020 - 15:06 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

The Belief That Everything Will Be Fine Once Trump’s Gone Is More Dangerous Than Trump

Whether it winds up being Buttigieg, Bloomberg, or one of their ideological alt-centrist clones like Amy Klobuchar or the floundering Joe Biden, the mainstream narrative will soon converge around one candidate in a very positive way, with the only important qualification being that they aren’t Bernie Sanders. Many powerful people will do everything they can to prevent a Sanders nomination, whose presidency they oppose more than Trump’s. As journalist Matt Taibbi recently pointed out, the Democratic establishment has “every incentive to play every conceivable card. Trillions at stake.”

25.01.2020 - 17:42 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Lucid Living

Beneath all our evolutionary conditioning, beneath all our cultural mind viruses and power-serving, power-promulgated belief systems, beneath the chaos and confusion of life in an insane society, there is a deep stillness.

We all know deep down in our guts that that stillness is there, and that it is our natural condition. That’s why we all spend our lives trying out different strategies for coming to inner tranquility. Most of those strategies are unhealthy and doomed to fail, but that inner stillness at the root of our being is what we’re always reaching to experience.

23.01.2020 - 07:59 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

How To Be A Mentally Sovereign Human

Being a mentally sovereign human means constructing your own understanding of this weird reality based on your own investigations and your own reasoning, which means constructing it from the ground up. Even your most basic assumptions about reality itself must be rigorously cross-examined with complete skepticism. Nothing must be taken on faith.

16.01.2020 - 00:59 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

#CNNIsTrash Trends As Pushback Grows Against Oligarchic Election Meddling

The joint smear job against Sanders had many arms, including wildly biased questions like Wolf Blitzer deliberately associating Bernie with “Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei” by pointing out that they both want US troops out of the Middle East and demanding to know how he was going to avoid “bankrupting the country” with a healthcare plan used in nations all over the world.

But by far the most glaringly egregious assault on the Vermont Senator’s image was when CNN moderator Abby Phillip took a completely evidence-free sexism smear which defies all logic and presented it to the debate audience as an established and undeniable fact.

29.12.2019 - 15:17 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Why Everything Is Fucked

The most powerful early humans were the cleverest humans, the ones who understood how to use this new capacity for language and abstract thought to their own advantage. They realized that by simply saying something is true in a sufficiently confident way, they could persuade the less clever humans to treat it as true.

Those clever humans used this newfound ability to place themselves in charge, and to make a bunch of rules to be passed down from generation to generation proclaiming that the less powerful humans must submit to the more powerful humans. Over the generations these rules became more and more numerous and complex, weaving in moralism, codes of filial piety, and insane, power-serving religions glorifying meekness, obedience and poverty.

(…)

But then, I believe in miracles.

28.12.2019 - 15:58 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Media’s Deafening Silence On Latest WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal

This is getting really, really, really weird.

WikiLeaks has published yet another set of leaked internal documents from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) adding even more material to the mountain of evidence that we’ve been lied to about an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria last year which resulted in airstrikes upon that nation from the US, UK and France.

This new WikiLeaks drop includes an email from the OPCW Chief of Cabinet Sebastien Braha (who is reportedly so detested by organisation inspectors that they code named him “Voldemort”) throwing a fit over the Ian Henderson Engineering Assessment which found that the Douma incident was likely a staged event. Braha is seen ordering OPCW staff to “remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever” from the organisation’s secure registry.

28.12.2019 - 15:55 [ Caitlin Johnstone / theblogcat.de ]

Das ohrenbetäubende Schweigen der Medien zu den neuesten WikiLeaks-Veröffentlichungen ist an sich schon ein Skandal

Es wird wirklich sehr sehr seltsam.

WikiLeaks hat eine Reihe weiterer geleakter interner Dokumente der Organisation für das Verbot chemischer Waffen (OPCW) veröffentlicht und dem Berg an Beweisen noch mehr Material hinzugefügt, dass man uns über den angeblichen Chemiewaffenangriff in Douma, Syrien belogen hat. Diese Lüge führte zu den Luftangriffen auf Syrien durch die USA, UK und Frankreich.

Diese neue WikiLeaks-Veröffentlichung beinhaltet eine E-Mail des Kabinettschefs der OPCW, Sebastien Braha (der Berichten zufolge von den Inspektoren der Organisation so verachtet wird, dass er den Spitznamen „Voldemort“ bekam), der einem Tobsuchtsanfall gleicht, weil eine Ingenieur-technische Einschätzung von Ian Henderson herausfand, dass der Douma-Vorfall wahrscheinlich eine Inszenierung war. Braha wurde dabei ertappt, dass er OPCW-Mitarbeiter angewiesen hat, aus dem Sicherheitsregister der Organisation „jedwede Spuren davon aus Registratur/Speicherung/was auch immer zu beseitigen“.

18.12.2019 - 14:40 [ Caitlin Johnstone ]

Attacking The Source: The Establishment Loyalist’s Favorite Online Tactic

If you’re skeptical of western power structures and you’ve ever engaged in online political debate for any length of time, the following has definitely happened to you.

You find yourself going back and forth with one of those high-confidence, low-information establishment types who’s promulgating a dubious mainstream narrative, whether that be about politics, war, Julian Assange, or whatever. At some point they make an assertion which you know to be false–publicly available information invalidates the claim they’re making.