Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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