Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

Israel is demolishing residential buildings in the West Bank, burning homes in Lebanon and constructing military facilities in Syria, all while continuing to kill civilians in Gaza. Reading by Tim Foley.

"And it should here be mentioned that Donald Trump has publicly admitted to being bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs. The president openly acknowledged on the campaign trail that the first time he was president, megadonors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were at the White House “probably almost more than anybody” demanding favors for Israel like moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and acknowledging Israel’s illegitimate claim to the Golan Heights, which he eagerly granted. Miriam Adelson, who is Israeli-American, gave the Trump campaign $100 million last year." Reading by Tim Foley.

It is very possible to live a truth-driven life which does not shy away from the harsh realities of the world without being consumed by the darkness. All you have to do is make sure you’re expanding your knowledge in both directions, not just your knowledge of the outer world. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's not very often you hear a US empire manager come right out and admit they only care about planetary hegemony and that their whole schtick about spreading freedom and democracy is a sham. They'll pick a US crony dictator over a sovereign democratically elected leader ten times out of ten. Reading by Tim Foley.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Nowhere is it inscribed upon the fabric of reality that control of the world must be ceded to the dumbest, crudest and cruelest among us. Nowhere is it written in adamantine that our happiness and the fate of our biosphere must depend on what the market will bear. It’s one of those things that gets sillier and sillier the more you think about it, like making your bed or the Avatar sequel. We are giants who have been tricked into thinking we are insects. We are a dragon wearing a name tag being yelled at in a cubicle by a short man with a receding hairline whose wife is about to leave him. We could bite him in half at any time, or light him on fire like a child’s marshmallow on a stick, but instead we sit there taking it while his spittle frosts our cheeks, silently hoping that we are making the expected level of eye contact. There is a hungry wolf inside every wagging dog. Every tiger in every cage remembers the natural order of things, and reminds us now and then right

Drop Site News reports that more than 80 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF in Gaza since what we’re calling a “ceasefire” went into effect on the 19th of January. The majority have been in Rafah, a now completely destroyed city which the Biden administration had previously said was off limits for a major Israeli offensive. Reading by Tim Foley.

And this, ultimately, is why the world looks the way it looks: because powerful people have been so successful at manipulating the way the public thinks about things. Reading by Tim Foley.

And the liberals shriek about Donald Trump while the sky rains blackened skeletons And the capitalists surf on collapse like raptors on an updraft And we scurry back and forth between toil and distraction with pythons around our stomachs and mollusks in our mouths And we search achingly for our pilfered hearts inside bottles of pills and TED Talks And the amputated limbs of Ukrainian men and Palestinian children are draped about the fast food restaurants like Christmas tinsel And the billionaires turn the oceans into plastic so they can pay strangers to pretend to love them And men with rusty nail teeth push needles into babies to open up markets in the global south And the talking heads tell us the news but won’t tell us why the flesh is melting from their faces as they die of radiation poisoning And we cackle at parties and act like everything isn’t covered in oil and the bones of birds and fish And we beat back the revolution within ourselves with a chair and a whip for no other reason than becaus

The buzz around Xiaohongshu and then DeepSeek has had an unusually high volume of westerners speaking positively about China for the last couple of weeks, which of course means we're also seeing many westerners falling all over themselves to say "Well actually China is actually quite bad actually" in response. Reading by Tim Foley.

Both Jordan and Egypt have put out statements rejecting President Trump's proposal to "clean out" Gaza and move its population to those nations. Reading by Tim Foley.

Well that didn't take long. President Trump has said he wants to "clean out" Gaza and relocate its population to US client states Egypt and Jordan, which would of course be a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. Reading by Tim Foley.

They killed a two year-old girl in the West Bank on Saturday. Laila al-Khatib was shot in the head by Israeli forces in Jenin, because I guess they needed one more dead Palestinian kid. One more dead Palestinian kid to add to the mountain. One more small Palestinian face raining down upon us in our nightmares like meteors on the dinosaurs in the prequel to this apocalypse. One more screaming, blood-spattered mother. One more grandfather with boulders for feet carrying the tiny shrouded form of someone who should have buried him. It’s one more dead Palestinian kid. One more snowflake in the blizzard. And yet here I sit, mouth agape, a mortally wounded polar bear in my chest and a cry of despair turning into a ghost and leaving me silent and slack-jawed like an imbecile. I want to crawl into my childhood crib and fall asleep forever. I want to turn into a crystal punch bowl and fall and shatter on a marble floor. The air is full of flapping, and there’s seaweed in my hair. There’s an angel with a

Here in the thick of it, our eyes full of pixels and our veins full of microplastics, out here with the child amputees in Gaza and the frightened street schizophrenics in Los Angeles and the pigs living their whole lives in metal crates the size of their bodies, our lives ruled by algorithms and wealthy world eaters as we pray for a miracle on knees made of miracles with clasped hands made of miracles in a world made of miracles, craning our necks to see past the giant flashing signs saying "YOU ARE LOVED, YOU ARE LOVE" in order to find Defects and Inadequacy. In the thick of it, up to our ears in it, cracked wide open, wide open to the screams of mothers clutching tiny broken bodies, to the screams of men on fire, to the screams of dying coral reefs and rainforests, to the screams inside all of us saying "Something is wrong, something has gone very, very wrong," wide open to the agony but also to the beauty, to the booming holiness of the earth and the sky, to the mysteries hiding in abandoned buildings, t

They've arrested another pro-Palestinian journalist, this time in Switzerland. The Electronic Intifada's executive director Ali Abunimah has reportedly been detained by Swiss police in Zurich, after having been interrogated for an hour and released the previous day when entering the country. Abunimah, who is Palestinian-American, has played a leading role in exposing and critiquing the apartheid abuses of Israel for many years. Reading by Tim Foley.

Even if this ceasefire somehow manages to hold, some other nightmare will be unleashed by the US-centralized empire somewhere else in the world in the coming years. Reading by Tim Foley.

The world is ruled by religious fanatics with nukes. If a normal person says they're the second coming of Jesus Christ they get medicated and institutionalized. If you make equally insane religious claims on the Senate floor, they let you run an empire. Reading by Tim Foley.

During his inaugural address, the new president of the United States was refreshingly open about the fact that Washington is the hub of a continuously expanding empire which is ruled by billionaire plutocrats. Reading by Tim Foley.

TikTok is back in the US after a brief shutdown, reportedly because Trump pledged to suspend the Biden administration's ban. A Gaza ceasefire has also finally emerged due to pressure from Trump after Biden stalled for 15 months, and NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration plans on pressuring the Israeli government throughout negotiations to establish a permanent peace beyond the 42 days scheduled for the first phase of the agreement. Remember this: it's not that Trump is good, it's that Democrats are just that bad. Biden's completely unconditional facilitation of Israeli atrocities has actually been the exception rather than the norm among US presidents, as Trita Parsi explained in Foreign Policy last April. From what we are seeing so far, Trump is just returning things to their horrible standard baseline. Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear

Together, a bunch of mostly powerless people can create a very, very powerful force. If a healthy world is to be born, it that is the force by which it will come into being. Reading by Tim Foley.

Two journalists were ejected from a State Department press conference on Thursday for asking inconvenient questions about Gaza. One of them, Sam Husseini, was physically carried out by security while demanding to know why Secretary of State Antony Blinken is not in The Hague for his war crimes. Reading by Tim Foley.