JOHNSTONE

Of course they'd try to silence our speech. Of course they'd try to send our kids off to war with Iran. Of course they'd work to manipulate our government. Of course they'd pollute the information ecosystem with mountains of lies. They support a live-streamed genocide. They're bad people. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's so funny how Trump has stopped even pretending to be a populist. As soon as he was re-elected he was just "Yeah okay so Israel comes first and forget everything I said about free speech and the Ukraine war is continuing and there will be no Epstein investigation, fuck you." Reading by Tim Foley.

The Israel apologists have lost the argument. They might not know it yet, but they have. Public sentiment has turned irreversibly against them as people's eyes are opened to the truth of what's happening in Gaza, and more and more propagandists are choosing to rescue what's left of their tattered credibility instead of going down with the sinking ship. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Good Guys are building concentration camps in Rafah and massacring civilians trying to obtain food. The Good Guys are circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and telling us we're not allowed to oppose genocide. Yesterday I saw a little girl playing and I thought how nice it is that she has all her limbs and that she is not lying still covered in gray dust while her father screams and cries and calls out to God while trying to kiss her back to life. The world is changed now. The moon is covered with powdered buildings. The pigeons are weeping and the wind sounds like drones. Sometimes I cough and gray dust comes out. Sometimes it's a child's shoe. There's a dead donkey lying in my backyard that nobody wants to talk about. The Australians chat about real estate investments and how you can knock down one house and replace it with two houses and then make believe that neither house smells like corpses. The news man tells us the corporations are just dumping the products directly into the Pacific now while clinging tightly to the edge of the screen so the black hole doesn't pull him in. Everything's fine, the news man yells, and the system is working perfectly. We are the Good Guys after all. We are, after all, the Good Guys. Reading by Tim Foley.

If you want to really live an awake and inspired life, you've got to blaze your own trail. You've got to unlearn everything you've been told about what a life properly lived would look like, and write your own rules. Because the rules everyone else has been playing by were written by madmen. Reading by Tim Foley.

It really is nuts how a young person can fly to Israel and go play genocide games in Gaza for a while and then just fly back to their own country and expect to be treated like a normal member of society like it's some kind of genocide summer camp. Reading by Tim Foley.

As Australia's dear friend Israel announces its plan to move Gaza's entire population into concentration camps to prepare them for deportation and murder them if they refuse, the Australian government is laser-focused on tackling the problem of — you guessed it — antisemitism. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US has imposed sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for using her position to oppose the most thoroughly documented genocide in history. At the same time, the US has removed Syria's Al Qaeda franchise HTS from its list of designated terrorist organizations, because its leader successfully carried out the regime change in Damascus that the western empire had been chasing for years. At the same time, the UK has added nonviolent anti-genocide activism group Palestine Action to its list of banned terrorist organizations for opposing the Gaza holocaust. At the same time, the Israeli prime minister who is carrying out that holocaust has nominated the American president who is helping him perpetrate genocidal atrocities for a Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time, Israel has continued its ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza, while also arresting the Israeli journalist who helped expose the IDF officials who cooked up fake atrocity propaganda about burnt babies on October 7. At the same time, the Trump administration has enraged its MAGA base by concluding that Jeffrey Epstein had no client list for any kind of sexual blackmail operation and definitely committed suicide. The western empire is one nonstop insult to our intelligence. The peace advocates are terrorists, the genocide architects deserve peace prizes, the journalists are dangerous, and Epstein was just a wealthy socialite who made a few mistakes. Reading by Tim Foley.

Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok has gone full Nazi after changes were made to its programming to give it a heavier right wing bias, sparking international headlines with its tweets praising Adolf Hitler's treatment of Jews and babbling about Jewish conspiracies to spread anti-white hate. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US has removed Syria's Al Qaeda franchise from its list of designated terrorist organizations just days after the UK added nonviolent activist group Palestine Action to its own list of banned terrorist groups. Reading by Tim Foley.

Welcome to the empire, where peace activists are called terrorists, where hospitals are called military bases, where facts are called blood libel, where people opposing genocide are called hateful Nazis, where genocidal soldiers are a protected group and chanting for their death is a hate crime. Reading by Tim Foley.

Everyone’s still talking about Bob Vylan, and rightly so. A crowd full of westerners happily being led through a chant of “Death, death to the IDF” at the 2025 Glastonbury Festival was a historical landmark moment for the 21st century, and the group’s persecution at the hands of western governments is once again highlighting the way our society’s purported values of free thought and free expression go right out the window wherever Israel is concerned. But one thing that’s not getting enough attention is the fact that many, many other acts also spoke out in support of Palestine at that same festival, and that the crowd was full of attendees waving Palestinian flags. Supporting Palestine and opposing Israel’s genocidal atrocities is just what’s cool now. This is a massive cultural development, because it means we are seeing the emergence of actual, meaningful rebellion in western counterculture for the first time arguably since the Vietnam War. The artists and their fans aren’t just talking the talk of sticking it to the establishment anymore. Reading by Tim Foley.

Anyone who has had the misfortune of knowing a manipulative narcissist has seen all these patterns before. The self-centeredness. The hypocrisy. The horrific abuse, followed by collapsing into blubbering victimhood the second the abuse is called out. The aggressive efforts to control the narrative and frame all critics and rivals as evil monsters. It's a very familiar playbook. Reading by Tim Foley.

Honestly at this point they should just get Netanyahu his own room in the White House and a desk in the Oval Office. The prime minister of Israel is taking his third trip to the White House in the five months since Trump has been back in office. I have immediate blood family members who I love with all my heart and visit less often than this. Reading by Tim Foley.

Do something every day to help undermine public perception of the empire. Draw attention to its abuses in places like Gaza. Get people laughing at its absurdities and hypocrisies. Spread distrust in the imperial propaganda services known as the western press by spotlighting their deceptions and manipulations. Help people to recognize all the ways their government is screwing them over for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Facilitate the collective dawning of the realization that everything westerners have been taught about their society and their world is a lie. Help people to understand that it really, truly does not need to be this way. Use every means at your disposal to help open up the next pair of eyelids to the ugly reality of the empire. Cultivate a habit of daily acts of sabotage against the imperial machine. There is always something you can do. You cannot defeat the machine by yourself, but you can do something every day to help tilt our society’s collective consciousness toward tearing it down together. Reading by Tim Foley.

Zohran Mamdani has won the Democratic Party primary in the New York City mayoral race after a frenetic smear campaign to portray him as an antisemite for his pro-Palestinian views, and now all the world's worst people are freaking out about it. Reading by Tim Foley.

The more exposed Israel's criminality becomes, the more absurd the arguments made in its defense are getting. Reading by Tim Foley.

If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, its crazy lunatic government will flip out and nuke us all. Watch out for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, those guys are a bunch of maniacal antisemites who want to attack Israelis just because they’re Jewish. Oh no, Putin is invading Ukraine completely unprovoked because he’s a madman who hates freedom and won’t stop until he’s conquered all of Europe. China is building up its military because the megalomaniacal Xi Jinping wants to take over the world; all those US military bases surrounding China are just a defensive measure to contain Beijing’s insanity. Assad just went nuts one day and started slaughtering his own people out of nowhere. Gaddafi is a sexual sadist who’s giving Viagra to his troops to help them commit mass rapes in Libya. Saddam Hussein is so crazy and evil he’s trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction to give Americans another 9/11. The North Koreans used to be far too insane to be allowed to have nuclear weapons because they’d nuke San Francisco immediately, but after they obtained nuclear weapons they were miraculously cured of this rare psychological disorder. The stories of the western empire ask us to believe that everyone who finds themselves in the imperial crosshairs is an irrational actor whose loony behavior can only be attributed to some uncontrollable defect within their own minds, or who will soon snap and do something nutty if they are not contained by force. Reading by Tim Foley.

There is nothing you can say to me that will make me stop opposing Israel's western-backed atrocities. Call me an antisemite or a Nazi or any name you want. The name-calling stopped having any effect a long time ago. Babble about October 7 and Hamas and hostages all you wish. I've stopped listening to you. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US empire and Israel both exist in a perpetual state of war and attack other countries constantly; Iran never invades other countries and avoids war like Melania Trump avoids missionary position. But we're meant to accept that it's fine for the US and Israel to have nukes and do anything necessary to prevent Iran from getting any? Reading by Tim Foley.