Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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Trump should have stuck to just doing legal things like assassinating foreign leaders, deliberately starving civilians, imprisoning journalists, and dropping military explosives on foreign nations.
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If you’re just tuning in, US dollar hegemony and diplomatic dominance are rapidly eroding while the US and its allies accelerate aggressions and provocations against Russia and China simultaneously in a desperate bid to quash the emergence of a multipolar world. I’m a bit less excited about the mounting threats posed to US hegemony than other anti-imperialists, only because a desperate unipolarist empire is a dangerous unipolarist empire. The deadliest time for a battered wife is right when she leaves.
A cornered animal is dangerous, especially when it has sharp teeth. A cornered empire is dangerous, especially when it has nuclear weapons. “If I can’t have you no one can” is a line that can be said to a partner or to a planet.
Abuse victims need to escape, but we may also be heading into the most perilous moment in all of history.
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How is this even debatable? The US Constitution explicitly says in the clearest terms possible that congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, and yet that's literally exactly the thing that congress is trying to do. https://t.co/Zt9DCMmUJF pic.twitter.com/TwFOJ0CpdC
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 29, 2023
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It’s so crazy that the immensely authoritarian RESTRICT Act is getting shoved through on a tidal wave of consent that’s based on literally nothing besides people’s fuzzbrained artificially-manufactured hysteria about China.
Consent for the PATRIOT Act was manufactured by planes crashing into American skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. Consent for the RESTRICT Act was manufactured by a few right wing pundits stoking a dopey moral panic about an app where kids post dancing videos.
It just says so much about the lies the west tells about itself and its values that the second any social media service becomes widely used you see the entire US security state converge upon it and demand control over it.
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The US needs to stop China’s rise by militarily encircling it and crippling nations who are aligned with it and waging economic warfare and staging proxy wars and saturating the world in propaganda and crushing free speech, because otherwise a tyrannical regime might take over.
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Russia, China and Brazil are the only three nations on the UN Security Council who want an independent investigation into the Nord Stream bombing, for some reason. https://t.co/lOOcYL6tnd
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 28, 2023
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In the year 2023 there’s really no excuse for ordinary Americans to believe any politician is on their side in either major party. The very best of them will only once in a while do the bare-minimum not-evil thing. Don’t make heroes of these scumbags. They’re not your friends.
Don’t celebrate on those rare occasions when one of them does the bare-minimum not-evil thing. Don’t “give them credit”. Don’t think it proves anything about who they are as people. All it means is a shitty empire manager did one bare-minimum not-evil thing. They’re still trash. Believing anyone in either mainstream party is your friend is believing that institutions which are explicitly designed to promote the interests of oligarchy and empire are going to help ordinary people like you. It’s like believing you can put out a fire with enough gasoline.
There are no solutions to America’s dysfunction in electoral politics. That doesn’t mean there are no solutions, it just means you can’t use something that’s specifically designed to perpetuate the thing you don’t like to end the thing you don’t like. Any time you’re being told that a major figure in mainstream politics is fighting for you, you’re being sold a psyop; you’re being sold the false belief that the system works and can be used to achieve positive change. This is done to keep you from dispensing with that system.
In 2016 you could be forgiven for thinking electoral politics had some hope, but after watching Trump facilitate every deep state agenda in the book and watching Bernie cave and capitulate at every turn year after year, there’s no excuse anymore. Stop buying into the puppet show.
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Imagine invading a nation on the other side of the planet and establishing an illegal military occupation controlling a third of the nation and then claiming "self defense" when you kill people in that nation who try to make you leave. https://t.co/vEo8BOI31M
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 31, 2023
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Western journalists are some of the most herd-minded, approval-seeking losers you’ll ever meet. Their entire lives revolve around seeking the approval of other journalists, when they should be doing the exact opposite: working to expose journalistic malpractice in the media.
Journalists should have an oppositional relationship with power, and that means all power. Not only should they have an aggressively oppositional relationship with their government and its oligarchs, they should have an oppositional relationship with the mass media itself. They should spurn the approval of other journalists and media institutions; all the best journalists do.
It’s not okay for journalists to let themselves become tools of power. It’s not okay for journalists to be friends with politicians and government officials. It’s not okay for journalists to have tribal loyalty to other journalists or seek to ingratiate themselves to them.
Journalists should have loyalty to the truth and the truth only. Not to the high-level people they schmooze with at the nation’s capital. Not to government officials in the name of maintaining “access”. Not to their government’s geopolitical interests. Not even to each other.
And of course everything I just described is career suicide to anyone who’s looking to make it anywhere in the mass media. If what you want is to have the story of “being a journalist” and all the social clout that comes with it, you’re going to do the exact opposite of what I said. That’s a big part of what makes western journalists such herd-minded, approval-seeking losers; that’s the only type of personality that can make it to any level of prominence in the mass media today. That’s a problem, and if we’re ever going to have a healthy society it’s going to have to change.
The only way to do real critical reporting and still keep your job is to go independent, but that means going without all the resources people have at mainstream news outlets to get their information. Nobody’s found a great solution to this yet, which is perfectly understandable because we live in a sick society where money and power are closely related and it takes money to produce good investigative journalism. So you’ll see things like “independent” media outlets cozying up with plutocrats to pay the bills, and they always run into problems down the track.
Really it’s a bit of a catch-22; we can’t have healthy media until we have a healthy society, and we can’t have a healthy society until we have healthy media. We just muddle through as best we can, telling the truth the entire time, come what may.
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