Caitlin Johnstone

Screw The Troops, And Other Notes Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is claiming that anyone who opposes Trump’s warmongering hates “the troops”. “If you want to take issue with what we did in Epic Fury or Rough Rider or NAB and Nicolas Maduro, you’re taking issue with the troops and what they accomplished,” Hegseth told the press on Monday. If you’re too young to remember 2003, this was the line they used the last time the White House started an unwinnable war in the middle east. If you hate the war, you hate The Troops. And we all know you’re not allowed to hate The Troops. You MUST love the imperial stormtroopers. It’s such shitbrained war propaganda. Yes, absolutely fuck the war. Absolutely fuck every single person who chose to enter into this ridiculously unprovoked war of aggression. And hey, fuck The Troops too while we’re at it. Fuck everyone who knowingly enlisted in a military force that is literally only ever used to inflict evil in modern times. Don’t valorize employment in a murderous war machine. If you do, you’re only encouraging future waves of young people to enlist. Don’t be a pro bono recruitment advertiser for the US military. Stigmatize that entire line of work. We’re not doing that shit anymore. You don’t get use “the troops” as human shields to hide the depravity of your military decisions behind. The fact that your mass atrocities are carried out by rank-and-file employees does not magically exonerate anyone involved. Not the people sending those employees off to war, and not the people who knowingly enlisted in a military force that is only ever used to murder human beings for power and profit. ❖ Senator Ruben Gallego took to Twitter on Monday to proclaim, “Ukraine can win. Thats why I back them. It’s a Russian talking point that Ukraine can’t win, cause Russia big blah,blah. If Ukraine kills enough Russians they will quit.” When a commenter told him to join the International Legion and go fight the Russians himself, Gallego replied, “No that’s the beauty of this, we can pay the Ukrainians to kill the Russians.” Propagandists claim it’s Russian propaganda to say those who support the war in Ukraine want to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” but that really is their position. Ukrainians keep telling pollsters that they want a negotiated end to the war while western proxy warriors chomp on cheesy carb snacks and tweet from their sofas about how great it is to throw Ukrainian bodies into the meat grinder. ❖ New rule: if you get to tell me that I hate Jews, then I get to tell you you’re just pretending to believe that in order to advance the interests of a genocidal apartheid state. If you get to tell me about my thoughts and feelings, I get to tell you about yours. I get to tell you that you don’t believe a single word you are saying in our conversation. I get to tell you that you are lying about what you think and feel in order to marginalize criticism of the state of Israel. Those are your rules. We get to make sweeping assertions about one another’s internal conditions in an authoritative tone instead of making actual arguments. If you whine about this, I will tell you, “This is the type of conversation you chose to have. This is the interaction you asked for, so this is the interaction you are getting. You’re just upset because you’re unaccustomed to getting back what you are serving.” Give them back what they are giving, and don’t stop until they produce a real argument instead of dopey “antisemite” ad hominems. ❖ I ran into one of those liberal Zionists who poses as pro-Palestine but spends half their time concern trolling about “antisemitism” in the pro-Palestine movement. He tried to get me to engage him in this subject and I told him this: “Address the fact that 99.9% of the time “antisemitism” gets mentioned it’s in reference to criticisms of Israel and Zionism. Address the fact that Israel and Zionism cause many orders of magnitude more damage than the 0.1% instances of actual antisemitism. Address the fact that the overwhelming majority of the 0.1% instances of actual antisemitism are caused by Israel’s genocide and warmongering and would go away if Israel stopped butchering children under the banner of the Star of David. Explain how it is possible to have a 'serious discussion about antisemitism' while these three things are happening. “You will answer all four questions I asked you in their entirety if this conversation is to proceed. Until you have thoroughly addressed them all, the conversation you are trying to have is nonsensical.” Back in 2021 I tweeted, “If I wanted to sabotage the pro-Palestine movement, I would make myself a part of the conversation by criticizing Israeli abuses and supporting Palestinian rights, then I’d start going “This rise in anti-semitism sure is concerning though, can we pause and focus on this please?” That’s exactly what these freaks are doing. ❖ Reading by Tim Foley:

They Want To Use AI To Re-Centralize Control Of Information "It’s becoming clearer and clearer to everyone that these new technologies are not intended to improve the lives of ordinary people, but to serve the interests of the oligarchs and empire managers who rule our world."

I keep thinking about a talk I listened to by @JulianAssange back in 2017 where he warned that one day AI could be used to facilitate the propaganda interests of the powerful by manipulating news media and information in ways that are too subtle for the human mind to notice. Assange described a future where AI-powered algorithms serve us a customized feed of information based on data collected about our search queries and interests, calculated to appeal to our biases and construct a worldview for us which advances the agendas of those who control the machines. He explained that sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence systems could arrange this information with more subtlety and complexity than human perception can pick up on, in much the same way a computer can outperform any human brain at a game of chess. Here’s an excerpt from Assange’s remarks, delivered via video chat at the Meltdown Festival in June 2017: “What I think is probably the most important development that is happening as far as the fate of human beings is concerned is that we are getting close to the threshold where the traditional propaganda function that is employed by, you know, the BBC, the Daily Mail, etc... can be encapsulated by AI processes. “Now, if you think about when you’re playing chess, already we’re in a situation where AI can do better than any human chess player. So you can see a certain number of moves ahead. And someone moves a piece onto the board and you go ‘Why did they put that knight there?’ And you start to think what is the intentionality behind it, and you try and look several steps ahead to work out what the intentionality was and then counter it: Okay, they want to manipulate me into moving here so this will happen and so I will lose. “We take these considerations already when we’re — well, some of us — when we’re reading stories in the press. What is the intentionality of this story? Why is this particular information being pushed to the public and not some other form of information? Who’s the name of the author? What publication is it appearing in? What language? Etc. Well, possibly the reason is because someone wanted to promote a particular agenda, therefore we should read it in a different light. “But when you have artificial intelligence programs harvesting all the search queries that people have on their phones, all the YouTube videos that human beings have uploaded etc, and it starts to lay out perceptual influence campaigns 20 to 30 moves ahead, this starts to become totally beneath the levels of human perception. And once a computer-augmented organization such as Google is able to engage in influencing human beings 20 to 30 moves ahead, keeping each move beneath the level of human perception, there’s nothing we can do about it, because we can’t see it.” I keep thinking about these remarks nearly a decade later because this does seem to be the goal. It’s becoming clearer and clearer to everyone that these new technologies are not intended to improve the lives of ordinary people, but to serve the interests of the oligarchs and empire managers who rule our world. That’s why they’re being rammed into existence at breakneck pace despite the obvious fact that they’re making life worse for most people without advancing human quality of life in any meaningful way. A big part of the agenda seems to be to re-centralize the control of information that was temporarily lost with the advent of the internet. Revolutionary sentiments are rumbling around the world as our species becomes increasingly discontented with the abuses of capitalism and the US-led world order, assisted by humanity’s unprecedented ability to network and share information around the world in real time. Artificial intelligence’s usefulness in re-centralizing information in ways that can be easily manipulated has already been noted by the Israel lobby. At an American Jewish Committee event this past June, Santa Clara University’s Maya Ackerman argued that generative AI presents an exciting new opportunity for imposing pro-Israel narratives on public consciousness, because AI companies can be lobbied directly to push pro-Israel narratives since their leaders can control what information people see. Here’s a transcript of what she said: “The really cool thing about AI is that while it can become a great ally for our enemies, if we act early it could be exactly the opportunity that we need after missing the boat with social media. AI is now becoming the dominant source of information — the main source of information. People trust AI more than anything else. They trust AI more than social media. They turn to chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini instead of using Google. And young people use these bots instead of Google in very, very very large numbers. So this is becoming the main source of information. “And so when I say this, I still find Jewish people being discouraged, they say ‘Oh, but Wikipedia is already so antisemitic and social media is so antisemitic — why bother? The AI just learns from all of this data.’ So, you know, whatever, not much we can do. “But that’s not true, because over the past two years the AI companies have been moving towards alignment. So instead of algorithms sort of honestly representing what’s in the data, we’re finding that these chatbots and the text to image models are increasingly showing us exactly what the companies want us to see. “Okay, so it’s becoming intentional. Which means that instead of trying to control the whole world and trying to somehow manage what’s happening in this big blob called Wikipedia and social media, we can go directly to the companies with clear technical and advocacy solutions. For the first time, there is a path to correcting the digital world.” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt recently confirmed that this was the Israel lobby’s new MO, saying the ADL has been “working with” all the top AI companies and pushing them to into alignment with the pro-Israel agenda. Speaking at a Jerusalem Post conference last month, Greenblatt said the following: "So we've been working with the frontier labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet the company that runs Gemini, Google, Meta who runs Muse, and others, X, who run Grok—testing their models and using the results to push them to do better." “Look, we’ve had excellent collaboration with Silicon Valley. These companies want to improve ChatGPT and Claude. We’ve got to help them. So we’ve run the tests and seen where antisemitism shows up and helped them develop strategies to tackle it right in the source code.” If the Israel lobby manipulators are doing this, then we can assume that all the high-level imperial narrative managers are doing it as well. In January 2018, Assange tweeted the following: “The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control machines and machines that control humans. “While the internet has brought about a revolution in our ability to educate each other, the consequent democratic explosion has shaken existing establishments to their core. Burgeoning digital super states such as Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are integrated with the existing order, have moved to re-establish discourse control. This is not simply a corrective action. Undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. “While still in its infancy, the geometric nature of this trend is clear. The phenomenon differs from traditional attempts to shape culture and politics by operating at a scale, speed, and increasingly at a subtlety, that appears highly likely to eclipse human counter-measures. “Nuclear war, climate change or global pandemics are existential threats that we can work through with discussion and thought. Discourse is humanity’s immune system for existential threats. Diseases that infect the immune system are usually fatal. In this case, at a planetary scale.” Anyway, just some things we should keep in mind as we make our way into this strange new future.

Trump Official Claims Those Who Oppose Iran War Are Blinded By “Satan”, And Other Notes US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee claims that anyone who opposes Trump’s war with Iran is being blinded by Satan. Like, the actual, literal devil character from the Bible. During an incredibly sycophantic recent interview on The Anchor Podcast, Huckabee was asked by the host if he believed European opposition to the US war on Iran was the result of mental problems. “I think it’s a spiritual issue,” Huckabee replied. “I know it sounds a little funny for an ambassador to be talking like this, but look, I see this as spiritual darkness, spiritual blindness,” adding that “Satan has blinded the minds of those and has captured their thinking.” This is the same raving lunatic who said Israel is like America’s “wife”, and who got in hot water earlier this year for saying it would be fine for the Israelis to forcibly annex the territory of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia in addition to the Palestinian Territories because the Bible says so. It says so much about American politics that this nut job has been elevated to such a high position in the US government. The US empire is a giant armageddon cult with nukes. ❖ As children die in floods because of Israel’s humanitarian abuses in Gaza, Saturday Night Live is using this moment to push the spiritually exhausting fake narrative that anyone who humanizes Palestinians must secretly hate Jews. “Abdul El-Sayed made history as the first Muslim elected to the senate — well, first OPENLY Muslim,” SNL’s Colin Jost quipped in front of a photo of Barack Obama during the show’s Weekend Update segment. “El-Sayed hinted that he would like to see Chuck Schumer replaced as senate majority leader, but if I had just gone through the campaign he did, I don’t think my first move would be get rid of the Jewish guy,” Jost said. El-Sayed was aggressively smeared as an antisemite throughout his senate race due to his support for Palestinian rights and his criticisms of the state of Israel. Palestinians in Gaza are being flooded out of their tents while Saturday Night Live tells jokes that sound like they came out of the Babylon Bee to silence their supporters. SNL is such disgusting empire smut. It’s not just the American news media that’s propaganda; it’s all mainstream entertainment. ❖ It’s crazy how the western world went “it’s bad that our governments are backing a genocide in Palestine” and a few loud Zionist Jews said “this discussion should obviously center us and our feelings at all times and in all ways” and the west went “ah yes true, good point.” ❖ I’ve never seen a logically sound argument that it’s anti-semitic to deny that Jews have an extra special connection to the land of Israel. It’s where their religion comes from, so in that sense they have the same connection that Christians have, but beyond that the only arguments to be made are claims based on nothing but blind religious faith. You can tell me that Israel is mentioned all the time in Jewish prayers and Jewish scriptures etc, but that’s just telling me about Jewish religious beliefs. Telling me I’m an anti-semite if I don’t accept those religious beliefs as true is exactly the same as telling me I’m an anti-semite if I don’t stay in my house and pray on Saturday. Jews can believe whatever they want to believe, but it violates my freedom of religion to demand that *I* believe what they believe. That’s the same as telling me I’m Islamophobic if I don’t wear a hijab. You can tell me that all Jews everywhere are descended from the biblical Israelites, but that’s (A) another blind-faith belief based on nothing but religious assertion and (B) irrelevant since all westerners can trace their heritage back to many different countries they aren’t allowed to lay claim to. So there’s really no case to be made. And yet “antisemitism” watchdog groups throughout the western world assert that it is an antisemitic offense to deny that Jews have a unique connection to the land of Israel. They have no argument. They are wrong. ❖ I sometimes see hear debates in feminist circles about why men are so disproportionately violent and abusive compared to women and what makes them act that way, but I don’t really think it’s that much of a mystery. Like so many other questions about the illnesses of our society, the answer is “because of war.” Society conditions men to be cruel because for thousands of years civilizations around the world have needed men to go kill people in wars for the powerful. They were ordered to do horrific things to men, women and children using blades, spears, arrows and bludgeoning weapons, so everything kind and gentle in them needed to be snuffed out in order for them to do these things. We still have the vestiges of the culture which shaped men in this way living on in our civilization today. ❖ Reading by Tim Foley.

There's a saying that history is written by the victors, but this is also true of the present story. Those who are winning the capitalism game get to set the narrative about what is currently happening in our world. If you succeed in dominating the humans you share a planet with using our current socioeconomic systems of labor exploitation and resource extraction, then you get to buy up politicians, media outlets, online platforms and influence operations which allow you to determine the mainstream narratives about what's going on in our world, in the same way the victorious armies of the past often had the power to shape the historical record in their favor. The present is therefore written by the victors. Those who've landed at the top of the heap have the power to circulate narratives which normalize the abusive system they benefit from, and to scare the public away from seeking to implement other systems of power distribution and resource allocation. They have the power to shape public perception of world events, to reverse victim and perpetrator in their narratives about international conflicts, and to frame the western empire as a passive witness to the terrible things that are happening around the world rather than the primary driver of those horrors. They have the power to determine which protest movements, mass atrocities and scandals receive widespread attention in our society, and which get conveniently overlooked. They have the power to determine which political parties are taken seriously, and which parties are considered unrealistic vanity projects which steal votes from the viable candidates. They have the power to make or break careers in media or politics, to choose which figures are elevated to celebrity status or marginalized to the fringes, and to fabricate antisemitism scandals out of thin air. Power is the ability to control what happens. Absolute power is the ability to control what people THINK about what happens. Those who are winning the capitalism game are able to exert absolute power over our society. The real source of power in our world is not money, nor resources, nor armies, nor weapons. The real source of power in our world is narrative, and the ability to control it. Narrative is the only thing that determines what governments look like, how power works, how money operates, what laws there are, and why nations operate the way they do. They're all completely made-up guidelines made of words which we have all collectively agreed to pretend are true. The only reason anything works the way it works is because enough of us believe the shared narratives saying it is so. It is our collective belief which gives those narratives their power. That's why our rulers pour so much energy into controlling the narrative. That's what you're seeing with all the news media consolidation, the centralization of internet activity into a handful of trillionaire apps, the aggressive artificial intelligence push, and the efforts to stomp out dissident speech throughout the western world. It's because the powerful understand something most of us do not: that their power comes entirely from narrative. They know that as soon as enough of us stop believing their narratives, we are free. We can decide to re-write the made-up rules of society whenever we choose to, and change everything about states, authority, money and labor which have allowed the plutocrats to live like kings at the expense of everyone else. We can stop playing the capitalism game they've been winning at any time, because the rules are completely made up, and we can just make up a different game. As soon as enough people stop believing the stories of the dominant storytellers, we can use the power of our numbers to force the creation of a healthy world.