Don’t let the fraudulence of this civilization eclipse the supernova of authenticity hidden just beneath that thin membrane. Don’t let the vapid artificiality of mainstream culture cause you to miss the weird magic of life as it actually is. Don’t let the barrage of advertisements screaming “THIS IS NEVER ENOUGH” distract from the symphony of […]
Caitlin Johnstone
There Is Always Hope, And There Is Always Wonder by Caitlin Johnstone
I often hear talk of how depressing it is to learn the truth about what’s really going on in our society and in our world, including in the comments sections of the places my own writings appear. I’m always being asked for advice on how to keep going on when everything seems so dismal. This […]
Growing Up Means Extracting The Beliefs That Were Placed In Your Head By Others by Caitlin Johnstone
Most people never grow up. Not really. Growing up means maturing. It means becoming independent. It means developing into your own person and standing on your own two feet. Few people really do this. Because few people ever get around to extracting all the beliefs that were placed in their heads by other people. Most […]
Our Mortality Should Unite Us by Caitlin Johnstone
And that’s how we’re able to pretend we’re at odds with each other. To pretend it makes sense to live in a competition-based society where we need to claw our way overtop everyone else in order to get ahead in a zero-sum rat race that can’t exist without losers. To pretend it makes sense to […]
The Trouble With ‘Western Values’ Is That Westerners Don’t Value Them by Caitlin Johnstone
Have you ever noticed how those who shriek the loudest about tyranny in foreign countries are always the same people calling for the censorship and deplatforming of anyone who criticizes the western empire? It’s a ubiquitous mind virus throughout western society. Anyone — and I do mean anyone — who aggressively and consistently criticizes the […]
In This Disaster We Are All, Ultimately, Innocent by Caitlin Johnstone
The eat-or-be-eaten dynamic came crashing headlong through the dawn of a new species with a rapidly-evolved cerebral cortex and the sudden capacity for abstract thought, and all that fear and stress kept marching forward from generation to generation entangling itself with this added new element of thought, language and storytelling. This gave rise to societal […]
Trapped In The Slaughterhouse by Caitlin Johnstone
This is no civilization. It’s a slaughterhouse. A fake plastic performance staged to funnel human life into the gears of an insatiable machine. A fake plastic culture designed to keep us on the conveyor belt so that our life force can be converted into fuel for a soulless empire. A fake plastic society built to […]
We’ve Been Lied To Our Whole Lives About Everything That Matters by Caitlin Johnstone
Stories about protagonists who’ve been misguided their whole lives about something very important have been emerging in our culture for generations, and they continue to delight audiences in the box office to this day. The pauper was really a prince. Luke was Darth Vader’s son. Keanu Reeves had been living in a computer simulation. Bruce […]
The Empire Is Showing More And More Of Its True Face by Caitlin Johnstone
Genocide walrus John Bolton outright admitted to planning foreign coups with the US government in conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday. That’s coups, plural. While arguing that the Capitol riot on January 6th of last year was not an attempted coup but rather just Trump stumbling around trying to look after his own interests, […]
The US Empire Acts Like A Textbook Manipulative Sociopath by Caitlin Johnstone
Propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening. Censorship only works if it doesn’t draw attention to the information being censored. The US empire’s nonstop campaign to control the world’s dominant narratives only works if it isn’t in the spotlight of public scrutiny. This is why those who draw attention to these things are […]
The Most American Thing That Has Ever Happened by Caitlin Johnstone
We are once again witnessing history being made, folks. Today, in the Year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two, we get the great privilege of bearing witness to the single most American thing that has ever happened. The Biden administration has asked top Democrats to decouple the federal government’s Covid relief spending package from […]
The US Cries About War Crimes While Imprisoning A Journalist For Exposing Its War Crimes by Caitlin Johnstone
In what his lawyers have described as a “brief but significant moment in the case,” a British magistrates’ court has signed off on Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States, bringing the WikiLeaks founder one step closer to a US trial under the Espionage Act which threatens press freedoms worldwide. The extradition case now goes […]
Hard To Swallow Pills by Caitlin Johnstone
You were born in the middle of the most sophisticated and expansive mass-scale perception management operation that has ever taken place. The news media is propaganda and schooling is designed to condition us to accept that propaganda. Public understanding of what a normal moderate position looks like and what a radical extremist position looks like […]
The Assange Case Invalidates US Criticisms Of Russia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by Caitlin Johnstone
If you’ve been following the news about Ukraine but still don’t understand that it’s the single most aggressively narrative managed and psyop-intensive war in human history, there is a 100 percent chance you believe false things about what’s happening there. It’s not a question of if the US played a role in Imran Khan’s removal […]
If It Feels Like You’re Being Manipulated, It’s Because You Are by Caitlin Johnstone
If you’ve got a gut feeling that your rulers are working to control your perception of the war in Ukraine, it is safe to trust that feeling. If you feel like there’s been a concerted effort from the most powerful government and media institutions in the western world to manipulate your understanding of what’s going […]
They’re Enslaving Our Minds And Driving Us Toward Destruction by Caitlin Johnstone
You know you are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine by the mass media and by Silicon Valley. You can feel it in your guts. Everyone can feel it, on some level. It feels gross. The split on this issue is between those who trust this gut feeling and those who choose to psychologically compartmentalize away […]
People Overestimate The US War Machine And Underestimate The US Propaganda Machine by Caitlin Johnstone
As Pedro Gonzales recently documented in Human Events, The Kyiv “Independent” was slapped together a few months ago with what the Committee to Protect Journalists called “an emergency grant from the European Endowment for Democracy.” The European Endowment for Democracy is a spinoff of the US government-funded “NGO” National Endowment for Democracy, which according to […]
Umm… Are We The Baddies? by Caitlin Johnstone
Reuters reports that Facebook and Instagram are now allowing calls for the death of Russians and Russian leaders in exemption from the platforms’ hate speech terms of service due to the war in Ukraine: “Meta Platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in […]
Every US Enemy Is Hitler: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by Caitlin Johnstone
It’s just incredible how even after all this time, after all those wars, after all those lies, it’s not even occurring to most mainstream westerners to investigate whether the US could possibly have had anything to do with starting the war in Ukraine. There’s one asshole in the room who always starts shit. Any time […]
Perhaps The US Should Shut The Fuck Up About Respecting Other Countries’ Sovereignty by Caitlin Johnstone
There are all kinds of criticisms that one can level against this move by Moscow, if one feels that the entire western political/media class screaming all of these criticisms in unison does not have enough amplification. For myself, I would just like to point out that the US-centralized empire is the very last institution on […]
The US Empire Is Evil And You Should Want It To Fail: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by Caitlin Johnstone
To rule the world, make it rely on a single dominant financial system you control so anyone who disobeys you can be cut off from the economy you’ve made them dependent on for survival—whether they’re a nation, a protest movement, or an individual—without having to fire a shot. I don’t “support dictators”, as one will […]
Proposal: Just Run All Western News Media Directly Out Of CIA Headquarters by Caitlin Johnstone
I think it would be a lot more efficient and straightforward if all English-language news media were just run directly out of CIA headquarters by agency officials in Langley, Virginia. This way news reporters could eliminate the middleman and drop the undignified charade of presenting unproven assertions by western intelligence agencies as “scoops” that they […]
The Assange Case Explained Simply by Caitlin Johnstone
One of the most common reasons I hear from people on their reluctance to wade into the Assange debate is that they don’t understand it. It looks like a complicated issue to them, so they leave it to the experts. In reality, the complexity of this case is a complete illusion. It’s very, very simple. […]
Oligarchic Empire Is Working Harder To Bolt Down Our Minds In Service Of Its Agendas. And That Gives Us Hope… by Caitlin Johnstone
Propagandists work so hard to manufacture our consent for the status quo even as more and more people, including extremely influential ones, begin questioning whether we’re being deliberately deceived about everything. Silicon Valley is working more and more openly in conjunction with the US government, and its algorithms elevate empire-authorized narratives while hiding unapproved ones […]
They’re Normalizing Police Robots By Calling Them “Dogs” by Caitlin Johnstone
Hawaii police are defending their use of pandemic relief funds for a robotic “police dog” made by Boston Dynamics which scans homeless people’s eyes to see if they have a fever. “If you’re homeless and looking for temporary shelter in Hawaii’s capital, expect a visit from a robotic police dog that will scan your eye […]
I Desire Your Freedom by Caitlin Johnstone
“I desire your freedom,” the old professor told me. “My freedom?” I asked, leaning in. “Yes. I want you to be free from all forms of tyranny and oppression. Inward and outward, from the past or in the present.” https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/i-desire-your-freedom
I Don’t Always Believe CIA Narratives. But When I Do, I Believe Them About China. by Caitlin Johnstone
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/july/22/i-don-t-always-believe-cia-narratives-but-when-i-do-i-believe-them-about-china