US Presidents Are Always Evil Because The US Empire Is Evil: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Saturday, 22 May 2021, 3:51 pm
Opinion: Caitlin Johnstone

Joe Biden is a corrupt, murderous empire lackey. He is also a very normal US president. The same was true of Trump. The same was true of Obama. The same was true of Bush. If you can't see this, it's because propaganda and partisan politics have warped your perception of reality. US presidents will always be evil because the US empire is evil and only evil people will be allowed to participate in its operation.

By far the single most important job of a US president is to take responsibility for decisions on empire management that would have been made regardless of who is in office, whether Democrat or Republican or tuna fish sandwich. Their job is to provide the illusion of democracy, letting you feel as though you "voted out" the perceived perpetrators of various misdeeds while leaving the actual power structure responsible for those misdeeds fully intact.

It's like rectifying a corporation's misdeeds by firing the secretary. They just rotate in a new secretary every few years.

Nobody is born supporting nonstop military expansionism and regime change interventionism. It takes a lot of education to make us this stupid.

It's always hilarious how the US pretends its "unwavering support" for Israel is some kind of principled stance based on morals and not the need to have a nuclear-armed military enforcer in the most resource-rich region on earth.

Anti-semitic this, anti-semitic that. Hey, maybe supporters of a brutal apartheid ethnostate shouldn't be the authorities that people look to on what constitutes religious bigotry.

Opposing Israeli war crimes is anti-semitic. Opposing US imperialism is sexist. Opposing starvation sanctions is homophobic. Opposing proxy wars is misgendering. Opposing nuclear brinkmanship is kink shaming.

If I'd been getting my information from western mass media I would believe that Israel incinerated Gaza in self-defense because Hamas attacked it with rockets completely unprovoked for no other reason than hatred of Jewish people. These outlets are propaganda firms.

Israel deliberately destroying the offices of over 20 news outlets in Gaza is narrative control at its most overt. Reminds me of a Game of Thrones quote: "When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say."'

Saying Jewish people have a right to exist and saying a brutal apartheid ethnostate has a right to exist are two completely separate claims and anyone conflating them is being knowingly manipulative. The self-evidently true claim that Jews have a right to exist has nothing whatsoever to do with the self-evidently false claim that nations have rights.

Nations are conceptual constructs with no independent existence outside the human imagination. Saying Israel has a right to exist is the same as saying Bugs Bunny has a right to exist, except if you needed to murder a bunch of kids every few years to keep Bugs Bunny around.

Saudi Arabia is killing far, far more children in Yemen every single day than Israel just killed in Gaza and it would be good if opposition and activism reflected this.

If you ever feel dumb, remember that there are people who believe it's "populist" to hate China — even as the machines of war pivot toward Asia — because a Fox News pundit and a US president told them so.

CIA applicant Tucker Carlson is not anti-warmonger, he's just the new model of warmonger. He's not pushing for an end to wars, he's pushing for the military pivot to Asia that the entire empire already wants anyway. If you care about peace and truth, stop listening to Tucker Carlson. The very last place you should be looking for answers is an extremely mainstream TV show on the network that pushed the Iraq invasion harder than anyone else.

Mental illness doesn't help with art; art helps with mental illness. People with diagnoses often become artists/musicians/creators because making stuff is good medicine, so naturally they make more stuff.

I think this distinction is important because there's a toxic belief that artists need their mental illness to create. It deifies the illness rather than the medicine. You can just make art until you feel better and then you can keep making art because it feels good.

Meditation is good, especially the part where you notice that meditation is never not happening and the entire universe is meditation.

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Caitlin Johnstone

Rogue journalist

Caitlin Johnstone is a 100 percent crowdfunded rogue journalist, bogan socialist, anarcho-psychonaut, guerilla poet and utopia prepper living in Australia with her American husband and two kids. She writes about politics, economics, media, feminism and the nature of consciousness. She is the author of the illustrated poetry book "Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers."

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