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WELCOME to the inaugural issue of Treazine, the zine dedicated to treason.

Treasonous speech, treasonous thoughts, treasonous information, the
treasonous expansion of consciousness; if it wrongthinks, it Treazines.
If you are reading this, it means you have full control of this body of work.
You have full permission to print it out, distribute it, republish it online,
translate it into other languages, make money off it, even claim authorship.
Wherever you think this material belongs, you have unconditional
permission to put it there.
This is a collection of our favorite publications over the past month. If it’s
relatively well-received there will be another one next month, if not then our
inaugural issue will be our last. Either way, we hope you enjoy!

Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley

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 TRAPPED IN THE
SLAUGHTER HOUSE
WESTERN civilization is a story of full bellies and starving hearts. Of a feast of
information and a famine of truth. Of conveyor belts churning out processed food,
conformity-enforcing media and power-serving culture. Enough food to stay alive but
not enough sustenance to live.
They keep us alive but they don’t let us live. They give us enough carbohydrate to turn the gears of
industry, but they keep us too busy, poor, propagandized, confused and crazy to actually drink from
the waters of life. To actually experience the beauty of this world. To let the crackling potentiality of
advanced terrestrial life blossom to fruition within us.
The modern empire rules us by filling our markets with Wonder Bread and our schools and media
with lies. By filling our bellies and starving our souls. By churning out mountains of useless landfill
without ever producing anything of real value. By making more while providing less.
They improve food production and medicine just enough to lengthen our lifespans, only so that
they have more life to drain us of. They let us populate the earth with more humans only to drain us
of our humanity.
We’re not people to them. We are batteries. We are fuel.
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 keep us marching into the food processor.
There are so very many more of us than there are of them. We could crush them like an insect the
moment we decided to. But the brainwashing is so very, very effective, and the matrix hallucination
seems so very, very real. Our propaganda-induced coma keeps us fueling the machine.
Not until we awaken ourselves from the coma will our adventure on this planet really begin. Not
until we can unplug our minds from the empire’s life-siphoning control mechanisms we can begin
to really live.
We’ll either wake each other up, or we’ll remain trapped in the slaughterhouse.

3
First published 1st August 2022
 In The US You Can’t
Witness An Execution
If Your Skirt Is Too
Revealing
Joe Nathan James Jr was executed by lethal
injection on Thursday, against the wishes of
his victim’s family. He was the eighth person
to be put to death in the United States so far
this year, and the second from Alabama.
In the moments leading up to his gruesome
murder by the state, a news reporter was forced to
change her outfit by the Alabama Department of
Corrections, because her skirt and her open-toe
high-heeled shoes were considered too revealing.
Yes, while a man was being strapped down to meet
his end in the world’s largest prison system at the
hands of a governmental institution designed to
serve power rather than justice, Ivana Shatara’s skirt
and shoes were deemed by authorities to be the
most offensive thing going on in that moment.
And it was arguably the most American thing that
has ever happened.
This is the backwater cowboy theocracy that we are
all currently preparing to fight a third world war
for. This is the knuckle-dragging puritanical regime
who rules our planet.
A place where a tiny bit of skin is more of a
problem than injecting a Black man with poison
in a judicial system that turns the poor into slaves
while not even recognizing the crimes of the
wealthy.
A place where conservative modesty is a higher
value than refraining from state-mandated murder.
A place where the dress code is more important
than human life.
Come on, Ivana, this is an execution not Mardi
Gras.
Come on, Ivana, you’re dressed like a hooker
instead of a witness to a modern-day stoning.
Cover that skin as you see Joe Nathan James Jr
poisoned to death by your government; don’t you
know Jesus is watching you?
How can you expect to get into Heaven when you
can’t even dress properly to watch us choke the life
out of a man’s eyes?
Let us all dress like proper servants of the Lord
while we execute and enslave those who our
systems have failed.
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 Let us all dress like proper servants of the Lord while funneling
impoverished communities into the largest prison population in the
history of civilization.
Let us all dress like proper servants of the Lord while turning the gears of
industry for God and country.
Let us all dress like proper servants of the Lord while we prepare to show
Russia and China what real violence looks like.
Let us dress like proper servants of the Lord while we ride that ICBM
straight into Beijing, waving our cowboy hats and giving them commies a
taste of that old rebel yell.
Let us all dress like proper servants of the Lord as we march with
e western unquestioning faith into the sweet welcoming embrace of mass
NOTES: Every claim th extinction.
nal order”
“rules-based internatio
d its values Let us all dress like proper servants of the Lord as we abandon our
makes about itself an
by the humanity and march to the drumbeat of money and empire over the edge
has been discredited and into the loving arms of oblivion.
Assange.
persecution of Julian
Let us all become American, with prudish moralism and private porn
addictions, with Bibles in our hands and murder in our eyes, with
indoctrinated minds and calloused hearts, with proper attire at our
executions and pious abandon at our extincion.
Joe Nathan James Jr, I witness your execution, even while the people
around you are arguing about open-toed high heels in your final
moments.
Joe Nathan James Jr, I see you, even while your death is eclipsed by the
madness of our day.
Joe Nathan James Jr, I am so sorry for everything.
I can only promise you that those of us who go on living will keep trying

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to make things right as best we can.
First published 31st July 2022
THE FORGOTTEN ONES
AND then one day we just couldn’t anymore.
Couldn’t keep up the maintenance on our
shouldn’ts and shoulds.
Couldn’t pay the contractors to keep building our
skyscrapers of spin.
Could no longer hold up the weight of a world
made of lies
and so we let it splatter on the floor
and sprout night orchids.
And that was when the Forgotten Ones rushed in.
No longer staved off by propaganda and pain,
no longer contained by our cages made of mind,
they set to work with sharp claws and great
mandibles of ivory
slicing away the steel bands wrapped around our
soft hearts
and cutting the bolts on the door of the old
grandmother magic.
And they taught us— no!
They reminded us
how to walk on this earth as they walk
How to step with a pregnant tenderness
in communion with the planet.
How to grow our hair long so it makes love with
the wind
and listens for the whispers that are too quiet for
our ears.
How to work with the land not in dominion but in
friendship
and to extract the thorns of dogma and punditry
from our flesh
and to vomit up the madness of millennia of
civilization.
And we forgot our old stories of separateness and
shame,
our minds now too life-sized and world-shaped for
falsehood.
And we strode in companionship with the
Forgotten Ones back to Eden,
untamed beings in an untamed world.
Untamed beings in an untamed world.
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First published July 8 2022
 Warmongering
Republicans Have
Throbbing Hard-Ons For
Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip
NOTES: Remember when rich people
were so worried about Jeremy Corbyn
raising their taxes that they spent
months pretending to believe he was a
closet Nazi? They really committed to
the bit, too. You weren’t even allowed
to call it a bit because they’d start
saying you’re a Nazi for defending a
Nazi. It was wild.
OCTOGENARIAN House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decided
to spend her final years on this mortal coil trying to start
World War Three, pushing the Biden administration to
designate Russia an official “state sponsor of terrorism” and
planning a freakishly incendiary trip to Taiwan just in the
last few days.
Beijing has made it clear that the first visit to Taiwan by a major US
official in decades would be seen as an aggressive escalation and an
egregious transgression of Washington’s official one-China policy.
“The U.S. side is wrong to believe that it can continue to flagrantly
disregard the feelings of the Chinese side on Taiwan without more
serious consequences,” a Chinese official told the Washington Post in
response to the news of Pelosi’s planned trip in August, adding that
“actors like Nancy Pelosi are committed to destabilizing China under
the guise of morality” and that Pelosi has “openly threatened China’s
development.”
Chinese state media put it even more bluntly, stating, “Pelosi’s Taiwan
visit is a blatant provocation which will surely be met with a forceful
response from China, including unprecedented military pressure.
She is creating a dangerous moment, placing us on the brink of war.
Nobody can guarantee there will be no mishaps.”
Pelosi’s insane escalation is finding support from some of the worst
people on this planet, many of them from the other side of America’s
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illusory political divide.
“Nancy, I’ll go with you,” tweeted the Trump
administration’s warmongering secretary of state
and CIA director Mike Pompeo. “I’m banned in
China, but not freedom-loving Taiwan. See you
there!”
“Let Pelosi go to Taiwan,” tweeted Trump’s
bloodthirsty National Security Advisor John Bolton.
“It will tell us a great deal about who actually
controls American foreign policy: Washington or
Beijing. Doing anything more than blustering is far
riskier to them than to us.”
“It is my personal view that the one-China policy
has outlived its usefulness, that it is time to
move away from strategic ambiguity,” the Trump
administration’s secretary of defense Mark Esper
said in the wake of the news of Pelosi’s visit during a
meeting with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.
“I think it’s important that we begin that national
discussion [on strategic ambiguity] back in
the United States. It would help us educate the
American people if we can also point to bold
decisions being made in Taipei,” Esper added, an
apparent call for open domestic propaganda about
the issue.
“I think China should not have any say over where
American officials travel. I think if the Speaker
wants to go she should go,” Esper said on CNN’s
New Day.
“Speaker Pelosi absolutely should take a bipartisan
congressional delegation to Taiwan,” tweeted
former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich.
“I am the highest ranking US official to visit
Taiwan. John Dingell and other Democrats joined
GOP members. Communist China cannot dictate a
Speakers travel!”
“Would it surprise you to learn that Nancy
Pelosi got a round of applause at a meeting of the
Trump-backed America First Policy Institute?”
journalist Michael Tracey tweeted from the meeting
on Monday. “Because that’s exactly what just
happened, when Newt Gingrich declared support
for her upcoming trip to Taiwan.”
“Speaker Pelosi should go to Taiwan and President
Biden should make it abundantly clear to Chairman
Xi that there’s not a damn thing the Chinese
Communist Party can do about it,” Republican
Senator Ben Sasse said on Monday. “No more
feebleness and self-deterrence. This is very simple:
Taiwan is an ally and the speaker of the House of
Representatives should meet with the Taiwanese
men and women who stare down the threat of
Communist China.”
Taiwan is in fact not a formal ally under current
US policy, but that’s exactly what all these calls
to abandon the one-China policy and strategic
ambiguity are geared toward changing.
Sasse’s comments are particularly annerving
because they suggest that if the Biden
administration does anything to deter Pelosi’s
Taiwan brinkmanship it will be weaponized
by the GOP to attack Biden as a puppet of Xi
Jinping. This would be an exact inversion of the
way the Democratic Party spent four years using
accusations of Kremlin loyalty to put political
pressure on the Trump administration to ramp up
cold war escalations against Russia, which helped
pave the way to the dangerous aggressions between
those two nuclear powers we now see today.
We’re already seeing these frenzied accusations
of Beijing loyalty from Republican spinmeisters
like Tucker Carlson, which is something I warned
would happen under a Biden presidency before the
2020 election.
When it comes to China, the so-called “populist
right” is in lockstep with both Nancy Pelosi and
with murderous neoconservatives like Bill Kristol,
Max Boot and John Bolton. Steve Bannon’s support
for regime change in Beijing is indistinguishable
from Bill Kristol’s support for regime change in
Beijing. You will never, ever see a Trump supporter
address this perfect harmony between their faction
and neocons and liberal hawks with any degree of
intellectual honesty.
In reality, though Democrats tend to lean more
toward supporting aggressions against Russia while
Republicans lean more toward favoring aggressions
against China, they’re both just manufacturing
consent for the same unipolarist agenda of total
global domination. They pretend to be on opposing
sides, but if you ignore the narratives and just look
at the actions what you see is a steadily escalating
“great power competition” designed to facilitate
the US empire’s longstanding agenda of securing
unipolar planetary hegemony at all cost.
The drums of war are growing louder and louder,
and the psychopaths who feed off it are growing
more and more aroused. Let’s hope this evil empire
ends as soon as possible in as peaceful a manner as
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possible, before these freaks get us all killed.
First published July 26 2022
 Our Challenge Is
To Transcend Our
Evolutionary Ape Heritage
DID you know chimpanzees hunt smaller
primates for food?
They do. They’re actually very skillful hunters due
to their size, their strength, and especially their
intelligence. They coordinate their attacks, working
together to cut off the escape routes of their prey to
greatly increase their success rate. Scientists have
even frequently observed them using crude spears
to kill a small primate species called the lesser bush
baby for their meat.
One of the many interesting things about this
behavior in our primate cousins is that they are so
good at hunting they can become victims of their
own success, wiping out entire populations of prey
in their area. Red colobus monkeys have been
hunted to the brink of local extinction in Uganda by
chimpanzees hungry for a quick protein fix, solely
because they’ve been gobbling up those delicious
little guys faster than they can reproduce.
Sound familiar?
The tendency of homo sapiens to overburden our
ecosystem with our consumption is not unique to
us, and is not new. In fact, it looks like we’ve been
on this trajectory toward ecocide since our ancient
evolutionary ancestors began evolving extra brain
matter.
And it is possible to just stop there and conclude
that we are no different from our chimp relatives
in this sense. That we will simply keep overhunting
the red colobus monkey until there are none left,
that we will keep depleting and destroying our
biosphere until it can no longer sustain life. That the
human brain differs from the chimpanzee’s only in
intelligence, not in wisdom. That we are in essence
no different from the cyanobacteria at the dawn of
the Proterozoic Era, a new species showing up on
the scene and causing a mass extinction event in an
ecosystem overburdened by their rapid flourishing.
You do also however have the option of openness to
the possibility that maybe, just maybe, our species is
destined for greater things. That maybe, just maybe,
we have within us the capacity to transcend the
mindless patterning of our evolutionary ancestors
and move into a mindful relationship with this
planet and its life forms. That maybe, just maybe,
this whole human adventure doesn’t need to end in
disaster after all.
From what I can tell, the only people who find
this idea outlandish are those who have never
experienced a great unpatterning of their own.
Who have never healed the wounds of their past
and transcended the unwholesome mental habits
which were given to them by their conditioning.
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To anyone who has experienced a dramatic
transformation from dysfunction into health,
it’s obvious that any human could potentially go
through such transformations as well. Or even all
humans.
It is possible that our descendents will look back
on humanity’s existence on this planet from
prehistoric times up until this crucial present
moment as a kind of bridge between animal life
and a new terrestrial expression that isn’t driven by
the unconscious conditioning patterns that have
driven the movements of every species on this
planet from the very first single-celled organisms
onward. That what we’re experiencing right now at
this critical juncture is what it looks like before the
emergence of the Earth’s first conscious species.
An unconscious human is one driven compulsively
by deep-seated mental habits they don’t really see
and can’t do much to control, so they’ll often find
themselves engaged in unwholesome behavior
patterns like addiction, unkindness, greed and
neurosis, and making the same mistakes over and
over for reasons they don’t quite understand.
A conscious human is one who doesn’t have
unseen conditioning pulling the strings from
behind the scenes in their subconscious mind,
because they have done their work and drawn their
inner demons into the light of consciousness where
they can be healed. They are therefore able to move
through life deliberately and in the interest of
what’s best, rather than compulsively and in a way
that spreads trauma to others.
A conscious humanity would mean that this way
of functioning blossoms throughout the entire
species.
Doesn’t it kind of look like that might be what’s
happening? Like all the chaos and confusion of
these strange times could simply be the birth pangs
of a species whose relationship with consciousness
is about to take a dramatic pivot? The increasingly
shrill mass media narratives rapidly approaching
white noise saturation? The increasingly
widespread awareness that our society’s rules
are made up and we can change them whenever
we want? The mysterious increase in incidents
of spiritual awakening as reported by teachers
of enlightenment? Just how goddamn weird
everything’s been getting these last few years?
I think it’s possible. I think it’s possible we are
moving as a species toward an adaptation that will
enable us to survive in a situation which is very
different from the one we first emerged in, as every
species eventually does if it doesn’t go extinct. If
this is indeed what is happening, it stands to reason
that it will be an adaptation that prevents us from
wiping ourselves out via ecocide or nuclear war, and
that a collective movement into consciousness is
what that adaptation will look like.
A conscious species would be able to work in
cooperation with its ecosystem, rather than
compulsively consuming it due to primitive
impulses to obtain and dominate and egoic
impulses to be rich and have more. A conscious
species would be able to convert civilization from
competition-based models into collaboration-based
models, where rather than trying to climb over
each other to get ahead we all work together to
make sure everyone has what they need to live. A
conscious species would no longer see the sense in
dividing itself up into separate competing nation-
states which brandish armageddon weapons at each
other out of fear and greed.
The more I learn about humanity, and the more
I learn about myself, the more possible such a
world appears to be. Sure the world’s a chaotic and
distressing mess right now, but so is childbirth.
However bad things get for us, as long as we’re still
alive our problems are nothing that can’t be fixed
with a collective movement into consciousness.
Anyway. That’s my pet theory right now. And the
cool thing about my theory is that if you like it
too, you don’t have to wait for it to come true. You
can start becoming more conscious on your own
right now and leading the charge for the rest of us.
Investigate your true nature, heal your wounds, be
responsible with your actions, and begin working to
coax all your endarkened bits into the light.
And then hopefully the rest will follow. If they
don’t, worst-case scenario is you wind up a lot more
happy and functional than you otherwise would
have been, because you brought so much more
consciousness to your inner processes and your
habits of perception and cognition.
This is where the real adventure is at, in my opinion.
This is where the rubber meets the road.
I will meet you there.
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First published July 20 2022
 The Empire Is
Showing More And
More Of Its True Face
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, Bolton hastened to pull authority
on the matter when Tapper suggested that he might
not be correct about how coups work.
“I disagree with that,” Bolton said. “As somebody
who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here, but,
you know, other places — it takes a lot of work, and
that’s not what [Trump] did.”
Places. Plural.
Tapper just let Bolton’s remark slide like he didn’t
just admit to something extraordinarily fiendish,
but did eventually follow up with a request that the
former National Security Advisor elaborate.
“I do want to ask a follow up,” Tapper said. “When
we were talking about what is capable, or what you
need to do to be able to plan a coup, and you cited
your expertise having planned coups.”
“I’m not going to get into the specifics,” replied
Bolton with a chuckle.
“Successful coups?” Tapper asked.
“Well, I wrote about Venezuela in the book,” Bolton
answered. “And it turned out not to be successful
– not that we had all that much to do with it, but
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I saw what it took for an opposition to try and
overturn an illegally elected president, and they
failed. The notion that Donald Trump was half
as competent as the Venezuelan opposition is
laughable.”
“I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me,
though,” Tapper responded.
“I’m sure there is,” Bolton said, grinning like he just
finished boiling a puppy.
Tapper pursued the matter no further, because he
is a propagandist first and a journalist second, and
he would be acutely aware that Bolton was saying
things that you are not supposed to admit to on
television.
Bolton’s sole admission to coup plotting
runs counter to his comments about the US
government’s failed attempt to oust President
Nicolas Maduro while he was facilitating that
bizarre operation under the Trump administration,
telling reporters in 2019 that the empire’s
Venezuela shenanigans were “clearly not a coup.”
In other examples of the US empire just rearing its
ugly head right out in broad daylight, an excellent
new report by Alan MacLeod with Mintpress News
shows that Facebook/Instagram parent company
Meta has been hiring dozens of people who
previously worked in the US intelligence cartel to
help regulate what content gets seen on the social
media giant’s platforms. Some were hired from
straight out of the CIA or had (officially) left the
agency very recently.
The CIA used to infiltrate the media. Now the
CIA is the media. This trend of openly hiring US
intelligence veterans to help teach the public what
thoughts to think about the world began a few
years ago in the legacy media, and now we’re seeing
it in the new media as well.
This is part of a broader trend in which many of
the ugly things the US empire used to do in secret
it now does openly with the aid of propaganda
spin. In addition to attempting coups right out in
the open as we saw in Venezuela and just giving
intelligence insiders positions of influence within
both new and old media institutions, you’ve got
things like the US government-funded National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), which
according to its own founding officials was set up
to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly.
We see NED’s fingerprints all over pretty much any
situation where the western power alliance needs
to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted
government, from Ukraine to Russia to Hong
Kong to Xinjiang, to the imperial propaganda firm
known as Bellingcat. Rather than manipulate world
narratives and foment discontent from behind
the veil of hidden identities and cutouts as in CIA
tactics of old, NED just manipulates them openly
by pouring funds into narrative management
operations which benefit the empire while framing
it as promoting democracy and human rights.
Then you’ve got things like American officials
telling the press that the US government has
been circulating disinformation about Russia
and Ukraine, Biden administration officials
saying the proxy war in Ukraine is being used to
“weaken” Russia and that they are fine with US
brinkmanship with Russia causing global recession
and hunger, and western officials telling the press
that Ukraine is crawling with CIA personnel.
What the empire has found is that you don’t need
to hide as much from public visibility as long as
you can manipulate what people think they’re
seeing. If the public is sufficiently propagandized
and consent has been adequately manufactured,
you can get away with just proclaiming some
in g t h e m os t dangerous
criticiz destructive
If someone ow e r f u l a n d
e most p n
agendas of th arth looks like “Russia
e to
government on “Chinese propaganda”
or n
propaganda” yo u yo u r s e lf have bee
ause
you, it’s bec e d b y propaganda.
bra in w a s h
12
 random guy the president of a foreign country and
seeing if you can manipulate the rest of the world
into playing along with you.
If your narrative control is strong enough, you
can even keep the empire running smoothly when
information gets out into the open that you’d
rather stay hidden. Very often these days major
stories about imperial malfeasance will come out
that simply have no impact, either because the
mainstream news media unite to ignore them or
because they spin those revelations as coming
from someone bad or not containing important
information.
People tend to overrate the power of the US war
machine and underrate the power of the US
propaganda machine. While the US military finds
itself losing a war to the Taliban, the awesome
power of its propaganda engine has people
marching in perfect alignment with the will of the
oligarchic empire.
When I was in an abusive relationship, the more
ground down and submitted I became the more
my abuser would flaunt his abusiveness in the
plain light of day. Toward the end he was just
outright admitting he was a sociopath and a
manipulator and openly telling me he was going
to do monstrous things to me before he did them,
because he was that confident that he had me
wrapped around his finger.
Luckily, he was wrong. And hopefully the empire is
wrong as it makes this same calculation with all of
us.
First published July 14 2022

your
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NOTES: Can’t s t l y c hoosi cause y t
believe we’re Va
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Peop cance is now sh cause th od
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NOTE betwe s The world will never kn r a g r a
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evil ey will not vil things do what it always
doesn’t
h e inevitably
say t then do does.
and

13
 Humanity Is Learning
That The Rules Are
All Made Up And Can
Be Re-Written
THE human species is at an adapt-or-perish
juncture in its history on this planet; we will
either drastically change the way we operate,
or we will wipe ourselves out by nuclear war

At Any Time
or environmental cataclysm. Because we’ve
been brought to this point by our unhealthy
relationship with mental narrative, the
adaptation we’re being challenged to make
would be a collective movement into a
healthy relationship with mental narrative.
We’re where we’re at because powerful people have
been able to manipulate us into believing mental
stories about reality which aren’t based in fact.
History is one long unbroken tale of large groups
of humans being manipulated by much smaller
groups of humans in ways which benefit the
smaller groups, and that tale continues to this day.
Propaganda and other forms of narrative control
are used to manufacture consent for status quo
models of governance, economic and monetary
systems, and foreign policy which benefit an elite
few at the expense of the general population.
And what’s interesting is that underneath all
the babbling propaganda stories about what’s
happening in our world, humanity is indeed
showing signs that we are collectively slipping
out of our old relationship with mental narrative.
It’s happening in the usual sloppy, awkward,
two-steps-forward-one-step-back shamble which
has always marked all of human progress, but it’s
happening.
It’s happening in the way people are moving away from
religion as we collectively discover that those ancient
narratives which so long transfixed our ancestors are
not necessary or helpful for finding meaning, morality
and fulfillment in our lives, and as we collectively
notice that doctrines about eternal reward for
obedience and eternal damnation for disobedience
sound made-up.
It’s happening with the rise of cryptocurrencies as
people figure out that money is made up and we can
change the rules whenever we want. Money is nothing
more than an agreed-upon story that’s only as true as
we all continue to pretend it is, a collective narrative
that we can collectively rewrite at any time.
It’s happening as people figure out that a romantic
relationship doesn’t need to look the way they’ve

14
looked throughout most of our recorded history;
that it’s only narrative which says one man and one
woman must love and have sex with only each other
throughout their lives, or even throughout their
relationship. That those rules have only ever been
made of empty narrative fluff and can be replaced
with an entirely different set of guidelines.
It’s happening as people figure out how much
narrative overlays things like gender and sexuality,
that there’s nothing inscribed upon the fabric of
reality which prescribes our longstanding models
of men and women and what their roles are and
how their sexualities should express. Rearranging
societal narratives that deeply entrenched in our
culture is causing a lot of chaos and confusion, and
the arguments it’s bringing up are very upsetting for
a lot of people, but it’s gradually working itself out as
people pick through the narratives and sort out fact
from story.
Indeed each issue I’m describing here has brought
in its own set of quandaries, challenges, bad faith
actors and abuses that had previously been avoided
under the old models, but it’s not like the old models
have been free of those things either. And as we all
discuss, argue, push and pull and muddle our way
through these obstacles with each other, we are
collectively sinking into the real important insight
which underlies all those more superficial areas of
contention: that our society is made of narrative,
and we can change the rules whenever we want.
We’re still in the early days of this growing insight,
but if you look at the conceptual rigidity we had as
a society even a few decades ago around our how-
it-is stories and our how-it-ought-to-be stories, it’s
clear that there’s a real unravelling happening. A
relaxation in our collective certainty about how the
various components of our civilization are meant to
look.
This relaxation and unravelling is the first step in
transforming into a healthy society. It’s the first step
in the adaptation we’re going to have to collectively
make to survive as a species.
But it can’t stop at insights into the fluid nature
of narratives around faith, money, gender and
relationships. We’re going to have to unlearn the
how-it-is and how-it-ought-to-be narratives we have
learned about everything over the course of our
entire lives.
We’re going to have to learn that we’ve been lied to
since we were children about how the world works,
how our government works, how our political and
economic systems work. We’re going to have to
learn that the very building blocks of our culture
are mostly just made-up stories from people who
want to control us and from long-dead people
who wanted to control our ancestors. We’re going
to have to learn that all the metrics by which we
measure our personal success and failure and the
frameworks we use to decide what our lives are
about are fictions implanted in our minds by the
powerful. We’re going to have to learn that even
our most absolutely fundamental ideas about
who and what we are have been built on faulty
assumptions.
You can’t rewrite a rule if you still believe it’s
written in stone. You can’t rewrite a story if you
don’t know that you are its author. We can’t rewrite
the structure of human civilization if we haven’t
yet learned that none of the old rules are real. We
can’t collectively withdraw our consent for status
quo systems until we collectively understand that
our consent is actually required. We can’t bend the
spoon until we realize that there is no spoon.
And we are collectively moving toward that
realization. We are learning as a collective and as
individuals that we don’t have to be what we’ve
been told we are, that things don’t have to be how
we’ve been told they must be, that all the how-it-is
narratives and how-it-should-be narratives we’ve
been indoctrinated with are just fairy tales for
adults made up by highly confused people whose
only qualifications were that they got here before
us.
So don’t worry when you see the old rigid
boundaries start to blur and wobble. Don’t panic
when you see the old stories being met with
incredulity. It might look awkward and sloppy
right now, but that’s just what it looks like when a
thinking species begins moving into a conscious
relationship with thought.
15
First published July 10 2022
 The US Military Was
Just Used To Help A
Dementia Patient Try To
Start WW3
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has left Taiwan after a brief but
diplomatically corrosive visit, the aftereffects from which may be
felt for years to come.
Toward the end of her speech alongside Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen,
Pelosi’s brain underwent one of its increasingly common software glitches,
causing her to begin babbling inarticulately.
Here is a transcript of what Nancy Pelosi’s brain said:
“In our earliest days at our founding of our country, Benjamin Franklin, our
presidency, said, freedom and democracy. Freedom and democracy, one
thing, security here. If we don’t have- we can’t have either, if we don’t have
both.”
Of course Benjamin Franklin was neither a president of the United States
nor a “presidency”, and the quote Nancy’s floundering brain was reaching for
was “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” These are not difficult things to
remember or articulate for someone with functioning gray matter.
This is right up there with other famous neural malfunctions by the speaker,
like her “Bernie loves hearing” gibberish from last year or her bizarre “Good
morning, Sunday morning” restart in the middle of an interview a couple of
years ago, and it calls to mind a DC pharmacist’s casual remark in 2017 that
he had filled prescriptions to treat Alzheimer’s disease for some powerful
decision makers on Capitol Hill.
None of which would be a problem, if we were talking about some little
old lady whiling away her twilight years at a retirement home in Florida.

16
 But we are not; we are talking about one of
the most powerful elected officials in the most
powerful government on earth, third in the line
of succession to the presidency after the vice
president.
More importantly, we are talking about someone
who just participated in an incendiary visit to
Taiwan which has ensured the escalation of
dangerous cold war tensions between major
world powers, and could potentially have
triggered a hot war with China.
US war machinery, including aircraft carriers and
large planes, were mobilized to provide security
for Pelosi’s visit ahead of her arrival. The United
States military was literally just used to help a
dementia patient try to start World War Three.
China’s response to Pelosi’s provocation has
thankfully been relatively measured, though we’re
about to see Taiwan fully encircled by the Chinese
navy for a show of force unlike anything we’ve
seen in decades, and Chinese sanctions upon
Taiwanese commerce are still being announced.
There will be political pressure in Beijing to
escalate tensions with the US so as not to look
weak, and the intensity of the new cold war has
certainly been ratcheted up a notch, but when it
comes to hot war it looks like humanity’s better
angels have prevailed for now.
None of this makes it acceptable for the world’s
most powerful government to send a politician
whose brains are leaking out her ears to try to stir
up hostilities under cover of its military forces.
The world is a worse place now than it was before
Pelosi’s plane touched down. Less safe, less wealthy,
less kind, and more frightening. Not one ordinary
person has benefitted from her insanely hawkish
provocation made in her final years on this earth,
especially not the people of Taiwan.
The US empire is sick, and it is playing sick games
with all our lives. As far as I’m concerned, its
downfall can’t come soon enough.
First published August 3 2022

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17
d n possibly
imagine.
We’ve Been Lied
To Our Whole
Lives About
Everything That
Matters
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 Willis was really a ghost. Jim
Carrey’s whole world was the set of a TV show, and everyone in his life had
been lying to him since his infancy.
This theme repeats so often because it strongly resonates with people. And it
strongly resonates with people because it’s exactly what is happening.
From our earliest moments we are trained to fit in with a society that was
designed from the ground up by the powerful in the service of the powerful.
As soon as we are old enough to get curious about the world and how it works
our heads are filled with lies about such matters, by our education systems, by
the media we consume, by our parents who were indoctrinated in the same
way, and by the very culture we find ourselves immersed in from day one.
These stories about a character who’s been deceived about life resonate so
strongly with us because on some level we all suspect it might be true of our
own lives as well. They whisper to something hidden and sacred within us
that has always sensed that there’s something not quite right with the way we
are perceiving things.

18
We’ve spent our whole lives marinating in lies
which serve the powerful. We’re deceived into
believing that we live in a democracy whose
government acts in accordance with the will of
the voting public. We’re deceived into believing
our political systems are driven by two warring
ideological factions whose divisions are naturally
occurring phenomena in our society instead
of the product of deliberate social engineering.
We’re deceived into believing our government is
basically good, and that it stands in opposition
to foreign governments who are pure evil. We’re
deceived into believing the way things are is the
only way they could possibly be.
We’re deceived into believing false things about
the ways we gather information and form our
understanding of the world. We’re deceived into
believing the news media tell us the truth about
what’s going on. We’re deceived into believing
that everything we hear from our side of the
political partisan divide is true and trustworthy.
We’re deceived into believing the partisan filters
which have been placed over our perception of
national and world events by indoctrination are
entirely reliable instruments for interpreting
information and drawing conclusions.
We’re deceived into believing false things about
ourselves. We’re deceived into believing that
we are successful if we can become dominant
capitalists and wealthy ladder climbers, and
that we are failures if we don’t turn the gears of
industry and climb over others to get ahead.
We’re deceived into believing that we are good
if we uphold the made-up, power-serving rules
of law, of culture and of religion, and that we are
bad if we transgress them. We are deceived into
believing that we need to keep accomplishing,
achieving and obtaining, that we need to keep
earning money and approval, so that we might
one day feel adequate at some imaginary point in
a future which never arrives.
If we really commit to uprooting the untruth
that’s been planted in us, we can even discover
that we’ve been deceiving ourselves about the
way we experience reality. That the perception of
oneself as a finite character who is separate from the
world is based on false assumptions about the way
experience is happening, unhelpful mental habits
born of incorrect premises, and overlooked aspects
of our own consciousness. That we’ve been making
ourselves miserable with false beliefs about who and
what we are.
This civilization is the set of the Truman Show, and
we are all Truman.
But because we are all Truman, we can only walk off
the set if we walk off together. There is no option to
leave as an individual, because even if you know it’s
all lies, you’re still stuck in a world full of humans
whose behavior is driven by lies.
Awakening to reality as an individual can for this
reason sometimes be more uncomfortable than
remaining asleep in the dream, because you’re like
Truman after he realizes it’s all a sham, but before
he escapes. At times you’re just stuck there, freaking
out at the actor who’s playing your mother while she
tries in vain to cut to a commercial break. It can be
distressing for you, and it can be distressing for the
people around you who aren’t yet on the same page.
The only way we’re getting off the set of the Truman
Show is if we can all succeed in waking each other
up from the lies which built it. Until then we’ll
be stuck in a world of poverty, war, exploitation,
degradation, ecocide, and suffering. It’s not until
enough of us have unplugged our minds from the
matrix of lies that we’ll be able to use our strength of
numbers to force real change.
Only then will we be able to escape.
Only then will we be able to walk off the set.
Only then will we be able to turn to the audience
and say, “In case I don’t see ya: good afternoon,
good evening, and good night!”
And then turn around, and walk out the door, and
begin our adventure into reality.
19
First published July 25 2022
 The Phoniest, Most
PR-Intensive War Of
All Time
THE president and first lady of Ukraine
have posed for a romantic photoshoot
with Vogue magazine, wherein President
Volodymyr Zelensky waxes poetical about
his love for his darling wife.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: how is
Zelensky making time for a Vogue photoshoot
amidst his busy schedule of PR appearances for
other major western institutions?
I mean this is after all the same Volodymyr
Zelensky who has been so busy making video
appearances for the Grammy Awards, the Cannes
Film Festival, the World Economic Forum and
probably the Bilderberg group as well, and having NOTES”
meetings with celebrities like Ben Stiller, Sean Current proxy warfare tactics
Penn, and Bono and the Edge from U2. It’s as busy in Ukraine have no chance of
a PR tour as he could possibly have without having delivering a swift defeat to Russia.
a discussion about the strategic importance of What they do have is a pretty
long-range artillery with Elmo on Sesame Street.
good chance of creating a costly
Oh yeah, and also isn’t there like a war or military quagmire for Russia and a
something happening in Ukraine? You’d think he’d 100 percent certainty of creating
probably be somewhat busy with that too.
massive profits for the arms
industry.

20

NOTES: Westerners are only
encouraged to contemplate the
horrors of war when it is someone
else’s war.
Call me crazy, but I’m beginning to suspect that there might
be a concerted effort to manipulate the way we think about the
war in Ukraine. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say it’s the most
aggressively perception-managed war we’ve ever experienced.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February we have not
only been smashed with mass media propaganda unlike
anything we’ve ever seen while Russian media are purged
from the airwaves, we’re also seeing the new media element
of unprecedented amounts of online censorship, algorithm-
boosted propaganda, and social media trolling.
So we’ve literally never seen this much overall effort put into
manipulating the way the public thinks about a war. Which
makes sense, given that it’s a profoundly dangerous proxy war
which stands to benefit ordinary people in no way, shape or
form.
I mean, can you imagine if people were allowed to just think
their own thoughts about their government’s economic
warfare against Russia which is hurting them financially and
pushing millions toward starvation with the full awareness
and approval of the US government? Or if Americans were
allowed to wonder if the billions they are pouring into this
proxy conflict could be better spent at home? Or if people
started objecting to a needless conflict for geostrategic
domination threatening their lives and the lives of everyone
they know with the risk of nuclear annihilation?
Can’t have that.
There is a night-and-day difference between wanting to tell
people the truth about something and wanting to manipulate
their perception of something. There are times when true facts
can be used to influence people’s perception one way or the
other, but if your agenda is to manipulate perception rather
than tell the truth you will necessarily be forced to rely on lies,
half-truths, distortion, and lies by omission wherever the truth
doesn’t serve that agenda.
If they were telling us the truth about this war, they wouldn’t
be censoring Russian media. They wouldn’t be censoring
online voices who disagree with the official narratives about
Ukraine. They wouldn’t be continually blasting us in the face
with mass media perception management, and they sure as
hell wouldn’t be putting Ukraine’s celebrity-in-chief on the
cover of Vogue magazine.
We are being manipulated, and we are being deceived. And we
are being manipulated and deceived because our perceiving
clearly on our own would go against the interests of the
empire. They are lying to us because the interests of the people
and the interests of the empire are, as usual, squarely at odds.
First published July 27 2022
21

Civilization Is
Made Of Lies
IT IS true that this civilization is made of
lies, was grown by lies, is powered by lies, is
controlled by lies.
And it is true that this civilization is woven from
violence, was birthed by violence, is sustained by
violence, is preserved through violence.
And it is true that this civilization is built on
exploitation, is run on exploitation, exists to
facilitate exploitation, is the product and the
producer of exploitation.
And it is true that this civilization is flying
facefirst toward collapse on myriad fronts and
that any attempt to draw attention to this gets met
with a “that makes me uncomfortable” hand-
waving dismissal.
It Is True
That This
But it is also true that a staggering beauty rips through
it all like a thunderbolt, continuously and pervasively.
And it is also true that there is a boundless intimacy
hidden beneath all things that, if you like, could be
called holiness.
And it is also true that the self is an illusion and
that all that arises is innately free and deliciously
purposeless.
And it is also true that science is in its infancy and that
what we know is a tiny minnow in the vast ocean of
what we do not know.
And it is also true that the universe is oh so very
much bigger and oh so very much older than our tiny
primate brains will ever be able to comprehend.
22
 And it is also true that it is possible for the human organism to undergo
a radical transformation in the way that it operates, from contraction
around the ego illusion to a life-sized expression of the unity of all
things.
And it is also true that the ability to see beauty in everything is a skill
that can be mastered, and that a failure to appreciate the beauty of any
moment is simply a failure of perception.
And it is also true that you can tell you’re approaching clarity in this
sense when you are able to see beauty in the billboards and bustle of a
busy city just as easily as you can see it in the forest.
And it is also true that we are never meant to stop growing and
learning, and that being the same person you were five years ago is a
signal from life that something’s not right.
And it is also true that our society’s measures of success and failure
are made of the same madness that got us into this mess and should
therefore be ignored when crafting a beautiful life.
And it is also true that you can continue falling in love with your
romantic partner for as long as you’re both willing to grow and expand,
and that the honeymoon never needs to end.
And it is also true that your sexuality can be a powerful tool for healing,
a n n o u n c e it’s time creativity and growth if you can succeed in making it conscious.
w a b o u t when they a ll ju s t be like
H o let ’s
War III .” And it is also true that none of this erases the harshness of our situation
f o r W o r ld
e ’r e n o t doing that and we must all be very tender with each other as we plunge into
“Nah, w
whatever comes next at this unprecedented point in human history.
d a h e a lthy world.
let’s buil And it is also true that you should be tender with yourself as
And then well, because it is only by loving ourselves deeply that our hidden
endarkened bits can be coaxed into the light of truth.
And it is also true that you are doing your best, and that any mistakes
you have made up until this moment were only because you did not yet
have sufficient consciousness to make different choices.
And it is also true that you are crackling with beauty, and it would be a
damn shame if you never let yourself truly see this.
And it is also true that humanity itself is crackling with beauty, and
that the only thing worse than our species slipping away would be if it
slipped away without really seeing and appreciating itself.

23
First published July 18 2022
 The Fistbump Heard
Round The World
TWO powerful leaders met beneath the hot
Jeddah sun to discuss oil and killing and
friendship.
One of the leaders rules a tyrannical regime which
funds terrorists, murders journalists, suppresses
civil rights and commits war crimes. The other, the
Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, is no better.
They greeted not with the traditional handshake,
nor with a stern finger wag from the American for
the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, but with the
most epic fistbump in the history of civilization.
Since the invention of the fistbump there have
been none so pure, so affectionate, so expressive of
perfect union and harmony. Observers said they
thought they heard angels singing.
Where their two fists connected, their souls
merged. Their eyes locked with an intimacy poets
and lovers have spent their whole lives trying
to capture. Their dick chakras burned with the
intensity of a thousand stars.
“This is who we are,” the fistbump roared to the
heavens. “This is who we have always been. Our
sacred bond presides over an empire that is fueled
by oil and blood, and we rule as one in holy
communion with the great kings of old. Nothing
shall ever come between us: not bone saw nor mass
beheading nor strained lip service to human rights
values on the presidential campaign trail.”
Time froze as the two joined fists in genocidal
matrimony, flashing coy grins at each other upon a
mountain of Yemeni corpses and the tortured bones
of Syria. Their faces turned to skulls. Doves with red-
stained feathers filled the sky.
And the Marxists of the world say “If only we could
one day capture that kind of class solidarity.”
And the wives of the world say “If only he would one
day look at me like that.”
And the arms manufacturers of the world say “Hoo
hoo yeah buddy boy this is gonna be great let’s go
snort coke off a Tomahawk missile.”
And the hidden saints say “Something’s gotta give
here.”
And the world rotates on the axis of those two joined
fists into ecocide and atrocity and Google Hollywood
McDystopia.
And the imperial juggernaut marches on, and the
Earth spins off into the blackness, and we all hold
hands and look to providence as we plunge into an
increasingly strange Unknown.
First published July 16 2022
24
 This Proxy War
Has No Exit
Strategy
THE International Committee of the
Democratic Socialists of America has
released a statement opposing the US
government’s ongoing proxy war in Ukraine,
saying the billions being funneled into the
military-industrial complex “at a time when
ordinary Americans are struggling to pay
for housing, groceries, and fuel” is “a slap in
the face for working people.” The statement
advocates a negotiated settlement for peace,
saying continuing to pour weapons into the
country will “needlessly prolong the war,
resulting in more civilian deaths” and that it
“risks escalating and widening the war – up
to and including nuclear war.”
In response to this entirely reasonable and
moderate position, the DSA is currently being
raked over the coals with accusations of Kremlin
loyalty and facilitation of murder and bloodshed
by blue-checkmarked narrative managers on
Twitter. This is because the only acceptable
positions for anyone of significant influence
to have about this war range from supporting
continuing current proxy warfare operations to
initiating a direct hot war between NATO and
Russia.
That’s how narrow the permissible spectrum of
debate has been shrunk regarding this conflict:
status quo hawkish to omnicidal hawkish.
Anything outside that spectrum gets framed as
radical extremism. As Noam Chomsky said: “The
smart way to keep people passive and obedient
is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable
opinion, but allow very lively debate within that
spectrum — even encourage the more critical and
dissident views. That gives people the sense that
there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the
presuppositions of the system are being reinforced
by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
This spectrum of debate has been shrunk on the
one hand by imperial spinmeisters continually
hammering home the message that any support
for de-escalation and diplomatic solutions
is “appeasement” and indicative of Russian
sympathies, and on the other by hawkish pundits
and politicians pushing for the most freakishly
25
aggressive responses to this war possible. By
forbidding the spectrum of acceptable debate
to move toward peace while shoving it as hard
as possible in the direction of warmongering
extremism, imperial narrative managers have
successfully created an Overton window wherein
the only debate permitted is over how directly and
forcefully Russia should be confronted, with calls for
peace now falling far outside that window.
Which is a problem, because both direct NATO hot
war with Russia and continuing along the empire’s
current course of action in Ukraine are stupid.
Direct conflict between nuclear powers likely means
a very fast and very radioactive third world war,
and the status quo proxy warfare approach isn’t
stopping Russia as more and more territory is taken
in the east in cool defiance of western claims that
Ukraine is bravely vanquishing its evil invaders.
Biden administration officials have told the press
that they doubt Ukraine will even be able to reclaim
the territory it has lost already. Unless and until
something significant changes, Ukraine has no
apparent path to victory in this war anytime soon.
In short, there is no exit strategy to this proxy
war. There are no plans in place to deliver Putin a
swift defeat, and the Biden administration remains
steadfastly dismissive of even the slightest gestures
toward diplomacy with Moscow. Boris Johnson
has reportedly been buzzing around admonishing
Ukraine’s President Zelensky, France’s President
Macron and who knows who else not to work toward
peace in Ukraine. The doors to ending this war
quickly by either winning it or negotiating a peace
settlement are both bolted shut, all but guaranteeing
a long and bloody slog.
Which as it turns out suits Washington just fine.
Biden administration officials have stated that the
goal is to use the Ukraine war to “weaken” Russia,
and the US already has an established pattern
of working to draw Moscow into costly military
quagmires as we saw in both Afghanistan and
Syria. Continuing to pour weapons and military
intelligence into Ukraine while working to cut Russia
off from the world stands no chance of ending the
war in a timely manner, but it does stand a pretty
good chance of bleeding and weakening Moscow.
And since this is the course of action that has been
taken by the empire, we can only assume that this
is its desired outcome: not victory, not peace, but a
long and gruelling war.
One of the major recurring criticisms of the Iraq
invasion was that Bush rushed into it without an
exit strategy, without a plan for ending the war once
it had been started. This proxy war with Russia not
only lacks a strategy for ending the war, it apparently
only has strategies for not ending the war. No exit
strategy is the strategy.
Whenever you point out the insanity of this
approach you’ll get useful idiots of the empire
objecting that by criticizing US proxy warfare and
supporting a negotiated settlement you are guilty
of “appeasement” and exactly the same as Neville
Chamberlain, because the only argument empire
apologists ever have is to compare every US-targeted
government to Nazi Germany.
According to these propaganda-addled empire
automatons, having the story of not compromising
with Putin-Hitler and not committing the sin of
“appeasement” is worth sacrificing everyone in the
entire nation of Ukraine for. They will happily throw
every Ukrainian life into the gears of this war while
they sit safe at home eating Funyuns and tweeting,
just so they can have that “we didn’t compromise
with Putin” story hanging on their mental
mantlepiece.
How many more lives are such people prepared
to feed into an unwinnable war which the west
knowingly provoked? How many more of other
people’s children are they prepared to sacrifice? How
long does the bloodshed need to drag on before their
“no appeasement” story loses value to them? How
long until people wake up from their propaganda-
induced comas and realize we’ve been manipulated
into supporting a proxy war which benefits ordinary
people in no real way, and in fact impoverishes us
and threatens our very lives?
There is no morally consistent argument for
continuing this proxy war in the way it has been
going. If you actually value life and peace, the only
way out is through negotiation and compromise. I
point this out not because I believe it will happen,
but to hopefully help a few more people open their
eyes to the fact that we are being deceived.
26
First published July 14 2022
 Information
Anarchism
OUR civilization is built upon lies and obfuscation to such an extent that
advocating for transparency and the democratization of information
can be a complete political ideology, all by itself.
Rather than claiming to know what’s best for society (whether we should move
left or right, whether we should espouse this model or that model), it is perfectly
legitimate to simply support giving humanity the information tools necessary to
know the truth about what’s happening so that they can collectively determine for
themselves what direction to take.
This would mean supporting the end of the mass-scale manipulations and
obfuscations used by the powerful to influence the way the public thinks, acts and
votes, and it would mean giving them the democratic infrastructure to steer their
civilization in response to the true information they’ve got access to.
It would mean supporting the end of government secrecy and advocating
transparency for any institution with any degree of power over the people. The
more power and influence they have, the more transparency should be required of
them, whether they be governmental, corporate, or financial institutions.
It would mean supporting the democratization of information and the end of mass
media propaganda. It would mean breaking up institutions which have too much
information-sharing ability and giving more information-sharing ability to those
who don’t have enough. Rather than a few plutocrats influencing the public, the
public influences the public. The public can collectively uplift individual voices
and ideas that they like, but no voice is given an unfair advantage in whether or

27
not that will happen.
It would mean supporting the end of internet
censorship and algorithm manipulation, so the
information the public sees is determined not by
billionaire megacorporations in Silicon Valley but
by what’s in the zeitgeist and what the public finds
interesting.
It would mean calling for an end to the war on
journalism and opposing the persecution of
publishers like Julian Assange and whistleblowers
like Edward Snowden for exposing inconvenient
truths about the powerful. All efforts to increase
transparency for the powerful and share
information in the public interest would be praised,
not punished.
In my personal opinion it would also mean
supporting the legalization of psychedelics, because
giving people the tools to gain information about
their inner dimensions is as important for helping
them understand the direction society should take
as giving them the tools to gain information about
their external world.
It would mean the complete absence of any
authority controlling people’s access to information
or ideas in any way. Call it information anarchism,
if you like.
Information anarchism is just as radical a goal
as any other revolutionary ideology, because
information control is so important to the
continued existence of our status quo systems that
it could never be achieved without drastic measures
taken by the collective. The difference is that rather
than claiming to know whether ideological models
like communism or anarcho-capitalism would
be better, for example, one only supports giving
the people the means to collectively decide for
themselves.
The idea of true information anarchy can be as
frightening to the ego as the idea of total societal
anarchy, because nobody being in control means
there’s nobody to stop it from going in a frightening
direction. What if ideas I don’t like gain popularity?
What if people start thinking wrong thoughts and
believing wrong beliefs?
But that’s kind of the appeal, in my opinion. Really
taking the brakes off of the way information moves
through our world and letting humanity take full
unbridaled advantage of the interconnectedness
of our brains at this unprecedented juncture in
terrestrial history could lead somewhere very bad,
but it could also lead somewhere very good. And
whatever ends up happening would be because of
our own decisions instead of the decisions of a few
powerful manipulators.
And right now the latter is what’s happening. We’re on
a collision course with extinction via environmental
catastrophe or nuclear war, and it’s because of
the decisions made by powerful people who are
continuously working to control what ideas and
information we consume. If information was really
freed up, along with our ability to collectively control
the direction humanity takes going forward, it’s hard
to imagine we’d mess it up any worse than they have.
And whatever world we built together will have
been by our own informed consent, instead of the
manufactured consent of elite manipulators. If we’ve
seen it all and we still choose our own destruction,
then that will have been our choice. Whatever happens
will be humanity showing the universe what it’s really
made of. What we really are as a species.
And in my opinion, that’s what real freedom looks
like. Giving humanity the tools to go whatever way it
wants to go, even if it’s the way of the dinosaur. If you
really, truly value freedom, in my opinion that’s the
wisest place to take your stand.
Wanting the truth to be known whatever it may be
is a standalone ideology, and it’s also a standalone
personal philosophy. Wanting the truth to be known
not just in the world but in your own life, even if it’s
uncomfortable or embarrassing. Wanting unhealthy
dynamics in your interpersonal relationships to come
into awareness. Wanting your unhealed traumas to
come into the light of consciousness where they can be
healed. Wanting your delusions to be seen so they can
be dispelled by truth. Wanting it all to come out into
the light: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
It’s possible for an individual to live an entire life that
is guided by truth and by the desire for truth, and
I’m fairly certain it’s possible for all of humanity to
live that way as well. We can all push for that, if we
decide we want it. We can all decide that we’re sick
of being lied to, sick of being manipulated, sick of
the completely backward status quo of secrecy for
the powerful and surveillance for everyone else, and
we can use the power of our numbers to force it to
change.
And from there we can sort out together what kind of
world we want to live in, guided by the light of truth,
whether toward harmony or oblivion, come what may.
28
First published July 4 2022
Tucker Carlson
Is As Much A
Propagandist As
Anyone Else In MSM
FOX News’s fabulously popular right wing pundit Tucker Carlson
has ratcheted up his show’s anti-China propaganda yet again,
introducing his interview with Brazil’s rightist president Jair
Bolsonaro with a psychotic rant against Beijing that, were it about
Moscow, would have looked perfectly at home among even the most
demented mainstream liberal punditry at the height of Russiagate
hysteria around 2018.
Before attempting to help Bolsonaro reverse his abysmal polling against
his left-wing opponent Lula da Silva in a presidential election this coming
October, Carlson led with the completely unevidenced claim that “China has
been busy with its own agenda—taking over the world.”
All facts in evidence say that China is not working to “take over the world”
(that’s what the US is doing), but is rather working to give rise to a multipolar
world order that’s no longer dominated by a single unipolar hegemon. All the
facts you ever see people citing to claim that China is attempting to supplant
the US as unipolar hegemon are, when you drill down on them, in reality
perfectly in alignment with Beijing’s stated agenda of multipolarism. China

29
taking up more space on the world stage only looks
like an egregious assault when viewed through the
prism of a worldview which believes this planet is
the property of the United States government.
Carlson’s claim that China has an agenda of “taking
over the world” is also absurd on its face because it’s
nonsensical to claim that Beijing has been watching
the US empire crush itself under its own weight,
burning itself out in a few short decades with its
frenzied attempts to rule the globe, and thinking
“Hey that looks awesome, let’s do that.”
Carlson also made the even more ridiculous claim
that “the Chinese have succeeded in re-colonizing
the entire continent of Africa.” Carlson does not
bother explain how Africa was “re-colonized” in
its entirety by China while the continent remains
dominated militarily by United States Africa
Command (AFRICOM) and economically by the
World Bank, the IMF, and western plutocrats and
corporations.
Clearly the Chinese government is not run by
self-sacrificing martyrs who gain nothing from
Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa, but it’s
absurd to put this on anywhere near the same level
as the US dominating the continent with dozens of
military bases and amassing proxy forces and the
crushing neo-colonialism of the World Bank and
IMF. Anyone who’s done any intellectually honest
research into Chinese infrastructure development
in Africa knows that it is far more mutually
beneficial and far more ethical than the western
systems of oppression which have been exploiting
that continent for centuries.
“So, why isn’t the New York Times writing stories
about any of this?” Carlson asks of the horrors in
Africa he just invented in his head. “You know why
– because the New York Times is on China’s side.”
Carlson is lying. This claim of his, that The New
York Times is “on China’s side,” reveals so much
about the fraudulent nature of Carlson’s populism
schtick. It takes nothing more than a quick search
of the keyword “China” on NYT’s website to show
that the outlet has been frenetically churning out
articles that can only be described as aggressively
critical of China, like this one, this one, this one and
this one, just to choose a few examples from the last
few days.
Do you see how this works? Carlson portrays
himself as an anti-establishment hero who’s sharing
knowledge with his viewers that they’ll never hear
from the elitists at The New York Times or those fat
cats in Washington, then goes on to tell them things
that are perfectly in alignment with the agendas of
those establishment institutions. Do you see how
this tricks viewers into believing they’re getting the
inside scoop on what the powerful are really up to
behind closed doors, while actually manipulating
them into alignment with the long-term goals of the
powerful?
I have some overlap with Carlson’s audience
because I criticize some of the same things he does
like the US proxy war in Ukraine, so some of my
readers get confused and upset when I say he’s just
as much a propagandist as the empire spinmeisters
on CNN and MSNBC. But if you actually look at
what Carlson does from day to day you start to
notice that he only criticizes some imperial actions
which are opposed by right-wing populist strains
in the US while continuously sheepdogging that
audience into supporting establishment agendas
like the cold war with China, legitimizing two-party
electoral politics, and keeping everyone fixated on
vapid culture war bullshit.
There is no more important goal for the oligarchic
empire than securing US hegemony by halting
30
the rise of China, and there is no figure more effective in manufacturing consent for that goal than Tucker
Carlson. He gains credibility by appearing to fight the power, then uses that stolen credibility to help
manufacture consent for the most high-priority agendas of the powerful.
And that’s just the sort of behavior you’d expect from someone whose life has been full of highly shady
overlap with the Central Intelligence Agency and who has actually admitted to having applied to join the
CIA.
Carlson introduced Bolsonaro as a leader who opposes “allowing Brazil to become a colony of China,”
implanting the idea that this is a real thing in his gullible audience’s mind. China is taking over the world, and
the powerful political and media elites want it to take over the world, so the best way to fight those elites is
to support the fight against China. Never mind the fact that the fucking Pentagon says openly that China is
America’s number one enemy, and that the entire political/media class is firmly in alignment with the agenda
to stop it.
The propaganda campaign against China has been quietly heating up on the back burner while everyone
focuses on Russia and Ukraine. Every so often I mention China on social media and the responses I get from
those who listen to Tucker Carlson and his fellow “right populist” pundits are just appalling in their stupidity
and their white hot emotionality.
I am really not looking forward to when the imperial crosshairs move to Beijing, partly for the self-evident
reason that this will be extremely dangerous and economically disastrous, but also because getting swarmed
by all these brainwashed dupes in my replies is going to be excruciating. They’ve already been made crazy,
and they’re going to be driven a whole lot crazier as this propaganda campaign gains more and more
momentum.
If you’ve fallen for this ruse, it’s not too late to step back and realize that you haven’t been receiving brave
anti-establishment commentary from the single most prominent pundit in the Murdoch press. Anyone who
tells you that the correct response to your instinct that things are messed up is to vote for one of America’s
two mainstream parties, consume mainstream media, and hate your government’s enemies is very clearly
working to deceive you.
First published July 2 2022

31
 Three
Illuminating
Quotes About The
War In Ukraine
NOAM Chomsky, John Pilger, and Chris
Hedges have lent their expertise to the
subject of the war in Ukraine with some
recent comments that help bring some
much-needed clarity to an often confusing
and always contentious issue. Here they are:
“I’ve spent my career working in
the mainstream, and I’ve covered
probably seven, eight, nine shooting
wars; I’ve never seen coverage so
utterly consumed by a tsunami
of jingoism, and of manipulative
jingoism as this one.”
John Pilger
This comment comes from a recent interview with
the legendary Australian journalist by the South
China Morning Post, and it says so much about
the information ecosystem we now find ourselves
floundering around trying to understand things in.
From the earliest days of the invasion it was clear
that the western world was being smashed with a
deluge of propaganda unlike anything we’ve ever
seen before. In the first full month of the conflict,
American network TV stations gave more coverage
to the war in Ukraine than any other war that the
US has been directly involved in, including Iraq
and Vietnam. Literal Iraq war architects were
some of the first pundits sought out for analysis
of the conflict by the mainstream press, and calls
for insane escalations against Russia succeeded in
pushing the Overton window of acceptable debate
in the direction of warmongering extremism and
away from support for diplomatic solutions.
And this was all easily piped into mainstream
consciousness because the way had been lubricated
by years of Russia hysterica resulting from the mass
scale psychological operation known as Russiagate.
America’s most dangerous confrontation in
generations just so happens to have been preceded
by years of media-generated panic about that very
same country, despite the Ukraine invasion having
ostensibly nothing whatsoever to do with the
conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had infiltrated
the highest levels of the US government. Heckin’
heck of a coincidence right there, buddy boy.
“It’s quite interesting that in
American discourse, it is almost
obligatory to refer to the invasion as
the ‘unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’.
Look it up on Google, you will find
hundreds of thousands of hits. Of
course, it was provoked. Otherwise
they wouldn’t refer to it all the time
as an unprovoked invasion.”
Noam Chomsky
32
This quote, from an interview last month with
Ramzy Baroud, is self-evidently true and should
be pointed out more often.
People don’t go adding the same gratuitous
adjectives and modifiers to something over and
over again unless they’re trying to manipulate
how it’s perceived. If your neighbor always
referred to his wife as “my wife who I definitely
never beat,” you’d immediately become
suspicious because that’s not how normal people
talk about normal things. We don’t say “round
Earth” or “the Holocaust that totally happened,”
we just say the words, because their basic nature
is not seriously in dispute and we’ve got nothing
invested in manipulating or obfuscating people’s
understanding about them.
The need of the political/media class to
continually bleat this phrase “unprovoked
invasion” over and over again is itself a
confession that they know they’re not telling the
whole truth. It’s the imperial propaganda version
of this classic tweet:
Chomsky outlines many of the provocations the
US/NATO power structure engaged in prior
to the conflict, which many western analysts
spent years warning was coming as a result of
the provocative actions that were already being
taken by the empire. The invasion could easily
have been prevented with a little diplomacy and
some low-cost, high-reward concessions ike
honoring the Minsk agreements and providing
assurances of neutrality for Ukraine, but they
chose provocation and escalation instead. Add
to that the exponentially increased shelling of
the Donbas by Kyiv immediately prior to the
invasion and you can understand why empire
spinmeisters are working so hard to push the
“unprovoked” line.
None of this is to say that Russia is blameless in
this war; if I provoke someone into punching
somebody they are still morally responsible
for having thrown the punch, but I am also
responsible for having provoked it. Russia is
responsible for its actions, and the US/NATO/
Ukraine power structure is responsible for its
actions. Putin is responsible for invading, the
western empire is responsible for provoking that
invasion. Not complicated.
In the same interview Chomsky also says that
“censorship in the United States has reached such a
level beyond anything in my lifetime” regarding this
war. That assessment plus Pilger’s testimony about
war propaganda unlike anything he’s ever seen
shows that imperial narrative management is at an
all-time high, which wouldn’t be happening unless
the empire had some major agendas it wanted to
roll out in the coming years.
“At no time, including the Cuban
missile crisis, have we stood closer to
the precipice of nuclear war.”
Chris Hedges
Echoing the urgent warnings that Stephen Cohen
was making at the end of his life, a new article by
Hedges outlines the profoundly dangerous games
the empire is playing with a nuclear superpower
in its continually escalating proxy war against
Moscow.
The observations by Pilger and Chomsky about how
much effort is going in to manipulating people’s
understanding of this war make sense when you
realize that the agendas the empire is trying to roll
out against Russia now and then China later down
the road stand not only to throw the world into
poverty and starvation, but to wipe us off the face of
this planet.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no good
reason the world’s most powerful government
needs to risk the life of everyone on earth in a bid
to secure planetary domination. It is possible for
all nations and peoples to simply get along and
collaborate toward the common good together. All
that would need to happen is for these agendas of
total hegemony to be abandoned.
Unfortunately the managers of empire don’t seem
to have any plans to abandon their goal of global
conquest anytime soon, so we the ordinary people
of this world may end up having to force the issue
with them at some point in the interests of our very
survival.
This is a hell of a time to be alive, but man they’ve
been keeping it interesting.
33
First published July 12 2022
 Democrats Love
Saying That
AR-15s Should
Only Be Used On
Foreigners
EVERY time there’s a mass shooting in America with an AR-15,
high-level Democrats line up to proclaim that those weapons
should only ever be used to kill impoverished foreigners.
The latest example of this ongoing phenomenon was Illinois Senator and
Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth telling the press that a recording
from the July 4th Highland Park shooting which killed seven people and
wounded dozens more reminded her of her combat experience overseas,
saying the US needs to do better within its own borders.
“I just listened to the sound of that gunfire from one of the videos that
was captured,” Duckworth said. “And let me tell you that the last time I
heard a weapon with that capacity firing that rapidly on a Fourth of July
was Iraq, it was not the United States of America. We can and we should
and we will do better.”
This was not the first time Duckworth has repeated this demented
Democratic Party refrain. Last month during the controversy which
followed the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Duckworth tweeted, “I
carried an M16 and M4 in the military, so let me be clear: High-powered
rifles designed for our troops to engage an enemy with accurate, lethal fire
at a velocity of 3,000 feet per second have no place on our streets. I fully
support an assault weapons ban.”

34
Obviously American weapons of war kill far more
people overseas than they do domestically, and
those killings are done in wars of aggression for
power and profit which are sold to the public with
lies and propaganda, so they’ve got no higher moral
standing than the killings of any mass shooter. But
because the Democratic Party exists only to kill
leftward movement in the United States and ensure
the continual functioning of a globe-spanning
empire, gun violence is seen at its highest echelons
not as a moral issue which should be opposed
everywhere but as a wedge issue which should be
exploited for campaign donations.
We saw this illustrated in a notorious 2017 tweet
from now-US Transportation Secretary Pete
Buttigeig which said, “I did not carry an assault
weapon around a foreign country so I could
come home and see them used to massacre my
countrymen.”
Silly Republicans! Assault weapons are for killing
foreign kids!
Another classic came from Instagram progressive
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019: “Weapons of
war, specifically designed to kill human beings en
masse, should not be available for purchase.”
Cool beans, AOC. Leave the killing en masse to the
American stormtroopers exterminating brown-
skinned poor people for resource control.
We saw this “those bullets belong in foreign bodies”
Democratic talking point seeded way back in 2013
by that masterful empire manager Barack Obama.
“These weapons of war, when combined with high-
capacity magazines, have one purpose: to inflict
maximum damage as quickly as possible,” reads an
Obama White House statement. “They are designed
for the battlefield, and they have no place on our
streets, in our schools, or threatening our law
enforcement officers.”
The line “Weapons of war have no place on our
streets” would go on to be parroted, again and
again and again, by Democratic Party candidates
and officials for years. Hillary Clinton regurgitated
it verbatim during her 2016 campaign. Biden
said it on the campaign trail in 2019. We heard
the slogan “Weapons of war have no place on our
streets” repeated word-for-word by Democratic
Party war hawks like Dianne Feinstein, Adam
Schiff, and Seth Moulton.
“Weapons of war don’t belong on our streets.” You
can learn so much about the Democratic Party’s
true nature just from those eight words. Those
weapons do not belong on our streets, they belong
on someone else’s streets. Far away streets. The
streets where our wars are. We shouldn’t have to
see that stuff!
Some pundits take it a step further and call for the
US to actually physically ship all the nation’s AR-
15s overseas to be used in Washington’s proxy war
in Ukraine:
That’s the Democratic Party for you. Progressive
in the streets, murderous imperialists in the
sheets. That unique brand of psychopathy that
can posture and preen as a compassionate voice of
sanity before the voting public, turn around and
help gun down everyone in the Global South for
crude oil and Raytheon profit margins, and then
go to bed and not lose a wink’s sleep over it.
That’s the face of the Nice Guy Empire, also
known as the rules-based international order,
also known as the liberal world order, also known
as the US-led world order. It presents the facade
of humanitarianism and democratic ideals, but
underneath the performance it’s just as savage and
bloodthirsty as any other empire in history.
35
First published July 6 2022
 This work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this
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works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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