JOHNSTONE

April 2022: Zelensky speaks at the Grammy Awards

May 2022: Zelensky speaks at Cannes Film Festival

June 2022: Zelensky hosts SNL

July 2022: Zelensky stars as himself in action biopic co-starring The Rock

August 2022: Zelensky releases his own breakfast cereal and clothing line

September 2022: Celebrities are flocking to the new Hollywood pop religion known as Zelenskyyology

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything at all, about what's happening on the ground there and get it uncritically reported as an actual news story by the mainstream western press.

The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death. Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail and Yahoo News have all run this story despite no actual evidence existing for it beyond the empty assertions of a government who would have every incentive to lie.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Twitter has published what it calls a "crisis misinformation policy" announcing that it will be actively reducing the visibility of content found to be false which pertains to "situations of armed conflict, public health emergencies, and large-scale natural disasters."

If you've been paying attention to the dramatic escalations in online censorship we've been seeing in 2022, it will not surprise you to learn that the Ukraine war is the first crisis to which this new censorship policy will be applied.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Oh my God. It happened. I can't believe it really happened.

During a speech in Dallas at Southern Methodist University’s George W Bush Presidential Center on Wednesday, the man himself, George W Bush, did the best thing ever. I am pretty sure it is the single best thing that has ever happened. I do not believe I am exaggerating when I say that.

While criticizing Russia for having rigged elections and shutting out political opposition (which would already be hilarious coming from any American in general and Bush in particular), the 43rd president made the following comment:

“The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine."

Reading by Tim Foley.

People who think Tucker Carlson is fighting the establishment are exactly the same as people who think "the Squad" is fighting the establishment. Exactly the same. Same people, slightly different bumper stickers.

It's obvious that every member of the "populist right" who's now getting praise for being correct about Ukraine will function as virulent empire propagandists once the imperial crosshairs inevitably move from Moscow to Beijing. We know this because of their rhetoric about China today.

Do you know what happens to mainstream media figures who provide real resistance to empire agendas? They get fired. Ask Phil Donahue or Chris Hedges. The fact that Tucker Carlson is a top pundit on imperial media (Murdoch media no less) means he's an agent of the empire.

This belief that there are factions of the mainstream media working against the empire is as naive as the belief that there are factions of mainstream US politicians working against the empire. The empire doesn't platform people who pose a threat to it. This isn't complicated. The TV man is not your friend.

I run into far too many people who oppose war and can't understand why I'm saying things about issues like China which disagree with what they're being told by their "populist antiwar" heroes on the right. The propaganda campaign against China isn't going to get better; it's going to get much, much worse, and it's important to start fighting it early. Because it's going to be bad.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Really, when it comes right down to it, things are a mess because humans are in a very awkward and confusing stage in our development as a species.

Our giant brains evolved faster than we could adjust to, and now we're these scared little apex predators stumbling around the earth with massive prefrontal cortices overlaying a bunch of deep primordial conditioning. A rapidly developed capacity for language and abstract thought strapped on top of a fear response that our distant evolutionary ancestors developed to help them run away from long-extinct monsters with big sharp teeth.

Reading by Tim Foley.

NBC's Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran war games simulating a direct US hot war with China.

CNAS is funded by the Pentagon and by military-industrial complex corporations Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, as well as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, which Antiwar's Dave DeCamp has described as the de facto US embassy in Taiwan. 

Reading by Tim Foley.

Celebrities have been particularly odious empire sycophants these last few days, and it's probably worth taking a moment to reflect on what's going on when that happens.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Public approval of the Israeli apartheid regime, like approval of the US police, has plummeted in direct proportion to the ubiquitousness of video cameras. In much the same way DNA testing vindicated prisoners who'd insisted on their innocence for years, a new technological development proved true what a marginalized population had been saying all along.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The US House of Representatives has voted 368-57 to spend $40 billion on a world-threatening proxy war while ordinary Americans struggle to feed themselves and their children. All 57 "no" votes were Republicans. Every member of the small faction of progressive House Democrats popularly known as "The Squad" voted yes.

The massive proxy war bill then went to the Senate, where it was stalled with scrutiny not from progressive superstar Bernie Sanders, but from Republican Rand Paul. 

This is because the left-wing Democrat is a myth, like the good billionaire or the happy open marriage. It's not a real thing; it's just a pleasant fairy tale people tell themselves so they don't have to go through the psychological turmoil of acknowledging that their entire worldview is built on lies.

Reading by Tim Foley.