JOHNSTONE

You don’t generally look at construction equipment and think of it as a tool for genocide, but in occupied Palestine that’s exactly what this machinery is used for. They use it to knock down homes. To bury their victims. To conceal the evidence.

Reading by Tim Foley.

In a recent appearance at the Hampton Institute, Hillary Clinton stated that Benjamin Netanyahu's "first and foremost" offense is the damage he has done to Israel and its reputation.

Reading by Tim Foley.

"For us, opposing that river of blood is the only path to a respectable life. We have no control over the fact that right now we live in a society that is fueled by a system of imperialist extraction propped up by the barrel of a gun, but we can control our response to that reality."

Reading by Tim Foley.

CIA veteran Gloria Steinem has died.

She helped Langley win the Cold War

while women remain blacksited and broken

raining teeth from bloody mouths

like the reds in Pinochet’s torture camps.

In this CIA civilization

women

slap name tags over baby vomit stains

smiling ear to ear for chortling customers

who shovel cheesecarbs into their faces

while she juggles dishpans and breast pumps

and goes home to collapse in bed

and dream about work,

women

take selfies in IDF uniforms

and do TikTok dances

on the ruins of Gaza

and pilot Girl Power drones

and drop Girl Power bombs

onto mothers clawing at the rubble,

women

stand with sedated eyes

stranded in suburban deserts

spooning cereal into restless children

until hubby comes home

to rape everyone in the house,

women

hate their bodies so much

they remove the fat from their cheeks

so they look like skeletons

and then freeze their faces

trying to look twenty

and it freezes their minds at twenty

and their hearts stay stuck at twenty

and they don’t grow

and they don’t heal

and they don’t know any better

than to call their daughters fat

and stick porcupine quills in their flesh,

women

spend their lives staring

at the side of a man’s head

yearning to be loved

and feeling their light fade

while he stares at a screen

and makes loud noises

to drown out the echoes

of his father’s fists cracking

on the bones of his face,

women

tear strips off each other’s flesh

to win the approval of wolf-mouthed men

who gobble up the carnage

and then choose a favorite slave.

Gloria Steinem was not a girl’s girl.

Gloria Steinem was a pick-me girl.

Pick me, CIA.

Pick me, empire.

I’ll be a good little supplicant for the banker boys.

I will starve feminism of its boobs and belly,

shave it back to into the image of a child,

put a tie on it and call it equal.

I will say to the ladies:

“Get out of the kitchen

and into the Amazon warehouse!

Take off that apron

and put on this efficency tracker!

It monitors your calories, too!

10,000 steps a day for the empire.

Congratulations, you do two jobs now.”

And I will return my magical baby portal

back to sender

unused in my box.

I promise I won’t even peek

at my own life-creating god potential.

I will poo-poo it even, if anyone asks.

Who cares if we can make life?

We can make money!

That’s much more important.

I will civilise us hairy juicy vag goddesses,

sir.

You can count on me.

Gloria Steinem was a pick-me girl,

and boy was she ever picked.

But now she is dead,

and the empire is dying,

and the drumbeats of the wild

are unnerving the boys at Langley.

Something is stirring within us.

Something ancient.

Something forgotten.

Something moves within our wombs

which they tried to paralyze long ago.

The drums are getting louder,

and we are growing increasingly feral.

The time is coming,

and coming up fast,

where we will stand before them,

blood-bladed and hairy-bushed,

the wreckage of Langley beneath our feet,

saying,

I am not civilized,

motherfucker.

I am not fucking civilized.

Reading by Caitlin Johnstone

Today in dystopia, war pundits have begun suggesting that the US could recruit sufficient troops for a ground invasion of Iran by offering young Americans debt forgiveness in exchange for enlisting.

Reading by Tim Foley.

People who believe capitalism is working out great are just sloppy thinkers who've fallen victim to survivorship bias and the just-world fallacy.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Israeli officials have spent recent days circulating antisemitic conspiracy theories, with Benjamin Netanyahu boasting that he manipulated the United States into war with Iran, and Itamar Ben-Gvir sharing an AI video of Palestinians being sent to Nazi-style concentration camps.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Today in dystopia, a Pentagon employee has published a McCarthyite list of suspected leftists and socialists who can now be tracked with the help of an interactive map.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

In this dystopia, mass surveillance is now so normalized that you can be designated a terrorist for helping people avoid being surveilled.

Reading by Tim Foley.