Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“It’s just sitting there minding its own business trying to do a little genocide in peace while aggressively lobbying your government to crush your freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and you’re OBSESSING about it for NO REASON. You just hate Jews. That’s the only possible reason you could spend so much time obsessing about this one tiny little harmless country: you’ve got a crazy, irrational fixation on a small abrahamic religion, because you’re a weirdo. Stop saying it’s actually about all the wars and atrocities and apartheid and starving children and lobbying and propaganda and nonstop assaults on your civil rights and your government’s complicity in genocidal abuses …. No. That’s not it. It’s because you get freakishly enraged by small hats. Don’t you know there was a shooting on Bondi Beach?” (12/23/25)
“For writers, the future has long been a tricky terrain. While the past can prove unsettling and the present uncomfortable, the future seems to free the mind from reality’s restraints and let the imagination soar. Yet it has also proven full of political pitfalls. Sometimes writers can tweak a trend of their moment to produce a darkly dystopian future, as with George Orwell’s omniscient tyranny in 1984, Margaret Atwood’s institutionalized misogyny in The Handmaid’s Tale, or Ray Bradbury’s book-burning autocracy in Fahrenheit 451. And ever since H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (about technologically advanced Martians invading this planet) was published in 1898, space has been a particularly fertile frontier for the literary imagination. It has given us Isaac Asimov’s seven-part galactic Foundation fable, Frank Herbert’s ecological drama Dune, and Philip K. Dick’s post-nuclear wasteland in Blade Runner, opening us to possible techno-futures beyond our mud-bound presence on this small planet.” (12/23/25)
“If anyone doubted that the rich would use their control of the media to push their agenda and silence dissent, CBS removed it with its decision to censor the scheduled ’60 Minutes’ broadcast on CECOT prison. CECOT is the notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador where President Donald Trump has sent a number of the people that he has deported. There have been numerous accounts of torture and abusive treatment in the prison, which presumably would have been highlighted in the segment. CBS, under its new ownership, decided that we shouldn’t see the ’60 Minutes’ segment, or at least not the one its team had prepared for broadcast last night. Apparently, they were worried it would offend the Trump administration..” (12/23/25)
“For Americans wondering about the future of China and its relationship with the West, the latest verdict in the Jimmy Lai case proves an ominous harbinger of Hong Kong’s continued slide towards authoritarianism. Lai, the self-made billionaire, media entrepreneur and pro-democracy activist, has been held prisoner of the Chinese Communist Party for five years under Hong Kong’s National Security Law. He was finally convicted Dec. 14 on trumped-up charges of sedition. This verdict, handed down in 855 pages of meaningless gobbledygook, is Lai’s second conviction during his state-sponsored persecution since Hong Kong’s 2019 pro-democracy protests. Lai was previously found guilty of lease violations in connection with Apple Daily, his popular former newspaper that was closed by the Chinese government in 2021, and sentenced to 69 months in prison. The latest charges, for which Lai will be sentenced in early January, carry a penalty of 10 years to life in prison.” (12/23/25)
“Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, in her recent USA Today and Newsweek opinion pieces, has worked hard to present herself as a champion of American farmers and a steward of healthier food options. Alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., she spoke of the values these farmers embody (independence, grit, patriotism) and celebrated a $700 million regenerative agriculture initiative as proof that this administration is delivering for rural America. But if you pull back the curtain on Secretary Rollins and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the narrative changes. What looks like a bold vision for ‘regeneration’ quickly reveals itself as a political performance designed to distract from the USDA’s business-as-usual that props up industrial agriculture, not family farmers.” (12/23/25)
“Antisemitism is on the upswing in the United States and around the world. Although antisemitism has a long tradition on the European right, the communists under Stalin were also very antisemitic. That’s why so many Russian Jews immigrated to Israel. What is surprising is the recent increase in antisemitism on the progressive left – particularly on college campuses. The explanation, I believe, lies in ‘woke’ ideology. By one widely respected measure, America is the most individualistic country in the world. Geert Hofstede, who pioneered the study of the subject, defines individualism as ‘a cultural orientation in which people see themselves primarily as independent individuals rather than as members of tight, cohesive groups.’ They also see others that way. That undoubtedly explains why America is the most successful melting pot in the world.” (12/23/25)
“If you’re a little too online, you likely know that Marco Rubio as a teenager made extra cash working for his late brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia. The business imported and sold exotic animals as a front for moving nearly a half million pounds of cocaine and marijuana. It was later said, when kingpin Mario Tabraue became a main character on the monstrously popular documentary series Tiger King, that the cocaine was actually stuffed into the bodies of vipers and boa constrictors, though an 80-page indictment of the enterprise makes no mention of that, and Tabraue has been known to sue those who accuse him of animal cruelty. ‘I dealt to support my animal habit,’ Tabraue humbly told the Netflix documentarians about the drug ring that imported and distributed $79 million worth of drugs between 1976 and 1987. It was Rubio’s job, the current secretary of state wrote in his memoir, to clean the cages.” (12/23/25)
“Earlier this month, the Trump administration released its new National Security Strategy, or NSS. Normally, such documents are poor predictors of what’s likely to happen in the real world. They are more like branding tools that communicate the attitudes of a given administration while rarely offering a detailed or accurate picture of its likely policies. The reason documents like the NSS are of limited import is simple enough: foreign and military policies aren’t set by documents but by power and ideology. Typically enough, the current U.S. approach to the world flows from struggles among representatives of contending interest groups, some of which, like the military-industrial complex (MIC), have a significant advantage in the fight.” (12/21/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“The dumbest thing we are being asked to believe today is that pro-Palestinian protests caused the Bondi shooting. It’s self-evidently moronic. No one sincerely believes it. They’re just pretending to believe it to get protests banned and criticism of Israel outlawed. Nobody actually believes pro-Palestine protests caused the Bondi shooting. They’re just pretending to believe that to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state. Nobody actually believes ‘globalize the intifada’ means ‘kill all Jews.’ They’re just pretending to believe that to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state. Nobody actually believes pro-Palestine demonstrations are ‘hate marches’ or that pro-Palestine speech is ‘hate speech.’ They’re just pretending to believe that to promote the interests of a genocidal apartheid state.” (12/22/25)
Source: Common Dreams
by Medea Benjamin & Nicolas JS Davies
“The United States has now intercepted multiple Venezuelan oil tankers as part of its escalating aggression against Venezuela, while also destroying dozens of small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific under the banner of ‘drug enforcement’, killing over 100 people whose identities the U.S. has obscured. At the same time, the Trump administration has threatened a naval blockade of Venezuela – a sovereign country with which the United States is not at war. How can Washington claim the right to seize or blow up vessels, disrupt maritime trade, and kill civilian boaters – while bombing Yemen and condemning its de facto Houthi government for intercepting ships in the Red Sea to counter Israel’s genocide in Gaza? This contrast exposes a stark double standard in U.S. policy.” (12/22/25)
