Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“I don’t know what to say today. We are ruled by abusive monsters. The US is preparing for war with Iran. They’re going in for the kill shot on Cuba. The latest batch of Epstein emails looks horrifying. The US is full of protests because ICE keeps killing people. Israel is still massacring civilians in Gaza as Australia prepares to host its president for an extended visit. Reuters has confirmed that Biden officials actively obstructed the circulation of internal USAID reports that Gaza was being turned into a nightmarish hellscape in early 2024. There’s so much cruelty. So much abuse. You’d think all this evidence that we are ruled by deranged psychopaths would unite us against them, but it doesn’t. The population is more angrily, bitterly divided against itself than ever.” (02/01/25)
“Iran’s supreme leader warned Sunday that any attack by the United States would spark ‘a ]regional war’ in the Mideast, further scalating tensions as President Donald Trump has threatened to militarily strike the Islamic Republic. The comments from the 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are the most-direct threat he’s made so far as the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and associated American warships are in the Arabian Sea, sent by Trump there after Tehran’s bloody crackdown on nationwide protests. It remains unclear whether Trump will use force. He’s repeatedly said Iran wants to negotiate and has brought up Tehran’s nuclear program as another issue he wants to see resolved. But Khamenei also referred to the nationwide protests as ‘a coup,’ hardening the government’s position as tens of thousands of people reportedly have been detained since the start of the demonstrations.” (02/01/25)
“Whether Don Lemon broke federal law in his role in an attack on a Minnesota church will be up to a jury, but we can already say he deserves the max for his crime against journalism. At issue, both in the criminal case and the one in the court of journalistic ethics: Was the former CNN anchor present at the disruption of the church service in St. Paul to document the event or was he participating in it? It was quite clearly the latter. In the moments prior to the harebrained ‘protest’ in the house of worship that left children in tears, Lemon can be seen outside, on video he took himself, telling his viewers the ‘operation is a secret,’ adding, ‘I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, but you’re going to watch it live.'” [editor’s note: Is a journalist embedded with a military unit betraying his profession if he doesn’t broadcast classified attack plans in advance? – TLK} (01/31/25)
“Students poured into Dolores Park on Friday afternoon, sporting baggy pants, backpacks and protest signs as they joined thousands of workers and organizers for a national day of action demanding Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents be removed from communities nationwide. A drum circle pulsed through the crowd — with maracas shaking and a cowbell clanging — as teens waved signs bearing cheeky slogans like, ‘We are skipping our lessons to teach you one,’ ‘End the ICE age’ and ‘Sex is good but have you ever tried fucking the system?’ Cars passing the park honked in support while chants of ‘Minnesota to the Bay ICE ICE go away’ rippled across the hillside, driven by impassioned local labor and student organizers from a makeshift stage near the base of the park.” (01/30/25)
“‘How’s the Democratic Party’s ground game in Pennsylvania?’ I asked a friend several weeks before the 2024 presidential election. He replied optimistically that there were far more door knockers this year than in 2022. It turned out these door knockers were just urging a vote for the Democrats without putting forth a compelling agenda attached to candidate commitments on issues that mean something to people where they live, work, and raise their families. There was no Democratic Party ‘Compact for the American People’. Then-President Joe Biden visited Pennsylvania, which went Republican, many times, with his most memorable message being that he grew up in Scranton. Once again, the vacuous, feeble Democratic Party is relying on the Republicans and the cruel, lawless dictator Donald Trump to beat themselves to gain control of the Senate and the House.” (01/31/25)
“Victor Ahansu was barely awake with his wife and baby twins before the grinding sound of bulldozers woke them. It was all the warning the family had, he said, before fleeing mass evictions in their historic community of Makoko in Lagos. Their house was demolished on Jan. 11, one of thousands taken down by the ongoing operation. Now the 5-month-old twins and their parents live in a wooden canoe, with a woven plastic sack for shelter from the rain. The thump of hammers fills the air as other residents of Nigeria ’s largest city break down homes and salvage what they can. … For decades, tens of thousands of people have lived in homes on stilts above the lagoon in Makoko, one of Africa’s oldest and largest waterfront communities.” (02/01/25)
“This weekend, what began as a protest in Los Angeles turned into violence. Not debate. Not a peaceful assembly. Violence. As you watch the scenes unfold on television, it feels like something that should be happening in Iran or Afghanistan — not in Los Angeles. Downtown mobs clashed with federal officers outside the Metropolitan Detention Center. Protesters were seen throwing water bottles, bottles, rocks, debris and other objects at federal and assisting law enforcement officers. A dumpster was moved into the street and set on fire outside the federal facility. The image was unmistakable: street chaos aimed directly at the seat of federal authority in the center of America’s second-largest city. This is happening yesterday and today — not in some unstable foreign capital. It is happening in Los Angeles, on streets where families work, live and commute.” (01/31/25)
“The national security adviser to Slovakia’s prime minister has resigned after documents released by the US showed he exchanged messages about girls and diplomacy with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Robert Fico announced he had accepted Miroslav Lajčák’s departure in a video message on Saturday, describing the adviser as ‘an incredible source of experience in diplomacy and foreign policy’. The resignation comes a day after three million files relating to the influential financier were released by the US Department of Justice. While the files do not show any wrongdoing on the part of those featured, including Lajčák, they have raised renewed questions for those who associated with Epstein.” (01/31/25)
“NASA began a two-day practice countdown Saturday leading up to the fueling of its new moon rocket, a crucial test that will determine when four astronauts blast off on a lunar flyby. Already in quarantine to avoid germs, Commander Reid Wiseman and his crew will be the first people to launch to the moon since 1972. They will monitor the dress rehearsal from their Houston base before flying to Kennedy Space Center once the rocket is cleared for flight. The 322-foot (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket moved out to the pad two weeks ago. If Monday’s fueling test goes well, NASA could try to launch within a week. Teams will fill the rocket’s tank with more than 700,000 gallons of super-cold fuel, stopping a half-minute short of when the engines would light. A bitter cold spell delayed the fueling demo, and the launch, by two days. Feb. 8 is now the earliest the rocket could blast off.” (02/01/25)
“Stephen Miller’s ascent to the shadow presidency began like so much other poison in the very immediate aftermath of 10/7, with a post nine days after the terror attacks from the official X account of the Trump campaign introducing a long list of bullet points under the title ‘Trump Plan to Keep Jihadists and Their Sympathizers Out of America.’ The campaign promised it would immediately revoke student visas from campus protesters born outside the country, ‘proactively send ICE to pro-jihadist demonstrations’ to arrest them, ‘aggressively deport resident aliens with jihadist sympathies,’ use a then-obscure law called the Alien Enemies Act to jump-start said deportations, and ‘implement strong ideological screening for all immigrants to the United States’ that would automatically disqualify anyone suspected of harboring ‘sympathy for jihadists, Hamas or Hamas ideology.'” (01/31/25)
