JOHNSTONE
1,117 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 3 hours ago - ★★★★★ - 99 ratingsReadings of all Caitlin Johnstone's articles, usually by her co-writer Tim Foley.
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Episodes
We Won't Be Free Until Our Minds Are Free
September 22, 2021 02:04 - 6 minutes - 5.87 MBThey give us the illusion of freedom, but as long as they chain our minds with propaganda we are not free. It wouldn't matter if they gave us every personal liberty imaginable if a critical mass of us were still thinking in ways which benefit the powerful, because those thoughts would cause us to act, organize and vote in a way that benefits our rulers and not us. Reading by Tim Foley.
Crazy
September 21, 2021 00:56 - 3 minutes - 3.07 MBThey'll make you poor, then shame you for being poor, then push you into a job that keeps you poor at a billionaire megacorporation. They'll make you crazy, then shame you for being crazy, then sell you the cure for crazy at eighty bucks a pill. You're a failure if you can't make ends meet on impossible wages at an impossible cost of living with a worthless degree you will never pay off no matter how hard you work while advertisers blare at you about your insufficiencies, while the news man...
Talkin' About Armageddon
September 20, 2021 01:15 - 5 minutes - 5.07 MBThe fact that our world is hurtling toward man-made obliteration on multiple fronts should probably occupy more of our conversational bandwidth than it does. Reading by Tim Foley.
The Frogs Are Dropping Dead In Australia
September 19, 2021 11:21 - 3 minutes - 3.47 MBThe frogs are dropping dead in Australia, and no one knows why. They get sick from some strange new frog pandemic and change colors and shrivel up into little brown frog mummies when they die. The frogs are dropping dead in Australia. Animals are dropping dead everywhere. Ocean animals wash up packed full of plastic, insect animals fall from the sky, and we barely notice, because it hurts enough to be human, because our tender little hearts were punched and kicked as children by big people w...
Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years?
September 18, 2021 01:05 - 4 minutes - 4.45 MBThe Pentagon only admitted to the unjust slaughter of civilians in this one particular instance because the mass media did actual investigative journalism on this one particular airstrike. This is an indictment of the Pentagon's airstrike protocol, but it's also an indictment of the mass media. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/where-was-all-the-investigative-journalism
Propaganda Scrambles Our Minds
September 17, 2021 00:56 - 5 minutes - 4.92 MBPropaganda warps people's perspectives so drastically their own opinions don't even adhere to the values they'll tell you they hold. A liberal will get angrier about a random member of the public circulating a conspiracy theory than about government agencies killing children with bombs. Political Twitter got angrier about Joe Rogan taking ivermectin than the Pentagon murdering an entire Afghan family and lying about it. All sense of proportion and perspective has been scrambled. Reading by T...
Australia Continues Its Plunge Into Authoritarianism And Military Brinkmanship
September 16, 2021 01:49 - 7 minutes - 7.28 MBAustralia has joined the US and UK in an "enhanced trilateral security partnership" called AUKUS with the unspoken-yet-obvious goal of coordinating escalations against China. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/australia-continues-its-plunge-into
Our Gods Have No Heads
September 14, 2021 00:14 - 5 minutes - 4.6 MBWe're on a planet-sized haunted hayride to Armageddon, and no one is driving. Reading by Tim Foley.
Manufacturing Dystopia
September 13, 2021 00:25 - 6 minutes - 5.97 MBWe live in a world of manufactured lack, manufactured enemies, manufactured crises and manufactured consent. We've had sufficient resources to care for everyone for generations. All our wars are based on lies. All our problems are cooked up by a few psychos with too much power. Reading by Tim Foley.
Twenty Years Of Phony Tears About 9/11
September 10, 2021 18:07 - 5 minutes - 5.44 MBCompared to the horrors the United States unleashed upon the world under the justification of 9/11, 9/11 itself was a family trip to Disneyland. The death and destruction visited upon Iraq alone dwarfs the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 by orders of magnitude; hell, this was true of the death and destruction the US had been inflicting on Iraq even before 9/11. Reading by Tim Foley. Link to the Twitter thread mentioned here: https://twitter.com/KikiRosecrans/status/1436126923541913602?s=20 Ar...
The World's Deadliest Terrorist Group
September 09, 2021 11:09 - 6 minutes - 5.74 MBImagine if the world's deadliest terrorist group got their hands on drones and cruise missiles and nuclear warheads and aircraft carriers and circled the planet with hundreds of military bases and began waging wars and destroying any country which disobeyed their dictates. Reading by Tim Foley.
Australia Has No Bill Of Rights, And It Shows
September 08, 2021 12:23 - 7 minutes - 6.83 MBIn reality, while the pandemic has certainly been a major factor in exacerbating civil rights erosion, Australia's Covid response has simply added to a problem that had already existed and was already getting worse. The 2019 CIVICUS Monitor, a global research group that tracks fundamental freedoms in 196 countries, downgraded Australia from an “open” country to one where civil space has “narrowed”, citing new laws to expand government surveillance, prosecution of whistleblowers, and raids on ...
The Completion Of The Afghanistan Withdrawal Is Nothing To Celebrate
August 31, 2021 01:09 - 3 minutes - 3 MBPride, praise and celebration are not the appropriate emotional response to the day. The appropriate response to a decades-overdue withdrawal from a war that should never have happened in the first place is rage. Unmitigated rage at an unforgivable atrocity which amassed a mountain of corpses for no legitimate reason, from which the region will probably not recover in our lifetime. Unmitigated rage at those responsible for starting and maintaining this horror all this time. Reading by Tim Fo...
Warmongers Keep Raging About The Phrase 'Ending The Forever Wars' And We Should Laugh At Them
August 29, 2021 14:50 - 8 minutes - 7.7 MBIn the wake of the Afghanistan withdrawal influential promoters of western militarism have been absolutely fuming about the popular idea of ending the forever wars, and their tantrums are not even trying to disguise it as something else. They're literally using that phrase, "ending the forever wars", and then saying it's a bad thing. I mean, what a bizarre hill to die on. War is the very worst thing in the world, and forever is the very worst amount of time they could go on for, yet they're ...
Questions After New Reports That US Forces Gunned Down Civilians After Kabul Blast
August 28, 2021 13:09 - 5 minutes - 4.7 MBA new BBC report shows eyewitnesses at the scene of the deadly Kabul airport explosion on Thursday saying that a significant number of the 170 Afghans killed in the attack actually died from gunfire by the US-led alliance in the chaos following the blast. "Many we spoke to, including eyewitnesses, said significant numbers of those killed were shot dead by US forces in the panic after the blast," the BBC's Secunder Kermani said on Twitter. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and source...
Propaganda Is The Source Of All Our Problems
August 28, 2021 01:11 - 5 minutes - 4.64 MBWe don't talk nearly enough about the fact that wealthy and powerful people are constantly pouring vast fortunes into manipulating the way we perceive our world and that this is the ultimate source of all our major problems. Democracy is a meaningless concept when the primary factor in determining how votes will be cast is the wealth that plutocrats have poured into mass-scale media psyops to manipulate public perception of reality. Reading by Tim Foley.
The 'War On Terror' Scam Continues
August 27, 2021 01:23 - 4 minutes - 3.84 MBISIS has reportedly claimed credit for an explosion near Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport. As of this writing there are around 90 dead including 13 US military personnel, though to read western mainstream media reports you'd think only US troops died and not scores of Afghans as well. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-war-on-terror-scam-continues
OMG Afghanistan Is Invading Afghanistan
August 24, 2021 01:25 - 5 minutes - 5.42 MBDuring the Trump years the media wept for the poor kids in cages and ignored all the bombs he was dropping. Now the media ignore the kids in cages and weep for the poor neglected bombs. Reading by Tim Foley.
Bush-Era War Criminals Are Louder Than Ever Because They've Lost The Argument
August 22, 2021 15:02 - 4 minutes - 4.22 MBThe Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has posted a lengthy essay by the former British Prime Minister who led the United Kingdom into two of the most unconscionable military interventions in living memory. Blair criticizes the withdrawal as having been done out of "obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending 'the forever wars'," bloviating about “Radical Islam,” and asking, "has the West lost its strategic will?" Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://...
The End Of Illusions
August 21, 2021 12:56 - 7 minutes - 6.7 MBAnd it was seen that there's not actually any reason humanity cannot collectively awaken to this perspective. The ability to awaken from the illusion of the mental self exists within us all, and probably exists for a reason. Every species eventually reaches a point where it must adapt to changing conditions in an ever-changing world, and with egoic consciousness threatening our existence with climate collapse and nuclear war we are most certainly arriving at that point today. Reading by Tim ...
The System Is Rigged For Endless War
August 20, 2021 13:04 - 5 minutes - 5.49 MBMilitary members who support imperialism get promoted. Those who get to the top go on to work for war profiteers. The war profiteers fund think tanks which promote more wars. The mass media report "news" stories citing those think tanks. These stories manufacture consent for more wars. The war industry reinforces itself. Those who get to the top of the war machine move on to the private sector and spend their time lobbying for more wars which create more eventual Pentagon officials who go on...
The Oligarchic Empire Is Actually Simple And Easy To Understand
August 19, 2021 14:11 - 6 minutes - 6.15 MBDon't let elitists use the illusion of complexity to cow you out of talking about what's going on in your world. You can see what's going on well enough to begin speaking out, and the more you learn the more detailed the picture will become. Reading by Tim Foley.
Serious News For Serious People
August 18, 2021 13:01 - 7 minutes - 6.87 MBThe fact that the mass media continually seek out expert foreign policy analysis from warmongers who've been consistently wrong about everything for decades is by itself enough reason to fully dismiss them. Reading by Tim Foley.
Now Would Be A Great Time For George W Bush To Shut The Fuck Up
August 17, 2021 12:13 - 5 minutes - 5.13 MBGeorge W Bush has issued a statement on the situation in Afghanistan, and there are not enough shoes in the world to adequately respond to it. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/now-would-be-a-great-time-for-george
Stop Believing US Military Invasions Have Noble Intentions
August 15, 2021 01:28 - 10 minutes - 9.21 MBI love how everyone's just pretending the Afghanistan Papers never happened and the Taliban takeover is some kind of shocking tragedy instead of the thing everyone knew would happen because they've been knowingly lying about working to create a stable government this entire time. Reading by Tim Foley.
You Need To Understand That The US Is The Most Tyrannical Regime On Earth
August 14, 2021 00:45 - 4 minutes - 4.35 MBThe United States is currently circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and waging wars which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century. Its sanctions and blockades are starving people to death en masse every single day. It works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates by toppling their governments via CIA coups, proxy armies, partial and full-scale invasions, and the most egregious number of election interferences in the enti...
Citing Corrupt Think Tanks For News Reports Is Blatant Propaganda
August 13, 2021 01:21 - 7 minutes - 7.31 MBOne of the weirdest things about the mass media propaganda which manipulates the way people think, act and vote to maintain the status quo is the fact that mainstream news outlets routinely cite the employees of think tanks that are sponsored by war profiteers and government powers as expert sources for their reports. And they just get away with it. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/basing-news-stories-on-corrupt-think
Afghanistan Proves The US Military Needs Its Budget Slashed To Ribbons
August 11, 2021 23:16 - 4 minutes - 3.97 MBA military which can afford to spend trillions of dollars on a devastating 20-year war which accomplished literally nothing besides making war profiteers fabulously rich is a military which needs its budget slashed to ribbons. Clearly if Pentagon officials can waste such unfathomably vast fortunes lining the pockets of the military-industrial complex to the benefit of not one single ordinary American, they do not need anything like the obscenely bloated military budget the United States curre...
You Can Never Do Everything, But You Can Always Do Something
August 10, 2021 12:15 - 5 minutes - 5.43 MBWhenever I talk about the fact that our world is ruled by psychopaths who have our species on a trajectory toward annihilation via climate collapse or nuclear war, I get people asking the very understandable question, "What can we do to stop this?" By which they generally mean something like, how can we collectively free our minds from the propaganda prison of manipulative dominators and use the power of our numbers to create a healthy world? And the answer to this question is essentially, d...
We're Destroying Our World Over Imaginary Nonsense
August 10, 2021 00:19 - 6 minutes - 5.78 MBWe are killing each other and our ecosystem over an economy made of debt books and imagination. Reading by Tim Foley.
Rent Is A Scam
August 05, 2021 02:10 - 5 minutes - 5.23 MBPeople complaining about the US eviction ban are like, "Oh help me, I am a landlord and my investment property isn't yielding free money. I am a lord, I cannot get a job, I cannot work for my hands are like gelatin desserts." Reading by Tim Foley.
After Russiagate, Why WOULDN'T People Be Skeptical About Covid?
August 04, 2021 02:25 - 5 minutes - 5.33 MBThe way people are acting like trust in media-sanctioned narratives should be a given after those institutions literally JUST discredited themselves in front of everyone is insane. You don't have to believe anything odd about the virus or the vaccine to understand the distrust. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/after-russiagate-why-wouldnt-people
There's Never Been A Better Time To Crush Capitalism
August 02, 2021 23:09 - 6 minutes - 6.33 MBThere's nothing more enraging than a system which treats the homeless like the problem rather than homelessness. Reading by Tim Foley.
They're Normalizing Robot Police By Calling Them "Dogs"
August 01, 2021 13:35 - 8 minutes - 8 MBTo be absolutely clear, there is not actually any legitimate reason for any normal person to refer to these machines as a "robotic dog", or a "high-tech canine", or by a cutesy cliché name for a pet. These are robots. Robots that are being used by police forces on civilian populations. If the robots being used had two legs, or eight, they would not be able to apply such cuddly wuddly labels, and public alarm bells would be going off a lot louder. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and ...
Keith Olbermann Wants Jimmy Dore Banned From All Platforms
July 31, 2021 12:24 - 3 minutes - 3.46 MBProving once again he doesn't care who he has to step on to claw his way to rock bottom, fallen liberal media hero Keith Olbermann has called for the complete removal of left wing comedian and podcaster Jimmy Dore from all internet platforms. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/keith-olbermann-wants-jimmy-dore
On Art, Integrity, And Crowdfunded Creativity
July 31, 2021 01:08 - 5 minutes - 4.61 MBI don't think I talk enough about how cool our setup is here. I can't tell you how freeing it is to be able to write and make anything we want without an editor, but, more importantly I'm coming to see, without the extrinsic motivation of money. Reading by Tim Foley.
It's About The System, Not The Individuals
July 30, 2021 11:25 - 6 minutes - 5.76 MBFocusing on individuals instead of the system creates the illusion that if you replaced the individuals you could fix the problems with the system. The individuals are symptoms of the disease. Reading by Tim Foley.
Australian War Crimes Syndicate To Police The Streets Of Sydney
July 30, 2021 00:41 - 3 minutes - 3.54 MBIn what was already being called the harshest pandemic restrictions in Australia, New South Wales police have requested 300 Australian Defense Force troops to help enforce lockdown rules in eight local government areas in the suburbs of Western Sydney. Reading by Tim Foley.
For Every Whistleblower They Make An Example Of, They Prevent A Thousand More
July 28, 2021 01:44 - 5 minutes - 5.41 MBWhistleblower Daniel Hale has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking secret government information about America's psychopathic civilian-slaughtering drone assassination program. The sentence was much harsher than Hale's defense requested but not nearly as harsh as US prosecutors pushed for, arguing that longer prison sentences are necessary for deterring whistleblowing in the US intelligence cartel. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and source...
A Race Between Revolution And Robotics
July 27, 2021 10:42 - 5 minutes - 5.27 MBBasically we're looking at a race to see if the deterioration of material conditions inherent in capitalism leads to mass-scale revolution before the plutocrats have the technological and legal ability to roll out robot and drone security forces. Reading by Tim Foley.
Consciousness And Dysfunction Cannot Coexist
July 26, 2021 02:06 - 7 minutes - 6.96 MBSo the answer to the ever-present question "What can we do?" is, spread awareness. Spread awareness outwardly in the world in whatever fun and creative ways you can, and spread awareness inwardly to your own psychological processes as well, since that's part of the network of humanity we're trying to bring into consciousness. The expansion of consciousness can occur to a limitless extent inwardly, up to and including the never-ending journey of spiritual enlightenment, and it can happen to a...
The 'Harm Reduction' President Keeps Killing People
July 24, 2021 12:58 - 6 minutes - 6.26 MBThe "harm reduction" president just bombed Afghanistan and Somalia and added further sanctions to Cuba. Reading by Tim Foley.
Our World Is Dying Because We Don't Value Un-Making Things
July 23, 2021 13:24 - 9 minutes - 9.1 MBEnding growth for its own sake, producing less, consuming less, paying people to stay home instead of commuting to pointless jobs; all of these would help the ecosystem far more than producing some new battery made of strip-mined materials. But there’s no profit, so they’re overlooked as viable solutions. You’re only ever going to look for solutions to problems through the reality tunnel you’ve been conditioned to look through. For thousands of years human civilization has been valuing the ma...
The US Is The Absolute Worst
July 21, 2021 11:52 - 7 minutes - 6.78 MB"Stop saying the US is the worst government on earth! Others are way worse!" Name one. Name one that's currently doing anything that rises to the level of murdering millions and displacing tens of millions in imperialist wars and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it. You can't. You can't name a single government that's anywhere near as destructive and tyrannical as Washington today. All you can do is talk about what other governments have done generations in the past or pretend d...
Warmongers Should Be Treated Like Serial Killers And Child Rapists
July 20, 2021 10:48 - 5 minutes - 4.95 MBCalifornia Representative Ro Khanna announced on Monday that he'd just hung out with Iraq war architect Bill Kristol and had a wonderful exchange of ideas, fully discrediting the myth of the progressive Democrat with a single tweet. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/warmongers-should-be-treated-like
"We've Got To Fight Disinformation," Says Empire Made Entirely Of Disinformation
July 19, 2021 15:34 - 5 minutes - 5 MBThe weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself with the censorship of "disinformation" on social media is that the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and facilitated by disinformation. Reading by Tim Foley.
You're Not SUPPOSED To Trust The Government
July 18, 2021 12:08 - 8 minutes - 7.42 MBYou're not supposed to trust the government, and governments aren't supposed to act in a way that requires your trust. If you find yourself ruled by a secretive power structure which demands your blind faith in its righteousness, something has gone horribly wrong. Reading by Tim Foley.
The US Government Threatens Tech Companies To Push Censorship Agendas
July 17, 2021 13:57 - 8 minutes - 7.71 MBThe elephant in the room with the ongoing controversy about the Biden administration's push for more internet censorship is the fact that both the US government and the Silicon Valley tech companies who are being pushed to censor are acutely aware that those companies can be brought to their knees by antitrust cases and other regulation if they don't censor people's voices in accordance with the government's wishes. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnsto...
Biden Administration Completely Kills The "It's A Private Company So It's Not Censorship" Argument
July 16, 2021 02:37 - 6 minutes - 5.76 MBIn what's surely the biggest "Imagine the outrage if Trump had done that" moment to date, the Biden administration has admitted that it is giving Facebook a list of accounts to censor for spreading "disinformation" about Covid-19. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/biden-administration-completely-kills