The Empire Is The Real Enemy: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The US has offered to drop its ridiculous criminal charges against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro if he agrees to leave power. These freaks really do believe the entire planet is their property.

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Normal person: Genocide is bad.

Crazy person: DO YOU WANT TRUMP TO WIN??

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Normal person: The candidate you are supporting wants to commit actual genocide.

Crazy person: Hey, look, nobody’s perfect.

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President Trump, 2025: [bombs a middle eastern hospital] I bombed that hospital because Muslims are terrorists.

President Harris, 2025: [bombs a middle eastern hospital] Our thoughts are with the victims of this terrible tragedy as we work toward peace and stability in the region.

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Zionism and Christian fundamentalism are used as excuses to inflict vastly more violence than Islam is. Muslims are not the enemy, the murder machine of the globe-dominating US-centralized empire is.

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It’s so sociopathic how anyone who complains about struggling to make ends meet under the oppressive, exploitative systems in this civilization is told “Get another job” or “Work harder”, like that’s a real response to complaints of systemic problems.

It’s sociopathic because telling someone who’s complaining about systemic problems to change their circumstances as an individual is just telling them to make sure it’s someone else at the bottom of the societal pyramid instead of them. Even if the person making the complaint got a better-paying job than the one they had, their old job would be filled with someone else who would find themselves struggling to make ends meet in the same way. Our entire capitalist system is built on the premise of the existence of a permanent underclass of exploited and underpaid laborers, and an individual moving out of that underclass doesn’t change the existence of that underclass.

It’s like if someone radioed for help saying “Our ship sank and we are drowning at sea!” and was told, “Okay well just climb on top of your fellow passengers so that they drown instead of you.” That’s why I say this attitude is sociopathic. How broken does your sense of empathy have to be for you to see “Just make sure someone else is being abused by our systems instead of you” as a valid response to complaints about systemic problems? How devoid of basic human compassion do you have to be to be satisfied with that kind of position? You must not be able to really understand that other people exist out there in the world who experience life the same way you do. It means there’s something deeply wrong with you as a person.

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Until election season the leftier end of the political spectrum in the US was pretty unified in opposing the Gaza genocide. Now that November draws closer as the Democrats run a genocidal candidate, there’s a split between those who oppose genocide and those who just want to feel nice about themselves.

This split emerges time and time again in western politics, and it’s ultimately a divide between people who seek an end to the warmongering US-centralized empire and those who just want the empire to have a kinder, more diplomatic face so that they can feel nice feelings about the political status quo in their country. It’s the difference between someone who wants to kick their heroin habit and someone who just wants their heroin habit not to have any unpleasant consequences for their health, finances or social life. One desires real, meaningful change, and the other wants to keep things the same without being disturbed by cognitive dissonance or the nigglings of conscience.

And really these two positions could not be more different from each other. A Trump supporter and a Bernie Sanders progressive who now cheerleads for Kamala Harris are much closer to each other on the political spectrum than the progressive is to a leftist who is steadfastly opposed to the empire’s criminality in Gaza. The progressive Democrats and the real anti-imperialist leftists have a lot of shared smaller goals and wind up on the same side of many common issues, but in the big picture they are still squarely at odds with each other, because one seeks the end of the empire and one seeks to maintain it. Their ultimate goals are diametrically opposed, which will keep being highlighted every time those goals come into conflict with each other.

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The main reason I’m not looking forward to another Trump presidency is because of how fake and insipid political discourse gets when he’s around. It’s not because of his policies and actions (the US empire’s depravity continues uninterrupted regardless of who’s in office), it’s because of the widening effect he has on the gap between reality and narrative when he’s president.

Trump’s presidency oversaw huge new cold war escalations against Russia, genocidal atrocities and deliberate starvation in Yemen, brutal new starvation sanctions on nations like Venezuela, Iran and Syria, brinkmanship with Iran, massively expanded bombing campaigns, turning the situation with Israel into an incendiary tinderbox, and the arrest of Julian Assange. But if you ask the average American liberal what was the worst thing Trump did during his time in office, they’ll start babbling about Russian collusion and insurrections and a conspiracy to end American democracy. They spent the entire time ignoring all of Trump’s worst crimes and shrieking hysterically about pretend nonsense and rude tweets.

And it’s just as bad with Trump’s supporters, who generally have no idea that Trump even did those things. They believe he spent four years “fighting the Deep State”, waging a brave populist revolution against the establishment to Make America Great Again. They’re just as clueless as the Democrats as to what Trump actually did, because both sides spent the entire time in a media-generated narrative matrix that kept them blind to the whole thing. The gap between the raw data of what actually happened and the narratives about what happened is immense.

At least with Biden people are actually sometimes talking about the actual evil things his administration is actually doing, like the Ukraine proxy war and the genocide in Gaza. The reality of the situation has much more in common with the topics of political discourse. Under Trump everyone enters into this bizarre, contorted reality tunnel where fake nonsense is all that matters and real problems are invisible to everyone who’s anywhere near the mainstream.

Really not enthusiastic about the idea of experiencing that moronic bullshit again.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-empire-is-the-real-enemy