Caitlin Johnstone
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cryptoflovecraft — 2 weeks ago(March 14, 2026 01:01 PM)
Caitlin Johnstone
Mar 14
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt gave a bizarre appearance on CNN in response to an attempted car bombing of a Michigan synagogue by a man whose Lebanese family members were killed by Israeli forces.
“We are seeing Jewish people, the Jewish state, blamed for the war in the Middle East,” Greenblatt said. “That is wrong. It is wrong to scapegoat, it is wrong to hold Jewish people accountable for something you don’t like on the other side of the planet. And we really need leaders on all sides in politics, running for office, podcasters, to stop with the conspiracies, to stop with the accusations, and then tell us ‘but we oppose antisemitism’. You don’t get to say you’re opposed to hate if you’re trafficking in hateful conspiracy theories.”
Now, at first glance it this might read like Greenblatt is taking the entirely reasonable position that it is wrong to blame Jewish Americans for the actions of the Israeli government.
But take a closer look at his use of the phrase “the Jewish state”.
What Greenblatt is actually doing here is claiming it’s an antisemitic conspiracy theory to blame the state of Israel for its war crimes, while simultaneously lumping all Jewish people in with the actions of that state. That’s what he’s doing when he says “Jewish people, the Jewish state” in the same breath while talking about Israeli acts of mass military violence.
It’s so obnoxious how genocide apologists like Greenblatt make a living actively telling everyone that Jews and Judaism are inseparable from the acts of the Israeli government, but whenever there’s an extremist attack by someone who doesn’t distinguish between western Jews and the state of Israel it gets blamed on the pro-Palestine left.
Pro-Palestine leftists perform endless verbal gymnastics to avoid conflating Jewish people with the state of Israel, while Israel and its supporters conflate them constantly. Yet we’re always the ones who get blamed whenever there’s a terror attack on a Jewish institution by someone enraged by Israel’s actions.
Zionists are the ones doing everything they can to make sure people see the state of Israel as synonymous with Jews and Judaism. That is what they are doing every time they claim a criticism of Israel’s actions is hate speech against Jews. They are claiming that the nation and its government are one and the same as the entirety of the Jewish faith and its adherents.
Pro-Palestine leftists have been doing the exact opposite. We go to great pains to make sure all our arguments are carefully worded to avoid being interpreted as an attack on the Jewish faith, making it clear that our grievance is with the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism which supports that state’s abusive nature. And then Israel apologists come in and smear those meticulously crafted arguments as a hateful attack on all Jews everywhere.
Zionists are therefore responsible for the growing perception that our Jewish neighbors and countrymen are culpable for the abuses of the Israeli government. When more attacks on Jewish institutions occur (and they will), it is Israel and its supporters who will hold the blame for this, not the pro-Palestine left.
I am not saying attacks on Jewish institutions should happen. I am not saying it will be good when they do happen. I’m saying it will happen, and when it happens it will be a terrible thing. And it will be the fault of Israel and its supporters.
We’ve been running around like crazy trying to stop this, falling all over ourselves to thwart the Zionist efforts to conflate Jews with Israel, but our voices aren’t strong enough. We’re not the ones getting loudly amplified by every mass media outlet, they are. It’s not people like me getting invited to appear on CNN to talk to Wolf Blitzer, it’s people like Jonathan Greenblatt.
So when we lose the narrative war on this front and the next extremist attack occurs, it won’t be our fault. It will be theirs. It will be the fault of Israel and its apologists. We fought them as hard as we could to prevent this, but they won. And the consequences of this will therefore rest squarely on their shoulders.
https://substack.com/@caitlinjohnstone -
cryptoflovecraft — 2 weeks ago(March 15, 2026 11:45 AM)
True, Israel isn't doing them any favors either (aside from the $$). After supporting genocide in Gaza and now supporting a pointless war with Iran that's wrecking the global economy, AIPAC and its lapdogs in Congress are looking the worse for wear.
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Madotsuki_the_Dreamer — 2 weeks ago(March 18, 2026 07:18 AM)
Israel deliberately funds anti-Semitism around the world to "prove" how much their Jewish ethno-state supposedly needs to exist. Even before Israel existed, many powerful Jews funded anti-Semitism for similar reasons. It supposedly creates solidarity among Jews and it validates the supposed need for a Jewish ethno-state.
With that said, Caitlin Johnstone is still a ****ing retard, though. -
cryptoflovecraft — 1 month ago(February 20, 2026 01:02 PM)
Caitlin Johnstone
Feb 20
The Wall Street Journal reports that the US has been gathering the most air power seen in the middle east since the Iraq invasion in 2003.
CNN says the US military is prepared to strike Iran as early as this weekend.
A Trump advisor has reportedly told Axios that “The boss is getting fed up. Some people around him warn him against going to war with Iran, but I think there is 90% chance we see kinetic action in the next few weeks.”
The US is by every indication headed straight toward war with Iran, and Trump’s ostensible opposition has conspicuously little to say about it. We’re seeing some pushback from House Democrats like Ro Khanna, but party leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are completely missing from the scene on this issue of unparalleled urgency.
Democratic Party leaders are doing nothing to oppose Trump’s war plans for Iran because they support those plans. They just don’t want to be the ones pulling the trigger.
When the attack begins they’ll do the same thing they did with Venezuela: publicly finger-wag about rules and protocol while providing no meaningful resistance and privately being glad the empire took out another unauthorized leader.
Democratic Party empire managers love Trump. They love having a bad cop who’s willing to get his hands dirty and slit the throats that need slitting while they sit back looking pretty and fundraise off his depravity.
Democrats hate having to be the bad guy. They hated trying to come up with excuses for why it was fine for Biden to aggressively back a live-streamed genocide in Gaza, and they were relieved to finally hand off that PR nightmare to Trump. They wanted to lose in 2024, and they were glad when they did.
Now they get to just coast along and let Trump take the blame for all the imperial depravity.
On Wednesday, Democratic Senator Mark Warner told MS NOW’s Katy Tur that “I think it’s appropriate that the president has all the options on the table” with regard to war with Iran, complaining only that Trump was too incompetent to strike last month when Iranian domestic turmoil was at its peak.
Warner said that “seeing regime change in Iran would make sense” and made it clear that he would like to see the Iranian government removed, with his only criticism being that Trump was going about obtaining it in a clumsy and impolite way.
“First of all, remember the president said in our previous bombing that we had obliterated Iran’s nuclear program,” Warner said. “While clearly our military did an exquisite job, we did not obliterate Iran’s nuclear program, number one. Number two, if the president is calling for regime change in Iran — and Iran is an awful regime — but he should make the case to the American public and to the world of how we’re going to go about doing that.”
This is such a perfect example of the Democratic Party’s relationship with all of Trump’s most depraved agendas. Here’s this monstrous warmonger, poised to unleash violence in the middle east of potentially devastating consequence, and all Warner can do is hem and haw about proper war etiquette and criticize the president for failing to drop enough bombs on Iran’s nuclear energy infrastructure.
The United States has two right wing war parties: the polite one and the rude one. No party or faction which advances peace and human interests is allowed to flourish at the heart of the empire.
Trump is responsible for the war crimes of his administration, and he belongs in a cell in The Hague. But these Republican swamp monsters wouldn’t be able to do the damage they do without the assistance of the Democratic Party.
https://substack.com/@caitlinjohnstone -
Factcheck․fart — 1 month ago(February 20, 2026 01:42 PM)
When the attack begins they’ll do the same thing they did with Venezuela: publicly finger-wag about rules and protocol while providing no meaningful resistance.
What else can they do? They have zero power in Washington. -
cryptoflovecraft — 6 months ago(September 17, 2025 12:53 AM)
Caitlin Johnstone
September 15, 2025
US Attorney General Pam Bondi just said on a podcast that “hate speech” directed at conservatives was responsible for Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and that people responsible for such speech will be prosecuted by the Trump administration.
Bondi’s comments came after the podcast’s host Katie Miller (wife of Trump henchman Stephen Miller) bizarrely suggested that Kirk’s murder at a university was a symptom of university campuses being too tolerant of mistreatment of people with conservative views.
Here’s a transcript:
Miller: “These universities are complicit in allowing conservatives to be harassed on campus. And what happens when you allow a university to harass conservatives and don’t expel or don’t take action is what happened last week.”
Bondi: “It is, and you know, on a broader level, the antisemitism that’s been happening at college campuses around this country is disgusting. It’s despicable. And we’ve been fighting that. We’ve been fighting these universities left and right, and we’re not going to stop. There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place — especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie — in our society.”
Miller: “Do you see more law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people so we show them that some action is better than no action?”
Bondi: “We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything. And that’s across the aisle.”
At the same time, Miller’s husband Stephen circulated the baseless claim that an “organized campaign” by left wing “terrorist networks” led to Kirk’s murder, and that the Trump administration is going to “dismantle and destroy” these networks.
Appearing on the late Kirk’s podcast which was being guest hosted by Vice President JD Vance, Miller stated the following:
“We are going to channel all the anger we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks … The organized doxxing campaigns. The organized riots. The organized street violence. The organized campaigns of of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses. Combining that with messaging designed to trigger and incite violence and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement. With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks, and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
On the same show, Vance urged American conservatives to report anyone who celebrated the killing of Charlie Kirk to their employer in order to get them fired.
“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out, and hell, call their employer,” Vance said, adding, “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”
If the Biden administration had been saying these things about right wingers, Trump supporters would’ve shrieked their lungs out. But because Trump supporters are mindless unprincipled NPCs, they’re perfectly fine with using authoritarian speech suppression and cancel culture against the other side.
One of the many naive mistakes I made when I first started this commentary gig was taking Trump supporters at their word when they said they support things like free speech, ending wars, and dismantling the deep state. I thought they can’t be all bad, because they’re saying they’re on the same side as me with many important issues that I care about.
This wishful thinking quickly fell apart as I watched them defend every single one of Trump’s acts of warmongering and authoritarianism and advancements of longstanding deep state agendas throughout his first term. Even actions which should have gone against their own basic partisan ideological biases like imprisoning Julian Assange were excused, justified, or spun as some kind of 4-D chess maneuver to actually rescue Assange. I stayed in dialogue with them the entire time, and they stood by literally every last bit of Trump’s warmongering, authoritarianism, and assaults on free speech.
Every once in a while you’d see one of them go “This is the final straw for me! I don’t support Trump anymore!” But then their disdain for Democrats would pull them right back into the fold and they’d be toeing the Republican Party line just the same as before.
And it became clear to me that these people do not actually oppose the terrible abuses they claim to oppose, they just oppose them when the other party is doing them. They don’t oppose assaults on free speech, they just oppose assaults on their own speech. They don’t oppose war, they just oppose wars that they perceive as being started by Democrats. They don’t oppose the unelected power structure which runs th