Democrats Don’t Care About Trump’s Real Crimes: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Caitlin Johnstone
4 min readAug 7, 2023

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

Ask an anti-imperialist what’s the worst thing Trump did and they’ll talk about real things like Yemen, Venezuela, Soleimani, Assange, the JCPOA, and the new cold war. Ask a Democrat what’s the worst thing Trump did and they’ll talk about pretend nonsense like Russian collusion and insurrection.

The US government is doing literally hundreds of things right now as you read this that are more harmful and concerning than a pretend “insurrection” that never at any time had a higher than zero percent chance of succeeding, but that’s the issue liberals have been shrieking about for the last two and a half years.

It’s so stupid how today’s right wingers pretend they’re different from the stuffy warmongering conservatives of previous decades. Trump supporters revealed how phony their faction’s antiwar lip service is when their guy assassinated Soleimani; Trump took the US to the brink of war with Iran and everything I said in opposition to this was met with tons of comments from MAGAs cheerleading the assassination and saying the Iranian people need to be free. All of a sudden Politics Twitter was full of 2003 Bush Republicans spouting the exact kinds of rhetoric they were spouting 20 years ago. These people haven’t changed at all.

Trump supporters are Bush supporters cosplaying as Ron Paul supporters.

If you place opposing US murderousness and militarism at a high level of importance, then you can’t really dispute that Bush was quantifiably worse than Trump. And because this administration actively sabotaged peace between Ukraine and Russia, Biden is arguably worse than Bush.

Americans are abusing fentanyl that’s being manufactured and distributed by Mexican drug cartels, so naturally imperial narrative managers have been blaming this problem on China.

Blaming China for Mexican cartels manufacturing fentanyl using precursor chemicals they obtained from China is like blaming mass shootings on the countries which export the raw materials used to manufacture firearms.

Really the problem isn’t even the cartels, the problem is that Americans live in a miserable dystopia where everyone’s increasingly impoverished and abused and made to feel worthless while their minds are being pummeled and warped by nonstop propaganda 24/7/365, and that the American big pharma oligarchs who helped create the opiate crisis have never been punished.

A new study from American University has found garing discrepancies between the mass media coverage of the war in Ukraine and the war in Yemen, saying its research shows that the press “highlights or downplays human suffering in the two conflicts in a way that seemingly coincides with U.S. foreign policy objectives.”

This will come as no surprise to my readers, but these kinds of side-by-side comparisons are really important for showing media bias because otherwise it’s just kind of a vibe that some alert individuals know is happening but often can’t really say how. Yemen and Ukraine are ideal for such comparison, since the attack on Yemen has been waged by Saudi Arabia, a government the US likes, while the attack on Ukraine is being waged by an empire-targeted government.

Basically what happened was some rich manipulators figured out they could bully the global south into trading away real resources for pretend money, and any foreign government which refused to participate in this extraction scheme could be ousted and replaced with one who would.

When Russia or China talk about “national security” they mean the existential security of their respective countries. When the US talks about “national security” it means the security of global US hegemony.

The biggest lie being circulated in Australia right now is that our government is militarizing against China as a defensive measure. We’re not militarizing to defend ourselves against a future attack by China, we’re militarizing in preparation for a future US-led attack on China.

China has literally zero history of invading and occupying countries on the other side of the planet. You know who does have a very extensive history of doing that? The United States. The military superpower that Australia’s military is becoming increasingly intertwined with. The belief that we’re intertwining ourselves with the world’s most aggressive, destructive and war-horny military force as a defensive measure to protect ourselves against that military force’s number one rival — a rival who hasn’t dropped a bomb in decades — is transparently false and idiotic.

The narrative that Australia allies with the US for protection from China is plainly false. China hasn’t been waging wars of aggression around the world, the US has. It follows that Australia is actually allied with the US to protect itself from what the US would do if it wasn’t.

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Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Khamenei.ir (CC BY 4.0)

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