Gaza WILL Get Worse Under Trump. It’ll Also Get Worse Under Harris.
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
❖
The thing about people who argue that Gaza will get worse if Trump wins is that they’re technically not wrong: Gaza will get worse if Trump wins. But it will also get worse if Harris wins.
Know how I know? Because it’s been getting worse and worse in Gaza for a whole year, and both Trump and Harris have pledged to continue unconditionally supporting the state that’s making it worse and worse.
❖
Crazy person: If Trump wins something BAD might happen!
Normal person: His opponent is literally committing genocide right now.
Crazy person: No but like something REALLY bad!
❖
The other day a Muslim streamer named Frogan enraged every western liberal on earth by making the very correct and obvious observation that the US military is a force of immense evil in our world and the people who work for the US military directly perpetrate those immense evils.
She’s right. If you are offended by part of the things she said you’re a bootlicker and a loser.
❖
I’m an avowed socialist but I have more in common with a US libertarian who opposes the Gaza genocide than with any lefty I agree with about every issue besides Palestine. If you get Gaza right you’re a better person than someone who gets it wrong, even if the rest of your politics are ridiculous and the rest of their politics are solid.
❖
I am going to be so mean to Democrats if they lose another easily winnable election by unforced errors and try to blame anyone but themselves for their loss again. I am going to ruin people’s day. I will make grown men cry.
❖
There are two types of Israel apologist:
1. The openly racist and genocidal “Haha kill them all” kind.
2. The dishonest kind that makes bad faith arguments and pretends to believe things they know are false.
These are the only two types. There are no others. This is because the only two ways you can defend Israel’s genocidal atrocities are either (1) to argue that genocidal atrocities are good, or (2) to obfuscate the reality that indefensible genocidal atrocities are happening and need to stop immediately. Only the first can be done with any level of intellectual honesty.
❖
❖
So much of the PR for the US/Israeli genocide in Gaza revolves around convincing people to abandon their common sense and believe self-evidently idiotic bullshit, because that’s all they’ve got.
They can’t justify Israel bombing hospitals, routinely shooting Palestinian kids in the head, assassinating journalists and doctors and cultural leaders, and deliberately targeting areas known to be packed full of civilians, so they ask you to turn off your critical thinking faculties and accept that all of those people are either (A) Hamas or (B) “human shields” of Hamas.
They seriously ask you to set down everything you know about Israel’s history and its longstanding agenda to steal all Palestinian land and accept on faith that what’s being done in Gaza is all about self-defense and fighting terrorism.
They’ll facilitate a genocide right in front of you for an entire year and then still ask you to believe that they’re working real hard on a ceasefire and they’ll get aid to those starving civilians any minute now.
They’ll get caught in lie after lie after lie trying to justify their genocidal atrocities, and then STILL try to tell you that a bunch of journalists in Gaza are secret Hamas combatants and that there’s a secret Hezbollah base hidden underneath a hospital in Beirut.
Their position is so evil and so stupid, so completely indefensible on any moral or rational basis, that the only tool in their toolbox is to ask you to voluntarily turn yourself into a drooling moron and swallow obvious propaganda right down your throat with zero gag reflex.
It would be cute and funny if it wasn’t being used to justify the ugliest things happening in our world today.
❖
If the mainstream western media were comprised of journalists instead of propagandists, there would be earth-shaking outcry over Israel claiming that six Al Jazeera reporters in Gaza are secret members of Hamas and thereby marking them for death.
It’s not just people like me who view the western press as propagandists for the western empire — that’s how they view themselves. They don’t say it, and they might not even think it, but you see it tacitly acknowledged in the disparity between how they treat journalists who criticize the empire compared to mainstream reporters who dutifully toe the imperial line. The outcry in the mainstream press over a Wall Street Journal reporter like Evan Gershkovich getting arrested or a Washington Post columnist like Jamal Khashoggi being murdered is always orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen about all the Palestinian journalists being murdered in Gaza, or the imprisonment of Julian Assange, or the persecution of pro-Palestinian journalists like Asa Winstanley or Jeremy Loffredo.
This disparity reveals a clear “us vs them” attitude in the mainstream western press which draws a solid line between journalists who promote the information interests of the western empire and journalists who do not, with journalists who challenge the official narratives of Washington and its allies placed firmly in the “them” category.
Even the way you’ll routinely see mainstream media outlets report news that was already broken by independent dissident media as a “scoop” without giving those indie outlets credit for their original reporting illustrates this “us and them” viewpoint. They simply do not regard journalists as real journalists unless they work for an imperial media outlet like The New York Times or the BBC, and therefore don’t respect or regard them accordingly.
This shows that they don’t view the job of “journalist” as simply someone who does journalism; for them, a real journalist is someone who aligns with the US government and its allies and helps market its wars and agendas to the public. If you’re not doing this, then you’re not one of “us”, you’re one of “them”, and you will be treated accordingly. And the “us” that they view themselves as belonging to is a collective of professional propagandists.
_______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
