Oh No, Now The US Will Have A President Who Does Bad Things

Caitlin Johnstone
4 min readNov 7, 2024

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

So hey, can Democrats finally start opposing genocide now?

Just kidding. They won’t.

Democrats are sitting on a mountain of hundreds of thousands of human corpses they helped kill by mass military slaughter in the last four years, weeping and lamenting that now bad things are going to start happening.

Democrats are shrieking so loud today because they know they’re wrong. They know their party ran a dogshit candidate. They know it was crazy to expect the left support the party that’s committing a live-streamed genocide.

It’s not anger.

It’s not fear.

It’s cognitive dissonance.

I should probably repeat what I said back in July: if you’re a Trump supporter who started reading me for my criticisms of the Biden administration, you are going to hate my guts after your guy gets in.

Democrats will spend the next four years viciously attacking Trump. So will I. But while Democrats will attack Trump because of the few ways in which he is different from themselves, I will be attacking him because of the many ways in which he is the same as the Democrats.

Both parties are in full alignment when it comes to the worst evils of the US empire. I and others like me will be focusing there, while the Democrats pour all their energy into pretending to be a real opposition party and exaggerating the differences between themselves and Trump.

The reason US presidential elections are so close and US politics remain divided pretty much 50–50 is because both parties are constantly walking the tightrope of trying to give the donor class as much as possible while giving Americans as little as possible and still getting votes. As soon as they figure out they can make fewer concessions to ordinary voters and still have a chance at winning, they roll back those concessions to make concessions to the plutocrats who own them.

They’re constantly calculating how little they can get away with giving the voting public. Give too much to the people and the plutocrats switch sides; give too little and the people won’t vote for you. So they both walk it right up to the line year after year, keeping them split right down the middle and never changing the status quo in any major way.

Which just so happens to be exactly what the rich and powerful oligarchs who own America want.

The only real solution to the trolley problem is to find and kill the prick who keeps tying people to trolley tracks and making people choose which ones die.

Meanwhile, Israel keeps brutally hammering Lebanon and Gaza with the full support of the United States. The Israeli military has publicly announced that the Palestinians who’ve been driven out of northern Gaza will not be allowed to return to their homes, meaning that this is a completely undisguised ethnic cleansing operation.

Benjamin Netanyahu fired Yoav “We’re exterminating human animals” Gallant on Tuesday because he’s too moderate and gentle for the current Israeli government. He has been replaced by the even nastier Israel Katz, who said in 2022, “Yesterday I warned the Arab students, who are flying Palestine flags at universities: Remember 48. Remember our independence war and your Nakba, don’t stretch the rope too much. […] If you don’t calm down, we’ll teach you a lesson that won’t be forgotten.”

If these things had happened after Trump was sworn in, liberals would be trying to rub it in our faces telling us it proves he’s worse on Gaza. But it’s happening now while they’ve still got a couple more months in power, so liberals are just ignoring it.

I honestly don’t think my respect for Democrats could sink any lower. It was very low already, but watching them try to bully people into supporting a genocidal monster these last few months has dropped me to a whole new level of disgust I didn’t know was possible.

A leftist is someone with logically and morally correct politics. A liberal is someone who wants to feel logically and morally correct without ever putting themselves at odds with power or costing themselves opportunities or experiencing the uncomfortable emotions that truth causes.

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Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.

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