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You’re A Terrorist If You Resist Genocide Or Mass Surveillance, And Other Notes

Caitlin Johnstone, Aug 28, 2026

The US has joined the UK in adding the activist group Palestine Action to its list of designated terrorist organizations.

The UK proscribing Palestine Action was already arguably the most insane attack on free speech in recent western history, and now it’s the official position of the US government as well. Western support for Israel is poisoning our entire civilization.

The US has also made the unprecedented move of adding the Italian tech support collective Autistici/Inventati to its list of banned terrorist groups, not because they’ve been accused of any crimes, but explicitly because the company allows people to communicate with each other while staying “anonymous, untraceable, and beyond the reach of the law.” Americans are now strictly forbidden from any transactions with the banned company.

In this dystopia, mass surveillance is now so normalized that you can be designated a terrorist for helping people avoid being surveilled.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has been issuing statements thanking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli President Isaac Herzog for their support, gushing about the “bilateral cooperation, trade partnerships, and strong people-to-people bonds” between the two countries.

These statements have been causing a lot of cognitive dissonance for a particularly annoying category of western progressive. You know the type. The ones who say both “Slava Ukraini” and “Free Palestine” and act like cheerleading for a NATO proxy war is an act of anti-imperialist resistance.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent just tweeted, “As the Iranian people struggle to afford basic necessities, the corrupt regime continues to squander enormous sums abroad. Instead of funneling billions of dollars to its terrorist proxies, the regime should spend that money for its people.”

Which is just hilarious, given what country this is coming from.

It’s so funny that US officials keep making this criticism of Iran. The United States is literally the single most egregious offender on the planet when it comes to spending obscene amounts of money on militarism and proxy warfare overseas while its own people struggle to afford basic necessities. I myself have built an entire career on slamming the United States for doing precisely this.

Saying you’re both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel is nonsensical.

I have a friend who was savagely raped by a guy in her social circle, and her friends told her they didn’t want to take sides about it because they valued their friendship with both her AND her rapist.

That’s what saying “I’m both pro-Palestine AND pro-Israel” reminds me of.

Europeans stopped fighting constant wars with each other like ten seconds ago and yet the average white westerner will tell you “the middle east has always been at war so all the bloodshed there is an unsolvable dilemma”. The only reason the middle east didn’t join the rest of the world in entering into a period of relative peace and stability after the second world war is because the west created Israel right after WWII and has been aggressively destabilizing and abusing the region ever since.

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AI isn’t going to save us. Techno utopianism only sounds reasonable when you don’t know the tech is run by an alliance of narcissistic billionaires and psychopathic government agencies who have no interest in creating a better world and would happily incinerate billions of people to obtain more money and power.

Europeans stopped fighting constant wars with each other like ten seconds ago and yet the average white westerner will tell you “the middle east has always been at war so all the bloodshed there is an unsolvable dilemma”. The only reason the middle east didn’t join the rest of the world in entering into a period of relative peace and stability after the second world war is because the west created Israel right after WWII and has been aggressively destabilizing and abusing the region ever since.

❖

AI isn’t going to save us. Techno utopianism only sounds reasonable when you don’t know the tech is run by an alliance of narcissistic billionaires and psychopathic government agencies who have no interest in creating a better world and would happily incinerate billions of people to obtain more money and power.

The latest wave of Hasan Piker hysteria shows that there is nothing these freaks won’t pretend to believe in order to stomp out criticism of Israel and shut down all leftward movement in US politics. The guy made the completely obvious and indisputable observation that Jews are endangered by the Zionist tactic of painting all Jews as a monolith who support Israel, and now the top Democrats in Washington are pretending to believe he said Jewish people deserve to be attacked. The way they’re all just lining up behind a narrative they all know is false has got to be one of the most nakedly cynical uses of this smear I’ve ever seen employed.

Writing about “antisemitism” smears in the year 2026 is so tedious, because everyone already knows this tactic is bullshit and everything worth saying about it has already been said. But it really is fascinating how they’re looking us right in the eye and telling us they’re going to keep using this weapon to slash at the left until the blade has completely broken rather than simply espousing popular policies that make the world a better place.

September 1, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | culture and arts