https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-face-at-the-front-desk-changes
Caitlin Johnstone
Nov 15, 2024

Obama continued and expanded Bush’s most evil policies. Trump continued and expanded Obama’s most evil policies. Biden continued and expanded Trump’s most evil policies. Now Trump is preparing to keep the streak going. The face at the front desk changes, but the corporation stays the same.

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Trump’s insanely pro-Israel cabinet of bloodthirsty Iran hawks suggests that Trump is going to expand the evils of the Biden administration in the middle east. This is a great example of the point I often make that the empire uses Democrats and Republicans the way a boxer uses the jab-cross combo to set up knockout blows.

Democrats and Republicans are different from one another, not in the ways they claim to be different, but in the same way the jab and the cross are used differently in boxing. The jab, thrown with the left hand for an orthodox fighter, is used as a range-finding weapon which can stun or blind the opponent to open them up for a crushing power blow from the right hand. That power blow is called a cross, which is often set up by the jab in the classic “one-two” combination you learn on day one in boxing.

The two parties are not the same, but they are used in conjunction with one another toward the same end, and, most importantly, they are both being used by the same boxer to punch you right in the fucking face. You’ll hear people try to argue that Democrats are better because it sometimes hurts less when they’re in office, but that’s exactly the same as saying it’s a good boxing strategy to let your opponent jab you in the face because it hurts less than the cross. You can’t understand boxing if you see your opponent’s fists as two opposing forces and think you can side with one against the other. You can’t understand US politics in that way for the exact same reason.

Any decent boxer will tell you they’d rather fight an opponent with a powerful cross than a masterful jab, because an opponent with a great jab will stifle your offense while allowing their offense to be much more effective — including their cross. The two-armed monster of the US oligarchy will keep using both fists to punch you in the face until you stop staring at its hands and trying to calculate which one you’d rather be smashed by, and start focusing on knocking that motherfucker’s head off.

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Israel regularly bombs buildings full of civilians and then sends sniper drones to go pick off the survivors, including children.

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It’s the most liberal thing ever how Democrats who’ve been completely ignoring Gaza are pointing to the news of Israeli plans to annex the West Bank and going “HAHAHA see what happens when you stupid Muslims and leftists refuse to support Kamala??”

Like, the West Bank is already an occupied territory. West Bank annexation would have been very escalatory a couple of years ago, but compared to everything that’s happened in the last thirteen months it’s barely a blip. The way these Democratic Party loyalists spent months frantically telling everyone to shut up about an active genocide are now going “Are you happy now?? Israel’s gonna CHANGE THE PAPERWORK on the West Bank!” says so much about their worldview.

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The only intellectually honest reason to support Trump is because you’re a garden variety Republican and you support standard Republican agendas like lower taxes on the rich and low tolerance for human diversity. There is no honest basis to support Trump on antiwar grounds, or because you want the swamp of corruption to be drained from Washington. This was obvious to anyone who paid attention the last time he was president, but it is glaringly obvious now from all the warmongering swamp monsters he’s been packing his cabinet with.

This narrative so-called “MAGA Republicans” have about themselves as some new special breed of Republican who are meaningfully different from the Republicans of the past simply is not born out by any kind of material evidence. They’re not draining the swamp. They’re not fighting the deep state. They’re not ending the wars. They’re doing all the gross stuff Republicans have always tried to do while LARPing as brave rebels.

I despise the entirety of the Republican Party; it’s one of the most evil things humanity has ever produced. But in a sense I actually respect the Republicans who don’t pretend to be anything different from what they’ve always been more than I respect the frauds who pretend they’re waging some kind of populist insurgency against the establishment. At least the Ben Shapiros and the Fox News weird hair pundits are honest about who they are and what they’re doing.

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Trump supporters tell me, “At least Trump might end the Ukraine war!”

Trump probably will end the Ukraine war eventually; if he doesn’t the next president will. Ukraine has already lost and the US needs its resources to prepare for war with China over Taiwan, so it’s only a matter of time before the proxy war is brought to a conclusion. The empire was always going to leave Ukraine a smoldering wreck after a senseless, stupid, insanely dangerous war that could easily have been avoided with a few low-cost concessions and a little diplomacy.

Trumpers have been fixated on Ukraine because it’s one of the wars that can be pinned more on the other party (even though Trump himself played a major role in paving the way to that war while he was president), but what matters is what happens after that war ends. Everything about Trump’s foreign policy cabinet picks indicates all that war machinery will be redirected toward Iran, China, and who knows where else once Washington stops pretending it’s going to help the Ukrainians kick Putin in the balls and retake all their territory. Stop looking for excuses to paint this warmongering empire goon as some kind of antiwar hero and watch what the war machine actually does.

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The western empire behaves irrationally because it is ultimately run by irrational forces.

The gears of capitalism are turned by the blind pursuit of profit.

Plutocrats and interest groups lobby and bribe in the blind pursuit of power and control.

Empire managers blindly continue the policies and agendas of the previous generation of empire managers, moving war machinery and control mechanisms around the world pursuing planetary domination for its own sake.

And all the individuals running this operation are deeply unconscious people — more unconscious even than the average human — whipped about by forces within themselves that they’re not at all aware of like unresolved trauma and maladaptive coping mechanisms.

The empire is flying blind, which is why it looks like it’s flying blind. It’s why it’s doing completely irrational things like destroying the biosphere we all depend on for survival, continuing to work toward global hegemony despite all the evidence that this will fail, continuing to make life harder and harder for the people who live under it despite growing discontent and revolutionary sentiment swelling in the background, and preparing for an unwinnable and self-destructive war with China.

The empire is behaving illogically because it is illogical. The gears are turning themselves. There is ultimately no man behind the curtain, no scheming manipulators unleashing all these evils to advance some grand plot which will benefit them. They’re more like bacteria in a petri dish mindlessly consuming the food scientists placed there without slowing down as supplies begin to dwindle. They might have elaborate rationales and narratives to justify why they’re doing what they’re doing, but ultimately they don’t know. They are doing it because they are swept up in the momentum of forces which they do not understand, both internally and externally.

The challenge facing us is to become a conscious species. A species that is responsive rather than reactive, driven not by primitive unconscious impulses and habit but by an alert and truth-based relationship with reality. That’s what’s being asked of us here in this slice of spacetime. That is the existential hurdle we must find some way to get past. And the western empire is the largest and most concrete manifestation of that obstacle.