"It is the basic problem of left-liberal stupidity, and the root of all their useful idiocy: "the victim is always innocent."
I don't think Johnstone has said "the victim is always innocent". She said; "We must be vigilant in directing our anger at the manipulators and not the manipulated". It's more that she's looking at overall energy expended and advising where to make best use of energy and which battles to choose.
I think she makes a really good point (and I feel it's been made by someone else? Chomsky?) that if Americans were uniquely evil in tooth and claw, they would not have to be deceived and manipulated into going to war. There's evidence the powers-that-be expend an awful lot of energy persuading people, meaning that they believe the populace need to be persuaded and deceived. They make use of massively-resourced foundations, think tanks, lobbies, PR companies, TV talking heads and journalism to punt a remarkably homogenous on-point narrative that sells a certain 'product'. In the same way, big corporates spend lots of energy and money pushing marketing, PR, advertising (both above and below-line), advertorial and editorial - because they know (from intense data analysis) that this persuades people and sells products.
Popping his head out from behind the persuasion barrage, George H.W. Bush Senior famously said: "If the people were to ever find out what we have done, we would be chased down the streets and lynched."