Michael, Part Two

I’m desperately trying not to write about this anymore. I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m livid. I’m trying to stay away from all the media circus surrounding Michael’s death; it’s been only a week, and I never thought it could be worse than when he was alive. But I live in Hollywood, and even if I stay offline, I cannot buy a piece of godamn bread without my eyeballs being assaulted in the cashier line.

We get it, press, Michael Jackson was weird. Got it! You showed it down our throats for decades, can you give it a fucking rest?

And the media isn’t even the end of my fury. Hearing his friends, acquaintances, family members, doctors, gurus, rabbis, and numerous other idiots in his close circle talk so much nonsense for this past week, it makes you wonder — how did this guy even live to be 50?

How normal could he be with that kind of surroundings? It’s astonishing what’s going on in the aftermath of his death. I’m unable to work, how disturbing it all is. I’m trying to round up his life and legacy, write a decent piece about his art, do this man some justice — but no, you simply cannot catch a fucking breath here, in this town.

The level of rumors and headlines, the audacity of these journalists doing everything but their job of investigating and REPORTING is just grotesque. This is storytelling, this isn’t even journalism anymore.

I’m trying to find some sense. It’s not just that he died, it’s HOW he died. How can his ending not make you furious?! Everyone just keeps repeating how sad and tragic his life was — how could it not be, with everybody around him constantly taking stabs at him?

And he just took it, and took it, and took it.

Now that he died, isn’t there one godamn person in his circle who can step up, truly STEP UP and do him some justice?

Everybody just keeps going along with the same rhythm as when he was alive; shitting, trashing, manipulating — instead of calling out those who took part in his demise. Why would we call anyone out, right? Why would we know the truth, right? It’s easier than ever now that he’s dead; we can just conclude he was weird, that he died because he was a freak, and close up shop?

There are people who, with their DIRECT actions, helped destroy the life of such an extraordinary human being and a talent. And we’ll just let somebody cover it all up?

I understand scandal sells more than humanity, but beyond media — someone’s reaaaaally hard at work trying to cover all this up. Who is covering all this up? What happened here?

And why are we as a public so complacent about this? Why are we not raging? Why are we not investigating? This man was practically an invalid by the time he died; the incredible physical demands on his body since he was 5 years old, to preform FOR US, left him with so many ailments. We enjoyed his music, his performances — couldn’t we at least do him some justice and dig into what happened here?

The man has three small children; it makes absolutely NO SENSE that he would be reckless with asking to be put under with propofol, however sleep-deprived he might have been. It. Makes. No. Sense.

We keep reading how “tragic his life was.” What the fuck do you mean, his life was larger than life itself, and his humanity even larger; tragic were all the leeches around him, and what’s deplorable is that those who contributed to his demise can’t even step forward to do him some justice in death.

I blame them all.

Idiotic “friends” around him that did nothing to protect him.

Some members of his family who can‘t even shed one tear for the son and brother who’s been feeding them all their lives.

The media that deliberately destroyed him because he dared to give them just his art, and not his private life. Because scandals, lies, and smears sell better than achievements and charity.

Random useless strangers that ruined his life, his reputation, and crushed his soul by taking advantage of his kindness.

“Business partners” who used his kindness to feed off of him. You name it, they took a bite.

Executives who feared him having more control than they did.

Can we at least, as the public and as fans, have the decency not to judge, but to try to understand, question what’s been served to us, and demand the truth?

It seems to me that we aren’t supposed to get the truth.

Does this man, who never complained and just kept taking punch after punch, not at least deserve the truth?

Press, you who made enormous profits over five decades by ruining this man’s life, can you at least give something back to him in death and investigate what really happened here? Can you actually investigate this time, what is being covered up, and finally lay it out for the people who actually care?

We are sick of the lies; it’s so transparent and coordinated. Who is afraid of Michael Jackson, even in death? Why are you STILL doing this? WHO are you doing this for?

Why are you taking a step back in the investigation? Why are you not challenging bits and pieces that don’t make any sense in this story? You were relentless when digging through his private life; now dig into the lives of the people who ruined his. Isn’t that just as profitable as exploiting him was?

There are so many things here that do not make sense. So many disturbing things surrounding Michael’s life that, at times, even his strange behavior starts to feel somewhat intelligible.

People always say no one is going to help you unless you help yourself. Strength matters in life, but vulnerability matters too. Sensitivity is often treated as a weakness, something that will diminish you, when in reality it can become a source of enormous strength if you have real support from the people/family around you.

I truly think his biggest downfall was not having any of it.

Even in death, he cannot be left in peace. All of his friends are suddenly crawling out with a story, a clothing line, some advice they supposedly gave him; everybody knew something was wrong, yet nobody did anything. They all come out now with the same line: “He was taking all kinds of pills, you know…” Then why are you saying it now? Why didn’t you say it to him when there was still time?

Why didn’t you do something about it then?

And his family is even worse.

First, his sad excuse of a father goes to the BET Awards held in his son’s honor. He sits in the first row, laughs the whole time, gets up and dances from time to time, and then goes to the after-party. AN AFTER PARTY. Your son died a week ago! When approached by CNN’s reporter asking him how he feels, he simply responds:

“Great, I feel great.”

You feel great?

The confused reporter looks at him, abashed: “Hmmm. Anything else? I mean, you know, your son just died…”, and Joe Jackson says — “Yeah, you know, the world’s greatest entertainer just died, and you know how it is….” Then turns to someone on the red carpet and yells: “Hey Marvin….Marvin, come here, tell him what we do, we just opened a new Record Company, you know, what’s the name of the company, Marvin, Marvin, tell ‘em….”

What ih the flying fuck was that? I know, joke’s on me, expecting more from Joe Jackson, but this whole spectacle is just unbearable.

Hey, Joe, your son just died, but it’s cool, promote your shady business, loser.

Did the media do the piece on this old fart not being phased with his son's death, other than mentioning, well, that was “a bit strange”? No.

How about Jermaine Jackson, the one who always thought he deserved Michael’s solo career, always famously called out for being jealous? Jermaine Jackson went on to meet Larry King in Neverland today, and when Larry asked him, “Are you sad being here? Do you feel terrible?”, loser 2.0 answered, “No, you know, I feel joyful, I feel his spirit….”

This interview sent me to the smithereens.

Larry: “How did you find out your brother died? Was that shocking for you?”

Jermaine: “Well, Larry, I heard from you guys, you guys called me, CNN, ha ha ha…you know, that was funny, yeah, it was a shock, and I had to drive all the way to another part of town.”

(He means he had to drive to UCLA Medical Center when Michael was pronounced dead, as I was there, and saw him going in and out of the hospital.)

Larry: “Well, Jermaine, do you want to know what happened? Why did your brother die?”

Jermaine: “Larry, you know, it doesn’t matter now, you know, I mean I feel his spirit, and I’m joyful.”

Larry: “Yes, I understand, but maybe there was something inappropriate that happened, wouldn’t you like to know?”

Jermaine: “Larry, I feel wonderful here at Neverland. I feel joyful.”

A brain has left the fucking building.

Did any of the press call out on Jermaine? Could Larry King maybe have said Hey, what’s going on with you asshole, can’t you mourn your freaking brother for 2 seconds?

Nah.

I know, Larry’s old school, but hey, if anybody could have done it, it’s Larry King. What was CNN going to do? Fire him? Larry is bigger than CNN.

Just how many people are working for the same system that did not want to have Michael Jackson on this earth anymore?

I’m losing it.

Maybe I’m subjective, I fully admit it. After all, Michael was my first virtual boyfriend. Yes, I felt the first tingle of sexuality that one gets triggered in their adolescence with looking at something or someone — that first thing you feel it, when you understand you’re soon leaving a child in you and becoming a woman. That was Michael in the ‘Dirty Diana’ video for me.

I watched it over and over, relentlessly,  and I thought he had to be the most beautiful boy in all the world. I am subjective. Have at it. But this is not about my pubescent sexuality, discovered by watching Mike crawl on stage in tight leather pants, and that expressive face.

It’s about fairness and fucking justice. It’s about the fact that everybody deserves it, while you’re going on about his face. Why are you all so stuck on the face? A thousand suspicious things are going on about this death, and you’re STILL on the face? It’s his face; he can do whatever he wants with it.

They say extraordinarily talented people are often surrounded by mediocre, uninspired people who leech to them, while deeply resenting their greatness. In Michael’s case, can this be more obvious? His genius was so potent; the people around him could not stand being constantly reminded of how ordinary they were.

It’s only logical, by that formula, that the one person who had a genuinely human reaction to Michael Jackson’s death, a visible pain and despair, was Janet Jackson, the next most talented member of the Jackson family.

Is there an end to how much grief, deception, and betrayal this man endured, and now even in death?

Which brings me to the most painful part of this huge rant, and Michael’s entire life — the molestation lies. The ruined legacy that will never breathe outside this scam, even though the man was acquitted BY THE COURT, on all 14 counts. No media, with access to all the legal files, ever bothered to set the record straight. A ten year long investigation that found NOTHING.

No one’s printing it. We’re still on the Wacko Jacko racist carousel.

If you haven’t been living under a rock somewhere, you know Jordan Chandler’s father sued Michael for child molestation. We all know he put the kid under hypnosis with drugs and implemented a fake “memory.” We all heard the tape of him admitting he drugged and coached the kid, admitting he’s extorting Michael, admitting he doesn’t care about the kid. It’s all ON TAPE. We all know Jordan’s mother was driving around town in Michael’s limo and went shopping using Michael’s black Amex. We all know he was never charged for anything.

We all know Michael wanted to go to trial, but was advised to settle, to make the story go away. Did those around him plan this? He settled; therefore, he’s guilty? He gave them $20 million; therefore, he must be guilty. Right?

Wrong.

Media won’t tell you this. You have to look on your own. I spent months researching this. Michael didn’t settle anything. He did not even know he had settled. He did not give any money. His insurance company settled because THEY did not want to deal with a lengthy trial that would probably cost as much. The studio wanted him to tour, not waste time in the court, like the good cash cow he was. Michael protested it, but it was already done.

And that became the one thing he always regretted because it informed every other leech that Michael’s good for good ‘ol extortion! And they piled up, later in life.

Michael publicly stated all this, but the media never wanted to put it in their circulation. Wacko Jacko was more profitable. It was done; he was a child molester, a stigma that was never going to leave him.

Why am I going on about something that happened 16 years ago? Because the kid who sued him is 29 years old today. Jordan Chandler admitted his father coached him. And Jordan and he also heard that Michael died today. Not just that, he feels bad about it, he says. Not just that, he’s unofficially talking to some small media outlets, asking for forgiveness and admitting Michael Jackson never touched him.

Are you fucking serious?

His dad Evan made him do it, Jordan says to small media outlets, no one heard about, unless you research it yourself. He was afraid of his dad, Jordan says, to a small media outlet no one knows about. He says all that while collecting $20 million of extortion money.

In 2005, Jordan sued his dad because, apparently, he hit him, beat him, and tried to kill him. So he doesn’t have any contact with the dad. But he has the money. Plenty of it. Did Jordan come forward in 2005, when he removed his dad from his life? Did he do anything to save at least the last four years of Michael’s life that he could have spent in dignity?

He didn’t.

But he is stepping out today, a week after Michal had died, one of the most talented entertainers in history, broke and despised. He watched Michael get thrown out of his beloved Neverland because of accusations he now admits were false. He watched him lose everything, and he said nothing.

Today, he’s out in New York, getting papped on the street, dripped in bling that Michael’s extortion money paid for. He was just a kid then, I understand, a victim of greedy parents, I get it. Guess what, Jordan, you aren’t a fucking kid anymore. No one’s pushing you to continue the lie.

Get out of your expensive apartments and your Bentleys, and do one decent thing in your life. Lose me with that mea culpa chatter in the small media outlets; call Larry King or Oprah, sit down, look at the fucking camera, and tell the world the truth.

Harvey Levin, why aren’t you on top of this? What is TMZ doing now? Why aren’t you hunting Jordan in his Bentley, driving around New York, and quizzing him on the street like you do all other celebrities?

Who is the person above, running this charade?

Who is still profiting from lies about Michael, even now, in death?

I just cannot accept the fact that this kind, sensitive, talented human being, the one who gave millions to charity and helped people in need when almost no one else was doing it, the one who was born to bring joy to people, simply fades away and disappears. I cannot believe how mistreated he was in childhood, in life, and even in death, and that no one wants to do absolutely fuck all about it.

Was the purpose of his life truly just to give joy to others, to always give — the joy, the music, the money, the cultural clout — and never receive anything in return except judgment, ridicule, and lies thrown back at him?

I managed to get through this whole piece without crying; I’m angry. Anger is good, better than sadness; anger keeps me focused.

But as I’m finishing writing it, I just saw what Stephen King posted about Michael on his website. This absolutely floored me. I’m bawling, again.

“There’s a sadness that’s all too common in people who possess talent in amounts so great it has become a burden instead of a blessing. Michael was indeed innocent of the abuse allegations. In the court of public opinion, however, he was found guilty of Weirdness of First Degree. You’ll also see Jackson’s sadness and almost painful desire to please. Yes, I am strange, his eyes say, but I am doing the best I can, and I want to make you happy. Is that so bad?”

Indeed, was that so BAD?

The world simply wasn’t ready for so much innocence, kindness, and beauty mixed with that much talent.

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This past weekend, a friend asked me to see the Michael movie with him. I have tickets, where do we meet? This is a friend I usually go to the theater with; we don’t ask each other what we want to see, one of us buys the tickets and tells the other where to show up. When I told him I couldn’t go, he casually asked — busy today, what day can you go? No, I can’t see this movie. Ever.

I spent about 45 minutes on the phone explaining to one of my closest friends why I can’t see a Michael Jackson biopic, and probably never will, and he just wasn’t getting it. Miranda, you’ve been obsessed with Michael for 4 decades, what the fuck, let’s go see a fucking movie.

I figured out during that phone call that I’ll never be able to explain why my body physically can’t walk into that theater and watch that movie unless I give you the full picture. And that picture begins on June 25, 2009 — the day Michael Jackson died. I was there, ten minutes from his house. When the news broke, I went to his home. I went to UCLA Medical Center to wait for confirmation of death. Then I went home and wrote a piece about the entire day.

Five days later, after watching the aftermath of his death unfold — his family, the media, and the people around him who had played a role in his demise — I wrote another piece. That was 17 years ago. These two articles are relics, firsthand historical accounts of one of the biggest cultural events of my lifetime, and of the moment that fundamentally shaped how I perceive humanity, fame, media, power, and America itself.

And more importantly, they became firsthand accounts of what Michael Jackson revealed about human nature itself: how society treats people who embody sensitivity, honesty, genius, and transcendence, and how quickly those same people are consumed by forces built on the exact opposite of everything they represented.

The forces you see at play today.

It’s a full circle. It all connects.

People who are profiting from this movie are the people who participated in removing him from this earth, and who robbed us of him.

I’m haunted by this man. His life, legacy, and the way he ended.

I’m haunted by the fact that he left this earth believing people hated him.

I’m happy that the revival of his image has pushed younger generations to dig deeper into understanding him — one more step toward a greater awakening.

Michael is completing the work, even from the grave.

He warned us then about the systems. The hierarchy. And for me to properly review and write honestly about the renewed interest in Michael’s legacy that this film has reignited, I need to revisit the past and walk that entire circle with you.

Michael Jackson has been a crucial part of my own self-construction. I owe him this series.

Michael, Part One

I wrote this piece on June 25th, 2009, on the day Michael Jackson died, 10 minutes from the house he died in. All the images were taken by me, in front of his house, in front of the UCLA Medical Center, where he was presumed dead, and in front of the morgue in Boyle Heights, where he was finally taken on that day. The pictures are blurry; smartphones weren’t then what they are now — they were taken with my BlackBerry. I have never read this piece since the day I wrote it. It’s been 17 years since I’ve looked at it.

A surreal, surreal day.

I still don’t know what to make of it. I honestly don’t even know what to write about today. What can I write? What is it to say?

Michael Jackson just died.

I can’t even digest that sentence. It just looks wrong. Wrong isn’t the right word; it doesn’t look anything. It just doesn’t look at all. Those four words don't go together; why would anybody say or write that?

I sat down to write what I feel about this entire day, and I just can’t. I’m staring at the blank screen. What kind of poetic justice could ever do justice to someone like Michael Jackson?

Nothing I can say sounds gratifying enough. An Icon? A King? A Legend? It just doesn’t sound enough. But why does this specific death mean more to me than other deaths of the public people I loved, who also crumbled my world?

The fact that this is the first time I was at the place where it happened.

Every time someone I loved died, someone who defined my childhood or teenage years, I heard about it on TV or read about it in the press. And it was always the same ritual: hearing the news, the shock, watching television around the clock, absorbing every detail I could find, refusing to sleep in case I missed something. Watching the stretcher carry out the body of someone who had shaped my life, as if a piece of my own life was being carried away with it.

At those prodigious times, I remember frantically calling my friends who lived where it happened, pestering them with questions, as if knowing every detail would make my grief bearable.

This time, it was the most surreal day. I was there. I live 10 minutes away from the house he died in. First, I woke up to the news that Farrah Fawcett died. Terrible news, but Farrah Fawcett was an icon of another generation, not so much mine; I knew a lot about her, but I didn’t feel that death, other than being sad for this probably very lovely lady.

I left the house shortly and went to the bank. I realized one of the bank tellers is my neighbor; I chatted with him, laughed, gossiped about all the tenants we don’t like, laughed some more, and left. I finished some other chores, came back to my bank again, waited in line to make a deposit, when my banker/neighbor approached me from behind and said:

“Did you hear? I just found out; it’s still unofficial”. And I said: “Yeah, I know, I heard this morning, terrible news”. And he goes: “You couldn’t hear this morning, because it’s 2 pm, and I just heard it. It’s not even official; someone from the Fire Department just leaked it”. And I said: “Well, I did hear this morning that Farrah died; I don’t know what to tell you”. And he goes: “No, not Farrah, that was this morning, but Michael Jackson…Michael Jackson JUST died”…

Come again?

“Michael Jackson just died”.

“Sorry, got to go back to work”.

And he went back behind the counter.

I was spinning. The city was spinning.

I walked to the car where my boyfriend was waiting for me, and I couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell him, his face was spinning, everything was spinning.

The City of Los Angeles, in the next couple of minutes and hours, was just indescribable. A lot of huge people died here, but nothing of this magnitude. Surreal atmosphere. Before it was even official, people were whispering on the streets. Instantly, Michael Jackson’s music was playing from just about every passing car, every store, every house.

One of the Fire Department guys who drove MJ from his house to the hospital told someone right away, before it was even official, and the word spread like a damn plague.

I was driving down Beverly Blvd with my boyfriend, both of us abashed, when the calls started to pour in. Managers, agents, publicists, all the Hollywood people were just perplexed — “Oh my god, did you guys hear, I just heard, did you hear?”

It was minutes, and everybody already knew.

It felt like a dark plague had descended on the city. Sadness isn’t even the word. I don’t have to tell you; you felt it too, if you’re here. Being so close to it made it all the more spellbinding. I felt as if being there, at the place where it happened, at ground zero, might somehow give me a sense of control over the grief.

I couldn’t work that afternoon. If he died 10 minutes from my house, I want to be where it happened, as if I needed to grab a piece of his soul, before it migrates somewhere else.

In all my affliction, I did feel good about something. I felt good about Los Angeles. The same city that often shows attributes I can’t quite fathom, or even stand — today, the city was just amazing. People dropped the act for one day and showed a genuine, colossal sadness everywhere you turned. I have never seen people in this city be authentic about anything, and I finally did today.

There was something so ethereal about Angelenos’ determination to follow Michael through every final stop his body would make, as if letting go were simply unacceptable. Everyone was on the same page. We will follow him. Every step they move him, we’ll follow.

People came to his house in Bel Air, then went to UCLA Medical Center, where he died, then they moved to the morgue in Boyle Heights, and just stayed there all night as if they wanted to guard his body and his soul.

I wanted to be where he died. Even though they say he might have even died in his house, I wanted to be where he was presumed dead. I didn’t want to listen to the news just yet. I didn’t want to make sense out of it at this moment. I didn’t want to know what exactly happened. I just wanted to be where he was going to be last, as if that fixes anything. As if that is going to make it better.

UCLA Medical Center looked like it was under siege. News trucks everywhere, helicopters flying overhead, reporters speaking in a million different languages, Jermaine Jackson going in and out of the hospital crying, it was just surreal.

I will never forget those hordes of people. Thousands of them. People walking out of work, doctors’ offices, grocery stores. I spoke to people at every stop we followed, and whatever they had been doing at that moment, they dropped it and just came. The city froze to a standstill.

I will never forget those faces at every stop. Crying. Confusion. Disbelief. Anger. But something transcendent happened all of a sudden — the grief began to turn into dance, Moonwalk face-offs, singing, and a strange kind of comradeship.

The crowd was at the hospital for about 5–6 hours; nobody was moving, nobody was leaving; everybody was waiting for his body to be taken out of the hospital and put into a helicopter that was supposed to take him to a morgue in Downtown LA. It seemed like everyone was waiting to be absolutely, positively sure he died.

My feelings today shifted from anger, confusion, and disbelief to lethargy, then to a strange sense of solitude, as if I felt he might finally be relieved of the unbelievable lies, smear campaigns, and pressures that had plagued his life.

Some Swedish reporter snapped me out of my thoughts when she approached us outside of the UCLA Medical Center with a question — “What did MJ and his music mean to you?”

God.

How does a person of my generation even answer that question?

I pulled myself together for a few seconds to give her a coherent answer, but instead just fell into a sort of spell of a memory, the recollection of my life that led me here, at this spot, the UCLA Medical Center, where Michael Jackson was presumed dead.

I wasn’t born in this country; he brought me here, at this spot, and left me here, at this spot.

Michel Jackson was more than just a musician to me. He was the personification and the embodiment of America in my eyes. He represented what America meant in my small, adolescent life back in Europe, and he became the trigger that shaped the path my life would take.

I was extremely Americanized as a child, much to the detriment of everyone around me. I absorbed everything that came out of the US: the music, movies, magazines, TV shows, and it was never just entertainment to me; it felt like a mission, a plot.

Seeing Michael for the first time — yes, I saw Thriller first, but I was too young to comprehend its cultural significance, the moment it truly clicked for me was the Dirty Diana video. I was about 12 or 13, and I watched it the way people study a science project. That was the moment I decided I wanted to live in the place where that kind of artistry and dedication could exist.

I knew the names of every single actor, actress, singer, and group from the ’80s and ’90s, and I knew the lyrics to every song. I remembered lines from all my favorite movies. It was a hobby of mine, something I enjoyed. But Michael was different. Michael was a job. A plan, a determination, an endgame. I studied him like one studies survival.

How do I explain all this to a reporter from Stockholm? I lifted my head, she was still looking at me, and said just that — Michael was a survival to me. Existential component that carried everything I felt I needed to inhale to become who I needed to be.

The word started to spread around the crowd in front of the UCLA, that Michael died from some sort of overdose. I wasn’t ready for the cause of death, and to take a path on that road just yet. I ignored it and talked to anyone and everyone outside, but my mind couldn’t avoid it. No one’s mind could avoid it.

I started to get angry again. Wait for the confirmation, I kept telling myself. I couldn’t. I felt betrayed.

How could he be so reckless?

Didn’t he know how much he means to us?

I forced myself to forget the latter. I don’t want to listen to any noise. I walked to the group that was still moonwalking and practicing the tilt. Someone brought the white gloves. I took one. Let’s take a picture, someone said. We didn’t need anyone to coordinate us. We all did it at the same time, same hand.

We just knew.

My boyfriend called me over to show me an article that just came out. The cause of death. I declined to read.

I choose to remember how he made me feel.

At least for today.

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This is going to be a quick run-through of the key points I wanted to highlight about the Met Gala. I genuinely do not want to invest more than the bare minimum of my energy into the tech bros and billionaires who have infiltrated every space and taken so much from us already. I refuse to give them even more of my attention on top of everything else they’ve taken.

You have all the money in the world, your workers are pissing in the plastic bottles to meet the productivity quota, you fund ICE, you enrich yourself from the genocide; can you at least get the fuck out of our sight?

Lauren Sanchez-Bezos did a Met presser on Monday afternoon and said she’s grateful to be there and: “The Met has always understood something the rest of the world is finally catching up to: fashion is art.” Where do you go from here? What did we expect, allowing billionaires to pay their way into creative spaces?

Tech bros and billionaires infiltrated The Met, Art Basel, Coachella, Burning Man, Sundance, Tribeca — why are they doing this? These people have never been interested in art or creativity of any kind; that’s precisely why they are who they are — people who exploit, not people who create. They’re nerds with money, and money cannot buy cultural relevance. That’s why they keep trying to purchase it.

Why is it so important to them to be cool? Is it just an attempt to make up for what they never were in adolescence? No. Don’t be fooled by that notion. They understand very well that art is political. That culture is political. They understand that politics and policy are shaped by culture. They understand that to shape policy, you need cultural clout, and for that, you need to be cool.

The person who lets his workers piss in plastic bottles to meet their high productivity quotas will never, ever be someone with genuine cultural clout. He has to buy it. And I blame Anna Wintour for letting him do it. The gatekeepers of art are the ones allowing people like Jeff Bezos into creative spaces.

Anna Vintour lost all the killer instincts that made her who she is, and she should step down and retire.

And Bezos? $10 million for The Met, $70 million for Melania’s Funniest Home Videos, sorry — movie; in his deranged mind, he thinks he’s motherfucking Medici.

And the wife with the Madame X inspired dress, a Schiaparelli that looked like Amazon Prime Fashion on her? It takes a special skill to make Schiaparelli look like a cheap prom dress instead of wearable art.

If I thought even slightly better of these people, I would say that, by choosing that specific dress — an homage to a famous painting by John Singer Sargent, fitting for a Costume Art theme — they were being self-aware, making a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of their place in today’s cultural climate. Instead, I think the reference Lauren Sanchez chose to replicate is an unintentional reflection of what Bezoses represents today, and what Madame X represented in 1884 — using art to force your way into creative spaces you do not belong in, and into cultural relevance you have not earned.

Yes, museums need money, but not at this cost. People are dying all over the planet. Freedoms are being stripped away at home. Museum funding is simply not that important at a time like this, when the current wealth gap is larger than it was before the French Revolution.

At this moment, the wealth gap is larger than in pre-revolutionary France. Per Save The Planet Society, globally, the top 1% is now holding 30.4% ($46.18 trillion) of global wealth, while the bottom 50% holds only 2.5%. In the U.S., the top 0.1% saw their share of wealth grow from 8.7% in 1989 to 13.9% in 2024, and it widens every day.

Tech billionaires are not people who achieved the American dream by simply working harder than everyone else. They are not success stories. They are unethical hoarders of wealth with political agendas, and they need cultural events like the Met Gala to whitewash their image.

Culture shapes the political agenda. Why are people on the right, along with Zionists across the political spectrum, so afraid of Hasan Piker and constantly trying to cancel him? Because Hasan has enormous cultural power, and the people who oppose him know he can move crowds toward his political views. Cultural relevance is an extremely powerful political tool.

This image, posted by Everything is Political in a piece by Louis Pisano, perfectly captures this year’s Met Gala and the deeply distorted image of the billionaire class it revealed — something straight out of a slasher film.

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What a week this has been. This has to be the absolute dumbest timeline in history. The world has seen its share of horrors, but we might be living in the most profoundly stupid timeline since Adam and Eve. Not the most violent, not the most tragic. The dumbest.

Every Sunday that I wake up still semi-sane, not yet driven to bang my head against a wall, I count it as a victory. Another week endured under a ruling class that is both comically clueless and disturbingly violent.

This week’s collection hit me for exactly that reason: the combination of an absurd, comical display — paired with a total disregard for human life beyond one’s own circle.

Why do I do this to myself? A stranger on Instagram asked me today: ”How’s your mental health with all this? You seem to process so much news, and then you write about it, to contextualize it all. Serious question: what do you do to keep sane and normal?” I was startled, as no one usually asks me how my mental health is — honestly, I’m just on a loop, churning out information without thinking about the cost to my body or psyche.

Writing is not passive.

I remembered a bit I wrote this year for a magazine that featured a piece on me:

Today, writing is not passive; it’s a labor of witnessing in real time, documenting fractures as they form, refusing erasure, and standing inside history while it unfolds, rather than explaining it safely after the fact.

It’s nauseating. Every day. Not just for writers, but for every single person posting bits and pieces on social media, trying to awaken the masses, sharing the atrocities, and hoping accountability finally reaches the perpetrators.

To everyone choosing to live on the inside of this grotesque timeline, witnessing it so it can be documented, choosing clarity over comfort — I know the price of your clarity. We’re not on the front lines; our loved ones aren’t dying. Yes, we’re privileged, and we got the better end of the stick, but we still need to acknowledge we’re part of it. Because the seed for revolting must come from us. People in America. People in the West.

Holding the truth without letting it hold you hostage.

I read something great today. This is how I help myself, and try to help others: I find sources, other writers and creators who have uncovered something, and bring it back to the community. It’s about clarity, knowledge, passing the information. I look for it, I share it. My articles heal me as much as they might heal my readers. This is how I cope — by documenting everything.

I will give you a source for this at the end of this article. Read it:

Everyone talks about waking up. Nobody talks about what comes after, when you see how deep it goes, and you still have to show up to your life, pay bills, talk to people who think the news is real. The worst part isn’t knowing, it’s knowing and having nowhere to put it.

And here’s what happens to most people who start seeing clearly: the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a physical threat and an existential one. When you understand the scale of what’s happening, the manipulation, the layers, your cortisol spikes every single day, that’s not enlightenment, that’s a trauma response. Can seeing the truth actually break you?

About this past week.

What is it about this past week that had me specifically irked about this timeline forced on us? It’s the accumulation, the totality of it all.

It’s the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that offered us a visual into the most grotesque nature of the U.S. administration. The ducking under the tables with the phones in their hands, everyone with an agenda of their own, with a supposed active shooter in the building. What in The Garden of Earthly Delights was that?

It’s Erica Kirk doing her bit in front of the perfectly positioned camera, followed by an appearance on a podcast, complaining about rumors of killing her husband while dressed as a sniper.

It’s Pete Hegseth testifying before a US House Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, grifting lawmakers for another $1.5 trillion in military spending, not answering one single question he is elected to answer, while parroting but what about Ukraine, but what about October 7, but what about the Islamic regime for hours on end.

It’s someone in the White House pressing send on Trump’s messianic, self-mythologizing memes, every hour of every day.

It’s Trump giving a statement about the Iranians “who executed three young people for protesting” the same year ICE executed Renee Good, Alex Preti, and Keith Porter.

It’s about IDF militarily attacking the twenty-two Global Sumud Flotilla ships off the coast of Italy and Greece, kidnapping and beating activists to the pulp, without a word of condemnation from one single government in the European Community.

It’s the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Warren Goldstein, publicly stating that “Pope Leo has blood on his hands” for criticising the US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon, and not respecting the “noble and brave soldiers of the State of Israel,” the actual people, with actual blood, on their actual hands.

It’s Bibi Netanyahu going on air to tell the world Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian community is thriving, while we’re watching an Israeli settler punch a French nun, kicking her with his feet, after he knocked her down.

It’s about Michael Jackson being exploited and repurposed by the same people who took him out, now, in death, when he’s not a damger to their system anymore.

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I reached the end of the news. I do not know where to go anymore with all this. I do not know where to store it anymore.

As I reached a proverbial wall this week, watching this grotesque display of human rot suffocate everything sane and civilized, I came across a media platform called The End of News, and their bio validated every bone in my body:

Reporting from the frontlines of civilization’s descent into stupidity. Perspectives on the news from the dumbest timeline imaginable.

If you need to watch one thing this Sunday night, let it be this video, and this reporter’s perspective on the news from the dumbest timeline imaginable.

“Oh no, someone tried to shoot the president again, just as his poll numbers are tanking, oh no, what a coincidence. Everything he touches, everyone he surrounds himself with are fake. Fake lips, fake tits, fake gold, fake pools, fake Bible verses, for crying out loud. False promises to voters. False prophets in his cabinets. False flags for the cameras. No one cares anymore. And maybe that’s the point, I don’t know, not to convince you of anything, not to win; just to make reality so exhausting. So exhausting to hold onto, that we just give in and play along.”

The truth doesnt set you free, it tests you.

What happens when the illusion cracks, but life keeps going like nothing changed? When patterns appear everywhere, trust dissolves, and the people around you still believe the script? Do you go back to sleep — or risk losing yourself trying to hold a truth no one else sees?

This question is asked by a profile on Instagram called Daily Conspiracy Peter X. Don’t let the name fool you; this profile offers some of the best investigative research on crucial events I’ve come across. The excerpt I quote in this article comes from their think tank, and you need to absorb it.

Check this out:

“I see patterns everywere now, in the news, in history and people I used to trust and I genuinely don’t know what to do with that. That’s what nobody warned you about. Everyone talks about waking up. Nobody talks about what comes after when you see how deep it goes and you still have to show up to your life pay bills talk to people who think the news is real. The worst part isn’t knowing it’s knowing and having nowhere to put it.

And here’s what happens to most people who start seeing clearly, the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a physical threat and an existential one. When you understand the scale of what’s happening, the manipulation, the layers, your cortisol spikes every single day, that’s not enlightenment, that’s a trauma response.

So seeing the truth can actually break you?

It breaks most people one of two ways. They go back to sleep - comfort over clarity. Or they spiral, consumed, angry, isolated, losing relationships, losing themselves. Both are traps, and a person who sees everything but can’t function is just as controllable as someone who sees nothing. Actually more useful to the system. Exhausted and alone is a great look for someone you want neutralized.

Knowing the cage exists doesn’t free you. Losing your mind inside it definitely doesn’t either.”

Are we there yet? Has the seed of a real, physical revolution taken root? What exactly are we waiting for?

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I wasn’t planning on giving Jack Schlossberg an entire article; I already covered his performance on the I’ve Had It Podcast last week on my Instagram, where nearly 952 people chimed in on his verbal gymnastics about Israel’s war crimes.

But clips of his views — revealing exactly how he plans to govern, if elected —keep resurfacing on social media, and this is another one I want to immortalize on Antagolist, in case he wins, God forbid. We’ll be seeing a lot more of him, I’m sure, and the receipts need to live somewhere.

This was during the ‘No Kings’ protest in New York, and where do I even begin with his rodent voice + boomer politics? Jack says, “We’ve got to get the money out of politics; I do not have a super PAC, or a corporate PAC,” while shilling for Israel before he’s even won the office. Those who don’t do it for the money but for the love of the apartheid game are even more nauseating.

How is this guy so bad at this?

“We will never have no kings as long as billionaires can buy elections.”

Can you see free Palestine, Jack?

“What? I’m not going to say it.”

Wait, why can’t you say Free Palestine?

“Because th th (stutters) that’s not what we’re here for, I’m here for no kings.”

Can you say fuck Israel?

No way, dude, I'm Jewish.

Do you like Zionism?

“We’re not talking about that right now.”

The interviewer demolished him in under 30 seconds. Iconic, to watch, truly.

I had hopes for this guy — not high hopes, but hopes. Given his family was (give or take one black sheep here and there) historically on the right side of — I won’t say things, but that one big thing we need our politicians to be on the right side of —alas, no.

I wasn’t that shocked with his performance on I’ve Had It, as I already heard him give the same “offensive/defensive” spiel about Iron Dome at some conference. And last August, when Chuck Schumer tweeted the following, it was pretty clear what we were getting here. Nothing, in short. We get nothing.

Per ABC, a Senate Majority AIPAC cheerLeader Chuck Schumer, appointed the only grandson of former President John F Kennedy, Jack Schlossberg, to the America 250 Commission, “in an effort to push back against President Donald Trump.”

This is quite literally the only play Democrats have, no substantive policy — just one constant play: “we’re not Trump.” They absolutely refuse to listen to their base or come up with an actual strategy that would remove the fascists in power. We are not as bad as them is not policy, it’s a lazy effort play for the same oligarchs and Zionist masters.

“We know that Donald Trump will try to aggrandize the whole thing and make it part of him and his ego,” Schumer said in a video beside Schlossberg. “There’s no better person to push back on that than you, Jack, and I know you will be there and make sure that when we celebrate our 250th birthday, we remember that America is a nation of justice, equal justice, of unity, e pluribus unum, of treating everybody with dignity.”

Barf.

I’ve Had It.

On Jennifer Welch’s Podcast, Jack was asked if he’s against more aid to Israel, offensive or defensive, and his response was:

“I do draw a distinction there, and I do think that the US should continue, I would continue funding the Iron Dome in Israel. US and Israel, I hope for a better relationship in the future, and I think that we can get there. They are our historic ally.

I’m not trying to understate the atrocities, the loss of life, and the fact that the situation there is terrible, but I do think that the US shouldn’t fully abandon its ally and should continue funding the Iron Dome.”

When asked if he thinks what Israel is committing are war crimes, he said:

“I would let a court determine that. What I think is, it’s a murderous regime, and it’s not making Israelis safer, in my opinion, or American Jews safer. And I take very seriously, you know, the district I’m running in is the most Jewish district in the country.

I have two grandfathers, one was the president of the US, the other was the president of his temple uptown. And so I take the concerns of people here, anti-semitism on the rise, and the importance of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people, I take it really seriously. I’ve met so many, especially now running the campaign, people who — it’s very important to them, and to the world, to have a Jewish state that doesn’t disappear and isn’t constantly under threat.

If you were to full scale abandon the Iron Dome program, I do believe you invite attack. I do believe you invite a wider attack that draws the US even further into a war in the region. And it is a nuanced position, but in short, I do not support this war. I would vote against funding this war.”

Jennifer tried, she really tried to lead him out of the pit, but that Zionist upbringing is harder than any sense or logic:

“Do I think that I would remain voting to continue Iron Dome funding because of what I think would happen if we didn’t?

Yes.”

Democrats remain unwilling to change course or listen to their base. We do not want another candidate more concerned with footing the bill for Israel while Americans struggle. He talks about Israel’s safety even when confronted with the IDF sniping children in the head - he’s clearly not his grandfather, nor even his uncle.

We won’t vote for anyone who refuses to condemn Israel’s war crimes. They can fund their own Iron Dome. Arguing that tired “I’m for defensive weapons, not offensive” tells us exactly how he’ll govern: shilling for Israel by pretending there’s a moral distinction while they wipe their neighbors from the face of the earth. Defensive aid allows Israel to be offensive.

Jack is running on being a Kennedy. That’s it. He has no substance, no personality, no youthful perspective, no generational awareness in his politics; he has nothing. His pro-Israel stance is a non-starter.

“We’re not talking about that right now,” Jack says on the streets of New York, when asked about freeing Palestine from its oppressors.

Oh no, we’re definitely talking about that right now, Jack. In fact, it’s all we’ll be talking about for a long, long time. Well into your election.

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Iran’s delegation departed for Islamabad today for negotiations with the United States. This sounds hopeful, one might think, after all, no one wants WW3 to interfere with our summer plans, the World Cup, and gas prices. Yes, this was sarcasm. I’m at my wits’ end.

Negotiations are good. Talks and agreements matter when there’s a credible partner. Traveling to negotiate with terrorists who, on the first day of an unprovoked aggression against your nation, double-tapped your elementary school with a Tomahawk cruise missile, killing 168 schoolgirls, is not diplomacy; it’s futility.

Even the mafia has rules. The United States and Israel have none.

Why would you travel to negotiate with the terrorists who bombed 800 of your schools, over 30 universities, healthcare facilities, and other civilian infrastructures?

Why would you travel to negotiate with the terrorists who openly brag about assassinating your leaders?

Why would you travel to negotiate with the terrorists who bring Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, two real estate crooks who know nothing about diplomacy, two Israel First Chabad fanatics who want to see your entire civilization destroyed?

Minab-168.

The aircraft transporting the Iranian officials to Islamabad was not just a government plane; it was an act of remembrance, an indictment — it was named Minab-168. It’s a tribute to the young schoolgirls erased from this earth by the US/Israeli disregard for human life. Taking a life with such ease, and disregard — an ultimate flex of power.

What could you possibly negotiate with such a demonic, barbaric force?

The images from inside the plane are haunting. Photographs of the young victims, along with blood-stained school bags and personal belongings recovered from beneath the rubble of the destroyed classrooms.

Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, who heads the Iranian delegation, posted an image from aboard the aircraft on X, writing simply: “My companions on this flight.”

For our entire lives, we’ve been fed a farce: Western goodness versus Eastern evil. You have eyes and ears — you see it every day. You watch diplomats on both sides, what they say, how they act, and then you look at the side you were taught to fear, the supposed epitome of evil, and all you see is kindness, reason, restraint, empathy, modesty, diplomacy, respect. Tell me you finally see it. The difference is so stark, it’s unbearable.

By naming the aircraft and their mission in Islamabad — “Minab-168,” Iranian diplomats signaled to the world that it would not separate diplomacy from memory, nor negotiations from justice. In carrying bloodied school bags onto a plane bound for peace talks, Iran made clear that it does not approach negotiations in abstraction. It approaches them with the weight of 168 lives — children who will never return to their classrooms.

The shadow of the US double strike on Minab school, in the age of drones and surveillance, needs to loom over these entire peace talks. The United States needs to be forced to confront the human cost of its actions.

Children of Minab are not a footnote in this conflict. They are its conscience.

Israeli asset.

You can measure the state of affairs in the US — and just how much it is influenced, by proxy, by American Zionists — by how many of these voices dominate the government and mainstream media. The number of people occupying the airwaves and newsrooms primarily to advance Israeli interests is nauseating.

A few days ago, Marc Thiessen, a known Israeli asset moonlighting as an American author and columnist, published an article titled 'Iran thinks it has leverage. Here’s how Trump can prove it wrong,’ in The Washington Post. Free version here.

The gall of these people is becoming unbearable. The audacity of the Bezos rag publishing these Netanyahu assets, foaming at the mouth with bloodlust toward Iran, calling for the murder of Iranian diplomats who refuse to bow to them, is exactly what we need to fight with everything we’ve got.

The way these Zionists talk about the death of the people whose worldview they don’t like is truly barbaric and satanic. To be allowed to spread their degenerate, murderous culture through American media while calling to jail people for saying Free Palestine is mind-boggling.

You need to read that entire insult to humanity, but this part is astounding:

“Fourth, carry out a final barrage of leadership strikes, eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations. Iran’s leaders must be made to understand that their lives literally depend on reaching a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking. If they refuse to do so, they will be killed.”

Just to recap: Marc Thiessen's Washington Post op-ed argues that the foreign diplomats’ lives were only spared from the Israeli assassination machine, so that they can accept the Emperor Trump’s negotiated settlement to his LIKING.

Mario Nawfal gets this right:

“Show up for peace talks and a Washington Post columnist will recommend your assassination.

Marc Thiessen just published a piece saying if Iran does not accept Trump's terms, eliminate the negotiating team. The same people who were spared specifically to come talk.

You invited them. They came. Pakistan shut down its entire capital for this. And some guy in Washington with a keyboard and zero skin in the game is writing columns about killing diplomats while they are still at the table.

This is disgusting. There is no other word for it.

You want to know why nobody trusts American diplomacy? This. Right here. You push for talks, someone shows up, and your newspapers start printing assassination wish lists before the first session is even over.”

If Iran walks away from this table tomorrow, nobody should wonder why.

Conclusion:

The Iranians possess high morals and a rich civilization; treachery, betrayal, and assassination are not in their nature. Unlike the other side, whose only skills are lying, deception, treachery, betrayal, and crime. Everyone must decide which side they stand with.

Iranian delegation, I hope you walk away from the negotiating table. The cost for you and for the world will be high, but the time has come to end our complicity in American depravity — tolerating, accepting, accommodating, and justifying its arrogance and barbarity.

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This Friday, on the first Good Friday of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV entered the Colosseum in Rome to begin the Via Crucis. The new 70-year-old pope decided to carry the cross through all 14 stations of the Way of the Cross, holding it up in front of his face for nearly two hours as he prayed “for victims of war, the defense of human dignity, the despairing, and the lonely.”

A chilling sight, seeing the new Pope walking the Way of the Cross where early Christians were martyred.

Talk about a powerful moment. For Christianity? Humanity?

This marks the first time a pope carried the cross for every station in more than three decades. Pope John Paul II was the last pope to do so, carrying the cross from 1980 to 1994.

When asked about his decision to carry the cross for all 14 stations, Pope Leo told reporters he saw it as a sign the world needed right now:

“I think it will be an important sign because of what the pope represents, a spiritual leader today in the world, for this voice that everyone wants to hear to say that Christ still suffers, and I carry all these sufferings too in my prayer.”

Pope Leo extended an invitation to all people, regardless of faith:

“I would like to invite all people of goodwill, all people of faith, all Christians to walk together, to walk with Christ who suffered for us to give salvation, life, and to seek how we may also be bearers of peace and not of hatred.”

Per OSV News, the meditations for this year’s Via Crucis celebration were written by Father Francesco Patton, who formerly served as custos of the Holy Land and drew on his experience walking the historical Way of the Cross through the narrow streets of Jerusalem’s Old City, describing it in both Jesus’ time and today as “a chaotic, distracting and noisy environment, surrounded by people who share our faith in him, but also by those who deride or insult him.”

Biblical parallel that’s somehow still accepted in 2026.

In this way, Father Patton said, the Via Crucis parallels how every Christian is called to incarnate faith, hope, and charity in the real world “where the believer faces ongoing challenges and must constantly strive to imitate Jesus.”

Do you see where I’m going with this? I mean, it’s Easter Sunday, the text and the context are practically writing themselves.

What kind of believer are you?

Each of the 14 stations of the Via Crucis Pope Leo walked in Rome’s Colosseum included a Scripture reading, a quotation from St. Francis, a meditation by Father Patton, and a short introspective litany.

Meditation for the first station:

“Jesus is condemned to death,” called leaders of every kind to account, with Father Patton writing that every person in authority will answer to God in the Last Judgment for how they exercise power, including “the power to judge; the power to start or end a war; the power to instill violence or peace; the power to fuel the desire for revenge or for reconciliation; the power to use the economy to oppress people or to liberate them from misery.”

The tenth station:

“Jesus is stripped of his garments,” drew a sharp connection between Christ’s humiliation and contemporary violations of human dignity. The meditations cited authoritarian regimes that force prisoners to remain half-naked in bare cells, torturers who tear away not only clothing but skin and flesh, sexual abusers who reduce victims to objects, and an entertainment industry that “exploits nudity for the sake of profit.”

The meditation concluded with a call to conversion, “Remind us, Lord, that each time we fail to recognize the dignity of others, our own dignity is diminished.”

The eleventh station:

“Jesus is nailed to the cross,” offered a meditation on the nature of true power in the eyes of God. “You show that true power is not that of those who use force and violence to impose themselves, but that of those who are capable of taking upon themselves the evil of humanity — ours, mine — and destroying it with the power of love that is manifest in forgiveness.”

The litany prayers that followed each meditation gave voice to a wide range of human suffering.

The eighth station:

“Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem,” the crowd prayed to “weep over the devastation of war” and “for massacres and genocides.”

OSV News reports that, throughout the evening, prayers were offered for political prisoners, for people searching for the ultimate meaning of life, for those suffering from addiction, for children whose childhoods have been stolen, for victims of trafficking, for the poor stripped of their dignity, for migrants and refugees, for the lonely, for mothers who have lost children and for those who die alone.

This was all lovely. In theory.

I’m a Roman Catholic. I don’t really practice my religion. I dabble in it. If you want to read about my (funny-ish) religious journey, check it out below.

Every Easter, for the past three years, I share the same post on social media with the same caption that says:

Wishing you a blessed Good Friday. Today, your horoscope and your Christian faith tell you to commemorate Jesus’ crucifixion by speaking out on the injustices in Gaza and today’s crucifying of an entire group of people at the birthplace of your favorite religious leader, because that’s the best possible way to honor him, your religion & your beliefs.

This year, I added the bombing of the sovereign state of Iran in an illegal war of conquest and the bombing of civilian infrastructures in Southern Lebanon to my yearly Good Friday post.

Every Easter, this post steers some trouble. People feel called out. And that is my intention. Every Easter or Christmas, when people dial up their Christian sentiments online, those sentiments, I feel, should be confronted with the reality of a live-streamed genocide, occupation, invasions of sovereign countries, and illegitimate wars of conquest filling our screens.

But I mostly do it to provoke religious people into translating their beliefs into actual words and tangible actions, especially now, in the times of unimaginable violence and impunity.

Does your God approve of this?

As I’m writing this, I took a short break to check my Instagram, and the first thing that filled my screen was two stories posted by a friend of mine: his favorite uncle, killed by an IDF bomb in a civilian village in southern Lebanon. On Easter morning. Just like that, a life that meant so much to someone, gone within minutes. Because people who already have land need more land. My heart sank.

What do you say to someone directly affected by the biblical prophecy of the cult next door?

Every year, I share my Easter post to see how people respond, how believers react, and whether anything changes — to see whether the scale of carnage we’ve been witnessing will move those who remain unmoved by the annihilation of people far away, people who don’t look like them or pray like them.

I’ve been busting my brain for the past three years trying to understand how a religious person can witness this level of suffering, carnage, death, torture, rape, dehumanization, man-made starvation, and medieval brutality, and remain unmoved. Or worse, justify it.

And I came up with nothing but — exceptionalism.

Religion, at its core, is sold to us as a belief rooted in principles of compassion, humility, and service to the oppressed and the less fortunate. Yet exceptionalism, by its nature, fosters superiority and exclusivity, making it an oxymoron when paired with the teachings of most religious doctrines.

So why do they go hand in hand so seamlessly? Why do so many religious people find themselves caught in a sense of exceptionalism, the belief that their faith or cultural identity places them above others?

A weapon.

This contradiction is precisely what turns a tool for unity into a force of division, and more often than not, into an actual weapon, as we see in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and across Africa.

Are people too naive to think this tension highlights how religious identity, when warped by exceptionalism, has strayed too far from its intended purpose? Or has this distortion always been a central feature of religion, wielded throughout history as a shield for those who subjugate others?

As I was breaking down the relationship between religion and exceptionalism for this piece, I came across an interview with George Galloway that filled in the gaps for me. George, as always, hits the mark:

“I honestly can’t understand how anyone can look at the pictures and videos that I’m looking at (carnage in Gaza) and come to any other conclusion, unless you believe in exceptionalism, unless you believe that some of us are more exceptional than others, some of us are chosen, therefore some of us by definition are not. I believe that all of us are God’s children, that none of us are exceptional, that none of us are God’s chosen people, that we are all God’s chosen people. We need to make a world that is fair and equitable.”

Exceptionalism is tricky.

It doesn’t reside solely among the privileged, the successful, the affluent, or the well-connected. It manifests in many forms. I’ve seen it among friends from humble beginnings who still believe that their European heritage, Western ideals, and lifestyle represent what the entire world should aspire to.

Arnaud Bertrand once asked himself if religion is either a legitimizing instrument of power — a crown on its head — or a thorn in power's side, standing with the powerless?

Whether we believe in God or not, we embody something greater, and it’s up to us to define that essence. Are we ready to acknowledge that we are all interconnected as part of the human race, and that nothing we hold dear should take precedence over the well-being of others?

Trump and his gang of criminals, driven by their partner — a biblically deranged cult in the Middle East — have pushed us toward a decade of economic uncertainty, and for those less geographically fortunate, toward death. We will all be affected by this war.

The marriage of religion and exceptionalism must be examined and checked daily, and I am not inclined to entertain those who use “their Christianity” to justify racial supremacy or to deflect from the injustices that sustain their privilege.

Everyone who has been paying attention over the past three years can see how often religion is used to legitimize power. Jesus Christ, whose resurrection is being celebrated today, preached humility, compassion, and care for the marginalized — values that stand in direct opposition to the priorities of modern power structures. Yet his teachings are constantly repurposed and commercialized to serve political agendas, including those that justify or accompany imperial wars.

The fact that the entire planet is now at the mercy of economic and geopolitical collapse, mass death and destruction, and even the threat of nuclear warheads, led by Christian Zionists, which contradicts the core teachings of Christianity, is a tragic consequence of bad theology.

Theological crisis.

Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian pastor, laid out this theological crisis forcefully in his sermon, “Christ is Still in the Rubble,” live from Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem in Dec 2024. He touches on what has been weighing on all of us: how can religious, church-going Christians stay silent on a live-streamed genocide in Gaza? And even worse, how can they support it?

Bombing civilian villages in South Lebanon and taking their land? Bombing Iran, a sovereign nation, in the middle of the negotiations, twice? Massacring 168 of their schoolgirls? 20 teenage female Volleyball players in a gymnasium? Does their God approve of this?

Key points from his speech worth pondering on:

“This is the result of an exclusionary mentality. Even God, we have made tribal, exclusionary, and selective — a God of one people at the expense of another, one religion over another, one nation over another. In our human racism, we have made God a racist!”

We have made God a racist. Have you ever heard anything so essential?

“Palestine is a human and moral cause, and for the church, it is a theological crisis. It’s about the credibility of our witness; it’s here that we come face to face with the tragic consequences of bad theology. Actually, this is much more than bad theology or even ideology. Zionism and Christian Zionism are ideologies of supremacy; it is racism.”

“Zionism and Christian Zionism turned God into a racist tribal deity of their own image. So we must call things for what they are, and today we also acknowledge all those who stood on the side of justice and truth. All those who said no to dehumanization, many of whom paid the heavy price.”

“Every Herod will pass, every Caesar will fade, for empires have an expiry date.⁠”

“And let us remember that according to Jesus, it is the meek, not the powerful, who inherit the land. In our pain and oppression, we might feel that death has the final word, that Herod is sovereign. But through the eyes of faith, we see that God has the final word.”

If you’re a Christian, does your God approve of this? Be honest with yourself. You’ve seen it all. How can you still justify this?

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I wrote an International Women’s Day poem in 2024, and I’ve been posting it every year since. It’s always current, always fitting — nothing seems to change. The world has descended into a permanent state of imperial stupor, so it always applies. It goes like this:

This year, I feel like expanding it, given the sheer Western arrogance of this moment — Women, Life, Freedom in action. “Help is on the way, Iran,” claim US and Israeli politicians, activists, influencers, and Iranian diaspora hasbarists; liberation underway, one bomb at a time, war openly marketed as feminism, and the liberation of the Iranian people.

Over the past two years, we watched Palestinian and Lebanese women face levels of violence, displacement, and trauma unimaginable to the rest of us. Entire families wiped out. Mothers and daughters buried under rubble. Hospitals and maternity destroyed.

Yet these women rarely appear in the speeches of the same politicians or social media posts of the people who suddenly invoke feminism when discussing Iran. Like we haven’t witnessed it, livestreamed, on our phones. Women’s rights are not universal principles. They are geopolitical talking points.

Liberating Iran.

This March, a week into the US and Israeli bombing of Iran, waking up every day to watch the Orientalist myth of “saving Muslim women from their oppressors” play out by dropping bombs on their schools and killing 168 of their children has been a hard pill to stomach.

I’m sick and tired of the language of women’s rights being repurposed every time the Western empire needs to justify wars and geopolitical violence against its adversaries around the world.

Bombs are humanitarian. Military strikes are feminist acts. And the Epstein class of pedophiles and sex traffickers controlling the US government now pose as guardians of oppressed women abroad to justify the imperial domination of the resource-rich Middle East.

We aren’t angry enough, people. They are taking us for fools.

Women, Life, Freedom.

Looks like they went down to the basement and dusted off the Women, Life, Freedom movement, right on schedule. Only when convenient. Only when it serves the Empire, and the Iranian diaspora Zionists.

Diaspora monarchists, Zionists, Washington neo-cons, Israel-first warmongers, and the Epstein class pedophiles grabbed the Women, Life, Freedom movement from the shelf, fronting as the champions of women’s rights, cheering the first two bombs dropped on an Iranian school, massacring 168 girls, and on a gymnasium, massacring 20 female teenage volleyball players.

There’s not a single mainstream media outlet that has published a story about a volleyball massacre. Drop Site News gave it some justice.

Saving Muslim women.

The Women, Life, Freedom movement emerged organically from the experiences of Iranian women confronting their own government and their own social constraints. It was a movement rooted in local agency. It has no business being hijacked by the pedophile class now feigning moral superiority.

Western governments have long justified intervention in the Middle East through a narrative that casts Muslim women as victims waiting to be rescued. The storyline is always the same: Muslim women are oppressed by their backwards culture, religion, and by men around them. Western powers must step in as liberators.

Liberators who preside over Western societies plagued by sexual violence, trafficking, exploitation, child abuse, and deep structural inequality. Liberated by the militaries that carry their own documented histories of abuse, including rape and sexual violence during occupations.

What did the US army do to women in Iraq and Afghanistan? Or to their female colleagues? What did the Israeli army do to women in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Israeli Detention Facilities?

The irony is obscene.

Marketing war as feminism.

Today, on International Women’s Day, the Israeli Defence Forces released a video of a female IDF soldier proclaiming, “As a woman, I’m not here to watch history from the side. I’m here to build it.”

A remarkable reach, and a signature of the most moral army in the world, which has vaporized close to 700,000 human beings in Gaza in the past two and a half years.

After everything we’ve seen come out of that society, what’s a little more purplewashing? Cloaking military action and the massacre of civilians in the language of gender equality, while concealing the suffering those actions produce.

The message is grotesque: our women participate in war equally, so our wars and our massacres are morally validated. Our female soldiers are commanders and pilots; we are a society with progressive values, unlike those backward barbarians we’re bombing into civilization.

The erasure of women’s agency.

The most damaging aspect of the saving Muslim women narrative is that it erases the agency of the very women it claims to defend. It portrays them as weak, oppressed, and in need of rescue, while simultaneously casting Arab men as inherently violent and oppressive.

Women are framed as helpless victims, we must bomb the country to save them; and men are dangerous enemies, we can kill them, they are terrorists. It is a brilliantly nefarious equation, long cultivated by the West and Israel to justify their imperial pursuits.

In reality, women across the Middle East have long histories of activism and political resistance. They have organised movements, led protests, fought authoritarianism, and challenged patriarchal structures within their own societies. Leila Khaled, anyone?

From Palestinian resistance movements to Iranian student activism, women in the region have repeatedly taken leading roles in struggles for justice. Western power structures have been able to sustain their lies about the Middle East for so long because of the Islamophobia deliberately planted in Western minds.

Yet Western narratives portray these women as passive victims waiting for outside salvation. If women are helpless, intervention becomes morally justified. If they are active political actors, the argument collapses.

Their struggle has never required scripts written in Washington or London to justify imperial supervision.

Accusation as strategy.

As I already mentioned, the idea of saving women relies on another stereotype about Middle Eastern men: that they are uniquely violent, backward, and oppressive. It serves several purposes at once. It justifies violence against those men, undermines their legitimate armed resistance to occupation by labeling it terrorism and extremism, and feeds the belief in Western moral superiority.

Western moral superiority, now plagued by the Epstein files. A ruling class entangled in pedophilia, sex trafficking, and exploitation wants to lecture the world about domestic violence, sexual assault, and gender inequality.

The myth that patriarchy belongs to other cultures is comforting to the West. It allows us to avoid confronting our own failures. Patriarchy is not a regional trait. It is a global system.

And the violence exported through imperial wars rarely stays contained abroad. It returns home through militarised policing, surveillance, and a political culture increasingly comfortable with dehumanisation.

The same societies that claim to protect women overseas shoot their own women in the face for protesting ICE violence, then lie about it to the public.

Whose Feminism?

International Women’s Day should be a moment to reflect on solidarity across borders. And solidarity requires honesty.

Unlike dishonest Iranian diaspora Zionists and monarchists who cheer the bombing of their own people “for freedom and democracy,” we need to stay on point: women around the world do not need bombs dropped in their name. They do not need their struggles instrumentalized for the geopolitical narratives of a biblically deranged Western ruling class.

If the language of women’s rights is to mean anything, it cannot be selectively deployed to justify war while ignoring violence produced by the very same policies.

Women around the world need the freedom to define their own struggles, their own movements, and their own futures. And that freedom begins with rejecting the idea that empire has anything to do with liberation. Empire does not liberate. It devastates.

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In case you haven’t already figured this out, Hollywood isn’t innocent in creating the dystopian world we live in. In fact, it’s an active participant — a creator, an accomplice, an extended hand.

American arrogance doesn’t stop at geopolitics or failed diplomacy; it seeps into culture, cinema, music, entertainment — into the narratives that teach the world how to perceive power. Hollywood is not simply complicit in the global power structure. It’s one of the most morally corrupt cultural institutions of our time.

In a country overwhelmed by political dysfunction, cultural fragmentation, and ideological chaos, people pointed to an actor. A talent emerged in the American landscape, seemingly out of nowhere, and he made people feel something that felt clean, grounded, and human.

Connor Storrie.

I was scrolling through Threads the other day when I came across a post asking, “Is there one good thing about America?” A surprising number of people gave the same answer: “Connor Storrie.”

It’s silly, in the scope of things — and yet this is where people’s minds went, instantly. It’s a phenomenon, the way everyone is reacting to this guy who appeared out of nowhere and caused a cultural whiplash.

When people who are tired, disillusioned, and emotionally overstimulated by the constant violence their government inflicts at home and abroad look at a newly emerged artist like Connor and say, “There. That feels good. That feels hopeful,” that’s not just a sudden fandom, but a larger impact.

There’s a bigger story here, folks. You might be wondering why we’re talking about actors when the entire world is burning. Here’s the simplest answer I could give you: authenticity now functions as protest.

In a landscape built to numb and monetize, genuine presence destabilizes the control we no longer even notice. But we felt it. When someone like Connor shows up, an artist not shaped by the machine and not born close to power, the audience responds to him because we experience the feeling of finally choosing for ourselves.

And systems of control, cultural or political, have never handled that well.

A shift.

This week in Connor Storrie’s life feels like a marker. He turned 26, he’s featured in VMAN’s Game Changers issue, and he’s hosting SNL on Saturday. It feels like a shift — not just in his life, but in how fame works, how audiences decide, how Hollywood no longer fully controls the narrative.

His rise wasn’t just a breakout. It was a full-on recalibration.

Connor didn’t take the usual road to stardom. He didn’t spend years climbing a gatekept ladder or endure the ritual humiliation phase that so often precedes recognition in Hollywood. Five months ago, he was waiting tables. Now he’s presenting at the Globes, hosting SNL, and likely heading to the Met Gala.

Hollywood didn’t groom him, slow-walk him, or make him pay his dues in public. He skipped the ritual humility tour.

For eight years, casting offices saw him audition and didn’t fully recognize what was there — until Jacob Tierney did. What followed didn’t feel like a studio-manufactured launch. It felt like a spark that the audience caught first.

The industry didn’t manufacture this rise.

We, the audience, did.

And that’s what makes it seismic.

The rise.

I talk about the phenomenon of Connor’s rise with my culture-obsessed friends, often (Husdon too, but in this piece I’m focusing on the American cultural landscape/American actor), and we try to break it down: how did this happen? How did Connor happen?

We’re living in a moment when the systems of power that control the entertainment industry (don’t forget, culture has been historically used to push political agendas, pass policy, and artwash criminal activity) still try to ration visibility. They decide who gets the magazine covers and who stays in supporting roles, who is limited to independent projects, and who is allowed to become a star. But Connor’s rise made something clear: fame is no longer exclusively engineered in conference rooms. It can be crowd-sourced. It can be people-powered. It can happen because millions of viewers collectively say, “No. That one. That’s the one.”

Connor isn’t an industry plant. He isn’t a nepo baby. He’s not the result of some legacy last name sliding open doors. His breakout proved something almost radical in 2026: when talent is undeniable, institutions don’t get to ration recognition anymore. The public can crown a star before Hollywood stamps their approval.

And Hollywood, frankly, now has to catch up to Connor Storrie.

The speed.

Here’s the thing — the speed of Connor’s rise is dramatic, yes. It gives whiplash. It makes headlines. It makes people ask, “Has this ever happened before?” But the speed isn’t the most striking part. After all, this man auditioned for eight years, before Heated Rivalry; it’s unimaginable to me that so many casting directors saw this enormous talent, and decided to pass. A famous decade-long overnight success.

The most striking part is his presence, and it seems to me that we missed this particular kind of presence.

Connor carries a kind of depth and magnetism that feels almost anachronistic. There’s a flavor to him that we associate with a different era — true ’90s movie star energy in a time that rarely produces movie stars anymore. Not influencers. Not franchise placeholders. Actual stars. The kind who make you lean forward towards your screen, and smile stupidly at every image, video, or project announcement of his, instead of scrolling away.

There’s something reminiscent of a River Phoenix lineage in him. Not imitation. Not even a glimpse of cosplay nostalgia. But that same sensitivity. That intensity that pulls you in, but it’s also quiet. The emotional intelligence that doesn’t scream for attention but commands it anyway. River was an experience, and Connor brings out the same feeling. You watch him, and you sense someone who understands interiority — who lives inside the character instead of performing around it.

That’s rare in today’s world of fast-paced technology, social media, and constant information overload. And that rarity is what creates cultural moments.

An intuition.

Connor didn’t just enter Hollywood. He disrupted it. He exposed the gap between institutional gatekeeping and audience intuition. He proved that the public doesn’t need to be told who matters. We know. Sometimes we feel it collectively, long before the industry’s casting offices, which watched a once-in-a-generation talent audition for eight years without recognizing him, suddenly rush to catch up and monetize what the audience already recognized and crowned.

Connor’s rise reminds us that fame doesn’t need to be engineered by PR firms that script every vulnerability and assume they know what the audience wants. It can feel organic and be discovered in real time. It can feel like watching something unfold — not something being carefully rolled out.

That matters. Greatly.

Because when audiences realize they have that kind of power, when they see that their collective recognition can launch someone into global visibility, the entire ecosystem shifts. The hierarchy of power cracks. The myth that only insiders can make stars starts to weaken.

Connor’s story isn’t just about one actor having a meteoric year. It’s about a cultural recalibration. About a public deciding that talent, when it’s undeniable, doesn’t need permission.

And the industry hates this. That’s why they quickly signed him (and Husdon) to CAA and dug their claws into both of them. We changed their rules.

The people decided: This one’s ours.

A recovery.

The last few years rewired us; fame became a product line, art became marketing, even humanity got algorithmic. Every emotion was pre-tested for virality before it reached us. Then Heated Rivalry showed up, uncurated and impossible to brand, and something shifted.

Neither of its stars broke into Hollywood; they broke through it.

And maybe that’s the real story — not the rise itself, but what it revealed about us:
that audiences are starving for something unmanufactured, something that doesn’t reek of sponsorships and media choreography. Something that feels true in the body.

It feels almost like a global recovery.

Sincerity is radical now.

A reminder that truth still seduces, still breathes, still cuts through the noise.

However powerful and all-mighty they are, Hollywood can’t really replicate that. It can only chase it, package it, overexpose it. But Connor and Hudson — at least for now — feel untouched. A moment before commodification. A glimpse of what it once meant to witness a movie star before the system processed them.

They reminded us that not everything beautiful must first be approved. That fame can still belong to instinct. That truth, when uncontained, can reach its audience.

Happy Birthday, Connor.

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The Berlinale stage is not a neutral living room. It’s one of the most visible cultural platforms in the world, where silence is not accidental. Also, a tiny reminder — there is no such thing as “apolitical art.”

Every film, every performance, every red-carpet moment, every acceptance speech carries the fingerprints of the political world that produced it.

This year’s Berlin Film Festival is a parade of spineless, apolitical cowards posing as artists. It’s hard to comprehend the pile of nonsense that came out of so many mouths over the past couple of days.

Being an artist, standing on one of the world’s largest stages, at one of the most political festivals, backed by a government funding an ongoing genocide — while living through deadly ICE protests in the U.S., the Epstein scandal, a livestreamed genocide in Gaza, genocide in Sudan, human rights violations and sexual violence in Congo, and the rise of fascism in the UK, the U.S., and Germany — and then declare, “I choose to keep my work apolitical.”

As if that were possible.

As if culture floats above power.

As if silence is neutral.

Cowards.

At the press conference for filmmaker George Jaques’ Sunny Dancer, Bella Ramsey and Neil Patrick Harris were asked by a journalist whether they consider their “art to be political, and if so, how can movies these days help fight the rise of fascism in Europe and in America.”

Neil Patrick Harris: “I think we live in a strangely algorithmic and divided world right now. And so as artists, I’m always interested in doing things that are apolitical, because we’re all as humans wanting to connect in some way. That’s why we experience things together.”

George Jaques: “I think sometimes the most rebellious thing you can do is be optimistic. And we wanted to make a film about joy. I think, you know, there’s so much going on in the world right now, and I wanted to make something that really takes you somewhere else.”

Bella Ramsey: “Sunny Dancer was honestly, like, the best experience I’ve had in my career so far. It will be very hard to top. It’s a big statement, but it was probably the best professional six weeks, and also one of the best personal six weeks, of my frickin’ life.”

Journalists at the Sunny Dancer presser, bless their souls, wouldn’t be deterred. A writer from German broadcaster ZDF asked Harris, as a U.S. citizen, whether he “dared criticize the U.S. government and whether he believes democracy is in danger in the U.S.” The Berlinale moderator then interjected that the question “wasn’t relevant to Sunny Dancer.”

Neil Patrick Harris added he would rather discuss the film, saying: “I make my own choices as a performer, as an artist … I feel more the jester in the castle. So while I have my own political opinions, which are my own, I think as a performer, especially in this kind of movie, it’s trying to be as inclusive as possible to as many people as possible. So I never read this script as a political statement.”

The journalist from ARD broadcaster responded: “It’s embarrassing to say the film isn’t political. Without proper health insurance, I wouldn’t be here. I had cancer myself. So the film is political, and this festival must be political.”

Heroes.

Unlike Ethan Hawke, who just a few days ago said, “Anything that fights fascism, I’m all for it, fascism is on the rise in Europe and the U.S.,” but at the Berlinale stage, where it mattered, resorted to: "I feel like there's a slight agenda to your question that is different to my agenda. But I respect you and I respect the question."

At his press conference, Rupert Grint explained he’s against fascism, but the biggest festival stage on earth is not the moment where he thinks he should talk about it, then said: “Obviously, I’m against it. But I choose my moments when to speak.”

During her press conference, Michele Yeoh chose to say: “I don’t think I am in the position to really talk about the political situation in the U.S., and also I cannot presume to say I understand how it is," she said. "So, best not to talk about something I don’t know about. I think I want to concentrate on what is important for us, which is cinema.”

Jury.

Jury president Wim Wenders, producer Ewa Puszczyńska, and festival director Tricia Tuttle gave the most embarrassing examples of artists pretending art is apolitical for their own comfort.

At the opening jury press conference, the live feed cut out as a German journalist asked a question about why Berlinale had shown support for people in Iran and Ukraine, but never for Palestine, a fitting disruption for a festival in a country whose government is funding that genocide while beating and imprisoning its own citizens for protesting it:

“My question is, in light of the German government’s support of the genocide in Gaza and its role as the main funder of the Berlinale, do you, as a member of the jury, support this selective treatment of human rights?”

At this moment, the live feed went down, cutting the live broadcast in the middle of a journalist's question.

The answer that came from Ewa Puszczyńska, the producer of Cold War and The Zone of Interest, two films about war and genocide, was the most shocking:

“Asking us this question is a little bit unfair… we use the word ‘change the world’ but we are trying to talk to people, every single viewer, and to make them think, but we cannot be responsible for what their decision would be to support Israel … to support Palestine.

We can talk about Senegal and all the other wars, you know, you just pointed [to] the most, the biggest, but there are many other wars where genocide is committed and we do not talk about that. So this is very complicated questions … And I think, as I said, it’s a bit unfair asking us what we think, how we support, or not support, or are talking to our governments or not.”

“I’m speaking for myself I go to elections. I go, I vote using my right as a citizen of Poland, as a citizen of Europe, of the world. I go to marches, I support causes which I think I should support. But all of us here may have other things and take other decisions. So I think asking us these questions and expecting the general kind of answer is not fair.”

Jury president Wim Wenders also attempted to shut down the question about genocide and human rights, saying:

“We cannot really enter the field of politics. We have to stay out of politics because if we made movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics … We are the counterweight of politics, the opposite of politics, we have to do the work of people — not the work of politicians.”

The myth of the apolitical artist.

For decades, artists have been allowed to position themselves as “just storytellers.” As if storytelling does not define who is human, who is a villain, and who is disposable.

Art has always legitimized power, challenged power, normalized violence, built empathy, erased empathy, shaped national myths, and rehearsed political futures.

The idea of the apolitical artist is a fiction that protects comfort.

When fascism rises, and artists claim neutrality, what they are really protecting is access: to funding, to markets, to institutions, to safety.

Culture precedes policy.

Before laws change, culture shifts. Before a regime consolidates power, stories prepare the ground. Before people accept cruelty, they are taught who deserves it.

Cinema does this. Television does this. Literature does this. Culture trains emotional reflexes long before anyone reads a manifesto.

So when artists on global stages refuse to imagine a better world — refuse even to acknowledge the one unraveling in front of them — they are not staying out of politics. They are participating in it through omission.

Platforms carry responsibility.

Berlinale is not a private dinner conversation. It is one of the most significant cultural stages in the world. An actor may say, “I’m here to talk about my film.” But the film exists inside history. The industry exists inside geopolitics. The festival exists inside a political climate.

To pretend otherwise is aesthetic minimalism masquerading as moral restraint.

No one is asking artists to become policy experts.

But to say nothing, in an era openly flirting with authoritarianism, is not humility. It is a refusal to imagine a better world for all.

Art lost its moral force when it lost its nerve.

For years, mainstream art cultivated a tone: aesthetic, poetic, detached, safely humanist. The artist was meant to be visionary but never confrontational. Profound but never implicated. Empathetic but never specific.

This produced a generation of artists who explore trauma but avoid naming perpetrators, depict oppression but refuse to confront authoritarianism, celebrate “humanity” while violence unfolds in real time, and accept awards on global stages while declining to acknowledge the forces shaping the world around them.

Art lost moral teeth when artists were encouraged to stay in the realm of feeling, not responsibility.

But the world changed, and many artists did not.

The artists who matter now are the ones who refuse the fiction.

The artists who resonate today are the ones who understand that storytelling is not decorative. It is formative.

They are willing to connect their work to the world, acknowledge the systems that fund and distribute them, speak clearly about dehumanization, defend democracy without irony, and imagine futures that resist brutality.

Art has always been political — not because it waves slogans, but because it shapes perception. When artists claim neutrality, they misunderstand their own power.

And when they step onto a stage like Berlinale, they are already participating in the cultural architecture of the moment.

The question is not whether art is political. The question is whether artists are willing to admit it.

We live in a world where the separation between culture and politics has collapsed. Culture is politics. Politics is cultural. Narratives shape ideology more effectively than legislation. On a stage as large as Berlinale, refusing to engage is not modesty. It is a choice.

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Angelina Jolie, Louis Garrel, and the cast of Couture attended the film’s premiere at Pathé Palace in Paris. Louis and Angelina are rumored to be dating. The comments on social media flooded in: “She could be his mother.” “She’s too old for him.” “He should run.”

Angelina is 50 years old, Louis is 42.

I’ve been seeing this kind of commentary for years on the posts of many famous women over 45 — Kate Beckinsale, Sienna Miller, Heidi Klum, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and others. These comments are usually made by very young women, often sounding angry about how these women dress, how active they are on social media, how playful they are in their posts — but especially when they date younger men.

When I see men leaving these comments, I don’t flinch. They’re so obviously bitter and pathetic — a statistic that doesn’t deserve our time, no matter how ridiculous they sound.

But when women do this, it hurts me.

How can we do this to eachother, given everything that exists on this earth is constantly against us?

Internalized ageism, repackaged as concern.

What’s happening here?

Just take a look at some of these comments directed at Angelina:

I attempted to examine this phenomenon of women behaving this way toward women older than them — check out the post below to understand the response it attracted. 1 million views, over 2,000 comments, over 7,000 shares.

What is happening with this youth panic disguised as morality?

Why does a woman living freely bother other (younger) women so much?

It’s because a woman who ages without apology unsettles the fantasy.

It goes deeper.

As I already said, this youth panic, disguised as morality, is age anxiety projected outward. It’s self-hatred on delay.

The fear isn’t age, it’s freedom. It’s the audacity to be with a younger man.

These are the same young women who insist they’re progressive, liberal, and pro-choice, then suddenly become guardians of who women are allowed to date once they cross an invisible age line.

This isn’t about concern. It’s internalized ageism dressed up as judgment. A belief quietly absorbed early on — that a woman’s value peaks young, and anything after that is embarrassing, predatory, or sad. Seeing an older woman desired and unapologetic about it threatens that narrative.

If women don’t expire on schedule, then youth stops being a guarantee. And that’s unsettling. The real discomfort isn’t her age — it’s her freedom. A woman who keeps living, dating, breathing, and taking up space long past the moment she was supposed to disappear.

Again, why is this happening?

It’s a mix of social conditioning, fear, and competition, and not something innate.

It’s because patriarchy teaches women that their value expires. From a young age, women are told youth = worth. Older women who are visible, confident, desired, or free directly threaten that lie.

It’s because of internalized misogyny. Instead of questioning the system that pits women against time, some younger women turn that anxiety outward and police other women.

It’s the scarcity mindset around men. Culture frames male attention as limited and something women must compete for. An older woman who doesn’t “step aside” disrupts that narrative.

It’s the fear of their own future. Seeing older women living fully forces a confrontation with aging, and many respond with denial or hostility rather than curiosity and reflection.

It’s social media distortion. Algorithms reward youth obsession, mockery, and cruelty. Ageist jokes get likes; empathy doesn’t trend as easily.

The irony?

Ageism toward older women is self-hatred on a delay. Every younger woman who mocks aging is rehearsing how she herself will be treated later, unless she chooses to unlearn it.

Older women aren’t the problem. Or your competition. The system that taught women to fear becoming one is.

For some younger women, ageism becomes a way to enforce the rules and feel temporarily safe within them. The irony is harsh: every ageist insult aimed at older women is a rehearsal for how society may one day treat them.

A woman left an interesting comment on my Instagram post about this subject — something I hadn’t given much thought to before. She said that many of these young women spewing ageist bile toward older women grow up to become older women who resent very young girls. I thought about it and realized I grew up around a few girlfriends who were openly angry in our early twenties when boys they liked chose older women. Today, those same women smirk at very young women.

That cycle of hell sent shivers down my spine. It has to be our mission in life, however hard it may be to contain your emotions or your regret, to never allow yourself to become either of those examples. A woman, at any age, is the only person who understands exactly what you went through and what you will go through.

We simply have to break this cycle.

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For the past two years, like anyone with a talent for words and a functioning conscience, I wrote about power. I wrote about wars, genocides, cruelty, violence, and the cost of bearing witness. That cost was high for me. I lost myself in the process. I became a shell of a human being — waking up every day to frantically research the latest atrocity that had happened while I slept, taking notes, consuming, sourcing, reliving it in my bones so I could put it on paper and pass the information on. I haven’t slept properly in two years; I was napping, researching, writing — rinse, repeat.

I stopped writing about myself, and in doing so, I stopped examining myself. I stopped caring for myself. I stopped examining the world; the art, music, and craft I had loved and written about for most of my life.

Live genocide, streamed daily on our phones, paralyzed me.

How do you write about your life, culture, movies, film, books, relationships, love, and tell all these beautiful stories while children are being shredded to pieces?

Nothing seemed to matter anymore. I was blocked, and I was angry at my government for telling me this is normal. I have been researching, taking notes, saving, listening, reading, taking more notes, writing, and reporting on what I have learned to others, to the level of mental and physical exhaustion that became my constant. My permanent state.

I’m proud of what I have built on Antagolist and how many of you use it as a guideline, and a source of information, a take, an opinion, a breakdown, through these violent times. I have built a community of great people whom I discovered throughout this injustice — and if you are one of them reading this now, I’m grateful for you and our dialogues about dignity, community, and liberation. You keep me sane.

I won’t stop dismantling these systems with my words.

What I realized, though, is that I gave myself so fully to the work of breaking down the house of cards that funds and sustains such violence that I lost myself in the process. For the past two years, I felt as though I were outside my body, looking in — waiting for the nightmare to end so I could return to myself. And to my life.

I think it’s clear to all of us that this won’t be ending anytime soon. The atrocities keep piling up, growing bolder and more blatant, and by now we’ve learned how to live with a permanent fight-or-flight mode switched on.

Joy is resistance.

Around Thanksgiving, my Canadian friend told me to watch this new Canadian show, Heated Rivalry. I instantly said no. I removed the TV from my room so I could focus on writing and didn’t have time or focus to binge-watch anything. I had too many unfinished articles to work on and barely made time as it is.

But she insisted. Life-changing, she said.

For the past two years, I haven’t been able to write about anything beyond the constant stream of injustice, death, and manufactured narratives. There was no room left for anything else while mass suffering played out in real time, normalized and justified before our eyes.

I kept waiting for something, anything, that could pull me out of that paralysis, disrupt the despair, and remind me why storytelling still matters. But for a long time, nothing did.

I never imagined that the antidote to two years of genocide, permanent war, propaganda, and political decay would be two men fucking their way toward love.

I didn’t seek out this show for comfort. I wasn’t in the mood to be softened. I was exhausted, like everyone else, bracing for the next headline confirming how bad things were getting (are).

But it touched me. It sobered me up. It woke me up.

Love as counter-programming.

What caught me off guard wasn’t the mind-blowingly realistic depiction of sex turned into romance. It was the relief of realizing my nervous system hadn’t been lying to me all along — that I still knew the difference between something real and something manufactured.

We’re told, day after day, to accept stories that don’t match what we can see. That violence is unfortunate but necessary. That dissent is dangerous. That empathy is naive. That obedience is patriotism.

It’s all bullshit. They drained the joy out of us, and joy is resistance. Tenderness is resistance. They bombarded us with so much violence and cruelty that we began to accept it as a permanent state. The depravity they hurl at us daily is what numbs us, turning us into shells of human beings.

This little Canadian low-budget show snapped us all out of this despair.

Storytelling as recalibration.

Much of today’s culture is built for speed and profit. Stories are made to be easy to consume, not to stay with us. When everything is built on narrative, honest narrative becomes insurgent.

That is why a love story between two hockey players can matter more than a thousand prestige dramas engineered to launder power. That is why we all responded so intensely to something that simply feels honest. And that is why this show landed so precisely, and landed now — not as escape, but as recalibration.

It reminds us all how truth feels in the body.

Staying sane in this time of absolute, unchecked power, cruelty, injustice, and lawlessness means learning how to see clearly without being consumed by what we see. This moment isn’t asking for panic, but for coherence. And staying sane means filling your body with joy — music, craft, art, all the beauty life can still offer, despite the depravity we’re subjected to.

Returning to myself.

I have been exceptionally joyful these past two months, even as I continue to feel the cruelty we’re subjected to every day. I continue to witness the unabashed violence our government commits at home and abroad, analyze it, and write about it — but I counter it with JOY. I make sure to take in enough beautiful things to remain human, capable of feeling happiness, desire, love, lust, wonder, curiosity, kindness, and tenderness.

And it healed me.

I have more clarity and more strength to fight the unchecked power more precisely than ever before.

And I want to continue on this new (normal) path. I opened a Patreon account to start writing about myself again — unrestricted, unstructured trains of thought that help me examine my own consciousness and reclaim my truth.

I want to return to writing about the beautiful things that keep us human — the films I love to watch, the music I listen to, the books I read. I want to talk about love, real or on screen, about connection and self-examination. I want to laugh, to be joyful and silly. And I wholeheartedly reject letting the psychopaths in power turn me into a shell of the person I was for two years straight.

Staying true to yourself and your humanity, despite the horrors being committed in the world, is the greatest act of resistance and a middle finger to those trying to make you unfeeling.

Join me in this space.

William Faulkner once said that the only thing worth writing about is “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

Whether we’re examining the real or the fictional, the truth is the same. Fiction is written from someone’s lived experience. And in a world that makes less and less sense, where violence is committed unchecked, where power toys with us through its depravity, the only thing that truly makes sense is connection with another human being.

The only thing that fully and absolutely makes sense, and is worth living for, is love.

And I, for one, want to exist in that space.

Hope you share it with me.

Head out to my Patreon, and subscribe — it’s going to be my personal space, a platform where I’ll be writing about us, me and you, and all the beautiful, joyous things still happening in this world.

I’ll also be sharing excerpts from my book (still in progress), as well as essays that will be published as part of an essay collection — all centered on love, acceptance, desire, and self-examination.

Antagolist will, as always, continue to interrogate power — examining the structures that shape our politics and our culture, and remaining a space for analysis, refusal, and the reclaiming of reality.

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Hi, folks. Three weeks into 2026, and wow. Checking in on you, and myself in the process. The first few days of the new year, along with the 2025 holiday season, felt promising.

What a beautiful thing it was to wake up on New Year’s Day and celebrate the inauguration of Mayor Mamdani — the joy, the hope, the inclusivity, the clarity of both the man and the message, all sprinkled with confetti as the final words were spoken, coming right after the high of a Heated Rivalry Christmas.

The year started strong, and we’ll hold on to that hope no matter what. Anything else would be capitulating to power — and we’re not the bending kind. Unless we choose to bend for things far more pleasurable than letting the government fuck us in the ass.

Did anyone truly believe we’d get a whole week into the new year without state violence, lightly seasoned with yet another breach of international law? I did. I was riding the high on my Mayor / Cottage crossover, and I foolishly believed we might have a chance of catching a breath.

And after two years of struggling to find my own sense of meaning, living in a country in perpetual decline, I was determined not to let 2026 be taken from me in the same way.

No can do, said the crime syndicate, pretending to be your government.

Only three days into the new year, and it’s already Grand Theft Venezuela — snatching presidents of foreign, sovereign countries to steal their resources, all in service of attacking another, bigger, badder enemy that threatens the ethnostate we’ve been propping up since 1948.

Only two weeks into the new year, and it’s the Israelization of the U.S. in full swing — IDF, sorry, my bad — ICE shooting citizens on the street, taking out nurses documenting violence and cruelty.

Bearing witness.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes with being a writer today — one that has nothing to do with motivation or creative block. It is the exhaustion of bearing witness. The cost of it.

When you just consume information, you read it, possibly share it — and it leaves you. I take that back: if you have a strong moral compass, it never fully leaves you. But you don’t have to sit inside it the way someone does who has to live in it — who has to stay with it long enough to research it, source it, and write about it.

And bearing witness, in this moment, is not a passive act. It is an active, grinding labor carried out in a world that produces suffering faster than it can be processed.

Frends, I’m exhausted.

This is not the fatigue of consuming news. It is the fatigue of carrying it. Witnessing without pause, of being unable to look away because looking away feels like moral failure, yet looking directly feels like erosion.

By the time you finish researching one atrocity, another one has already replaced it. By the time you shape a sentence to honor the dead, the algorithm has already moved on.

Seven million pieces of information a day. This is the reality of writing now. Not writing as commentary. But writing as moral documentation.

Your anger is needed.

The other day, I received a message from someone I know. She told me she appreciates everything I’ve been doing for the past two years — posting, writing, informing people about the genocide in Palestine, U.S. aggression around the world, and ICE violence at home.

Then she added that I don’t seem as angry as I used to. That it looks like I’m able to enjoy other things too, not just write about constant violence.

I think it’s your turn to be angry — I responded. For the past two years, she never said a word about a livestreamed genocide and shared my story about it twice.

For the past two years, many of us have been saying this clearly — If you stay silent about Palestine, the violence will come home. The same government that funds genocide abroad will use the same tools here.

You didn’t listen.

You thought what was happening to the Palestinian people was far away. Someone else’s problem. Not connected to your life. But now you’re seeing those same tactics used here, at home, in the U.S.

And now you’re angry. Now you want me to be angrier, too.

I already saw the worst things human beings can do to each other. I saw children’s limbs blown apart. I saw suffering that most people chose to scroll past.

You feel angrier than I do right now because you turned away when brown bodies were being destroyed. Now, when violence reaches people who look like you, it feels like the worst thing you’ve ever seen.

For me, it isn’t.

Bearing witness for two years — really bearing witness — cost me my health, my sanity, my sense of self. That’s the price of not looking away.

So yes. It’s your turn to be angry now. Feel it. Sit with it. Carry the weight yourself.

Connection has always been there. Palestine trained us to watch horror, scroll past it, and keep going — so that when violence shows up here, it doesn’t shock us anymore.

Your anger is needed now.

My anger is spent.

Writing in the violent world.

There will always be more suffering than you can document. More injustice than you can expose. More violence than you can contextualize. The work is not to capture everything — it is to refuse the lie that nothing can be captured truthfully.

This is why writing today feels less like creation and more like triage.

And maybe that is what it means to be a writer now: not a commentator on history, but a recorder of its fractures while they are still forming. Not someone who explains the world after the fact, but someone who stands inside it while it burns and refuses to pretend the fire is normal.

Writing in this moment is an act of defiance against erasure.

If this work feels unbearable, it is because it is being done correctly.

Despite all, the work continues. Not because it is rewarded — it often isn’t. Not because it is sustainable — it often isn’t. But because bearing witness is not optional for those who understand what silence protects.

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As soon as I saw Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams sign with CAA this past week, I had a feeling of dread overcome me. Am I insane? These two were waiters three months ago, I hear your inside voice, they deserve this! Not insane quite yet, I’m afraid. Experienced in Hollywood shitfuckery, very much yes.

These two men are talented, chill, beautiful, enjoyable, and glorious. They are not a Hollywood product. You might be too excited for their rise in this industry to realize they are a threat to that same industry. To the façade that is Hollywood, the most corrupt industry, probably right after our government.

Let’s unpack the Globes, their first awards show, ever. Connor and Hudson looked majestic on the red carpet. Literally every single media outlet published their faces, over and over again, from every possible angle. Images. Videos. My entire scroll was just them. I saw no one else.

Their red-carpet interviews were the best of the night. No one, I repeat, no one is as interesting as they are. This isn’t novelty, it’s presence. It’s swag, personality, charisma.

Connor and Hudson were scheduled to sit front-center with Charli XCX and Paul Mescal. At the last minute, they were moved to the table at the back of the room. A massive slap in the face to the queer community. Visibility, anyone?

What are we doing here?

Before they presented, two UFC fighters were brought onstage, with the announcer joking that the Heated Rivalry boys are “so hot right now” they need “extra security.”

UFC preceding a queer show?

Connor was then written into a strange, timid, “scared” bit. Why would anyone sane write a joyful, bubbly, larger-than-life, confident man into a skit designed to shrink him? It makes no sense if you want to achieve a maximum impact. Unless you, erm, don’t.

Heated Rivalry gave people immense joy; made entire communities feel seen, and is currently the biggest show in the world, with over 600 million minutes of viewing only in the US alone. It’s a cultural revolution, and Hollywood didn’t know how to handle it at the Golden Globes.

Or did it?

Maybe it felt threatened, unwilling to uplift them, while remaining perfectly happy to publish their pictures and monetize on their enormous fame.

It goes to show you that the Hollywood industry wants to cash in on the boys, but at the same time, aren’t really happy that the two kids who waited tables three months ago blew them all off with only one show. Heated Rivalry, Jacob Tierney, Connor, and Hudson continue to expose everything that’s wrong with Hollywood, and many egos are not happy about it.

The skit.

It came across as an attempt to downplay Hudson and Connor’s impact, as if they’re intentionally stripping it of its weight. It doesn’t feel accidental. It felt like a preemptive strike, realizing exactly how powerful those two can be.

The wings were clipped. People didn’t cheer as much as the biggest show on earth right now deserved. Many stars in the room pretended they didn’t hear about it ot watched it.

They did. Everyone knows about it. Your mother knows about it.

A room full of egos, having two kids who waited tables a blink ago, making a cultural shift not seen in a long while.

Tight leash vibes.

Hollywood hates being cut out of the fame pipeline.

Two creators summed up my entire feeling about this fumble, so I will let them sum it up for you:

Crowdsourced fame.

“… that audience was filled with haters, jealous, mad haters, very little applause or laughter throughout their speech…”

“… these two boys didn’t have to suffer for fame; they totally leapfrogged the whole process. They didn’t have to deal with the perverts of Hollywood. The Internet liked them and decided, yeah, you’re famous now, and there’s nothing Hollywood can do about it. That’s the real issue. They hate that fame is like crowd-sourced now; it’s a democracy.”

@rjrokoszThe audience when the casting couch didn’t get a say 👁️👄👁️ #heatedrivalry #hudsonwilliams #connorstorrie #goldenglobes #hollywood

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Did the Golden Globes fumble Heated Rivalry boys? Most def. The only question here is, purposefully or yes?

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Did anyone truly believe we’d get a whole week into the new year without state violence, lightly seasoned with yet another breach of international law? I did. I was riding the high of Heated Rivalry Christmas, followed by the historic Mamdani inauguration, and I foolishly believed there were still so many joys in this world — joys our government works r…

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“My fellow New Yorkers — today begins a new era.

I stand before you moved by the privilege of taking this sacred oath, humbled by the faith that you have placed in me, and honored to serve as either your 111th or 112th Mayor of New York City. But I do not stand alone.

I stand alongside you, the tens of thousands gathered here in Lower Manhattan, warmed against the January chill by the resurgent flame of hope.”

It was a long way to here — a year, to be exact — since I joined the new media team of Mayor Mamdani (I cannot stop saying those two words together), helping him reach this moment, standing in –10°C weather, limbs numb by the time he came out to address us all — and the New Yorkers watching at home.

It’s strange, my mother says, the levels of energy and persistance in the midst of so much exhausting, undersleeping that is what busy life in New York is — that i’m able to find in my body to rally for this man. It’s almost subhuman, all the canwassing and rallying we accomplished, with having full time jobs, so that this city ca finally be led by a man that tryly cares about all new yorkers.

It’s strange, my mother says, the amount of energy and persistence I have, in the middle of so much exhaustion and sleep deprivation — the kind that comes with life in New York — that I’m still able to find it in my body to rally for this man.

It almost feels subhuman, all the canvassing and rallying we managed while working full-time jobs, just so this city can finally be led by a man who truly cares about all New Yorkers.

That same endurance, the kind that keeps you moving through exhaustion, cold, and lack of sleep — didn’t come from nowhere. It was forged in the past year itself.

This past year has felt like a roller coaster — a terrifying one. The kind where one limb feels like it’s hanging out of the carriage, and you’re constantly shifting your weight, trying not to fall, while the whole thing keeps moving anyway. Turn after turn, you manage to stay in. You stay in one piece. Not because you’re fearless, but because you’ve learned how to brace.

Atrocity after atrocity. Your government insisting you didn’t see what you saw. And by the time you reach the next turn, a new form of violence has already replaced the one you were just forced to absorb.

This man kept me sane through all of it. It’s astonishing what a glimmer of hope, embodied in a single person, can do to a body worn down by years of watching children’s limbs blown apart, by a government that funds it, and by a media ecosystem that insists it didn’t happen.

Hope is contagious. Once it appears, it multiplies. It spreads. And that’s precisely why Mayor Mamdani is a threat to those who depend on despair — to those who don’t want you to recognize hope when it shows up, or to believe it could grow into something real.

A era of possible futures

Let’s cling to that hope. The era of possible futures can begin with one man — and metastasize into an unstoppable force. “8 and a half million New Yorkers will speak this new era into existence. It will be loud. It will be different.”

We have to imagine it.

Every minute of this inauguration inspired me, but one thing stood out. A poem “Proof” recited by its author and poet Cornelius Eady. Read it. Cling to it. Let it consume you. You have to imagine it! This is our time.

You have to imagine it.
Who said you were too dark?
Too Large, too Queer, Too Loud? 
Who said you were too poor, too strange, too fat? 
You have to imagine it. 
Who said you must keep quiet? 
Who heard your story then rolled their eyes? 
Who tried to change your name to invisible? 
You’ve got to imagine. 
Who heard your name and refused to pronounce it? 
Who checked their watch and said not now? 
James Baldwin wrote the place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it. 
New York, city of invention, 
Roiling town, refresher
And re-newer,
New York, city of the real,
Where the canyons
Whisper in a hundred
Tongues,
New York,
Where your lucky self
Waits for your
Arrival,
Where there is always soil
For your root.
This is our time.
The taste of us, the spice of us, the hollers and the rhythms and the beats of us and the echo of our ancestors who made certain we know who we are. 
City of insistence, city of resistance. 
You have to imagine an army that wins without firing a bullet. 
A joy that wears down the rock of no. 
Up from insults up from blocked doors, up from trick bags, up from fear, up from shame, up from the way it was done before. 
You have to imagine that space they said wasn’t yours. 
That time they said you’d never own. 
The invisible city lit on its way. 
This moment is our proof.

This moment is our proof.

Let it inspire you. Let Zohran’s inaugural address motivate you into imagining a new world, hopeful world, and let’s speak it into existence.

“Together, we will tell a new story of our city.

This will not be a tale of one city, governed only by the one percent. Nor will it be a tale of two cities, the rich versus the poor.

It will be a tale of 8 and a half million cities, each of them a New Yorker with hopes and fears, each a universe, each of them woven together.

8 and a half million New Yorkers will speak this new era into existence. It will be loud. It will be different. It will feel like the New York we love.

No matter how long you have called this city home, that love has shaped your life. I know that it has shaped mine.

So, standing together with the wind of purpose at our backs, we will do something that New Yorkers do better than anyone else: we will set an example for the world.

If what Sinatra said is true, let us prove that anyone can make it in New York—and anywhere else too.

Let us prove that when a city belongs to the people, there is no need too small to be met, no person too sick to be made healthy, no one too alone to feel like New York is their home.

The work continues, the work endures, the work, my friends, has only just begun.”

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Because she’s a threat to Israel. After more than 800 days, you should be able to see the pattern clearly. None of this is about Jews, and not even really about Zionists. It’s about Israel — preserving the narrative it needs to maintain its legitimacy. “Safety” is the excuse, not the motive.

Think about this for a second. Kanye West manufactured swastika merch and dropped a song titled “Heil Hitler.” If that isn’t the most on-the-nose basis for being labeled an antisemite, what is? And yet he wasn’t even included in the list of the biggest antisemites of the year.

Why?

Kanye West goes around talking about Jews ruining his career, but he doesn’t threaten the existence of Israel. In fact, he doesn’t even speak about Israel. I haven’t heard him mention it once. Zionists don’t have a problem with people talking about Jews, or even talking shit about Jews, as long as they don’t threaten Israel.

Look at this tweet by Ben Shapiro, a foreign agent, shilling for a foreign country, in the heart of the United States:

Read it again. He’s talking about Ann Coulter talking shit about Jews, but she’s pro-Israel, so he doesn’t mind. He won’t lose sleep.

Is it ringing in yet?

How is Israel threatened? By removing a carefully curated, planted narrative that has been served to the American and Western public for eight decades. How is that done? By informing people about what Israel is actually doing in Gaza. By awakening young people to the realities of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people.

This is the equation:

Awakening > truth > physical evidence > changing narratives > reaching young minds > reclaiming reality > lack of support for the ethnostate > US public pressure to the US government > halt on military funding = ethonstate threatened.

By this equation, Ms. Rachel is the most dangerous human being on earth for the Zionist ideology and preservation of an ethnostate, Israel.

I’ll explain this through the example of Charlie Kirk. He was a threat to Israel because he was influencing young conservative men who are the primary pool for US military recruitment and, logically, the soldiers expected to fight Israel’s future wars of conquest. If that demographic withdraws its support, and Kirk’s political ambitions continue, he becomes the largest, most influential obstacle to Israeli interests.

Ms. Rachel is even more dangerous because she reaches an even younger demographic — children. Her “crime” was refusing to restrict empathy only to the children we’re politically permitted to mourn. And she committed the biggest crime of all: she SHOWED a Palestinian child on screen.

If you’ve watched The Occupation of the American Mind, you know how hard Israel has worked to prevent any image, or even the suggestion, that Palestinians are human beings. Ms. Rachel not only showed empathy for Palestinian children; she brought a Palestinian child, a double amputee, onto her show and let the world SEE her.

Actual neo-Nazis are marching through American streets with swastikas, openly threatening Jews and planning real violence. There was no comparable outrage or mobilization from Zionist communities in response — no daily headlines, no frantic influencer posts, no sustained pressure. But Ms. Rachel? She’s framed as the ultimate danger.

Ms. Rachel threatens none of these people. What she threatens is their control of discourse — the ability to monopolize victimhood, to push Palestinian life outside the boundaries of moral concern, and to shape how the youngest generation understands the world.

If toddlers learn empathy for all children, Zionist organizations lose the emotional foundation of their propaganda: the belief that some lives are inherently worth more than others.

This is why Ms. Rachel, and not Kanye West, was targeted. Or even Nick Fuentes. Real antisemitism is being ignored because it’s not politically useful. The logic is simple — accusing Kanye West or Nick Fuentes does not silence criticism of Israel. Accusing Ms. Rachel does. Kanye is not educating children about structural violence. Nick Fuentes is not teaching toddlers about empathy.

Although Nick challenges the enormous Israeli influence on the US government, which is an essential conversation to have from such a large platform, but that’s a subject for another piece.

Neither of the men I mentioned threatens the Zionist narrative that Palestinians are somehow exempt from humanization. Ms. Rachel, by contrast, does exactly that. By teaching empathy early, she disrupts decades of propaganda built on the selective withholding of empathy.

Legitimacy of Israel.

So why are Zionists so worried about anything that challenges the legitimacy of Israel? It’s a phenomenon I’ve been trying to understand for years — this absolute, unbreakable obsession with the state. And it finally clicked for me a few weeks ago, after everything I’ve read and everything I’ve watched unfold online: Zionists don’t truly believe in God as a mythical being, or a powerful spiritual force. They believe in Israel. Israel IS their god.

A few days ago, I saw an interesting post that further expands on my epiphany:

This is why they spiral the moment anyone questions Israel’s existence or legitimacy. People can acknowledge that Jews lived in the Holy Land for millennia and have a historical claim to that land while also saying the land should be shared, as it was before 1948, rather than emptied of the Palestinians who were already there. Yet even that basic truth sends them into emotional freefall. Because Israel isn’t just a state to them. It’s their god.

Anyone who questions it is an instant enemy.

Questioning the narrative.

It’s also important for Zionists who questions their narrative. They always care and react when it’s a person with a lot of influence — doctors, lawyers, entertainers, famous people with large followings. And Ms. Rachel fits this category too, because of the kind of celebrity she is and the influence she has.

Ms. Rachel is gentle, sweet, wholesome, kind. She’s authentic and genuine, and deeply cares about children. And she has an enormous following. That’s the Zionist nightmare: someone who represents goodness seeing depravity in their actions + having a large audience to tell it to.

She brought a child onto her program — a child from Gaza, a double amputee. A Palestinian child wounded by an Israeli bomb. And she showed her to the world. If you understand the basics of what Zionists are, you can easily deduce why they would see such an act as a personal attack.

Ms. Rachel brought a relic of their war crimes on air — proof, evidence of their depravity. In reality, Ms. Rachel simply wanted to provide some joy to a child who has experienced more grief than most people on the planet ever will, all before her fifth birthday. But seeing a Palestinian as a human being, rather than reducing them to a terrorist label, is treated as a direct antisemitic attack against the chosen people who simply can do no wrong.

When Zionists attack Ms. Rachel, they are letting us know — no Palestinian can ever be humanized, not even the Palestinian child. The child’s life is insignificant; it’s only used to smear them. They aren’t even questioning the reason this child has no limbs; they know they are the reason. They are offended by making the child visible, not by what has been done to the child.

It’s not about their war crimes; it’s about the world knowing about their war crimes.

No good for capitalism.

I watched a brilliant assessment of Ms. Rachel/Zionism phenomenon by Israeli-Arab Writer Alon Mizrahi. Alon argues Ms. Rachel represents a woman who is famous, successful, loved, and popular; a woman who seemingly follows all the rules of success in capitalist American Western colonial society.

This is really great stuff:

Why is Ms. Rachel hated so fiercely by Zionists? We need to remember that Zionism and capitalism are married. Zionism, capitalism, and colonialism are different names for basically the same thing. It’s the same camp. The reactionary American camp, the colonial camp. The establishments and Zionism are one. So why do they hate her so much?

Ms. Rachel succeeded as a woman in a capitalist society. Which should be the mark of feminism, right? This is what Western feminism teaches us. But Miss Rachel represents the archetype that goes against everything those people believe in. She’s a successful woman who doesn’t have a corporate personality.

She is not cold, calculated, or controlled. She doesn’t toe the corporate line. She doesn’t repeat the PR messaging that every corporate person in America repeats and never goes off script. You can never make those people go off script. But Ms. Rachel isn’t that. She’s something else. She’s an ancient archetype.

She is all compassion, she is all love, she cares for children. This is not corporate. They have to hate her for it. They cannot have this role model of success. Women who succeed, in terms of the archetype that capitalism wants, that Western society wants, need to be cold. They need to not have actual emotions. They need to be Hillary Clinton.

These are the kind of women that the West celebrates as feminist success. This is the archetype they’re trying to build. And Miss Rachel breaks this stereotype. They don’t want women, and they don’t want people in general who have a soul. They don’t want women who cry over poor children.

This is not good for the plan. This is not good for capitalism. This is not good for corporate America. This breaks the discipline. They don’t want that. So Ms. Rachel’s success as a maternal archetype that goes against the acceptable standards of Western society and Western capitalism isn’t good.

And the fact that she humanizes Palestinian children and dares to criticize Zionism makes her a heretic. An enemy of the established order. And it doesn’t matter how soft, gentle, and kind she is.

She is the kind of woman who, in ancient times, would be declared a saint by the church. Looking after the kids no one wants to look after. Humanize the people, society is trying to dehumanize. And it’s always the poor. It’s almost always the poor. Another race, another religion, but almost always the poor. So they hate her for it. She spoils the plan. She humanizes Palestinians. She criticizes Zionism, and she embodies an ancient archetype of what a woman can be, what a woman has the capability of being.

There’s another, even bigger aspect to it. It’s not only humanizing Palestinians and criticizing Zionism while being a successful woman in ways that Western capitalism hates. We need to look at the big things happening right now and see the common thread.

What connects the Gaza Holocaust, Epstein, the shooting at fishermen in the Caribbean, wanting to go to war with Venezuela, and bombing Iran? I’m connecting all of this to Miss Rachel — all of it is the fundamental, defining element. It’s all organized around abuse and sadism.

What Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza is nothing but sadism. What Zionism demands from the world is a license to abuse, torment, and destroy the Palestinians. And what the U.S. is doing to the fishermen in the Caribbean is the same thing. What Epstein did to his victims is the same thing.

And what is capitalism? It’s the same thing. If Zionism has the license to use the international legitimacy, power, money, and connections to abuse and torture and destroy another group of people, then capitalism is the license of people who have a lot of money to abuse people who don’t. Capitalism is not an economic theory. It’s just an ideology that says that very rich people can do whatever they want to poor people. This is all capitalism is.

And in Capitalism we trust! It’s an American religion that must never, ever be challenged.

When Empathy Becomes a Crime.

The nomination of Ms. Rachel as “Antisemite of the Year” is not a story about her; rather, it’s a story about an ideology losing its moral vocabulary. When real antisemites go unchallenged while educators who advocate for universal safety are condemned, the word antisemitism no longer names hatred — it names dissent.

And that transition is dishonest, and it’s dangerous.

When a word designed to protect people is repurposed to protect power, both truth and safety collapse. Clowns who “nominated” Ms. Rachel are petty and insignificant, but her nomination is a warning about what our culture is becoming.

The message is clear: there is a higher cause out there — Zionism, and for that cause, you can disregard all the normal rules of morality.

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Welcome to In Dialogue, the new section I’m launching on Antagolist, where I’ll be speaking with creators, writers, artists, activists, and people whose work helps us understand the world more honestly. These conversations will look at power and culture, yes — but also explore the human experiences beneath everything we’re living through. My hope is that this becomes a space where readers can feel grounded, understood, and less isolated in a world that often asks us to process too much on our own.

My first edition brings you a dialogue with Tiberius, actually, we did a one-on-one with this opener as he wanted to turn the tables on me too; we have become great friends and collaborators over the past two years, and his musings about the western imperial pursuits, liberation, dignity, sanity, moral clarity on his famous Twitter handle helped me regain sanity more times than I care to admit.

Miranda on Tiberius

Miranda: First of all, how are you? I think we don’t give ourselves much credit for how hard it is to exist in this current world right now, especially all of us that are making content to inform and make sense of it all, as opposed to those just consuming information — I feel like we’re on an apocalyptic hamster wheel, exhausted, but we cannot stop; so how are you?

Are you able to find the meaning in your existence, seeing the level of violence, carnage, gashlighting, lawlessness, tyranny, genocide — how do you cope with it all? For me, writing is how I cope. I’ve been running on virtually no sleep for two years, but digging into what’s happening, breaking it down for people’s easy consumption, and sharing that information is the only thing that keeps me sane.

Tiberius: You’ve gotten to the heart of it. There’s a deep helplessness that comes with being at the mercy of massive, corrupt power structures — a feeling that becomes unbearable when those same forces start killing innocent people simply for existing.

It’s always hard to reconcile that helplessness with the everyday trivialities of life, especially in the West’s often absurdly shallow and superficial routines. But the only real relief I’ve ever found for any sense of helplessness — and it really is just a feeling — is action.

Can I end imperialism, colonialism, and apartheid today, alone? Of course not. But I can contribute to the fight, and if enough of us do, then, together, we can. History shows this clearly: the world is littered with the bones of long-dead empires. That hope, that’s what keeps me sane, too.

Miranda: October 2023 and everything that followed created a strange loophole in time — one where everyone who was appalled by what we witnessed, and instantly saw things for what they were, somehow found each other online, even as the algorithm worked against it. I see that as a miracle. Amid all the carnage flashing daily on our phones, it felt as if some mythical hand had connected us all.

I don’t remember exactly when I “found you” online, but even before we ever spoke, your tweets were a lifeline for me. Each morning, I’d wake up with that familiar wave of anxiety and hopelessness creeping in — and then I’d go on your Twitter, read what you’d written that day, and feel a flicker of hope again. Hope in people, in community, in understanding what we’re witnessing, in connecting the dots — and in having the courage to say it out loud. Many people tell me my articles made them feel hopeful, but you were that glimmer of hope and sanity for me.

Tiberius: I can only express gratitude that my words, and yours, have been of some small use to those on our side of the line. Finding you, and others — too many to mention here — revealed to me that there remains, in the belly of the beast, where propaganda is more prevalent than air, a defiant, shared humanity within so many of us.

That’s why our helplessness is undeniably merely a perception. A cry for people of all nationalities, cultures, and religions to be treated with the basic dignities we ourselves enjoy and continue to fight for is built into the foundations of who most of us are. They — the people with their blood-soaked hands on the wheel — spend billions trying to condition us into apathy and indifference, even buying social media platforms to enable their depraved plots. But it won’t work. It can’t work.

Social media landscapes are today’s battlefields, where the virtue upheld by those of us who care about a universal framework of justice stands against the false perception of virtue that sustains the West. That’s why it’s so fundamentally important that we win on this front. So thank you — and thank you to everyone reading who has posted, shared, analyzed, debated with friends and family — all of it. Thank you, and please, don’t stop.

Miranda: Lots of people are speaking now, but at the beginning of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, it was a very lonely place. Not many of us did, and we were constantly harassed, threatened; you were doxxed. How hard was that for you? How did you find the way to continue speaking with all that hardship?

I was numb for the first few days, not gonna lie, when it was clear what Israel intended to commit in Gaza. I connected online with a Jordanian friend who explained to me how important it is for people with Western names in Western countries to speak out for Palestine, as everyone in the Middle East already knows what’s happening. I received that so seriously, like a mission, something I, a Westerner, a Eurocentric white privileged person, must do.

What was your path to being so vocal about it, and from the start? Were you involved before 2023? What tipped you off, if before Oct 7th? For me, it was the irregularities and propaganda around the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 and the grotesque handling of her funeral.

Tiberius: One of the biggest regrets I have about all of this is not making Palestine and other geopolitical tyrannies a bigger cornerstone of my political writing sooner. I came to the party late: I began posting about UK politics after feeling so hopeless and disenfranchised back in 2018 (the feelings had lasted years, decades even), and eventually this led me to bigger, but also more organised critiques of the Western systems. I’ve had my share of problems before that, but that’s no excuse. But even from 2018, I focused mostly on domestic politics. I realise now how big of a mistake that was. I was still involved, but much more on the fringes, having been active with some activist groups earlier, but I was a passenger for the most part as I figured a lot of things out.

Then October 7th happened, and it was evident that this had to become the central part of my efforts. And yes, that led to some pushback I’ve never experienced, no matter how strong my posting was before then. I was publicly calling for revolution — and not the nice kind — long before 2023, with no pushback at all. Now, if I posted some of those things, I’d lose my account, because Zionism will find ways to silence its critics, or at least attempt to. But, as you say yourself, nothing will stop me now. How can I let it, when I’m so privileged to begin with? It’s just not in my DNA to capitulate to the people at the heart of so much wrongdoing.

Miranda: How do you feel about all the people who only started speaking about Palestine well over two years in, when it was safe, to protect their social capital, as they saw the narrative being shaped by those who had spoken from the beginning and had turned the tide?

This might be the biggest disappointment of my life, to see how absolutely deplorable liberal progressives turned out to be on Palestine (PEP: Progressive Except Palestine) and how performative all their “activism” always was. They are the biggest collaborators and upholders of war crimes and fascism, and the reason why this world isn’t progressing.

I know you are also extremely annoyed with this and are trying to dismantle it daily on your Twitter. Why can’t people understand why we criticise and call out the left more than the right? I don’t expect much from the right, and yet all the people with the platforms, be it podcasters, streamers, or online personalities who are raging about Israel’s war crimes, are right-wing. Is that surprising to you?

Tiberius: The Right, at least those who have spoken out, have surprised me — in a good way. It speaks to at least a partial authenticity underlying their politics, in spite of so many things I fundamentally disagree with that they say and do (this doesn’t apply to the section who weaponise this for personal or nefarious ends, of course).

But there’s a large middle section, that encompasses many of the faux-left liberals and self-labelled pragmatics, that are so fundamentally superficial that they operate on pretentiousness and vibes. And calling out the depravity in your own government is perceived as contentious, so the cowards remained silent for so long, now only wearing a pin or saying a few hollow words to leverage the social capital of the turning tide. It’s sickening.

But, as infuriating as it is, the silver lining is that this moment — and Palestine generally — reveals the utter inadequacy of these people. The idols of yesterday are dead. They committed suicide on the alter of their own indifference. This creates a space for a new wave of people to step up and speak out more strongly than ever before — which many on both the right and left are doing.

Miranda: How do you deal with those people who still cannot understand the concept of uniparty working for the same donor class, or as I also like to call them the Epstein class? Why are people so unreceptive to this concept that has been clearly exposed for the past 2 years? How do you explain to them that the uniparty controls the West by constantly forcing us to pick a side—spending all our time raging about Trump on the Left or about trans people on the Right? Are you hopeful that most people will ever realize this dynamic is manufactured and begin working together?

Tiberius: The Epstein class, I like that. That needs to stick. I think this comes back to how attached people become to privilege, and the hesitation to step out of their comfort zone until it’s safe. In history, there has always been a minority that led the charge, that proved the beast can bleed. When people finally see that the monster in the room — a Western hegemony that speaks the language of justice while acting like a comic-book villain — is really just a cluster of pathetic little men clinging to power because they’re terrified of their own shadows, more will step up.

It’s infuriating, frustrating, and mind-numbing, but it’s human nature, I guess. I still grapple with it at times, but that’s essentially where we come in. Caitlin Johnson has a great piece on this where she says her job is to wake as many people from the machine as possible, with the sincere hope that those awakened will follow the long-trod path of fighting for a better, more just world.

Miranda: What was the most disappointing, most devastating thing you discovered or experienced over the past two years? For me, it was realizing just how far legacy media, especially the New York Times, is willing to go to run cover for this genocide.

I spent my entire life honing my writing to fit NYT standards; it was my holy grail, the endgame, the goal I set for myself. I grew up in a war, and like everyone from the Balkans, was forced into geopolitical literacy — naivety was a luxury we were never afforded. I know what media in bed with politicians can do, and even with that background and awareness, this still crushed me. It destroyed my faith to watch how meticulously my beloved NYT manufactured consent through unbearable journalistic malpractice. All the idols have fallen so hard over the past two years, and I don’t think we’ll ever recover from it.

Tiberius: This was definitely a high-water mark, but I have to return to this point because it matters. It’s a giant neon sign showing just how deeply fucked things truly are in the West. That reality is devastating, but the neon sign itself is, in a way, a good thing. We need these institutions to fall so that better, more deserving ones can rise.

Zionism is so deeply entwined with Western media that this was the one thing they were willing to sell themselves for. And they did. They betrayed everything they had built for the Zionists within their ranks, and it has hopefully delivered a fatal blow to whatever remaining legitimacy Western media was still clinging to.

The most devastating thing I experienced is realizing how widespread the banality of evil actually is. I often talk about the human baseline being compassion and care for others, and I fundamentally believe this is the case, and that inflicting harm on others is a perversion of who we are. However, understanding how significant that perversion is, and how deep it runs, was a shock. Maybe that’s because I’m a white man, maybe it’s due to my own privilege — it certainly plays a part — but I wasn’t prepared to see so many people cheering for the slaughter of children. I’ll never get used to that.

Miranda: I still can recite the speech by Julian Assange, about 10 years ago, where he said, “Democracies are always lied into a war. Iraq was a result of lies, Vietnam was the result of a Gulf of Tonkin Incident, a lie. It’s not just the lies by the intelligence analysts; it’s lies by the big media machine. And what is in the big media machine? It’s the various institutions that get too comfortable and too close to the table of power. The very tables that are meant to be reporting on, and policing, and getting into the historic record. Working against that trend and against corrupt, powerful organizations who are producing a distorted perspective through mainstream media vehicle — has been the internet. It has allowed one person with one truth to speak to every single person who wants to hear that truth.”

The Internet has truly killed the military-industrial complex’s business plan, because we became Wikileaks. We killed mainstream media. Regular people started researching, finding information, thinking critically about what we uncovered, and sharing it with anyone who wanted to hear it. We broke the most vicious, hundred-year, billion-dollar hasbara. Are we even aware of what we accomplished with nothing more than a phone in our hands?

Tiberius: No, and Assange was, like he often is, well ahead of the curve here. The media and political class aren’t distinct entities, not really. They’re often called bedfellows, but they’re the same thing. At least in the West. There is a myth of separation that their legitimacy relies on, but the cold truth is that only a very limited window of ideas are allowed to be discussed, and they’re almost exclusively pro-Empire.

I believe some legacy journalists genuinely want to tell the truth, and my earlier point about a universal desire for justice applies here as well. But many of these pieces are tactical concessions, published far too late and in passive voices, meant to offset the deep guilt of being complicit in a vast collection of crimes.

Returning to your question, I don’t think we are aware, but the testaments to it are everywhere, both good and bad. The sheer number of people who now support Palestine — with more young people in the United States supporting Palestine than Israel, of all places — is a massive positive testament to the work that has been done. The purchase of TikTok, and the ongoing slide into fascism and authoritarianism driven by a fragile and vulnerable Zionism, is the flipside of it. The work continues.

Miranda: We’re heading toward a very dubious future, with digital IDs being forced on people in Britain, and freedom of speech increasingly taken away in the United States and around the world to protect the ruling class, their wars, and the billionaire donor class that controls our politicians. The media sits at the table of power instead of reporting on it. In response, people are being forced to organize, protest, boycott, and create their own sources of free information — which is why both of us write, inform, and often challenge those who are still asleep. What are you hoping to achieve with your voice?

Tiberius: History shows there are certain characteristics that tend to precede a successful revolution. Elite divisions, economic crises, betrayed expectations, new moral visions emerging, organised networks outside the mainstream, state paralysis, and a catalytic spark — we are clearly in one of those periods now. Everyone knows things cannot continue like this indefinitely. The desperate efforts of the Epstein class (thanks!) are aimed at accelerating an authoritarian system to control us all, but we also know that will not work, at least not for long.

The question is what comes next, who gets to decide, and whether we can make it something better — significantly better — for everyone. That’s where independent media comes in. An uninformed electorate is ripe for control, sitting ducks. An informed electorate, armed with a sharp understanding of the games our oppressors play and a clear vision of the future we could build together based on justice and liberty, real justice and liberty, gives us a fighting chance. At scale, it gives us the edge, I think.

A good friend once told me that the vehicle delivering change has to embody that change if it hopes to succeed. Responsibile, independent media that rose up in the past two years does exactly that: gives a voice to the unheard, connects with different communities, and works for the benefit of people everywhere. If I can do that, then I can not only offer hope, but provide a platform for more people to step up, speak out, and push back against the helplessness we all feel inside.

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Tiberius on Miranda

Tiberius: You built Antagolist to confront establishment narratives head-on, writing with passion and conviction — you don’t pull punches, and that’s one thing I love about your writing. What is your mission? What space do you want to occupy?

Miranda: My mission is to collect, connect and organize with a collective of minds I’ve encountered on this two-year tour of grand awakening. Everything changed in our lives as we started seeing children’s limbs being blown off with our tax money, we changed our friends circles, many people even their relationships or marriages with people who didn’t seem to comprehend the importance of raising up, but continued to live on vibes, instead of clarity.

I’m adamant about needing all hands on deck; there is so much we can achieve together as a collective, from organizing for change to building movements and amplifying independent media. Reaching people with truth and information is a power that can threaten an establishment that does not work for the benefit of its own citizens, and that’s my mission.

I never really think about what space I should occupy; I just occupy it. I have an analytical mind and I explain things well to others, as you do too; your Twitter is one of the most legendary accounts that exists on that platform. And Antagolist will continue to be a space for analysis, refusal, and the reclaiming of reality.

Tiberius: In your earlier work, you sat at the heart of industries built on illusion: fashion, media, image-making. That’s a sharp contrast from where you are now: turning the lens back on power itself. How did that journey shape your understanding of propaganda and perception? Was there a moment when the facade cracked, or was this a gradual process of seeing the cracks appear and widen, until you couldn’t ignore them anymore?

Miranda: It’s not really a shift — I’ve always been political, regardless of the industry I worked in. I regularly pivoted to geopolitical conflicts while in college; even when I had to write papers on theater or a fashion house, I’d somehow end up connecting it to some war, conflict or political context in general.

I grew up in Croatia and was a teenager during the Croatian War of Independence. When you grow up in the Balkans, politics and conflict are part of your DNA — it’s our original setting. The First World War began there, the Second was fought there brutally, and the ‘90s war defined my generation. I often say that in that part of the world, we’re all walking on bones.

I still have a printout of the New York Times opinion piece on Bill Clinton, “Lucky Charms” from 1999; I keep it in the boxes with old letters, memories, photos, and VHS tapes. I should probably throw it out, but at this point it serves as a reminder of how much I’ve learned about the political theater of deception. My sister always says I’m completely uninterested in every conversation I half-listen to, and the only time I actually turn on is when politics come up. I’m passionate about changing this shithole of a world that’s designed for some people while brutal to others.

As for perception, I’ve worked in PR and marketing, which taught me how much propaganda is built into everyday consumerism, not to mention the ways people are persuaded to accept wars. That’s why I want to use everything I’ve learned to inform people, demystify the manipulation, and help anyone who is open to seeing clearly.

Tiberius: When you look at where we currently are — the censorship, the widespread collapse of trust, the open authoritarianism, the normalisation of dehumanising rhetoric — what feels different about this moment? Could it be just another cycle of decay that leads to a course-correction, with no real change in direction, or the point where the system finally loses control of its crooked narrative?

Miranda: Well, that’s up to us, isn’t it? You saw what the Italian dockworkers did when the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was intercepted? Coordinated disruption in all major cities, and forced their government to retract statements, change policy. We need more angry people, more organizing, and less complacency.

What feels different about this moment is that we’ve reached a point where our governments know that we know what they’re doing. This isn’t 2003, when it was easier to lie us into a war without social media; this time they’re doing it in plain sight. Our government is occupied, it doesn’t work for our benefit, and the establishment running this show needs to be dismantled and guillotine dusted back from our basements.

Gaza opened everyone’s eyes. We cannot waste it. All those people in Palestine cannot die for nothing. They awakened us all, and we must push and organize to dismantle this system.

Tiberius: You’ve seen how narratives are manufactured from both the inside and the outside. What do you think people misunderstand most about the perception being managed by the existing media architecture? Is propaganda mainly about what is said, or about what never makes it through the filter? Is it top-down, or is it a culture of self-censorship because the rewards for kissing the ring, and the punishments for spitting on it, are so great?

Miranda: I really think people are just dumbed down and complacent with capitalism. The media is constantly banging the importance of making money on you; achieving fame, recognition, beauty, status — it sends you on a wild goose chase for things you’ll never attain, instead of encouraging you to demand a dignified life for everyone.

I often see girlfriends on social media posting the most idiotic takes, especially after Mamdani won the NY mayoral election. It’s always money, cars, travel, events, snapshots from expensive restaurants, paired with dramatic captions like, “Goodbye New York, dark times are coming.” They are politically illiterate and civically uninformed, and they’ve been dumbed down by mainstream media convincing them that this man will bring poverty. The reality is they live paycheck to paycheck, and their attachment to capitalism is purely aspirational, but completely misunderstood. They think capitalism means I’ll marry someone rich, as if that’s an economic ideology rather than a wish.

Mainstream media is heavily assisting the establishment in deceiving people this way.

Tiberius: Telling the truth has become a radical act — especially when the truth itself is being algorithmically managed by social media tycoons that are openly in support of an active genocide. As media creators, what responsibility do we carry? Where’s the line between provocation and precision?

Miranda: We carry all the responsibility. All of us who decided we cannot stay silent about these many atrocities funded with our money. We are the WikiLeaks now, and I’m extremely serious about my role in fighting the media machine, making cracks, and letting the truth out.

I worked on Zohran Mamdani’s election campaign, and it’s the best example I can give you. We were organized like a small, disciplined army; everyone knew what needed to be done at every point in the day, and we knew exactly what kind of content to put out to counter mainstream media manipulation. Our job was to get the message out before they could distort it. Zohran gave us access no one else had, and it became a collaboration of policy, ideas, and accuracy working in perfect unison, led by a once-in-a-generation smart, capable, charming, caring, authentic human being. And we managed to carry him from 1% to victory.

People don’t fully grasp the power we collectively hold. Donald Trump threatened New Yorkers with blocking federal funding if we voted for Mamdani, even threatened to send the National Guard — and we basically said fuck off and voted with our conscience. And I think what you saw in the Oval Office when he met with Zohran was respect. That bitch was fully impressed with our game. We outplayed the billionaire donors, we carried the message, and we beat the media machine.

Tiberius: People often say the bottleneck to change is money, politics, or apathy. But what if it’s the absence of honest media — a ‘big media machine’ that sits ‘too close to the table of power’, as Assange put it, where an honest, free press should be? Is the real barrier to liberation not the fact that Empire now controls not only the information we receive, but the platforms on which we receive it, and even the very language through which we think?

Miranda: Mainstream media owned by the billionaire donor class is definitely the barrier to liberation. The Western Empire has a stranglehold on the truth, and I really don’t understand why the Global South allows it, instead of creating alternatives to this blatant weaponization of information.

I read a great article about it by BettBeat Media, where they argue that “The Global South’s failure to develop alternative information infrastructure represents a catastrophic strategic blindness.” Everyone should read this article, it’s one of the most important analyses of the ailments of the society, caused by all of us allowing the enemy to have a total control over our communication.

All their points are so great, they are stressing the importance of reclaiming reality, reminding us information sovereignty is as important as economic sovereignty, and that narrative independence is a prerequisite to political independence.

“The machine is not invincible. It simply appears so because we have forgotten how to fight it. The first step is refusing to mistake its projections for reality, its manipulations for truth, its violence for justice. The second is building something better. The third is never, under any circumstances, allowing them to make us forget what we have seen. The dead children of Gaza are not misinformation. They are the truth the machine cannot tolerate, and therefore the truth around which resistance must organize. Their memory demands nothing less than the complete dismantling of the apparatus that made their murder possible—and profitable.”

We simply need to work toward the goal of reclaiming reality, and that is why you are here, reading this.

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There’s no greater paradox on earth than the week(end) of Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday in America. It’s an unparalleled showcase of the nation’s essence, steeped in hypocrisy, morbidity, and violence. Nowhere else does the contradiction emerge more starkly than on a day meant for giving thanks and reflecting on gratitude, only to give way, as the weekend comes, to a chaotic celebration of consumerism and excess.

This year’s Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday feel especially jarring in the shadow of two years of genocide, displacement, and deliberate starvation unfolding on our phones — followed by a fake “ceasefire” and a mainstream media apparatus actively creating cover so those violations can continue.

We’re celebrating a day, a weekend, a holiday rooted in deliberate misinformation and the genocide of Native Americans — right after witnessing two years of a livestreamed genocide unfold on our phones, followed by a so-called “ceasefire” that ceased no fire, during which 342 Palestinians were killed, including 67 children, and 875 were wounded.

It’s hard to watch the Thanksgiving parade, and all the attempts to rewrite history with gratitude lists or “land acknowledgments” over turkey — the “friendly feast” narrative, designed to whitewash colonization, violence, and mass murder into a peaceful, benign story.

As if that weren’t enough, while the compassionate, clear-minded world supports the BDS, Thanksgiving is followed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This consumerist frenzy stands in stark contrast to Native American spirituality, reverence for creation, environmental stewardship, and our basic human need for communion with nature and with one another.

Colonial damage is far greater than Thanksgiving.

But it endures as a symbol of colonialism, nauseatingly romanticized, yet rooted in the very foundations of settler colonialism. It’s not the primary act of colonialism, but it perpetuates a distorted view of history, obscuring the true scope of colonial violence.

The American settler-colonial model has served as a blueprint for other colonial powers. Its unprecedented success in establishing a settler society while marginalizing Indigenous populations is unmatched in scale. Now, Israel, in a cynical attempt to avoid scrutiny, argues that if America could do it, why can’t they?

We’ve witnessed two years of the first livestreamed genocide unfolding before our eyes, as ICE raids and state-sponsored terror crept into our reality. Our Western governments and their propagandists lie, fund, support, and justify atrocities at home and overseas. The history told by the West, from its very beginning, is a series of distorted, whitewashed, and romanticized lies.

We have to keep telling these truths.

Whether it’s the past or present, the only path forward is through unapologetic, radical truth, repeated relentlessly. We must expose lies, share them, and open as many eyes as possible. The education system is rigged in favor of the establishment, and history books reflect the bias of the victors. As Julian Assange warned, social media has the power to change these narratives, which we have proven with our relentless posting about Palestine:

“Working against corrupt, powerful organizations who are producing a distorted perspective through mainstream media vehicle — has been the internet. It has allowed one person with one truth to speak to every single person who wants to hear that truth.”

The livestreamed genocide in Gaza and the unspeakable horrors inflicted on a civilian population, funded and justified by the entire West, have laid bare the corruption, insincerity, and manipulation of our governments. The situation is so dire that we no longer resemble a functioning society, but a “transnational security elite that is busy carving up the world using our tax money” — another classic Julian.

Today, we are WikiLeaks.

Instead of living in a humane, civilized, and democratic society, we find ourselves forced to take on the responsibilities of our government, police, and media, much like the people of Amsterdam, exactly a year ago, who had to step in and defend themselves from Israeli football thugs rampaging around their city — while Dutch authorities failed to protect their own citizens.

Julian, again, explains this concept:

“To combat the elite we must not petition, we must take it over, we must form our own networks of strength and mutual value which can challenge those strengths and self-interested values of the warmongers.

When we understand that wars come about as a result of lies peddled to the British public the American public and the public all over Europe and other countries, then who are the war criminals? It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists.

Journalists are war criminals. While one might think that should lead us to a state of despair, that the reality around us is constructed by liars; it should also lead us to an optimistic understanding — because if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by the truth.

So that is our task, and it is your task — go and get the truth, get into the ballpark, get the ball, and give it to us, and we’ll spread it all over the world.”

Let’s start with debunking Thanksgiving myths.

Children in schools have been taught a Thanksgiving myth: friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, share a meal with them, and then disappear. They handed off America to white people so they could create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity, and Christianity for the rest of the world to profit.

That’s the story — a tale of Native people quietly conceding to colonialism. It’s a bloodless narrative and an extension of Manifest Destiny, the belief that white Americans were divinely ordained to expand across North America. This ideology justified westward expansion and fueled policies like the Trail of Tears, forced relocations, violent conflicts, and the systematic destruction of Native cultures, all cloaked in the language of destiny and divine right.

Manifest Destiny / We Are The Chosen People?

In 200-300 years, when all of us eyewitnesses are gone, along with our children to whom we’ll pass down the stories of the first live-streamed genocide in history, will Israelis invent warm, fuzzy tales about sharing falafels with Indigenous Palestinians in Gaza, before the latter peacefully decided to leave, so Israelis could create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity, and Zionism, for the rest of the world to profit?

The history of the West repeats itself, over and over. And it continues to do so, even in 2025, because we’ve grown complacent. We don’t confront power as fiercely or as consistently as we should; we’ve absorbed their gaslighting, their narratives, and the consumerism designed to keep us compliant. Instead of speaking radical truths whenever and wherever they’re needed, we’ve let ourselves be muted.

The people of Palestine have woken us up from this propaganda-induced coma, a term coined by Caitlin Johnstone, a much-needed voice tirelessly working to lead us out of the matrix. She also chose these apt, albeit fighting, words:

“The deck is stacked so heavily against truth, peace, and justice. You will watch powerlessly as your government backs genocides, starts wars, and unleashes nightmare after nightmare upon the global south.

We live in a tyrannical dystopia that’s driving humanity to its doom, and we need to wake up from the propaganda indoctrination and egoic delusions which keep us complying with the status quo so that we can use the power of our numbers to overthrow our oppressors and create a healthy world.”

A radical truth at every turn must become everyone’s mission.

The “First Thanksgiving” didn’t unfold as history tells you. The Wampanoag tribe taught the English settlers (Pilgrims) how to grow crops, leading to a successful harvest. However, the Wampanoag weren’t invited to a “peaceful feast”, otherwise known as the First Thanksgiving. In fact, 90 armed Wampanoag warriors arrived at the feast after hearing gunshots, coming not to celebrate but to protect their people.

This occurred only months after the Pilgrims had robbed their graves and stolen food meant for Native families. The so-called “First Thanksgiving” marked the beginning of violent conflicts, with the colonists later seizing land and imprisoning, enslaving, and executing Native people.

While the legacy of colonialism spans centuries, Thanksgiving perpetuates a narrative that oversimplifies and sanitizes the violence and dispossession endured by Indigenous peoples. Are you even aware of the scale of devastation the European settlers inflicted on Native American populations? It’s one of the most depraved, evil, and violent crimes in history. And what stings the most — it worked. It was successful.

Look at the numbers:

While Americans celebrate and indulge in turkey feasts, Native Americans mourn this day. Since 1970, many Native Americans have participated in the National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving Day, often held at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, to commemorate their ancestors and advocate for indigenous rights.

For many Native Americans, Thanksgiving marks the beginning of their oppression, the loss of their land, and the erasure of their culture.

Witnessing a livestreamed genocide for two years, with daily massacres landing on your phone as soon as you open your eyes in the morning, and the reality that America’s past violence mirrors what Israel is currently attempting, makes Thanksgiving and its associated history feel even more nauseating to participate in.

I saw Native Americans at every anti-genocide protest I attended. I’ve seen pictures of them standing in solidarity, in other cities across America. There is a unique bond between Native Americans and Indigenous Palestinians. They understand the pain of cultural erasure, having witnessed it firsthand, while the same attempt is now being made against Palestinians. The parallels are unavoidable, especially since the erasure of Native Americans succeeded, whereas, for 77 years, Palestinians have miraculously resisted erasure.

“We are not Red Indians.”

In his last interview in 2004, Yasser Arafat reflected upon his achievements. Among them was the fact that “the Palestine case was the biggest problem in the world” and that Israel had “failed to wipe us out.” As a final mark of that success, he added the declarative, comparative, and final point of distinction: “We are not the Red Indians, we will not go into the museum. We are a live people with a live cause, that we will carry with us until the end, until victory.”

Twenty years later, Palestine is still the moral center of the world.

For 77 years and counting, the plight of the Palestinian people has remained at a standstill, and that’s purposeful, as maintaining the status quo is necessary for the existence of the state of Israel.

But what’s truly fascinating is that Yasser Arafat got his wish: “For our movement, armed struggle means waging a mass revolutionary war. Therefore, the first stage of our work is to attract the masses. The first thing is to attract the masses of our people and make them live in a revolutionary atmosphere.”

As The Guardian pointed out ten years ago, on the 10th anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death: “He saw himself as part of a global movement and as a member of an international revolutionary fraternity against injustice — part of the global struggle of oppressed peoples for freedom and liberation.”

Keffiyeh Arafat wore came to symbolize revolution, not just the Palestinian struggle.

And it’s up to us, the global community, to never let the Palestinian people go into the museum. The struggle for Palestinian liberation is a fight against all forms of oppression.

Just as Thanksgiving has been rebranded into a “friendly feast” narrative, whitewashing colonization, violence, and mass murder into a benign story, Israel has spent 77 years attempting the same erasure of the Palestinian people, their culture, identity, sovereignty, and their land. We must resist the distorted version of history that allows Israel to claim the mantle of the “only democracy in the Middle East” and the “most moral army in the world,” obscuring the full scope of their shocking, barbaric violence toward the entire group of people whose land they covet.

We are a live people with a live cause, that we will carry with us until the end, until victory.” — Yasser Arafat

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Until Monday night, you could have optimistically believed that the UN was the most impotent organization in the world. I’ve endearingly called them content creators for the past two years. I truly saw no difference between them and an influencer trying to sell you the newest face cream, promising it will make you younger if you just keep applying it.

The UN is the most useless organization on earth; I’ve said it repeatedly. They show up to file reports, tally the dead, and archive what was already allowed to happen. Their entire job seems to be documenting the atrocities, never stopping them. Don’t even get me started on the veto power.

But, see that’s just the thing. They aren’t useless. The only catch is, they aren’t useful to you or me, or the Palestinian, Sudanese, or the Congolese people — they are useful to the Western establishment. They’re a crucial puzzle of the imperial project. They operate as partners of the Empire. And what they did on Monday effectively makes them part of the crime scene.

The resolution.

On Monday night, the UN Security Council adopted a US resolution detailing the mandate for the Gaza International Stabilization Force outlined in Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan.

Per Reuters, the text of the resolution says member states can take part in the Trump-chaired Board of Peace, envisioned as a transitional authority that would oversee “reconstruction and economic recovery of Gaza.” It also authorizes the international stabilization force, which would ensure a “process of demilitarizing Gaza, including by decommissioning weapons and destroying military infrastructure.”

This resolution was adopted 13-0-2; 13 countries voted in favor of it, 0 voted against it, and 2 abstained (Russia and China).

Demilitarizing Gaza.

These jokers really expect us to accept their morbid idea — that an occupied population without sovereignty, without a military, and without freedom of movement, one that has just been subjected to the most brutal genocidal campaign by the two most powerful psychopathic powers, is supposed to demilitarize?

Hamas, naturally, said — no way, Jose. In a statement, they reiterated that it will not disarm and argued that its fight against Israel is legitimate resistance, potentially pitting the resistance group against the international force authorized by this resolution.

A peace deal, anyone?

And what was Israel doing in the days leading to the United States passing the resolution that would come in and help them achieve military goals they themself couldn’t achieve for the past two years against the population in flip-flops, with homemade weapons?

On Sunday, per Al Jazeera, “Israel was engaged in a last-ditch bid to change the wording of a United Nations Security Council resolution on the next phase of United States President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan that was recently amended to mention a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood.”

Please mention the two-state solution one more time to me, I dare you.

On Sunday, Netanyahu repeated to his cabinet that his opposition to a Palestinian state had “not changed one bit”. This was one day before the United Nations Security Council would vote on the US-drafted resolution, which would mandate a transitional administration and an international stabilisation force (ISF) in Gaza.

Straight out of Shakespeare.

Iago, Lady Macbeth, and Richard III would be ashamed of what Netanyahu and his government pulled in the last 48 hours to prevent Palestinian statehood before the United Nations Security Council vote on Monday.

He engaged in a last-minute diplomatic push to alter the draft resolution, which the US had changed to include more defined language about Palestinian self-determination under pressure from Arab and Muslim countries expected to contribute troops to the International Stabilisation Force.

The draft now says that “conditions may be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” after reforms to the Palestinian Authority are “faithfully carried out and Gaza redevelopment has advanced”.

Do you finally realize the scope of this diplomatic farce?

All of you insincere Islamophobes who still parrot the — but Palestinians are refusing any peace deals and offers to have a state, are you finally there? Did you arrive at the Netanyahu pulling Shakespearian chess moves for decades to prevent any coexistence, like ever?

And this is where the United Nations comes in as his tool. Instead of holding him and the state of Israel accountable for the war crimes the entire world saw on their phones, livestreamed, they came out with this vote to legitimize this genocide, and the occupation of the Palestinian people.

Not much different from what the United Nations did in November 1947, when it proposed the partition of Palestine. This is simply a continuation of their original sin.

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The resistance factions came out, naturally, to call these efforts “a new attempt to impose another form of occupation on our land and people, and to legitimise foreign trusteeship”.

Palestinian voices and aspirations for sovereignty have been fully sidelined by the farce and the spectacle of Trump’s Gaza plan, which we knew would happen from its launch. The villains of the world, deciding the destiny of a nation they just bombarded to oblivion, allowing no Palestinians at the table, having a say in their own reality.

Al Jazeera also reports, as of late Sunday night, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions called on Algeria, a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, to reject the plan for stabilisation forces to be deployed in Gaza.

“We direct a sincere and fraternal appeal to the Algerian Republic, government and people, to continue adhering to its principled positions supporting Palestine, and its steadfast rejection of any projects targeting Gaza’s identity and our people’s right to self-determination.”

Algeria denied their plea.

Instead, they raised their hand and voted yes on this shameful resolution.

A book could be written about the scale of betrayal the Arab world’s leaders continue to inflict on the Palestinian people. It’s unbearable to watch.

The people in Gaza just endured two years of the most brutal assault, genocide, starvation of its people, fighting the entire Western empire and their most sophisticated weaponry — stateless people without sovereignty and military, and Israel still could not defeat them. The most powerful army in the Middle East, backed and funded by the biggest superpower on earth, could not defeat these orphans from defending their land.

Instead, they needed a resolution passed by the United Nations Security Council, so that the international community could send in the international boots on the ground, to impose Israeli goals — the ones they failed to secure militarily.

The world is literally being asked to police the Palestinian people for Israel!

Russia.

Russia had a golden chance here. The world is finally waking up to the lies — about Israel, about Ukraine, about the brutality of the American Empire. They had a rare opportunity to veto this humiliating resolution and show the world exactly where the violence is coming from, and which side of the hemisphere keeps failing at even the bare minimum of diplomacy.

In the weeks leading up to this vote, Russia was circulating its own resolution to rival the US version, offering stronger language on Palestinian statehood and stressing that the occupied West Bank and Gaza must be joined as a contiguous state under the Palestinian Authority.

They did not insist on their resolution, and they did not use this opportunity to veto the US resolution; instead, both Russia and China cowardly abstained.

Best part? Israel and Turkiye are supposed to be the two countries mediating this resolution on the ground in Gaza. Israel has already said it will not accept Turkiye, a key Gaza ceasefire mediator, having any role on the ground.

This means Israel, a country that has just committed a genocide on these people, will be the ones mediating this “peace deal!”

This farce is hard to swallow even for those least informed; this is like putting Hitler in charge of peace for the Jews in 1945.

Shameful. Humiliating.

Russia’s failure to use this moment to advance its own resolution, or at the very least veto this shameful US draft that renders Palestinian self-determination impossible, raises the question: in practice, how are Russia and China any different from Washington and Tel Aviv?

Sam Husseini tweeted what was on my mind, reading this unfortunate turn of events:

China and Russia abstained. All other US puppet United Nations Security Council members voted yes.

Mark today in your calendars folks: The start of a new imperial crusade.

Craig Mokhiber, a former United Nations human rights official and a specialist in international human rights law, posted a sobering tweet:

“The UN Security Council has just adopted the horrific US resolution with 13 yes votes and 2 abstentions. Not a single member of the Council had the courage, principle, or respect for international law to vote against this US-Israel colonial outrage.

This proposal has been rejected by Palestinian civil society and factions, and defenders of human rights and international law everywhere. 17 November 2025 is a day of shame for the United Nations, and for governments around the world on their knees before the US empire and its violent Israeli client. But the struggle for Palestinian freedom will continue undeterred, with or without them.”

Board of Peace.

Another important detail about this “peace resolution” for you to know. Drop Site News reminds that this vote installs Jared Kushner and Tony Blair’s concept for a foreign “Board of Peace” as Gaza’s governing authority, giving it control over the enclave’s resources and borders. The resolution authorizes the deployment of an International Stabilization Force to disarm the resistance in Gaza. It also creates a Palestinian executive committee for day-to-day administration and ties Israeli withdrawal to Hamas disarmament, with progress reports required every six months to the Security Council.

What to even say?

Hope you now understand that the United Nations’ purpose is not to uphold international law or bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice. Its purpose is to legitimize colonization, genocide, and imperial pursuits. After all, the UN was created to formalize and recognize the state of Israel on top of the existing Palestinian population. We should never forget its origins.

If the United Nations were actually doing what its mandate claims, it would place neutral forces in Gaza, work with the Palestinian resistance to secure the State of Palestine, disarm Israel, and remove all its nuclear weapons.

Great tweet by Sultan Khan:

The UN just wrapped the US occupation plan in blue flags and called it “peace.” A foreign council to rule Gaza, foreign soldiers to disarm the occupied, and Israel leaves only when Palestinians kneel.
This isn’t peacekeeping.
It’s empire management.
It’s genocide with official paperwork.

I want to leave you with this excellent United Nations Villain’s Origin Story, in case this article didn’t make it clear enough. This analysis is by a brilliant geopolitical, historical buff, Queniform. Please read this:

The UN Was Born as an Instrument of Partition. Today, It Returns to Its First Task.

Today, the UN approved an “international stabilization force” for Gaza - a polite phrase for an occupation army.

Strip the diplomatic veneer and the meaning is blunt: the world is being asked to send its own soldiers to finish what Israel’s armed groups failed to do. An international battalion to impose Israeli goals. Foreign sons dying for a land grab.

This is not a rupture.

This is continuity.

This is the UN returning to its original assignment.

From the Beginning, the UN Was the Administrative Wing of the Zionist Project.

The mythology says the UN was born to maintain peace after World War II. The record says something else. In 1947, the UN Partition Plan carved Palestine with a pen stroke so violent it still echoes. Jews, who owned only 7% of the land, were suddenly “awarded” 56%.

Not through history, not through purchase, not through population, not through consent — but through a vote orchestrated by Western powers already invested in a settler state to secure their imperial corridor between the Mediterranean and the Gulf.

This was no act of impartial global governance.

It was the handover ceremony of British colonialism to its chosen successor.

Britain had failed to break Palestinian resistance — even after the 1936 revolt, even after collective punishments, executions, home demolitions, curfews, and martial law.

So the mandate was passed to a new structure: the United Nations.

The partition plan wasn’t peacekeeping. It was dispossession in legal dress.

2025: The UN Returns to Form.

Fast-forward.

Israel’s army has exhausted itself in Gaza.

The global public has seen the atrocities and refuses to legitimize them.

So a familiar mechanism is revived:

When colonial violence reaches its limit, the UN steps in to launder the next phase.

Under “international mandate,” the same outcome is pursued:

The fragmentation of Palestine.

The containment of its people.

The protection of Israeli expansion.

The neutralization of resistance.

It is the Mandate system without the British flag.

It is the Partition Plan without the word “partition.”

Israel failed to conquer Gaza.

So now the “international community” is being marshalled to do it for them — to impose the political arrangement Israel could not secure militarily.

The World Is Being Asked to Police Palestine for Israel.

Make no mistake:

Occupation does not become legitimate when the uniform changes color.

An international army that enters Gaza against the will of its people is not peacekeeping — it is subcontracted apartheid.

A globalized settler-colonial force.

And its task is clear: to stabilize the conditions for another century of dispossession.

The UN’s Mandate Has Never Changed.

From 1947 to today, the institution has been consistent:

It did not stop the Nakba — it administered it.

It did not reverse the land theft — it codified it.

It did not restrain the settler state — it offered diplomatic scaffolding to build one.

It did not protect Palestinians — it provided procedural cover for their erasure.

What we are witnessing today is not an aberration.

It is the system functioning as designed.

The tragedy is not that the UN failed.

The tragedy is that people still expect the UN to be something it never was.

Its core purpose - from partition to peacekeeping mandates to today’s occupation force — has been to translate Western strategic interests into international legitimacy.

And Palestine has always been the proving ground of that architecture.

Hopeless?

Don’t be. Subjugated, occupied people never achieved their freedom through diplomacy. The path to freedom will be forged by the people of the land, not by resolutions. Hamas will not disarm, and we need to sharpen our resistance to the Zionist grip on politics, culture, and the imperial machinery that sustains it. We can’t give up. Keep fighting!

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