In Dialogue: Tiberius and the Importance of Reclaiming Reality

Narrative independence is a prerequisite to political independence.

Illustration by Aleksandra Gavrilovic for Antagolist

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.

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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