Anyone who has had the misfortune of knowing a manipulative narcissist has seen all these patterns before. The self-centeredness. The hypocrisy. The horrific abuse, followed by collapsing into blubbering victimhood the second the abuse is called out.

Caitlin Johnstone

July 2, 2025

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

 

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My God Israel supporters are exhausting. I’ve never gotten used to it.

“Wahh, Zohran Mamdani wants to murder Jews!”

“Wahh, the musician hurt the IDF’s feelings!”

Shut up. Shut up. Shut the whole entire fuck up. Everyone is sick of your bullshit.

There is a genocide happening. A genocide. Babies are being starved. IDF soldiers are telling the Israeli press that they’re being ordered to massacre desperately hungry civilians at aid sites. There are vast stretches of the Gaza Strip that now look like the surface of the moon. Trump and Netanyahu are openly working to purge the Palestinian territory of Palestinians so the land can be permanently taken from them.

Your feelings don’t matter. The world does not revolve around you and your feelings. Your emotional response to whatever made up nonsense you’re choosing to have a melodramatic tantrum about today is completely irrelevant. Every single Palestinian who died today, individually, matters infinitely more than every feeling you’ve ever felt about every imaginary phantom you’ve pretended to feel threatened by.

Anyone who has had the misfortune of knowing a manipulative narcissist has seen all these patterns before. The self-centeredness. The hypocrisy. The horrific abuse, followed by collapsing into blubbering victimhood the second the abuse is called out. The aggressive efforts to control the narrative and frame all critics and rivals as evil monsters. It’s a very familiar playbook.

My hope for our world is that we one day become so emotionally and psychologically healthy that such cynical manipulations stand out like a white cloud against a deep blue sky. That we become so caring, understanding and supportive of our fellow human beings that the needful get everything they require to lead a fulfilling life, while sociopathy and psychopathy become as alienating and disadvantageous as chronic schizophrenia is today. That we become so tender-hearted that genocide can never rear its ugly head on this planet again, and all the abusive dynamics which made the Gaza holocaust possible fade away like darkness in the rising sun.

 

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The real story is not that one musical act said “death to the IDF” at Glastonbury Festival, the real story is that a huge number of acts spoke out in support of Palestine at Glastonbury Festival. They’re just making the story about one of those acts hoping you won’t notice that supporting Palestine and opposing Israel is what’s popular and cool now. 

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It’s so funny when people accuse me of “bias” when I talk about Gaza. Like oh no I’m not being neutral enough about the active genocide, I’m so sorry.

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Israel is making it abundantly clear that it’s going to keep doing everything it can to instigate a war between the US and Iran, and the Washington swamp is crawling with war sluts who are pushing in the same direction. Trump’s cabinet is full of Iran hawks, and Trump himself has publicly confessed to being bought and owned by the world’s richest Israeli, Miriam Adelson.

Israel will not stop pushing for a full-scale American regime change war until it gets it. It will keep pushing and pushing and pushing, because there’s nothing stopping it from doing so. It has too much to gain and too little to lose, since the political layout in Official Washington and the parapolitical layout in the unelected deep state largely aligns with this goal as well. The warmongers will keep trying, and if they fail next time, they will try again.

Nobody with any real power is doing anything to permanently shut this warmongering down and lock it away; at most they’re just postponing it a bit until the next moment of demented brinkmanship occurs.

What this means is that anyone in the United States who doesn’t want this war to happen needs to get much, much more hostile toward all the elements that are seeking to bring it about. Support for Israel needs to become politically toxic. A complete abandonment of Washington’s status quo approach to the middle east must be demanded. A robust peace movement needs to emerge.

The people in power aren’t pushing back against this mad shove toward war, so the pushback is going to have to come from the American people themselves. It will not happen from the top down, so it’s going to have to come from the bottom up, or it’s not going to come at all. That’s the only thing that will stop this looming nightmare from being inflicted upon our world.

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