Trump will do many evil things but none will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism.
Biden at the White House. (Adam Schulz/White House Photo)
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
TikTok is back in the U.S. after a brief shutdown, reportedly because Trump pledged to suspend the Biden administration’s ban.
A Gaza ceasefire has also finally emerged due to pressure from Donald Trump after Joe Biden stalled for 15 months, and NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration plans on pressuring the Israeli government throughout negotiations to establish a permanent peace beyond the 42 days scheduled for the first phase of the agreement.
Remember this: it’s not that Trump is good, it’s that Democrats are just that bad. Biden’s completely unconditional facilitation of Israeli atrocities has actually been the exception rather than the norm among U.S. presidents, as Trita Parsi explained in Foreign Policy last April.
From what we are seeing so far, Trump is just returning things to their horrible standard baseline.
Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism.
The Democratic Party plays just as crucial a role in promoting the tyranny and abuses of the U.S. empire as the Republican Party does, and it is nonsensical to think of either of them as a lesser evil. The empire itself must end.
It’s possible that Trump’s term will constitute another swing from Bush-level depravity to Obama-level depravity.
It isn’t normal for the U.S. empire to be as openly depraved as it has been in Gaza. Normally its evils are much more well-disguised, because it is in the empire’s interests to preserve its image in the eyes of the western public.
You only see the really in-your-face acts of monstrosity when a coalition of forces within the swamp are able to seize on a rare opportunity to shove them through, as we saw in the wake of 9/11 and again in the wake of Oct. 7.
The rest of the time, the empire likes to be a lot subtler about its abuses, like it was during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration.
Starvation sanctions.
Staging coups.
Secretly arming proxy forces.
Drone assassinations.
Covert ops.
It prefers these means over the Hulk Smash ground invasions like we saw during George W. Bush’s first term, and the overt genocidal atrocities like we saw during Biden’s.
The Zionists, war profiteers and empire managers seized on the rare opportunity presented by Oct. 7 combined with a senile lifelong Zionist in the White House to push through agendas in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon that they had wanted to push through for years, but they greatly damaged the empire’s propaganda interests in the process.
We can expect the empire to try to move its ugliness out of the spotlight as swiftly as possible in the coming years and attempt to restore its false public image as a force of good in the world, while continuing to advance its psychopathic agendas in sneakier ways.
Mitt Romney admits that Israel had congress ban TikTok to keep the American people from learning about the genocide taking place in Gaza.
This is treason and Romney should be punished accordingly. pic.twitter.com/3T6s0ecnry
— Stew Peters (@realstewpeters) January 19, 2025
So young Americans can take the same lessons from the TikTok ban that they’ve taken from Gaza: that they live in a tyrannical dystopia, and that the Democratic Party is not their friend.
To be clear, when you hear people saying that U.S. lawmakers voted to ban TikTok in order to shut down criticism of Israel among young people, it’s not some antisemitic conspiracy theory; they have openly admitted that this was in fact what they were doing.
Legislators like Chris Murphy, Mitt Romney, Mike Gallagher and Mike Lawler are all on record saying they supported the ban because of the prevalence of pro-Palestinian content on the platform.
In the meantime, One of the most politically interesting developments in recent days has been Americans flocking to the Chinese app Red Note in response to the looming TikTok ban and interacting with people in China for the first time in their lives with the help of translation technology.
If you had asked me last month what country I wish ordinary Americans would start communicating with at mass scale, I would have said China without a moment’s hesitation. If this keeps up it’s going to cause some real problems for the empire propagandists down the track.
This is HUGE. Red note is adding auto translate on all posts in order to encourage even more dialogue between Americans and the Chinese
What does it say that China is encouraging dialogue between America and China while the American ruling class wants to shut it down? pic.twitter.com/rT9BjvUXjV
— Revolutionary Blackout? (@SocialistMMA) January 19, 2025
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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