America has bases in 80 countries.
Think about what it means to need 800 bases across 80 countries to feel secure.
This is not the behavior of an invincible power.
This is the behavior of a power so terrified of a world that organizes itself without its permission that it has planted itself, at enormous expense, on every continent, in every strategic geography, in every chokepoint and sea lane and border region where independence might otherwise take root.
Invincibility does not require this.
Invincibility does not need to be everywhere.
Invincibility does not spend trillions maintaining a presence in 80 countries to prevent the world from discovering what it would look like without that presence.
The 800 bases are not evidence of strength.They are evidence of what strength is terrified of.A world that has noticed it can function without asking permission.
This is a huge scandal: The campaign of Brazil's far-right, US-backed presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro paid a US company that sells an AI system for manipulating elections.
This is a huge scandal: The campaign of Brazil's far-right, US-backed presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro paid a US company that sells an AI system for manipulating elections.
Bolsonaro's right-wing party also paid the US company, which maps voters and makes fake social media accounts to spread disinformation online targeting crucial voters.
This revelation comes after Meta admitted that it censored the accounts of left-wing candidate Lula da Silva and promoted Bolsonaro on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
This is the source (only in Portuguese): https://intercept.com.br/2026/10/16/flavio-pagou-empresa-eua-sistema-manipular-eleicoes/
During a speech at the Las Vegas Sphere on Saturday, Metallica frontman James Hetfield took aim at artists like Macklemore for making political statements about the genocide in Gaza during their concerts.
“I just gotta say, Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit, okay?” said Hetfield, adding, “We’re here to forget about all the outside shit, okay? Metallica’s agenda is love, energy and heavy music, baby!”
Defenders of imperial status quo apathy like Matt Taibbi are presently defending Hetfield from the backlash his comments are receiving, arguing that art exists on some kind of magical higher plane that transcends such trivial “political” concerns like whether or not genocide is bad.
I have no respect for this idea that art is somehow separable from politics. ALL art is political when you live in a genocidal dystopia, because all your expression exists in relation to our freakish civilization.
If you were on fire, any action OR inaction on your part would necessarily be happening in relationship to the urgency of your situation. If you chose to stand there strumming your guitar while the flames consumed your body, nobody would try to argue that your artistic expression in that moment was somehow separable from your failure to address your urgent need for extinguishment. Your inaction would be a self-destructive act, and your final song would have been about burning to death — whether you sang anything about fire or not.
In exactly the same way, western artists who ignore the abuses of the western empire are taking a political position and sharing a political message. They might be singing about romance, or dancing, or the Sandman, but their actual message is, “Here are those circuses you ordered, you vapid NPCs, you mindless empire automatons, you shambling zombies consuming the flesh of the third world. Distract yourselves from the burning ecosystem, from the screams of Gaza, from the suffering of the poor and the marginalized, from the AI-assisted surveillance system they are constructing all around you right this very moment. Pretend everything’s fine and capitalism is working out great for everyone. Here you go, you empty-headed human livestock, sedate yourself with some catchy rhythms while our rulers turn our world into a desert planet so a few billionaires can become trillionaires.”
Real art tells the truth, and facilitates a deeper connection with reality. It pulls us into intimacy with parts of ourselves we’d been neglecting, draws attention to aspects of the human experience we’d avoided, directs us, rebukes us, inspires us, encourages us, emboldens us and reassures us as we crawl forth on our adventure across this mysterious blue planet during our short few decades between birth and death. And in a healthy world it could do all these things without ever getting “political”, because the most urgent needs of the moment would typically just involve our feelings, our interpersonal relationships, and our struggle toward self-actualization.
But we do not live in a healthy world. We live under a tyrannical world-eating empire that is fueled by human blood and suffering. That is our reality, and your art is either real about reality or it isn’t. You’re either telling the truth about reality or you’re normalizing it.
It’s easy for the rich and the propaganda-addled to believe we are living in a healthy world where everything’s basically fine, but for everyone whose eyes are open to the reality of our situation as a species, it’s a five-alarm fire. A real artist is in tune with reality, and in this particular slice of spacetime our reality contains horrors that should be treated with the same urgency as we would have if our clothing caught fire.
Telling artists to shut up about politics is telling them to stop being artists and start being propagandists for the empire. It’s telling them, “Don’t say anything unless you have absolutely nothing worthwhile to say. Your job isn’t to incite, your job is to distract and sedate. Your job isn’t to blow on the embers of human brilliance, your job is to play the fiddle while we smooth the pillow of a dying world.”
Fuck that. Make art. Be brilliant. Fight the empire. Free Palestine.
(Republished from Substack by permission of author or representative)
