Jay Snyder

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The ruling class does not care if you are liberal or conservative.

It does not care about your pronouns or your guns or your God or your flag.

It cares about one thing with the focus of a religion:

Whether you are looking at them.

Every culture war battle that occupies your attention is attention not aimed upward.

Every tribal conflict that produces genuine outrage, genuine grief, genuine investment in defeating the other side, that is energy that is not organizing, not striking, not asking who owns the building, not noticing that the liberal politician and the conservative politician both got rich in office and both vote the same way when the defense budget comes up.

They are not on opposite sides of the culture war.

They are the people running it.

From the same suite.

With the same broker.

Watching you fight and calling it "democracy."

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The most telling thing about American political culture is what is never on the menu.

You can vote for the party that wants to bomb six countries or the party that wants to bomb six countries while feeling bad about it.

You can vote for the party that gives tax cuts to billionaires while cutting social programs, or the party that gives tax cuts to billionaires while expanding one social program, slowly, after a decade of negotiation, in a form the insurance industry approves of.

You can have the culture war from the right or the culture war from the left.

You cannot vote for a candidate who says: the military budget will be cut in half and the money will be spent on housing and healthcare and the forty million Americans living in poverty.

That candidate does not appear on your television.

That candidate does not receive institutional funding.

That candidate, if they emerge anyway, is described by the media, left and right, as unserious. Naive. Extreme.

The Overton window is not a natural phenomenon.

It is maintained by the people who benefit from the options it contains.

And the one option it has never contained, in living American political memory, is the option that would actually change who pays for the empire.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The culture war is not a malfunction of American democracy.

It is a feature of American empire.

While the State Department was funding opposition media in Venezuela, American media was running wall-to-wall coverage of which bathroom transgender people should use.

While the CIA was training civil society organizations to destabilize governments in Eastern Europe, American workers were being told that the reason their wages hadn't moved in thirty years was immigration.

While the Pentagon was spending $300 million on a single failed program in Syria, American teachers were buying their own classroom supplies and working second jobs.

The noise was never accidental.

The noise was the point.

A population fighting each other over the cultural battlefields the ruling class assigned them cannot simultaneously look upward at the people assigning the battlefields.

That is not a conspiracy theory.

That is a management strategy.

It has a budget. It has architects. It has decades of documented results.

And the first sign that it is working is that the people inside it call anyone who describes it a conspiracy theorist.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Here is the truth that American power needs you never to fully believe:

They are not invincible.

They are very powerful. This is real. Don't be stupid about it. The power is real, it has consequences, and dismissing it entirely is its own kind of naivety.

But invincible is different from powerful.

Invincible means there is no path. Means resistance is irrational. Means the correct response to their pressure is capitulation.

They are not invincible.

Vietnam proved it.

And the proof is not just military.

The proof is deeper.

An empire that has to spend this much, in money, in propaganda, in institutional energy, in cultural production, in political capital, simply to maintain the belief that it is invincible, is already telling you something important about itself.

Truly invincible powers don't need to work this hard at the psychology.

The performance of invincibility is the tell.

Watch what they do when countries say no.

Watch the panic underneath the punishment.

Watch how many tools they have to deploy just to make one small country comply.

That is not the behavior of something that cannot be beaten.

That is the behavior of something that has been beaten before and is terrified of it happening again.

They are terrified.

They should be.

We already showed them why.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

If you truly oppose bombing Iran,
then start by rejecting the vocabulary
designed to make the bombing emotionally acceptable.

Stop calling it a "terror regime."
Stop reciting Israeli panic as analysis.
Stop treating American mythology as a source.

Because the truth is simple.

You cannot call a people evil
and then be shocked
when evil believes it has the right to exterminate them.

You cannot demonize the target
and then pretend innocence
when the trigger is pulled.

You cannot stand against war
while kneeling before the story that makes war inevitable.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The United States in the 1950s was not simply worried about the spread of an ideology.

It was worried about the spread of a behavior.

The behavior was:

A poor, colonized country expels a foreign power, takes control of its own resources, and builds an independent political economy not integrated into the Western-led global system.

If Vietnam does this successfully and prosperously, then:

Indonesia looks at its oil and thinks differently.

The Congo looks at its copper and thinks differently.

Bolivia looks at its tin and thinks differently.

Iran looks at its oil and thinks differently, and Iran actually did, in 1953, which is why the CIA removed Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed the Shah that same year.

The domino theory was not really about ideology.

It was about the terror of example.

Successful independence is contagious.

That is why it had to be crushed.

Not because Hồ Chí Minh was a military threat to the United States.

He was not.

He was an example.

And an example cannot be bombed into silence the way a military installation can.

They tried.

He remained an example anyway.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

What has Iran really done that is so unforgivable?

Did it invade continents?

Colonize half the earth?

Drop atomic bombs on civilians?

Build military bases around the globe?

Topple governments by the dozen?

Starve nations with sanctions and call it diplomacy?

No.

Its unforgivable act was simpler.

It refused to become manageable.

And for some rulers in the Muslim world, that refusal is more offensive than any Western crime, because it threatens the very terms of their own survival.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

There is a reason some rulers get angrier at Iran than at Israel.

Israel humiliates Muslims.

Iran embarrasses collaborators.

One wounds the body.

The other exposes the soul.

It is one thing to watch a genocide and remain silent.

It is another to watch someone resist it and realize your silence was never necessity.

It was choice.

That is why the language becomes so frantic.

"Iran is destabilizing the region."

No.

Iran is destabilizing the fantasy that cowardice is diplomacy.

The region was already destabilized by occupations, invasions, sanctions, and bases.

What Iran destabilizes is the lie that submission is moderation.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

History is being written right now.

Not in fifty years.
Not when the archives are declassified and the memoirs are published and the documentaries are made.

Right now.

Every government in the Muslim world is making a record.

The votes at the United Nations are on record.
The defense cooperation agreements are on record.
The normalizations are on record.
The statements calling Iran an enemy while Israel bombed are on record.
The silence during the siege of Gaza is on record.
The bases made available to American forces striking Muslim targets are on record.

And on the other side of the record: Iran.

Under sanctions.
Under assassination.
Under bombardment.

Still standing.
Still armed.
Still the country that fired back when everyone else was drafting statements.

Still the country that answered the hadith while others were explaining why the hadith had to be understood in context.

Still the country whose answer to "on which side do you stand?" is legible, consistent, and paid for in blood.

Future generations of Muslims will read this record.

They will ask their grandparents: where were you?

They will ask their governments: what did you do?

The record will answer for you.

The record is already being written.

Make sure you understand what it currently says about you.

Because the Muslims you abandoned already know.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The bubble is not just political.

It is spiritual.

To support U.S. empire, you must believe that your comfort is worth someone else’s extinction.

You must believe that your gas tank, your iPhone, your retirement fund are somehow detached from the corpses piled up to sustain them.

The only question they never ask is:

"What did it cost for me to live like this?"

Because deep down, they know the answer.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The empire does not need your enthusiasm.

It was very clear about this, very early.

It does not require your flag-waving or your belief or your conscious endorsement of its methods.

It needs only your silence.

Your silence at the dinner table when the conversation turns to sanctions on a country whose name your relatives mispronounce.

Your silence in the meeting when someone makes the joke.

Your silence online, where you have an account and an audience and a platform that did not exist for any previous generation of bystanders, and you use it to post about your breakfast.

Your silence is not neutral.

In a structure built on the production of silence, choosing silence is choosing the structure.

The empire has enough soldiers.

What it has always needed, in far greater numbers, is witnesses who decide not to witness.

You are more useful to it than any soldier.

You are educated. You are articulate. You have access.

And you have decided that the maintenance of your own comfort is worth more than the use of what you have.

That is not a passive position.

That is the infrastructure of every atrocity that required a civilian population to look away while it happened.

You are that population.

You are looking away right now.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

You will write essays about freedom.

You will cry over New York, over Paris, over London.

You will change your profile picture for the latest Western tragedy.

But you will never ask why the countries your flag bombs never get a minute of silence.

You will never ask why their dead do not qualify as history, only as background noise.

Your bubble is not ignorance.

It is comfort.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Let's be specific about what sanctions do to a human body.

Sanctions are described in policy language as "economic pressure." "Diplomatic tools." "Alternatives to military force." "The civilized option."

Here is what they do on the ground.

They reduce the foreign currency reserves needed to import medicine.

Hospital supply chains collapse.

Equipment cannot be replaced.

Drugs that treat cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease become unavailable or prohibitively expensive.

They cause inflation that destroys the savings of the middle class faster than the political class they're supposed to pressure.

They collapse employment in sectors tied to international trade, which in countries with limited economic diversity means mass unemployment.

They kill slowly.

They kill without a visible weapon.

They kill children with preventable diseases, elderly people without medication, pregnant women without adequate obstetric care.

And when people in those countries rage against the country imposing these conditions, Americans say:

"Why do they hate us?"

Because you are killing them.

You are killing them with paperwork and executive orders and Treasury Department designations.

Without a soldier. Without a missile. Without anything that looks, on your evening news, like violence.

But the people dying do not experience it as non-violence.

They experience it as dying.

And they know who signed the order.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Maybe the most American thing is not the flag,
or the military,
or the smile they wear while describing another country's children as necessary collateral.

Maybe the most American thing is the reflexive need to believe that even their worst crimes must somehow contain a hidden virtue.

They cannot just invade.
They must "liberate."

They cannot just starve.
They must "pressure."

They cannot just overthrow.
They must "stabilize."

They cannot just lie.
They must "lead."

That is why arguing with them feels like arguing with a church that baptizes every missile on the way out of the factory.

You are not fighting facts.
You are fighting liturgy.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

You share photos of women in hijab and say:

"Look how oppressed they are."

You never share photos of women holding their dead child in a bombed hospital and say:

"Look what my taxes did."

You are not worried about women’s rights.

You are worried about maintaining the illusion that your violence is somehow enlightened.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The American empire survives not because its crimes are hidden, but because millions of Americans have made peace with being the passive shareholders of atrocity.

That is the part no one wants to say plainly.

They do not have to pilot the drone.
They do not have to interrogate the prisoner.
They do not have to starve the child.

They only have to keep believing the old fairy tale that their comfort is somehow detachable from the machinery that produced it.

It is not.

The suburb is connected to the sanction.
The pension is connected to the plunder.
The national myth is connected to the mass grave.

And every time you point that out, they call you "extreme."

Of course they do.

Truth sounds extreme inside a civilization built on denial.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The sophistication of the imperial system is that it gives you two ways to feel innocent.

The first is the flag-waver's innocence:

We are great.
We are good.
What we do is justified.

The second is the dissident's innocence:

The ruling caste did it.
I see through the propaganda.
I am not responsible for the system I correctly criticize.

Both innocences serve the system.

The flag-waver's fuels it directly.

The dissident's neutralizes the people most likely to disrupt it.

The most radical position is not the one that correctly identifies who made the decisions.

It is the one that asks:

What did my comfort cost?

Who paid for it?

What am I willing to give up so that the accounting changes?

That question has very few takers.

Across the political spectrum.

Because it turns out that "innocence," of whatever variety, is the most universally desired product the system makes.

Everybody wants to be clean.

Nobody wants to pay the price of actually getting there.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

"No mass ever decided anything anywhere."

This is the counsel of despair dressed as political sophistication.

And it does very specific work.

If masses never decide anything, then masses are never responsible for anything.

The voter who returned the war government to office four times bears no weight. The culture that produced the consensus bears no weight. The society that benefited from the arrangements bears no weight.

Only the elites acted. Everyone else was scenery.

This framework is very comfortable for the scenery.

It is also, not coincidentally, the framework that leads most reliably to: therefore, nothing can be changed, because masses never change anything, because elites always decide, so why organize, why resist, why hold anyone in your own society accountable?

The conclusion of "elites decide everything" is always, somehow, passivity.

The people who benefit most from passivity find this framework very useful.

They sometimes even fund it.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🎥 “The second the occupation ceases to exist is the second that the need to resist ceases to exist.”

Asked by Rep. Ro Khanna to weigh in after his exchange with Jeremy Scahill over Palestinians’ right to armed resistance, Drop Site’s Maysa Mustafa, a Palestinian American, said Palestinians are denied the ability to defend themselves against Israeli soldiers and settlers, while the violence of Israel’s occupation is ever-present and unavoidable.

“Armed resistance doesn’t exist just because these are violent people,” Mustafa said. “We’ve tried the UN. We’ve tried the Oslo Accords. We’ve tried everything.”

@maysamustafa | @RoKhanna

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Let's take seriously the idea that democratic populations are manipulated into supporting imperial policy.

Take it completely seriously.

Then the question becomes: who does the manipulating, and how, and through what institutions?

The answer is: through media that those populations consume and fund. Through culture those populations produce and celebrate. Through education systems those populations design and staff. Through political systems those populations participate in and could, collectively, transform.

None of these are external impositions from a sealed elite.

They are institutions that exist in relationship with the broader society. That require the society's participation to function. That can be, and have historically been, contested, reformed, and sometimes overthrown by exactly the kind of collective action that "no mass ever decides anything" says is impossible.

The manipulation is real.

The institutions that carry it are not invulnerable.

They are vulnerable to exactly what their ideological products are designed to prevent:

People deciding, collectively, to see clearly.

To ask who benefits.

To follow the money past the comfortable stopping point.

To refuse the pronoun that costs them nothing and the passivity that costs everyone else everything.

That is not nothing.

That is, in fact, the only thing that has ever changed anything.