how the Empire sells its massacres.

from Yemen to Gaza to Iraq, the US weaponises narrative to package slaughter, and many in the West keep buying it.

Mar 27, 2025

Good day, spectators,

And, I know there’s a lot of buzz about the Trump administration’s Signal chat leak but I want to cut through it a little bit today, because to me, the real outrageousness isn’t that a journalist (who is an ex-IDF prison guard) saw these war plans. No, my outrage is directed towards what those plans reveal about how power really works. Something many of my readers will already know but it’s never a bad time to talk about it.

Buried in the messages between National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other cabinet members is a horrible demonstration of narrative engineering.

While the legacy media fixates on ‘classified information’, the real story is actually not the incompetence of these people but instead how they casually discussed spinning the bombing of Yemen—an already battered and famine-ravaged nation—into a palatable story for the American and global public. Let’s have a look.

the messaging of murder.

Hegseth’s messages show he clearly doesn’t give a shit about the ethics of this attack. While Yemeni families will be sleeping in rubble, his main worry is packaging their annihilation for prime-time media. The playbook is sickeningly familiar:

Blame-shifting becomes 'strategic messaging'
War crimes become 'counterterrorism operations'
Entire families obliterated become 'high-value targets with collateral damage'

These people are not soldiers - they're salesmen and they are simply moving product in their minds. And surprise…the product is death, wrapped in whatever the hell branding will make the American public swallow it. 'Precision strikes.' 'Iranian proxies.' 'Military infrastructure.' Each phrase meticulously chosen to sanitise slaughter.

The most chilling part is that it works. People have been conditioned to hear 'Houthi commander' and picture a legitimate target, they don’t think of a man's apartment building reduced to dust with his neighbours inside. The language does the killing twice over - first their bodies, then our empathy.

This isn’t strategy at all. It’s normalised psychopathy with PowerPoint slides. The real question isn’t how they sleep at night, but how we the millions in the West tolerate leaders who treat mass murder as a branding exercise.

narrative is the ultimate weapon.

Here’s the open secret of modern imperialism: the bombs are secondary. The real violence happens in your cortex. The Houthis aren’t people – they’re ‘Iranian proxies’. A residential block isn’t a home – it’s ‘unfortunate noise’. And that famine you caused? Well that’s just another PR hurdle to ‘message around’.

Watch: A Yemeni man comforts his daughter in their shop as they are bombed by the US.

We’ve seen this script time and time again, of course. Gaza has its ‘human shields’, Iraq its ‘WMDs’, Vietnam its ‘domino theory’. The labels change, but the lie is always the same: violence is always defensive, critics are always naïve, and the empire is always the victim. Pure 1984.

you, my friend, are the target.

Every single censored journalist, every barred reporter, every ‘national security’ redaction proves the same truth: the war isn’t in Yemen – it’s in your perception. They’ll murder truth-tellers in Gaza while banning Western observers. They’ll drone-strike a wedding, then debate ‘classified leaks’ as if the crime was the exposure, not the atrocity. They’ll call it ‘collateral damage’ when children die, but ‘espionage’ when someone shows you the receipts.

Truth-seekers and truth bringers are usually punished for revealing this game. Pete Hegseth gets promoted for playing it.

we will break the spell.

The beauty of the Signal leak? It reveals the wizard behind the curtain – and he’s not some geopolitical mastermind. He’s a flaccid middle manager who can’t even work a messaging app properly. The panic over these exposed texts tells you everything: narrative control is their Achilles’ heel.

Every TikTok exposing their lies, every demonstration shouting down their euphemisms, every truth that slips through the cracks weakens the spell. The question isn’t whether we’ll break their narrative – but whether we’ll build our own fast enough to matter.

And on that thought, I will let you go for today,

(As always, thanks for reading, and please give this post a ❤️ and restack below.)