By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
April 4, 2025
None of the people applauding Trump's war on Yemen because "the Houthis are attacking ships" will tell you why the Houthis started attacking ships.
The pundits won't say, and the people don't know.
After two weeks of interacting with people who support Trump's war I can confidently say that none of them know why the war is happening. They know it has something to do with the Houthis attacking ships in the Red Sea, but they never have any idea why those attacks started happening in the first place. They generally assume it's because the Houthis are just plain evil and want to attack ships, or because Iran ordered them to do it in order to take over the middle east. The words "terrorists" and "pirates" come up a lot.
They legitimately do not know it's a blockade aimed at halting Israel's genocidal atrocities in Gaza, and that all attacks had ceased while the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was in effect. They have no idea that Ansar Allah only announced the Red Sea blockade would resume after Trump and Netanyahu actively collaborated to sabotage the ceasefire and resume starving Gaza, or that they hadn't even resumed attacks yet when Trump began bombing them.
My latest piece in @Mondoweiss: Yemen is acting responsibly to stop genocide and the U.S. is bombing them for it t.co- Craig Mokhiber (@CraigMokhiber) 𝕏 April 2, 2025
They do not know that the Houthis succeeded in causing an 85 percent reduction in shipping activity to Israel's Port Eilat, putting effective pressure on the Netanyahu regime to end the Gaza holocaust. They do not know that Trump's reason for bombing Yemen is the same reason as Biden's: because the US empire believes it should be allowed to back Israel's genocide without any consequences or resistance of any kind.
They're supporting a war without knowing why they support it. This is possible because they not only don't know why the war is happening - they also don't care. They would support literally anything Trump did for any reason whatsoever, because they are mindless infantile cultists and not free thinking adults.
They don't need to know why Trump is bombing Yemen, all they need is to be assured in a confident-sounding tone that the people he is bombing deserve to be bombed. As long as they receive that assurance, they don't ask any further questions. They don't even bother doing a few seconds worth of research. All they care about is supporting whatever Trump and his pundits tell them to support.
When you see how effective the Houthis have been at using Yemen's critical location to shut down Red Sea traffic, you understand why the US spent years backing a horrific genocidal military campaign trying to get rid of them. pic.twitter.com/kL3fYDqJlY- Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) 𝕏 December 21, 2023
And what keeps blowing my mind is that they're still supporting Trump's war even after seeing the leaked Signal chat featuring Trump's own team privately acknowledging to each other that it isn't really necessary. They know that chat exists. They saw Trump officials talking about how there's no real reason the bombing needs to happen right now and at most it can be used to "send a message" (whatever that means). But they've been aggressively defending Trump's war this whole time anyway.
Really all that would need to happen for the Houthis to permanently stop attacking ships would be for Trump to use the immense amount of leverage the White House has over Israel and force Netanyahu into a permanent ceasefire. That's how he could make himself into the "President of Peace" Tulsi Gabbard says he is instead of another disgusting warmonger advancing all the longstanding neocon war agendas his political faction pretends to oppose.
But that all it is. Pretending. They're all phonies and frauds. A bunch of George W Bush Republicans LARPing as Ron Paul libertarians. Bleating human livestock cheering for every act of mass military slaughter they are instructed to cheer for.
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