In an era when mainstream media provides rampant misinformation surrounding global events, the anonymous account cointel.hoe (now known as showandtellhoe on Instagram due to censorship) has emerged as a powerful counter-narrative. The 30-something-year-old with a degree in political science behind the popular Instagram page has made it her mission to offer quick, incisive analysis of world affairs, focusing on imperialism, capitalism, and the power dynamics that shape our lives. With 100,000 followers on her initial account, the page quickly became a go-to resource for those seeking truth beyond the headlines—until Instagram censored and shut it down. Undeterred, cointel.hoe launched a second account, which is now facing multiple warnings and at risk of deletion. Multiple backup accounts have already been prepared, a testament to her resolve in fighting the silencing of alternative voices.
The account has become more than just a source of information; it has evolved into a new form of alternative media, challenging mainstream media narratives and giving people the tools to critically understand their world. Covering issues like U.S. imperialism and what legal experts believe constitutes genocide in Palestine, cointel.hoe’s work serves as the "people's media," providing an antidote to mainstream distortions while empowering a rapidly growing audience to seek justice and truth in an often unjust world.
Q: Instagram has already shut down your first account after you gained 100,000 followers, and your second account is at risk of deletion. How has this censorship impacted your mission, and what strategies do you employ while countering these setbacks?
A: Censorship has served only to strengthen my resolve. It signals to me that I am succeeding in some small way, at posing a threat to the current order—an order which is an existential threat to life on earth: that not only am I poking holes in the foundation of this empire of lies, but that I’m bringing millions of others along with me (my high water mark for 30-day reach was 8.7M on my original account).
An informed public is the most dangerous situation for the ruling class. This is explicit, for example, a Reagan advisor warned an “educated proletariat” was dangerous, so free college was pushed aside leading directly to today’s student debt crisis. A truly informed public knows who its adversaries and oppressors are, which is the first step toward organizing against them.
As far as strategies go, I try to evade censorship “triggers” like certain words and names, without really diluting the content. With occasional exceptions, I avoid graphic visuals. Sometimes, if I know I’m going to share a truth that’s especially inconvenient to the Official Narrative, I’ll tuck it behind a less incisive or sometimes humorous cover slide. By doing that, I’m hoping a much larger number of users will be served with my post, even if a smaller proportion of them scroll to the most important slide. Very unscientific, varying success!
Q: Under what pretext did IG close the original account @cointel.hoe? Did you challenge it? Tell me about the entire process.
A: My account was wiped on the same day many of the accounts for university students organizing for Palestine were, on August 28 as the school year kicked off. I didn’t have a specific “offending” post and was only given a vague “your account does not adhere to our community guidelines” explanation. I appealed and it was quickly denied and permanently deleted.
I’d had a previous brief suspension over sharing a mutual aid raffle, but was reinstated and the original poster had not gotten any warning or removal of the post. They only targeted me.
Importantly, Meta, like other big tech players, hires both Israeli and US intelligence folks into senior positions.
Q: What was the turning point for you when you realized that mainstream news sources were failing to provide accurate explanations of world events? What was the initial vision and did you foresee where you would end up today providing millions of people with your perspectives of events through what I would call “people’s media?”
A: I always had this nagging sense that despite my degree, and despite religiously consuming in-depth news and analysis from prestigious mainstream outlets, I couldn’t holistically make sense of the world.
A constant refrain in my mind was, “this can’t be all there is. All the world’s experts cannot just portray the world as an endless procedure of semi-random phenomena with no unifying cause or solution.”
It wasn’t until I started looking outside the prescribed sources that all of these loose threads began to neatly tie themselves together. What began with Howard Zinn, a bit of Chomsky, and the occasional Malcolm X quote exploded into devouring Marx, Fanon, Parenti, Dunbar-Ortiz, Said, Rodney, Kanafani, etc. Then came the declassified and leaked intelligence documents and the think tank-industrial complex. I was blown away by how much imperial horror was self-admitted, planned and detailed in dry, administrative language by RAND and the Atlantic Council.
For a reader looking to consolidate this experience, I recommend Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti, available here as a PDF, and also for sale online.
My friends and family, despite being educated and progressive, were quite hostile to my efforts to share what I’d learned. I didn’t understand then that, as a general rule, it’s a lot easier to dupe someone, than it is to convince them they were duped. The defenses that spring into action, the cognitive dissonance, are overwhelming.
So, in 2022, I launched my anonymous Instagram page initially as an outlet for myself. It was almost like a journal, or digital scrapbook to document whatever struck me most in a given day’s learning. As my page gained traction, it grew into a passion as well as a sense of duty to inform a ballooning and diverse audience. After all, the people cannot organize against their oppressors if they don’t understand the nature of their oppression.
I didn’t foresee it having the scale and impact that it has, but I am so grateful to have a large platform, one that’s about truth and not about me, and I strive to be worthy of the trust so many have put in me. Always the truth, always in good faith. Always in the interest of collective liberation.
Q: The formats you use are particularly interesting to me; screenshots from X, images from the web, scratched or written over news headlines, memes and other ever evolving styles, which I assume that you select as the narrative requires. It is quite different from the visuals of news media, it is art. Do you have a background or interest in arts at all?
A: Oh, yes. I paint and draw a bit and have a musical background. I came from a long line of artists and sculptors, grew up surrounded by my ancestors’ work, and I got “the gene.” I wish I had worked more persistently to cultivate the gift for making art that I received from them.
I am primarily trying to make people think and understand, but to the extent I’m creating a form of self-expression through objective realities, I think there’s value in evoking feelings, too. I suppose telling the truth where it’s not allowed becomes a bit of an art form. My fear, compassion, love, disgust, outrage, hope for collective liberation, it’s all in there.
Q: I usually recommend artists to unlearn what they learned at art school. I am actually glad you did not cultivate the gift of art through the traditional channels. What you do is art and you are an artist.
Social media can be a hostile space, particularly when discussing sensitive issues like Palestine or U.S. foreign policy. What have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced with censorship and backlash?
A: I would argue that geopolitical issues are only sensitive if you’re trying to defend an oppressive posture, to justify aggression or imperialism or colonization or regime change. Take Zionism: is it sensitive, or do people who support the world-historic crimes of apartheid and ethnic cleansing get really upset when you tell the incontrovertible truth? Is it sensitive, or do they just not like that there’s a robust record of confessed colonization, rape, and massacre that actually began before the Holocaust? Is it sensitive to assert the truism that being a victim in one context does not preclude you from being a perpetrator in another context? Only if you’re trying to give cover to horrific crimes and those who support them.
Educated liberals (I used to be one) tend to get very upset when confronted with information that undermines their worldview. It’s a lot like watching a Zionist react to correct information about Zionism and Palestine. They typically rotate into identity-based arguments like, “listen to [people belonging to identity X]!” Without considering that there are people with regressive, incorrect views across identities. There are compradors who are incentivized, people whose minds are colonized (read Fanon), people in “target” countries who have been propagandized by NED programs, etc. Those are the voices we’re meant to uplift in the West.
There’s a strong aversion to thinking about issues at a systems level. A global hegemon that extracts wealth from the rest of the world can only exist as a systematic aggressor. The US isn’t always the aggressor “by coincidence,” which would be hard to believe. It’s always the aggressor structurally. You don’t achieve hegemony by merely defending yourself. You do it by holding the rest of the world hostage at gunpoint with your 800+ international bases and through coups, genocides, assassinations, wars, and illegal sanctions that collectively punish entire populations.
It’s so hard to break people of this.
Q: You’ve amassed a significant following. I am aware of how important anonymity is for you. How has anonymity shaped your journey, and have you ever felt the urge to reveal your identity to the world?
A: It’s liberating and it helps that in an ocean of “influencers,” it’s not about me. I don’t want to be a distraction from the information, I don’t want to gain or lose audience members over whether they like me. Despite pouring so much of myself into it, I’m just a vessel.
There are a few comrades I’ve “come out” to and my family now knows and is on board. It helps to have a little community.
I’m thinking a lot about shifting towards a proper career in independent journalism, and waffling about whether that means coming out, or launching separately as myself and sort of starting over in terms of audience building.
Q: Are you worried about getting physically and/or politically targeted?
A: Yup. It already happened, when I very briefly syndicated a bit of my content to my personal social media accounts after Al-Aqsa Flood, and it was terrifying. It was also a little bit funny in terms of the self-absorbed hysteria involved, but I can’t tell the story without risking outing myself.
While I want to avoid being targeted, I’d rather be targeted, raided, hated, and endangered for telling important truths with globally existential implications, than be safe, liked, and embraced in silent possession of those truths. The guilt would eat away at me in that type of illusory “safety.”
Q: Can you explain the state of freedoms in the United States for those who still naively believe we have freedoms?
A: Every “freedom” Americans enjoy is a concession from the ruling class. Concessions can be revoked at any time. Take civil rights: in Brown v Board of Education, the Attorney General filed an amicus brief warning that “racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills.”
We desegregated schools over the threat of a socialist uprising. Not because we’re leaders in emancipation.
Look at Roe. For 50 years, it stood, and for 50 years, democrats fundraised and campaigned on codifying it. They enjoyed control of the presidency and both houses of Congress multiple times, most recently in the first half of Biden’s term, and before that, under Obama. They never codified it. Obama ran on codifying Roe on Day One, then once in office, said it wasn’t a top priority. When Roe was overturned, Dems started fundraising instead of implementing obvious solutions, like allowing for abortion on federal lands within states that had trigger laws or expanding SCOTUS.
I could go on, but I need US’ians to understand they enjoy their rights only to the extent that they are convenient to the ruling class.
As capitalism decays into intensifying fascism, the “community of the free” will continue to shrink, and the American citizenry will be ever more narrowly defined. This will happen no matter who’s in the White House or who has the majority in Congress. It’s structural.
Q: Your tireless work focuses heavily on exposing imperialism and capitalist exploitation. What do you hope your audience will take away from your analysis of these systems?
A: I hope they will come away with clarity and an understanding that their adversaries are not in Beijing or Moscow or Tehran, but in DC and on the interlocking boards of directors of the major transnational corporations.
I want them to understand they deserve better. They deserve freedom from hunger, inadequate healthcare, pollution, fear of losing their homes, meaningless alienating work, and so on. “Freedom from” is at least as important as “freedom to.”
I also want them to understand that other countries are sovereign, and their approval of leaders or systems of government is irrelevant. Whether a government is socialist, a liberal democracy, or a right wing theocracy, it’s not our right to sanction, demonize, invade, or overthrow anyone else, either morally or under international law. This is so difficult for Westerners to internalize.
Q: You describe your work as contributing to the “battle for human cognition.” Could you expand on what that means to you and why it’s such a critical element in today’s information landscape?
A: The ruling class is explicit that our very brains are a critical battleground. Western think tanks, RAND Corp., and NATO-backed reports have been prolific in their study and emphasis on cognitive warfare in recent years. It’s an effort to saturate attention, exploit biases, and undermine our ability to discern fact from fiction. Of course, this is all couched in terms of “defending” against the schemes of authoritarian boogeymen. These boogeymen are usually leaders of countries that have refused to allow the US to ransack their resources and strip away social safety nets through structural adjustment programs.
The only thing our ruling class cares about, with respect to us, is what we think. Not if we live long, healthy lives. Not if we are safe and warm. Not if we receive a rich education. As long as we blame the boogeyman du jour, be it communism, migrants fleeing homelands we’ve destabilized or destroyed, or “Islamic terrorism,” for our problems, we won’t organize against the managers of our empire.
The idea is to turn us, as a nation, into Emmett Till’s accuser and often, into his lynch mob. The rest of the world must be a scary, barbaric jungle of swarthy hordes, and we in the NATO-bloc are the lily white virgin picking flowers inside our walled garden needing protection.
We’re supposed to see the collective West, whose defining characteristic is that it spent the past 500 years pillaging and genociding the rest of the world, as the arbiters of truth, democracy, and morality. It’s appalling, illogical, and cartoonishly racist once you see it.
Q: What advice would you offer to those who are just beginning to question mainstream narratives and want to explore alternative perspectives?
A: For those who have seen through the mainstream narratives regarding Palestine, I’d ask them to bear in mind that Western coverage of every major geopolitical issue is like Palestine. Total inversion of aggressor and victim.
Getting familiar with some very basic international law is helpful, because the media pretends the law just doesn’t exist. “Israel has a right to defend itself” - not under the law, not from threats emanating from territory it occupies. Its only legal options are to stop shooting, end the occupation, and obey the law which guarantees Palestinians a right to return to all of ‘48 (which would dissolve the artificial Jewish majority and thereby eliminate it as a Jewish state). “Palestinian fighters are terrorists who must be suppressed” - not according to international law, which insists several times over that colonized, occupied people have a right to resist foreign domination by all available means, including armed struggle. (UN Res 37/43, UN Res 3246).
When learning about current or looming conflicts, recall that at any given time, the consensus is “the US lied about all the previous wars except this one.” When NATO destroyed Libya, alleging Gaddafi had given his soldiers Viagra to commit mass rapes, it was already common knowledge that we lied about WMDs in Iraq, babies thrown from incubators in Kuwait, the Gulf of Tonkin, the USS Maine, and so on. Yet everyone bought it, and now we know that was a lie. Turns out Gaddafi wanted to create a pan-African currency to help the rest of the continent throw off its neocolonial shackles.
Whatever the atrocity propaganda, interrogate it! Where have we seen similar false narratives? In whose interest is the narrative? What minerals or other resources are in the region suddenly afflicted with “human rights concerns”? Where do we overlook or excuse atrocities?
When we hear that an inconvenient fact “only serves [‘bad’ country]’s narrative,” the response should be, “so what?”. Everything, including narrative comparisons, and whose narrative we should support, should proceed from truth.
Q: Tell me about why you picked the crying Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) picture as your account’s profile image.
A: I chose it to playfully highlight the absurdity and hypocrisy of progressive political theater. Feelings and unserious aesthetics over substance. It’s also about the futility of trying to fix the system from the inside. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has had a number of crying photo ops, but this one was AOC crying after voting “present” for Israel’s Iron Dome funding. The spinelessness of not even voting “no” and then crying crocodile tears is both reactionary and pathetic. I wanted to frame her as the disappointment of a generation that she is, rather than the symbol of hope she is often portrayed to be.
End.