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The Peace President - by Mr. Fish

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There is no ceasefire in Gaza. There is no functioning “Board of Peace.” There is no roadmap to ending the genocide or mechanism to creation of a Palestinian state. Israel has refused to implement or abide by any of the conditions of Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” since its inception. It won’t begin to honor them now.

There is only genocide. It changes shape and intensity. But it does not change its essence.

Trump’s plan is a mirage, a conjuring trick, a fleeting vanity project. In October 2025, Trump gathered world leaders in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to announce his peace deal, which he said “took 3,000 years” to achieve, before disappearing offstage. The peace plan, like the smoke-and-mirrors act that defines the Trump era, has been relegated to a dark memory hole, as our P.T. Barnum commander in chief trots out another bloody spectacle: war on Iran.

Trump announced a “historic” agreement on July 30 that entailed “the complete disarmament of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza.” He called the 15-point plan, credited to the Board of Peace, which has no Palestinian representatives and installed Trump as its chair for life, “a monumental step toward lasting peace and security.”

But Hamas swiftly qualified the demand by saying that handing over its heavy weapons was only contingent on Israel ending “all forms of” its “aggression” and withdrawing its occupying forces from Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu blithely dismissed Trump’s proposal. Israel, he said, will not withdraw its forces until Hamas is “genuinely” disarmed.

Read this to mean never.

The peace plan — which was endorsed by the United Nations in a stunning disregard for Palestinian sovereignty and international law — was never more than a publicity stunt. It exists to provide Israel with the diplomatic cover to bring the genocide to its intended conclusion — the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza — a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

Since the “ceasefire” went into effect on Oct. 10, 2025, two months before the Trump “peace plan” was formalised, Israel has killed 1,258 Palestinians in Gaza.

Ceasefires with these body counts are not ceasefires.

Once Gaza is emptied, the West Bank will be next.

Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, this one is the least serious.

Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire began — which took place — it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement.

That is the point.

“It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand,” I wrote when the plan was announced. “Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only ‘rhetoric’”

Israel, I noted, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”

“Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement?” I asked. “Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?”

“How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?” I continued. “How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?”

“Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an “International Stabilization Force,” a polite term for foreign occupation?” I wrote. “Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?”

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Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and around 81 percent of all structures are damaged, according to UN estimates. The Strip has been reduced to 61 million tons of rubble, including nine million tons of hazardous waste that includes asbestos, industrial waste, and heavy metals, in addition to unexploded ordinance and an estimated 10,000 decaying corpses. Israel has demolished some 1,500 buildings since the ceasefire went into effect.

How can anyone believe that Israel, intent on leveling Gaza, will reverse itself to allow Palestinians to rebuild what it spent so much time, money and blood to destroy?

Retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, echoed this sentiment on Sunday on Israel’s 103FM radio station.

“Israel has no interest in Gaza being rebuilt, it is better for us that it be destroyed for generations to come,” Eiland said.

“The greater the despair in Gaza and the greater the destruction, and the greater the monument to what they did on October 7, years to come, that is good,” he added.

Israel will never permit reconstruction in Gaza. It will never restore health facilities or water treatment plants. It will never turn over authority to an International Stabilization Force (ISF), one which only exists on paper. It will never permit the creation of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza or agree to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.

Trump promises a Gaza Riviera that will function as a “special economic zone” — a territory operating outside of state law governed entirely by private investors, such as the Peter Thiel-backed charter city in Honduras. But Trump’s Gaza Riviera is nothing more than a pathetic temporary camp along the ceasefire line near Rafah. It consists of “portable cabins” under Palestinian administration and a tiny international security force, according to The Guardian.

It is touted, in desperation, as a pilot scheme.

Despite some $17 billion in pledges to the Board of Peace, as of late May 2026 not a single dollar had reached its official World Bank-administered Gaza reconstruction fund. Only about $23 million had been received through alternative channels for operating costs, with a further $100 million pledged by the United Arab Emirates that was earmarked for a future Palestinian police force, though it remains “frozen,” according to the Financial Times.

This amounts to about $0.72 for every $100 pledged.

Given the heavy economic costs incurred by Gulf and regional donor countries because of the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran — including Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the UAE — it is very unlikely the pledged funds will be paid.

The European Union, the U.N. and the World Bank, in an assessment published in April, estimated that $71.4 billion is needed for recovery in Gaza.

The Board of Peace, for which Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov is the principal official, is desperate for funds. The U.S. attempted to pilfer $11 billion in Palestinian tax revenues and frozen bank funds withheld by Israel, which was rejected by the Palestinian Authority (PA). The Israeli withholding of tax revenues has deepened the ⁠financial crisis in the West Bank, with the PA slashing salaries in half of thousands of Palestinian civil servants.

The ISF, a multinational peacekeeping force that is supposed to be composed of troops from Albania, Kosovo, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Uganda and Indonesia — the latter of which has since suspended its commitment, is also nonexistent.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Settlements and National Missions Minister Orit Strook have demanded that Netanyahu reconvene the Security Cabinet so that its July 26 vote authorizing the entry of ISF troops can be reversed.

The entire Trump project is an Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy.

Anyone in Gaza who strays close to the Yellow Line — which is constantly shifting and poorly marked — is shot. Police are shot. Hamas leaders, along with their families — including Azzam Khalil al-Hayya, the son of Khalil al-Hayya who was the head of Hamas’ political bureau and the faction’s lead negotiator — are assassinated. Palestinians lining up at food kitchens and those handing out aid to them are obliterated by Israeli bombs. Israel restricts food and humanitarian aid to half of the trucks stipulated in the ceasefire agreement.

Palestinians, 90 percent of whom have been displaced, continue to live in tent cities amid rubble and open pools of raw sewage. They lack toilets or electricity. There is an 80 percent unemployment rate. Tens of thousands of children suffer acute malnutrition in Gaza. A child, on average, is killed every day.

Tacitus understood. They made a desert and call it peace.

Trump’s plan was not designed to end the conflict. It was not designed to provide an equitable settlement for the Palestinians. It was not designed to halt the ongoing mass slaughter. It was designed to allow Israel to complete its genocide and drive surviving Palestinians from their homeland — the culmination of the Zionist dream.

Trump, however obtuse, has at least figured this out.

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The United States and Israel’s attacks on Iran have inflamed West Asia to the point that it has turned “into a matrix of smaller wars taking place across the region, all of which are interconnected, but all of which have quite separate agendas,” describes Alistair Crooke of Conflicts Forum, a former diplomat who served in the Middle East and who authored, “Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution”. In this episode of the Chris Hedges Report, Hedges and Crooke explore the wide-reaching geopolitical and economic ramifications of the war on Iran and what options remain for the Trump administration, which has been forced multiple times to walk back its threats of escalation.

The war on Iran has depleted a significant percentage of US munitions, costing tens of billions of dollars so far, and has lowered the US’ strategic petroleum reserves to its lowest level in over forty years. The closure of both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab Strait have blocked oil exports from Saudi Arabia completely, as well as other products that were previously traded through these major transit routes. This has rocked the global economy, sending Japan into a debt crisis.

As countries scramble to adjust to these new realities, there is no end in sight to the crisis. The Trump administration is running out of options. Crooke describes the fall of US military hegemony in the region and how this has changed the mood in Iran, saying, “It’s triggered something much more profound, a memory of Iran as a major civilizational power, as something that has been a dominant influence in the region for thousands of years.” He states that Iran is prepared for and expects a long war as negotiations with the United States are not a reliable route to peace.

Hedges and Crooke discuss the numerous and growing wars in the region from the state of Israel, where leaders are pushing to force Palestinians out of the West Bank ahead of the October election, to the increasingly fragile situation in Iraq, to the hot war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. No country in the region is untouched as even Egypt and Jordan are positioning troops along their borders. The fate of millions of people in West Asia is at stake as Washington scrambles to protect dollar hegemony and risks what Crooke refers to as a “slow tactical nuclear weapons strike,” the destruction of infrastructure that provides the energy and water necessary to sustain their lives.

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Diego Ramos and Thomas Hedges

Transcript

Chris Hedges:

Donald Trump has canceled a planned large-scale military attack on Iran. This cancellation follows reports that the U.S. has expended large quantities of critical munitions since the war began on February 28th. These depletions include tomahawk long-range missiles that are fired from sea at ground targets. Of the estimated 3,000 tomahawks in the U.S. arsenal, 1,000 have apparently been used. Some 1,100 Jassam air-launched long-range missiles out of about 4,000 have also been used in the war. Some 40 to 70 PRSM ground-launched long-range missiles, of which the U.S. only had 90 in its stockpile, have been fired on Iran, virtually exhausting the entire inventory. The ship-launched ballistic SM-3 missile, which costs $28 million, numbered around 410 before the war. The U.S. may have used as many as 250.

The SM six, also ship-launched, is used to intercept aircraft and cruise missiles. Somewhere between 190 and 370 have been used from a stockpile of 1,160. Of the some 360 THAAD anti-ballistic missile systems, as many as 290 have been fired on Iran. And finally, of the estimated 2,300 Patriot missiles, between 1,060 and 1,430 have been expended.

The depletion of vital weapons systems is not the only problem facing the Trump administration, but also the depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Oil Reserve. Bank of America Global Research shows that the level of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest level since 1983, leaving the country with 43 days of crude oil supply. Add to these depletions the inability of the U.S. to wrest control of the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, and you have a war that by any measure the U.S. can no longer afford to prosecute.

Iran’s FARS News Agency is reporting that an Iranian parliamentary committee is reviewing a preliminary bill that would bar US, Israeli, and other ‘hostile vessels’ from transiting the Strait. Iran and Oman, which now jointly control the Strait, said they had formalized shipping routes through the waterway, whose closure has triggered, of course, the global energy crisis.

Trump’s sunny assessment of the war is not new, nor is the walking back of apocalyptic threats to obliterate Iran. For example, on April 7th, he threatened that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again if Iran did not immediately open the Strait,” and then two hours later, before his imposed deadline, he backed down, instead announcing a two-week ceasefire. This pattern of threats and retreats has eroded Trump’s credibility. It has distanced an already skeptical Iran from any proposed negotiations. Iran assumes correctly it cannot trust anything the President says. And it also knows that the U.S. cannot afford to prolong the conflict without suffering tremendous military and economic costs.

Joining me to discuss the state of the current war, is Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat who served for many years in the Middle East, working as a security advisor to the EU special envoy to the Middle East, as well as helping lead efforts to set up negotiations and truces between Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian resistance groups. He was instrumental in establishing the 2002 ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. He is also the author of “Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution”, which analyzes the ascendancy of Islamic movements in the Middle East. So, Alastair, let’s begin with where we are at this moment. As I mentioned in the introduction, Trump had threatened a massive bombing campaign. Once again, he retreated. You have this agreement between Oman and Iran. Just set the stage for us, if you can.

Alastair Crooke

Certainly. I thought, though, one of the things was quite striking, you read off this list of missiles and weapons that have been depleted during the course of the war and what is quite remarkable is how little that has achieved. It has not degraded Iran’s missile capability to any great extent. It has not brought a change in posture by Iran. It has failed utterly to change the war. And it really, I think, represents the end of a way of fighting. Over the period we’ve seen since the Second World War, the West has completely moved over to the idea of control of airspace, control of ability to carpet bomb its enemies, and believed it had complete freedom to go where it wanted, when it wanted, how it wished. And that’s come to an end. And what has brought it to an end is basically cheap electronic components that have allowed states to produce missiles. And so, Iran has actually found the answer to this. You bury your missiles. You bury the production systems. You bury the leadership. It was called a “mosaic system”, but it’s been very effective. And I think you’re reading off of that list underlines just how much it is, both Israel and the United States say that Iran has the same capacity in terms of the missiles. They don’t have an air force, but they have missile air dominance at this stage over the Gulf. And in contrast to the air dominance that the United States has not been able to fully achieve.

You ask where we are. Where we are is these talks. They’re really, just to be absolutely clear, they’re just talks, technical talks. Still at the moment, they are the technical teams discussing the Straits between Oman. America is not involved in it, although undoubtedly certain mediators will be sort of on the phone all the time to the Omanis. But my understanding is basically this. There’s no intention on the part of Iran to open Hormuz in the sense of opening it to all traffic at zero cost. There’s no intention to do that. It may be opened very cautiously, for example, to Chinese vessels and tankers, but it’s not going to be opened in the sense of as it used to be.

Secondly, the Iranians are going to charge fees. Seven percent is mooted, and they are also going to charge 20 percent fines for any vessels that do not stick to the rules set by the new administration for the Hormuz Straits. I think what we’re going to see is, and the discussions are about, the question of whether there are two corridors or one corridor, an outward corridor and an inward corridor. At the moment, there is, if you like, just one corridor because the Iranians have shut the corridor that goes along the coast of the Omani shoreline and exits that way by mining it. So, that one is effectively closed. In fact, I think just this morning, an Abu Dhabi tanker tried to use that exit and was attacked with missiles and damaged and has turned back. So, that is still not operating. The northern route is under IRGC control, I think some vessels are passing to China, but the amount of passages is very few. And so, I think that what Trump will be faced with is the proposal that Iran controls Hormuz, that it will control passage in and out, although passage may be administered by the Omanis under IRGC ultimate control. In other words, all the details of vessels will have to be passed to the IRGC before they are allowed to enter this route. And the process is still going to be completely administered, and it is going to be closed. This is not part of the negotiating team’s remit. The Majlis in Tehran seems to be saying that they are going to produce a law that would forbid in any future time after the war is over that shipping either from the United States or Israel will not be allowed passage through Hormuz.

My understanding is none of this is going to come into operation, according to the Iranians, until after an agreement, after the war is ended, after it’s been established that there really is a ceasefire, that the US blockade is lifted, after sanctions have been lifted on petroleum and oil products from Iran for export. Only at that point will these new regulations fully come into being. But this still hasn’t been, as my understanding, put to the Supreme Leader and passed by the committee that supervises the security. They’re still discussing it at the technical level. And so, it may be a little while until the talks are finished. But I think it will face Mr. Trump with the very obvious dilemma, I mean, either he accepts that this is a loss. Maybe he can accept it. We had Mr. President in just recent hours saying, “Well, Hormuz, it’s actually irrelevant. I mean, in a couple of years, we won’t need Hormuz anyway.” He didn’t mention the Red Sea, and he didn’t mention Bab-el-Mandeb, but he just said Hormuz might be irrelevant.

Is this the beginning of preparation for an exit? It’s too early to say. Who knows? But the question is, is Trump able, after his entire career, after his coaching by Roy Cohn, “Never be a loser, you always must be a winner,” and is he able to stand this or will he try another military action even though, as you rightly pointed out, that it seems there is really not much point to another military escalation because it won’t change anything in terms, it won’t change the posture of Iran, of its determination to control Hormuz and they are not about to open it. And even to start negotiations, they would require from the United States that they make commitments upfront, in advance and only then would negotiations be even possible.

But overall, as you said in the introduction, quite rightly, that Iran just doesn’t believe it’s possible to arrive at a complete settlement with Mr. Trump, with the administration. It is dismissive of the MOU. It sees that the United States is just using this pattern of threats and then talk of a deal. It’s all about the markets. It’s all about manipulation of the oil price. And the Iranians are laughing at this now. Now they’re setting out pieces of paper which show how many futures were sold just before Monday and the whole manipulation is being detailed by the Iranians. And so for them, the MOU has become much less important because they see that it’s really not intended to be a document from which negotiations could develop, could issue forth because really it is all about manipulating markets because Trump’s main concern really now is markets and the oil price and inflation and above all, the bond market.

Chris Hedges:

Well, you have all these accusations of insider trading within the Trump administration. It is possible, I suppose, that like the late Roman Empire, the emperors in the late Roman Empire would go up to Gaul and the Germanic tribes would beat back the Roman legions and then the emperors would just stage a triumphal march through the city of Rome even though they’d been shellacked. That is very much in Trump’s vein. So, reality and loss and defeat may be facts, but they’re not necessarily facts that Trump will acknowledge.

I want to talk a little bit about the agreement because the original agreement was supposed to be carried out in phases. I think it’s pretty clear that Iran will not sign something like that again. This was an unprovoked war. It was a criminal war of aggression under international law and verified by the head of the UN and others. And Iran wants reparations. It wants its frozen assets, about $100 billion released, and that’s the one side, and then of course it wants a guarantee that it will not be attacked again. And on the other side, Trump is facing the midterms, his poll numbers are very low and I think it’s clear the White House desperately wants, even if it’s an interim agreement, some kind of an agreement that they can limp through with for the next few months, certainly until November. And I wondered if you can address those two competing concerns.

Alastair Crooke:

Yes, and I think, what you described is almost a phase of the war that is now behind us in the sense that that MOU is now widely regarded, there’s a small faction that doesn’t see it in this way, but overall, the leadership regards the MOU as a deceit. It was a deceit that was deliberately done because the purpose of it was simply to get Hormuz open as quickly as possible and so it was signed up without any real serious intent of taking it to any sort of conclusion. So, I mean, there is no real sense that this is the building block towards an agreement that will be respected by Trump. It was in their view a deceit and therefore we are in a different phase.

I think that phase is to increase the pressure on Trump by, first of all in the markets, in terms of the Red Sea is now closed. The Houthis again have been attacking Saudi tankers that are trying to enter and go to the Yanbu Port in the Red Sea to load oil and stopping that. So, there’s very little traffic. It’s open to other traffic but not to Saudi tankers. So, the Saudis, I think, this is the first time that they’ve exported no oil at all during this period. Zero oil.

Chris Hedges:

And just to interrupt to interrupt, Alastair, I believe the Saudis were exporting about six million barrels a day through the Red Sea. Is that correct?

Alastair Crooke:

That’s it. And it’s now down to zero. Overall, it’s now down to zero. And the UAE has not been exporting oil during this period either. And so, the main element is that Iran sees it as leverage because you mentioned, if you like, the effects on the oil markets. But actually, what is so important is really the type of oil that is lacking. That is crucial to their thinking in the equation because what Iran and the Hormuz Strait was supplying were basically the middle distillates of oil, not light oil. America has light oil from the fracking fields and Permian and so on and Venezuela has the ultimately heaviest oil, almost like tar, sitting on the other side but the middle distillates are the ones that provide diesel and kerosene for aircraft and those are in drastically short supply. The asking price in refineries to get a barrel today of middle distillates is much higher than in the future. The markets are in backwardation. The crisis is in diesel and in kerosene. And that’s one of the reasons I’m not sure we’d see a major attack on Iran because aircraft, if you’re going to do a major air operation, it takes a lot of aviation fuel to mount that sort of operation. F-15s, F-35s consume it by the gallon, and have to be refueled after 250 miles or so.

So, I think one part of this is going to be the leverage. The second part that we’re going to see, and change, is also the idea of being shifting, and this is what we’re seeing in this phase. Iran has moved to a more proactive stance. They’re not simply going to wait till the United States attacks and then consider or have already lined up the targets that it’s going to attack in retribution. They are keeping up a quiet level of proactive attacks on the United States, on Gulf states. And, at the moment, Israel is not involved, but they are keeping up a level of military proactive force. In other words, extending the war, making it extremely difficult for Trump to say he’s won the war, to put pressure on him and at the same time, not to go so far that it explodes the whole situation into a big war but to continue to attack vessels. As I say, Abu Dhabi tanker, Adnok, the state oil company, was attacked just in the recent hours. While these talks are going on in Oman, they haven’t stopped and it’s not in response to an American attack. So, proactive attacks and the sense increasingly is that Trump is under pressure and they think that Iran feels it has the cards, as Trump calls it, that they are in a better position and that they see that if they are going into a long war with the United States, then they have the capacity and control over Hormuz is crucial because they can finance a long war if they have the fees and the passage charges for Hormuz. It’s estimated at about 100 billion a year. You can finance a war in that way. So, the thinking is changing a little bit towards putting more pressure on Trump and not looking to an agreement.

My understanding is we’ve gone back to the sense that Iran has had for some time is that this will not be settled in some sort of deal, that, ultimately, they’ve thought for long time that a war with the United States was inevitable, that that was the only way out of the predicament in which Iran has been trapped for the last 47 years, and that this war was inevitable. It was going to come. And I think that if it comes, they feel they are ready for it and in a much better position than Mr. Trump in Washington. As the pressures on the oil markets bite and also as the military realities of Washington become obvious, the inability to fire standoff weapons, the inability to really do damage to the missile cities. So, what is he going to attack? Pickaxe Mountain? It’s a granite mountain with whatever facilities it has buried a thousand meters under granite. I mean, all that would happen is he’d bounce bombs off it. It wouldn’t hit it. One of their missile cities has now been hit 45 times by American bombing during that process and still half an hour afterwards, it was firing missiles from that same site.

So, I think we’re in a different sort of atmospherics, different phase to increase the pressure on the United States because the appetite for a quick deal is not there and that is very clearly reflected on the ground in Iran. We saw this during the funeral process and others. The Iranian mood has become quite changed. It’s triggered something much more profound, sort of triggered a memory of Iran as a major civilizational power, as something that has been a dominant influence in the region for thousands of years, and is being treated with no respect and discourtesy and called scum. And this has produced a very tough mentality, I think, amongst the young. So, what you saw was not people on the streets saying, “Come on, let’s have a deal. We want to get back to a deal.” I mean, the call is, “We want revenge.” That’s what the young are shouting for. That’s what we saw in those huge gatherings that took place at the funerals, both there and in Iraq. And in Iraq, too, three cities, each one producing four to five million people on the streets to mark the funeral of the late Supreme Leader.

Chris Hedges:

I want to ask about the effects of this war within the region, but before I do, I wondered if you could address the potential consequences of a prolonged closure of both the Bab-el-Mandeb and the Strait on not just necessarily the oil markets, but on the global economy.

Alastair Crooke:

It’s difficult to give you a straight quantitative answer to that because so much is unknown. We are in the middle, or at least the United States is trying to deal with a major crisis in Japan of the Japanese Yen falling precipitously and America trying to bail out, Bessent trying to bail out Japan from its collapsing currency and having to resort to sell off euros in order to buy yen to try and support it. Why is Japan important? Well, because it has $1.2 trillion of U.S. Treasuries, but also because of its strange situation. For decades, it’s had such low interest rates that it has been a boon, of course, to Wall Street because they could borrow cheaply in Japan and lend expensively in the US and it was effortless profits that were made in this way. And suddenly interest rates are rising and they are going up. And much of Japanese economy, about 14%, are really zombie economies, by which I mean they don’t make enough profits to cover their debts. I mean, in other parts of the world you might say they’re bankrupt, but they’re calling them ‘Zombie companies’. That’s 14 % of the economy trying to keep this up without showing any signs of further weakening of the dollar. And so, we’re now doing complicated exercises of saying that we’re going to borrow the Japanese’s treasuries against ultimate repayment in due course, but we’re going to let you have the money for these things now so that you can buy more yen and try and prop it up. But in short what I’m saying is the bond market is in a state of crisis and therefore the markets are in a state of crisis.

I think in some ways Netanyahu let the cat out of the bag when he came back from Washington. Yes, he said, “Look, this was the best meeting ever. Everything was wonderful.” Netanyahu’s fighting an election campaign. That’s what that’s all about. But then he said, “Mr. Trump is trying to prevent an economic collapse.” That’s what it was. And I think he hit the nail on the head that the focus very much is now on preserving the economy, on preserving the dollar hegemony, on preserving the petrodollar, on preserving that whole structure of credit, provision of credit and finance, which underwrites the US military presence around the world, which finances wars and finances the weapons that fight the wars. And keeping that going is probably the highest priority. And Iran is threatening that very process. The petrodollar is threatening the hegemony, it’s threatening that whole Gulf construct, which is actually a sort of an element of that Wall Street financialized world plunked down in the Gulf States right next to Iran and is exactly the sort of threat that the Iranians would like to see gone. The financial threat, the financial structures there, the new economy for the Gulf states is data centers. They want the data centers and of course Iran knows why, cheap energy and also it will be able to monitor everything in the Middle East on behalf of Israel and America. They don’t want that and that’s why they destroyed the big data center, the Amazon data center, just recently.

Chris Hedges:

So, let’s talk about the region. This has shaken the foundations of US military hegemony, obviously, throughout the Gulf state. The Gulf allies were not consulted about the launching of this war, yet they’ve paid a terrific price in no small part because of the precision strikes that Iran has been able to carry out, presumably with the help of Russian and Chinese satellites and intelligence. Before going on the air, you described the region as fragile. Talk a little bit about the effects within the Gulf states.

Alastair Crooke:

OK, well, but first I would say that the key element of uncertainty is the recurrence of war between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia. This is now a hot war. In the last hours, in the last day, the Houthis have fired missiles in Mandeb and Hadhramaut province in Yemen, at the forces and the mercenaries assembled there to attack the Houthis by the southern government. And there are images, we can see that the mercenaries just fled. They’ve been completely destroyed by the Houthi missiles.

Chris Hedges:

Alastair, let me just interrupt. These mercenaries are both armed and funded by Saudi Arabia, is that correct?

Alastair Crooke:

Yes, they are proxy forces on behalf of Saudi Arabia were proxy forces on behalf of Oman, but now proxy forces on behalf of Saudi Arabia. And so, they’ve been sent running by the Houthis. It is believed that the Houthis destroyed the big Aramco refinery that lies just adjacent to the Saudi’s Red Sea port, Yanbu. This big refinery was not just any refinery. We’re used to hearing about refineries hit in Russia and so on and are repaired quickly. This was the BN, be-all and end-all of refineries, all dancing, all singing. This was the latest refinery in the world and it’s been destroyed and that was the terminal of the pipeline coming from the East to the West to the Red Sea and at the same time the Aramco facilities, the pumping element, on the East side, the Hormuz side, if you like, was destroyed too. So, the pipeline was completely destroyed that transports Saudi oil from their main fields to the Red Sea. And the Saudis said not that it was the Houthis that did it, but they said it was the Iraqi resistance, the Hashd al-Jahan, that were responsible for this. The Hashd al-Shaabi denied it completely and said, “No, it wasn’t us that did this.” And it is likely that it wasn’t because it’s the Arba’in in Iraq. This is a celebration. This is a solemn, if you like, period of 40 days that marks the anniversary of death of Imam Hussein in Karbala. And it’s a religious period, not one of conflict and war. But the Saudis and America attacked them, the Iraqi resistance, killing many and killing some Iranian forces of the IRGC. And then Iraq has begun an attempt to try and purge some of the resistance under the name of saying it’s an anti-corruption group. But there are signs that the resistance has been moving up onto the borders of Saudi Arabia, moving closer towards that, and the Iraqi government is trying to stop that and to try and contain that and threatening the groups.

You will know, and I, just for listeners to understand Iraq, approximately there are, we have no exact numbers, but is roughly 60 % Shia. 40 % of the others are split between Sunnis and Kurds. So, the Sunnis are quite a small proportion, and the Shi’i are the largest proportion. The Hashd are always referred to in Western media saying, “Oh, but these are just Iranian proxies.” And so, as if putting pressure on them would put pressure on Iran in the Hormuz dispute. They’re not that. I mean, I know them. I’ve met the Hashd. Put straightforwardly, these Iraqi nationalists. They are strongly Iraqi nationalists. Yes, they are Shi’i. And yes, Iran is the sort of mothership of Shi’ism, but these are Iraqi nationalists and they’ve been tagged. And they also, for the majority of them, accepted and followed the Supreme Leader who was assassinated on the 29th of February as their source of emulation, their Marja. And so, they are deeply angry about his death. He was their religious leader too, not Iran’s. And so, they’ve said there will be retribution. They’ve given the Iraqi government a little leeway, but from what I see is that there are, if you like, movements on both sides of the border and maybe it will be contained, but it is a very fragile state. Some Iraqi security people have said actually it wasn’t the Hashd, the Iraqi resistance, that attacked the Saudi oil facilities, it was Ukrainian groups that were doing it. I don’t think we have to attach too much importance to that, but it comes at a time at which an Iranian ship was struck and struck by Ukrainian missiles in the Caspian Sea. So, that is very much heating up between Saudi Arabia and Iraq and the United States and Iraq. The Hashd are clearly mobilizing but have not yet taken the decision.

At the same time in Iraq, the Iranians have moved into Erbil. That is the Kurdish part of Iraq, Kurdistan if you like, and attacked the Kurdish forces there, assassinating some of their leaders, attacking their supply lines, their fuel and ammunition, because there were reports that the United States was trying to sort of see if it was possible to revive a sort of plan, which has already failed, for Kurds to sort of invade into Iran and establish a sort of mini-state. We saw that in Russia, in the Kursk region, to put more pressure on Iran. And so, they are taking preemptive action there to stop that. We’ve also seen a gas tanker attacked by drones in a port in Egypt in these recent days. It’s not clear who was responsible, but the war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen is getting much more intense. And I think the reason that the Saudis blamed the Hashd in Iraq for the attacks on the Aramco facilities was probably because they didn’t want to exacerbate the war with the Houthis.

The Houthis are a formidable fighting force and, in the past, they’ve delivered a huge defeat in the army of Egypt when they ended up killing, I think, 20,000 Egyptian soldiers. This was in the past, a long time in the past, not present. But this is the sort of sense that Saudi is not anxious to get into this war, but at the same time, Saudi now has no money. I mean, it’s getting no revenue. It was anyway short of money. And it hasn’t got that far with the Abu Dhabi, but the Gulf states, too, are short of money. So, all of this is becoming very much, the hot plate is getting hotter and hotter, and there’s a misjudgment here, like the misjudgment of Ukrainians trying to attack an Iranian ship in the Caspian. Could he easily change the whole nature and the whole dynamic of this war and make it more profound?

But my main point is Trump is talking about trying to find a solution to the Iran problem. Look what’s happened. The whole thing has become a matrix of other conflicts. I haven’t even mentioned Lebanon in this process with the threats that Washington has been trying to encourage the Sharia from Syria to come and take part in the disarmament of Hezbollah or to attack the Shia villages that lie on the border between Lebanon and Syria. And Turkey, who has considerable influence over the forces in Damascus, says they’re not unopposed to Syria being involved in Lebanon. But as soon as that happened, we had more reaction from the Iraqi resistance that said to Sharia, “You go near Lebanon and we come into Syria and we’re going to attack from that side.” And so, the whole thing is getting more and more mixed, and we have the potential Black Swan flying. And I do think we need to take it seriously, which is that the far right in Israel, I hate the word far right, but the messianic right shall we say more correctly, BenGvir, Smotrich, but particularly Ben Gvir is saying that they would like to see a crisis in the West Bank, a big crisis, perhaps on Temple Mount, perhaps in a war in the West Bank. They want to have the crisis that will force an exodus of Palestinians from the West Bank, and it will help win the election for them.

It’s about the elections but it’s also a double motive to provoke another 48-type situation with Palestinians fleeing for their lives from the West Bank. So, they are preparing it. They’re making no secret of it. The election is going to be an existential election. This is due to take place in October. And it’s not clear what’s going to happen. And it’s not clear that it will not end up in violencece in Israel because the two sides are really at loggerheads at the moment and the future of Netanyahu is by no means certain. But to set fire to the West Bank at this time has been a long-standing aim. I remember Smotrich talking about this some years ago in a talk he gave to the Likud when he said, “Listen, this is our plan and the Arabs are going to go.” And he said, “But what we really need to implement this plan is a big crisis or a big war. And during that war, the plan will be finally operational.”

And so, as I say, these are some of the possibilities, all of this together. It makes it very volatile. But that’s not my point. There’s no clean binary deal available to Washington. It’s now turned into a matrix of smaller wars taking place across the region, all of which are interconnected, but all of which have quite separate agendas - the Lebanese war, the Yemen, the Syrian circumstances - all of these things have got completely different agendas. The possibility of Washington coming to a comprehensive solution now seems to me close to zero.

Chris Hedges:

The Egyptians and the Jordanians have moved their military up - the Egyptians in the Sinai, the Jordanians along the border with the West Bank - to prevent the kind of ethnic cleansing that Smotrich and others have openly advocated. I think they call it ‘voluntary transfer’ or something. So, if they try and push the Palestinians out of the West Bank or they finally decide that they want to make that kind of push in Gaza where about two million Palestinians are now huddled in fetid overcrowded tent cities, in a third, Israel’s already seized seventy percent of Gaza. How does that play out? I mean, doesn’t that create a military confrontation between Israel and either Jordan or Egypt?

Alastair Crooke:

It could break out in many different ways. I mean, this is exactly what I’m trying to say. It’s incendiary. The whole region could be one match here, another match there, another killing in Lebanon, a mass killing somewhere else. It’s very volatile and can easily be set off. But particularly the Palestinian things could erupt. There could be from the consequences that could bring Iran back into the conflict directly with Israel. It could bring Iran into directly striking into Israel in the Northern Territories. That’s the territories from the south of Lebanon down to the Galilee. All of this is possible. Iran is expecting a conflict with the United States, and one could easily be triggered. The Iranians are ready for war not only with the United States, but I think they expect that it will include Israel at some point. They are prepared for that. I just underline that because I think quite often people misunderstand and say, “Well, Israel is so strong, isn’t it?” Actually, in terms of their infrastructure, which they say they want to attack in Iran, it’s the Israelis who have won. They have two refineries, effectively, just two, and they have a small country and so their power plants are centrally located, concentrated. Whereas Iran is a big country and its power structures and all of its infrastructure is dispersed. It’s been dispersed, as I say, for 20 years, precisely in anticipation of a coming war with the United States. So, it’s not so clear.

Does Israel want a war with Iran? No, it wants Trump to wage a war with Iran and to destroy Iran, to destroy its infrastructure so that the state can no longer provide the services to the citizens. That’s a quote of what they say they would like to see. Of course, I mean, to demand that the state should be so destroyed that it is unable to provide any services to its people really amounts to a slow tactical nuclear weapons strike instead of a big one because it means without water, without electricity, at this time of year without fuel, I mean this would be impossible to survive. And if this happens, the Iranians will strike back at the water purification plants of Saudi Arabia and at the Gulf states, and they’re very vulnerable in that. Iran is less vulnerable in water purification. Only 3 % of their water comes from purification.

Chris Hedges:

And let me just throw out about seventy percent of desalination plants provide water in Saudi Arabia. I think the UAE is over eighty percent. If Iran took out these desalination plants, that would instantly - I think all of Riyadh, for instance, depends on desalination - that would create a humanitarian crisis throughout the region.

Alastair Crooke:

Absolutely. But is that in the calculus in Washington? I mean of course it’s understood in parts of Washington, but how much is this put to Trump when he’s in the right sort of state of mind to hear this and to understand it and not to go on saying, “Iran is defeated, it’s broken, we’ve won the war.” This is the uncertain part of this. What might happen anywhere in the region, but a mistaken decision taken could blow it up across the entire region because all of these things are interlinked and somehow they will be connected. Hezbollah will not stand by if Palestinians are being thrown out of Gaza or thrown out of the West Bank. It’s all interconnected and what happens in Syria, what happens with the Hashd, the Hashd might come into Syria. All of these things are in the air.

How much of this is really thought through in Washington and understood? You have to say at the end of it, I mean, this is what they brought on themselves because all of this was an attempt to find, “Okay, we can’t put military pressure on Iran, so we’ll put on pressure from Iraq and we’ll put pressure from this region. We’ll disarm, threaten to disarm the militia in Iraq. We’ll threaten to disarm Hezbollah.” And all of this is done is to make the thing ten times more complicated, ten times more complex to resolve. There’s no simple binary silver bullet that is going to be fired.

Chris Hedges:

Great, thank you, Alastair. And I want to thank Diego, Thomas, and Max who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

Photos

US-IRAQ-ATTACK

A Tactical “Tomahawk” Block IV cruise missile, conducts a controlled flight test over the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) western test range complex in southern California. The Tactical Tomahawk, scheduled to join the fleet in 2004, is the next generation of Tomahawk cruise missile and it adds the capability to reprogram the missile while in-flight to strike any of 15 preprogrammed alternate targets or redirect the missile to any Global Positioning System (GPS) target coordinates. (Photo by US NAVY / AFP) (Photo by -/US NAVY/AFP via Getty Images)

C-130 And Lockheed JASSM Cruise Missile

The propellers of a C-130 Hercules and a Lockheed Martin JASSM cruise missile exhibit at the Farnborough Airshow, on 16th July 2018, in Farnborough, England. The AGM-158 JASSM (Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile) is a low observable standoff air-launched cruise missile developed in the United States. It is a large, semi-stealthy long-range weapon of the 2,000 pounds (910 kg) class. (Photo by Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images Images)

U.S. Military Launches Operation Epic Fury Attacking Iran

AT SEA, UNSPECIFIED - MARCH 1: (EDITOR’S NOTE: This Handout image was provided by a third-party organization and may not adhere to Getty Images’ editorial policy.) In this U.S. Navy released handout, Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Thomas Hudner (DDG 116) fires a Tomahawk land attack missile in support of Operation Epic Fury, on March 1, 2026 at Sea. (Photo by U.S. Navy via Getty Images)

USS Fitzgerald Fires Missile

Guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) fires a Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) during a joint ballistic missile defense exercise, Pacific Ocean, 2012. Image courtesy US Navy. (Photo via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images).

US Navy Tests Missiles

KAUI, HI - NOVEMBER 6: In this handout image provided by the US Navy, a threat representative target is launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) to be intercepted as part of a Missile Defense Agency test of the sea-based capability under development, yet tactically certified and deployed with the U.S. Navy November 6, 2007 in Kaui, Hawaii. (Photo by US Navy via Getty Images)

Pentagon delays ‘’THAAD” anti-missile system

The Pentagon again postponed a key test of its troubled “THAAD’‘’‘ anti-missile defense rocket, seen this file photo, due to a commercial power failure, the Defense Department said. (photo by Lockheed Martin)

US Air Force Personnel Launch A Test Patriot Missile During An Exercise Invo

390840 02: (File Photo) Us Air Force Personnel Launch A Test Patriot Missile During An Exercise Involving The Militaries Of The Us, Canada, Germany, And The Netherlands April 30, 1997 Near El Paso, Tx. (Photo By Usaf/Getty Images)

Iran And US Remain In Stalemate Over Strait Of Hormuz

STRAIT OF HORMUZ, IRAN - MAY 16: An Iranian flag flutters in the wind as ships remain anchored on May 16, 2026 in the Strait of Hormuz near Larak Island, Iran. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

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US President Donald Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting at Camp David in Maryland, on July 31, 2026. (Photo by Aaron Schwartz / AFP via Getty Images)

Bombing Campaign

October 1965: A US Air Force strategic air command (SAC) B-52 stratofortress drops a string of 750-pound bombs over a coastal target in the Republic of Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Official U.S. Air Force photo released by the Department of Defense. (Photo by US Air Force/Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-UAE-DALMA-SAILING

TOPSHOT - Emirati competitors sail their dhow past a crude oil tanker Navig8 Honor during the Dalma Sailing Festival in the waters of Dalma island in the Gulf, about 40 kms off of the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi, on October 22, 2019. (Photo by KARIM SAHIB / AFP) (Photo by KARIM SAHIB/AFP via Getty Images)

Donald Trump

Donald Trump (L), owner of the New Jersey Generals, of the U.S. Football League, said 10/18 his league’s $1.32 billion antitrust suit against the national Football League will crack “one of the great monopolies in the is country.” At right is his attorney Roy Cohn.

U.S. And Israel Wage War Against Iran

TEHRAN, IRAN - MARCH 28: A large plume of smoke rises over Tehran after explosions were reported in the city during the night on March 28, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. The United States and Israel continued their joint attack on Iran that began on February 28. Iran retaliated by firing waves of missiles and drones at Israel, and targeting U.S. allies in the region. (Photo by Getty Images)

UK Hosts President Trump And First Lady Melania Trump For State Visit - Day Three

AYLESBURY, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 18: U.S. President Donald Trump attends a press conference with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer (not pictured) at Chequers at the conclusion of a state visit on September 18, 2025 in Aylesbury, England. This is the final day of President Trump’s second UK state visit, with the previous one taking place in 2019 during his first presidential term. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Oil production in Venezuela

17 March 2022, Venezuela, Anzoategui: Side view of the “Jose Antonio Anzoategui” industrial park for crude oil and petrochemicals. According to current knowledge, the South American crisis country has the largest oil reserves in the world. However, due to sanctions, mismanagement and corruption, the daily production rate had dropped to 668,000 barrels of oil per day. Photo: Stringer/dpa (Photo by Stringer/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Tunnel Construction and Spoil Pile at Nuclear Facility - November 14, 2025

PICKAXE MOUNTAIN NEAR NATANZ NUCLEAR FACILITY, IRAN -- NOVEMBER 14, 2025: 12 -- Vantor satellite image shows tunnel construction activities and a large spoil pile near the Natanz nuclear complex at Pickaxe Mountain. Please use: Satellite image (c) 2026 Vantor.

Iran Holds Dayslong Funeral For Late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

TEHRAN, IRAN - JULY 4: People raise fists at a farewell ceremony for Iran’s late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on July 4, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. Khamenei and members of his family were killed on February 28 during U.S.-Israeli strikes at the beginning of the war, bringing an end to his 36-year rule over Iran. A multi-city state funeral will be held over six days before his body is laid to rest on July 9, in his hometown of Mashhad, Iran. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Iran Holds Dayslong Funeral For Late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

NAJAF, IRAQ - JULY 08: Mourners gather outside the Imam Ali Shrine to attend the funeral procession of Iran’s slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on July 08, 2026 in Najaf, Iraq. Khamenei and members of his family were killed on February 28 during U.S.-Israeli strikes at the beginning of the war, bringing an end to his 36-year rule over Iran. A multi-city state funeralis being held over six days before his body is laid to rest on July 9, in his hometown of Mashhad, Iran. (Photo by Meghdad Madadi ATPImages/Getty Images)

U.S. President Trump Visits USS George Washington In Japan

YOKOSUKA, JAPAN - OCTOBER 28: Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi (L) raises her fist as U.S. President Donald Trump (R) speaks aboard USS George Washington on October 28, 2025 in Yokosuka, Japan. Trump is visiting Japan, fresh off an appearance at the ASEAN summit in Malaysia, and will next travel to South Korea for the APEC meetings. (Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)

Late Senator Lindsey Graham Memorialized In Washington DC

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 28: (L-R) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, his wife Jennifer Rauchet, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche attend the funeral for the late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) at The Washington National Cathedral on July 28, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

UAE-ECONOMY-ENERGY

Guests look at a model of the largest data center in the UAE under construction in Abu Dhabi as the Stargate initiative, a joint venture between G42, Microsoft, and OpenAI, during the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition & Conference (ADIPEC) in Abu Dhabi on November 3, 2025. (Photo by Giuseppe CACACE / AFP via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-UAE-IRAN-ISRAEL-US-CONFLICT

TOPSHOT - Delivery-persons ride motorcycles along a road as behind a tall smoke plume billows following an explosion in the Fujairah industrial zone on March 3, 2026. Iran’s strikes on Gulf neighbours since February 28, following the US-Israeli attack, forced the UAE to shut its airspace, blindsiding travellers who thought they were headed to one of the region’s safest holiday destinations. (Photo by Fadel SENNA / AFP via Getty Images)

Protest Supporting Iran By Houthi Loyalists In Yemen 2026

SANA’A, YEMEN - MARCH 27: A Yemen’s Houthi soldier mans a machine gun mounted on a police vehicle next to a billboard depicting Houthi launching missile and drone attacks, during a protest staged to show support to Iran against the U.S.-Israel war on March 27, 2026 in Sana’a, Yemen. (Photo by Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images)

Satellite Imagery Of The Aramco Oil Terminal At Jizan In Saudi Arabia

JIZAN, SAUDI ARABIA - 26 JULY 2026: A satellite view of smoke plumes rising from Saudi Aramco’s refinery complex and oil terminals in Jazan/Jizan, Saudi Arabia, after coordinated Houthi strikes launched from Yemen. The attacks disrupted fuel exports through the Red Sea’s Bab al‑Mandeb strait and marked a major escalation in the Iran–Saudi conflict fought through the Yemen war. Imaged 26 July 2026. (Photo by Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2026)

IRAQ-CONFLICT-POLITICS-SHIITE

A fighter of Iraq’s Hashed al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation) paramilitary forces stands guard next to a wall showing the group’s logo outside their headquarters in the capital Baghdad on June 13, 2021. (Photo by Ahmad AL-RUBAYE / AFP) (Photo by AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP via Getty Images)

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei meets students in Tehran

TEHRAN, IRAN - OCTOBER 18: (----EDITORIAL USE ONLY MANDATORY CREDIT - “ IRANIAN LEADER’S PRESS OFFICE / HANDOUT” - NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS - DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS----) Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei speaks during his meeting with students in Tehran, Iran on October 18, 2017. (Photo by Iranian Leader’s Press Office - Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

YEMEN-CONFLICT-SAUDI-ANNIVERSARY

Members of Houthi security forces stand guard while supporters of Yemen’s Huthi movement attend an event commemorating the ninth anniversary of the Saudi-led intervention in their country, in the capital Sanaa on March 26, 2026. (Photo by Mohammed HUWAIS / AFP via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-SYRIA-CONFLICT-ANNIVERSARY

TOPSHOT - Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa waves to the crowd at the gate of Aleppo’s Citadel during celebrations marking one year since an Islamist alliance, led by Sharaa, entered the northern city and swiftly took control of it, on November 29, 2025. Sharaa visited the northern city of Aleppo on November 29 as the country marks a year since a lightning Islamist-led offensive that eventually toppled longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad last December. (Photo by Bakr ALkasem / AFP via Getty Images)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Qatar

DOHA, QATAR - SEPTEMBER 15: (----EDITORIAL USE ONLY - MANDATORY CREDIT - ‘TURKISH PRESIDENCY / MURAT KULA / HANDOUT’ - NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS -DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS----) Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (R) meets with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa (L) as part of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation-Arab League Joint Extraordinary Summit on September 15, 2025 in Doha, Qatar. (Photo by TUR Presidency / Murat Kula/Anadolu via Getty Images)

ISRAEL-POLITICS-GOVERNMENT

Right-wing Knesset members Itamar Ben-Gvir (L) and Bezalel Smotrich, attend a special session at the Knesset Israel’s parliament, to approve and swear in a new right-wing government, in Jerusalem on December 29, 2022. - The right-wing government, formed after the fifth election in four years, has sparked fears of a further military escalation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, amid the worst violence there for nearly 20 years. (Photo by AMIR COHEN / POOL / AFP) (Photo by AMIR COHEN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

‘Jerusalem Day’ Flag March

JERUSALEM - MAY 14: Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich takes part in the Jerusalem Day parade at the Damascus Gate in the old city of Jerusalem on May 14, 2026 in the Old City of Jerusalem. The controversial annual march sees thousands of nationalist Israelis celebrate the capture of the formerly Jordanian-held east of the city during the Six-Day War in 1967. The march has become increasingly volatile, with tensions over the war in Gaza, as well as settler violence in the West Bank, fuelling hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians. (Photo by Erik Marmor/Getty Images)

Explosions heard in Tehran as new Israeli airstrikes hit Iranian capital

TEHRAN, IRAN - MARCH 01: Smoke rises from the area after it was targeted in attacks as a series of explosions are heard in Tehran, Iran on March 01, 2026. The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) building after Iranian authorities said it was targeted in the attacks, as the Iranian army announced it had launched new strikes against U.S. and Israeli targets (Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-SAUDI-ENVIRONMENT-WATER-ENERGY-COP28

TOPSHOT - In this picture taken on March 30, 2023, Mohamed Ali al-Qahtani (L), Phase General Manager at the Ras al-Khair water desalination plant, owned by the Saudi government’s Saline Water Conversion Corporation, speaks with an employee at the facility in Ras al-Khair along the Gulf coast in eastern Saudi Arabia. (Photo by Fayez Nureldine / AFP via Getty Images)

Israel Continues Air Strikes And Ground Offensive In Lebanon

BEKAA VALLEY, LEBANON - MARCH 23: A local man shouts slogans in support of the Lebanese resistance at the scene of an Israeli air strike on a civilian home which caused several fatalities in the village of Shaat on the edge of the town of Younine on March 23, 2026 in Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. Israel has continued its aerial and ground assault in Lebanon after Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon, launched missiles at Israel in what it said was retaliation for the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. (Photo by Guy Smallman/Getty Images)

YEMEN-CONFLICT-US-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN

Yemenis brandish rifles and chant during a demonstration called for by the rebel Huthi movement in Sanaa on March 17, 2025. Huge crowds joined protests in rebel-controlled Yemen on March 17 after deadly US strikes killed dozens and sparked fears of a new cycle of violence in the conflict-torn country. (Photo by Mohammed HUWAIS / AFP) (Photo by MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP via Getty Images)

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Under the radar, the billionaire class is building the infrastructure and models necessary to create a dystopian future in which cities become billionaire fiefdoms - completely privatized, governed by dictatorial CEOs and financed by subservient taxpayers. The buildout of data centers is one essential part of the effort to construct a totalitarian capitalist society, which is already advancing.

In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Hedges interviews investigative journalist Whitney Webb, the author of “One Nation Under Blackmail,” who, in her new article, unravels the complex relationships between elected leaders, the National Security State, the state of Israel and Big Tech. Webb discusses the methods being used in the Silicon Heartland, the area around Columbus, Ohio, where Les Wexner, who has ties to organized crime and was Jeffrey Epstein’s most notable benefactor, and other powerful billionaires such as Peter Thiel of Palantir, have made significant headway in creating a privately-run city — New Albany. She describes their use of innocent-sounding front groups, such as Jobs Ohio, private development corporations and political bribery to enrich themselves and create what they are marketing as Smart Cities.

Hedges and Webb expose the connections between the billionaires behind this effort and the State of Israel. Webb argues that Israeli startups have been promoted to Big Tech “so that US technological infrastructure on multiple levels would be so intimately enmeshed with Israeli interests that they could never meaningfully boycott Israel.” The same technological infrastructure is also being fused with the National Security State – intelligence and the military – to also make it dependent on the private sector.

The ideology underlying this new model of feudalism originates from the Neo-Reactionary Movement. Beyond that, Webb explains, the billionaires involved believe fervently in a transhumanist future where “the end goal of humanity is to have humanity merge with AI in some capacity” such that there are two classes, the wealthy and a large underclass that is either exploitable or expendable, and obedience is enforced through technology. There is still time to prevent further development of this dystopian future by, among other actions, unplugging from the very technology being employed to create it.

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

Chris Hedges: The proliferation of data centers built to process immense amounts of data sets and train AI models has spawned widespread grassroots backlash by a diverse coalition of Americans across the country. The people behind these industrial behemoths and the legislative infrastructure that has laid the path to their development, however, are scarcely understood. In a recent article for Unlimited Hangout, Whitney Webb investigates the Silicon Heartland or the part of the Columbus metropolitan area that is being rapidly developed into a major hub for technological development, hosting big tech campuses, semiconductor production facilities, and massive data centers. Webb reveals that at the center of this technological development drive is Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent benefactor, Les Wexner, the billionaire founder of Bath and Body Works with ties to organized crime, who co-founded the Mega Group, a cohort of Jewish entrepreneurs who once met twice a year to discuss where to target their philanthropic investments. Birthright Israel was one of the most prominent initiatives spun out of the group.

Through a dizzying array of public-private partnerships and alleged shell companies, Wexner has gained control of key real estate that is now being utilized by military-contracting big tech companies, enriching himself and the corporations he’s lured to the Silicon Heartland along the way. But it is how Wexner has accumulated this leverage that illuminates the dark inner workings of our political system. These public-private partnerships, Webb reveals, despite the banality of their name, function as a way for oligarchs to funnel taxpayer money into privately developed business projects. These agreements also enmesh the money, objectives, and players of the private sector so deeply into the legislative process that they empower the private end of these partnerships to take de facto control of their government collaborators. In doing so, these oligarchs facilitate a quasilegal corporatization of government.

Inevitably, as data centers increasingly become a key component of the nation’s surveillance infrastructure, other centers of power enter the mix as well, with national security actors - defense executives, Israeli business interests, Vivek Ramaswamy, Peter Thiel allies, and Vice President J.D. Vance lingering on the peripheries of the public-private framework advancing this data center deluge.

Joining me to discuss the legal infrastructure and networks behind some of our modern surveillance state is investigative journalist and author of “One Nation Under Blackmail,” Whitney Webb. So, let’s begin with Wexner, who he is, and perhaps, he has close ties to Epstein, you can speak about that as well.

Whitney Webb: Sure. Thanks so much for having me back on, Chris. So yes, Leslie Wexner, probably best known for one of two things, either being the richest man in the state of Ohio or being the most well-known benefactor of Jeffrey Epstein, at least on paper. So, Leslie Wexner created what is now a large conglomerate of companies, now under the parent company L Brands, but some of the best-known companies that he has been behind are longtime staples of American malls, Bath and Body Works being one, Abercrombie and Fitch, The Limited, Limited Two, etc. etc.

Some of my reporting on him in conjunction with Epstein has focused on things like his organized crime connections, which were alleged by Columbus local police as they were investigating the death of one of his lawyers, or one of the lawyers rather, of The Limited, named Arthur Shapiro in the 1980s, who was deemed to have been murdered in what was referred to as a mob-style hit back in, I believe, 1985 or so. And he, Wexner, and his close associate, John Kessler, were named as suspects and their ties to organized crime were detailed in a report that was heavily censored by the Columbus police chief at the time and ended up being revealed inadvertently through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by local journalist Bob Fitrakis in the late 90s. And so, we have a record of that and the various organized crime connections that were alleged too, a record of that now.

Notably Kessler is the person that created with Leslie Wexner something called the New Albany Company, which is this private company that has essentially taken control of this what was once a very small suburb outside of Columbus, Ohio, called New Albany. And through a series of efforts to drastically alter not just local law, but also state law, the New Albany Company was able to become the de facto local government of the town of New Albany by entering into a public-private partnership with the local government of New Albany. But in some of these law changes they lobbied for, including at the state level, allowed the New Albany company created by Wexner and Kessler to do unprecedented things for a private company, like tax local residents and issue bonds and all sorts of things that are normally meant to be the business of local governments. And Kessler, for example, has said that basically the New Albany local government in their partnership is extremely pro-development and adheres to a master plan that was developed by the New Albany Company.

So, this is one of Wexner’s other endeavors, aside from, of course, his association with Jeffrey Epstein and longtime partnership there, and his corporate behemoth, L brands, that he runs and that made him a billionaire. But this is one of the other things that he has been developing for some time, the town of New Albany, which now obviously is part of the broader Columbus region, home to the vast majority of Ohio’s data centers. So, Ohio is currently, I believe, fourth in the United States for having the most data centers behind Virginia, Texas and California, I believe. But they have about 193 data centers currently, I believe, and 121 of those are in and around New Albany.

Chris Hedges: Your article shows that Wexner and various public-private partnerships that he’s spirited are serving as a key node in the development of this data center in Ohio, the Silicon Heartland, but there’s a much broader coalition of people and institutions that are driving the data center push, wrapping Big Tech, the US government, elements of the military-industrial complex in the mix. What’s the objective and why data centers?

Whitney Webb: Do you mean in Ohio or in general?

Chris Hedges: Nationally. Well, both, I mean, because Ohio is kind of your case study.

Whitney Webb: Right, sure. So obviously it’s fair to say that the network behind the data center push is extremely large and influential, obviously spearheaded by big tech companies that, at this point, have, for all intents and purposes, fused with the National Security State. And this has been ongoing for some time. So, a good example is to look back at the 2018 National Security Commission on AI that was chaired by Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, and a close associate of Schmidt, who had previously held a top position at what is now the Department of War. And basically, everyone on that commission was either a major executive at one of these big tech companies that is behind the data center push or figures that had previously worked for the military to establish, basically, the US roadmap on AI and what needed to be done for “national security purposes.” And it’s fair to say that even beyond that, you can see how these two groups have become so intertwined by the fact that the intelligence community, as well as the military and other major aspects of the federal government, contract extensively with these same big tech companies and are arguably largely dependent on them. While at the same time, a lot of these big tech oligarchs are major donors to our politicians.

So, on various levels, they have much more influence than arguably any other group right now. And I think as a very visual example that people will be familiar with that’s a testament to this, is after Trump’s inauguration or during Trump’s inauguration last year, behind him was a line of Who’s Who of Big Tech CEOs like Jeff Bezos and other figures like him, a testament to their role and importance in getting him elected for a second term. And he has obviously, so far, been generously repaying their patronage.

But there’s important people to look at too in the buildout of the data center deluge, as you called it, that aren’t such public figures at this point. So, there’s a lot of AI infrastructure companies that are becoming increasingly important to this, but they largely stay out of the news. So, one good example, I think, for this would be a company called Crusoe AI, which is, for example, building the Stargate project for Open AI and Larry Ellison’s Oracle, which was announced in the early days, I think one of the first announcements actually, of Trump soon after his inauguration this time around. And they’re basically building a lot of the data centers and working as a sort of a middleman between these big tech companies and the actual creation and infrastructure that they rely on. And so, those companies are an important part of this constellation of actors as well.

And it’s also something that’s happening well beyond the US. So, one of the founders of Crusoe AI, for example, is named Cully Cavness, and he accompanied Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Palantir, on his recent trip to Argentina to meet with Javier Milei. Later, they also met with Chilean politicians, apparently including the president of Chile, though it wasn’t publicly announced, and also the president of Paraguay. And, not long after that, at least in the case of Milei, there have been these proposals of allowing companies with no human employees that are run by AI to operate in the country, an announcement of Stargate Argentina on behalf of OpenAI, run by Sam Altman, who’s closely affiliated with Peter Thiel.

So, these people are looking to build data centers really all over the world. And why are they doing it? Why data centers? It’s essential to basically their various plans for AI, which include not just their plans for AI-related businesses, but also a lot of these people subscribe to specific ideologies that see that extreme investments in AI and AI compute capability are necessary in order to further the development of what they call ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ or an AI superintelligence, and some of them hold an almost religious fervor, you could say, for having that come to fruition and are openly transhumanist and think that the end goal of humanity is to have humanity merge with AI in some capacity. So, they have not just the economic incentive, they also have this, I would call it, quasi-religious incentive as well, which may help propel this along even when the economics of it don’t necessarily make sense. And at the end of the day, I think it’s a testament to how we’re sort of living in an era of, this is the importance to them, of computing power over people. And so, people that are negatively affected by them, apparently their concerns don’t matter and there’s a coordinated effort to sort of paint any pushback as being propelled by China, for example, and various different narratives are being fielded right now to try and manage local anger at an increasing cost of living crisis, many of which have been linked to data centers, particularly their power usage and their water usage.

And some of these Thiel-linked outlets, like Pirate Wires, for example, have tried to push against those claims, but using the data on the books about water usage and some other people in some other claims, but in states like California, most data centers aren’t required to report how much water they use. So, how accurate is the data we have on it anyway? And a lot of data centers are moving into areas that have water issues or are having droughts already and so obviously local concern about that is quite reasonable but for the big tech oligarchs, they’re not really interested in hearing those concerns. They have a dedicated mission to improving AI for, as I mentioned, various purposes and moving the United States further into an AI-powered economy.

Chris Hedges: So, could you explain what people like Wexner and Thiel, what is their political and social vision? What are they trying to create and how will these data centers and AI help them achieve this vision?

Whitney Webb: So, essentially what Wexner has done in the state of Ohio, and what I detail, is that he has privatized major aspects of local and state government through first, in the example I gave earlier of New Albany and then extending beyond that to first the Columbus region and then really the state in its entirety, focusing mainly on the Department of Economic Development, and where that essentially intersects with people like Peter Thiel is his professed interest in the writings of people like Curtis Yarvin in the Neoreactionary Movement, who posit that the answer to current problems with our government is to privatize the state entirely and place in charge of it a CEO that would essentially operate as a dictator. So, both men quite clearly have an interest in privatizing major aspects, if not all, of the US government. And so, ultimately from that, what does that mean? And up until this point, the way to achieve that in a practical sense has been to expand and grow the power of public-private partnerships, where almost always the public sector is subservient to its private sector partner. And it’s used to enrich the private sector partner and the public sector, ostensibly working as a watchdog here on private sector power, does not end up functioning that way. And so ultimately, this is what we’re seeing, I think, especially with the ascendence of oligarchs like Thiel and people close to him in the halls of political power, for example. The best example, obviously, being current vice president JD Vance, is to further this so we go beyond the public-private partnership model that’s predominated for several decades now and move into this more extreme privatization, which may happen gradually or suddenly, depending on how they think it could best be implemented to suit their interests.

Chris Hedges: One of the points you make in the article is that they seize, I think, they took control of the liquor tax in Ohio, but one of the points you make is that once this public money pours into their hands, there’s no accountability. Nobody knows where it goes.

Whitney Webb: Yeah, so what I was talking about in that specific example is this organization that was created as essentially the privatized version of the State Economic Development Authority, and it’s called Jobs Ohio. And so, Jobs Ohio was allowed to purchase rights to the Ohio liquor tax for, I think, $1.4 billion, which it made back extremely quickly, and because they are a private company, they are not required to show how they use the funds they take in from the liquor tax and are essentially referred to as a ‘dark money organization’. They claim, of course, to be creating lots of jobs by offering taxpayer-funded, through the liquor tax and other means, incentives packages to a lot of these large data center companies and other corporations that are in the same sphere that have moved in like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, which is backed by Peter Thiel.

But Jobs Ohio has been able to, supposedly, they claim that these incentive packages help attract all of these businesses to the state and if they didn’t exist, those companies would go elsewhere. But studies show that’s only true in maybe 25% of cases. And it’s unclear how many jobs Jobs Ohio has actually created since it came into existence in 2011. And if you’re looking at data centers, a lot has been said about how many jobs they’re going to create, but most of the jobs they create are temporary. They’re construction jobs, and so once the data center is built, most of them employ maybe 20 to 30 people per data center, which is not very much. And so, if you consider the amount of money, which is often millions, poured into these incentive packages, which also include in Ohio sales and property tax exemptions, is it really worth it for 20 to 30 jobs per center when the losses to the Ohio taxpayer number in the millions?

Chris Hedges: And this was money, if I remember correctly from your article, that that was used to fund education, I mean to fund basic services. Once they took it, that money is gone.

Whitney Webb: Yeah, so if you look at Governor Mike DeWine, for example, he pushed through a recent spending bill that gutted all of those services. And there was efforts at the state level to push through legislation that would curb some of these tax exemptions for data centers, and Mike DeWine vetoed that but Mike DeWine and some of the people that work under him, their political careers have been very related to the fortunes of Leslie Wexner, who count among their biggest donors. Of course, it’s fair to say also that Wexner donates to both parties, but the vast majority of his patronage in the state has gone to Ohio Republicans, Mike DeWine being no exception. And his predecessor, John Kasich, was heavily funded by Wexner as well, which seems to have resulted, in part, in the creation of Jobs Ohio, which ended up being used to scale the model that Wexner implemented in Columbus via the Columbus Partnership.

Chris Hedges: At the beginning of the article, you write about how Wexner helped create a network of public-private partnerships, and of course, as you mentioned, use billions of dollars of Ohio taxpayer money to finance a massive welfare system for corporations. Can you detail how the public-private partnerships are put together, how they work, and how Wexner used them to create this vast data center development?

Whitney Webb: Yeah, so the culmination of that effort is the company that we just discussed called Jobs Ohio, but it started off in the region of Columbus. So, as I mentioned earlier, Wexner successfully privatized the town of New Albany, which is close to Columbus and sits within the Columbus region, and in the early 2000s, Wexner and Kessler, who created the New Albany Company that took over that town, created something called the Columbus Partnership, which basically became the de facto Economic Development Authority. And the Columbus Partnership then spawned something that is now called One Columbus, that is the Columbus Region’s Economic Development Authority. And it is a public-private partnership that the private sector donors to One Columbus include Wexner’s companies but also include very large companies that have a large presence in the state, like JP Morgan, for example, and ones that have large data centers in the state and the Columbus area specifically, like Amazon. And so not surprisingly, One Columbus, as they say, is “aggressively focused on achieving the economic development goals of its private sector partners,” which includes the build out of data centers. And so, to facilitate that and subsidize that with taxpayer money, that is what these public-private partnerships are essentially doing. And as I said earlier, there’s no proof that these are necessary to bring the vast majority of these companies to the region or to the state, but it is a way to use taxpayer money to subsidize the buildout of AI infrastructure on a massive scale.

And they continue to foot the bill in other ways via higher power bills, for example, which in the Columbus region, in particular, have exploded as the data center boom in the state has continued to grow. And as I mentioned earlier, the vast majority of data centers in the state are in that area. And so, after the success of the Columbus Partnership, various other replicas, you could say, were spawned in various other parts of the state - Cleveland, Cincinnati, and so on - until it was basically, I think, in about five or six, maybe seven chunks. And then Jobs Ohio is created and then partners with every single one.

So basically, Wexner and Kessler created the model in Columbus, and then it’s replicated in every other major metropolitan area in Ohio, and then connecting all of them is the 2011-created Jobs Ohio, which John Kashich, as I mentioned earlier, the year before Jobs Ohio was created, declared receiving 35 ‘gifts’ from Wexner, but declined to disclose what the gifts were and what their monetary value was. And another interesting point there is that the venture capitalist from Sequoia Capital, Mark Kvamme, also donated, I think, several million dollars to Kasich right before he created Jobs Ohio. And then after creating it, Kasich put Kvamme in charge of Jobs Ohio.

Chris Hedges: Can you talk about the ties with Israel? I know Compass data centers, you mentioned, has Israeli ties. And I’m wondering whether the pairing between Wexner and Compass illustrate a network driving the development of Big Tech in the AI boom that has deep Israeli roots.

Whitney Webb: Well, looking at a lot of the tech companies and data center companies that have installed themselves in New Albany in particular, the vast majority of them have significant subsidiaries that operate in the state of Israel. And Wexner, of course, is intimately related to the State of Israel through his own activities. For example, I think several decades ago, he was sort of acting as a middleman in some business capacities between Israel and China and also working on establishing Israeli businesses and helping them establish themselves in the occupied Golan Heights, among other things. And that’s to say nothing of his links to the Mega Group, for example, which, as you noted in your introduction, created Birthright Israel, and also Jeffrey Epstein, who at this point is quite known for his ties to former Israeli politicians and the Israeli state.

But I think it also speaks to sort of a broader issue, to have a lot of this infrastructure of technology in the US be intimately intermingled and connected to Israel. And this was actually something that was furthered and actually developed in conjunction with Netanyahu and the so-called vulture capitalist and significant donor to neoconservative causes, Paul Singer, who explicitly created a company called Startup Nation Central with the explicit purpose of making it impossible for the US to ever significantly support the BDS movement or the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement. And the goal was to basically market Israeli startups to US big tech firms so that they would acquire a lot of those startups in unprecedented numbers and also contract with them so that US technological infrastructure on multiple levels would be so intimately enmeshed with Israeli interests that they could never meaningfully boycott Israel, no matter what happened, essentially. And a lot of these startups, of course, if you’ve ever looked into the Israeli startup scene, are intimately related to Israeli intelligence and Israeli military operations. They’re staffed by veterans of one or the other. And at the same time, coincidentally, that Startup Nations Central was created, the Israeli government developed an explicit policy where these startups would be used to conduct operations that previously had been conducted in-house by Mossad and Unit 8200 and other parts of the Israeli intelligence system. So, for lack of a better word, they have an explicit policy of using them as front companies for intelligence. And so basically by having all of these big tech companies absorb them, the goal is to have a a major economic lever of power over the tech industry in particular that would prevent US policy from ever meaningfully challenging Israel, even at this point in time when they have actively been conducting a genocidal war for years in Palestine.

Chris Hedges: So, let me ask about Anduril. Can you explain what that is and its importance?

Whitney Webb: Yeah, so Anduril is a company that was created by Palmer Luckey and Trae Stephens. Palmer Luckey was a Thiel fellow. He created Oculus Rift, and later it was sold to Facebook when Peter Thiel was on the board of Facebook. And Luckey’s subsequent venture, Anduril, was funded in large part by Thiel. And then Trey Stevens is a former veteran of the intelligence community that went to work for Palantir, which of course is a Peter Thiel-created company, and then later joined Founders Fund and decided to create Anduril with Luckey at a time when he was also more or less advising the Trump administration Pentagon, its transition team, during Trump’s first term as president. And so, they in particular specialize in autonomous weaponry, mainly drones. And so, they have moved into the Columbus area as well.

Palmer Luckey credits Jobs Ohio with their decision to establish themselves there for this factory called Arsenal One, which is due to be producing an extensive amount of autonomous lethal drones, really any day now at this point. And nearby, there’s an effort by Howard Lutnick’s company, Cantor Fitzgerald, to find the next Anduril to fill that particular space. So, Cantor Fitzgerald, of course, being Howard Lutnick, the current commerce secretary with a lot of ties to Epstein in particular. So, it’s kind of interesting to see that coalesce in the region that has essentially become Leslie Wexner’s fiefdom. And aside from that, it’s worth noting that another venture of Palmer Luckey as well, that’s also more or less linked to Peter Thiel and other figures in and around Palantir, like Joe Lonsdale, is this effort to create a Stable Coin bank called Erebor, which Luckey nominally created, but it’s going to be run by other people. But it’s going to be based in Columbus. And so, this is an effort to increase dollar hegemony through dollar Stable Coins.

And I think recently they were fielded as a choice to restructure Venezuela’s sovereign debt, or particularly the debt of their state oil company, following the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and during a time when Trump, at least, claims that he is “running the country.” So that’s worth keeping in mind, as is the fact that Erebor was explicitly created to replace Silicon Valley Bank, which you may remember collapsing a few years ago. And if you paid attention to reporting about the collapse, the collapse of the bank was largely created by a run on the bank that was orchestrated by none other than Peter Thiel. How interesting. So, just an example of how this this particular network operates in one sense and also the fact that they have extensively sought to include Ohio in a lot of their plans.

Chris Hedges: Just to close, I wonder if you can describe Smart Columbus and how it’s kind of functioning as a test city for other smart cities in the US. It’s clearly, I think you make the point, part of a broader nationwide trend.

Whitney Webb: Yes. So, Smart Columbus is an initiative that was created by the Columbus Partnership, which as I mentioned earlier, was created in the early 2000s by Wexner and his henchman - I don’t know what else to call him - John Kessler. And essentially, it was created to yes, make Columbus a test case for smart city technologies and the implementation of various smart city programs, one of which is aimed at eliminating the use of private cars within the city of Columbus and moving sort of to these fleets of ride-sharing vehicles, Ubers essentially, and potentially in the future, Waymo’s and things like that. And oddly enough, this directly intersects with an entity that I mentioned earlier, the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which was led by Eric Schmidt, and one of the goals of that commission, though not in their final report, but in documents of theirs that were obtained by Freedom of Information Request, was their belief that in order for the US to compete with China in artificial intelligence, which of course to them was of prime national security importance, it was essential that private car ownership be phased out and replaced with these ride-sharing fleets of Ubers essentially or eventually autonomous ride-sharing vehicles as necessary to train and improve AI in order to compete with China. And so essentially Smart Columbus was a test case for that or is looking to promote those types of initiatives, which they’ve done quite gradually. It obviously hasn’t gotten to that point in Columbus, but essentially the goal of this other Columbus partnership-connected entity is to have those kinds of things happen in Columbus specifically and basically use it as a beta test for these technologies that are designed by Silicon Valley or, in the case of the US and NSCI military-related figures as well to have that essentially be beta tested in Columbus without the people of Columbus really having any input into that process at all.

Chris Hedges: What they’re building is a kind of totalitarian capitalism, isn’t it?

Whitney Webb: You could say that in a way. It’s interesting to point out that a lot of these oligarchs that swim in these same circles as Peter Thiel, take Mark Andreessen, for example, is the author of a document that he calls “The Techno-optimist Manifesto”, and one of the main influences he says for that paper is a “philosopher” by the name of Nick Land, who’s quite popular also in the Neo-Reactionary Movement.

And Nick Land argues that capitalism is a type of AI, and that capitalism is also God, and thus AI is God. And Mark Andreessen kind of reflects those ideas in his writings. And these ideas are pretty much very popular with the same people who are interested in Curtis Yarvin’s ideas of privatizing the state and having it be led by a CEO dictator, which, as I mentioned earlier, is of interest to Peter Thiel and some of his allies, which include Andreessen. So essentially, like I said earlier, I think they’re building it out of the sense that they’re essentially creating, I guess, a new model of feudalism, but enforced by technology, where basically there’s an upper class and then a large underclass and having that be enforced by technology. And one of the favorite historians of these big tech oligarchs that they’ve done interviews with, sit-downs with him, like one with Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is Yuval Noah Harari and he has argued that in this era of AI and the data center push and all of this that we’re living now, but he said this several years ago that in contrast to the industrial revolution of times past where it was the unexploited versus the exploited, now for the vast majority of people, it will be exploited versus expendable, and it’s better to be exploited than expendable. And so, as AI is taking jobs from regular people and all of this, being led by organizations that, it must be a sick joke to call it Jobs Ohio.

We are basically living in an era where these people are attempting to build a very anti-human future, and they see capital as the most important thing to support and guide and nurture. People, and humanity in general, are secondary to the progression of AI, which a lot of these people, as I mentioned earlier, see as directly connected to capital and is essentially deified by these people. And so, we certainly cannot live in a world like that. Some of them have written books about how the goal is to basically have like brains in vats and robots basically conduct economic activity and have a perpetual growth economy with no humans involved at all, that our future is essentially that.

So, this is obviously a future that people that don’t want something insanely dystopian like that should reject. And the best way to do that is to not use their products and to basically divest yourself as much as possible from big tech devices and services and the products they offer because, for example, in the data center push, in this paradigm where they say anyway that data is the new oil, data centers are sort of like the oil pipelines in previous decades. And if you look at examples like the Keystone Pipeline and how the government managed that backlash and things like that and furthered their development through things like eminent domain, we may see a lot of that happen in the future with data centers. But the best thing we can do is not use their products. It’s a little different than oil, where you have to fill up gas in your car to get by. We don’t need to use AI chatbots and ask them all these mundane things or use them if we’re really against what the data centers are doing. And as this becomes a progressively more pertinent issue for people in the United States, in particular, if you want to stop the data center push and backlash, they have a lot prepared to prevent any sort of direct action or even in-person protests so the best thing we can do is just boycott and divest ourselves from their products as much as possible because they can’t really justify a data center build out if no one is using their algorithms and in chatbots. So, we absolutely do have a way to keep this from going as far as they would like it to go and to prevent them from pumping up everyone’s water and raising electricity prices and basically doing a lot of things that are going to make regular life people’s lives increasingly harder. It’s already hard and we have time now to develop something independent of these companies that are basically taking control of our government that have very nefarious agendas not just for the United States, but for the natural world, and humanity in general. And I think really the best way forward, the nonviolent approach is best, and it is to divest, and not use their stuff as much as possible.

Chris Hedges: Great, thanks, Whitney. I want to thank Max, Thomas, Diego, and Nawell who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

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Opponents of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines hold a rally as they protest US President Donald Trump’s executive orders advancing their construction, at Lafayette Park next to the White House in Washington, DC, on January 24, 2017.US President Donald Trump signed executive orders Tuesday reviving the construction of two controversial oil pipelines, but said the projects would be subject to renegotiation. / AFP / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

This article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.

Text originally published July 22, 2026.

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The State Department’s 100-page report on Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States,” along with Donald Trump’s assertion that “Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure,” lays the groundwork for dictatorship.

Elections will be sabotaged in the name of “national security.” Left-wing dissent will be criminalized in the name of “combating terrorism.” Democracy will be snuffed out in the name of protecting “freedom.”

Trump, who has lately taken to issuing warnings about a communist plot to take over America, posits that an island of 9.6 million people — nearly 90 percent of whom live in extreme poverty amid extended blackouts due to decades of U.S. economic warfare — is an existential threat.

These accusations are not meant to be rational. They, like the charge that our elections are manipulated, are transparent excuses to go after institutions and individuals that are seen as threatening Trump and the Republican Party’s absolute grip on power. While Cuba has supposedly “carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history” Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, “have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.”

Under the heading “Front Groups and Fellow Travelers,” the report assembles a disparate collection of organizations belonging to Cuba’s“ideological network.”

For example, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), founded as an ecumenical social justice organization by the Presbyterian Church, is described as part of a Cuba “solidarity network” which “facilitates radical agitation within the United States.”

I am an ordained Presbyterian minister. I can assure you the Presbyterian Church is not facilitating “radical agitation.”

The report lists a wide variety of organizations on whose behalf IFCO has acted as an intermediary — perfectly legally — facilitating tax-exempt donations and handling grant management, compliance and reporting. These include The Jericho Movement, Equality for Flatbush, Claudia Jones School, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, changingFrequencies, Viva Palestina US, and The People’s Forum, which the report describes as “a major activist group in Cuba’s U.S. ideological network.”

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are castigated in the same chapter. The NLG “is one of the most persistently relevant — and insidious — organizations in Cuba’s U.S. network.”

The report continues:

The association of extreme-left lawyers and radical street activists has played a key role in a disproportionate share of the far-left terror and violence that has plagued the United States from the 1960s up to today. Throughout its history, it has maintained intimate ties to Cuba and other communist regimes and has explicitly sought to advance the causes of the international far left, including by working to defend and facilitate terrorism and extremist violence — from the Weather Underground of the 1970s to the violent BLM militants and Antifa terror cells of today.

The NLG is labeled a foreign influence operation because it provides assistance to activists, whose right to legal representation is constitutionally enshrined.

In 2025, the Trump administration conditioned federal funding to Harvard University on defunding and dissolving the law school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (HLS NLG), which provided legal assistance to individuals and student groups that opposed the genocide.

A subsection in the report is dedicated to the anti-war activists at CODEPINK and their co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans. It notes Evans’ marriage to the wealthy software entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham was attended by a “Who’s Who’ of progressivism” including co-host of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman; Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen and the playwright V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) who wrote “The Vagina Monologues.”

Naming guests at a wedding is one of the more bizarre passages.

The report grossly exaggerates the influence of Singham’s support for left-wing organizations — described as “far-left” — while ignoring the massive sums supplied by U.S. corporations, millionaires and billionaires, as well as the Israel lobby, to both major political parties, super PACs, think tanks and advocacy networks.

Israel has a far more insidious influence on U.S. politics and foreign policy than Cuba, Russia and China combined.

The State Department attacks the co-founders of The People’s Forum, Manolo De Los Santos and Claudia De la Cruz.

It draws on documents that are often decades old and infused with Cold War paranoia. These include a 1966 Senate report claiming there is “overwhelming evidence that the machinery of the Cuban Government has been progressively organized over the years, to carry out its number one task — the export of Communist subversion.”

It ignores more thoughtful assessments, including a 1981 CIA estimate that acknowledged “[m]uch of the turmoil around the world is rooted in regional and local disputes of a political, social, or religious nature and has nothing to do with Communism.”

In a chapter titled “Revolutionary Tourism,” the Venceremos (“We Shall Overcome”) Brigade is characterized as one of the most “extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States.” This assertion libels thousands of individuals and organizations as Cuban assets, offering nothing more than innuendo.

It lists “the founder of Mother Jones,” — although there were four founders —– along with “several other [unnamed] notable magazine editors, leaders of powerful labor unions and advocacy groups, think tank executives, and a suite of professors at top U.S. universities” as Brigade “alumni.”

Transporting humanitarian goods to Cuba is not a crime. Although the Justice Department’s extradition request from Spain of philanthropist Fergie Chambers, who provided funds to humanitarian organizations in Gaza, may see the criminalization of any person or any group that assists those suffering under sanctions and a blockade.

The report attacks members of the March 2026 “Nuestra América Convoy” which transported goods to Cuba “in defiance of U.S. sanctions.” It notes that 120 organizations “from across 33 countries joined the caravan” with “a suite of influential progressives,” including Isra Hirsi — daughter of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, video game live streamer and commentator Hasan Piker — with whom I discussed my book “A Genocide Foretold” last year — former U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and “several other current and former members of European Parliament.” Even the Gaza flotilla activist Thiago Avila — who I interviewed last month after he was tortured by Israeli soldiers — gets a mention.

Those listed in the report did not become “radicals” because of Cuban indoctrination. Their politics are homegrown, formed in opposition to racism, genocide, police violence, the terrorizing and killing of immigrants and U.S. citizens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs and neoliberalism, along with the crimes of U.S. imperialism and militarism.

The report makes passing reference to a wide range of people on grounds so tenuous that it has to be read to be believed.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is mentioned for refusing “to denounce” a “tribute to [Assata] Shakur,” who was almost certainly framed for murder and who fled to Cuba after escaping from a U.S. prison in 1979.

It dedicates two paragraphs to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for her “friendliness towards the communist regime.” The evidence provided is her participation in a congressional delegation that joined then President Barack Obama on a visit to the island.

Cuban agents, it charges, “maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, solidarity centers, and ideological NGO and nonprofit networks. These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” Cuba has allegedly “infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists [and] backed an unprecedented wave of leftwing terrorism [my emphasis] on American soil.”

Note the word terrorism. Note that it makes these individuals and organizations terrorists. Note that it makes them subject to draconian terrorism laws. And note that the Trump administration has committed itself to hunting down and rooting out the “radical left.”

The report charges that Cuba and its allies are mounting “a revolution against western civilization itself — waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” It accuses Havana of “gleeful support of the George Floyd uprisings.” It asserts that “the rise of antifa” and “the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses,” can be “linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.”

It characterizes the DSA as serving “as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist radicalism.” It claims the organization maintains a “fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime.” It alleges Cuba has built a “sprawling revolutionary network” that has “shaped America’s most famous and influential extremist movements” including the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and antifa. These networks include “powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations” in the U.S.

Cuba, the report concludes, “has sought to undermine, degrade and destabilize America with spies and soldiers, but also with students and intellectuals; with terrorist cells, but also with solidarity committees and nonprofit networks with intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover.”

The broadside is chilling. It is worse than McCarthyism. It presages a savage purging of American society.

Those named in the report are condemned without evidence. They are denied due process. That the assertions in the report are distorted at best, and often fictitious, is irrelevant. Fascist propaganda is not rooted in truth. It is rooted in a hatred for liberal values, democracy and the left. It is rooted in the belief that once those condemned as human contaminants are removed, there will be a moral, spiritual and economic renaissance.

We have seen this fascist dance before. We know what comes next. It is not good.

Photos

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V20: The Red Party - 20th Anniversary Celebration Of V-Day And The Vagina Monologues Featuring A Performance By Eve Ensler Of In The Body Of The World And After Party At Carnegie Hall

NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 14: Founder of CODEPINK, Jodie Evans (L) and founder of ThoughtWorks, Neville Roy Singham attend V20: The Red Party, a 20th anniversary celebration of V-Day and The Vagina Monologues, featuring a performance by Eve Ensler of “In The Body Of The World” and after party at Carnegie Hall on February 14, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for V-Day)

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The Don - by Mr. Fish

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I visited Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City the day before it closed, in October, 2016. The casino had two huge white gates flanked by 2-ton white, cast-stone elephants. Its entrance was topped by an array of 70 turquoise and teal fiberglass minarets and a dozen gold-tipped domes. A neon sign with red and gold lettering read: “Trump Taj Mahal Casino and Resort.” A lighted fountain in front of the glass casino doors was decorated with two rows of six white-and-gold urns.

The Trump Taj Mahal, New Jersey’s tallest building and the world’s largest casino, cost $1.2 billion to build. The opulent suites, when they opened, were named after historical personalities — Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Napoleon and Cleopatra. The suites cost around $10,000 per day. Trump, whose name and image were plastered throughout the casino, employed his familiar hyperbole to call it the “eighth wonder of the world.” The casino operators were instructed to answer incoming calls with the words: “Thank you for calling the Trump Taj Mahal, where wonders never cease.” The waitresses wore “harem girl” outfits.

The casino went through bankruptcy five times.

Trump is doing to the country what he did to the Taj Mahal. His administration is operating well beyond its means with a budget of $7.4 trillion for fiscal year 2026, against projected revenue of just $5.6 trillion. Trump’s idiocy has embroiled the United States in an endless and unwinnable war with Iran, which may tank the global economy. He is set to cut health coverage for 15 million people, along with food assistance and other basic needs programs. He has terminated the jobs of thousands of government employees. He has shut down USAID, the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center. He gutted Voice of America and vows to close the Department of Education. He withdrew from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement (twice). He continued the suspension of funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which had begun under the Biden administration. He canceled thousands of U.S.-funded international development projects. He erased government datasets and climate-related web pages. He slashed the budgets for renewable energy initiatives while revoking federal carbon and pollution regulations.

His scorched earth policies, which are dynamiting the foundations of the republic, are accompanied by a culture of corruption and deceit that is unmatched in American history.

Trump, whose officials face accusations of insider trading and whose family has made more than $1.4 billion from crypto-related ventures since taking office, shamelessly profits from the fusion of unregulated cryptocurrency-based prediction markets and politics pioneered by gambling apps, such as Polymarket.

Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, is a major investor in Polymarket, where he sits on the advisory board. He has an estimated net worth of $400 million. He also serves as a strategic advisor at Kalshi, which gave him equity in the company worth some $300,000 — now estimated to be worth millions. Kalshi recently announced it will allow users to bet on whether the FDA will approve individual drugs as “safe and effective.”

Trump’s Truth Social is developing a prediction market called Truth Predict. His administration sued Connecticut, Arizona and Illinois in an attempt to block these states from regulating prediction markets. Truth Social also launched a $100,000 per month service offering quicker access to Trump’s market manipulating posts — a thinly disguised version of insider trading.

The White House, replicating the mob-style shakedowns of Atlantic City’s casino culture, demands huge payouts from corporations and billionaires in exchange for political favors and deregulation. The Wall Street Journal writes that Trump has amassed a slush fund of $800 million for pet projects, including his ballroom, presidential library, super PACs and political issue committees.

Trump’s chief fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, nicknamed “The princess of darkness,” collects the payoffs with the blunt pitch “The boss wants this money.”

The nonnegotiable demand is lifted from the playbook of Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, the head of the Bruno-Scarfo crime family, whose extortion racket collected millions from Atlantic City construction firms, businesses, bars, restaurants, unions – which saw their health and welfare funds looted – and casinos. And, just like the mob, once is never enough for the Trump crime syndicate.

It always comes back for more.

Trump, who like most mobsters is accompanied by a much younger goomah — his latest being his executive assistant Natalie Harp — has a long history of mob-like retribution. He issued executive orders targeting law firms that previously employed attorneys who investigated him. The firms lost security clearances and access to federal courthouses. Scrambling to placate Trump, they sheepishly succumbed to his demands.

When I arrived at Trump’s casino, the 22-space tour bus terminal was empty. Most of the 12 restaurants in the casino were closed. The casino’s arena, seating 5,500 people, had shut its doors.

The Trump Taj Mahal, like our republic, was about to die.

“When I walked inside the Taj, glittering Austrian crystal chandeliers, which cost $14 million each, dangled over the softly lit interior,” I wrote in America: The Farewell Tour. “Many were missing strings of beads. The walls were covered with mirrors. I looked out at rows of gaming tables, blackjack tables, roulette wheels, and three thousand slot machines that twinkled with colored lights. The slot machines emitted beeps, hums, and dings of various pitches. They stretched over an area the size of three football fields. The gambling floor was almost empty. The dealers stood in front of vacant, felt-covered tables. Most of the gamblers who slumped in the cushioned chairs in front of the slot machines were elderly and haggard. They robotically pulled down levers or pushed square buttons. They stared blankly at the spinning screens in front of them. One slot machine generates between $200 and $300 a day for the casino. The dedicated gamblers are given courtesy drinks. Housekeepers occasionally enter rooms to discover the corpses of elderly men or women who spent hours drinking more alcohol than their bodies could absorb. It is not uncommon for slot players to wet and soil themselves.”

“The seventeen computerized check-in desks near the entrance were empty,” I continued. “A lone clerk stood behind the long counter facing empty rope lines. Toilets in the bathrooms, adorned with Carrera marble, were covered with plastic bags and had signs reading ‘Out of Order.’ I walked along the soiled and worn carpet through long, deserted, and poorly lit corridors on the upper floors. Semicircular beige wall sconces, some of which enclosed burned-out bulbs, were placed every few feet on either side of the hall. The sconces were dirty and cracked. The ceiling had brown water spots. The air smelled of mold. Three quarters of the 1,250 rooms had been mothballed. The casino felt like a ghost ship.”

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Gambling, like Trump’s sham university and his $TRUMP memecoin, is about selling escapist fantasies. It is about preying on people’s despair. The spinning reels on the slot machines, for example, are an illusion. They do not slowly run out of momentum. They are programmed to appear that way. Computer chips determine the outcome the moment the button is pushed or the lever pulled. Virtual reel mapping ensures that a jackpot symbol appears above or below the payline. The player has the impression of almost winning, spurring the gambler to bet more money.

Trump from his earliest days as a real estate developer was enmeshed with the mob, including his cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn represented Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family, and Carmine Galante from the Bananno crime family. Trump was schooled by Cohn and others in the art of extortion, blackmail, threats and graft. He has, throughout his career, surrounded himself with mobsters, grifters and sycophants.

Joseph Weichselbaum, a three-time-convicted felon who was eventually imprisoned for trafficking marijuana and cocaine, managed Trump’s helicopter fleet. The helicopters ferried high rollers to and from Trump casinos. These high rollers could get anything they desired, from sex with escorts to cocaine. Weichselbaum’s easy access to drugs was probably an asset. When Weichselbaum was awaiting sentencing, Trump wrote to the judge that he was “a credit to the community.” The trafficker received a three-year sentence, although he served only 18 months. The couriers who physically delivered the drugs for Weichselbaum got up to 20 years. When he was released from prison, Weichselbaum moved into Trump Tower with his girlfriend.

Trump’s casino opened in 1990 with a concert by Michael Jackson. It was an extravaganza built with $820 million of unsustainable debt, including the issuing of $675 million in junk bonds at a 14 percent interest rate.

Marvin B. Roffman, a casino analyst at the Philadelphia investment firm Janney Montgomery Scott, told The Wall Street Journal that the Taj Mahal would need to make $1.3 million per day to meet its interest payments. No casino had ever brought in that much money.

“The Taj was doomed from the start,” I wrote. “Trump soon had to service interest rates of $95 million a year. He was able to get new loans for a while and then went bust. It was a brief and giddy moment of insane excess. But it was good for his outsized brand, even if it showed an atrocious lack of business sense. Trump had borrowed money at high interest rates and lied about the rates to regulators. Trump dumped the losses on stock and bondholders, who were fleeced for more than $1.5 billion. Numerous local contractors and suppliers, never paid by Trump, went bankrupt.”

Trump made out like a bandit. He put up little of his own money. He shifted personal debts to the casino and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. His casino employees collectively lost millions of dollars in retirement savings, along with their jobs. His business debts were off-loaded on his investors.

Trump owned three casinos in Atlantic City and one in Gary, Indiana. The Trump Plaza and the Trump Taj Mahal casinos were shut down. The Trump Marina, his third casino, was sold to Texas billionaire Tilman Fertitta. Fertitta, currently Trump’s ambassador to Italy, renamed it The Golden Nugget. Trump’s casino in Indiana, a 340-foot vessel called the Trump Princess, declared bankruptcy in 2004.

All failed because of Trump’s insatiable greed and mismanagement.

Trump is doing to the nation what he did to the Taj Mahal. He is harvesting and extorting the organizations he oversees for personal profit, while the rest of us are left bereft amid the ruins.

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This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

In their most recent documentary, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy”, Abby Martin and Mike Prysner examine the US military as not only the world’s biggest consumer of fossil fuels, but also the world’s biggest perpetrator of ecological devastation and a driver of both increasing carbon emissions and militarization in other countries. Chris Hedges speaks about the new film and why it is an important tool in the global struggle against imperialism with Abby Martin in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

On top of the US military’s direct carbon emissions from powering warships, bombers, tanks, the vast web of foreign bases and more, in the feature length film, Martin exposes the amount of indirect carbon emissions generated by the military industrial supply chain, from the extraction of raw materials in Global South countries to the factories that manufacture weapons and equipment. Martin also discusses the toxic footprint of the US military both at home and abroad, which poisons the land and water leaving a legacy of disease and death, and the Pentagon’s efforts to deny responsibility and prevent compensation for the suffering it causes. She states, “Every base is a story of toxic dumping with the soldiers as the lab rats.”

Hedges and Martin speak about the US military as the enforcement arm for global capital, especially for fossil fuel corporations and Big Agriculture, which “imposes the dictates of global capitalism around the world at the barrel of a nuclear armed gun.” They describe the ‘collective suicide’ of an unsustainable system that uses fossil fuels to protect the interests of and expand the fossil fuel industry. And they explain the imperial boomerang effect of “a global military empire that acts as a for-profit corporation,” which supplies surplus weapons “to entities like ISIS or the Taliban or to local police forces here in the US, which in turn brutalizes and subjugates its respective population.”

The interview concludes with a discussion of what can be done to change course. Hedges and Martin agree that a major obstacle is the lack of an opposition party in power. Even the most progressive Democrats are unwilling to take on the Military Industrial Complex. But Martin finds hope in the rising support for socialism and growing realization that “Gaza is actually the connective tissue to our liberation all over the world.” She adds, “I do have revolutionary optimism in the fact that people are putting their careers on the line…. We need to be militant. We need to be proud and confident about our anti-imperialism.”

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

Chris Hedges: Earth’s Greatest Enemy, the second feature film project by Abby Martin, documents how the Pentagon, the world’s single largest institutional polluter, spews carbon, contaminates water and spreads toxins across vast landscapes while being exempt from climate agreements. The film focuses on an often unexamined aspect of the war industry, which not only eliminates human lives through violence, but also through ecological devastation. The US military is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet at 270,000 barrels of oil a day. This amounts to 55 million metric tons of CO2 annually, more than 150 countries. The United States is the only country which has some 1,000 installations and bases dotted throughout the globe. Russia has nine, China has one.

These military outposts are equipped with thousands of vehicles and aircraft. The US Air Force alone is larger than the next five biggest air powers combined. It would take the average American driver over 40 years to burn as much fuel as a single flight of a Boeing Pegasus. The US flies more than 600 of these tankers, triple the rest of the world combined. The direct emissions from warships, vehicles, warplanes, tanks, and military bases do not include the indirect emissions emitted by weapons manufacturers, suppliers for the military, and the machinery that extracts raw materials in countries such as the Congo that are vital to the military machine. If these indirect emissions are factored into the carbon footprint, the pentagon’s CO2 output is at least three times higher, over 165 million metric tons a year.

Joining me to discuss her film, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy”, is Abby Martin. It’s a great film and we’ve got to make sure we tell viewers how to link to it, but what is it that propelled you to look at the military from this angle?

Abby Martin: I think for a lot of us who have been witnessing the ecocidal nature of U.S. imperialism and the destruction that it brings around the world, it’s been so obvious for so long that when you destroy landscapes, when you mass murder people, those toxins, the carcinogens that are unleashed from the constant bombing, the pulverization of concrete, this carbon-dense material that we’ve seen in Gaza, it’s so obvious, Chris. You know, I’ve always been an environmentalist and so as an anti-imperialist journalist, it’s always just been such an obvious link. And I was always so curious why no one had synthesized this material and not just the emissions, but the totality of this gargantuan subject, because it’s not just emissions. It’s really everything. Every base is a story of not only legacy contamination, but ongoing contamination with the waves of militarization that we see today. So, I was really upset that this wasn’t a mainstream issue, that this wasn’t incorporated in the narratives with mainstream environmentalism. And instead, you saw people like Elizabeth Warren talking about greening a global military empire, which we know is completely unsustainable and uninhabitable with the viability of a planet that sustains human life.

Chris Hedges: Well, and they don’t just poison those abroad. I remember the bombing in Bosnia when I covered the war and, in those craters, nothing ever grew because there was uranium. Those were uranium depleted munitions. I drove on my way to Basra, where I was eventually captured by the Iraqi Republican Guard, up the highway of death. It was coated in white dust from Iranian depleted munitions that of course sickened and killed many of the service members who had to go clean it up. But you also talk about Camp Lejeune, that these poisons are, in that sense, the military’s non-discriminatory. They’re quite happy to poison their own as well. We didn’t even talk about the trash dumps in places like Iraq.

Abby Martin: Exactly, I mean you look at something as cynically exploited as the 9-11 first responders. I mean these were lauded as the heroes of 9-11, slapped over all the propaganda to activate that reptile brain after 9-11 and what was done to them? Basically, left to die, denied health care at every step of the way. These are the 9-11 first responders that were digging through the asbestos-laden toxic dust. So of course, the service members are completely expendable in the eyes of the ruling class and the military brass.

I mean, every base is a story of toxic dumping with the soldiers as the lab rats. We saw this during the waves of radiation with nuclear, the extractivism with the Cold War, literal US soldiers as lab rats with the nuclear testing and, today, the burn pits and, of course, you mentioned Camp Lejeune. This was the worst water contamination event in American history and for years the military command was dumping intentionally toxic chemicals and lying about it. And then, of course, this is their modus operandi. They deny claims. They deny the existence of the toxic dumping until it’s undeniable and then they’ll just basically dole out these claims with such an extreme delay that a judge today said it will take 100 years to basically look at every claim because they’re trying to deny the class action lump sum lawsuit.

So, it’s insane. I mean this is a 50 plus year old story and there’s still people that are sick and dying because of this cover-up. And they’ve never been held accountable and they’ve never properly remediated any of these areas. Chris, most of the superfund sites in the US have either housed military installations or been used for military use and they completely do not clean these sites up. They are left to rot and kill the people who live there, and this includes American citizens and servicemen members.

Chris Hedges: Well, Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps camp, it of course not only sickened and poisoned the Marines, but their families. As you said, it was incredibly prolonged because the military denied it. You do explore it in the film, but give us the kind of details of just how callous that abuse was.

Abby Martin: Yeah, this is a thing that people can look at and say, “They didn’t know any better”, right? “It was a long time ago. They certainly didn’t know the toxicity. They didn’t have any safe alternatives.” Of course they did. Similarly to PFAS today, they have safe alternatives. They don’t need to use PFAS. They choose to, Chris, they choose to. There’s always safe alternatives. There’s always other things that they could be doing other than open burning, open detonation on all of these indigenous lands and desecrating these places. But when it comes to Camp Lejeune, this was a story that was happening for decades. I mean, they were dumping so much toxic waste because you look at just the maintenance of the military arsenal alone, the amount of toxic chemicals that are dumped into the ground and the open atmosphere just to clean these engine parts to make these engines mission ready to fly around in pointless patrols.

So, the amount of toxic waste that that’s accumulating every day, it’s really unquantifiable. So, the military was doing this, dumping the toxic waste into water wells at this Marine Corps base for years and years and years. So, when the tests were done and they knew the wells were poisonous, instead of stopping the dumping, Chris, they continued. They continued for years and covered it up while Marines were drinking the water, bathing in the water. I mean, it was just like Red Hill where they were literally bathing, cooking, cleaning in toxic water. And who died as a result of that? Of course, countless people. I mean, we’re talking about a million people that were impacted by this. But the people who really were affected by this were the babies. The babies who didn’t have the ability to deflect the carcinogens in their body. They didn’t have the ability to do that. So, we saw over a thousand babies that were killed. Stillborn, newborn infants, Chris.

One of the women who goes back to these graves sees three born and died gravestones of children. Every two years, this woman would have a stillborn baby and probably thought it’s her. She didn’t know to blame the military brass. They didn’t know. There was no accountability. There was no information given. Still to this day, you have people, activists, are going out with cards saying, “Did you know about Camp Lejeune? Hey, you might be affected by this.” I mean, it’s absolutely insane to think of the lives lost, the destruction wrought on the families there, and actually no knowledge of what happened. Think about how many lives were ruined thinking that’s you, and there was no answers for these people.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the nexus between our addiction to fossil fuels and imperialism, which I think is also a theme of the film.

Abby Martin: Yeah, I mean, you look back at the existence of the US military as an institution. It’s always been to extract, I mean, basically as the enforcement arm of extractivism. You look at the first extraterritorial bases, and they were always to protect coal, the infrastructure of coal. And then it became oil, right? When oil was discovered that became cemented as the national security priority. It’s always been there. It’s just that we adopted the pretense of national security being human rights, democracy, freedom. It’s always been explicitly about oil. But the military has always been the enforcement arm for global capital.

So, today, the military basically is pointed as this arch nemesis in the film. But really, it is just the consequence of an imperialist system that imposes the dictates of global capitalism around the world at the barrel of a nuclear armed gun. And the consequences are dire if you don’t bow to the dictates of the system, Chris. So, I always look at the perpetrators that have been rightly pointed at in terms of the global pollution that we are experiencing today, Big Oil, Big Ag. But who enforces these mechanisms? Who props up this system? Who does it? It’s the U.S. military. The oil companies have a military and that’s the U.S. military.

Now you mentioned the fact that if you look at just the institutional level of pollution in terms of the consumption of oil, that amounts to 150 countries, right? But it doesn’t even scratch the surface of the emissions because we’re talking about U.S.-led military emissions, which includes NATO. It includes the Great Power Competition. When the U.S. continues to build up its armaments and withdraws from all these treaties, well, of course, Russia and China will respond with their own military buildup. It all goes back to the impetus, to the imperial core and the belligerence and arrogance by the US.

And then you see this reaction, this wave around the world reacting to the US belligerence. But you talk about the necessity of maintaining this arsenal and kind of the self-fulfilling prophecy, and that’s, I think, really the key here is the actual infrastructure of the fossil fuel domination and that cyclical need to get the natural resources to pillage and plunder, to extract the last vestiges of natural gas and oil, to justify feeding the arsenal. To feed the oil dragon, you need to continue to grow and expand just to feed it.

So, it really is a self-fulfilling prophecy in the worst way possible. It’s collective suicide because the military itself is the main driver of this system. It is driving this unsustainable world that’s dominated by fossil fuel. And then it uses the expanse to justify its own growth and expansion. And then you have people like Nancy Pelosi and these liberal politicians saying the military is the solution for the problem that it caused. So, we’re in the worst way possible where there’s no imagination or ingenuity outside of the system itself that has caused the very problem that we’re facing. And they want it to be the solution for it.

Chris Hedges: Well, as the climate breaks down, as you have increasing numbers of climate refugees fleeing from the Global South, as you have naval bases, and the military is planning for this, essentially buried underwater because of sea level rises, the very problem they create becomes the excuse not only for their existence, but their expansion where Trump is now talking about a military budget of a trillion and a half dollars. I mean it is this kind of very bizarre feedback loop.

Abby Martin: Yeah, it is. People talk about the notion of the imperial boomerang. Of course, for marginalized brown and black people, they’ve always felt the brunt of our colonial, the consequences of colonialism and imperialism. But I think for people who look like me in this country, they’re seeing that this is inseparable. This boomerang effect of the consequences of having a global military empire that acts as a for-profit corporation. That when you have surplus weaponry that you need to continue to justify the next generation of these pointless vehicles, it either is handed off to entities like ISIS or the Taliban or to local police forces here in the US, which in turn brutalizes and subjugates its respective populations like in Minneapolis. So, it’s a feedback loop in the worst way in every possible way that you need to continue to grow on a finite planet. You need to continue to justify the growth and the expanse. And so, one fascinating thing about Trump that I’ve heard you articulate many times is the fact that he’s completely dropped the mask. I mean, all of this is just very explicit. It’s about the oil. Iran’s the third largest oil producer in the world and Venezuela’s the first. I mean, this is insane. It’s an overlap of just the law of the jungle, complete lawlessness, harkening back to the days of Christopher Columbus, where it’s just openly colonial, like Operation Total Extermination of Latin America.

Any country that doesn’t bow to this global system will be punished, will be destroyed unapologetically from the ruling class. So, when we did this film, what’s amazing about it, it was kind of the incubation period to get us somewhere like Trump. I mean, this was the neoliberal doctrine. This is the neoliberal order. This is what was deemed normal, right? This was the status quo. And this is a death spiral, Chris.

So, the film’s really instructive because it shows us how we got here. It gives us answers to how things have gotten so bad, how it is possible that someone like Trump can get in and ratchet things up to this extent, because he’s not a king. He’s not an anomaly. He’s exactly the perfect encapsulation of the system that we have today.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the opposition. Those who are attempting to confront the now naked imperialism that backs genocide in Gaza, that carries out unprovoked attacks against countries like Iran. Where is it coming from? And what are the strategies that are effective to combat this monster that we’ve created?

Abby Martin: I mean, as uncertain and dystopian as the time that we’re living through is, Chris, I find it simultaneously very exciting because of the uncertainty, because of where it could go. We both know that 10 years ago, talking about socialism was considered completely controversial in this country. We are living in a country that its unofficial religion is anti-communism. And so, to live in a time where all of this is exposed, the bankrupt, hollowed out nature of this feckless opposition that has done nothing but lay down as the doormats for empire, for genocide, I mean, it’s a very important time because there’s no toeing the line. There’s no middle ground. It’s really socialism or barbarism.

We have to abandon this notion that this is the end of history. This is the finality of our economic system. This is unacceptable. This is barbarism in its purest sense. This is where it’s gone. It’s gone on the ruins of all these institutions that have basically just been fronts for U.S. power this whole time. It’s all been exposed as sacrificial, like we are all sacrificial lambs, all of the human beings on this planet and also the environment, all of us are expendable basically in the eyes of the ruling class. It’s all about short-term profit. It’s not even about tactics or strategy.

I mean, you look at the Strait of Hormuz, you look at even the Iraq War. When has the US even won a war, right? I mean, we stole the glory from the Soviet Union with World War II, but when has the US, in terms of asserting its imperial dominance and US hegemony, when has it actually resulted in a victory, like a military victory? It’s all about profit and that’s what’s so dystopian about it. They are willing to create apocalyptic moonscapes all over the planet. Dead zones still existing from small armaments during World War I. I mean, this is the result. This is the legacy of these wars, but they’re not stopping. In fact, you saw it getting worse with Iran - the intentional targeting of oil infrastructure, oil depots, natural gas pipelines. The casual warning of committing war crimes – today is ‘Bridge Day’, tomorrow is ‘Power Plant Day’ with the world’s media just being like, “Is he gonna do it? Like, let’s find out. We have a 48-hour timeline.”

So, I think this is how we got here is the wanton impunity for war criminals, not holding people accountable for the Iraq war crimes. I mean, this is how we get Gaza This is how we get the new lawlessness and the law of the jungle. And so, the resistance that we’re seeing to it is incredible, the sustained actions around the world, people’s understanding that Gaza is actually the connective tissue to our liberation all over the world. How Gaza fits into everything because five years ago no one understood that and it was always considered too controversial. It was a third rail and now it’s understood as everything. It is intrinsically tied to humanity’s liberation, and so to understand that and to see that foundation of understanding ripple throughout the world is something that is incredibly motivating and inspiring to me. And I do have revolutionary optimism in the fact that people are putting their careers on the line, their bodies on the line, their lives on the line just for the chance to move the needle, Chris, because that’s what we’re up against. We’re up against a completely insane global system. But it’s comprised of a bunch of dumb people. And that’s also what gives me hope. It’s not just the banality of evil, it’s the stupidity of evil. These people are so compartmentalized in their self-preservation that they can’t even see what’s right in front of them. They can’t even see that they’re destroying the planet for their kin. So, this is the opening that we have. We have a chance to change the world, to insert the truth, to reclaim our narratives and uplift those. And this movie is one tool in the arsenal to push that forward.

Chris Hedges: And yet when capitalists feel threatened, they reach for fascism. And we are rapidly consolidating a fascistic system within the United States. Fascists are not particularly smart. They’re often very buffoonish, but they’re very deadly.

Abby Martin: Indeed. And to see the US waning its power in terms of the consciousness of the public. I mean this is the least popular war ever. Trump has the lowest approval rating but still, the fact that they don’t even need to try I think says a lot, right? The fact they didn’t even need to placate the public. They didn’t need to put out a propaganda campaign like in the wake of 9-11, What does that say? They don’t even care to try.

And that really exposes the state that we’re in, the detachment from the ruling class to the public, the fact that they don’t care. That should show us everything, that there is no connection whatsoever. There’s no representation. There has to be something that we do that’s outside of this electoral arena because it has completely failed us. There’s no material gains whatsoever from the Democratic Party. They are going to continue to basically push this system as we all fly off a cliff.

Chris Hedges: Abby, it’s always, the Pentagon is really not only unaccountable, but unassailable. It often submits budgets and then Congress will give them more than they even ask for. In many ways, it’s a state within a state. I remember the historian Arnold Toynbee highlighted unchecked, unregulated militarism as the death blow of the empire. You’re right that, of course, this is at once suicidal in terms of the imperialist policies and yet the power of the war industry, I mean even Bernie Sanders isn’t going to go after it. The power of the war industry is such within the American political system that it’s virtually sacrosanct.

Abby Martin: Indeed, this is the problem, isn’t it? Even with the case like Bernie Sanders or AOC as president, they’re still imperialists. I mean, at the end of the day, they are going to sustain the bipartisan consensus of US empire. They have never questioned the notion, the existence of a global military dictatorship, holding the world under its boot, subjugating billions of people.

This is unacceptable. You cannot call yourself an environmentalist if you are not anti-imperialist. Similarly to how Zionism is incompatible with progressivism. These concepts are contradictory. So, the real problem is that one of the only politicians that I ever heard even talking about closing down the bases around the world was Ron Paul, right? This is why he was so popular, but people tried to basically castigate him and lump all of his supporters in as racists. And that’s a really, really problematic premise because you have to have an opposition that is calling into question this imperial machinery of death.

And when you have Bernie Sanders, the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party, not even questioning that, not even talking about roping in these bases, decommissioning any aspect of the military empire. And instead, it’s just the liberal wing of it, right? I mean, defending the use of sanctions as diplomacy. Sanctions killed 1,800 babies in Cuba since 2019. This is mass murder by policy, right? You have AOC, I mean, basically just defending Liberal interventionism. This is a huge, huge problem.

We need to be militant. We need to be proud and confident about our anti-imperialism. We need to not throw the Global South under the bus when times get tough and castigate Cuba and Venezuela. We need to full-throatedly defend the Global South and their sovereignty and independence. And we need to call into question the entire premise that we have the ordained right to arbitrate anything around the world. That’s the problem, Chris. This is chauvinism. This is insane. So, we need to start basically pressing our politicians at the bare minimum that they need to be anti-imperialist. And it’s unacceptable that you have people posing as progressives that are not anti-imperialist at all.

Chris Hedges: Well, all the great socialists, Rosa Luxemburg and others, reminded us that you can’t be a socialist unless you’re also an anti-imperialist. You can’t.

Abby Martin: No, and sadly you’re not seeing any of that. Where is anyone in power talking about this stuff? There’s cursory kind of attempts to just admonish Trump like on these mealy mouth statements from people like Hakeem Jeffries, “Oh, the process. Well, Maduro had to go, but the process had to be better. We should have had the process involved better when it came to a war of aggression and eco-side unleashed against Iran.” I mean, it is disgusting. It is disgusting to have Chuck Schumer out there talking about his undying support for Israel as he tries to hawk books about anti-Semitism while there’s a goddamn genocide going on. This is the opposition party? This is the opposition party that you want to browbeat Leftists and is saying, “Vote blue”? If you’re not going to stand up against genocide, how the hell are you going to fight for democracy? Jesus Christ.

Chris Hedges: Tell us how people can see the film and, also, follow your work.

Abby Martin: You can see the film. It’s up now on Vimeo. It’s for streaming for international audiences and domestic audiences. Check it out, Vimeo. You can check out EarthsGreatestEnemy.com and it’s embedded right on the home screen. You can also get me to do Q and A’s, show the film all around the world if you want to. It’s also available for patrons on our Patreon and YouTube members only. Soon in a couple of weeks, we’re releasing with Watermelon Pictures out on Amazon and Apple, so it’ll be widely available on streaming then.

I encourage everyone to reach everyone you know who’s still reachable with the film. It’s an incredible tool in the arsenal to try to activate and motivate people and agitate them into becoming anti-imperialist and give us a fighting chance against the parasites robbing us blind, Chris.

Chris Hedges: You did a wonderful job, Abby. Thanks. And I want to thank Max and Diego, who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.subtack.com.

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This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Compared to other wealthy Western nations, the United States stands out for its high incarceration rates and military spending and declining standard of living. In her new book, “Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power and Violence, in America”, which just won the Robert F. Kennedy book award, Professor Marie Gottschalk connects the dots between the “twin evils of state violence at home and imperial violence abroad.” She chronicles the rise of President Trump as a manifestation of the failures of the Democrats to stem police violence and address economic insecurity when they had opportunities to do so, and illustrates how the tendrils of US Empire permeate the current crises.

Chris Hedges explores this history with University of Pennsylvania Professor Gottschalk in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. They begin with Frederick Engel’s concept of ‘social murder’ in which the state creates conditions of social decline that shorten the lifespans of the general population. Hedges and Gottschalk point to deindustrialization during the mid-twentieth century and the oligarchic class’s fears of popular backlash as precursors to mass incarceration. They also discuss the growing militarization of policing as returning veterans were hired into the force and equipped with excess military equipment.

The Great Recession of 2008 was another critical turning point as millions of people lost their pensions and homes. Gottschalk refers to the Obama administration paving the way for the election of Donald Trump by refusing to prosecute those responsible for crashing the economy and then giving the banks billions of dollars in bailouts while people struggled financially. The public’s awareness of this disparity, plus the fact that corporations and law enforcement are permitted to commit crimes with impunity, has fueled growing mistrust in Congress.

Rural communities, which represent President Trump’s political base, have been hit particularly hard by the unequal recovery. Gottschalk describes the shift in police violence and incarceration from urban to rural communities where there are white majorities. Rural communities feel abandoned by the Democrats. Hedges explains, “We have a figure like Trump, a con artist, demagogue because the one thing he did was tap into that very legitimate sense of betrayal, by both parties, a sense of anger and in some ways the mask has been ripped off and we’re seeing all of the poisons that you document in the book being turbocharged by the Trump administration.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Diego Ramos and Sofia Menemenlis

Transcript:

Chris Hedges: In the opening chapter of Marie Gottschalk’s book, “Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America”, a chapter titled “Social Murder”, she writes, “The United States is an exceptionally militarized, lethal, and violent country. The growing concentration of economic, political, and military power is draining America of vital resources to sustain healthy and peaceful communities. It is pushing more people to the margins where a police officer, a prison cell, a tent, a military recruiter, or a deadly dose of fentanyl-laced heroin is waiting for them. Rates of homicide, gun violence, suicide, drug overdoses, incarceration, traffic deaths, poverty, and police use of force are exceptionally high in the United States compared to those of other Western countries.” She continues, “In a historic reversal, U.S. life expectancy has fallen below that of much poorer countries as a growing number of people in this country are at risk of losing their homes, health, livelihoods and savings. Tens of millions of U.S. gun owners are locked and loaded, ready to take the law into their own hands or turn their guns on themselves. And escalating political violence has put the electoral system and democracy in America in mortal danger.”

She warns that the United States is increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. Powerful economic and political interests are rendering less powerful groups and individuals in the United States more susceptible to premature death and other harms, or what Frederick Engels calls ‘social murder’.

Joining me to discuss her new book, “Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power and Violence, in America”, is Professor Marie Gottschalk. She is the Edmund Cain Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the author of “Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics”.

So, Marie, I said before we went on the air, I thought your book was just a compendium of all of the political and historical missteps that have resulted in the rise of the cult-like figure of Trump. You open the book by looking at the twin evils of state violence at home and imperial violence abroad. I’m just going to read, I thought it was a really prescient little section, you say, “The country’s deep investment in its overseas empire, including the massive military budget, and the unassailable assumption that the United States is the indispensable nation destined to police the world, has compounded the problem of violence in America.” Can you talk about that inner link between imperial violence and violence at home?

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, there’s so many links. I studied mass incarceration for many years, and we focused on how we can shift money from policing to social welfare issues and defund the police. But we ignore the fact that defunding the police is not going to solve the fundamental issues in the United States and that for all the talk about polarization, the giant military budget goes through every year almost without any significant opposition. And that as a society, those resources are not available to be tapped. So, the first thing is just where the money is going.

The second thing is that there’s blowback from the Empire that we see that the policing that is done overseas and what we learn about policing overseas, how policing developed since the early 20th century, was very much intertwined with what the American military was doing and also of recruiting veterans to go into our police forces to use high-level military training in our police forces, use military equipment. And so, this kind of blowback from the Empire, and after 9-11 we talked about blowback whether it was going to increase threats of terrorism at home, but we’ve ignored the blowback from policing, and also the disparate impact of the Empire on certain parts of the country. It’s very easy today to disparage rural areas and to say that this is the heartland the support of MAGA, but in many ways rural areas have carried some of the heaviest burdens of the Empire. Many people from rural areas have gone for two, three, four trips overseas, served in the military and they’ve come back. Deaths have been lower than other wars, but casualties, injuries, PTSD, mental health problems, opioid problems related to overseas service are astronomical in many of these communities.

Chris Hedges: You make the link between the law and order agenda pushed through in large part by the Clinton administration, and at the same time, the deregulation and lack of oversight of corporate crime, corporate malfeasance. Those two issues for you are also interrelated.

Marie Gottschalk: It was fascinating to me, and I have to admit it was a major blind spot of myself teaching mass incarceration. I just focused on crime in the streets and didn’t really focus on, I sort of knew there was crime in the suites, but I didn’t intensely focus on it, and I didn’t see these as two important twins that go together. And so, while we’re all focusing on mass incarceration and increasing number of people for crime in the streets or in US prisons putting the US really to be the world’s warden, almost the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. And yes, you’re right to finger the Clinton administration. At the same time, we have these crime waves from corporate America, and we have this phenomenal decriminalization of crime in the suites. So, we have an evisceration of our regulatory units. We have the financialization, not only of the Treasury of the Secretary, the SEC, taking people from the financial industry but increasingly during the Obama administration, to some extent Clinton administration, you have people from the financial sector who are staffing key positions in the Department of Justice. And so, what we’ve seen is a lightening up on corporate crime, both in investigating it and prosecuting it, and we had this intensification of punishing people for street crimes.

Chris Hedges: Well, because all they do is slap fines on them. Nobody’s ever really sent to jail unless they’re Bernie Madoff, and that’s because he stole from the rich. But there’s a quote in the book, I think it’s from Jamie Dimon, he says, “Go ahead, fine me. I don’t care.” What’s $15 million, whatever it is, he doesn’t care.

Marie Gottschalk: Right, and it was a quote directed at Elizabeth Warren when he was testifying, right? And if you see some of these fines from the financial crisis, they look like a lot of money, billions and billions of dollars, right? But often they don’t even equal the quarterly profits of these corporations. The corporations are able to often deduct these from their taxes. And many times, the government doesn’t even follow up whether they’ve paid these fines or not.

I think the other thing important to focus on is these so-called ‘deferred prosecution agreements’. This was a mechanism, dates back to the early 20th century, and it was to help young juveniles who got in trouble with the law to say, “Look, you stay clean. You don’t get in more trouble. We’ll just not charge you. We’ll not prosecute you.” Well, beginning toward the tail end of the Clinton administration and then really taking off in the Bush administration and Obama administration, these became the mechanism of choice to deal with corporate America. And these are basically negotiated agreements between corporate law firms and the Justice Department. If you break the deferred prosecution agreement, you’re supposed to be prosecuted. That’s what it is, a deferred prosecution. But it’s often like Britney Spears’ “Oops, I did it again.” I break the agreement and I’m given another deferred prosecution agreement. These agreements are often not monitored in any close way.

And so, with crime in the streets, we obsess about people who commit robbery or people who commit burglary, are they going to recidivate again? But we have major corporations who are repeat recidivators, and they get deferred prosecution agreements. The other thing about these agreements is you have a shift towards prosecuting the corporation rather than the corporate executives, right? And so that even if you have these, it’s still not directed at the individuals, but rather it’s directed at the corporation, which is a big change in the United States.

Chris Hedges: Talk about the political effects as these huge corporate entities accrued more and more wealth and more and more power. You also write about the rise of the American oligarchic class. How did that affect our political system?

Marie Gottschalk: I think we have not fully reconciled with the enormous impact of the Great Recession and that we said the Great Recession was over, Obama campaigned in 2012, “The economy is back, we’re back.” But for many parts of the country, we were not back. And many parts of the country understood that this traumatic economic event happened. Millions of people lost their homes. We had the biggest mass migration of people since the Great Depression. People lost their pensions. People lost their healthcare. And it was a rebound from the Great Recession that was very unequal and that the coastal areas, the high-tech parts of the country, rebounded while many other parts of the country were mired in this economic distress. Tax bases were eroded, public spending didn’t come back, spending on public health didn’t bounce back. And I think that was for many people a crystallizing event of experiencing this economic trauma and nobody was to blame for it.

And many of the elite – the head of the Fed, the heads of corporations - treated it like it’s an act of nature, it’s an act of God. And yet we knew that there were many reports coming and that something had to be done and it wasn’t done. And many people in the United States understood that nobody went to jail for that, nobody was charged for that. And I think that that has been a very powerful undermining of trust in government, and also that there was no reckoning with the banks. The largest banks came out stronger than before. People understood that hundreds of billions of dollars went to save the banks, but the Obama administration supported a very shoddy foreclosure plan that as Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, we now understand said, “Well, the only reason for that was to foam the runway for the banks”, so to slow down the foreclosures a little bit so they could process them. It wasn’t really to help the people who were in threat of losing their homes.

And I think we focus on lack of trust in Congress, but there’s a fundamental lack of trust in corporations right now. And the public opinion polls are very interesting in that increasingly people don’t trust corporations. They don’t have trust in capitalism. They have increased favorable views of socialism. If we look at the current president, 45, running in 2016 and then coming back again in in 2024, and we all want to blame this on this kind of misogynist racist deplorables that he’s appealing to. And I think there are much more complicated reasons that yes, he’s got this rage that he appeals to from certain parts of the country, but there’s also a powerful economic rage that then has been directed towards immigrants, towards women, et cetera, et cetera. But I also think it’s directed towards increasingly the economic elite.

Chris Hedges: It was a little interesting for me, a footnote in the book, which I didn’t know until I read it, and I’d like you to address it, and that is the spiraling mass incarceration rates in rural areas.

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, so we often think of mass incarceration as an urban phenomenon and one that primarily affects African American men. And what we’ve seen over the last decade is a kind of shift in that your chances of being incarcerated actually are higher in rural areas and suburban areas than they are in urban areas right now. And so even though we’re overall, in some states, seeing the incarceration rate go down, it’s often driven because the incarceration rate in urban areas is going down. And meanwhile, in rural areas, it’s going up. And so, it’s misleading to say we finally are going to have a downward trend in incarceration rates. There’s actually great variation across the country in this.

Chris Hedges: And this is also accompanied by, which I didn’t know until I read your book, “A rise of police violence in rural and suburban communities,” you write, “which have accounted for about three quarters of such fatalities. In 2020, the fact is not widely known for several reasons, research on police homicides overwhelmingly focuses on large cities, even though most of these fatalities occur in communities with fewer than 100,000 people. Furthermore, major cities tend to have more political networks, organizational resources, and media outlets, so, police killings in urban areas are more likely to attract public attention. Indigenous people are the most at risk of being killed by the police, but their deaths, which typically occur in rural underpopulated areas without witnesses to record the deadly encounters on smartphones, do not garner wider public attention.”

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, you know what I’m trying to do here is to talk about police as state violence and to see that it’s not just an urban phenomenon, and also to understand some of the deeper structural roots and causes of that. And it’s remarkable to me that really we have very good data on how many police get killed each year, but we don’t…

Chris Hedges: I just want to interrupt you. I know from your book, almost none are charged or they’re charged with very minor offenses. I mean, it’s staggering.

Marie Gottschalk: Right. Very few get charged. Very few get convicted and then even if they get convicted, the sentences are pretty nominal. Even in departments that have banned chokeholds, you can have police who use chokeholds and sometimes they won’t get charged and the internal punishment might be taking some of their vacation days. But trying to look at rural deaths and to see state violence as something that spans the United States, right, is a very important way to try to think about the coalitions to challenge state violence and that certainly African Americans are disproportionately killed by the police. But in many parts of the country, being a white person in a rural area will put you at high risk for being killed by the police. And it’s often how we think about racial disparities. White people are less likely to be killed by police than African American people are. But white people in the United States, compared to white people in the United Kingdom or Germany, are very high at risk for being killed by the police because we have such high rates of police violence. And the police violence is probably even higher than what we know because we don’t collect good data on police killings of civilians.

Chris Hedges: So, I just want to read this passage and have you comment. You said, “More white people are killed by U.S. police officers each year than people from any other racial or ethnic group. Eight of the 10 states with the highest rates of fatal police shootings are in the West, where black people constitute barely 3 % of state populations on average. As for the other leading states, one is West Virginia, which is one of the whitest and least diverse states. The other is Louisiana, one of the most racially and ethnically diverse states. White people make up the majority of people in rural areas in nearly every state and also constitute two thirds of the people killed by the police in rural communities.” Those statistics were completely unknown to me.

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, it’s not known to a lot of people, right? Because we think that if we just fix our urban police departments, we’re going to fix this problem. I think the other piece that I don’t emphasize enough in the book, though I do mention, is many of these rural areas are run by sheriffs. And sheriffs are a whole force onto their own. They’re elected. They are above the law in many ways. And they are a prime recruiting ground now for this constitutional sheriff’s movement, which is that we can interpret the law the way we see fit because we are elected and we are, they argue, the prime representation of the public will.

Chris Hedges: Or you compare it to police systems in Europe, not only in terms of training, which is much more extensive, but also the vast variety of law enforcement entities that exist throughout the United States, which are disparate, which are not connected.

Marie Gottschalk: Right, and some places you have a police force that’s one person, right? And the average police force is 10 or 12 people. How do you get high quality training? In many states, we have more extensive training required for a hairstylist or manicurist than we require for someone who’s going to carry a gun and be able to shoot and kill someone.

Chris Hedges: It’s a matter of weeks, isn’t it? What’d you say, it’s like 11 weeks or something?

Marie Gottschalk: Right, yeah, 11 weeks is the average. In Europe, in some countries it’s three years of training, and in some of the Scandinavian countries, getting into a police training program is as hard as getting into an elite university in the United States.

Chris Hedges: I want you to talk about what you call the ‘fetish of secrecy’.

Marie Gottschalk: The fetish of secrecy is we don’t know what the police are doing, right? We don’t collect good data on civilian deaths. And we often focus on civilian deaths, and we forget that there are many more times shootings, sexual assault, beatings, all other kinds of abuse by the police. Much of the data that we have on police abuse is collected by enterprising journalists, citizens. It’s no national database on what the police are doing. The 1994 Crime Bill said that police departments should collect this data, but there have been no real strong incentives like we’ll take away federal funding if you don’t collect this data. So, we don’t have even good databases to track this information.

Chris Hedges: You also write about non-fatal police violence and abuse. You say, “While killings by the police have become a major issue in recent years, other types of police violence and abuse have received comparatively little national attention. Sexual assault and sexual misconduct are among the most frequently reported forms of police misconduct, second only to excessive use of force. Low income, LGBTQ people, black women, and members of other historically disadvantaged groups are most likely to be victims of sexual assault and sexual misconduct by law enforcement. Police officers across the country conduct roadside digital anal and vaginal exams on the thinnest of pretext. Furthermore, school officials and police nationwide persist in strip searching students, from preschoolers to high schoolers, in violation of the Constitution because courts cannot bring themselves to impose a penalty upon them for doing so.”

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, it’s pretty remarkable, isn’t it?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, but again it’s this culture of impunity.

Marie Gottschalk: It is a culture of impunity and the reasons why: first, we don’t prosecute. And then the second reason is if you want to bring a civil lawsuit, we have this thing called qualified immunity, which essentially has immunized most of the police from really ever facing serious civil lawsuits. And even if you’re able to get your lawsuit into court, and even if you win, the police themselves usually don’t even pay the penalties or the cost of the civil lawsuit, the fine.

Chris Hedges: You also write about police unions. Of course, you have a notorious police union in Philadelphia, where you teach, which can often resemble a white hate group. These police unions bestow, you write, political endorsements. They run their own candidates. It goes far beyond the traditional role of enforcing established policies. Talk about the role of police unions.

Marie Gottschalk: Police unions are a very powerful force, and some police commissioners say, “We don’t even have control over our unions,” right? And so, if there’s a shooting, often police have the right, for example, if there’s video of that shooting, to see the video ahead of time before they’re interviewed, right? So, they can make their stories align with what the video is there. They often aren’t interviewed right away when there’s a shooting of a civilian. Many of these things go to arbitration and the arbitration is very heavily tilted towards the police. So, it’s very difficult to discipline police, fire police, to impose new strictures on the police.

Chris Hedges: When did this begin? I mean, you had Rizzo in Philadelphia. It was the 1960s, right? And I think at one point Philadelphia had the most, in terms of per capita, was killing more people. Of course, the whole Mumia Abu Jamal case. But what is it, in your view, that triggered this culture of impunity, this ability of the police to carry out lethal violence and non-lethal abuse?

Marie Gottschalk: I have to go back to the 20th century and really going back again to the Empire actually and bringing military back into the United States at a time when there’s more attention on developing police forces. Because at that time, Capital didn’t really want to pay for police forces. They had their own private police forces. But increasingly with labor unrest, rising concerns about income inequality, political mobilization with the populace, Capital began to think maybe we need professional police forces, maybe we need to pay for those police forces. That was the same time that the United States was going out as an empire and then bringing back veterans, who had developed policing tactics overseas. And there was this idea that we should make professional police and professional police should be autonomous and they should behave like the military. And so, these roots of this militarization of the police and its autonomy are intertwined with the development of the Empire.

Chris Hedges: But there was a backlash, I mean, certainly in the 60s. Wasn’t there a certain period of an attempt at a corrective or not?

Marie Gottschalk: Yeah, it’s really, really interesting. We think about Lyndon Johnson and the Big Crime Bill and the Kerner Commission and saying that we need to invest more in jobs and health care and the social safety net and things like that. But the other thing that came out of the Crime Bill of 1968 was actually that we need to have more professional police. And here, professional police was defined by more equipment, more training and more autonomy for local police because one of the ways that local police bought into “okay, we might get this infusion of money from the federal government” was that we’ll take that, but we need to have autonomy. And so, you give a lot of this military equipment but you’re also having rising autonomy of the local police.

And again, you also see the blowback from the Empire because this was a period of “let’s develop nonlethal weapons”, but many of these so-called ‘non-lethal weapons’ that were used overseas during that period, obviously Vietnam, many of them were actually quite lethal. Tear gas that was used in Vietnam that was imported back here was very, very lethal. Rubber bullets, things like that. But we began to use the language of non-lethal weapons, even though these actually could kill you and if they didn’t kill you, they could seriously harm you. So, we talked about this new professional policing with non-lethal weapons, but it was highly militarized policing.

Chris Hedges: Can you talk about the parallels between deindustrialization and the militarization and excessive force by police and, of course, the huge expansion in the carcel state?

Marie Gottschalk: So, one of the reasons that we got the carceral state - I served on the National Academy of Sciences Commission on the Causes and Consequences of Mass Incarceration - and one of the causes we came to as a committee to agree upon was that you had deindustrialization in the cities in the 1950s and 60s. And there were rising fears that people didn’t have jobs and that that might be a threat in some ways to the stability of cities and with the decline of jobs, decline of social services, things like that in the cities. And so, there was a sense that you needed to assert more control over cities.

There’s a common thing that if unemployment goes up, then disorder will follow. That isn’t always true, but it’s a really common belief. And so, there’s an idea about cracking down. If you think that that’s one of the things that fueled increased police and increased incarceration, then we can think that something like that is happening at a delay in rural America. As you got NAFTA, as you got more industry that was in rural areas and in the heartland moving overseas, you had this wave of deindustrialization. In the 50s and 60s, many companies moved out of the cities, moved to greenfield sites where they didn’t have to deal with labor unions, fewer environmental protections, cheaper labor, all that kind of stuff. Then they started moving to Vietnam, to China, to Mexico. And with this deindustrialization in these areas, you have some of the same fears that you had in urban areas that helped to fuel mass incarceration in urban America.

Chris Hedges: I just want to read a passage you wrote about the Obama administration because it seems to me that this passage explains how the Obama administration really paved the way for the arrival of Trump. “The Obama administration failed to reverse the remarkable inversion in the criminal legal system of the last five decades. That is, the vast expansion of the carcel state to punish street crimes, drug offenses, and immigration violations since the 1970s and the accelerating de facto decriminalization of high-level crime in the suites since the 1990s. As non-prosecution agreements, and deferred prosecution agreements proliferated to settle cases stemming from the financial and foreclosure crises, these get out of jail free cards became even more deeply legitimized and institutionalized to deal with all kinds of corporate crime under Obama and his successors. Furthermore, Obama’s mortgage relief program ended up being a boondoggle for leading banks and mortgage servicers, who turbocharged the foreclosure crisis turning millions of people out of their homes and illegally repossessing many properties. An estimated nine to 10 million families would end up losing their homes, about two thirds of them to foreclosures. Many people simply walked away from their devalued properties,” as you said earlier, “returning the keys to the banks, an action that would destroy families’ credit for years.” I think that you make this point in the book. I mean, people who turned to Trump had at one point supported Obama.

Marie Gottschalk: At one point, had supported Bernie Sanders too, after Obama, right? And so, you know, there’s a common argument that, the support for Trump is largely racially driven, but there were millions of whites who voted twice for Obama. Obama won states like Indiana, which we can’t imagine the Democrats right now winning, right? But he won Indiana, and a good proportion of the Sanders voters, we understand, then moved over to Trump. And if you listen to Trump’s final commercial, his main commercial in the 2016 election, it could be a commercial by Bernie Sanders except that the voice is unmistakably Trump’s. But it’s pictures of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the so-called global elite, the oligarchy, and it’s interspersed with this multicultural, working-class people of seemingly all different races, ethnic backgrounds, etc. And it’s a very, very powerful commercial about this perception that these people have been abandoned in the United States.

I want to add one other thing about Obama. What I don’t want people to come away with is thinking corporations have always had all this power. There is no choice. There’s nothing we can do about it. And what I try to do in the book is say, “Yes, corporations throughout American history have disproportionately had power, but it’s waxed and it’s waned.” And I try to identify moments when it was possible to do something else. So, after the Savings and Loan Crisis, George H.W. Bush was forced to put some regulations in. The Clinton administration stripped down those guardrails and let the economy rip and be deregulated, crashed and burned with the Great Recession. Obama comes in and we read back now and say it was always polarized with Obama. Yes, it was very polarized about the Affordable Care Act, but there was remarkable support ranging pretty broadly across the political spectrum to restructure the banks, to do not just window dressing about economic reform, but something much more penetrating so that you wouldn’t have these banks become too big to fail, that you would make them pay in some certain way, that you would make them keep high reserves compared to previously. And the Obama administration blinked on that. And Obama’s justification, he said, “If we sent these corporate executives to jail and we use the criminal system,” he says in his memoir, “that would have been violence to the social order.”

I think about that and think about the violence to so many Americans who lost their homes, who lost their pensions, right? But this would be violence to the social order. So, what Obama sort of argues is, okay, we’re going to do regulation, right? We’re going to let our Department of Justice close its eyes to what’s going on and instead we’re going to do regulation. And then he supported a very weak economic reform, regulation of the banking industry. He delayed in what side he was going to come out on that. By that time, Capital had regrouped. They were back on a roll. The largest banks had consolidated. They used the hundreds of billions of dollars in the TARP money to come back, to buy up smaller banks. Then at that point, Obama had missed the moment, and yet there were opportunities, legislation in Congress to take a much stricter position with the financial industry and it didn’t happen. And Obama justified it, “Okay, we’re going to do regulation, we’re not going to do criminal,” but he didn’t really do either.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk, before we talk about Trump, the media a little bit and the fact that you have this handful of oligarchs buying up - Larry Ellison, Bezos and others - and what that has done that kind of corrosive effect on our political life?

Marie Gottschalk: You know, I’m a professor today in part because I used to be a journalist and I sort of saw some of what was happening. I worked for an independent newspaper. It got bought up by Gannett. We tried to organize a union. I watched what happened when an independent was…

Chris Hedges: Which paper was it? I have to ask.

Marie Gottschalk: It was the Burlington Free Press. It was a really fine newspaper that then shrunk its news, didn’t do as much investigative journalism, et cetera, et cetera.

But the problems with the press predate Jeff Bezos, right? That in fact, we’ve had this consolidation of the media for several decades now. We have not had administrations willing to use antitrust law, the FCC, to prevent those consolidations that are going on. We’ve also not had a good push to support local journalism like you have in other countries where people pay a tax and they see it as a public service that you should have good local journalism, right? That’s what you have in Norway, and you pay for it like you pay for roads, you pay for good local journalism. What we’ve seen now is this all happening on steroids. And the other piece of it, and again, goes back to Clinton administration, the Clinton administration let private equity rip after the 1980s and the crisis that we had with some of the corporate raiders, private equity recoiled a bit, but then some deregulation that happened during the Clinton administration allowed private equity to blossom again, and private equity has been very corrosive to journalism. And one of the things I’m trying to do with the book is to say that we need to think of all these aspects, right, of what is corroding our society and not just look at Trump, either Trump 45 or 47, and one of them being journalism.

Chris Hedges: Well, Trump is the symptom. He’s not the disease. And I think by the end of your book, I think you do a good job of explaining why we have a figure like Trump, a con artist, demagogue because the one thing he did was tap into that very legitimate sense of betrayal, by both parties, a sense of anger and in some ways the mask that has been ripped off and we’re seeing all of the poisons that you document in the book being turbocharged by the Trump administration.

Marie Gottschalk: We are and people say to me, “How could all these Americans have voted for Trump in 2016?” And I said to many Americans, “Hillary Clinton looked like a shill for Wall Street.”

Chris Hedges: Which she was.

Marie Gottschalk: Right. And when it came to her $100,000 speeches that she was getting…

Chris Hedges: Goldman Sachs.

Marie Gottschalk: Goldman Sachs. You know, her fancy home in the Hamptons, etc, etc. And her saying, “When Bill and I left the White House, we were penniless,” and then their net wealth was being in the tens of millions of dollars. And so, people saw that and I don’t think we should underestimate what, hey may not know every in and out of the Great Recession and the financial crisis, but they can pick up on some of that. And especially when Trump came down his elevator and made his announcement and he stoked some of those concerns.

Chris Hedges: So now, the deregulation, the destruction of watchdog agencies, just the entire edifice that provided ineffective, at least largely ineffective, but at least some protection, are just being ripped apart. Of course, the Trump administration has no respect for the system. I mean, they tried to overturn when he lost the first presidential race. When he ran this time, he said that if he lost in 2024, he wouldn’t acknowledge the results. He’s talking about a third term. Where are we?

Marie Gottschalk: Where are we? I guess it’s who’s ‘we’, right? I think the elite in the Democratic Party are, “There were good days, we need to go back.” And Obama looks better when you compare him to Trump. Biden looks better when you compare him to Trump. George W. Bush looks better when you compare him to Trump, right? Until the elite finally reconcile with what their responsibility was for where we are, we can’t start rebuilding. And it’s not about going back. And in some ways, it’s about a reckoning with what the wrecking ball was from both parties and the elite of both parties. And then it becomes, this is not just going to come by putting somebody else in the White House. And the takeover of the Republican Party was not just about Donald Trump. This has been a decades-long project to figure out how to shift the polity in the United States, and this didn’t come out of nowhere. And if we think we’re just going to let somebody new in 2028 to clean it up, it’s not going to happen. And there isn’t, I don’t sense, that energy in the elite levels of the Democratic Party to really reckon with this. I think there are the grassroots that they’ve been trying to trash in the Democratic Party for a long time, or trying to contain it, those forces. But there does seem to be this kind of, bring back the good old days without recognizing that the good old days were the Clinton years of deregulation, were Obama having this phenomenal moment, this political moment, got himself to for a short time, a veto proof Senate. And what did he do with it? Right? He squandered that moment.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, that’s the tragedy of it. It’s kind of like the sterility of the late Weimar Republic. It’s extremely worrying. I think you’d probably agree the Democratic Party’s sabotaging of the Bernie Sanders campaign was one of the greatest political sins because he was speaking to those issues and his commitment to the working class, unlike Trump’s, of course is real. And as you mention, even on university campuses, there’s a paragraph in your book about shutting down the encampments, the closure of free speech on university campuses.

Marie Gottschalk: Well, this is something that’s very near and dear to me because, and even at my own university, the narrative is, “Well, we just have to weather what’s going on in Washington, and it’s all just happening down in Washington.” And we forget the really tragic year we had in universities in 2023, 2024 and really that we’re living in right now of a complete chill and lockdown for open expression on universities. And we’re right now going to impose possibly some very permanent draconian open expression rules at my university that I can’t believe might actually pass and be imposed here. And these are pre-Trump. These are things that happened under Obama and even at my own university, I talk about in the book, we called out, my public security people, a SWAT team, looking for a student who allegedly threw paint on the statue of Benjamin Franklin. Like, how did that happen? And how do we allow, like, the outrage, right, that we’re calling out SWAT teams on our students for something so minor like that. And that again is also a public reckoning.

Likewise, at my own university, we essentially had an attempt for a hostile takeover of our board that ended up losing our president at our university. And that was not all about just what happened in Washington, but it is the tentacles of these larger political forces that many people just think, including many administrators at my university, that we can just get below the radar, wait this out, maybe things will be better in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 election and not really see that democracy is in peril and that we’re all of fault and we all have to save it rather than kind of cowering, which is what I see with many of the elite universities, including my own.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, it’s really quite tragic. I spent 20 years overseas and universities are always the last readout of free expression in a real political debate. Once they shut those down, it’s almost unfortunately terminal. I was at Harvard and the Dartmouth students would always come and dump green paint all over John Harvard every year. So, I can just imagine the SWAT teams coming for them. Thank you very much, Marie.

And I want to thank Sophia, Max, and Malena who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

Your Death is My Command - by Mr. Fish

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The State Department’s 100-page report on Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States,” along with Donald Trump’s assertion that “Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure,” lays the groundwork for dictatorship.

Elections will be sabotaged in the name of “national security.” Left-wing dissent will be criminalized in the name of “combating terrorism.” Democracy will be snuffed out in the name of protecting “freedom.”

Trump, who has lately taken to issuing warnings about a communist plot to take over America, posits that an island of 9.6 million people — nearly 90 percent of whom live in extreme poverty amid extended blackouts due to decades of U.S. economic warfare — is an existential threat.

These accusations are not meant to be rational. They, like the charge that our elections are manipulated, are transparent excuses to go after institutions and individuals that are seen as threatening Trump and the Republican Party’s absolute grip on power. While Cuba has supposedly “carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history” Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, “have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.”

Under the heading “Front Groups and Fellow Travelers,” the report assembles a disparate collection of organizations belonging to Cuba’s“ideological network.”

For example, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), founded as an ecumenical social justice organization by the Presbyterian Church, is described as part of a Cuba “solidarity network” which “facilitates radical agitation within the United States.”

I am an ordained Presbyterian minister. I can assure you the Presbyterian Church is not facilitating “radical agitation.”

The report lists a wide variety of organizations on whose behalf IFCO has acted as an intermediary — perfectly legally — facilitating tax-exempt donations and handling grant management, compliance and reporting. These include The Jericho Movement, Equality for Flatbush, Claudia Jones School, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, changingFrequencies, Viva Palestina US, and The People’s Forum, which the report describes as “a major activist group in Cuba’s U.S. ideological network.”

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are castigated in the same chapter. The NLG “is one of the most persistently relevant — and insidious — organizations in Cuba’s U.S. network.”

The report continues:

The association of extreme-left lawyers and radical street activists has played a key role in a disproportionate share of the far-left terror and violence that has plagued the United States from the 1960s up to today. Throughout its history, it has maintained intimate ties to Cuba and other communist regimes and has explicitly sought to advance the causes of the international far left, including by working to defend and facilitate terrorism and extremist violence — from the Weather Underground of the 1970s to the violent BLM militants and Antifa terror cells of today.

The NLG is labeled a foreign influence operation because it provides assistance to activists, whose right to legal representation is constitutionally enshrined.

In 2025, the Trump administration conditioned federal funding to Harvard University on defunding and dissolving the law school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (HLS NLG), which provided legal assistance to individuals and student groups that opposed the genocide.

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A subsection in the report is dedicated to the anti-war activists at CODEPINK and their co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans. It notes Evans’ marriage to the wealthy software entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham was attended by a “Who’s Who’ of progressivism” including co-host of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman; Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen and the playwright V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) who wrote “The Vagina Monologues.”

Naming guests at a wedding is one of the more bizarre passages.

The report grossly exaggerates the influence of Singham’s support for left-wing organizations — described as “far-left” — while ignoring the massive sums supplied by U.S. corporations, millionaires and billionaires, as well as the Israel lobby, to both major political parties, super PACs, think tanks and advocacy networks.

Israel has a far more insidious influence on U.S. politics and foreign policy than Cuba, Russia and China combined.

The State Department attacks the co-founders of The People’s Forum, Manolo De Los Santos and Claudia De la Cruz.

It draws on documents that are often decades old and infused with Cold War paranoia. These include a 1966 Senate report claiming there is “overwhelming evidence that the machinery of the Cuban Government has been progressively organized over the years, to carry out its number one task — the export of Communist subversion.”

It ignores more thoughtful assessments, including a 1981 CIA estimate that acknowledged “[m]uch of the turmoil around the world is rooted in regional and local disputes of a political, social, or religious nature and has nothing to do with Communism.”

In a chapter titled “Revolutionary Tourism,” the Venceremos (“We Shall Overcome”) Brigade is characterized as one of the most “extensive and dangerous infiltration operations ever undertaken by a foreign power against the United States.” This assertion libels thousands of individuals and organizations as Cuban assets, offering nothing more than innuendo.

It lists “the founder of Mother Jones,” — although there were four founders —– along with “several other [unnamed] notable magazine editors, leaders of powerful labor unions and advocacy groups, think tank executives, and a suite of professors at top U.S. universities” as Brigade “alumni.”

Transporting humanitarian goods to Cuba is not a crime. Although the Justice Department’s extradition request from Spain of philanthropist Fergie Chambers, who provided funds to humanitarian organizations in Gaza, may see the criminalization of any person or any group that assists those suffering under sanctions and a blockade.

The report attacks members of the March 2026 “Nuestra América Convoy” which transported goods to Cuba “in defiance of U.S. sanctions.” It notes that 120 organizations “from across 33 countries joined the caravan” with “a suite of influential progressives,” including Isra Hirsi — daughter of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, video game live streamer and commentator Hasan Piker — with whom I discussed my book “A Genocide Foretold” last year — former U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and “several other current and former members of European Parliament.” Even the Gaza flotilla activist Thiago Avila — who I interviewed last month after he was tortured by Israeli soldiers — gets a mention.

Those listed in the report did not become “radicals” because of Cuban indoctrination. Their politics are homegrown, formed in opposition to racism, genocide, police violence, the terrorizing and killing of immigrants and U.S. citizens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs and neoliberalism, along with the crimes of U.S. imperialism and militarism.

The report makes passing reference to a wide range of people on grounds so tenuous that it has to be read to be believed.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is mentioned for refusing “to denounce” a “tribute to [Assata] Shakur,” who was almost certainly framed for murder and who fled to Cuba after escaping from a U.S. prison in 1979.

It dedicates two paragraphs to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for her “friendliness towards the communist regime.” The evidence provided is her participation in a congressional delegation that joined then President Barack Obama on a visit to the island.

Cuban agents, it charges, “maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, solidarity centers, and ideological NGO and nonprofit networks. These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” Cuba has allegedly “infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists [and] backed an unprecedented wave of leftwing terrorism [my emphasis] on American soil.”

Note the word terrorism. Note that it makes these individuals and organizations terrorists. Note that it makes them subject to draconian terrorism laws. And note that the Trump administration has committed itself to hunting down and rooting out the “radical left.”

The report charges that Cuba and its allies are mounting “a revolution against western civilization itself — waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” It accuses Havana of “gleeful support of the George Floyd uprisings.” It asserts that “the rise of antifa” and “the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses,” can be “linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.”

It characterizes the DSA as serving “as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist radicalism.” It claims the organization maintains a “fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime.” It alleges Cuba has built a “sprawling revolutionary network” that has “shaped America’s most famous and influential extremist movements” including the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and antifa. These networks include “powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations” in the U.S.

Cuba, the report concludes, “has sought to undermine, degrade and destabilize America with spies and soldiers, but also with students and intellectuals; with terrorist cells, but also with solidarity committees and nonprofit networks with intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover.”

The broadside is chilling. It is worse than McCarthyism. It presages a savage purging of American society.

Those named in the report are condemned without evidence. They are denied due process. That the assertions in the report are distorted at best, and often fictitious, is irrelevant. Fascist propaganda is not rooted in truth. It is rooted in a hatred for liberal values, democracy and the left. It is rooted in the belief that once those condemned as human contaminants are removed, there will be a moral, spiritual and economic renaissance.

We have seen this fascist dance before. We know what comes next. It is not good.

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Becoming the Stranger - by Mr. Fish

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We are becoming strangers. Strangers in our own countries. Strangers in the world. The values we cherish, the liberties we once took for granted, and the possibility of a democratic future are vanishing. The communities where we found meaning and purpose are being demolished. The iron grip of fascism is being consolidated. The decades long assault on democratic institutions in the name of neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitized name, cutthroat capitalism, is reaping its grim harvest.

Ece Temelkuran in “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century” draws on her exile from Turkey, as she did in her previous book, “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship,” to prepare us for a future we do not want but will be forced to endure.

“Nation of Strangers” is written as a series of forty letters beginning in June 2022 and ending in April 2025. Each letter is addressed “Dear Stranger,” which slowly drives home the point that we will soon become, like her, a stranger. First in our own land, then, for some of us, in exile.

She scoffs at our mania for hope, the naïve belief that our hollowed out and corrupted institutions can roll back the fascist tide.

“I don’t believe in hope,” she writes, “but in determination, having faith and doing what you can to survive when there is no hope.”

Temelkuran was a prominent Turkish novelist. essayist and journalist. She wrote a widely read column and had a show on national television. She was also the bête noire of the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, especially after the publication of her 2016 book “Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy.”

She left Turkey after being relentlessly smeared and attacked by government-run media, her colleagues started to be imprisoned, the death threats became “too regular to ignore,” and she lost her job.

Temelkuran called her mother on November 6, 2016, from Zagreb, Croatia: “Mom, I am not coming back home.”

“It was a one-minute phone call,” she explains. “Half of it was silence. But that’s all it took for me, in the autumn of 2016, to become homeless.”

She was 43.

You can see my interview with Temelkuran here.

“The neoliberal system’s reality — extreme inequality — cancels out the fundamental promise of democracy — equality — and that is why the idea of protecting democracy means less and less to people,” she writes.

We are rendered homeless not only because of those who hold power, whether it be Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, or Erdoğan, but because of a bankrupt liberalism, a faux opposition enslaved to the same corporate and oligarchic masters.

“Since our political outrage is considered irrelevant by the conventional homes of realpolitik, the old political parties, we find ourselves politically homeless, too,” Temelkuran notes. “We no longer know through which political medium we can unite our voices to be heard by the rulers. Like refugees, we stay in temporary places: protest tents, makeshift occupy-movement tents or strike marquees. In the cold or under the sun, we imagine and reimagine a new political home — like an exile who knows that the old home is impossible to return to but still misses a home.”

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Fascism’s lifeblood is the demonization of the other, of the stranger.

By 2050, over 1 billion people will find themselves “at threat of being displaced” due to “environmental change, conflict and civil unrest.” By 2070, between 1 and 3 billion people may find themselves “left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 [years].”

She warns that the genocide in Gaza is a template for what will come, an exercise by the global ruling class to see how much carnage it can inflict with impunity.

Temelkuran describes Gaza as “a long bleeding, thick scar on the world map,” that is “widening to become a fatal gangrene, swallowing up the entire body of humanity.” She cautions that the “new standards of brutality will be set,” that “too many will become homeless by the end of this story, and it will not only be those whose houses are bombed. And it will all begin with the loss of one word.”

“There will be no explicit agreement needed,” she goes on, “but gradually, people will avoid that one word that is deemed ‘problematic’. It is the word genocide in Germany today; in other countries, it will be other words.”

The void left by the lost word “will soon be filled with harmless words kindly suggested by the power-approved words, such as war, even though the other side is primarily civilians. ‘Let’s not call it a genocide but ‘atrocities.’ Eventually, it will become impossible to join the public conversation without uttering only those approved words. They will operate as signal flares to show that you are not using the criminalized word. This is how fascism works. It not only silences people but also forces them to speak in a certain way.”

Temelkuran chronicles the indignities of surmounting bureaucratic obstacles to apply for residency and visa permits in “soul-sucking waiting rooms.” She wonders, along with the other strangers, if, when the permit expires, it will be renewed or if she will be forced to find another refuge. She is hardened by exile. Humor is dark. She watches as refugees from the war in Ukraine arrive in Germany, clueless about what awaits them.

“The Ukrainians do not know this yet,” Temelkuran contends. “They don’t doubt that the promise made to them by the Western world will be kept. They still believe that they’ll be welcomed in a civilized manner and taken in gracefully, dignity intact. A very dark, very broken place in me wants to laugh that repugnant laugh. You wish, baby! They never take you in without crushing you first. You will despise yourself, hate everything, give up, turn numb, and only then will everything start happening. You will be welcomed only when you surrender.”

Her experience as an exile mocks the West’s conception of itself.

“Westerners still like to think of Europe as the safe haven for the oppressed intellectuals of the Global South, but that is giving too much credit to Europa when thousands are pushed back into the sea to die,” she insists. “Putting the spotlight on ‘the exile’ to divert from ‘the refugee’ operates as a crisis management tool, if not a branding strategy for Europe’s self-image.”

The persecution by the regime that drives the stranger into exile is not, ironically, the most difficult to digest.

“What the Westerners haven’t realized yet is that many of us do not leave our homes for fear of a dictator,” she writes. “They still make the distinction in their heads between the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies.’ But what truly severs your ties to a country is to see so many people, ordinary people, supporting the regime even after witnessing its evil — to see so many choosing to be evil. That is when your faith in humanity shakes. That is what ostracizes us and makes us homeless even when we are at home — the sense of being under siege from inhumanity, madness and brutality.”

The final blow, Temelkuran says, the one that “actually breaks you,” does not come from “the other side.” Rather, it “comes from those whom you think of as your people, your side. When the sense of defeat takes over the side you belong to, the anger or self-disgust of being on the losing side turns to self-hatred. The hatred turns people against each other, and then — as I did once before, permanently leaving the country — you find yourself under attack, more viciously than the other side can manage. They say you are not enough. No cut is deeper than that. That is the precise moment when you become a total stranger in your home, when not the dictator but your fellow people sever your ties to your country.”

Home for “the abyss of the unhomed self” is no longer a place. It is not “a thing of the past or a destination to be arrived at in the future.” It is found in “these moments of being fully in myself, an intermittent sense of wholeness, a rare but precious feeling of normal people, and it will only be in the here and now.”

While the home we leave behind may be gone, there are “new homes in the making that yield moments of peace when you least expect them.”

That, perhaps, is a kind of hope, but one accompanied by eternal mourning and estrangement.

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This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The Trump administration has embroiled the United States in another quagmire, similar to the Vietnam War and recent wars in the Middle East, by going to war against Iran. Now that the June 17^th Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran is dead, the US and Iran seem to be stuck in a tit for tat war where the US bombs Iran and Iran retaliates against US and allies’ in the region. As Gulf States that are being targeted by Iran mount pressure on President Trump to stop the attacks, and a global economic crisis looms, the US is running out of options and time.

For a greater understanding of the balance of power in the region, the US’ military capacity and possible outcomes of the US-Iran War, Chris Hedges speaks with Professor John Mearsheimer in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. Mearsheimer argues that what happens in the coming week is crucial in determining whether there can be a peaceful resolution to the conflict. At present, Iran has the upper hand, and the United States lacks the capacity to follow through on President Trump’s threats to escalate if Iran doesn’t acquiesce to Trump’s demand that it concede. If the US does escalate, then there is a real risk that in addition to a renewed closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Yemen may close the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, cutting off oil flows as strategic reserves around the world dwindle, which could trigger a global depression.

Hedges and Mearsheimer discuss the similarities between the war on Iran and the Vietnam War. Leadership in the United States knew early on that they could not win in Vietnam, but they continued escalating anyway. It is likely that the Trump administration knows that they have failed in Iran, but they refuse to give in even though they lack an exit strategy. Mearsheimer frames the June 17^th MOU as the first concession by the US and says, “The idea that we have a newfound advantage over the Iranians now that we didn’t have when we signed the June 17th MOU agreement makes no sense at all.”

Hedges summarizes the potential paths available to the United States: “One, if the United States does continue to attack infrastructure, we are headed for a humanitarian disaster in the Gulf. If it doesn’t, then it leaves open the possibility of some kind of a negotiated settlement that is even more advantageous to Iran than the memorandum of understanding.” A glimmer of hope, Mearsheimer offers, is that President Trump halted further attacks on Iranian infrastructure this week, but what happens next is uncertain.

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Transcript:

Chris Hedges: U.S. forces launched new airstrikes last night against Iran for the eighth straight day following the deaths of two U.S. service members at an airbase in Jordan that came under Iranian attack. The deaths were the 15th and 16th among U.S. service members in the war with Iran. The U.S. has also reimposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports to halt its shipments of crude oil. Iran’s Supreme Leader, in response, issued a statement calling Donald Trump’s signature on the memorandum of understanding, which initiated the now broken ceasefire, “worthless and invalid” and suspended the agreement. The latest round of strikes is ominous. They include attacks by the US on Iranian desalination plants, which remove salt from seawater, and power plants that provide the electricity to carry out water production.

Iran has responded by bombing desalination plants in Kuwait, where U.S. warplanes are based. Nations in the Gulf rely almost exclusively on desalination plants to provide fresh water. In Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination, along with roughly 86% in Oman and about 70% in Saudi Arabia. There are hundreds of desalination plants situated along the Persian Gulf. The water supply for millions of people is within range of Iranian missiles and drones. Should the targeting of desalination plants continue, it will trigger a humanitarian crisis.

Iran has once again closed, for the most part, the Strait of Hormuz to shipping. U.S. bases in the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have been attacked. Iran has called on their Houthi allies in Yemen to close the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait should the U.S. attack Iran’s power infrastructure. This would block all shipments out of the Gulf, including oil from Saudi Arabia.

Trump’s escalation is a huge gamble for the United States, whose strategic petroleum reserve has fallen to its lowest level since 1983. Its stockpiles of missiles and interceptors are also being exhausted. After initially projecting that the war would cost $29 billion, the Pentagon is now saying it needs $80 billion. Once indirect costs, such as increases in food and fuel prices are added, the cost to consumers and taxpayers is about $132 billion and rising. Where do we go from here? Will the steady escalation ignite a regional war? What will the renewed fighting do to the global economy? And will a negotiated settlement at this point even be possible?

Joining me to discuss the latest round of fighting in the Middle East is Professor John Mearsheimer. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Professor Mearsheimer, who graduated from West Point, was a captain in the U.S. Air Force. He is the author of numerous books, including “Conventional Deterrence”, “Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy”, “Liddell Hart and the Weight of History”, “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, and “Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics.”

So, John, before we begin, you made a point that last night the United States apparently did not attack infrastructure within Iran and you suggested that the Iranian attacks on desalination plants and oil facilities, we should add, in Kuwait, as well as the two bases in Kuwait that are staging areas for US war planes may have functioned as a kind of deterrence. I just wondered if you could address that.

John Mearsheimer: Yeah, let’s just talk about the big picture here. This tit for tat strategy that has been going on for over a week now started on July 7th. And this past week, early in the week, President Trump made it clear that if the Iranians did not surrender by the end of this week, that he would then go after civilian infrastructure in Iran. He’d go after bridges. He’d go after power plants and so forth and so on. But what happened was that at the end of this past week, the United States started to go after civilian infrastructure. We went after bridges. We went after power plants, and we went after a desalination plant inside of Iran. Now, what the Iranians did was they instantly retaliated against similar targets in countries like Kuwait. Furthermore, they ramped up the bombing campaign against Jordan and they bombed Saudi Arabia for the first time in almost four months. So, they made it clear that they were going to play tit for tat.

Moreover, the Iranians made it clear that next week, if President Trump went after civilian infrastructure in a big way, they would basically shut down the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf and out of the Red Sea and out of the United Arab Emirates, which has a very important port that’s located outside of the Strait of Hormuz. All of this would be shut down. And furthermore, the Iranians would go after all sorts of power plants, desalination plants across the Middle East. So, the Iranians made it clear that they were playing hardball.

Now, when you look at these threats in the context of what the Iranians have actually been able to do over the past few days in terms of hitting various targets in Jordan and in other places in the Middle East, it’s manifestly clear that the Iranians have the capability to target all sorts of infrastructure inside of these Middle East states and do great destruction. And both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have run articles in recent days about how effective the missile strikes are. So, I think what has happened here, Chris, and I’m just saying I think this is what happened, is that last night, which is Saturday/Sunday night, the American retaliation against Iran did not include civilian infrastructure in any meaningful way. They did not go after bridges. They did not go after power plants. They did not go after desalination plants, which they had been doing. We had been moving in that direction, but that stopped last night. And the question you have to ask yourself, is number one, why? And number two, is that a harbinger of what we think will happen in the coming week?

Now my guess is that it stopped last night because the Gulf States called up President Trump and said, “You absolutely cannot go after civilian infrastructure inside of Iran, because if the Iranians retaliate, they will destroy our societies. They will wreck our power plants. They will wreck our desalination plants.” And it looks like, again, Trump listened. And then that raises the question: what will Trump do this coming week because he has promised that he is going to unleash the dogs and go after all this civilian infrastructure in Iran, but he now knows what the consequences of that will be.

Chris Hedges: Well, he’s so mercurial, of course, it’s very dangerous to predict. He could very well bomb civilian infrastructure tomorrow night. One senses he’s flailing about. Of course, the entire war on Iran was built on a fantasy that didn’t come to fruition, fed to him largely by Bibi Netanyahu, but it doesn’t appear that there’s any real strategy other than an escalation of force and, I think, the naive hope that that will make the Iranians bend, but you may have another take on that.

John Mearsheimer: Well, I think you’re right that he signed the MOU on 17 June. And as I’ve emphasized on numerous occasions on numerous platforms, that was a surrender document. The Iranians won on every point. Then after signing the agreement, he decided to challenge the Iranians on the whole question of who controls the Strait of Hormuz.

To me, it was very clear from Article V of the memorandum of understanding that Iran controlled the Strait in the 60-day negotiating period, and then moving forward, control of the Strait would be settled between Iran and Oman. That was the deal. There was nothing about the United States controlling the Strait, but what President Trump tried to do was open a US-dominated channel in the Gulf that got around Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. And the Iranians said, unsurprisingly, this is unacceptable and it violates Article V. But Trump felt confident that he could basically throw the MOU under the bus and he could engage in a tit-for-tat military strategy with the Iranians where the United States would win. In other words, he seemed to believe that we had newfound coercive leverage over the Iranians after signing the June 17th MOU. But this is delusional. Nothing has changed in the dynamics of the conflict, as we have seen over the past week or so. The Iranians have a formidable missile and drone capability, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And the idea that we have a newfound advantage over the Iranians now that we didn’t have when we signed the June 17th MOU agreement makes no sense at all.

Chris Hedges: Well, the irony is that there was huge opposition from the hardliners in Iran to essentially agree to this MOU. And that raises the other issue, if there a negotiated way out, it isn’t going to look like the MOU, which was a surrender document, it’s going to look a lot worse for the United States because the MOU was predicated on phases. This time around, the Iranians are going to demand that - they have about a hundred billion in frozen assets - they’re going to want that released. They’re going to want a lot of stuff up front.

John Mearsheimer: I agree with that. I mean, there’s no question that the moderates won with regard to whether or not Iran should sign the MOU on June 17th. The hardliners said, “Don’t sign it. You can’t trust the Americans.” But the moderates prevailed, and then the hardliners proved to be correct. So, they’re now in the driver’s seat, as best we can tell. And it seems to me, given that we don’t have any military strategy for defeating Iran, that we’re going to, at some point, have to move to a memorandum of understanding number two. And it will be the hardliners, not the moderates, who are in the driver’s seat. And as I think you correctly point out, those hardliners will push forward a tougher deal for Trump to swallow. I would imagine that in addition to your point about them wanting all of those frozen assets up front, they will also demand that the Israelis get out of southern Lebanon.

If you look at Article I of the 17 June MOU, it dealt with Lebanon. And it was very clear from that memorandum of understanding, and the mere fact that the Lebanon issue was the number one issue on that agenda, that the Iranians really do want the Israelis to stop bombing Hezbollah and to get out of southern Lebanon. One can’t tell for sure, but it could be that the Iranians will demand that that happen before they sign a memorandum of understanding. And this, of course, will put Trump in an extremely difficult position, because as we both know, the Israelis have no interest in getting out of southern Lebanon.

But the problem that we face here is that the Iranians, I think, probably have more leverage now than they had before the June 17th agreement. I would note, Chris, that I said, not publicly, but I said privately to a number of friends who I go back and forth with on this whole issue, that I thought the Iranians were foolish to sign the 17 June Memorandum of Understanding. I’ve long believed that the longer the war goes on, and the more oil that’s cut off from the Gulf, the better off the Iranians are.

And just to elaborate on that a bit, and this will put some meat on the bone when it comes to talking about what might happen this coming week, you want to remember that there were about 20 million barrels per day coming out of the Gulf on February 27th. When people talk about 20% of the world’s oil came out of the Gulf, that 20% represents about 20 million barrels. And since the war started, we’ve devolved to a situation where seven million barrels are still coming out of Saudi Arabia and the UAE combined. So, it’s only, in my opinion, about 13 million barrels that have been bottled up in the Gulf. Now, where are those seven million barrels coming out of? One is that Saudi Arabia is sending probably somewhere on the order of five million barrels out through the Red Sea, not through the Strait of Hormuz. And I would guess that the UAE is sending out close to two million barrels from Fujairah, which is a UAE port on the Gulf of Oman. In other words, it’s outside of the Strait of Hormuz. So, you have this roughly seven million barrels of oil, seven million out of the original 20 million, that are still coming out of the Persian Gulf. I think the Iranians have a vested interest in shutting down the flow of oil through the Red Sea -that’s the Saudi Arabian oil - and shutting down Fujairah. And there’s some evidence they’ve already shut down Fujairah because this will worsen the global oil problem that the United States and the rest of the world faces. So, if the war goes on and the Iranians are able to shut down the Red Sea, which they’re threatening to do, and also shut down and keep shut down Fujairah, this will work to their advantage. It will give them more coercive leverage.

So, all of this is to say, Chris, if Trump does up the ante this coming week and goes after civilian infrastructure inside of Iran, the Iranians will retaliate by shutting down almost completely the flow of those seven million barrels of oil that are now coming out of Saudi Arabia and probably the UAE as well.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about Israel. Israel has not carried out strikes in this latest round, and Iran has refrained from attacking Israel, although I think the Iranians attacked the Port of Aqaba, which is of course very close to the Israeli border. There were Israeli officials who objected to the fact that American refueling planes were stationed in Israel. Netanyahu had to override them. Let’s talk about the wild card of Israel. If Israel gets pulled back into this, it does feel like Armageddon at that point.

John Mearsheimer: The Israelis definitely want to stay out. They’ll let the Americans wage this tit for tat campaign. I would imagine if a major air war started again, which is extremely unlikely, the Israelis would willingly participate. But I think the Israelis understand at this point that if they get involved in the fight now, if they get involved in the tit for tat conflict, then they become a giant magnet for Iranian missiles. The Israelis are surely watching what just happened in Jordan, what’s happening in Kuwait, what’s happening in Bahrain, and what the Iranians are promising to do in the UAE. And they fully understand that Iranian missiles invariably get through the defenses. Maybe a few of those defensive missiles, those Patriots, will knock down an incoming ballistic missile, but most of the ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and drones that the Iranians fire at those Gulf States get through. And they will get through in Israel as well.

We now know that the Israelis were not very successful in shooting down Iranian ballistic missiles and drones during the 40-day air campaign, which ran from February 28^th to about April 8^th. Israel really got pounded and the Israelis don’t want to get pounded again. So, they’re perfectly content to sit on the sideline and let the Americans wage this tit for tat strategy.

Chris Hedges: The other issue is that the accuracy of the Iranian missiles and drones has increased exponentially from the inception of the conflict back to the 40-Day Conflict, largely because I think they’re using, or it’s assumed they’re using, Chinese and perhaps Russian satellite systems.

John Mearsheimer: Yeah, it’s not just the accuracy, Chris, it’s also the missiles, in many cases, many of the ballistic missiles can maneuver as they’re coming down toward the target. And that enables them to dodge or avoid the missile defense systems that the Gulf States and Israel have. And I think maybe most important of all, it appears that both the Chinese and the Russians are supplying Iran with excellent intelligence as to where the key targets are. So, in other words, it’s not just the accuracy, it’s not just that they can put these missiles in the pickle barrel. It’s also the fact that they know which pickle barrels to hit, because either the Russians or the Chinese or both of them, are providing them with excellent intelligence. And the maneuverability, the accuracy that you mentioned, and the intelligence information, you combine all those things with the fact that they have ballistic missiles that have powerful warheads, and you can see where they can do one heck of a lot of damage. And they are doing one heck of a lot of damage.

And again, we don’t want to underestimate that they’re promising to do even more damage. And when you see what they have done up to now, and you think about the promises, you begin to say, these are credible promises. And this is why, at the start of the show, I was saying to you that I think that this is why President Trump did not go after civilian infrastructure last night and why he, and I want to underline the word might, might not go after civilian infrastructure this coming week. Although as you pointed out, he is flailing around. And I think your use of the word flailing is exactly the right word. He is flailing around and he is in desperate straits, so nobody knows for sure what he might do this week. But it does seem that if basic deterrence strategy or basic deterrence logic kicks in, that he probably won’t go up the escalation ladder this week.

Chris Hedges: How much damage has Iran inflicted on US bases in the region. It’s all classified, so we are kind of groping.

John Mearsheimer: Well, it’s quite clear from what you read in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and these are newspapers that are deeply dedicated to the American cause, it’s not like these are pro-Iranian newspapers, but it’s quite clear what you read from these newspapers that we have suffered an enormous amount of damage on our bases. Usually, the rhetoric in these newspapers is that almost all of the bases have been either badly damaged or destroyed. And of course, the Iranians have continued to go after those bases in places like Kuwait and Bahrain. The Fifth Naval headquarters are at Bahrain, and the Iranians have continued to pound those headquarters and that naval base more generally. They’ve continued to bomb all sorts of US targets in Kuwait. Now, very importantly, Chris, just recently we started bombing Jordan. And the question you want to ask yourself is why are we now bombing Jordan when we hadn’t been bombing Jordan for most of the war?

Chris Hedges: You mean Iran? Iran is bombing Jordan.

John Mearsheimer: Yes, I’m sorry. Iran is bombing Jordan. Why is Iran bombing Jordan? And the answer is that we have moved lots of military assets to Jordan because they are so vulnerable in places like Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, and so forth and so on. So, Jordan has become an important staging area. Well, the Iranians responded by going after US targets in Jordan. And this is why they ended up killing two American servicemen. They’ve also, it appears, wounded many other American servicemen. They’ve attacked one base and destroyed a significant number of Black Hawk helicopters, and they have attacked the main US air base in Jordan as well.

And they are threatening to continue those attacks on Jordan. And what the Iranians are basically saying, “There is no place to hide. Wherever you go, we’re coming after you. And you want to understand that we have a lethal missile and drone force, and we will use that force in very effective ways.” And they have demonstrated quite clearly that they have that capability.

Chris Hedges: A lot of the air attacks have been concentrated in southern Iran and there’s been speculation that this is because the United States is considering seizing parts of Iranian territory, some of the islands, perhaps Kharg Island. I don’t know how they would do it. I guess they would have to do it by air. I’m not sure how that would work. Certainly, they can’t do it by ship. I think the Boxer is their amphibious and that’s what, two hundred miles away or something. But do you see that as a possibility and how would it play out?

John Mearsheimer: I’ll make a couple of points, Chris. First of all, you have to ask yourself how many combat troops? And here we’re talking mainly about infantry and marines, U.S. Army infantry and marines, combat troops, people that you can use for an amphibious operation. How many troops of that sort do we have in the Gulf? Now you’ll see in the media people say there are 50,000 American troops in the region. That’s true, but those 50,000 troops are not all combat troops. And in my opinion, most of them are not combat troops. My guess is that there are at the most 8,000 Marines and Army troops from the 82nd Airborne in the region, about 8,000 combat troops at most. What are you going to do with 8,000 troops? It’s a tiny number of troops.

If you’re seriously talking about invading a country like Iran that has 93 million people, a formidable military, represents a huge piece of real estate, I mean, this is a big territory that it covers, has forbidding terrain. What are you going to do with 8,000 troops? Not only do you have to invade with those 8,000 troops, you have to sustain them, and then you have to reinforce them. This is just not in the cards. And if you listen to President Trump talk, he says that it’s not going to be American ground troops that do the invading. It’s other troops from the region that are going to do the invading, the ground operation. So, I scratch my head and say, “Well, who is that? Are they going to send in the IDF?” No, I mean they’re bogged down in southern Lebanon, and the Israelis are too smart to invade Iran. That’s not going to happen. So, who’s going to do it? And it looks like if anybody, it’s going to be the Kurds coming out of Iraq who invade Iran. But the Kurds are not going to do that unless they’re crazy. And if they do invade, it’s not going to have any meaningful consequence. The Kurds are our ground force option? This is not serious. 8,000 troops in the region are a ground force option? I don’t think so.

Furthermore, if President Trump were foolish enough to try and seize an island or to land somewhere on the coastline of Iran, many American soldiers would die. This would be a highly dangerous operation. The Iranians would go to great lengths to retaliate and drive those American forces off the beaches. And the question you have to ask yourself is what does the cost-benefit analysis look like for President Trump? There’d be zero benefit, right? What is he going to gain by invading an island or establishing a beachhead on the Iranian coast? What are the gains from that? I don’t see any.

And the cost? The cost is that many Americans will die in what almost everybody will see as a futile military operation. And he’ll pay an even greater political price for that. So, why would he do that? So, I don’t see any ground force option. You know, Chris, just to elevate for a second here, we started with a strategic bombing campaign. That lasted 40 days. It failed. We were running out of munitions, and despite all the talk about all the damage we were doing to Iran’s missile and drone capability, that proved not to be true. So, we quit after 40 days. Then we went to the blockade. That lasted just a little over two months. And then we quit when we signed the memorandum of understanding, because the blockade didn’t work. Then Trump welched on the deal on the June 17th memorandum of understanding, and we started engaging in this tit for tat war, which we’re now involved in. And that’s not working, as we’ve just talked about. That’s not working. By the way, we have actually reinstituted our blockade. We’re back to the maritime blockade as well, which didn’t work last time, but on July 14th, President Trump reinstituted the naval blockade. So, we have that at play now with the tit for tat, but it looks like the tit for tat’s not working out very well as we talked about. So, people are now talking about using land power. We’ve used air power. We’ve used naval power, that didn’t work. Let’s use land power. This is not a serious option. If it was a serious option, we would have tried it a long time ago. We didn’t try it a long time ago because it doesn’t stand any chance of working.

The point is, Chris, we have no military option here. This is why Trump signed the June 17th MOU, because we had no option. The Iranians were winning the war. And then the question you have to ask yourself is: “Have the dynamics changed since then? Is there evidence that the United States has turned the tide and that we now have found a theory of victory?” The answer is clearly no. Unless you and I are missing something and they have some secret strategy in mind that they haven’t told us about. And I don’t think that’s the case.

Chris Hedges: Isn’t there always a temptation to go back to L B J and the Vietnam War, when it was clear and it was clear fairly early on in the Vietnam War, that the United States was in serious trouble, then you get the heavy bombing campaign. This fantasy that the escalation of force is going to solve your problem has been characteristic of these imperial adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and as I said earlier, in Vietnam, although it’s not tethered to reality.

John Mearsheimer: A couple of points on Vietnam. First of all, there’s no question that the Johnson administration, starting in March of ‘65 when the bombing campaign began big time - this is ‘Rolling Thunder’ - and then shortly thereafter, this is on March 8th, ‘65, we put combat troops for the first time into Vietnam. And we escalated and escalated up until March 31st of 1968. You remember very well that that’s when LBJ, who was the president, said that he was not going to run for another term. He was clearly a defeated man. We had failed. Now it’s very important to understand that all along the way, from March ‘65 up until ‘68, the key decision makers, including Johnson himself, did not have a lot of faith in the military option that we were pursuing. They were desperate, but they were well aware that there were tremendous limits to what we could do against the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong with military force. They were not wildly as optimistic. Nevertheless, they escalated. And I think that you see a similar situation here. I think after the initial bombing campaign failed, after about two weeks, we understood that we were in a very difficult position. I believe that we will eventually discover that the key policymakers inside the administration understood pretty early in this war that we did not have a good military option. Nevertheless, we’ve escalated.

And this is exactly what happened in Vietnam. There’s no question that the leaders understood that we did not have a good military option, but they escalated. And as you remember, we ended up with about 530,000 combat troops in Vietnam. Just think about that. 530,000 combat troops in Vietnam by March of ‘68, when Johnson decided that the war was a lost cause, and he stopped the bombing campaign. Of course, Nixon and Kissinger then came in, and they thought that maybe they could find a way to win the war. Nixon said that he had this secret plan to get out of the war, but not really. What he really wanted to do was see if he could greatly reduce the American military commitment and we could still win the war. But of course, that didn’t happen. And we were forced to quit. That was in ‘72, of course, we quit. And what happened with Johnson is he quit in ‘68. And if you look at Trump and what happened, he quit once on June 17th. And I think what’s going to happen here is he’s going to be forced to quit again. Not altogether unlike what happened in Vietnam.

Again, Johnson wanted to quit in March ‘68, and Nixon was eventually forced to quit at the end of ‘72. We just had no military strategy for winning against Vietnam. We had no military strategy for winning in Afghanistan. We had no military strategy for winning in Iraq. And we have no military strategy for winning here. Your point is that once you get into these things, it’s very hard to get out, no question. And you look for ways to escalate and it’s kind of like a wing and a prayer. Maybe something’ll happen that we don’t foresee. And if we just double down, maybe, we’ll be lucky. And I think there’s just a lot of that going on. I think that’s what President Trump was thinking after June 17th. He figured that memorandum of understanding I signed, it’s a surrender document. I really don’t like it. I’m sure the Israelis and the Israel lobby and the neoconservatives and the hawks in the United States were telling him he made a mistake signing that June 17th MOU. And he probably said, “Let’s try something else. Maybe if I go back to putting pressure on the Iranians, I can get them to cut a deal.” And here we are. But again, there is no deal to be had, just as there was no deal to be had in Vietnam.

If you took five of the smartest strategists in the United States, and you could ramp back in a time machine to March of 1965, and you told those five strategists, it’s your responsibility to come up with a brilliant strategy to win the Vietnam War, the end result would be the same. And if they were really brilliant strategists, they would have told LBJ not to go in. And if he had nevertheless gone in, they would have told him to immediately get out because there was no way to win the Vietnam War. We had no theory of victory. And again, I think that most of the policymakers at the time understood that.

Chris Hedges: Well, who’s advising Trump? That’s the question. He doesn’t have a McNamara, whatever you think of McNamara, he was competent, although of course led us into disaster in Vietnam, but that’s the question. He’s surrounded by sycophants and people like Stephen Miller. I don’t know if Miller is involved in this, but of course he has no military training, and Trump seems to be able just to decide unilaterally. I mean Congress did pass a resolution with Republican support saying any more strikes in Iran had to be cleared through Congress that, of course, Trump has just blithely ignored.

John Mearsheimer: Well, it’s very hard to say who exactly is whispering in his ear, and it’s also hard to say whether he listens to anybody. It seems from the outside that the key force for restraint, the person who was sort of acting like McNamara, and just to be clear, McNamara figured out quite quickly that we had no winning strategy in Vietnam. He did not act this way when he spoke publicly. He was full of confidence when he talked publicly about the war, but it’s quite clear now that behind closed doors he understood that we just did not have a winning strategy. And I think if there’s anybody in the administration who fits that bill, it’s J.D. Vance. It’s quite clear that Vance was hardly enthusiastic about this war to begin with. He had real doubts, and it appears that he advised against it. And he has been the point man for dealing with the Iranians. I mean, he is the person who met with the Iranians with regard to getting the 17 June MOU in place.

So, it looks like Vance is the person who is telling Trump that it makes sense to cut a deal here. And as we all know, Vance has basically said publicly that he thinks that the Israelis and their supporters in the United States have been going to great lengths to sabotage the 17 June MOU and any future negotiations that might put an end to this conflict. So, Vance looks like one person who’s pushing in the right direction.

I don’t know what to make of Witkoff and Kushner. I wouldn’t be surprised if Witkoff was telling him pretty much the same thing that Vance is. I would guess that Rubio is saying exactly the opposite. You want to remember, Chris, that what Rubio and Vance say on this issue has significant implications for their chances of being the Republican presidential candidate in 2028. I’m sure Vance understands that by being appointed the point man in dealing with the Iranians and working to negotiate a deal with the Iranians, Vance is not going to endear himself to the Israel lobby and to the Hawks in the United States, and they will go to great lengths to make sure that Rubio, not Vance, is the Republican candidate in 2028. Viewers should remember that when President Trump was thinking about appointing a vice president for his 2024 run, the two choices were Rubio and Vance. And Vance barely won because there was a huge amount of pressure from people like Rupert Murdoch to make Rubio the vice presidential candidate. But Vance won out in the end. And these two individuals will surely be in a head-to-head competition for the 2028 nomination of the Republican Party for the presidency. And I think how the two of them act on this whole subject of dealing with Iran and working out a memorandum of understanding really matters for that purpose.

I don’t think it’s any surprise that you don’t see Marco Rubio deeply involved in dealing with the Iranians. He surely understands who’s buttering his bread, and he’s trying to stay as far away as he can from getting involved in those negotiations. And of course, from his point of view, it’s advantageous that it’s Vance who is involved. But I do think Vance understands that we cannot win this war, that we have to cut a deal, from his point of view. But I think more importantly, from Trump’s point of view, I think Vance believes that from Trump’s point of view, the best thing that could happen here is just to cut a deal and put an end to this. Accept the fact that we’ve lost and walk away.

Chris Hedges: I mean, how much time do we have left before the global economy craters? It’s already pretty stressed out - the shortages of cooking oil in India, fertilizer, helium for microchips. I had read before the memorandum of understanding that some economists were saying by July that if there wasn’t an opening of the Strait, we could head for a global depression. And as I mentioned in the introduction, the strategic reserves have been heavily depleted, and not just in the United States, countries like Japan as well. How much more time do we have?

John Mearsheimer: Let me tell you how I read the oil situation. I think what’s happened is that with a set of workarounds, we have been pretty successful at minimizing the damage that has been done so far. And there are three major workarounds that I see. First, as I told you before, of the 20 million barrels that used to come out of the Gulf, seven million are actually still coming out. So, when people say that the flow of oil out of the Gulf has been completely cut off, those 20 million barrels have been completely cut off, that’s not true. Seven million are coming out through Yanbu and Fujairah. That’s Yanbu in Saudi Arabia and Fujairah in the UAE.

And furthermore, as you know, the Strait has been opened up at different points. And some ships have come out when that Strait was opened up, including Iranian ships. So, the 20 million barrels have not completely disappeared. That’s one point you want to keep in mind.

The second point is, and this is quite remarkable, the Chinese have greatly reduced their demand for oil by about five million barrels a day. It’s amazing how they’ve done that, and how they’ve done it, we’re not sure. But the fact is that the Chinese demand for oil has gone down five million barrels. So, when we talk about those 20 million barrels coming out, there’s five million that are not needed because the Chinese have reduced their demand. And there’s seven million that are coming out from the UAE and Saudi Arabia. And then getting back to what you were mentioning, there’s all that oil that’s been released from the strategic reserve. And that adds up to another maybe three million barrels a day, as best I can tell. So, when you add all these things together, you can see that we have been able to weather the crisis in the Gulf reasonably well up to now.

Now, what scares people is that the strategic petroleum reserve is running down, and we’re running out of oil that’s available in that strategic reserve to float into world oil markets. Furthermore, there is the danger, as I was talking about before, that Fujairah and Yanbu will be completely shut down, and then there’ll be no oil or hardly any oil coming out of the Gulf.

And then there’s the Chinese demand for oil, which is the wildcard. What if the Chinese all of a sudden decide that they need more oil and the demand for oil from China begins to go back where it was on February 27^th? If those three things happen, then you’re in deep trouble. But it’s hard at this point to say exactly how this plays itself out. I mean, for example, if President Trump continues the tit for tat campaign this coming week and he doesn’t go after Iranian infrastructure in the process, he doesn’t go after Iranian bridges and power capabilities or power stations, then maybe the Iranians will not shut down the Red Sea and maybe oil will start to come out of Fujairah or will continue to come out of Fujairah. I’m not sure whether Fujairah is completely shut down at this point. And that really matters for the overall question of oil supply. And then what the Chinese do is just very hard to say. So, all this is to say we’re in a sense flying blind here.

Chris Hedges: I mean, really it sounds like there are two roads that we can take. One, if the United States does continue to attack infrastructure, we are headed for a humanitarian disaster in the Gulf. If it doesn’t, then it leaves open the possibility of some kind of a negotiated settlement that is even more advantageous to Iran than the memorandum of understanding. Are those the two scenarios that face us?

John Mearsheimer: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, I don’t see a land invasion as feasible or as turning the tide. I don’t think we have any meaningful theory of victory at this point in time. And I think what’s happening here is that we have this tit for tat strategy or tit for tat campaign taking place between the United States and Iran. And the question is, how does it play itself out? And I think we’ll know a lot a week from now. It all remains to be seen what the United States does. And I think that if President Trump does this coming week as he promised he would, which is to go after Iranian power plants and bridges and maybe even oil facilities in a serious way, then the consequences for the Gulf states will be disastrous. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Iranians even attack targets in Israel. And I think it will have a seriously negative effect on the flow of oil into global oil markets, because I think almost certainly Fujairah and Yanbu will be shut down.

Chris Hedges: Great. Well, thanks, John. And I want to thank Diego and Max who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

Photos

Iran Accuses US Of Striking Civilian Infrastructure In Hormozgan Province

HORMOZGAN PROVINCE, IRAN - JULY 17: (EDITOR’S NOTE: This Handout image was provided by a third-party organization and may not adhere to Getty Images’ editorial policy.) (Handout Photo by Morteza Akhoundi via Getty Images)

Mojtaba Khamenei, Son Of Irans Supreme Leader

May 31, 2019 file photo shows, Son of Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba Khamenei, attends a demonstration to mark Jerusalem day in Tehran. (Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-SAUDI-ENVIRONMENT-WATER-ENERGY-COP28

TOPSHOT - In this picture taken on March 30, 2023, Mohamed Ali al-Qahtani (L), Phase General Manager at the Ras al-Khair water desalination plant, owned by the Saudi government’s Saline Water Conversion Corporation, speaks with an employee at the facility in Ras al-Khair along the Gulf coast in eastern Saudi Arabia. (Photo by Fayez Nureldine / AFP via Getty Images)

Desalination Plant in Saudi Arabia

A desalination plant drawing water from the Arabian Gulf, providing the water scarce and oil rich eastern province with fresh water, Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, 1990. (Photo by Barry Iverson/Getty Images)

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IRAN-US-ISRAEL-WAR

A heavily-damaged bridge which was hit by a US strike is pictured along the road connecting Roudan and Bandar Abbas in southern Iran on July 18, 2026.(Photo by Amir Hossein KHORGOOEI / ISNA / AFP via Getty Images) /

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JERUSALEM - OCTOBER 13: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, on October 13, 2025 in Jerusalem. President Trump is visiting the country hours after Hamas released the remaining Israeli hostages captured on Oct. 7, 2023, part of a US-brokered ceasefire deal to end the war in Gaza. (Photo by Evelyn Hockstein - Pool/Getty Images)

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TOPSHOT - A plume of black smoke rises from an ongoing fire near fuel depots at the port of Fujairah in the gulf emirate of Fujairah on March 4, 2026. Iran’s strikes on Gulf neighbours since February 28, following the US-Israeli attack, forced the UAE to shut its airspace, blindsiding travellers who thought they were headed to one of the region’s safest holiday destinations. (Photo by Fadel SENNA / AFP via Getty Images)

Iran-Ballistic-Missiles-Attack-on-Israel

Israel’s air defense targets Iranian missiles in the sky of Tel Aviv in Israel, on June 16, 2025. (Photo by Matan Golan / Middle East Images via AFP) (Photo by MATAN GOLAN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

Kharg Island Oil Terminal in Iran

TEHRAN, IRAN - MARCH 12: A general view of the Port of Kharg Island Oil Terminal, 25 km from the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf and 483 km northwest of the Strait of Hormuz, in Iran on March 12, 2017. Kharg Island Oil Terminal brings Iranian oil to the world market. The oil terminal is the world’s largest open oil terminal, with 95% of Iran’s crude oil exports coming through it. (Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

President Johnson And General Westmoreland

US President Lyndon Johnson (1908 - 1973), standing next to General William Westmoreland (1914 - 2005) on the back of a jeep, visits troops at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, December 23rd 1967. Johnson was on a 23-hour stop-over after attending the funeral of Prime Minister Harold Holt in Australia. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Nixon Talks With Kissinger

US President Richard Nixon (1913 - 1994) (left) meets with National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger on the Colonnade outside the White House’s Oval Office, Washington DC, September 16, 1972. (Photo by White House via CNP/Getty Images)

President Lyndon Johnson Whispering to Robert McNamara

President Lyndon Johnson (right) whispers to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during a news conference at Johnson’s ranch in Texas. Johnson is resting at his ranch in advance of an operation.

Stephen Miller Speaks To The Media At The White House

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 30: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller speaks to the media outside the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. Miller spoke out against the recent court ruling that blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to prevent Harvard University from enrolling foreign students. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Former President Trump And VP Nominee Sen. JD Vance Hold Rally In St. Cloud, Minnesota

ST CLOUD, MINNESOTA - JULY 27: Republican vice presidential nominee U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) introduces U.S. Republican Presidential nominee former President Donald Trump during a rally at Herb Brooks National Hockey Center on July 27, 2024 in St Cloud, Minnesota. Trump hopes to flip the state of Minnesota this November, which hasn’t been carried by a Republican in a presidential election since 1972. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

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PARIS, FRANCE - JANUARY 6: (L-R) Steve Witkoff US Special Envoy and Jared Kushner attend a Press Conference during the ‘Coalition Of The Willing’ meeting at Elysee Palace on January 6, 2026 in Paris, France. Leaders from around 30 countries are gathering in Paris to discuss military support for Ukraine, amid ongoing negotiations on a US-brokered peace plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. (Photo by Tom Nicholson/Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-US-LEBANON-ISRAEL-TRUMP-DIPLOMACY

TOPSHOT - (L-R) US Vice President JD Vance and US President Donald Trump listen to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speak during a meeting with Lebanon Ambassador to the US and Israel Ambassador to the US, at the White House in Washington, DC on April 23, 2026. US President Donald Trump met Lebanese and Israeli envoys at a new round of peace talks Thursday, with Beirut seeking a one-month extension of a shaky ceasefire set to expire. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

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We are living in an age of climate collapse, which will most likely result in mass displacement and death, warns Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion in the United Kingdom on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. . And while that reality is hard to accept, it is an honest assessment of what lies ahead that must be addressed as we decide how to navigate what Hallam calls humanity’s “darkest hour.” In his new book, “Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death,” written while he was in prison for climate action, Hallam shares his background in academic sociology and organizing for social change to provide tools for resisting under the current repressive legal and political systems.

People often respond to repression with greater courage and resolve to resist it. Hallam’s experiences in prison and elsewhere taught him that “we always have that opportunity to choose how we’re going to react and how we’re going to live our lives in response to the involuntary hell that’s imposed upon us by the powers that be.”

Hedges and Hallam explore the ways that societies can fracture as they are collapsing, tending towards violence or hedonism. Some people may “retreat into crisis cults” as demonstrated by the growth of the Christian Right in the United States. They emphasize the necessity of a form of spiritual or moral grounding that transcends the individual and awakens our sense of connection, of being part of something greater than ourselves, of being willing to ask difficult questions and to make sacrifices. It is through organizing and collective action that people can confront the power structure effectively and build a different society.

Finally, Hedges and Hallam analyze the state of social movements and what it takes to create a popular revolution. They call out the liberal class, including mainstream climate organizations, that “perpetually undermines the ability to bring along the objective revolutionary conditions, which are strategically and ethically undeniably necessary at the present time.” They point to the dire need for revolutionary demands and prophetic leaders who will guide social movements. In the end though, Hallam points out that social transformation is the result of door-to-door organizing in our communities, building support systems and challenging power in the streets.

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Nawelle Mouihi

Transcript

Chris Hedges: From a cell in Wayland Prison, Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, while serving a five-year prison sentence, wrote his book, “Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death.” It is a searing indictment of a legal and political system that is designed to punish those who resist, while protecting those who propel us towards mass extinction.

In the age of climate collapse, telling the truth has become a criminal act. He and his four co-defendants, who each received four-year sentences, were convicted for hosting a Zoom call in 2022 to organize activists to climb onto bridges over the M25, the main motorway that circles Greater London. The short-term aim was to stop traffic. The long-term aim was to force the government to stop new oil and gas licenses. This was not a symbolic protest, exemplified by protesters hurling tomato soup at Van Gogh’s sunflowers preserved by protective glass in the National Gallery in London. It was a protest designed to disrupt, as it did, commerce and the machinery of state. Although even the protesters who tossed soup at the painting, which was not damaged, received harsh prison terms of nearly three years, Roger, like a reviled biblical prophet, warns that we are already experiencing fundamental shifts in climate patterns that are destroying the foundations of human society. Our infrastructure and social structures are increasingly based on climate models that no longer exist. Seas are rapidly rising, tens of millions of people once considered safe from coastal flooding, are now considered at risk. Global warming has nearly doubled in only a decade. Ocean overheating is accelerating. Over a two-year period, ocean heat waves with temperatures up to three to five Celsius above normal lasted for 500 days nonstop, covering ninety-six percent of the world’s oceans. Antarctica is undergoing the fastest glacier collapse ever recorded. Thawing permafrost is belching out greenhouse gases.

“If greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced by 50% within the next six years, by 2030,” Roger writes, “average global temperatures will exceed 2 degrees Celsius, displacing an estimated 1 billion people. That’s 20 times the number of homeless at the end of World War II, amounting to one in eight people on Earth. There’s a fifty percent chance the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation will collapse by 2050, causing temperatures in Europe to drop by ten to thirty degrees Celsius. The Arctic is expected to be ice-free in summer between 2030 and 2035, and by 2040, forest fires may destroy twenty percent of woodland annually. This is just the beginning.”

Joining me to discuss the climate crisis and his book, “Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death,” is Roger Hallam. So, Roger, as you know, I wrote the foreword to this book. So, I have to be upfront about that. It’s a great book. I wouldn’t have written for the foreword if it wasn’t. When I was in London, of course, I visited you in prison. I wondered how that prolonged period in prison changed your perspective, if it did, not just on your social role, but also on British society.

Roger Hallam: Well, yeah, I was in prison for about fourteen, fifteen months and then I was in prison on remand for about four months. So, I’ve been in and out of prison basically for three or four years now for various matters. I mean, how it’s affected me is I’m just a lot stronger. And people might think that’s peculiar or unusual, but I don’t think it is. I think there’s been a recent study come out that people who’ve been to prison, and about 250 people have been put in prison in UK, so that’s the equivalent of 1,500 plus in America, if you take in the increase in population. The study showed people come out more committed, not less committed. And there’s reasons we can discuss why that’s the case. But it certainly gives you a visceral sense of what an authoritarian state looks like now and in terms of doing action on the mass death projects that we face, we’re already in an authoritarian state in the UK and obviously similarly in America.

Chris Hedges: I remember Craig Murray, he’d spent much less time in prison or jail than you did, but I remember when he got out, he told me he was just stunned at the bankruptcy, if that’s the right word, of the kind of lives that many of those who were incarcerated led - the lack of opportunity, the poverty, the even illiteracy. It may not have come as a surprise to you. I’m just curious whether it gave you a window into this rapidly expanding social inequality, which defines certainly the United States and the UK.

Roger Hallam: Yeah, I think it does. It didn’t particularly surprise me or strike me this time. It’s the seventh time I’ve been in prison. I went to prison in the 1980s when I was 19, 20 for the peace movement. So, I’ve had plenty of experience with the British class system, let’s put it like that. And British society has been characterised by extreme inequality for centuries. And that’s sort of baked in, I suppose. I think what we need to understand though is that people have the opportunity and the courage to deal with their circumstances. Not always, of course, and often terrible tragedies and great injustices happen in prison, as you of all people are aware, Chris. But at the same time, people get on with their lives, and people are capable of taking control of themselves and living with some dignity in spaces of extreme provocation and deprivation. And I think this is what we need to understand.

As you know, I have a generally positive attitude of the human. We are capable. We’re not just pieces of dead matter that get hit on the head. We are capable and very capable of fighting back, both internally and externally, and otherwise history wouldn’t happen as we know. So, for me, it was a place of reflection really and admiration really for some of the guys that I was incarcerated with.

I was on a corridor with people, “Lifers,” as this they call them in the UK. I don’t know if that’s the word in other places, but you know, people that been sent to prison 25 years plus. So many of these people had done terrible things. No two ways about that. But many of them had decided they were going to live their life anyway. And they were very spiritually solid. Not all of them of course, but a lot of them were. And this for me was a lesson that whatever the bad guys do to us, we always have that opportunity to choose how we’re going to react and how we’re going to live our lives in response to the involuntary hell that’s imposed upon us by the powers that be.

Chris Hedges: You have long made this point, which of course is correct, that you have the what’s called the liberal wing of the political establishment that will acknowledge the reality of the climate crisis, but essentially do little to nothing, perhaps symbolic gestures, and then you have the Trump-like climate denialists, but both sides of this political equation are dangerous. Explain.

Roger Hallam: Well, I’m with Martin Luther King, as you know, Chris, right? The enemy is the liberal moderates, not the Ku Klux Klan, as per the letter from a Birmingham prison. And I don’t mean that in some provocative way just to get attention. I mean it from the heart of my being that what makes me furious beyond words is not the evil people in the world. There’s always evil people in the world, as various people have said. The problem is those people that facilitate that evil in full-in knowledge that it is evil and pretend to be good while they do it, right? And this is the liberal class. And this is the class that perpetually undermines the ability to bring along the objective revolutionary conditions, which are strategically and ethically undeniably necessary at the present time, given the objectivity of the number of people who are going to die in the next 20, 30 years due to the whole shit show of things that are going to be brought down upon us that everyone listening to this knows about, right?

The problem is the lack of leadership, the lack of revolutionary leadership, which will call out the liberal class and make clear that if people are not going to die, then they need to join together to create a revolutionary movement. And again, I don’t mean that in some romantic put a poster on your wall way. I mean in the classical 20th-century civil resistance way, right? Of having a leadership structure, having a mass organization, having an explicit strategy of regime change and having a rhetoric of rage and determination. And until we get those things in place, we will be continually sabotaged by what I would call the administrative class, you know. And I’ve recently been mobilizing in inner city London and this is the problem, right? There’s so many people that are furious, like just about everyone that you speak to, and I’ve knocked on the doors of thousands of people in the last eight months. The problem is that all the vast majority of the campaign spaces, the vast majority of the deliberative spaces are basically controlled by this administrative class, which exists to prevent any collectivization of resistance. And as soon as you do that, they’re down on you, right? And they use various methods to make sure you’re not successful. And that’s the problem.

I’m not interested, as you know, on coming on podcasts and saying how bad Donald Trump is. It’s like we’ve done that. We’ve been there. What we need to do is organise. And we need to understand how you organise. And we’ve got a 200-year tradition of organising since the French Revolution. And we need to start being humble enough to realise people in the past used to do it a lot better than we did. Rather than thinking we can just mess around on social media and such like these are. Anyway, there’s a bunch of things to be discussed there, I guess.

Chris Hedges: Well, I think you have pointed out quite astutely that this organization requires that you show up, that you invest significant time in speaking to various groups in programs of education. That it’s not done online. That it’s done through personal connections, and that it’s labor and time intensive.

Roger Hallam: It is, and there’s no sort of mystery about why that is the case. Humans are functions basically of what’s happening around five meters around them at any one time. In other words, what the other humans are doing within your immediate space. And I did years of research in academia about this before I co-founded Extinction Rebellion. And I’m not saying anything unusual, there’s 40, 50 years of psychological research. Individuals don’t read books and then decide to do A. What they do is they talk to people who they respect and if they are doing X, they’ll do X as well. And if they’re doing Y, they’ll do Y. So, people can be enormously courageous and enormously evil, depending upon what’s happening around them. So, the role of the revolutionary is to design those spaces. We don’t need to talk about individuals, we need to talk about spaces and dynamics.

There’s different units of spaces. What you say to people on the doorstep. What you say to people in assemblies. What you say to people in interviews like this and such like. And they all need to come together. And the big message needs to be if we don’t join together, we’re going to die. And I mean that literally, right? I don’t mean you get together and say, “Hey guys, we’ve got some problems, and Trump’s a terrible person and various like abstract nouns.” We need to say, “You are going to die. And your death is going to be appalling. And you need to go through your dark night of the soul and come out of the side and become a mature human being, like millions and billions of people were in the past, who confronted the same situation.” This is nothing unusual in the human experience, as you know.

What’s unusual is we’ve had 30 years where we’ve fooled ourselves, do we don’t face mass death? And now we do because we’re in 2025. So, it’s a matter of getting over ourselves. And this is the role of prophetic leadership. And there’s not enough prophetic leaders out there because that sort of function is not valued. There’s this idea everyone will spontaneously join together, they won’t unfortunately. Which doesn’t mean I’m justifying some patriarchical, traditional, top down, crap leadership sort of model. What I’m pointing to are the great leaders of the past who stood up and died for the cause, as we know, which is what usually happens. But again, that is not a problem.

If I had thirty years of saying, “We don’t want leaders because they end up getting shot.” Well, obviously they end up getting shot. That’s what the life of the human involves is sacrifice. We haven’t ended history. We’re still in the midst of it and we’re about to come to the final chapter of it. And one of the reasons we’re going to fail is because we pretend the old logics don’t apply, which is, you live a good life and if you get shot, so be it. That’s the way we need to approach the future.

And that’s not going to happen unless people act like me and you, Chris. We’re one of the few people in the Western world that gets up and tells people. And this is what Larry Kramer did, who I think is the most important American of the last hundred years, not Martin Luther King. It’s Larry Kramer, who got up and said, “Get out in the streets, otherwise you’re going to fucking die.” And he said it again and again. And as you know, he turned around the campaigns against AIDS and the obscenity of what was happening in in the late 80s with gay guys dying in corridors. He turned that around. How did he turn it around? By getting fucking angry. It’s not complicated. You just need to get a grip and do what you need to do, really.

Chris Hedges: Is there a parallel between the faster we move towards ecocide, the harsher the repression becomes? That certainly seems to be your experience.

Roger Hallam: Yes, it is, but we take the wrong message from that. We take the materialistic capitalist message, which is life isn’t an accounting system, and you’ve got ten dollars, Chris, and I take five from you and you’ve only got five left. This is what the Left does all the time to get colonized by neoliberal capitalistic logics. If you get put into prison, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost five dollars and you’ve got five left. It means whatever you want it to mean. You see what I mean? Humans are not accounts. When the neoliberal liberal left says, repression is really bad because that means people cannot rebel, not only are they betraying the essence of what it is to be human, they’re just talking empirical bollocks, as you know. History is absolutely full of societies becoming more authoritarian. And because they’re more authoritarian, people rebel, not despite because it’s an obscenity. I mean you’ve got Trump in America and what are the numbers? Like five, ten million people have been out on the streets. Why’s that? It certainly isn’t because of the repression, despite the repression, it’s because of it, isn’t it? People didn’t all rush indoors in Minnesota going, “Dear, there’s a chance I might I might lose my liberty or whatever.” They were going, “Fuck this, let’s go,” because some things are more important, right? Which is self-respect and all the rest of it.

Chris Hedges: How do you see the movement moving? We have had movements that embrace this kind of radical response, confrontational response, essentially become domesticated. Most of the environmental movements, the mainstream environmental movements, Sierra Club and all already have. But how would you kind of judge or explain the health of our radical movements in terms of confronting power?

Roger Hallam: Well, I think we’re in the darkest hour before the dawn. That’s my analysis. I think the state of the radical movements is massively immature in the presence of the objectivity that we face. But the important thing to understand is this is nothing new.

There’s a cycle of resistance in response to repression. And you can have a cycle of resistance and then everything collapses because you can’t keep that level of energy up for a long time. And what we’ve got now is in many ways like the last spasm of denial, right, before it becomes absolutely obvious what’s going on. In the words of a university professor, whose name I’ve forgotten, he was on social media last week saying, “Everything won’t change until white people die.” And this was a professor from an elite university, right? Obviously, he was retired. He wouldn’t say that if he was in a job. But that’s the fundamental tipping point, as we know. And white people will start dying. Obviously, I’m talking about rich white people here as well. They will start dying because the climate crisis is a suicide prospect, which is why my book is called “Suicide.” My book isn’t called, the ruling class are going to do us in and they’ll be fine and we won’t.

Chris Hedges: They think they’ll be fine. Don’t they?

Roger Hallam: This is a unique moment in the human experience because since 1945, you’ve had the capacity to destroy every human on the planet. It’s not like previous ruling classes were worse than this one. Obviously, they would have destroyed themselves as well. The point is this ruling class will destroy all of us and also they’ll destroy themselves. And by ‘destroy’ I mean we’re going extinct and they will go extinct. And, we can have little obscene conversations about whether a few of them survive in the bunker for a few decades, but that’s not the point. The point here is that the whole way our civilization sees reality is intricately combined with why we’re going extinct.

And what we need is a fundamental new way of seeing what it is to live a human life. And this sounds ridiculous at the moment because we’re at the darkest hour before the dawn, but I can a hundred percent guarantee that in ten years’ time there’ll be a revolution in the ways in which we see the nature of our civilization, in the ways that prophetic explosions have happened at times of extreme distress in human history. There’s nothing unusual about this. What’s happening at the moment is it’s like we’re having the last dance in Hitler’s bunker before the Russians arrived, you know what I mean? That’s the logic that’s being promoted by the liberal left, and in the conservative spaces is, let’s forget about reality for another ten years, pretend, and then we’ll have to deal with death.

Chris Hedges: And yet there are movements within societies that face imminent death - the ghost dance or something - where people retreat into crisis cults. I look at the Christian Right as a crisis cult. You unplug yourself from reality. You embrace magical thinking. That’s also a phenomenon of an overwhelming existential crisis.

Roger Hallam: Yes. I mean, as you know, I’m not some madman, Chris. This is going to happen and it’s all really straightforward. I’m a sociologist, as you know, right? And it’s not complicated. This issue is not complicated. It’s emotionally appalling, but analytically it’s not complicated, which is in times of massive distress, a society will fracture along several key lines. One of them is towards internal destruction - personal suicide, nervous breakdown, domestic violence. Another fracture will go towards external hedonism - live now, forget the future. And another element will go into some form of collective cult-like behaviour or some fascistic worship of death, which is what fascism basically is. And the last fracture will be the fracture that turns towards the prophetic love of life and the human. And obviously, it’s the last one that we’re putting our bets on, right? But it’s naive to think that the others won’t exist. The point is everything will be up for grabs.

And any of those fractures could become hegemonic. But no one can predict beforehand how it’s going to go, right? That’s the point. But what we can predict with absolute certainty is the centre will collapse. And it is collapsing. It’s a zombie space already, as we know. It’s only there because of institutional support. So that’s the prospect in the next two decades.

Chris Hedges: Let me ask a little bit about the climate crisis itself. As it accelerates, you, of course, see the solidification of climate fortresses. This is what Europe is doing. What the United States is doing, essentially locking out those who are fleeing northwards. Talk a little bit about the crisis itself and the increasing pressure it’s bringing on human societies.

Roger Hallam: Well, first of all, we need to deal with the liberal left idea that the climate crisis is complicated, right? There’s lots and lots of talk shows and podcasts about the climate crisis and what’s communicated is this is just a vague idea. There’s nothing vague about putting CO2 into the atmosphere. There’s three facts we need to just establish, and then we can just move on to what’s going to happen on the human scale, right? We’re at 1.5. No one can dispute that. We’re going up 0.4 per decade. So, we’re going to be hitting 2 around 2035, maybe a bit before, maybe a bit after.

At 2 degrees, we trigger all the tipping points in the Earth system. Again, maybe 1 or 2 will be earlier, maybe 1 or 2 will be afterwards. That will create runaway climate collapse. Everyone knows that. That means we’ll go up to 2.5 and 3 and 3.5 and such like. And once we pass 2 degrees, a quarter of the world’s population will be on the move. Again, not immediately, not all of them, but who’s counting, right?

As you said in the introduction, that’s two billion people. That’s two billion people on the go. And in the future decades, it will rise. There is a get out clause, which is revolution that collapses the carbon, which is why I am revolutionary, because that’s the only way out. And then there’s a technological fix, geoengineering and such like. So, it’s not a hundred percent guaranteed that we’re going extinct, but we have to accept that’s now the main scenario, because it’s quite difficult to have a revolution and there’s no guarantee geo-engineering will work. But if you want to be a realist out there, if someone’s listening to this and they think, “Okay, I’m a realist,” then you have to be a revolutionary and you have to consider geoengineering. That’s it. And obviously added onto that we’ve got AI and nuclear war and various sort of wild cards. But this isn’t a wild card, it’s physics. It’s like you drop a ball and it drops to the ground, right? You put CO2 into the atmosphere, it warms up and we’re at 1.5 and we’re going to reach 2.

So, once we’ve got that established, then we can look up what it means to have a billion people on the move. And we know what that looks like because 50, 100 million people were on the move in World War II. And basically, it destroys the world economy. That’s the first thing to say. There’s going to be no pensions. The second thing to say is unless there’s a revolutionary religious transformation, there’ll be genocides of a scale many, many times greater than what happened in the 20th century because we know what fascists do is they kill the outsider. And that’s what’s coming down the line. And they’ll kill those who try and prevent it.

So, we’re going into a period of history where unless we do something fundamental with ourselves and our society, we all plunge into the greatest spasm of horror the human race has ever experienced. And it’s super important that people don’t avoid that, because the only way we’re going to avoid it is by facing it, which means facing up to death. And this is why I’m spending more and more of my time talking about religiosity in the widest sense of the word that unless you come to face what it is to be a human, i.e., a conscious entity that’s going to die, and accept that reality whenever it’s going to be, you’re never going to grow up and be able to be fully human in the face of horror. And it’s entirely possible to do that, right? But it’s not going to happen by avoiding the realities that we face. And this is difficult, to put it mildly, but it’s not impossible.

Chris Hedges: Well, consumer society is completely oriented towards the fantasy of eternal youth. I mean we’re fighting against a culture that essentially does everything it can to mask or hide the fact of our own mortality.

Roger Hallam: Which is why we’ve got a massive mental health crisis because the mainstream culture is saying, “You can live forever.” That’s the subliminal message. I know we sort of know that in actuality, but that’s the message, the idealization of youth, the idealization of life without death, which is a contradiction in terms, obviously. And then we’ve got the reality, which is people below 30 are facing a slow death by starvation and death in social breakdown and all the rest of it. And the solution to that is prophetic witness, as it always was in the past. And this is why the new movements that are going to emerge, which are going to be in a position to actually concretely deal with the crisis materially and spiritually, have not yet been born, to be honest with you, Chris. They’re going to come out of the edges of the social space.

And the reason I come onto shows like this is not to talk to the ninety percent. I’m talking to the one percent of people who have at the back of their mind that they’re going to be the people who are going to provide the prophetic witness. And there’s nothing wacky or weird about this. I had a chat with Paul Engler, you may know, who’s one of the most skilled movement organizers in the States, and we both compare notes every now and again because I do similar work in Europe. And we both agreed. The single biggest determinant of movement growth is prophetic leadership. You need someone to go around and say, “You’re going to fucking die. Get out there.” You don’t want people to start giving you facts and figures. When I do talks, I do that, what I’ve just said. It takes two minutes to tell everyone where we’re up to. After that, the key question is how do you want to live your life? The key question isn’t what are we going to do? That’s like a machine question, right? You know, Lenny was a machine revolutionary. It’s like, no, the question isn’t what are we going to do. We’re not dealing here with a broken car engine. We’re dealing with a spiritual being called the human and the key question is how are you going to live your life? And the great thing about that question is, it doesn’t matter what the outcome is because the outcome is above your pay grade, as we all know. It’s only like humanist arrogance that thinks we control this world. We most certainly do not control this world, which isn’t to say we shouldn’t give up a good life. But the reason we live a good life is because we believe in the good. And if you don’t believe in the good, you get mentally ill.

It doesn’t take long to put your ducks in a row. You know what the ducks in a row look like, Chris, right? And many of your viewers and listeners know what having your spiritual ducks in a row looks like. But someone needs to go out and talk about this rather than why the rich are terrible and all the rest of it. Obviously, the rich are terrible. People don’t need to be told the rich are terrible. They’ve known that for the last 5,000 years. What they need to know is what is it to live a good life?

Chris Hedges: Well, you mentioned the word religiosity and I know that that’s important to you, as it is to me, not in an orthodox kind of way, but I think it is vital for a successful movement where one is judged not by the outcome finally, but by one’s integrity and commitment to justice and I wondered if you could kind of flesh that out.

Roger Hallam: Yeah, well the first thing to establish is orthodoxy, as you called it, is what secularity is imposed upon us. Like the whole idea of religion is a modern concept, as I think you know, and many of your listeners may know. The word religion didn’t come in until the modern period. Before the modern period, the notion of religiosity, as you might say, was impregnated in all aspects of life. And what modernity did, what secularity did, what the capitalist regime did, is stick religion as a noun and stuck it as something that happens on Sunday and some weird belief in some concrete other called ‘God’. Right? That’s nothing to do with religion. That’s like what secularity has done. And the tragedy and the appalling criminality of secularity is to prevent people engaging in the sense of the transcendent and the enchantment of what life is, because they’re told that’s child’s play and all the rest of it, and it’s some weird belief, as if secularity and modernity isn’t a belief itself, right? The outlier is modernity. For 99% of the human history, people have believed in transcendent phenomena or the transcendent within the material, and other related ideas. And even in today’s world, for the sake of argument, 80% of the world’s population is aware there’s something other than going out and making money. You see what I mean? Like we need to understand there’s history here, just as there’s history in imperialism and there’s history of the oppression of common people, there’s also the history of the stripping of a sense of the transcendent from culture. And this is the primary reason why we are not resilient, why people burn out because they think they’re just themselves. But being just yourself is just some weird cult idea of Newtonian physicists. It’s obvious that we’re not just on our own. We’re part of some universal thing that’s beyond words. And just because something’s beyond words, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just go and read some quantum physics, for God’s sake. You see what I mean? So, we need to start battling back, and this is a big battlefield, of saying it’s obvious and it’s natural and it’s absolutely needed that we start understanding what it is to be who we are, which is to be part of something greater than what we are, because that’s objectively what we are. It’s not some postmodern whim, it’s a reality. We are objectively part of something bigger, and we always are and always will be. And once we start engaging with this, and I’ve got great hopes that the younger generation, younger 30s, are ready for this because it’s intolerable to live in a world where there’s just you on your own. So, people will be looking for it. And if we don’t provide a progressive pro-social orientation of what the transcendent is, we know what will happen is the Nietzschean Nazi space will come and gobble everyone up and get everyone to worship death and destruction as some sort of perverted form of transcendence.

So, the race is on, but the idea this is just about inequality that the secular left is just appallingly self-sabotaging. People need to believe in something greater than themselves. And it’s already there, right? I mean better people than me, no doubt, will design what that looks like over the next 20 years. But there’s absolutely no question that we’re not going to win by pretending we’re dead matter because we’re not.

Chris Hedges: So just to close, ideally, what does this revolution look like? How is it built? How does it come about? And how are the ruling global elites dethroned?

Roger Hallam: Well, first of all, by not asking the question. I mean, if you ask the question, Chris, without doing the spiritual work before you ask the question, you’re going to burn out in six months. This is why Gandhi said you have to go and like do self-purification before you go into battle. Everyone does this for the last 2,000 years. You can’t send your troops into battle thinking you’re going to hit the left wing and then the right wing and then do X, Y, and Z. First of all, you have to pray to God. The praying to God is the important bit, right, because that gives you the courage to do everything else. So that when it looks like you’re losing, you don’t turn and flee, because if you do, then everyone dies. I mean obviously that’s the military version of it, but there’s a nonviolent Gandhian version of it as well. So, as I said, the first question is to ask the question with other people in some form of collectivity, in an assembly, what do we want to do with our lives? What are our obligations to our parents and our children? What’s our obligation to our countries? What is it to be good? Those are the key questions. Only when you’ve spent a decent amount of time asking those questions and you’ve got a practice that reintroduces you to those questions on a regular basis, can you then go into battle?

And when you go into battle, then there’s a few basic rules, right, which is to concentrate all your resources in one time and space. In other words, you have to create a mass collectivity. You have to elect or choose who your leadership, your generals will be, who will go, “Go there. We’re going to go to Washington on the 2nd of October. We’re not going to go to Washington a little bit in September and a little bit in November and a little bit in December.”

Someone needs to make the big strategic decisions, and you need to choose wise people to do that, obviously. But you can’t avoid that. And then, once you go into battle with the powers that be, then you need to have a positive message of what you’re going to do afterwards. You can’t have all the neoliberal civil resistance movements of the last 20 years that overthrow some dictatorship in Egypt or Ukraine and then just reinstitute liberal capitalism, which morphs into monopoly capitalism. You have to have a fundamentally revolutionary demand. And that revolutionary demand is sortition, which is the original meaning of democracy, which is people selected randomly from the population in order to make the decisions of the society, which is what they did in Athens and what they did in Florence, right?

It was only the last 200 years we’ve got this perverted idea that voting in elections was democracy. It’s not. That’s aristocracy. It’s oligarchy. And you only need to look at America to see how it works out. So, we’ve just been told a big lie that we’ve got a democracy, we haven’t. But there’s no point complaining and trying to make voting better. You need a whole new system, which is you select people by sortition randomly. So, 70% of the people in the decision-making assemblies are working class people because 70% of people in the population are working class or whatever you want. And that’s a whole new other discussion, of course, Chris, right? But the point is that’s the revolution for the 21st century. And unless you make it explicit, then people obviously degenerate back into liberal logics and then you’ll have fascism because obviously there’s no point voting for the Democrats or the Labour Party. It just facilitates a bigger fascist surge next time round. And this is why you need strategic and prophetic leadership, otherwise people will go, “Yeah, let’s give the Democrats one more chance.” Like those days have gone. Haven’t they?

Chris Hedges: Yeah. Well, they went a long time ago. But the liberal class is quite good at herding people in every election cycle back into the dead embrace of the political system. I mean that’s probably why they’re there.

Roger Hallam: Yeah, which is why, if you want to talk concretely, after you’re doing your spiritual preparation, what do people do? You need to organise in your communities. Simple as that. And everyone thinks this is a hard grind. Obviously, it’s a hard grind. But also, it goes nonlinear at a certain point. Like in the community that I’ve been organising, we organised about five or six of us, three or four nights a week and then we started a community campaign, and we had twenty, thirty percent name recognition within six months. This is my day job, right? It’s not like I’m making this stuff up. My day job is how to organize mobilisations, but that’s what needs to be done. There’s no point going to conferences or sitting on social media. That’s just going to let the fascists win because the fascist strategy is to get out into communities and organise those communities. And if you don’t organise them, then the fascists will organise them, and this is one of the biggest problems with the secular left is they don’t actually like human beings, right? You know what I’m saying? I mean you need to decide whether you’re a Democrat or not. If you’re an elite anti-human leftist, then fair enough, but at least be honest about it. And if you actually genuinely love the common people, you need to go out and talk to them, for God’s sake. You see what I’m saying? You need a hundred thousand American young people to do a big freedom summer, which is spend the summer knocking on the doors of working class districts, listen to people, get them into assemblies, allow them to create their own political realities like Paulo Freire did in Brazil, and then put their candidates up, organize mutual aid projects, organise local campaigns, aggregate them, build a mass movement, and then off you go. It’s really not rocket science, right? Sitting around moaning about it is just like a suicide strategy, as we know.

Chris Hedges: Right. Thanks, Roger. And I want to thank Max, Thomas, and Nawelle, who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

Photos

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This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Forced to leave her home country due to political and economic repression under the dictatorship of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish author Ece Temelkuran sought an understanding of how a population can be led down the path to fascism. Whether it is under Narendra Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey or Donald Trump in the United States, she found that the stages are very similar and so are the mistakes people make along the way. Temelkuran strives to provide readers with an understanding of the roots of the fascist new world order and the language necessary to change direction.

In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Hedges and Temelkuran discuss her newest work, “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century,” and a previous book, “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism.” Temelkuran connects the crises of today to the neoliberalism of the late twentieth century, which made promises of prosperity but instead destroyed social infrastructure and financial security and increased state repression to subdue resultant popular struggles. Hedges calls this ‘cutthroat capitalism’, a system that divides people and pits them against each other and against their own interests. Temelkuran states, “I think people have been cheated enough with this liberal democracy promises, which were never fulfilled, so, they are perhaps taking a revenge on the entire political establishment.”

While it is tempting to believe that ousting particular political leaders, such as President Donald Trump, will solve the current crises, Temelkuran emphasizes that the crises are systemic in nature and require a long-term approach to organizing resistance.

Fundamental to that effort is breaking with a culture of fear, hatred and hostility that has been instilled by the ruling class. In this new world order, Temelkuran explains that more people are becoming ‘unhomed’ in the sense that the life they once knew no longer exists and won’t return. The antidote is a greater sense of connectedness and solidarity, of realizing that we are all vulnerable in a state that knows no boundaries in the violence, exploitation and displacement it will inflict on populations. Many people in the United States are waking up to this new phenomenon and are searching for answers. Temelkuran advises, “What neoliberalism made us believe, a dim view of humanity, we need to see that humanity and have faith in it…. Our entire economic and social system stands upon that fundamental definition of human.”

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Thomas Hedges

Transcript

Chris Hedges: Ece Temelkuran has written two books I highly recommend: “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism,” and her newest book, “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century.” We will discuss both.

She delineates seven global patterns, repeated and recognizable in several cases, from India to the United States. These patterns begin with a movement that divides society into two, the real people versus the corrupt elite, and with a leader who insists they alone embody the real people. The next step is the dissolution of truth and the prioritization of loyalty above decency. Then shame is dismantled. The leader breaks the long standing political and moral consensus with unprecedented relentlessness. The longer they remain in power, the boundaries of what is acceptable begin to stretch. What once felt unthinkable or despicable gradually becomes normal as the institutions that hold democracy together are quietly hollowed out, and the very definition of democracy is rewritten as being simply majority rule. Universal values, human dignity and the rule of law, are replaced with a fierce nationalism, a proud victimhood, and a rewriting of history. Cruelty and ruthlessness are deemed just, not only in the highest echelons of politics, but also trickling down to daily life. The circle of hook counts as “us” grows smaller, while millions of fellow citizens are recast as permanent suspects.

She notes that Americans, like those in other nations that have been down this path, soothe their fears by repeating the same illusionary line the institutions will hold. They do not yet dare to recognize their future country, and soon they will not be recognized as citizens unless they follow the new rules in Trump’s America. It does not matter, she writes, if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin, or Nigel Farage disappear, the tens of millions of people fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure. And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.

The dismantling of our democratic institutions under the six-decade onslaught of neoliberalism, perhaps better understood by its less sanitized name, “cutthroat capitalism”, is complete. The wounds are mortal. We live amid the ruins, the social inequality, and decayed institutions, including Congress, the courts, academia, and the media, ensuring the consolidation of our own fascist regime. “It is as if we are mourning not for what we have already lost,” she writes, “but for what we know we eventually will. For the first time in history, humanity is mourning in the future tense.”

Joining me to discuss “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism” and “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century” is Ece Temelkuran. Ece, let’s begin with how we got here and, of course, you experienced this in Turkey, were driven from Turkey under the Erdogan dictatorship and I want you to talk a little bit about neoliberalism because like a few writers, you saw that that was really the ideological engine that was used to disembowel democratic institutions.

Ece Temelkuran: Exactly. As you told, I left the country in 2016 due to the oppression. And people like me were not allowed to properly - live, write or think. So, I came to Europe and as soon as I came to Europe in 2016, it was so clear to me that what we had been through in Turkey was happening in Europe and in the United States. So, I sat down to write “How to Lose a Country” to find out the global patterns, the seven steps of what we are going through. I called it fascism. Many people would like to call it more benign names such as authoritarianism, right-wing populism, etc. But I called it fascism. And then with “How to Lose a Country,” I wanted to show the clear path, the clear connection between neoliberalism and fascism.

Very roughly, my main argument is that democracy had already lost its meaning, thanks to neoliberalism, thanks to incredible social injustice and lack of equality. And lack of equality, lack of social justice turned democracy into the theatrics of itself, a shallow theatrics, a show, so to speak. And that’s how people lost faith in democracy all over the world. And then, when these strong leaders started appearing in global politics such as Modi, Tayyip Erdogan, Trump, Putin, etc., they promised people that they are going to be their guy in Washington, in Ankara, in the capital. And I think people wanted to believe that for several reasons, and one of them being they were done with these false promises of change over and over again, especially after 1970s, perhaps more after 1980s. So, neoliberalism, if you ask me, has swallowed up democracy and, as a consequence, such leaders were produced as a side product by the system. And now we are watching the last act of what started happening in 1980s, I think.

Chris Hedges: I’ve written about this. There’s a cult-like following to figures like Trump. Trump has spent his entire life preying upon and fleecing all sorts of people in his casinos and his sham universities and now his cryptocurrency. But just talk about that desperate need to believe in the figure, I’m sure you see it with Erdogan and Modi and others, despite reality.

Ece Temelkuran: Well, part of that story is quite understandable, actually, because, especially since the 1980s when this cutthroat capitalism took off, all the leaders who came to power in United States, in Europe, in Middle East, in Turkey, they promised people that things will change. And things did not change. It deteriorated especially after 2008, I think, for all of us, it deteriorated. And as a revenge, perhaps, people now want to bring down democracy. They do it knowingly or unknowingly, but they sure understand that the new rules of the game will not be sugarcoated anymore. All these words such as rule of law, democracy, social rights, they were already losing their meaning thanks to the loss of democracy, thanks to loss of social justice. And these new guys, so to speak, these new leaders, these terrifying clowns, they are telling people in like a dog whistle, that we know that the rules are not like what they have been telling us. So, we’re going to play by the new rules and I’m going to play for you.

So, this is why there is this radical association with the leader. And they are not, in Trump’s case, in Erdogan’s case, in such leaders’ case, people are not supporting these leaders to have a more equal life, more just life, or etc. They know that there will be winners and losers, and they just want to be winners. And if you associate with the leader on a personal and political basis, then you are part of that winning team. And sometimes they ask me, like after 20 years, after such cruelty, after such ruthlessness, how come Erdogan is so popular? I think Americans should know by now, right now, that this will happen to them. It’s not because they all fall in love with Erdogan, it’s just that that association that begins with this political and personal psychological association becomes a financial and economic association.

So, what Erdogan did in Turkey, which is happening in the United States as well right now, Erdogan built a financial network and that financial network went to the capillary system, capillary veins of Turkey. So, he is actually very much connected to the last man living in the small village who is voting for him. This small guy’s life depends on Erdogan’s political victory. That’s why they support him as if they are fighting for their own lives, Erdogan’s supporters, because they are actually fighting for their own lives. That hasn’t happened in the United States yet, it’s happening. But when that small man’s life is connected to Trump’s political victory, then you will get really die-hard supporters, devotees. So, of course it’s political, but then most of it is about money and it is actually more terrifying than anything else I think.

Chris Hedges: You have a scene in “Nation of Strangers” or you’re writing about, I forget the term, these well-meaning Leftists who want to go out and explain why Erdogan is corrupt in villages and then as soon as they leave, Erdogan’s ruling party brings in a big food truck or something and distributes. But it was just a meditation on your part about the inability of those of us who oppose this rising fascism to understand the mechanism we’re dealing with and respond.

Ece Temelkuran: Exactly. I mean we are trying to come up with an intellectual answer to this without realizing the depth of social injustice, and I’m talking on a global level, and how that lack of social injustice makes democracy impossible actually. When people are hungry, they cannot really make a sane and proper political decision. And especially if one of the leaders, one of the candidates, is giving bread. So, we are all this time I think, especially after 2016, after Trump came to power, the issue became more global. And after that time, for the last 10 years, we’re trying to come up with an intellectualized response. And perhaps you would agree with me on this, some of the opinion makers, writers, journalists, and politicians, they are looking for a quick fix, and they are still living in the comfort of this delusion of if Trump goes, everything will be back to normal. If we can just get rid of Putin, if we can just get rid of Modi. It’s nothing like that. It is a systemic problem. And I think they find comfort in this because they think that what democracy has been before Trump, after 1980s, was enough. I think what they’re missing from that point of view is the fact that Trump is not the reason, he’s a consequence and he’s a consequence of last decades. Just like in Turkey, Erdogan is the fruit of 1980 military coup, which was you know supported by CIA and which brought the country into a conservative militarist and ultranationalist status quo. So, that status quo produced Erdogan. And what produced Trump, I think that would make break many hearts, but actually it was Reagan. What produced all these leaders all around the world was Reagan and Thatcher coming together, saying, “There’s no alternative.” And they started this ride of cutthroat neoliberalism, cutthroat capitalism. And when people thought that “There’s no alternative. We cannot change anything through voting. We cannot change anything in our lives,” it not only created this political dryness, in which we end up with these leaders, but it also created an existential problem as well. I think we lost faith in democracy. We lost faith in future in general. But most importantly, we all lost faith in democracy, which I think is a big, big, big, big problem of today. Even if we can get rid of Trump or his likes, I am not sure we will be able to come up with better leaders at the moment in the current state of democracy.

Chris Hedges: Well, you also see the bankruptcy of the opposition - Labour under Blair, the Democratic Party under Clinton - essentially transform themselves into the Republican Party light, totally embraced and propagated neoliberal policies: NAFTA, destroying institutions in the United States like the FCC, revoking Glass-Steagall that set up a firewall between investment and commercial banks, all this came under the Democrats. So, there’s a bankruptcy of alternatives.

Ece Temelkuran: I think this is why Mamdani, like Ekrem İmamoğlu, imprisoned mayor of Istanbul, these political figures are important because they are promising something truthful. When Mamdani talks about social inequality, I think the enthusiasm around the world tells us something about the current political situation and what has been lacking all this time. I think people all around the world, the citizens of the world, are done with all those false promises and then seeing, as it happened in 2008, that they are paying for the wrongdoings of the Big Capital. I think people have been cheated enough with this liberal democracy promises, which were never fulfilled. So, they are perhaps taking a revenge on the entire political establishment. Perhaps Democrats all over the world should be learning from this and then should be more courageous, more brave when they’re thinking about social equality, social justice.

Chris Hedges: Well, we know from the study of the Democratic National Committee that that’s not the case. And of course, Mamdani’s greatest enemies come from within the Democratic Party and that’s very frightening.

Ece Temelkuran: I don’t know how much people are aware, people meaning people who are doing active politics, how much of it they are aware that we are really reaching the end times for several reasons. So, this is time to be brave. There is no other option, I think. And perhaps we have to bring down certain taboos because Democrats, especially in the United States, but in Europe as well, they are still living in the cage of Cold War propaganda, I think. If we talk about social justice, they will call us communists. If we talk about social inequality, we will look like communists. And I think that propaganda has been so prominent and so influential in our politics, in global politics, that Democrats could not come out from that paralysis, I think. That’s why I’m saying it’s time to shake off the Cold War fears and then be brave and talk about the real issues. The real issue is not Trump or Erdogan. The real issue is how are we going to build a global solidarity for true democracy, for true social justice. These are the darkest times, but perhaps it’s also the time to look at something, to create this vision of the future. And we have been lacking utopias. We have been lacking this kind of talk for such a long time, I think. This is one of the reasons I wrote “How to Lose a Country,” but this is also the reason I wrote “Nation of Strangers.” We’re losing something, not only on political level, philosophical and existential level. So, it is time to liberate ourselves from the fears. I think end times, people love this word, but end times, it’s a very dark word, but it’s also a liberating thing because as you know from all the crises that you followed and I did as well. I have seen several of them. Crises have this habit of crystallizing things. They crystallize the evil, but they crystallize the good. And wars are wars, crises. They are those places where people allow themselves to be heroes. I think we just entered that time, and I am hoping that people will feel the liberation so they can act like heroes, if that makes sense.

Chris Hedges: You write, I think it’s in “Nation of Strangers,” that what we need ultimately is not a political revolution but a moral revolution. I’m paraphrasing it, those aren’t your exact words.

Ece Temelkuran: My second book, which wasn’t so spectacular, I mean it came out during pandemic, nobody knows about it, is called “Together: A Manifesto Against the Heartless World,” and I wanted to tell people that we didn’t only lose democracy, we lost many other things, especially human dignity. And this is the main problem of this century’s politics, I think. We have to put human dignity at the center again, which is the hardest thing to do.

And I counted ten more values, moral emotions that we have to come together and defend. Nation of Strangers is a little bit different because I wanted to give people the language for them to come together. Because what is lacking, I guess, in general on a global level, is that there is enough outrage, there’s enough cruelty, brutality, horrible things, there’s enough genocide, and there are enough ideas actually how to change all these things. The missing thing that would connect these two things together is the pathos, is the language. and I think people are lacking the language and I wanted to give them this language in Nation of Strangers, this language of humility, truthfulness, and if I may say that human love because in the end neoliberalism, fascism, it all comes from this fundamental emotion of fear. All these leaders are organizing and mobilizing fear. They are manufacturing hostility and hatred out of it. So, on that moral and philosophical level, we have to have an answer, the progressives, Democrats, whatever you want to call it, anti-fascists. So, on that level, we have to organize human love. How are we going to do it? That is the main problem of global politics today, I think, because in order to create that passion for people to fight for a humane life, I think we need the poetry and we need that special human language so that the global solidarity is possible against leaders like Trump, Erdogan, or many more to come, probably.

Chris Hedges: And yet the expressions of that have been ruthlessly crushed. And I’m thinking in particular about those courageous students who stood up against the genocide, the encampments were all shut down. On US universities, free speech, if you count the ability to speak out against genocide, has been banished. Faculty, not a lot of faculty, but a lot of students have been suspended, expelled. Police were brought onto campuses such as Columbia and were allowed to act quite brutally. You live in Germany. You know the draconian extent to which the Germans have gone to silence free speech. We have Trump promising to go after the radical left. He has created his own paramilitary force in the shape of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. They just shot another unarmed American citizen in Houston. So, as that consciousness has risen, and I think of course you saw this in Turkey, there has alongside it risen harsher and harsher forms of oppression.

Ece Temelkuran: You call Gaza blueprint, if I’m not wrong, and I call it experiment. And it’s an experiment to see how much the world can swallow, I think. A new world order is being established at this point, the NATO summit recently happened in Ankara was a very good example of that, a very good proof of that. And there were several others like what happened in Davos, for example. A new world order is in place. It’s being built at the moment. And Gaza, I think, was the experiment to see if this new world order can be just very freely built. And I think good part of humanity said no, but they were not listened to.

This is also why I keep saying we lost our faith in democracy, not only because of neoliberalism, but because of all the national and international institutions that were put there to defend human dignity, failed us. And that failure began when Iraq was invaded. I remember the No to War Coalition in 2003, and the entire world was on streets. We did not want war. I was one of the spokespersons in Turkey. We did not war. The world did not want war, but the war still happened. And we see this next act in Gaza. The entire world was again on streets. They wanted to stop a genocide, but no, the leaders, the institutions did not listen or could not act upon that demand. So, this is how we lose faith in democracy.

What was more disgusting than genocide, if there can be anything, was Jared Kushner’s PowerPoint presentation in Davos. He actually told us why this Gaza genocide is happening because they just want to build a resort there. And that indiscrepancy between the human demands of the global community and the psychopathic blindness of this new world order. I think the experiment was this: Can we do this? Can we just make people as psychopath as we are? So far we are not, but, it is disheartening to say the least, what’s happening. And Gaza still goes on and many people, perhaps too many people, feel relief after there was some sort of peace talk about Gaza. And I think many people took shelter there and they don’t want to talk about Gaza anymore.

But, as I told in Together, we have to have faith. It’s a human moral stance to have faith in humans. And I choose to believe in people against this system because I think this is where we are going. We will have to defend the basic human morale, not only politics, democracy, democratic institutions, but basic human morals, actually, moral value, which is more terrifying than anything.

Chris Hedges: Although, the more the more repressive a regime gets, I mean I’ve lived in several of them, that act of dignity, asserting one’s dignity, that act of compassion for the other is seen in the eyes of the state as subversion.

Ece Temelkuran: I’ve seen in Turkey, and I’m still seeing so many people, despite the fact that they are under this enormous suppression, not only politically through political violence, but also economic suppression, people are still resisting, which is incredible, which is ultimately admirable. So yeah, talking about human dignity is becoming a crime now, but this I hope will also crystallize the courage of those people who are there to defend human dignity.

Chris Hedges: Let me ask you about elections. You write about it. I think it’s maybe in your first book. We are now on the cusp of midterms. The Trump administration is energetically attempting to subvert those elections through a series of measures, including appointing election deniers over Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen when he ran against Biden. He just fired the bipartisan election commission. He’s blocking mail-in ballots. He wants voter lists. And I remember you writing about when the elections were stolen in Turkey. Talk about those parallels when you see what’s happening here and what happened in Turkey.

Ece Temelkuran: One of the things that Americans did not understand in 2016, hopefully they understand it now, this is a long game. So, being angry, being emotional, being outraged and so on, those things do not count. It’s an endurance game. So, instead of anger, a country has to organize active attention if this country wants to get rid of such a leader. And America is still in a good place because Trump still could not institutionalize his regime, unlike Erdogan. He did not have the time to raise a generation in his vision like Erdogan did. So, for America this might be the one of the last chances to change its destiny probably.

And one of the common mistakes when a country experiences such a regime, in the first years, is to be distracted by the spectacle of evil and ruthlessness. Whenever Trump does something like absurd, I mean there are so many mistakes that I cannot come up with right now. And I always think that he’s doing this absurd thing, and everybody loves to talk about it, most probably, he’s doing something else about the institutions behind the closed doors. Like he’s changing something critical about the institutions or the laws. But people, because of social media, love to talk about the other absurd thing. I mean, like he said something to somebody, that kind of reality show part of the story.

I think the most important thing that United States should be careful about is the change in judicial institutions. That is critical. And I hope Americans understand that this is not a passing by political fancy, what Trump is about. Trump is there because he is ruthless and shameless enough to bring the new world order through the power of the United States on a global scale. So unfortunately, when Americans are voting, they’re voting for all of us. I hope they are aware of their responsibility.

Chris Hedges: Right, although I think it’s pretty clear that even if the Democrats were to regain control of the Congress, the Senate and the House, in the midterms, Trump would work hard not to even validate it. I worry about the midterms. I remember from your book that seizure of the electoral process in Turkey, it in many ways just shut down certainly within the system any hope of any exit and I wonder if we are reaching that same point.

Ece Temelkuran: Hopefully not. It took Trump to do in one or two years what Erdogan could do in twenty years. And unfortunately, this wasn’t due to the extraordinary talents of Trump. This was only because Turkish society was more politically organized than Erdogan, the opposition, both in party politics and outside party politics, made it impossible for Erdogan to do the things that Trump did in only one year. But then you’re right, your political opponent, in this case Trump or Erdogan, they don’t get tired of this kind of very cheap antagonism. And they do all the cheap tricks whereas one of the most important problems of the other side, Leftists, Democrats, whatever you call it, we get emotionally tired of this, of course. Not only that, but also you lose faith in the electoral system because you know that you cannot get out of this through elections, so you start giving up. But then in Turkey, after a while, exactly the opposite happened. Elections became part of street politics, so to speak, part of militancy, political militancy, to go there and to wait at the ballot boxes so that there is no poll rigging, etc. And so many citizens, unprecedented high number, have become witnesses for ballot boxes and so on. I hope Americans can see this election like that, not only for voting, but also protecting the ballot boxes, protecting the electoral process. Also, it would invigorate them, I think. It would invigorate the party politics in a different manner, and Democrats probably would feel less comfortable when they are making false promises.

Chris Hedges: Well, in Nation of Strangers, you talk about people pouring onto the streets. I think you use the word carnival, is that right? But that’s exactly right. I mean, my energy, my therapy was going to the encampments at Columbia or Princeton. I live in Princeton. I spent a lot of time in the Occupy in Zuccotti Park, but it was completely rejuvenating, especially for those of us such as yourself who’ve been calling this out for a really long time.

I want to talk about, I thought one of the points in Nation of Strangers that particularly struck me was, and you differentiate between refugees and exiles, exiles being sort of the sanitized version, maybe even the romanticized version, of the people forced out of their country as opposed to refugees. But you’re all treated the same when you’re standing for visa lines and you’re trying to get an extension. And I found one of the poignant parts of that book was how the rest of the world may look at you, the stranger, as outside the social milieu, but your point is, no, you have to recognize that we’re you, that you’re headed for exactly the same place. You too are going to be ‘unhomed’. I think is the word you use.

Ece Temelkuran: Yeah, ‘unhomed’ is a very old English word I resurrected. It’s an 18th century word. Interestingly, ironically, after I published a book in Britain, in a few days Minneapolis started happening. and I thought, here you go, Nation of Strangers. People are made to feel homeless, unhomed, in their own country. For Americans, for white Americans at least, I think, middle class white Americans, this was the first time that they saw that a government can target you as an enemy, even though you are protecting the basic human values. But they felt unhomed, and then, of course, some of them were really strangers, like foreigners or immigrants, whatever. But Nation of Strangers was formed there on a microscale, I think. People stood up for all the others, all the immigrants, and they said that this country will home all of us. That was the utopia that I was thinking about, imagining, which happened only one week later after the book was published. That was interesting.

Yes, I do think that the central problem of our century is the word ‘home’. We are losing home on many different levels. Some of us are really immigrants, refugees, we lose our homes due to wars, fascism. But also we’re losing home because of leaders like Trump. Because you look at your country, you see all these screaming devotees, minions of Trump, let’s say, and then you feel like “Is this my country anymore? Am I at home in this country anymore?” We lose home due to climate crisis. We lose home because of this moral decay that we are going through, you know, seeing PowerPoint presentations about a country that is under occupation and is witnessing a common experience, a genocide. So, all these things make us feel homeless in this world, in these times, in this new world order. So, we are all strangers. So, can we connect through that? That is the point of the book. And I think what I wanted to do is that, “Yes, I’m in exile. Many people are. There are so many refugees. There are so many immigrants. And they are perhaps the ones who carry the very necessary wisdom for our age, because we are the people we who lost everything and we had to rebuild our homes from nothing. And this is what the world will have to do very soon, for many different reasons. So, can we build our relations from here? And also, can we produce politics out of this fact, out of this affinity, out of this shared predicament?

Chris Hedges: You have a line in there. It’s like, I’m gonna butcher it, “Home is not where you’re from, but it’s who remembers you,” is that right? Something like that?

Ece Temelkuran: No, it’s “Home is not what you remember but where you are remembered.”

Chris Hedges: Yes, where you are remembered. Explain that idea.

Ece Temelkuran: We always think that home is a memory. When we miss home, actually we don’t miss a place, we miss a time. And that is why I think going back home is impossible. And when somebody promises you, like Trump, for instance, to make your home great again or something, that is absolute absurdity. Anyways, but many people think that home is about what you remember, all these things that you remember, whereas once you leave your country and once you end up in another country where nobody knows you, where nobody remembers you, you kind of suspect your own existence. It’s that very terrifying clean slate that you embark upon. So, I think this is something I found out through experience, unfortunately, home is where you are remembered, not where you remember people.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the media. You and I both come out of the media. You write in your book about the confrontation you had, and you write about the whole notion of objectivity or which is, as you write, just neutrality. But the media’s been complicit in essentially bringing us to where we are. And I just wondered if you could comment on that.

Ece Temelkuran: Absolutely. And that’s another kind of homelessness. Right now, American journalists are experiencing it because our homes are taken away from us. All those journalists in Washington Post, for instance, they were left homeless overnight, and so many of us all, in Turkey and all over the world, actually. The thing is I’m one of the early birds. I mean like I write all these books too early. I write columns too early, that is a problem. No, it sounds like I’m bragging. On the contrary, it makes my life really difficult. I first wrote about Erdogan and that is this is going to be a big and different kind of problem, it was 2002. And everybody, not everybody, but too many people were in love with him anyways. And I remember that complicity does not only come because people are evil and they want to have perks for being close to power. There is that as well. But there is also this being mesmerized by power, being inclined to be mesmerized by power. And this, the power of wanting to believe in something, that is so dangerous and that is more nuanced, it’s more subtle. You cannot just put your finger on it and call it complicity. And that was very present in Erdogan. And I think the United States is very lucky in that sense. You have an obvious one. Erdogan was not like that. Erdogan, I mean, even Obama was in love with him until very late. It was too late when it became embarrassing to support him on the global and national level. He was already too powerful.

So yeah, complicity in journalism started before Erdogan, obviously. It started, I think, in 1980s when we were made to mistake neutrality for objectivity. We were made to forget that journalism, in its essence, by nature, in opposition to power, should be opposing power, questioning power at least. But the propaganda of neoliberal understanding of truth was so profound, was so powerful that it made us forget that we were supposed to be the voice of the voiceless, if there is such a thing, or we were supposed to be standing with the poor, with the weak, with the oppressed.

Chris Hedges: Well, it’s those people who would not have a voice without us.

Ece Temelkuran: Exactly. And I remember it very well. I’m fifty-two years old now. I started journalism when I was nineteen or even eighteen, full time. And I remember how they split up, you know, first economy and correspondence were one thing. And then they became two groups, business correspondence and economy. No, not economy, Labor correspondent. And labor correspondent was seen as this, of course you are mesmerized by the discourse of the communists. And I saw it happening, by time this business journalism became more important and they were more respected within the newspaper and so on. It was as if a small scale of change, what was happening in the outside world was happening in the newspaper.

Chris Hedges: I just want to say the exact same thing happened in American newspapers as well. With very few papers, even I think the New York Times may still have a labor correspondent, but it’s the behemoth of the business section, which missed the 2008 crash because they were all interviewing people like Jamie Diamond. But you’re right, the same thing happened within American journalism.

Ece Temelkuran: And it became a taboo to talk about these things. And it was made by an invisible hand almost. It was very visible, of course, it was politics and so on. But those were different times. And I remember how the news reporters who were writing about workers’ unions were treated as if they were communists.

Chris Hedges: I want to go back to the point you talked about being close to power because you also make the point in your book, I think it’s Nation of Strangers, that there was a naivete, we’re talking even about the intellectual class, that they couldn’t read Erdogan and they couldn’t read what was happening around them. And you actually write about conversations you had, and I think that’s also been true about what’s happening here.

Ece Temelkuran: I think I would now call it arrogance. Looking back at Turkey in hindsight, but then for today in the United States and in Europe, I can very easily call it arrogance. And it’s a very hidden, subtle arrogance. They still think that, intellectual class, cultural elite, opinion makers, party politicians and so on, they still think that they matter. We don’t matter. We have to accept this, and this fact should liberate us from all the etiquette that we feel like we are limited by. The arrogance is causing a lot of problems, and it’s more important than complicity, perhaps.

We still think that our presence matters, our word matters. We still think that people will listen to us. No, unfortunately, this is not the case. One very small example when I was launching my book, Nation of Stranger, in France, a far-right businessman bought a very important publishing house, Grasse. And then all the writers of this publishing house resigned or left the publishing house in protest. And I told my French friends and colleagues and writers, why do you think that your absence matter? Your presence even do not matter. I mean like you don’t understand this new world now. So, this is why I’m talking about, maybe it’s a strong word, but militancy. I’m talking about liberation of fears. I’m talking about humility. I’m talking about truthfulness and the courage to assess our reality, not only our own reality as people of culture and politics and letters, but also the reality of the world. We are there where we have not much to lose.

I think we have two options now. Either some of us will do that probably, we’ll take shelter in the bunkers of the rich and powerful, and others, like artists, cultural people, writers and so on and politicians, and the others will realize that they have no choice but to stand with people and realize that we are truly equals and we have nothing else but each other, which I think is more than enough.

Chris Hedges: There’s a passage in a novel by Joseph Roth, a very obscure German novel I read, and Roth is a character in the novel. Roth, like you, called out the Nazis. He knew exactly what was coming, back in the 20’s, and was a pariah, not only a great journalist but a great novelist. But he, at one point, says, “I feel like a mouse squeaking against an avalanche but squeak I must.”

Ece Temelkuran: Exactly. I’m laughing and I think Europeans and Americans should learn this kind of laughter very soon, not the laughter that comforts us against the danger, but the laughter that brings us together and makes us more powerful. This is a dark laughter, but dark laughter we must.

Chris Hedges: Well, you write about it in the book and I’ve been in war, so I totally get the black humor. However, I think you are trying to get a visa, I can’t remember the story, but you call up a friend who’s also in a precarious situation and the friend says, “So, when are you gonna commit suicide?” as a joke, if I have that story right. But that’s exactly what we need.

Ece Temelkuran: Yeah. No, it is like that, yeah. You know, many times when I talked about Turkey, especially in 2016, I remember I was in Lincoln Center talking to 3,000 women and telling them, and at the time, many Americans thought that especially in New York, he wouldn’t last a year. And I told them, “No, he will last a year and then he will come back again.” And then I laughed. And now I think, after ten years, Americans are more familiar with this kind of laughter than they were then, which is good.

One thing, Nation of Strangers has been published in I don’t know how many languages now, and I was touring Europe for the last six months. A new phenomenon, which is interesting to me, in every European city, in every audience, there was an American with a trembling voice and teary eyes. They all told me the same thing. I’m an exile in Europe. And I thought, “This is McCarthy era. This is, I don’t know, Hemingway all over again. Expatriates, American exiles. American exiles. This is a new phenomenon.” And I’m thinking, I write books early and so on, but Nation of Strangers, I think, hits the spot. Now we are all becoming homeless in one way or another. And for the first time, maybe, America is closer to the rest of the world than it has ever been.

Chris Hedges: You write, which I love, I remember Margaret Atwood once saying that she doesn’t share Western culture’s mania for hope, but you also write that you don’t like the word hope, you like the word - is it defiance?

Ece Temelkuran: Faith. Faith because I think that was the main topic of “Together: A Manifesto Against the Heartless World.” Many people think that it’s hope. We have to have hope, be hopeful and so on. By time, after especially after writing “How to Lose a Country” and going around the world for two times and talking to audiences that asks for hope. I notice that they’re not asking for hope. Actually, they’re asking for a reason to believe. They’re asking for a meaning so that they can work for it and with it. What neoliberalism did is not only creating incredible social injustice and ugly clownish leaders, but also I think it stole our faith in humanity, in our own agency as humans, political agency and otherwise. Because neoliberalism tells us, just like fascism, by the way, that humans are selfish, self-centered, horrible beings. And this is how our faith in our humanness, in the human future has been, I think, stolen from us because we fell for that definition for some reason. Our entire economic and social system stands upon that fundamental definition of human. Selfish, self-centered bastard. So, in order to change that, we don’t need hope. We need faith. Faith in humans. And like any faith, it is not for the object of the faith, but for yourself, because once you start believing in humans, in humanity, in the future of humans, then you start believing in yourself. And this is the starting point of our political struggle, I think. How do we refresh our faith in humanity?

You see, when you go to the encampments, you feel a certain joy. That is the joy of dignity. It’s a very, very specific joy. And why do you go there? It’s like, okay, you go there once, you feel the joy, it’s lovely. Why do you go there more? It’s like a pilgrimage. You want to refresh your faith in humans because you want to see the humans like you, and you don’t want to forget that we are here and we are many, and so on.

These acts, all those people who spoke up for Gaza, all those people who still speak up for many injustices and so on, these people are refreshing our faith in humans, in humanity, in ourselves. And if we can have faith in ourselves, then it’s not only voting for the right leader, but it can truly change the very fabric, very essence of politics all around the world. And I think this is why Mamdani, Ekrem İmamoğlu in Istanbul and several other local leaders, they are becoming the carriers of this faith so that we think, okay, we are beautiful, we are good, we’re not evil, and we are selfless, beautiful creatures. I think we need to see that more and believe in that more.

Chris Hedges: Great. Thank you, Ece. and I want to thank Thomas and Max, who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

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Poison Pen - by Mr. Fish

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PEN America, an organization founded to defend persecuted and censored writers, has once again made a mockery of itself with its call to protect Israeli writers from discrimination.

Yes. Israeli writers.

Its most recent screed, “A Silent Moratorium,” is so tone deaf and embarrassing that it triggered a widespread backlash. PEN America’s president, Dinaw Mengestu, resigned in protest.

Mengestu told The New York Times the post is the most recent in a series of moves he felt are counter to the organization’s values and could harm efforts to preserve freedom of expression.

“This report is not an isolated incident,” Mengestu said. He added, it “continues this approach toward defending some rights while not defending others.”

I doubt Mengestu’s resignation will change much. At best, it will make PEN America more circumspect about exposing its moral bankruptcy.

“A Silent Moratorium,” is authored by Editorial Director Lisa Tolin, Chief Communications Officer Geraldine Baum and consultant Malka Margolies. It criticizes what it calls “a widening cultural isolation” of Israel. It decries “the blatant hostility, discrimination, and hate that some Jewish and Israeli authors” face. It calls the loss of opportunities for Jewish writers “devastating” and complains that Israelis who write for U.S. magazines “are put through a series of ideological checks, such as whether they use the word genocide.” It condemns the call by more than 7,000 writers and literary professionals, who in the fall of 2024 signed a pledge not to work with Israeli publishers, festivals, literary agencies, and publications which “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.” And it defends Zionists, stating:

In interviews with PEN America, Israeli and Jewish writers described a climate where Zionism is treated as a slur. While there remains no popular agreement on what it means to be a Zionist, recent survey data suggests that one-third of American Jews self-identify as Zionist and nearly nine in 10 say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Calls to exclude Zionists from publishing could therefore mean excluding people with a wide range of voices and views.

For the record, Zionism is explicitly racist. It is an ideology used to justify the occupation and colonization of historic Palestine and the ethnic cleansing and annihilation of its native inhabitants. Hateful ideologies cannot be normalized because a third of American Jews identify as Zionists. The Nazis, after all, had about the same level of support among German voters — 37.3 percent — in the 1932 election.

This latest defense of Israel comes from an organization that has spent the last decade shredding its credibility. It studiously ignored the genocide in Gaza and the murder and maiming of Palestinian journalists, academics, writers, poets and their family members.

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PEN America accepted money from the Israeli government to fund its literary festival for five years and only stopped in 2017, following heavy criticism. It failed to defend the few courageous voices inside Israel who denounce Israeli apartheid and genocide, or did so only belatedly. It remained silent as Palestinian writers were deplatformed or blocked from publishing. It regularly promoted Zionist authors such as A. B. Yehoshua, who has long dismissed the reality of settler-colonialism in Palestine. It co-sponsored a book event with Zionist actor Mayim Bialik, who has donated to the Israel Defense Forces, is an outspoken ceasefire opponent, regularly circulates anti-Palestinian and Israeli military propaganda and frames pro-Palestinian activism as “antisemitic.”

PEN America placed an employee under investigation for sharing an article critical of Zionism and later fired him after he wrote an article explaining why he was placed under investigation. It functioned as a propaganda arm for the Biden administration and Ukrainian government, including cancelling a panel that included Russian writers — under pressure from PEN Ukraine — despite the fact that they were critics of the Russian government. It amplified lies about Julian Assange and refused to classify him as a journalist.

PEN America’s board includes writers such as George Packer, labeled one of “Bush’s useful idiots” by Tony Judt for cheerleading the invasion and occupation of Iraq, along with real estate and investment firm CEOs. It has been hijacked by wealthy backers, corporate donors and apologists for imperialism and genocide.

“PEN America peddles agitprop,” I wrote in 2024. “Writers and editors, such as Assange, who expose the lies and crimes of the state, are discredited, while propagandists for U.S. imperialism and the apartheid state Israel — even as it carries out genocide — are fêted.”

PEN America lost its way over a decade ago, when in 2013 it appointed a former Clinton State Department official, Suzanne Nossel, as its Executive Director. That year, I won the PEN Center USA First Amendment Award. I was scheduled to participate as a speaker at the PEN World Voices Festival when Nossel’s appointment was announced. I refused to take part in the festival and resigned from PEN America in protest.

“This appointment makes a mockery of PEN as a human rights organization and belittles the values PEN purports to defend,” I wrote in my resignation letter:

I spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. The suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation and the plight of those caught up in our imperial wars in countries such as Iraq are not abstractions to me. Nossel’s relentless championing of preemptive war — which under international law is illegal — as a State Department official along with her callous disregard for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians and her refusal as a government official to denounce the use of torture and use of extra-judicial killings, makes her utterly unfit to lead any human rights organization, especially one that has global concerns. PEN American Center, by appointing Nossel, has unwittingly highlighted its own failure to defend and speak out for our dissidents, especially Bradley Manning. I hereby resign from PEN. I will wait until the organization returns to its original mandate to defend those who are persecuted, including those within the United States, before returning to the organization.

PEN Canada responded to my resignation by offering me membership, which I accepted.

PEN America’s latest post, which refers to the genocide in Gaza as a “war,” is in the spirit of Nossel. Nossel participated in the State Department’s efforts to discredit Assange and the WikiLeaks disclosures. In May 2012, when NATO held a “Summit Meeting” in Chicago, Amnesty International USA — with Nossel as the executive director — sponsored a “Shadow Summit.” She dotted the city with billboards reading: “NATO, Keep the Progress Going. Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan.” Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once said 500,000 dead Iraqi children killed by U.S. sanctions was “worth it,” was invited to speak at Nossel’s event. Nossel left Amnesty International USA within a year, before ending up at PEN America. She resigned in 2024 after numerous writers — angered at the organization’s failure to defend Palestinian writers — withdrew from the annual PEN World Voices Festival in New York and Los Angeles, resulting in the cancellation of the event and its annual Literary Awards.

PEN America was once run by writers who fought on behalf of writers persecuted across the globe. I knew some of them, including Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Robert Jay Lifton, Joan Didion and Russell Banks. They were fierce critics of U.S. militarism, capitalism and imperialism. They were steadfast champions of freedom of expression. They would be sickened by what PEN America has become.

“This failure is particularly striking in light of the extraordinary toll this catastrophe has taken in the cultural sphere,” the letter sent to PEN America in March 2024 — signed by writers including Naomi Klein, Ruha Benjamin, Michelle Alexander and Hisham Matar — reads. It goes on:

Israel has killed, and at times deliberately targeted and assassinated journalists, poets, novelists, and writers of all kinds. It has destroyed almost all forms of cultural infrastructure that support the practice of literature, art, intellectual exchange, and free speech through the bombing and demolition of universities, cultural centers, museums, libraries, and printing presses. By disrupting access to digital communication, Israel has also been blocking Palestinians from sharing what they have witnessed and experienced and telling the truth of what is happening to them. Everyone who uses the power of the pen and free speech to appeal to the conscience of the world is at risk.

A scathing open letter sent to PEN America one month earlier, criticising its double standards when dealing with Palestinians and Israel’s genocide, garnared over 1,300 signatories.

Fascism looms. Those who write and speak in opposition to the genocide are silenced and criminalized. Our universities have banned free speech and purged students and faculty who dare to denounce the crime of all crimes. Corporate media, including CBS and CNN — bought by the arch-Zionist Larry Ellison — have been cowed into silence. The Democratic Party, captured by the Israel lobby, ignores the call by 75 percent of registered Democrats to end arms shipments to Israel.

Free expression is withering away. Liberties are being abolished. Those who resist are branded enemies of the state.

It will only get worse.

PEN America has been hollowed out. Its moral core is gone. It abandoned its mission to “defend writers, artists, and journalists and protect free expression.” It transformed itself into a propaganda machine for the oppressors, not the oppressed. It should be purged and returned to its former self or shut down.

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Since October 2023, people around the world have watched as the Zionist State flouts international laws and norms – the genocide of Palestinians, murdering medical workers and journalists, detaining and torturing civilians, including children, and blockading efforts to bring aid into Gaza, to name a few. International bodies, such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, have demonstrated that they are completely incapable of enforcing laws or even following through on court mandates. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are suffering immensely as they are terrorized daily and forced to flee into shrinking spaces without the means to survive.

In this lawless and topsy-turvy world order, those who investigate and report on Israel’s crimes or who provide aid to Palestinians are viciously targeted, assassinated outright or tortured to death in prison, or, if that is not possible, placed on a list of sanctioned persons, cut off from their own bank accounts and unable to earn income. In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Hedges speaks with UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) Francesca Albanese, who has been speaking out about the Palestinian genocide and has paid a price for it, but has not given in.

In her new book, “When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine,” Albanese shares the experiences of Palestinians she met during her time conducting investigations in the OPT. Albanese refers to Palestine as the ‘red pill in the matrix’ that exposed the failures of the system and the media complicity in hiding them. She refers to politicians as “dead men walking,” saying, “they seem empty of life, empty of humanity” and asking, “what else does Israel need to do and say for you to take measures… to take international law seriously?”

Hedges and Albanese speak about Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza who was abducted by Zionist forces 18 months ago without charges and is dying in prison from torture and starvation although the Geneva Convention protects healthcare workers. They discuss the failure of the United Nations to intervene on behalf of its own representative, Albanese, when she was sanctioned, leaving it to her husband and 13-year-old daughter to sue the US government for relief. And they analyze President Trump, whom she calls a “Caligula of the twenty first century” for his excesses and for his “unlawful, immoral, and irresponsible” plans for Gaza.

Albanese hopes that her book will provide a greater understanding of “the human cost of Israel’s occupation” and will spur them to take action to end it. She laments that “even those who see, seem to be paralyzed and they seem not to understand that this moment of awakening requires action…. We cannot be the same in the time of genocide.”

Pre-order my new book "Requiem for Gaza"

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Thomas Hedges

Transcript

Chris Hedges: Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories comprising the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, is one of the singular most courageous voices against the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the savage repression meted out to Palestinians in the West Bank. Her detailed UN reports have been fearless examinations of the machinery of apartheid and genocide and Israel’s disregard for international humanitarian law. She has been viciously attacked. The Trump administration ordered the U.S. Department of Treasury to classify her as a “specially designated national”, cutting her off from the global financial system and blocking any U.S. citizen and corporation from engaging with her. All of her U.S. assets have been frozen. She is unable to carry out routine financial transactions. She has paid for her courage and her honesty.

Her book, “When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine” lifts up the voices of Palestinians, many of whom she knows, and others in ten short chapters to expose the human cost of Israel’s occupation and mass slaughter. She draws from her own experience living in Palestine, weaving her chapters around individuals who give a human face to the suffering. These include Malak Mattar, an artist who fled Gaza to Egypt, and who suffers tremendous guilt for those she left behind, as well as Eyal Weizman, who opened her eyes to Israel’s vertical politics, the three dimensional use of physical space employed by Israel to control airspace and subsoil, as well as horizontal borders. She excoriates the Western press, the world’s diplomats, for creating a false sense of equivalency in the conflict as if Palestinians stand on equal footing with their occupiers. Palestinians do not have an Air Force, heavy weapons, mechanized units and navy, or billions in military aid from the United States and Israel’s European allies. It cannot structurally subordinate Israelis’ control, their movement and access to land, air and water, or the flow of goods essential to maintain a minimum quality of life.

“To use words like war and conflict masks the truth. It presents a false version of reality. Israel’s apartheid system and genocide cannot be stopped until it is acknowledged and understood,” she writes. This requires not only knowledge but empathy. She fortunately is endowed with both. Joining me to discuss her new book, “While the World Sleeps,” is Francesca Albanese.

Francesca, I want to begin with the case of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. He has been jailed by the Israelis for eighteen months since the 27th of December 2024. He was the head of the hospital in Gaza. And there’s very disturbing news from his attorney, Nasser Odeh. He’s been moved to this underground prison, Rakefet, that used to be closed and Ben Gvir has reopened. Has no light. It’s a severe detention facility. and when Dr. Abu Safiya arrived for the attorney’s visit, he was handcuffed, shackled, in leg irons, accompanied by masked prison guards, and his attorney saw fresh and severe bruises on his body, especially on his head, around his eyes, ears and neck. And the lawyers said it was hard to recognize him.

He struggled to breathe. He struggled to speak. He appeared extremely weak. He was terrified. He was in severe distress. He couldn’t express himself for fear, he said, of retaliation. And he told his lawyer that after his hearing took place on June 10th, 2026, regarding the appeal to the Supreme Court against the extension of his incarceration order, four or five prison guards entered his cell, beat him on all parts of his body with a hammer and batons. And he’s basically suffered daily violence, lost consciousness several times and, as you write in the book, this isn’t the first time that doctors have died within Israeli prisons. You had Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, a surgeon and head of orthopedics at Al Shifa. This was after severe torture, perhaps sexual torture. You had Dr. Iyad Rantisi, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital’s maternity unit.

I just want to speak to this kind of very urgent case. His lawyer, Physicians for Human Rights, Amnesty International and others are at this point saying his life is in danger. And I think he actually told his lawyer in court that this would be the last time, that he was finished, I think, or something like this.

Francesca Albanese: Thank you very much, Chris, for having me. The situation of Dr. Abu Safiyah is extremely, extremely serious, extremely painful. He told his lawyer that he doesn’t think he will survive. Imagine how painful it is for a man who’s been unlawfully detained, he’s held without charges, without trial, severely beaten with signs of torture, as you said. I don’t need to repeat. But I got this message from his family yesterday. They were imploring me to do something for their beloved one. And the sense of powerlessness is incredible.

So, there are three dimensions here. One is the fact that he’s a very well-respected doctor who’s been injured himself, who has survived the loss of one of his children. His child was killed during this genocide. And this, notwithstanding, he went back to work and he stayed there. He stayed in a hospital under siege. He said, “I cannot leave my patients behind.” He had to surrender to the Israeli army as a way not to have the hospital raided. In any case, the patients were displaced anyway. And so, what is done to the man is incredible.

Again, he’s been held for 18 months now and there is no charge, just proof, visible evidence of severe abuses. He’s lost half of his weight. He’s emaciated. He has visible signs of bruises. He looks terrified and he’s a doctor. This is part and parcel of a continuous relentless attack that Israel has conducted against medical personnel, medical facilities that have been reduced to nothing, which is also the way to ensure that whatever wound, whatever disease, whatever illness that the Palestinians trapped in the Gaza nightmare have, they won’t be able to be cured.

The second aspect, it’s torture, heavily documented. I’ve reported with another special rapporteur who received a notice already in January 2024, the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Reem Alsalem, severe violence, abuse and rape against female inmates. So, we reported it and after there have been denunciations from Piccati, Physician for Human Rights, B’Tselem, multiple reports denouncing torture and the network of torture centers that Israeli prisons had turned into. Then the Committee Against Torture has documented the recourse to torture as a state policy later in 2025. I have documented torture after the commission on Israel and Palestine also report their torture as an act of genocide.

There is no doubt whatsoever that torture exists and in the face of this, and this is the third element, what is shocking is the sense of impunity that Israel continues to enjoy. Because, you know, it’s absolutely normal that there was a huge campaign to bring the Israeli hostages home. I just wonder why there is a selective empathy and there is no campaign to bring the Palestinian hostages, as Dr. Abu Safiya home. And there are 10,000 people detained by Israel, who maintains an unlawful occupation. So, this speaks to the moral decay of global leadership, and also many of us enjoying the summer indifferently.

Chris Hedges: So, this is from your book: “The torture and killing of nearly a thousand health workers is a key component of the destruction of the healthcare system.” You’re quoting one of the people you write about, Hassan, in the book. The Al Shifa hospital can rebuild in a couple of years. It took twelve years to train a doctor. He’s talking about Dr. Adnan Albursh, who was probably tortured to death. Considering the main medical specialists that Gaza urgently needs, it can be said that of the five pathologists present before October seventh, only two are still alive. In Gaza, there are no qualified doctors to perform emergency surgery. And then you talk about how a healthcare worker in Gaza is two and a half times more likely than any other individual to be killed. I just want to stay on that. Doesn’t Israel hold eighteen Palestinian surgeons? That number may fluctuate or change, but I think it’s about that. I just want to talk about the savagery directed at medical workers who don’t carry weapons, who, under international law, under the Geneva Convention, are completely exempt from being treated as combatants.

Francesca Albanese: Look, Israel has blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants, times and times again, during its occupation. It’s nearly 60 years long occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. What it has done though, in the last 1,005, 1,007 days, is humanitarian camouflage. Israel has used the categories of international humanitarian law and capsized them. So, in order to have a more convincing narrative at the international level and reduce criticism, it has accused everyone, everyone in Gaza to be Hamas, a terrorist, a terrorist accomplice. And two doctors were ‘protecting Hamas’. Hospitals were allegedly Hamas headquarters. I mean you might remember and the audience might remember the video that was shared simulating the presence of a Hamas headquarters built underground under the Al-Shifa hospital was a lie. You might remember the Israeli generals pointing to the Hamas schedule of attacks, which was a medical shift in fact, just because it was written in Arabic, so it was easy to convince the audience that this was a Hamas planning found in a hospital. So, this is how Israel has convinced ignorant people or naturally predisposed to bias people that every doctor could be a potential terrorist, henceforth deserving to be punished, arrested, detained or killed, tortured, whatever. But so, there is no innocent civilian as many Israeli leaders have said.

And therefore, everyone was to be considered guilty until proven innocent. This has always been the norm. But they’ve endured a treatment which includes extrajudicial killing, torture and again, this is the blowing of the international humanitarian legal system, which is premised upon distinguishing between civilians and combatants, civilian objects and military personnel. So yes, you’re right when you say, but aren’t medical personnel, medical workers and hospitals protected under international humanitarian law? Surely so and for two reasons, both as civilians and second, because they serve an incredibly important and a vital function in a situation of hostilities, helping continue to provide medical care. But this is exactly why Israel has targeted the medical system. This is why Israel has killed and tortured, I mean, over a thousand medical personnel in order to make sure that the people in Gaza have no redress, no medical support.

This is part and parcel of the genocide. What I find, however, incredibly disturbing is the fact that how, and again, now I’m investigating as I speak, the role of the media. There was a video that I shared from BBC speaking of Dr. Abu Safiya yesterday. It was a two minute, three minute video. And most of it, instead of talking about the torture, how visibly abused the doctor appears, the fact that he has been detained without charge for 18 months and the fact that he reports his fear of being killed, of having been taken in these dark places, in this dungeon in order to be killed, the BBC journalist goes on and on and on saying, “I’ve been casting doubt about him as an Hamas acolyte.” This is the point. Western audiences do not even have the opportunity to understand what’s happening because legacy media, instead of scrutinizing, has amplified the Israeli narrative. This is not journalism. This is complicity, complicity with genocidal propaganda.

Chris Hedges: Which has been true from the beginning. Israel started attacking hospitals and at once denying that they were responsible, although we now know from the genocide that this was Israeli policy from the beginning to eradicate the health care system, and the press dutifully reported these lies. We should also be clear that the only journalists on the ground in Gaza were Palestinian, over two hundred and fifty of whom have been killed, large numbers, perhaps most, in targeted assassinations. So, I mean you call your book, “While the World Sleeps.” Unfortunately much of the world, certainly the Western world, and including the media, they didn’t sleep at all. They were completely complicit.

Francesca Albanese: Yeah, absolutely. I think that like in any genocide, and I truly encourage people who feel so compassionate with Israel because of the Holocaust, I really encourage people to go and read for real what the Holocaust was and how Jewish people were treated before the Holocaust and even after the Holocaust because there was, I mean, since the 60s, there has been such a manipulation of the memory of the Holocaust to serve the Zionist agenda. But the Jewish people have suffered transnational denigration from the media of the time as well. And this is so similar in a way to what’s happening to the Palestinians with the added element that in 2026, we have a legal framework which should have prevented certain phenomena of decay and moral collapse in light of what has happened in the past. So, we like to claim - we, I say we in the so-called West. But definitely, the media has amplified the Israeli narrative and contributed to portray the Palestinians as part of the problem to be eradicated.

The word sleep is part of indifference, part of lack of knowledge, but even those who know, even those who see, seem to be paralyzed and they seem not to understand that this moment of awakening requires action, requires change, change in every sphere of life. We cannot be the same in the time of genocide. This is the only thing that I keep on repeating over and over, that there is hope for a change. And we will stop this genocide the moment even that those who are awakened will be able to connect that awakening to a sense of action and responsibility.

Chris Hedges: Well, you write in the book, I think correctly, that the genocide in Gaza has kind of exposed a new and very frightening world order, one that has utter disregard for the rule of law. You write, “The crisis in Gaza is symptom of a global crisis. I think more and more often that all of this, while it is bound to instill fear, must give us courage. The system that represses the Palestinians, a well-established alliance between Israel and in all the other states whose elites guarantee it the impunity it has always enjoyed, is the same one to which we belong. It is the system that decides for us on issues that are crucial to our lives without listening to us and representing us. It is the system that transforms secure jobs into part-time and temporary work, rights into privileges that alienates us from each other.

making us all more fragile and insecure, that considers solidarity a subversive act and empathy a form of mental and social dysfunction.” You actually talk about for you, Palestine was the red pill in the matrix. Talk about that or place Palestine and the genocide in that global context.

Francesca Albanese: Yeah, I think those who have read the book, and then I’d like also to say a few words about how difficult it’s been to have this book made available to the US readership, because there has been such pressure from pro-Israel support groups against it. You guess why. Yeah, for me, Palestine has been a revealer. It’s not that all of a sudden, we woke up in a world that is dominated by the US, especially the world we are part of politically, militarily, strategically, the US is the dominant character here. And Israel is a sort of extension of it in the Middle East. It’s an extension of Western power and Western supremacy. I know that the Israelis do not like it, but I do also believe that they do not realize how instrumentalized they are because of interests that are above all of us. We tend to think in terms of states as the ultimate decision makers. We think of it in democracies. We think of it in dictatorships. But, in fact, I don’t think that states are the decision makers. States today, more than before, more than a few decades ago, respond to certain interests, economic, military and financial interests that are connected to the main power holders in this world. I mean, and there are numbers. What I’m saying may sound like conspiracy theories to people who might not know enough about the inequality of the world. The Thomas Piketty Institute in its most recent inequality report mentions this data, which I found shocking, staggering, the fact that half of the world population retains altogether one third of the wealth which is retained by 50,000 people in the world. I repeat, 50,000 people in the world retain three times the wealth retained by half of the world population. How is it possible? Who are these? Clearly, they are not just individuals like you and I. They retain pockets of power. And it’s those connected to the extractive industry for the control of natural resources, those connected to securing the use of force, military power and surveillance, and those connected to financial transactions, corporations and banks and pension funds. So, these are the main powers with certain corporations like pharmaceuticals more influential than others, or those related to tourism for example. However, this is the brain power of those 50,000 people.

And today there is also Big Tech. They are above the law. I mean, when you try to sue corporations, you are inundated with problems, with issues, with more legal issues, with more litigation. And so, it’s impossible to face this. Palestine has revealed this world order. Palestine has been the epicenter of it because - this is the reason why I was sanctioned for that report, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide” that we discussed earlier last year, Chris. But again, explaining to the world that while the economy of many Israeli families and individuals was collapsing, the stock exchange of Tel Aviv was rising, skyrocketing, doubling, tripling its value, has been a revealer. So, there was someone profiting from the genocide and these are Palantir and the likes, these are Lockheed Martin and the likes, the military industry, not just Israeli and US, but all connected. And because we are all connected, this is the second and last part of the story, we are part of it. We are part of it as consumers. We are part of it as producers, because you know how many trade unionists or workers I’ve been speaking with over the past two years. You know how many consumers I’ve been speaking to and they say the same, “You know how difficult it is to get out of this market. You know that we would like not to work for this company, which is for example connected in Italy to the military industry like Leonardo,” but they’re scared of losing their job. They realize that their fragility is part of the system because they have to choose between producing weapons that are used to kill children and not working at all. But this means that we are part of or we are seeing pockets of populations who are just sacrificial. They are sacrificial entities, sacrificial beings and probably we can change this order. This is the other thing that Palestine is telling us. Through boycotting, divesting, we can break the ties of the system and through sanctions we can curtail the complicity with Israel. But this requires individual commitment.

Chris Hedges: And I should say I was in Italy with you last November joining the dock workers, who have refused to load weapons onto Israeli ships. I think both you and I feel that is where all of our energy should go, that kind of blockage of the system. People can watch an hour documentary on it called “Resistance 101”.

You write in the book that when you were at the School of Oriental and African Studies you discovered two fundamental things. The first was that Palestine could and should be discussed as a legal issue of protracted institutional and systematic illegality, not simply as a political issue with opposing claims.” The second thing you said you discovered was “the encounter with law firms influenced by critical race theory, a way of understanding law in a critical and decolonial key, framing it in the historical evolution not necessarily written by the victors, but observed from the perspective of the people who, until recent times, have been subjected to international law as it has been formulated above all by Western countries.” I do want to talk about the sanctions against your book, but just address those two points if you could first.

Francesca Albanese: Absolutely. And even here I think that Palestine epitomizes what happens, let’s say, to the most disadvantaged part of the world, the former colonies, people whose indigeneity has been experienced as a toll, almost as a crime in the eyes of the colonizer. Palestine are among them. And Palestine have always been projected as potential savages in the Western media, for example. When I think of western media, they’re always the ones deemed barbaric or according to violence. I mean, the discourse concerning Arab people, Muslim people, is so vicious, violent, that I say, “How do we not connect the dots and understand that this is the way we were talking about the Jewish people 100 years ago?” And probably less, because there is still antisemitism and we should talk of the real antisemitism instead of apartheid Israel’s paranoia and manipulation of what antisemitism means. But however, I think that for a long time, Palestinians have been, even by those well-intended, proposed, presented as a humanitarian issue to be managed instead of a critical political issue, to be resolved in line with international law. For example, now the International Court of Justice, so there is an international tribunal, which has pronounced itself on the fact that the occupation is unlawful. Henceforth, it is to be dismantled totally and unconditionally. The deadline was September 2025. No one is talking about that, but this is why I say that international law already offers a roadmap, a way out of this quagmire. And instead, the situation continues to be treated as if it was a humanitarian emergency after an earthquake or after a flood.

I think that this is part of the problem, which is also intimate to what has gone wrong within the United Nations. However, international law has been used often as part of the problem because I remember 15 years ago, it was unthinkable to look at the occupation as a whole illegal endeavor. Even those who were progressive back then used to refer to the legality of the occupation because of Israel’s occupation violating such and such provision of international humanitarian law, for example, abusing the detainees or translating into abusive practice leading to home demolitions, punitive home demolitions. So, it was criticized because of its excesses, but not ontologically, not in its entirety, which today is normal. And I think it’s because there has been finally a shift, I hope as a special rapporteur to have helped that effort, but there has been a shift from addressing the symptom type of approach to looking at the overall phenomenon of the legality of the occupation. Critical studies have played an enormous role and critical studies are primarily animated by scholars from the global majority, from South Africa, from Kenya, from Nigeria, from Palestine, from indigenous scholars themselves, from Australia or Canada and the United States or Asia. And this is beautiful. I think that this has helped us progress as lawyers. But of course, of course, there is still a lot of patronizing attitude and chauvinism in legal studies as in many other disciplines.

Chris Hedges: So, let’s talk about what’s happened to the book. But let’s begin with the broader sanctions. You were sanctioned, as I mentioned in the introduction. You won a court case that lifted those sanctions, and then the Trump administration turned around and reimposed them. And, of course, that has - I mean you can talk about that process - that has affected your ability to even publish and disseminate this book.

Francesca Albanese: In a way, yes, absolutely because the sanctions… I mean, I would like people to spend a moment to reflect upon what freedom of expression means. Because here we are outside the physiology of a democratic debate. The moment you prevent someone you do not agree with to speak, this is no longer a liberal space. You and I do not have to agree. People can disagree with me, but I will always protect the right of those who think differently from me to speak because this is the essence of a democratic space. This is the essence of protection of freedom of expression. All the more, I am protected as a UN person who’s voluntarily, I serve on a pro bono basis just for those who are wondering, the United Nations and the protected person under the Convention on Privileges and Immunities. So, I shouldn’t face consequences for words spoken, actions taken in the execution of my mandate. Instead, I’ve been sanctioned at very severe instruments taken normally against drug dealers or dictators in the US, and this time to sanction me, the judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Court who have investigated Israel’s crimes and Palestinian human rights organizations who have provided evidence for those trials. So, you see, there is also such an attempt to tamper with evidence and strangle the international justice system that the US helped to create with the Nuremberg trial and after the Nuremberg trial. So, it’s vicious. And because of it, people in the US cannot entertain financial interactions with me of any nature, including a glass of wate is the commission of a felony, which means up to 20 years in jail and up to $1,000 in fines for those who are caught providing an economic advantage to me.

So, even my publisher, Other Press, has faced huge pressure. They had to hire a lawyer in order to find a way to publish the book because Judith Gurewich, who really liked the book, and she was the first one. Other Press has been the first one to offer to translate the book, which is now available in 60 countries and in 20 languages. But the English one should have been the first to come out, in the US, in Australia and in the UK. But apart from the longer process of publishing in the US, there has been a huge opposition in order not to have my book published and distributed. So, I said, “Look, I don’t care. I don’t need to claim the copyright of this as I’m sanctioned. I don’t want the publisher to go in trouble. I want people to read this book.” So, we found a way for me to keep on sort of working pro bono even as a writer and I said, “It doesn’t matter. I still want the book to be to be read.” And this was the only agreement we could find to have “When the World Sleeps” available on US bookstores.

One thing is that because the United Nations and no other states, certainly not Italy, found the courage to stand before the International Court of Justice bringing a case against the US for violation of privileges and immunities of a UN person. My 13-year-old daughter and my husband who works for a US-based organization, who are clearly directly impacted by the fact that my assets in the US. We own a small apartment in the US where my daughter was born. It’s been taken. My bank account was shut down and I’ve not been able to open a bank account anywhere else. So, I cannot be paid. I cannot be reimbursed even for medical expenses. And even my private insurance doesn’t reimburse me anymore. You know, it’s a very heavy situation and because it affects my entire family, they recur to justice. So, because the United Nations didn’t even give me the possibility to defend myself in court, my 13 year old daughter brought to court, President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio and others involved in the sanction. The first instance, a federal judge in the First District Court in Washington DC recognized the fact that the proceeding appeared not to be right, to have persecuted me just for exercising freedom of expression and so proposed to suspend the sanctions. And then because of the system and because of the fact that there are judges appointed by the executive, there was an appeal against the suspension of the order of the sanctions. And now, I need to wait until the judge pronounces itself on the merit. So, I’m still sanctioned by the US.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk a little bit about Gaza. In the book you write about, “President Trump has repeatedly intimidated anyone who dares to touch Israel, saying that they will have to, ‘deal with us,’ a threatening language unbefitting of politics, as we have known it until now, but which is entirely consistent with the substance of what Trump himself said when he declared, ‘Everyone I’ve spoken to likes the idea that the United States owns that piece of land, referring to the Gaza Strip.’” In this sentence you write, “There is all the violence of an unbridled power that can achieve everything through force, because like Caligula of the twenty first century, he considers himself above the law. In fact, he doesn’t even know the law.” I want to talk about his proposal for Gaza and, of course, Hamas has said that they would step aside for a technocratic government. I don’t think that any appeasement that Hamas makes is going to placate Netanyahu, but let’s address that.

Francesca Albanese: Yeah, first of all, I think that you are the first interviewer who picks up on the fact that I define Trump as the Caligula of our time, but it’s real. I mean, you don’t need to be an expert on Roman history to understand what Caligula’s features were and the absolute arbitrary power unconstrained by the law, the extreme narcissism and self-aggrandizement, the corrupt preciousness and erratic nature of power, the humiliation of opponents, the cult of personality, all of this, all of this makes me think of Caligula, the Roman emperor.

So, when President Trump came out with this Gaza Riviera thing in February 2025, I said three things. It’s unlawful because the United States has no right whatsoever to speak decisively of the future of Gaza or the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory or Palestine or frankly any part of the world, full stop. Because there is something called the right of self-determination of people and the Palestinians have the right of self-determination vis-à-vis Israel, vis-à-vis the United States and anyone else. It’s unlawful and this would embroil the United States in a different set of crimes, like the crimes of forced displacement, because this would entail the forced displacement of Palestinians as Israel is doing. I said it’s unlawful and it’s immoral because what on earth would push the president of the United States to say something so disrespectful toward a population at the time of greatest suffering that the latter is enduring? And then I said it’s irresponsible because it will prompt more sense of impunity and license to kill, torture and displace among the Israeli leaders, which is in fact what has happened. So, it’s unlawful immoral, irresponsible. This is what I said, and this is what I think still.

However, I also think that the Gaza Riviera is a distraction. I don’t think that anyone is really planning to have a Riviera in Gaza. Gaza has been ungrounded. Gaza has been made unlivable. I already started researching for a next report I want to write about ecocide. But what this current US administration is surely champion of among many, is psychological, overwhelming of its audiences, including us in Europe. Every day in this part of the world, in Europe, we wake up with a new shocking thing said by President Trump. It might be the Gaza Riviera or it might be that he is intervening in the World Cup in a way that only Caligula would do if he was with us today in 2026 because the level of self-restraint, the inexistent self-restraint of this man is incomparable, immeasurable. So, I do think that this is a way to distract us from the real plans of, again, displacing the Palestinians and using Gaza as an extension of Israel, probably for economic purposes. I keep on thinking of why Netanyahu has brandished over and over the plan to have a gas duct that goes from the Arab countries, Gulf countries, into the Mediterranean through southern Israel and probably Gaza because this is something that is going to be convenient for Israel. But in any case, whatever the plan they might have, it remains unlawful, immoral and irresponsible.

Chris Hedges: Well, we should be clear there are extensive gas fields in southern Lebanon and on the northern coast of Gaza that Israel wants.

Francesca Albanese: Exactly. And this is why there is need to scrutinize each and every company involved in it because these amount, for the companies themselves, in the crime of pillage. Recently, and I can think that it was also following external pressure from myself, the working group on business and human rights, Italian civil society, and probably also internal from conscientious people working for the company, that the energy giant ENI went out of the consortium to exploit those fields of offshore gas in Gaza. And again, this is why we need to pressure both states and companies to disengage and divest from the Israeli occupation.

Chris Hedges: Those gas fields are in territorial waters of Lebanon and Palestine, correct?

Francesca Albanese: Yes, these gas fields are outside Lebanon, historical Palestine, so Israel and Gaza. Gaza toward Egypt.

Chris Hedges: I want to close with, you write about children and what’s been done to children by Israel. You write, “I attended several trials against minors. I have seen with my own eyes their absurd brutality.” You’re talking about the Israelis. “The children were brought into the courtroom in chains. And I felt like I was watching scenes of slaves and labor camps. Small, emaciated, exhausted, anxious at the thought that for the first time since their arrest, they would be seeing their parents again in these hearings that lasted no more than a few minutes. The judge often did not even look at them. He heard the charge. ‘He was throwing stones’, and handed down the sentence, two years in prison, three years in prison, and so on. And that’s a generous judge. Given that the punishment for Palestinians who throw stones is up to ten years, twenty if done with the intention of harming someone, how can anyone be surprised that when jailed Palestinian children return home, they are traumatized, do not want to go out, are afraid, wet the bed, and exhibit disturbances or violent behavior? We are talking about 12, 13, 14 year old kids but even younger kids are arrested. There were children as young as five or six being taken away by Israeli trucks, perhaps not detained, but interrogated and then sent home.”

Let’s talk about this and, of course, this war on children has reached epic kind of proportions in Gaza where children, if they walk too close to the yellow line, are just killed by snipers.

Francesca Albanese: It’s interesting, Chris, because I used exactly the same words you just used a few weeks ago in another interview saying, “The war on childhood has reached epic proportions in Palestine.” And you can see that. I mean, it was already quite bad, probably when you and I, at the various times we’ve been living in Palestine, but it has, because there has never been the possibility to enjoy childhood for kids who risk to have their homes demolished, their schools demolished, their teachers, parents, uncles either killed or arrested and then returning like zombies because they’ve been beaten and tortured and sometimes raped in prison. And so, coming back and having so much repressed rage, anger and violence. And so, the entire life of a Palestinian child is contaminated by violence, is hijacked by violence and over decades, the horizons of hope has been shrinking and shrinking.

But what I’ve seen happening in the last 1,005 days since October 2023 is of another league and this interrogates both Israelis, who think they are bystanders, and bystanders around the world. Whatever you qualify what Israel does but have you seen the bodies of the kids turned into pieces? Have you seen bodies of kids hanging, or what remains of them, hanging from walls as if they were coats? Have you seen mutilated bodies? I mean, Gaza is the place with the highest ratio of orphan children in the world, amputated children in the world. And now, there is starvation and there is misery. There is malnutrition, stunting. Stunting was already an issue before the tightening of the blockade after October 23. And you don’t even need to go to Gaza. Look at the West Bank where Palestinians, including children, live under threat of being assaulted by soldiers or under constant threat of settlers’ terror. Who would like to live in a system like that? And again, it didn’t start on October 2023. It’s been ongoing for decades. And again, I can only say the only way forward is that we say to Israel’s violence, no more. And we let children enjoy a bit of life. Look, the first chapter of my book, because each chapter, for those who have not read it, each chapter has a sort of Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy, is a character, a lady who’s a real person, who has existed for real. Most of them are friends of mine who have belonged to my life, except for one, Hind Rajab, the child who gives the name to the chapter. I wrote this chapter in January 2025, so one year after Hind’s death. So, it was a well-known case among many, among thousands, but not as well-known as it is today. And still is one among hundreds of thousands, is one of the tens of thousands of children brutally killed by the Israeli army. And then the chapter talks about my experience with Palestinian children, which has been beautiful and uplifting, but still these kids carry a weight and preoccupations that is not for any child to hold, any child to carry.

Chris Hedges: Well, you write in the book that when you were in Palestine and working for the UN, you did a report on children. But you talked about how these young children would speak to you and they sounded as if they were adults.

Francesca Albanese: Yeah, it’s almost disturbing at times because there is someone in our mind, I mean, again, and it is not that I don’t have biases. I mean, I try to be as open as possible, but you know, I have two children myself and so I have my own way to measure the maturity of a child. So, when you find a 10-year-old or a 13-year-old who starts mentioning right to education, right to food, right to health to say, maybe it’s been taught to speak like that because they had to meet with me. But I have met these kids times and times again because I’ve had focus groups often with the same children and I came to know them a little bit during two, three months of investigation, even if I couldn’t go there. I spent the summer of 2024, July and August and part of September, speaking almost every day to Palestinian children. And I can tell you, the reason why they are so knowledgeable is because they’ve been forced to grow so fast and still find a peaceful way to overcome the horror in front of and around them. So, the fact that I could find almost destabilizing the fact that they were speaking as young lawyers, as I say in the book, is out of despair. They try to remain safe in a world and healthy, mentally healthy, in a world that is horrifically unhealthy for them and horrifically unfair to them.

Chris Hedges: And, of course, one of the chapters centers around Gabor Mate, who deals with this kind of trauma.

Francesca Albanese: Yes, I had a beautiful talk with Gabor Matej about my book, “When the World Sleeps,” a couple of days ago. And we were talking about the characters in the book, what they evoke. It was weird for him, at a certain point, to say, “I’m also a character in there.” And he asked me if I feel like screaming at times. Yeah, I wish I don’t. I don’t know. Yes, of course, at times you want to scream at politicians who seem like dead men walking, but dead men walking not because death is awaiting them at the next corner, it’s just because they seem empty of life, empty of humanity. But, what else do you need to see, whatever you want to call it? But what else does Israel need to do and say for you to take measures, for you to take international law seriously and do it because by letting Israel ravage the realm of international law with impunity, you are also destroying the foundations of the international legal system.

And yeah, I feel the pain, but it’s also a weird way of how we protect ourselves by numbing the pain. And so, I think that I will probably be able to process the trauma of this, I mean, the secondary trauma of being exposed because nothing compares to what the Palestinians endure, the Palestinians in Gaza, the Palestinians in Israel, the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Palestinians in the diaspora. But our secondary trauma by being exposed, by being witnesses to this, I will probably be able to deal with it once the genocide is over because right now I really try to stay healthy and focused on how to bring this to an end because it’s not over and people need to understand that the end of injustice doesn’t happen because we want it or because we pray for it, we need to act. There are things that we need to do and we need to persevere. It doesn’t matter if it takes one day, 10 days, 100 days or 1,000 days, we need to persevere. This is the only way to win over injustice.

Chris Hedges: It took us fourteen years to get Julian Assange free. So, that’s a long fight. But you’re certainly one of the most important figures in that fight for justice. Thank you, Francesca. And I want to thank Thomas and Max who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

Photos

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TOPSHOT - People walk with sacks of flour delivered after trucks carrying humanitarian aid entered northern Gaza on July 27, 2025 coming from the Zikim border crossing. (Photo by BASHAR TALEB / AFP via Getty Images)

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Palestinian prisoners being held before interrogation in Ramallah, West Bank, during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, circa 1990. (Photo by James Lukoski/Getty Images)

West Bank Separation Wall

WEST BANK - NOVEMBER 22: View of the concrete separation wall between the Palestinian city of Abu Dis and Israel, November 22, 2004. With Gaza already being separated by a security fence from Israel, the 350 km long border between the West bank and Israel is much more complicated to separate. (Photo by Shaul Schwarz/ Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-DISPLACED

TOPSHOT - A child stands behind barbed-wire along a slope near a camp housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on April 30, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict in the Palestinian territory between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

Free The Filton 24 Protest London

An image of the detained Palestinian doctor Dr Hussam Abu Safiya of Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza is displayed by pro-Palestinian activists protesting outside Woolwich Crown Court on the occasion of a bail hearing for the Filton 24 on 13th October 2025 in London, United Kingdom. (photo by Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images)

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Diva Don - by Mr. Fish

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FIRE ISLAND, New York – I am on a boat with 100 drag queens who are traveling from the gay enclave of Cherry Grove on Fire Island to the neighboring community of the Pines. They have staged this “invasion” every year since 1976, after a drag queen was denied service at a restaurant. Incensed by the discrimination, a group of 17 drag queens from Cherry Grove piled into a water taxi and traveled to the Pines before storming the restaurant.

The invasion is part political statement, part party. But in the age of Trump, when drag queens, people who identify as transgender, immigrants, feminists, people of color and the so-called radical left are demonized and targeted, the invasion is at once outrageous and poignant. It captures the best of the United States of America — what it means to be a patriot and what compassion, individual liberty and a civil society looks like.

If I was going to celebrate the nation’s 250^th birthday, it could only be here.

“Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP,” Trump posted on Truth Social last year, later announcing he would allow “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.”

Former Miss Fire Island 2022, Zelina Duval, is wearing a topaz sequin gown, stiletto heels decorated with rhinestones and huge flower droplet earrings with a matching ring and bracelet. She has an auburn wig and long, black false eyelashes. Like the other drag queens, she instantly sees through Trump.

“Trump’s a queen,” Zelina says. “We all know. He wears makeup, bronzer and highlighter. He has a new costume every day.”

“Our founding fathers wore wigs, heels and makeup,” says Paige Monroe, dressed in a champagne sequin gown, a honey-blond wig, rhinestone earrings and redolent in Cap Camarat perfume. “Drag is nothing new. It has been with us since the beginning of time. In ancient Greece and Japan, men played women’s roles.”

Trump’s gaudy ballroom, his smothering of the Oval Office in gold leaf and gold ornaments, his finicky concern about the color of his drapes, his penchant for old show tunes, his love of the gay national anthem “Y.M.C.A” by the Village People, his 1950s aesthetic of men in dark suits and black Florsheim shoes and his Mar-a-Lago women, whose surgically enhanced bodies sport huge breasts, puffed up lips and taut death masks, could be transferred to any of the evening drag shows held next door to my hotel at the Ice Palace.

The shows are very loud. They often don’t end until 4 a. m. The hotel staff leave ear plugs on the nightstand. It helps. A little.

During this Fourth of July weekend there was an “underwear dance party,” where in the morning, blurry eyed men told me their underwear swiftly became optional. There was also Alaska Thunderfuck’s “Fourth of July Alien Invasion Party.” Alaska sang selections from her albums “Anus” and “Poundcake.” Songs included “Your Makeup is Terrible,” “This is My Hair” and one song, whose refrain, repeated over and over, was “I fucking love you.”

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The frequent sexual liaisons — the Ice Palace has a curtained off area for those who want immediate and often anonymous gratification — mirror the promiscuity of the Epstein Class, but with one important difference: Epstein’s girls and women were trafficked and enslaved. Here, relations are consensual.

Fascism is an inverted form of camp. Its evil side. It is devoid of irony and humor. It takes itself seriously. It uses exaggerated, theatricalized art to turn a leader — like any drag queen — into a larger-than-life persona. The outward forms are the same. But fascist camp is about instilling obedience. Drag queen camp is rebellious. Drag queen camp seeks to expand human possibilities and identities. Fascist camp crushes identities into narrow, state-approved molds of good and bad, man and woman, patriot and traitor.

“Trump doesn’t know its camp,” says Bob Levine, who arrived in Cherry Grove in 1955 and has been performing for 70 years under his alter ego, Rose Levine. He was one of the original 17 drag queens who invaded the Pines. At 93, he is still performing. His next show at Cherry Grove Community House and Theatre is on July 11. It is the oldest continually operating gay summer theater in the country.

He was here in the 1960s when police sent undercover officers to entrap gay men. Once arrested, the men’s names were published in the papers. Most were fired from their jobs.

“So many lives were destroyed,” Levine says.

As rights are rolled back, as all who do not conform to the Trump administration’s rigid definition of what it means to be a man or woman are attacked, the darkness of the past becomes that of the present.

Thom Hansen, known in drag as “Panzi,” is dressed as the Statue of Liberty. She wears a long green gown, has a towering white wig with a crown and a small torch. In 1976, Panzi was one of the drag queens who stormed the Pines.

As our boat enters the harbor at the Pines, hundreds of people line the docks. They clap and cheer. Docked boats let out loud blasts. Sirens wail.

A singer in shorts wearing red, white and blue socks on the dock sings “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He changes the lyrics to, “My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the queens.” When he closes with “The queens are marching on,” the crowd erupts in sustained cheers.

Panzi, disembarks. She stands on the pink carpet rolled out on the dock. She grips a microphone. Signs in the crowd read: “We will not be erased.” “We the People Means Everyone.” “Drag sets our imagination free.” “Fuck Fascists.” “Fuck ICE.”

“The invasion was founded because someone here in the Pines did not allow a trans woman to dine in a restaurant,” she says to the crowd. “That’s all history. We all love each other, well, most of you anyway. If you have phones on, if you are recording this, send these recordings to our little trans brothers and sisters in fucking Texas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota and Washington because they are alone. They need to know we are there with them. I will fight until I die for their freedom and mine.”

The crowd roars in appreciation.

“I love you Panzi,” a man screams.

“I love you too!” Panzi replies. “Are you pretty? Do you have a big dick?”

The drag queens who disembark are announced to the onlookers. There is a group of men dressed as “trad wives.” They have brown and blond wigs and matching beige dresses. There are crosses dangling from their necks. They are holding wicker baskets and are wearing straw sun hats. There is a group of drag queens who call themselves “America’s Sweethearts,” carrying blue pom-poms and dressed in blue and white cheerleader outfits. There is a drag queen in a short green skirt with a sash that reads, “Best Ass.” A group of men in shorts wear white hard hats with the words “Trad Repair.” Sophya Medina, Miss Fire Island 2025, wearing her sash and crown, disembarks to sustained applause.

“I keep praying that the administration and the policies will change,” Panzi tells me later. “Everybody is praying for that, but nobody wants to do anything. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why the immigrant community doesn’t rise up. Why don’t the Black and Hispanic communities rise up? Why don’t ethnic communities rise up? Everybody is quiet. The LGBTQ community is quiet. If we all get together and rise up, it might mean something. But people are terrified. In my day we were rebels. We fought. We burned cars, for God’s sake. We broke windows. But nowadays, I don’t know. They are rolling us back to the 1950s.”

There are many here who have been rejected by their families and communities. For them, gay enclaves such as Cherry Grove are like oxygen.

“Why can’t we have a country where it’s just okay to be yourself?” asks Basit Noor, an oral surgeon who moved to New York from Pakistan after repeated death threats. “Why should anyone feel endangered for being themselves if it’s not hurting anyone? We fought for our rights. We fought for our freedoms. We fought for where we are today. If this movement stops, we won’t have a place to be who we are. We get tired, like ‘Oh my gosh, when is the change going to happen?’”

The melancholy is a constant theme.

“Back in 1984, I was 15 years old,” says Flaggarina Ivanna Diamond, this year’s Cherry Grove Homecoming Queen. “I was on a ninth-grade field trip at Sailors Haven’s Sunken Forest. One of the boys points to Cherry Grove. I didn’t know anything about Cherry Grove. I didn’t even know it existed. At that time I’m this closeted gay, teen boy. And there’s a lot of homophobia at the school. The boy says ‘Watch out, those guys, they’ll grab you.’ I’m praying as hard as I can, ‘Oh please grab me, please grab me, please grab me.’ And after all these years, Cherry Grove did grab me. It grabbed my heart.”

Fascism is not only a poisonous political movement. It is a poisonous cultural and social movement. It eliminates the space for those who do not submit to the narrow definitions of what it means to be a citizen, a man, a woman or a patriot. It ruthlessly crushes independent lives and identities. It leaves in its wake loneliness and trauma. Fascism begins with the marginalized and demonized, but it does not stop there. It destroys community after community until we are orphans in our own land.

I wanted to be in my country on July Fourth before it disappeared.

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Bread and Bullets - by Mr. Fish

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Neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitized term cutthroat capitalism, is the poison that destroyed our democracy. It gave the billionaire class and corporations the ideological cover to impoverish the working class, impose crippling austerity, hollow out democratic institutions, buy off our two ruling political parties and deform our courts into appendages of corporations and the rich.

Neoliberalism drove tens of millions of disenfranchised, desperate people into the arms of Christian fascists, who preyed on their despair and sold them the fantasy of magic Jesus. It drove them into the arms of conspiracy theorists and right-wing charlatans. It drove them down the self-destructive rabbit holes of alcoholism and opioid addiction, compulsive gambling, domestic and sexual violence. These were the inevitable consequences of personal stagnation, disempowerment and feelings of worthlessness, frustration and profound despair.

Neoliberalism ignores the cries of its victims. It dismisses their suffering and rage as irrational, ignorant and racist. It neuters liberal reforms, rendering them cosmetic and useless. Liberal apologists for neoliberalism, no longer concerned with economic justice, retreat into boutique activism. They mouth empty slogans about diversity and political correctness while pretending the relentless class war, unleashed globally since the 1970s, does not exist. The victims of neoliberal deindustrialization, 30 million of whom lost their jobs in the U.S. in mass layoffs, understand that the precarity of their existence does not concern their neoliberal masters.

Right-wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump, who issue crude, vulgar and expletive-laden insults against the traditional neoliberal establishment are celebrated by the disenfranchised for exposing the political charade. These demagogues promise moral and economic renewal for the betrayed, albeit grounded in magical thinking.

Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking. Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Trump embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed. He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — the twelve richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world — is designed to create massive income inequality and monopoly power. It is the antithesis of democratic equality. It is designed to fuel political extremism and foster social and cultural divisions. It is designed to hollow out democratic institutions. Economic rationality is not the point. David Harvey calls neoliberalism “accumulation by dispossession.”

As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism is a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were marginalized or pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The same is true of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman were given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They slavishly disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand.

Once the country was forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace, once government regulations were abolished, once taxes on the rich were slashed, once money was permitted to flow across borders, once unions were crushed and once trade deals were signed that sent jobs to sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world, these poseurs assured us, would be happier, freer and wealthier. It was a scam. But it worked. And it fueled the rival con game of the demagogues and fascists who were vomited up out of the moral and political morass.

The media bears much of the blame. In the name of objectivity, better understood as neutrality, it absented itself from the class war. It did not investigate the mounting abuses of the rich, corporations or its bought-and-paid-for political class. It did not expose the absurdity of neoliberalism. It rendered the victims invisible. By shutting themselves out of the debate, the media, a vital pillar of any democracy, neutered itself. It too became despised.

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Individual freedom, which neoliberalism holds up as the highest good, and social justice are not compatible. Social justice, Harvey writes in “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” requires social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric is able to “split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.”

Neoliberalism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy to Fascism,” exiles morality from public life. It isolates it in the private space of the individual. It corrals it into “the holding pen of religion” while religion is “clipped and cropped into market-friendly ‘spiritualities.’” Justice and mercy are no longer shared concepts. Personal and public morality are severed. How, she asks, “can we convince people not to commit evil in those realms of public life from which law enforcement is absent?”

“Humans,” she writes, “are incapable of functioning and living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of values intact. That’s why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind. Since humans are forced to live in a state of mild antipathy — an acceptable amount of antipathy that is crucial to the neoliberal system — they are forever in dire need of a cause, a central triangulation point that they can use to orient themselves in relation to what’s good and what’s bad. The ethical vacuum of neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention of causes, and sometimes the most groundless or shallowest ones.”

Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” distinguishes between bad freedoms and good freedoms. Bad freedoms are sacrosanct under neoliberalism. They permit the powerful to exploit workers and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations, for example, jeopardize the lives of those who cannot afford their exorbitant prices. The fossil fuel industry is driving us towards extinction.

Good freedoms — freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job — are snuffed out by bad freedoms. The freedom of the many is transformed into the freedom of the few. The result is fascism.

Fascism uses the blunt instruments of fear, intimidation and violence to curb the mounting disquiet. It divides the country into warring factions — the patriots vs. the enemies of the state. It obliterates shared values. It champions the cruelty of hypermasculinity. Those who dissent are branded domestic terrorists. Civil liberties are abolished in the name of national security.

The 30- to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalized. A ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest, but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other materials. A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.

The equation of civil disobedience with terrorism is routine in countries such as Turkey, Russia and India. It is being cemented into place in Europe. A British judge, in a ruling that mirrors what took place in Texas, recently sentenced four members of Palestine Action as terrorists, sending them to prison for five to nine years, even though they were neither charged nor convicted of terrorism offenses.

It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappear. The tens in of millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes. “And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.”

Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function. Those who champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the “radical left.” I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose. This social isolation will soon be physical isolation. We will be criminalized or driven into exile.

Trump and his fascistic cabal, epitomized by billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are constructing a mafia state. A nation of gangsters and marks. A nation where they alone have unlimited freedom to pillage and exploit. A nation where the government is privatized. A nation where we are enslaved to corporate technology. A nation where we have no place.

We must name our enemies this Fourth of July. They are the fascists who have seized power. And they are those who, selling us the con of neoliberalism, put them there.

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The war on information in the West has tread new grounds since the genocide in Palestine. Journalists and media outlets who report on the imperialist endeavors of the ruling class increasingly find themselves under the boot of legislators who concoct fascist legislation to act as imperial henchmen. Their methods are stretching the limits of the law with the scope and severity of the punishments imposed. Nowhere is this repression more apparent than in Germany where, since October 7 of 2023, governments have banned languages and symbols related to Palestine and many people, not only journalists but also professors, doctors and lawyers, have lost their jobs for speaking out against the genocide or participating in pro-Palestine demonstrations.

In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Chris Hedges speaks with Hüseyin Dogru, a German citizen and father of three young children, who founded Red Media, an anti-imperialist, socialist media outlet. Since May 20 of 2025, Dogru has been experiencing a “civil death,” as Hedges calls it. Dogru and his family members are sanctioned by the European Union as part of its sanctions package against Russia. Their bank accounts are frozen, and they are forced to live on 506 euros a month, which is wholly inadequate for a family of five. Providing any support for Dogru’s family, such as bringing them food, is considered a violation of the sanctions and is punishable by heavy prison sentences and fines.

The allegations against Dogru are unfounded and inaccurate, but even though he has not committed any crimes, he is left with little recourse in the judicial system. Dogru describes the day-to-day struggles to find answers about what he is or isn’t permitted to do and the painful uncertainty of not knowing whether his children will have enough food or other necessities. His case illustrates the state’s expanding powers to weaponize the legal system and to control every aspect of a citizen’s life.

Dogru calls this attack on press freedom “militarization of the information space” and he notes its effectiveness. His trade union is siding with the government. Journalists are afraid to even report on his plight. Dogru explains, “What is happening to me and to my family scares the people and journalists so much that they self-censor.” When asked about Germany’s support for the Zionist State, Dogru exposes the hypocrisy of Germany’s claim to a historical responsibility to Jewish people. He places Germany’s actions in the context of its declining economy and search for relevance in a rising multipolar world, saying, “German imperialism is trying to be the leading force in Europe as well. And we know how it ended the last time when German imperialism got militarized and expanded in the world.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Diego Ramos

Transcript:

Chris Hedges: The German journalist, Hüseyin Dogru, because of his reporting on the genocide in Gaza, has been hit with draconian sanctions. Since May 2025, he has been banned from leaving Germany or re-entering if he somehow managed to leave. He has been forced to surrender his identity card. His bank account has been frozen. He is prohibited from working, although he is allowed 506 euros per month to survive. The German Bundestag passed legislation targeting anyone, directly or indirectly, who provides money or other resources to a person on the sanctions list. Offenses are punishable with up to five years imprisonment. And because these sanctions are defined as an administrative measure within the EU’s bureaucracy, he cannot appeal to a German court.

This imposition of civil death is a familiar tactic used to cripple and silence dissidents and was used against Paul Robeson and Julian Assange. It is seen Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur in Palestine, and the two international criminal court judges, who issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Galant, also locked out of the global financial system. Dogru founded Red Dot Media in early 2023, the left-wing English language video portal focused on the genocide in Gaza and the Palestinian solidarity movement in Germany. In perhaps one of the most bizarre twists to this story, the European Union charges that his reporting supports “Actions by the government of the Russian Federation, which undermine or threaten stability and security in the Union.” Think about this. Reporting on the genocide in Gaza undermines the war effort against Russia. Dogru’s name was included in the EU’s 17 package of sanctions against Russia. No mainstream newspaper or broadcaster in Germany has reported on his case.

Dogru believes this silence is due to journalists and news organizations fearing they may too be sanctioned. Sanctions have also been applied to Thomas Röper and Alina Lipp, who are German journalists but based in Russia, and Nathalie Yamb, a Cameroonian Swiss activist noted for her opposition to French influence in West Africa, along with Jacques Baud, a former Swiss Army colonel whose reports on the debacle in Ukraine have angered NATO and European states.

Joining me to talk about his civil death and what this means for journalism, especially those journalists who report on the genocide, is Hüseyin Dogru. Let’s go all the way back to the inception of the genocide shortly after October 7th. And if you can describe the kinds of things you were reporting and putting out in your portal.

Hüseyin Dogru: Hello Chris, thank you for having me here. So, as you mentioned, we founded 2023, Red Media. I was its founder, and we have an understanding of an anti-imperialist socialist news outlet that is trying to highlight people’s struggle around the world, especially from the Global South against Western imperialism and exploitation. So, until October 7 we focused internationally about struggles in Latin America, in Asia, in Europe, but also from the African continent, Middle East. And with October 7, our focus was not primarily, but mainly on the Middle East and Palestine and the slowly unfolding at the beginning war crimes, which turned into a genocide later. So, we focused heavily on that and about the pro-Palestinian anti-genocide protests across the world, in Europe or in the US as well as in the Middle East. That was our primary focus.

At the same time, we also managed to do a couple of documentaries from Palestine as well, as well as from the African continent, which focus and highlight exploitation, which highlight war crimes, which also highlight human stories of people, as I mentioned at the beginning, fighting these injustices in their way. With the time, we also try to talk with the political actors in the Middle East, who are part of this war, especially with the Axis of Resistance groups such as the Palestinian resistance groups with the Houthis, Ansar Allah, and Hezbollah as well, to give a different perspective on the events that are unfolding and also trying to break that one-sided news coverage on the genocide, which is still dominated here in Europe, primarily from the perspective of the Zionist entity in the Middle East. And we wanted to break that a little bit because we thought, and we understood, that these people who are opposing the resistance in Palestine, partially do oppose that because they are not exposed to their version of the events and not the historical context of it. And that was our aim.

Chris Hedges: And when was the first indication that you were running into serious problems? Didn’t you interview Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, and a few other figures. Do you think it was that? I mean, when did you first sense that you were in pretty serious trouble?

Hüseyin Dogru: So, that was pre-sanctions. So, what happened is with October 7 and our unique coverage that we had internationally, we gained a lot of followers, we gained a lot of viewers. I think in January 2024 until mid-September 24, we had almost half a billion views, which was enormous.

Chris Hedges: Wow.

Hüseyin Dogru: Yeah. And I think that triggered something because we managed to break that image and the view on the Western countries in terms of their complicity in the genocide but also the repression against pro-Palestine activism because, especially in Germany, we saw that - I mean maybe you could follow that as well - and most of the people forget that after October 7, how the repression looked like on the streets here in Germany. People were battered, bones were broken. Speaking Arabic was even forbidden in Berlin for a while, even I think Hebrew for anti-Zionist Jews, it was obviously forbidden to talk even Hebrew. So, the repression was heavy. And with our coverage, that unique coverage that we tried to give here, also from the Middle East, with these interviews and insights, we got the attention of the mainstream media here in Germany, who started directly writing articles about like who is spreading these Jew hate videos, who’s supporting these terrorist supporters here in Germany and Europe as well. And then they started to look into us and found at some point that I, the founder of Red Media, worked in the past for Redfish, which was funded by Ruptly, connected to RT back then. And they started that propaganda of Hüseyin Dogru worked at Redfish, now he’s doing Red Media, it must be the same. And specific right wing pro-Zionist journalists started to create a theory of Kremlin communist, Kremlin Jew hater triangle conspiracy that we are behind all these demonstrations, that we are provoking these things. And that disinformation and campaign against us from the German mainstream ended up in, I think it was 14 or 16 of September 2024, when Anthony Blinken back then the second powerful person in the world, so to speak, was giving a press conference in UK, I think, and then the first time he mentioned us and said, “Red Media is a covert operation of the Russian disinformation according to the German newspapers.” But the German newspapers never said it is like that. They always said it could be like that. And so, it was an assumption at the beginning. And then Blinken talked about it. The question is also how the German newspapers’ coverage ended up on his desk because the German newspapers are internationally not really relevant. And then what the German newspapers did, first, there was an allegation from their side. Blinken talked, and out of the allegation, they made a fact. They said, “Red Media is Russian because Blinken said so.” But what they never said is Blinken’s referring to your articles where you never say it is like that. You say there is a suspicion it might be.

So, after Blinken talked about us publicly, I think there was also another outlet, which they mentioned, or outlets, we understood things getting quite serious, that the entire campaign against Red Media from the German mainstream ended on his desk and he is publicly speaking. And we anticipated that something will come, repression will come, maybe raiding the apartments or blocking the social media accounts, which did not happen. But at some point, the next year, 2025, May 20^th, we were sanctioned by the European Union.

Chris Hedges: The whole media organization was sanctioned?

Hüseyin Dogru: Me and my media organization, Red Media. We both. I mean me as a founder, I was sanctioned because I was accused that I’m spreading false information, disinformation, and terrorist propaganda through my media outlet Red Media, and that was the reason why they put us on the sanction list.

Chris Hedges: So, that shut down your media operation, in essence?

Hüseyin Dogru: No, what happened before, and that I think that’s the irony then, not the irony, but the scary part technically. So, because we understood there is something coming from the German government, European governments, and we saw what happened after the war in Ukraine started, that everything was banned in Germany, people got lost their jobs, also after October 7, a lot of academics, journalists, they got publicly attacked by newspapers, even German journalists called their employees and told them, “Do you know they’re participating at a pro-Palestine demonstration?” Because of that, people lost their jobs here. And we’re not talking about just a social worker. We’re talking about professors. We’re talking about journalists. We’re talking about doctors, lawyers, everyone. So, we understood it is going in a dark direction. So, we decided, I think it was one or two weeks before the sanctions, we decided to shut down Red Media and that was before the sanctions, without us even knowing that there will be something like sanctions, because we got also threats, threats against our colleagues who were threatened, and there was a social media campaign against people, and then we decided it is not worth the risk, especially being me personally partially being in Germany, but other people being in Europe or other countries. And that was the reason why we shut down Red Media. We announced it publicly. And then the European Union, I think one or two weeks later, sanctioned me and Red Media, even though there was no Red Media anymore. So that’s a bit, I mean, the funny or scary part even that they come even after you if you don’t even do what they alleged you to do. Yeah, that happened then on the twentieth of May.

Chris Hedges: Before we get into your sanctions and what they’ve done to your personal and professional life, just explain why Germany is such a fervent supporter of the Zionist state, of an apartheid regime, of the genocide. It’s, from a distance, certainly not because anti-racism runs through German blood.

Hüseyin Dogru: No, clearly not. Because if you look at statistics, if you look at what the German Chancellor says since one or two years, it’s quite racist remarks publicly against migrants. So, there is this rumor, and that’s what the German politicians constantly repeat that they have a historical responsibility towards the Jewish people and the state of Israel because of what they did. And they have this nice slogan, “Never Again is now.” But I don’t believe that Germany is supporting the Zionist entity because of the historical responsibility towards Jewish people because if they really would have that historical responsibility against the crimes that they committed, they would show the same historical responsibility and support for the people of Namibia, which they slaughtered back in the days, and still until today refuse to pay compensations. They would have the same support against the people of Crete, which fascist Germany invaded and massacred. And until today, they refuse to pay compensation or even support them. The funny thing about that is even in Crete, the German government is still funding up today memorial or area where former Nazi soldiers are buried and they’re paying, until today with German taxes, fascists people, tombs and the area where they’re buried. I mean, this is not the historical responsibility.

I think what we need to understand is in general, in which political economic context the support for Israel or the support for genocide is happening. Germany’s economy is declining. That is a fact. Germany missed the technological update of their economy, of their industry. They missed the entire AI developments. The heart of their industry, which is the car manufacturing, is crashing down. They’re losing against the US. They’re losing against the Chinese. I think in that context, Germany is trying to find their own place in the changing world, in the multipolar world that we have, and German imperialism is trying to be the leading force in Europe as well. I think that’s also why they’re pushing quite hard if it comes to Ukraine. And that’s why they’re pushing also in the Middle East because if you look at who’s benefiting in Germany from the genocide in Palestine, is the German military-industrial complex, is Rheinmetall. Germany is still selling weapons there. Germany sold weapons to Saudi Arabia. Germany sold weapons to Turkiye, which was used against the Kurds in the Middle East, in Syria. And now this is the same happening also with Palestine.

And the other thing is, I think, that Germany is trying to survive politically and economically. I mean you heard as well what von der Leyen said a couple of months ago, I think, where she said that the car manufacturing should be reorganized so they can be part and produce tanks or weapons. And this is exactly what they want here as well. I think it was Volkswagen who’s now thinking as well to produce for the military-industrial complex. And Germany is playing a crucial role there to redesign Europe militarily, to spend more money for militarization. Now they want to invest 500 billion euros in the next couple of years. There is also a militarization of the society happening, and I think this is all part of that. And even for them and for their technology, Gaza and the genocide is also a good opportunity to test their weapons and then later go on, I hope not, but against Russia or other places in the world, because German imperialism is waking up again. And they want to be the dominant power in Europe. And I think they’re trying to find their place in the world. And we know how it ended the last time when German imperialism got militarized and expanded in the world.

Chris Hedges: So, you’re sanctioned. When did you find out that you were sanctioned? How did you find out you were sanctioned? And I assume you were immediately cut off. You couldn’t go down to your ATM and get money or anything.

Hüseyin Dogru: So, I was sanctioned on 20th of May 2025. So, this is very important, when you’re sanctioned, you are not informed. No one is informing you. No one is informing you beforehand or the day when you’re sanctioned. It is up to you to find out that you are sanctioned. So that’s the first problematic part because once you’re sanctioned, until you found out that you are sanctioned, you could circumvent sanctions. That’s a criminal offense. So, you can get in Germany, I think now, up to five or ten years and fifty thousand euros. Five to ten years in prison, I think. Don’t nail me on the number.

So, how did we find that out? The day when I was sanctioned, me and my wife, my wife was pregnant back then, we went to the pharmacy to buy some medicine for her, and her cards did not work. Credit cards, no, nothing. And then we said, “Maybe there is a glitch,” and then I tried my card. It did not work out as well. And then we called the bank and the bank said, “We can’t tell you. Please write us an email and a letter.” And later the day when we were at home, obviously we’re journalists, we’re looking into the news, new Russian sanction package, and then I found my name on that list.

But there was a weird thing because I’m a German citizen, only German citizen, no dual nationality. And there was my name, my birth date, but it said a Turkish citizen, born in Turkiye even, with a different address, which is not my address. So, then we were curious, looked into it, read it, and it said, Hüseyin Dogru, AFA Media, Red Media, and we said, “Yeah, it must be me. But why is there such a mistake?” Then we called the lawyer. The lawyers asked the EU council what is happening, why is it happening? Because when we found out that I’m sanctioned, we read the sanctioned reasoning, and that is also, I think, quite dangerous and shows where Europe in general is going. It said, “Sanctioned under the 17th Russian sanctions because of very deep financial and personal ties to the Russian state’s propaganda operators.” And then they tried to explain why is that so, and they gave, and it’s still online that paper, three reasons. First one was that I interviewed Palestinian resistance groups, which is for them spreading terrorist propaganda. The second reason was that I reported from a university occupation here in Berlin, Humboldt University, it was Karl Marx’ university, by the way, was occupied by pro-Palestinian activists. And I was there. They invited me. They gave us information beforehand, and I reported from there, and they said that I gave Jew haters a platform to spread terrorist symbols. I think they mean the triangle, the red triangle, which is now forbidden in Germany, even I think the similar watermelon in Germany is not allowed anymore. And the third reason was that I covered protests, demonstrations, and violent demonstrations in Germany and in Europe; therefore, I am apparently trying to create discord and destabilize Europe. Therefore, only Russia can benefit from that, which is a very hard thing to believe to having that formula and reason.

So, this is how I found out that once you’re sanctioned, your accounts are frozen immediately, but not only yours, also from your family. My wife’s accounts were immediately frozen as well. Her savings are until today seized, they don’t give back her savings. And since one week, almost two weeks, my mother’s accounts are frozen. And then they start to target also your family because there was a time, I think it was almost 10 days, two weeks, where me, my wife, my two newborns and seven-year-old child, we had for ten days or two weeks only 104 euros to survive. 104 euros in a city like Berlin. So, they really want to hurt you then, and they really want to make you feel that they’re coming for you. And they also show you that it is not only the person who is sanctioned, who is targeted, the entire family is sanctioned because since then, I think it was this January, the German government created a new law, the Sanctions Implementation Law, which is more repressive than the sanction itself. The sanctions do allow support to my family, or let’s say they do not criminalize the support to my babies, to my children, or to my wife. But the new German law criminalizes even, in theory, they left that door open because it’s so vaguely written, that the support to my babies, if you would come now, say you say I have some nappies for your children, you technically could be charged with five years prison or up to 50,000 euros of fine. So, they criminalize everything to isolate you, and this is also sanctions. It is not only asset freeze. And because I’m sanctioned, I’m not allowed to leave Germany, to leave or enter Europe. That’s what the sanctions say. But the problem lies here that sanctions are designed for people outside of Europe. So, they don’t really know how that should function with me because I’m a European citizen and I’m living in Europe. So, recently the German government said I am allowed to leave, but when the journalists asked the question, “Is he allowed to enter?” they said, “That’s not our responsibility.” And they said, “But he’s a German citizen.” They said, “That’s not our responsibility.” So, sanctions have a big effect, not only on the person but also the entire family.

Chris Hedges: And of course you’re not allowed to work.

Hüseyin Dogru: That’s also something they don’t know if I’m allowed to work or not. We applied for permission because I need to apply for everything for permission from the federal bank, the Bundesbank, or BAFA, which is like the customs, for everything. So, I have 560 euros that I can use monthly for humanitarian reasons, which is not enough at all. Everything else I need to ask, even if I want to pay my rent, pay my lawyer, pay my bills, I need to ask them. And they need to give me permission for that. And with the work is the same thing. There was a leftist anti-imperialist news outlet called Junge Welt, Young World. It’s quite an old leftist newspaper in Germany, who wanted to employ me, who said, “Hey Hussein, we want to show solidarity, but we also want to employ you.” And the German government couldn’t tell us until today if I am allowed to work there or not. So, is everything vague because they don’t have the answers as well because the sanctions violate European law. The sanctions violate European Member States law because they’re designed against people outside of Europe. So that is the limbo where I am right now.

Chris Hedges: And your legal recourse: you don’t have one inside Germany, as I understand it, but you technically can go to the European Union court, is that correct?

Hüseyin Dogru: Yes, so first of all, I think people need to understand sanctions are extrajudicial measures. They’re extrajudicial. There’s no court. There is no hearing. There is no evidence. There is no sentence by the court, nothing. Just 27 foreign ministers of Germany come together and they just decide we sanction these people, then they sanction it. So, that’s the main problem. I need to fight something that is decided extrajudicially with judicial measures, which does not really work. So, in Germany, I can’t go to the courts because Germany says, “We are not responsible for that. You need to go to the European Union, to the courts,” which we are. We are at the European court, which is in Luxembourg right now, is one before the European Court of Justice and we are expecting a decision, I think, next month or the month in July or August. But the problem lies here that I don’t have really all the rights to defend myself because I technically can’t or I’m not allowed to pay my lawyer. So, everyone says you can have a lawyer, you can fight and challenge that in front of the courts, but I need to ask the German government if I can pay my lawyer. So, they technically control how much access I have for my defense, which makes it very hard for me to fight that. So, they control the means and they say, “We have nothing to do here in Germany with that.” So, right now we’re waiting there. We think it’s going to be a negative decision by the European courts because it is a political decision. Sanctions are political. It has nothing to do with a judicial process and even the European Council’s website says, when they describe what sanctions are, and that’s the most frightening thing. I think that shows us where European imperialism, maybe the German imperialism, because German imperialism is European imperialism, that dominant power here, where it goes.

And they say that sanctions are not punitive. Sanctions are designed to change the non-illegal behavior of the person to promote the foreign and security policy of the European Union. That’s very important. So, that means if you do not think like us, if you do not promote our foreign policy or security policy, then we can sanction you. That’s censorship by design. That’s censorship. And I mean, the Europeans love to say, “Look at the authoritarian system in Russia. Look at the authoritarian system in in Venezuela, in Cuba, in China.” But as McNamara, I think it was the Irish MEP, said, “By fighting disinformation, we’re becoming what we are supposedly fighting against.” And that’s the problem that I have. So yeah, let’s see. The court says, I think, the decision will be in one to two months and if it’s negative, we are going to the European Court of Justice. Until then I’m sanctioned and that can take still a couple of years.

Chris Hedges: How has this played out in your daily life?

Hüseyin Dogru: The daily life, you don’t have. Technically you live day by day because you can’t plan further. We don’t know if the next day the accounts are frozen again of my wife, or the 506 euros that I have personally for humanitarian reasons is frozen again. We are facing right now a situation where the accounts of my wife could be frozen again, and then it takes one to one or two weeks, maybe three weeks, until we have access to more money, more than the 506 euros. And then you have problems. Why? You can’t pay your rent. You can’t pay for food. You can’t pay for basic needs, not only for me, but also for my family. And asking for someone else to do that is also not allowed. So, that is the hardest part. And what is also happening, if you don’t have the means to survive or live, it isolates you as well because people get scared. A lot of people in Germany, also journalists who are writing me, neighbors, friends, or whatsoever, they are in full solidarity with me on WhatsApp or Signal or private conversations, but they won’t write something because they also don’t know what these sanctions mean for them if they write something positively about me, or write at all about me. But that chain is a little bit kind of like changing right now because the German mainstream is slowly looking into my case. but the more momentum I get, the more repression I face. Also, from the German newspapers.

What it means personally for me, as well is that, for example, my trade union is attacking me. They technically made a comment and said, “We do share the assessment of the foreign ministry. As long as the foreign ministry’s assessment regarding Hüseyin Dogru does not change, our position will not change.” That also shows how aligned the trade union, the newspapers are with the government line. So, again, I’m going back to the example that I gave is Germany is always pointing with fingers to others, but if it comes to press freedom and how everything is separated from each other, that the government does not control it, but it feels like they do, or at least they’re all on state line. And last but not least, what is also very hard for us is the fact that your children, even they’re little, they’re being attacked. Their survival is being attacked and that scares you. Like you are in constant, I mean we are not paranoid, but we are like having the fear of being put in a situation where we can’t feed our children at some point. Because we live through that ten days, almost two weeks, and that is the most brutal thing right now they did to us, and that scares you a lot because you’re stuck here and you can’t get out.

Chris Hedges: What effect has this had on other independent media organizations that do the kind of work that Red Media did?

Hüseyin Dogru: I think what is happening, I don’t know about media organizations, but journalists in Europe, let’s talk about Germany, with October 7, a lot of journalists lost their jobs. Why? Because they criticized the Zionist entity. They criticized the genocide, or they talked about the genocide. A lot of journalists lost their job. A lot of journalist organizations like Reporters Without Borders, Germany, they made a report, I think the 2025 report, where they highlight how the news outlets pressure the journalists to report, directly or not directly, but on behalf of the Zionist entity and not to use certain words or certain phrases, and that is affecting the job. And journalists in Germany do have, maybe not everyone, but a big part of the journalists that I know, they just avoid to talk about certain topics. And I think that is sanctions as well by going so hard after me here in Europe, because what separates me from Lipp, Ruper, Jacques Baud, as well as Nathalie Yamb, they’re outside of Europe. They can be sanctioned and they are sanctioned, but they can still exist. They can still earn money. They can still buy things. It was the same with Francesca Albanese as well. I don’t say it is good. It is still bad situation, but with me it’s like I’m stuck in Europe as a European citizen. I’m technically in a prison right now. And what is happening to me and to my family scares the people and journalists so much that they self-censor themselves. And I think that’s also the aim.

Now Europe does not have to sanction journalists anymore because they are scared. And with the new laws coming in Germany especially, I mean I think that they’re proposing a law where you can get up to five years of prison if you deny the right of existence of the Israeli state. So, it is escalating. And I think what is happening right now with the sanctions as well, they’re testing. It is a test field right now. How far can they go? How far can they cut the rights of people, the press freedoms, freedom of speech? And they’re testing and adjusting everything. But in certain countries, it’s not an EU level anymore, even the countries themselves sanctioned people. In France, there is the unfortunately unknown case of Iranian French, I think he’s a French citizen with an Iranian background, a journalist, Shahin Hazamy, who was sanctioned by the French government. His house was raided by anti -terror units because he was in Lebanon and reported from there. The videos are even online. He published them where his pregnant wife was smashed against the wall by anti-terror units, I think it was, and he publicized everything. So, it is escalating and people get scared. And that is the problem that we have with the sanctions. I mean, yeah, I can be attacked, it is fine, but the entire society is being put online technically or being threatened as well. I mean, even the German foreign ministry spokesperson threatened journalists during the German press conference. He said, ‘Everyone who’s threatening our information space will face repression with sanctions.” And he mentioned something very important: information space. And I think that’s the aim as well: the militarization of information. They want to control the information because sanctions do not say that you say something wrong. For them it’s like who says that? Who is giving the information? Who has a monopoly of information? And that scares.

Chris Hedges: Great, thanks Hüseyin. I want to thank Max, Thomas, and Nawell, who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

Photos

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Join me at 7:00 pm ET tomorrow on June 29 for a livestream in which we will discuss Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Make sure to read before joining and come with questions to put in the chat.

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