How the War on Terror Created the Age of Trump (W/ Matt Kennard) | The Chris Hedges Report

Matt Kennard shows in his new book that the bipartisan War on Terror laid the groundwork for the Trump presidency and the rise of fascism — now, with extremists empowered, we face the consequences.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

In the United States, but also around the world, fascism is on the rise again, similar to what occurred in Germany and Italy after World War I. Its foot soldiers in the US include right wing extremists who enter the military, where they are welcomed and encouraged, for empowerment and training. The current Trump administration, includes Christian Nationalists, such as Pete Hegseth who heads the Pentagon, and openly supports fascist and Zionist leaders — Javier Milei in Argentina, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, to name a few.

To understand the rise of neo-Nazis in the US military and law enforcement, Chris Hedges speaks with British investigative journalist Matt Kennard. For his new book, “Irregular Army,” Kennard interviewed hard-right veterans who were open about enlisting to gain the skills they need to wage RaHoWa, a Racial Holy War, at home.

The book demonstrates that the War on Terror gave rise to the Trump presidency. He cites the repressive powers granted to the state under the Patriot Act, the rise of the Imperial Presidency, the loosening of restrictions on qualifications for military recruitment, the cover up of atrocities committed by military members in Afghanistan and Iraq and the epidemic of PTSD as factors that allowed White Supremacy and racism to flourish in the United States government and military brass.

Hedges asks if an even more extremist body politic could develop. Kennard’s response is that many alarm bells are ringing: “I think that we’re on a slippery slope and things have been normalized now that we wouldn’t have even believed could be normalized a long time ago.” The fact that those in power do not have a cohesive strategy provides a ray of hope, but if we are to develop strategies to stop the rise of fascism, we must first understand the social and political factors that underlie it.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan saw the United States military, straining to meet recruitment quotas, jettison past restrictions, including felony convictions, membership in neo-Nazi groups, learning disabilities, psychiatric conditions, mental health concerns, or even racist tattoos. It has raised its minimum enlistment age from 35 to 42. The induction of right-wing extremists into the military has emboldened and empowered, not to mention trained, these extremists whose ideology of white supremacy and race war is embraced by the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who has several symbols and words that identify right-wing extremists tattooed on his body. Hegseth is also at the same time forcing out tens of thousands of women, Blacks, and transgender people from the military.

These extremist groups have powerful allies in the Trump administration. The White House unveiled a new counterterrorism strategy that will now target narco-terrorists, Islamic terrorists, and what the Trump administration calls “violent left-wing extremists”. The far right is noticeably absent from this list, although a 2024 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that right-wing extremists had killed 112 people over the past decade, compared to 13 people killed in left-wing attacks and 82 killed in jihadist attacks.

At the same time, the Trump administration has targeted groups that monitor these extremist right-wing groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, which investigates and documents hate crimes. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been indicted on federal fraud charges by acting Attorney General Todd Blanch for allegedly improperly raising millions of dollars to secretly pay leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups for inside information. The center was attacked by the Trump administration last year after the assassination of Charlie Kirk for characterizing Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled, “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024”, as a case study of the hard right in 2024. Videos and images of the January 6th storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters, such as those showing Air Force veteran Larry Brock Jr. inside the Senate chamber, wearing a tactical vest and helmet and gripping plastic handcuffs, as well as the arrests of several dozen American service members or veterans for their involvement in the incursion, are a signal that the marriage between the right-wing extremists and the military has ominous consequences domestically.

Matt Kennard investigates the infusion of the extreme right into the military and its consequences in his book, “Irregular Army”. Matt is an investigative journalist and co-founder of Declassified UK, a news outlet covering British national security issues. He worked as a staff writer for the Financial Times. He is also the author of “The Racket”, which documents how the US rigs the global economy for the benefit of its elite.

Matt, in the book, you interview several of these neo-Nazi hard-right veterans. I just want to begin by asking you about one of the most fascinating points that I found in those interviews, and that’s their sense of betrayal, their sense of abandonment.

Matt Kennard: Yeah, but many of them who were sent off to Iraq and Afghanistan did not believe in the War on Terror. That was one of the interesting takeaways from doing all those interviews because I came into it thinking, well, this is a martial ideology and it’s a country full of brown people, so if you send racists there, they want to go and kill people. Many of course did kill people. But many of them said the reason they signed up and went out to the Middle East was because they wanted to get training courtesy of the US taxpayer and bring that training back to the United States for what they call RaHoWa, which is Racial Holy War, which is this idea that America will descend into a civil war with all the races pitted against each other, which will end with a white supremacist regime in Washington.

There have been many cases of veterans actually plotting and carrying out domestic attacks who were trained in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, it was a hugely eye-opening experience. It’s also interesting how open they were about their experiences because the other thing is you would think that they would want to keep it quiet, but the story that they were telling was that they were not only welcomed, they were promoted because of their ideology while in Iraq particularly.

Forrest Fogarty, who is one of the neo-Nazis I interviewed - I went down to Tampa, Florida to interview him and ended up going to the zoo with him and his kids actually - but he was talking about how his commander would say to him, “I like the fact you’re a Nazi.” And he said that he sent him on the hardest missions and liked the fact that he saw him as a warrior. Now, obviously, that’s him saying that. I can’t say that it’s true, but that was an experience I got from many of the neo-Nazi veterans I talked to, that they were welcomed and treated in a way that was like, well, it’s good to have you in here, boys.

So, it’s a hugely, hugely worrying thing for every American because you have to remember that there’s two million veterans of the War on Terror in the United States now. And that includes thousands of these neo-Nazi white supremacists, tens of thousands of gang members, which is another group which was enfranchised by the War on Terror. And they’re not coming home to become priests. They’re coming home to either see out their ideological convictions in the form of Racial Holy War or, in the case of gangs, to use their resources and their training to kill other members of other gangs to help the drug trafficking regime. And the thing is this is all bubbled under the surface. So, it’s not often that it comes out to the fore. Of course it does at certain points, like in 1995 with Timothy McVeigh with the Oklahoma City bombing. That was a major, major attack that completely changed America in many ways. But he was a veteran of the first Gulf War.

But there hasn’t been an attack by one of these veterans of that scale. But on a lower level, if you look at local news reports from local American newspapers, there’s criminal activity happening all the time involving the veteran community, neo-Nazis, white supremacists who served, gang members, criminals who got in through what was called the Moral Waiver Program, where they allowed felons and people guilty of serious misdemeanors, who previously wouldn’t have gotten in, to serve. So, it’s a major issue in the United States, but you wouldn’t know it if you read the media.

The other important point, and I’ll end here, is we kind of are aware of what’s happening in the United States because the media covers it on the local level and law enforcement. You can’t get away with killing people and plotting terrorist attacks in the United States. But what were they doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? We don’t know a lot of the stuff that they were doing because nearly every atrocity that was committed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military was denied and covered up until it got to the point that the US military couldn’t do it and that’s their ethos. I mean, I remember in the book we reference actually an article you wrote with Laila Al-Arian about the conduct of the US troops and about how carefree they were with just shooting civilians and shooting anyone on site.

And there was one case, just specifically to link this policy with atrocities that were carried out. There was an infamous massacre in 2006 called the Mahmudiyah Massacre, where a group of American soldiers went to a house south of Baghdad, separated a 14-year-old girl from her family, and then killed the dad and the sisters, went into the other room, and they all raped her, and then killed her and then burnt the whole house down. Now, this was a crime that was covered. The soldiers said this was the work of insurgents, which is why they burnt the house down. That was a lie that was accepted by the US military for a while until there was a soldier that had a crisis of conscience who revealed what had actually happened. And who was the leader of that massacre? A guy called Steven D. Green, and he’d got into the US military during the War on Terror through the Moral Waiver Program. He had convictions for stuff that would previously have not allowed him to serve.

So, that’s just a taste of what impact this had on the occupied population. It’s a two-front problem. And also, as you mentioned in your intro, a lot of the research I was doing on these soldiers that were getting in with swastikas and SS bolts and other things. We’ve now got a situation where it’s institutionalized. You mentioned Pete Hegseth. This is a guy that has Jerusalem cross tattooed on his chest, which is Neo Crusader imagery. He’s got the word Kafir tattooed on his arm in Arabic, which is just a statement to say that he sees Islam as a threat.

Chris Hedges: Is it kafir or is it kafar? Kafar is the word for infidel. Is it kafir or kafar?

Matt Kennard: Well, maybe I mispronounced it. Yeah, it’s Kafir. It’s the Arabic term for it.

Chris Hedges: It’s infidel. It’s the Arabic word for infidel,

Matt Kennard: So, he’s proudly saying, “I’m an infidel.” And then you see how he talks about the attack on Iran in crusader terms. So, it’s like we’ve come full circle that these people that we were trying to expose what was happening during the War on Terror and the US military are trying to keep it quiet has now become institutionalized. And a head guy is one of the soldiers and veterans, because obviously Hegseth served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Interestingly as well, it’s been reported that in 2021, he was not allowed to even serve at the inauguration of Joe Biden because one of his fellow soldiers flagged the extremist tattoos he’s got.

So, when you’re talking about the most powerful military in history of the world, and it’s run by this extremist who, as you said, is now basically advertising the fact that there’s complete impunity for the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, it’s hugely worrying for the world and the American population because these people do not serve the Constitution of the United States. They’re not in it for any other reason than to get training to start their own war back home in the United States. And Hegseth said in his confirmation hearing, “We’re not going to focus on extremist activities now because this is a political witch hunt by liberals,” which is a green light to say, “Sign up. You’re welcome in the US military now.” Alongside, obviously, he said, “We’re not going to deal with these stupid rules of engagement,” and again, which is an advert to say to his soldiers, “You can commit war crimes with impunity.”

But the point of the book, I think, is to show how the War on Terror led to Trump. Trump is presented by the Democrats and so-called ‘moderate’ Republicans as this massive outlier. But the conditions for Trump were all created during the War on Terror. So, the complete evisceration of the US military and its regulations is one part of that, what was called the Imperial Presidency, which was put in place by Dick Cheney when he concentrated so much power in the executive. These are all things that were in place and have been taken advantage of by Trump. Look at what Trump’s doing now. From the UK, sometimes I look at the US and it’s easy to forget that the US even has a legislative branch because If you look at the attack on Venezuela, Iran, it’s not even talked about that they should be voted on. You barely hear about the legislative branch and that is a product of the War on Terror as well, plus all the repressive powers that were enshrined by the Patriot Act and plenty of other legislation. So, it’s a story that I think that people don’t talk about enough. Trump is not connected to the War on Terror.

There’s also, of course, the historical precedent for fascism taking off after a major war. So, fascism really began in the early 20th century post the First World War in Italy. And Mussolini took advantage of a massive reservoir of disaffected and disillusioned soldiers. And a lot of his foot soldiers were those troops. And Italy won the First World War, but they didn’t make territorial gains, or at least the gains that their soldiers fought, that their sacrifices should have engendered. And he took massive advantage of that.

Same with Hitler later on. Hitler, a veteran of the First World War and used, in what is very well known now, about the punitive action of the Treaty of Versailles, the humiliation of Germany and all these, this reservoir of troops who were disaffected with the First World War to really become the foot soldiers of the rise of Nazism. And I do think there is a parallel with Trump because Trump is using so much of the ideology and so much of the personnel of the War on Terror, the disaffected troops to say, I mean, if you look at his pitch for when he was first elected and he still does it, he says, “We’re not gonna do nation building. We’re not gonna waste all this money abroad on wars.” Of course, it was all rubbish and we know that, but he used that pitch to get into power.

And of course, the War on Terror was a bipartisan disaster and bipartisan crime. The Democrats were as guilty as the Republicans. They carried on all the Bush policies, plus they supported all the Bush policies when he was in the White House. So that creates the conditions for a demagogue, an outsider to say, “Well, look, Washington’s corrupt and bunk, and I’m going to come in and sort it all out.” “Drain the swamp,” as he said. So, I think that we really need to understand the current moment in America from the point of view of the War on Terror and what it did to American society. And a very, very clear window into that is the US military because the US military is probably the most important institution in America. Half the Congressional budget goes on it. According to some estimates, 1.4 trillion a year. It’s vaunted by all political sides. And if you have this kind of degradation of the fighting force, it is impossible for that not to percolate out into wider society and it has and it’s extremely, extremely worrying for Americans.

Chris Hedges: Talk about that disaffection. You’ve spent a lot of time with these people, give us a kind of a psychological profile of these extremists.

Matt Kennard: Well, I mean, it’s not just the extremists by the way. A major part of this story and this toxic mix that has developed and developed during the War on Terror, was because of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which many, many US soldiers and veterans have. They were saying up to 30 %. And actually in the book I contrasted that with other places like the UK and the UK military and for some reason on which I don’t really understand the US military has much, much higher rates of PTSD than any other comparable military. I think it’s like 30 % according to some estimates. In the UK, it was like four or five. And they’re not treated. So you have this weird psychological cognitive dissonance for these soldiers because they read the media. They look at their politicians and they always talk about how wonderful these people are defending our freedom. “They’re the best of America” and blah, blah. So, they’re vaunted as heroes and they come back and they’re treated like dirt effectively. They’re not given the treatment they need. They’re sent back into combat because the other thing when they couldn’t recruit enough troops, it wasn’t just getting rid of regulations, they also lengthen tours and shorten the time between tours and you can’t do that.

The reason they have that system and the lengths they had was because you can’t do that without breaking soldiers’ brains. So many, many soldiers were broken by that. And then they’d give them prescription drugs to try and keep them on a level where they could keep fighting. So, there’s huge amounts of disaffection. And soldiers are saying, “Well, if I’ve done all this. If I’m being vaunted as a hero, why am I treated like dirt? Why am I homeless? Why can’t I get treatment for the PTSD?” And again, so many of them turned towards Trump because the rhetoric was sweet. He said, “The corrupt Washington consensus hasn’t looked after our troops, blah, blah, blah.” So again, the failure of the Trump administration to do anything for them, in fact, he’s probably been worse, has added to it all. And I think we’re going to see this play out in America over the next decades, because this is not… I mentioned Timothy McVeigh, obviously, he was a veteran of the first Gulf War that took five years. But you’re talking about way, way more soldiers with his kind of ideology that served. And actually the FBI has stopped a bunch of different attacks that were planned by neo-Nazi veterans and active duty. And all it takes is one of those investigations or one of those plots to not get found out and then you’re talking about dozens or hundreds of Americans dead. So, this is something we’re going to see play out and they don’t want to talk about it. This massive cover-up has been happening all the way through.

So, the media barely covered it because it contradicted the fairy tale narrative of the War on Terror because you can’t really say that you’re taking democracy and freedom to somewhere if you are sending neo-Nazis to do it. But the other point is the institutions themselves were trying to cover it up. So, whistleblowers was the only way we kind of got information about this. And I interviewed a whistleblower called Jeffrey Stoleson who signed up and served in Iraq. These pictures are in the book. He took photos of all the gang graffiti that was up - Sir 13, Crips, Bloods - all over the blast walls around Baghdad and other cities in Iraq. His treatment by the US military is actually salutary. It’s like he was effectively persecuted and his life was ruined and he eventually had to leave the US military. And that’s because they wanted to cover it up. His information wasn’t used because they didn’t want to solve the problem, because they couldn’t slow down. So, it is a massive cover up that is going to get exposed eventually.

And the other point is, again, just to talk about why it doesn’t reach the mainstream. Our discourse is basically a bipartisan discourse, right? So, if this book had presented this as a wholly Bush administration phenomenon and nothing to do with Obama, then the sort of Democrat-aligned media would have got behind it, and it would have given them a nice ideological tool to beat their enemies. But it wasn’t like that. Obama carried on all the same policies. He carried on all the not enforcing the regulations and stuff like that. So, this is something that the whole of Washington is responsible for.

Chris Hedges: Can you describe what that ideology is of these neo-Nazis? Layout for us their vision of the race war and what they see happening in the United States.

Matt Kennard: Yeah, so the White Supremacist Movement has many different groups and elements. And I’ll just say, before I carry on, that this was a trend that happened after the Vietnam War as well. You saw a massive rise in paramilitary activity and white supremacist activity after the Vietnam War for the reasons I outlined earlier. These disaffected troops came back from a war that they’d sacrificed a lot for and were treated awfully. They lost the war. So, there’s many different elements running from the Ku Klux Klan, who claim to prefer democratic methods, to neo-Nazi groups, who want a neo-Nazi regime in Washington, to lone wolf potential terrorists that operate across the United States. And I interviewed a couple of self-described lone wolf, individual, white supremacist individuals, one who’s now in prison because he was planning an attack. And yeah, it’s basically about trying to overthrow the government. And how do we do that? It’s called ‘accelerationism’. You commit an attack, you create a crisis, and in that crisis, you can cleave off the white population and say, “We need to overthrow the whole government. We’re not protected. The government wants to kill us.” There’s a very paranoid culture that the central government wants to kill everyone and keep them suppressed.

And so that’s basically it. When I was talking to the neo-Nazis, I mean, that is what they are. They subscribe to Hitler’s ideology, which is that Jews run the world. They subscribe to something called ZOG, which is Zionist Occupied Government, which is that the Jews run the whole government. They have equal animosity to Black people. So, when I was interviewing Forrest Fogarty, the veteran, in this bar in Tampa, he was sitting across from me and we were having a beer and he was just fulminating about Jews and Black people. And it was quite hairy because I looked like his friend and he was talking about how often he gets into fights. So I was just like, “Okay, well, let’s just tone it down a little bit or bring the volume down.” But they are completely unashamed.

And it’s quite interesting because the cleverer fascists cover up the more extreme parts of their ideology or present themselves as a bit more palatable to the mainstream, whereas these guys don’t. They see themselves as street fighters. He was a member of a gang called the Hammerskin Nation, which according to the ADL, is the most violent skinhead group in the United States. And again, he was saying that he had fellow members who were serving in the US military. And this is why I’m saying it’s linked to the US military, right? So, if you have an accelerationist agenda where you want to overthrow the US government, but you need to create the conditions for a race war and you do that through terrorist attacks, you need training. You need to be able to fight that war that presages the bigger war. So, it makes total sense that they would see the US military as a good place to go. And that is why regulations are in place or have been in place. And that is why it’s such a criminal thing that the US government and the Bush administration and the following Obama administration made it so easy for them to serve. You’re going to see it play out, as I say. So, these people want a… I mean, we talk about the Holocaust and they think it was a good thing and that’s what we need to do. We need concentration camps in the United States. That kind of thing is the most extreme you can get really.

Chris Hedges: Do you think this describes Hegseth’s worldview?

Matt Kennard: I don’t know, privately it could. I mean, publicly, as I said, he’s one of these people that’s cleverer with how he presents his ideology. I believe he believes in End Times. I mean, he’s a Christian nationalist, isn’t he? He believes in that whole End Times Armageddon idea that there’ll be a conflagration of huge proportions in the Middle East and then Christians will be raptured up to heaven with Jesus Christ or Jesus Christ will come down. So, I believe that is a driver, maybe the main driver of policy. And you just have to listen to him to believe that.

And obviously that’s linked to racism. And, like you say, he’s actually, according to some analysts, he’s purged the Pentagon and he hasn’t explicitly said that he’s purging Black people, but it’s by coincidence being mainly Black people that have been purged from the Pentagon. So, I believe that, yeah, he’s a subscriber to this and he is literally one of the soldiers that I was talking to during the height of the War on Terror that we were trying to raise the alarm about and he’s now in control of the whole thing. So, it’s super, super scary.

It’s interesting. I mean, he’s obviously got other history as well. He was accused of rape, wasn’t he? And he paid off the accuser. There was a report in the New Yorker that he was leading chants of “Kill all Muslims” at one point in his career. So, the evidence is there. And I don’t understand how the American media, the political culture, Washington is not more alarmed by this because if you have someone like that at the top, it just goes all through the institution and it’s quite hard to bring it back after that.

And I don’t know if Trump subscribes to this stuff. Obviously, Hegseth for him is a play to the base, I guess, because he’s got this Christian evangelical base that probably thinks Hegseth is great. But the other thing about Hegseth is again, he was another one. He made all these speeches about “We’re going to stop nation building and we’re going to stop going abroad and fighting futile wars.” And then, in power, he’s been extolling how great, he said, “We’re going to go everywhere. We’ve got a dynamic military that has got the gloves off and we’re going to destroy anyone that puts a finger of resistance up to us.” And then of course, the special forces, Delta Force was sent into Venezuela to kidnap the President. So, it’s hard to know if he believes anything or he just gets pushed around by the various forces within the Trump administration. I don’t know, but he’s an extremely dangerous character who, if he’s not a full-grown neo-Nazi, is definitely close to it.

I mean the seriousness of it is hard to overstate because, as I say, when you’ve got a military of this power and this global reach, you know, the carrier battle groups, you’ve got 800 bases around the world, you’ve got bombing all these different places without any Congressional oversight. How does that end? How does it end?

The only good thing for the world is that they’re massively incompetent. Like, Hegseth is genuinely quite stupid. I wouldn’t trust him to make me a sandwich. And so, they don’t do what they do very well. So, they sent in the special forces to get Maduro, but the government in Venezuela is still in place. Iran has been a complete disaster, maybe the biggest foreign policy disaster for generations. They don’t know what they’re doing. They just know how to smash things up and they don’t have any strategies. So that is a benefit.

And I do think it’s a sign - and I know you’ve written a lot about this - but it’s a sign of the acceleration of the American Empire because it’s ended in this decadent phase where it’s got no strategy. It’s just hubristic and knows it has power. And this military power just dwarfs everyone else and they’re going to use it, but they haven’t got a strategy for how to use it. They haven’t got a strategy for how to win.

And in fact, that’s a problem that goes back a long way for the US military, maybe to 1945. Have they won a war since 1945? I’m not sure. And that is a bit different to the British who obviously were the previous superpower. We were savage in many, many places in the world, but we kind of became experts at counterinsurgency and putting down liberation movements and we could stabilize societies. And we had centuries to kind of hone those skills. But the Americans don’t seem to be able to do it. They can’t stabilize, they can’t…. I mean, the other problem for the Americans and Hegseth and Trump is it’s quite hard to even know what the Iran war, what the stated purpose is. It changed every week. One week, it was about regime change, then it’s about oil or then it’s about opening up the Strait of Hormuz. I don’t think many people understand what even that was. Maybe the Trump administration doesn’t itself. But it is hugely worrying.

And again, this evangelical Christian sort of Armageddon idea is very linked to and taken advantage of by Israel because, although it means that rapture would mean Jewish people would die if they don’t convert to Christianity, they use that Christian evangelical base because the massive conflagration is in their interest. And they’re presenting Iran as this holy war to the Trump administration, and it feeds into all these people. I mean, it came out in the New York Times recently that Netanyahu came to Washington before the Iran attack and did a PowerPoint presentation to senior Trump administration officials and basically said, “We have to do this. We have to do that.” And Trump was like, “Okay, I’m behind it.” So, I think the link with between evangelical Christians and Zionism and the kind of messianic parts of both of those things are clear and Hegseth is just an ardent Zionist. So yeah, he’s a nightmare. He’s someone who could really blow up the whole world.

Chris Hedges: And yet you see a schism within the MAGA movement, people - Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, a kind of open admirer of Hitler. Is this the spawning of an even more extremist movement within the body politic?

Matt Kennard: I think it is, and I think it’s happening everywhere. It’s a natural progression though. If you have a corrupting, corrupted rotting center, which you have in the United States, which is the Democrats and Republicans, people search for movements and parties outside of that, right? And the Left seems to be nowhere, organizationally. So, the Right capitalize on it. In the case of the UK, it’s Reform, and in the case of America, it’s Trump.

But their policies are not going to solve any of the problems they claim to. It’s all about Mexicans or Muslims. In the case of reform in the UK, it’s all about stopping the small boats that are coming across the Channel. Even if they did all that stuff, it wouldn’t change anything because you’ve got to take on the embedded interests in those countries, which is corporations and the 1%. So, when they get into power, nothing gets better even though they’d been promised that it’s all to do with this. Also, in the case of the UK, was Brexit. There was a whole thing that it was all about if we can take back control from the EU, we’ll be fine. None of that happened. So, what do the people who are suffering, who are dislocated, who don’t know, don’t really understand where power lies because they’re fed all the propaganda from the media, where do you go at that point? You have to go more extreme because then you’re saying, “Well, they’re not doing it the way it should be done.”

And here we have someone called Tommy Robinson, who’s more extreme than Nigel Farage. And when Nigel Farage, who’s probably going to be the next prime minister, comes in and it doesn’t get better, even though he’s stopping complete immigration, making refugees live on the street, whatever it is. He’s going to do all these horrible policies. They’re going to then go to someone like Tommy Robinson. And in the case of Donald Trump, it’s the same thing. He has completely betrayed his voter base.

And a lot of the criticism about him just doing the bidding of Israel is true. So that the actual genuine anti-Semitic Right can take advantage of the fact that Donald Trump has done so much of his foreign policy in the Middle East, at least it is being done at the behest of Netanyahu. And it’s hugely worrying. I mentioned the link, the political culture we have now is similar to the time of Mussolini and Hitler. I don’t think it is over the top to compare our current epoch with the 1930s. We’re at the beginning of it and it might not end with concentration camps and gas chambers, but it could end up with a more Mussolini-style fascism, which is not that different to Trump. I mean, all the “Make America Great” is phraseology from fascist Italy. The complete rhetorical disregard for free press, for the Constitution, for Congress, it’s all veering one way.

And as I say, it’s going to get more extreme. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but obviously the Reichstag fire happened in 1933, right? This is in Nazi Germany, and that was used by Hitler to pass the enabling laws, which allowed him basically to dismantle democracy. It does feel like if there is a major attack in the United States, the fervor that there was, and we saw this a bit with Charlie Kirk and the rhetoric that came out from Stephen Miller and people who said, “We’re gonna actually just destroy the ‘people of darkness’”, he called them. A big actual terrorist attack could… I think that everything’s in place for him to really just completely dismantle American democracy. And then there’s also the question of what happens at the end of his term? Like, does he leave? He barely left last time. He didn’t leave willingly last time. But I don’t know. I think there’s so many of the norms, so many of the assumptions that we believed about America and the protections and the Constitution and the balance of power and checks and balances, it’s all up in the air and has actually been proven to be air. The Founding Fathers didn’t plan for someone like Trump. And as you say, and you mentioned in the question, we could be getting someone worse or even more extreme than Trump. And that is, I’m talking about the sort of extreme neo-Nazi type person.

Chris Hedges: I’m going to ask you about ICE, the creation of ICE. They draw from these disenfranchised veterans often, as well as far right-wing groups like the Proud Boys. How do they play into the equation?

Matt Kennard: Well, yeah, as you mentioned, they often have huge, high percentage of veterans. And it’s the same culture. ICE has been given impunity in the same way. We’ve seen them murdering people and getting away with it. And again, it comes from the top. People like Stephen Miller said, “We’re not going to do anything about these people,” so that they’re signaling to these institutions and the people within them, you can carry out impunity and you can kill people, Americans, with impunity. So, it’s a similar dynamic. This idea has long reigned in American foreign policy and way back to Korea and Vietnam. There was that book by Nick Turse called “Kill Everything That Moves”. And if you read that book, you just understand that the My Lai Massacre was de rigueur. It was happening every week, maybe not every day, but every week there were massacres of that scale.

But it that kind of impunity hasn’t on a large scale come back to the policing of the American population. Obviously, you had people killed at Kent State and places, but it’s been patchy. Whereas now it seems like there’s forces of being created that have the same martial ideology and the same impunity that can act against Americans, which is again, another massive alarm bell about fascism because if you look at Hitler, Nazi Germany and Mussolini, Mussolini’s Italy, we know about the Holocaust and the attacks on Jews but what we don’t understand, what we don’t remember as well, is how both those ideologies were predicated on the destruction of the Left. And that was their main goal. Mussolini’s violence and his followers’ violence was directed on left-wing newspapers, unions. They just went in and beat up people and shut down newspapers. And I think that you’re seeing a politicized police force which sees its enemy as the Left.

And you saw that even with the defense of the people that were murdered by ICE. The Right was saying, “Well, these are scum, sort of down and outs, bleeding hearts.” Basically, othering them to the point where making it permissible that Americans can be killed for their political ideology if they’re on the Left, of course. So again, it has parallels, but yeah, it’s incipient fascism. Again, it’s linked to Israel as well, because the attacks on free speech. If you look at what’s happened to, there was that footage of that green card holder, I think she was a Turkish student, or maybe she was on a student visa, but who was manhandled on the street by undercover ICE officers for writing an article in a student newspaper, which I then read, which was quite mild in itself. And I just thought this is a massive alarm bell that I kind of had to double take and think this actually happened, but then it becomes normalized. And then again, that was that was done at the behest of Israel or the different organizations that work for Israel in America. They’ve got lists of people.

So, if you can so easily dismantle what we assume we have as freedoms, then it’s not going to be harder to go the next level and say, “Well, we don’t mind if people are killed. Or we don’t mind if there’s not a new elections or we don’t recognize as elections.” I think that we’re on a slippery slope and things have been normalized now that we wouldn’t have even believed could be normalized a long time ago. So yeah, but it’s part of a whole, I think, fascistic administration, but not all of their base is fascistic, but the upper echelons, people like Stephen Miller, they see this as their time to destroy the Left. I don’t know.

And then the Democrats who are meant to be the Left or represent the Left are nowhere. They’re part of the same congealed blob in Washington that represents the establishment. It’s very, very scary. And again, just to mention, it’s happening in the UK too. So, Reform, the sort of Trumpian far-right party to the right of the Conservative Party, they’re now leading all the polls. They just won the election two days ago, the local elections, in a huge way. Nigel Farage is odds on to be the next Prime Minister. Now one of their candidates for a mayoralty in the UK, he was literally calling for me to be arrested for my reporting on Gaza for months and it eventually got into some alternative media and he stopped saying it. But if they get into power, people like him are going to be in government.

What happens to people like me? What happens to other journalists who are already being arrested and raided under a Labour government? So, it’s a global trend and a global phenomenon which its heart is in Washington and Trump is the lodestar as well as Netanyahu, but Trump is. Yeah, from Bolsonaro to Reform here to Milei. It’s a very, very scary thing. But so as I say, so it’s important to understand I think if we’re going to try and combat it and come up with strategies, we have to understand the base and understanding the base is impossible to do, in the United States particularly, without understanding the War on Terror and what it did to millions of Americans who served in it and where those people are going now and what their concerns are and what the political forces that are taking advantage of their concerns are.

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

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Photos

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