Q&A w/ Chris Hedges — What I'm Doing After Real News

On this first livestream at my new studio, I explained what the plans are for my show following the termination of my program at The Real News Network and answered questions from viewers on a myriad of topics.

Transcript:

Thanks for joining us on the Chris Hedges YouTube channel. It's a moment of transition, of course, and I'll be answering questions that are submitted on the Substack as well as on YouTube and on X. My show, as probably most of you know, was terminated by The Real News, I'd had that show there for two years. My last show was an interview with Dennis Kucinich, which The Real News took down from the site and then canceled the show. They said that it was because I jeopardized their nonprofit status. There was nothing they can point to that I've said that jeopardized their nonprofit status. I am fairly certain that the real reason was that the major funder of the real news, T.M. Scruggs, who I had a run in with before, and who had told The Real News that if they did anything, in his eyes, to elect Donald Trump, they would lose all their funding and which would mean The Real News wouldn't be able to exist, interfered to essentially erase my presence from, The Real News channel. Dennis, there was nothing particularly incendiary about it, but Dennis, of course, was running as an independent. But we'll reconstitute it on the YouTube channel and I'll get back to doing it weekly, and then periodically maybe we can do, live streams.

If you want to keep up with what we're doing, then you can subscribe and click the bell to turn on notifications if you want to be notified whenever we upload. 

So let's begin with the Q and A, and the first question I've got is, will we ever be able to vote, this comes from Bill, ever be able to vote for a major party candidate like George McGovern?

That's a really good question. I met McGovern towards the end of his life and had spent a summer as a teenager working for him in his 1972 campaign. McGovern, because of the calcification of the democratic party in the 1960s, especially if you remember the Chicago convention in 1968, McGovern ran the Rules Committee and it opened up the process to non-traditional candidates that weren't picked by the party bosses and McGovern became the nominee. But as soon as he became the nominee, and I would say since World War II, he and Henry Wallace were probably the only two major political figures. Wallace had been Roosevelt's vice president and then ran for president, the only two political figures that tried to take on the military industrial complex and they were crucified for it.

So as soon as George McGovern became the nominee, the leadership of the Democratic Party conspired with the leadership of the Republican Party to destroy his candidacy, which they successfully did. And I think that's it, Bill. I think that after that, we have not seen either of the parties put forth a candidate that would take on the war machine, which is disemboweling the country, destroying the country.

It doesn't matter how many wars they lose, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, how many debacles and fiascos, and we can add Ukraine and the funding by the Biden administration, as well as massive arms shipments to sustain the genocide it's all ultimately, aside from the moral aspects of it, completely counterproductive, to the American empire. But empires in decline, and we are certainly in precipitous decline, engage in what historians call micro-militarism. So they're very judicious at the beginning of the empire about the use of military force. But at the end, they seek to regain a lost hegemony through military adventurism, which only accelerates the decline, there's historical example after historical example of that, but the Athenian empire would be a good one where they attack Sicily, the fleet is sunk. The forces are wiped out or taken captive. I think they spend many, many years working in stone quarries or something. And this leads to the kind of breakup of the Athenian empire where that's the point that we're at. And these constant, this military posturing, of course, internally is seeing the country cannibalized from the inside, our cities and infrastructure and everything else is crumbling. And that, Arnold Toynbee writes quite a bit about this, but that is what happens in late empire. So no, I don't see the rise of a figure, at least out of the major parties and of course the two parties have conspired to essentially block third party candidates. 

This is from Kevin: On the basis that RFK is likely to be the only viable candidate outside the party duopoly, do you think electing an independent, I can't vote, overrides his tragic flaw of supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza?

I can't vote for anyone... I spent seven years covering Gaza. That's a moral line I can't cross. That's why I won't vote for Biden. That I have people I know who have been killed. I have others who have been missing for weeks. I think the number of fatalities is much, much larger than the official figure. I think the official figure is deflated for two reasons. One, the Hamas fighters can largely protect themselves in the tunnel system, but have left the civilians in most of Gaza to be butchered in this saturation bombing and then of course, Israel doesn't have an interest in inflating the figures. But I suspect that it's far, far higher than the official figures. Remember that the numbers of dead are only those who were registered at morgues or hospitals, most of which don't exist anymore in Gaza. So no, I think that genocide is not something we can countenance. We can't hold our nose and it also presages a kind of new world order and then people in the global South are very, or acutely, aware of this, as the mass migrations and the climate crisis disrupts the ability of states to maintain control. And you will inevitably see the global North and Biden, of course, is doing this now by sealing off the border with Mexico, building these climate fortresses and using the industrial weapons at their disposal to slaughter those Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth.

I think part of the angst and anxiety in the global South, number one, of course, many of these countries, like South Africa, understand apartheid and colonialism and settler colonial projects. But I think it's also, they're worried about the precedent that it sets for the world to come. Yeah, I just voted in the New Jersey primary, I voted uncommitted but I haven't voted for a Democrat for years. I have of course worked for [Ralph] Nader and have long been a supporter of third parties not because I think the third parties can win, there's too much stacked against them, but as Ralph often said if we can pull 5, 10, 15 million people out to vote for a progressive third party candidate, that's the only way we have left to put pressure, pressure can be put on the Democratic Party to essentially break this slavish obsequiousness to Corporations.

From Ciara: Are the neocons' power waning in Washington? 

That's an interesting question because the neocons, the ideology of neoliberalism or the neocons, they've all grafted now, those who were in the Republican party, have grafted themselves on to the democratic party and in fear of Trump. And now we just have the old establishment ruling party, the figures like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney and [Bill] Kristol and all these others, are they losing power?

They may be if Trump wins because Trump rules by whoever is the highest bidder. There's no real ideology. What ideology, or there's a kind of ideological vacuum, I think, that Trump has, and I think that will be filled by the Christian fascists, which makes my book, "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" important if you want to know what's coming. Now, many of those Christian fascists already had high ranking positions in the past Trump administration, [Mike] Pence, [William] Barr, Betsy DeVos, all these figures, but I think that there will be a real purging now of, down to the lowest levels of the federal bureaucracy with these ideologically driven Christian fascists. And the Heritage Foundation put out its kind of program 2025, including giving a list of people Trump should hire. I think that the Trump administration, the first round was disorganized, impulsive, and now there are forces around it that will essentially are organizationally prepared to snuff out what's left of our very anemic democracy. 

I always enjoy hearing Chris talk about novels, any interesting fiction he can recommend that he's been reading lately? 

The nice thing about the break from the show, and that show, by the way, is actually quite old. It was on Telesur and then when the governments, the left wing governments that were funding it were defeated in elections by the right wing, they dried up the funding, so the show was canceled. And then RT America, approached me to essentially, with rebranding, just do the same show. So probably, I would say 70 plus percent of the people I interview are authors about their books and as a writer, I find that there are so few platforms where there can be serious discussion about my work. And then the other thing is that as a writer, I find that, it's rare that somebody who is interviewing me has taken the time to read the book, which I don't like, and that's not true in other countries. I've done book tours in Canada and France, and they're much better about investing the time and reading the book. So, for me, the prep time is immense, because a big book can swallow 10 or 12 hours, at least, of my time. So that show was on RT. The head of RT used to call it my intellectual show.

I don't know how much he watched it. I don't sense very much. And then when RT was shut down and my archives were erased by YouTube and Chris Arnone, who was the bureau chief at RT in New York, he took all of those shows and put them on the Chris Hedges YouTube channel. So they're at least there, many of those shows have gotten quite high numbers on YouTube. So some of the shows have just a very small number of views, but at least they can be viewed. And so I lost RT as an employer. and I went to The Real News and the quid pro quo was that they didn't have to pay me. and they could put the show out on their site and I could put it up on my Substack. Substack is now the way I survive. That's a long answer to your question, but it's given me more time to read. So I'm going to Cairo on Saturday. I won a big award by the Arab Press Association for the work that I've done on The genocide since October 7th and I've been reading a lot around the Middle East, including rereading "A Piece to End All Peace" by David Fromkin. I'm halfway through a thousand page book by Robert Fisk, who I knew was a friend, "The Great War for Civilization." He's a beautiful writer and a great reporter. And I'm reading an Egyptian novel by Mohamed Salmawy called "Butterfly Wings," because Mohamed, who's a great writer and is the editor-in-chief of Al-Masry Al-Youm, the big newspaper that's hosting this event, is having me. So I do try to read a mix, the last big novel that I went through was "Germinal," which is fantastic, but yeah, right now I'm focusing a lot on the Middle East.

This is from Bentley, without mainstream media reversing its role as the propaganda outlet for the government, is there any chance of saving democracy? How does independent media reach the same level of exposure as mainstream media? 

Well independent media is never going to reach the same level of exposure as mainstream media. So I began my career in the early '80s covering the wars in Central America and I've watched, over now several decades, the deterioration of the mainstream media. There was a place for people such as myself, for Matt Taibbi, for Glenn Greenwald, a decade ago even, we were still operating in the mainstream media that is gone now. There's a couple of reasons for that, but the big reason is profit. So the newspapers began with the loss of classified ads. Classified ads brought in 40 percent of newspaper revenue, so that's almost 50 percent of the revenue once you had Craigslist. And then with the rise of the internet, sellers can, with profiles will, can reach or, directly to consumers. They don't need the intermediary of the press to get there. So this has had a devastating impact and The Post, Washington Post, which is a shell of what it was, lost 100 million last year, huge layoffs, in all sorts of media Vice and everything else, NPR. And the press has not found its way out of that. The response has been to constrict the range of acceptable opinion or acceptable reporting. The New York Times reporting on Gaza has been just terrible, just awful. And I mean everything on Ukraine they've been awful too. They spent two years slogging this fiction that Trump was a Russian asset.

When most of their subscriptions are digital and when they did surveys, they found, with the election of Trump that their viewers wanted stories that bash Trump. And so they, like MSNBC, cater to their viewers and ignore stories that their viewers didn't want to hear like the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop or something like that. So the mainstream media is in free fall and it's destroyed its credibility. It's been, I think it's been almost suicidal. It's certainly been self destructive. And you've always had alternative media in the United States and alternative media has always played the role of shaming the mainstream press, the commercial press, the legacy press into doing their job. That's always been true from Ida B. Wells to Bob Scheer's Ramparts and everything else. And the alternative media rarely made money, or didn't make much money. 

But now it's really tough. So you had a few alternative sites that rose up out of the kind of response to the Iraq War; Salon founded by David Talbot, a very fine journalist, Alternet and others. And they've all just been bought up by hedge fund managers or private equity managers or something and destroyed. Same was true with Vice News. It's tough. It's very tough to continue. And of course, what is really taking a hit is reporting. There's just less and less reporting being done. And then you have local newspapers atrophying and dying. You have big city newspapers atrophying and dying. And it's a very dangerous situation. I would say that it's one symptom of the death of American democracy. I wouldn't say, it's a contributing factor, but it's not... there are many other factors. The biggest being the kind of what John Ralston Saul calls the corporate coup d'etat in slow motion. It's over. 

What's your thought on building a left voting bloc rather than a third party? We vote or abstain based on platform demands and only when mainstream candidates implement our top... 

Well the mainstream candidates are never going to implement our top legislation because they don't work for us. They work for Goldman Sachs and Exxon and Chevron and Raytheon and everyone else. That's who pays them and that's what they work for. And their lobbyists write the legislation. No, I think that Kshama Sawant probably got it right. We have to build a militant labor movement because the only power we have left to effectively pressure those who run the country is the strike and without rebuilding a militant labor movement, things are just going to get worse and worse. 

This is from Lisa: Why would Biden crack down on immigration in a Trumpian way?

Because Biden has no moral core. Biden has, his entire career, he's been obsequious to the centers of power. They used to call him Senator Credit Card. He's the one who I teach in a prison and half of my students wouldn't be there but for Biden and Clinton. That's the three strikes you're out law, the massive militarization of police, the tripling of sentences, that's all Biden. Biden was calling for the invasion of Iraq five years before we invaded Iraq. He used to oppose abortion. Obama picked him because basically he's a Republican. He did it essentially, you're right, to out Trump, Trump. His entire political career has been devoid of any moral center at all.He's not, deviating from that now.

This is from Janet: What will it take to see a significant change for the better in the state and federal prison systems? 

I think the way to go after the prison systems, and I get this from the students I teach in the prison, is to build a campaign, to force states, federal and state authorities, to pay the minimum wage. Because if those and remember the prisons are run by those who are incarcerated. That labor and in some states like Alabama, they don't even pay it. In New Jersey you make $28 a month. But if they had to pay them the minimum wage the system would collapse. I think that is the way to carry out a frontal assault because, again, the privatization of prisons, we talk about private prisons, which are a small percentage of prisons, usually ICE uses private prisons, some federal prisons, but the real problem is that, internally, all prisons have the services or, I hate to call them services, the medical, the money transfer. The phone service, global telling, they've all been privatized and they're gouging the poorest of the poor. On the phone service is just criminal because, of course, it's the only way incarcerated men and women can speak to their children, you have to pay in advance. And then because it's a multi-billion dollar industry, including of course, corporations use prison labor, McDonald's makes their uniforms in prison, their lobbyists are all writing the legislation that continues this monstrous system of mass incarceration. 25 percent of the world's prisoners, although we're less than 5 percent of the world's population, because, it's... and of course, a very high recidivism rate. 76 percent of people go back to prison after five years. Why? Because they can't get public housing, they can't get public support, they're banned from, they're not trained vocationally inside the prisons to do anything, by intent. They often get out owing a lot of money, which a lot of people don't know. So if they can't get a job and they can't pay off those debts, they go right back to prison. The system is, people say it doesn't work, no, it works just the way it's designed to work. So that is what my students and others who are incarcerated say, that the campaign has to be to raise the minimum wage. That's the most effective way, because we don't have the money to compete with their lobbyists. We can't do that. 

Will BiBi and company ever cave, this is from Bob, to a two-state solution? 

No, they have no intention of creating a two-state solution. And we, I covered Oslo. We found that out after Oslo. It's interesting watching this, Biden peace proposal, which was dead in the water as soon as he announced; it was a public relations gimmick. But they always do it in phases, just like Oslo, because Israel never abides by any phase. Netanyahu and company have been very clear. These people are the heirs to the far right Rabbi Meir Kahane, who I covered in Jerusalem, liberal Zionists blocked Kahane from running, and blocked his Kach party. Not that liberal Zionists were any better towards Palestinians but they understood that in order to maintain a kind of solidarity with Western governments they couldn't be too open about the ultimate goal of ethnic cleansing. But no, Bibi is not going to do a two-state solution, nor at this point, after October 7th and the genocide in Gaza, is a two-state solution possible. 

The intent is to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza. The impediment is that the Arab countries do not want to take Palestinian refugees. And Blinken tried that, he gave quotas. I think the Egyptians were told they should take 1.1 million and, I don't know, the Iraqis 700,000. I don't remember the exact numbers, and the Arab governments said absolutely not. But that is the intent. The intent is to ethnically cleanse Palestine. You either die or you leave. And we don't know where it's going to end up. We know what Israel wants and the Egyptian government has deep economic distress. There's certainly going to be pressure put on the Sisi government. So how it's going to end up, I don't know. What Israel wants is not in dispute and it's not a two-state solution.

Can you talk about immigration exploitation of undocumented workers? Is there corporate pressure to deny and delay work permits for asylum seekers to keep this cycle of exploitation in place? 

Well that's a good question because the irony is that the corporations love the undocumented workers because it allows them to carry out even more egregious abuses against labor, because these people have no rights. They can wage theft and there's nothing they can do. When Joe Sacco and I wrote our book, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt," which was written out of the poorest pockets of the United States, and Joe and I will be working together on the next book, which will be on Gaza, which we'll do out of the Middle East, we found workers in Immokalee, Florida—and the worst labor laws in the country are in Florida not California—who at night had been chained inside a truck, Hondurans. 

And they'd been told that if they went to the authorities, their families will be killed back in San Pedro Sula or Tegucigalpa. Yeah, that is a final irony that, especially in certain areas, construction, agriculture, the big corporations, the big agribusinesses, they love undocumented figures, but of course, the blowback is that the 30 million plus workers who have suffered from mass layoffs since 1996, which was when they began to keep figures and who support Trump not only see their unionized manufacturing job outsourced or sent overseas, but that any kind of manual labor is often given to undocumented workers who are often working below minimum wage without benefits or rights or anything else. So there is that tension within the American system, but you're right.

How did the Prince of Peace become the God of War in America? And why is Christianity so often equated with God guns and guts? 

Well because these people are heretics. They've perverted or deformed or distorted the gospel to embrace the worst aspects of white supremacy capitalism and American imperialism and again, I would refer you to my book "American Fascist," which I spent two years on but I begin the book by talking about my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, James Luther Adams. James was, he was 80 when I had him, and he had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936. He'd been at the University of Heidelberg. He was bilingual in German and he dropped out to join the underground confessing church run by [Martin] Niemöller and [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth and others. And he was eventually arrested by the Gestapo and expelled from the country. But that had a huge impact on him and he made the parallel between the German Christian church, which was pro-Nazi and the Christian right. And I remember him saying to me, when you're my age, you'll all be fighting the Christian fascists, which seemed rather far-fetched, as brilliant as he was at the time, but he was right. So it is the sanctification, the misuse of religion, which is all common. It does not... h. Richard Niebuhr once said, religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people. but that sanctification of, let's call it what it is, evil, is, especially as societies break down, this was true when I reported the war in Bosnia, or I reported the, In the Middle East, that those religious institutions are essentially used to give, to sacralize mass murder. And that's what we're seeing. And unfortunately, the liberal church, which I come out of, failed to call these people out for who they are in the name of tolerance and dialogue and everything else. 

Okay, I have not read "Techno Feudalism," Ceelo asks. 

Dorothy: do you think today's events in southern Lebanon and northern Israel will escalate into a full blown war? 

It's always hard when you're not there. I know as a reporter, but I think Hezbollah and Iran do not want to ignite a war with Israel. And remember, West Beirut was leveled in 1982 by the Israelis and would be leveled again in terms of a war. But that said, what people want once you open that Pandora's Box of war and what you get are not the same thing things can easily spiral out of control. So I wouldn't rule it out. Yet at the same time, from everything i've seen, I think both Hezbollah and the Iranians have been very careful not to either respond to Israeli provocations or carry out the kinds of attacks that would trigger a regional war.

This is from Laura: How does one overcome the rational fear of speaking out against empire and maintain integrity? 

I did an event in Toronto with Margaret Atwood and she's not only a great writer, a lot of people know she's a really great poet and she said something I thought was kind of prescient to the crowd. She said, look, Chris and I have the ability because we're free from institutions to say the kinds of things that you can't say, and that's our job. But lots of people have to pay their rent and feed their families and may not even like the job that they have and they don't have that choice. So I think that in that sense, people like Margaret Atwood and myself are in a very privileged position, which we must use, even with the momentary problems of having shows canceled and everything else, because ultimately, we don't have... the forces that constrain some somebody between an employer-employee relationship, were much freer. Those constraints are much less. I recognize that fear and I think that their survival is an issue. People have to survive, you gotta feed your kids. I get it.

Blair: What advice would you give to young or aspiring journalists? 

That worries me the most. I began as a freelance journalist, but It was possible to make a living as a freelance journalist. So there were all of the big regional papers, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe, I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, I worked for NPR, they all had foreign sections, they ran foreign news, that's all dried up, it's gone. I'm speaking as a foreign correspondent, but the work for freelancers is, you're not remunerated, you're not paid, the internet doesn't pay. And when I left RT, I started Substack and I think because I was a known quantity and Glenn Greenwald was and Matt Taibbi, I think Glenn's not on Substack anymore, but Matt is, the that allowed us to get enough paid subscribers that we can continue to do our work. 

We have very talented and great young journalists, but they don't have the name recognition. So that really concerns me. Barbara Ehrenreich, I remember before she died, saying that the new generation of journalists are just going to have to accept that they're poor. Poor, you still have to survive, you have to find a way to survive. Journalists are going the way of blacksmiths, and even when I speak at a university, I'll always be dragged off to the J-school. And I'll always ask, you may have a hundred kids in the room, and I'll say, who wants to be a journalist? And I would say maybe 10, 15 raise their hands. The rest want to go into public relations. So they're in the J-school to essentially work for the enemy. So yeah, I'm deeply concerned about it. They'll be there, but how are they going to sustain themselves? What platforms are they going to go on? I don't have an easy answer to that.

Gerakkel: What is a good source for knowing what really happened on October 7th?

 The Israeli press. Max Blumenthal on Grayzone has picked up a lot of the reporting on the Israeli press because they're there and they're interviewing people who are there. And so the monitoring what's coming out of Israel, 972, which is this investigative magazine out of Israel is very good. The Electronic Intifada is really good. Ali Abunimah is really great. Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera has done heroic work on Gaza. So there are sources. But it's interesting that the stories about Israel essentially flying blind into the chaos of October 7th, let it, I think it's pretty conclusively proven, to killing a fairly large number of their own citizens that, because they were just shooting any vehicle that was moving to Gaza, of course, many of those vehicles had hostages, that doesn't in anyway mitigate, also the fact that the terrible atrocities were carried out by Hamas or other resistance groups, that's clear as well. War crimes were carried out. But yeah, I would say I rely on all of those sources. Haaretz is not what it was before October 7th, but it still has some good reporting. And certainly, Gideon Levy and Amira Hass are amazing figures both as journalists and opinion writers.

Margaret: How has your Christian faith changed since the time of your ordination? To be honest, the tone of your pieces are generally quite bleak and leave me feeling hopeless, despairing, and without faith. 

Well I'm Presbyterian, so I come out of Calvin, it was about as dark as you can get in terms of human nature. I think a good preacher, I wasn't ordained until 2014, by the way, that was, and I was ordained, I went into it on a kind of technicality because I was after I was pushed out of The New York times, I didn't have health insurance. I got it through the church, but then some people started complaining I wasn't ordained. So I had done all the academic work to be a minister and I took these five, three hour exams, including Greek. I had to go to the Princeton University Library and do a lot of study. And then we had this actually beautiful ordination service that is on YouTube where James Cone, the father of Black liberation theology, gave the sermon and Cornel West spoke and we, threw out the hymnals and brought in a blues band and, the whole service was geared and we invited, we did it in intercity church and, invited the families of my students in the prison. 

So the whole service was geared towards. mass incarceration, which is probably the civil rights issue of our time. I don't think it's changed at all. And I think that having been a war correspondent and seen the worst of human atrocity, so I understand what human beings are capable of, but I also have seen, these are heroic figures that arise in every culture, every faith, every ethnicity to fight the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. And it's the little things that, when you actually build a relationship with the oppressed, oppressed peoples, whether that's in Gaza or in prisons or anywhere else that is what gives me hope and empowers me, not in a kind of macro-sense. So for instance, I was teaching a student who was, incarcerated at the age of 14 for a crime, he was illiterate and they forced him to sign a confession for a murder and rape he did not commit. He wasn't eligible to go before a parole board until he was 70, which was a death sentence. And one of my best students, and just worked so hard and I taught a class, a history class. And he waited till after the class, he got an A, as he always did, and he said to me, I know I'm going to die in this prison, but I work as hard as I do, because one day I'm going to be a teacher like you. I can live on that for a really long time. 

By the way, we got him out under the Miller ruling of the Supreme Court, although it was quite an effort. And he's now a community organizer in Brooklyn, graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers. 

Can you comment on the seizure of Scott Ritter's passport preventing him from attending the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and his plans to travel the country making the documentary? 

Yeah, I know Scott and this was a very disturbing moment when they... remember it replicates the kind of tactics that were used in the Red Scare. Remember they took away Paul Robeson's passport and I think we are moving into, clearly moving into, an era like that because the ruling elites really have no answer anymore to the deep and legitimate rage that is rippling across the country. And so instead of actually altering the system and who they serve, the idea is to crush and silence dissidents and the Democratic Party is at the forefront of this. To be clear, these figures like [Chuck] Schumer and [Joe] Biden and [Nancy] Pelosi and others, they wouldn't hold the positions that they hold if they weren't awash in corporate cash. And so they're running around talking about the danger of Trump destroying what's left of our democracy, and they're not wrong, but they won't do anything, anything meaningful, to address the disenfranchisement and the alienation that is pushing people to support Trump. Because if they did, they would lose their positions of privilege and power, and they would rather risk everything, than give up those positions.

This is from Ron: Why have U.S. business schools been given a free pass and allowed to function as indoctrination factories for managerial capitalism and have become complicit in the perpetual? 

Well, money! So I think it was the University of Washington a few years ago with this giant gleaming business school, and they had just abolished the theater and the philosophy departments, which is. the equivalent of gouging your eyes out. So yeah, these universities have become corporations. And the irony, I've taught at Princeton, went to graduate school at Harvard, which are just staggering amounts of money, billions and billions of dollars in endowments. All of that money is actually constricted intellectual debate, and academic integrity, not enhanced it. And business schools, business schools have no place at a university at all. But, as is also true at Harvard , it's been a kind of hostile takeover. And universities, especially universities without the wealth of Princeton or Harvard, they function as corporations. So you have the administrators pulling down salaries and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They come out of the financial or corporate sector, as the president of Columbia University does, and then you have adjuncts carrying the teaching load, sometimes up to 70 percent of the teaching load, and they're paid about $4,000 or $5,000 per course. They make $25, 40,000, 30,000 a year, often without benefits and certainly no job security or anything else. So that corporate model, that insidious corporate model has infected higher education.

This is from Enevadesign: do you see a future military intervention from countries to dismantle the Israeli government? 

No, the only government that's actively resisting the genocide is Yemen. But that is essentially nullified because Saudi Arabia and Jordan have set up a land quarter, to bring in all the goods that are in, consumer items and everything else that have been disrupted, in the maritime corridor by Yemen. No, I don't. 

Cindy: Can you think of any sudden unexpected positive historical events like the fall of the Berlin wall that could provide a sense of hope for turning around our seemingly hopeless direction? 

That is interesting because as a reporter, I've covered all the revolutions in Eastern Europe. I covered the street protests against Slobodan Milošević. I covered both the first and the second Intifada by the Palestinians. What's interesting is that you, as a reporter, you often know that tinder is there, but you never know what will ignite it. So for instance, with the first Intifada uprising, it was literally a traffic accident where Palestinian day workers were killed. And that was the tipping point, that was enough. And, the Occupy movement, when Joe and I did our book, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt," revolt was conjecture and as we were working on the book, Occupy took off and that was the last chapter of the book, but we didn't see it coming. I didn't see it coming. 

So yeah, there is hope that, at a certain point, something erupts. It has to be organized, and it has to have a kind of vision or ideology in order to succeed. But you can't rule it out. The Arab Spring, okay, the gains of the Arab Spring, Egypt, Tunisia have been, of course, reversed, crushed, even Greece and everything else. But, yeah, you don't know, the famous quote of Lenin when he was in Switzerland, saying, my generation will never see, probably, revolution. Six weeks later, he was in Saint Petersburg. So you don't know. And I'm waiting to be surprised. Let's hope we're all surprised.

This is from John: Do you see hope in mass movements, and what do they need to improve on? 

Yeah, I think we've seen Black Lives Matter, we've the these protests against the genocide have not only not gone away but they've sustained the numbers and terrible oppression over 2,000 of these very courageous kids have been arrested. I was just up at Princeton and two of the students were, they didn't award them their degrees because they walked out of a president's talk. It was pretty remarkable how little it takes. But yeah, mass movements are where the hope is. It's not in actual voting. Emma Goldman's great quote, "if voting was that effective, it would be illegal." Yeah, we have to build those militant mass movements. I'll go back, this is something Kshama Sawant is trying to do. That's where the hope lies. 

What's the future for Trump, jail or presidency? 

I don't think he's going to jail, for everything I've read, he's a first time offender. It's not a major crime. Trump is essentially, the figure that somebody once said is the middle finger to the establishment and he also functions as a cult leader. He doesn't really function as a politician and cult leaders are viewed differently. Margaret Singer wrote a very good book on this called "Cults in Our Midst," but I saw in the megachurches when I did my book, "American Fascists," I I found having spent a lot of time in them that they were cults. They were run by almost invariably white male mega church pastors who In within that milieu, seen as being in direct contact with God who could never be questioned. Any kind of questioning was backsliding. 

And so I remember when Trump was elected, some people asked me, how is it that these mega churches supported Trump? And I said, no, the fact is that Trump fits the personality completely of these mega pastors who essentially prey on these people's despair and become fabulously rich off of it in the same way that Trump did with his sham university and his sleazy real estate deals and casinos and everything else. In fact, their sexual proclivities are probably kinkier than Trump's, but I don't see any real difference. The irony is that they emasculated themselves by essentially shifting the adoration that localized adoration towards them to Trump and they essentially gave away their power, which is interesting. 

This is Bob: Given the ongoing position of the biden administration Ukraine and Palestine conflicts Are there any missing hidden factors outside of naked imperial hubris that are driving their positions? What don't we know? 

So the war machine, that's all we do anymore is make weapons. The war machine drives foreign policy whether it's rational or not. I mean we knew for instance The Washington Post published The Afghan Papers, everybody knew the war was unwinnable years before we pulled out. We were defeated in Afghanistan but we didn't leave because it's the money and so we left Afghanistan and the arms industry, the weapons industry, their stocks went down and then Ukraine started and the stocks went back up. And of course now they're having making immense profits off of the genocide in Gaza and it's out of control. Karl Leibknecht, the German socialist, called German militarism the enemy from within. And that's what they are, they're the enemy from within. And again, go back to Arnold toynbee when he writes about the decline of world empires, he cites that unregulated, uncontrolled militarism as being the death knell of empire. So I think that's what we're seeing, 

And this is from Eduardo, what are your thoughts on the administration in Argentina?

So this is the great poison of neoliberalism is that it vomits up all of these figures, Trump, Orban, and others. There's a kind of continuity to Le Pen in France and everywhere else, the far right in Germany, because the system seizes up. The institutions that once allowed for democratic participation essentially are converted into funnels to further enrich the power of a tiny oligarchic, corporate elite, and in frustration, people turn to these demagogues. I saw the same thing in Yugoslavia with Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tuđman, and others. That's what happens. That fascism is the result of a failed liberalism. I can't remember who said that, I think it may have been Fritz Stern, and we live in a failed liberal, democratic liberalism, and we're not immune to these forces.

Why do economists think the economy is growing, but polls show that American people think that the economy is declining? 

Because the economy is declining. The figures are completely fixed, whether it's unemployment, so after six weeks if you're considered not looking for work, you're erased from the polls. The consumer price index is fixed, inflation if you work one hour a week, you're considered employed. The gig economy doesn't provide sustainable income and then of course you can lose your job instantly. So yeah, again, there's a kind of Potemkin quality. And then of course, so much of our economic health is tied to wherever the stock market is, which is utterly irrelevant to most working men and women.

Oh, this is a good question from [inaudible] probably mispronounced that: Is there a difference between Trump and Biden vis-à-vis Palestine? 

No, zero, no difference. 

From WarClan, are the current conflicts in Ukraine and Taiwan a representation of the fall of petrodollar over the future? Once manufacturing is gone...

The big problem is the day the dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency then you go back and look at what happened to Britain in the 1950s when the pound sterling no longer became the world's reserve currency and Britain went into a huge depression. And that will make the Empire just, we won't be able to sustain it because we sustain it with debt. People just, they won't buy Treasury bonds because the dollar won't be worth anything. 

And Russia, China, Iran, they're working very hard to break the hegemony of the dollar. Alfred McCoy, a great historian, I think he actually pins, the very risky in my mind but I think he says 2025 or something, which is pretty soon. But at that point, the empire crashes, that's the issue. And yes, with the petrodollars, if they accept in Euros or, once they accept in other currencies, once they bypass the dollar, then that is devastating to the American economy.

Can you tell us more about your upcoming book with Joe Sacco? 

So if you don't know Joe Sacco's work, get it, Palestine, "Footnotes in Gaza" is one of the great, great books on the Middle East, which Joe spent six years on and it's just, it's brilliant. And I had met him in Bosnia when he wrote his book "Gorazde." And I didn't know his work, but we were both in Gorazde and we were interviewing, but I know, what a good reporter is. And, he was clearly a great reporter and he invented this kind of comics journalism where he reports it out like a reporter does, but then he draws it out. It's really powerful stuff. And if you go to fanographics, they put up a bunch of his drawings and panels on Gaza. So Joe spent a lot of time in Gaza. I spent seven years in the Middle East and a lot of that time was in Gaza, lived in Gaza for weeks on end. And he called me a few weeks after this genocide began and said, we have to do a book on Gaza. So we don't know where we're going to do it because we don't know where the Palestinians will end up. 

But of course, the intent of Israel is erasure, to erase their culture, their history, erase them physically as people. He and I, as journalists, and he, as an artist, we'll do whatever we can in our own small way to counter that erasure. I can guarantee we will lose a lot of money on the book because Simon and Schuster already doesn't want to touch it, that's my normal publisher, and it'll be, we'll have to go back to the Middle East. I studied Arabic, but I left the Middle East, almost three decades ago. So I'm now doing probably seven, eight hours a week of Arabic too, because you don't want to go blind into those situations. You don't want to be deaf and dumb in those situations. You want to know what's happening around you. You want to be able to connect with another culture and I'll actually go to Jordan for intensive Arabic this summer. But yeah, I think because, I don't know if Joe would like this word, but it's a calling, it's what we meant to do. It's what, given the massive amount of time that we've spent in Gaza and given the scale of the atrocities and slaughter that's taking place. I don't think we have a choice. 

So that's what we're going to do. And if I were, I did one book with him, as I mentioned before, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt," 50 pages of that book were panels that he did. And the interesting thing about, he's a wonderful guy to work with. He's just, he's literate and funny and kind, so it's oftentimes very lonely writing a book so it's nice to be able to work with someone like that. But the other thing about Joe is that I would do these long interviews, four to five hours or something. And he would listen and then at the end, he would probably ask about a half dozen questions that were absolutely vital that I should have asked and I missed, which kind of drove me crazy. So when you do a book with someone like Joe, what's counterintuitive is that when you get a really powerful narrative as a writer, you covet that. But I have to give it to him because he not only takes the narrative, but then he draws it out to give it to me. More power, give it a kind of visual punch. So that is where we're headed. and that is our, mission at the moment. 

This is from Cindy: as we face the disgusting choices for the next U.S. President election, do you see any possibility of someone other than Biden and Trump winning? 

No. So I am good friends with Cornel West and, Cornel and was instrumental in getting Cornel to run as a Green Party candidate that didn't work out, but as Theresa Amato writes in her book, she was [Ralph] Nader's campaign manager. She wrote a very good book on all of the mechanisms the two parties use to block independent and third party candidates. Cornel was just not given many ballots. I think on the Green Party he would've been given more. But I don't think the goal is winning, I think the goal is to spook the establishment enough, if enough people are willing to step outside of it and challenge and that has been the rule of progressive parties throughout history. Teddy Roosevelt, who was a retrograde political figure, broke up all the monopolies because you had powerful, progressive parties, socialists who were beginning to put heat on the center. Within the American system that is a way we can pressure them. But we have to hold fast. Ralph would be polling for 7%, but then people would get into the polling booth and he wouldn't walk away with those kinds of numbers. And I think he always said it was because he think people finally were frightened once they got in the booth. Because in, in the American political system, you don't actually vote for who you want, you vote against those you dislike.

This is from Lois: Are you following Haiti? 

Yes, from a distance. 

Do you believe the U.S. is using Kenya as an excuse to set up a SouthCom base? 

Probably, but I haven't reported it closely. 

This is from Bracing Views: How do you fight a shameless system that makes its own corruption legal? For example, all the money [Nancy] Pelosi has made from insider training. 

The whole system is a criminal enterprise. That's what it is. The whole electoral system is legalized bribery. That's all it is. And there were all these pushes to get petitions to get money out of politics. And a politician in Washington wouldn't support it because they wouldn't be there if they got money out of politics, dark money out of politics and the person who's done the best at laying all this out is Sheldon Wolin and his book "Managed Democracy," which is worth reading, probably our most important contemporary political philosopher, Cornel West's intellectual mentor. 

Do you think the death count in Gaza is being undercounted? 

Oh, certainly. The death count in Gaza, Ralph Nader, I was speaking to him the other day. He thinks it's 200, 000. It wouldn't surprise me if it's that high. It's, not even close to what is it now? What, about 40,000? Yeah. Because I have a lot of Palestinian friends and all of them have many relatives, family, friends who are missing, who they haven't had contact with for weeks. And of course, they're under the rubble and they're not being counted.

From James: Do you think anything regarding Julian Assange will happen before the election? 

So the extradition of Julian is being driven by the CIA because of Vault 7. Vault 7 was the leak that exposed the hacking tools the CIA uses in our smartphones and televisions and even our cars, even if you turn it off, it's a monitoring device, and they were furious. So the extradition request, although he's being extradited for the Iraqi war logs, the extradition request did not come until the release of Vault 7. And then you add the, it was exposed these discussions within the CIA about assassinating or kidnapping Julian, and I've been to London. I was, not at the last two hour hearing, but I was at the two day hearing before that and the the legal farce that's been carried out. First of all, Julian didn't commit a crime but all of the legal anomalies, just as many of them, viscerating attorney client privilege because. the U.C. Global, the Spanish security firm recorded all of Julian's meetings with his lawyers, turned it over to the CIA. So that alone should see the case thrown out. 

Charging an Australian citizen under the espionage act whose publication isn't based in the U.S. it doesn't, none of it makes any sense, but the British courts have gone along with it. And I think Biden, he's got enough headache. He doesn't want Assange extradited. So in the last case, the two judge panel, this was Julian's last attempt to avoid extradition and to get them to agree to an appeal. The judges asked for two assurances from the U.S. One, that Julian would not be given the death penalty. And secondly, that, he would be given First Amendment rights. And it was interesting that the U.S. lawyers did not, would not guarantee Julian First Amendment rights, and by doing that, they, of course, knew that the appeal would go forward, which is what I think they want. You have to remember that Julian is in very precarious psychological and physical health. 

He's been in Belmarsh prison, high security prison, although he's not charged with a crime. Technically he violated bail by going to the Ecuadorian embassy, but I think part of it is just to destroy him. Seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy. he's had a minor stroke. We know from court proceedings that he has been observed banging his head against the wall, hallucinating. They found a razor blade in his socks. He's called the Samaritans hotline for suicide prevention and that's what they want. It suits their purposes to destroy him. I, think now, the appeal won't go ahead until the fall and which will surely allow the Biden administration not to extradite him until after the election, but the pressure comes from the CIA. It's the CIA that wants him and, that's a very unforgiving agency.

So I don't want to hold everybody up. We can do a couple more. tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of D Day. This is from Charles. What will you be reflecting on tomorrow as America and the rest of the world celebrates victory against fascism? 

We love those movies like “Saving Private Ryan” and everything else because it's a celebration of us. You notice there aren't a lot of movies about the South Pacific where my uncle fought and they didn't take any prisoners and they were cutting off the ears of Japanese corpses and everything, cutting their teeth out for the gold fillings, et cetera. There is that kind of nostalgia for, and of course the good war was never good, but there is that kind of nostalgia. Fascism is protean, it comes in different shapes, different forms. It isn't going to come to America in jackboots and the swastika. It's going to come with a Christian cross and the Pledge of Allegiance, as Robert Paxton pointed out in "The Anatomy of Fascism." So the irony is that, on the one hand we're celebrating the defeat of German fascism. The fascists within our midst are about to assume power if Trump is elected, which he may well be. 

Do you think an institution like WikiLeaks could ever exist again in this age of the internet? 

Julian wrote a book called, "Cypherpunks." It's a short little book. He wrote it with [Jacob] Applebaum. It is really interesting because his argument, he knows a lot more about it than I do, is that in the short term, the internet gave us access as all sorts of information like the kind of information that was provided by WikiLeaks. But the book in the end argues that it will be a very effective, tool for totalitarian repression, unlike anything we've ever seen. Certainly dwarfing anything the East German Stasi was ever able to do. and unfortunately, I think probably Julian is right. So I guess we're going to stop there. We'll do it again. And, check out the Substack, chrisedges.substack.com. And this will go out and the shows will go out once we get them.

And I want to thank Diego and Thomas and Max who set all this up because I'm incapable of setting it up. And we'll be handling the shows. Once we get the technical facilities set up, which were, of course, this is the first trial of that, then I will begin to set up the authors and the books. And it takes me two to three weeks to prepare for those shows because I have to read the books. So I think we're looking at starting probably cause I am going to Jordan. Try and start the middle of the summer if we can because I'd like continuity, I'd like to be able to do it every week. At the latest, the end of August, but I don't see why we can't start sometime in July. All right. Thank you very much for watching.