The Chris Hedges Report

The year 2008 signaled to many the weak foundations of modern capitalism in the hands of the greedy, untethered financial sector—the “vampire squid” investment banks as journalist Matt Taibbi called them. Rising from the ashes of the crash, these banks used government money—”socialism for the bankers”—to enrich themselves and Big Business. This money never got to the masses. Instead shares were bought back in traditional capitalist industries and an emerging powerful bloc—the Jeff Bezos’s, the Microsoft’s, the Google’s of the world—invested in what guest Yanis Varoufakis calls, “cloud capital.”

Former member of the Greek parliament and Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to explain how capitalism is dead and a new form of capital, the title of his new book, “Technofeudalism,” has arisen and holds power akin to the feudal lords of medieval times.

Varoufakis argues that the two pillars of capitalism, markets and profits, have now been replaced and a familiar system of fiefdoms and serfs has emerged. “Markets have been replaced by these digital platforms that look like markets but are not markets. They're more like digital or cloud fiefdoms like Amazon.com or Alibaba, where you have a digital fence keeping within it producers, consumers, artisans, intellectuals, and we are all essentially producing value for the owner of that digital fiefdom, Jeff Bezos in this particular case, in the case of Amazon, who charges ground rent, but of course it's cloud rent,” Varoufakis tells Hedges.

The huge amount of investment in phones, laptops, cell towers, server farms and thousands of miles of optical fiber cables has brought about a system that now dominates all parts of life, including even behavior modification in individual people. The most common platforms used today—Instagram, Google, Amazon, etc.—use their automated systems to produce “tailor-made advertisements which are in a dialectical relationship with us,” Varoufakis says. “We train them to train us, to train them to train us, to convince us that we want something.”

Varoufakis discusses this and more, including how private equity companies like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard also tap into this system of rentier capitalism and do away with competition, parasitically exploiting working people and traditional capitalists alike.

Mary Shelley, in the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, writes, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” In the chaos of war and inequity, cartoonist Joe Sacco pioneered the first graphic illustration journalism. Sacco has covered some of the most devastating warzones such as in Bosnia, which gave birth to his book, “Safe Area Gorazde,” and Gaza, which inspired “Footnotes in Gaza,” a book host Chris Hedges calls, “A masterpiece… one of the finest books done on the Palestine-Israel conflict, hands down.”

Sacco joins Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his continued journey through chaos and how Israel’s genocide in Gaza influenced the newest iteration of his invention, his book “War on Gaza.”

Hedges quotes a question Sacco asks in the book, “Is it genocide or is it self-defense? Let's make everyone happy and say it is both. In that case, we'll need new terminology. I propose genocidal self-defense that should give both sides something to work with.”

Through visual renderings, dark humor and objective reporting, Sacco is able evoke responses to events playing out in ways traditional media can never achieve.

“You will find humor in places like Gaza, places like Bosnia, and it's always of the darkest sort. It's their way of sort of managing their own thoughts, being funny, but understanding the underlying darkness of their humor. And I think I picked that up and I'm reflecting it back,” Sacco tells Hedges.

The two reference several parts of Sacco’s new book, touching on the different ways the genocide has altered life in the West, including academic censorship, the question of democracy and biblical interpretation.

In the end, Sacco says it all comes back to his own personal life and the connection it has with such an atrocity. “I've always had this idea that whatever I'm paying in taxes really just adds up to one small piece of shrapnel. I mean, as a nightmare, I just imagine that all my money is funneled into a small part of a bomb that causes someone to lose their life in Gaza.”

“You can't just sit there and build drones and not talk about who it's serving and who does it help,” says Richard Solomon, PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the Coalition for Palestine at MIT. On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Solomon and fellow MIT PhD student Prahlad Iyengar detail their battle against the historic institution’s active participation in the genocide in Gaza. Their story exemplifies the repression students face across the country who dare question how their work and labor are used to advance the illegal and morally reprehensible goals of the Israeli military.

“What this ultimately means is that MIT's research can enable a genocide and in fact is enabling the ongoing genocide against Palestinians,” Iyengar states plainly. The two students have found themselves in hot water recently following Iynegar’s tepid encounter at an MIT career fair as well as an op-ed authored by the student coalition.

Iyengar’s engagement with Lockheed Martin recruiters—where, after politely waiting in line at a career fair, he expressed his discomfort for their involvement in the genocide and climate crisis—resulted in him being charged with harassment and intimidation of the recruiters. The op-ed called out Daniela Rus, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, for the laboratory’s direct collaboration with the Israeli military. Rus successfully pressured MIT’s paper, The Tech, to retract the article despite presenting publicly available information and real ties to the Israeli military apparatus.

“By introducing these technologies and by enabling these technologies,” Iyengar tells Hedges, “what is really being enabled by MIT's research for the Israeli military is the ability for drones to engage in tracking, in facial recognition, in targeting of Palestinians.”

Solomon makes clear that the politicization of academic work is not novel and recently, MIT itself has distanced itself from projects that are tied to genocides or wars. “If MIT did it for the genocide in Darfur in 2008, if they could divest from the Draper labs, if they could, at one point, I think in 2022, they ended their relationships with a Russian university that they'd helped establish—I mean, if they can do those things over political crimes and acts and recognize them as political moves, they can also do the same for the Palestinians,” he says.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said, “The protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.” International law enshrines medical facilities as sanctuaries for those in direst need but as Dr. Rupa Marya tells host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Israel’s attacks on hospitals amidst the ongoing genocide represent a catastrophic violation of this principle.

A professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, Marya now faces suspension for speaking out against Israel’s blatant violations of international law. “The killing of healthcare workers [in Gaza] is related to the silencing of healthcare workers here [in the U.S.], and that by silencing us, the medical institutions we are a part of, which have an obligation, professionally and morally, to uphold all life, are actually abetting and enabling genocide,” Marya tells Hedges.

Marya describes the horror scenes at hospitals across Gaza. The IDF not only targets hospitals with airstrikes but also enters them to deploy gun strapped drones that kill patients and staff as well as destroy vital medical machines and instruments. “Hamas is not hiding in those machines. This is an attempt to shorten the life of Palestinian people,” Marya says.

Mayra, collaborating with a handful of medical professionals and lawyers, is authoring a UN report, addressing what they refer to as “the genocide enablement apparatus of Israel.” Alongside bringing critical attention to the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system, they urge the inclusion of medical professionals future international legal frameworks for defining genocide. “It does not take months to see that this was a genocide. So for those of us who were in touch with the physicians on the ground and the healthcare workers on the ground in October, it was clear that this was a genocide.”

The vast censorship and suppression campaign launched by American tech companies since October 7, 2023 has been both systemic and deliberate. Instagram, Facebook, X as well as other tech platforms and companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have actively worked to stifle information regarding the genocide in Gaza. Dissent against policies or individuals who enable these decisions is often met with swift reprimand in the form of job loss.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report are three courageous individuals who chose to put their careers on the line to fight against Big Tech suppression of voices fighting for Palestinian lives.

Saima Akhter, a former data analyst at Meta; Hossam Nasr, a former software engineer at Microsoft; and Tariq Ra’ouf, a former tech expert at Apple, speak about the internal struggles they dealt with in light of the genocide, which ultimately led to each of their dismissals.

Tariq recalls how Muslim Slack channels at Apple were often subjected to mass flaggings for innocuous things such as posting Quran verses yet Jewish Slack channels, “were advocating for the genocide… calling all Palestinians terrorists. They were saying that we need to stop this company supporting pro-Palestinian causes.” Those messages, Tariq says, were never removed and nobody was ever fired for them.

Saima details the problematic dangerous organizations and individuals [DOI] policies, which she says are heavily influenced by the Israeli and American governments. “Even though this is a platform that is global—Instagram and Facebook is the way the world communicates, but it is an American company, and the American government heavily influences what it determines to be a terrorist,” she tells Hedges.

The most critical and perhaps frightening part, Hossam describes, is the actual complicity many of these tech companies have on the genocide. “The truly scary part of this is that all the major American cloud companies—Google, Amazon and Microsoft—are deeply critical to that infrastructure, providing cloud services, storage services, artificial intelligence services without which the Israeli military would not have been able to be as effective,” Hossam says. Israel simply does not have the in-house power to be able to collect and process the data that is being used to target Palestinians, according to Hossam, and tech companies, at the objection of hundreds of employees, fill that need.

In a case of tragic coincidence, the place most closely associated with the uplifting story of Jesus Christ, Christmas and the teachings of the Bible is now being subject to some of the most sustained and severe death and destruction that modern society has seen.

Rev. Munther Isaac, the pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem and the Lutheran Church in Beit Sahour, joins host Chris Hedges on this special episode of The Chris Hedges Report to revisit the story of Christmas and how it relates to Palestine then and now.

Rev. Isaac wastes no time in reminding people that despite the usual jolly associations with Christmas, the story of Jesus Christ is one of oppression, one that involves the struggle of refugees, the rule of a tyrant, the witnessing of a massacre and the levying of taxation. “To us here in Palestine,” Rev. Isaac says, the terms linked to the struggle “actually make the story, as we read it in the Gospel, very much a Palestinian story, because we can identify with the characters.”

Hedges and Rev. Isaac invoke the story of the Good Samaritan to point out the deliberate blindness the world has bestowed upon the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza in the midst of the ongoing genocide. The conclusion of the [Good Samaritan] story is that there is no us and them, Rev. Isaac tells Hedges. “Everybody is a neighbor. You don't draw a circle and determine who's in and who's out.”

It’s clear, Rev. Isaac points out, “the Palestinians are outside of the circle. We've been saying it—human rights don't apply on us, not even compassion.”

While the trauma that Palestinians continue to face in Gaza is sustained, brutal and seemingly never-ending, the way people experience the effects of trauma has the potential to unite humanity as much as it divides the self. Dr. Gabor Maté, renowned physician and expert in trauma and childhood development, illustrates this point articulately and beautifully on the latest episode of The Chris Hedges Report through attempting to make sense of the psychology, trauma and reason behind the actions of Palestinians, IDF soldiers, WWII survivors, Nazis and even himself. 

Hedges begins the show by asking Maté to describe the trauma that Palestinians currently face, as they struggle to survive the constant shelling and murder delivered by their occupiers for over a year now. But even Maté struggles to make sense of it all: “This weekend, 40 members of a single family were killed. So when that child is orphaned, it means that their whole support system is gone. So you know what? I can't tell you. I can only extrapolate from what I've seen and imagine something unfathomable.”

Hedges and Maté do not only reckon with the psychology of the victims of genocide, but also grapple with how “ordinary men” become willing, ruthless, executioners under the rule of totalitarian regimes. Hedges, not sure if these seemingly normal people commit atrocities as a result of trauma or because they are not “morally sentient,” is challenged by Maté, who poses the question, “Well, why would somebody become morally insentient?” 

The doctor goes on to describe how humans achieve a healthy moral compass. Rather than be taught morality or indoctrinated into it, people gain moral sentience “because [caretakers] treat you well, because they see you, they understand you, they love you, they embrace you. They promote the development of moral faculties, which is a natural human process given the right conditions. So the lack of moral sentience is actually a sign of trauma.” 

Maté’s analysis connects back to the Palestinian resistance itself, and the atrocities they often commit in pursuit of liberation from their occupiers. Hedges, who knew the co-founder of Hamas, Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, tells Maté that when he pressed al-Rantisi on the act of suicide bombing, Rantisi justified his stance with statistics as a way to “morally evade” the subject. Maté simply, yet wisely, explains that Rantisi, who witnessed the Israelis execute his uncle at the age of 10, did not receive the “right conditions” that would have equipped him to recognize these moral contradictions. “I think what happens is that one of the impacts of trauma is it can close your heart, and when your heart is closed, you don't see the humanity of the other.”

The fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, ending a 55-year dynasty begun by his father, dramatically shifts the pieces on the chessboard of the Middle East. The rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is armed and backed by Turkey and was once allied with Al Qaeda. It is sanctioned as a terrorist group. Turkey’s primary goal is to prevent an independent Kurdish state in northern Syria where Kurds have formed an autonomous enclave. But it may not only be Turkey that is behind the overthrow of Assad. It may also be Israel. Israel has long sought to topple the Syrian regime which is the transit point for weapons and aid sent from Iran to the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah. The Syrian regime was backed by Russia and Iran, indeed Russian warplanes routinely bombed Syrian rebel targets. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gloated about the ousting of Assad calling it an "historic day" and said it was a direct result of Israel's actions against Hezbollah and Iran. But at the same time, Israel will soon have an Islamic state on its border.

Syria, a country of 23 million, is geopolitically important. It links Iraq’s oil to the Mediterranean, the Shia of Iraq and Iran to Lebanon, and Turkey, a NATO ally, to Jordan’s deserts.

Assad’s decision to brutally crush a pro-democracy movement triggered a 14-year-long civil war in 2011 that led to 500,000 people being killed and more than 14 million displaced.

Now What? Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham seek to renew relations with Iran? Will it impose an Islamic state, given its jihadist roots? Will Syria’s many minority groups, Alawite, Druze, Circassian, Armenian, Chechen, Assyrian, Christian and Turkoman, be persecuted, especially the Alawites, a heterodox offshoot of Shiite Islam comprising around 10 percent of the population, which Assad and the ruling elites were members of? How will it affect the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which holds the Syrian oil-rich territory in north and east Syria? Why are the U.S. and Israel bombing targets in Syria following the ouster of Assad? Will the new regime be able to convince the U.S. and Europe to lift sanctions and return the occupied oil fields? What does this portend for the wider Middle East, especially in Lebanon and the Israeli occupied territories?

Joining Chris Hedges to discuss the overthrow of the Assad regime and its ramifications is former British diplomat Alastair Crooke. He served for many years in the Middle East working as a security advisor to the EU special envoy to the Middle East, as well as helping lead efforts to set up negotiations and truces between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian resistant groups with Israel. He was instrumental in establishing the 2002 ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. He is also the author of Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, which analyzes the ascendancy of Islamic movements in the Middle East.

The American material life is taken for granted. Things just appear. There is no consideration for what country the Empire destroyed to fuel their cars, which people are earning pennies inside sweatshops for their clothes or how many children’s hands touched the lithium in their phone batteries fresh out of the mine. The U.S. Empire makes sure these realities are out of the public consciousness and only the shiny, finished products end up in the public view, no questions asked. Matt Kennard, founder of the independent investigative outlet Declassified UK, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire.”

In his book, Kennard details his journey as a reporter for the Financial Times and how his time in the mainstream media permitted him unrestricted access to countries around the world, not to report on the destruction, destabilization and ransacking by the corporate state the U.S. serves but rather on the veneer of what he calls the “empire of acronyms.”

The NED (National Endowment for Democracy, USAID (United States Agency for International Development), DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) all feature in Kennard’s book as the supposed benevolent American representatives abroad. This is what makes them so effective and their strategy unprecedented.

“The United States is unlike all previous empires which did operate on exploitative terms… . It operates on noble principles like freedom, democracy, development, whatever these words are, and it's pervasive,” Kennard tells Hedges.

Exposing this facade, as Kennard does, quickly exposes the true nature of the “benevolent” US organizations operating overseas: “The U.S. is the major impediment to human progress.”

His reporting and research paints a clear picture of how the modern day empire works. U.S. subversion in Bolivian elections, U.S. presence on military bases around the world, U.S. undermining of anti-imperialist British politicians and, of course, U.S. subservience to Israel all paints this bloody picture. “The primary role of the U.S. Empire is to make a global economy run in the interests of American corporate power.” 

The years of war and terror imposed upon the Middle East have left its people, as Jordan Elgrably tells host Chris Hedges, “tired of saying that [they’re] human too.” In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Elgrably discusses the stories that remind English-speaking Western readers of the humanity behind those from this often misunderstood and misrepresented region.

In “Stories From the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction,” 25 authors weave together unique tales that offer a nuanced and substantive portrayal of the region. Hedges and Elgrably explore a handful of the stories, delving into themes such as the struggles of working class immigrants, the challenges of adjusting to life in the Middle East after years in American society and more.

A consistent theme of many of the tales that Hedges and Elgrably explore is the rejection of society, and a people longing for connection that imperial power and greed denies them. As Hedges states, “[The] first section of stories are about exile, the pain of exile, the way that these outside forces intrude to distort, deform, destroy lives.” In one chilling passage, the author states: “I made an unavoidable mistake. I had a terrible dream, screamed and was discovered here. Even your nightmares can betray you. In the future — and I also use this word with a laugh — I will sleep with tape over my mouth."

These stories thrust the reader into the perspectives of Middle Eastern people, whether they’re immigrants or refugees, and through their thoughts, actions and complexities, unravel the misconceptions so often exploited by politicians about them. “There's an explanation for why people would leave. They don't hate their countries. They would love to be able to stay,” Elgrably says.

Through the characters' interactions with culture and society, the stories tackle themes such as class dynamics, and the often untold trauma of a population cursed by foreign intervention and war. As Hedges and Elgrably discuss, the narratives reveal the humanity at the root of these underrepresented issues.

The multitude of stories provides people an accessible introduction into the world of Middle Eastern writing. “You can take this as a stepping stone to discovering other writers from that part of the world,” Elgrably says.

Any technology created by the US military industrial complex and adopted by the general public was always bound to come with a caveat. To most, the internet, GPS, touch screen and other ubiquitous technologies are ordinary tools of the modern world. Yet in reality, these technologies serve “dual-uses”; while they convenience typical people, they also enable the mass coercion, surveillance and control of those very same people at the hands of the corporate and military state.

Nolan Higdon and Allison Butler, authors of “Surveillance Education: Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools,” join host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. They explore the software and technology systems employed in K-12 schools and higher education institutions that surveil students, erode minors’ privacy rights and, in the process, discriminate against students of color.

The use of this technology, Higdon explains, is predicated on treating humans as products through surveillance capitalism. “You extract data and information about humans from all these smart technologies, and then you're able to make determinations about their behavior, how they might react to something. And there's a lot of industries that are interested in this,” Higdon tells Hedges.

Butler explains that students, often with no choice in the matter, are subjected to the use of this technology that inherently exploits their data. Because there is an implied consent for it to be used, “The very limited amount of protections that there are to keep minors’ data secure is gone once you have a technology that is put into their classroom,” Butler says. “There's a passive acceptance of this technology.”

Higdon points to changes made by the Obama administration in 2012 to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) as a key factor. These changes allowed for student data to be shared with private companies that serve as educational partners. “Effectively, all of that data that the students rights movement worked to make sure was private was allowed to be distributed to these companies,” Higdon says.

The authors stress the deep impact these technologies have on the fundamental processes of learning in the classroom. “It curtails curiosity, which is essential to the education process,” Higdon says. “The mental trauma and difficulty of closing one of the few spaces where they're able to explore, I think it just speaks to the problem with surveillance and the education process.”

Reporting from Israel in the aftermath of October 7th demands guts and courage. Censorship, rouge military personnel and an entire state hellbent on their goals of national security and ethnic cleansing spells a nightmare for journalists seeking to expose the truth. This nightmare became a reality for Grayzone reporter Jeremy Loffredo, who was detained in Israel in solitary confinement for three days after reporting on the Iranian missile attacks on October 1.

Loffredo joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to review his reporting covering Israel in the U.S., the Occupied Territories and Israel itself—as well as his frightening detainment by the occupying forces. 

From covering Israeli counter protests in New York City to witnessing Israeli settlers obstructing humanitarian aid to Gaza, Loffredo was consistently shocked by the attitude and drive of Israelis. The widespread nature of extreme rhetoric isn’t just isolated to a handful of individuals, Loffredo learned. “It was the first time I heard anyone be so candidly racist and genocidal, and truly, I didn't know the face of fanatical Zionism,” he tells Hedges.

During his time in Israel, Loffredo documented not only more of the genocidal rhetoric and actions from Israelis but also the suffering and bravery of Palestinians. One particular instance involved a woman who, out of a list of 50 previously detained people, was the only one willing to speak to him on record. The others were too frightened of the consequences that telling the truth might bring them. 

Beyond revealing the utterly authoritarian and censorious climate of Israel, Loffredo’s detention and treatment by the IDF and Israeli police also expose the U.S. government’s corrupt devotion to the Jewish State, and how it abandons its purported democratic values when they interfere with the goals of their most “reliable partner” in the Middle East. When an Israeli social worker was sent by the American embassy to do a “wellness check” on Loffredo while he was in solitary confinement, the journalist hoped she would get him food and water, which he had been deprived of for days. Instead, she berated Loffredo because he “hurt Israel” and told him that he’d likely remain in prison for a long time. “That is the only help that the American Embassy afforded me… was giving me this Zionist social worker to berate me because of my reporting and give me no help at all,” Loffredo recounts.

A truly representative and honest voice for the working class—one that takes part in the struggle, resists cozying up to the centers of power, makes tangible, material commitments rather than settling for empty rhetoric—is hard to find in the United States. Kshama Sawant, the socialist and former Seattle City Council member who won the battle for a $15 minimum wage, introduced the Amazon tax and championed unprecedented renter’s rights joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the 2024 election.

Sawant frames the election as an opportunity to build a worker-led movement, explaining her support for Jill Stein’s campaign and introducing Workers Strike Back, a nationwide organization she co-founded to advance the cause for working people.

“If genocide is not a red line, then there is no red line,” Sawant declares. She emphasizes that while a victory for Stein is not in the cards, Sawant argues that being honest is crucial, especially when the Stein campaign is capable of outlasting this election cycle and become a catalyst for an anti-war, pro-worker movement capable of taking on the big business-backing, warmongering parties.

Sawant says that even if Stein captures only 1% of the vote, it is still a powerful statement: over a million people  reject the two party system. In her experience running for Seattle City Council, she explains how numbers like this can energize and mobilize working people—only if the candidates are honest and upfront about the gains they stand to make. After telling her constituents that she expected to win 1% in her primary but ending up with 9%, “nobody walked home after primary election night feeling demoralized. People walked home thinking, I'm gonna get up tomorrow and fight like hell in the general election,” Sawant tells Hedges.

Sawant insists that the struggle is about changing the lives of working people. Evoking her political history, she describes what it means to be a Marxist: “it means you lead a fight back. It means you show actual examples of class struggle, meaning going up against the forces of capitalism and winning despite all their might and having the strategy of bending the balance of forces towards the working class.” 

“That is what it's all about,” Sawant asserts.

Sawant will continue these thoughts on an election night (November 5) stream on YouTube, analyzing the results and discussing what can happen next for working people.

Donald Trump will become the 47th president of the United States and given the host of global debacles the US has its hands in—ranging from the genocide in Gaza, to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Iran to the Ukraine war—nobody is quite certain what direction the country will take with the former president at the helm again.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. With his extensive insights and expertise into the Middle East and American foreign policy, Wilkerson provides a valuable understanding into what a Trump presidency may look like outside of the borders of America.

Wilkerson predicts Trump will stay true to “his disdain for war,” emphasizing “it's genuine. I don't think he likes war. I don't think he likes starting wars.” Regarding Ukraine, Wilkerson thinks Trump will shut down the war effort. But when it comes to the Middle East, that commitment clashes with one of Trump’s long standing loyalties: unwavering support for Israel.

War with Iran seems increasingly likely by the day despite, according to Wilkerson, resistance from the Pentagon and prior administrations. In the case of Trump, however, “you wonder how long that resistance can hold up if the president of the United States is intent on—and this is the one place where Trump really worries me—doing everything in his power for Israel,” Wilkerson notes. He adds, “Trump has made it quite clear that that's his policy, that's his belief, and I think he's being honest about it.”

Citing war-game simulations, reports, personal sources as well as his own expertise, Wilkerson lays down the reality of potential war with Iran: sheer disaster. With sources saying that the IDF is already taking heavy casualties in Lebanon, any sort of escalation with Iran would compound the suffering of the US and Israel. “Iran will top $10 trillion, take 10 years to pacify, if it's even moderately pacified, and cost a fortune in blood and treasure,” Wilkerson warns.

“The crime of all crimes.” That is how the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda declared genocide in the final judgment of Prosecutor v. Akayesu, the case against the mayor of Taba, Rwanda for crimes against humanity. Today, that crime repeats itself as UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese painfully details in her latest report.

Albanese joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to breakdown her report and present the indisputable evidence that Israel is actively committing a genocide on the Palestinian people.

“The acts of killing, the mass killing, the infliction of psychological and physical torture, the devastation, the creation of conditions of life that would not allow the people in Gaza to live, from the destruction of hospitals, the mass force displacement and the mass homelessness while people were being bombed daily, and the starvation—how can we read these acts in isolation?” Albanese asks.

The UN Special Rapporteur clearly outlines the steps and conditions required to meet the classification of genocide, and in the case of Gaza, it’s undeniable. Albanese tells Hedges, “What is relevant in order to establish that there is genocide is not just the intent behind these crimes, enunciated in Article II of the Genocide Convention; it’s the overall intent, specific intent, to destroy the people—the group as a whole, or in part, as such. And what is the group here? It's the Palestinians.”

Throughout the rest of Albanese’s report are harrowing details of the death and destruction Palestinians endure on a daily basis in countless forms, alongside the horror suffered by non-Palestinians in Gaza. Albanese documents record-breaking numbers: The highest number of journalists killed, the highest number of UN officials killed, the highest number of hospitals targeted, the destruction of all universities, the fastest rate of population starvation. It’s clear, according to Albanese, the scale of devastation the Israelis are inflicting is one of scorched-earth catastrophe.

Decades of Islamophobia, relentless propaganda campaigns and heavily financed lobbying efforts have made it difficult to understand the political realities of the Middle East. John Mearsheimer, prominent political scientist, University of Chicago professor and self-proclaimed realist, has consistently demonstrated the courage and ability to bypass the noise, delivering honest and well-informed analysis on global affairs. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to lay out what’s happening in the Middle East, from Israel’s genocide in Gaza to its escalating attacks on Lebanon and Iran.

Netanyahu and his cabinet have resorted to violence and escalation every step of the way thus far and any prediction of what’s to come involves more of the same. “I see [Netanyahu] escalating at every turn,” Mearsheimer tells Hedges. “And I think if you look at what's happening in Lebanon, that fits the pattern that you were describing. They're just going up the escalation ladder, looking and hoping that they can find a solution.”

Israel’s decisions are transforming world politics, with alliances hardening in response to their aggression: Russia and Iran on one side, the U.S. and Israel on the other. Even long-standing religious divides between Shia and Sunnis are beginning to fade as they join forces against Israel’s brutality and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Sunni Hamas, Shia Hezbollah and the Houthis, even the Saudis and Iran are starting to find common ground. “I think what's going on here is that Israel's behavior is so horrible. It's so terrible what they're doing, and America's support of that behavior is so horrible, so terrible, that what's happening is that the divide between Shia and Sunnis is beginning to melt.”

Despite this shift in the region and rising tension with Iran, the U.S. continues to be drawn deeper into the turmoil, with every Israeli provocation pulling its leadership further in— regardless of popular opinion. Mearsheimer says that while the majority of Americans do not support U.S. involvement in Gaza, “that doesn't translate into policy, because the lobby is so deadly effective on Capitol Hill and in dealing with the executive branch.”

He has little hope in change, especially given the precedent of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and its complicity in the genocide thus far. “I think the lobby remains as powerful as ever, if not more powerful in terms of influencing the actual US policy,” Mearsheimer asserts.

Transcript and video available at: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-escalating-crisis-in-the-middle

It is rare to hear a United States presidential candidate clearly and eloquently spell out the realities of the country — whether it’s the genocide in Gaza, rising economic inequality or the horrors of mass incarceration. Dr. Cornel West, renowned political activist, philosopher, public intellectual, author and now independent presidential candidate, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to give an update on his campaign and to highlight the critical issues that define his fight for justice and equality.

West argues that the duopoly in the U.S. today often represents two sides of the same coin. On one hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans are a much more blatant example of the push towards fascism while Kamala Harris provides the American people a friendly face who in reality will defend the interests of the country’s most powerful elites. These forces, West says, embody the core features of the American political class, which are “conformity, complacency and cowardliness and being well adjusted to injustice and well adapted to indifference, it wants people to only see your success and not the underside.”

While West’s campaign has tried to address the most pressing issues facing Americans, he explains the system is set up to disenfranchise movements like his. He states, “The lies are so thick, people are so gullible, and every empire we know undergoes, for the most part, implosion based on outreach, military outreach.”

West invites people to view themselves as part of this bigger picture of what America represents, both domestically and globally. When people view themselves as innocent or removed from the crimes of the American empire, West argues, they absolve themselves of the responsibility to confront and correct these injustices. The various forms of hatred that brew within the U.S. — racism, classism or any other type of discrimination — are, according to West, “ideological forms that hide and conceal the deeper crimes that are tied, in the end, to predatory capitalist processes that will do anything for short term profit.”

There is a careful art to good journalism. It involves not only seeing and writing what happens but also understanding the reason why, and the precedent that came before it. Empathy, combined with a cunning understanding of one’s environment and ability to talk to people are crucial instruments for a reporter hoping to get the whole story — not just the headline a paper may seek. Joining host Chris Hedges is Lara Marlowe, journalist and author, to talk about how her former husband and colleague Robert Fisk encapsulated all of that in his years as a journalist and writer and how his work, specifically his book "The Great War for Civilization,” serves as one of the West’s great tools in understanding the modern Middle East.

Marlowe details how Fisk meticulously reported on major stories, such as the US carrier Vincennes shooting down an Iranian civilian airplane or the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. She highlights what it was like to be a fly on the wall, observing his reporting methods, including often finding ways of reporting a story when official lines of communication were down. While in Iran reporting on the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655, Marlowe tells Hedges, “Robert started sweet talking the Telex operator… and…started writing his front page story directly onto the Telex machine, which amazed me, it really did.”

When Fisk was subject to an almost fatal beating by an Afghan mob, Marlowe explains that even then, he was still understanding and empathetic to the anger of the people. “[Fisk] said that he didn't blame the people who'd beaten him, because he said if the Americans had just bombed my village and destroyed my house… and I saw a Westerner on a bus on the Afghan-Pakistan border, I'd want to kill him too,” Marlowe recounts.

It is this level of discernment and compassion that distinguished him from other reporters and what made him such an effective journalist. He would step where others wouldn’t and face controversy head on. One such instance involves Fisk’s reporting on the suicide bombing of a US Marine compound in Beirut in 1983, which killed 307 people, and how he interviewed parents and siblings of the bombers. Through this, Marlowe sums up his dedication to reporting: “He really made the effort to understand why they did it. And I think he came closer than anybody else in the West, any non-Muslim, to understanding.”

Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCBujuk6g48)

Transcript available: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/robert-fisk-and-the-great-war-for

Watch this interview at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=see5c5Sgi14

The current world order is designed to be complex and confusing. Its function enshrines the power of our rulers, who purposely obscure its origins and underlying philosophy. Politicians, the media, so-called intellectuals at think tanks — along with the inertia of systemic falsehoods — perpetuate this veiled system. Neoliberalism has maintained its dominance through exploiting the many to sustain the prosperity of the few.

The discussion, Hedges and Monbiot make clear, extends far beyond economics and policy decisions. Neoliberalism affects every aspect of people’s lives and for this reason, it remains an elusive topic of discussion amongst its victims and beneficiaries. “Neoliberalism has permitted a kind of full spectrum capitalism, which could be described as totalitarian capitalism in that it penetrates every aspect of our lives,” Monbiot tells Hedges. “Everything becomes monetized, everything becomes commoditized, even our relations with each other.”

Neoliberalism establishes a tollbooth over the essential systems necessary for human survival. With little regard for regulation (other than its diminishment), the law or the overall well-being of humans and the planet, this system enables “this tremendously rich class of oligarchs emerging out of the rentier economy [to use] their exclusive capture of assets, assets which the rest of us need, to ensure that we pay way over the odds to them in order to use those assets.”

Monbiot illustrates this dynamic through his own experiences in the United Kingdom, referencing the privatization of the water supply, which allows for private companies to charge outrageous fees, invest minimally in maintenance and use rivers as sewers. “We have no choice,” Monbiot says. “We have to use the water. There's only one supplier in each region of the UK, so we have to go with that supplier. So they can charge pretty well what they want. There is a regulator which is supposed to limit that, but the regulator, as so often happens with neoliberalism, has been completely captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate.”

The world has failed Palestine. The United States and European Union pay lip service to principles of human rights and democracy while providing limitless support to Israel’s genocidal project of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Western media outlets censor reporting of Israeli atrocities, and international humanitarian organizations require that Palestinians prove their victimhood over and over again. Arab states, on the whole, remain silent and complicit. 

In the context of so much injustice, the new documentary Where the Olive Trees Weep offers a rare view into the everyday experience and psychological ramifications of occupation. Filmed in 2022 in the West Bank, the film follows Palestinian journalist and therapist Ashira Darwish, Israeli journalist Amira Haas, activist Ahed Tamimi, Dr. Gabor Maté, and others. On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Chris Hedges speaks with Ashira Darwish and with the film’s directors and producers, Zaya Ralitza Benazzo and Maurizio Benazzo. 

Zaya & Maurizio’s intention for the project was to explore the cycles of trauma inflicted by the Zionist occupation. Since long before the present genocide, Israeli forces have been using violence with impunity to punish popular and nonviolent resistance, and to inflict terror on Palestinian men, women, and children going about everyday activities such as attending school. Consequently, the Palestinian experience is marked ubiquitously by violence and loss, and by the constant fear of further violence. 

Darwish, who herself has been detained and seriously injured by Israeli soldiers while participating in nonviolent protest, observes how the violence of everyday life shapes attitudes towards death. For children in Gaza and the West Bank, “being in the hands of the divine” becomes a safer, easier option than life under occupation. Amidst endless loss, “death is a celebration also because you’re going home to your beloveds.” 

As Palestinians embrace death, so do they embrace life. While filming in the West Bank, Maurizio and Zaya were moved by Palestinians’ joyful celebrations of life, deep sense of community, and fearless commitment to fighting for their freedom. Faith, community, and resistance are deeply intertwined, and integral to the process of healing collective trauma. As Darwish affirms, “the liberation of Palestine is our healing.”