Palestinian professor and activist Amin Husain knows what Western settler colonialism looks, sounds and feels like. Growing up in Palestine, Husain experienced the iron grip of Israeli force and came to understand how important it was to struggle against such a powerful imperial entity, even in the face of defeat.

In the United States, Husain applied his learned experience to organize and educate about how colonialism and imperialism not only exists in the modern world, but is intertwined in the economy and culture of the global capitalist world order. Husain joins host Chris Hedges to chronicle his story and his approach to fighting settler colonialism, which, after October 7th, led to his firing from New York University.

?A lot of people exceptionalize Palestine, but what Palestine does is clarify what is happening in the world. It?s one type of future,? Husain explains.

Some of Husain?s activism work involved organizing alternative tours in museums such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where the very layout and structure of the museum was challenged in a way that brought material change.

?You go into a museum and you think that that?s neutral but this is how the nation state narrative gets perpetuated from a very young age so that you think it?s normal. There?s nothing normal about a 36-foot monument that?s about imperialism and white supremacy,? Husain says of the infamous Teddy Roosevelt statue depicting the president riding on horseback accompanied by a colonized Native American and African, each wielding guns.

Husain?s work, which has been censored by the military-contracting Big Tech companies, demonstrates a model of resilience and education that can challenge power and cultivate community.

Lawlessness has been a common theme characterizing the events of the first weeks of the year. The kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the murder of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, the threat of bombing Iran by the Trump administration. Perhaps one of the worst violations of the law has slipped under the radar amidst the chaos ? the continued genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the United Nations? abetting of Israel and the U.S.?s efforts to ethnically cleanse the region.

Professor Norman Finkelstein, author and scholar of the Middle East, knows better than anyone how to interpret international action at the hands of the United Nations in relation to Palestine and Israel. As for the adoption of Resolution 2803 (2025) in November, Finkelstein tells host Chris Hedges, ?[The resolution] abolished 70 years of UN history? [It] gave Gaza to Donald J. Trump.?

The resolution, Finkelstein points out, legitimizes Israel and the U.S.?s ethnonationalist and imperialist goals and delegitimizes the sanctity of international law. He explains, ?there was a robust consensus on how to resolve the conflict, which means that Israel didn?t have a leg to stand on. But guess what? It now has a leg to stand on. It has you right here.?

History, as it?s understood in most Western countries, often misses important chapters that leave critical gaps in the story of how modern countries came to be. In Latin America in the 20th century, episodes of guerilla warfare and juntas are acknowledged, along with portrayals of a drug war, usually depicted through popular culture.

What is left out, however, is the clandestine involvement of American intelligence agencies, including the CIA and DEA, and how their drug operations were intimately tied to the Latin American anticommunist brigades funded by Western capital throughout the Cold War, and the brutal liquidation of the Left these narco-terrorists often carried out.

Maureen Tkacik, investigations editor at The American Prospect, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, to chronicle some of these missing chapters, including ones connected to the current Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio.

In her article ?The Narco-Terrorist Elite,? Tkacik dives into Rubio?s personal ties to the drug trafficking racket in the 20th century as well as how this history informs his own policy, one that attempts to cynically use drug trafficking as a means to achieving the Trump administration?s extrajudicial goals.

?When Marco Rubio maligns the efficacy of interdiction and other traditional law enforcement approaches to mitigating narco trafficking in favor of military operations, as he did in a recent speech on Trump?s speedboat bombings, he is contradicting every empirical evaluation of drug war efficacy that exists,? Hedges says.

The military-industrial-complex (MIC) is unique in its ability to pull untold flows of tax revenue into ?defensive? infrastructure that benefits no one other than the private sector manufacturing and investing in it. The machine, which perpetuates itself through an incestuous milieu that lobbies for war and defense spending, wages psychological warfare on citizens and engages in corrupt backroom deals, has risen to once unthinkable heights of influence and power since Dwight D. Eisenhower first warned Americans of its growing presence in 1961.

Political scientist William D. Hartung joins this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his and Ben Freeman?s new book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, which contextualizes the growth of the MIC behind the backdrop of Silicon Valley?s increasing radicalism and integration into American military infrastructure, as well as the Trump administration?s chaotic and unabashed foreign policy.

These tech elites push for automated warfare, domestic surveillance, and the full diffusion of any line still separating the corporate and public sectors. In essence, they symbolize how significantly Western capital has grown since Eisenhower?s warning ? bolstering a corporate state bent on maximizing profit through warfare and manufacturing reliance on its often faulty products both in the public and private sector.

Empowered by the Trump administration, the trillion dollar war machine only looks to grow ? and Hartung says that it will harm the entire nation in its endless quest for domination.

Noam Chomsky once said ?The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.?

Today, this profound quote from an important figure is ensconced in irony, not only in light of Chomsky?s close ties with Jeffrey Epstein, but also regarding the entire ruling class structure?s facilitation of the pedophile?s rise to the top. Anand Giridharadas, in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, talks about this privilege and the elite delusions that capitalism and capitalists can save the planet from the very problems that they create.

Giridharadas joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report and shares how the world today, one of vast inequality and stark class divide, is perpetuated by the self-serving and egotistic mentality of oligarchs who see themselves as humanity?s figureheads.

Many of the elite class, especially those in Silicon Valley, believe they are shaping the world for the better. They believe, according to Giridharadas, ?the way to solve gender inequality is through Silicon Valley tech companies. The way to solve the environment is through Tesla. The way to solve poverty in Africa is MasterCard and Goldman Sachs figuring out credit cards for rural people in Kenya.?

Their belief that they are the agents of change, efficiency and good in the world leads them to gut government programs and proceed to point ?to the failures of government, failures they helped engineer, as evidence for why government cannot be entrusted with the solution of public problems, thus leaving only them, the private sector, to step in,? Giridharadas explains.

As for the Jeffrey Epstein-aligned elite, they are different because they can still function as good capitalists but have no reservations about the morality of their work. After Epstein?s conviction in 2008, Giridharadas spells out that Epstein surrounded himself with these people, those who do their business and have no trouble looking away.

?[Epstein] picked a group of people who are expert, if at nothing else, in putting fingers in their ears when people begin to scream.?

While Palestine has always represented a contradiction in the Western-established world order, the genocide in Gaza has brought the issue to the forefront of the world?s conscience ? and moreover, may signal the end of an era marked by U.S. hegemony. As today?s guest Dylan Saba, host of the Turbulence podcast, puts it, the genocide is

?the capstone of the War on Terror, [with] Israel as the greatest representation of U.S. overextension?What?s happened is all of those forces, all of those colonial forces that had been amassing over over generations really exploded on October 7th, and catalyzed the most dramatic imperial overreaction that we?ve seen to date.?

Amidst the chaotic collapse of American hegemony ? where do normal people, those who are ruled by the elite, fit in? And must they fall victim to the violence and psychological warfare that characterizes the policy doctrine of Western democracies, or can they seize the moment and build parallel systems of oppositional power?

?The cause of Palestine can be this tip of the spear, both in terms of repression but also potentially in terms of catalyzing a political response that?s adequate for the moment,? Saba tells host Chris Hedges.

In a post-October 7th world, one where the need to cloak brutal warfare in humanitarian rhetoric is disintegrating, what pressure points can the working class exploit? Though the masses are outgunned and militaristically vulnerable in the face of the American empire and its allies, ?there are ways to think strategically about how to leverage a marginal position to have an outsized impact.?

The Houthis in Yemen, Saba suggests, have demonstrated this reality. With targeted, strategic planning that can kneecap critical parts of the machinery of state, we may stand a chance against the oligarchy dominating the globe.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza has become a litmus test of institutional integrity. When a university denies the reality of Israel?s brutality, it reveals complicity with the genocidal regime?s actions. To then misrepresent campus dissent over institutional investment in the Zionist entity as illegitimate ? or even ?antisemitic? ? makes it clear that that these institutions are invested in the existence of Israeli apartheid and genocide. 

These contradictions were brought to a head during the Gaza solidarity encampment movement in 2024, where hundreds of college campuses around the world protested against their universities? affiliations and investments in anything related to Israel. The media and Zionists inside these universities cried wolf about widespread bigotry and hatred, and many believed them.

Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker documented through their film, ?The Encampments,? that these protests were not only peaceful and nonviolent but that the violence described in the media almost always came from the Zionist counter protestors.

Workman and Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student who was a negotiator for the encampment movement and was made famous after being kidnapped by ICE agents, join host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. They share their experiences seen in the film as well as updates to Khalil?s case as he faces potential deportation by the Trump administration. The film ? as well as their accounts ? document a clear narrative that demonstrates the failure of our institutions to abide by any moral standards, and their active role in descending Western society into fascist authoritarianism. 

Achieving greatness requires immense sacrifice. Nobody knows this better than perhaps professional athletes or, as author and journalist Brin-Jonathan Butler reveals, chess players. Butler joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his book, The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match That Made Chess Great Again and how the history of chess? greatest players is riddled with psychological dysfunction.

Butler invokes famous chess figures such as Bobby Fischer, Peter Winston and Magnus Carlsen to demonstrate how those who reach the top do so at the expense of their humanity. Referencing Fischer?s famous victory over Boris Spassky in 1972, Butler explains how Fischer was not satisfied because ?it?s not enough to murder your opponent, you need to compel their suicide.?

?That was a very common sort of narrative throughout all the top levels of chess, how often the metaphor of blood execution, murder, blood on the board was commonly used,? Butler adds.

The level of obsession that develops within the best chess players transforms into an addiction, similar to one with drugs, alcohol or gambling. Despite it being a fun, challenging game for most, for others who have a propensity to become addicted in such an obsessive way, it must be cautioned with. Butler says, ?For that narrow group, which I think comprises the people at the top because you have to be that way, it?s not only sort of recommended that you be this way, there?s no other way to qualify for that top zone unless you happen to be this relentlessly devoted.?

?How do we understand now if we don?t understand 1948 or 1917 or all the things that happened during the British Mandate??

This is a central question Micaela Sahhar, author and educator, asks while dissecting her book, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate. Sahhar reframes these monumental events in Palestinian history through an intimate, granular lens of her own family?s displacement during the 20th century.

Sahhar joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, sharing more personal narratives, revealing how her family lived through the pivotal moments that shaped modern Palestine.

?To grow up as a diaspora Palestinian,? Sahhar explains, ? is to be equipped with a particular kind of superpower, which is to understand the enormous rift between a dominant culture and what you know to be true from the people you love and trust.?

Filmmaker, author and journalist Antony Loewenstein documents how Israel has used Gaza as a weapons showcase. Spyware, killer drones, robot dogs and other weapons are debuted in Gaza and field-tested on the civilian population, demonstrating their effectiveness to regimes around the world that await their chance to purchase them.

Loewenstein joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle what he has learned from writing The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World and producing The Palestine Laboratory, a documentary based on the book.

?I think the whole idea of what Israel?has been showing the world, I say two things. One, what weapons you can use to murder, kill, target Palestinians but also how to get away with it. I think Israel sells that concept,? Loewenstein explains.

As spyware companies like Pegasus and Paragon and arms companies like Elbit and Rafael see business boom, Loewenstein argues countries have a moral imperative to end trading with Israel. These same technologies perpetuating the genocide in Gaza, Loewenstein explains, will come back to haunt the citizenry of purchasing countries.

?All these governments around the world, whether they?re so-called democratic or repressive, are obsessed with these tools. They can?t give them up. They?re desperate to listen to their opponents, to the journalists, to activists,? Loewenstein remarks.

?It?s very hard for these regimes to give them up because there?s no regulation. There?s just none. It just doesn?t exist.?

After two years of genocide, it is no longer possible to hide complicity in Israel?s crimes against the Palestinians. Entire countries and corporations are ? according to multiple reports by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese ? either directly or indirectly involved in Israel?s economic proliferation.

In her latest report, ?Gaza Genocide: a collective crime,? Albanese details the role 63 nations played in supporting Israel?s genocide of the Palestinians. She chronicles how countries like the United States, which directly funds and arms Israel, are a part of a vast global economic web. This network includes dozens of other countries that contribute with seemingly minor components, such as warplane wheels.

Rejection of this system is imperative, Albanese says. These same technologies used to destroy the lives of Palestinians will inevitably be turned against the citizens of Israel?s funders.

?Palestine today is a metaphor of our life and where our life is going to go,? Albanese warns.

?Every worker today should draw a lesson from what?s happening to the Palestinians, because the large injustice system is connected and makes all of us connected to what?s happening there.?

The meddling and infiltration of governments in Latin America by the United States is a huge chapter of its 20th century history. One of the most egregious and blatant examples of intervention was in Chile, where the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by the CIA-backed military coup in 1973.

The ensuing years saw violent repression of student activists, labor leaders, journalists, leftwing politicians and dissidents at the helm of a brutal military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet. Among the victims of this ruthless crackdown were two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is journalist John Dinges who, in his new book Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup, dives into their involvement in Chile at a time where grand hope quickly turned into great despair.

Despite the demoralization and destruction produced by Israel?s two-year-long genocidal campaign on the Palestinians, Israel potentially finds itself at its weakest point in its short history.

In his new book, Israel on the Brink, renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé makes the case that Israel?s current path forward is unsustainable. With a combination of domestic, political, military and international pressures, Israel will continue to destabilize.

Pappé writes, ?A potential fall of Israel could either be like the end of South Vietnam, the total erasure of a state, or like South Africa, the fall of a particular ideological regime and its replacement by another. I believe that in the case of Israel, elements of both scenarios will unfold sooner than many of us can comprehend or prepare for.?

Hedges and Pappé chronicle the path Israel has taken to reach this point, one of radical religious fanaticism manifesting itself in figures such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir at the highest positions in government, and what the future looks like for them as well as the devastated Palestinian population.

The descent into a new, mutated and technology-focused form of American fascism is already here. Those who have kept track of the rise of the Thielverse, which includes figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and JD Vance, have understood that an agenda to usher in a unique form of authoritarianism has been slowly introduced into the mainstream political atmosphere.

Whitney Webb, investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to document the rise of this cabal into the most powerful positions of the American government.

?I think now it's quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia's moment. These particular figures have had an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government,? Webb explains.

It?s clear that the architects of mass surveillance and the military industrial complex are beginning to coalesce in unprecedented ways within the Trump administration and Webb emphasizes that now is the time to pay attention and push back against these new forces.

If they have their way, all commercial technology will be completely folded into the national security state ? acting blatantly as the new infrastructure for techno-authoritarian rule. The underlying idea behind this new system is ?pre-crime,? or the use of mass surveillance to designate people criminals before they?ve committed any crime. Webb warns that the Trump administration and its benefactors will demonize segments of the population to turn civilians against together, all in pursuit of building out this elaborate system of control right under our noses. 

For decades, clandestine foreign military and intelligence operations have been the deadly, destabilizing engine of American foreign policy. Today, as exposed by investigative journalist Seth Harp in his new book The Fort Bragg Cartel, 21st-century Special Forces operations have become their brutal, logical successor.

Harp joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to highlight the dark culture of violence inflicted by Special Forces operators both abroad and domestically. These operators exist in a world where battlefield impunity spirals into rampant drug use and trafficking, extrajudicial killings and domestic violence. Harp?s reporting insists that these are not isolated events but rather part of a system built on secrecy and unaccountable violence.

?The book,? according to Harp, ?is not a work of history, it?s intended to be a murder mystery at the heart of it, kind of a police beat reporting but in order to tell the backstory of these operators? lives, I recapitulate a brief history of the Global War on Terrorism with a focus on Fort Bragg soldiers in particular, because Fort Bragg is really the beating heart of the global special operations complex, and many people are unaware of its centrality in all of these events.?

Historian Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years? War on Palestine, joins host Chris Hedges to detail the dwindling academic freedom in American universities and society at large as Donald Trump?s grip on free speech tightens.

Khalidi notes that while the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is an old tactic to stifle academic scrutiny of Israel, its current deployment is unprecedented. Today, professors are intimidated out of teaching about Israel and Palestine, entire Middle Eastern studies departments are threatened with receivership and federal funding is withheld from universities.

?I know many people who are not going to teach courses this semester of my colleagues out of fear that if I teach about settler colonialism, if I teach about genocide, if I teach this or that about the Middle East, I?m going to be hauled up before these kangaroo courts,? Khalidi tells Hedges.

?That means your life is going to be ruined. You?re going to have to get lawyers, have to deal with a process that is completely opaque and which is designed? to punish and discipline anybody who opens their mouth on Palestine.?

"Are you a worker? Yes. Are you a consumer shopper? Yes. Are you a taxpayer? Yes. Voter? Well, sometimes. Are you a parent? Yes. Are you a veteran? Sometimes. Well, how can you say you're a nobody? You know things about those roles. You've experienced them. You've been frustrated. If you lie to yourself to be a nobody, you're going to be treated like a nobody. You're going to be treated like someone who doesn't count, someone who doesn't matter, somebody who can be disrespected, someone who can be ripped off, somebody who could be underinsured, somebody who can be suppressed."

Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate, asks these questions to demonstrate how Americans often sell themselves short regarding their power as citizens.

Nader, whose life-long mission has been to empower people to fight back against corrupt politicians and greedy corporate criminals, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to continue to spread this message at a critical juncture in American politics.

With Donald Trump?s increasing fascistic repression and an impending government shutdown, Nader offers a roadmap for how both government officials and ordinary people can fight back.

His latest book, Citizen Self-Respect, serves as a call to action, arguing that Americans must not passively allow the Trump administration and corporate elites to consolidate their power.

Medea Benjamin and CODEPINK, the organization she cofounded, are synonymous with accosting power in the United States. Their fearless confrontations with the nation?s most prominent and powerful politicians in the halls of Congress, often seen through viral videos, are a stark embodiment of the First Amendment. Despite over 20 years of activism and consistent critique of America?s representatives over their subservience to the military industrial complex and other big money interests, their ability to have these conversations is beginning to dwindle.

Benjamin joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the current moment in American politics, which sees free speech sitting on a knife?s edge following the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the American political class?s continued support of Israel?s genocide in Gaza.

Benjamin was recently arrested after questioning Rep. Darrell Issa about Israel?s recent airstrike targeting Hamas negotiators in Qatar. Despite police saying she did nothing wrong, Issa continued with lodging a complaint against her, a move she believes is also in line with the suppression of activists and free speech.

Furthermore, after CODEPINK activists confronted Donald Trump and his cabinet at a restaurant and chanted at the president, ??Free DC, free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time,? Trump said he is looking into having US Attorney General Pam Bondi bring RICO charges against the protestors ?because they should be put in jail.?

Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and an associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, analyzes how the weaponization and distortion of the Holocaust, in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, has been used to serve the narrative of Zionists and the Israeli government. He tells host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report:

?We know that Holocaust education eventually was more focused on transmitting this feeling of exceptionality than actually teaching about Holocaust as history, as real history, as normal history, as a part, indeed, of the making of the modern and late modern world.?

Segal recounts his personal experience learning about the Holocaust in Israel, revealing a Zionist perspective that is both skewed and contradictory.

?Jews, because they were a unique people, always faced a unique hatred, anti-Semitism, which then culminated in a unique genocide, really the only genocide ever in human history, in this framework: the Holocaust,? he explains.

Though Segal outgrew this propagandized view, he explains that many in Israel and its international supporters still frame Jews and the Holocaust as exceptional. This belief in exceptionalism, Segal argues, blurs the history that led to the Holocaust and the events that have followed.

?We really can't understand the phenomena of modern genocide without understanding the nation-state system, the exclusionary nation system and colonialism, European expansion around the world, settler colonialism and colonial genocides that accompanied this expansion for hundreds of years,? Segal contends.

?I've witnessed a lot of war and in that there is nothing that compares to the level of destruction, the level of [dis]proportionality, the absolute disregard for Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law and considerations of the laws of armed conflict. [Nowhere] in my career? have I witnessed anything close to the absolute escalation of violence and [unnecessary] force I witnessed in Gaza.?

This is what Anthony Aguilar, a retired Lieutenant Colonel who served for 25 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Green Beret, tells host Chris Hedges in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, as he recalls his experiences in Gaza serving as a subcontractor for UG Solutions, which provides security for The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

His testimony has added another crucial dimension to understanding the genocide in this late stage, as hundreds of thousands face starvation and desperation for food and aid. While GHF presents itself as a humanitarian aid group, in reality it is an arm of Israel?s infrastructure of genocide, facilitating violence and imposing increased desperation against Palestinians at the behest of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Aguilar?s testimony ? detailing the weaponry he was supplied as a contractor, the money he was paid, the operating procedures he was given and the internal structure linking the GHF and the IDF ? provides undeniable evidence of Israel?s continued aggression and depravity. From high tech-surveillance that beams Palestinians with biometric scanners to scan their faces at aid sites, to dehumanizing crowd control techniques, to blatant indiscriminate murder, Aguilar makes clear that GHF is a project of Israeli genocide.

It is rare to find war correspondents who are willing to break the rules of access and safety imposed by dominant powers. Only by challenging these structures and facing the dangers of war can journalists begin a true effort to report the truth and, if they are lucky, materially alter the course of conflict.

Journalist, author and documentary filmmaker Ben Anderson joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to detail what it means to be a reporter who is committed to chasing and documenting the truth in a media landscape that often chooses complacency.

Anderson chronicles his motivations and influences, such as the late John Pilger, early on in his career. ?Back then, I really believed that if I went to these places, got this shocking footage, something would happen to help the people that you were actually covering,? he explains.

Over time, Anderson realized that this youthful optimism may not translate to reality ? but his cynicism did not deter him from covering brutal conflict in Afghanistan. Anderson went far beyond typical embedded reporting, choosing to spend weeks away operating independently with other journalists to the point of exhaustion and hunger, refusing to submit to the relatively comfortable lifestyle of most foreign correspondents.

Anderson?s commitment to journalism drove him and his work: ?I just thought, this is obviously the most important story in the world and here is something I can do. Just by having a bit of endurance, I can stick it out and get footage that might make a difference.?

One of the most stark examples of the expanding tide of authoritarianism worldwide was the 2017 murder of Gauri Lankesh, an Indian journalist and activist, allegedly assassinated by a far-right religious group in India for her fearless journalism.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is Rollo Romig, a journalist whose Pulitzer Prize-finalist book, I Am On the Hit List: A Journalist?s Murder and the Ruse of Autocracy in India, examines the historic and political context of Lankesh?s murder.

Romig chronicles the rise of Hindu nationalist extremism in India, linking it to India?s current authoritarian policies under Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The group accused of Lankesh?s assassination, Sanatan Sanstha, operates on the vision ?of making India an officially Hindu country and, equally importantly, relegating all non-Hindus to second-class citizenship and ostracizing, particularly, Muslims from Hindu society,? according to Romig.

Much like in the United States, Romig and Hedges argue that such fringe groups serve a strategic purpose of mainstreaming extremist ideologies that ultimately benefit the ruling class. Gauri?s work represented a threat to far-right political movements in India and she was often subjected to fierce intimidation campaigns, including, as the title of Romig?s book suggests, being placed on murder hit lists.

Known as the ?Silent Holocaust,? the genocide in Guatemala is seldom mentioned in modern history. The United States, with support from Israel, backed yet another violent crusade against an indigenous population as well as against communism. The Guatemalan genocide ? preceded by a CIA-instigated coup d?état of the Guatemalen government in 1954 and the ensuing civil war ? saw hundreds of thousands of the Mayan Indigenous peoples and alleged communists massacred or disappeared.

Jennifer Harbury, an attorney, author and human rights activist, witnessed the horrors of the genocidal campaign waged by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan military. Included in these horrors was the torture and disappearance of her husband, Mayan rebel leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez (known as Everardo) by CIA-backed Guatemalan military officials.

Harbury joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to dissect the brutal history of the genocide as well as recount her own experiences, including several hunger strikes in Guatemala and Washington, D.C., that ultimately led to the exposure of the CIA?s complicity in the atrocities.

Fame and fortune are often corrupting forces, ones that beget power and comfort. To stand with the afflicted requires sacrificing this privilege and few embody that sacrifice more profoundly than the legendary musician of Pink Floyd Roger Waters.

For years, through his music and political action, Waters has amplified the voices of the oppressed. He has championed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, defended attorney Steven Donziger, demanded the closure of Guantánamo Bay, has long stood against the apartheid state of Israel and now unwaveringly against the genocide of Palestinians.

Waters joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his political activism, including his support for Palestine Action, a group criminalized by the British government for their protest against Israel.

The pair discuss how Waters? art has documented his moral devotion against oppression over the years while also examining the political decay ? fueled by greed and corruption ? of the United States, the United Kingdom and other world powers.

The gutting of public funding for higher education in the United States has led to the takeover of universities by private donors, many of whom are Zionist entities and billionaires. As a result, universities have become, as guest Dr. Maura Finkelstein calls them, ?banks and real estate development companies that offer classes.?

As demonstrated by Finkelstein?s story, this new paradigm of higher education has pushed aside democratic values and academic freedom. In January 2024, as a result of a McCarthyist-style crackdown on pro-Palestinian faculty, Finkelstein was fired from her position as a tenured associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Muhlenberg College. Her dismissal followed a farcical Department of Education investigation, making her one of the latest victims in the purge of dissenters against the Zionist narrative.

On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Finkelstein explains how Muhlenberg reached this point of seemingly no return and how it serves as an example of how universities nationwide are capitulating to the Trump administration?s crackdown on free speech with regard to the genocide in Gaza.

From the increasing pressures from Zionist campus organizations like Hillel International to the constant monitoring and surveillance of those sympathetic to the Palestinian plight on social media, Finkelstein and host Chris Hedges make clear the walls are closing in on American education and democracy itself.

Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room of American politics is the existence of a pedophilic blackmail network that involves some of the most powerful people in the country and the world. Despite efforts to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein case, which saw the trafficking and sexual exploitation of thousands of children, justice continues to be evaded and the cabal associated with Epstein ? President Donald Trump notwithstanding ? continues its conspiracy.

Nick Bryant is a journalist and author who first published Epstein?s infamous ?black book? in 2015 as well as Epstein?s flight logs. This information exposed the powerful names associated with Epstein and those who likely participated in his abhorrent pedophilic escapades as well as those who are likely controlled via Epstein?s extensive blackmail apparatus.

Bryant joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his work as well as the history of the Epstein case and what can be expected next. Trump has resorted to calling the entire matter a ?hoax? and Attorney General Pam Bondi, despite promising to release the Epstein files, has recently balked at the idea that there is evidence of an Epstein client list.

Bryant and Hedges discuss how there is already myriad evidence of Epstein?s crimes and relationships but efforts by the current administration could cloud the hope for justice.

Following attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States, the world held its breath as the prospect of World War III loomed on the horizon. After 12 days of conflict, a ceasefire has brought about new uncertainty for the future.

Former British diplomat Alastair Crooke joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to make sense of the current situation in the Middle East and what can be expected in the coming weeks or months.

Crooke details the lead up to the Israeli attacks, including the use of technology and neighbouring countries that allowed for the element of surprise. Cyber attacks, drones flown in from Azerbaijan and American military software served as crucial elements for the Israeli attacks on Iran.

As for the American strikes weeks later, Crooke explains Donald Trump?s alleged anxiety in not engaging in a prolonged conflict and theorizes about what the damage on Iran?s nuclear facilities actually looks like and what it could mean going forward.

Hedges and Crooke lay out what could come next, indicating that this conflict is far from over and the future of the Middle East, along with the rest of the world?s economy, hinges on what comes next from Israel, Iran or the United States.

Zohran Mamdani?s emphatic victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary has shaken the core of American politics. A self-described democratic socialist, Mamdani ran a campaign centered around affordability as well as relentless denunciation of the genocide in Gaza. Mamdani drew the ire of Zionists, right-wingers and the billionaire class not only in New York City but across the country, including calls for his deportation by Congressman Andy Ogles and subsequent slander by President Donald Trump.

Former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who is now running for Washington state's 9th congressional district, weighs in on her fellow democratic socialist?s journey on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

Sawant has been a standout figure for working class representation, winning a $15 an hour minimum wage in Seattle during her city council tenure as well as the Amazon Tax, which helped fund affordable housing. She says Mamdani?s victory should be celebrated, especially because it shows the Zionist lobby can be defeated not just in the U.S. but in a state home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.

Despite this encouraging repudiation of the billionaire class in the wealthiest city in America, Sawant emphasizes the need to continue the fight and make sure Mamdani sticks to his original promises.

?If you don't understand that careerism is one of the death knells of winning anything substantial for the working class, then you will sell out even with those good intentions because you will make it about yourself and you will immediately get the memo that in order to fight for working people, you will need to be in battle mode every single day when you enter City Hall,? she says.

Mamdani?s alignment with the Democratic Party is concerning, according to Sawant, pointing to a pattern in which groundbreaking campaigns, like those of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, have fallen short of delivering promises for working class people once in office.

?At the end of the day, the Democratic Party is a party of capitalism itself,? Sawant asserts. ?The working class loses out more and more and is subjected to more and more misery with every passing decade that you're not going to stand up for working people.?

So far, Mamdani?s campaign has made strides to inspire the American working class. ?It's a real boost of confidence for working class people nationally to see that yes, working people will fight alongside you if you put forward demands that make a huge difference in their lives and which reflect their anger, their just anger at the Wall Street billionaires,? Sawant says.

There is not much more that can be said about the unfathomable levels of devastation the genocide in Gaza has reached. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has been chronicling the genocide and joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to shed light on the current situation in Gaza, including parts from her upcoming report on the profiteers of the genocide.

Israel?s siege on the Palestinians is leaving the population starving, and Albanese lambasts other nations for not stepping up and completing their obligations under international law. ?[Countries] have an obligation not to aid, not to assist, not to trade with Israel, not to send weapons, not to buy weapons, not to provide military technology, not to buy military technology. This is not an act of charity that I'm asking you. This is your obligation,? she explains.

Albanese compares Gaza and Israel?s siege to a concentration camp, stating it is unsustainable but also allows the world to witness how a Western settler colonial entity functions. ?There is a global awareness of something that has for a long time been a prerogative, a painful prerogative of the global majority, the Global South, meaning the awareness of the pain and the wounds of colonialism,? Albanese tells Hedges.

In her forthcoming report, Albanese will detail exactly how Palestine has been exploited by the global capitalist system and will highlight the role certain corporations have played in the genocide. ?[T]here are corporate entities, including from Palestine-friendly states, who have for decades made businesses and made profits out of the economy of the occupation, because Israel has always exploited Palestinian land and resources and Palestinian life,? she says. 

?The profits have continued and even increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.?

The ultra-wealthy hover above the realities of the world around them like extraterrestrial aliens. Their material reality physically separates them from the rest of society with gated communities and private jets but paradoxically, their very wealth also severs them psychologically, unable to understand the reality of the 99%.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is professor and author of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More, Rob Larson.

Larson begins by bringing attention to basic data points that nakedly reflect the state of the world and particularly the U.S. when it comes to wealth inequality. ?[The] richest 1% owned 35% of all US wealth and that's cash, that's real estate, that's all kinds of investment portfolio assets? the bottom 50% of all US households, very similar to the bottom half in most regions of the world, you're looking at about 1.5% of the national wealth is owned by that half of the population,? he explains.

This gross wealth imbalance produces a number of problems within a society, including the wealthy?s overreaching influence into policymaking. Tax breaks, deregulation and other neoliberal doctrines have defined the last few decades of American politics, and that imbalance means ?that's more cash chasing the same number of assets, and it just tends to have the effect of hideously inflating every asset market, making housing out of reach for so many people, making the market absurdly overpriced,? Larson spells out.

Hedges and Larson go on to describe the evolution of elites and the psychology behind handling obscene wealth, from personal relationships to the way they dress. Both agree, however, that it is possible to continue the fight against this inequality through labor organizing and local community building.

Journalist A. J. Liebling famously said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.? Today, in a world dominated by corporate capitalism ? including subservient politicians and careerists ? the press?s freedom has been eroded to mere margins. Journalist and writer Patrick Lawrence joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle the decline of journalism, which he details in his book, Journalists and Their Shadows.

Lawrence defines what a journalist is meant to do and be, a definition he attributes to John Dewey. A journalist ?has to stand outside of power and present to readers and viewers the known considerations whenever a question of national policy was at issue, and engender a public debate so people could draw their conclusions and register those conclusions.?

This is no longer the case. ?Context, history, causality, agency, and responsibility are all essential for us to understand events in the world around us. And none is permitted to any effective extent in corporate media,? Lawrence explains. Drawing on examples of reporting from the Vietnam War up until the Iraq War and even the current war in Ukraine, Lawrence dives into how the views from the State Department became the views of the press and anybody who differed from that would be cast out.

Lawrence points to psychological disruptions within journalists as a result of the nature of their work as part of the reason why the press has deteriorated. ?The corruptions in the press begin with the corruptions of the personalities who want to get paid, want to be promoted, and so on,? he says.

Instead of employing the Socratic process of reasoning, mainstream journalists today have agendas they must serve. ?[Reasoning] has been turned upside down in our hyper-ideological polity such that you draw your conclusion first and then you reason backwards,? Lawrence declares.

There are few pieces of literature that remain as prescient and relevant throughout history as John Milton?s Paradise Lost. Thomas Jefferson, Malcolm X, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Paine and dozens more drew inspiration from and studied Milton?s grand work and the revolutionary themes within it.

Professor Orlando Reade, in his book, What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost, examines the epic poem?s influence in the four centuries since its publication and joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss this history.

Reade begins with the historical context of the poem, which was after the seventeenth century English revolution that overthrew the monarchy. Milton?s work, Reade and Hedges explain, embodies critiques of both monarchy and revolution.

?The reader is presented with a figure of Satan that seems a lot like Milton himself, a failed revolutionary recovering from a disastrous defeat and often articulating arguments against God, who Satan calls a tyrant, that Milton himself had made against the English King,? Reade explains. ?So the great mystery of Paradise Lost is trying to figure out why Milton gives us a Satan that seems so much like himself.?

The historical parallels found within Paradise Lost clearly resonate with figures in history, especially those in the struggle for freedom and abolition. Reade emphasizes how many times the poem is referenced throughout this history.

?This is not an epic poem that spends much time celebrating the heroic deeds of men. It's not a macho poem. It's a poem for which the most heroic acts are true to the New Testament. They're humble and often quiet acts of love, of forgiveness, and so on,? he says.

The narratives surrounding Israel and their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians took decades to create and embed into the West?s psyche. The Holocaust, decades after its end, became a central part of the Jewish and Israeli identity. Enemies of the Israeli state were conflated with Nazis. The physical location of Israel became essential to Christian evangelicals who believe the second coming of Jesus Christ was to take place there.

The late Amy Kaplan, in her book, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, explored how these narratives developed through popular culture and the media?s reporting on the Israeli government?s actions throughout the 20th century, particularly in the United States. Professor Joan Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and adjunct professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss Kaplan?s book and how prevalent it is in the face of Israel?s genocide of the Palestinians.

?Part of the invincible victim story is that Jews have to always be alert about defending themselves against any sign that the Holocaust is about to reappear and then attribute it to Palestinians, the possibility that they will bring another Holocaust,? Scott says. ?So the whole defense industry of Israel, the whole occupation of Gaza and the West Bank become a way of arguing against the possibility of another Holocaust.?

When it comes to Christian Zionism, Scott explains that cynicism in the Israeli government tolerates the antisemites within these groups ?because they're bringing a large sector of the American population, a powerfully politically influential sector of the American population, certainly now with Trump, to support the activities that Israel is engaging in.?

In a world gripped by daily catastrophes, there is one that affects all but lacks the attention it deserves. The climate crisis ? pervaded by ecological collapse, war, endless resource accumulation fueled by capitalism ? is the issue of our time. The warning signs are there but as author Eiren Caffall tells host Chris Hedges, people are not able to handle the facts regarding the ?fragility of our ecosystem, and [they] just don't really have a great way of managing the emotional impact of that.?

Caffall joins Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss her novel, All the Water in the World, and her memoir, The Mourner?s Bestiary. She explains that climate talk is often a tough pill to swallow because it deals with ideas of impermanence: ?I think we are struggling to talk about our climate grief, our experience with the eco-collapse as a collective, as a planet who are all confronted with the evidence of our mortality.?

As someone who has dealt with loss and trauma her whole life as a result of inheriting polycystic kidney disease, a genetic illness that has plagued her family for over 150 years, Caffall employs a unique perspective when it comes to preserving her family?s stories and art.

?That sense of it is vital to protect whatever stories we can in the face of great loss is kind of baked into my background, my childhood, my understanding of my role as an adult to tell the stories of the dead, to hold on to the culture of those folks, to make sure that there's a continuance,? she tells Hedges.

Caffall understands the need for stories like hers to create the empathy that is lacking in a world that continually sees violence as an answer to problems. ?I just think actually it's that vulnerability and that presence that's the real tool that we need to be able to move carefully through the world that we're being confronted with at this moment and in a possible bleaker future.?

On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Chris Hedges speaks with filmmaker Alex Gibney about Gibney?s documentary series The Dark Money Game, which examines the ?labyrinth of mirrors? that facilitates untraceable corruption through the American political system. Although both the Democratic and Republican parties have served the interests of the billionaire class since well before the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court ruling in 2010, the removal of restrictions on political spending created a system by which corporations could route millions of dollars in bribes through an intricate, opaque network of nonprofit organizations and super PACs. 

FirstEnergy, a failing Ohio nuclear power operator, exploited this network to pay $60 million to former Ohio State Representative Larry Householder, in exchange for his support of a ?Clean Energy? bill that would award FirstEnergy $1.3 billion in benefits. Ohio Confidential, the first documentary in Gibney?s series, follows the affair, which was subject to an FBI investigation, and which offers a view into mechanisms of illegitimate influence which are rarely visible to the public. Nonetheless, Hedges notes, the FirstEnergy story is likely a ?microcosm of the whole system.? 

The second film in the series, Wealth of the Wicked, portrays the contradictory but effective partnership between the anti-abortion Christian right and the billionaire class, which has used a variety of sordid tactics to sway the Supreme Court towards conservative and pro-corporate decisions. For example, Gibney describes how wealthy donors would ?engage in a kind of romance? with justices, offering expensive gifts and pursuing ?friendships that ultimately would have the effect of turning their perspectives...?

The faster the dark money flows through the American political system, the greater the power of the billionaire class to oppose regulations and steal wealth. ?It's a series of interlocking favors,? Gibney observes, ?but all these interlocking favors, which?let's face it?are traditional tools of the political system? are made possible and made far more corrupt by the application of tens of millions of dollars, which to the public is completely invisible.?

Richard Barnard, Sarah Wilkinson, Asa Winstanley and Richard Medhurst. These are some of the canaries in the coal mine for what is to come in the West as the region?s elite quickly becomes Israel?s international police. Medhurst joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his own experiences in the United Kingdom and Austria, where federal agents and police arrested him and searched his home under draconian counterterrorism laws.

?I was just trying to tell the truth as best as I could with the facts that we had at that time and that's it. And I think they're trying to make an example out of me, definitely,? Medhurst tells Hedges.

Medhurst points to Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 in the UK as one of the broad laws being used to silence people like him. ?If they really want to, they can charge you for just saying a simple fact just because the fact is uncomfortable to the government or perhaps they can twist it into saying you're glorifying a group but it's not true,? he explains.

For Medhurst, the UK pinned Schedule 12(1A) on him, which he explains ?has never been used before, and escalated it straight to an arrest.? They then took his ?fingerprints, [his] DNA, [and] they put [him] in jail for 24 hours.?

Despite his accurate reporting, Medhurst says that the validity of what one says does not matter when it conflicts with the establishment line. ?You're not glorifying anyone. You're just stating a fact, but they can still charge you. That's what's so dangerous about this law,? he said.

Austrian security service agents still possess most of Medhurst?s journalistic tools. There is still no clear time table as to when he will get his tools back.

As Medhurst explained:

?It wasn't just my phone and my laptop, which I also use for work, which are my work tools, but ?you know, hard drive adapters, things that don't even have data on them, analog microphones. Why would you do that to someone unless you're trying to make a point that you don't want them to continue their work??

If anyone can witness the genocide in Gaza with utmost clarity, it would be medical professionals working there. Their accounts continue to be as harrowing as those of journalists and Gazans themselves, stripped of rhetoric and left with only raw truth. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a general, trauma and critical care surgeon in California, has been to Gaza twice and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

?There is no serious health system in Gaza anymore,? Sidhwa tells Hedges. Instead, what?s left of hospitals are mere buildings filled with medical professionals stripped of the equipment vital to saving lives, refugees seeking anything more than tents and endless streams of people barely surviving the constant onslaught of bombs.

Sidhwa explains the gut wrenching details of treating people mangled by bombs, children shot in the head and the inability to save people because of the lack of basic equipment. While describing the treatment of a six-year-old boy with severe shrapnel injuries, Sidhwa explains, ?In the flagship hospital of any third world country, this kid could have survived. But at Nasser [Medical Complex], we don't have the right types of pressures, the right types of critical care medications and even just simple things like a pediatric ventilator, which just wasn't available. So he died 12 hours later.?

The situation in Gaza, as Sidhwa details, is morbidly bleak:

?I don't know how women who need C-sections will get them. I don't know how people who even just have regular role general surgery problems will be able to get them. I don't know how a kid that has asthma will be able to get albuterol. I don't know how somebody with heart disease will be able to get their medications. Just leaving aside the trauma. And then on top of that?the whole population is being starved. Literally no food has gone into Gaza for six weeks.?

Israel, both materially and rhetorically, has made their intent to destroy the Palestinian people clear. One of the most renowned and courageous Middle East scholars, Norman Finkelstein, has assiduously documented the Palestinian plight for decades and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. Finkelstein and Hedges assess the current state of the genocide in Palestine as well as how the media and the universities have all but abandonded their principles in servitude to the Zionist agenda.

Finkelstein makes clear the gravity of Israel?s unprecedented actions: ?If you take any metric?number of UN workers killed, number of medics killed, number of journalists killed, proportion of civilians to combatants killed, proportion of children killed, proportion of women and children killed?if you take any metric, Israel for the 21st century is in a class all its own.?

Israel?s use of propaganda and strategically timed attacks?often lining up with other major world events so as to avoid media scrutiny?has muddied political outlook of the genocide into one of war and defense rather than ethnic cleansing. The American media has done its part to feed these narratives as well.

?What is going to prove that Hamas has been defeated?? Finkelstein asks. ?I know what's going to prove it: when there's no one left in Gaza. That will be the proof.?

?These are levels of craziness that are part of the decline I suspect of all empires when they consume themselves,? Professor Richard Wolff says of America?s current situation in the outset of Donald Trump?s second term. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the history and rationale behind the decisions made by Trump and how it relates to the decline of the US empire.

From tariffs to deregulation, Wolff says it is all erratic, uncoordinated and unpredictable, which are tangible signs of America?s decay. ?You cannot tell people what a tariff will do. The reason is a tariff sets off a whole series of reactions. You can't know them in advance. [People and governments] will all respond, but how they do it, it's like knowing in advance the chess move: you have some probabilities, maybe, but you never know,? Wolff tells Hedges.

Wolff explains how historic economic suffering has led to the protections and regulations Trump is now dismantling.

China and the expanding BRICS bloc also represent a growing challenge to U.S. global hegemony?a strategic shift that has significantly influenced the Trump administration?s policies and reflects today?s unique geopolitical tensions. Wolff says, ?The United States is different now from what it has been for a century, because we really have an economic competitor.?

The internet, from its inception, was created to be a tool of mass surveillance. It was developed first as a counterinsurgency tool for the Vietnam War and the rest of the Global South, but like many devices of foreign policy naturally it made its way back to U.S. soil. Yasha Levine, in his book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, chronicles the linear history of the internet?s birth at the Pentagon to its now ubiquitous use in all aspects of modern life. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to explain the reality of the internet?s history.

Levine describes the early concept of the internet as ?an operating system for the American empire, an information system that could collect all this data and that could provide useful, meaningful information to the managers of the world.? 

This was understood by university students with close proximity to the internet project as well as domestic critics. Far from its coy, modern day interpretation of the internet as a mere communication technology, Levine makes clear the originator?s plans as well as the surprising resistance to them that followed. Levine explains that at the height of the Vietnam War, when much of America?s youth were protesting and seeking to understand the American empire, people were aware of the large amounts of capital it took to purchase and run computers, capital that only the most powerful in America had access to.

?This history or this understanding [was repressed] and people have been propagandized to view computers in a totally different light, in a benign light, in a utopian light, which was not the case in the 1950s, in the 1960s, in the 1970s and even up into the 1980s,? Levine tells Hedges.

Today, the internet?s omnipresence vindicates the skepticism of those early skeptics. Even the supposedly privacy-advocating technologies developed in response to the internet project, Levine explains, came out of the Pentagon for military purposes. Levine reveals the Tor browser, Signal messaging app and other tools that were meant to help ordinary people hide themselves from American surveillance spies were actually developed to help the spies these same applications claim that they are  subverting.

?Jacob Appelbaum and Roger Dingledine, who was also the head of the Tor project back then?these guys were on the payroll of the US government.?

Ever since the first Donald Trump administration, the word ?fascism? has dominated discussion around Trump?s policies and ambitions to the extent of semantic satiation. Liberals and leftists often use fascism as a blanket term for anything right-wing politicians represent and Republicans equally use ?communism? to denote Democratic or left-wing politics. Jason Stanley, author, American philosopher and Yale professor, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to give proper context to what fascism means and how the Trump administration?s second term could really mean the completion of the American fascist state.

One key element in the spread of fascism is the attack on a central pillar of democracy: education. Stanley explores the recent assault on crucial parts of the American education system, including critical race theory, Black history and now the sanctity of free speech. Legislation pushing for the suppression of these segments is expected, Stanley explains, since ?it creates a fake version of the past and it tells students that you're the greatest country in history and your leaders are the greatest people in history. It's exactly what Hitler in Mein Kampf said the education system of the Third Reich should be.?

Stanley also illustrates the various ways in which fascist regimes attempt to psychologically manipulate the public into being subservient and by eliminating any reference to historic self-determination. ?An education system should give people the sense that they have agency to change history,? Stanley tells Hedges. ?And if you want to impose patriotic education, you want to impose the kind of education that fits into an authoritarian system, you want to remove agency from people.?

The bleakness of the near future is hard to avoid, Stanley warns. He likens the deportation and hunting down of pro-Palestinian student protestors to the stripping of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson?s passports:

?That's what happened with Du Bois and Robeson. Like if they can take down those people, they can take down anyone. And so that is clearly the next phase. Clearly the next phase is stripping the passports of people they don't like. You know, every authoritarian country does that. We've done it and I expect that to come, unfortunately.?

Mahmoud Khalil?s arrest and detention in a Louisiana ICE facility is a harbinger for a new authoritarian era of the United States. Khalil?s arrest, the capitulation of Columbia University against dissent and protest by its own students and the Trump administration?s threat of stripping the university of $400 million in grants if it does not meet its requests is just one place where the tentacles of fascism tighten their grip.

Katherine Franke, a former law school professor at Columbia, is on the front lines of this assault. Her support for student protests and her condemnation of the university for not addressing the harassment of pro-Palestinian students has earned what she called, ?a termination dressed up in more palatable terms.?

Franke joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to address the Constitutional crisis that faces the US, how it has manifested itself on university campuses and what are the next steps in challenging it.

?They're using immigration laws now to come after protesters or people who are voicing views that are critical of the Trump administration who are not US citizens. They'll come next for us, the US citizens, with the criminal law,? Franke warns.

As for universities and Columbia specifically, Franke points to the shift in institutional integrity within schools. Hedge fund managers, venture capitalists and corporate lawyers now run these institutions and their goals aren?t to maintain the principles of education and democracy, but rather the financial bottom line.

Franke says Columbia ?is humiliating itself in this process of negotiation with a bully that will not end because it's that repeated proof of ?I have all the power and you have none.? That is what governance looks like at this point. There's no principle at stake here. It's about an abusive exercise of power accompanied by humiliation.?

Any account of the decades-long occupation of Palestine from a Palestinian is immediately expected to be refined within a specific lens to appeal to the pathos of Western society. Well meaning activists, journalists and politicians may intend to share the stories of Palestinians, but end up curating them into a digestible format, one adjacent to the truth rather than one that embodies the whole of it. In other words, society forces Palestinians to justify and format their identities, experiences and traumas in order to be seen. Yet in the process, crucial and real pieces of their stories are sacrificed. 

Mohammed el-Kurd is a Palestinian writer and poet who defines this concept in his new book, ??Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal.? He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to share the ways in which Palestinians must bog down their identities, even in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, to crack through the limited and racist perspectives of Western audiences.

?None of these anchors or pundits are interested in what my political analysis or my assessment of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], they are just keen to know whether I fit in in their world order, whether I submit to their worldview and they would operate accordingly. And if I don't condemn Hamas or if I don't fall into their kind of world order, then I am condemned and it's okay for me to die,? El-Kurd tells Hedges.

Any positive support for Palestinians is always conditional, El-Kurd explains. He says, ?in order for these people to become sympathetic victims or order for them to acquire a spot in the newspaper? they need to be transformed from this political subject into this humanitarian subject. And in doing so, you obfuscate who the killer is, you obfuscate what the genesis of their suffering is, which is, again, in our case, Zionism.?

In writing about Palestine, El-Kurd admits that ?you're talking to an audience that is suspicious of you.? That changes the way people and particularly Palestinians write and speak, implanting a self-censorship that is hard to overcome. ?So you write and you draft your eulogies as if they are addressed to people who are eager to indict you,? he says.

The American corporate coup d'état is almost complete as the first weeks of the Trump administration exemplify. If there has been one person who saw this coming, and has taken courageous action over the years to prevent it, it would be Ralph Nader. The former presidential candidate, consumer advocate and corporate critic joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle his life?s work battling the corporate takeover of the country and how Americans can still fight back today despite the growing repression from the White House.

?The sign of a decaying democracy is that when the forces of plutocracy, oligarchy, multinational corporations increase their power, in all sectors of our society, the resistance gets weaker,? Nader tells Hedges.

Nader asks people to look around them and witness the decay through the ordinary parts of their lives. ?If you just look at the countervailing forces that hold up a society?civilized norms, due process of law and democratic traditions?they're all either AWOL [absent without official leave] or collapsing,? he said. Civic groups are outnumbered by corporate lobbyists, the media barely pays attention to any grassroots organizing and the protests that do occur, such as the encampments at universities, are brutally suppressed.

It?s not an impossible task, Nader says, recalling the precedent of organizing in the U.S. He says the fundamental basics are supported by a majority of people regardless of their political labels.

?Living wage is one. Universal health insurance is two. Crackdown on corporate crooks is three. A fair tax system is four. De-bloating the military budget and coming back home to repair and modernize infrastructure and public services in every community. Creating a lot of jobs is five. And empowering people so they can take back their sovereign power and condition it before they give their instructions back to their senators or their state legislators or their city council person.?

The Holocaust is the quintessential example of human evil for people in the West. In the rest of the world, especially in the Global South, the atrocity of the Holocaust ? genocide ? has had a closer proximity both in time and place. Colonialism in Africa, destructive wars in Asia and most recently, genocide in the Middle East, have shaped the lives of billions of people.

On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his latest book, ?The World After Gaza.? Mishra argues that the shifting power dynamics in the world means the Global South?s narrative on atrocity can no longer be ignored and the genocide in Gaza is the current crux of the issue.

?Large parts of the world have a cultural memory, historical memory of the atrocities that were inflicted on those parts of the world by Western powers. And that has actually gone to the making of their collective identity. And that is how they see themselves in the world,? Mishra tells Hedges.

Mishra explains that in the case of Israel, Zionist leaders weaponize this narrative by tying the safety and existence of the state of Israel to the defense against the evils of the Holocaust. In other words, the Zionist state exploits the suffering of millions for the benefit of the powerful.

?The words of politicians like Netanyahu, the rhetoric of people like Joe Biden insisting that no Jewish person in the world is safe if Israel is not safe, consistently connecting the fate of millions of Jews living outside of Israel to the fate of the state of Israel, I cannot think of anything more antisemitic. And yet these people keep doing it, endangering Jewish populations elsewhere,? Mishra says.

To the West, the concept of the rules-based order functions either as a list on paper to be ignored, or a strict set of laws to be weaponized. Omar El Akkad, Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, has witnessed many instances, both in the West and in the Middle East, where banners of virtue are used to justify hypocritical behavior. El Akkad writes about such instances in his new book, ?One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,? and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss them.

In the West, El Akkad admits there is a tendency of including indigenous land acknowledgements at gatherings like literary festivals and while it may be honest, he argues it continues the same pattern of theft. ?You steal land, you steal lives, and what's left to steal at the end but a narrative? The narrative that absolves all that came before,? he tells Hedges. This has always been the playbook of colonialism, he explains. ?We can all be sorry afterwards.?

With regard to the genocide in Gaza, Western media brushes over the daily acts of brutality with ?neutral,? unassuming language. Akkad recounts the description of children being killed as as bullets colliding with their bodies, and says ?What [they?re] trying to do is give someone on the other side of the planet who has the privilege of looking away the language with which to look away without feeling a pang in their conscience,? El Akkad says.

Many in the West are quick to pillory resistance movements in places like Palestine, but resistance and the right and methods of resistance, El Akkad illustrates, belong to those under oppression and occupation. He explains:

?I have zero right to tell anybody anywhere who lives under occupation and injustice how to resist that occupation and that injustice. There is no acceptable form of resistance in the view of the institutions doing the oppressing. You engage in boycotts, that's economic terrorism. You try to march peacefully, you are shot with the intent to kill and or maimed. You boycott cultural institutions, you are being illiberal. You take up arms, you are a terrorist, and you will be wiped out. All you can do is die. That is your only acceptable form of resistance.?

The material needs of working class people in America continue to be obscured and co-opted by politicians and people claiming to know what?s best on both sides of the political aisle. While Republicans and right-wingers address some of these needs head on, they do so by luring people through empty rhetoric and culture war distractions. On the other side, Democrats and liberals police and enforce a cancel-culture paradigm built by elites that also distracts and divides the proletariat from ever engaging in meaningful connection and change.

Catherine Liu, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss her new book, ?Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.?

The PMC, as Liu calls it, is a group of courtiers made up of academics, media figures and cultural elites who hover above the working class and dictate the aesthetic direction of ?progress,? notably without ever addressing the material needs of the workers it claims to look after. They stifle debate, discourage dissent and issue dire punishments of anyone who dare challenge their rationale. After the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, the liberal PMC blame ?people who are concerned with bread and butter issues for the defeat of these candidates that have been promoted by [Democrats,] a party completely captured by one segment of capital who are trying to show the American worker that they are idiots, they are racist, they're anti-immigrant, they're transphobic, they're homophobic, they're sexist,? Liu tells Hedges.

Liu points to a podcast appearance by Democratic campaign managers and their response to not combating Trump on a simple advertisement because of focus group testing as an example of the PMC?s disconnection from their constituents. ?They were in a box. They didn't go outside. They didn't talk to Americans. They didn't talk to people. They don't know people.?

Farah El Sherif, writer, academic and Visiting Scholar at Stanford, is uncompromisingly blunt in her assessment of the Middle East. The decades of repression faced by an entire people have produced a fragmented society?culturally and through colonially imposed borders. To help understand why the Muslim world is so broken, corrupt and full of contradictions, El Sherif joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

?The systemic repression that Muslim communities worldwide experience is inextricably linked to the interventionist, expansionist, supremacist American-Israeli Western project,? El Sharif says. Though the region has grown to have perceived independence from its former colonial states, El Sharif explains that the imperial agenda and the manufacturing of a Muslim menace continues.

The psychological and physical damage runs so deep that many give in to their oppressors in hope of selfish prosperity, while others look at themselves as less than deserving of a dignified existence. The genocide in Gaza proves to be the most crucial litmus test, as the leaders of fellow Muslim countries stand by and witness the slaughter of their own people in exchange for ?petty crumbs? from Western powers and the Zionist state.

?A lot of Muslims even internalize this war on terror rhetoric and they themselves start being apologetic and say, Islam is peaceful, Islam is this, Islam is compatible with democracy, Islam is compatible with civility,? El Sharif explains. ?I see that as a sign of decimated consciousness, not just double consciousness. They don't know their own faith, they don't know their own history, and so they start being apologetic about it, and that is a position of weakness.?