the deep state gave us Trump i mean a dysfunctional system gave us Trump in a functioning open society Trump would not even be a viable candidate the Harris campaign was so vapid and clueless and celebritydriven and issueless and the Democratic Party is all running around talking about their messaging i mean it shows you how utterly checked out they are and then Musk is that's what he's doing destroying everything what they intend to do is essentially cast aside the most vulnerable to increase the fear and anxiety among the precariat because uh they're more easily exploited i believe in transparency you know I have seen that when power abregates itself the ability to operate in darkness abuses proliferate so I wasn't planning on asking this before we s sat down but before we sat down we were out there talking with Rick Wolf whose episode will probably come out sometime around now and you mentioned uh penchant for weightlifting and you said more than you probably should be doing and it sounded like a sort of interesting story behind why you're doing that yeah it's really my way I cope with trauma yeah can you explain how it is that trauma from past war reporting and experiences manifest itself in your mental life today in such a way that you need to cope with it by weightlifting well the trauma doesn't go away it just rises and falls in intensity it never goes away and you can't control it because what it does is come to you at night and uh I mean when I first the last war I covered was Kosovo and when that ended um I was I I did don't did not have nightmares when I was in war zones which was kind of weird was when I got out but it was awful i mean it would come in waves and you don't sleep because you wake up with such fear sometimes you don't even remember why you're afraid but you just wake up with this and you don't you just lie there till dawn you can't uh and it what it does is it breaks you down you're exhausted you know after 2 3 4 days of that when you haven't slept it you know getting up and shaving becomes herculean in terms of the energy level and you can't really connect you become numb you can't connect with anyone around you um and you know I abused I wasn't an alcoholic but I would sometimes at moments like that drink a lot at night cuz I just wanted to pass out i just didn't want to remember my dreams that's obviously a really bad way to deal with it i mean I but I always lifted I lifted in war zones uh as a prophylactic so that because I was big enough that most people didn't want to deal with it um I also had boxed for three years so I kind of knew the rudimentary you know I knew how to fight um I think it's So my wife does audio books she's an actor and uh she did an audio book she read me a passage from an addict from a recovering addict about weightlifting which really resonated with me and he said that you know when you So now I I bench 185 which is heavy for me i'm 68 but you know you got to concentrate on that bar um because you can hurt yourself and um it's uh that concentration I think pulls you away or or pulls you into that moment or that space obviously with exercise you kick in endorphins and this addict was writing precisely that you know it was a completely complete description of my own experience um in the gym so I'm I mean if I'm on book tour and my day is packed I will get up at I hate getting up that early but I'll get up at 5 and if I don't go to the gym I start to get very very dark i get very black um so I'm you know there's probably you know a physiological component to this i don't know um but that's how I cope with it yeah no that that's the part that I find interesting and I wonder if you have insight into it but the part that I have in mind is I can understand why witnessing these horrible acts and being around them and fearing for your life could result in these nightmares that prevent sleeping but the connection between witnessing these things and then depression is sort of mysterious to me yeah but it's not just witnessing because you're afraid i mean you if you're in combat you're you know if I've been in a fair bit of combat but I mean when you're actually in an ambush where people are being killed around you it is terror is the right word i mean it's really and so I think it's a revisitation that terror when it comes back it's hard to describe i mean it's like just right literally down to your bones you know and so when the uh Israelis began the genocide in Gaza uh that was a really rough few months for me because one I was in Gaza quite a bit over a 7-year period that I covered the Middle East and number two I was in Sarvo during the war so I know what it feels like to be shelled with 300 shells a day and I know exactly what it feels like it's actually worse in Gaza but it was pretty bad in Sarvo and that combination was really really awful most of my nightmares even though like in the war in Salvador I I was morted a few times but it was primarily small arms fire but the nightmares tend to be the shelling it's interesting and I didn't spend anywhere near the time in Saro that I spent in Salvador uh but it tends to be the shelling I think because it's so you can't control it i mean there's just no not that in an ambush you have any sense of control it's complete confusion but I don't know why i mean the nightmares tend to be shelling yeah i really want to come back to Gaza and Palestine which you've just mentioned but before doing so I'd like to set some broader context for the conversation and what I hope to talk about similarly to what I spoke about with Rick recently is the decline of the American Empire and in 2018 you wrote an acclaimed book America: The The Farewell Tour and first before we get into some of the details there and and how things might be different today is it possible I know this is a big question to summarize what the main arguments were in that book that book was really the it was uh tied intimately to previous books so I had written uh American Fascist The Christian Right and the War on America i'd written Death of Liberal Class Empire of Illusion the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle uh Days of Destruction Days of Revolt which I wrote with a cartoonist Josaka where we wrote out of the poorest pockets of the United States these so-called sacrifice zones places that had been sacrificed by cap cap rapacious capitalism camden New Jersey which per capita at the time was the poorest city in the United States Pineriidge South Dakota where the average life expectancy for a male is 48 and so these were all descriptions of the decline of the empire in America the farewell tour it was really modeled on Emil Durkheim's book in on suicide i think he wrote it in 1898 where he asked the question what is it that propels individuals and societies to carry out acts of self annihilation and that's where the term enemy is drawn from Durkheim um and he argues that it's the rupture of social bonds which I think is true and that was something that I saw in all of the reporting that I did uh you know out of distressed pockets of the United States because work is a a key way to bond you to the society to give you a place within the society when you lose work or work becomes precarious then it has a terrible ripple effect not only within the family but within the community to self-esteem and all sorts of stuff and and so uh Durkheim highlighted um pathologies self-destructive pathologies that people engaged in when those social bonds were broken and that's what America the farewell tour is i'm no longer arguing that the societyy's breaking down i'm looking at the pathologies so uh gambling sexual sadism uh suicide uh I mean I actually wrote the chapter in gambling out of the Trump TSH um as it was closing i mean it was uh you know ratinfested and people were shooting up in the elevators and I said you know it's kind of where the country is headed um and right-wing hate groups because Durkheim argues that people who have a longing for uh annihilation for carrying out acts of annihilation are driven by a kind of desire for self annihilation so I was with the 3enters um which are mostly veterans far-right group um so that book was really looking at the America American pathologies and what it was doing i mean the opioid crisis for instance I I wrote about that i mean all of the ways by which we are obliterating ourselves as we talk about the decline of the American empire today I imagine that a big part of that is going to be Trump and speaking of Trump you have this wonderful Substack the Chris Hedges Report Substack which is replete with articles on these topics that we're about to discuss you also mentioned your wife and she reads a lot of them too she's a voice actor as you well she's an act she went to Julliard but then on co like all out of work actors she started doing audio books yeah yeah no but I think it's cool that they're they're they're read prefer that format but maybe this is a bit early in the interview for a more difficult difficult questions but I think it's often interesting to start out a conversation like this by not necessarily arguing for the other point but at least giving some support for it and so I wonder are there any things that Donald Trump is doing now or that he did in his first presidency that you do strongly approve of or maybe we don't have to go so far as say strongly approve of them i would oppose the uh proxy war in Ukraine so but of course he wants to end the war because he wants to build an alliance with Putin who he clearly admires and who he would like to emulate um but yeah I always felt that that proxy war was really uh cruel and unnecessary to the Ukrainians of course uh the expansion of NATO i was in Eastern Central Europe in 1989 covered the fall of the Berlin wall covered the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia it was in Romania with the fall of Chaescu um but I covered the the reunification of Germany and in order for Germany to be reunified you had to have the acquiescence of the Soviet Union and the deal was uh you know very uh uh overt and very public which was that we will not expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany um but with the collapse of the Soviet Union and this fantasy of a uniolar world which the American empire would dominate plus the billions of dollars that would be made by Rathon and all these companies when they reconfigured Warsaw pack companies to have their militaries be compatible with NATO um we ignored it and um there is real historical trauma in Russia uh they've been invaded three times uh uh Napoleon first world war second world war most of it coming through Ukraine um and it was it it just was unnecessary and and that doesn't excuse Putin what he did was a war crime without question but he was clearly provoked and baited and it it need not have happened it was predictable i mean we even know that from the Wikileaks dump because there were uh messages uh from uh the ambassador in um Moscow who later became the CIA director who said you know Ukraine's a red line uh and uh William Burns and um and we ignored it and then in a war of attrition there's just no way i know I covered war i mean you can give them M1 Abrams i mean remember we're not going to give them this we're not Every red line got crossed even when it was a def desperate kind of gamble because they were getting rolled back um uh and now Ukraine is devastated the uh numbers of dead I mean it's just and but it achieved American interests which were not the same as Ukrainian interests american interests are to degrade the Russian military and isolate Putin within Europe that's what they wanted um and that's what they got like all proxy wars you know the agenda of uh the uh country that is fmenting the proxy wars of I mean I covered many of them is very different from what I covered the Kurds for instance i mean there's just you know constantly betrayed armed and betrayed armed and betrayed armed and betrayed so yes I uh but Trump is um there's not much good to say about Trump i mean he's a con artist he's a demagogue he's a grifter it's all transactional uh he's obviously morally bankrupt intellectually limited um you know he's what you get i once wrote a column about how he was like the Snopes in Faulner's trilogy you know that rise up out of the decayed former slaveolding south um that's kind of who he is and he reminds me of the figures I covered in Yugoslavia who rose up from the swamp of Tito's decayed Yugoslavia Rodavanich Sloanovich Frano Tougeman all these figures i mean he uh and Vimar too i mean if you look at the collapse of Vimar you you have these buffoonish thugs which is what the Nazis were and you know these are basically pe and the people around him are just you know mediocrities goons um so I mean we're in big trouble it's interesting that you bring the Nazis up because in the last conversation that I just had with Rick we were talking about parallels between Hitler and and Trump and one was the use of rhetorical techniques in in a particular context so for instance his moves with regard to annexing Canada or Greenland or taking over the Panama Canal to sort of galvanize this defeated workingclass people and it's similar to some of Hitler's claims to to revitalize the defeated German people i like to when possible have interviews with people on both sides of an issue so I have guests who are proTrump as well and one of them Victor Davis Hansen we were speaking about these very same rhetorical moves and he viewed them as very successful uh tactical maneuvers kind of like art of the deal I think is that he quoted the he said it was kind of like what Trump describes in his book he didn't write art of the deal come on yeah it was let's let's not give Trump more any intellectual validity that was ghostritten what I wonder is how you at least view his rhetorical abilities do you think that they're I mean successful or Hitler was a much better uh speaker and you know actor in that sense than Trump uh uh Hitler had a political sense that Trump doesn't have so no I I think Trump is a very limited figure i think that the he's the product of a bankrupt liberalism he he's more a product of the failure of the established society than uh uh you know than uh the product of some kind of political genius he's a terrible speaker i mean let's be frank i mean you listen to him i listen to him he's not a good speaker at all he rambles he goes on and on uh you know half of the crowds walk out he he's not he's not a a a great but but the problem is that the decay within American society is so pronounced um that um a figure like Trump is able to exploit the macity and the selling out of the especially the working class but the American public in particular by the Democratic party but not just the Democratic party i mean the rejection is focused at the establishment Republican party the Liz Cheney the Mitt Romney these figures who have fused with the establishment democratic party into one party which is you know the old discredited ruling class uh and the Trump has tapped into the anger and it's a legitimate anger on the part of a betrayed populace uh and that's what's fueled his political project catering to that anger so did exactly the same thing there's a scene of him in Kosovo and uh there there are there was a Serb ethnic Serb minority in Kosovo and there were uh ser uh Kosvar Albanian separatists and so there were there would be attacks or um and and he starts saying to the crowd I will not let them beat you i will not and the crowd erupts you can almost see the light go off in his eyes and he rode that into power mallosich and Trump's done the same kind of thing how did the Democratic Party sell out the American working class um largely Clinton okay so this is this happened before Trump's first president trump's the product he's the He's I just didn't know if you were referring to his success in this most recent election or the first one well both right now now I see that i mean and I mean the the Harris campaign was so vapid and clueless and celebritydriven and issueless i mean just and the Democratic Party is all running around talking about their messaging i mean it shows you how utterly checked out they are but it was Clinton clinton uh turned the Republican or the Democratic party into the Republican party in essence uh you know whether it was the omnibus crime bill which militarized police and double the prison population three strikes your outlaws uh the NAFTA which was the greatest betrayal of the working class since the Taft Harley Act of 1947 which makes it very hard to union to organize to unionize um the ripping down the firewalls between investment and commercial banks that's GlassSteagall canada did not have a banking crisis because those firewalls were left in place or deregulating the FCC i mean and he and a congressman named Tony Quelloo out of California understood that if they did corporate bidding they get corporate money that's what's behind it because I'm I'm very much not an expert in these areas so I find it quite fascinating so so Clinton turned the Democratic party into the Republican party basically for money yeah and so the anger is particularly fierce to the Democrats because traditionally labor had a a say in Democratic policy you know would probably be stretching it to say the Democratic party was you know a Labor party but it it uh at least unlike the Republican party Labor had a seat at the table hence Clinton abolished that this is interesting because I see some connection to today in that it sounds like corporations corporate money plagued the Clinton administration in this way or became a plague for the American working class through Clinton and what I'm wondering is if you see today Elon Musk being part for instance of Trump's administration or Trump just being in the White House as maybe the logical next step of corporations further invading or replacing um a government right well you have to make a differentiation between corporists and oligarchs they're not the same uh the slashing of tax rates the moving of manufacturing bases overseas places like Mexico China etc enriched corporations and they also created a very powerful oligarchic class worth hundreds of billions of dollars i don't know what the you know what's Bezos 180 billion or something and oligarchs and corporatists they're both capitalists but they don't want exactly the same thing did I stop you for one moment did you mention Bezos why is Bezos connected to like why is Amazon connected to what you were just describing maybe I missed something well he's an oligarch so what oligarchs make their money off of rantier capitalism they don't actually produce anything they set up toll booths so Amazon doesn't make anything but if you want anything you got to pay Amazon to get it that's rantier capitalism whereas if GM they make cars so GM used to make cars in Anderson Indiana and in America the Farewell Tour I write out of Anderson they're big gigantic weed choke lots surrounded by cyclone fencing because they move the plants to Mexico literally truck them up and move them and you had about 25,000 unionized workers in Anderson who were making you know roughly with benefits uh about $50 an hour and they pay $3 an hour in Monterey Mexico without any benefits at all that's corporations so corporations want things like stable uh trade deals uh they because they will make an investment and it will take it could take a while for them to seek a return that's that's corporations oligarchs and so they want a certain amount of stability they want a certain amount of decorum figures like Obama figures like Biden at least you know while he was sentient oligarchs want chaos they want the system to be destroyed because the more it's destroyed uh the more for vital services i mean that's why they're destroying the Department of Education everything becomes privatized and in order to get essential services and this is the horror of our for-profit healthcare industry uh you've got to go through these oligarchs in order to get it um Facebook you know all what Giannis Verafakis calls techno uh feudalism uh so there's the I looked at the last election as one between corporatists who are backing the Democrats and oligarchs who are backing Trump and the oligarchs won and they're doing what oligarchs do which is dismantling the administrative state to create a system whereby our most basic needs I mean it's already happened in many cities the privatization of water the privatization of sewer systems the privatization of parking authority everything becomes a way to uh extract it's extractive and the services decline of course I mean that's why they want to privatize the postal service which they did in the UK if you look at the UK postal service it's a disaster they don't deliver to rural areas now they'll only deliver in some places to boxes people have to come in and get their mail the mail gets lost um because it's not about sustaining a civil society and providing basic services to the society it's extractive uh and and so the oligarchs won and and Musk is that's what he's doing he's destroying everything and and and uh and what they hope what they intend to do is essentially cast aside the most vulnerable uh to increase the fear and anxiety among the procariat who don't have stable jobs don't have job protection because uh they're more easily exploited um and that's what all of this is about it's it's and it's it's also a window into the collapse of the structures of the democratic state which were already very anemic and in decline but you know for instance Congress which is you know we have our elections are just legalized bribery I mean you they you you get a candidate they go in the lobbyists write the legislation and but Congress which has the power of the purse the power to control spending has completely abregated its control and what you're watching is the slashing of basic services uh and then uh Congress people who support Trump can call Musk up and say "Well don't cut this social security office or whatever it is in my district." And they restore it whereas the Democrats are reduced to kind of writing uh angry and uh you know memos or something or press releases but have no power well that's a system of patronage that's how dictatorships or authoritarian regimes work um and and so yeah we're very far down the road towards a kind of American fascism um we're we're barreling towards it with the usual inability on the part of a bankrupt liberal class to put up roadblocks and stop it i'm curious about this point about the privatization of the postal service just because one often hears that it's government organizations that are the most bloated and inefficient and the post office in my experience does not do as well as FedEx or UPS and at least facially what I hear Musk claiming is that they're trying to get rid of this government bloat and excess well that's garbage i mean if you lived in rural Montana you wouldn't say that because in in remote areas uh FedEx won't pick up oh really oh no i mean they're going to drive four hours out to your ranch to get something uh the the the that what they will do i mean let's remember what they've done to the postal service that they borrowed from the pension funds to drive it into economic distress so it's always and they're doing that right now to social security they they will create a system uh or they will they will essentially devour cannibalize a system so that it becomes dysfunctional and then use that as the excuse to privatize it um but take a good look at the UK postal service if you want to see what a privatized postal service looks like it's a disaster there they're the a postal service is about giving the postal ability to the citizenry in the same way that our public school system is about educating children regardless of where they are or if it functions well even what income level they're at that's not true in the United States because it it is driven by property taxes um so what you're doing is taking the most basic services that we pay for we pay for them not Musk we pay them with our tax dollars and if you want to talk about the most bloated uh unaccountable government agency that's the Pentagon they haven't been audited in 10 years the waste and fraud and you know you sign contracts with Boeing or whoever it is and you have cost overruns they're all guaranteed and then the weapon systems don't work it's the military which consumes half of all discretionary spending and when Arnold Toneby writes about his book about the collapse of civilizations he cites a rampant uh unaccountable uncontrollable militarism as the death nail of all civilizations which was true and I covered I read studied classics which was true of course with Rome and Greece in ancient Greece this question might be tangential i'm I'm not sure but as I was combing through your Substack I found some articles on on the deep state and I'm admitting to this I hear people mention the deep state all the time but I am pretty unclear on what it is and it's probably something that I should have looked into much more a long time ago but I do hear the deep state used in connection often with the Pentagon so maybe before we continue I could just ask because I think it is relevant to Trump just what exactly is the deep state what are the like the myths that maybe irresponsible conspiracy theorists might lobby about with it but what is it actually well in that sense you know the right when they talk about the deep state is not wrong there is a deep state um it is built around uh largely the intelligence agencies um secret black budgets which even Congress doesn't know about um and which which you're very confident still exist so it's not conspiracy theories to talk about it no we know there's what I think hundred billion dollars goes towards black budgets and if you look it up we don't even know where the money goes and this and the military in the United States is a state within a state no Congress person can vote against appropriations in fact you know every time they put a bill that even under the Biden administration they pay them more i think the last was what they gave them $40 billion more than they even asked for because they've set up the only thing we make anymore in America largely are weapons and they've set up plants all throughout the country so it becomes an issue of employment you can't close the F-35 plan in Vermont because these people will go to so that the the deep state is any institution within the state that is beyond control and I think the intelligence agencies are beyond control certainly the CIA but we have 16 intelligence agencies military is beyond control uh yeah that's the deep state and it's largely you said this like hundred billion dollars going to what's more than that if you count the Pentagon budget it's a trillion dollar trillion well the Pentagon is what we spend on defense mhm defense weaponry what is I guess when when I said irresponsible conspiracy theorists and maybe I'm I'm totally wrong here too but I have in mind people talking about reptilians or Illuminati in the in in the deep state uh but well I mean you know every when when systems of information shut down when you live in societies dominated by secrecy this I've lived in these societies then conspiracy theories run rampant uh because people are searching for explanations about what's happening and because the press is shut down uh there there's no kind of rational explanation for what's happening conspiracy theories are uh you know and that that that was true in every kind of totalitarian country that I covered whether it was in the Middle East or Latin America or anywhere else so that's what happens when when they're right about the secrecy and then they make guesses often which are or or they seek to construct narratives often which are fantastical but they they're looking for narratives to explain what's happening to them i mean that was certainly true with the Christian right i spent two years with the Christian right and they were searching for conspiracy theories to explain their own emiseration their own dislocation you know the suffering that they endured uh within their communities their de-industrialized communities so you said we know that this money is going to the deep state but we don't know I mean the question then is what sorts of things are they doing with this money i guess by definition we don't know exactly what they're doing but what sorts of things might they be doing with it well they build both an international and a domestic apparatus of internal security i mean wholesale surveillance that's what Edward Snowden exposed or Bill Benny who wrote Trailblazer and he wrote that kind of program to monitor people suspected of being involved in groups that would carry out terrorism and they immediately seized upon and used it to surveil all of us uh you know leaks because of Snowden because of Wikileaks we know we have glimpses you know the backdoor capabilities they have so that if we think our phone is turned off it's not really turned on it's not fake that's all real and and and totalitarian societies i covered East Germany a stazzi state of East Germany it's always about wholesale surveillance uh and as Hannah Ertent writes it's people say "Well I didn't do anything wrong so I shouldn't worry." Well that's to misread what's happening because where they they collect data on you and we're the most monitored watched photographed uh surveiled population in human history they have all that data and then the moment they want to criminalize you they can uh and that's what you know Stalinism did that's that's what any any totalitarian state does so uh after that exposure this was under Obama that Snowden made nobody rolled it back uh so we have glimpses we know what they're doing i mean we have we're assuming they're ICE agents as are taking these students off the streets with uh student visas from foreign countries and with the video of the tough students who was seized it's an unmarked car they're in unmarked clothes their faces are covered we're not even sure what agency they're from and she's bundled in handcuffed bundled in a car and taken away well I used to watch that kind of stuff on the streets of Santiago under the regime of Austo Pino that's how those countries work i I didn't see this TUS video what what when yeah it was just a few days ago it's a It's a video of a woman who I think she was Turkish PhD student at TUS and they she was coming to her home for Ramadan I think for thear and they grabbed her and nobody knows what's happened to her maybe they do i mean you know somebody somebody ostensibly does but the public doesn't seem to end up in Louisiana why because of course the uh the judicial system there is amanable to sending all these people you know when you start uh revoking visas when you start arresting people with green cards it's a very short step towards grabbing people with citizens with passports very short which I expect to happen very soon even as I was just having this conversation with Rick a couple of hours ago now as I ask him what are some parallels between Trump and Hitler in the back of my mind I'm wondering can I even publish this anymore or am I just targeting myself for something in the next few years right now that you're going to get crucified over the genocide they've weaponized anti it's not anti-semitism to criticize Israel of course But they've weaponized that as a as a as a kind of way as just a substitute to go after quote of leftism you know but for citizens too at this point uh in this sense that that those students who are citizens within the universities are uh have been expelled suspended put on probation professors have been and administrators have been expelled suspended and put on probation so they haven't been stripped of their passports but they've been essentially punished or criminalized for free speech i mean we have I live in Princeton and Rua Benjamin a very highly regarded academic is teaching on probation and then you have Katherine Frankie this you know very important legal scholar who spoke out against the repression against the students and the assault by veterans of the IDF who were students at Colombia uh they used some kind of a toxic chemical to spray protesters they ended up in the hospital she spoke out against that after 25 years she's pushed out of Columbia Law School and within the legal profession Frankie is a huge huge figure so you're already you're you creep towards uh totalitarianism that was true with the fascists in Germany it was true under Stalinism so Nitson writes about it it's a it's a process it's And by the time you're shackled you or you realize you're shackled it's too late yeah i don't know how law schools work but I assume that there's tenure in law schools too right probably i don't know i would assume so but I wonder how it was pushed out i'm sure that there are ways that universities have of exerting pressure on people they don't want to be there even if they have tenure but I'm curious sure i don't know the specifics of it i just know she was pushed out after 25 years returning though to the to the deep state you mentioned that Congress doesn't even have access to what's going on in well Feinstein car after it was exposed that there was torture being carried out in CIA run black sites she tried to do a Senate investigation and they intimidated her staff they hacked into her computers and she came out and gave a press conference a completely ashen and said you can't hold these people I I'm paraphrasing I remember the exact quote but you know you can't these people are unaccountable we can't hold them accountable so uh I mean there's an example again of the deep state you can't if you cross that line uh it becomes dangerous I mean Robert Kennedy I'm not a conspiracy theorist on the assassination of JFK but Robert Kennedy till the day he was assassinated believed the CIA had a hand in the execution of and the assassination of his brother and then there's pretty good evidence there was and I'm going to draw a blank on his name but there's an old CIA director I want to say McCoy but I can't remember who uh after he retired became very critical of the CIA and then died in a like a boating accident or something so and we know from history the history whether it's COINTELP pro the kinds of stuff the FBI did against activists uh or the uh information that came out about uh you know the the the um torture techniques it was all done at McGill University how to break people down psychologically uh the use of LSD and and uh I mean the Steve Kzer wrote a book called Poisoner and Chief about the guy who was in charge of kind of creating the poisons and the hallucinogenics for the CIA so we have glimpses in the past of how they operate and they certainly have they're no different today yeah well the reason that I I just brought up Congress not knowing what's happening behind these budgets is I wanted to ask what relationship one I wanted to ask what relationship Donald Trump might have to the deep state and why it's interesting and then also what it is that the quote unquote right-wing conspiracy theorists that you mentioned earlier said they're not really conspiracy theorists in this case maybe at all because not they they are in terms of Qanon and this kind of stuff but they're not wrong about the existence of the deep state they have you know created their own kind of theories about how it works and many of which I find fantastical but they're not wrong about the deep state and Donald Trump is terrified of the deep state because the deep state is hostile how do we know because every former intelligence head clapper milit as soon as they retired they could not be on CNN fast enough accusing Trump of being a Russian asset which was a fiction of course and the New York Times slogged that thing for two years and both the New York Times and the Washington Post won Pulitzers based on on unsubstantiated garbage so all fascist regimes rise to power by promising to clean out the rot of the state uh to you know to drain the swamp so to speak they're not wrong about the swamp uh that was true in Vimar Germany which was a morass of corruption and anti-democratic and uh but what it's what they replace it with so what he replaces it with is people who are personally loyal to him uh and that's what's dangerous when you have all sorts of unconstitutional measures being carried out uh including the u you know attempt to the seizure and attempt to deport green card holders these are legal residents in our country uh when the justice department is personally loyal to Trump then there's no enforcement mechanism so uh how do you stop these judicial abuses uh when uh the Justice Department has lost all independence at all um but again I don't want to somehow pretend that pre-Trump these institutions were not rotten and corrupt they were that and that's what when I talked about a bankrupt liberalism that's what I meant that it that the you know the anger towards the dishonesty and the corruption and um the fact that they would for two years go after Trump on the fiction that he was a Russian asset exposes the um uh you know the rot within those institutions but all totalitarian regimes which promise to clean out that rot replace it with something worse and that's what's happening I mean these people are even more corrupt than the people they're replacing who are pretty corrupt the people from the deep state who are being No no no they're purging the deep state right i'm saying the people who are being purged from the deep state are being replaced with people who are more corrupt yeah of course they are but you are also in opposition to there being a deep state yeah I believe in transparency right so accountability I believe that uh I'm a journalist I don't you know you know I have seen that when power abregates itself to itself the ability to operate in darkness abuses proliferate i know I spent my whole life covering and writing about it right but so I guess in this case the deep state is the lesser evil you would almost rather them remain no I wouldn't say that i would say that the deep state gave us Trump i mean a dysfunctional system gave us Trump i blame the Democratic party and the uh ruling class for Trump in a functioning open society Trump would not even be a viable candidate but because the the system seized up and democratic institutions were seized by the billionaire class to serve exclusively their interests it gave us Trump that it's not new i mean this has been going on it was true in Yugoslavia it was uh you know it's true when any society breaks down there there's something that I'm not understanding i mean you said that the the deep state gave us Trump you said that the the Democratic Party and the ruling elites gave us Trump but the deep state is also you also characterized it as it can't be controlled and it's hostile and it's not these people so they they both independently contributed to Trump or you're saying that in in concert oh it's because of their it's because they can't be controlled because of their abuse of power and which generated a legitimate frustration and anger among the populist that you make a Trump possible in that sense they don't want Trump they don't like Trump uh and that's why Trump is going after him you know if you look at any society I mean for instance you and I covered Iran 1979 uh the Iranian revolution they immediately purged the quote unquote deep state or the bureaucratic state of the Shaw and put in their own people that was true after the Russian Revolution that was true in 1933 when the Nazis took That's what always happens and uh you know but the the world is a complicated place and the charges that often times these people make against the old bureaucratic state is not wrong i mean the Savak which was the Shaw's secret police was savage i mean just savage and brutal and murderous um uh it it's what comes later when that when that society uh essentially is reconstituted to serve a particular person or a particular ideology it's it's not better and that's what's happening but the deep state itself was awful and the uh you know our the breakdown of our democratic institutions is real and is awful none of that's fiction you mentioned and this is a change of subject I don't think maybe it's tangential but you said that you spent two years with the the far the Christian right right and what did that entail spending two years with them well I'm a reporter so what did it entail i went to their mega churches i I took evangelism explosion seminars with D james Kennedy i went to write R write write the life weekends what's an evangelism explosion d James Kennedy used to be a really big farright and it teaches you how to it was kind of fascinating it teaches you how to recruit people into the mega church you know and and they were quite open about praying on people who had just gotten divorced just lost their job uh just lost a spouse were new in the neighbor i mean they kind of cynical in a way but you have to go on the inside to understand what these institutions are i'm also a divinity school graduate i grew up in the church so I'm biblically literate and I was acutely aware of how they were misusing the Bible which is why I my book's called American Fascists i mean I saw them as an authentically fascist movement why as a I mean among other things of course a a war reporter was this a job that you wanted to spend two years of your life working on well I wasn't a war reporter anymore and I had been pushed out of journalism because of my public uh critiques of Bush's call to invade Iraq but what was it in particular just your interest in divinity or Yeah I mean I'm I grew up in the church my father was a minister my mother was a seminary graduate and I was frustrated with a liberal church for not calling these people out for who they are which they're heretics they have sacralized the worst aspects of American imperialism white supremacy capitalism it's a complete anathment of the biblical message it's why they concentrate they focus so much on Paul rather than the gospels but uh you know just something that I knew a lot about and that I was uh interested in as a movement in understanding and I love reporting anyway i just you know I love it because you get out you carry all sorts of assumptions that often get shattered i mean I went so I come out of the kind of left-wing uh religious social gospel movement my father who was a World War II vet he was in North Africa but he was in the anti-war movement Vietnam civil rights movement and in uh very uh outspoken for gay rights at a time when that was very unpopular um especially with the church um and so I was I had a kind of disdain for these people but you can't listen to their stories without you have to have a heart of stone not to feel for what they went through i mean the evictions the struggle with substance abuse the domestic violence and which are all we talked about Durkheim all attendant to societal breakdown and I actually the first chapter in the book is called despair and all totalitarian movements are uh drawn from this despair that's what Fritz Stern and the politics of cultural despair writes about that's what Hannah Arent writes about both of them refugees from Nazi Germany and it's and and you have in these mega churches and I think Trump does this you pray on that despair so the megaurch pastors uh um who make fabulous sums of money in the same way that Trump made money from a sham university or his casinos or anything else it's praying on this despair so I came away you know although I think the movement's dangerous and I think it is fascist and I think that that uh ideology fills the ideological void i don't think Trump has any other than you know if it's transactional and he just wants to make money but it it's filling that ideological void and many of the figures both in the first administration and the second come out of that movement um but I looked at most of the adherence as victims yeah and I and that that that was because I spent time with them uh and I while I disliked the megaurch pastors immensely uh James Dobson and these figures who I really thought were very cynical and I didn't necessarily dislike the people you know their congregants correct me if I'm wrong but are you a Presbyterian minister i am i don't advertise that too much but I am ordained yes am I right that you became a minister so that you could work in prisons not quite so I after I lost my job at the New York Times and I was given a reprimand i was told I was not allowed to speak about the war in Iraq and I refused and so I left the paper oh wow i I did not know that so and I've been the That's pretty insane that a paper would do that well I was the Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times i spent seven years in the Middle East including a lot of time in Iraq it wasn't a it wasn't an active I I knew that this was number one I knew he didn't have weapons of mass destruction and number two I realized this was a um a debacle a fiat going to be a fiasco which of course it was and I think all the Arabists did in the State Department the CIA I don't think there was any division between any of us um but you couldn't say it after after 911 to say this kind of things i mean my I come into my office at the New York Times and my phone was filled with death threats and there were weren't more because they'd run out of space it was that moment in time was to speak out against the war was well of course I lost everything i lost my salary lost my health insurance lost everything and because I have friends in the church they managed to get me health insurance through the church and then the administrators of the Presbyterian church said "Well at some point he can't have it he's not ordained." So I had done all the academic work to be ordained um and all I needed was to pass the five exams which are three about three hours each roughly including Greek and I just went to the Princeton University Library and retaught myself everything I'd forgotten took the exams and passed them and then had uh was ordained in inner city church and I already been teaching in the prison so I teach in the college degree program through Ruckers and have for a long time uh and I invited the students of my families in the prison to come we threw out the himynelss and got a blues band and Dr james Conn the father of black liberation theology gave the sermon and Cornell West spoke and um but it was really geared towards mass incarceration so that's how I and it it wasn't illegitimate i mean I look at that as a ministry most of my students are Muslim and I'm not trying to bring them to Jesus but I think being I think the mass incarceration is a civil rights issue of our time and I think for you know there we're we should be in those prisons doing everything we can for those people we have the largest prison population in the world 2.3 million people I think in the prisons or roughly 2 million uh 40% of whom never convicted a crime of violent crime um and uh and they know I'm you know they know they I never say it but they know I'm they know I'm a minister and uh so yeah and it's on YouTube so you can watch the ordination YouTube well it's not every day that I have a Presbyterian minister and reporter who is embedded in the the Christian right on the show so I'm curious i mean this is getting a little bit far from the decline maybe it's not the decline of the American Empire but clearly Christianity is a very important part of your life and one that you value why is it so valuable yet at the same time this ostensibly Christian movement could be so dangerous i don't look I think they're heretics i don't look at them as Christians it's a political movement i mean you know they're all talking about family values and moral probability and then they they sign up for Trump i mean his life is just a train wreck of immorality and dishonesty so I think that's evidence that it's primarily a political movement what is its goal as a political movement they want to create a quote unquote Christian nation but it's a theocratic state in the same way that Iran is a theocratic state so their philosophers I mean they they lean a lot on Carl Schmidt the Nazi jurist they lean on Rousus John Rush Doneyi who's a Nazi sympathizer uh his Institutes of Biblical Law which is pretty turid which I've read um they replicate the so-called German Christian Church which was pro-Nazi and that was driven home to me by my mentor at Harvard Divinity School James Luther Adams who was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and uh dropped out of the University of H Highleberg to join the so-called confessing church which was run by Neoler and Bonhaofer and these great resistance figures until he was picked up by the Gustapo and expelled from Germany and he's the first person I heard refer to the Christian right as Christian fascists in the same way that I look at Netanyahu Smutzidge Ben Gavir Jewish fascists they come out there's a fascist strain in America the Kulux Clan is a fascist organization we had all sorts of in the 1930s outliers uh you know who were openly supported fascism in Europe uh same was same is true in Israeli society you go back to Vladimir Jabatinsky whom Mussolini called a good fascist that's a quote and then Mayor Kahana who I covered who was this fascistic rabbi he was his party was actually outlawed both Israel and the United States declared uh the party a terrorist organization the people who run Israel are now the heirs of Kahana you had the Harut Party which Netanyahu's father comes out of Benzion which uh there was artic a letter published in the New York Times signed by Hannah Erant and uh Sydney Hook and Albert Einstein all these leading Jewish intellectuals who accused it of being fascist so the strain has been there problem is that that fascism has now ascended not just in Israeli society not just in American society but in Hungary in uh in Russia in uh in France in Germany the off day i mean so we're we this fascism the the uh Robert Paxton wrote a book anatomy of fascism kind of good study of fascism and he said you know fascism when it returns isn't going to come to American jack boots and swastikers they will return with mass recitations the pledge allegiance and uh you know the Christian cross and that's right fascism Italian fascism and German fascism are very different italian fascism which did not have a very strong anti-Semitic strain to it uh was all based on the glories of ancient Rome uh German fascism was was grounded in Tutonic myth uh so you know fascism takes on a domestic kind of coloring uh but I I came away after two years in that movement convinced that it was a very dangerous fascistic political force and I think I've been proven right what is it about what is happening in this movement specifically that leads you to label it as fascistic what is the actual behavior that's happening it's based on a leadership cult it glorifies white supremacy quote unquote you know patriotic education uh it uh is uh you know calls for the death penalty i mean Rush Doneyi writes about how we won't need prisons because people who are recidivists will be executed uh it is about inculcating quote unquote Christian values in education uh it's it's essentially the calcification of uh the intellectual life of and artistic life of the nation which is what any totalitarian regime does uh it is the belief that a figure like Trump is anointed by God and that's that what's that woman who's head of his now faithbased the newly created faithbased I think her name is white I mean she she said any criticism of Trump is a criticism of God well you know that's wow let me tell you that's something yeah that's idolatry I that that is the worst sin that any religious movement can make to essentially sacriize temporal or political power so yeah it's a very very dangerous movement and not very well understood I think by people who are outside it one part of your response that I didn't understand which I'm sure is just a failure on my part is why advocating for the death penalty is fascistic because a huge percentage of those people are innocent they don't most of them are people of color poor people of color i mean look at the work of Brian Stevenson in Alabama uh look at the Innocence Project look at the DNA testing i I teach in a prison they don't get adequate legal representation at all okay so it's not necessarily the belief that somebody who is guilty should be killed i don't I don't believe that the state has a right to commit murder any more than an individual has a right to commit murder i mean I've taught in the prison i'm not romantic about the prison i can tell you I've taught people should not be walking the streets i've taught them but I don't believe in killing them uh you know and most of those people who should not be walking the streets I would say it's a mental health issue and they're dangerous let's I'm not I'm not a p prison abolitionist but I I don't I don't believe in in it uh I mean aside from the inhumanity of it it's also the fact that if you're poor and vulnerable um you know you're often very likely to be innocent and uh and you know if if you even do that once it's But I just don't believe in the death penalty i don't and is that because really at the root of it because of the ten commandments if you took the Ten Commandments literally then you could never kill at all and having been in SVO during the war where we were surrounded by trenches and if the Bosnian Serbs broke through the trenches we knew that a third of the city would be slaughtered and the rest would be driven into displacement and refugee camps that wasn't conjecture that's what happened to Vukavar and the Dina Valley knew you didn't have discussions in the basement of Sar Evo because we were being pounded by shells about pacifism it doesn't save you from the poison of violence you're distorted and deformed by violence even in a quote unquote just cause but there are moments when you are such as Sarva will be a good example you're facing your own annihilation and you're not really given a choice i mean I would say that's true for the Palestinians they've not been given a choice in that uh Israel has shut down any attempts to uh create a just and equitable settlement through peaceful means i'm not def I hate violence and I actually know Hamas really well i spent a lot of time with Hamas and I'm no huge fan of Hamas or any other violent movement um but it's the oppressor that determines the uh configurations of resistance by the oppressed i would like to I hope it's okay that we've spent as much time as we have talking about religion i think it's interesting i have I have one last question that's more philosophical in nature i mean we've seen you said you hate violence we saw in the beginning of this conversation how deeply it has affected you and how much more deeply it's affected you than me or probably many of our American listeners at least and given that you are also a very religious man I'm curious how you reconcile the problem of evil which I take to be a very long and storied problem in in theology how can we have or how could there be a a perfect God when we live in this very terrible in many ways world um evil is a mystery it's not a problem and in war when everything gets stripped down you see almost the pure face of evil but you also see incredible acts of goodness and kindness because to carry out an act of kindness in a war especially when you reach out to the other who's demonized is almost suicidal um there's almost a a a willful acceptance of self-sacrifice and those stand in very very stark relief so that both good and evil almost become palpable i mean when the shells so there was no running water in Svo in individual dwellings you had to go to what the UN had created water collection sites or taps where people would line up and get water remember we're being shelled 24 hours a day and the Serbs would find out when the crowds were gathering at those and then bomb them and shell them and we're talking about 90 mm tank rounds 155 howitzers i mean really heavy stuff and I've seen it i mean it's you know the bodies are split in half and it's just awful and so you almost had these waves of death emanating from these epicenters but then you you you saw these families and friends frantically trying to reach out to friends and loved ones to and you and it was these concentric waves of good and evil that are very real um so yeah I mean I think that the I was close to the great radical priest Daniel Beran who went to federal prison for burning draft records during the Vietnam War in Caitensville in Maryland um and I asked him to define faith i said "How do you define faith?" And he said "The belief that the good draws to it the good even if empirically everything around you says otherwise and I think having come out of conflicts and wars and distress situations that true that's true I mean figures like Oscar Romero I covered in El Salvador Martin Luther King you know these are figures that draw the good to the good um uh and yet you know there's that old Christian adage that you when you when you make a commitment as a Christian it's called bearing bearing the cross and the cross is ultimately what they kill you on if you read I think David Garrow wrote a very fine biography of King called bearing the cross king like Malcolm X they at the end they were very aware that it was over that they weren't going to live very long and yet they held fast to that kind of moral and spiritual imperative i mean essentially that they carried their cross i mean I don't think it's an accident that I would argue our two of our greatest prophets were both deeply religious malcolm X and Martin Luther King because I think that when you uh confront radical evil at that level um which has the capacity not only to kill you but almost probably will kill you um then you have a feelalty to um a world that I don't like the word spiritual but a but a world that is rooted in the sacred speaking of evil you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation when I asked you about America the farewell tour that sadism was something emblematic of the sexual sadism oh sexual sadism well sadism but particularly I mean we're a pornified culture well then maybe this isn't directly connected to by the way this is where something I will agree with the Christian right on and I'm against this is now kind of a bit of nonsequiter from what we were speaking about but why why is this what why is sexual sadism and because it's about turning human beings into objects so I wrote a chapter out of kink.com in San Francisco which is a BDSM community at the time they were housed in the old armory in the mission district and people could pay they could call in and literally women would be waterboarded i mean women and I interviewed the women who were carrying out these acts and they were the they were beaten and it was and it was that sexual sadism is always a part of disintegrating societies it's the erotic eroticizing violence towards others and particularly the vulnerable and particularly women i mean I saw it in war i mean look in war uh the only thing that's produced in greater numbers than prostituted girls and women are corpses because the men aren't there the men are dead they're Yeah and and sexual violence is very much a part of war too what is the connection though between the sexual sadism and the decline of empires well it's a breakdown it's a breakdown of any communal solidarity and it is a warped uh it's it's it's a warped kind of desire in order to uh fill estatic needs by punishing beating abusing degrading another in which empire what evidence is there i'm not suggesting that there isn't any that it has been connected to Rome look at the last Caligula Nero all this kind of stuff what was happening then what wasn't I mean Tiberius you know throwing people off of cliffs and uh you know terrible physical I mean there was they used in the there was actually they at one point I can't remember which emperor it was in the in In the coliseum they reenacted the rape of Europa by the bull and they put a woman inside like a leather bull and had the actual bull mount her and rip her apart i mean Rome was pretty awful how do if at all do you see this issue of sadism if not sexual sadism as playing out in Israel and Palestine over the last two years well sadism comes through dehumanization so you dehumanize the other and then the other is not only are they less than you but they have no actual worth and uh you they become in the words of Israeli politicians a human animal i think that was Gance who said that but uh and then you they get treated like animals i mean the Nazis did it i mean that's but it's it's a way of denying another's humanity another's another person's worth another person's right to exist and that unleashes a kind of sadism i mean sadism was part of every war that I covered i mean sadism was because when you can kill with impunity it just becomes kind of boring just to kill so like in Bosnia I went into towns and uh saw where the Serbs had crucified Muslims on the sides of barns or split them open or I mean even in the war in Salvador the death squads would mutilate the bodies i mean they would cut off their genitals and put it in their mouth and that's all sadistic my my uncle was in the South Pacific in World War II and I'm not the Japanese were horrible but so were the Americans i mean he carried out acts of sadism i mean drank came home and drank himself to death but sadism is very very much a part of war because war begins from the point of dehumanization of the other because it's so difficult for a human to kill and harm other people while thinking of them as humans rather than objects yeah yeah although you train killers so you use operant conditioning the same way you train a dog repeatedly repeatedly so if you look at like uh boot camp it's about operant conditioning it's about inculcating uh an instinctive response um that that's how you create killers i don't think most people have a natural tendency to kill i think it has to be induced in the case of Israel and Palestine do you see the war there and the sadism there as indicative of the United States decline as well i I would say it's more well yes in a sense that if we defended international law if we stood up for the Geneva Convention we would not be arming and s Israel and sustaining the genocide with billions of dollars of weapons we would have a no-fly zone out of Gaza we would bring in humanitar if we if if if the rule of law mattered to us so that breakdown of the rule of law is quite frightening and it sends a message to the global south uh you know which is we we have everything and if you try and take it away from us we'll kill you and that's why there's been so much opposition with climate change and the rise of failed states and mass migrations that tactic of open genocide I mean Gaza is now been shut off for 3 weeks for it's going to be mass starvation in an attempt by the probably successful by the Israelis to force the Palestinians out of Gaza and we're sitting here watching it uh and that has delivered an unequivocal message to the rest of the world i mean we may not see it but we are paras we are paras israel is a pariah in the eyes of almost every country on the planet uh so in that sense but I think that you know in many ways Israel's uh trajectory which has become fascistic is mirrored our own in a lot of ways how does the Christian right connect to Israel why are they in such support yeah that's a good question because I think at their core they're both fascistic movements so I think that what the Christian right sees in Israel is a a a European dominated settler colonial project that cares nothing for the rule of law and uh and uh is making war on you know the darker peoples of the earth and Muslims and that's very much the project that the Christian right embraces it's about the the return of white male patriarchy of uh the uh eradication that's the whole great replacement theory which you know Israel is terrified demographically if they were to create a unified state given the demographic numbers it would very quickly the Palestinians would outnumber the Israeli Jews uh and I think that what they see and I think you've see the alt-right the off day and Orban and all these kind of fascistic type movements in Europe also ally with the Netanyahu government for exactly the same reason that it's about uh the domination of uh you know Euroamerican or Euro settlers over others uh and and that that is very very much a part of the Christian right that fear that they're going to be displaced the religious narrative about maybe a return to the homeland you see as just a a cover for the by the Christian right yes well you have to remember what is their belief their belief is that uh according to the Bible and look there's a lot of stuff they believe that's not in the Bible the rapture for instance is not in the Bible rapture is not in the Bible no they twist a part of Revelation but the rapture is not in the Bible not the way Tim describes it others so I mean floating naked up to heaven that's not in the Bible um so uh what they believe is that at the end times before Christ returns you have Armageddon and the Antichrist and the Jews will dominate the Holy Land but I think there's actually I think it's 177,000 if I remember will convert and the rest will be annihilated i mean there's a deep anti-semitic strain to the Christian right but it it is about the fulfillment of what in their eyes is biblical prophecy there is an irony here with anti-semitism and what is Trump's relationship to Israel is it just a continuation of the Biden administration is it significantly different is it similar it's not significantly rhetorically it's different so Biden would pay lip service to the two-state solution that's kind of Trump doesn't do that in that sense trump's more honest uh I mean there's no secret within the centers of power Democratic or Republican what Israel is doing in Gaza and what its goals are and so all completely but Trump endorses it in a way publicly that Biden doesn't i mean you know he talks about the Riviera turning it into a Riviera in the Mediterranean and stuff i mean Biden wouldn't do this but at the same time Biden uh was a full supporter of the genocidal project and and and knew or at least I don't know how much Biden knew at the end but but certainly his administration Blinken and others knew and Blinken comes out of a very strong Zionist household that the goal was ethnically cleansing it's not a secret i mean that seemed to be one of the major motives that you attributed to the Christian right ethnic ethnic cleansing and avoid superiority but I would have thought that for somebody like Biden or the contemporary mainstream Democratic party that isn't lock step with him it's more a global security American dominance securing our foothold in the Middle East sort of i can tell you it's been seven years in the Middle East and the perpetuation of the genocide has not contributed to American security it's destabilized the region tremendously american allies King Abdullah and Jordan the CC government in Egypt are in tremendous trouble uh if the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed especially if they're pushed into the northern Sinai and Egypt or uh out of the West Bank into Jordan I think those regimes will have a very hard time maintaining power um it has turned the Muslim world what is it 1.2 billion Muslims or something against us without and it's going to create blowback i mean you can't decimate families on this level uh and not have blowback and that worries me because I think what will happen is you'll get something like a 911 or uh and then Trump will seize on that to really shut down the last vestages of uh our open society why is this and correct me if you think I'm wrong here but it it strikes me that the dominant narrative explaining America's involvement in Israel is that they're our crucial ally in the Middle East so we need to defend them why is this narrative dominant if you agree with me that it might be because of the Zionists own Congress they have tremendous influence in the media it's not true coming out of the Middle East that our unwavering uncritical support for Israel you know do you know who actually said it once and then backtracked as fast as he could was David Petraeus no the everybody in the state department of the military knows that or especially if they spent significant time in the Middle East that our unequivocal backing of Israel is not beneficial to our national interests how does this small country exert such pressure on the United States how do they because the Israel lobby is quite wealthy and because it can buy it's bought our most of our elected officials biden received more money from Apac than any other US senator he owes the record and he hasn't been in the Senate he wasn't in the Senate for what 10 years 12 I don't know how long it's been they buy them and And if you stand up to them like Jamal Bowman they sp what they spent $11 million to get him ousted from his house seat uh and that's a that's a long track record i mean they pushed out Fulbright fulbright held hearings about Apac raising money as a nonprofit and you know the money coming back to Israel lobby groups i can't remember the exact details they mounted a fierce campaign to push Fulbright out of the Senate and they succeeded so it's not new to to challenge the Israel lobby given the deep pockets of the Israel lobby is uh you know they they will punish you you will get pushed out and it's money but you know it's not just Israel i mean Goldman Sachs I mean we it the whole system's for sale norman Finglestein has been on on the show a number of times i'm talking with him tomorrow morning actually i like Norman yeah Norman's great and he attributes I think a lot of the success well I don't know at least some of the success of Israel to in this domain to its intelligence capabilities and blackmail he called them like the dark arts in one of our recent conversations but do you see Every country does that russians are I think the king of it i mean really blackmail yeah every country we do it yeah yeah well I know that everybody does it i'm just surprised that Russians are the king of But first now the Russians have supposedly got it down to a science i don't know but I'm I'm not of no direct experience with it but apparently there uh well let's come back to that in a moment but do you do you think that the MSAD may play a non-negligible role in American Congress as it pertains Congress no I think it's the lobby but but the there are close ties between the Mossad and the American intelligence community without question yeah i mean they they sh they share virtually my understanding is they pretty much share most information before we return back to Israel what what have you heard about Russian intelligence the blackmail is uh I mean honey traps are famous what's a honey trap it's where you get a very good-looking woman and you're some like dumpy middle-aged diplomat and you know suddenly this gorgeous 25year-old wants to sleep with you i mean uh that's pretty common in Moscow uh yeah I've heard that that the uh FSB is ah look I I'm I'm talking anecdotally I don't but I heard that I I don't think blackmail we all everyone does it i mean Richard Goldstein probably got blackmailed he wrote the great report uh he's a Zionist Jewish of course and then suddenly disowned it and I I know Norman and I think a lot of us think well they got to him we don't know how they got to him but blackmail is a very common way that Israel uses to shut down their critics has anybody ever attempted to blackmail you or I mean maybe you wouldn't want to say it on the air no no but people have tried to recruit me i mean Central America we both the Cubans and the CIA were trying to recruit reporters because like in the war in Salvador we traveled with both sides we're very rare so we traveled with the FMLN gerillas so we saw things we knew numbers we knew the kinds of weapons they had we knew where they were we knew I mean obviously I didn't do it but both the Cubans made approaches and the CIA can I ask you more about this there's not much more to ask i mean other than I said no but yeah if I talked to somebody about a top secret clearance they might say "Well I can't say anything about it." And I could understand not wanting to talk about being recruited by the CIA or attempted recruitment it wasn't quite that hard it was you can work with us maybe you know it was that kind of stuff and the Cubans were going you know we'd like to take you to Aana for a trip and they I was in Managa so when I'd go to Managa they grabbed me i'm more curious about the CIA but so are you just in some dark Cuban bar and somebody cidles up to you and No that's out of a movie isn't it yeah so so what what actually happened well it's in Managua the center of the you know where all of the internationals were was at one hotel so everybody mixed we knew them socially you'd know them i I it when the Contra war got really hot that last year I moved to Managa two houses down were a bunch of Cubans so you saw Cubans all the time right but no I'm asking about how the CIA approach that wasn't Monaga that was Salvador yeah so how did the CIA approach you well they didn't identify themselves as the CIA but it was understood um they just it was friendly i mean first of all you socialize with these you know it's not that they you know these people you have a relationship with them uh and they talked about because they knew I was spend a lot of time in a place called Morazison which was uh most of Morrison was dominated by a faction of the FMLN and they were very interested in Morazison so they would a ask me questions and would I uh you know would I be willing to look at a map i remember they wanted me to help them with which I won't I won't do i mean when I was in uh well the reason you won't do it is just because you're a reporter and a proponent of transparency as you mentioned earlier and opposed to the deep state no because I I don't think reporters should be spooks uh I don't you know at that point you're working for them you're not my I'm working for my readers or my listeners i used to work for NPR i mean my job is to tell them the truth i don't work for anybody other than them so it was a complete anathema to what I my role as a reporter i mean look there are reporters who were recruited without question but I wasn't one of them do they offer to pay you like sums of money i think they will pay but I never we never pursued it to that point very fascinating they'll pay yeah h so returning though to Israel and Palestine this I I'm not asking this question to be provocative but do you view what happened or and is happening in Gaza as a genocide and why how can you not do you don't view it as a genocide well for instance I interviewed Benny Morris uh and Benny Morris benny Benny Morris lives in Israel morris if Benny Morris called it a genocide he wouldn't be living in Israel like Elon Poppy or Avi Schlom or all the other Israeli historians who do call it a genocide benny Morris is a great scholar and his book Perfect Victims and he did groundbreaking work on 1948 but if he were to get up and call it a genocide in this climate in Israel he wouldn't be in Israel anymore can't he can't call it a genocide i got the sense from him that he genuinely did not believe it to be a genocide though um I I would like to know his arguments on how it's not a genocide so we spoke maybe 6 months into the war or so and he said what we hear on the news is false the Israeli military knocks at the door i think that's the name of the policy they send out pam pamphlets um to prevent the deaths of civilians the what we see on the news is all false and twisted that's ridiculous you're telling me dropping 2,000 lb bombs on refugee camps they did do what they call the knock on the door i mean they would send a an empty artillery piece to hit a building as a warning this is in the past look 90% of Gaza is destroyed you can't tell me that 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced officially 50,000 are dead but it's far larger than that because anybody buried under the rubble is not counted as dead i have Palestinian friends they have families that were killed they're not even counted on the list of the dead i mean the numbers are probably I would guess a couple hundred thousand at least dead they blew up just on March 21st they blew up the Turkish hospital Turkish donated cancer hospital in a controlled demolition they blew up Isra University in a controlled demolition uh no the the idea that they're protecting civilian life or that they've there's nothing left in Gaza i mean I don't even know how anyone could even argue this i don't that's that's incontrovertible it's not I'm not making it up it's not conjecture there's nothing there i mean even Trump admits there's nothing there there's rubble and for 3 weeks there's no food nothing is getting in we're beginning to see mass starvation no it's a genocide a genocide is about the extermination of not just a people but their culture their history their habitat everything and there are no universities in Gaza every single one has been destroyed none they don't exist anymore i think there were eight they're gone central Library is gone everything's gone right i said I like to interview people on both sides of the issue so I mean well you know but I don't have a lot of time for I'm happy to have both sides of the issue as long as the discussions are rooted in verifiable fact but when people create facts or make up facts then it's not a discussion at least have your discussion rooted in reality and uh and that narrative is not rooted in reality i had a conversation with Rasheed Khaledi in this I know Rasheed too and I like Rasheed very room um six months ago or so and something that Norman brought up that I found very interesting as well in my conversation with um Benny Morris was that take Rasheed for instance rasheed is very very animated when when speaking about these issues but Benny Morris doesn't come off that way at all i mean Norman was remarking about their debate that they had on Lex Freriedman's podcast where Benny Morris is kind of just like laughing a lot of the time and not really taking it seriously and it was I thought so it was a three-hour debate and then he was on with was this person Destiny or I'd never heard of them i told Norman the last hour I mean Norman was just like trashing Destiny and you read off of I don't care about that i don't care about but I thought the first two hours were interesting because both Norman and Benny Morris know the history really well and I thought that was very interesting where they were you know looking at 1948 looking at what happened comparing and look Benny Morris is a serious scholar no one who comes out of the Middle East myself included is ever going to deny that he's a very important and very serious scholar i don't agree with his characterization of what's happening in Gaza but I respect a lot of his work and you you you've stressed a number of times that Gaza is all but gone so how do you see the conflict evolving going forward oh the Israelis will push them out so you think it's it's pretty much Well that's clearly the intent yes and the only way to stop it the only force that can stop it is the US government and they're not going to so the military has told President Cece in Egypt absolutely no one in the Sinai um and it that is a powder cake i mean I come out of the middle i was actually I've been in Egypt twice since uh the genocide began and I'm about to go back and I can tell you that it's the anger on the street is fierce understandably uh but that you know there are negoti according to the Israeli press there are negotiations with Somali land with Sudan with other places but the intent is to push them out and they are creating a humanitarian crisis that is so catastrophic that and they've already the Israeli cabinet has already put out a plan for quote unquote voluntary deportation that's clearly where they go that's a question mark at least I don't know but that is the intent and that's what we're moving towards and I don't see an outside force that's going to stop it were you expecting this ceasefire that I think was agreed upon in January to be broken yeah of course i wrote a column called the ceasefire shade yeah really okay you called it well yeah because I've been there a long time so I know how Israel operates they everything is done in phases so Camp David Oslo Accords all the ceasefire agreements they're always phases and in the first phase Israel gets what it wants in the case of Camp David that's normalizations normal diplomatic relations with Egypt etc um and then they violate every other phase which is exactly what happened so in the first phase Israel first of all they killed roughly 137 Palestinians which wasn't widely reported um and they refuse to withdraw from NetSarim so there's an eight mile border between Gaza and Egypt under the Camp David Accords is uh Egypt controls the Rafa crossing and then there's something called the Philadelphia corridor which is the kind of buffer zone so Israel is not withdrawn israel of course just retook a place called the Netzarim Junction that's right below Gaza City and in fact I was at an ambush there where a kid was killed next to me by an Israeli sniper um they have ordered a sniper killed the child he was 20 he was about a young man throwing a rock um we had to carry his body up the road then I went and visited his parents um so yeah Israel was has no intention had never had any intention of the other phases which was which were about allowing in 600 trucks a day they blocked that it was about a permanent ceasefire it was about rebuilding Gaza none of that was ever never gonna happen ever and what is it that is bringing you back there right now i mean you said you're going to Egypt soon well so I'm going to do a book my next book will be on Gaza and I hope to get into Gaza that's not going to happen but you have those that's a book of kind of history and essays but I'm reporting a book with a cartoonist Joe Sako i did a book Days of Destruction Days Revolt with him joe did two great works on Gaza Palestine and then Footnotes in Gaza um which he spent several years on uh and so there's 150,000 Palestinians who are displaced who are in Egypt and we'll start by interviewing them before we begin speaking that's right make my publisher happy yes let me make your publisher happy chris Hedges A Genocide Fore reporting on survival and resistance in occupied Palestine this is out mhm when did it come out last week okay so that's probably why I did I prepared before this so I haven't had a chance to look at this all I possess in the presence of death is pride and fury that's a very good That's marked with the wish epigraph yeah so what is the story of this book well it's drawn you know I spent a lot of time in Gaza i spent I'm an Arabic speaker um I was in the Middle East for seven years i was in the West Bank i was in Jordan in the West Bank this summer and it's a book about the the genocide but putting it in context i mean how did it happen where did it come from what is the intent what it's all that so granted that I haven't had a chance to look at the book can I I mean I just opened it up and you said it's essays it's a collection of essays no I've written reams and reams of material since October 7th so it's not essays it it's drawn from a lot of my writings but it's a book i mean it's it's it's centered on themes that I think are fundamental to understanding what's happening can I ask you about some of them because as I open it the table of contents is already quite interesting to me so the first chapter is called the old evil yeah it's going back to the West Bank this summer after 20 years okay and seeing all the colonists and the roadblocks and you know the oppressive weight of the occupation i was visiting a friend of mine who uh lives in Ramala but he was a great Palestinian novelist actually Ataf Fabu who um is from Gaza and he was in Gaza on October 7th so he was there for 85 days with his teenage son and it was just horrific and he wrote a diary called Don't Look Left which is really powerful i I studied Arabic i was just going to ask you that because your pronunciation was very impressive i needed to I need to resurrect it i need to go you know because it was 30 years ago so I was in Jordan doing intensive Arabic and then I went into Ramala um and it's about wow like it it was like a you know it was like yesterday that I left uh returning to the old story it's also the feeling of oppression the fact that violence could suddenly erupt around you just without warning uh the long lines the despair the Yeah yeah it all I mean it's one thing to to kind of intellectually know it or to remember it it's another thing to get back into that millu when all of those smells and emotions and sounds yeah another chapter I see is called the psychosis of permanent war yeah and maybe that gets back to the beginning of our conversation but are you writing in this chapter about psychosis you are going through or it's it's a cultural it's what it cultural what it does what what permanent war does to a society yeah and where did you see that in this book in Gaza uh well it's a military occupation i mean there are Israeli soldiers everywhere uh but how do you see the psychosis in the people who live there yeah i mean I was writing more about what it had done to Israeli society oh to Israeli society yeah yeah yeah i mean Palestinian society is also not immune to the psychosis of permanent war that's what created Hamas so uh but you know when you live in a state that is perpetually either in war preparing for war it deforms the state what did it do though to Israeli society what is the psychosis well there's a great uh Israeli philosopher Yeshiashu Liowitz who wrote about it and was very opposed to the occupation because he said when a society occupies another people's land it inevitably creates both a military and a bureaucratic structure to sustain the occupation but it poisons the host society so it's about creating jailers torturers guards deforming a legal system uh it's about brutalization it's about dehumanization and these have very negative consequences for Israeli society itself you mentioned that this state created Hamas as well and because right at the very beginning it felt like there was an overwhelming pro-Israel sentiment but well because of the horrible atrocities that happened on October 7th was not in any way denied them and the narrative in this time that I kept hearing was that Hamas was a corrupt organization led by reclusive billionaires enriching themselves of the suffering of the people and I wanted to ask you I mean you cuz you said earlier that you you've spent a lot of time with Hamas what those people are actually like well I knew one of the co-founders of Hamas Dr abdul Aziz Renti who was a pediatrician he was first in his class at the University of Alexandria very bright um not probably what you would expect from a mosque leader he was assassinated with his son by Israel in 2004 I think um uh he was in the refugee camp of Hanunas in 1956 as a 10-year-old boy israel occupied Gaza for 100 days and they rounded up they were called fedí these are kind of guerilla fighters or people suspected of either being fighter supporting fighters and lined them up against a wall and killed them including members of his own family that radicalized him just as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are being radicalized right now and we're going to hear from them and it's not going to be good um uh I was covering the the at the time Hamas was carrying out suicide bombings on buses in Israel which I covered so I mean I was there after the bus explosions with the bodies and I argued with him i mean I I said you know by indiscriminately killing Israeli civilians including children you're seeding the moral ground you have as an occupied people and he would answer me with statistics and he would say "Well this is the number of Palestinian children they've killed and this is the number of children we've killed and when they stop killing our children we'll stop it." That was you know especially for somebody that bright it you couldn't penetrate it it disturbed me quite a bit i mean I'm often attacked by the Zionist lobby but I think very few people have sat down with the head of Hamas and tried to argue with them about their suicide bombings which appalled me what he did dead children or dead children i don't care whether they're Jewish or Muslim or whatever make any difference um so I mean it was probably a response from someone who had trauma i knew his replacement Nisa Ryan who was also assassinated also in his house i found him kind of thuggish uh um I mean I'm not I don't like violence i don't I don't really care who wields it i don't romanticize violence as the some supporters of Palestine do i can't go there violence is awful i've been around it i don't care who wields it i think that Israel has essentially shut down any other way to resist i'm a strong supporter of the boycott devestment and sanction movement because it's nonviolent i mean that's really where since it founded a lot of my energy went in the same way that we we built a successful sanction movement against South Africa but I hate violence and and people who wield it i don't care whether they're Hamas or Israeli soldiers so I just have a kind of anathema to violence i mean I I understand how it arises i put it in context you have to put it in context but I don't like it most people tend to avoid things that they don't like how was it that you ended up spending so much of your time in life and in work as a wartime correspondent when you hate violence so much well I didn't I didn't know violence till I started covering a war it was it was academic for me and I was I I was still to this day admire George Orwell tremendously and uh I wanted to like Baldwin used my writing as a weapon uh not for propaganda but as a weapon for truth to expose what was happening to the vulnerable and the weak that's why I went to the war in El Salvador when I got there the death squads were killing about 700 people a month um but when you cover war you become infected with the poison of war i mean you become deformed by it it doesn't matter what your intentions are going into it you the adrenaline highs soldiers and marines call it a combat eye it's real oh you would feel this oh of course yeah yeah you become a kind of adrenaline junkie i mean I wrote a book called Wars a Force That Gives Us Meaning which I I only put myself in there to illustrate a moral failing but it's about the culture of war yeah and and you you become I mean I was 5 years in the war in Salvador so you you reach a point where you can't almost function outside of that i mean I liken it i didn't I haven't taken drugs but to being a drug addict where you need to go back for one more hit that you know you you're alienated when you're outside the war zone at least when you're there you're everybody around you or war junkies like you it's not a healthy existence um but being a professional war correspondent means you leap from war to war to war around the globe so 20 years later I'm in Kosovo and two of the reporters I work with we covered the war in El Salvador together two decades earlier um it's very hard to let go very hard um I mean it probably took me three years to extract myself many of my friends knew they had to get out but they got seduced to going back in and they died they got killed because of this adrenaline junkie status yeah and the cache and power i mean in a war zone war zones are divided between the all powerful the people with the weapons and the all powerless which is almost everyone else but you you know are as a as a war reporter you have money you have armored cars you are you're not although I mean there were times I had bodyguard i had bodyguards in northern Iraq because Saddam Hussein put a price on my head so I had seven bodyguards i read that that must have been horrifying or maybe it was appealing to you in a certain sense at that time no no I don't want to get shot i I But you said you get a high out of this i'm talking about combat i'm talking about I mean combat's weird because your parameter of fear becomes small but when it's breached you're I don't want to pretend you're not I mean terror is probably the right word you're people are being shot near you it's really scary um but I think that with the weird pathology of war correspondence is that like a half hour later you think it's a big cosmic joke um and you go back for more i mean it's not a sane lifestyle uh and so I think my motives were good but I became infected you know like a lot of war junkies a lot of people photographers i love these people too by the way i mean my closest friend Kurt Short was killed along with another very good friend of mine uh Miguel Gilar i mean a lot of people were killed so uh and I like them for their courage for their honesty about themselves too i mean they were self-aware and none of us thought we were Mother Teresa uh u and the good ones cared i mean they cared they cared about the suffering around them and and of course that's why the Israelis do not allow journalists into Gaza foreign journalists into Gaza and why they've killed what is the numbers now 129 Palestinian journalists or something certainly over 100 because in every war the killers seek to keep what they have done shrouded in darkness so like in Kosovo and also Salvador they block the roads we'd have to walk in sometimes snipers would open fire on us because they don't want the story told and uh and that's what we did we made it hard for the killers to deny what they had done that was our contribution before an interview like this I often have many questions swirling around that I want to ask but that I that don't ever come up but something you said jogged my memory and you said something to the effect that initially your interest was more academic then it became sort of an addiction in a certain sense but the the reason that the word academic joged my mind was that it my memory is that I was very aware in having this interview that you're a journalist and you didn't take the route of political theory like Norman or or history and economics like uh Rick but you've ended up I mean writing you're writing about a lot of the same issues jews and I'm wondering why it is that you chose this academic route instead of the traditional academic route to get at these same topics well I love reporting and I learn a lot from it as I said before with the Christian right I mean assumptions that I carry get shattered so it's a constant process of learning and I think academics can become calcified if they stay in an academic environment uh and so I mean in the end I look at myself as a journalist i I spent eight years in a university i mean I and I studied classics philosophy English lit theology so I mean I certainly was well educated um but and I think that's you know so I'm good friends with Cornell West i was good friends with Susan Sek these are really really serious intellectuals and I mean both of them can or Susan used to and then Cornell can make me feel illiterate even though I read a lot but the difference is that I was in these places and saw these realities and reported on them and I think that's my contribution in that in the end I'm not an academic I am a journalist but a journalist like Robert my good friend Robert Fisk who covered the Middle East for 44 years and wrote I think the best book on the modern Middle East the great war for civilization uh Robert had a PhD in history from Trinity College Dublin so I think both of us bring a sense of history that's what I tried to do in this book a sense of context a sense of understanding because journalism itself is a very superficial profession if you write you know what happened today which I've done probably hundreds of times in a refugee camp there was an Israeli strike this number of kills here's the people without the context you don't really understand what's going on you need to go all the way back to the Balffor Declaration and Jabotinsky and Benorian and the Nakoba you need all that and journalism doesn't do that and that's why I prefer writing books because you can put things in context but in order to put them in context you have to know history you have to know culture i mean both Robert Robert spoke Arabic i speak Arabic uh and so when that's combined with journalism I think it's quite potent quite powerful but that's the difference between me and an academic also I can write academics are terrible writers they don't even make the effort most of them maybe you do but there are there are a number of chapters in here but another one that I wanted to talk about is Zionism is racism just because I mean whether or not an anti-Israeli sentiment and anti-Zionist sentiment are the same things but what what is this chapter about well it's about the nature of Zionism as an ideology and uh Zionism is an ideology that is meant to strip the indigenous inhabitants of historic Palestine of their history their culture their civilization uh to justify a settler colonial project and it's racist i mean it's it doesn't treat the Palestinians who we should be clear have lived on historic Palestine for centuries as co-equals how are we supposed to determine though who belongs on the land in the first place not by the Bible you can't draw modern nation states based on a document that hardly has precise geographic indicators written 4,000 years ago but how long must someone live on the land before they should have rights to it i'm I'm not advocating anything myself but I mean I remember but but the turn of the century only 6% of historic Palestine was Jewish so you know you had the Zionist project imported Jews from Europe starting roughly in the 1920s to possess land where people had lived for centuries they were interlopers they were colonists in the same way that we were colonists in uh the same way the British were colonists in Ireland for 500 years the same way the British were colonists in Kenya or India they came from the outside in recently historical you know historical time what do you make of the retort that they weren't colonists so much as they were fleeing a Well that was true after World War II not before it hadn't they experienced rampant had pilgrims that's right by Russia i mean that was one of the interesting things about the Zionist movement which was formulated by Herzel and kind of upper crust European Jews they had no intention of going there it was a way to keep the Jews from theles in Eastern Europe out of London center there was an element of racism even within within the Zionist movement itself uh but this was as Hannah Aaron said after World War I with the resettlement of Jews who had been not only driven from their homes and put in concentration camps but when they went back we know to places like Poland and tried to move back into their homes were met with pilgrims we're talking about after World War II by the Poles attacked killed because those Poles or Europeans who had taken over Jewish property did not want to give it back so that is part of the tragedy in that they had nowhere else to go it was d es especially a country like Poland it was dangerous for the few Jews who survived to go back there's a book a good book on it called Neighbors uh by a Polish historian whose name escapes them but it's a very good book um so they ended up in Palestine uh and they took other people's land but an Aaron said you know the crime that was committed against Jews is not solved by committing a crime against Palestinians and that is the tragedy of modern Israel one of the other common narratives that's already come up when we were discussing the Christian far right is that Jews have a divine right to this land and maybe you will tell me that this isn't in the Bible i I wouldn't know that but if it is why is that not an argument that you find appealing this land belongs to the Jews well I don't think God's a real estate agent uh I mean what the the term the Holy Land is a Christian term so what were the Crusades about the belief that Christians through vi savage violence had a right to occupy quote unquote the Holy Land uh and anybody who knows the history of religion would tell you it's you know one blood soaked episode after another so claiming a divine right or claiming that God gives you the right is the kind of absolutism uh that justifies mass murder i don't care what the religion is islam Christianity Judaism that because what it does is it externalizes evil evil is embodied in the other and once you eradicate the other evil is gone and I think this for me as somebody who is religious that is a complete inversion of the understanding of evil uh both in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian gospels and in the Quran because the prophet talks about the three levels of jihad with the greatest jihad being the struggle to curb the evil within you and uh you know there was a theologian H richard Ne neighbor said religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people and that's kind of it so I I find all of these efforts to sacriize violence to be very frightening well this is another good question to ask a theologian i'm not a theologian i'm I'm I'm I am a minister but I wouldn't go so far as you got a masters in divinity well that would not for my professors in any way uh legitimate me as a theologian i can assure you but anyway but any anyway yeah the question that I have is if you're not supposed to take your teachings by even if not literally reading the Bible very closely um where are you supposed to get information about God and and what God wants and ordains everybody who reads the Bible reads is a selective literalist they pick out what it is that they want i mean we in the Presbyterian church did not spend much time on Revelation for instance this fact martin Luther when he translated the Bible from Latin into German wanted to put Revelation as an appendic he didn't even want it in um the Bible is a complex mix of many theologies both within the Hebrew Bible and as well as in the Gospels it's some are gnostic some like Paul or based on the law uh or very legalistic um you have all sorts of I mean Ecclesiastes could have been written by Sart i mean you know it's it's a mix of stuff and I think one looks for religious or divine inspiration but not through literalness i mean the are we supposed to uh literally abide by the strictctures of the Hebrew Bible where adulterers are stoned to death i mean we don't nobody does that i mean even the Christian right doesn't do that so it's always selective literalism and and any if anyone ever tells you they read the Bible literally they're lying they because they pick out they pick and choose what works for them and what doesn't um so I mean there are passages in the Hebrew Bible where God blesses acts of righteous genocide there's no question about it um and yet for me the beauty or the power of religion is that it struggles or grapples with what I would call the most important elements of life and and these are the elements of life that cannot be measured empirically beauty grief death the struggle for our own mortality a life of meaning love i mean Freud said he could write about sexy he couldn't write about love and the Buddhists have a saying that you can memorize as many sutras laws as you want it will never make you wise and I think great art and the you know the great religious thinkers struggle with the key and most important elements of human existence which is why it's important to me but I don't take the Bible literally i don't believe that we can create nation states based on the Bible the crusaders tried it the Zionists try it um but I also think that it's um I mean certainly in my own life it's extremely important because it gives me an understanding that there is a moral imperative to stand with those the theologian James Con called the crucified of the earth um and an understanding that when you truly stand with the oppressed you will end up being treated like the oppressed you're not going to be the world around you is not going to reward you for virtue or what you consider virtue uh and that's a really important lesson to have that that that the reward is the maintenance of your own integrity and also that solidarity so I did not vote for Joe Biden uh I can't vote for anyone or Harris or any of these figures who supported the genocide because I have friends who are victims of that genocide and I have to go back and see them and say however ineffectual everything I did every single thing I did was to stand up against what's happening to you uh and that uh attempt on my part that's why I teach in a prison to build relationships with oppressed peoples and remember privilege and especially white male American privilege as king is really the theme of king leer is a form of blindness privilege is blindness and and the more you strip away privilege the more you're able to see but even though I speak Arabic even though I've spent months of my life in Gaza Um I can finally never understand what it is to be a Palestinian i mean they can't leave Gaza they have no travel documents the people born probably those most of those people who cross the border in October 7 they had never been outside of Gaza ever um and if you honor that gap that inability to see then you can have real relationships with people who are oppressed um and uh and those relationships are important because I think too often liberals uh you know for them oppression is an abstraction but when it's embodied in people you care about um you can't betray those people first of all and second of all I mean people say because I you know teach in a prison as I mentioned in the college degree program offered by Ruckers and people people say well wouldn't it be depressing and I said no it's the highlight of my week um partly because in that classroom it's sacred space it's the only time in the day when they're treated as dignified sentient thoughtful human beings um but it creates anger i mean if you're not angry at injustice at what's being done to them then you don't have a heart and as Augustine said courage has two beautiful daughters anger and uh no hope has two beautiful daughters anger and courage anger at the way things are and courage to see that they don't remain the way they are but I don't think that courage is possible unless you have real relationships so all of my work as a journalist was in the global south was in with the pressed whether I was in SVO whether Salvador whether that was in Gaza you know I've always purposefully embedded myself in these communities that were under oppression terrible oppression one throughine of this conversation for me as we continue to get more personal is that you have a tremendous mendous amount of integrity and that's that's very clear to me in this conversation because I mean as humans we're also good at often at telling whether people are being honest with us and I sense that you are so I wonder where you think that this comes from because integrity integrity is really lacking in in most people where do you get yours i think it's from um being close to people who had tremendous integrity including my father so he as I said was in the civil rights movement the anywhere in the gay rights movement for which he was pushed out of the church um and there's a book by I think his name is Richard Rhodess it's called Why We Kill it's a great book he's a criminologist and it's about why people kill and he talks about phantoms that many people who commit acts of violence are victims of terrible violence in their own childhood and that when they react to situations with violence they're reacting to those phantoms who had terrorized and carried out violence against them but I think we also have phantoms of people who we can't betray who stood up at great cost and carried out acts of tremendous courage sometimes losing their own lives i think those are also real i think that's for me it's about being around people like that including some of the reporters I worked with who were killed including my close friend Kirk Shork who I worked with for 10 years um was a road scholar um and you kind of can't betray I think it really is reduced to that very personal level just as I think that if you really care about people who are being oppressed you have to have real relationships And not patronizing it's not going to a sue kitchen on Thanksgiving and giving them food i mean but real relationships uh but I think the same thing is true that it's it's uh you know it is the the power of their witness kind of in the end because you know I feel fear like everyone else and and let's not be romantic about reporters i mean it's a very aggressive competitive i could be a total son of a when I had to be i mean I don't uh you know it's uh even a kind of callousness in a war zone i think kind of black humor i mean all of that and I talk about that in my book Wars of Force That Gives Us Meaning i don't in any way want to pretend that there isn't a dark side to myself and a dark side to what people like I did um I think in the end what we did is good but I there's a lot of darkness there too but yeah I think it's I think it is those those figures who we can't you know because they're not here anymore have to stand with i'm curious what you think about the connection between integrity and the dark side with which we began this conversation which was is depression because I think that integrity and depression are connected in in interesting ways on the one hand these are just my thoughts and you tell me what you think is that integrity can be an antidote for depression because integrity also represents I mean self-love and self-respect and I think depression often comes from not having those things but then at the same time when you are very depressed you tend to be pessimistic and I'm speaking from experience and and think much less of yourself and everything you do and that leads to an erosion of integrity and self-esteem so I'm curious about how you've experienced the two so I would say my depression comes from a sense of helplessness not from a lack of self-esteem but a sense of helplessness helplessness and powerlessness go hand in hand and I think having a sense of power and autonomy is pretty vital to self-esteem yeah but also power can be a poison i mean I saw it i mean even good people can get seduced by power and it becomes poisonous um I think for me it's a I mean I look at what's happening to my country i look at what's happening to my Palestinian friends and colleagues i look at what's happening to the climate i mean these if you know I have think I have pretty rational reasons to be depressed have children um and I think that comes from a sense that these forces are so overwhelming and so powerful that I mean I will fight against them but there's not much chance that I'll make much of a dent i think that's but I think that's you know I remember when I went to divinity school I I lived across the street from a housing project in Roxbury in Boston which was the ghetto and I ran a small church there for two years and I used to commute into Cambridge to go to school go to class I always say it's where I learned to hate liberals um all these people who talked about empowering people they never met uh you know they could have got on the green line it was 20-minute ride and gone out to see where people were being warehoused and police violence and all the interlocking systems by which we keep the poor poor and I mean Cornell West once asked me of all the experiences of my life what was the most impactful and I said it was living in the ghetto i was a white person not understood uh institutional racism and how it works and I went back and saw my great mentor Coleman Brown was the chaplain in Colgate where I went to undergrad and I just was sat down he had been an inner city minister in East Harlem in Chicago and I I walked in his office and I sat down and I said "Are we created to suffer?" And he said "Is there any love that isn't?" And I think when you love deeply and you care deeply especially about people who have been forgotten or abused it is the acceptance of suffering and depression um and and I think that you're sustained to continue to fight back by the power of the relationships that you have um I mean I remember once I was teaching in the prison and I had this wonderful student he was a student i don't give a lot of A's two or three in my class and um he'd been picked up at the age of 14 in Camden New Jersey his parents had died he was living on the streets he was illiterate there had been a rape and a murder they dragged him he was 90 lb they dragged him into the police station they browbeed him to sign a confession and he couldn't read for the rape and the murder he got to court and heard it tried to protest they ignored him and he was sentenced as an adult sentenced as an adult and he wasn't eligible to go before parole board until he was 70 years old which doesn't mean he get out it means the first time he get asked to get out and uh in the prison when the bell goes off you got to get in the hall quick or you get what they call a charge and he waited till that last minute on the last class and he said "Um I know I'm going to die in this prison but I work as hard as I do because one day I'm going to be a teacher like you." And walked out and people ask about hope i said "Okay I can live on that for a really long time." Um and maybe that's it maybe we only change the world one person at a time anyway um but yeah I think those relationships are vital to counteracting a a crippling despair an inability to respond and cynicism i've been accused of being a cynic i don't think I'm a cynic uh I think I'm what Reinhold Neighbor would call a Christian realist um but yeah I think those relationships are key i mean whether that was in El Salvador sorry or the prison system or anywhere else and I think it's important to note I mean something you said is you have really good reasons for being depressed the kind of depression you're talking about is one that's born of the circumstances around you that you're unable to change really there it's not a just a purely biological sort of depression that you're dealing with well also being in war so long and having seen the worst of human atrocity what human beings are capable of because we live in a in a in you know Conrad writes about this in Heart of Darkness or in that great short story short history of progress we live in a kind of veneer but when societies break down and like Bosnia and you see what human beings are capable of it's pretty disturbing it's hidden from us it wasn't hidden from Conrad that's his brilliance because he was in the Congo watching the colonists you know the the whole 9 million Congalles dead with King Leabold and everything else so uh and in that sense that when you come out of that environment back to the United States you're kind of permanently alienated because not only do most people not see it but they don't want to see it they don't not only not want to see it they don't want to hear it veterans have that i mean vets have that all the time combat vets there are two other chapters that I've seen the titles of in this book that jump out at me one is exterminate all all the brutes is that similar theme to Zion that's a line from that's a line from Heart of Darkness that's what Kurt says at the end of Heart of Darkness okay what is the subject of of this one is it similar to the Zion it's about It's the way you dehumanize people in order to kill them so it gets back to sadism yeah i mean sadism is just a natural outgrowth of any kind of violence towards another but it's more about dehumanization and where did you witness this in particular during your time in Gaza that led it led to it being put in this book well I mean they I mean many times Israel runs a shooting gallery in Gaza where they kill unarmed civilians including children i was in I mean and let's be clear we did it in Iraq and Afghanistan it's not hardly exclusive to the Israelis um I was at uh Hanunis uh and uh in the refugee camp in Hanunas in one afternoon and I and there was when the Jewish settlers were still colonists were still in Gaza and they had these armored jeeps with loudspeakers and as the children came out of school I heard in Arabic tal which is means come and then come come and then I would hear them taunted in Arabic with these curse They've been shot and all this kind of stuff and these little kids 10 years old would pick up rocks and they'd been baited and throw them at the jeep and the soldiers got out and shot them while this is obviously deplorable behavior it goes without saying why do you qualify this as dehumanizing well because anybody who shoots children is has already dehumaniz Well no they've already dehumanized them so I mean if you look at the slang they use you know they'll call Palestinian children pint-sized terrorists this kind of stuff i mean Israel I mean the thing about this genocide which has been live streamed is that many of the atrocities and racist tropes have also been posted on social media by the Israelis you know the way they make fun of the Palestinians i have not seen I believe you that it's there it's all there and the last chapter I mean it's the the title of chapter 11 is letter to the children of God right so I right after the genocide started the Egyptian press syndicate in Cairo called for international reporters to go to Rafa to the border crossing and protest the exclusion of foreign press as well as call for a ceasefire and I sat up all night on the plane and wrote that letter to the children of Gaza which is how I end the book what do you say in the letter i mean people will read find out more so I'm not going to butcher it by you read it okay i mean before I put this down uh and we perhaps finish by talking a bit more about the decline of the empire for the remaining time chris Hedges a genocide fortold who is this book for who do you want to read it i would say anybody who wants to put what's happening in context anybody who wants to understand the roots and the mechanisms of the colonial settler project and how it works in the apartheid state and why it works the way it does so with um Rick's memory still with us you began I mean you begin the America the farewell tour by drawing some lessons from Karl Marx in understanding the economic situation of the United States one do you consider yourself to be a Marxist no no okay that's interesting um but yeah but you can't you have to read Markx i mean I think Marx's ideas about how to form the socialist society are completely utopian and and unachievable but I think that the analysis that he did of capitalism with a lot of help from Engles is absolutely fundamental to understanding capitalism you would just not label yourself as a Marxist because of this more prescriptive element you you would I think most people who label themselves as Marxists embrace Marxist prescription i don't I have a much darker view of human nature i don't believe in the withering way of the state i think power is always a problem no matter who wields it that that as an intellectual or writer one is always in opposition to power even power you may sympathize with uh and that the role of an intellectual or a journalist is to constantly hold power no matter who holds it to account to clarify then are you still do you still identify as a socialist you just don't think I'm a socialist you just don't think that but I'm I'm that's not the same as a Marxist right i'm a kind of a Swedish socialist that in the old Sweden where you have powerful unions uh heavily regulated businesses you know the prohibition of monopolies uh the state provides universal healthcare highquality education um so it it is a socialism that can coexist with heavily controlled capitalism what was your purpose then in drawing on Marx at the beginning of America oh because Marx understood that in the late stage of empire that a as if you allow unregulated uncontrolled capitalism to become predatory and exploit a nation which is what's happened then eventually they start cannibalizing the very system that makes capitalism capitalist accumulation possible which is exactly what we're wish watching with Doge could you say more about that yeah they they'll devour the the state mechanism that sustains the nation for pro short-term profit but in the process destroy themselves now I mean this is an interesting point because my understanding is that Musk's wealth is declining rapidly and I could be totally wrong just because his Tesla stocks but it all goes up and down you know it's a roller coaster i mean it goes up it goes down and isn't SpaceX didn't they just sign a quarter of a uh like $250 million contract with SpaceX $250 million means nothing to Elon Musk though that's the point when we're talking about insane amounts of money probably not seen since Feronic Egypt i mean so so what is he worth uh like how many I mean what Bezos 180 million I don't know what's Musk a billion i mean what I mean you can't even keep track of the numbers so right but I I guess I'm just wondering what the short-term gain is when it seems like he's losing money in the short term well he won't lose money in the long term mhm where does he stand to gain from what's happening with Doge though well one he'll make sure he gets the government contracts two because he has access to all the information he can see exactly what all the other private contractors competitors are getting and doing that's not something I was thinking three uh in the kind of new uh digital information society amassing or accumulating data on everyone in itself is a form of enrichment and he and he has access to all that all our social security records everything our tax anything to prevent him from profiting from that information i don't see anything to prevent him and that that becomes commodible i mean there's a whole something called the blackbox industry where if you get hired for a big firm they don't really care what you write on your form because they pay the blackbox industry and they have everything on you your medical records your traffic fines your everything your alimony payments anything they get and that that that becomes that information itself which is what of course the aggregate sites Facebook and all they that's what they gather so that's in itself a form of wealth and you you wrote though the farewell tour was published at least in 2018 it's 7 years later now probably longer since you you wrote those chapters has everything you predicted or described worsened or accelerated i think I mean I probably made a few mistakes I mean like anyone but I think the general trajectory I got I mean there's so that book is more about the pathologies but if you look at Empire of Illusion the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle it begins in Madison Square Garden with wrestling with the professional wrestling because I didn't understand that we were going to get a president that came out of professional wrestling but I understood that that had become the template for the narrative of American culture um death of the liberal class is a whole look at the collapse of the liberal class uh and the consequences of that which I think we're watching uh so I I think that I think I got the zeitgeist i got where we were going pretty well and I think that's because my books are so heavily reported i'm not sitting in Princeton writing though i'm you know I'm I'm in these places where uh you know the fly over rust belt i'm Detroit i'm in those places interviewing looking watching seeing how they work so I don't follow professional wrestling i I don't either i have seen some clips so I know that Trump was at some point on some episodes at least of of the WWE but why do you say that he's a a product of or he came from professional wrestling because that's that's exactly how his So the thing about professional wrestling is it's not so much the matches it's the backstory of the wrestlers so for instance there were when I was writing it there was uh a one wrestler who'd been incarcerated and he comes out in his orange jumpsuit and wrestles his former the former corrections officer or there was a really cruel uh you know manager of the wrestlers who was cheating all the wrestlers and taking their money uh uh and and and and Trump and and so the the I think if you went up to ask a wrestling fan is that is it real what's happening I don't know that they would answer yes but what's real is the emotional they tap into the emotions of people who have been abused abandoned forgotten that's the power of it and that's just exactly what Trump does So but Trump was I mean he was close to Vince McMahon he was often at wrestling he had some kind of stylized bout over you know he got to shave Vince McMahon's hair and this kind of stuff uh but that's and and now we have Linda McMahon who managed it i mean she's the secretary of education so uh and and I think that you know it used to be in the old wrestling uh that you had the good guy and the bad guy and the iron shake and the guy who was like captain and that now everyone cheats everyone uh authority itself no whatever its guys is abusive and I think there in the narrative yeah in all the narratives so I found the narratives really emblematic of where the country was and important that way and and Trump you know there's so much in his rallies and the way it's heel lifted from professional wrestling yeah i mean look he had Hulk Hogan come speak at the Republican convention it's interesting though to me that you acknowledge that he has these skills maybe from the professional wrestling world but in the beginning of the conversation you didn't really want to say that this rhetorical ability is a skill that he has well I don't think he's a good speaker okay so you Okay so you don't think he's a good like he's not I think he I think he he he understands entertainment okay and I think you know his the commonality with many of his supporters is that he thinks that whatever was on television is real including the fact that he was a you know an astonishing brilliant business person which was we now we all know from David K johnson other reporters William Barrett and others was fake i mean so there that that and that's again my book Empire of Illusion the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle he knows how to do spectacle in the same way that Barnum you know PT Barnum knew how to do spectacle trump knows how to do spectacle he knows how to do that this is something that I've heard many times but never really bothered to look into that he he spends hours and hours and hours every day watching TV and that he believes the things that he sees sure because it's on Fox News and then he gets up and repeats it okay well what I was going to ask was yeah where do you get this evidence that he believes it because you can see the kinds of things that he says have been fed to him largely by Fox News i mean it's why he we have a secretary of defense who was on Fox News i mean he pulls these media personalities and puts them in positions of power uh no there's repeated examples and I don't have many off the top of my head where he Fox will push a narrative and he repeats it even though it's false he's not he doesn't read books right uh yeah I happen to have to be really careful but I knew somebody worked at the White House in the first administration yeah he spends a lot of time watching TV but that seems to serve him in some way sure because the rest of the country spends most of his time watching TV too so he knows how to speak in that idiom yeah and you told me you don't watch much TV i don't even own on TV yeah so you get mo do you read a lot of print journalism these days i I read a lot you you said you were reading two novels on the year troubles by Frell i had to bring them both in because I'm I'll finish Troubles and then I'm going to read The Leopard by the Italian novelist where is the best reporting coming out of these days it depends for what i mean Alazer does really good stuff on Gaza you and you said you and Rick were just on their video just I did Alazer show yeah with Marman but I've also Alazer's flown me to Qatar twice to do broadcasting for them oh well they're not very good on Qatar but they're pretty good on Gaza i mean so you got to know where to look uh I mean I follow the Middle East really closely so Electronic Indotam under Weiss Middle East eye i mean I read the New York Times every day i don't read the Washington Post anymore it's just there's nothing there the BBC I follow pretty closely i read AR it's the Israeli newspaper and then there are all sorts of sites like 972 which is an Israeli site they're very good i mean I tend to focus a lot on the Middle East and that was going to be my next question i mean what is it about the Middle East that has gripped you so much because I mean another major theater right now is uh China we haven't we haven't spoken at all it's not an act of wars i don't know i But why was it the Middle East cuz I come out of it i mean I spent seven years there i'm an Ara I speak Arabic i I know it and so I'm called upon to speak about it a lot um so I follow it really really really closely and I write about it i mean I would say 90% of my columns and my shows have been on the genocide um it's an area I know i'm very reluctant to write or speak about China i've never been to China i don't speak Mandarin i don't I'm And I know as a reporter that if you haven't spent a lot of time on the ground it's you start making assumptions that are wrong so I try and uh you know do what I'm good at and recognize I'm not good at everything mhm we spoke a little bit about Russia and Ukraine at at the very beginning of the conversation because you mentioned that one thing you appreciate about Trump at least is his reluctance to engage in this proxy war yeah that war should end i mean so in that sense yeah that war should never have been fought i mean even Kissinger said you know they're just going to because you have you know a Russianspeaking section of the Ukraine and there's no question that they were certainly being pushed to being secondass citizens under the resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism and even Kissinger said look they need a peace agreement of land for peace they'll have to have some kind of autonomy or connection well that's what's going to happen now but look the cost that Ukraine has paid it that was always going to happen and so I think in that but you know I think that that Trump's motive is because he wants to build alliances with Putin well those wouldn't be my motives but uh aside from the motives or the intent ending the war in Ukraine is a rational thing to do so you you both want the war to be over but it sounds like you're certainly not on Trump's side in the way in which it should end well there's only one way to end it and that's the same way you end the genocide and you cut off the arm supplies israel's Oh that's not what I meant i meant the the side that seems to be victorious i I think that whatever peace agreement is drawn up in the Ukraine will look a lot like what the peace agreement would have looked like before the war started i find it highly doubtful they're going to allow Russia to occupy Kev and yeah there is an ethnic Russian that would they've been in the Crimea for what 150 years or something i mean uh so and that's the tragedy of Ukraine i mean that that strikes me then as just a very big difference between the Russia Ukraine war and the Israel Palestine war and that it seems like based on what you said earlier Israel gets a unanimous victory in in this war that's the way that things are are going well the kind of hypocrisy you know everybody rushes to laud the Ukrainian resistance and demonizes the Palestinian i mean they're both occupations brutal occupations but the treatment of the Ukrainians is very different from the treatment of the Palestinians or in the perception of them as well returning to the the question of Marx and the American Empire you again you you wrote this in 2018 have wealth disparities between like the richest and the poorest in our country changed much since then are the uber wealthy getting wealthier yeah of course especially under co And why was that how did that work out i I you'll have to ask Rick Wolf the economic reason for that um but we know statistically that their wealth increased tremendously the billionaire class um yeah the consolidation of wealth by the billionaire class has gotten worse and worse and when you create that social inequality it creates political distortions always that's throughout history it goes all the way back to Aristotle where he writes that once you eviscerate that social equality and he talks about the deemos and and Athenian democracy the choice is between tyranny and revolution and you know unfortunately we're choosing tyranny or we're not choosing it we're getting it so a few minutes ago you were explaining how Doge represents government cannibalizing itself or just the the the wealthy that have come into government cannibalizing government for their own short-term gain those in power but I'm wondering how in other ways and this this gets back to Markx you see under Trump the wealthier getting the wealthy getting wealthier at the expense of the working class and then it also raises the question I mean why why he is so appealing to the working class if this is happening and ostensibly would have happened in the first administration every you know fascist movement throughout history has gone to power promising to wipe out the corruption and drain the swamp everyone Nazis everybody Mussolini they all did it just different words yeah and they're not wrong about the swamp i mean in that sense it's not a fiction it's just as we said earlier that what replaces it is worse so in the name of you know curbing government waste to corruption the swamp what they're really doing is the long-term goal of the oligarchic class which is deconstructing the state because if for instance the Department of Education is abolished and everybody is getting vouchers then this is a boom for charter schools Christian schools for-profit schools trump has talked about creating an online university uh it's it's all profit driven remember Trump ran supposedly his own university where he fleeced all sorts of people so it's about destroying institutions that serve the common good and replacing them with institutions that people need by which they can make money that's really what's happening so look they've abolished Head Start i mean the the none of it really is going to make much difference if they don't slash the military budget in half which they're not going to do there's a bill in Congress to increase military spending by hundred billion dollars over the next decade they fired civilian employees but that's different because then they'll just they'll become contractors so that's what's happening i mean that that is clearly what's happening and these people stand to make a ton of money they don't like to spend money on things like Medicare or Social Security or uh because they think it's a waste of you know uh tax dollars not that they pay much taxes yeah it's anytime an oligarchy or seizes control of your country in big big trouble does having a less educated public benefit Trump in other ways all totalitarian systems seek to teach people skills by which they can maintain the system but they don't that there are no liberal arts colleges totalitarian states why because a liberal arts education is about teaching you to question assumptions and structures of power to ask questions and if you can't ask the questions then you can't find the answers it's it's about you know what they're calling patriotic education which is just the glorification of you know the white male slaveholding quote unquote founders of the nation uh the great man theory of history but of course as Howard Zinn pointed out in the people's history of the United States our closed system women couldn't vote men without property couldn't vote african-americans were enslaved and couldn't vote native Americans couldn't vote senators were not elected they were appointed if you read the Federalist Papers there is a terrible uh fear of popular democracy you had Shea's rebellion and rebellion popular rebellions after the revolution thomas Payne who was the great populist is driven out of the country and and and excoriated and eviscerated although he was the ideological core of the American Revolution with common sense and stuff so uh and as Zin points out all of the openings in American society came through movements the abolitionists the labor movement the socialists like Debs the Progressive Party uh the Communist Party which we've kind of written out of our history all of that opened up the suffragists the civil rights movement they opened up the space but that's an anathema to people who want to teach you know the the great white man theory everything was done out of benevolence it wasn't done because of movement so indoctr they they're they want to turn systems of education into for-profit indoctrination machines they're destroying our universities as we speak colombia and they've essentially been able to criminalize free speech they've got 60 universities they want to pull funds for i mean the anti-semitism is just a kind of code word for what they consider leftism or you know disscent of any kind uh the German universities with the rise of Nazis in 1933 collapsed like a house of cards germany had the best universities in the world certainly some of the best as we do uh and and uh they're you know they're following all of the familiar patterns of totalitarian or fascist countries it's just that you can pick them off the list people like uh Stanley Jordan and others I think have documented that where do you see the Jordan Stanley right yeah jason Stanley jason Stanley yeah yeah where do you see the recently highly publicized over the last couple of years attacks on like critical and gender theory and queer theory in particular as well because these are the enemies of a multi-racial democracy you know again it's about the it's it's about consolidating the power in particular of the white but especially the white male uh and it is about uh creating a mythic version of history uh rather than exposing the crimes for which we as a country are culp committed culpable whether slavery or genocide against Native Americans subjugation of women Jim Crow all this kind of stuff uh and they that because if if people are taught and believe that mythic version of the narrative then power itself becomes current power becomes sacriized and can't be questioned you you calcify the education system to such an extent that it it just becomes a ray's own detra for the dominance of a select particular class which is patriarchal and white you mentioned that or we mentioned that you don't watch the news anymore you read it seems well no I watch Al Jazer on my computer i mean so I mean I say I don't have a TV but I got a computer so let's say it's not pure there but you read from some selective sources and I'm wondering in in 2018 you thought that fake news was a big problem and I'm wondering how that has changed in the last seven years especially given the much greater prevalence of and power of AI well the problem with the press is that it's uh deteriorate it's siloed itself and I'm talking about all of the press including the New York Times where I used to work so they've siloed themselves to cater to a particular demographic so if you look statistically at NPR MSNBC CNN the certain I don't know about CNN but certainly the New York Times they're about 90 something% Democrat so they cater to that narrative so as people transfer to online for instance with the New York Times um they know from readership surveys that those people hate Trump so they will feed like that's how they got away with feeding them two years of the Russia gate stuff which was garbage but they're not paying a price for it because it's what their demographic wanted to hear and the opposite is true with Fox News so you have people retreating into echo chambers where uh and it it may make commercial sense to feed that demographic what it wants to hear but it's not journalism so the New York Times coverage on Gaza has been appalling um I mean every the the people who clearly have been persecuted on campuses are the pal pro Palestinian demonstrators 100 arrested columbia calling the cops three times outlawing Jewish voice for P let's be clear a significant percentage of these protests are Jewish the Jewish Voice for Peace gets outlawed students for Justice in Palestine faculty administrator staff get fired probation suspended and yet every time the New York Times writes a story they rush off to the hell house and interview some Jewish student who feels uncomfortable um and that's just a that's that's not just a perversion of the truth that's a lie uh but it's what their demographic wants to hear and that has really deteriorated the media because when I worked for the New York Times the power of the New York Times wasn't Oh we had a circulation I think about 2 million the power of the New York Times is that it set the agenda for the news so when I was overseas uh the correspondents from CBS and I mean they would all come to my room late at night and say "What are you writing for tomorrow what's going to be in the front page of the New York Times tomorrow because that's what we're going to get sent to do where do we go what are the phone numbers what that so you set the agenda for the news that was the power of the New York Times that's gone that kind of reaching a broad audience by any news outlet is gone and that is really hurt news gathering a lot yeah given this situation that you've just described and I was going to say given what we're doing right here except I I don't want to pretend that I'm a journalist uh but given what you're doing on your own channels what do you see the role of independent small news I don't know what you want to call it outlets like yours playing now and going forward that they didn't in 2018 or 2008 well I'm not beholden to commercial interests so I can say things about the genocide I could never say at the New York Times or CNN or anywhere else and because Substack is subscription-based you pay $6 a month it gives you autonomy i mean you know Leeing used to say the freedom of the press is guaranteed to the people who own it um and so a lot of Matt Taibbei Glenn Greenwald myself all of by the way all of us who a decade ago were mainstream i mean Glenn was at the Guardian Matt was at Rolling Stone I was I wasn't at the New York Times a decade ago but I was still part of the mainstream that's all gone so in that sense it's given us uh a kind of counterweight however I the we have to be clear the media landscape is still dominated by roughly a half dozen corporations uh that control what about 90% of Americans watch and listen to and so it I'm thankful that it's given us a space and given us enough of an income that we can do our work but I don't want to exaggerate the power of the alter i mean I think all in the press it's always been the alternative media that has shamed the traditional media into doing their job that's what Julian Assange did who was a friend at Wikileaks but you go back to the 60s I mean with the Ramparts magazine run by Bob Sheer they exposed Co-Itelp Pro they uh printed that iconic photo of the little girl being burned by Napal running naked down a road in Vietnam that came in ramparts um the beginning of understanding the kind of uh debacle that Vietnam was that came out of the alternative press uh and then it shames the traditional press into doing their job so uh I think the situation now is that we who are outside the legacy media or the commercial media we don't have the power to shame them to do anything anymore well the last thing that I will ask for today is we've spent a lot of time talking about the decline of the American Empire what would it take is there anything that could happen to avert and perhaps even reverse this decline mass mobilization by militant unions with the ability to begin to shut the machinery of state down that's the only hope i don't have any hope in the electoral process at all so we need to regain that militancy because it was the unions that gave us the weekend the 8-hour workday social security we forget they fought for those things and hundreds of American workers were killed we had the bloodiest labor wars of any industrialized nation and capitalism hasn't changed and the capitalists have not changed and the mechanisms by which we defend ourselves haven't changed but the capitalist class has done a very good job of decimating the one mechanism we have and that's the unions and in particular the strike um that's what they fear most uh that's why unions are about 11% and about 6% of those are public sector workers like the railroad freight union they couldn't strike they were legally under Biden they were blocked from striking um and you look at throughout history I mean even the great revolutionary movements so what brought down the Shaw what brought down Batista in Cuba it was national national strikes so we have to regain our power uh which means not getting caught up in woke virtue signaling garbage uh because it means a class war it means standing with people who voted for Trump i got relatives who voted for Trump i come from rural Maine you know and I love them to death uh and I also have seen what NAFTA did to them all these old mills are gone and uh we have to think in terms of class war uh and the billionaires are are fleecing us uh and uh they run the government it's a it's an oligarchic state so we have to regain that i think the only hope is that militancy well Chris after these three hours all I can say is thanks it's really been a pleasure talking to you thank you very much