CounterVortex Podcast

In Episode 300 of the CounterVortex podcast (which coincidentally marks 24 years since the launch of his news blog in the immediate aftermath of 9-11), Bill Weinberg takes stock of the CounterVortex mission in light of the now urgently dire world situation—and makes an appeal for support from the listeners. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Ch...

The recent political reversal in Bolivia raises the question of whether the advances of nearly 20 years of rule by the indigenist left will survive—including a constitution that refounded the state as a "plurinational" republic. In Episode 299 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg explores how the lessons of the Bolivian experience can be applied to Syria, where the new revolutionary governm...

Trump's call at Quantico for the armed forces to use American cities as "training grounds" and fight the "enemy within" was quickly followed by militarized ICE raids in Chicago and mobilization of the National Guard. His National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), issued four days before the Quantico meeting with Pentagon brass, explicitly identifies "anti-fascism" as a threat that must...

Trump's executive order designating Antifa a "domestic terrorist organization" was quickly followed by a mobilization of federal troops to anarchist hotbed Portland and a highly unusual call for a gathering of military brass from around the world in Quantico—to take place the day before the government will be shut down if a Congressional deal is not reached. These evident preparations for mass rep...

Some are drawing an ominous analogy between Charlie Kirk and Horst Wessel, the early martyr of the Nazi cause. In Episode 296 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg offers a more ominous analogy still: to José Calvo Sotelo, the Spanish fascist leader whose assassination in 1936 provided the expedience for Generalissimo Franco's coup d'etat that initiated the Spanish Civil War—and ultimately b...

Charlie Kirk was not just a "conservative" but a white supremacist who denigrated the advances of the Civil Rights era and sought to impose patriarchical subjugation of all but white men. Yet he was opposed as insufficiently "pro-white" by the so-called "Groyper Army" of Nick Fuentes. This raises the possibility that the anti-fascist rhetoric of Kirk's accused shooter, Tyler Robinson, was actually...

The case of Kilmar Abrego García, shunted from detention in one country to another, with no end in sight, recalls the World War II-era classic of dystopian fiction The Twenty-Fifth Hour by Romanian writer C. Virgil Gheorghiu. The wartime transnational detention system, harrowingly depicted in the novel, was seen by Gheorghiu as an inevitable manifestation of our technocratic civilization that exal...

Kilmar Abrego García, released from extrajudicial detention in El Salvador, now fights deportation to Uganda. Hundreds of the Venezuelans sent by the US to the Salvadoran prison gulag have now been returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap. But El Salvador remains on the growing list of human rights offenders cultivated by the Trump regime as surrogate detention states. The Trump State Department's...

In Donald Trump's perverse ambition to win the Nobel Peace Prize, he is citing his supposed diplomatic victories in ending six conflicts: Armenia-Azerbaijan, Congo-Rwanda, Israel-Iran, India-Pakistan, Thailand-Cambodia and Egypt-Ethiopia. In Episode 292 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg examines each of these examples, and breaks down how claims to have won "peace" are either extremely o...

Russia's irredentist claims on its former holding Alaska have provided fodder for comedians, but the stakes at the Trump-Putin meeting in the Last Frontier are no laughing matter. Despite the escalating mutual nuclear threats between Washington and Moscow, Trump's call for a Russia-Ukraine "land-swap" obviously means Kyiv being forced to accept Moscow's annexation of much of its territory in excha...

Two landmark rulings on the urgent responsibility of states to address the climate crisis are issued—by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in a proceeding brought by Chile and Colombia, and by the World Court in a proceeding brought by the threatened Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. Meanwhile in the USA, the Trump regime withdraws from the Paris Agreement, removes greenhouse gases from EPA...

The ideological enforcer of MAGA-fascism in American higher education (just met with craven capitulation by Columbia and Brown University) is the Trump regime's Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. Purporting to act on behalf of Jewish students, the Trump regime simultaneously attacks policies to promote campus diversity. This replicates the historical function of anti-Semitism—setting up Jew...

The investigation by the Syrian transition government into the March violence against the Alawites in Latakia province has been submitted—but the full findings have not been made public, and it apparently exonerates the government of involvement. Meanwhile southern Suwayda province has seen a perhaps even deadlier eruption of violence—this time pitting Druze against Bedouin, with the role of the g...

As a dictatorship consolidates in Turkey, aspiring strongman Recep Tayip Erdogan is launching a special attack on municipalities, arresting the mayor of Istanbul and removing elected governments in hundreds of cities and towns across the country—mostly in the restive Kurdish east. In the United States, aspiring strongman Donald Trump is now threatening to similarly remove Zohran Mamdani if he beco...

Amid starvation and horrifically escalating atrocities in Gaza, Israel announces plans to build a giant concentration camp on the ruins of Rafah, an evident preparation for forced "transfer" of the Palestinian populatin from the Strip entirely—an idea Trump enthusiastically embraces. On the West Bank, amid growing settler attacks, more Palestinian land is enclosed behind separation walls built to...

Amid an amusingly paranoid reaction from the MAGA right, Donald Trump is threatening to have Zohran Mamdani denaturalized and deported under the archaic Cold War-era Communist Control Act if he continues with New York's "sanctuary city" policy as mayor. A Justice Department memo has already set the machinery for "denaturalization" of citizens in motion. But the Islamophobic, xenophobic and old-sch...

In Episode 284 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Frieda Afary of the blog Iranian Progressives in Translation, author (most recently) of Socialist Feminism: A New Approach, and a longtime voice for democratic-secular opposition movements in Iran. How is the situation of Iran's civil resistance complicated by the US-Israeli air-strikes on the country, and how should progressive...

New York City's mayoral race has become embroiled in the national and global dilemmas, with progressive candidate Brad Lander getting arrested by ICE and progressive frontrunner Zohran Mamdani being aggressively baited as an anti-Semite by the campaign of the overall frontrunner, disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo. Joining Cuomo in this propaganda offensive, not surprisingly, is the pro-Israel...

With Israel's criminal air-strikes on Iran's nuclear sites releasing radioactive contamination, Bibi Netanyahu cynically invokes the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protest movement that shook Iran for months from September 2022. Of course nothing is less conducive to pro-democracy civil resistance in Iran than to have this cause associated with the foreign power that is bombing the country's territory—and...

Amid the massive war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine and Israel in Gaza, there are dissident Russians and dissident Israelis who are courageously protesting, and resisting the consolidation of a pro-genocide consensus. Recent violent and deadly attacks on perceived Israeli or pro-Israel human targets in the US meanwhile point to the dangers of the notion of collective guilt. In Episode 281 o...

As Israel escalates its genocide in Gaza and prepares to execute its final cleansing or "transfer" of the populace of the Strip, calls are mounting for humanitarian intervention to protect the Palestinians. In Episode 280 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg explores the concrete steps already taken by elements of the international community to implement the "Responsibility to Protect" doct...

Amid the hype about how Trump "snubbed" Netanyahu on his Middle East trip come reports that his White House is pushing a plan to relocate some 1 million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya—which is in the midst of a massive human rights crisis. Even while on the ground in Qatar, Trump plugged his relocation scheme for the Gazans, who now face complete ethnic cleansing from the devastated Strip. In Epi...

Since alarming reports broke that Trump is preparing deportation flights to Libya, the plan has happily been put on hold by the courts—as well as denied by both of Libya's two rival governments. But Libya, like El Salvador, was clearly chosen because of its horrific human rights record, with a UN investigation characterizing its treatment of detained migrants as crimes against humanity. A migrant...

Trump is pointing to Kilmar Abrego Garcia's tattoos to justify his indefinite detention without charge in the ultra-oppressive Salvadoran prison gulag. These notoriously include a cannabis leaf, demonstrating the continued propaganda utility of the "Reefer Madness" stigma, even as a multi-million dollar legal industry emerges. But the White House actually added the characters "MS13" (name of the n...

Trump's annexationist designs on Canada were the central issue in the country's elections this past week, which saw a victory for the intransigently anti-Trump candidate, Mark Carney. While this seems surreal after a generation of economic integration under NAFTA, the vast resources of Canada—especially hydrocarbons, water and energy—provide a long-term goad of conflict between the two giants of N...