CounterVortex Podcast

With UN aid agencies and humanitarian organizations warning of an "apocalyptic" scenario in North Gaza, the Biden administration faces a lawsuit charging complicity with genocide. The "pause" that the White House has imposed on some arms shipments to Israel by no means absolves the administration of moral (or legal) culpability. However, it may have had the effect of restraining Benjamin Netanyahu...

Israel's long-awaited strikes on Iran have targeted military and industrial installations in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam, with air-strikes also reported in the Syrian cities of Damascus and Homs. It is now Iran's turn to retaliate in the escalatory tit-for-tat game, as the brink of regional and even world war looms ever closer. In Episode 249 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg advocates a...

In Episode 250 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg examines the New York Times coverage of the ugly turn in the pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, and warns against the targeting of Jews in the guise of a misguided supposed "anti-Zionism." The ongoing genocide in Gaza urgently demands protest, but just as urgently demands tactically and analytically astute protest that does not...

The bellicose and authoritarian Russian state's propaganda exploitation of the anarcho-pacifist novelist Leo Tolstoy is an obvious and perverse irony. But a less obvious irony also presents itself. Like all fascist regimes, that of Vladimir Putin is stigmatizing and even criminalizing homosexuality and other sexual "deviance." Following alarming reports of "concentration camps" for gay men in the...

With Lebanon under bombardment and the world awaiting Israel's response to the Iranian missile attacks on its territory, fears mount that Iran's nuclear facilities could be targeted—which, in addition to being an environmental disaster in its own right, could represent the crossing of a moral threshold toward the use of nuclear weapons. So two theaters of the world conflict—the Middle East and Ukr...

In the first CounterVortex meta-podcast of February 2018, we noted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' decision to advance the minute hand of its Doomsday Clock to two minutes of midnight, citing the threats of nuclear weapons, climate change and "cyber-based disinformation." The clock was most recenty moved to 90 seconds to midnight in January 2023, in light of the Ukraine war—the closest it h...

Once-time peacenik icon Tulsi Gabbard has joined Robert F. Kennedy Jr in defecting to the now openly fascist and even Nazi-embracing MAGA camp—actually becomng members of the Trump transition team. Meanwhile, the Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, likewise enamoured of Vladimir Putin and the dictators in his orbit (including mass murderer Bashar Assad), is being represented by a former...

Four Black nationalists affiiated with the Uhuru Movement, an arm of the African People's Socialist Party (APSP), are on trial for acting as agents of a Russian propaganda network, in what they are calling "the free speech trial of the century." Regardless of whether their activities were protected by the First Amendment, the case reveals the very strangest of political bedfelows. Tucker Carlson,...

Amid global protests over the genocide in Gaza, the hypertrophy of digital technology and its colonization of every sphere of human existence contnue to advance, portending the ultimate eclipse of human culture and real life, the death of literacy, and the hegemony of saturation propaganda. While the Arab Revolution of 2011 was facilitated through social media, those same platforms are today being...

With anti-Semitic and Islamophobic violence in the US both rising since Israel began its campaign of genocide in Gaza, it is incumbent upon Palestine solidarity activists not to play into this dynamic by engaging in rhetoric and tactics that demonize Jews as the "other." Cynical weaponization of the accusation of anti-Semitism by Zionist propaganda increases rather than decreases our responsibilli...

In Episode 240 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses China's hubristic plans for massive expansion of its nuclear power sector—and notes that some of the new plants are slated for the southern province of Guangdong, which in recent years has seen repeated outbursts of protest over land-grabs and industrial pollution as well as wildcat labor actions (and was, in fact, the site of a...

In Episode 239 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg provides an overview of the protest waves and popular uprisings going on across the planet—in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, China, Serbia, Venezuela, and in Israel. This as worldwide protests in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza continue. Amid ongoing protests aganst Netanyahu in Israel, there have also been protests ag...

In Episode 238 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes stock of the Democratic ticket's new vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and the role he played as Minnesota governor in two of the major activist struggles in the North Star State over the past years—the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising, which began in Minneapolis; and the fight against Line 3, which delivers Canadian shale oil to...

In Episode 237 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg provides some under-reported context for the international crisis that has quickly spiraled since last week's deadly rocket strike on a Golan Heights village, and now threatens to escalate to the unthinkable. Under international law, the Golan is Syrian territory not Israeli. And the kids who were killed in the rocket strike were Druze not...

Trump and MAGA are no longer hiding their intention to instate a dictatorship if they regain power, and the most radical elements of their base are mobilizing to unleash a reign of terror on the local level from coast to coast. The Democrats, however, have regained some momentum since Biden relinquished his candidacy in favor of Kamala Harris—who is certainly compromised, but (at least!) not a fas...

With Trump gaining momentum since surviving an assassination attempt, and the Democrats demoralized and in disarray, the forces of MAGA-fascism seem poised to retake the White House—and, with Project 2025, are this time armed with the organizational wherewithal to effectively instate their program. Meanwhile, the radical left, which by rights should be the most intransigent source of anti-fascist...

Tech companies now acknowledge that they are failing to meet their carbon emission reduction goals because of the mega-computing necessary for artificial intelligence—as if AI were something good and inevitable rather than ultra-dystopian. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry exploits carbon concerns to lubricate its comeback—with even countries like Kenya now planning reactors, amid oppressive and ini...

In Episode 233 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg recalls his days as a young neo-Yippie in the 1980s. A remnant faction of the 1960s counterculture group adopted a punk aesthetic for the Reagan era, launched the US branch of the Rock Against Racism movement, brought chaos to the streets at Republican and Democratic political conventions, defied the police in open cannabis "smoke-ins"—and...

In Episode 232 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg examines the politics of the ugly dust-up between pro-Palestinian protesters and local Jewish residents in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Pico-Robertson—and notes the anniversary of June 1941 anti-Jewish pogroms in Bialystok, Poland, and Baghdad, Iraq. Propagandistic and distorted portrayals of the LA protest as mere arbitrary anti-Semiti...

The Zionist propaganda machine continues to weaponize the accusation of anti-Semitism to delegitimize any effort to resist Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza. This increases rather than decreases the responsibility of activists to distinguish—and oppose—actual anti-Semitism. Yet in recent weeks, sectors of the activist response to the Gaza genocide in the United States have utterly surrendered to...

Mexico has made history with the election of its first woman president, former Mexico City mayor and environmental scientist Claudia Sheinbaum. But the ongoing human rights crisis that will obviously pose a grave challenge for Sheinbaum was dramatically exemplified by the record number of political assassinations that marred the elections. And she inherits a pending constitutional reform from her...

Benjamin Netanyahu's gaffe on French TV, displaying a map of the "Arab World" that showed the occupied (and illegally annexed) Western Sahara as a separate entity from Morocco, sparked a quick an obsequious apology from the Israeli Foreign Ministry. But the snafu sheds light on the mutual hypocrisy at work here. There is an obvious hypocrisy to Moroccan protests that demand self-determination for...

The attempted coup d'etat in the Democratic Republic of the Congo may or may not have been assisted by the CIA, but one of the Americans arrested in the affair is named as a "cannabis entrepreneur"—pointing to the possibility of legal cannabis playing the same destructive role in Central Africa that bananas have played in Central America. Yet while corporate power sees a lucrative new cash crop, l...

Azerbaijan, now facing accusations of genocide against Armenians, suddenly rallies to the defense of the Kanak indigenous people in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, and accuses France of a legacy of "crimes against humanity" in its colonial holdings. This appears to be blatant retaliation for French support of Armenia in the conflict between the two Caucasus nations. The repression...

In Episode 226 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses the alarmingy under-reported humanitarian disaster in Darfur. A generation later, the genocide is back on—but this time there is no global campaign to stop it. Even last time around, elements of the campist pseudo-left portrayed the "Save Darfur" movement as a Zionist conspiracy, because atrocities by an Arab-led regime happened...