The Chris Hedges Report Podcast

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text Originally published 08/14/2022 Doomsday Selfie - by Mr. Fish CAHOKIA MOUNDS, Illinois: I am standing atop a 100-foot-high temple mound, the largest known earthwork in the Americas built by prehistoric peoples. The temperatures, in the high 80s, along with the oppressive humidity, have emptied the park of all but a handful of visitors. My shirt is matted with sweat. I...

The CIA, from its inception, carried out assassinations, coups, torture, and illegal spying and abuse, including of US citizens, many of which were exposed in 1975 by the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House.  Congress attempted to enact laws to curb the widespread criminal activity by the CIA. Senate and House intelligence oversight committees were created and after...

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army Colonel who fought in Vietnam, and Danny Sjursen, a retired Army Major who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, have just published Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars . Bacevich and Sjursen, West Point graduates, like many writers in the book, come out of the military culture. They began as true believers, embracing the myths of Amer...

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Narrated by Eunice Wong The past week has seen record-breaking  heat waves  across Europe.  Wildfires  have ripped through Spain, Portugal and France. London’s fire brigade experienced its  busiest day  since World War II. The U.K. saw its  hottest day  on record of 104.54 Fahrenheit. In China, more than a dozen cities  issued  the “highest possible heat warning” this weekend with over 900 million...

Narrated by Eunice Wong The United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia are plotting a war with Iran. The 2015 Iranian nuclear arms accord, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Donald Trump sabotaged , does not look like it will be revived.  U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is reviewing options to attack if Teheran looks poised to obtain a nuclear weapon and Israel, which opposes U.S.-Ira...

American society is the most violent of any nation in the industrialized world. Nothing we do, from administrating the world’s largest prison system to militarizing our police, seems to help. Dr. James Gilligan, the former director of the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and the former director of the Bridgewater State hospital for the criminally insane, argues that childhood abuse, and...

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Narrated by Eunice Wong Original Text published 07/10/2022 Together We Are Wrong - by Mr. Fish The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machi...

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Narrated by Eunice Wong Original Text published 06/30/2022 A few days before Meghan Marohn, a 42-year-old English teacher at Shaker High School in Latham, New York, disappeared, she confided to friends that she had gone into hiding to escape from a man who had “brutally harassed and intimidated me because I wouldn’t sleep with him.” She said she was too afraid to stay at home, especially when she...

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Narrated by Eunice Wong Original Text Published 06/27/2022 Elephants in the Womb — Mr. Fish The Supreme Court is relentlessly funding and empowering Christian fascism. It not only overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a constitutional right to an abortion, but ruled on June 21 that Maine may not exclude religious schools from a state tuition program. It has ruled that a Montana state program to support p...

In the fall of 1980, I was a second-year student at Harvard Divinity School. I intended, like my father to become a Presbyterian minister. But I was by nature a writer and a news junkie who devoured at least two newspapers a day and had already published freelance articles in papers such as The Christian Science Monitor. I could not, however, reconcile the social activism of my father, who was inv...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Original Text published 06/19/2022 The Four Horsemen - by Mr. Fish It is hard to be sanguine about the future. The breakdown of the ecosystem is well documented. So is the refusal of the global ruling elite to pursue measures that might mitigate the devastation. We accelerate the extraction of fossil fuels, wallow in profligate consumption, including our consumption of live...

The rise of neofascist movements across the globe differs from the fascist movements of the 20th century. Fascism in the last century arose to break radical worker’s movements, many organized by the Communist Party. That was the point of Mussolini and Hitler. But the current neofascists, figures such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Narendra Modi in India, do not need to destroy worker’s movements a...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published 06/12/2002 The Puppet Master - Mr. Fish The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol , whose first of six televised hearings began last Thursday, is spectacle replacing politics. There is nothing substantially new in the accusations. The committee lacks prosecutorial power. No charges have been filed by Attorney Ge...

Welcome to the Chris Hedges Report. Today in Part Two of The Long Road Home we look at the numerous hurdles faced by prisoners released into society, the toll on their families, the importance of educational programs in restoring self-esteem and setting goals and the difficult process of even being granted parole. We begin by speaking with Russ Owen, who spent 32 years in prison, the day he was re...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published 06/05/2022 “White Light/White Heat” - Mr. Fish Guns were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. My grandfather, who had been a master sergeant in the army, had a small arsenal in his house in Mechanic Falls, Maine. He gave me a 2020 bolt action Springfield rifle when I was 7. By the time I was 10, I had graduated to a Winchester lever action 30-30. I m...

Welcome to the Chris Hedges Report. The United States has 25 percent of the world’s prison population, some 2.3 million people, most of whom are poor, although it represents less than 5 percent of the global population. Its prisons are notorious for their violence, overcrowding and human rights abuses, including the widespread use of solitary confinement. But what is often not examined is what hap...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published 05/22/2022 No Guts No Glory - by Mr. Fish The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs...

In December Socialist Alternative leader and Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant defeated a well-funded campaign by the city’s business community to remove her in a recall vote. Since being elected to office in 2013 Sawant and her socialist party have been locked in a bitter battle against the city’s moneyed elites, which has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a corporate PAC called...

The leaked majority draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health , which suggests the Supreme Court is be poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, returning the question of abortion to the states, is part of a broader assault against women. The Covid-19 pandemic has seen an estimated 30 percent increase in violent attacks against women along with the curtailment of their rights. This assault, writes V,...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published 05/15/2022 Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera reporter with more than two decades of experience covering armed conflicts, knew the protocol. She and other reporters remained last Wednesday in the open, clearly visible to Israeli snipers about 650 feet away in a building. Her flak jacket and helmet were emblazoned with the word “PRESS.” There were th...

The war in Ukraine, stoked in part by NATO expansion beyond the borders of a unified German, violating promises made to Moscow at the end of the Cold War, now looks set to become a lengthy war of attrition, one funded and backed by an increasingly bellicose United States. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, after a visit to Kyiv, declared that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it c...