The Chris Hedges Report Podcast

The assassination of Trump would not remove the yearning of tens of millions of people, many conditioned by the Christian right, for a cult leader. Most of the leaders of the Christian right have built cult followings of their own. These Christian fascists embraced magical thinking, attacked their enemies as agents of Satan and denounced reality-based science and journalism long before Trump did....

Text originally published July 1, 2024 Craig Murray - by Mr. Fish Blackburn, England: I am standing with Craig Murray who is running for Parliament in this gritty former mill town. We are on a narrow street with brick row houses that jaggedly descend down a hill. The sky is overcast. There is intermittent rain. Craig, portly, his white hair unkempt and dressed in a clashing checkered shirt with a...

Text Originally Published June 26, 2024 Free as a Bird — by Mr. Fish The dark machinery of empire, whose mendacity and savagery Julian Assange exposed to the world, spent 14 years trying to destroy him. They cut him off from his funding, canceling his bank accounts and credit cards. They invented bogus allegations of sexual assault to get him extradited to Sweden, where he would then be shipped to...

Text Originally posted May 21, 2024 Dust to Dust - by Mr. Fish The decision by the High Court in London to grant Julian Assange the right to appeal the order to extradite him to the United States may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. It does not mean Julian will elude extradition. It does not mean the court has ruled, as it should, that he is a journalist whose only “crime” was providing evidence of...

Text Originally published May 08, 2024 Strangelove 2024 — by Mr. Fish University President Christopher Eisgruber met with the hunger strikers – the first meeting by school administrators with protesters since Oct. 7 – but dismissed their demands. “This is probably the most important thing I’ve done here,” says Areeq Hasan, a senior who is going to do a PhD in applied physics next year at Stanford,...

Text Originally Published May 08, 2024 Strangelove 2024 — by Mr. Fish NEW YORK CITY: I am sitting on a fire escape across the street from Columbia University with three organizers of the Columbia University Gaza protest. It is night. New York City Police, stationed inside and outside the gates of the campus, have placed the campus on lockdown. There are barricades blocking streets. No one, unless...

Text originally published May 13, 2024 When You’re Smiling - by Mr. Fish Run, the Israelis demand, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop 2,000-pound bunker buster bo...

Text Originally published April 28, 2024 Staying Power - by Mr. Fish In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of varying creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are dead. Some of them are forgotten. Most of them are...

Text Originally published April 25, 2024 Where Have All the Flowers Gone - by Mr. Fish PRINCETON, N.J. — Achinthya Sivalingam, a graduate student in Public Affairs at Princeton University did not know when she woke up this morning that shortly after 7 a.m. she would join hundreds of students across the country who have been arrested, evicted and banned from campus for protesting the genocide in Ga...

A talk at the benefit Iftar on April 6th to establish the Palestine Center for Public Policy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

The presidential election in November looks set to pit Donald Trump, who will most likely dismantle what is left of our decayed democracy, against Joe Biden, who is a full partner in the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Not, for most of us, a palatable choice. The two ruling parties, who have foisted these candidates on the public, have at the same time conspired with their corporate sponsors...

A small group of high-tech-savvy entrepreneurs who understand the velocity of technological innovation have harnessed this new power to establish predatory high-tech monopolies such as Uber or Amazon. They subvert labor laws, strip the state of its powers, gut regulation, ignore legal norms and amass personal fortunes in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Their apps, services and private equity...

Text originally published April 12, 2024 Requiem for The New York Times - by Mr. Fish NEW YORK: I am sitting in the auditorium at The New York Times. It is the first time I have been back in nearly two decades. It will be the last. The newspaper is a pale reflection of what it was when I worked there, beset by numerous journalistic fiascos, rudderless leadership and myopic cheerleading of the mili...

There was a decade of popular uprisings from 2010 until the global pandemic in 2020. These uprisings shook the foundations of the global order. They denounced corporate domination, austerity cuts and demanded economic justice and civil rights. The Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter mass demonstrations following the execution of George Floyd in 2020 are cases. There were also popular eru...

Text originally published March 30, 2024 A Genocide Foretold - by Mr. Fish There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonial project. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge par...

Text originally published April 3, 2024 Amr Abdallah On the morning Amr Abdallah was killed, he woke before dawn to say his Ramadan prayers with his father, mother, two younger brothers and aunt, in an open field in southern Gaza. “It is You we worship and You we ask for help,” they prayed. “Guide us to the straight path — the path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have...

The country’s major corporations, seeking to crush union organization, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights and oversees unionization efforts. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s have targeted the NLRB after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law in battl...

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed the lawsuit on behalf of the human rights organization, Defense for Children – Palestine; Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group based in the occupied West Bank; and eight Palestinians and US citizens with relatives in Gaza accusing President Joe Biden and other senior officials of being complicit in Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza. The case is being he...

Text Originally published March 18, 2024 Israel’s Trojan Horse - by Mr. Fish Piers allow things to come in. They allow things to go out. And Israel, which has no intention of halting its murderous siege of Gaza, including its policy of enforced starvation, appears to have found a solution to its problem of where to expel the 2.3 million Palestinians.  If the Arab world will not take them, as Secre...

Text originally posted on March 17, 2024 Onward Christian Fascism - by Mr. Fish Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look set to make it possible again. If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference , voter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and racists. It will be because the Democrats are as...

Israel, like all settler colonial projects, is built on lies – the lie that the land historically belongs to the colonizers, the lie that Palestinians have no national identity, the lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, the lie that a peaceful settlement is thwarted by the Palestinians rather than the Israelis. This mendacity is especially prevalent when Israel carries out its...

On May 2016 a monster wildfire engulfed the city of Fort McMurray in the Canadian province of Alberta, destroying thousands of homes and forcing the evacuation of 88,000 people. The freakishly destructive conflagration, which tore into town with such speed that residents barely escaped in their cars as their houses flared and vaporized, is a harbinger of the new normal, the kind of climate catastr...

Text Originally published Feb 29, 2024 Divine Violence - by Mr. Fish Aaron Bushnell, when he placed his cell phone on the ground to set up a livestream and lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., resulting in his death, pitted divine violence against radical evil. As an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force, he was part of the vast machinery that sustains the ong...

The U.S. economy is being held hostage by a small cohort of financiers who run private equity firms --- Apollo, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. These equity firms buy up and plunder businesses, piling on debt, refusing to reinvest, slashing staff and often driving companies into bankruptcy. The object is not to sustain businesses, but to harvest them for assets to make a...

Has Zionism, especially Liberal Zionist, exhausted itself? The humanistic constructs of liberal Zionism, always in conflict with itself because of its refusal to grant Palestinians equal civil and political rights, has led many Israelis to embrace a far more chauvinistic and fanatic religious Zionism. What does this mean for Israel? And, as important, what does this mean for Judaism? The Zionist m...