The Chris Hedges Report Podcast

I carried copies of William Shakespeare’s plays into conflicts in Central America, the Middle East and the Balkans. When I was taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard in Basra during the Shiite uprising following the first Gulf War, I had a copy of Anthony and Cleopatra in the pocket of my M-65 field jacket, along with Homer’s The Iliad. Sigmund Freud turned to Shakespeare, along with the Gre...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text Originally published 02/12/2023 Give Enough Rope - by Mr. Fish On Sunday, February 19, I will be at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington at noon to speak at the anti-war rally, Rage Against the War Machine . There, I will be joined by Jimmy Dore , Dennis Kucinich , Ann Wright , Jill Stein , Max Blumenthal , Cynthia McKinney , Anya Parampil , David Swanson and other left-...

Matt Taibbi has published an investigation about a vast propaganda campaign called “Hamilton 68, launched a year after Donald Trump won the presidency, to smear critics of the Democratic Party, from the left and the right, as Russian assets. Hamilton 68 claimed it used complex data analysis and relied on so-called disinformation experts to ferret out information on social media that emanated from...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published Feb. 5, 2023 Identity Politics - by Mr. Fish The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department...

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have carried out the most important investigative journalism of our generation, revealing to the public the inner workings of power through the release of voluminous leaked documents. No other news organization has come close. This information has exposed the crimes, lies and fraud of the powerful, sparking the judicial lynching of Assange who awaits extradition to the...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published: January 29, 2023 Everything Must Go - Mr. Fish Empires in terminal decline leap from one military fiasco to the next. The war in Ukraine, another bungled attempt to reassert U.S. global hegemony, fits this pattern. The danger is that the more dire things look, the more the U.S. will escalate the conflict, potentially provoking open confrontation w...

The film Ithaka , the title taken from a poem by C.P Cavafy, chronicles the slow-motion torture and execution of the Australian journalist Julian Assange, currently awaiting extradition to the United States in a high security prison in London. It charts his journey from publisher of the most important revelations of our generation of fraud, war crimes, lies and corruption by the powerful to his re...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text Originally posted January 21, 2023 Cell Damage - by Mr. Fish There is very little to recommend my old gym, other than the low monthly fee, where I worked out nearly every day from 2007 until the pandemic shut it down. The locker rooms were grimy with moldering carpets. There were brown rings around the basins and a thin blackish layer of slime, composed, I suspect, of...

The long persecution of Julian Assange, the publisher of Wikileaks, is set to culminate in its final act – a trial in the United States this year. Kevin Gosztola has spent the last decade reporting on Assange, WikiLeaks and the wider war on whistleblowers. His new book, “Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange,” methodically lays out the complex issues surrounding the case,...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Original Text posted January 15, 2023 Russell Banks - by Mr. Fish The deep malaise that defines American society — the rage, despair and widespread feelings of betrayal and loss — is rarely captured and almost never explained in the pages of newspapers or on screens. To grasp what has happened to the United States, the savage economic and emotional cost of deindustrializati...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published January 8, 2023 Macdeath - by Mr. Fish Our political class does not govern. It entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. The Squad and the Progressive Caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers’ rights or defying the war machine th...

Boyah J. Farah fled the war in Somalia arriving in the United States as a refugee with his mother and siblings when he was fifteen. His romantic dreams of America quickly ran into the dark undercurrents of American racism. Living in a housing project in Bedford, Massachusetts he was forced to discover the curse of being Black in America, the daily humiliations and small, but insidious ways he was...

Democratic debate and dialogue have all but vanished in the United States. There is widespread censorship imposed by social media platforms, private corporations about which we know nothing, while they know everything about us. Mainstream news outlets champion censorship and deplatforming in the name of democracy. Brian Seltzer, for example, on CNN justified banning Donald Trump form social media...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published 12/25/2022 Democratic Dark Side - by Mr. Fish The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All th...

There are some 84 million forcibly displaced people in the world, more than at any time since World War II. They are fleeing a combination of war, civil unrest, religious conflict, poverty, persecution, local violence and the climate crisis. As conditions worsen, authoritarian governments are on the rise that denounce immigrants and refugees as contaminants and impose draconian policies to turn th...

In Ray Nayler’s novel The Mountain in the Sea he explores the marine habitat of a hyperintelligent species of octopus, endowed with its own language and culture, is seized by a global tech corporation determined to harness this non-human intelligence for profit in new systems of artificial intelligence. This dystopian future world is one of total surveillance, vast polluted dead zones, climate bre...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Original Text published December 18, 2022 No Justice No Peace - by Mr. Fish Two nights a week for the last four months, I plowed my way through the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ’s The Gulag Archipelago with 17 students in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system. No one in my class endures the extremities imposed on...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published Dec 11, 2022 Where there’s smoke - by Mr. Fish Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed coalition government of Jewish extremists, fanatic Zionists and religious bigots represents a seismic change in Israel, one that will exacerbate Israel’s pariah status, erode external support for Israel, fuel a third Palestinian uprising, or intifada , and create irreconci...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published Dec. 4, 2022 Power Couple - by Mr. Fish The Congressional decision to prohibit railroad workers from going on strike and force them to accept a contract that meets few of their demands is part of the class war that has defined American politics for decades. The two ruling political parties differ only in rhetoric. They are bonded in their determina...

There was once a wing of the Democratic Party that stood up to the war industry. J. William Fulbright. George McGovern. Mike Gravel. William Proxmire. But that was decades ago. The new Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but the arms industry. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. The ma...

High school history textbooks have as remarkable ability to leave out one of the most crucial moments in 20th century history that took place during World War I and its aftermath. In popular American mythology we leap from the war to the roaring twenties. This willful historical amnesia blots out one of the darkest periods in American history – the severe state repression of political dissidents,...

Narrated by Eunice Wong Original Text published 11/13/2022 Father Michael Doyle - by Mr. Fish During the two years the cartoonist Joe Sacco and I spent on our book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt , written out of the poorest pockets of America, we invariably encountered heroic men and women who — against overwhelming odds — rose up to fight lonely and often losing battles on behalf of the oppr...

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Narrated by Eunice Wong Text originally published Nov. 20, 2022 Marcel Proust - by Mr. Fish During the war in Bosnia, I worked my way through the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” The novel , populated with 400 characters, was not an escape from the war. The specter of death and the expiring world of La Belle Époque haunts Proust’s work. He wrote it as he was dying; in fac...

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