Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and Aaron Maté

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here: A 23-year-old Ray McGovern, fresh in the CIA, a believer in John F. Kennedy, sat for a lecture from a senior operations officer at the agency. And was shocked by the rant he heard: “This president is a coward! He failed to ba...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here: “Humanity escaped by the skin of its teeth.” But you wouldn’t know it without journalists like Branko Marcetic , a returning Useful Idiot revealing the contents of the Pentagon leaks that the media has tried so hard to bury....

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here: If you thought beef with Elon Musk and threats of imprisonment from Congress would stop Matt Taibbi from breaking more of “the biggest story” of his career, you underestimate the power of a Useful Idiot: Matt returned to the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here: *We recorded this episode before it was revealed that Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett had written Matt Taibbi a letter threatening him with prison time over his Twitter Files testimony. This makes our discussion with Lee even m...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here: “Something monstrous is taking shape in America,” warns journalist Jacob Siegel in an article at Tablet: Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fasci...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here: Congressman Ro Khanna joins Useful Idiots to answer the question once and for all: can we still call him, or any member of Congress for that matter, a progressive? Aaron and Katie come ready with hard-hitting questions on the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here: “It’s the biggest lie I’ve ever witnessed in my life. I’ve never come across this amount of misinformation.” The Middle East, known geographically correct as West Asia, is fogged with years of propaganda and misinformation, l...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here: The US has finally stopped pretending to be pro-peace: with China proposing a plan for a ceasefire, Secretary of War Antony Blinken announced that stopping the war is unacceptable. And when CodePink’s Medea Benjamin called fo...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here: “Why has the Left turned its back on free speech?” asks Christian Parenti, professor of economics and author of Radical Hamilton . As Democrats censor Matt Taibbi over the Twitter Files, smear journalists Seymour Hersh and Je...

Announcement : Useful Idiots is taking a break for the rest of the week, so no Thursday Throwdown and regular Friday episode. We’ll be back next week (March 13-17) as normal. Thanks as always for your support. -Katie, Aaron, and Wilson This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here: “You either fight to the last Ukrainian or you’re pro-Russian.” As this motto of CIA-backed corporate media and politics strengthens, there is suddenly a glimmer of hope: people are beginning to wake up. Protests, no matter h...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview of our interview here: For all the Pete Buttigieg-defending Democrats who say that the chemical explosion in East Palestine, Ohio isn’t the chief regulator’s fault because Donald Trump repealed the Brake Rule, and for all the Trump...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview of our interview here: “If we do not build left-right coalitions on issues such as militarism, health care, a living wage and union organizing,” warns Chris Hedges, “we will be impotent in the face of corporate power and the war ma...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview of our interview here: “Sanctions are a form of war. They’re economic warfare. And they destroy people’s lives.” Joshua Landis ( https://twitter.com/joshua_landis ), Sandra Mackey Chair in Middle East Studies at the University of O...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview of our interview here: With Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files and Jeff Gerth’s new in-depth reporting for CJR exposing the years of lies spread by Russiagaters, bitter attacks from outed journalists are rolling in. Gerth and Taibbi, who...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.usefulidiotspodcast.com We’re changing up our look, now the free preview and full episode are all in the same place. If an alien life form (or just someone who watches mainstream media) happened across the Useful Idiots community, watched a few episodes, and read the the Absurd Arena , they might start to think: “Hey, these people s...

Click here for the full interview with former CIA counterterrorism officer John Kiriakou. After CIA officer John Kiriakou blew the whistle on US torture, no one in the CIA was arrested for their crimes. Except, of course, John Kiriakou. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act. He served 23 months in prison as punishment for his opposition to...

Click here for the full episode, including the extended interview with Shahid Buttar. Advocate, artist, lawyer, organizer, musician , and former politician Shahid Buttar joins Useful Idiots to explain why Democrats are failing. Why is he a former politician, you ask? Well after running a campaign against Nancy Pelosi and getting buried by racist attacks from liberals, Shahid realized a sad truth a...

Click here for the full interview with Ukrainian Professor Ivan Katchanovski. Ivan Katchanovski , Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist who teaches at the University of Ottawa, is exposing US media lies about the Ukraine proxy war. And, like many Useful Idiot guests, no one will report on his story. This week, Katchanovski shares his research on the Maidan Massacre, a mass killing of Ukrainians p...

Click here for the full end of year special on Ukraine, Guantanamo Bay, and Meet the Press’s cringiest moments. 2022 is nearly dead! Last year in our year recap with Thomas Frank, we asked “WTF will happen in 2022?” While we predicted correctly some brutal Jan 6 hearings and a nightmare midterm year, none of us thought the biggest news of the year would be a proxy war in Ukraine. So in our 2022 en...

Click here for the full interview with Miko Peled on Israeli apartheid, US hypocrisy, and why we ignore Palestinians while funding billions in weapons for Ukraine. Miko Peled , author of “ The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine ,” is the son of an Israeli general and former family-friend of Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, he’s an anti-Zionist fighting for Palestinian rights. He joins Usefu...

Click here for the full interview with Luhansk Deputy Foreign Minister Anna Soroka. War in Ukraine did not start with Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Ukraine has been at civil war since 2014, when the US backed a coup to overthrow President Viktor Yanukovych. When the new post-coup government cracked down on ethnic-Russian Ukrainians and their Russian culture, Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas reg...

Click here for the full interview with Matt Kennard on the crimes against Julian Assange and the right to free speech. “It’s a complete stitch up,” Matt Kennard, author and co-founder of Declassified UK , tells Useful Idiots about Julian Assange’s extradition case. “None of the rules of the game apply.” Assange, who has been jailed and tortured for nearly a decade for releasing documents which she...

Click here for the full interview with locomotive engineer Michael Paul Lindsey and host of Working People Maximillian Alvarez. Congress and Joe Biden are pushing through a contract backed by the rail companies and rejected by workers. Michael Paul Lindsey, a locomotive engineer for Union Pacific, and Maximillian Alvarez, editor in chief of the Real News Network and host of the podcast Working Peo...

Click here for the brand new part 2 of our 2-hour interview with Norman Finkelstein. If you heard the free version of Part 1 on Nov 11, the interview continues at 28:50. In Part 2 of the interview, Norman X Finkelstein previews his new book, "I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It," which unleashes his fiery analysis on identity politics and President Obama. To write it, he first had to do some ma...