Notes From Chris Hedges' Weekly Q&A
More Gaza genocide censorship at the BBC and the latest TrumpThump update for bushwhacked Trump voters.
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (3/1/125)
Journalist Chris Hedges has begun an interesting new weekly podcast where he responds to questions from viewers on a variety of issues. In the midst of an ever-rising flood of irrelevant, ahistorical BS, grifting hysteria and outright lies, Hedges’ interviews and commentaries are a dose of much-needed sanity. His direct responses to viewer and reader concerns in the new podcast adds immediacy to bringing a dollop of sanity to the national clown show.
Below are some excerpts from the most recent Q&A podcast. I have done some light editing for clarity and you can link to the full podcast below.
Moral foundation of dissent
As Israel and the US are gearing up to restart and accelerate the obscene massacre in Gaza, Hedges’ opening response regarding one’s spiritual and moral foundation of dissent is important to consider. Hedges’ clarity on that moral grounding goes back to his father, who was a minister active in the 1960s anti-war movement and even the early gay rights movement.
Hedges went to Harvard Divinity School and is an ordained Presbyterian minister, though he has never led a congregation. He notes his spiritual background is essential to his years of seeking and reporting truth in the corrupt empire, for which he has paid a price.
In that spirit, be sure to check the link below to the Code Pink training tomorrow on your rights of protest.
*****
Spiritual ground as the personal bedrock for those working for justice:
“I don't see any outside impediment to stop Israel from it's punishing and inhuman treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza, who don't have clean water; they don't have medicine, they don't have shelter. They are orchestrating a catastrophic humanitarian disaster on purpose and neither forces in Europe or certainly the Trump administration has any intent to stop them, but that doesn't invalidate the fight on behalf of Palestinian justice.
“It's been 14 years of decrying the persecution of Julian Assange, and — to be honest — I didn't think he would get out. But we were relentless and it was really because of the mass movements in Australia that put pressure on the Australian government that finally did free him. …
“But I never let my bleak view inhibit the constant campaign on my part to do everything possible to publicize his crucifixion. …After 14 years he's free but he wouldn't be free if there weren't all sorts of people who pushed. It wasn't the benevolence of the Biden or any other administration, it was this constant worldwide pressure for — I would argue — probably the greatest journalist of our generation.”
NOTE: You can view the six-minute video clip this quote was taken from, adding additional context to Hedges’ comments here.
What happened to the Left and what is needed:
“We got diverted with the boutique activism of woke politics and virtue signaling and forgot that this is about class warfare. As Ralph Nader frequently said to me, we’ve got to stop asking people whether they voted for Trump or not. We’ve got to organize unions to fight Walmart. It doesn't matter whether they voted for Trump or they didn't vote for Trump, or they didn't vote, because once you engage in that confrontation with the real centers of power, that's an education in itself. The viciousness of those centers of power is an education itself, so you begin to understand where real power lies.”
…“We won't get a general strike until we rebuild individual labor movements. The two keys are Amazon and Walmart. These are huge, huge employers. Amazon has built a very sophisticated system to break Union organizing, but I think those are the two companies we have to focus on because they employ such a large amount of the workforce force and because shutting them down in a strike would have significant economic effects.
“It's not going to be a very easy battle. The media is not on our side, so there's not a kind of public consciousness. The media is corporate owned. [Jeff] Bezos owns the Washington Post and just denuded the opinion page. It wasn't very good but still he denuded it.
“We have the capacity to obstruct and shut down the system. To shut down the mechanisms by which they make money. If we want to use it they will be very, very unforgiving.”
Where the Musk/Trump dismantling of government and firing of public employees will take us:
“If you look at the early years of both the Bolshevik and the fascists in Germany, it took them several years to consolidate power because they had to dismantle bureaucratic structures that were not loyal to the party. There were a lot of court battles in the beginning of the Nazis.
“There was a hostile press in both early Nazi Germany as well as in the early years of the Bolshevik seizure of power. But [all that was] gradually dismantled and destroyed. I think that's the process that we're watching now.
“Within the bureaucratic structures there are forces that seek, or would like to obstruct the unilateral or dictatorial power that Trump and those around him are trying to achieve. That's why we're seeing the assault on the Deep State and the replacement. There's two things going on: They're firing lots and lots of people. That's, of course, about privatization. There's a million civilian employees working for the Pentagon they would like to get rid of. They got rid of 5,000 of them, but they would like to get rid of most of them. Then you contract out those jobs because that's how these corporations make money.
“If you read Karl Marx, he talks about the late stage of capitalism where unregulated predatory capitalism disembowels the country and finally cannibalizes the very structures that permit capitalism to exist. And that, I think, is a good analogy for what is happening.”
The role of the right-wing ‘Project 2025’ in the second Trump administration:
“Project 2025 is the blueprint and that's the difference between the first Trump administration and the second, in that the first one was just chaos. There was no direction. There was no focus. It's not that Trump has focus. I don't think half the time he probably has a very vague notion of these executive orders he's signing with his Sharpie. But they're ready and they have a very clear vision of what they want to do. It's all available and it's frightening. So, yeah, I think that Project 2025 has clearly become the the central agenda of the Trump Administration.”
The true end game of Trump’s Project 2025 agenda:
“Project 2025 is not about diminishing the power of the military it is about expanding funding for the military and that's why we see in Congress Republicans trying to push through a bill with a hundred billion dollar increase in military spending over the next decade. What they are about is destroying the State Department; destroying diplomacy. It's all about using the ‘Big Stick’, or using the most brutal techniques of empire in order to achieve what it wants, which is — of course — disastrous. But I don't see any indication that they will get rid of civilian workers. That work will be outsourced and that's what the corporations want. That's why they're firing everybody right and left.
“Trump, we saw it with Zelensky today, loves the power that empire gives him. He loves wielding that power like all autocrats.”
On the nature of empire:
”I hate empire. I spent two decades on the outer reaches of empire. I know the cruelty of empire. The racism of empire is the external expression of white supremacy. When I was covering the war in Iraq the way US Marines and soldiers would refer to Iraqis was, you know, ‘Sand-the-n-word’. It was awful and empire is a malevolent force.”
Collapse of the American/Western empire:
“They don't have any internal impediments. There's no internal regulation and so they they actually end up destroying the very system that enriches them because … the way they're built is to extract more and more and more.
“If you look at late empires, whether it's the Aztec or anywhere else, what happens is that the ruling class retreats into their version of The Forbidden City or Versailles and continues to extract disproportionate amounts of wealth from an immiserated population and a devastated environment, which ultimately leads to collapse.
“We're certainly replicating that and we didn't talk about the climate crisis; that's fundamental. So everything is a commodity that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse without external forces to stop them. That's their nature. That's what they do. But unfettered and unregulated, they end up — essentially — committing collective suicide.”
Have you faced persecution for your work? Details of harassment, and a warning to all:
“It doesn't compare in any way to the kind of persecution that dissidents have endured in full-blown dictatorships, but we're moving there. You've seen an assault against [journalists] Richard Medhurst and Max Blumenthal got stopped at the airport and questioned. I was actually stopped once at the New York airport and not allowed back into the country with a valid US passport for two hours. They didn't question me. They put me in a room with — I think people — who had forged visas and then after two hours a supervisor came over and said to the guy on the computer, “He's on a watch [list] you can tell him he can go.”
“That's all I heard, but it was a message.
“The demeanor of the Homeland Security people when I come back from overseas will change when my profile comes up. Sometimes they can be very caustic and aggressive, so that's all minor, really, but it's there. The state is aware of your presence they don't like your presence, and that's not going to get better.
“Right now the Trump administration is focused on the Deep State, on the legacy media, on the Democratic Party, but once they finish with them then it's us.”
65-minute video
THIS TUESDAY / MARCH 4th!
Join CODEPINK and NLG Chicago for a virtual Know Your Rights Training focusing on direct actions! Whether in the streets or online, we must protect ourselves from intensified surveillance and criminalization. It is more important than ever to be visible for Palestine, for the environment and for the liberation of all peoples. And we can only do that by keeping each other safe and supported! Bring questions, thoughts and a friend!
Featuring: A Know Your Rights Presentation From The National Lawyers Guild Chicago
WHEN: Tuesday, March 04, 2025 at 6-7:00pm (CST)
WHERE: Zoom
CONTACT: Grace · grace@codepink.org
Why Did The BBC Just Censor This Documentary On The Children Of Gaza?
Electronic Intifada (3/1/25)
Associate editor Asa Winstanley discusses the BBC's censoring of a documentary about Gaza, following pressure by Israel and its lobby. This is a segment from The Electronic Intifada's livestream on day 40 of the Gaza ceasefire. Ali Abunimah, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Jon Elmer and Asa Winstanley were joined by Canadian author Yves Engler. You can watch the full show here: https://youtube.com/live/DDfgH5nSD-U
33-minute video
“Is it possible to buy insurance against lying, grifting casino con politicians?”
Trump Stripped Away All $103 Million Of Legal Assistance For Storm & Disaster Victims
Trump campaigned on a promise he wouldn't abandon hurricane and flood victims.
By Ryan Grim & Sarah Hay
Drop Site News (2/24/25)
WASHINGTON—Before officially taking office, the incoming Trump administration directed House Speaker Mike Johnson to strip legal assistance from victims of floods, hurricanes, and fire that had been included in an emergency supplemental spending bill in December.
Johnson readily complied, sources familiar with the negotiations said, and the move came even after President Donald Trump's election campaign ran heavily on the claim that Democrats had "abandoned" flood victims, particularly those in western North Carolina. The funding cut, amounting to $103 million, has not been previously reported.
Without legal assistance, regular homeowners and renters are less likely to be made whole after a crisis. Landlords often try to use disasters to evict tenants, who themselves often lose their jobs or have hours cut as a result of the disaster.
The directive was delivered to Johnson by Russ Vought, the sources said. Vought at the time was Trump's incoming director of Office of Management and Budget and has since been confirmed to the position. As Trump's budget director during his first time, he attempted each year to defund the Legal Services Corporation in its entirely. LSC provides legal aid on civil matters to struggling Americans. Despite Vought’s previous effort, both Republicans and Democrats continued funding LSC during his first term. Vought’s sniping of LSC in the disaster supplemental suggests his attack on LSC is far from over.
Vought is known in Republican circles as one of the most aggressive advocates of austerity. He served as a senior staffer on Capitol Hill to House Republicans before his first stint at the OMB, and was a principal driver of Project 2025, the blueprint for the evisceration of the administrative state now underway.
More than 90 million people in 28 states were impacted by hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, flooding, and extreme weather that warranted a disaster declarations in 2023 and 2024, according to LSC's supplemental request for funding (see below for an itemized list). The California wildfires have only exacerbated the crisis. Before the California fires, 17 million people were already eligible for legal assistance navigating disaster recovery. Absent the new funding, those services will be largely unavailable.
Victory for insurance industry
The move is a victory for property insurers looking to cut costs after major disasters, as homeowners and renters still reeling from some of the worst natural disasters in their lifetimes will be unable to tap the legal resources needed to navigate the thicket of obstacles often thrown up by insurers. The line item struck by Johnson would have provided $103 million of assistance to support families facing opportunistic scammers and miserly insurance companies seeking to avoid paying out on policies. Funding for the LSC has been part of every storm-response package since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, including during the first Trump administration, according to a review of legislation enacted over the past decade.
“Congress has consistently recognized that after boots on the ground, disaster survivors need suits on the ground in the form of legal aid,” said Ron Flagg, a spokesperson for LSC, which was created in 1974 as a private, government-funded nonprofit. Flagg said that under normal circumstances, based on the scale of the need and LSC’s capacity, half of eligible people who come in for support get turned away, meaning that when there’s a disaster there’s no ability to expand support without increased funding, which is why LSC has always been included in disaster supplementals. LSC serving as a granting organization, funding nonprofits at the local level. In major cities, a variety of legal services are generally available, but in rural areas, nonprofits backed by LSC are generally the only game in town. …
The Corrupt American State
“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
— President Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (1913).
"As Ralph Nader frequently said to me, we’ve got to stop asking people whether they voted for Trump or not. We’ve got to organize unions to fight Walmart. It doesn't matter whether they voted for Trump or they didn't vote for Trump, or they didn't vote, because once you engage in that confrontation with the real centers of power, that's an education in itself. The viciousness of those centers of power is an education itself, so you begin to understand where real power lies.”
Chris' statement here is solid gold. We've got to stop bickering amongst ourselves and get down to organizing labor in order to fight Walmart and Amazon and the rest. Power to the people!
Trump and his cronies are trying to take us back to colonial times when; women and children were property, POC were only considered 3/5 human, and LGBTQ and disabled people didn't exist in public.