CounterVortex Podcast

As the architecture of total surveillance falls inexorably into place, cellular technology comes to colonize more and more of daily human existence. Accepted in the banal interest of “convenience,” this trajectory ultimately ends in not only the extinction of human freedom, but the abolition of humanity itself—an idea openly embraced by the fascist tech bros as “transhumanism,” and warned of by CS Lewis in his eerily prescient 1943 work The Abolition of Man. In Episode 317 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg urges a revolution of everyday life, in which we start saying no to the relentless encroachment of cellular and digital technology. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

Plans by Trump's fascist tech bros as well as Putin and Xi to build AI-run nuclear reactors on the Moon open jurisdictional dilemmas that far outpace the modest UN efforts to put a regulation regime in place for artificial intelligence. These plans are unveiled just as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the symbolic hands of the Doomsday Clock to an unprecedented 85 seconds to midnight. The new Doomsday Clock Statement explicitly names AI, as well as nuclear weapons and climate change, as a potential threat to human survival. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, in conjunction with the Doomsday Clock move, reiterated its position that "we must move beyond managing nuclear weapons and start phasing them out before midnight strikes." In Episode 316 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg argues that we must take a similar abolitionist position on AI and space expansionism, citing unacceptable threats on ecological, epistemological and eschatological grounds. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

A last-minute "permanent ceasefire" may mean that northeast Syria is back from the brink of Arab-Kurdish ethnic war. But ceasefires have repeatedly broken down since fighting resumed earlier this year, with Damascus demanding disbandment of the Rojava autonomous zone, and the integration of its institutions—including its military wing, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—into the central government. While the new pact sets a more "gradual" pace for this integration, the Kurdish aspiration to regional autonomy and the central government's insistence on centralization may prove a long-term obstacle to peace. In Episode 315 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg weighs the odds for avoiding a conflict that holds the potential for escalation to genocide, with the connivance of the Great Powers that so recently backed the SDF to fight ISIS. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

Trump's Greenland annexation drive is only secondarily about the strategic minerals, but fundamentally driven by a geostrategic design to divide the planet with Putin. Even if his belated and equivocal disavowal of military force at the Davos summit is to be taken as real, the threat has likely achieved its intended effect—dividing and paralyzing NATO, so as to facilitate Putin's military ambitions in Europe, even beyond Ukraine Also at Davos, Trump officially inaugurated his "Board of Peace," seen as parallel body to the United Nations that can eventually displace it—dominated by Trump and Putin, in league with the world's other authoritarians. In the Greenland gambit, the territory itself is a mere pawn in the drive to establish a Fascist World Order. In Episode 314 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg calls for centering indigenous Inuit voices on the future of Greenland, and universal repudiation of annexationist designs. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

As ICE agents open fire on protesters in Minneapolis, Portland and Los Angeles, Trump frames his military threats against Iran in terms of human rights and democracy—an atypical nod back to the neocons. Following mass deadly repression, the protests in Iran appear to have abated—for now. In Minnesota, both Trump and protesters are turning up the heat. Trump's blatant hypocrisy highlights the imperative of international solidarity. The challenge for stateside protesters is to repudiate the calumny that the Iran protests are CIA or Mossad astroturf, and recognize them as a genuine self-organized popular uprising. The challenge for Iranian protesters is to repudiate Trump's bid to exploit them for his imperial ends, as well to reject the ambitions of the reactionary "crown prince" Reza Pahlavi to install himself as leader. In Episode 313 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg urges that explicit mutual support between the anti-authoritarian struggles in the US and Iran is what can move the historical process forward at this grim hour. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

A close reading of the facts indicates that Putin and Trump worked out a global carve-up in which Russia gets Ukraine and the US gets Venezuela. This was implicitly acknowledged in the "Trump Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine enshrined in the National Security Strategy released by the White House weeks before the illegal Venezuela attack was launched. In this light, Russian protests of the US aggression at the UN Security Council seem strictly pro forma. Both dissident left voices in Venezuela and democratic socialists in Ukraine have made the point that to betray one country is to betray the other. In Episode 312 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg demonstrates how the global divide-and-rule racket that is campism has never made less sense. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

Israel has become the first country on Earth to recognize the de facto independent Republic of Somaliland, in exchange for a committment from Somaliland to join the Abraham Accords and recognize Israel. However, not three years ago, Israel joined the US as the only two countries on Earth to recognize Morocco's claim to sovereignty over the disputed territory of Western Sahara—a betrayal of the occupied Sahrawi Arab people who seek an independent state. And of course both these deals constitute a betrayal of the Palestinians. Somaliland and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic should be natural allies, and instead they are being pitted against each other in the Great Power game. Yet another example of how a global divide-and-rule racket is the essence of the state system. In Episode 311 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg breaks it down. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

With his Christmas air-strikes on Nigeria, Trump is blundering into a conflict fundamentally driven by desertification related to the very climate change that he denies, and which now threatens democratic rule throughout the West African region. And while the Muslim-Christian sectarian strife that Trump hypes is a large element of the situation, the violence has gone both ways—and also targeted Muslim minorities such as Shi'ites, and even indigenous Jews. Furthermore, making Christians the perceived beneficiaries of imperialist intervention is only likely to exacerbate the tensions and make Christians more of a target. In Episode 310 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes an in-depth and unsparing look. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 60 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 61!

Zohran Mamdani's Oval Office lovefest with Donald Trump was a dangerous legitimization of fascism, and has won New York no respite—as the city was targeted for ICE raids mere days later. These were happily met with a strong street response by progressive New Yorkers, and Zohran has reiterated his stance of non-cooperation with the federal police state. Meanwhile, the massacre of Jews one week ago in Sydney increases the pressure on Mamdani to walk the fine line between remaining true to his anti-Zionist principles on one hand, and acquiescing in anti-Semitism on the other. And his support for bulldozing the Elizabeth Street Garden (even after a deal to save it has been accepted by the incumbent administration), while failing to protest displacement of tenants from public housing projects slated for privatization, points to an accommodation with the pro-"development" consensus of the city's permanent government. On the final countdown to Mamdani's inauguration, the contradictions he faces are sharpening. In Episode 309 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg breaks it down. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 61! In Episode 309 of the CounterVortex podcast Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 60 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 61!

Donald Trump's new National Security Strategy instates a "Trump Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine. Like the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, which was used to justify the "gunboat diplomacy" of that era, this new corollary openly calls for dividing the world into spheres of influence—with the Western Hemisphere assigned to the US. Russia is obviously pleased as punch over this, as it implicitly gives Moscow a free hand in Ukraine—and Putin will likely consider this an acceptable pay-off for his betrayal of Venezuela. However, China is less likely to surrender its massive investments and mega-projects in Latin America in exchange for a free hand to take over Taiwan. The document's text on Europe is even more sinister, revealing a white supremacist agenda that looks not to Washington's traditional allies to counter Russia, but to the continent's Russian-backed far-right movements to counter Washington's traditional allies. In Episode 308 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg exposes the NSS as a further step toward consolidation of a Fascist World Order. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 60 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 61!

Trump's perverse ambition to win the Nobel Peace Prize was given a boost by his "winning" of the first "FIFA Peace Prize"—just as he is carrying out illegal deadly air-strikes in the Caribbean, and threatening Venezuela with war. "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth is denying claims that he gave orders to "kill them all" in the strikes, but Congress is preparing an investigation. Regardless of whether this order was given, the strikes are clearly illegal under the international laws of war. Nonetheless, the Pentagon has opened an investigation into Sen. Mark Kelly for his video calling for troops to refuse illegal orders. Trump—who pardoned soldiers convicted of war crimes in his first term—has called for Kelly to be hanged for sedition. In Episode 307 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues to be flabbergasted by the Orwellian war-is-peace propaganda. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 60 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 61!

Trump continues to pursue his perverse ambition to win the Nobel Peace Prize—now proffering "peace" plans for Ukraine and Gaza that would actually reward war crimes, and therefore portend wider war. In both cases these new "peace" plans are merely sanitized recapitulations of earlier proposals—for the surrender of the Donbas and Crimea to Russia, and for Israeli annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and "transfer" of their indigenous inhabitants. Meanwhile, the actual winner of this year's Peace Prize, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, is obsequiously pandering to Trump, and playing along with his bellicose designs on her country. In Episode 306 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg cuts through the Orwellian war-is-peace propaganda. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

Syrian interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa's White House meeting with Donald Trump followed the removal of his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) from the list of designated "terrorist organizations" both at the State Department and at the UN. It also coincided with raids against ISIS by his security forces, raising the prospect of his government being invited to join the US-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. The Washington visit also came just a month after al-Sharaa's similar trip to meet Vladimir Putin in Moscow, where a deal was brokered allowing Russia to keep its military bases in Syria. Amid all this, Syria continues to see forced disappearances and other abuses targeting Druze, Alawites and Kurds—pointing to the looming threat of an ethnic or sectarian internal war. The US troop presence in Syria is largely embedded among the Kurdish forces in the east. As al-Sharaa becomes a new "anti-terrorist" partner (or proxy) for the Great Powers, will these troops be withdrawn—providing a "green light" for the Damascus government to attack the Kurdish autonomous zone? In Episode 305 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg weighs the risks at this critical moment in Syria's transition process, nearly one year after the fall of the Assad dictatorship. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

Zohran Mamdani hasn't even taken office, and already there has been a physical skirmish between ICE agents and NYPD cops in Washington Heights. This portends a full-on confrontation between federal and municipal power in the months to come—with the potential (yes, really) for civil war. In Episode 303 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg argues that despite the danger, Mamdani's election heightens the contradictions in American society in a salubrious way, and may even open revolutionary possibilities. However, his pledge to destroy Lower Manhattan's Elizabeth Street Garden points to the contradictions in Mamdani's own politics that activists will have to press him on. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

The anarchist critique of Zohran Mamdani's election in the New York City mayoral race reminds us that "socialist faces in high places" do not bring fundamental change, and Gotham has seen mayors before elected on populist platforms only to capitulate to the permanent government dominated by the real estate industry once in office. However, the MAGA backlash to Mamdani's rise may help keep him true to his populist program, as it is the working people of New York who will have his back when Trump strikes back against the city—not the real estate barons. This crisis could provide the impetus for the needed rupture between progressive-run localities and a federal apparatus controlled by the illegitimate Trump regime—vindicating Murray Bookchin's theories of radical municipalism. In Episode 303 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg breaks it down. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

Throughout the 18-month siege of El Fasher, capital of Sudan's North Darfur state, international human rights observers had been warning that the city's residents faced a general massacre when it eventually fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Yet nothing was done, apart from ineffectual Great Power diplomacy that had zero impact on the ground. Now that the foretold massacre is underway—with hundreds killed, thousands missing, and no end in sight—calls are at last emerging for boycott, divestment and sanctions against the United Arab Emirates, the apparent underwriter of the genocidal RSF. In Episode 302 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes the contrast with the situation 20 years ago, when #SaveDarfur was a cause célèbre—and asks what has changed. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 63 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 64!

In Episode 301 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg offers his anarchist annotation of the New York City mayoral candidates' debate. He makes the case that the promise of "socialism" represented by Zohran Mamdani is (alas) not as real as the threat of fascism represented by Curtis Sliwa—or acquiescence to fascism represented Andrew Cuomo. Both Cuomo and Sliwa invoked the too real possibility of Trump attempting to abrogate New York's municipal powers if Mamdani becomes mayor. However, this contingency could heighten the contradictions in a politically salubrious way—prompting the needed rupture between progressive-run localities and the illegitimate Trump regime. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 63 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 64!

In Episode 300 of the CounterVortex podcast (which coincidentally marks 24 years since the launch of his news blog in the immediate aftermath of 9-11), Bill Weinberg takes stock of the CounterVortex mission in light of the now urgently dire world situation—and makes an appeal for support from the listeners. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

The recent political reversal in Bolivia raises the question of whether the advances of nearly 20 years of rule by the indigenist left will survive—including a constitution that refounded the state as a "plurinational" republic. In Episode 299 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg explores how the lessons of the Bolivian experience can be applied to Syria, where the new revolutionary government faces a challenge in Kurdish and Druze demands for regional autonomy. New fighting in the Kurdish district of Sheikh Maqsoud in Aleppo city between government forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), armed wing of the Kurdish-led autonomous administration that still controls much of the country's northeast, points to the continued threat of ethnic war. Results in Syria's first post-revolution parliamentary elections (carried out in a controlled process by the central government, not popular vote) were tilted to the Sunni Arab majority. Exiled left-dissident Joseph Daher sees a consolidation of power by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the ostensibly disbanded Islamist formation that led the rebel offensive that toppled the old regime last December, and whose leader is the current interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa. Can the current transition process in Syria return to the secular-democratic values of the 2011 Arab Revolution without a rethinking of nationalist precepts? In Episode 299 of the CounterVortex podcast Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 61 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 62!

Trump's call at Quantico for the armed forces to use American cities as "training grounds" and fight the "enemy within" was quickly followed by militarized ICE raids in Chicago and mobilization of the National Guard. His National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), issued four days before the Quantico meeting with Pentagon brass, explicitly identifies "anti-fascism" as a threat that must be targeted with the full power of the state. In Episode 298 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues to deconstruct the propaganda and examine the apparatus being employed to impose a fascist order in the United States—and explore the prospects for resistance, and even non-cooperation within the rank-and-file of the federal forces. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex Production by Chris Rywalt We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 65 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 66!