Claim OwnershipThe Chris Hedges Report
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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges interviews a wide array of authors, journalists, artists and cultural figures on complex topics of history, politics and war.
71 Episodes
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Filmmaker, author and journalist Antony Loewenstein documents how Israel has used Gaza as a weapons showcase. Spyware, killer drones, robot dogs and other weapons are debuted in Gaza and field-tested on the civilian population, demonstrating their effectiveness to regimes around the world that await their chance to purchase them.
Loewenstein joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle what he has learned from writing The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World and producing The Palestine Laboratory, a documentary based on the book.
“I think the whole idea of what Israel…has been showing the world, I say two things. One, what weapons you can use to murder, kill, target Palestinians but also how to get away with it. I think Israel sells that concept,” Loewenstein explains.
As spyware companies like Pegasus and Paragon and arms companies like Elbit and Rafael see business boom, Loewenstein argues countries have a moral imperative to end trading with Israel. These same technologies perpetuating the genocide in Gaza, Loewenstein explains, will come back to haunt the citizenry of purchasing countries.
“All these governments around the world, whether they’re so-called democratic or repressive, are obsessed with these tools. They can’t give them up. They’re desperate to listen to their opponents, to the journalists, to activists,” Loewenstein remarks.
“It’s very hard for these regimes to give them up because there’s no regulation. There’s just none. It just doesn’t exist.”
After two years of genocide, it is no longer possible to hide complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Entire countries and corporations are — according to multiple reports by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese — either directly or indirectly involved in Israel’s economic proliferation.
In her latest report, “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime,” Albanese details the role 63 nations played in supporting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. She chronicles how countries like the United States, which directly funds and arms Israel, are a part of a vast global economic web. This network includes dozens of other countries that contribute with seemingly minor components, such as warplane wheels.
Rejection of this system is imperative, Albanese says. These same technologies used to destroy the lives of Palestinians will inevitably be turned against the citizens of Israel’s funders.
“Palestine today is a metaphor of our life and where our life is going to go,” Albanese warns.
“Every worker today should draw a lesson from what’s happening to the Palestinians, because the large injustice system is connected and makes all of us connected to what’s happening there.”
The meddling and infiltration of governments in Latin America by the United States is a huge chapter of its 20th century history. One of the most egregious and blatant examples of intervention was in Chile, where the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by the CIA-backed military coup in 1973.
The ensuing years saw violent repression of student activists, labor leaders, journalists, leftwing politicians and dissidents at the helm of a brutal military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet. Among the victims of this ruthless crackdown were two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi.
Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is journalist John Dinges who, in his new book Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup, dives into their involvement in Chile at a time where grand hope quickly turned into great despair.
Despite the demoralization and destruction produced by Israel’s two-year-long genocidal campaign on the Palestinians, Israel potentially finds itself at its weakest point in its short history.
In his new book, Israel on the Brink, renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé makes the case that Israel’s current path forward is unsustainable. With a combination of domestic, political, military and international pressures, Israel will continue to destabilize.
Pappé writes, “A potential fall of Israel could either be like the end of South Vietnam, the total erasure of a state, or like South Africa, the fall of a particular ideological regime and its replacement by another. I believe that in the case of Israel, elements of both scenarios will unfold sooner than many of us can comprehend or prepare for.”
Hedges and Pappé chronicle the path Israel has taken to reach this point, one of radical religious fanaticism manifesting itself in figures such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir at the highest positions in government, and what the future looks like for them as well as the devastated Palestinian population.
The descent into a new, mutated and technology-focused form of American fascism is already here. Those who have kept track of the rise of the Thielverse, which includes figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and JD Vance, have understood that an agenda to usher in a unique form of authoritarianism has been slowly introduced into the mainstream political atmosphere.
Whitney Webb, investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to document the rise of this cabal into the most powerful positions of the American government.
“I think now it's quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia's moment. These particular figures have had an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government,” Webb explains.
It’s clear that the architects of mass surveillance and the military industrial complex are beginning to coalesce in unprecedented ways within the Trump administration and Webb emphasizes that now is the time to pay attention and push back against these new forces.
If they have their way, all commercial technology will be completely folded into the national security state — acting blatantly as the new infrastructure for techno-authoritarian rule. The underlying idea behind this new system is “pre-crime,” or the use of mass surveillance to designate people criminals before they’ve committed any crime. Webb warns that the Trump administration and its benefactors will demonize segments of the population to turn civilians against together, all in pursuit of building out this elaborate system of control right under our noses.
1For decades, clandestine foreign military and intelligence operations have been the deadly, destabilizing engine of American foreign policy. Today, as exposed by investigative journalist Seth Harp in his new book The Fort Bragg Cartel, 21st-century Special Forces operations have become their brutal, logical successor.
Harp joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to highlight the dark culture of violence inflicted by Special Forces operators both abroad and domestically. These operators exist in a world where battlefield impunity spirals into rampant drug use and trafficking, extrajudicial killings and domestic violence. Harp’s reporting insists that these are not isolated events but rather part of a system built on secrecy and unaccountable violence.
“The book,” according to Harp, “is not a work of history, it’s intended to be a murder mystery at the heart of it, kind of a police beat reporting but in order to tell the backstory of these operators’ lives, I recapitulate a brief history of the Global War on Terrorism with a focus on Fort Bragg soldiers in particular, because Fort Bragg is really the beating heart of the global special operations complex, and many people are unaware of its centrality in all of these events.”
Historian Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, joins host Chris Hedges to detail the dwindling academic freedom in American universities and society at large as Donald Trump’s grip on free speech tightens.
Khalidi notes that while the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is an old tactic to stifle academic scrutiny of Israel, its current deployment is unprecedented. Today, professors are intimidated out of teaching about Israel and Palestine, entire Middle Eastern studies departments are threatened with receivership and federal funding is withheld from universities.
“I know many people who are not going to teach courses this semester of my colleagues out of fear that if I teach about settler colonialism, if I teach about genocide, if I teach this or that about the Middle East, I’m going to be hauled up before these kangaroo courts,” Khalidi tells Hedges.
“That means your life is going to be ruined. You’re going to have to get lawyers, have to deal with a process that is completely opaque and which is designed… to punish and discipline anybody who opens their mouth on Palestine.”
"Are you a worker? Yes. Are you a consumer shopper? Yes. Are you a taxpayer? Yes. Voter? Well, sometimes. Are you a parent? Yes. Are you a veteran? Sometimes. Well, how can you say you're a nobody? You know things about those roles. You've experienced them. You've been frustrated. If you lie to yourself to be a nobody, you're going to be treated like a nobody. You're going to be treated like someone who doesn't count, someone who doesn't matter, somebody who can be disrespected, someone who can be ripped off, somebody who could be underinsured, somebody who can be suppressed."
Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate, asks these questions to demonstrate how Americans often sell themselves short regarding their power as citizens.
Nader, whose life-long mission has been to empower people to fight back against corrupt politicians and greedy corporate criminals, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to continue to spread this message at a critical juncture in American politics.
With Donald Trump’s increasing fascistic repression and an impending government shutdown, Nader offers a roadmap for how both government officials and ordinary people can fight back.
His latest book, Citizen Self-Respect, serves as a call to action, arguing that Americans must not passively allow the Trump administration and corporate elites to consolidate their power.
Medea Benjamin and CODEPINK, the organization she cofounded, are synonymous with accosting power in the United States. Their fearless confrontations with the nation’s most prominent and powerful politicians in the halls of Congress, often seen through viral videos, are a stark embodiment of the First Amendment. Despite over 20 years of activism and consistent critique of America’s representatives over their subservience to the military industrial complex and other big money interests, their ability to have these conversations is beginning to dwindle.
Benjamin joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the current moment in American politics, which sees free speech sitting on a knife’s edge following the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the American political class’s continued support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Benjamin was recently arrested after questioning Rep. Darrell Issa about Israel’s recent airstrike targeting Hamas negotiators in Qatar. Despite police saying she did nothing wrong, Issa continued with lodging a complaint against her, a move she believes is also in line with the suppression of activists and free speech.
Furthermore, after CODEPINK activists confronted Donald Trump and his cabinet at a restaurant and chanted at the president, ““Free DC, free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time,” Trump said he is looking into having US Attorney General Pam Bondi bring RICO charges against the protestors “because they should be put in jail.”
Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and an associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, analyzes how the weaponization and distortion of the Holocaust, in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, has been used to serve the narrative of Zionists and the Israeli government. He tells host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report:
“We know that Holocaust education eventually was more focused on transmitting this feeling of exceptionality than actually teaching about Holocaust as history, as real history, as normal history, as a part, indeed, of the making of the modern and late modern world.”
Segal recounts his personal experience learning about the Holocaust in Israel, revealing a Zionist perspective that is both skewed and contradictory.
“Jews, because they were a unique people, always faced a unique hatred, anti-Semitism, which then culminated in a unique genocide, really the only genocide ever in human history, in this framework: the Holocaust,” he explains.
Though Segal outgrew this propagandized view, he explains that many in Israel and its international supporters still frame Jews and the Holocaust as exceptional. This belief in exceptionalism, Segal argues, blurs the history that led to the Holocaust and the events that have followed.
“We really can't understand the phenomena of modern genocide without understanding the nation-state system, the exclusionary nation system and colonialism, European expansion around the world, settler colonialism and colonial genocides that accompanied this expansion for hundreds of years,” Segal contends.
“I've witnessed a lot of war and in that there is nothing that compares to the level of destruction, the level of [dis]proportionality, the absolute disregard for Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law and considerations of the laws of armed conflict. [Nowhere] in my career… have I witnessed anything close to the absolute escalation of violence and [unnecessary] force I witnessed in Gaza.”
This is what Anthony Aguilar, a retired Lieutenant Colonel who served for 25 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Green Beret, tells host Chris Hedges in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, as he recalls his experiences in Gaza serving as a subcontractor for UG Solutions, which provides security for The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
His testimony has added another crucial dimension to understanding the genocide in this late stage, as hundreds of thousands face starvation and desperation for food and aid. While GHF presents itself as a humanitarian aid group, in reality it is an arm of Israel’s infrastructure of genocide, facilitating violence and imposing increased desperation against Palestinians at the behest of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Aguilar’s testimony — detailing the weaponry he was supplied as a contractor, the money he was paid, the operating procedures he was given and the internal structure linking the GHF and the IDF — provides undeniable evidence of Israel’s continued aggression and depravity. From high tech-surveillance that beams Palestinians with biometric scanners to scan their faces at aid sites, to dehumanizing crowd control techniques, to blatant indiscriminate murder, Aguilar makes clear that GHF is a project of Israeli genocide.
It is rare to find war correspondents who are willing to break the rules of access and safety imposed by dominant powers. Only by challenging these structures and facing the dangers of war can journalists begin a true effort to report the truth and, if they are lucky, materially alter the course of conflict.
Journalist, author and documentary filmmaker Ben Anderson joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to detail what it means to be a reporter who is committed to chasing and documenting the truth in a media landscape that often chooses complacency.
Anderson chronicles his motivations and influences, such as the late John Pilger, early on in his career. “Back then, I really believed that if I went to these places, got this shocking footage, something would happen to help the people that you were actually covering,” he explains.
Over time, Anderson realized that this youthful optimism may not translate to reality — but his cynicism did not deter him from covering brutal conflict in Afghanistan. Anderson went far beyond typical embedded reporting, choosing to spend weeks away operating independently with other journalists to the point of exhaustion and hunger, refusing to submit to the relatively comfortable lifestyle of most foreign correspondents.
Anderson’s commitment to journalism drove him and his work: “I just thought, this is obviously the most important story in the world and here is something I can do. Just by having a bit of endurance, I can stick it out and get footage that might make a difference.”
One of the most stark examples of the expanding tide of authoritarianism worldwide was the 2017 murder of Gauri Lankesh, an Indian journalist and activist, allegedly assassinated by a far-right religious group in India for her fearless journalism.
Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is Rollo Romig, a journalist whose Pulitzer Prize-finalist book, I Am On the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Ruse of Autocracy in India, examines the historic and political context of Lankesh’s murder.
Romig chronicles the rise of Hindu nationalist extremism in India, linking it to India’s current authoritarian policies under Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The group accused of Lankesh’s assassination, Sanatan Sanstha, operates on the vision “of making India an officially Hindu country and, equally importantly, relegating all non-Hindus to second-class citizenship and ostracizing, particularly, Muslims from Hindu society,” according to Romig.
Much like in the United States, Romig and Hedges argue that such fringe groups serve a strategic purpose of mainstreaming extremist ideologies that ultimately benefit the ruling class. Gauri’s work represented a threat to far-right political movements in India and she was often subjected to fierce intimidation campaigns, including, as the title of Romig’s book suggests, being placed on murder hit lists.
Known as the “Silent Holocaust,” the genocide in Guatemala is seldom mentioned in modern history. The United States, with support from Israel, backed yet another violent crusade against an indigenous population as well as against communism. The Guatemalan genocide — preceded by a CIA-instigated coup d’état of the Guatemalen government in 1954 and the ensuing civil war — saw hundreds of thousands of the Mayan Indigenous peoples and alleged communists massacred or disappeared.
Jennifer Harbury, an attorney, author and human rights activist, witnessed the horrors of the genocidal campaign waged by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan military. Included in these horrors was the torture and disappearance of her husband, Mayan rebel leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez (known as Everardo) by CIA-backed Guatemalan military officials.
Harbury joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to dissect the brutal history of the genocide as well as recount her own experiences, including several hunger strikes in Guatemala and Washington, D.C., that ultimately led to the exposure of the CIA’s complicity in the atrocities.
Fame and fortune are often corrupting forces, ones that beget power and comfort. To stand with the afflicted requires sacrificing this privilege and few embody that sacrifice more profoundly than the legendary musician of Pink Floyd Roger Waters.
For years, through his music and political action, Waters has amplified the voices of the oppressed. He has championed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, defended attorney Steven Donziger, demanded the closure of Guantánamo Bay, has long stood against the apartheid state of Israel and now unwaveringly against the genocide of Palestinians.
Waters joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his political activism, including his support for Palestine Action, a group criminalized by the British government for their protest against Israel.
The pair discuss how Waters’ art has documented his moral devotion against oppression over the years while also examining the political decay — fueled by greed and corruption — of the United States, the United Kingdom and other world powers.
The gutting of public funding for higher education in the United States has led to the takeover of universities by private donors, many of whom are Zionist entities and billionaires. As a result, universities have become, as guest Dr. Maura Finkelstein calls them, “banks and real estate development companies that offer classes.”
As demonstrated by Finkelstein’s story, this new paradigm of higher education has pushed aside democratic values and academic freedom. In January 2024, as a result of a McCarthyist-style crackdown on pro-Palestinian faculty, Finkelstein was fired from her position as a tenured associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Muhlenberg College. Her dismissal followed a farcical Department of Education investigation, making her one of the latest victims in the purge of dissenters against the Zionist narrative.
On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Finkelstein explains how Muhlenberg reached this point of seemingly no return and how it serves as an example of how universities nationwide are capitulating to the Trump administration’s crackdown on free speech with regard to the genocide in Gaza.
From the increasing pressures from Zionist campus organizations like Hillel International to the constant monitoring and surveillance of those sympathetic to the Palestinian plight on social media, Finkelstein and host Chris Hedges make clear the walls are closing in on American education and democracy itself.
Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room of American politics is the existence of a pedophilic blackmail network that involves some of the most powerful people in the country and the world. Despite efforts to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein case, which saw the trafficking and sexual exploitation of thousands of children, justice continues to be evaded and the cabal associated with Epstein — President Donald Trump notwithstanding — continues its conspiracy.
Nick Bryant is a journalist and author who first published Epstein’s infamous “black book” in 2015 as well as Epstein’s flight logs. This information exposed the powerful names associated with Epstein and those who likely participated in his abhorrent pedophilic escapades as well as those who are likely controlled via Epstein’s extensive blackmail apparatus.
Bryant joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his work as well as the history of the Epstein case and what can be expected next. Trump has resorted to calling the entire matter a “hoax” and Attorney General Pam Bondi, despite promising to release the Epstein files, has recently balked at the idea that there is evidence of an Epstein client list.
Bryant and Hedges discuss how there is already myriad evidence of Epstein’s crimes and relationships but efforts by the current administration could cloud the hope for justice.
Following attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States, the world held its breath as the prospect of World War III loomed on the horizon. After 12 days of conflict, a ceasefire has brought about new uncertainty for the future.
Former British diplomat Alastair Crooke joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to make sense of the current situation in the Middle East and what can be expected in the coming weeks or months.
Crooke details the lead up to the Israeli attacks, including the use of technology and neighbouring countries that allowed for the element of surprise. Cyber attacks, drones flown in from Azerbaijan and American military software served as crucial elements for the Israeli attacks on Iran.
As for the American strikes weeks later, Crooke explains Donald Trump’s alleged anxiety in not engaging in a prolonged conflict and theorizes about what the damage on Iran’s nuclear facilities actually looks like and what it could mean going forward.
Hedges and Crooke lay out what could come next, indicating that this conflict is far from over and the future of the Middle East, along with the rest of the world’s economy, hinges on what comes next from Israel, Iran or the United States.
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