On Contact (February 2019 - February 2021)

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to filmmaker and journalist, Eleanor Goldfield about her documentary, "Hard Road of Hope". Goldfield’s documentary, "Hard Road of Hope", revisits West Virginia’s long tradition of radicalism and militant unionism, including the famed 1921 armed uprising, the largest since the Civil War, by some 10,000 coal miners at Blair Mountain who fought the repressive coal owners and their hired coal company gun thugs and militias. In 2018, the state’s 20,000 public school teachers and employees carried out a strike over low pay and high health-care costs, shutting down every public school in West Virginia until their demands were met. The strike inspired similar teacher strikes in Oklahoma, Colorado and Arizona. These contradictions, and what they mean for a nation fragmenting into antagonistic tribes, are explored in the documentary.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Michael Smith about civil rights attorney Michael Ratner's recently published memoir, "Moving the Bar – My Life as A Radical Lawyer". Smith was a close friend and collaborator of Ratner's for over three decades. Michael Ratner was one of the most important civil rights attorneys in our era. He spent his life fighting on behalf of those who state and empire sought to crush, from the leaders of the prison uprising at Attica to Muslim prisoners held in Guantanamo, to Julian Assange.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Professor Noam Chomsky, the pioneering linguist and prolific author of numerous seminal political works, about the state of the American Empire. Professor Chomsky is the author of over 100 books, including ‘The Fateful Triangle’, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, ‘Failed States’ and ‘Requiem for the American Dream’, and America’s most important intellectual. His new book, with Marv Waterstone, professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, is ‘Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance’.

On this show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald about the incoming Biden administration and what it will mean for a country in crisis, ravaged by a pandemic it cannot control, hostage to corporate power and bifurcated into warring factions. Glenn Greenwald is the author of several bestsellers, including ‘How Would a Patriot Act?’ and ‘With Liberty and Justice for Some’. His most recent book is ‘No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State’. Greenwald is a former constitutional law and civil rights litigator. He was a columnist for the Guardian until October 2013 and was the founding editor of media outlet the Intercept. He is a frequent guest on Fox News, Rolling Stone, and various other television and radio outlets. He has won numerous awards for his NSA reporting, including the 2013 Polk Award for national security reporting, the top 2013 investigative journalism award from the Online News Association, the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting (the Brazilian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), and the 2013 Pioneer Award from Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also received the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2009 and a 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the arrest and detention of Chelsea Manning. In 2013, Greenwald led the Guardian reporting that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses with moral philosopher Dr. Cornel West what we can learn about America's existential crisis after witnessing enraged supporters of Donald Trump storming the Capitol to try and halt Congress's counting of the electoral votes to confirm the victory of President-elect Joe Biden. Dr. Cornel West, professor of the practice of public philosophy at Harvard University, and the author of numerous books, including ‘Race Matters’.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to author Naomi Wolf about the bitter legacy of the British and Western colonialism of rampant homophobia, so virulent that people to this day are murdered for being gay in countries such as Egypt or Uganda. Naomi Wolf in her new book, 'Outrages, Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love', examines through the life of the British poet and gay activist John Addington Symonds how imperial power used, and uses, rigid sexual stereotypes as tools for repression and social control.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to journalist Diana Johnstone about the betrayal of the left with its historical role as the champion of social justice and peace now replaced with the boutique activism of identity politics, political correctness and what has become known as humanitarian intervention, the justification of US and NATO adventurism and wars on the specious belief it would liberate the women of Afghanistan or the peoples of Iraq. Diana Johnstone’s memoir is ‘Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher’. Johnstone was the European editor of In The Times from 1979 to 1990, and her work has appeared in New Left Review, Counterpunch and Covert Action Quarterly.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Fabian Scheidler about how the global economic machine came to dominate our lives, and with looming social upheavals caused by predatory capitalism, what can be done to blunt its destructive power. Fabian Scheidler is author of The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization, and co-founder of Kontext TV. www.end-of-the-megamachine.com www.fabianscheidler.com

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Gabriel Rockhill about the undercurrents of fascism in America’s DNA, and the US role in internationalizing fascism after World War II through clandestine activities such Operation Paperclip and Operation Gladio. Rockhill is a Franco-American philosopher and the founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. His books include Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy, Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics, Radical History & the Politics of Art and Logique de l’histoire.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Dr. Margaret Flowers about the Covid-19 pandemic and the catastrophic response to the public health crisis under America's for-profit healthcare system. Without national coordination, or universal and free national health care, Americans are faced with uneven or absent care due to hospital closures, reductions in hospital beds and services. Lawmakers and hospital administrators compete to purchase basic supplies leading manufacturers to hike prices. The mercenary nature of the for-profit health care system also means many Americans are distrustful of health guidelines and refuse to get tested. Dr. Margaret Flowers is a retired pediatrician and advocate for public universal health care, and advisor to the board of Physicians for a National Health Program.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to the Rev. Dr. Mel White about the Christian Right, which Hedges describes as “a homegrown fascist movement.” It has been organizing to take political power for decades, he says. During the Trump administration, it seized senior positions in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government – a move violating US Constitutional powers of separation of Church and State. In his book ‘American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America’, Hedges states that there are 70 million evangelical Christians in the United States, representing about 25 percent of the population, and that, between them, they attend more than 200,000 Evangelical churches. Polls indicate that about 40 percent of respondents believe in the Bible as the “actual word of God,” and that it is “to be taken literally, word for word.”

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Professor Paul Street about the outcome of the US presidential election, and how despite likely losing, Donald Trump has solidified an angry, dispossessed working class that cuts across racial lines and has embraced a right-wing populism. What does this portend for the two ruling parties? Will the Democrats continue to be captive to big donors and Wall Street, or will they embrace the anti-corporate message and promises of Medicare for all, free higher education, higher corporate taxes and regulation of big banks and Silicon Valley that drew such broad and enthusiastic support for Bernie Sanders? And will the Republicans capitalize on this grassroots discontent, much of it rural, where Trump took 60 percent of the vote, or go back to its abject subservience to big business?

On the show this week, Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi examine how the media and the major tech platforms function as a propaganda and censorship bureau on behalf of the Democratic Party and the Biden campaign. Author and journalist, Matt Taibbi, has been following developments since Twitter and Facebook blocked a New York Post story about a cache of emails reportedly belonging to Democratic nominee Joe Biden's son Hunter, with Twitter locking the New York Post out of its account for over a week. The overt censorship is emblematic of the widening and dangerous partisan divide into information that hurts or promotes one political faction over another, and is now infecting nearly all news organizations.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Christian Parenti about Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary of the United States, who has been called the founding father of US capitalism and imperialism. In his new book ‘Radical Hamilton; Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder,’ Parenti argues that his ideas for the US economy were distorted or ignored by the capitalist elites.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to former Baltimore Black Panther leader Eddie Conway about the nature of resistance, white supremacy and the rise of the a new black militancy. The book, The Brother You Choose, is a conversation between Eddie Conway and Paul Coates. Conway reflects on state repression and the hard road of resistance in a state that stops at nothing to crush resistance movements.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses what happened three decades ago in Yugoslavia when the country broke into brutal warring factions, and the parallels in the US today, with Croatian author and journalist, Slavenka Drakulić. Drakulić’s book ‘They Would Never Hurt a Fly’ is about the war criminals from the former Yugoslavia who were put on trial in the Hague. She explores not only the motivations of these killers and their sense of themselves, but also how such crimes were allowed to be perpetrated in her country.

Chris Hedges discusses with former British ambassador Craig Murray the hearing that just adjourned in London to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States. Murray’s exhaustive reporting, which can be found at craigmurray.org.uk, has become one of the few sources of reliable information about the hearing, which has become notoriously difficult to cover due to court restrictions imposed on the press, and is being ignored by most mainstream news organizations.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the origin of white supremacy and how it plays out in contemporary society with historian Gerald Horne. Horne is the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, Texas. Horne’s new book is ‘The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century’.

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the rise of the new black militancy with film director and producer Mobolaji Olambiwonnu. Olambiwonnu's new documentary is called ‘Ferguson Rises’. https://www.gofundme.com/f/ferguson-rises-racial-healing-documentary

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the economic and political collapse of the American empire with economist Professor Rick D. Wolff. Wolff’s new book, ‘The Sickness is the System – When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself,’ is available on September 15.