I mean, that's an admission that the Democrats are nailed on to win the House, but it's also an admission that there ain't really much of a difference between them, isn't it?

No, I mean, and you see it in the pathetic campaign that mainstream Democrats are running.

We have had insurgencies, you know, Mamdani being the most prominent, uh, within the Democratic Party, but of course, the Democratic hierarchy is deeply hostile, Chuck Schumer and these figures.

Uh, so, you know, what did they offer in the last presidential campaign? Well, once they got rid of their candidate, who nobody was allowed to run against in the primaries, Joe Biden, who clearly was in cognitive decline, they anointed, and that is the word.

Nobody voted for Kamala Harris, who ran this issueless, vapid, celebrity-driven campaign on the assump- which cost over a billion dollars, by the way, on the assumption that she wasn't Trump, and, uh, that's very dangerous.

The, the, the poll numbers for Trump are poor, very poor.

However, uh, the, the Democratic Party is loathed.

I- is that the road we're on?

Your reporter spoke with Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times foreign correspondent and author, who asserts that the Trump regime, by weaponizing anti-Cuba rhetoric, is preparing for McCarthyite blacklisting and criminalizing of U.S. progressive activists.

This definitely lays the groundwork for an assault against the left.

That's not hidden.

You have this 100-page report, which is a pretty remarkable, non-reality-based document that demonizes all sorts of groups, Code Pink, you know, as either front groups or I mean, I found it just stunning in its mendacity.

I mean, for example, it goes after the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization.

This is known as the IFCC.

This is an ecumenical social justice organization that was founded by the Presbyterian Church.

Well, Chris, should we be cautious and not take this report too seriously, given the fact that there's a concerted strategy in the Trump White House to say or do something outrageous almost every day, normalizing what I think is vile, anti-democratic and irrational policies? Could this be another case of just more nonsense, throwing spaghetti against the wall following Trump whisperer Steve Bannon's theory of flooding the zone? Conversely, what's the danger of not taking this set of bogus McCarthyite accusations seriously?

Chris, this State Department report on Cuba, labeling it as the 21st century's bastion of communism, is part of the Trump administration's laying the groundwork for blacklisting and criminalizing all left-wing progressive anti-war and anti-imperialist dissent, isn't it? Talk to us about this.

Yes, exactly.

I mean, it's quite chilling and quite mendacious.

So it's a 100-page report that supposedly details Cuba's, I'm quoting, campaign of subversion against the United States.

You know, it posits, in essence, that an island of 9.6 million people, 90% of whom live in extreme poverty and amid extended blackouts because of U.S. sanctions somehow poses an existential threat.

And when you read it through, the accusations are just not even rational.

They are attempting to pump Cuba up as in their words, the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetration in American history.

Chris, is not the NSPM No. 7 National Security Presidential Memorandum No. 7, which Trump signed in September, also a part of the growing new McCarthyism in America? And what sort of groups and movements and political beliefs does the presidential memorandum identify as, quote, terrorist groups and ideas?

We have Trump's national security presidential memo of it's called NSPM 7 that denounces any American who questions capitalism, Christianity or MAGA and is telling the world that they're domestic terrorists.

Yes, well, this definitely lays the groundwork for an assault against the left.

That's not hidden.

You have this 100-page report, which is a pretty remarkable non-reality-based document that demonizes all sorts of groups, Code Pink, you know, as either front groups or fellow travelers.

I mean, I found it just... stunning in its mendacity.

I mean, for example, it goes after the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization.

This is known as the IFCO.

Yeah, it was

Thank

you.

And it's always a pleasure to be at Sanctuary, this great institution which I hope you all support and cherish.

My old office in Gaza is a pile of rubble.

The streets around it, where I went for coffee, ordered maftoul or manakish, had a haircut, are flattened.

Friends and colleagues are dead, or more often have vanished.

Last heard from weeks or months ago, no doubt buried somewhere under the broken slabs of concrete.

And maybe it's just one example, but I wonder if you could speak to it and just how extreme we could expect that to become.

Mm.

Uh, and empires at the beginning are actually fairly judicious about the use of military force.

Uh, but with the, uh, centralized power, this is what destroyed Athenian democracy of course, when central- centralized power is essential for maintaining an empire, and so, uh, democratic, uh, processes, democratic institutions inevitably wither and die, uh, which is what's happened in the United States.

I mean, even during the Trump era, this current Trump era, the Congress passed a resolution saying that there would be no more attacks in Iran without congressional approval, and Trump just ignored it.

So I mean, that's just an indication of how one of the three branches of government just is completely dysfunctional.

Um, and as, uh, empire pours its resources into military adventurism, when you can go all the way back to Vietnam, uh, but of course 20 years in Iraq, Afghanistan, all fiascos, interve- massive interventions in Syria, uh, Libya, et cetera, and now Iran, um, you have this desperate effort on a part of a decaying empire.

But of course, as you know, the infrastructure in the United States is crumbling.

How? What do you mean, how?

[chuckles]

So they needed a new enemy.

It became Russia, and that's ...

I was there, by the way, Jimmy.

I was, I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe, and I covered the unification of Germany, and there were very clear promises made to Gorbachev not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany.

I was in the room when Hans-Dietrich Genscher made those promises and James Baker made that promise.

Well, then, of course, the arms industry ...

Right.

And I want to ask you, why don't they organize themselves so they can be a conveyor of the norms of a civilized society? They can speak out against tyranny, autocracy, exploitation of workers, climate violence, and the horrific coming impact of artificial intelligence, as Pope Leo has just done with his encyclical.

Well, I would cite two reasons.

First of all, the Catholic Church traditionally has a very broad umbrella.

Now, that kind of inclusiveness was damaged under John Paul II when he went after so-called liberation theologians.

The term was preferential option for the poor.

I was in Latin America at the time.

These people were not in any way Marxist necessarily, but they worked in poor communities.

on that? And first, describe what an encyclical is.

Quit bragging

... uh, but, uh, he, the infrastructure was modern, uh, highly educated, uh, of course, a wealthy state.

The education system was very good, et cetera.

Um, and Israel had to destroy it, and they did that by the, now Iraq is kind of divided, especially, you know, with the Kurdish zone in the north.

So, uh, they have to destroy these states, but they don't have the power to do it, uh, for the reasons you pointed out.

So they, they have to get the United States to do it, uh, which they did in Iraq.

Uh, they did in s- in, you know, it's why, uh, as soon as Assad was overthrown, Israeli jets were in there bombing everything that potentially could sustain the new state militarily.

Do you think that that's a possibility, or do you see another way for Americans to take control of our government?

are being rapidly reconfigured to protect countries from a rogue American state that lashes out like a wounded beast as it spirals toward terminal decline." Now, first of all, my first question, has Israel and the United States suffered a humiliating defeat?

Yes.

I mean, they may bomb again, um, but Iran holds all the cards because it has a stranglehold on 20% of the seaborne natural gas and oil.

Uh, and, uh, it can-- It's already, of course, created catastrophic consequences in countries like India, uh, and, uh, you know, Bangladesh and the Philippines and everywhere else.

Um, in the United States, we have a buffer because we're a net exporter of oil.

But nevertheless, diesel is up to almost $5 a gallon.

Uh, and, and we've been cushioned because, uh, Trump has drained 40% of our p- uh, strategic reserves in petroleum.

Mm-hmm.

Sort, sort of a virtual war.

Well, it's, you know, for instance, watching Saving Private Ryan.

Uh, i- it's very effective and very powerfulUh, but in fact, of course, it has nothing to do with the reality of war.

And it becomes very difficult for veterans or people who come back from combat to compete against these images or these pseudo-events that are mistaken for reality.

[bomb explodes] The power of images to create its own reality has left us the most illusioned nation on Earth.

Uh, it has created an illusion about who we are, about where we are going, about what is happening around us, and has disconnected us so deeply from reality, uh, that we can no longer make rational decisions that affect our future.

Uh, and that is true in terms of the continued expansion of imperial military power, which we are able to do only by borrowing from the Chinese.

Ladies and gentlemen, the referee has stopped this match.

... we risk as a nation a really extraordinary defeat?

Yes, I think we've already been defeated, but that's a very good question because it's, it's been a long war on Iran.

Uh, you could, uh, begin it with the overthrow of, uh, Mossadegh, the prime minister who sought to...

And, and remember at that time, this was 1954, uh, or '53, I can't remember, uh, the, I- Iran had a, a quite a, uh, a vital and functioning democracy, and he sought to, uh, seize control of, from British Petroleum of the oil assets.

They didn't know how much oil, uh, BP was, the, the, that the British, uh...

I, was, uh, it was mayb- maybe called Anglo British Petroleum.

I can't remember.

And yet the irony is, given everything you've saidAnd if I take you literally that it's not a defeat in the making, but a defeat already made, how do we account in a serious way for the United States not to have learned from all those years and all those efforts and all that history not to do what may be the undoing of this empire?

Why not? It seems kind of a fundamental breaking of the rules.

Well, it depends, you know, who you work for.

And in my case, I spent seven years in the Middle East and I'm an Arabic speaker and most of that time was in Gaza and dealing with both the pressure of the Israel lobby and the acquiescence of most of the mainstream press, including my old employer to the New York Times, to the pressure of the Israel lobby, it was extremely difficult for those of us who reported from Gaza to lift up the voices of Palestinians or describe accurately what was happening.

there were two ways that this was essentially shut down.

The first was the decision on the part of my colleagues to repeat Israeli lies, which they knew were lies.

It's very cynical.

But of course, when you work for a publication like the New York Times, it's all about access.

That's our job.

So in the aftermath o- of Charlie Kirk's murder, where you're seeing the Trump administration exploit it to call for an even harsher crackdown on its domestic opponents, what are your thoughts?

Well, I mean, as you're well aware, I spent 20 years covering disintegrating societies all over the globe, El Salvador, seven years in the Middle East, countries like Iraq, uh, of course, the war in the former Yugoslavia, not to mention (laughs) the apartheid state of Israel.

So all, that kind of deterioration and disintegration is intimately familiar to me.

Uh, and so, of course, as soon as Kirk was assassinated, he was elevated within the canon of his movement to the status of a martyr.

That was instant.

I mean, even before they had apprehended Robinson as the suspect, you had, uh, Trump declare him a martyr.

You had flags lowered at half-mast, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, uh, instantly.

Right.

Explain your headline and what your concerns are, The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, about the horrific murder of Kirk.

Well, every ...

You saw that hi- his murder weaponized even before the suspect was apprehended, uh, and the quote-unquote "radical left" being blamed.

Um, so in every conflict that I covered, martyrs, uh, were kind of the lifeblood of violent movements.

Um, you hold up the martyr, uh, and any, uh, shirking from, uh, purging the society through violence of tho- those individuals or groups who are blamed for killing, uh, the martyr is a betrayal of the martyr.

Uh, and that's, we saw that happen instantly.

Uh, that's how, uh, Kirk's casket goes on Air Force Two.

So that's President Trump before there was any evidence revealed, um, after, uh, Utah Governor Cox says, "We have to be very clear this is the work of one person." I mean, for example, when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City building and killed over 160 people, uh, people didn't say, "They're gonna go after white Christian men." Um, but what about what Trump, what Stephen Miller is doing in saying they're going after leftist organizations, they're going, talking about flag burning?