Podcast
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast
Hosted by Chris Hedges · EN
Covering US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society.
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The Fight to Save America - Read by Eunice Wong
2w ago00:08:48Tap to summarizeThis article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published June 8, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full Text: NEWARK, N.J. — The worst is not the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and private contractors, wielding baseball bats and batons, who flood the parking lot at the end of their shifts and unleash on protesters outside the gates the sadism practiced on those incarcerated inside Delaney Hall.The worst is not the tear gas, the tasers, the pepper spray or the dozens of arrests.The worst is not the beatings and the riot shields, raised above the heads of New Jersey State Police and Newark police and brought down swiftly on bodies, leaving severe lacerations.The worst is watching the children.The ones heaving and sobbing as they leave Delaney Hall, saying goodbye to their mothers, fathers, sisters or brothers who took them to school, who cheered them on at their soccer games, who told them they are beautiful and talented, who woke up before dawn to work menial jobs so they could have a future, who love them in a world where love is a diminishing commodity.I am seated against a cyclone fence a block from Delaney Hall, New Jersey’s largest ICE jail, with a protester who goes by the name of Basher. He is 41. He has a thick black beard. His nails are dirty. His hands are scarred from clashing with police. His head is wrapped in a green keffiyeh. The stench of the sprawling Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission treatment plant across the street saturates the air. When it comes to the children, the ones ripped from their parents by a nation that is institutionalizing cruelty, even Basher must catch his breath and stop. The scenes are too much to bear.The savagery at Delaney Hall is the warm-up act. The goons, the ones who attack those demonized on the inside of the ICE jail and those demonized on the streets outside of it, are in training for the rest of us. Delaney Hall, run by a private prison company — The GEO Group — is the template for a world where we will be stripped of our rights; routinely jailed and tortured; denied adequate medical care; fed rancid, expired and moldy food infested with worms and maggots; forced to drink contaminated water and breathe polluted air; and work for poverty wages — in the case of those inside Delaney Hall, a dollar a day.Some 300 of the roughly 600 people detained at Delaney Hall — which includes teenagers, the elderly and pregnant women — began a hunger and labor strike on May 22.ICE and GEO Group guards reacted as you would expect. They beat the strikers. They seal vents and toss tear gas and pepper spray into cells. They place suspected leaders of the strike in handcuffs and force them out of the facility to unknown locations, or isolate them, in “punishment units.” They manipulate the heating and cooling systems so prisoners endure extreme heat or cold. They cut telephone and internet access and suspend visitation rights. They sexually harass women.On May 31, 56 of those held inside Delaney Hall issued their fourth public letter. It was handwritten in Spanish on ruled paper:“The conditions in this prison are not fit for human beings over such a long period of time: medical neglect, water unfit for consumption, food that is past its expiration date and in poor condition, bathrooms that are unusable, and ventilation systems that have never been maintained and because of this, we are constantly sick,” the latest letter reads. “We demand freedom, a fair trial, and for our rights to be respected. S.O.S.”On July 24, last year, at around 6:45 a.m., ICE vehicles blocked a van carrying 15 Guatemalan workers, three blocks from my house. I went to see the men at the ICE jail in Elizabeth, New Jersey, because I speak Spanish and because their families, terrified of being targeted, could not. The men told me they were threatened with lengthy prison sentences, followed by certain deportation, if they did not sign papers agreeing to their immediate deportation. They signed. It was my job to inform their families they would not be coming home.A Guardian analysis of government records found that during the first seven months of Trump’s second term, the parents of at least 27,000 children — 12,000 of whom had U.S. citizenship — were arrested.These men were my neighbors. Their children attend high school with my children. The kidnapping of parents — often at work or at immigration hearings and ICE check-in appointments — not only traumatizes the children of these families, but the entire community. Every child in the high school wonders if their parents will also one day be seized and disappear. Every child wonders how this cruelty can be inflicted on their friends. Every child wonders what kind of country we live in.The state and the media organs that act as its echo chamber are doing their best to convince the public that those locked up in Delaney Hall are “criminals,” “the worst of the worst.”But a review of ICE data by Austin Kocher — an assistant research professor at Syracuse University and an immigration data and policy expert — exposes the lie.Kocher found that 88 percent of immigrants detained at Delaney Hall have no criminal conviction and more than 70 percent have no criminal history. Those with criminal convictions almost universally committed low-level offenses.The rogue paramilitary forces that pour daily out of the gates of Delaney Hall are unaccountable. They ignore the law. They are the Satanic foundation of our emergent police state. The terror they inflict on those in this small patch of Newark will soon be inflicted on all of us.New Jersey Senator Andy Kim — who was pepper-sprayed outside Delaney Hall by ICE agents — and Governor Mikie Sherrill were denied entry into the facility. Kim, after an appeal to the Director of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, was eventually given a lightning tour, but forbidden to speak to any detainees. City and state health inspectors have also been blocked from fully accessing the ICE jail.The message is clear: We will carry out any abuse with immunity.On Saturday afternoon, after about a dozen protestors blocked cars from driving out of the facility, ICE agents, wearing combat gear and face coverings, charged the protesters with pepper-ball guns, mace and tasers.“Move back! Get back!” they shouted as they unleashed clouds of pepper spray.Cars leaving the facility struck at least one protester.By around 10:00 p.m., some 100 protestors had set up a barricade of barrels filled with sand to block the facility’s exits and entrances. The blockade saw a huge influx of ICE agents, GEO Group guards and Newark police push the protestors several hundred yards down the street.Police announced a ban on protesters wearing protective gear...
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Tyranny or Revolution - Read by Eunice Wong
3w ago00:13:24Tap to summarizeThis article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published June 1, 2026. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full Text: MEXICO CITY — There are two ways to confront global capitalism. There are mass movements, especially strikes, which disrupt commerce and government to force the ruling class to create systems of justice and equality — albeit ones where capitalists retain significant power.The National Coordinator of Education Workers in Mexico (CNTE) — a grassroots union created in 1979 by dissident teachers — is currently attempting this in Mexico. It announced that if its demands for salary increases and job security are not met it will occupy public spaces and shut down the World Cup soccer matches scheduled to take place later this month in Mexico City.When the teachers went on strike in the Mexican city of Oaxaca in 2006, following the incarceration and disappearances of union leaders, police fired on the protesters. The community rose up and drove the police out of the city. Oaxaca established an autonomous anarchist commune for several months. Although the commune was ultimately crushed by the Mexican government, the uprising spawned popular assemblies, independent media and empowered indigenous communities.The second way to destroy capitalism is through the nationalization of industries and banks and the seizure of capitalist assets, although this can give rise to an equally pernicious form of state capitalism. This radical route entails, as in the Russian or Cuban revolutions, violence. Capitalists do not part with their monopolies on wealth and power peacefully. They orchestrate severe state and vigilante violence. They install dictators and fascists who abolish civil liberties, carry out mass arrests and criminalize even the most tepid forms of dissent.Accommodating capitalists and their institutions, even with high taxation, regulation, strong labor laws and a prohibition of monopolies, means living amid a hostile force. It is a matter of time before this hostile force organizes to dismantle the social democratic state as happened in Sweden, Britain and Salvador Allende’s Chile.Liberalism, which Rosa Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name — “opportunism” — is an integral component of capitalism. Liberalism ameliorates capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms blunt resistance, but later, when things grow quiet, are revoked. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study of Luxemburg’s observation.Luxemburg also knew that socialism and imperialism were incompatible. Imperialism, which empowers a war machine designed to enrich arms merchants and global capitalists, is accompanied by a poisonous ideology — what social critic Dwight Macdonald in his 1946 essay “The Root Is Man” calls the “psychosis of permanent war” — which makes socialism impossible.The psychosis of permanent war results, as it has in the U.S., in the curtailing of civil liberties and punishing economic austerity. Dissent is equated with treason. State power serves the dictates of empire rather than democracy, which devolves into farce, or in our case, a tawdry reality show.The rollback of the New Deal, the closest we came to a social democracy, began in the mid-1940s. Cold War anti-communism and corporate opposition converged to make war on organized labor and the New Deal left. This assault culminated in the Second Red Scare.In 1947, President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9835 launched loyalty investigations that purged the left, including public-sector workers and union allies. That same year, the Taft–Hartley Act directly targeted organized labor by restricting strikes, secondary boycotts and union security agreements and by requiring union officers to sign anti-communist affidavits.The left fell victim to what the historian Ellen Schrecker, in “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America,” calls “the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history.”“In order to eliminate the alleged threat of domestic Communism, a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists hounded an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers, and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture,” Schrecker writes.This crusade, she goes on, “used all the power of the state to turn dissent into disloyalty and, in the process, drastically narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political debate.”The witch hunts silenced communists, socialists, anarchists, pacifists and all those who denounced the abuses of empire and capitalism. The “anti-red” actions dealt devastating blows to the political health of the country. The radicals spoke the language of class war. They understood that Wall Street and the billionaire class are the enemy. They offered a broad social vision that allowed even the non-communist left to make sense of the predatory nature of capitalism. But once the radicals were purged, once the liberal class took government-imposed loyalty oaths and collaborated in the witch hunts for phantom communist agents, we were robbed of the ability to make sense of our struggle. We lost our voice. We were integrated into the corporate structures we should have been dismantling.The ruling class justifies its pillage with the ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, as David Harvey points out, “had limited effectiveness as an engine for economic growth” but is successful as “a project to restore class dominance.” It transfers wealth upwards. It consolidates power in the hands of the billionaire class. It is an updated version of the divine right of kings.Wages under neoliberalism stagnate. If the minimum wage kept pace with productivity, it would be at least $25 an hour.Deindustrialization, turbocharged under Bill Clinton, sent industries overseas, where workers are paid slave wages and lack benefits. Some thirty million mass layoffs in the U.S. between 1996 and 2023, according to analysis by the Labor Institute, thrust the working class into economic misery. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair carried out the same assaults in Britain.Ominously, accompanying this deterioration is the blocking of peaceful avenues for social change, including the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which effectively turned elections over to the billionaire class.As social inequality has grown, so has state repression. We stand on the cusp of full-blown authoritarianism and fascism. If the Trump administration succeeds in rigging or invalidating the midterm elections, the last possible exit door within the political system will be slammed shut.The evisceration of the rule of law at home is accompanied by the evisceration of the rule of law abroad. The U.S. Empire is a rogue state. It issues bellicose threats to all who defy it, braying like a wild animal. It carries out “preemptive” wars and imposes sanctions on nations that are defiant. It assassinates and kidnaps foreign leaders. It abducts foreign nationals and transports them to black sites where they are tortured and sometimes murdered. It uses its navy to seize merchant vessels and resell their cargo. It bombs nations in open violation of international law. It funds and arms Israel to carry out genocide. It ignores and h...
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The Rise of the Global South - Read by Eunice Wong
3w ago00:09:24Tap to summarizeThis article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published May 28, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full Text: The humiliating defeat of Israel and the United States in their war on Iran, along with the savagery of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, are ushering in a new world order. This order is one where voices of reason and stability emanate not from the West — which spent tens of billions of dollars sustaining Israel’s genocide — but from the Global South, including China. It is an order where alliances 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.The end of the U.S. Empire, led by an impetuous and clueless Donald Trump, is irreversible. The U.S. has lost its sixth war in the Middle East in 25 years. Iran’s power has been enhanced not only because it — along with Oman — controls the Strait of Hormuz — where roughly 25 percent of the world’s seaborne oil and 20 percent of the world’s seaborne liquified natural gas pass through — but because it has delivered a stark message, with its drones and missiles, to U.S. allies and bases in the region, while sending the global economy into a tailspin.Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who reportedly lured Trump into the war with Alice-in-Wonderland visions of easy regime change in Iran following the decapitation strikes against the country on February 28, 2026, which included the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other political and military figures, along with 168 school children and their teachers — may strike Iran again. They are desperate. But a renewed bombing of Iran will not work. Iran’s mosaic defense strategy ensures all political and military commanders are easily replaced.Iran can strangle the world economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz. It can accelerate the pain by getting its Yemeni allies — Ansar Allah — to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea, just as they did to Israel-bound ships when defending Palestinians after October 7. This could result in a complete blockade. Saudi Arabia, with the Bab el-Mandeb Strait open, is able to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and export five million barrels a day through its pipeline to tankers in the Red Sea port of Yanbu.If a ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is not reached soon, the global economy will crash, perhaps within weeks. The U.S. and its allies, such as Japan, have released some of their extensive strategic oil reserves, however they will not be able to cushion markets indefinitely. Stockpiles in America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve are near their lowest in more than 40 years. Once these reserves are depleted, the price of fuel will skyrocket. If a barrel of oil shoots up to $200, the price at the pump could climb as high as $10 per gallon. This, coupled with shortages of other petroleum-based products, along with nitrogen fertilizer, aluminum, and helium — an indispensable element in the production of MRI machines and semiconductors — are already shutting down vital industries and driving up prices on basic commodities.The World Bank projects a 31 percent increase in the cost of nitrogen fertilizers alone — which are produced in the Persian Gulf and transit through the Strait of Hormuz — if the war continues. This will mean a steep rise in the price of food.Trump is like a dog being pushed unwillingly into a crate. When it appears a deal with Iran is close, he snarls and barks, sabotaging the proposed 30-to-60-day ceasefire agreement. Netanyahu’s apoplectic fits about any agreement that would halt Israeli attacks against Lebanon, along with the potential release of some of Iran’s estimated $100 billion in frozen assets, spurs Trump’s momentary defiance.But the clock is ticking. There is little time left. And the longer Trump waits, the worse it will get. Neither Trump, nor Netanyahu, are the masters of this game. Iran holds the cards.Israel’s dream of formalizing its hegemony over the Middle East, codified in the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first term — which normalized relations between Israel and regional states — is dead. This war and the genocide in Gaza killed it.Trump is attempting to revive them by inserting them into a deal to end the war on Iran. He has demanded states previously uninvolved with the Abraham Accords, such as Pakistan and eventually, Iran, sign up to normalize relations with Israel. Pakistan — the only state to publicly respond — rejected the invitation due to what it called a clash with the country’s “fundamental ideologies.” Every other state Trump appealed to reacted with bewildered silence.Iran demands the removal of sanctions and an end to the naval blockade — which the Central Intelligence Agency concluded Iran can endure for months before it experiences severe economic hardship — in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The proposed agreement makes no mention of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, which U.S. military and intelligence officials believe remains at 70 percent pre-war levels, according to The New York Times.Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Qatar — a lead negotiator with Hamas — are the new powerbrokers in the region.Pakistan not only signed a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia in 2025, it deployed troops, jets and air defense systems to the Gulf dictatorship in April. It has also been hosting ceasefire talks between Trump’s Dumb and Dumber duo of lead negotiators — his feckless son-in-law Jared Kushner and fellow real estate developer and golfing partner, Steve Witkoff.The war has enhanced the prestige and power of China, which compared to Washington is seen globally as embodying rational, prudent and stable leadership. Iran, in a sign of the new global order, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.l...
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Trump’s Iranian Nightmare - Read by Eunice Wong
Jun 200:13:06Tap to summarizeThis article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published May 14, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full Text: America’s newest quagmire in the Middle East is like its old quagmires in the Middle East. It is based, as were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on a gross misreading of our adversaries, a catastrophic failure to understand the limits of imperial power and no discernable strategy. It swells the profits of the war industry, wasting billions of public funds, alienates our allies and erodes the global power and prestige of the United States.Dying empires, governed by the corrupt and the incompetent, are blinded by militarism and hubris. They are unable to read the world around them. They stumble into self-defeating cul-de-sacs — as we did in Iraq, Afghanistan and earlier in Vietnam — where military adventurism accelerates self-inflicted wounds.The war on Iran is one more chapter in our precipitous and ultimately fatal decline.Tehran’s 10-point temporary ceasefire proposal — brokered by Pakistani mediators and presented to the U.S. 40 days after war against Iran had begun — is tantamount to surrender terms. It demands the end of U.S. and Israeli attacks, including in Lebanon. It calls for the removal of U.S. military bases and installations from the region. It solidifies Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz. It refuses to abandon uranium enrichment. It calls for the end to sanctions and termination of anti-Iranian resolutions by the United Nations Security Council and International Atomic Energy Agency. It also requires release of frozen assets — estimated at $100 billion — and reparations for the U.S. and Israeli attacks.This is too bitter a humiliation for the U.S. and Israel to accept.Within hours of the Iranian proposal, Israel — determined to sabotage any agreement — launched a devastating air attack against Lebanon. The attack, which was carried out over 10 minutes, included the bombing of central Beirut. It involved 50 fighter jets and 108 airstrikes that dropped around 160 bombs, killing 350 people and wounding 1,000 others. The lightning and unprovoked massacre, known as “Black Wednesday,” is a potent reminder that Israel has no intention of allowing this war to end. With the U.S. not ready to admit defeat, and Israel’s bloodlust, we are in for a very rough ride.Iran submitted an updated proposal last week, which Trump said is “totally unacceptable.”But Iran, with its stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz, can afford to wait. The longer it maintains its blockade over shipping — roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz — the more global economic pain it inflicts.There is no good outcome for the U.S.The Trump administration’s obstinacy and Israel’s determination to resume attacks on Iran ensures that the global economy will barrel towards a global depression.The World Bank projects a 31 percent increase in the cost of nitrogen fertilizers which are produced in the Gulf and transit through the Strait of Hormuz this year if the war continues. This ensures a huge rise in food costs.Shortages are already shutting down global manufacturing and production. The fragile, interdependent global supply chains are seizing up.This economic ecosystem, as Iran has shown, is easy to destroy. It will be very hard to piece back together.Iran suffered devastating blows to its civilian infrastructure and economy — including residential areas, schools, health centers, police stations, churches and synagogues and energy, desalinization plants, steel and pharmaceutical facilities — as well as its military assets, including parts of its navy, air force and missile launch capabilities. It endured “decapitation strikes” against its senior political and military leaders at the start of the war, which included the assassinations of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the secretary of Iran’s Defence Council, Ali Shamkhani, and the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Abdolrahim Mousavi, among others.None of the U.S. and Israeli objectives, however, have been met.The new Iranian leadership — centered around the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — is more defiant and intransigent than the previous leadership.Iran maintains control over the Strait of Hormuz. It charges as much as $2 million for every oil tanker passing through it. These tariffs — which Iran introduced as part of its demand for war reparations — must be paid in Chinese currency, part of an attempt by Iran, China and Russia to break the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. Iran also retains significant missile and drone stockpiles and enriched uranium, which it has <a target="_bla...
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America’s Suicide Pact - Read by Eunice Wong
May 1200:11:21Tap to summarizeThis article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published May 8, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full Text:Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They collapse from within. They fall prey to moral, social and spiritual decay. They are seized by a parasitic ruling class. Democratic institutions seize up. The citizenry is immiserated, wealth is funneled upwards to the ruling class and coercion is the principle form of control.Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit.There is a word for these people. Traitors.These traitors, ensconced in the leadership of the two ruling parties, stripped us of assets and power slowly. They used subterfuge, lies and legalized bribery. They pretended to honor electoral politics, checks and balances, a free press and the rule of law while subverting all of these democratic pillars. That old system, however flawed, was hollowed out. It was turned over to the amoral and the idiotic — look at the Supreme Court or Congress — those willing to do the bidding of the billionaire class.Armed with billions by the mortal enemy of the demos — the oligarchs and corporations — the political elites, Republicans and Democrats, destroyed the careers of those politicians who resisted. They crushed labor unions. They blacklisted honest journalists and consolidated the press into the hands of a handful of corporations and oligarchs. They slashed regulations that constrained unfettered greed and protected the population from predatory corporations and environmental toxins. They passed legislation that created a de facto tax boycott for the rich — Trump famously paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his presidency — while stripping the country of its industry and throwing some 30 million people out of work. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.These parasites cut or abolished social programs, militarized the police, built the largest prison system in the world and pumped funds into a bloated and out-of-control war industry. German socialist and politician Karl Liebknecht, on the eve of the suicidal folly of World War I, called German imperialists “the enemy at home.” Our rulers, our enemies at home, mounted a series of futile wars that degraded the empire’s global hegemony and poured trillions of dollars of taxpayer money into their bank accounts. Iran is the most recent example.Trump is not an outlier. He is the naked, stripped-down expression of this suicidal pact. He does not pretend the system he inherited works. He lies with less finesse. He crassly enriches himself and his family. He speaks in crude vulgarities. He dismantles any government agency dedicated to the common good, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service. But he embodies what came before him, albeit without the liberal façade.“Trump is not an anomaly,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour”He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels. The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.The Epstein files, a window into the degeneracy of our ruling class, included not only Trump, but former U.S. president Bill Clinton — who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein — Prince Andrew, Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates, hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former secretary of the treasury and former president of Harvard University Larry Summers, cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker, Epstein’s lawyer and arch Zionist Alan Dershowitz, billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner, the former Barclays banker Jes Staley, former Israel prime minister Ehud Barak, magician David Copperfield, actor Kevin Spacey, former CIA director William Burns, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell and disgraced Hollywood producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. They all orbited Ep...
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Trump the God - Read by Eunice Wong
Apr 2300:15:06Tap to summarizeThis article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published April 20, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full Text:During the two years I spent writing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” I encountered numerous mini-Trumps. These self-proclaimed pastors — very few had any formal religious training — preyed on the despair of their congregants. They were surrounded by sycophants and could not be questioned. They merged fact with fiction, peddled magical thinking and enriched themselves at the expense of their followers. They claimed their wealth and ostentatious lifestyle, including mansions and private jets, was a sign of being blessed. They insisted they were divinely inspired and anointed by God. They were, within their hermetic circles of their megachurches, omnipotent.These cult pastors promised to use their omnipotence to crush the demonic forces that had created misery in the lives of their followers — unemployment and underemployment, evictions, bankruptcies, poverty, addiction, sexual and domestic abuse, and crippling despair. The more power the cult leaders possess — according to their followers — the more certain is a promised paradise. Cult leaders stand above the law. Those who desperately place their faith in them want them to be above the law.Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious adulation and total obedience. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim that Donald Trump is able to draw a “perfect map” of the Middle East, or White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement that Trump is always the “most well-read person in the room,” are two of innumerable examples of the abject fawning required by those in a cult leader’s inner circle. Blind loyalty matters more than competence.Cult leaders are immune from rational and fact-based critiques amongst those who invest hope in them. This is why Trump’s hardcore followers have not abandoned him and will not abandon him. All the chatter about fissures in the MAGA universe misreads Trump cultists.All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas of the cult leader. Trump, with his faux “Trump crest,” revels in Louis XIV-inspired tasteless kitsch awash in gold Rococo and glittering chandeliers. The women in Trump’s court have “Mar-a-Lago Faces” – overinflated lips, taut, wrinkle-free skin, silicone gel-filled breast implants and chiseled cheekbones, capped off by gobs of make-up. They wear stiletto heels and garish outfits that Trump finds appealing. Trump’s men, who in his eyes must be telegenic and from “Central casting,” dress like 1950s advertising executives. They sport Trump-gifted Florsheim black shoes, specifically $145 Lexington Cap Toe Oxfords.Cults impose dress codes that mirror the style and taste of the cult leader.The followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, dressed in red and orange robes, often combined with a turtleneck and beads. Heaven’s Gate members wore Nike Decade trainers and black jogging bottoms. Men in the Unification Church, known as Moonies, wore crisp white shirts and pressed slacks. Women wore dresses. They looked as if they were on their way to Sunday School.Like Jim Jones, who convinced or forced over 900 of his followers — including 304 children aged 17 and younger — to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink, Trump is aggressively courting our collective suicide.Trump dismisses the climate crisis as a hoax. He unilaterally withdraws from nuclear arms agreements and treaties. He antagonizes nuclear powers, such as Russia and China. He impetuously launches wars. He alienates and insults U.S. allies. He dreams of annexing Greenland and Cuba. He embraces holy crusade against Muslims. He attacks his political opponents as enemies and traitors, belittling them with crude insults. He slashes social programs designed to sustain the vulnerable. He expands an internal security apparatus — masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons — to terrorize the public. Cults do not nurture and protect. They subjugate, annihilate and destroy.Trump employs the U.S. military without oversight or constraint. He presides, for this reason, over what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called a “world-destroying cult.” Lifton lists eight characteristics of “world-destroying cults” that implant what he calls “totalistic environments.”These eight characteristics are:1. Milieu control. The total control of communication within the group.2. Loading the language. Using “groupspeak” to censor, edit and shut down criticism or opposing ideas. Followers must mouth the mindless Trump-approved clichés and cult jargon.3. Demand for purity. An us-versus-them view of the world. Those who oppose the group are wrong, unenlightened and evil. They are irredeemable. They are contaminants. They must be eradicated. Any action is justified to protect this purity. The goal of all cult leaders is to widen and make irreconcilable social divisions.4. Confession: The public confession of past wrongs. In the case of Trump supporters, this includes the disavowal, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance and others have done, of past criticism of Trump, with public admission of their former wrong-thinking.5. Mystical manipulation. The belief that those in the group are specially chosen with a higher purpose. Those in Trump’s orbit act as though they are divinely elected. They convince themselves that they are not coerced to embrace Trump’s lies and vulgarities — or repeat cult jargon — but do so voluntarily.6. Doctrine over person. The rewriting and fabrication of personal history to conform to Trump’s interpretation of reality.7. Sacred Science. Trump’s absurdities — global temperatures are declining rather than rising, the noise from wind turbines cause cancer and ingesting disinfectants such as Lysol is an effective treatment for the coronavirus — are presented as grounded in science. This scientific patina means Trump’s ideas apply to everyone. Those who disagree are unscientific.8. Dispensing of existence. Nonmembers are “lesser or unworthy beings.” Meaningful existence means being part of the Trump cult. Those outside the cult are worthless. They do not de...
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The Voice of Hind Rajab: The Film They Don’t Want You to See - Read by Eunice Wong
Apr 900:10:54Tap to summarizeThis article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published January 19, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full TextNEW YORK: “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” like all great pieces of art, takes a straightforward story — the battle to save the life of a 6-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, trapped in a car in Gaza surrounded by murdered family members — and elevates it to an archetype. This story is as old as time. It lies at the heart of all religious and moral literature. It pits the cruelty and heartlessness of power against the empathy and compassion of the powerless. It asks us what kind of a life we want to live. Is it a life defined by hubris, domination and violence? Or is it a life defined by compassion, justice and self-sacrifice? These are moral, not political questions.To nurture, preserve and protect the lives of those demonized in war is to be branded a traitor — a subversive, the enemy. It is to risk death. War, and especially genocide, is the quintessential expression of what Sigmund Freud called Thanatos, the death instinct that drives humans towards the destructions of others and themselves. Those who fight for Eros, for life, are eliminated. This schism is at the core of the film. It is the struggle between good and evil, light and dark. And, as so often happens in war, Thanatos prevails. This almost certain defeat gives unquestioned nobility to those who defy the forces of death.Israel and its supporters do not want the outside world to see the bureaucratic machinery that perpetuates its mass slaughter, but I suspect, even more, it does not want the world to see the humanity of the Palestinians who resist.It was hard to find a screening. I traveled for over an hour to see it at the Film Forum in New York City, which had just one showing at 4:45 in the afternoon. I understood why. Despite critical acclaim, an Oscar-nominated director and industry heavyweights like Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix behind it, the film — directed by Tunisian filmmaker, Kaouther Ben Hania — faced major difficulties in getting an American distributor — reportedly out of “fear” and disagreement “with the film’s politics,” according to a report by Deadline.It is not only devastating, not only a cinematic masterpiece, but it rips back all the layers of rhetoric and propaganda to expose the fundamental struggle between the Israeli occupier and the occupied. The struggle is, yes, a conflict about the theft of Palestinian land. It is, as well, a conflict about a violent and lethal occupation, one that has become full-blown genocide in Gaza. But it is also the ancient struggle between the forces of life and death.Anyone who follows Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza knows the story of Hind Rajab. On Jan. 29, 2024, the Israeli army ordered the evacuation of the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza. Six members of the Hamadeh family, along with their 6-year-old niece, Hind, crammed themselves into a black Kia and attempted to flee. They did not get far. An Israeli tank fired on the car, killing everyone except Hind and her 15-year-old cousin, Layan. Layan was able to contact the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) on her dead father’s phone.“They are shooting at us. The tank is next to me,” Layan tells the PRCS dispatcher, Omar Alqam, an emergency medical worker based in Ramallah.“Are you hiding?” asks Omar, played by Palestinian actor Motaz Malhees.“Yes, in the car, we’re in the car, the tank is right next to us,” Layan says.“You are inside the car?” Omar asks.There is the sound of gunfire — 62 shots in six seconds — as Layan screams.The line goes dead.“Hello? Hello?” Omar says.There is no answer.The PRCS immediately calls back.Hind picks up the phone. She tells Omar that Layan has been shot and everyone in the car is asleep. Hind is trapped in the vehicle surrounded by her dead relatives, who are covered in blood.It is raining.For the next three hours, frantic emergency workers seek permission from Israeli authorities to approve a route for an ambulance — which is eight minutes away — to rescue the girl. The film focuses on the frustrations, desperation and hopes of the rescue workers who try to move a boulder up the Sisyphean hill of Israeli occupation.Rather than recreating the horror of a small, terrified girl trapped in a car with the blood-soaked bodies of her dead relatives, the film uses the recording of Hind’s voice — shown on the screen as a spectrogram — to tell the story.The focus is on the Red Crescent workers who try to reassure and comfort Hind. They plead desperately with the Red Cross and later the Palestinian Ministry of Health, who act as intermediaries with a unit from the Israeli Defense Ministry known as Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), for a safe passage for the ambulance into an area designated a restricted zone. The phone line with Hind repeatedly cuts. Red Crescent workers are frantic, fearing the worst.The frustration and trauma of the powerless rescue workers, living under the humiliating and oppressive boot of Israeli occupation, is overwhelming.The emergency workers release audio from the calls and photographs of Hind on social media, with English subtitles, in hopes of eliciting international outrage. But, as is true for the genocide, Western governments are indifferent to the slaughter of Palestinians, including Palestinian children.While Hind is on the line, we hear bursts of gunfire.Rana al-Faqih, another dispatcher — played by Palestinian-Canadian actor Saja Kilani — assures Hind she will be rescued. She helps her recite verses from the Quran in an attempt to comfort the girl.“I’m so scared,” Hind says. “Please come, come take me.”The car where Hind is sheltering is near Fares petrol station. The sun sets. Gaza City is shrouded in darkness.“I’m scared of the dark,” Hind tells Rana.“Is there gunfire around you?” Rana asks.“Yes,” Hind says. “Come get me, please.”After three hours, the IDF gives paramedics permission to rescue Hind, with a map of a route the ambulance must take.“Hind!” Omar announces on the phone. “In one minute, the car will reach you. It’s just moving slowly.”The ambulance’s paramedics, Ahmed al-Madhoun and Yusuf Zeino, approach the area. They get within 162 feet of the vehicle.“Can you see the car?” a dispatcher asks.“I can’t see a thing here,” one paramedic responds.“Do you have your siren and flashing lights on?” the dispatcher asks.“Just the lights, not the siren…oh there it is — ”There is the sudden sound of gunfire and explosions.The paramedics can no longer be reached.Omar asks Hind if she heard an explosion. She responds that she has.“I’m so scared, please come,” Hind repeatedly pleads.There is a long period of silence.“Why aren’t you speaking?” Rana asks Hind.“I’m not speaking because my mouth is bleeding,” Hind says.“Wipe it with your hand and then tell me if you’re still bleeding,” Rana says.“I don’t want to get my shirt dirty, so I don’t trouble my mom,” Hind replies.“It’s okay, wipe your mouth and I’ll wash it, my sweetheart,” Rana tells her.“Okay,” Hind says.Her voice fades away for the final time.Wissam, Hind’s mother, waits anxiously at the hospital. She desperately searches every incoming ambulance for her daughter.The Israelis seal off Tel al-Hawa. Palestinians are unable to reach the car until 12 days later. When they finally enter the area, they find the burned-out shell of the ambulance that was sent to rescue Hind.By that time, Israel has destroyed 80 ambulances, usually killing their crews.Further up the street from the ambulance, they find Hind’s decomposed body in the back of the car with her relatives.There are 335 bullet holes in the car and the windows are blown out.What were Hind’s final thoughts? Did she see the flashing lights of the ambulance? Did she believe she would be rescued? Did she watch the tank shells rip apart the ambulance and see the paramedics die? Did she see the Israeli machine guns before they opened fire on her? Did she cry out in pain? Did she linger, bloodied and wounded, like her cousin Layan? Did she realize she would not be saved? Did she utter any final words, alone, in the darkness and horror?“The Voice of Hind Rajab” reminds us that indifference is complicity. It mo...
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The World According to Gaza - Read by Eunice Wong
Mar 2400:11:16Tap to summarizeThis article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published January 19, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full TextThe war on Iran and the obliteration of Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs.Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.Resources – as the Venezuelans know – are openly stolen. Food, water and medicine, as in Palestine, are weaponized.Let them eat dirt.International bodies such as the United Nations are pantomime, useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished. The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.They spew the same hypermasculine tropes. They spew the same vile, racist cant. They spew the same Manichaean vision of good and evil, black and white. They spew the same infantile language of total dominance and unrestrained violence.Killer clowns. Buffoons. Idiots. They have seized the levers of power to carry out their demented and cartoonish visions as they pillage the state for their own enrichment.“After witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world,” writes Pankaj Mishra in “The World After Gaza.” “The shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil – the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilized societies – cannot be overstated. Nor can the moral abyss we confront.”The subjugated are property, commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The Epstein Files expose the sickness and heartlessness of the ruling class. Liberals. Conservatives. University presidents. Academics. Philanthropists. Wall Street titans. Celebrities. Democrats. Republicans.They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers. They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts. They exist in another reality, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,” a world of private Xanadus where they hold Nero-like bacchanalias, make their perfidious deals, amass their billions and cast aside those they use, including children, as if they are refuse. No one in this magic circle is accountable. No sin too depraved. They are human parasites. They disembowel the state for personal profit. They terrorize the “lesser breeds of the earth.” They shut down the last, anemic vestiges of our open society.“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life,” as George Orwell writes in “1984.” “All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon be purged — is an instrument of repression. The judiciary exists to stage show trials. I spent a lot of time in the London courts covering the Dickensian farce during the persecution of Julian Assange. A Lubyanka-on-the-Thames. Our courts are no better. Our Department of Justice is a vengeance machine.Masked, armed goons flood the streets of the United States and murder civilians, including citizens. The ruling mandarins are spending billions to convert warehouses into detention centers and concentration camps. They insist they will only house the undocumented, the criminals, but our global ruling class lies like it breathes. In their eyes, we are vermin, either blindly and unquestionably obedient or criminals. There is nothing in between.These concentration camps, where there is no due process and people are disappeared, are designed for us. And by us, I mean the citizens of this dead republic. Yet we watch, stupefied, disbelieving, passively waiting for our own enslavement.It won’t be long.The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls what is happening “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”Oh, the critics say, don’t be so bleak. Don’t be so negative. Where is the hope? Really, it’s not that bad.If you believe this you are part of the problem, an unwitting cog in the machinery of our rapidly consolidating fascist state.Reality will eventually implode these “hopeful” fantasies, but by then it will be too late.True despair is not a result of accurately reading reality. True despair comes from surrendering, either through fantasy or apathy, to malignant power. True despair is powerlessness. And resistance, meaningful resistance, even if it is almost certainly doomed, is empowerment. It confers self-worth. It confers dignity. It confers agency. It is the only action that allows us to use the word hope.The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not ma...
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The Last Election - Read by Eunice Wong
Feb 1100:13:45Tap to summarizeThis article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published January 19, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full Text:Donald Trump’s threat to cancel the midterm elections is not a feign. He attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and said he would not accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost. He ruminates about defying the Constitution to serve a third term. He is determined to retain absolute control — buttressed by an obsequious Republican majority — in Congress. He fears, if he loses control of Congress, impeachment. He fears impediments to the rapid reconfiguration of America as an authoritarian state. He fears losing the monuments he is building to himself — his name emblazoned on federal buildings, including the Kennedy Center, his scrapping of free entry to National Parks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and replacing it with his own birthday, his seizure of Greenland and who knows, maybe Canada, his ability to put cities, such as Minneapolis, under siege and snatch legal residents off the streets.Dictators love elections as long as they are fixed. The dictatorships I covered in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans staged highly choreographed election spectacles. These spectacles were a cynical prop whose outcome was preordained. They were used to legitimize iron control over a captive population, mask the enrichment of the dictator, his family and his inner circle, criminalize all dissent and ban opposition political parties in the name of “the will of the people.”When Saddam Hussein held a presidential referendum in Oct. 1995, the only question on the ballot was “Do you approve of President Saddam Hussein being the President of the Republic?” Voters marked “yes” or “no.” The official results saw Hussein win 99.96 percent of some 8.4 million votes cast. Turnout was reported at 99.47 percent. His counterpart in Egypt, the former general Hosni Mubarak, in 2005 was re-elected for a fifth consecutive six-year term with a more modest mandate of 88.6 percent of the vote. My less than reverential coverage of the elections held in Syria in 1991, where there was only one candidate on the ballot, President Hafez al-Assad, who reportedly got 99.9 percent of the vote, saw me banned from the country.These spectacles are the model, I expect, for what comes next, unless Trump gets his deepest wish, which is to emulate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia — whose security detail assassinated my colleague and friend Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — and hold no elections at all.Wannabe president-for-life Trump floats the idea of canceling the 2026 midterm elections, telling Reuters that, “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” When President Volodymyr Zelensky informed Trump elections were not held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump gushed, “So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”Trump told The New York Times he regrets not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. He wants to abolish mail-in voting, along with voting machines and tabulators, which allow boards of elections to post results on election night. Better to slow the process down and like the Chicago political machine under Mayor Richard J. Daley, stuff boxes with ballots after the polls close to ensure victory.Trump’s administration is prohibiting voter registration drives at naturalization centers. It is imposing nation-wide restrictive voter ID laws. It is reducing the hours that federal employees have to leave work and vote. In Texas, the new redistricting map blatantly disenfranchises Black and Latino voters, a move upheld by the Supreme Court. It is expected to eradicate five Congressional Democratic seats.Our money-drenched elections, coupled with aggressive gerrymandering, mean few races for Congress are competitive. Recent redistricting has, so far, all but guaranteed the Republicans another nine seats in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio and six for the Democrats, five in California and one in Utah. Republicans intend to carry out more redistricting in Florida and Democrats plan a redistricting ballot initiative in Virginia. If the Supreme Court continues to gut the Voting Rights Act, then Republican redistricting will explode, possibly cementing into place a Republican victory whether the majority of voters want it or not. No one can call redistricting democratic.The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United took from us any real input into elections. Citizens United permitted unlimited money from corporations and wealthy individuals to rig the election process...
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Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Epstein and the Politics of Betrayal - Read by Eunice Wong
Feb 1000:03:59Tap to summarizeThis article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor. Text originally published February 8, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full Text:I don’t expect much from politicians, corporate tycoons, the presidents of prestigious universities, billionaire philanthropists, celebrities, royalty or oligarchs. They live in narcissistic and hedonistic bubbles that cater to their self-worship and moral depravity. But I do expect a lot from intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky. The explanation by his wife Valéria - Noam suffered a severe stroke in June 2023 and is incapacitated - of their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is filled with the fatuous excuses used by all those who have been outed in the Epstein emails and documents. According to Valéria, she and Noam were “overly trusting.” This led to “poor judgment.” She writes that she and Noam were ensnared by dinners with luminaries at Epstein’s mansion, flights on his private jet nicknamed the Lolita Express, a literary reference to the sexual exploitation of girls Noam would have recognized, financial assistance, trips to Epstein’s ranch and the use of one of Epstein’s apartments in New York. Like everyone else outed in the Epstein files she and Noam “never witnessed any inappropriate behavior from Epstein or others.”Noam’s advice to Epstein on how to handle press inquiries into his crimes, like Noam’s letter of recommendation for Epstein, was, she insists, the result of Epstein’s taking “advantage of Noam’s public criticism towards what came to be known as ‘cancel culture’ to present himself as a victim of it.” After Epstein’s second arrest in 2019, she and Noam “were careless in not thoroughly researching his background.” She ends by expressing “unrestricted solidarity with the victims.” Her letter regurgitates the formula of everyone outed in the Epstein files. I know and have long admired Noam. He is, arguably, our greatest and most principled intellectual. I can assure you he is not as passive or gullible as his wife claims. He knew about Epstein’s abuse of children. They all knew. And like others in the Epstein orbit, he did not care. From the email correspondence between Epstein and Valéria it appears she particularly enjoyed the privileges that came with being in Epstein’s circle, but this does not absolve Noam’s acquiescence. Noam, of all people, knows the predatory nature of the ruling class and the cruelty of capitalists, where the vulnerable, especially girls and women, are commodified as objects to be used and exploited. He was not fooled by Epstein. He was seduced. His association with Epstein is a terrible and, to many, unforgivable stain. It irreparably tarnishes his legacy. If there is a lesson here, it is this. The ruling class offers nothing without expecting something in return. The closer you get to these vampires the more you become enslaved. Our role is not to socialize with them. It is to destroy them.Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe
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