Chris Hedges: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Rise of American Fascism

The deep state gave us Trump. I mean, a dysfunctional system gave us Trump. In a functioning open society, Trump would not even be a viable candidate.

The Harris campaign was so vapid and clueless and celebrity-driven and issueless. And the Democratic Party is all running around talking about their messaging. I mean, it shows you how utterly checked out they are.

And then Musk is, that's what he's doing, destroying everything. What they intend to do is essentially cast aside the most vulnerable to increase the fear and anxiety among the precariat because, uh, they're more easily exploited. I believe in transparency. You know, I have seen that when power abrogates itself, the ability to operate in darkness, abuses proliferate.

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So, I wasn't planning on asking this before we sat down, but before we sat down, we were out there talking with Rick Wolf, whose episode will probably come out sometime around now. And you mentioned, uh, a penchant for weightlifting, and you said more than you probably should be doing. And it sounded like a sort of interesting story behind why you're doing that.

Yeah, it's really my way I cope with trauma. Yeah.

Can you explain how it is that trauma from past war reporting and experiences manifests itself in your mental life today in such a way that you need to cope with it by weightlifting?

Well, the trauma doesn't go away. It just rises and falls in intensity. It never goes away. And you can't control it because what it does is come to you at night. And, uh, I mean, when I first, the last war I covered was Kosovo, and when that ended, um, I was, I, I did not have nightmares when I was in war zones, which was kind of weird. It was when I got out, but it was awful. I mean, it would come in waves, and you don't sleep because you wake up with such fear. Sometimes you don't even remember why you're afraid, but you just wake up with this, and you don't, you just lie there till dawn. You can't, uh, and it, what it does is it breaks you down. You're exhausted. You know, after two, three, four days of that, when you haven't slept, it, you know, getting up and shaving becomes Herculean in terms of the energy level, and you can't really connect. You become numb. You can't connect with anyone around you. Um, and, you know, I abused, I wasn't an alcoholic, but I would sometimes at moments like that drink a lot at night 'cause I just wanted to pass out. I just didn't want to remember my dreams. That's obviously a really bad way to deal with it.

I mean, I, but I always lifted. I lifted in war zones, uh, as a prophylactic so that because I was big enough that most people didn't want to deal with it. Um, I also had boxed for three years. So I kind of knew the rudimentary, you know, I knew how to fight. Um, I think it's. So my wife does audiobooks. She's an actor, and uh, she did an audiobook. She read me a passage from an addict, from a recovering addict about weightlifting, which really resonated with me. And he said that, you know, when you. So now I, I bench 185, which is heavy for me. I'm 68. But, you know, you got to concentrate on that bar, um, because you can hurt yourself. And, um, it's, uh, that concentration, I think, pulls you away or, or pulls you into that moment or that space. Obviously, with exercise, you kick in endorphins, and this addict was writing precisely that, you know, it was a completely, complete description of my own experience, um, in the gym. So I'm, I mean, if I'm on book tour and my day is packed, I will get up at, I hate getting up that early, but I'll get up at 5, and if I don't go to the gym, I start to get very, very dark. I get very black. Um, so I'm, you know, there's probably, you know, a physiological component to this. I don't know. Um, but that's how I cope with it.

Yeah. No, that, that's the part that I find interesting, and I wonder if you have insight into it. But the part that I have in mind is, I can understand why witnessing these horrible acts and being around them and fearing for your life could result in these nightmares that prevent sleeping. But the connection between witnessing these things and then depression is sort of mysterious to me.

Yeah. But it's not just witnessing because you're afraid. I mean, you, if you're in combat, you're, you know, if I've been in a fair bit of combat, but I mean, when you're actually in an ambush where people are being killed around you, it is terror is the right word. I mean, it's really. And so I think it's a revisitation. That terror, when it comes back, it's hard to describe. I mean, it's like just right literally down to your bones, you know. And so when the, uh, Israelis began the genocide in Gaza, uh, that was a really rough few months for me because one, I was in Gaza quite a bit over a seven-year period that I covered the Middle East. And number two, I was in Sarajevo during the war. So I know what it feels like to be shelled with 300 shells a day. And I know exactly what it feels like. It's actually worse in Gaza, but it was pretty bad in Sarajevo. And that combination was really, really awful. Most of my nightmares, even though like in the war in Sarajevo, I, I was morted a few times, but it was primarily small arms fire, but the nightmares tend to be the shelling. It's interesting. And I didn't spend anywhere near the time in Sarajevo that I spent in Sarajevo. Uh, but it tends to be the shelling, I think, because it's so, you can't control it. I mean, there's just no. Not that in an ambush you have any sense of control. It's complete confusion. But I don't know why. I mean, the nightmares tend to be shelling.

Yeah. I really want to come back to Gaza and Palestine, which you've just mentioned. But before doing so, I'd like to set some broader context for the conversation. And what I hope to talk about, similarly to what I spoke about with Rick recently, is the decline of the American Empire. And in 2018, you wrote an acclaimed book, America: The Farewell Tour. And first, before we get into some of the details there and and how things might be different today, is it possible, I know this is a big question, to summarize what the main arguments were in that book?

That book was really the, it was, uh, tied intimately to previous books. So I had written, uh, American Fascist, The Christian Right and the War on America. I'd written Death of Liberal Class, Empire of Illusion, The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Uh, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which I wrote with a cartoonist, Joe Sacco, where we wrote out of the poorest pockets of the United States. These so-called sacrifice zones, places that had been sacrificed by cap, rapacious capitalism. Camden, New Jersey, which per capita at the time was the poorest city in the United States. Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where the average life expectancy for a male is 48. And so these were all descriptions of the decline of the empire. In America, the Farewell Tour, it was really modeled on Emile Durkheim's book on Suicide. I think he wrote it in 1898, where he asked the question, what is it that propels individuals and societies to carry out acts of self-annihilation? And that's where the term anomie is drawn from Durkheim. Um, and he argues that it's the rupture of social bonds, which I think is true. And that was something that I saw in all of the reporting that I did, uh, you know, out of distressed pockets of the United States, because work is a key way to bond you to the society, to give you a place within the society. When you lose work or work becomes precarious, then it has a terrible ripple effect not only within the family but within the community, to self-esteem, and all sorts of stuff. And, and so, uh, Durkheim highlighted, um, pathologies, self-destructive pathologies that people engaged in when those social bonds were broken. And that's what America, the Farewell Tour is. I'm no longer arguing that the society is breaking down. I'm looking at the pathologies. So, uh, gambling, sexual sadism, uh, suicide. Uh, I mean, I actually wrote the chapter on gambling out of the Trump Taj, um, as it was closing. I mean, it was, uh, you know, rat-infested, and people were shooting up in the elevators, and I said, you know, it's kind of where the country is headed. Um, and right-wing hate groups, because Durkheim argues that people who have a longing for, uh, annihilation, for carrying out acts of annihilation, are driven by a kind of desire for self-annihilation. So I was with the 3%ers, um, which are mostly veterans, far-right group. Um, so that book was really looking at the American pathologies and what it was doing. I mean, the opioid crisis, for instance, I, I wrote about that. I mean, all of the ways by which we are obliterating ourselves.

As we talk about the decline of the American empire today, I imagine that a big part of that is going to be Trump. And speaking of Trump, you have this wonderful Substack, The Chris Hedges Report Substack, which is replete with articles on these topics that we're about to discuss. You also mentioned your wife, and she reads a lot of them too. She's a voice actor, as you.

Well, she's an actor. She went to Juilliard, but then on, like all out-of-work actors, she started doing audiobooks.

Yeah. Yeah. No, but I think it's cool that they're, they're, they're read. Prefer that format. But maybe this is a bit early in the interview for a more difficult question. But I think it's often interesting to start out a conversation like this by not necessarily arguing for the other point, but at least giving some support for it. And so I wonder, are there any things that Donald Trump is doing now, or that he did in his first presidency, that you do strongly approve of? Or maybe we don't have to go so far as to say strongly approve of them.

I would oppose the, uh, proxy war in Ukraine. So, but of course, he wants to end the war because he wants to build an alliance with Putin, who he clearly admires and who he would like to emulate. Um, but yeah, I always felt that that proxy war was really, uh, cruel and unnecessary to the Ukrainians. Of course, uh, the expansion of NATO. I was in Eastern Central Europe in 1989. Covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, covered the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. It was in Romania with the fall of Ceaușescu. Um, but I covered the, the reunification of Germany, and in order for Germany to be reunified, you had to have the acquiescence of the Soviet Union. And the deal was, uh, you know, very, uh, uh, overt and very public, which was that we will not expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany. Um, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union and this fantasy of a unipolar world, which the American empire would dominate, plus the billions of dollars that would be made by Raytheon and all these companies when they reconfigured Warsaw Pact companies to have their militaries be compatible with NATO, um, we ignored it. And, um, there is real historical trauma in Russia. They've been invaded three times. Uh, uh, Napoleon, World War I, World War II, most of it coming through Ukraine. Um, and it was, it, it just was unnecessary. And that doesn't excuse Putin. What he did was a war crime without question, but he was clearly provoked and baited, and it, it need not have happened. It was predictable. I mean, we even know that from the WikiLeaks dump, because there were, uh, messages, uh, from, uh, the ambassador in, um, Moscow, who later became the CIA director, who said, you know, Ukraine's a red line, and, um, and William Burns, and, um, and we ignored it. And then in a war of attrition, there's just no way. I know I covered war. I mean, you can give them M1 Abrams. I mean, remember, we're not going to give them this. We're not. Every red line got crossed, even when it was a desperate kind of gamble because they were getting rolled back. Um, uh, and now Ukraine is devastated. The, uh, numbers of dead, I mean, it's just. But it achieved American interests, which were not the same as Ukrainian interests. American interests are to degrade the Russian military and isolate Putin within Europe. That's what they wanted. Um, and that's what they got. Like all proxy wars, you know, the agenda of, uh, the, uh, country that is fomenting the proxy wars, of, I mean, I covered many of them. The Kurds, for instance. I mean, there's just, you know, constantly betrayed, armed and betrayed, armed and betrayed, armed and betrayed. So, yes, I, uh, but Trump is, um, there's not much good to say about Trump. I mean, he's a con artist. He's a demagogue. He's a grifter. It's all transactional. Uh, he's obviously morally bankrupt, intellectually limited. Um, you know, he's what you get. I once wrote a column about how he was like the Snopes in Faulkner's trilogy, you know, that rise up out of the decayed former slaveholding South. That's kind of who he is. And he reminds me of the figures I covered in Yugoslavia who rose up from the swamp of Tito's decayed Yugoslavia, Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tuđman, all these figures. I mean, he, uh, and Weimar too. I mean, if you look at the collapse of Weimar, you have these buffoonish thugs, which is what the Nazis were. And, you know, these are basically, and the people around him are just, you know, mediocrities, goons. Um, so, I mean, we're in big trouble.

It's interesting that you bring the Nazis up because in the last conversation that I just had with Rick, we were talking about parallels between Hitler and Trump. And one was the use of rhetorical techniques in a particular context. So, for instance, his moves with regard to annexing Canada or Greenland or taking over the Panama Canal to sort of galvanize this defeated working-class people. And it's similar to some of Hitler's claims to revitalize the defeated German people. I like to, when possible, have interviews with people on both sides of an issue. So I have guests who are pro-Trump as well, and one of them, Victor Davis Hanson, we were speaking about these very same rhetorical moves, and he viewed them as very successful tactical maneuvers, kind of like "Art of the Deal." I think that he quoted the. He said it was kind of like what Trump describes in his book.

He didn't write "Art of the Deal," come on. Yeah. Let's not give Trump more any intellectual validity. That was ghostwritten.

What I wonder is how you at least view his rhetorical abilities. Do you think that they're, I mean, successful? Or Hitler was a much better speaker and, you know, actor in that sense than Trump. Uh, uh, Hitler had a political sense that Trump doesn't have. So, no, I think Trump is a very limited figure. I think that the, he's the product of a bankrupt liberalism. He, he's more a product of the failure of the established society than, uh, you know, than a product of some kind of political genius. He's a terrible speaker. I mean, let's be frank. I mean, you listen to him. I listen to him. He's not a good speaker at all. He rambles. He goes on and on. Uh, you know, half of the crowds walk out. He, he's not, he's not a, a great. But, but the problem is that the decay within American society is so pronounced, um, that, um, a figure like Trump is able to exploit the mendacity and the selling out of the especially the working class, but the American public in particular, by the Democratic Party, but not just the Democratic Party. I mean, the rejection is focused at the establishment Republican Party, the Liz Cheneys, the Mitt Romneys, these figures who have fused with the establishment Democratic Party into one party, which is, you know, the old discredited ruling class. And the Trump has tapped into the anger, and it's a legitimate anger on the part of a betrayed populace. Uh, and that's what's fueled his political project, catering to that anger. So, did exactly the same thing. There's a scene of him in Kosovo, and there, there were, there was a Serb ethnic Serb minority in Kosovo, and there were, uh, Serb, Kosovar Albanian separatists, and so there were, there would be attacks or, um, and and he starts saying to the crowd, "I will not let them beat you. I will not." And the crowd erupts. You can almost see the light go off in his eyes, and he rode that into power. Milošević and Trump have done the same kind of thing.

How did the Democratic Party sell out the American working class?

Um, largely Clinton. Okay. So, this is, this happened before Trump's first presidency. Trump's the product. He's the.

He's. I just didn't know if you were referring to his success in this most recent election or the first one.

Well, both. Right now, now I see that. I mean, and I mean, the, the Harris campaign was so vapid and clueless and celebrity-driven and issueless. I mean, just. And the Democratic Party is all running around talking about their messaging. I mean, it shows you how utterly checked out they are. But it was Clinton. Clinton, uh, turned the Republican, or the Democratic Party into the Republican Party, in essence. Uh, you know, whether it was the omnibus crime bill, which militarized police and doubled the prison population, three strikes your out laws, uh, the NAFTA, which was the greatest betrayal of the working class since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which makes it very hard to unionize, to organize. Um, the ripping down the firewalls between investment and commercial banks. That's Glass-Steagall. Canada did not have a banking crisis because those firewalls were left in place, or deregulating the FCC. I mean, and he, and a congressman named Tony Coelho out of California understood that if they did corporate bidding, they'd get corporate money. That's what's behind it because I'm, I'm very much not an expert in these areas. So, I find it quite fascinating.

So, so Clinton turned the Democratic Party into the Republican Party basically for money.

Yeah. And so the anger is particularly fierce to the Democrats because traditionally labor had a say in Democratic policy. You know, would probably be stretching it to say the Democratic Party was, you know, a labor party, but it, it, uh, at least unlike the Republican Party, labor had a seat at the table. Hence, Clinton abolished that.

This is interesting because I see some connection to today in that it sounds like corporations, corporate money plagued the Clinton administration in this way, or became a plague for the American working class through Clinton. And what I'm wondering is if you see today Elon Musk being part, for instance, of Trump's administration, or Trump just being in the White House, as maybe the logical next step of corporations further invading or replacing, um, a government, right?

Well, you have to make a differentiation between corporatists and oligarchs. They're not the same. Uh, the slashing of tax rates, the moving of manufacturing bases overseas, places like Mexico, China, etc., enriched corporations, and they also created a very powerful oligarchic class worth hundreds of billions of dollars. I don't know what the, you know, what's Bezos, 180 billion or something. And oligarchs and corporatists. They're both capitalists, but they don't want exactly the same thing.

Did I stop you for one moment? Did you mention Bezos?

Yeah.

Why is Bezos connected to, like, why is Amazon connected to what you were just describing? Maybe I missed something.

Well, he's an oligarch. So, what oligarchs make their money off of rentier capitalism. They don't actually produce anything. They set up toll booths. So Amazon doesn't make anything, but if you want anything, you got to pay Amazon to get it. That's rentier capitalism. Whereas if GM, they make cars. So GM used to make cars in Anderson, Indiana. And in America, the Farewell Tour, I write out of Anderson. They're big gigantic weed-choked lots surrounded by cyclone fencing because they moved the plants to Mexico. Literally trucked them up and moved them. And you had about 25,000 unionized workers in Anderson who were making, you know, roughly with benefits, uh, about $50 an hour, and they pay $3 an hour in Monterey, Mexico, without any benefits at all. That's corporations. So corporations want things like stable, uh, trade deals. Uh, because they will make an investment, and it will take, it could take a while for them to seek a return. That's that's corporations. Oligarchs, and so they want a certain amount of stability. They want a certain amount of decorum. Figures like Obama, figures like Biden, at least, you know, while he was sentient. Oligarchs want chaos. They want the system to be destroyed because the more it's destroyed, uh, the more for vital services. I mean, that's why they're destroying the Department of Education. Everything becomes privatized. And in order to get essential services, and this is the horror of our for-profit healthcare industry, uh, you've got to go through these oligarchs in order to get it. Um, Facebook, you know, all what Yanis Varoufakis calls techno-feudalism. Uh, so there's the. I looked at the last election as one between corporatists who are backing the Democrats and oligarchs who are backing Trump, and the oligarchs won. And they're doing what oligarchs do, which is dismantling the administrative state to create a system whereby our most basic needs. I mean, it's already happened in many cities, the privatization of water, the privatization of sewer systems, the privatization of parking authorities, everything becomes a way to, uh, extract. It's extractive, and the services decline, of course. I mean, that's why they want to privatize the postal service, which they did in the UK. If you look at the UK postal service, it's a disaster. They don't deliver to rural areas. Now they'll only deliver in some places to boxes. People have to come in and get their mail. The mail gets lost. Um, because it's not about sustaining a civil society and providing basic services to the society. It's extractive. Uh, and, and so the oligarchs won. And, and Musk is, that's what he's doing. He's destroying everything. And, and, and, uh, and what they hope, what they intend to do is essentially cast aside the most vulnerable, uh, to increase the fear and anxiety among the precariat, who don't have stable jobs, don't have job protection, because, uh, they're more easily exploited. Um, and that's what all of this is about. It's, it's, and it's, it's also a window into the collapse of the structures of the democratic state, which were already very anemic and in decline, but, you know, for instance, Congress, which is, you know, we have our elections are just legalized bribery. I mean, you, you get a candidate, they go in, the lobbyists write the legislation, and, but Congress, which has the power of the purse, the power to control spending, has completely abrogated its control. And what you're watching is the slashing of basic services. Uh, and then, uh, Congress people who support Trump can call Musk up and say, "Well, don't cut this social security office or whatever it is in my district." And they restore it. Whereas the Democrats are reduced to kind of writing, uh, angry and, uh, you know, memos or something or press releases, but have no power.

Well, that's a system of patronage. That's how dictatorships or authoritarian regimes work. Um, and, and so, yeah, we're very far down the road towards a kind of American fascism. Um, we're, we're barreling towards it with the usual inability on the part of a bankrupt liberal class to put up roadblocks and stop it.

I'm curious about this point about the privatization of the postal service, just because one often hears that it's government organizations that are the most bloated and inefficient, and the post office in my experience does not do as well as FedEx or UPS. And at least facially, what I hear Musk claiming is that they're trying to get rid of this government bloat and excess.

Well, that's garbage. I mean, if you lived in rural Montana, you wouldn't say that, because in, in remote areas, uh, FedEx won't pick up. Oh, really? Oh, no. I mean, they're going to drive four hours out to your ranch to get something. Uh, the, the, what they will do. I mean, let's remember what they've done to the postal service. That they borrowed from the pension funds to drive it into economic distress. So, it's always, and they're doing that right now to Social Security. They, they will create a system, uh, or they will, they will essentially devour, cannibalize a system so that it becomes dysfunctional, and then use that as the excuse to privatize it. Um, but take a good look at the UK postal service if you want to see what a privatized postal service looks like. It's a disaster. There, they're the, a postal service is about giving the postal ability to the citizenry in the same way that our public school system is about educating children regardless of where they are or if it functions well, even what income level they're at. That's not true in the United States because it, it is driven by property taxes. Um, so what you're doing is taking the most basic services that we pay for, we pay for them, not Musk. We pay them with our tax dollars. And if you want to talk about the most bloated, uh, unaccountable government agency, that's the Pentagon. They haven't been audited in 10 years. The waste and fraud, and you know, you sign contracts with Boeing or whoever it is, and you have cost overruns, they're all guaranteed, and then the weapon systems don't work. It's the military, which consumes half of all discretionary spending. And when Arnold Toynbee writes about his book about the collapse of civilizations, he cites a rampant, uh, unaccountable, uncontrollable militarism as the death knell of all civilizations, which was true, and I covered, I read, studied classics, which was true of course with Rome and Greece, in ancient Greece.

This question might be tangential. I'm, I'm not sure, but as I was combing through your Substack, I found some articles on, on the deep state. And I'm admitting to this, I hear people mention the deep state all the time, but I am pretty unclear on what it is, and it's probably something that I should have looked into much more a long time ago. But I do hear the deep state used in connection often with the Pentagon. So maybe before we continue, I could just ask, because I think it is relevant to Trump, just what exactly is the deep state? What are the, like the myths that maybe irresponsible conspiracy theorists might lobby about with it? But what is it actually?

Well, in that sense, you know, the right, when they talk about the deep state, is not wrong. There is a deep state. Um, it is built around, uh, largely the intelligence agencies, um, secret black budgets, which even Congress doesn't know about, um, and which, which you're very confident still exist. So it's not conspiracy theories to talk about it. No, we know there's what I think, a hundred billion dollars goes towards black budgets. And if you look it up, we don't even know where the money goes. And this, and the military in the United States is a state within a state. No Congress person can vote against appropriations. In fact, you know, every time they put a bill, that even under the Biden administration, they pay them more. I think the last was what, they gave them $40 billion more than they even asked for, because they've set up the only thing we make anymore in America, largely, are weapons, and they've set up plants all throughout the country. So it becomes an issue of employment. You can't close the F-35 plant in Vermont because these people will go to. So that, the, the deep state is any institution within the state that is beyond control. And I think the intelligence agencies are beyond control, certainly the CIA. But we have 16 intelligence agencies. The military is beyond control. Uh, yeah, that's the deep state. And it's largely.

You said this, like, hundred billion dollars going to, what's more than that? If you count the Pentagon budget, it's a trillion.

A trillion. Well, the Pentagon is what we spend on defense. Mhm. Defense weaponry.

What is, I guess, when when I said irresponsible conspiracy theorists, and maybe I'm, I'm totally wrong here too, but I have in mind people talking about reptilians or Illuminati in the, in, in the deep state.

Uh, well, I mean, you know, every, when, when systems of information shut down, when you live in societies dominated by secrecy, this, I've lived in these societies, then conspiracy theories run rampant, because people are searching for explanations about what's happening, and because the press is shut down, uh, there, there's no kind of rational explanation for what's happening. Conspiracy theories are, uh, you know, and that, that was true in every kind of totalitarian country that I covered, whether it was in the Middle East or Latin America or anywhere else. So that's what happens when, when they're right about the secrecy, and then they make guesses, often which are, or, or they seek to construct narratives, often which are fantastical, but they, they're looking for narratives to explain what's happening to them. I mean, that was certainly true with the Christian right. I spent two years with the Christian right, and they were searching for conspiracy theories to explain their own emiseration, their own dislocation, you know, the suffering that they endured, within their communities, their de-industrialized communities.

So you said we know that this money is going to the deep state, but we don't know. I mean, the question then is, what sorts of things are they doing with this money? I guess by definition, we don't know exactly what they're doing, but what sorts of things might they be doing with it?

Well, they build both an international and a domestic apparatus of internal security. I mean, wholesale surveillance. That's what Edward Snowden exposed. Or Bill Binney, who wrote "Trailblazer," and he wrote that kind of program to monitor people suspected of being involved in groups that would carry out terrorism, and they immediately seized upon and used it to surveil all of us. Uh, you know, leaks, because of Snowden, because of WikiLeaks, we know we have glimpses, you know, the backdoor capabilities they have so that if we think our phone is turned off, it's not really turned off, it's not fake. That's all real. And, and, and totalitarian societies. I covered East Germany, a Stasi state of East Germany. It's always about wholesale surveillance. And as Hannah Arendt writes, it's people say, "Well, I didn't do anything wrong, so I shouldn't worry." Well, that's to misread what's happening, because where they, they collect data on you, and we're the most monitored, watched, photographed, uh, surveilled population in human history. They have all that data, and then the moment they want to criminalize you, they can. And that's what, you know, Stalinism did. That's, that's what any, any totalitarian state does. So, uh, after that exposure, this was under Obama that Snowden made, nobody rolled it back. Uh, so, we have glimpses. We know what they're doing. I mean, we have, we're assuming they're ICE agents as are taking these students off the streets with, uh, student visas from foreign countries. And with the video of the TUS student who was seized, it's an unmarked car. They're in unmarked clothes. Their faces are covered. We're not even sure what agency they're from. And she's bundled in, handcuffed, bundled in a car, and taken away. Well, I used to watch that kind of stuff on the streets of Santiago under the regime of Augusto Pinochet. That's how those countries work.

I, I didn't see this TUS video. What? What? When?

Yeah, it was just a few days ago. It's a, it's a video of a woman who, I think she was Turkish, PhD student at TUS, and they, she was coming to her home for Ramadan, I think, for the Eid, and they grabbed her. And nobody knows what's happened to her. Maybe they do. I mean, you know, somebody, somebody ostensibly does, but the public doesn't seem to end up in Louisiana. Why? Because, of course, the, uh, the judicial system there is amenable to sending all these people, you know, when you start, uh, revoking visas, when you start arresting people with green cards, it's a very short step towards grabbing people with citizens with passports. Very short, which I expect to happen very soon.

Even as I was just having this conversation with Rick a couple of hours ago now, as I ask him, what are some parallels between Trump and Hitler? In the back of my mind, I'm wondering, can I even publish this anymore, or am I just targeting myself for something in the next few years? Right now, that you're going to get crucified over the genocide. They've weaponized anti-Semitism. It's not anti-Semitism to criticize Israel, of course. But they've weaponized that as a, as a kind of way, as just a substitute to go after, quote, "leftism." You know, but for citizens too, at this point, in this sense, that those students who are citizens within the universities are, have been expelled, suspended, put on probation. Professors have been and administrators have been expelled, suspended, and put on probation. So they haven't been stripped of their passports, but they've been essentially punished or criminalized for free speech. I mean, we have. I live in Princeton, and Rueben Benjamin, a very highly regarded academic, is teaching on probation. And then you have Katherine Franke, this, you know, very important legal scholar who spoke out against the repression against the students and the assault by veterans of the IDF who were students at Columbia. They used some kind of a toxic chemical to spray protesters. They ended up in the hospital. She spoke out against that. After 25 years, she's pushed out of Columbia Law School. And within the legal profession, Franke is a huge, huge figure. So you're already, you creep towards, uh, totalitarianism. That was true with the fascists in Germany. It was true under Stalinism. So, Neitzsche writes about it. It's a, it's a process. It's. And by the time you're shackled, you, or you realize you're shackled, it's too late.

Yeah. I don't know how law schools work, but I assume that there's tenure in law schools, too, right?

Probably. I don't know. I would assume so, but I wonder how it was pushed out. I'm sure that there are ways that universities have of exerting pressure on people they don't want to be there, even if they have tenure. But I'm curious. Sure. I don't know the specifics of it. I just know she was pushed out after 25 years.

Returning though to the, to the deep state, you mentioned that Congress doesn't even have access to what's going on in. Well, Feinstein, after it was exposed that there was torture being carried out in CIA-run black sites, she tried to do a Senate investigation, and they intimidated her staff. They hacked into her computers, and she came out and gave a press conference, completely ashen, and said, "You can't hold these people." I'm paraphrasing. I remember the exact quote, but, you know, you can't, these people are unaccountable. We can't hold them accountable. So, uh, I mean, there's an example again of the deep state. You can't. If you cross that line, it becomes dangerous. I mean, Robert Kennedy, I'm not a conspiracy theorist on the assassination of JFK, but Robert Kennedy, till the day he was assassinated, believed the CIA had a hand in the execution of, and the assassination of his brother. And then there's pretty good evidence there was. And I'm going to draw a blank on his name, but there's an old CIA director, I want to say McCoy, but I can't remember who, uh, after he retired, became very critical of the CIA, and then died in a like a boating accident or something. So, and we know from history, the history, whether it's COINTELPRO, the kinds of stuff the FBI did against activists, or the, uh, information that came out about, you know, the, the, um, torture techniques. It was all done at McGill University, how to break people down psychologically. The use of LSD and, and, I mean, Steve Kizer wrote a book called "Poisoner in Chief" about the guy who was in charge of kind of creating the poisons and the hallucinogenics for the CIA. So we have glimpses in the past of how they operate, and they certainly have. They're no different today.

Yeah. Well, the reason that I, I just brought up Congress not knowing what's happening behind these budgets is I wanted to ask what relationship, one, I wanted to ask what relationship Donald Trump might have to the deep state, and why it's interesting, and then also what it is that the quote-unquote right-wing conspiracy theorists that you mentioned earlier said they're not really conspiracy theorists in this case, maybe at all, because not, they, they are in terms of QAnon and this kind of stuff, but they're not wrong about the existence of the deep state. They have, you know, created their own kind of theories about how it works, and many of which I find fantastical. But they're not wrong about the deep state. And Donald Trump is terrified of the deep state because the deep state is hostile. How do we know? Because every former intelligence head, Clapper, Miller, as soon as they retired, they could not be on CNN fast enough accusing Trump of being a Russian asset, which was a fiction, of course. And the New York Times slogged that thing for two years, and both the New York Times and the Washington Post won Pulitzers based on on unsubstantiated garbage. So all fascist regimes rise to power by promising to clean out the rot of the state, to, you know, to drain the swamp, so to speak. They're not wrong about the swamp. That was true in Weimar Germany, which was a morass of corruption and anti-democratic. But what it's, what they replace it with. So what he replaces it with is people who are personally loyal to him. And that's what's dangerous when you have all sorts of unconstitutional measures being carried out, including the, you know, attempt to, the seizure and attempt to deport green card holders. These are legal residents in our country. When the Justice Department is personally loyal to Trump, then there's no enforcement mechanism. So, how do you stop these judicial abuses when, uh, the Justice Department has lost all independence? At all. But again, I don't want to somehow pretend that pre-Trump these institutions were not rotten and corrupt. They were. That, and that's what when I talked about a bankrupt liberalism, that's what I meant. That it, that the, you know, the anger towards the dishonesty and the corruption and, um, the fact that they would for two years go after Trump on the fiction that he was a Russian asset exposes the, um, you know, the rot within those institutions. But all totalitarian regimes, which promise to clean out that rot, replace it with something worse. And that's what's happening. I mean, these people are even more corrupt than the people they're replacing, who are pretty corrupt.

The people from the deep state who are being.

No, no, no. They're purging the deep state, right?

I'm saying the people who are being purged from the deep state are being replaced with people who are more corrupt.

Yeah, of course they are. But you are also in opposition to there being a deep state.

Yeah. I believe in transparency. Right. So accountability. I believe that, uh, I'm a journalist. I don't, you know, you know, I have seen that when power abrogates itself to itself, the ability to operate in darkness, abuses proliferate. I know I spent my whole life covering and writing about it.

Right. But so I guess in this case, the deep state is the lesser evil. You would almost rather them remain.

No, I wouldn't say that. I would say that the deep state gave us Trump. I mean, a dysfunctional system gave us Trump. I blame the Democratic Party and the, uh, ruling class for Trump. In a functioning open society, Trump would not even be a viable candidate. But because the, the system seized up and democratic institutions were seized by the billionaire class to serve exclusively their interests, it gave us Trump. That it's not new. I mean, this has been going on. It was true in Yugoslavia. It was, you know, it's true when any society breaks down. There, there's something that I'm not understanding. I mean, you said that the, the deep state gave us Trump. You said that the, the Democratic Party and the ruling elites gave us Trump, but the deep state is also, you also characterized it as it can't be controlled and it's hostile and it's not these people. So they, they both independently contributed to Trump, or you're saying that in, in concert?

Oh, it's because of their, it's because they can't be controlled, because of their abuse of power, and which generated a legitimate frustration and anger among the populace that you make a Trump possible in that sense. They don't want Trump. They don't like Trump. Uh, and that's why Trump is going after them. You know, if you look at any society, I mean, for instance, you and I covered Iran, 1979, uh, the Iranian Revolution. They immediately purged the quote-unquote deep state or the bureaucratic state of the Shah and put in their own people. That was true after the Russian Revolution. That was true in 1933 when the Nazis took. That's what always happens. And, you know, but the, the world is a complicated place, and the charges that often times these people make against the old bureaucratic state is not wrong. I mean, the SAVAK, which was the Shah's secret police, was savage. I mean, just savage and brutal and murderous. Um, uh, it's what comes later when that, when that society, uh, essentially is reconstituted to serve a particular person or a particular ideology. It's, it's not better, and that's what's happening. But the deep state itself was awful. And the, you know, our, the breakdown of our democratic institutions is real and is awful. None of that's fiction.

You mentioned, and this is a change of subject, I don't think maybe it's tangential, but you said that you spent two years with the, the far, the Christian right.

Right.

And what did that entail, spending two years with them?

Well, I'm a reporter, so what did it entail? I went to their mega-churches. I took Evangelism Explosion seminars with D. James Kennedy. I went to "Re-Write the Life" weekends.

What's an Evangelism Explosion?

D. James Kennedy used to be a really big far-right, and it teaches you how to. It was kind of fascinating. It teaches you how to recruit people into the mega-church, you know, and, and they were quite open about praying on people who had just gotten divorced, just lost their job, just lost a spouse, were new in the neighborhood. I mean, they're kind of cynical in a way, but you have to go on the inside to understand what these institutions are. I'm also a divinity school graduate. I grew up in the church, so I'm biblically literate, and I was acutely aware of how they were misusing the Bible, which is why my book's called American Fascists. I mean, I saw them as an authentically fascist movement.

Why, as a, I mean, among other things, of course, a war reporter, was this a job that you wanted to spend two years of your life working on?

Well, I wasn't a war reporter anymore, and I had been pushed out of journalism because of my public critiques of Bush's call to invade Iraq. But what was it in particular? Just your interest in divinity?

Yeah, I mean, I'm, I grew up in the church. My father was a minister. My mother was a seminary graduate, and I was frustrated with a liberal church for not calling these people out for who they are, which they're heretics. They have sacralized the worst aspects of American imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism. It's a complete anathema of the biblical message. It's why they concentrate, they focus so much on Paul rather than the Gospels. But, uh, you know, just something that I knew a lot about and that I was, uh, interested in as a movement in understanding, and I love reporting anyway. I just, you know, I love it because you get out, you carry all sorts of assumptions that often get shattered. I mean, I went, so I come out of the kind of left-wing, uh, religious social gospel movement. My father, who was a World War II vet, he was in North Africa, but he was in the anti-war movement, Vietnam, civil rights movement, and in, uh, very, uh, outspoken for gay rights at a time when that was very unpopular, especially with the church. Um, and so I was, I had a kind of disdain for these people. But you can't listen to their stories without, you have to have a heart of stone not to feel for what they went through. I mean, the evictions, the struggle with substance abuse, the domestic violence, which are all, we talked about Durkheim, all attendant to societal breakdown. And I actually, the first chapter in the book is called "Despair." And all totalitarian movements are, uh, drawn from this despair. That's what Fritz Stern and "The Politics of Cultural Despair" writes about. That's what Hannah Arendt writes about. Both of them refugees from Nazi Germany.

And it's and and you have in these mega churches, and I think Trump does this, you pray on that despair. So the mega church pastors, uh, um, who make fabulous sums of money in the same way that Trump made money from a sham university or his casinos or anything else, it's praying on this despair. So I came away, you know, although I think the movement's dangerous and I think it is fascist and I think that that uh ideology fills the ideological void. I don't think Trump has any other than, you know, if it's transactional and he just wants to make money, but it, it's filling that ideological void. And many of the figures both in the first administration and the second come out of that movement. Um, but I looked at most of the adherents as victims. Yeah. And I, and that, that, that was because I spent time with them. Uh, and I, while I disliked the mega church pastors immensely, uh, James Dobson and these figures who I really thought were very cynical and I didn't necessarily dislike the people, you know, their congregants.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but are you a Presbyterian minister? I am. I don't advertise that too much, but I am ordained. Yes. Am I right that you became a minister so that you could work in prisons? Not quite. So I, after I lost my job at the New York Times and I was given a reprimand, I was told I was not allowed to speak about the war in Iraq and I refused and so I left the paper. Oh, wow. I, I did not know that. So, and I've been the That's pretty insane that a paper would do that. Well, I was the Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times. I spent seven years in the Middle East, including a lot of time in Iraq. It wasn't a, it wasn't an active. I, I knew that this was number one, I knew he didn't have weapons of mass destruction. And number two, I realized this was a, um, a debacle, a fiat going to be a fiasco, which of course it was. And I think all the Arabists did in the State Department, the CIA, I don't think there was any division between any of us. Um, but you couldn't say it after, after 9/11 to say this kind of things. I mean, my, I come into my office at the New York Times and my phone was filled with death threats and there weren't more because they'd run out of space. It was that moment in time was to speak out against the war was, well, of course, I lost everything. I lost my salary, lost my health insurance, lost everything. And because I have friends in the church, they managed to get me health insurance through the church. And then the administrators of the Presbyterian church said, "Well, at some point he can't have it. He's not ordained." So I had done all the academic work to be ordained. Um, and all I needed was to pass the five exams, which are three about three hours each roughly, including Greek. And I just went to the Princeton University Library and retaught myself everything I'd forgotten, took the exams and passed them and then had, uh, was ordained in an inner-city church and I already been teaching in the prison. So I teach in the college degree program through Rutgers and have for a long time. Uh, and I invited the students of my families in the prison to come. We threw out the hymns and got a blues band and Dr. James Cone, the father of black liberation theology, gave the sermon and Cornell West spoke and, um, but it was really geared towards mass incarceration. So that's how I, and it, it wasn't illegitimate. I mean, I look at that as a ministry. Most of my students are Muslim and I'm not trying to bring them to Jesus, but I think being, I think the mass incarceration is a civil rights issue of our time and I think for, you know, there we're, we should be in those prisons doing everything we can for those people. We have the largest prison population in the world. 2.3 million people I think in the prisons or roughly 2 million, uh, 40% of whom never convicted a crime of violent crime. Um, and, uh, and they know I'm, you know, they know they, I never say it, but they know I'm, they know I'm a minister and, uh, so, yeah, and it's on YouTube so you can watch the ordination YouTube.

Well, it's not every day that I have a Presbyterian minister and reporter who is embedded in the the Christian right on the show. So, I'm curious. I mean, this is getting a little bit far from the decline. Maybe it's not the decline of the American Empire, but clearly Christianity is a very important part of your life and one that you value. Why is it so valuable yet at the same time this ostensibly Christian movement could be so dangerous? I don't look, I think they're heretics. I don't look at them as Christians. It's a political movement. I mean, you know, they're all talking about family values and moral probity and then they, they sign up for Trump. I mean, his life is just a train wreck of immorality and dishonesty. So I think that's evidence that it's primarily a political movement. What is its goal as a political movement? They want to create a quote unquote Christian nation, but it's a theocratic state in the same way that Iran is a theocratic state. So their philosophers, I mean, they they lean a lot on Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist. They lean on Rousseau, John R. Doneyi, who's a Nazi sympathizer, uh, his Institutes of Biblical Law, which is pretty lurid, which I've read. Um, they replicate the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. And that was driven home to me by my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, James Luther Adams, who was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and uh dropped out of the University of Heidelberg to join the so-called Confessing Church, which was run by Niemöller and Bonhoeffer and these great resistance figures until he was picked up by the Gestapo and expelled from Germany. And he's the first person I heard refer to the Christian right as Christian fascists. In the same way that I look at Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, Jewish fascists, they come out. There's a fascist strain in America. The Ku Klux Klan is a fascist organization. We had all sorts of in the 1930s, outliers, uh, you know, who were openly supported fascism in Europe. Uh, same was, same is true in Israeli society. You go back to Vladimir Jabotinsky, whom Mussolini called a good fascist. That's a quote. And then Meir Kahane, who I covered, who was this fascistic rabbi, he was his party was actually outlawed. Both Israel and the United States declared, uh, the party a terrorist organization. The people who run Israel are now the heirs of Kahane. You had the Herut Party which Netanyahu's father comes out of, Benzion, which, uh, there was an article, a letter published in the New York Times signed by Hannah Arendt and, uh, Sidney Hook and Albert Einstein, all these leading Jewish intellectuals who accused it of being fascist. So the strain has been there. The problem is that that fascism has now ascended not just in Israeli society, not just in American society, but in Hungary, in, uh, in Russia, in, uh, in France, in Germany, the AfD. I mean, so we're, this fascism, the, uh, Robert Paxton wrote a book, Anatomy of Fascism, a kind of good study of fascism, and he said, you know, fascism when it returns isn't going to come with American jackboots and swastikas. They will return with mass recitations, the Pledge of Allegiance and, uh, you know, the Christian cross. And that's right. Italian fascism and German fascism are very different. Italian fascism, which did not have a very strong anti-Semitic strain to it, uh, was all based on the glories of ancient Rome. Uh, German fascism was, was grounded in Teutonic myth. Uh, so, you know, fascism takes on a domestic kind of coloring. Uh, but I, I came away after two years in that movement convinced that it was a very dangerous fascistic political force and I think I've been proven right.

What is it about what is happening in this movement specifically that leads you to label it as fascistic? What is the actual behavior that's happening? It's based on a leadership cult. It glorifies white supremacy, quote unquote, you know, patriotic education. Uh, it, uh, is, you know, calls for the death penalty. I mean, R.J. R. Doneyi writes about how we won't need prisons because people who are recidivists will be executed. Uh, it is about inculcating quote unquote Christian values in education. Uh, it's, it's essentially the calcification of, uh, the intellectual life of and artistic life of the nation, which is what any totalitarian regime does. Uh, it is the belief that a figure like Trump is anointed by God and that's that. What's that woman who's head of his now faith-based, the newly created faith-based? I think her name is White. I mean, she, she said any criticism of Trump is a criticism of God. Well, you know, that's, wow. Let me tell you, that's something. Yeah, that's idolatry. I, that, that is the worst sin that any religious movement can make, to essentially sacralize temporal or political power. So, yeah, it's a very, very dangerous movement and not very well understood, I think, by people who are outside it.

One part of your response that I didn't understand, which I'm sure is just a failure on my part, is why advocating for the death penalty is fascistic because a huge percentage of those people are innocent. They don't. Most of them are people of color, poor people of color. I mean, look at the work of Bryan Stevenson in Alabama. Uh, look at the Innocence Project. Look at the DNA testing. I, I teach in a prison. They don't get adequate legal representation at all. Okay. So, it's not necessarily the belief that somebody who is guilty should be killed. I don't, I don't believe that the state has a right to commit murder any more than an individual has a right to commit murder. I mean, I've taught in the prison. I'm not romantic about the prison. I can tell you I've taught people should not be walking the streets. I've taught them, but I don't believe in killing them. Uh, you know, and most of those people who should not be walking the streets, I would say it's a mental health issue. And they're dangerous. Let's, I'm not, I'm not a prison abolitionist, but I, I don't, I don't believe in in it. Uh, I mean, aside from the inhumanity of it, it's also the fact that if you're poor and vulnerable, um, you know, you're often very likely to be innocent. And, uh, and, you know, if, if you even do that once, it's But I just don't believe in the death penalty. I don't.

And is that because, really at the root of it, because of the Ten Commandments? If you took the Ten Commandments literally, then you could never kill at all. And having been in Sarajevo during the war where we were surrounded by trenches and if the Bosnian Serbs broke through the trenches, we knew that a third of the city would be slaughtered and the rest would be driven into displacement and refugee camps. That wasn't conjecture. That's what happened to Vukovar and the Dinar Valley. You knew, you didn't have discussions in the basement of Sarajevo because we were being pounded by shells about pacifism. It doesn't save you from the poison of violence. You're distorted and deformed by violence even in a quote unquote just cause. But there are moments when you are, such as Sarajevo will be a good example, you're facing your own annihilation and you're not really given a choice. I mean, I would say that's true for the Palestinians. They've not been given a choice in that, uh, Israel has shut down any attempts to, uh, create a just and equitable settlement through peaceful means. I'm not defending, I hate violence and I actually know Hamas really well. I spent a lot of time with Hamas and I'm no huge fan of Hamas or any other violent movement. Um, but it's the oppressor that determines the, uh, configurations of resistance by the oppressed.

I would like to, I hope it's okay that we've spent as much time as we have talking about religion. I think it's interesting. I have, I have one last question that's more philosophical in nature. I mean, we've seen, you said you hate violence. We saw in the beginning of this conversation how deeply it has affected you and how much more deeply it's affected you than me or probably many of our American listeners at least. And given that you are also a very religious man, I'm curious how you reconcile the problem of evil, which I take to be a very long and storied problem in theology. How can we have, or how could there be a, a perfect God when we live in this very terrible, in many ways, world?

Evil is a mystery. It's not a problem. And in war, when everything gets stripped down, you see almost the pure face of evil. But you also see incredible acts of goodness and kindness. Because to carry out an act of kindness in a war, especially when you reach out to the other who's demonized, is almost suicidal. Um, there's almost a, a, a willful acceptance of self-sacrifice. And those stand in very, very stark relief so that both good and evil almost become palpable. I mean, when the shells, so there was no running water in Sarajevo in individual dwellings. You had to go to what the UN had created, water collection sites or taps where people would line up and get water. Remember, we're being shelled 24 hours a day and the Serbs would find out when the crowds were gathering at those and then bomb them and shell them. And we're talking about 90 mm tank rounds, 155 howitzers. I mean, really heavy stuff. And I've seen it. I mean, it's, you know, the bodies are split in half and it's just awful. And so, you almost had these waves of death emanating from these epicenters, but then you, you, you saw these families and friends frantically trying to reach out to friends and loved ones to, and you, and it was these concentric waves of good and evil that are very real. Um, so, yeah, I mean, I think that the, I was close to the great radical priest Daniel Berrigan, who went to federal prison for burning draft records during the Vietnam War in Catonsville in Maryland. Um, and I asked him to define faith. I said, "How do you define faith?" And he said, "The belief that the good draws to it the good. Even if empirically everything around you says otherwise." And I think having come out of conflicts and wars and distress situations, that true, that's true. I mean, figures like Oscar Romero, I covered in El Salvador, Martin Luther King, you know, these are figures that draw the good to the good. Um, uh, and yet, you know, there's that old Christian adage that you, when you, when you make a commitment as a Christian, it's called bearing, bearing the cross. And the cross is ultimately what they kill you on. If you read, I think David Garrow wrote a very fine biography of King called Bearing the Cross. King, like Malcolm X, they, at the end, they were very aware that it was over, that they weren't going to live very long, and yet they held fast to that kind of moral and spiritual imperative. I mean, essentially, that they carried their cross. I mean, I don't think it's an accident that I would argue our two of our greatest prophets were both deeply religious. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, because I think that when you, uh, confront radical evil at that level, um, which has the capacity not only to kill you, but almost probably will kill you, um, then you have a fidelity to, um, a world that, I don't like the word spiritual, but a, but a world that is rooted in the sacred.

Speaking of evil, you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation when I asked you about America, the farewell tour, that sadism was something emblematic of the sexual sadism. Oh, sexual sadism. Well, sadism, but particularly, I mean, we're a pornified culture. Well, then maybe this isn't directly connected to, by the way. This is where something I will agree with the Christian right on, and I'm against this. Now, it's kind of a non-sequitur from what we were speaking about. But why, why is this? What, why is sexual sadism? And because it's about turning human beings into objects. So I wrote a chapter out of kink.com in San Francisco, which is a BDSM community. At the time, they were housed in the old armory in the Mission District, and people could pay. They could call in and literally women would be waterboarded. I mean, women. And I interviewed the women who were carrying out these acts, and they were the, they were beaten. And it was, and it was that sexual sadism is always a part of disintegrating societies. It's the eroticizing violence towards others, and particularly the vulnerable, and particularly women. I mean, I saw it in war. I mean, look, in war, uh, the only thing that's produced in greater numbers than prostituted girls and women are corpses, because the men aren't there, the men are dead, they're, Yeah. And, and sexual violence is very much a part of war, too.

What is the connection though between the sexual sadism and the decline of empires? Well, it's a breakdown. It's a breakdown of any communal solidarity, and it is a warped, uh, it's, it's, it's a warped kind of desire in order to, uh, fill ecstatic needs by punishing, beating, abusing, degrading another.

In which empire, what evidence is there? I'm not suggesting that there isn't any, that it has been connected to Rome. Look at the last Caligula, Nero, all this kind of stuff. What was happening then? What wasn't? I mean, Tiberius, you know, throwing people off of cliffs and, you know, terrible physical. I mean, there was, they used in the, there was actually, they, at one point, I can't remember which emperor it was, in the, in the Coliseum, they reenacted the rape of Europa by the bull, and they put a woman inside like a leather bull and had the actual bull mount her and rip her apart. I mean, Rome was pretty awful.

How do, if at all, do you see this issue of sadism, if not sexual sadism, as playing out in Israel and Palestine over the last two years? Well, sadism comes through dehumanization. So, you dehumanize the other, and then the other is not only are they less than you, but they have no actual worth. And, uh, you, they become, in the words of Israeli politicians, a "human animal." I think that was Gantz who said that. But, uh, and then you, they get treated like animals. I mean, the Nazis did it. I mean, that's, but it's, it's a way of denying another's humanity, another's, another person's worth, another person's right to exist. And that unleashes a kind of sadism. I mean, sadism was part of every war that I covered. I mean, sadism was, because when you can kill with impunity, it just becomes kind of boring just to kill. So like in Bosnia, I went into towns and, uh, saw where the Serbs had crucified Muslims on the sides of barns or split them open or, I mean, even in the war in El Salvador, the death squads would mutilate the bodies. I mean, they would cut off their genitals and put it in their mouth, and that's all sadistic. My, my uncle was in the South Pacific in World War II, and I'm not, the Japanese were horrible, but so were the Americans. I mean, he carried out acts of sadism. I mean, drank, came home and drank himself to death. But sadism is very, very much a part of war because war begins from the point of dehumanization of the other, because it's so difficult for a human to kill and harm other people while thinking of them as humans rather than objects. Yeah. Yeah.

Although you train killers, so you use operant conditioning the same way you train a dog, repeatedly, repeatedly. So if you look at like, uh, boot camp, it's about operant conditioning. It's about inculcating, uh, an instinctive response. Uh, that's how you create killers. I don't think most people have a natural tendency to kill. I think it has to be induced.

In the case of Israel and Palestine, do you see the war there and the sadism there as indicative of the United States' decline as well? I, I would say it's more, well, yes, in a sense that if we defended international law, if we stood up for the Geneva Convention, we would not be arming and supporting Israel and sustaining the genocide with billions of dollars of weapons. We would have a no-fly zone out of Gaza. We would bring in humanitarian aid. If we, if, if the rule of law mattered to us. So that breakdown of the rule of law is quite frightening and it sends a message to the global south, you know, which is, we have everything, and if you try and take it away from us, we'll kill you. And that's why there's been so much opposition with climate change and the rise of failed states and mass migrations. That tactic of open genocide, I mean, Gaza is now been shut off for three weeks. It's going to be mass starvation in an attempt by the, probably successful by the Israelis, to force the Palestinians out of Gaza, and we're sitting here watching it. Uh, and that has delivered an unequivocal message to the rest of the world. I mean, we may not see it, but we are pariahs. We are pariahs. Israel is a pariah in the eyes of almost every country on the planet. Uh, so in that sense, but I think that, you know, in many ways, Israel's, uh, trajectory, which has become fascistic, is mirrored our own in a lot of ways.

How does the Christian right connect to Israel? Why are they in such support? Yeah, that's a good question. Because I think at their core, they're both fascistic movements. So I think that what the Christian right sees in Israel is a, a, a European-dominated settler-colonial project that cares nothing for the rule of law and, uh, and, uh, is making war on, you know, the darker peoples of the earth and Muslims. And that's very much the project that the Christian right embraces. It's about the, the return of white male patriarchy, of, uh, the, uh, eradication. That's the whole great replacement theory, which, you know, Israel is terrified demographically if they were to create a unified state, given the demographic numbers, it would very quickly, the Palestinians would outnumber the Israeli Jews. Uh, and I think that what they see, and I think you've seen the alt-right, the AfD, and Orban, and all these kind of fascistic type movements in Europe also ally with the Netanyahu government for exactly the same reason that it's about, uh, the domination of, uh, you know, Euro-American or Euro-settlers over others. Uh, and, and that that is very, very much a part of the Christian right, that fear that they're going to be displaced.

The religious narrative about maybe a return to the homeland, you see as just a cover for the by the Christian right? Yes. Well, you have to remember what is their belief? Their belief is that, uh, according to the Bible, and look, there's a lot of stuff they believe that's not in the Bible. The Rapture, for instance, is not in the Bible. Rapture is not in the Bible? No, they twist a part of Revelation, but the Rapture is not in the Bible. Not the way Tim describes it, others. So, I mean, floating naked up to heaven, that's not in the Bible. Um, so, what they believe is that at the end times, before Christ returns, you have Armageddon and the Antichrist, and the Jews will dominate the Holy Land. But I think there's actually, I think it's 177,000, if I remember, will convert, and the rest will be annihilated. I mean, there's a deep anti-Semitic strain to the Christian right. But it, it is about the fulfillment of what, in their eyes, is biblical prophecy.

There is an irony here with anti-Semitism and what is Trump's relationship to Israel? Is it just a continuation of the Biden administration? Is it significantly different? Is it similar? It's not significantly. Rhetorically, it's different. So Biden would pay lip service to the two-state solution. That's kind of Trump doesn't do that. In that sense, Trump's more honest. Uh, I mean, there's no secret within the centers of power, Democratic or Republican, what Israel is doing in Gaza and what its goals are, and so all completely. But Trump endorses it in a way publicly that Biden doesn't. I mean, you know, he talks about the Riviera, turning it into a Riviera in the Mediterranean and stuff. I mean, Biden wouldn't do this, but at the same time, Biden, uh, was a full supporter of the genocidal project and, and, and knew, or at least I don't know how much Biden knew at the end, but, but certainly his administration, Blinken and others knew. And Blinken comes out of a very strong Zionist household that the goal was ethnic cleansing. It's not a secret.

I mean, that seemed to be one of the major motives that you attributed to the Christian right, ethnic, ethnic cleansing and white superiority. But I would have thought that for somebody like Biden or the contemporary mainstream Democratic party that isn't lockstep with him, it's more a global security, American dominance, securing our foothold in the Middle East sort of. I can tell you it's been seven years in the Middle East and the perpetuation of the genocide has not contributed to American security. It's destabilized the region tremendously. American allies, King Abdullah of Jordan, the CC government in Egypt are in tremendous trouble. Uh, if the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, especially if they're pushed into the northern Sinai and Egypt or, uh, out of the West Bank into Jordan, I think those regimes will have a very hard time maintaining power. Um, it has turned the Muslim world, what is it, 1.2 billion Muslims or something, against us without, and it's going to create blowback. I mean, you can't decimate families on this level, uh, and not have blowback. And that worries me because I think what will happen is you'll get something like a 9/11, or, uh, and then Trump will seize on that to really shut down the last vestiges of, uh, our open society.

Why is this, and correct me if you think I'm wrong here, but it, it strikes me that the dominant narrative explaining America's involvement in Israel is that they're our crucial ally in the Middle East, so we need to defend them. Why is this narrative dominant? If you agree with me that it might be because of the Zionists' own Congress, they have tremendous influence in the media. It's not true coming out of the Middle East that our unwavering, uncritical support for Israel. You know, do you know who actually said it once and then backtracked as fast as he could was David Petraeus? No, the, everybody in the State Department, the military knows that, or especially if they spent significant time in the Middle East, that our unequivocal backing of Israel is not beneficial to our national interests.

How does this small country exert such pressure on the United States? How do they? Because the Israel lobby is quite wealthy and because it can buy, it's bought most of our elected officials. Biden received more money from AIPAC than any other US senator. He owes the record. And he hasn't been in the Senate. He wasn't in the Senate for what, 10 years, 12? I don't know how long it's been. They buy them. And, and if you stand up to them like Jamal Bowman, they spend, what? They spent $11 million to get him ousted from his House seat. Uh, and that's a, that's a long track record. I mean, they pushed out Fulbright. Fulbright held hearings about AIPAC raising money as a nonprofit. And, you know, the money coming back to Israel lobby groups. I can't remember the exact details. They mounted a fierce campaign to push Fulbright out of the Senate, and they succeeded. So it's not new to, to challenge the Israel lobby. Given the deep pockets of the Israel lobby is, uh, you know, they, they will punish you. You will get pushed out, and it's money. But, you know, it's not just Israel. I mean, Goldman Sachs, I mean, we, it, the whole system's for sale.

Norman Finkelstein has been on the show a number of times. I'm talking with him tomorrow morning, actually. I like Norman. Yeah, Norman's great. And he attributes, I think, a lot of the success, well, I don't know, at least some of the success of Israel to, in this domain, to its intelligence capabilities and blackmail. He called them like the dark arts in one of our recent conversations. But do you see? Every country does that. Russians are, I think, the king of it. I mean, really. Blackmail. Yeah. Every country. We do it. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I know that everybody does it. I'm just surprised that Russians are the king of. But first, now the Russians have supposedly got it down to a science. I don't know, but I'm, I'm not of no direct experience with it, but apparently there, well, let's come back to that in a moment, but do you, do you think that the Mossad may play a non-negligible role in American Congress as it pertains to Congress? No, I think it's the lobby. But, but the, there are close ties between the Mossad and the American intelligence community, without question. Yeah. I mean, they, they share, virtually, my understanding is they pretty much share most information.

Before we return back to Israel, what, what have you heard about Russian intelligence? The blackmail is, uh, I mean, honey traps are famous. What's a honey trap? It's where you get a very good-looking woman and you're some like dumpy, middle-aged diplomat, and you know, suddenly this gorgeous 25-year-old wants to sleep with you. I mean, uh, that's pretty common in Moscow. Uh, yeah, I've heard that that the, uh, FSB is, uh, look, I, I'm, I'm talking anecdotally. I don't, but I heard that. I, I don't think blackmail, we all, everyone does it. I mean, Richard Goldstone probably got blackmailed. He wrote the great report. Uh, he's a Zionist, Jewish, of course, and then suddenly disowned it. And I, I know Norman, and I think a lot of us think, well, they got to him. We don't know how they got to him, but blackmail is a very common way that Israel uses to shut down their critics.

Has anybody ever attempted to blackmail you? Or I mean, maybe you wouldn't want to say it on the air. No. No, but people have tried to recruit me. I mean, Central America, we both the Cubans and the CIA were trying to recruit reporters because like in the war in El Salvador, we traveled with both sides. We're very rare. So, we traveled with the FMLN guerrillas. So, we saw things. We knew numbers. We knew the kinds of weapons they had. We knew where they were. We knew, I mean, obviously, I didn't do it, but both the Cubans made approaches and the CIA.

Can I ask you more about this? There's not much more to ask. I mean, other than I said no, but yeah, if I talked to somebody about a top-secret clearance, they might say, "Well, I can't say anything about it." And I could understand not wanting to talk about being recruited by the CIA or attempted recruitment. It wasn't quite that hard. It was, you can work with us, maybe, you know, it was that kind of stuff. And the Cubans were going, you know, we'd like to take you to Havana for a trip. And they, I was in Managua. So when I'd go to Managua, they grabbed me.

I'm more curious about the CIA. But so, are you just in some dark Cuban bar and somebody sidles up to you and? No, that's out of a movie, isn't it? Yeah. So, so what, what actually happened? Well, it's in Managua, the center of the, you know, where all of the internationals were, was at one hotel. So, everybody mixed. We knew them socially. You'd know them. I, I, it, when the Contra war got really hot that last year, I moved to Managua. Two houses down were a bunch of Cubans. So you saw Cubans all the time, right? But no, I'm asking about how the CIA approach. That wasn't Managua, that was El Salvador. Yeah. So how did the CIA approach you? Well, they didn't identify themselves as the CIA, but it was understood. Um, they just, it was friendly. I mean, first of all, you socialize with these, you know, it's not that they, you know, these people, you have a relationship with them, uh, and they talked about, because they knew I was spending a lot of time in a place called Morazán, which was, most of Morazán was dominated by a faction of the FMLN, and they were very interested in Morazán. So, they would, uh, ask me questions and would I, uh, you know, would I be willing to look at a map? I remember they wanted me to help them with, which I won't, I won't do. I mean, when I was in, well, the reason you won't do it is just because you're a reporter and a proponent of transparency, as you mentioned earlier, and opposed to the deep state. No, because I, I don't think reporters should be spooks. Uh, I don't, you know, at that point, you're working for them. You're not, my, I'm working for my readers or my listeners. I used to work for NPR. I mean, my job is to tell them the truth. I don't work for anybody other than them. So it was a complete anathema to what I, my role as a reporter. I mean, look, there are reporters who were recruited, without question, but I wasn't one of them.

Do they offer to pay you, like sums of money? I think they will pay, but I never, we never pursued it to that point. Yeah. Very fascinating. They'll pay. Yeah. H.

So returning though to Israel and Palestine, this, I, I'm not asking this question to be provocative, but do you view what happened or and is happening in Gaza as a genocide? And why? How can you not? Do you not view it as a genocide? Well, for instance, I interviewed Benny Morris. Uh, and Benny Morris. Benny, Benny Morris lives in Israel. Morris, if Benny Morris called it a genocide, he wouldn't be living in Israel, like Ilan Pappé or Avi Shlaim or all the other Israeli historians who do call it a genocide. Benny Morris is a great scholar and his book *Perfect Victims*, and he did groundbreaking work on 1948. But if he were to get up and call it a genocide in this climate in Israel, he wouldn't be in Israel anymore. Can't, he can't call it a genocide.

I got the sense from him that he genuinely did not believe it to be a genocide, though. Um, I, I would like to know his arguments on how it's not a genocide. So we spoke maybe six months into the war or so, and he said, "What we hear on the news is false. The Israeli military knocks at the door." I think that's the name of the policy. They send out pamphlets, um, to prevent the deaths of civilians. The, what we see on the news is all false and twisted. That's ridiculous. You're telling me dropping 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps? They did do what they call the "knock on the door." I mean, they would send an empty artillery piece to hit a building as a warning. This is in the past. Look, 90% of Gaza is destroyed. You can't tell me that 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced. Officially, 50,000 are dead, but it's far larger than that because anybody buried under the rubble is not counted as dead. I have Palestinian friends. They have families that were killed. They're not even counted on the list of the dead. I mean, the numbers are probably, I would guess, a couple hundred thousand at least dead. They blew up, just on March 21st, they blew up the Turkish hospital, Turkish-donated cancer hospital, in a controlled demolition. They blew up Isra University in a controlled demolition. Uh, no. The, the idea that they're protecting civilian life or that they've, there's nothing left in Gaza. I mean, I don't even know how anyone could even argue this. I don't, that's, that's incontrovertible. It's not, I'm not making it up. It's not conjecture. There's nothing there. I mean, even Trump admits there's nothing there. There's rubble. And for three weeks, there's no food. Nothing is getting in. We're beginning to see mass starvation. No, it's a genocide. A genocide is about the extermination of not just a people, but their culture, their history, their habitat, everything. And there are no universities in Gaza. Every single one has been destroyed. None. They don't exist anymore. I think there were eight. They're gone. Central Library is gone. Everything's gone. Right.

I said I like to interview people on both sides of the issue. So, I mean, well, you know, but I don't have a lot of time for. I'm happy to have both sides of the issue as long as the discussions are rooted in verifiable fact. But when people create facts or make up facts, then it's not a discussion. At least have your discussion rooted in reality. And, uh, and that narrative is not rooted in reality. I had a conversation with Rashid Khalidi in this. I know Rashid too, and I like Rashid very much. Um, six months ago or so, and something that Norman brought up that I found very interesting as well in my conversation with, um, Benny Morris, was that, take Rashid, for instance. Rashid is very, very animated when when speaking about these issues, but Benny Morris doesn't come off that way at all. I mean, Norman was remarking about their debate that they had on Lex Fridman's podcast where Benny Morris is kind of just like laughing a lot of the time and not really taking it seriously. And it was, I thought, so it was a three-hour debate and then he was on with, was this person Destiny? Or I'd never heard of them. I told Norman, the last hour, I mean, Norman was just like trashing Destiny. And you read off of, I don't care about that. I don't care about. But I thought the first two hours were interesting because both Norman and Benny Morris know the history really well, and I thought that was very interesting where they were, you know, looking at 1948, looking at what happened, comparing. And look, Benny Morris is a serious scholar. No one who comes out of the Middle East, myself included, is ever going to deny that. He's a very important and very serious scholar. I don't agree with his characterization of what's happening in Gaza, but I respect a lot of his work. And you, you, you've stressed a number of times that Gaza is all but gone. Yeah.

So, how do you see the conflict evolving going forward? Oh, the Israelis will push them out. So you think it's, it's pretty much? Well, that's clearly the intent. Yes. And the only way to stop it, the only force that can stop it is the US government, and they're not going to. So the military has told President CC in Egypt, absolutely no one in the Sinai. Um, and it, that is a powder keg. I mean, I come out of the Middle East. I was actually, I've been in Egypt twice since, uh, the genocide began, and I'm about to go back. And I can tell you that it's the anger on the street is fierce, understandably. Uh, but that, you know, there are negotiations, according to the Israeli press, there are negotiations with Somaliland, with Sudan, with other places, but the intent is to push them out. And they are creating a humanitarian crisis that is so catastrophic, and they've already, the Israeli cabinet has already put out a plan for quote unquote voluntary deportation. That's clearly where they go. That's a question mark, at least. I don't know, but that is the intent, and that's what we're moving towards, and I don't see an outside force that's going to stop it.

Were you expecting this ceasefire that I think was agreed upon in January to be broken? Yeah, of course. I wrote a column called "The Ceasefire Shade." Yeah. Really? Okay. You called it. Well, yeah, because I've been there a long time. So, I know how Israel operates. They, everything is done in phases. So, Camp David, Oslo Accords, all the ceasefire agreements, they're always phases. And in the first phase, Israel gets what it wants. In the case of Camp David, that's normalization, normal diplomatic relations with Egypt, etc. Um, and then they violate every other phase, which is exactly what happened. So in the first phase, Israel, first of all, they killed roughly 137 Palestinians, which wasn't widely reported. Um, and they refused to withdraw from Netzarim. So there's an eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt under the Camp David Accords. Is, Egypt controls the Rafah crossing, and then there's something called the Philadelphia Corridor, which is the kind of buffer zone. So Israel has not withdrawn. Israel, of course, just retook a place called the Netzarim Junction. That's right below Gaza City. And in fact, I was at an ambush there where a kid was killed next to me by an Israeli sniper. Um, they have ordered a sniper killed the child. He was 20. He was about a young man throwing a rock. Um, we had to carry his body up the road. Then I went and visited his parents. So, yeah, Israel was has no intention, had never had any intention of the other phases, which was, which were about allowing in 600 trucks a day. They blocked that. It was about a permanent ceasefire. It was about rebuilding Gaza. None of that was ever, never going to happen. Ever.

And what is it that is bringing you back there right now? I mean, you said you're going to Egypt soon. Well, so I'm going to do a book. My next book will be on Gaza, and I hope to get into Gaza. That's not going to happen. But you have those. That's a book of kind of history and essays. But I'm reporting a book with a cartoonist, Joe Sacco. I did a book, *Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt*, with him. Joe did two great works on Gaza, Palestine, and then *Footnotes in Gaza*, um, which he spent several years on. Um, and so there's 150,000 Palestinians who are displaced, who are in Egypt, and we'll start by interviewing them before we begin speaking. That's right. Make my publisher happy. Yes, let me make your publisher happy. Chris Hedges, *A Genocide Foretold*, reporting on survival and resistance in occupied Palestine. This is out. Mhm. When did it come out? Last week. Okay. So, that's probably why I did, I prepared before this. So, I haven't had a chance to look at this. All I possess in the presence of death is pride and fury. That's a very good. That's marked with the wish epigraph. Yeah.

So, what is the story of this book? Well, it's drawn, you know, I spent a lot of time in Gaza. I spent, I'm an Arabic speaker. Um, I was in the Middle East for seven years. I was in the West Bank. I was in Jordan in the West Bank this summer. And it's a book about the, the genocide, but putting it in context. I mean, how did it happen? Where did it come from? What is the intent? What, it's all that. So granted that I haven't had a chance to look at the book, can I, I mean, I just opened it up and you said it's essays. It's a collection of essays. No, I've written reams and reams of material since October 7th. So it's not essays. It, it's drawn from a lot of my writings, but it's a book. I mean, it's, it's, it's centered on themes that I think are fundamental to understanding what's happening.

Can I ask you about some of them? Because as I open it, the table of contents is already quite interesting to me. So the first chapter is called "The Old Evil." Yeah. It's going back to the West Bank this summer after 20 years. Okay. And seeing all the colonists and the roadblocks and, you know, the oppressive weight of the occupation. I was visiting a friend of mine who, uh, lives in Ramallah, but he was a great Palestinian novelist, actually, Atef Abu Saif, who, um, is from Gaza, and he was in Gaza on October 7th, so he was there for 85 days with his teenage son, and it was just horrific. And he wrote a diary called *Don't Look Left*, which is really powerful. I, I studied Arabic. I was just going to ask you that because your pronunciation was very impressive. I needed to, I need to resurrect it. I need to go, you know, because it was 30 years ago. So I was in Jordan doing intensive Arabic and then I went into Ramallah. Um, and it's about, wow, like, it, it was like a, you know, it was like yesterday that I left, uh, returning to the old story. It's also the feeling of oppression. The fact that violence could suddenly erupt around you just without warning. Uh, the long lines, the despair, the, Yeah. Yeah. It all, I mean, it's one thing to, to kind of intellectually know it or to remember it. It's another thing to get back into that milieu when all of those smells and emotions and sounds. Yeah.

Another chapter I see is called "The Psychosis of Permanent War." Yeah. And maybe that gets back to the beginning of our conversation, but are you writing in this chapter about psychosis you are going through, or it's, it's a cultural, it's what, cultural, what it.

Does what permanent war does to a society? Yeah. And where did you see that in this book in Gaza? Uh, well, it's a military occupation. I mean, there are Israeli soldiers everywhere. Uh, but how do you see the psychosis in the people who live there? Yeah. I mean, I was writing more about what it had done to Israeli society.

Oh, to Israeli society. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Palestinian society is also not immune to the psychosis of permanent war. That's what created Hamas. So, uh, but, you know, when you live in a state that is perpetually either in war or preparing for war, it deforms the state.

What did it do, though, to Israeli society? What is the psychosis? Well, there's a great uh Israeli philosopher, Yeshiashu Liowitz, who wrote about it and was very opposed to the occupation because he said when a society occupies another people's land, it inevitably creates both a military and a bureaucratic structure to sustain the occupation, but it poisons the host society. So, it's about creating jailers, torturers, guards, deforming a legal system. Uh, it's about brutalization. It's about dehumanization. And these have very negative consequences for Israeli society itself.

You mentioned that this state created Hamas as well. And because, right at the very beginning, it felt like there was an overwhelming pro-Israel sentiment. Well, because of the horrible atrocities that happened on October 7th, that was not in any way denied them. And the narrative in this time that I kept hearing was that Hamas was a corrupt organization led by reclusive billionaires enriching themselves off the suffering of the people. And I wanted to ask you, I mean, you, because you said earlier that you, you've spent a lot of time with Hamas, what those people are actually like.

Well, I knew one of the co-founders of Hamas, Dr. Abdul Aziz Renti, who was a pediatrician. He was first in his class at the University of Alexandria. Very bright. Um, not probably what you would expect from a mosque leader. He was assassinated with his son by Israel in 2004, I think. Um, uh, he was in the refugee camp of Hanunas in 1956 as a 10-year-old boy. Israel occupied Gaza for 100 days, and they rounded up. They were called fedayeen. These are kind of guerrilla fighters or people suspected of either being fighters or supporting fighters and lined them up against a wall and killed them, including members of his own family. That radicalized him, just as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are being radicalized right now, and we're going to hear from them, and it's not going to be good.

Um, uh, I was covering the, the, at the time, Hamas was carrying out suicide bombings on buses in Israel, which I covered. So, I mean, I was there after the bus explosions with the bodies, and I argued with him. I mean, I, I said, you know, by indiscriminately killing Israeli civilians, including children, you're seeding the moral ground you have as an occupied people. And he would answer me with statistics. And he would say, "Well, this is the number of Palestinian children they've killed, and this is the number of children we've killed, and when they stop killing our children, we'll stop it." That was, you know, especially for somebody that bright, it, you couldn't penetrate it. It disturbed me quite a bit. I mean, I'm often attacked by the Zionist lobby, but I think very few people have sat down with the head of Hamas and tried to argue with them about their suicide bombings, which appalled me. What he did. Dead children or dead children. I don't care whether they're Jewish or Muslim or whatever. Make any difference. Um, so, I mean, it was probably a response from someone who had trauma.

I knew his replacement, Nisa Ryan, who was also assassinated, also in his house. I found him kind of thuggish. Uh, um, I mean, I'm not, I don't like violence. I don't, I don't really care who wields it. I don't romanticize violence as some supporters of Palestine do. I can't go there. Violence is awful. I've been around it. I don't care who wields it. I think that Israel has essentially shut down any other way to resist. I'm a strong supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanction movement because it's nonviolent. I mean, that's really where since it founded, a lot of my energy went, in the same way that we, we built a successful sanction movement against South Africa. But I hate violence and and people who wield it. I don't care whether they're Hamas or Israeli soldiers. So, I just have a kind of anathema to violence. I mean, I, I understand how it arises. I put it in context. You have to put it in context, but I don't like it.

Most people tend to avoid things that they don't like. How was it that you ended up spending so much of your time in life and in work as a wartime correspondent when you hate violence so much?

Well, I didn't, I didn't know violence till I started covering a war. It was, it was academic for me, and I was, I, I was still to this day admire George Orwell tremendously, and uh, I wanted to, like Baldwin, use my writing as a weapon, uh, not for propaganda, but as a weapon for truth, to expose what was happening to the vulnerable and the weak. That's why I went to the war in El Salvador. When I got there, the death squads were killing about 700 people a month. Um, but when you cover war, you become infected with the poison of war. I mean, you become deformed by it. It doesn't matter what your intentions are going into it. You, the adrenaline highs. Soldiers and Marines call it a combat high. It's real. Oh, you would feel this. Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. You become a kind of adrenaline junkie. I mean, I wrote a book called "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," which I, I only put myself in there to illustrate a moral failing, but it's about the culture of war. Yeah. And and you, you become, I mean, I was five years in the war in Salvador. So, you, you reach a point where you can't almost function outside of that. I mean, I liken it. I didn't, I haven't taken drugs, but to being a drug addict where you need to go back for one more hit. That, you know, you're alienated when you're outside the war zone. At least when you're there, you're, everybody around you is a war junkie like you. It's not a healthy existence. Um, but being a professional war correspondent means you leap from war to war to war around the globe. So, 20 years later, I'm in Kosovo, and two of the reporters I work with, we covered the war in El Salvador together, two decades earlier. Um, it's very hard to let go. Very hard. Um, I mean, it probably took me three years to extract myself. Many of my friends knew they had to get out, but they got seduced to going back in, and they died. They got killed because of this adrenaline junkie status. Yeah. And the cache and power. I mean, in a war zone, war zones are divided between the all-powerful, the people with the weapons, and the all-powerless, which is almost everyone else. But you, you know, are as a, as a war reporter, you have money, you have armored cars, you are, you're not. Although, I mean, there were times I had bodyguards. I had bodyguards in northern Iraq because Saddam Hussein put a price on my head. So, I had seven bodyguards.

I read that. That must have been horrifying. Or maybe it was appealing to you in a certain sense at that time.

No, no, I don't want to get shot. I, I, but you said you get a high out of this. I'm talking about combat. I'm talking about, I mean, combat's weird because your parameter of fear becomes small, but when it's breached, you're, I don't want to pretend you're not. I mean, terror is probably the right word. You're, people are being shot near you. It's really scary. Um, but I think that with the weird pathology of war correspondence is that like a half hour later, you think it's a big cosmic joke. Um, and you go back for more. I mean, it's not a sane lifestyle. Uh, and so I think my motives were good, but I became infected, you know, like a lot of war junkies, a lot of people, photographers. I love these people too, by the way. I mean, my closest friend, Kurt Short, was killed along with another very good friend of mine, uh, Miguel Gilar. I mean, a lot of people were killed. So, uh, and I like them for their courage, for their honesty about themselves, too. I mean, they were self-aware, and none of us thought we were Mother Teresa. Uh, u, and the good ones cared. I mean, they cared. They cared about the suffering around them. And and of course, that's why the Israelis do not allow journalists into Gaza, foreign journalists into Gaza, and why they've killed, what is the numbers now, 129 Palestinian journalists or something, certainly over 100. Because in every war, the killers seek to keep what they have done shrouded in darkness. So, like in Kosovo and also Salvador, they block the roads. We'd have to walk in. Sometimes snipers would open fire on us because they don't want the story told. And uh, and that's what we did. We made it hard for the killers to deny what they had done. That was our contribution.

Before an interview like this, I often have many questions swirling around that I want to ask, but that I, that don't ever come up. But something you said jogged my memory. And you said something to the effect that initially your interest was more academic. Then it became sort of an addiction in a certain sense. But the, the reason that the word academic jogged my mind was that it, my memory is that I was very aware in having this interview that you're a journalist and you didn't take the route of political theory like Norman or or history and economics like uh Rick, but you've ended up, I mean, writing, you're writing about a lot of the same issues. Jews. And I'm wondering why it is that you chose this academic route instead of the traditional academic route to get at these same topics.

Well, I love reporting and I learn a lot from it. As I said before, with the Christian right, I mean, assumptions that I carry get shattered. So, it's a constant process of learning, and I think academics can become calcified if they stay in an academic environment. Uh, and so, I mean, in the end, I look at myself as a journalist. I, I spent eight years in a university. I mean, I, and I studied classics, philosophy, English lit, theology. So, I mean, I certainly was well-educated. Um, but, and I think that's, you know, so I'm good friends with Cornell West. I was good friends with Susan Sek. These are really, really serious intellectuals, and I mean, both of them can, or Susan used to, and then Cornell can make me feel illiterate, even though I read a lot. But the difference is that I was in these places and saw these realities and reported on them, and I think that's my contribution. In that, in the end, I'm not an academic. I am a journalist, but a journalist like Robert, my good friend Robert Fisk, who covered the Middle East for 44 years and wrote, I think, the best book on the modern Middle East, "The Great War for Civilization." Robert had a PhD in history from Trinity College Dublin. So, I think both of us bring a sense of history. That's what I tried to do in this book. A sense of context, a sense of understanding, because journalism itself is a very superficial profession. If you write, you know, what happened today, which I've done probably hundreds of times in a refugee camp, there was an Israeli strike. This number of kills. Here's the people. Without the context, you don't really understand what's going on. You need to go all the way back to the Balfour Declaration and Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion and the Nakba. You need all that, and journalism doesn't do that. And that's why I prefer writing books because you can put things in context. But in order to put them in context, you have to know history. You have to know culture. I mean, both Robert, Robert spoke Arabic. I speak Arabic. Uh, and so when that's combined with journalism, I think it's quite potent, quite powerful. But that's the difference between me and an academic. Also, I can write. Academics are terrible writers. They don't even make the effort, most of them. Maybe you do, but there are, there are a number of chapters in here.

But another one that I wanted to talk about is "Zionism Is Racism." Just because, I mean, whether or not an anti-Israeli sentiment and anti-Zionist sentiment are the same things. But what, what is this chapter about?

Well, it's about the nature of Zionism as an ideology. And uh, Zionism is an ideology that is meant to strip the indigenous inhabitants of historic Palestine of their history, their culture, their civilization, uh, to justify a settler-colonial project. And it's racist. I mean, it doesn't treat the Palestinians, who we should be clear, have lived on historic Palestine for centuries, as co-equals.

How are we supposed to determine, though, who belongs on the land in the first place? Not by the Bible. You can't draw modern nation-states based on a document that hardly has precise geographic indicators written 4,000 years ago. But how long must someone live on the land before they should have rights to it? I'm, I'm not advocating anything myself, but I mean, I remember, but, but at the turn of the century, only 6% of historic Palestine was Jewish. So, you know, you had the Zionist project imported Jews from Europe starting roughly in the 1920s to possess land where people had lived for centuries. They were interlopers. They were colonists, in the same way that we were colonists in, uh, the same way the British were colonists in Ireland for 500 years. The same way the British were colonists in Kenya or India. They came from the outside in recently historical, you know, historical time.

What do you make of the retort that they weren't colonists so much as they were fleeing a...

Well, that was true after World War II, not before it. Hadn't they experienced rampant... Had pilgrims? That's right. By Russia. I mean, that was one of the interesting things about the Zionist movement, which was formulated by Herzl and kind of upper-crust European Jews. They had no intention of going there. It was a way to keep the Jews from the pogroms in Eastern Europe out of London, etc. There was an element of racism even within within the Zionist movement itself. Uh, but this was, as Hannah Arendt said, after World War I, with the resettlement of Jews who had been not only driven from their homes and put in concentration camps, but when they went back, we know, to places like Poland and tried to move back into their homes, were met with pogroms. We're talking about after World War II, by the Poles attacked, killed, because those Poles or Europeans who had taken over Jewish property did not want to give it back. So, that is part of the tragedy in that they had nowhere else to go. It was, uh, especially a country like Poland, it was dangerous for the few Jews who survived to go back. There's a book, a good book on it, called "Neighbors," uh, by a Polish historian whose name escapes me, but it's a very good book. Um, so they ended up in Palestine, uh, and they took other people's land. But Arendt said, you know, the crime that was committed against Jews is not solved by committing a crime against Palestinians, and that is the tragedy of modern Israel.

One of the other common narratives that's already come up when we were discussing the Christian far-right is that Jews have a divine right to this land. And maybe you will tell me that this isn't in the Bible. I, I wouldn't know that. But if it is, why is that not an argument that you find appealing? This land belongs to the Jews.

Well, I don't think God's a real estate agent. Uh, I mean, what, the, the term "Holy Land" is a Christian term. So, what were the Crusades about? The belief that Christians through, uh, savage violence, had a right to occupy, quote unquote, the Holy Land. Uh, and anybody who knows the history of religion would tell you it's, you know, one blood-soaked episode after another. So, claiming a divine right or claiming that God gives you the right is the kind of absolutism, uh, that justifies mass murder. I don't care what the religion is. Islam, Christianity, Judaism. Because what it does is it externalizes evil. Evil is embodied in the other, and once you eradicate the other, evil is gone. And I think this, for me, as somebody who is religious, that is a complete inversion of the understanding of evil, uh, both in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Gospels and in the Quran, because the prophet talks about the three levels of jihad, with the greatest jihad being the struggle to curb the evil within you. And, uh, you know, there was a theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr, who said religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people, and that's kind of it. So, I, I find all of these efforts to sacralize violence to be very frightening.

Well, this is another good question to ask a theologian. I'm not a theologian. I'm, I'm, I am a minister, but I wouldn't go so far as you. You got a master's in divinity. Well, that would not, for my professors, in any way, legitimize me as a theologian. I can assure you. But anyway, but any, anyway, yeah, the question that I have is, if you're not supposed to take your teachings by, even if not literally reading the Bible very closely, Um, where are you supposed to get information about God and what God wants and ordains?

Everybody who reads the Bible reads is a selective literalist. They pick out what it is that they want. I mean, we in the Presbyterian church did not spend much time on Revelation, for instance. This fact. Martin Luther, when he translated the Bible from Latin into German, wanted to put Revelation as an appendix. He didn't even want it in. Um, the Bible is a complex mix of many theologies, both within the Hebrew Bible and as well as in the Gospels. It's some are Gnostic, some like Paul are based on the law, uh, or very legalistic. Um, you have all sorts of, I mean, Ecclesiastes could have been written by Sartre. I mean, you know, it's, it's a mix of stuff. And I think one looks for religious or divine inspiration, but not through literalness. I mean, the, are we supposed to, literally abide by the strictures of the Hebrew Bible where adulterers are stoned to death? I mean, we don't, nobody does that. I mean, even the Christian right doesn't do that. So, it's always selective literalism. And and any, if anyone ever tells you they read the Bible literally, they're lying. They, because they pick out, they pick and choose what works for them and what doesn't. Um, so, I mean, there are passages in the Hebrew Bible where God blesses acts of righteous genocide. There's no question about it. Um, and yet, for me, the beauty or the power of religion is that it struggles or grapples with what I would call the most important elements of life. And and these are the elements of life that cannot be measured empirically. Beauty, grief, death, the struggle for our own mortality, a life of meaning, love. I mean, Freud said he could write about sex, he couldn't write about love. And the Buddhists have a saying that you can memorize as many sutras, laws as you want. It will never make you wise. And I think great art and the, you know, the great religious thinkers struggle with the key and most important elements of human existence, which is why it's important to me. But I don't take the Bible literally. I don't believe that we can create nation-states based on the Bible. The Crusaders tried it. The Zionists try it. Um, but I also think that it's, um, I mean, certainly in my own life, it's extremely important because it gives me an understanding that there is a moral imperative to stand with those the theologian James Cone called the crucified of the earth. Um, and an understanding that when you truly stand with the oppressed, you will end up being treated like the oppressed. You're not going to be, the world around you is not going to reward you for virtue or what you consider virtue. Uh, and that's a really important lesson to have. That, that the reward is the maintenance of your own integrity and also that solidarity. So, I did not vote for Joe Biden. Uh, I can't vote for anyone or Harris or any of these figures who supported the genocide because I have friends who are victims of that genocide, and I have to go back and see them and say, however ineffectual everything I did, every single thing I did was to stand up against what's happening to you. Uh, and that, uh, attempt on my part, that's why I teach in a prison, to build relationships with oppressed peoples and remember privilege, and especially white male American privilege, as King, is really the theme of King Lear, is a form of blindness. Privilege is blindness, and and the more you strip away privilege, the more you're able to see. But even though I speak Arabic, even though I've spent months of my life in Gaza, Um, I can finally never understand what it is to be a Palestinian. I mean, they can't leave Gaza. They have no travel documents. The people born, probably those most of those people who cross the border in October 7th, they had never been outside of Gaza ever. Um, and if you honor that gap, that inability to see, then you can have real relationships with people who are oppressed. Um, and, and those relationships are important because I think too often liberals, you know, for them, oppression is an abstraction. But when it's embodied in people you care about, um, you can't betray those people. First of all, and second of all, I mean, people say, because I, you know, teach in a prison, as I mentioned, in the college degree program offered by Rutgers, and people, people say, well, wouldn't it be depressing? And I said, no, it's the highlight of my week. Um, partly because in that classroom, it's sacred space. It's the only time in the day when they're treated as dignified, sentient, thoughtful human beings. Um, but it creates anger. I mean, if you're not angry at injustice, at what's being done to them, then you don't have a heart. And as Augustine said, courage has two beautiful daughters. Anger and, uh, no, hope has two beautiful daughters. Anger and courage. Anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they don't remain the way they are. But I don't think that courage is possible unless you have real relationships. So, all of my work as a journalist was in the global south, was in with the oppressed, whether I was in El Salvador, whether that was in Gaza, you know, I've always purposefully embedded myself in these communities that were under oppression, terrible oppression.

One of the things that's been a through-line of this conversation for me, as we continue to get more personal, is that you have a tremendous amount of integrity. And that's that's very clear to me in this conversation because, I mean, as humans, we're also good at often at telling whether people are being honest with us. And I sense that you are. So, I wonder where you think that this comes from, because integrity, integrity is really lacking in, in most people. Where do you get yours?

I think it's from, um, being close to people who had tremendous integrity, including my father. So, he, as I said, was in the civil rights movement, the anywhere in the gay rights movement, for which he was pushed out of the church. Um, and there's a book by, I think his name is Richard Rhodes. It's called "Why We Kill." It's a great book. He's a criminologist, and it's about why people kill. And he talks about phantoms that many people who commit acts of violence are victims of terrible violence in their own childhood, and that when they react to situations with violence, they're reacting to those phantoms who had terrorized and carried out violence against them. But I think we also have phantoms of people who we can't betray, who stood up at great cost and carried out acts of tremendous courage, sometimes losing their own lives. I think those are also real. I think that's, for me, it's about being around people like that, including some of the reporters I worked with who were killed, including my close friend Kirk Shork, who I worked with for 10 years, um, was a Rhodes scholar, um, and you kind of can't betray. I think it really is reduced to that very personal level, just as I think that if you really care about people who are being oppressed, you have to have real relationships. And not patronizing. It's not going to a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving and giving them food. I mean, but real relationships. Uh, but I think the same thing is true that it's, uh, you know, it is the, the power of their witness, kind of, in the end, because, you know, I feel fear like everyone else, and, and let's not be romantic about reporters. I mean, it's a very aggressive, competitive. I could be a total son of a bitch when I had to be. I mean, I don't, uh, you know, it's, uh, even a kind of callousness in a war zone. I think, kind of black humor. I mean, all of that. And I talk about that in my book, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." I don't in any way want to pretend that there isn't a dark side to myself and a dark side to what people like I did. Um, I think in the end, what we did is good, but I, there's a lot of darkness there, too. But yeah, I think it's, I think it is those, those figures who we can't, you know, because they're not here anymore, have to stand with.

I'm curious what you think about the connection between integrity and the dark side with which we began this conversation, which was is depression? Because I think that integrity and depression are connected in in interesting ways. On the one hand, these are just my thoughts, and you tell me what you think, is that integrity can be an antidote for depression because integrity also represents, I mean, self-love and self-respect. And I think depression often comes from not having those things. But then at the same time, when you are very depressed, you tend to be pessimistic and I'm speaking from experience and think much less of yourself and everything you do, and that leads to an erosion of integrity and self-esteem. So, I'm curious about how you've experienced the two.

So, I would say my depression comes from a sense of helplessness, not from a lack of self-esteem. But a sense of helplessness. Helplessness and powerlessness go hand in hand. And I think having a sense of power and autonomy is pretty vital to self-esteem. Yeah. But also power can be a poison. I mean, I saw it. I mean, even good people can get seduced by power, and it becomes poisonous. Um, I think for me, it's a, I mean, I look at what's happening to my country. I look at what's happening to my Palestinian friends and colleagues. I look at what's happening to the climate. I mean, these, if you know, I have, think I have pretty rational reasons to be depressed. Have children. Um, and I think that comes from a sense that these forces are so overwhelming and so powerful that I mean, I will fight against them, but there's not much chance that I'll make much of a dent. I think that's, but I think that's, you know, I remember when I went to divinity school, I, I lived across the street from a housing project in Roxbury in Boston, which was the ghetto, and I ran a small church there for two years. I used to commute into Cambridge to go to school, go to class. I always say it's where I learned to hate liberals. Um, all these people who talked about empowering people they never met. Uh, you know, they could have got on the green line. It was a 20-minute ride and gone out to see where people were being warehoused and police violence and all the interlocking systems by which we keep the poor poor. And I mean, Cornell West once asked me, of all the experiences of my life, what was the most impactful? And I said, it was living in the ghetto. I was a white person, not understood institutional racism and how it works. And I went back and saw my great mentor, Coleman Brown, who was the chaplain in Colgate, where I went to undergrad. And I just sat down. He had been an inner-city minister in East Harlem in Chicago. And I, I walked in his office and I sat down, and I said, "Are we created to suffer?" And he said, "Is there any love that isn't?" And I think when you love deeply and you care deeply, especially about people who have been forgotten or abused, it is the acceptance of suffering and depression. Um, and, and I think that you're sustained to continue to fight back by the power of the relationships that you have. Um, I mean, I remember once I was teaching in the prison, and I had this wonderful student. He was a student. I don't give a lot of A's. Two or three in my class. And, um, he'd been picked up at the age of 14 in Camden, New Jersey. His parents had died. He was living on the streets. He was illiterate. There had been a rape and a murder. They dragged him. He was 90 pounds. They dragged him into the police station. They browbeat him to sign a confession. And he couldn't read for the rape and the murder. He got to court and heard it. Tried to protest. They ignored him, and he was sentenced as an adult. Sentenced as an adult, and he wasn't eligible to go before parole board until he was 70 years old, which doesn't mean he gets out. It means the first time he's asked to get out. And in the prison, when the bell goes off, you got to get in the hall quick, or you get what they call a charge. And he waited till that last minute on the last class, and he said, "Um, I know I'm going to die in this prison, but I work as hard as I do because one day I'm going to be a teacher like you." And walked out. And people ask about hope. I said, "Okay, I can live on that for a really long time." Um, and maybe that's it. Maybe we only change the world one person at a time, anyway. Um, but yeah, I think those relationships are vital to counteracting a a crippling despair, an inability to respond, and cynicism. I've been accused of being a cynic. I don't think I'm a cynic. Uh, I think I'm what Reinhold Niebuhr would call a Christian realist. Um, but yeah, I think those relationships are key. I mean, whether that was in El Salvador, sorry, or the prison system, or anywhere else. And I think it's important to note, I mean, something you said is you have really good reasons for being depressed. The kind of depression you're talking about is one that's born of the circumstances around you that you're unable to change, really. It's not a just a purely biological sort of depression that you're dealing with.

Well, also being in war so long and having seen the worst of human atrocity, what human beings are capable of, because we live in a, in a, you know, Conrad writes about this in "Heart of Darkness," or in that great short story, "A Short History of Progress." We live in a kind of veneer, but when societies break down, and like Bosnia, and you see what human beings are capable of, it's pretty disturbing. It's hidden from us. It wasn't hidden from Conrad, that's his brilliance, because he was in the Congo watching the colonists, you know, the, the whole 9 million Congolese dead with King Leopold and everything else. So, uh, and in that sense, that when you come out of that environment back to the United States, you're kind of permanently alienated because not only do most people not see it, but they don't want to see it. They don't, not only not want to see it, they don't want to hear it. Veterans have that. I mean, vets have that all the time. Combat vets.

There are two other chapters that I've seen the titles of in this book that jump out at me. One is "Exterminate All the Brutes." Is that similar theme to Zion?

That's a line from, that's a line from "Heart of Darkness." That's what Kurtz says at the end of "Heart of Darkness."

Okay. What is the subject of of this one? Is it similar to the Zion?

It's about, it's the way you dehumanize people in order to kill them. So, it gets back to sadism. Yeah. I mean, sadism is just a natural outgrowth of any kind of violence towards another, but it's more about dehumanization. And where did you witness this in particular during your time in Gaza that led it, led to it being put in this book?

Well, I mean, they, I mean, many times Israel runs a shooting gallery in Gaza where they kill unarmed civilians, including children. I was in, I mean, and let's be clear, we did it in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's not hardly exclusive to the Israelis. Um, I was at, uh, Hanunis, uh, and, uh, in the refugee camp in Hanunis, in one afternoon, and I, and there was, when the Jewish settlers were still colonists were still in Gaza, and they had these armored jeeps with loudspeakers, and as the children came out of school, I heard in Arabic, "Ta'al," which is means "come," and then "come, come," and then I would hear them taunted in Arabic with these curses. They've been shot, and all this kind of stuff. And these little kids, 10 years old, would pick up rocks and they'd been baited and throw them at the jeep, and the soldiers got out and shot them.

While this is obviously deplorable behavior, it goes without saying. Why do you qualify this as dehumanizing?

Well, because anybody who shoots children has already dehumanized... Well, no, they've already dehumanized them. So, I mean, if you look at the slang they use, you know, they'll call Palestinian children "pint-sized terrorists," this kind of stuff. I mean, Israel, I mean, the thing about this genocide, which has been live-streamed, is that many of the atrocities and racist tropes have also been posted on social media by the Israelis. You know, the way they make fun of the Palestinians.

I have not seen. I believe you that it's there. It's all there. And the last chapter, I mean, it's the, the title of chapter 11 is "Letter to the Children of God," right? So, I, right after the genocide started, the Egyptian Press Syndicate in Cairo called for international reporters to go to Rafah, to the border crossing, and protest the exclusion of foreign press, as well as call for a ceasefire. And I sat up all night on the plane and wrote that letter to the children of Gaza, which is how I end the book.

What do you say in the letter? I mean, people will read and find out more. So, I'm not going to butcher it by you reading it. Okay. I mean, before I put this down, uh, and we perhaps finish by talking a bit more about the decline of the empire for the remaining time. Chris Hedges, "A Genocide Foretold." Who is this book for? Who do you want to read it?

I would say anybody who wants to put what's happening in context. Anybody who wants to understand the roots and the mechanisms of the colonial settler project and how it works in the apartheid state and why it works the way it does.

So, with, uh, Rick's memory still with us, you began, I mean, you begin "America: The Farewell Tour" by drawing some lessons from Karl Marx in understanding the economic situation of the United States. One, do you consider yourself to be a Marxist?

No. No. Okay. That's interesting. Um, but yeah, but you can't, you have to read Marx. I mean, I think Marx's ideas about how to form the socialist society are completely utopian and and unachievable, but I think that the analysis that he did of capitalism, with a lot of help from Engels, is absolutely fundamental to understanding capitalism.

You would just not label yourself as a Marxist because of this more prescriptive element. You, you would... I think most people who label themselves as Marxists embrace Marxist prescription. I don't. I have a much darker view of human nature. I don't believe in the withering away of the state. I think power is always a problem, no matter who wields it. That, that as an intellectual or writer, one is always in opposition to power, even power you may sympathize with. Uh, and that the role of an intellectual or a journalist is to constantly hold power, no matter who holds it, to account.

To clarify, then, are you still, do you still identify as a socialist? You just don't think... I'm a socialist. You just don't think that... But I'm, that's not the same as a Marxist, right?

I'm a kind of a Swedish socialist, that in the old Sweden, where you have powerful unions, uh, heavily regulated businesses, you know, the prohibition of monopolies, uh, the state provides universal healthcare, high-quality education. Um, so, it, it is a socialism that can coexist with heavily controlled capitalism.

What was your purpose then in drawing on Marx at the beginning of "America"?

Oh, because Marx understood that in the late stage of empire, that as if you allow unregulated, uncontrolled capitalism to become predatory and exploit a nation, which is what's happened, then eventually they start cannibalizing the very system that makes capitalism, capitalist accumulation possible, which is exactly what we're watching with Doge.

Could you say more about that?

Yeah, they, they'll devour the, the state mechanism that sustains the nation for short-term profit, but in the process, destroy themselves.

Now, I mean, this is an interesting point because my understanding is that Musk's wealth is declining rapidly, and I could be totally wrong, just because his Tesla stocks, but it all goes up and down. You know, it's a roller coaster. I mean, it goes up, it goes down. And isn't SpaceX, didn't they just sign a quarter of a, like, $250 million contract with SpaceX?

$250 million means nothing to Elon Musk, though. That's the point when we're talking about insane amounts of money. Probably not seen since Pharaonic Egypt. I mean, so, so what is he worth? Uh, like, how many, I mean, what, Bezos, 180 million? I don't know what's Musk, a billion. I mean, what, I mean, you can't even keep track of the numbers. So, right. But I, I guess I'm just wondering what the short-term gain is when it seems like he's losing money in the short term.

Well, he won't lose money in the long term. Mhm.

Where does he stand to gain from what's happening with Doge, though?

Well, one, he'll make sure he gets the government contracts. Two, because he has access to all the information, he can see exactly what all the other private contractors, competitors are getting and doing. That's not something I was thinking. Three, uh, in the kind of new, uh, digital information society, amassing or accumulating data on everyone in itself is a form of enrichment. And he, and he has access to all that, all our social security records, everything, our tax.

Anything to prevent him from profiting from that information?

I don't see anything to prevent him. And that, that becomes commodifiable. I mean, there's a whole something called the black box industry, where if you get hired for a big firm, they don't really care what you write on your form, because they pay the black box industry, and they have everything on you. Your medical records, your traffic fines, your everything, your alimony payments, anything they get. And that, that, that becomes, that information itself, which is what, of course, the aggregate sites, Facebook, and all they, that's what they gather. So, that's in itself a form of wealth.

And you wrote, though, "The Farewell Tour" was published at least in 2018. It's seven years later now, probably longer since you wrote those chapters. Has everything you predicted or described worsened or accelerated?

I think, I mean, I probably made a few mistakes, I mean, like anyone, but I think the general trajectory, I got, I mean, there's so, that book is more about the pathologies. But if you look at "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," it begins in Madison Square Garden with wrestling, with professional wrestling, because I didn't understand that we were going to get a president that came out of professional wrestling. But I understood that that had become the template for the narrative of American culture. Um, "Death of the Liberal Class" is a whole look at the collapse of the liberal class, and the consequences of that, which I think we're watching. So, I, I think that I think I got the zeitgeist. I got where we were going pretty well, and I think that's because my books are so heavily reported. I'm not sitting in Princeton writing, though. I'm, you know, I'm in these places where, uh, you know, the flyover rust belt. I'm in Detroit. I'm in those places interviewing, looking, watching, seeing how they work.

So, I don't follow professional wrestling. I, I don't either. I have seen some clips. So, I know that Trump was at some point on some episodes at least of of the WWE. But why do you say that he's a product of or he came from professional wrestling?

Because that's that's exactly how his. So, the thing about professional wrestling is it's not so much the matches, it's the backstory of the wrestlers. So, for instance, there were, when I was writing it, there was, uh, one wrestler who'd been incarcerated, and he comes out in his orange jumpsuit and wrestles his former, the former corrections officer. Or there was a really cruel, uh, you know, manager of the wrestlers who was cheating all the wrestlers and taking their money. Uh, uh, and and and and Trump. And and so the, the, I think if you went up to ask a wrestling fan, is that, is it real what's happening? I don't know that they would answer yes. But what's real is the emotional, they tap into the emotions of people who have been abused, abandoned, forgotten. That's the power of it. And that's just exactly what Trump does. So, but Trump was, I mean, he was close to Vince McMahon. He was often at wrestling. He had some kind of stylized bout over, you know, he got to shave Vince McMahon's hair and this kind of stuff. Uh, but that's, and and now we have Linda McMahon, who managed it. I mean, she's the Secretary of Education. So, uh, and and I think that, you know, it used to be in the old wrestling, uh, that you had the good guy and the bad guy, and the iron shake and the guy who was like captain, and that now everyone cheats, everyone, uh, authority itself, no, whatever its guys is abusive. And I think there in the narrative, yeah, in all the narratives. So, I found the narratives really emblematic of where the country was and important that way. And and Trump, you know, there's so much in his rallies and the way it's heel-lifted from professional wrestling. Yeah. I mean, look, he had Hulk Hogan come speak at the Republican convention.

It's interesting though to me that you acknowledge that he has these skills maybe from the professional wrestling world, but in the beginning of the conversation, you didn't really want to say that this rhetorical ability is a skill that he has.

Well, I don't think he's a good speaker.

Okay. So, you, okay. So, you don't think he's a good, like he's not...

I think he, I think he, he understands entertainment.

Okay. And I think, you know, his, the commonality with many of his supporters is that he thinks that whatever was on television is real. Including the fact that he was a, you know, an astonishing brilliant business person, which was, we now, we all know from David K. Johnson, other reporters, William Barrett, and others, was fake. I mean, so there, that, and that's again, my book "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle." He knows how to do spectacle, in the same way that Barnum, you know, P.T. Barnum knew how to do spectacle. Trump knows how to do spectacle. He knows how to do that.

This is something that I've heard many times, but never really bothered to look into, that he, he spends hours and hours and hours every day watching TV, and that he believes the things that he sees.

Sure. Because it's on Fox News, and then he gets up and repeats it.

Okay. Well, what I was going to ask was, yeah, where do you get this evidence that he believes it? Because you can see the kinds of things that he says have been fed to him largely by Fox News. I mean, it's why we have a Secretary of Defense who was on Fox News. I mean, he pulls these media personalities and puts them in positions of power. Uh, no, there's repeated examples, and I don't have many off the top of my head, where he, Fox will push...

A narrative, and he repeats it even though it's false. He's not, he doesn't read books, right? Uh, yeah, I happen to have to be really careful, but I knew somebody who worked at the White House in the first administration. Yeah. He spends a lot of time watching TV, but that seems to serve him in some way. Sure. Because the rest of the country spends most of its time watching TV, too. So, he knows how to speak in that idiom. Yeah.

And you told me you don't watch much TV. I don't even own a TV. Yeah. So you get, do you read a lot of print journalism these days? I, I read a lot. You, you said you were reading two novels a year. Troubles by Frell. I had to bring them both in because I'm, I'll finish Troubles and then I'm going to read The Leopard by the Italian novelist. Where is the best reporting coming out of these days? It depends for what. I mean, Al Jazeera does really good stuff on Gaza. You, and you said you and Rick were just on their video. Just, I did an Al Jazeera show. Yeah. With Marman, but I've also, Al Jazeera's flown me to Qatar twice to do broadcasting for them. Oh, well, they're not very good on Qatar, but they're pretty good on Gaza. I mean, so you got to know where to look. Uh, I mean, I follow the Middle East really closely. So, Electronic Intifada under Weiss, Middle East Eye. I mean, I read the New York Times every day. I don't read the Washington Post anymore. There's just nothing there. The BBC, I follow pretty closely. I read Haaretz. It's the Israeli newspaper. And then there are all sorts of sites like 972, which is an Israeli site. They're very good. I mean, I tend to focus a lot on the Middle East.

And that was going to be my next question. I mean, what is it about the Middle East that has gripped you so much? Because I mean, another major theater right now is uh China. We haven't, we haven't spoken at all. It's not an act of war. I don't know. I, but why was it the Middle East? Cuz I come out of it. I mean, I spent seven years there. I'm an Arabist, I speak Arabic. I, I know it. And so I'm called upon to speak about it a lot. Um, so I follow it really, really, really closely and I write about it. I mean, I would say 90% of my columns and my shows have been on the genocide. Um, it's an area I know. I'm very reluctant to write or speak about China. I've never been to China. I don't speak Mandarin. I don't, and I know as a reporter that if you haven't spent a lot of time on the ground, it's, you start making assumptions that are wrong. So, I try and, uh, you know, do what I'm good at and recognize I'm not good at everything. Mhm.

We spoke a little bit about Russia and Ukraine at, at the very beginning of the conversation because you mentioned that one thing you appreciate about Trump, at least, is his reluctance to engage in this proxy war. Yeah, that war should end. I mean, so in that sense, yeah, that war should never have been fought. I mean, even Kissinger said, you know, they're just going to, because you have, you know, a Russian-speaking section of the Ukraine. And there's no question that they were certainly being pushed to being second-class citizens under the resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism. And even Kissinger said, look, they need a peace agreement of land for peace. They'll have to have some kind of autonomy or connection. Well, that's what's going to happen now. But look, the cost that Ukraine has paid, it, that was always going to happen. And so I think in that, but, you know, I think that that Trump's motive is because he wants to build alliances with Putin. Well, those wouldn't be my motives. But, uh, aside from the motives or the intent, ending the war in Ukraine is a rational thing to do.

So, you, you both want the war to be over, but it sounds like you're certainly not on Trump's side in the way in which it should end. Well, there's only one way to end it, and that's the same way you end the genocide, and you cut off the arms supplies. Israel's. Oh, that's not what I meant. I meant the, the side that seems to be victorious. I, I think that whatever peace agreement is drawn up in the Ukraine will look a lot like what the peace agreement would have looked like before the war started. I find it highly doubtful they're going to allow Russia to occupy Kyiv. And yeah, there is an ethnic Russian that would, they've been in the Crimea for what, 150 years or something? I mean, uh, so, and that's the tragedy of Ukraine. I mean, that, that strikes me then as just a very big difference between the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Palestine war, and that it seems like, based on what you said earlier, Israel gets a unanimous victory in, in this war. That's the way that things are, are going.

Well, the kind of hypocrisy, you know, everybody rushes to laud the Ukrainian resistance and demonizes the Palestinian. I mean, they're both occupations, brutal occupations, but the treatment of the Ukrainians is very different from the treatment of the Palestinians or in the perception of them as well.

Returning to the, the question of Marx and the American Empire, you, again, you wrote this in 2018. Have wealth disparities between, like, the richest and the poorest in our country changed much since then? Are the uber-wealthy getting wealthier? Yeah, of course. Especially under COVID. And why was that? How did that work out? I, I, you'll have to ask Rick Wolff the economic reason for that. Um, but we know statistically that their wealth increased tremendously. The billionaire class, um, yeah, the consolidation of wealth by the billionaire class has gotten worse and worse. And when you create that social inequality, it creates political distortions always. That's throughout history. It goes all the way back to Aristotle, where he writes that once you eviscerate that social equality, and he talks about the demos and Athenian democracy, the choice is between tyranny and revolution. And, you know, unfortunately, we're choosing tyranny, or we're not choosing it, we're getting it.

So, a few minutes ago, you were explaining how Doge represents government cannibalizing itself, or just the, the wealthy that have come into government cannibalizing government for their own short-term gain, those in power. But I'm wondering how in other ways, and this, this gets back to Marx, you see under Trump, the wealthier getting, the wealthy getting wealthier at the expense of the working class. And then it also raises the question, I mean, why, why is he so appealing to the working class if this is happening and ostensibly would have happened in the first administration? Every, you know, fascist movement throughout history has gone to power promising to wipe out the corruption and drain the swamp. Everyone, Nazis, everybody, Mussolini, they all did it. Just different words. Yeah. And they're not wrong about the swamp. I mean, in that sense, it's not a fiction. It's just, as we said earlier, that what replaces it is worse. So, in the name of, you know, curbing government waste, corruption, the swamp, what they're really doing is the long-term goal of the oligarchic class, which is deconstructing the state. Because if, for instance, the Department of Education is abolished and everybody is getting vouchers, then this is a boom for charter schools, Christian schools, for-profit schools. Trump has talked about creating an online university. Uh, it's, it's all profit-driven. Remember Trump ran supposedly his own university where he fleeced all sorts of people. So, it's about destroying institutions that serve the common good and replacing them with institutions that people need, by which they can make money. That's really what's happening. So, look, they've abolished Head Start. I mean, the, the, none of it really is going to make much difference if they don't slash the military budget in half, which they're not going to do. There's a bill in Congress to increase military spending by a hundred billion dollars over the next decade. They fired civilian employees, but that's different because then they'll just, they'll become contractors. So, that's what's happening. I mean, that, that is clearly what's happening. And these people stand to make a ton of money. They don't like to spend money on things like Medicare or Social Security or, uh, because they think it's a waste of, you know, uh, tax dollars. Not that they pay much taxes. Yeah. It's anytime an oligarchy seizes control of your country, you're in big, big trouble.

Does having a less educated public benefit Trump in other ways? All totalitarian systems seek to teach people skills by which they can maintain the system. But they don't, there are no liberal arts colleges in totalitarian states. Why? Because a liberal arts education is about teaching you to question assumptions and structures of power, to ask questions. And if you can't ask the questions, then you can't find the answers. It's, it's about, you know, what they're calling patriotic education, which is just the glorification of, you know, the white male slaveholding, quote unquote, founders of the nation, uh, the great man theory of history. But of course, as Howard Zinn pointed out in A People's History of the United States, our closed system, women couldn't vote. Men without property couldn't vote. African-Americans were enslaved and couldn't vote. Native Americans couldn't vote. Senators were not elected, they were appointed. If you read the Federalist Papers, there is a terrible, uh, fear of popular democracy. You had Shays' Rebellion and rebellions, popular rebellions after the revolution. Thomas Paine, who was the great populist, is driven out of the country and and excoriated and eviscerated, although he was the ideological core of the American Revolution with Common Sense and stuff. So, uh, and as Zinn points out, all of the openings in American society came through movements. The abolitionists, the labor movement, the socialists like Debs, the Progressive Party, uh, the Communist Party, which we've kind of written out of our history, all of that opened up. The suffragists, the civil rights movement, they opened up the space, but that's anathema to people who want to teach, you know, the, the great white man theory. Everything was done out of benevolence. It wasn't done because of movement. So, indoctrination, they, they want to turn systems of education into for-profit indoctrination machines. They're destroying our universities as we speak. Columbia, and they've essentially been able to criminalize free speech. They've got 60 universities they want to pull funds for. I mean, the anti-Semitism is just a kind of code word for what they consider leftism or, you know, dissent of any kind. Uh, the German universities with the rise of Nazis in 1933 collapsed like a house of cards. Germany had the best universities in the world, certainly some of the best, as we do. Uh, and, and, uh, they're, you know, they're following all of the familiar patterns of totalitarian or fascist countries. It's just that you can pick them off the list. People like, uh, Stanley Jordan and others, I think, have documented that.

Where do you see the Jordan Stanley, right? Yeah. Jason Stanley. Jason Stanley. Yeah. Yeah. Where do you see the recently highly publicized over the last couple of years attacks on, like, critical and gender theory and queer theory in particular, as well? Because these are the enemies of a multi-racial democracy. You know, again, it's about the, it's, it's about consolidating the power in particular of the white, but especially the white male. Uh, and it is about, uh, creating a mythic version of history, uh, rather than exposing the crimes for which we as a country are culpable, committed, culpable, whether slavery or genocide against Native Americans, subjugation of women, Jim Crow, all this kind of stuff. Uh, and they, because if, if people are taught and believe that mythic version of the narrative, then power itself becomes current power becomes sacrosanct and can't be questioned. You, you calcify the education system to such an extent that it, it just becomes a race-based detritus for the dominance of a select particular class, which is patriarchal and white.

You mentioned that, or we mentioned that you don't watch the news anymore. You read, it seems. Well, no, I watch Al Jazeera on my computer. I mean, so I mean, I say I don't have a TV, but I got a computer, so let's say it's not pure there, but you read from some selective sources, and I'm wondering in, in 2018, you thought that fake news was a big problem. And I'm wondering how that has changed in the last seven years, especially given the much greater prevalence of and power of AI. Well, the problem with the press is that it's, uh, deteriorated. It's siloed itself. And I'm talking about all of the press, including the New York Times, where I used to work. So, they've siloed themselves to cater to a particular demographic. So, if you look statistically at NPR, MSNBC, CNN, the certain, I don't know about CNN, but certainly the New York Times, they're about 90-something percent Democrat. So, they cater to that narrative. So, as people transfer to online, for instance, with the New York Times, um, they know from readership surveys that those people hate Trump. So, they will feed, like that's how they got away with feeding them two years of the Russia-gate stuff, which was garbage, but they're not paying a price for it because it's what their demographic wanted to hear. And the opposite is true with Fox News. So, you have people retreating into echo chambers where, uh, and it, it may make commercial sense to feed that demographic what it wants to hear, but it's not journalism. So, the New York Times coverage on Gaza has been appalling. Um, I mean, every, the, the people who clearly have been persecuted on campuses are the Palestinian demonstrators. 100 arrested. Columbia calling the cops three times, outlawing Jewish Voice for Peace. Let's be clear, a significant percentage of these protests are Jewish. The Jewish Voice for Peace gets outlawed. Students for Justice in Palestine, faculty, administrator, staff get fired, probation, suspended. And yet, every time the New York Times writes a story, they rush off to the hell house and interview some Jewish student who feels uncomfortable. Um, and that's just a, that's just a perversion of the truth. That's a lie. Uh, but it's what their demographic wants to hear. And that has really deteriorated the media because when I worked for the New York Times, the power of the New York Times wasn't, oh, we had a circulation, I think about 2 million. The power of the New York Times is that it set the agenda for the news. So, when I was overseas, uh, the correspondents from CBS and, I mean, they would all come to my room late at night and say, "What are you writing for tomorrow? What's going to be in the front page of the New York Times tomorrow? Because that's what we're going to get sent to do. Where do we go? What are the phone numbers? What that?" So, you set the agenda for the news. That was the power of the New York Times. That's gone. That kind of reaching a broad audience by any news outlet is gone. And that has really hurt news gathering a lot. Yeah.

Given this situation that you've just described, and I was going to say given what we're doing right here, except I don't want to pretend that I'm a journalist, uh, but given what you're doing on your own channels, what do you see the role of independent, small news, I don't know what you want to call it, outlets like yours playing now and going forward that they didn't in 2018 or 2008? Well, I'm not beholden to commercial interests. So, I can say things about the genocide I could never say at the New York Times or CNN or anywhere else. And because Substack is subscription-based, you pay $6 a month, it gives you autonomy. I mean, you know, Lee Higgins used to say, "The freedom of the press is guaranteed to the people who own it." Um, and so a lot of Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, myself, all of, by the way, all of us who a decade ago were mainstream. I mean, Glenn was at The Guardian, Matt was at Rolling Stone, I was, I wasn't at the New York Times a decade ago, but I was still part of the mainstream. That's all gone. So, in that sense, it's given us, uh, a kind of counterweight. However, I, the, we have to be clear, the media landscape is still dominated by roughly a half dozen corporations, uh, that control what about 90% of Americans watch and listen to. And so it, I'm thankful that it's given us a space and given us enough of an income that we can do our work. But I don't want to exaggerate the power of the alternative. I mean, I think all in the press, it's always been the alternative media that has shamed the traditional media into doing their job. That's what Julian Assange did, who was a friend at WikiLeaks. But you go back to the '60s, I mean, with the Ramparts magazine run by Bob Scheer, they exposed COINTELPRO. They, uh, printed that iconic photo of the little girl being burned by napalm running naked down a road in Vietnam. That came in Ramparts. Uh, the beginning of understanding the kind of, uh, debacle that Vietnam was, that came out of the alternative press. Uh, and then it shames the traditional press into doing their job. So, uh, I think the situation now is that we who are outside the legacy media or the commercial media, we don't have the power to shame them to do anything anymore.

Well, the last thing that I will ask for today is we've spent a lot of time talking about the decline of the American Empire. What would it take? Is there anything that could happen to avert and perhaps even reverse this decline? Mass mobilization by militant unions with the ability to begin to shut the machinery of state down. That's the only hope. I don't have any hope in the electoral process at all. So, we need to regain that militancy because it was the unions that gave us the weekend, the 8-hour workday, Social Security. We forget they fought for those things and hundreds of American workers were killed. We had the bloodiest labor wars of any industrialized nation. And capitalism hasn't changed. And the capitalists have not changed. And the mechanisms by which we defend ourselves haven't changed. But the capitalist class has done a very good job of decimating the one mechanism we have, and that's the unions, and in particular the strike. Uh, that's what they fear most. Uh, that's why unions are about 11% and about 6% of those are public sector workers, like the railroad freight union. They couldn't strike. They were legally, under Biden, they were blocked from striking. Um, and you look at throughout history, I mean, even the great revolutionary movements. So, what brought down the Shah? What brought down Batista in Cuba? It was national, national strikes. So, we have to regain our power, uh, which means not getting caught up in woke virtue signaling garbage, uh, because it means a class war. It means standing with people who voted for Trump. I got relatives who voted for Trump. I come from rural Maine, you know, and I love them to death. Uh, and I also have seen what NAFTA did to them. All these old mills are gone. And, uh, we have to think in terms of class war. Uh, and the billionaires are fleecing us. Uh, and, uh, they run the government. It's an oligarchic state. So, we have to regain that. I think the only hope is that militancy.

Well, Chris, after these three hours, all I can say is thanks. It's really been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. [Music]