Drug Trafficking and Murder In the Special Forces (w/ Seth Harp) | The Chris Hedges Report
For decades, clandestine foreign military and intelligence operations have been the deadly, destabilizing engine of American foreign policy. Today, as exposed by investigative journalist Seth Harp in his new book The Fort Bragg Cartel, 21st-century Special Forces operations have become their brutal, logical successor.
Harp joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to highlight the dark culture of violence inflicted by Special Forces operators both abroad and domestically. These operators exist in a world where battlefield impunity spirals into rampant drug use and trafficking, extrajudicial killings and domestic violence. Harp’s reporting insists that these are not isolated events but rather part of a system built on secrecy and unaccountable violence.
“The book,” according to Harp, “is not a work of history, it’s intended to be a murder mystery at the heart of it, kind of a police beat reporting but in order to tell the backstory of these operators’ lives, I recapitulate a brief history of the Global War on Terrorism with a focus on Fort Bragg soldiers in particular, because Fort Bragg is really the beating heart of the global special operations complex, and many people are unaware of its centrality in all of these events.”
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Inside America's Academic Gulags (w/ Rashid Khalidi) | The Chris Hedges Report
Historian Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, joins host Chris Hedges to detail the dwindling academic freedom in American universities and society at large as Donald Trump’s grip on free speech tightens.
Khalidi notes that while the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is an old tactic to stifle academic scrutiny of Israel, its current deployment is unprecedented. Today, professors are intimidated out of teaching about Israel and Palestine, entire Middle Eastern studies departments are threatened with receivership and federal funding is withheld from universities.
“I know many people who are not going to teach courses this semester of my colleagues out of fear that if I teach about settler colonialism, if I teach about genocide, if I teach this or that about the Middle East, I’m going to be hauled up before these kangaroo courts,” Khalidi tells Hedges.
“That means your life is going to be ruined. You’re going to have to get lawyers, have to deal with a process that is completely opaque and which is designed… to punish and discipline anybody who opens their mouth on Palestine.”
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It's Time to Fight Back Against Trump's Fascist Regime (w/ Ralph Nader) | The Chris Hedges Report
"Are you a worker? Yes. Are you a consumer shopper? Yes. Are you a taxpayer? Yes. Voter? Well, sometimes. Are you a parent? Yes. Are you a veteran? Sometimes. Well, how can you say you're a nobody? You know things about those roles. You've experienced them. You've been frustrated. If you lie to yourself to be a nobody, you're going to be treated like a nobody. You're going to be treated like someone who doesn't count, someone who doesn't matter, somebody who can be disrespected, someone who can be ripped off, somebody who could be underinsured, somebody who can be suppressed."
Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate, asks these questions to demonstrate how Americans often sell themselves short regarding their power as citizens.
Nader, whose life-long mission has been to empower people to fight back against corrupt politicians and greedy corporate criminals, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to continue to spread this message at a critical juncture in American politics.
With Donald Trump’s increasing fascistic repression and an impending government shutdown, Nader offers a roadmap for how both government officials and ordinary people can fight back.
His latest book, Citizen Self-Respect, serves as a call to action, arguing that Americans must not passively allow the Trump administration and corporate elites to consolidate their power.
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Trump's Crackdown on Anti-War Activists (w/ CODEPINK's Medea Benjamin)
Medea Benjamin and CODEPINK, the organization she cofounded, are synonymous with accosting power in the United States. Their fearless confrontations with the nation’s most prominent and powerful politicians in the halls of Congress, often seen through viral videos, are a stark embodiment of the First Amendment. Despite over 20 years of activism and consistent critique of America’s representatives over their subservience to the military industrial complex and other big money interests, their ability to have these conversations is beginning to dwindle.
Benjamin joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the current moment in American politics, which sees free speech sitting on a knife’s edge following the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the American political class’s continued support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Benjamin was recently arrested after questioning Rep. Darrell Issa about Israel’s recent airstrike targeting Hamas negotiators in Qatar. Despite police saying she did nothing wrong, Issa continued with lodging a complaint against her, a move she believes is also in line with the suppression of activists and free speech.
Furthermore, after CODEPINK activists confronted Donald Trump and his cabinet at a restaurant and chanted at the president, ““Free DC, free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time,” Trump said he is looking into having US Attorney General Pam Bondi bring RICO charges against the protestors “because they should be put in jail.”
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Israel, Charlie Kirk, and the Weaponization of Murder (w/ Max Blumenthal) | The Chris Hedges Report
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges interviews a wide array of authors, journalists, artists and cultural figures on complex topics of history, politics and war.
France