The Chris Hedges Report

• Erasing History: How Fascism Works (w/ Jason Stanley)

  Ever since the first Donald Trump administration, the word “fascism” has dominated discussion around Trump’s policies and ambitions to the extent of semantic satiation. Liberals and leftists often use fascism as a blanket term for anything right-wing politicians represent and Republicans equally use “communism” to denote Democratic or left-wing politics. Jason Stanley, author, American philosopher and Yale professor, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to give proper context to what fascism means and how the Trump administration’s second term could really mean the completion of the American fascist state. One key element in the spread of fascism is the attack on a central pillar of democracy: education. Stanley explores the recent assault on crucial parts of the American education system, including critical race theory, Black history and now the sanctity of free speech. Legislation pushing for the suppression of these segments is expected, Stanley explains, since “it creates a fake version of the past and it tells students that you're the greatest country in history and your leaders are the greatest people in history. It's exactly what Hitler in Mein Kampf said the education system of the Third Reich should be.” Stanley also illustrates the various ways in which fascist regimes attempt to psychologically manipulate the public into being subservient and by eliminating any reference to historic self-determination. “An education system should give people the sense that they have agency to change history,” Stanley tells Hedges. “And if you want to impose patriotic education, you want to impose the kind of education that fits into an authoritarian system, you want to remove agency from people.” The bleakness of the near future is hard to avoid, Stanley warns. He likens the deportation and hunting down of pro-Palestinian student protestors to the stripping of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson’s passports: “That's what happened with Du Bois and Robeson. Like if they can take down those people, they can take down anyone. And so that is clearly the next phase. Clearly the next phase is stripping the passports of people they don't like. You know, every authoritarian country does that. We've done it and I expect that to come, unfortunately.”

  27.3.2025  

  59:09
• America’s Constitutional Crisis (w/ Katherine Franke) | The Chris Hedges Report

  Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest and detention in a Louisiana ICE facility is a harbinger for a new authoritarian era of the United States. Khalil’s arrest, the capitulation of Columbia University against dissent and protest by its own students and the Trump administration’s threat of stripping the university of $400 million in grants if it does not meet its requests is just one place where the tentacles of fascism tighten their grip. Katherine Franke, a former law school professor at Columbia, is on the front lines of this assault. Her support for student protests and her condemnation of the university for not addressing the harassment of pro-Palestinian students has earned what she called, “a termination dressed up in more palatable terms.” Franke joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to address the Constitutional crisis that faces the US, how it has manifested itself on university campuses and what are the next steps in challenging it. “They're using immigration laws now to come after protesters or people who are voicing views that are critical of the Trump administration who are not US citizens. They'll come next for us, the US citizens, with the criminal law,” Franke warns. As for universities and Columbia specifically, Franke points to the shift in institutional integrity within schools. Hedge fund managers, venture capitalists and corporate lawyers now run these institutions and their goals aren’t to maintain the principles of education and democracy, but rather the financial bottom line. Franke says Columbia “is humiliating itself in this process of negotiation with a bully that will not end because it's that repeated proof of ‘I have all the power and you have none.’ That is what governance looks like at this point. There's no principle at stake here. It's about an abusive exercise of power accompanied by humiliation.”

  19.3.2025  

  43:18
• Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (w/ Mohammed el-Kurd) | The Chris Hedges Report

  Any account of the decades-long occupation of Palestine from a Palestinian is immediately expected to be refined within a specific lens to appeal to the pathos of Western society. Well meaning activists, journalists and politicians may intend to share the stories of Palestinians, but end up curating them into a digestible format, one adjacent to the truth rather than one that embodies the whole of it. In other words, society forces Palestinians to justify and format their identities, experiences and traumas in order to be seen. Yet in the process, crucial and real pieces of their stories are sacrificed.    Mohammed el-Kurd is a Palestinian writer and poet who defines this concept in his new book, ““Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal.” He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to share the ways in which Palestinians must bog down their identities, even in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, to crack through the limited and racist perspectives of Western audiences.   “None of these anchors or pundits are interested in what my political analysis or my assessment of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], they are just keen to know whether I fit in in their world order, whether I submit to their worldview and they would operate accordingly. And if I don't condemn Hamas or if I don't fall into their kind of world order, then I am condemned and it's okay for me to die,” El-Kurd tells Hedges.   Any positive support for Palestinians is always conditional, El-Kurd explains. He says, “in order for these people to become sympathetic victims or order for them to acquire a spot in the newspaper… they need to be transformed from this political subject into this humanitarian subject. And in doing so, you obfuscate who the killer is, you obfuscate what the genesis of their suffering is, which is, again, in our case, Zionism.”   In writing about Palestine, El-Kurd admits that “you're talking to an audience that is suspicious of you.” That changes the way people and particularly Palestinians write and speak, implanting a self-censorship that is hard to overcome. “So you write and you draft your eulogies as if they are addressed to people who are eager to indict you,” he says.

  12.3.2025  

  50:25
• How the Media Walked us into Autocracy (w/ Ralph Nader) | The Chris Hedges Report

  The American corporate coup d'état is almost complete as the first weeks of the Trump administration exemplify. If there has been one person who saw this coming, and has taken courageous action over the years to prevent it, it would be Ralph Nader. The former presidential candidate, consumer advocate and corporate critic joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle his life’s work battling the corporate takeover of the country and how Americans can still fight back today despite the growing repression from the White House.   “The sign of a decaying democracy is that when the forces of plutocracy, oligarchy, multinational corporations increase their power, in all sectors of our society, the resistance gets weaker,” Nader tells Hedges.   Nader asks people to look around them and witness the decay through the ordinary parts of their lives. “If you just look at the countervailing forces that hold up a society—civilized norms, due process of law and democratic traditions—they're all either AWOL [absent without official leave] or collapsing,” he said. Civic groups are outnumbered by corporate lobbyists, the media barely pays attention to any grassroots organizing and the protests that do occur, such as the encampments at universities, are brutally suppressed.   It’s not an impossible task, Nader says, recalling the precedent of organizing in the U.S. He says the fundamental basics are supported by a majority of people regardless of their political labels.   “Living wage is one. Universal health insurance is two. Crackdown on corporate crooks is three. A fair tax system is four. De-bloating the military budget and coming back home to repair and modernize infrastructure and public services in every community. Creating a lot of jobs is five. And empowering people so they can take back their sovereign power and condition it before they give their instructions back to their senators or their state legislators or their city council person.”

  07.3.2025  

  57:27
• Chris Hedges: The World After Gaza (w/ Chris Hedges) | The Chris Hedges Report

  The Holocaust is the quintessential example of human evil for people in the West. In the rest of the world, especially in the Global South, the atrocity of the Holocaust — genocide — has had a closer proximity both in time and place. Colonialism in Africa, destructive wars in Asia and most recently, genocide in the Middle East, have shaped the lives of billions of people.   On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his latest book, “The World After Gaza.” Mishra argues that the shifting power dynamics in the world means the Global South’s narrative on atrocity can no longer be ignored and the genocide in Gaza is the current crux of the issue.   “Large parts of the world have a cultural memory, historical memory of the atrocities that were inflicted on those parts of the world by Western powers. And that has actually gone to the making of their collective identity. And that is how they see themselves in the world,” Mishra tells Hedges.   Mishra explains that in the case of Israel, Zionist leaders weaponize this narrative by tying the safety and existence of the state of Israel to the defense against the evils of the Holocaust. In other words, the Zionist state exploits the suffering of millions for the benefit of the powerful.   “The words of politicians like Netanyahu, the rhetoric of people like Joe Biden insisting that no Jewish person in the world is safe if Israel is not safe, consistently connecting the fate of millions of Jews living outside of Israel to the fate of the state of Israel, I cannot think of anything more antisemitic. And yet these people keep doing it, endangering Jewish populations elsewhere,” Mishra says.

  26.2.2025  

  51:38

Weitere Kunst Podcasts

Trending Kunst Podcasts

Über The Chris Hedges Report