The Chris Hedges Report

The blowback of the failed 2024 Biden-and-then-Harris Democratic presidential campaign, which supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza, continues as another grassroots candidate runs for Congress. Dr. Karishma Manzur, a scientist who is running for senate in the September New Hampshire Democratic Primary against Chris Pappas, joins Chris Hedges in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about her campaign.

Manzur, who is also an activist for peace and climate justice, has had firsthand experiences with elected officials through her non-profit work, revealing to her the corrosive power of money in politics. She witnessed the ways big donors, such as AIPAC, control the politicians and both political parties, and the corruption and deceit, which she says are most pervasive at the federal level. She finally asked herself, “Why am I being forced to pick the lesser of two evils because the lesser of two evils is still evil. We’re having to choose between bad and really bad.”

Both the Democrats and Republicans engage in anti-democratic practices and demonstrate their allegiance to the wealthy. Manzur criticizes the revolving door between Congressmembers and corporations: “The money in politics is not just bribing our lawmakers and bribing our candidates, these lawmakers themselves are part of the big money.” A major focus for Manzur is what it means to be a public servant. She loathes the culture of treating politicians as celebrities rather than people who work for the public.

Manzur’s campaign rejects corporate donations and is running on a popular program of Medicare for All, affordable housing, living wages and stopping wars, all of which are gaining traction with voters. Despite the Democrat’s efforts to marginalize Manzur and the wide disparity in fundraising between her and her opponent, Manzur is optimistic that she can win.

John Mearsheimer breaks down the current state of the Iran War, and how the conflict increasingly appears to look like the most dire strategic mistake in US history.

Chris Hedges, who has extensive experience as a former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief, describes the information published by the Israeli State as lies: “If there is one indisputable fact, it is that Israel lies like it breathes.” The task of professional journalists and media outlets is to review evidence and verify the information they are reporting, but when it comes to Israel, Western establishment media function as stenographers, echoing their lies globally.

In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Hedges explores the mechanisms by which Western media function as propaganda outlets for Israel with media scholar Robin Andersen, who documented these practices in her new book, “The Complicit Lens.” They begin with a discussion of the ways media corporations control the narrative through omissions of historical context, dehumanization of Palestinians and censorship of specific words, such as ‘massacres.’ Journalists who work for these commercial outlets are aware of their complicity but sacrifice their integrity and honesty for access to those in power and to protect themselves from retaliation.

Hedges and Andersen explain the ways that media outlets manipulate language to cover up war crimes being committed by the Israelis and shift the blame for Israeli attacks on civilians and infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools, onto the victims, Palestinians themselves. Outlets engage in ‘atrocity propaganda,’ amplifying horrific lies about sexual assault and “beheaded babies” told by the Israeli State without factchecking them to generate public support for the genocide of Palestinians, who are characterized as ‘terrorists’ and members of the demonized organization, Hamas. Andersen reports, “The Israelis were presented in their whole humanity… and the Palestinians are dead bodies, and that’s it.”

Another method of information control is by limiting access. Foreign journalists are restricted from entering Gaza, and those who are allowed in are vetted by Israel in advance. In violation of international law, the Palestinian press is censored through murder. Over 270 Palestinians, including those who work for major media outlets, and their families have been targeted and killed by the Israeli military. The price that we all pay for this complicity by the media is the legitimization of genocide, the absence of accountability and the lack of reliable news sources. As Andersen concludes, our loss is that there are “fewer and fewer voices, fewer and fewer documentation [that] can make sense of this and bring it to global publics.”

The bipartisan US-backed genocide in Gaza exposed the corruption of the political system in the United States and the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party, which claims to represent working people. Rather than recognizing this fact and shifting its stances to better represent its voting base, the Democratic Party establishment is attacking candidates who run on progressive platforms and is setting the stage for another Republican victory.

In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Chris Hedges speaks with Dr. Adam Hamawy, a military veteran and trauma surgeon running for Congress in New Jersey to replace the retiring representative Bonnie Watson Coleman. Similarly to Dr. El-Sayed, who won his Democratic primary in Michigan despite record spending to oppose him by the Israeli lobby, AIPAC, and Democratic Party leadership’s support for his opponent, Dr. Hamawy recently won the primary and will face a Republican in the November election.

Hamawy discusses how his experiences of talking to members of Congress after coming home from volunteering in hospitals in Gaza drove him into politics and describes the vicious, racist and false attacks launched against him, his family and co-workers since the start of his campaign. He laments the influence of money on politics, especially by the military industrial complex, that puts profits over people and robs communities of funding for basic necessities. Hamawy calls for the consistent application of laws, especially the Leahy Law, which restricts foreign aid to countries that violate human rights.

Hedges and Hamawy analyze the failures of the Democratic Party to unify around a platform that represents their voting base’s interests, instead trying and failing to push progressive candidates out of the party. Dr. Hamawy says, “The Democratic Party has actually shifted more to the right and we are really holding that center.” Hamawy outlines his political priorities if he is elected and the struggles ahead for this new “wave of candidates that are fighting for the people,” saying, “We are going to fight to start bringing these resources back home.”

The United States and Israel’s attacks on Iran have inflamed West Asia to the point that it has turned “into a matrix of smaller wars taking place across the region, all of which are interconnected, but all of which have quite separate agendas,” describes Alistair Crooke of Conflicts Forum, a former diplomat who served in the Middle East and who authored, “Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution”. In this episode of the Chris Hedges Report, Hedges and Crooke explore the wide-reaching geopolitical and economic ramifications of the war on Iran and what options remain for the Trump administration, which has been forced multiple times to walk back its threats of escalation.

The war on Iran has depleted a significant percentage of US munitions, costing tens of billions of dollars so far, and has lowered the US’ strategic petroleum reserves to its lowest level in over forty years. The closure of both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab Strait have blocked oil exports from Saudi Arabia completely, as well as other products that were previously traded through these major transit routes. This has rocked the global economy, sending Japan into a debt crisis.

As countries scramble to adjust to these new realities, there is no end in sight to the crisis. The Trump administration is running out of options. Crooke describes the fall of US military hegemony in the region and how this has changed the mood in Iran, saying, “It’s triggered something much more profound, a memory of Iran as a major civilizational power, as something that has been a dominant influence in the region for thousands of years.” He states that Iran is prepared for and expects a long war as negotiations with the United States are not a reliable route to peace.

Hedges and Crooke discuss the numerous and growing wars in the region from the state of Israel, where leaders are pushing to force Palestinians out of the West Bank ahead of the October election, to the increasingly fragile situation in Iraq, to the hot war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. No country in the region is untouched as even Egypt and Jordan are positioning troops along their borders. The fate of millions of people in West Asia is at stake as Washington scrambles to protect dollar hegemony and risks what Crooke refers to as a “slow tactical nuclear weapons strike,” the destruction of infrastructure that provides the energy and water necessary to sustain their lives.