The Chris Hedges Report Podcast (private feed for Ian.Dudley@optusnet.com.au)

Trump's War on Education - Read by Eunice Wong

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actorText originally published March 11, 2025I Stink Therefore I Am - by Mr. FishThe attacks on colleges and universities — Donald Trump’s administration has warned some 60 colleges that they could lose federal money if they fail to make campuses safe for Jewish students and is already pulling $400 million from Columbia University — has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism. Antisemitism is a smoke screen, a cover for a much broader and more insidious agenda. The goal, which includes plans to abolish the Department of Education and terminate all programs of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), is to turn the educational system, from kindergarten to graduate school, into an indoctrination machine.Totalitarian regimes seek absolute control over the institutions that reproduce ideas, especially the media and education. Narratives that challenge the myths used to legitimize absolute power — in our case historical facts that blemish the sanctity of white male supremacy, capitalism and Christian fundamentalism — are erased. There is to be no shared reality. There are to be no other legitimate perspectives. History is to be static. It is not to be open to reinterpretation or investigation. It is to be calcified into myth to buttress a ruling ideology and the reigning political and social hierarchy. Any other paradigm of power and social interaction is tantamount to treason.“One of the most significant threats that a class hierarchy can face is a universally accessible and excellent public school system,” writes Jason Stanley in “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future:”The political philosophy that feels this threat most acutely — and that unites hostility toward public education with support for class hierarchy — is a certain form of rightwing libertarianism, an ideology that sees free markets as the wellspring of human freedom. These kinds of libertarians oppose government regulation and virtually all forms of public goods, including public education. The political goal of this version of libertarian ideology is to dismantle public goods. The dismantling of public education is backed by oligarchs and business elites alike, who see in democracy a threat to their power, and in the taxes required for public goods a threat to their wealth. Public schools are the foundational democratic public good. It is therefore perfectly logical that those who are opposed to democracy, including fascist and fascist-leaning movements, would join forces with right-wing libertarians in undermining the institution of public education.I taught Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” in a New Jersey prison classroom. Zinn’s book is one of the primary targets of the far-right. Trump denounced Zinn in 2020 at the White House Conference on American History, saying, “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.”Zinn implodes the lies used to glorify the conquest of the Americas. He allows readers to see the United States through the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, the enslaved, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists, anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and the poor. He holds up the testimonies of Sojourner Truth, Chief Joseph, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. As I gave my lectures I would hear students mutter “Damn” or “We been lied to.”Zinn makes clear that organized militant forces opened up democratic space in American society. None of these democratic rights — the abolition of slavery, the right to strike, equality for women, Social Security, the eight-hour work day, civil rights — were given to us by a benevolent ruling class. It involved struggle and self-sacrifice. Zinn, in short, explains how democracy works.Zinn’s book was revered in my cramped prison classroom. It was revered because my students intimately understood how white privilege, racism, capitalism, poverty, police, the courts, and lies peddled by the powerful, deformed their communities and their lives. Zinn allowed them to hear, for the first time, the voices of their ancestors. He wrote history, not myth. He not only educated my students, but empowered them. I had always admired Zinn. After that class I too revered him.Zinn, when he was teaching at Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Atlanta, became involved in the civil rights movement. He served on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He marched with his students demanding civil rights. Spelman’s president was not amused.“I was fired for insubordination,” Zinn recalled. “Which happened to be true.”Education is meant to be subversive. It gives students the ability and the language to ask questions about reigning assumptions and ideas. It questions dogma and ideology. It can, as Zinn writes, “counteract the deception that makes the government’s force legitimate.” It lifts up the voices of the marginalized and oppressed to honor a plurality of perspectives and experiences. This leads, when education works, to empathy and understanding, a desire to right historical wrongs, to make society better. It fosters the common good.Education is not only about knowledge, it is about inspiration. It is about passion. It is about the belief that what we do in life matters. It is about, as James Baldwin writes in his essay “The Creative Process,” the ability to drive “to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”The rightwing attacks on programs such as critical race theory or DEI, as Stanley points out in his book, “intentionally distort these programs to create the impression that those whose perspectives are finally included — like Black Americans, for instance — are receiving some sort of illicit benefit or unfair advantage. And so they target Black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving. The ultimate goal is to justify a takeover of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy.”The integrity and quality of public higher education in America has been under assault for decades, as Ellen Schrecker documents in her book “The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s.”The protests on college campuses in the 1960s, Schrecker points out, saw “the enemies of the liberal academy” attack its “ideological and financial underpinnings.”Tuitions, once low, if not free, have soared, and with them tremendous student debt. State legislators and the federal government have slashed funding to public universities, forcing them to seek support from corporations and reduce most faculty to the status of poorly paid adjuncts, often lacking benefits, as well as job security. Nearly 75 percent of the instruction at colleges and universities is in the hands of adjuncts, part-time lecturers, and non-tenure-track full-time faculty, who have no hope of being granted tenure, according to the American Federation of Teachers.Public institutions, which serve 80 percent of the nation’s students, are chronically short of funding and basic resources. Higher education has evolved, even at major research universities, into vocational training, no longer a vehicle for learning but economic mobility. The assault sees elite schools, where tuition can run over $80,000 a year, cater to the wealthy and the privileged, locking out the poor and the working class.“The current academy functions primarily to replicate an increasingly inequitable status quo, it is hard to imagine how it could be restructured to serve a more democratic purpose without external pressure for something like universal free higher education,” Schrecker writes.Totalitarian societies do not teach students how to think but what to think. They churn out students who are historically and politically illiterate, blinded by an enforced historical amnesia. They seek to produce servants and apologists who conform, not critics and rebels. Liberal arts colleges, for this reason, do not exist in totalitarian states.PEN America has documented nearly 16,000 book bans in public schools nationwide since 2021, a number, PEN writes, “not seen since the Red Scare McCarthy era of the 1950s.” These books include titles such as “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker and “Maus,” the graphic novel on the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman.The most important human activity, as Socrates and Plato remind us, is not action, but contemplation, echoing the wisdom enshrined in eastern philosophy. We cannot change the world if we cannot understand it. By digesting and critiquing the philosophers and realities of the past, we become independent thinkers in the present. We are able to articulate our own values and beliefs, often in opposition to what these ancient philosophers advocated. A capacity to think, to ask the right questions, however is a threat to totalitarian regimes seeking to inculcate a blind obedience to authority.Unconscious civilizations are totalitarian wastelands. They replicate and embrace dead ideas, captured in José Clemente Orozco’s mural “The Epic of American Civilization” where skeletons in academic robes bring forth baby skeletons.“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda — before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world — lies in the ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”As bad as things are, they are about to get much worse. The nation’s educational system is being dragged into the slaughterhouse, where it will be dismembered and privatized. The corporations profiting from the charter schools system and online colleges — whose primary concern is certainly not with education — replace real teachers with non-unionized, poorly trained instructors. Students, rather than being educated, will be taught by rote and fed the familiar tropes of authoritarian playbooks — paeans to white supremacy, national purity, patriarchy and the nation’s duty to impose its “virtues” on others by force. This mass indoctrination will not only ensure ignorance, but obedience. And that is the point.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Photos Chris HedgesChris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. Hedges is also the author of 'Death of the Liberal Class' and is a columnist for Truthdig. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images)'The Pequot War'A colorized engraving shows a militia raised in Connecticut Colony as they attack and ultimately set fire to an encampment of Pequot indians in what became Mystic, Connecticut, 1637. (Photo by Stock Montage/Getty Images)TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-CPACTOPSHOT - Billionaire Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), holds a chainsaw reading "Long live freedom, damn it" as he shakes hands with Argentinian President Javier Milei at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20, 2025. The chainsaw was a present to Elon Musk from Argentina's President Javier Milei. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)US-POLITICS-TRUMP-HISTORYUS President Donald Trump speaks during the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives in Washington, DC, September 17, 2020. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)Protesters Being Hosed by Fireman(Original Caption) Firemen bear in on a group of African Americans who sought shelter in a doorway as hoses and dogs were used in routing anti-segregation demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, 3rd May 1963.Celebrity Reading Of "Voices Of A People's History Of The United States"LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 05: Author Howard Zinn, reads on stage at the Celebrity Reading Of "Voices Of A People's History Of The United States" held at the Japan America Theatre, on October,2005 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)James BaldwinAmerican novelist and activist James Baldwin (1924 – 1987), USA, October 1963. (Photo by Mario Jorrin/Pix/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)Police Point Revolver at Student DemonstratorsSAN FRANCISCO -- DECEMBER: Policeman with a drawn gun holds back anti-war demonstrators who attacked the Administration Building at San Francisco State College. They were also protesting the selection of S.I. Hayakawa as president of the school, December, 1968. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Bettmann/Corbis via Getty Images)The Epic of American CivilizationSource: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orozco_-_Dartmouth_c.JPG This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

The Last Chapter of the Genocide - Read by Eunice Wong

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actorText Originally posted Mar. 22, 2025This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity. Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets. Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.Since Tuesday, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, over 700 Palestinians have been killed, including 200 children. In one 24 hour period 400 Palestinians were killed. This is only the start. No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly sixteen months of incessant attacks were awful. But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the twentieth century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis.Oct. 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair. Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten.“Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz threatened:The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again…Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction.The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1,900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of March 18). Hamas has released a total of 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased.The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the sixteenth day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violates subsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken.Israel refused to honor the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on March 15 in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza.Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed March 18 while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed — Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza.The Trump White House is cheering on the slaughter. They attack critics of the genocide as “antisemites” who should be silenced, criminalized or deported while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel.Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved. It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.PhotosChris HedgesChris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. Hedges is also the author of 'Death of the Liberal Class' and is a columnist for Truthdig. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images)Food distribution in Gaza amid Israeli blockadeJABALIA, GAZA - MARCH 27: Crowd of starving Palestinians, including children, wait to receive food distributed by charity organizations amid Israel's blockade as the situation dramatically deteriorates in Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza on March 27, 2024. (Photo by Mahmoud Issa/Anadolu via Getty Images)Aftermath of Israeli army's withdrawal from Al-Shifa Hospital and its surroundingsGAZA CITY, GAZA - APRIL 1: An aerial view of damaged area around the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza on April 01, 2024. The Israeli army said Monday that it wrapped up its military operation at the Al-Shifa Hospital complex in Gaza City, following a 14-day siege and incursion that resulted in scores of casualties and hundreds of arrests. (Photo by Omar El Qattaa/Anadolu via Getty Images)TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICTTOPSHOT - Members of a Palestinian family rush out of a bombed house during Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City on October 9, 2023. (Photo by Eyad AL-BABA / AFP) (Photo by EYAD AL-BABA/AFP via Getty Images)The destruction in Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in GazaGAZA CITY, GAZA - JANUARY 28: A view of the destruction at Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, built by Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TKA) between the years 2011-2017 in Gaza City, Gaza on January 28, 2025. (Photo by Hamza Z. H. Qraiqea/Anadolu via Getty Images)Israeli airstrikes continue on the 17th day in GazaGAZA CITY, GAZA - OCTOBER 23: A woman holding a girl reacts after Israeli airstrikes hit Ridwan neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza on October 23, 2023. (Photo by Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images)TOPSHOT-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICTTOPSHOT - Journalists take cover behind cars as Israeli soldiers take position during clashes with Palestinian fighters near the Gevim Kibbutz, close to the border with Gaza on October 7, 2023. (Photo by Oren ZIV / AFP) (Photo by OREN ZIV/AFP via Getty Images)TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICTTOPSHOT - Displaced Palestinian children walk on a hill facing their makeshift camp in Rafah, on the southern Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt on January 19, 2024, amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)Custer Attacks Black Kettle's CampEngraving depicts the 7th U.S. Cavalry, under the command of General George Arnstrong Custer, as it attacks a camp of Cheyenne Native Americans under Chief Black Kettle along the Washita River, near what is now Cheyenne, Oklahoma, November 27, 1868. (Photo by Kean Collection/Getty Images)TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICTTOPSHOT - Palestinian families fleeing Gaza City and other parts of northern Gaza towards the southern areas, walk along a road on November 10, 2023 amid ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS / AFP) (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)ISRAEL-FRANCE-PALESTINIAN-POLITICS-DIPLOMACY-CONFLICTIsrael's Foreign Minister Israel Katz waits to receive France's Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem on October 7, 2024. (Photo by Ahmed GHARABLI / AFP) (Photo by AHMED GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images)Israeli snipers seen taking positions on the rooftop during...WEST BANK, KAFR QADDUM, QALQILYA, PALESTINE - 2019/04/19: Israeli snipers seen taking positions on the rooftop during the clashes. Palestinians clashed with Israeli army during demonstration in the village of Kafr Qaddum. (Photo by Bruno Thevenin/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)IDF Takes Delivery Of Long-Range DronePALMACHIM, ISRAEL - MARCH 7: In this photo provided by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), the IDF's first long-range drone, named the Heron, comes in for landing March 7, 2007 at Palmachim air base in central Israel. (Photo by IDF via Getty Images)Sahur meal of Ramadan in a shelter on Gaza as Israeli attacks continueGAZA - MARCH 12: A Palestinian family, who left their homes due to the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, has sahur (pre-dawn) meal with za'atar, pepper sauce, a few pieces of bread and tea during the holy month of Ramadan at Salah al-Din shelter center in Gaza on March 12, 2024. (Photo by Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)President Trump Meets With Visiting Israeli PM Netanyahu At The White HouseWASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 04: U.S. President Donald Trump, accompanied by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L), speaks during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on February 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. Netanyahu is the first foreign leader to visit Trump since he returned to the White House last month. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)Egyptian Prisoners in the Six-Day WarA truck full of captured Egyptian soldiers meets a convoy of Israeli troops near El Arish, Egypt. The Israelis had taken El Arish and are heading toward the Sinai Desert. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

The Purge of the Deep State and the Road to Dictatorship - Read by Eunice Wong

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actorText Originally posted Feb. 18, 2025One Mind - by Mr. FishThe Trump administration’s war with the deep state is not a purgative. It is not about freeing us from the tyranny of intelligence agencies, militarized police, the largest prison system in the world, predatory corporations or the end of mass surveillance. It will not restore the rule of law to hold the powerful and the wealthy accountable. It will not slash the bloated and unaccountable spending — some $1 trillion dollars — by the Pentagon.All revolutionary movements, on the left or the right, dismantle the old bureaucratic structures. The fascists in Germany and the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, once they seized power, aggressively purged the civil service. They see in these structures, correctly, an enemy that would stymie their absolute grip on power. It is a coup d'état by inches. Now we get our own.Rearguard battles — as in the early years of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — are taking place in the courts and media outlets openly hostile to Trump. There will be, at first, pyrrhic victories — the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were stalled by their own judiciaries and hostile press — but gradually the purges, aided by a bankrupt liberalism that no longer stands or fights for anything, ensures the triumph of the new masters.The Trump administration has expelled or fired officials who investigate wrongdoing within the federal government, including 17 inspectors general. Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as the FBI and Homeland Security, are being purged of those deemed hostile to Trump. Courts, as they are stacked with compliant judges, will be mechanisms for the persecution of state “enemies” and protection rackets for the powerful and the rich. The Supreme Court, which has granted Trump legal immunity, has already reached this stage.“The original purge after the Shah’s fall sought to rid the ministries of senior-level holdovers from the former regime and to provide the revolutionary faithful with jobs,” reads a declassified CIA memo, dated Aug. 28, 1980, on the then newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran. “The second wave of purges began last month after a series of Khomeini speeches. Lower-level individuals who had been part of the Shah’s bureaucracy, those with Western training, or those who were deemed to lack full Revolutionary fervor have been retired or fired on an increasingly large scale.”We are repeating the steps that led to the consolidation of power by past dictatorships, albeit with our own idiom and idiosyncrasies. Those naively lauding Trump’s hostility towards the deep state — which I concede did tremendous damage to democratic institutions, eviscerated our most cherished liberties, is an unaccountable state within a state and orchestrated a series of disastrous global interventions, including the recent military fiascos in the Middle East and Ukraine — should look closely at what is being proposed to take its place.The ultimate target for the Trump administration is not the deep state. The target is the laws, regulations, protocols and rules, and the government civil servants who enforce them, which hinder dictatorial control. Compromise, limited power, checks and balances and accountability are slated to be abolished. Those who believe that the government is designed to serve the common good, rather than the dictates of the ruler, will be forced out. The deep state will be reconstituted to serve the leadership cult. Laws and the rights enshrined in the Constitution will be irrelevant.“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump boasted on Truth Social and X.The chaos of the first Trump administration has been replaced with a disciplined plan to throttle what is left of America’s anemic democracy. Project 2025, the Center for Renewing America and the America First Policy Institute compiled in advance detailed blueprints, position papers, legislative proposals, proposed executive orders and policies.The legal cornerstone for this deconstruction of the state is the unitary executive theory, articulated by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissenting opinion in the case of Morrison v. Olson. In Scalia’s opinion, Article II of the Constitution means that everything not designated as legislative or judicial power must be executive power. The executive branch, he writes, can execute all the laws of the United States outside of everything that is not explicitly given to Congress or the judiciary in the Constitution. It is a legal justification for dictatorship.Although the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 does not use the term “unitary executive theory,” it advocates for policies that align with the theory’s principles. Project 2025 recommends firing tens of thousands of government employees and replacing them with loyalists. Key to this project is the weakening of labor protections and rights of governmental employees, making it easier for them to be fired at the behest of the executive branch. Russell Vought, the founder of Center for Renewing America and one of the key architects of Project 2025, has returned as director of the Office of Management and Budget, a position he also held in Trump’s first term.One of Trump’s final acts in his first term was signing the order “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.” This order removed employment protections from career government bureaucrats. Joe Biden rescinded it. It has been resurrected with a vengeance. It too has echoes from the past. The Nazis’ 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw political opponents and non-Aryans, including Germans of Jewish descent, dismissed from the civil service. The Bolsheviks likewise purged the military and civil service of “counter-revolutionaries.”The firing of over 9,500 federal workers — with 75,000 others accepting a less-than-ironclad deferred buyout agreement amid plans to cut 70 percent of staff from various government agencies — freezing of billions of dollars in funding and ongoing seizure of confidential data by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not about downsizing and efficiency.The cuts to federal agencies will do little to curb the rapacious spending by the federal government if the military budget — Congressional Republicans are calling for at least $100 billion in additional military spending during the next decade — remains sacrosanct. And while Trump wants to end the war in Ukraine, part of his effort to build an alliance with the autocrat in Moscow he admires, he backs the genocide in Gaza. The purge is about gutting oversight and protections. It is about circumventing thousands of statutes that set the rules for government operations. It is about filling federal positions with “loyalists” from a database compiled by the Conservative Partnership Institute. It is about enriching private corporations — including several owned by Musk — that will be handed lucrative government contracts.This deconstruction is also, I suspect, about increasing Musk’s cloud capital, his algorithmic and digital infrastructure. Musk plans to turn X into the “everything app.” He is launching “X Money,” an add-on to the social media app, which gives users a digital wallet “to store money and make peer-to-peer transfers.”A few weeks after the announcement of X Money’s partnership with Visa, DOGE requested access to classified Internal Revenue Service data, including millions of tax returns. The data includes Social Security numbers and addresses, details on how much individuals earn, how much money they owe, properties they own and child custody agreements. In the wrong hands, this information can be commercialized and weaponized.Musk is pursuing an “AI-first” agenda to increase the role of artificial intelligence (AI) across government agencies. He is building “a centralized data repository” for the federal government, according to Wired. Oracle founder, business associate of Elon Musk and longtime Trump donor Larry Ellison, who recently announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure plan alongside Trump, urged nations to move all of their data into “a single, unified data platform” so it can be “consumed and used” by AI models. Ellison has previously stated that an AI-based surveillance system will guarantee that “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on."Trump has, like all despots, long enemy lists. He has pulled security details from former officials from his previous administration, including retired Gen. Mark Milley, who was the highest-ranking officer in the military during Trump’s first term, and Mike Pompeo, who was Trump’s Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Secretary of State. He has revoked or threatened to revoke, the security clearances of President Biden and former members of his administration including Antony Blinken, the former secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the former national security adviser. He is targeting media outlets he deems hostile, blocking their reporters from covering news events at the Oval Office and evicting them from their working spaces in the Pentagon.These enemy lists will expand as larger and larger segments of the population realize they have been betrayed, widespread discontent becomes palpable and the Trump White House feels threatened.Once the new system is in place, laws and regulations will become whatever the Trump White House says they are. Independent agencies such as the Federal Election Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Reserve System will lose their autonomy. Mass deportations, the teaching of “Christian” and “patriotic” values in schools — Trump has vowed to “remove the radicals, zealots, and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education” — along with the gutting of social programs, including Medicaid, low-income housing, job training, and assistance for children, will create a society of serfs and masters. Predatory corporations, such as the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, will be licensed to exploit and pillage a disempowered public. Totalitarianism demands complete conformity. The result, to quote Rosa Luxemburg, is the “brutalization of public life.”The hollowed-out remnants of the old system — the media, the Democratic Party, academia, the shells of labor unions — will not save us. They mouth empty platitudes, cower in fear, seek useless incremental reforms and accommodation, and demonize Trump supporters regardless of their reasons for voting for him. They are fading into irrelevance. This ennui is a common denominator in the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. It engenders apathy and defeatism.The “Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day Holiday Establishment Act,” introduced by Congresswoman Claudia Tenny, is a harbinger of what lies ahead. The act would designate June 14 as a federal holiday to commemorate “Donald J. Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day.” The next step is choreographed state parades with oversized portraits of the great leader.Joseph Roth was one of the few writers in Germany to understand the attraction and inevitable rise of fascism. In his essay “The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind,” which addressed the first mass burning of books by the Nazis, he counseled fellow Jewish writers to accept that they had been vanquished: “Let us, who were fighting on the front line, under the banner of the European mind, let us fulfill the noblest duty of the defeated warrior: Let us concede our defeat.”Roth, blacklisted by the Nazis, forced into exile and reduced to poverty, did not delude himself with false hopes.“What use are my words,” Roth asked, “against the guns, the loudspeakers, the murderers, the deranged ministers, the stupid interviewers and journalists who interpret the voice of this world of Babel, muddied anyhow, via the drums of Nuremberg?”He knew what was coming.“It will become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe,” Roth, after going into exile in France in 1933, wrote to Stefan Zweig about the seizure of power by the Nazis. “The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.”But Roth also argued even if defeat was certain, resistance was a moral imperative, a way to defend one’s dignity and the sanctity of the truth.“One must write, even when one realizes the printed word can no longer improve anything,” he insisted.I am as pessimistic as Roth. Censorship and state repression will expand. Those with a conscience will become an enemy of the state. Resistance, when it happens, will be expressed in spontaneous eruptions which coalesce outside the established centers of power. These acts of defiance will be met with brutal state repression. But if we do not resist, we succumb morally and physically to the darkness. We become complicit in a radical evil. This, we must never allow.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Photos in videoChris HedgesChris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. Hedges is also the author of 'Death of the Liberal Class' and is a columnist for Truthdig. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images)Hitler And Goebbels Being Saluted(Original Caption) 10/31/1933.Berlin, Germany- Chancellor Adolf Hitler & Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (left) receiving the cheers and Nazi salutes of their followers in the Berlin sports Palast where they opened the campaign of Hitler's government to get the support of the citzens for their program for the nation.The ballots for this election do not contain names of candidates for this or that office.Lenin Statue Unveiled to CrowdOn the 9th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a large statue of Lenin is unveiled to a tremendous crowd in Leningrad.Ayatollah Khomeini Returns to Iran During Iranian RevolutionAyatollah Ruhollah Khomeini greets the crowd at Tehran University after his return to Iran from exile in France during the Iranian Revolution. (Photo by Alain Dejean/Sygma via Getty Images)Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Ginsburg Discuss First Amendment At ForumWASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 17: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia waits for the beginning of the taping of "The Kalb Report" April 17, 2014 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The Kalb Report is a discussion of media ethics and responsibility at the National Press Club held each month. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)Senate Holds Confirmation Hearing For OMB Director Nominee Russell VoughtWASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 15: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought arrives for a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on January 15, 2025 in Washington, DC. If confirmed as director, Vought is poised to play a pivotal role in implementing a plan to reduce both the size of the federal government and federal spending. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-CPACTOPSHOT - Elon Musk (L) holds a chainsaw alongside Argentine President Javier Milei during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20, 2025. The chainsaw was a present to Elon Musk from Argentina's President Javier Milei. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)Exchanging Bitcoin via smart phones - stock photo (Getty Images)F1 Grand Prix of Miami - Final PracticeMIAMI, FLORIDA - MAY 06: Red Bull Racing Team Principal Christian Horner talks with Larry Ellison in the Red Bull Racing garage during final practice ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Miami at Miami International Autodrome on May 06, 2023 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)President Trump Delivers Remarks, Announces Infrastructure Plan At White HouseWASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 21: Oracle co-founder, CTO and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison, accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 21, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump announced an investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and took questions on a range of topics including his presidential pardons of Jan. 6 defendants, the war in Ukraine, cryptocurrencies and other topics. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)Monitoring through AI holographic eye - stock photoAI holographic eye and data with network on a dark blue background.House Committee On Foreign Affairs Examines The Biden Administration's Afghanistan WithdrawalWASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 19: Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley awaits the start of a hearing with the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on March 19, 2024 in Washington, DC. The committee held the hearing to question retired U.S. Generals on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)The former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is seen speaking...AUVERS-SUR-OISE, FRANCE - 2025/01/09: The former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is seen speaking during the conference. He said that Iran has a battle-tested force, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), which has been confronting the regime for decades in Iran & was the primary victim of 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in Iran. A conference titled Iran: Organized Resistance, Key to Overthrow was held at the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) headquarters in Auvers-sur-Oise (north of Paris) to review the future US policy towards Iran. The conference was held in the presence of Mike Pompeo, former US Secretary of State and NCRI President-elect Maryam Rajavi. (Photo by Siavosh Hosseini/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)President Biden Meets With Indonesian President Widodo At White HouseWASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 13: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (R) listen as U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Indonesian President Joko Widodo in the Oval Office of the White House November 13, 2023 in Washington, DC. Biden and Widodo were expected to discuss a range of bilateral issues during their meeting. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)Luxemburg, Rosa - Politician(KPD), Social theorist, D *05.03.1870-15.01.1919+ - Klara Zetkin (2nd from left) and Rosa Luxemburg (3rd from left) on the way to a SPD-party convention in Magdeburg - 18.-24.09.1910 Vintage property of ullstein bild(Eingeschränkte Rechte für bestimmte redaktionelle Kunden in Deutschland. Limited rights for specific editorial clients in Germany.) Luxemburg, Rosa - Politician(KPD), Social theorist, D *05.03.1870-15.01.1919+ - Klara Zetkin (2nd from left) and Rosa Luxemburg (3rd from left) on the way to a SPD-party convention in Magdeburg - 18.-24.09.1910 Vintage property of ullstein bild (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)Rep. Claudia Tenney...UNITED STATES - SEPTEMBER 6: Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y, participates in the press conference calling on President Trump to declassify the Carter Page FISA applications on Thursday, Sept. 6, 2018. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)Stefan Zweig and Josef Roth in OstendeAUSTRIA - JANUARY 01: Stefan Zweig and Josef Roth in Ostende, Belgium. Photography. 1936. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) [Stefan Zweig (li.) und Joseph Roth in Ostende, Belgien. Photographie, 1936]Stefan Zweigcirca 1940: Stefan Zweig (1881 - 1942), Austrian-born British writer, poet, pacifist and translator of Ben Johnson, working on a piece with his wife and secretary Lotte Altmann. (Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

The Mafia State - Read by Eunice Wong

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actorKiss the Ring - by Mr. FishKiss the ring. Grovel before the Godfather. Give him tribute, a cut of the spoils. If he and his family get rich you get rich. Enter his inner circle, his “made” men and women, and you do not have to follow rules or obey the law. You can disembowel the machinery of government. You can turn us and the natural world into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. You can commit crimes with impunity. You can make a mockery of democratic norms and social responsibility. Perfidy is very profitable at first. In the long term it is collective suicide.America is a full blown kleptocracy. The demolition of the social and political structure, begun long before Trump, makes a few very, very rich and immiserates everyone else. Mafia capitalism always leads to a mafia state. The two ruling parties gave us the first. Now we get the second. It is not only our wealth that is being taken from us, but our liberty.Since the election of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, currently worth $394 billion, saw his wealth increase by $170 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, worth $254 billion, saw his net worth increase by nearly $41 billion.Tidy sums for kneeling before Moloch.At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by the slash and burn campaign of the Trump administration have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions, into Musk’s six companies, according to a review by The New York Times.The mafia state ignores legal constraints and regulations. It lacks external and internal control. It cannibalizes everything, including the ecosystem, until there is nothing left but a wasteland. It cannot distinguish between reality and illusion, which obscures and exacerbates gross incompetence. And then the hollowed-out edifice will collapse leaving in its wake a shell of a country with nukes. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. So did the Mayans and the sclerotic reign of the French monarch Louis XVI.In the final stages of decay for all empires, the rulers, focused exclusively on personal enrichment, ensconced in their versions of Versailles or The Forbidden City, squeeze the last drops of profit from an increasingly oppressed and impoverished population and ravaged environment.Unprecedented wealth is inseparable from unprecedented poverty.The more extreme life becomes, the more extreme ideologies become. Huge segments of the population, unable to absorb the despair and bleakness, severs itself from a reality-based universe. It takes comfort in magical thinking, a bizarre millennialism — one embodied for us in a Christianized fascism — which turns con artists, morons, criminals, charlatans, gangsters and grifters into prophets while branding those who decry the pillage and corruption into traitors. The rush towards self-immolation accelerates intellectual and moral paralysis.The mafia state makes no pretense of defending the common good. Trump, Musk and their minions are swiftly repealing executive orders regarding health, environmental and safety regulations, food assistance, as well as child care programs such as Head Start. They are fighting a court order to halt their dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has ensured that Americans have been reimbursed with more than $21 billion due to cancelled debts, financial compensation and other forms of consumer relief. They are abolishing the U.S. Agency for International Development. They are closing federal defenders’ offices, which provide legal representation to the poor. They have cut billions of dollars from the budget of the National Institutes of Health jeopardizing biomedical research and clinical trials. They have frozen permits for solar and wind projects, including sign-offs needed for projects on private land. They fired more than 300 staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency that manages our nuclear stockpile. They are gutting the workforce of the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and the United States Geological Survey.The mafia state, its blueprint contained in Project 2025, ignores the dire lessons from history of extreme social inequality, political disintegration, wanton ecological plunder and the evisceration of the rule of law.We are, of course, not naturally destined for freedom. It was two millennia before democracy reappeared in Europe after its collapse — largely because Athens became an empire — in ancient Greece. The mafia state, not democracies, may be the wave of the future, one where the wealthiest one percent of the globe owns some 43 percent of all global financial assets – more than 95 percent of the human race — while 44 percent of the planet’s population lives below the World Bank’s poverty line of less than $6.85 per day. These calcified regimes endure solely because of draconian systems of internal control, wholesale surveillance and the evisceration of civil liberties.We have at the same time wiped out 90 percent of the large fish such as cod, sharks, halibut, grouper, tuna, swordfish, and marlin and degraded or destroyed two thirds of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet. Lack of access to safe drinking water, and the resultant spread of infectious diseases, kills at least 1.4 million people annually — 3,836 per day — and also contributes to 50 percent of global malnutrition, according to the World Bank. Between 150 and 200 million children are impaired by malnourishment. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is well above the 350 parts per million that most climate scientists warn is the maximum level for sustaining life as we know it. By May of this year, atmospheric CO2 levels are forecast to reach 429.6 ppm, the highest concentration in over two million years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the measurement could reach 541 to 970 ppm by the year 2100. At that point huge parts of the planet, beset with high population density, droughts, soil erosion, freak storms, massive crop failures and rising sea levels, will be unfit for human existence.Clans, in the later period of the Easter Island civilization, competed to honor their ancestors by constructing larger and larger hewn stoner images, which demanded the last remnants of the timber, rope and manpower on the island. By the year 1400 the woods were gone. The soil had eroded and washed into the sea. The islanders began to fight over old timbers and were reduced to eating their dogs and soon all the nesting birds.The desperate islanders developed a magical belief system that the erected stone gods, the moai, would come to life and save them from disaster.The belief by Christian nationalists in the rapture, which does not exist in the Bible, is no less fantastic. These Christian fascists — embodied in Trump appointees such as Russell Vought, head of Trump’s Office of Budget and Management, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, nominated to be the ambassador to Israel — intend to use schools and universities, the media, the judiciary and the federal government as platforms to carry out indoctrination and enforce conformity.The followers of this movement defer to a leader they believe has been anointed by God. They embrace the illusion that the righteous will be saved, floating naked upwards into heaven, at the end of time and the secularists they despise will perish. This retreat into magical thinking, which is the foundation of all totalitarian movements, explains their suffering. It helps them cope with despair and anxiety. It gives them the illusion of security. It also ensures retribution against a long list of enemies — liberals, intellectuals, gays, immigrants, the deep state — blamed for their economic and social misery.Our millennialism is an updated version of the faith in the moai, the doomed Taki Onqoy revolt against the Spanish invaders in Peru, the Aztec prophecies of the 1530s and the Ghost Dance, which Native Americans believed would see the return of the buffalo herds and slain warriors rise alive from the earth to vanquish the white colonizers.This retreat into fantasy is what happens when reality becomes too bleak to be absorbed. It is the appeal of Trump. Of course, this time it will be different. When we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will be no new lands to pillage, no new peoples to exploit. We will be exterminated in a global death trap.Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” writes that once a society surrenders to the dictates of the market, once its mafia economy becomes a mafia state, once it succumbs to what he calls “the ravages of this satanic mill,” it inevitably leads to “the demolition of society.”The mafia state cannot be reformed. We must organize to break our chains, one-by-one, to use the power of the strike to cripple the state machinery. We must embrace a militant radicalism, one that offers a new vision and a new social structure. We must hold fast to moral imperatives. We must forgive mortgage and student debt, institute universal health care and break up monopolies. We must raise the minimum wage and end the squandering of resources and funds to sustain the empire and the war industry. We must establish a nationwide jobs program to rebuild the country’s collapsing infrastructure. We must nationalize the banks, pharmaceutical corporations, military contractors and transportation and embrace environmentally sustainable energy sources.None of this will happen until we resist.The mafia state will be brutal with any who revolt. Capitalists, as Eduardo Galeano writes, view communal cultures as “enemy cultures.” The billionaire class will do to us what it did to the radicals who rose up to form militant unions in the past. We had the bloodiest labor wars in the industrialized world. Hundreds of American workers were killed, tens of thousands were beaten, wounded, jailed and blacklisted. Unions were infiltrated, shut down and outlawed. We can’t be naïve. It will be difficult, costly and painful. But this confrontation is our only hope. Otherwise, we, and the planet that sustains us, are doomed.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

The Empire Self-Destructs - Read by Eunice Wong

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actorText Originally published Feb. 07, 2025And Then the World Blew Up - by Mr. FishThe billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths. Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement,. They are pulling out of the World Health Organization. They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza. They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal. They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under U.S. control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the U.S.The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg monarch, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.I spent two years researching and writing about the warped ideologues of those who have now seized power in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” Read it while you still can. Seriously.These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianized” state led by a divinely anointed leader. They openly admire Nazi apologists such as Rousas John Rushdoony, a supporter of eugenics who argues that education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches and Biblical law must replace the secular legal code, and Nazi party theorists such as Carl Schmitt. They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. They embrace bizarre conspiracy theories from the white replacement theory to a shadowy monster they call “the woke.” Suffice it to say, they are not grounded in a reality based universe.Christian fascists come out of a theocratic sect called Dominionism. This sect teaches that American Christians have been mandated to make America a Christian state and an agent of God. Political and intellectual opponents of this militant Biblicalism are condemned as agents of Satan.“Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and ‘Christian values’ form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all,” I noted in my book. “Labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and ‘homeland’ security.”The Christian fascists and their billionaire funders, I noted, “speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past.” They commit logocide, killing old definitions and replacing them with new ones. Words — including truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life and love — are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings. Life and death, for example, mean life in Christ or death to Christ, a signal of belief of unbelief. Wisdom refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the doctrine. Liberty is not about freedom, but the liberty that comes from following Jesus Christ and being liberated from the dictates of secularism. Love is twisted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those, such as Trump, who claim to speak and act for God.As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration. Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain. A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.The near-collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before the arrival of Trump. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana. The day is not far off when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, have already acquiesced to the inevitable.The question is not whether we go down, but how many millions of innocents we will take with us. Given the industrial violence our empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — Elon Musk claims is run by “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” — is an example of how these arsonists are clueless about how empires function.Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.When the U.S. offered to build the airport in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, investigative journalist Matt Kennard reports, it required that Haiti oppose Cuba’s admittance into the Organization of American States, which it did.Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.USAID, for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed “as a counterweight” to the “radical” Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia. It then funded organizations and initiatives, including training programs so Bolivian youth could be taught American business practices, once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.Kennard in his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire,” documents how U.S. institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The heavily funded aid programs, designed to bring down Morales, eventually led the Bolivian president to throw USAID out of the country.The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. But the inequality these programs facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.Our tax dollars, meanwhile, disproportionately funds the military, which is the iron fist that sustains the system of exploitation. The 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialization lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas. As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically.”“The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimizes theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”Foreign aid maintains sweatshops or “special economic zones” in countries such as Haiti, where workers toil for pennies an hour and often in unsafe conditions for global corporations.“One of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the U.S., is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labor and taxes and customs,” Kennard told me in an interview. “You open these sweatshops in the special economic zones. You pay the workers a pittance. You get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. The state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they're offshoring this production, doesn't benefit at all. That’s by design. The coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. It’s the corporations that benefit.”These same U.S. institutions and mechanisms of control, Kennard writes in his book, were employed to sabotage the electoral campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of the U.S. empire, for prime minister in Britain.The U.S. disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.Humanitarian aid, often described as “soft power,” is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by U.S. corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the U.S. military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child laborers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organizations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors general and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalize the leviathan they worship.They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the U.S. will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates. The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power”:Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit — witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties including due process, torture, militarized police, the massive prison system, militarized drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe