The Chris Hedges Report

• The West Serves as Israel's Police (w/ Richard Medhurst) | The Chris Hedges Report

  Richard Barnard, Sarah Wilkinson, Asa Winstanley and Richard Medhurst. These are some of the canaries in the coal mine for what is to come in the West as the region’s elite quickly becomes Israel’s international police. Medhurst joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his own experiences in the United Kingdom and Austria, where federal agents and police arrested him and searched his home under draconian counterterrorism laws. “I was just trying to tell the truth as best as I could with the facts that we had at that time and that's it. And I think they're trying to make an example out of me, definitely,” Medhurst tells Hedges. Medhurst points to Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 in the UK as one of the broad laws being used to silence people like him. “If they really want to, they can charge you for just saying a simple fact just because the fact is uncomfortable to the government or perhaps they can twist it into saying you're glorifying a group but it's not true,” he explains. For Medhurst, the UK pinned Schedule 12(1A) on him, which he explains “has never been used before, and escalated it straight to an arrest.” They then took his “fingerprints, [his] DNA, [and] they put [him] in jail for 24 hours.” Despite his accurate reporting, Medhurst says that the validity of what one says does not matter when it conflicts with the establishment line. “You're not glorifying anyone. You're just stating a fact, but they can still charge you. That's what's so dangerous about this law,” he said. Austrian security service agents still possess most of Medhurst’s journalistic tools. There is still no clear time table as to when he will get his tools back. As Medhurst explained: “It wasn't just my phone and my laptop, which I also use for work, which are my work tools, but …you know, hard drive adapters, things that don't even have data on them, analog microphones. Why would you do that to someone unless you're trying to make a point that you don't want them to continue their work?”

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• Israel’s Eradication of Gaza’s Healthcare System (w/ Dr. Feroze Sidhwa) | The Chris Hedges Report

  If anyone can witness the genocide in Gaza with utmost clarity, it would be medical professionals working there. Their accounts continue to be as harrowing as those of journalists and Gazans themselves, stripped of rhetoric and left with only raw truth. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a general, trauma and critical care surgeon in California, has been to Gaza twice and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. “There is no serious health system in Gaza anymore,” Sidhwa tells Hedges. Instead, what’s left of hospitals are mere buildings filled with medical professionals stripped of the equipment vital to saving lives, refugees seeking anything more than tents and endless streams of people barely surviving the constant onslaught of bombs. Sidhwa explains the gut wrenching details of treating people mangled by bombs, children shot in the head and the inability to save people because of the lack of basic equipment. While describing the treatment of a six-year-old boy with severe shrapnel injuries, Sidhwa explains, “In the flagship hospital of any third world country, this kid could have survived. But at Nasser [Medical Complex], we don't have the right types of pressures, the right types of critical care medications and even just simple things like a pediatric ventilator, which just wasn't available. So he died 12 hours later.” The situation in Gaza, as Sidhwa details, is morbidly bleak: “I don't know how women who need C-sections will get them. I don't know how people who even just have regular role general surgery problems will be able to get them. I don't know how a kid that has asthma will be able to get albuterol. I don't know how somebody with heart disease will be able to get their medications. Just leaving aside the trauma. And then on top of that…the whole population is being starved. Literally no food has gone into Gaza for six weeks.”

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• Emptying Gaza (w/ Norman Finkelstein) | The Chris Hedges Report

  Israel, both materially and rhetorically, has made their intent to destroy the Palestinian people clear. One of the most renowned and courageous Middle East scholars, Norman Finkelstein, has assiduously documented the Palestinian plight for decades and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. Finkelstein and Hedges assess the current state of the genocide in Palestine as well as how the media and the universities have all but abandonded their principles in servitude to the Zionist agenda. Finkelstein makes clear the gravity of Israel’s unprecedented actions: “If you take any metric—number of UN workers killed, number of medics killed, number of journalists killed, proportion of civilians to combatants killed, proportion of children killed, proportion of women and children killed—if you take any metric, Israel for the 21st century is in a class all its own.” Israel’s use of propaganda and strategically timed attacks—often lining up with other major world events so as to avoid media scrutiny—has muddied political outlook of the genocide into one of war and defense rather than ethnic cleansing. The American media has done its part to feed these narratives as well. “What is going to prove that Hamas has been defeated?” Finkelstein asks. “I know what's going to prove it: when there's no one left in Gaza. That will be the proof.”

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• The Economics of a Dying Empire (w/ Richard Wolff) | The Chris Hedges Report

  “These are levels of craziness that are part of the decline I suspect of all empires when they consume themselves,” Professor Richard Wolff says of America’s current situation in the outset of Donald Trump’s second term. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the history and rationale behind the decisions made by Trump and how it relates to the decline of the US empire. From tariffs to deregulation, Wolff says it is all erratic, uncoordinated and unpredictable, which are tangible signs of America’s decay. “You cannot tell people what a tariff will do. The reason is a tariff sets off a whole series of reactions. You can't know them in advance. [People and governments] will all respond, but how they do it, it's like knowing in advance the chess move: you have some probabilities, maybe, but you never know,” Wolff tells Hedges.   Wolff explains how historic economic suffering has led to the protections and regulations Trump is now dismantling. China and the expanding BRICS bloc also represent a growing challenge to U.S. global hegemony—a strategic shift that has significantly influenced the Trump administration’s policies and reflects today’s unique geopolitical tensions. Wolff says, “The United States is different now from what it has been for a century, because we really have an economic competitor.”

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• The Secret Military History of the Internet (w/ Yasha Levine) | The Chris Hedges Report

  The internet, from its inception, was created to be a tool of mass surveillance. It was developed first as a counterinsurgency tool for the Vietnam War and the rest of the Global South, but like many devices of foreign policy naturally it made its way back to U.S. soil. Yasha Levine, in his book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, chronicles the linear history of the internet’s birth at the Pentagon to its now ubiquitous use in all aspects of modern life. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to explain the reality of the internet’s history.   Levine describes the early concept of the internet as “an operating system for the American empire, an information system that could collect all this data and that could provide useful, meaningful information to the managers of the world.”    This was understood by university students with close proximity to the internet project as well as domestic critics. Far from its coy, modern day interpretation of the internet as a mere communication technology, Levine makes clear the originator’s plans as well as the surprising resistance to them that followed. Levine explains that at the height of the Vietnam War, when much of America’s youth were protesting and seeking to understand the American empire, people were aware of the large amounts of capital it took to purchase and run computers, capital that only the most powerful in America had access to.   “This history or this understanding [was repressed] and people have been propagandized to view computers in a totally different light, in a benign light, in a utopian light, which was not the case in the 1950s, in the 1960s, in the 1970s and even up into the 1980s,” Levine tells Hedges.   Today, the internet’s omnipresence vindicates the skepticism of those early skeptics. Even the supposedly privacy-advocating technologies developed in response to the internet project, Levine explains, came out of the Pentagon for military purposes. Levine reveals the Tor browser, Signal messaging app and other tools that were meant to help ordinary people hide themselves from American surveillance spies were actually developed to help the spies these same applications claim that they are  subverting.   “Jacob Appelbaum and Roger Dingledine, who was also the head of the Tor project back then…these guys were on the payroll of the US government.”

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