Skip to content

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges: Occupy And Building Power Now To Confront Autocracy

October 4, 2021 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , ,
In his recent article, "America's Fate: Oligarchy or Autocracy," Chris Hedges writes that bankrupt liberals have sold out to the oligarchic class to try to prevent an autocracy from rising but that is actually creating the conditions for autocracy. Hedges speaks with Clearing the FOG about the lessons from the Occupy movement - he was involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City and the occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC in 2011 - and why we must build a militant movement now to confront and hold power accountable. He explains how power works, including the role of politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden in protecting the interests of the wealthy classes. 

America’s Fate: Oligarchy Or Autocracy

September 28, 2021 Chris Hedges, ScheerPost.com. , , ,
The competing systems of power in the United States are divided between oligarchy and autocracy. There are no other alternatives. Neither are pleasant. Each have peculiar and distasteful characteristics. Each pays lip service to the fictions of democracy and constitutional rights. And each exacerbates the widening social and political divide and the potential for violent conflict. The oligarchs from the establishment Republican Party, figures such as Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, George and Jeb Bush and Bill Kristol, have joined forces with the oligarchs in the Democratic Party to defy the autocrats in the new Republican Party who have coalesced in cult-like fashion around Donald Trump or, if he does not run again for president, his inevitable Frankensteinian doppelgänger. 

On Contact: Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, Part 1

September 26, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
On the show, the first of a two-part interview, Chris Hedges discusses with Professor David Harvey the reconfiguration of global capitalism, the contradictions of neoliberalism, the financialization of power, the commodification of spectacle, rate versus mass of surplus value, and other issues fundamental to economic theory. David Harvey, distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is a leading theorist in the field of urban studies. Library Journal calls Professor Harvey “one of the most influential geographers of the later 20th century.” Professor Harvey earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge University and was formerly professor of geography at Johns Hopkins, a Miliband fellow at the London School of Economics, and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford.

On Contact: Inverted Totalitarianism

September 12, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
In his books ‘Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism’ and ‘Politics and Vision’, a massive survey of Western political thought that his former student Cornel West calls “magisterial,” Wolin lays bare the causes behind the decline of American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the steady devolution of American democracy and in his last book, ‘Democracy Incorporated’, wrote: “One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic, surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.” 

On Contact: WWII America’s Historical Myths

August 15, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , ,
On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the historical myths about World War II with Danny Sjursen, Retired US Army Major, author and historian. Knowledge, or what the historian Howard Zinn called the knowledge industry, is a vital form of power. Yes, the ruling elite’s monopoly on force is a direct form of power, but just as important, as Zinn points out, is the ability to shape perceptions about our origins and identity, inculcating beliefs and narratives that legitimate and often glorify the centers of power. The knowledge industry, which consists of universities, colleges, schools and the mass media, Zinn argues, is not primarily about truth but deception. Truth is dangerous. It implodes the myths and lies used to legitimate the status quo and the ruling elite’s monopoly on violence.

On Contact: American Coup d’Etat

August 8, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
Dennis Kucinich served as a US representative from Ohio from 1997 to 2013, losing his seat after the state Democratic Party machine redrew Ohio’s 10th Congressional district, a redistricting designed expressly to oust him, although he is a Democrat, from his seat, which is what happened. He was also the 53rd mayor of Cleveland. As mayor he took on the entrenched power of the big banks and business interests, along with the mob, which controlled City Hall. His anti-corruption campaign included battling back against the efforts to privatize the city’s municipal electric utility, a scheme that would have jacked up utility rates for the city’s residents and netted millions in profits for the banks and the privately owned Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company.

On Contact: The Trial Of Ghislaine Maxwell

August 2, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
On the show this week Chris Hedges talks to investigative journalist Nick Bryant about the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. The British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, held at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center and denied bail, will be tried this fall on sex-trafficking charges for allegedly recruiting and grooming teenage girls to engage in sex acts with the late American financier Jeffrey Epstein. She is reputed to have procured teenage girls for Epstein to abuse between 1994 and 2004 and allegedly paid the girls hundreds of dollars in cash after each encounter with Epstein. Epstein died in a New York jail cell in August 2019 in what authorities ruled was a suicide, although a doctor hired by Epstein’s family to conduct an independent autopsy has disputed that conclusion.

On Contact: The Life And Work Of Susan Sontag

July 25, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the writer and intellectual Susan Sontag with her biographer Benjamin Moser. Susan Sontag, who wrote about art, feminism, politics, celebrity, style, homosexuality, illness, fascism, and war, was that rare species in American society – an intellectual celebrity. She traveled to Cuba as a naive political pilgrim, North Vietnam during the war, now older and more skeptical, and was in Germany when the Berlin Wall was breached and eradicated as a barrier between East and West Germany. She was in Sarajevo when the city was being hit with hundreds of shells a day and under constant sniper fire from the besieging Bosnian Serbs. An average of 10 people were killed in the city daily.

On Contact: Pandemic Two

July 18, 2021 Chris Hedges, On Contact. , , ,
On the show this week, in the second of a two-part interview, Chris Hedges continues his discussion with philosopher Slavoj Zizek about the social, political and psychological consequences of prolonged lockdowns and social distancing, as well as the mass illness and death caused by the pandemic. In his new book, 'Pandemic 2: Chronicles of a Time Lost,' Zizek argues the failure of global capitalism to cope with the pandemic presages, he fears, a systems collapse, a dress rehearsal for a frightening new form of authoritarianism in which the world is starkly divided between the elites and the rest of us. "...[T]he return to normality thus becomes the supreme psychotic gesture, the sign of collective madness," Zizek writes.

On Contact: Worker Cooperatives

July 11, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses worker cooperatives with Niki Okuk, activist and founder of the worker cooperative Rco Tires. Okuk founded Rco Tires in 2012. They've since recycled more than 300 million pounds of rubber, diverting 70 million gallons of oil from landfills, and with 16 employees, making it one of southern California's largest sustainability plants. Rco Tires creates alternative uses for trash tires, turning them into new products. Because of Okuk's progressive hiring and management practices, the cooperative provides stable jobs for local black and Latino residents who struggle to find employment because of past criminal convictions or their legal status.

Kucinich Memoir Is A Moving Account Of The Battle Against Corporate Power

July 9, 2021 Chris Hedges, ScheerPost.com. , , ,
The Division of Light and Power,” by Dennis Kucinich, like Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” is a gripping, moving and lucidly written account of the hidden mechanisms of corporate power in the United States and what happens when these corporate interests are challenged. It is essential reading, especially as we face an intensified corporate assault, done in the name of fiscal necessity following the financial wounds imposed by the pandemic, to seize total control of all public assets.   Kucinich warns that this assault is more than the seizure of public assets for private gain.  These corporate forces, which function as a shadow government in Washington and cities across the country, threaten to achieve a monolithic lock on all forms of power and extinguish our anemic democracy.

On Contact: Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man And The Gospel Of Jesus’ Wife

July 5, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to journalist and author, Ariel Sabar, about his new book Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. Sabar’s book exposes much about the bankruptcy of contemporary theology and the yearning by academics to be lionized by the mass media and popular culture, even at the expense of truth. In 1945 a collection of early Christian codices, or books, in fourth century A.D. script, were discovered at Nag Hammadi near the Nile, about 300 miles south of Cairo. The 52 works were translated from earlier Greek texts, many of them written by Gnostic sectarians. The Gnostics were condemned as heretics by the early church and their writings were banned.

Chris Hedges Speaks On ‘American Sadism’

July 4, 2021 Chris Hedges, ScheerPost.com. , , ,
Sadism defines nearly every cultural, social, and political experience in the United States. It is expressed in the unchecked greed of an oligarchic elite that has seen its wealth increase during the pandemic by $1.1 trillion while the country has suffered the sharpest rise in its poverty rate in more than 50 years.  It is expressed in the wanton killings by police of unarmed citizens in cities such as Minneapolis. It is expressed in the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA at secret black sites, Guantánamo Bay, and our prisons at home. It is expressed in the separation of children from their undocumented parents, where they are held as if they were dogs in a kennel. It is expressed in the pornification of American society, where women are tortured, beaten, degraded, and sexually violated, often by numerous men...

On Contact: ‘Except For Palestine’

May 23, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses why American liberals refuse to speak out about the crimes the Israeli apartheid state carries out against the Palestinians, with political analyst and author Mitchell Plitnick. Mitchell Plitnick's new book, with co-author Marc Lamont Hill, is: Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. “Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war,” wrote Hedges in his recent commentary, Israel, the Big Lie for Scheerpost. “Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel.

On Contact: Cancel Culture

April 25, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , ,
On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses cancel culture with Dan Kovalik, author and associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. Dan Kovalik is the author of ‘Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture’.
«123456789»
assetto corsa mods

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here
Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.