The Chris Hedges Report

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Oftentimes the idea of “wokeness” or “woke” ideology, whether calling it as such or acknowledging its existence, can be thought of as coinage of the right wing. Christian Parenti, professor at John Jay College, journalist and author, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to make the case that what he and many others define as “woke” is actually a weapon used to further suppress marginalized people, prevent the awareness of class politics and class struggle and further divide the working class.

“What a lot of the story comes down to,” Parenti tells Hedges, “[is] detaching class struggle from cultural struggles. And what woke is, is the continuation of all of the goals of the Enlightenment left, but in the realm of culture war, in the realm of cultural struggles, and that material conflict is increasingly elided and erased.”

Although the ideas behind “wokeness” attempt to foster a more egalitarian and inclusive society, it has been corrupted by the system itself and thus weaponized. “Woke ideology, wokeness, serves as an armory, an arsenal for the professional managerial class to draw weaponry and armor from in their increasingly Hobbesian war of all against all for posts,” Parenti remarks. For him, this is crucial to understanding the material incentive behind what wokeness stands for now as it continually appears in corporate and academic sectors. 

“There are real material stakes for people, and one way a professional manager/member of this class can get ahead is by using these tropes to advance themselves and defend themselves,” he argues.

Its prevalence in today’s society, Parenti asserts, has cynically manifested as a reaction to corporations historically having to shell out millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements for discrimination and unethical cultural practices. Nowadays, in contrast, companies are very careful and even promote this ideology to appeal to marginalized groups—and ultimately raise their bottom line. 

Enterprises like the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation, Parenti argues, may present themselves as proponents of social justice but in reality “[they] are not established to and are not seeking to overthrow, undo or transform American capitalism. They are fundamentally about legitimizing and perpetuating it,” he says. It turns out that wokeness is only their latest tool in doing so. 

Since the turn of the 21st century, the world has become deeply familiar with the global “war on terror.” Framed by the West’s ostensibly patriotic and “civilized” political narrative that conveniently expands their national security power and geopolitical interests, it also pins Muslims as savage, and Islam as a barbaric religion of people that want nothing but the destruction of the West.

This perception of Islam—and its followers—as wicked and violent, spread wide and far, especially in the United States, Great Britain and other allied countries. This doesn’t happen without the help of the media and influential public figures, who shape public opinion and reinforce stereotypes.

Peter Oborne, a renowned British journalist and author, has done much work throughout his career to challenge these myths that marginalize an already historically repressed group. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his latest book, “The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong About Islam.”

“It's perfectly okay to smear Muslims in Britain,” Oborne tells Hedges. “Because that press arena is captured by people who regard Muslims as second class, third class… citizens, if not barbarians, there's no mainstream corrective to a very dangerous narrative, and it's getting more and more frightening.”

Oborne, for the work he has done on this issue, has himself experienced the consequences of Islamophobia. While working at The Daily Telegraph, Oborne’s editors refused to publish a lengthy investigation he conducted that exposed how “senior Muslim figures in [Britain] were having their bank accounts just taken away from them without any reason given.” 

When he found out that “one of the [paper’s] advertiser [was] the HSBC bank” and that they were one of the banks closing the accounts, he left his post. Soon after, when he wrote a book about Boris Johnson’s “lies and the collaboration, the complicity, [and] the client journalism,” it marked the end of Oborne’s career in mainstream journalism. 

Yet the Islamophobia that accelerated after 9/11 has deep roots in Western thought. To truly understand its prevalence in Western society, “you have to go back to the Pilgrim fathers.” Fanatic religionism led the pilgrims to believe they were God’s chosen people, and enabled them to slaughter the Natives much like Israel is doing to the Palestinians today. Even the modern families who have furthered the goals of the Israeli state, such as the Bush dynasty, have distant relatives such as a pastor named George Bush from the 1840s that advocated for Christian Zionism and using the Jewish people as sacrificial lamb for a larger prophetic envisionment of Christianity. 

Oborne takes Hedges on a deep historical journey, explaining that Islamophobia and the persecution of Muslims is far from a new phenomenon. By understanding their origins, Oborne helps put today’s tragedies, such as the genocide in Gaza and the riots in the UK, in crucial and critical perspective.

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In his 2010 book, Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges wrote “The fate of the liberal class is tragic. It has been annihilated by the corporate state it supported, while it willingly silenced radical thinkers and iconoclasts who could have rescued it.”

There has been no time in American politics where this phenomenon has been more clear than today. In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, host Chris Hedges talks to comedian Jimmy Dore about his reporting at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. The pair find the event illustrative of the past few decades of liberalism in American society, namely that its entire concept is not “reality based.”

The values the liberal class arguably once cherished have been completely abandoned by today’s neoliberal Democratic Party, and its contradictions ring loud and clear in everything involving Kamala Harris’s campaign to the media’s coverage of it. While on the one hand, the Democratic Party rhetorically clings to its past as the party of progressivism and inclusion, Kamala Harris boasted at the DNC about wanting to make the US military the “most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Not many people capture the hypocrisy and demise of the liberal class as well as comedian and host of The Jimmy Dore Show, Jimmy Dore. While Dore felt the 2016 DNC was an event filled with hope and revolutionary energy after the emergence of Bernie Sanders, he described this year in more unfortunate terms: “I was just surrounded by zombie, brain-dead, brainwashed delegates who didn't care. They treated going to the convention like they were going to.

And it was, honestly, it was downright depressing.” Once a believer in the “Bernie or Bust” movement, Dore has become more radicalized since the fall of the progressive movement within the Democratic Party. While he’s not sure any solution is possible, he believes revolution is the only answer:

“And so it's going to take a real revolution and it's going to have to look something like what happened up in Canada during COVID with the truckers and something that Christian Smalls did on Staten Island. [He] was a black guy who organized a bunch of Trump voters against the establishment [and] Amazon. And so it's going to have to come from the ground up like that. We're going to have to shut down capitalism to…have even a chance to take over our government and bring it back to the people.”

“Genocide is the moral imperative of our era,” declares Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in this episode of The Chris Hedges Reports as she continues her campaign for the U.S. presidency. Joined by running mate, Professor Butch Ware, the two make their case as to why they should earn the vote of every disenfranchised American, stuck in the woes of personal domestic struggles and the atrocities committed abroad on their behalf by a self-serving empire.

Stein’s view is clear when looking at how the election is shaping up: “Forget the lesser evil, there is no lesser evil. You have two genocidal candidates, one conducting genocide right now and the other promising to finish the job.”

Stein and Ware hammer down that while the military-industrial complex may seem like a foreign policy issue, tackling it is key to unlocking solutions at the domestic level. Stein says the bloated defense budget, which reaches into the trillions of dollars when all expenditures are accounted for, is one of the primary obstacles she aims to take down. “This is why we are not providing for the health care, the housing, the education, getting people out of debt, dealing with the climate emergency, ending the carceral state and having a restorative system of justice and addressing the issues of poverty and hopelessness, which drive crime in the first place,” she explains.

Ware remarks that the dynamic between Americans who feel trapped into voting for Democrats out of fear of Trump is deeply toxic, fueled by the narcissism of the candidates themselves. “As soon as you sign on the dotted line, they get right back to business, murdering people with your tax dollars, putting it in their pocket, letting your neighborhoods dissolve and break down,” Ware tells Hedges.

Ware makes clear that there is a choice for resistance and dissent on the ballot in November: “We have to end this toxic cycle of abuse, because they have people spellbound into thinking that there is no way to resist, but you absolutely can resist right now by voting Green.”

Modern borders represent mere lines in the sand when understanding the deep history behind the forces that drew them. In the contemporary Middle East, nations such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and most notably Palestine, cannot be fully understood without delving into the region's intricate past—especially the pivotal role of the Ottoman Empire’s influence. Eugene Rogan, the Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford, joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his book, “The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East,” and explain how the modern geopolitical makeup of the region came to be.

While not the sole source of all conflict in the modern Middle East, studying the Ottoman Empire is essential for understanding both the region and the European powers that dominated during that era. World War I, in particular, marked a pivotal moment in the formation of modern nation-states. Britain, Russia, and France emerged as key beneficiaries of the early 20th-century battles that reshaped global power dynamics.

Rogan provides an in-depth analysis of the complex relationships between monarchs, religious leaders, ambassadors, and consuls, highlighting their crucial roles in shaping the region's historical developments. His detailed and thorough examination provides a clear picture of how the region evolved as a result of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

Rogan tells Hedges, “Britain had maintained that the preservation of the Ottoman Empire was in the best interest of the British Empire, that it was a buffer state that bottled up Russia, kept it out of the Mediterranean world, and that, were this Ottoman State to collapse, all that geo-strategic territory in the Mediterranean world would soon become the stuff of European rivalries that could lead to the next major European war.”

On the question of Palestine, Rogan notes, “Protestants in Britain, Catholics in France, Orthodox in Russia, all wanted a claim to the holy cities and the holy places of Palestine, and so Palestine was painted a kind of brown and internationalized.”

Rogan delves into the Zionist project, tracing its origins through collaboration with the British Empire and examining its evolving connection with the United States. He highlights the growing involvement of the U.S. in the region, which it thrusted itself into at the close of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st.

The Israel lobby wields some of the most influence over American politics than any lobbying group in Washington. As Ilan Pappé, the Israeli historian, professor and author, and host Chris Hedges detail in this latest episode of The Chris Hedges Report, the lobby’s rise to power consisted of diverging ideological factions uniting in pursuit of their shared interests in controlling the land of historic Palestine. The history and manifestation of this systemic corruption of the Zionist lobby, hyper-dependent on coercion and total control, is thoroughly described in Pappé’s new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic. 

Through Pappé’s historical accounts and analysis, he dispels the fabrication that Israel was created to protect the Jews of the world from systemic oppression. Those first involved in lobbying for Zionism were separated into two ideological groups; the religious Zionists, who actually believed in a messianic connection to historic Palestine, as well as protecting marginalized Jews, and those who the Israeli author describes as “more cynical”; the imperialists, or those “who saw the theological ideas as a good pretext for fulfilling more secular political roles…they wanted not only Palestine, but also Syria and Egypt to expand the British empire.” 

Even the Zionists who sincerely wanted to help the oppressed Jews of the world, however, found themselves working with antisemitic bigots to achieve their goal. As Pappé states, 

“One of the major motives for leaders of the Jewish community in Britain to support the idea of the Jews going from Russia to Palestine was the fear that these Jews would come to London.”  

This sordid partnership highlights the way that the Zionist lobby has functioned since its inception. Pappé describes it as a system that is “a solution for a certain group of Jews that is developed by a certain group of Jews who are not part of that project, but that project serves other interests that they have.”   

This idea is embodied in the current state of Israel, and the lobby’s obsession with controlling its “allies,” as opposed to actually pursuing policies and partnerships that benefit it: 

“As we’ve seen, the way AIPAC decided who Israel’s enemies were often had very little to do with the actual policies, which were frequently to Israel’s advantage–they decided simply based on how obedient an administration was to the lobby. America’s endorsement of the Oslo Accords was not a milestone on the road to peace for AIPAC, but a testimony to its own failure to influence America’s policy.” 

It is through this endemic toxicity that Israel may very well be leading itself, and Zionism with it, to its demise.

A significant justification for Israel’s existence relies on the narrative that, because of the inherent and rabid antisemitism of Arabs and Islam, the Jews of the Middle East never had a home. Without Israel, it is said, these Jews would be left on the fringes of Middle Eastern societies, marginalized for an irrational prejudice against their religion and ethnicity. 

Historian and author Avi Shlaim details in his book, “Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew,” through personal experience and historical analysis the lies that this narrative is constructed upon.

“There was no history of antisemitism in the Arab world. Antisemitism is a European disease,” he tells Chris Hedges. “In the 1930s, antisemitism was exported from Europe to Iraq in particular, and it's striking that there was no antisemitic literature in Arabic. So antisemitic literature had to be translated from European languages into Arabic…” 

Shlaim was born in Iraq, where a thriving, educated and economically diverse society existed for Jews. He describes how “It took Europe much longer than it took the Arab world to accept the Jews as equal citizens,” and how “[Jews] were very much part of the fabric of Iraqi society. We are not a foreign body. There were thriving Jewish communities throughout the Arab world, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, in Egypt, throughout North Africa, but the Jewish community in Iraq was the most successful, the most prosperous, and also the best integrated of all the Jewish communities.” 

It was Israel, according to Shlaim, that brought the divide and plight of the Jews in the Middle East. Shlaim mourns a time where his family experienced peaceful coexistence: “Muslim [and] Jewish coexistence was not an abstract idea. It wasn't a distant dream. It was the everyday reality.”

Shlaim’s accounts also turn parts of his memoir into an investigative account, diving into incontrovertible evidence he discovered that reveals false flag atrocities committed by Israelis against Jews themselves in the name of reinforcing the Jewish state.

“[T]his false flag operation,” Shlaim said, referring to the 1950 and 1951 Israeli bombings of Iraqi Jews, “is a terrible indictment of the State of Israel, because Israel was created to provide a safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution. Israel was not established in order to destabilize and frighten and create insecurity for the Jews of the diaspora.”

“The real upheaval,” Shlaim recounts, “ happened when Israel was created in 1948 and as my mother said to me, when Israel was created, everything was turned upside down.”

The latest chapter of Israel's occupation of Palestine has raged on for nearly the last year, marking a significant shift in the decades-long clash that has already initiated the demystification of the mythology behind Israel. Truth continues to be the first casualty of war in this particular struggle, as it has been massacred, through the killings of journalists in Gaza and the censorship of dissidents, throughout the conflict along with the Palestinians themselves. Unfortunately for Israel, however, the state’s lies and brutality this time are too severe to escape the eyes of the global stage, and even its own people. 

As David Hearst, Editor-in-Chief of the Middle East Eye, states in this interview: 

“There are huge tensions in Israel about how the war was prosecuted, particularly the central tension is the obvious fact that Israel has been killing its own hostages through military action, obviously. And the narrative from Israel that Israel is pushing Hamas to release hostages is nonsense. It is the exact opposite. The main killer of the hostages has been the bombing campaign. So there is a huge protest about getting the hostages home. And getting the hostages home means ending the war, basically.”

Hearst joins host Chris Hedges on the second episode of The Chris Hedges Report to offer a clear and direct explanation of the complexities surrounding the conflict, providing essential context on what to anticipate moving forward.

“What we've got to get really clear about is that our idea of left and right, or our idea of moderates and extremists, does not translate to Israeli realities. And when it comes to killing as many Palestinians as they can, everyone is up for it,” Hearst tells Hedges.

The brazen violence that journalists like Hearst and others have reported on is pulling Israel’s mask of nobility down, and revealing its true face as the “ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been.” 

Hearst claims that “there is a blood lust going through Israel.” He proves this point through stories of the brutality, demonstrating how for Israel “there's absolutely no attempt to distinguish between someone carrying a gun or a rocket launcher and someone carrying a bottle of water.” In other words, all Palestinians are automatically “terrorists” — guilty of crimes punishable by death — to the Israelis. 

This indiscriminate tactic of killing has exposed Israel for what it truly is. The livestreamed suffering of the Palestinians, and the violence of the Israelis, is too great for the apartheid regime to hide once the genocide is over. Israel will become synonymous with its victims, just as the violent regimes of the past have.

In this first episode of the new and independent iteration of The Chris Hedges Report, Palestinian novelist Atef Abu Saif and Hedges explore Saif's experiences under siege by the Israelis in Gaza, and the meaning behind them, in a substantive and powerful conversation. Through it, the texture of the genocide and the damage it inflicts on its victims is captured, as Saif’s eloquence and vulnerability reveals the weight of the tragedy in a way only facts and data simply cannot.