Filmmaker, author and journalist Antony Loewenstein documents how Israel has used Gaza as a weapons showcase. Spyware, killer drones, robot dogs and other weapons are debuted in Gaza and field-tested on the civilian population, demonstrating their effectiveness to regimes around the world that await their chance to purchase them.

Loewenstein joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle what he has learned from writing The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World and producing The Palestine Laboratory, a documentary based on the book.

“I think the whole idea of what Israel…has been showing the world, I say two things. One, what weapons you can use to murder, kill, target Palestinians but also how to get away with it. I think Israel sells that concept,” Loewenstein explains.

As spyware companies like Pegasus and Paragon and arms companies like Elbit and Rafael see business boom, Loewenstein argues countries have a moral imperative to end trading with Israel. These same technologies perpetuating the genocide in Gaza, Loewenstein explains, will come back to haunt the citizenry of purchasing countries.

“All these governments around the world, whether they’re so-called democratic or repressive, are obsessed with these tools. They can’t give them up. They’re desperate to listen to their opponents, to the journalists, to activists,” Loewenstein remarks.

“It’s very hard for these regimes to give them up because there’s no regulation. There’s just none. It just doesn’t exist.”

After two years of genocide, it is no longer possible to hide complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Entire countries and corporations are — according to multiple reports by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese — either directly or indirectly involved in Israel’s economic proliferation.

In her latest report, “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime,” Albanese details the role 63 nations played in supporting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. She chronicles how countries like the United States, which directly funds and arms Israel, are a part of a vast global economic web. This network includes dozens of other countries that contribute with seemingly minor components, such as warplane wheels.

Rejection of this system is imperative, Albanese says. These same technologies used to destroy the lives of Palestinians will inevitably be turned against the citizens of Israel’s funders.

“Palestine today is a metaphor of our life and where our life is going to go,” Albanese warns.

“Every worker today should draw a lesson from what’s happening to the Palestinians, because the large injustice system is connected and makes all of us connected to what’s happening there.”

The meddling and infiltration of governments in Latin America by the United States is a huge chapter of its 20th century history. One of the most egregious and blatant examples of intervention was in Chile, where the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by the CIA-backed military coup in 1973.

The ensuing years saw violent repression of student activists, labor leaders, journalists, leftwing politicians and dissidents at the helm of a brutal military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet. Among the victims of this ruthless crackdown were two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is journalist John Dinges who, in his new book Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup, dives into their involvement in Chile at a time where grand hope quickly turned into great despair.

Despite the demoralization and destruction produced by Israel’s two-year-long genocidal campaign on the Palestinians, Israel potentially finds itself at its weakest point in its short history.

In his new book, Israel on the Brink, renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé makes the case that Israel’s current path forward is unsustainable. With a combination of domestic, political, military and international pressures, Israel will continue to destabilize.

Pappé writes, “A potential fall of Israel could either be like the end of South Vietnam, the total erasure of a state, or like South Africa, the fall of a particular ideological regime and its replacement by another. I believe that in the case of Israel, elements of both scenarios will unfold sooner than many of us can comprehend or prepare for.”

Hedges and Pappé chronicle the path Israel has taken to reach this point, one of radical religious fanaticism manifesting itself in figures such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir at the highest positions in government, and what the future looks like for them as well as the devastated Palestinian population.

The descent into a new, mutated and technology-focused form of American fascism is already here. Those who have kept track of the rise of the Thielverse, which includes figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and JD Vance, have understood that an agenda to usher in a unique form of authoritarianism has been slowly introduced into the mainstream political atmosphere.

Whitney Webb, investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to document the rise of this cabal into the most powerful positions of the American government.

“I think now it's quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia's moment. These particular figures have had an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government,” Webb explains.

It’s clear that the architects of mass surveillance and the military industrial complex are beginning to coalesce in unprecedented ways within the Trump administration and Webb emphasizes that now is the time to pay attention and push back against these new forces.

If they have their way, all commercial technology will be completely folded into the national security state — acting blatantly as the new infrastructure for techno-authoritarian rule. The underlying idea behind this new system is “pre-crime,” or the use of mass surveillance to designate people criminals before they’ve committed any crime. Webb warns that the Trump administration and its benefactors will demonize segments of the population to turn civilians against together, all in pursuit of building out this elaborate system of control right under our noses. 

For decades, clandestine foreign military and intelligence operations have been the deadly, destabilizing engine of American foreign policy. Today, as exposed by investigative journalist Seth Harp in his new book The Fort Bragg Cartel, 21st-century Special Forces operations have become their brutal, logical successor.

Harp joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to highlight the dark culture of violence inflicted by Special Forces operators both abroad and domestically. These operators exist in a world where battlefield impunity spirals into rampant drug use and trafficking, extrajudicial killings and domestic violence. Harp’s reporting insists that these are not isolated events but rather part of a system built on secrecy and unaccountable violence.

“The book,” according to Harp, “is not a work of history, it’s intended to be a murder mystery at the heart of it, kind of a police beat reporting but in order to tell the backstory of these operators’ lives, I recapitulate a brief history of the Global War on Terrorism with a focus on Fort Bragg soldiers in particular, because Fort Bragg is really the beating heart of the global special operations complex, and many people are unaware of its centrality in all of these events.”

Historian Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, joins host Chris Hedges to detail the dwindling academic freedom in American universities and society at large as Donald Trump’s grip on free speech tightens.

Khalidi notes that while the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is an old tactic to stifle academic scrutiny of Israel, its current deployment is unprecedented. Today, professors are intimidated out of teaching about Israel and Palestine, entire Middle Eastern studies departments are threatened with receivership and federal funding is withheld from universities.

“I know many people who are not going to teach courses this semester of my colleagues out of fear that if I teach about settler colonialism, if I teach about genocide, if I teach this or that about the Middle East, I’m going to be hauled up before these kangaroo courts,” Khalidi tells Hedges.

“That means your life is going to be ruined. You’re going to have to get lawyers, have to deal with a process that is completely opaque and which is designed… to punish and discipline anybody who opens their mouth on Palestine.”

"Are you a worker? Yes. Are you a consumer shopper? Yes. Are you a taxpayer? Yes. Voter? Well, sometimes. Are you a parent? Yes. Are you a veteran? Sometimes. Well, how can you say you're a nobody? You know things about those roles. You've experienced them. You've been frustrated. If you lie to yourself to be a nobody, you're going to be treated like a nobody. You're going to be treated like someone who doesn't count, someone who doesn't matter, somebody who can be disrespected, someone who can be ripped off, somebody who could be underinsured, somebody who can be suppressed."

Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate, asks these questions to demonstrate how Americans often sell themselves short regarding their power as citizens.

Nader, whose life-long mission has been to empower people to fight back against corrupt politicians and greedy corporate criminals, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to continue to spread this message at a critical juncture in American politics.

With Donald Trump’s increasing fascistic repression and an impending government shutdown, Nader offers a roadmap for how both government officials and ordinary people can fight back.

His latest book, Citizen Self-Respect, serves as a call to action, arguing that Americans must not passively allow the Trump administration and corporate elites to consolidate their power.

Medea Benjamin and CODEPINK, the organization she cofounded, are synonymous with accosting power in the United States. Their fearless confrontations with the nation’s most prominent and powerful politicians in the halls of Congress, often seen through viral videos, are a stark embodiment of the First Amendment. Despite over 20 years of activism and consistent critique of America’s representatives over their subservience to the military industrial complex and other big money interests, their ability to have these conversations is beginning to dwindle.

Benjamin joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the current moment in American politics, which sees free speech sitting on a knife’s edge following the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the American political class’s continued support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Benjamin was recently arrested after questioning Rep. Darrell Issa about Israel’s recent airstrike targeting Hamas negotiators in Qatar. Despite police saying she did nothing wrong, Issa continued with lodging a complaint against her, a move she believes is also in line with the suppression of activists and free speech.

Furthermore, after CODEPINK activists confronted Donald Trump and his cabinet at a restaurant and chanted at the president, ““Free DC, free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time,” Trump said he is looking into having US Attorney General Pam Bondi bring RICO charges against the protestors “because they should be put in jail.”