To the West, the concept of the rules-based order functions either as a list on paper to be ignored, or a strict set of laws to be weaponized. Omar El Akkad, Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, has witnessed many instances, both in the West and in the Middle East, where banners of virtue are used to justify hypocritical behavior. El Akkad writes about such instances in his new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss them.

In the West, El Akkad admits there is a tendency of including indigenous land acknowledgements at gatherings like literary festivals and while it may be honest, he argues it continues the same pattern of theft. “You steal land, you steal lives, and what's left to steal at the end but a narrative? The narrative that absolves all that came before,” he tells Hedges. This has always been the playbook of colonialism, he explains. “We can all be sorry afterwards.”

With regard to the genocide in Gaza, Western media brushes over the daily acts of brutality with “neutral,” unassuming language. Akkad recounts the description of children being killed as as bullets colliding with their bodies, and says “What [they’re] trying to do is give someone on the other side of the planet who has the privilege of looking away the language with which to look away without feeling a pang in their conscience,” El Akkad says.

Many in the West are quick to pillory resistance movements in places like Palestine, but resistance and the right and methods of resistance, El Akkad illustrates, belong to those under oppression and occupation. He explains:

“I have zero right to tell anybody anywhere who lives under occupation and injustice how to resist that occupation and that injustice. There is no acceptable form of resistance in the view of the institutions doing the oppressing. You engage in boycotts, that's economic terrorism. You try to march peacefully, you are shot with the intent to kill and or maimed. You boycott cultural institutions, you are being illiberal. You take up arms, you are a terrorist, and you will be wiped out. All you can do is die. That is your only acceptable form of resistance.”

The material needs of working class people in America continue to be obscured and co-opted by politicians and people claiming to know what’s best on both sides of the political aisle. While Republicans and right-wingers address some of these needs head on, they do so by luring people through empty rhetoric and culture war distractions. On the other side, Democrats and liberals police and enforce a cancel-culture paradigm built by elites that also distracts and divides the proletariat from ever engaging in meaningful connection and change.

Catherine Liu, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss her new book, “Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.”

The PMC, as Liu calls it, is a group of courtiers made up of academics, media figures and cultural elites who hover above the working class and dictate the aesthetic direction of “progress,” notably without ever addressing the material needs of the workers it claims to look after. They stifle debate, discourage dissent and issue dire punishments of anyone who dare challenge their rationale. After the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, the liberal PMC blame “people who are concerned with bread and butter issues for the defeat of these candidates that have been promoted by [Democrats,] a party completely captured by one segment of capital who are trying to show the American worker that they are idiots, they are racist, they're anti-immigrant, they're transphobic, they're homophobic, they're sexist,” Liu tells Hedges.

Liu points to a podcast appearance by Democratic campaign managers and their response to not combating Trump on a simple advertisement because of focus group testing as an example of the PMC’s disconnection from their constituents. “They were in a box. They didn't go outside. They didn't talk to Americans. They didn't talk to people. They don't know people.”

Farah El Sherif, writer, academic and Visiting Scholar at Stanford, is uncompromisingly blunt in her assessment of the Middle East. The decades of repression faced by an entire people have produced a fragmented society—culturally and through colonially imposed borders. To help understand why the Muslim world is so broken, corrupt and full of contradictions, El Sherif joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

“The systemic repression that Muslim communities worldwide experience is inextricably linked to the interventionist, expansionist, supremacist American-Israeli Western project,” El Sharif says. Though the region has grown to have perceived independence from its former colonial states, El Sharif explains that the imperial agenda and the manufacturing of a Muslim menace continues.

The psychological and physical damage runs so deep that many give in to their oppressors in hope of selfish prosperity, while others look at themselves as less than deserving of a dignified existence. The genocide in Gaza proves to be the most crucial litmus test, as the leaders of fellow Muslim countries stand by and witness the slaughter of their own people in exchange for “petty crumbs” from Western powers and the Zionist state.

“A lot of Muslims even internalize this war on terror rhetoric and they themselves start being apologetic and say, Islam is peaceful, Islam is this, Islam is compatible with democracy, Islam is compatible with civility,” El Sharif explains. “I see that as a sign of decimated consciousness, not just double consciousness. They don't know their own faith, they don't know their own history, and so they start being apologetic about it, and that is a position of weakness.”

The year 2008 signaled to many the weak foundations of modern capitalism in the hands of the greedy, untethered financial sector—the “vampire squid” investment banks as journalist Matt Taibbi called them. Rising from the ashes of the crash, these banks used government money—”socialism for the bankers”—to enrich themselves and Big Business. This money never got to the masses. Instead shares were bought back in traditional capitalist industries and an emerging powerful bloc—the Jeff Bezos’s, the Microsoft’s, the Google’s of the world—invested in what guest Yanis Varoufakis calls, “cloud capital.”

Former member of the Greek parliament and Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to explain how capitalism is dead and a new form of capital, the title of his new book, “Technofeudalism,” has arisen and holds power akin to the feudal lords of medieval times.

Varoufakis argues that the two pillars of capitalism, markets and profits, have now been replaced and a familiar system of fiefdoms and serfs has emerged. “Markets have been replaced by these digital platforms that look like markets but are not markets. They're more like digital or cloud fiefdoms like Amazon.com or Alibaba, where you have a digital fence keeping within it producers, consumers, artisans, intellectuals, and we are all essentially producing value for the owner of that digital fiefdom, Jeff Bezos in this particular case, in the case of Amazon, who charges ground rent, but of course it's cloud rent,” Varoufakis tells Hedges.

The huge amount of investment in phones, laptops, cell towers, server farms and thousands of miles of optical fiber cables has brought about a system that now dominates all parts of life, including even behavior modification in individual people. The most common platforms used today—Instagram, Google, Amazon, etc.—use their automated systems to produce “tailor-made advertisements which are in a dialectical relationship with us,” Varoufakis says. “We train them to train us, to train them to train us, to convince us that we want something.”

Varoufakis discusses this and more, including how private equity companies like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard also tap into this system of rentier capitalism and do away with competition, parasitically exploiting working people and traditional capitalists alike.

Mary Shelley, in the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, writes, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” In the chaos of war and inequity, cartoonist Joe Sacco pioneered the first graphic illustration journalism. Sacco has covered some of the most devastating warzones such as in Bosnia, which gave birth to his book, “Safe Area Gorazde,” and Gaza, which inspired “Footnotes in Gaza,” a book host Chris Hedges calls, “A masterpiece… one of the finest books done on the Palestine-Israel conflict, hands down.”

Sacco joins Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his continued journey through chaos and how Israel’s genocide in Gaza influenced the newest iteration of his invention, his book “War on Gaza.”

Hedges quotes a question Sacco asks in the book, “Is it genocide or is it self-defense? Let's make everyone happy and say it is both. In that case, we'll need new terminology. I propose genocidal self-defense that should give both sides something to work with.”

Through visual renderings, dark humor and objective reporting, Sacco is able evoke responses to events playing out in ways traditional media can never achieve.

“You will find humor in places like Gaza, places like Bosnia, and it's always of the darkest sort. It's their way of sort of managing their own thoughts, being funny, but understanding the underlying darkness of their humor. And I think I picked that up and I'm reflecting it back,” Sacco tells Hedges.

The two reference several parts of Sacco’s new book, touching on the different ways the genocide has altered life in the West, including academic censorship, the question of democracy and biblical interpretation.

In the end, Sacco says it all comes back to his own personal life and the connection it has with such an atrocity. “I've always had this idea that whatever I'm paying in taxes really just adds up to one small piece of shrapnel. I mean, as a nightmare, I just imagine that all my money is funneled into a small part of a bomb that causes someone to lose their life in Gaza.”

“You can't just sit there and build drones and not talk about who it's serving and who does it help,” says Richard Solomon, PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the Coalition for Palestine at MIT. On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Solomon and fellow MIT PhD student Prahlad Iyengar detail their battle against the historic institution’s active participation in the genocide in Gaza. Their story exemplifies the repression students face across the country who dare question how their work and labor are used to advance the illegal and morally reprehensible goals of the Israeli military.

“What this ultimately means is that MIT's research can enable a genocide and in fact is enabling the ongoing genocide against Palestinians,” Iyengar states plainly. The two students have found themselves in hot water recently following Iynegar’s tepid encounter at an MIT career fair as well as an op-ed authored by the student coalition.

Iyengar’s engagement with Lockheed Martin recruiters—where, after politely waiting in line at a career fair, he expressed his discomfort for their involvement in the genocide and climate crisis—resulted in him being charged with harassment and intimidation of the recruiters. The op-ed called out Daniela Rus, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, for the laboratory’s direct collaboration with the Israeli military. Rus successfully pressured MIT’s paper, The Tech, to retract the article despite presenting publicly available information and real ties to the Israeli military apparatus.

“By introducing these technologies and by enabling these technologies,” Iyengar tells Hedges, “what is really being enabled by MIT's research for the Israeli military is the ability for drones to engage in tracking, in facial recognition, in targeting of Palestinians.”

Solomon makes clear that the politicization of academic work is not novel and recently, MIT itself has distanced itself from projects that are tied to genocides or wars. “If MIT did it for the genocide in Darfur in 2008, if they could divest from the Draper labs, if they could, at one point, I think in 2022, they ended their relationships with a Russian university that they'd helped establish—I mean, if they can do those things over political crimes and acts and recognize them as political moves, they can also do the same for the Palestinians,” he says.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said, “The protection of hospitals during warfare is paramount and must be respected by all sides, at all times.” International law enshrines medical facilities as sanctuaries for those in direst need but as Dr. Rupa Marya tells host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Israel’s attacks on hospitals amidst the ongoing genocide represent a catastrophic violation of this principle.

A professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, Marya now faces suspension for speaking out against Israel’s blatant violations of international law. “The killing of healthcare workers [in Gaza] is related to the silencing of healthcare workers here [in the U.S.], and that by silencing us, the medical institutions we are a part of, which have an obligation, professionally and morally, to uphold all life, are actually abetting and enabling genocide,” Marya tells Hedges.

Marya describes the horror scenes at hospitals across Gaza. The IDF not only targets hospitals with airstrikes but also enters them to deploy gun strapped drones that kill patients and staff as well as destroy vital medical machines and instruments. “Hamas is not hiding in those machines. This is an attempt to shorten the life of Palestinian people,” Marya says.

Mayra, collaborating with a handful of medical professionals and lawyers, is authoring a UN report, addressing what they refer to as “the genocide enablement apparatus of Israel.” Alongside bringing critical attention to the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system, they urge the inclusion of medical professionals future international legal frameworks for defining genocide. “It does not take months to see that this was a genocide. So for those of us who were in touch with the physicians on the ground and the healthcare workers on the ground in October, it was clear that this was a genocide.”

The vast censorship and suppression campaign launched by American tech companies since October 7, 2023 has been both systemic and deliberate. Instagram, Facebook, X as well as other tech platforms and companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have actively worked to stifle information regarding the genocide in Gaza. Dissent against policies or individuals who enable these decisions is often met with swift reprimand in the form of job loss.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report are three courageous individuals who chose to put their careers on the line to fight against Big Tech suppression of voices fighting for Palestinian lives.

Saima Akhter, a former data analyst at Meta; Hossam Nasr, a former software engineer at Microsoft; and Tariq Ra’ouf, a former tech expert at Apple, speak about the internal struggles they dealt with in light of the genocide, which ultimately led to each of their dismissals.

Tariq recalls how Muslim Slack channels at Apple were often subjected to mass flaggings for innocuous things such as posting Quran verses yet Jewish Slack channels, “were advocating for the genocide… calling all Palestinians terrorists. They were saying that we need to stop this company supporting pro-Palestinian causes.” Those messages, Tariq says, were never removed and nobody was ever fired for them.

Saima details the problematic dangerous organizations and individuals [DOI] policies, which she says are heavily influenced by the Israeli and American governments. “Even though this is a platform that is global—Instagram and Facebook is the way the world communicates, but it is an American company, and the American government heavily influences what it determines to be a terrorist,” she tells Hedges.

The most critical and perhaps frightening part, Hossam describes, is the actual complicity many of these tech companies have on the genocide. “The truly scary part of this is that all the major American cloud companies—Google, Amazon and Microsoft—are deeply critical to that infrastructure, providing cloud services, storage services, artificial intelligence services without which the Israeli military would not have been able to be as effective,” Hossam says. Israel simply does not have the in-house power to be able to collect and process the data that is being used to target Palestinians, according to Hossam, and tech companies, at the objection of hundreds of employees, fill that need.

In a case of tragic coincidence, the place most closely associated with the uplifting story of Jesus Christ, Christmas and the teachings of the Bible is now being subject to some of the most sustained and severe death and destruction that modern society has seen.

Rev. Munther Isaac, the pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem and the Lutheran Church in Beit Sahour, joins host Chris Hedges on this special episode of The Chris Hedges Report to revisit the story of Christmas and how it relates to Palestine then and now.

Rev. Isaac wastes no time in reminding people that despite the usual jolly associations with Christmas, the story of Jesus Christ is one of oppression, one that involves the struggle of refugees, the rule of a tyrant, the witnessing of a massacre and the levying of taxation. “To us here in Palestine,” Rev. Isaac says, the terms linked to the struggle “actually make the story, as we read it in the Gospel, very much a Palestinian story, because we can identify with the characters.”

Hedges and Rev. Isaac invoke the story of the Good Samaritan to point out the deliberate blindness the world has bestowed upon the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza in the midst of the ongoing genocide. The conclusion of the [Good Samaritan] story is that there is no us and them, Rev. Isaac tells Hedges. “Everybody is a neighbor. You don't draw a circle and determine who's in and who's out.”

It’s clear, Rev. Isaac points out, “the Palestinians are outside of the circle. We've been saying it—human rights don't apply on us, not even compassion.”

While the trauma that Palestinians continue to face in Gaza is sustained, brutal and seemingly never-ending, the way people experience the effects of trauma has the potential to unite humanity as much as it divides the self. Dr. Gabor Maté, renowned physician and expert in trauma and childhood development, illustrates this point articulately and beautifully on the latest episode of The Chris Hedges Report through attempting to make sense of the psychology, trauma and reason behind the actions of Palestinians, IDF soldiers, WWII survivors, Nazis and even himself. 

Hedges begins the show by asking Maté to describe the trauma that Palestinians currently face, as they struggle to survive the constant shelling and murder delivered by their occupiers for over a year now. But even Maté struggles to make sense of it all: “This weekend, 40 members of a single family were killed. So when that child is orphaned, it means that their whole support system is gone. So you know what? I can't tell you. I can only extrapolate from what I've seen and imagine something unfathomable.”

Hedges and Maté do not only reckon with the psychology of the victims of genocide, but also grapple with how “ordinary men” become willing, ruthless, executioners under the rule of totalitarian regimes. Hedges, not sure if these seemingly normal people commit atrocities as a result of trauma or because they are not “morally sentient,” is challenged by Maté, who poses the question, “Well, why would somebody become morally insentient?” 

The doctor goes on to describe how humans achieve a healthy moral compass. Rather than be taught morality or indoctrinated into it, people gain moral sentience “because [caretakers] treat you well, because they see you, they understand you, they love you, they embrace you. They promote the development of moral faculties, which is a natural human process given the right conditions. So the lack of moral sentience is actually a sign of trauma.” 

Maté’s analysis connects back to the Palestinian resistance itself, and the atrocities they often commit in pursuit of liberation from their occupiers. Hedges, who knew the co-founder of Hamas, Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, tells Maté that when he pressed al-Rantisi on the act of suicide bombing, Rantisi justified his stance with statistics as a way to “morally evade” the subject. Maté simply, yet wisely, explains that Rantisi, who witnessed the Israelis execute his uncle at the age of 10, did not receive the “right conditions” that would have equipped him to recognize these moral contradictions. “I think what happens is that one of the impacts of trauma is it can close your heart, and when your heart is closed, you don't see the humanity of the other.”