Politics After Trump: A Conversation with Chris Hedges

enterprise winning journalist best-selling author a professor at princeton and an ordained minister a master of his craft he has written 14 books within the last two decades including the new york times bestseller days of destruction days of revolt as well as his most recent book america the farewell tour here to talk about politics after the trump presidency one of america's greatest living intellectuals chris hedges thanks um so i've got 20 minutes and i'm going to lay out quickly how we got here why the age of trump is now going to be normalized with or without trump and uh what i worry especially with the signing today of the american rescue plan will be the inability on the part of the ruling democratic elites to uh counter uh this movement which trump embodied so first of all if you go back three four decades there was a very concerted assault it began in 1971 if you want to fix a date to it when the business elites decided to respond to what the political scientist samuel huntington called our excess of democracy what huntington was referring to is the rise of popular movements uh in the 1960s not just the anti-war movement but the women's movement the environmental movement ralph nader i'm very close to ralph i was a speechwriter when he ran for president uh founded the first earth day uh indigenous groups like aim uh the black panthers uh and uh so this frightened uh the ruling elites and they mounted a concerted and unfortunately exceedingly successful campaign to roll back that opening and close the or shut down or eradicate the programs that had addressed social inequality many of them put in place by the new deal but also by lyndon johnson's great society and if you read the lewis powell memo 1971 powell was the attorney for the chamber of commerce later was appointed to the supreme court he really lays out uh how that uh you know assault will be carried out and that meant creating think tanks like the heritage foundation it meant flooding money into the universities uh to essentially buy loyalty uh in political science departments economic departments uh it meant uh uh taking control of the airwaves uh it meant using that money to demonize marginalize and push out of the mainstream critics of neoliberalism i recommend very highly uh david harvey's book a brief history of neoliberalism neoliberalism never made any economic sense it was based on uh the fringe elements of the uh of economic theorists hayek and this kind of third raid novelist ayn rand etc but it made sense in terms of justifying the pillage by the ruling elites which is all that really mattered and people who didn't pay fealty to uh this neoliberal ideology were really ruthlessly silenced i knew sheldon wolin he died a few years ago but certainly our most important contemporary political philosopher taught at berkeley leonard princeton uh and uh wolin uh was shut out in the 80s uh he uh from the new york review of books and all the other publications he used to write for because he was calling neoliberalism out as a con um and so with the perpetuation of this ideology the idea that if you deregulate the market this will stimulate the economy and there will be that kind of magical trickle-down effect which of course is a myth and in fact what it does is is accrue political and economic power to that tiny oligarchic elite which is of course where we are now uh the 664 the billionaires uh in just during the pandemic alone saw their wealth increased by 44 percent that's 1.3 trillion uh dollars so um and and it it uh uh all of those quick nader of course became a pariah nader was actually by name uh uh targeted within the powell memo and they gathered such uh force within both the social cultural and political establishment that in order to survive politically you had to pay fealty to them which is how you got the figure like bill clinton uh clinton much like tony blair uh clinton transformed the democratic party into the republican party and pushed the republican party so far to the right it became insane and he uh with biden biden was a major architect in the senate at the time uh he passed nafta the greatest portrayal of the working class since the 1948 taft-hartley act uh he passed the 1994 omnibus crime bill which exploded the prison population we had about uh 300 000 uh people in incarcerated in 1970 we now have 2.3 million uh militarized the police uh glass-steagall which was a new 1933 new deal era piece of regulation that uh built a firewall in essence between commercial and investment banks they ripped that down that precipitated the global financial meltdown of 2008 and the banking crisis and it's interesting if you look to canada during that same period they didn't have a banking crisis banks didn't close right and left because their version of glass-steagall had not been repealed he deregulated the fcc this is under clinton so that uh the airwaves were are now controlled by about a half dozen corporations viacom general electric uh rubert murdoch's news corp uh and that is about what 90 of most americans listen to or watch um and uh and so uh we essentially entered that era after the clinton administration of what i would call the foe liberal i write in uh at length about this in my book death of the liberal class so the faux liberal is the person like clinton like obama uh to a lesser extent like biden the reason obama picked biden is that he essentially voted republican um but it's the people who are tolerant uh on uh cultural societal issues in terms of race or gender equality but assiduously serve corporate power and i think this was emblematic within the obama administration where after obama was given a mandate after the 2008 crash and he immediately uh turned his services to bolstering wall street and the banking industry became what cornell west called a black mascot for wall street it's also important to note that obama's assault on civil liberties outdoored even those of george w bush the misuse of the espionage act nine times i believe under the obama administration to go after whistleblowers that's of course how they went after snowden how they've gone after julian assange uh so this juggernaut rolled forward and i and i think the rise of trump uh was tied directly to obama's very flagrant betrayal of the working class and of the mandate in which uh he had been given uh to confront the elites and his refusal of course to do so why do you get a figure like trump uh clearly a con artist uh vulgar crude uh inept a narcissist um because there is so much pain especially among the white working class not that there isn't more pain among marginal communities people of color in urban areas but we have to remember that the two primary forms of social control in those areas are now so draconian and so fierce that it makes any kind of organized resistance almost impossible what are those uh those are the police militarized police which now function as internal armies of occupation and of course the system of mass incarceration i teach in the new jersey prison system through rutgers in their college degree program and uh most of the my students at least half of my students in those classes wouldn't be there but for clinton and biden the idea that you can be locked up for life for non-violent crimes 40 of the people in our prison system are never charged with physically harming another person uh and most of them 94 of them never get jury trials uh they're full forced coerced to plea out uh and as michelle alexander has pointed out if you actually if everybody went to demanded their right to a jury trial the system would collapse um uh so you have people railroaded into the prison system uh enhancement laws under terrorism laws under biden's uh 94 omnibus crime bill sentences are double tripled even quadrupled what they are in other countries um and so the mechanisms of police who have essentially uh stripped away any uh due process or habeas corpus coupled with uh the prison system has effectively shut down those communities the white working class suffered not to the same extent uh but they have suffered through de-industrialization uh and as crane brenton jeffrey davies and other theorists of revolution have pointed out those who rise up when you create societal rebellions do so uh primarily because their expectations are thwarted it's interesting baldwin i think you can't understand america if you don't read james baldwin but baldwin at one point writes about why african-american men in particular don't have the same kind of mid-life crisis that uh white men have and he said because it's they they black people very early on learn that the myth of america of american exceptionalism of meritocracy is a lie uh but white men are more susceptible to it uh because up until recently they benefited from it through uh white supremacy but all of that has been washed away i was in anderson indiana uh for my last book uh america the farewell tour with old uaw workers anderson used to be a center for gm 25 000 union jobs averaging about 25 an hour or more uh with benefits uh all of that got taken away with nafta the plants were not just shut down they were actually bulldozed and destroyed so their weed choked gigantic compounds surrounded by cyclone fencing and the city went into the usual death spiral that happens when those social bonds are ruptured with the opioid crisis becoming an epidemic suicides which are highest among white men supermarkets closed churches boarded up weed choke lots people abandoning their homes because they can't pay their mortgages etc and those old uaw workers of this was back in 2016 voted for bernie sanders in the primary but they voted for trump uh in the general election why why that swing from a sanders to a trump i it's because uh the anger towards the democratic party elites is particularly fierce uh because the betrayal was deeper the democratic party which once took into account the concerns of labor continued after they betrayed the american working class to speak in that feel you're paying language of liberalism while they thrust a knife into the back of the american working class and that's what really gave rise to trump um it is a simplistic to blame uh the uh a rise of a figure like trump on racism or on russia which is absurd of course the country that interferes most in our electoral process is not russia china it's israel um uh uh and that interference is uh so powerful that no administration uh can essentially uh challenge uh israel israeli policy and biden isn't going to move the embassy back to tel aviv from jerusalem uh even though that is a flagrant violation of international law so what you are what you saw with trump was a figure who essentially uh was vulgar crude but but expressed that anger towards the ruling elites that has gripped the american white working class and of course what trump has done like all demagogues is single out scapegoats muslims although islamophobia predated trump uh muslims uh undocumented men and women um liberals uh uh gblt community etc and i think it's important to note that trump himself had no real ideology but that ideological vacuum was filled by the christian right and i wrote a book about a decade ago called uh american fascist the christian right in the war in america i did not use the term fascist lightly first of all i come out of a religious tradition my father was a presbyterian minister my mother was a seminary graduate was a professor i graduated from harvard divinity school i'm actually even ordained as a presbyterian minister but the belief system itself is heretical uh the whole idea that jesus came to make us rich or that uh you know god or jesus blesses the white race above other races uh especially the american white race to establish the kingdom of god is ridiculous we can begin with the fact of course that jesus wasn't white jesus was a person of color the romans were white or that jesus would bless the dropping of iron fragmentation bombs all over the middle east and it was the failure of the liberal church which i come out of to denounce these people to confront these people for who they were um the the uh fascism as um paxton writes anatomy of fascism or go back to fred stern or even hannah aaron it always entails magical thinking but it also uh uh fuses uh the iconography and language of um of the movement of the fascist movement uh and and those that iconography and language is one that uh reaches within to the kind of cultural heritage whatever country you're in with uh uh the state itself uh and uh there was in germany under nazis the nazis the german christian church where you had the swastika on one side of the pulpit and the christian cross on another uh and my great mentor at harvard james luther adams had been in germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was expelled but he was picked up and gazpelled by the gestapo he was working in the underground church led by nemo and bonhoeffer um and he saw in the christian right that a kind of replication of um uh of the german christian church uh so that will and and trump brought all of these figures pompeo pence betsy devos who come out of this uh christian nationalist or christian fascist movement into the administration and they have remained in his most loyal uh base and i think that uh uh under uh uh you know the direction of a competent fascist especially cloaked in that christian garb we will see following the biden administration the cementing into place of an authoritarian a proto-fascist movement with that kind of christianized veneer so just in the last few minutes i want to address uh the 1.9 trillion coveted 19 relief bill the arp which it does not address the structural inequities it doesn't raise the minimum wage to 15 an hour it doesn't impose taxes and regulations on corporations it allows the health care system to remain privatized that means insurance and pharmaceutical corporations will through the arp reap a windfall of tens of billions of dollars and are already making record profits during the pandemic will do nothing to halt the endless wars in the middle east the bloated military budget uh it will not curb or regulate predatory global speculators on wall street that profit from massive levels of debt p and age stood to students underpaid workers and that loot the us treasury there will be no campaign finance reform to end our system of legalized bribery it won't break up the giant tech monopolies it won't curb the fossil fuel companies from ravaging the ecosystem it won't demilitarize the police in fact biden's called for more money for police which has always been the problem uh it is promoting censorship by digital media platforms i was opposed to taking trump off of digital media uh for reasons we can discuss uh it won't carry out uh prison reform um uh so what does the act do well it it offers a kind of momentary respite from the country's death spiral uh you send out one-time checks of 1400 to 280 million americans uh you extend 300 weekly unemployment benefits till the end of august uh you distribute 3 600 to a tax credit for children under the age of six three thousand for children ages six to seventeen uh started on july first uh and where will this money go it'll go into the pockets of landlords lenders medical providers credit card companies um and the question that we all have to ask is what happens to the majority of americans who get this support for only a few months what are they going to do when the money stops arise arriving by the end of the year and will the federal government orchestrate another massive relief package i don't think so uh it essentially puts you right back uh to where you started um and uh i think that the the myopia or naivete of the ruling elites is that they somehow think trump was a kind of freakish anomaly uh and they think they can make trump and his uh supporters uh disappear by banishing them from social media and recreate the asean regime with that kind of decorum of the imperial presidency and respect for procedural norms and choreographed elections and fealty to neoliberalism and i think what the elites have failed to grasp despite the fact that biden barely beat trump and despite the storming of the capital by this enraged mob on january 6 is that their credibility is dead that the trump era if not trump himself is the future uh and that the ruling elites embodied by biden and the democratic party as well as the kind of uh polite wing of the republican party uh represented by jeb bush or mitt romney's is headed for the dustbin of history and i think that's 20 minutes thank you so much chris that was great i i don't imagine you speak at many weddings i've only you know i've only done one and it was it was for one of my students who got out of the prison after 31 years so [Laughter] um okay so now we're going to transition to the next part of the evening i'm going to ask chris a few questions and then afterwards we'll do a q a with the audience so for your first question it seems that your main focus lately if not since the beginning of this century has been trying to expose the reality of humanity's near future existential crisis would you say that's true political and existential i mean the existential crisis is through the climate emergency [Music] but yeah i would say that all of my writing and all of my books have focused on the dysfunction of the american political and economic system and the consequences of that uh uh and you know one book tends to lead to another i write a lot out of poor communities days of destruction days revolt which i did with the cartoonist joe sacco is written out of the poorest communities in america these sacrifice zones like southern west virginia which has been turned into a toxic wasteland because of mining in particular mountaintop removal billion gallon impoundment palms with carcinogens and uh heavy metals was there a specific turning point that marked the beginning of this focus i well you know i was outside the country for 20 years so uh when i came back i think the changes within the country are more dramatic uh not least of which is because when i was a seminarian at harvard uh the christian right was a very marginal force uh and by the time i returned they were very powerful political force so that was quite striking and then just the way that the liberal wing of the democratic party had been eviscerated and i have to credit a lot of my understanding of corporate power to ralph nader ralph understands corporate power has been fighting it with probably more integrity uh than any american uh and ralph uh watched uh especially with the rise of the clinton administration how the liberal wing of the democratic party those people who cared about labor and uh you know passing uh or supporting social programs were just pushed out by the party which is why ralph finally ran for president because he said and i i agreed with him that the at this point the only pressure we can bring to bear on the democratic party is to pull five 10 15 million people away from the party as a counterweight within a third party to make them respond um so i think it was a combination of being outside the country for so long so i was more attuned to the changes which have been gradual but which were more dramatic to me and then also the fact that i had a good tutor uh in uh who uh in ralph who essentially uh uh both through our relationship but also in the books he gave me sheldon well he gave me sheldon woolen's great work democracy incorporated um helped me understand what was happening ralph ran against al gore and president bush in 2000 is that true um he ran against yes well looking back wouldn't you s when you say that's a mistake because al gore would have been a much better president than of course al gore but al gore ran such a tipid campaign he number one couldn't carry his own home state at tennessee uh and number two uh the republican party effectively disenfranchised 300 and some thousand voters in florida um they only counted two counties the supreme court which was anointed bush by overturning any known legal mechanism stop the counting in two counties so i think the the democratic ralph frightened the democratic party which is why they turned on him after 2000 um uh but i i and of course they sought to demonize and blame ralph for uh the election of bush but that just that's just patently false and even now gore says that the election was stolen which it was by the republican party was there a time that you were hopeful for humanity and or america well i you know i i spent most of those 20 years covering conflicts and wars so i certainly was in touch with the worst of human evil and i you know i was i was i wasn't i was just a boy in the 60s my father was involved in the civil rights movement the anti-war movement and the gay rights movement his brother my uncle was gay and my father had a particular sensitivity to the pain of being a gay man in america in the 50s and 60s was very vocal in the church finally pushed him out for it but very vocal in support of gbltq right so um i think then i had a kind of hopefulness when we had mass movements that were pushing back against these rapacious centers of power especially at the end of the vietnam war uh when there was a lot of soul searching in america we asked questions about ourselves that we hadn't asked before that we should be asking now um but of course all of that is is gone under this counter assault which i talked about in at the beginning how would you rank trump relative to the other american presidents oh he's probably the worst i never thought after george w bush we could get worse than that but yeah he's he's certainly the worst president in american history yeah wow really so noam chomsky a friend of yours i believe was was adamant about voting for joe biden much to some of the left's chagrin considering you have much in common with chomsky politically why do you think you felt so differently uh noam has always pushed that position i don't agree with noam i also clash with noah because i support the bds movement which he doesn't i once had to did a talk with noam a couple years in san francisco i hate arguing with noam chomsky but yeah i can imagine um but i do i mean you know the uh i i don't i think i think ralph is right i think that politics is a game of fear uh and that the only way to make the democratic party respond and the only reason the elites responded in the 60s wasn't because uh you know they had a walk with me jesus moment it's because they were scared of these movements i mean there's that scene in kissinger's memoirs where i think it's 71 the white house is surrounded by tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators and uh the nixon white house has put empty city buses in a ring around the white house to protect it uh and kissinger writes that nixon's standing at the window terrified going uh you know henry they're gonna break through the barricades and get us and that that's where we want people in power to be uh that's our job didn't did trump not have a similar moment this last summer um i don't think the threat i mean it wasn't tens of thousands of people um but it was enough people that he was spooked and that's a good thing he did run to the bunker i guess do you think president biden presents a better opportunity for positive political and economic change over donald trump biden is was anointed selected by the corporate elites they made that clear uh the democratic donor party class uh people like lloyd blankfein the former ceo of goldman sachs were very public about saying that if sanders was the nominee which was never going to happen the establishment was never going to permit it uh they would vote for trump they didn't like trump he was an embarrassment uh to the empire but they could live with them uh and uh so they all got behind biden obama did a lot of dirty work behind the scenes uh to make sure biden was elected uh because they know that he won't challenge these uh structures of power um [Music] so i don't and i fear that that you know what i look at the byte administration uh as analogous to the 1932 administration uh uh government of france von poppin in germany so everybody was spooked by the rise of the nazi party uh after the 1929 crash so these uh the old conservative uh elites centered around von poppin created the government to recreate like biden the cold old asean regime [Music] and this kind of conservative utopianism and by the way imposed all sorts of censorship on the nazi party and the fascists as well much as you've seen silicon valley try to do the digital platforms um and uh within a year hitler was in power so i think that the with my fear with the biden administration is that uh you know the refusal on their part to uh address uh the social inequality uh almost guarantees the rise of uh probably a competent fascist uh you know dystopia comes i cover the war in yugoslavia i've watched this stuff and [Music] i mean the figures 2019 uh there it was already uh horrific uh the bottom fifty percent of households had only one percent of the nation's wealth the top ten percent at 76 uh that was all before the pandemic more than 18 million americans now depend on unemployment benefits and this is as businesses close and contract 81 million americans say they can't meet basic household expenses 22 million americans say they lack food enough food on a daily basis 11 million can't make their house payments so either you carry out the deep structural fdr type new deal legislation uh or uh you know history has shown what these this kind of grotesque income disparity will do uh and uh and the biden administration and if you look at uh the bill he signed today but you know they made it very clear um that they're not they're not going to do these structural changes even raising the minimum wage which in real terms new york times had a story about a year ago we talked about how productivity uh has risen since i think the 70s or something by 77 and that if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity the minimum wage right now would be 20 an hour but of course it's remain the same when i think it's nine years or something so in real terms uh the minimum wage is declined and the fact that they can't raise it is really just criminal yeah it would it would hurt too many too many shareholder stock prices well they want they want a broken underclass because they're easily manipulated uh unreal unemployment of course is far beyond official statistics if you work one hour a week you're technically counted as employed uh if you work for walmart i think the average person at walmart works 28 hours a week they're still below the poverty line so they all qualify for food stamps so we can subsidize the walton fortune if you stop looking for work i think it's after six weeks you're magically erased from the unemployment rules so the la times estimated that real unemployment is probably about 17 like chomsky you do not think the political left has any business operating with tools of violence or force how can you believe in such absolute moral principles when they seem to contradict your assertion that we are doomed by a ruling elite who will stop at nothing to kill us all because they won't work uh i mean there's a practical quality to it um violence is a language the state can speak far better than the rest of us um and the only mechanism we have is essentially and that's why i support extinction rebellion is sustained acts of mass civil disobedience with the end uh aim being to overthrow the ruble ruling global elites uh i'm not a pacifist i was in sarajevo during the war and we were surrounded by bosnian serb forces that were dropping hundreds of shells a day in the city the city was protected by a trench system we knew that if the bosnian serbs broke through that trench system a third of the city would be slaughtered and the rest would be driven to displacement in refugee camps that wasn't conjecture that's what happened in the vukavar valley and the drina valley and vukovar and other places so at that point you don't have an option nobody was sitting in basements in sarajevo while they were being shelled talking about pacifism or non-violence um but that doesn't save you from the poison of violence that is all explored in my book war is a force that gives us meaning but when you essentially are trying to internally overthrow a power unless you have a neutral or not more than a neutral a friendly country on your border the way tunisia bordered algeria so tunisia was used as a kind of staging area arms shipment base and everything for the fln when they were overthrowing the french and algeria it's because you logistically can't do it the same way that the fmln and el salvador and i covered that war depended on logistical support from nicaragua um so it's just it's practically impossible so it's not like we have a choice i i think a lot of people would disagree with you though and especially that's probably true they spent well especially you know on the political left um people who share your opinions they're i i i've noticed that you've gone in trouble from the left by basically telling them not to be violent um but if you if you say it's not possible that that seems to contradict another conviction you have that you that you know so what if it's not possible we fight anyway um well i would say that that is if you look back at all the great revolutionaries che and i mean that they they went in it out of a kind of what the theologian rhino nieber called sublime madness um most revolutionaries don't think they're going to succeed in fact most don't um uh you know so yes i think that one has a moral duty to resist uh even if uh you're not going to succeed um in terms of effectiveness i covered the revolutions in eastern europe which were non-violent so i and you and i was in east germany which is the the most sophisticated security surveillance state until our own uh and you had it would begun by luther and clergy mostly in leipzig marching through the streets holding candles this kind of stuff and some of these 70 000 people were there and the regime under eric honaker got nervous and they sent down an elite paratroop division to crush the protests and they refuse to deploy and fire on the crowds that's how revolutions work that no revolution succeeds until a significant section of the security apparatus either defects or refuses to defend a discredited regime and that's the point that we have to get to and that isn't going to be achieved by carrying out acts of violence because acts of violence allows the state to demonize the movement you never get the numbers which is what they want if you look at occupy which wasn't i was spent a fair bit of time in zuccotti it wasn't particularly radical they all thought they were radicals but it wasn't that radical it was pretty mainstream uh and look at how the state furiously tried to uh and the media was part of this to demonize these people uh it was and i think what frightened the state was when especially on the weekends when these mothers and fathers would come from new jersey and push their strollers up and down zuccotti that's terrified this state so we need the numbers i mean i was i was in alexanderplatz when half a million people were in front of the communist party headquarters denouncing them i was in vencilla square when half a million people were gathering on the streets of prague um that that's the only mechanism it wasn't that a lot of historians would argue that was just sheer ineptitude on behalf of a state capitalist system that was coming undone like all state capitalist systems come undone by you know they had a war in afghanistan they were being out-competed by china and america um their their economies fell apart so therefore but that there is a true important truth to that but that's also where we are i mean you know we're you know i travel around this country and our cities are just one decayed wreck after another uh the the endless folly of these wars which nobody's neither the generals or the politicians or anyone else is held accountable for perpetuate themselves and then when they finish their military service they go off to raytheon and then they go back to become the secretary of defense i would argue that you know we are in the process of uh internal disintegration as was the old soviet empire i would say that's true um okay but then there is a a power vacuum and a lot of people on the left would say that a an organized a party would need to fill that power vacuum well you make a good point there i mean i think the problem with the left is that it's too addicted to social media kind of flash mob type events that organizing is a very laborious and timely operation and we don't have you're right the kind of organizational structures that the radical left in the united states created before world war one and then in the 1930s with the breakdown of capitalism so that's why i fear the propensity we have towards proto-fascism because the left is so weak i mean the left was assaulted it's not completely the fault of the left in the name of anti-communism uh but uh i i that is a deep concern of mine so what do you say that the solutions to these problems when you say they're rooted in a in a revolutionary organizing structure yes i mean so if you look at go back to crane brinton or any of these other theorists on revolution they always talk about at the inception of revolutionary movements they coalesce around a demand that the ruling elites can never accept because it would mean their own disintegration and i think that's right and that is by the way what occupy did i mean occupy wasn't outside of wall street by chance they understood that's where real power lay you were thinking of running for political office last year what stopped me was uh apparently there's some fcc rule that you can't have a national television show and run for office which i was unaware of i only did it true though is that is that a real law apparently it is uh and uh um i i wasn't gonna run a real campaign but we normally the green party runs a candidate in my district every year and then this year they are you know in the last election they just they didn't for some reason and so they called me up it was so i could sit in on the debates it so i could challenge in particular bonnie coleman the democrat establishment democrat and so it was it was a way to raise issues i wasn't going to run a serious campaign uh but that got mixed when i didn't want to lose my show do you think she's not since i wasn't running a serious campaign anyway make any sense do you think you you will run in the future seriously i don't want to run for office i mean it was totally done to help muck up the system and not let these people get away with what they get away with and call them out um so you generally don't believe that there's an electoral solution to our national and local problems no i i think that um without movements there's no solution i mean howard zinn made this point repeatedly um that doesn't mean i mean i vote i don't vote i didn't vote for biden i mean i vote third party uh but you know this is uh as as emma goldman said if voting was that effective it'd be illegal uh you know we have to build movements to hold power and check that is the only way and and that's the brilliance of zinn's book the people's history of people's history of the united states where he understood that the ruling white aristocratic slave male slaveholders created a closed system they were terrified of direct or popular democracy as they repeatedly documented in the federalist papers and it was only through the building of a series of popular movements that we opened up space within the democratic system and now that space is closed i mean even to the point where we're rolling back voting rights legislation you told julian casabla i'm going to skip that question you know sorry about that um could you tell us a little bit about why and how you sued president barack obama so obama signed into law at midnight on 2011 the national defense authorization act which included for the first time section 1021 section 1021 overturned the 1878 posi commentators act which prohibits the military from being used as a domestic police force um it uh essentially stripped u.s citizens of the right to habeas corpus and due process uh allowing them to be snatched off the streets if they were deemed to be uh supporters of al-qaeda the taliban or quote-unquote associated forces a nebulous term that could mean anyone and held indefinitely without trial and so uh the lawyers bruce afron and carl mayer and i sued obama in the southern district court in new york uh now there's a perfect example no one thought we were going to win we didn't think we were going to win but we didn't want to let the obama administration get away with it and not resist and much to our own surprise we did win and then the obama administration freaked out and so the the judge issued a temporary injunction the obama administration set up sent lawyers from the nsa up to new york uh to demand that the uh injunction be lifted the judge catherine b forrest refused to her credit that was a friday on monday they went to the second circuit appellate court and demanded uh that they be allowed to file an appeal and that the injunction we lifted until the appeal was heard the second circuit agreed but it's such a black and white issue it's so patently unconstitutional that the obama administration was in a kind of quandary and so uh they had to figure out how to allow this to go forward uh while uh not uh essentially because they couldn't argue argue the legal merits of it and so i had also been part of was one of the plaintiffs in uh clapper versus amnesty international this is before snowden we had sued uh through the aclu uh through amnesty international we had sued uh over wholesale surveillance and we'd argued that uh you know journalists were being uh monitored by the state and the government uh in the supreme court argued that this wasn't true in fact said that if any of us were being monitored the government would tell us it all turned out to be a lie we now know and so the supreme court threw the case out and the second circuit which i've been sitting on my case hedges versus obama then immediately said well hedges doesn't have standing in clapper versus amnesty international therefore he doesn't have standing to bring the case the right to bring the case and they threw it out and then we filed a cert or a petition to the supreme court but they wouldn't hear it so it's law so you you lost basically yeah yeah but we created a a mess for them uh and we didn't let it go uh unnoticed yeah thank you for doing that i appreciate it um given your concern over the welfare human civilization what set of actions would you advise anyone watching this to take on well i mean the climate emergency is really frightening when you read the climate science i i mean i became vegan because of that uh because of the animal agriculture industry and what it's doing to the environment and there's a good film with a kind of silly title called cowspiracy but watch it um it kind of lays it out actually i saw the film and that was kind of it so that's something you can wake up tomorrow and do and it turns out it's better for you anyway should be eating all that garbage um but yeah that's why i'm kind of involved with extinction rebellion because they realize there's no time left and that the ruling global elites are are not going to respond to the greatest existential crisis ever to confront the human species and every other species okay um thank you so much for answering those questions chris we're going to move on to the q a um so we will be taking questions both from there's a q a option if you're an audience member you can type those in and we will also have people come in on video so the the first person simon buhardana i hope i said that right he's a senior at brooklyn college um aaron could you bring him up hey can you hear me i can bikini and we can see you okay um hey chris hedges i wanted to let you know um considering uh your experience with working with independent uh campaigns like ralph nader do you ever see a situation where the two-party monopolies grip on power on this country can never be broken and if so how thank you um so the established elite in the two parties is already completely discredited um and that's why trump just uh walked all over the you know the mitt romneys and the jeb bushes and everyone else um and so the ruling elites uh have really only one option left and that is to use the more naked and harsher forms of internal control to maintain power which they will do i don't have any hope that any reform will come through the system uh at this point i think it will take an uprising you know massive amounts of sustained civil disobedience as i saw in eastern europe to bring these people down and i think that there's enough rot within the system that a lot of people aren't going to want to risk themselves to defend it but i think that's all we have left stuff oh sorry about that i was on mute sorry about that um someone asked over text what is the difference between neoliberalism and liberalism ralph hates the word neoliberalism always tells me to stop using it um so liberalism i agree is um part of a capitalist democracy a liberal center and this is chomsky so uh but i agree with tomsk on this so chomsky said you know the liberal class is tolerated in capitalist democracy because it ameliorates it acts as a kind of safety valve so uh it will deplore the excesses of the system uh it will uh ameliorate the system enough to stave off a popular uprising or popular discontent so the classic example of uh liberalism working was the 1930s with roosevelt now roosevelt in his private correspondent which i've read with his brother which was published after his death he talks about revolution uh and he's saying in essence to the oligarchs uh we have to give up some of our money now otherwise they're going to take all of our money uh and as roosevelt said his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism that's when liberalism functions so there are no jobs the government creates 12 million jobs under the new deal social security all this kind of stuff that is liberalism working to protect the capitalist system but what happened after world war ii is that in the name of anti-communism of course they wiped out all the radical movements uh and and we have to remember that tens of thousands of people were even down to high school teachers and ellen schrecker has written two good books on this uh uh you know they would the fbi would show up at a high school with a list of teachers with no evidence or most of them were not members of the communist party but they had a social conscience and they were out they were blacklisted they could never get a job again iaf stone the great investigative journalist all sorts of figures in hollywood it's why uh charlie chaplin and orson welles and others went to europe uh so uh uh the the the myopia of the ruling elites is they turned on the very liberal establishment itself and that's when you created this kind of faux liberalism embodied in figures like clinton or obama or biden who aren't liberals really uh so that is liberalism neoliberalism is really unfettered unregulated capitalism where you lift all of the controls on a market economy and so that market economy is allowed to commodify everything human beings become commodities the natural world becomes a commodity that they are then permitted to exploit until exhaustion or collapse and the great book on that is uh carl polyani's book the great transformation written in 1944 but it's a study of what happens when you deregulate financial systems and in polyany's words you create a mafia economy and then you create a mafia state and he's right chris you sound a downright marxian i you know i'm not a marxist i i i don't think anybody did a better uh critique of capitalism than engels and marx i i would really want to know you know and i i have slogged my way at least for the first volume of capital um i'm not marxist in the sense that i don't buy his kind of inverted hegelian solution but in terms of understanding capitalism uh marx is unparalleled and you really can't uh honestly i think uh be even remotely knowledgeable about economic systems if you haven't read marx or engel's great work the working uh condition of the working class in england 1848 is brilliant thank you for that um do you believe that lucas asks do you believe that internet censorship such as the suspension of trump's account is a step in the wrong direction if so how do you reduce mr information and propaganda without regulating it right so the question is who is regulated and these are large monopolistic corporations that are utterly opaque they know everything about us we know nothing about them there's no transparency and most of the people handling their censorship were taken from uh the security and surveillance apparatus so i was opposed to i don't want to read trump's tweets any more than anyone else does but i was opposed to taking him off the internet like that uh because that is handing power to social media platforms and history has shown that they will always use outliers like alex jones but then they will turn on the left which is really weak so you already have glenn greenwald wrote a column about this today they're going after sub stack and i've already been hit with algorithms after the director of national intelligence report came out in 2017 and went after rt have a show on rt america um and they had seven pages in there attacking rt which kind of exposed what their anger towards rt was had nothing to do with russian propaganda it's the fact that those shows uh gave platforms to black lives matter activist anti-fracking activist activists to third-party candidates uh and so then i was writing for truth dig before we all went on strike and then we all got fired um but the we did a graph that last year and impressions so if you went to google and you typed in imperialism and i had written an article recently on imperialism it would come up with anything else that was current uh those uh the algorithms essentially steered you away from that content so referrals from impressions on truth dig over a 12-month period declined from over 700 000 to below 200 000 now they're probably even lower i mean wikileaks was the first uh publication they really went after i mean that was the template uh so um uh it's it's giving this kind of power i mean we saw the me these digital platforms work on behalf of the bide administration so when uh the contents or some of the contents of hunter biden's discarded laptop were [Music] exposed in the new york post the new york post was locked out of its own twitter account and that's really dangerous we don't want to give these corporations remember amazon has i think a 600 billion dollar contract or must be million i get a 600 million 600 million dollar contract with the cia i mean these people are not our friends and we don't want to give them that the power of that kind of censorship what about what about the argument that um we should you know we should do what we can so if it means censoring nazis for example even though it might bite us in the butt uh if if we can prevent hateful ideas why not use the tools such as like who who's we the left i suppose left don't have any power they're not the ones doing it okay google facebook and twitter these are not the left and they're not our friends and we don't want to give them that power because they'll because they'll wipe us out understand the whole goal is to steer people back to establishment media organizations like the new york times which is why the new york times is colluding with all this we're going to move on to a second video question aaron could you bring up icara hello thank you for speaking with us today so my question is about how you've been speaking about a revolution is sort of the what we need and so in the context of the coven 19 pandemic and sort of the social upheaval that started last year which has kind of died down now um is the stage set for a populist revolution or are we sort of going back into the american psychosis so i think the tinder is there i mean i covered uprisings and revolutions around the world including the two palestinian intifadas and as a as a reporter you knew that that uh there could be a conflagration but you never knew what would set it off and it's always something relatively banal so for instance in the first intifada was a car accident where a bunch of palestinian day laborers were killed i think they were hit by they were in a van and they were hit by an israeli truck or something and that just that just was you know it it was it it was the the final kind of straw that uh saw and and the plo and everybody wasn't expecting it so that's how it works um uh you know that was true in east germany that was true in czechoslovakia it was true in romania i mean you had a moment where chancheska and elena come out on the balcony and then the crowd just starts to boo and they can't get to the roof of the palace fast enough to get a helicopter out so um i mean that happened in tunisia when the fruit vendor lit himself on fire um so it's there now that backlash can be a right-wing backlash but i mean this is my fear with obama administration that by not addressing the root cause of our malaise they are guaranteeing blowback and given the destruction of the left and the disorganization among the left that blowback i fear will be a kind of trumpy and proto-fascist blowback thank you euro do you have another question you want to ask oh should just oh um i guess my other question was sort of like where do you find hope um in having the knowledge about all of this and the way the world is sort of going so i i i think part of the problem with the left is that they have no real relationships with people who are oppressed so all of my life i was in el salvador nicaragua i was in the middle east months of my life in gaza i was in sarajevo and kosovo during the war and i came back and immediately started teaching in the prison system so if you don't walk out of that prison system angry then you don't have a heart i mean something's wrong with you and uh i think that when oppressed peoples become abstractions it's very easy to fall into despair become cynical but i i walk out of that prison and i'm out and they're not i walk out of the largest open-air prison in the world which is gaza and i'm out and they're not and to somehow not fight back is to betray people i care about and have built relationships with and i think that's where i mean augustine said hope has two beautiful daughters anger and courage anger at the way things are and the courage to see that they don't remain the way they are i mean you know i don't know how familiar you are with the palestinian struggle but it's been long and uh you know let's be frank it's it's things have gotten worse and worse and worse but should we stop and uh and the mechanism of boycott divestment and sanctions i don't think there's one university that has de-invested but what that movement has done is raise consciousness and that's why israel is so frightened of it but i have friends in palestine i can't be outside and do nothing i couldn't live with myself so i think it i think anger which is different from hate but anger uh anger what's done to people i care about and on a very personal level can someone asked can you well thank you apra for that question and thank you for the answer chris can you elaborate on israel's role in u.s elections someone asked that you can't vote against the interests of goldman sachs and you can't vote against the interests of the right-wing israeli government um you can't and we have to be clear that this isn't israel it's the rabid right wing of israel the racists and they are racists and i saw that because i covered rabine i knew rabin and rabino had no deep love for the palestinians at least recognized that the occupation was destroying israel from the inside which i think it now already has yeah and uh so rabine pushed through oslo and uh and his fiercest opponents were the israel lobby from the united states in particular aipac who uh funded likud at the time and uh hated rabin i mean they were american jews outside rabine's house and hair salia picketing him a bibi was holding rallies with allowing followers to dress rabine in a nazi uniform an effigy of ravine and burn it and of course this led this is dangerous because eventually it led to rabin's assassination and until the day she died leo rabin rabin's widow blamed bibi for his murder and she wasn't wrong so we have to be clear that it's a particular strain now i think the problem is that since they've essentially closed uh the occupied territories off from israel uh there was a point when large numbers of palestinian day workers would come into israel at least there were some kind of contact now there's none um so israel which had at one point a semblance of a kind of p-swing or liberal wing is now really replicated the apartheid state of south africa not only in terms of the way it treats the palestinians but in terms of the overt racism that is expressed by most israelis was born in israel i i would agree with you i would remember everything where yeah sorry what were you gonna say where in tel aviv okay [Laughter] so but i do agree with everything you say um yeah um all right moving on we have jordan ramos oh and i just want to say in terms of the hopelessness of israel it's true but there are uh you know left-leaning and even fully open communist and socialist parties that are trying their best yeah that you know they were bigger because i first went to israel in 88 and so they've shrunk you still have arrests i mean the best reporting on the palestinians comes from people like amir haas and danny rubinstein they're pretty amazing jewish israeli reporters um but that you know kind of uri of nary that wing was larger and it's certainly shrinking you know unfortunately yeah i'm i'm in new york not israel so uh you know you've had a million israelis have left the country and those are the people who i don't want to demonize everyone who remain behind but a lot of those people are the ones who are out of conscience yeah um all right aaron can you bring up uh jordan ramos i'm i'm here can you hear me yes um chris what do you think of like the democratic party staff staffers in nevada leaving after them after democrat soldiers taking over leadership and i also want to ask like um what do you think of like um do you think that the left should focus on winning like state state like local state elections because that's what um in the past the koppers have tried have put various have put a lot of funding into those races because they feel like um the state state rights and state elections due to having like some i think an impact in in in general elections in your opinion in your opinion so i think the problem is that you need so much money to run in the way the system is built and the left just doesn't have that kind of money so you can't get air time i mean ralph would say you know he'd go to madison square garden and speak to 10 000 people but he never reached a television audience which would be in the millions he couldn't bernie was the same uh i mean bernie uh to his credit raised money through salt small donations i i think that our priority should not be electoral politics i think our priority should be building disciplined organized militant popular movements and electoral politics can be an uh you know it can be uh part of that movement but shouldn't be the primary focus we have to rebuild those organizations because the only strength we have is in our numbers and if we use those numbers correctly we can pit power against power but that requires organization um and i think you know getting sucked into the electoral system is where and putting all of your energy into it as a mistake which doesn't mean you shouldn't do it but that shouldn't be your primary focus thank you jordan um someone asked anakin jackson i'm not sure if that's a real name in empire of illusion you speak at length about corporate media and the monopolization of what information we consume i'm a film student and also fascinated by your work you're critical of the role that visual media film television having the distortion of our reality in your view is there a way in which you can create deep meaningful art in the way of but still avoid spectacle um i think the problem is that when uh people rely on visual images for information and sever themselves from a print-based culture they're easily manipulated because uh you know images are emotionally driven um you know the actual script of uh the word count of let's say a 90-minute documentary i don't know what it is but it's not it doesn't compare to a book so uh i used to cover israel is to cover palestine um and i would write 800 or a thousand word stories uh but i came to see that if you didn't understand what happened in 1948 if you hadn't heard of dario scene if you didn't know about sabra and chatilla if you um in some ways everything i wrote was out of context so i think that the answer would be yes as long as it's within the context of a historical framework that is only possible through print um i mean i love documentaries and i watch them all the time um i love good documentaries uh but i think the the problem with a society that is solely dependent on images is that they lose so much context um that uh they have they're easily swayed one way or another uh and um they don't have the kind of critical faculties to judge i guess would be the best way to put it thank you chris thank you whoever asked that question um aaron can you is is sam samuel ganthier here he's the vice president of our undergraduate student government he'd like to ask a question aaron is uh are you bringing up sam okay hey how you doing um so my question is due to the impact of um covert 19 um you see that in new york that they're starting something called a covet passport um my question is what do you think will be its effects in the rest in in all of america and do you think it will do you think it will affect um the minority and poor class well i mean first of all we know that a disproportionate number of people in the health healthcare industry are people of color i think in maryland it's like 44 or something uh i mean the figures probably not exactly right i don't have them in front of me but in terms of people who've gotten vaccinated uh that they only account for like 16 so you already have a health care system which of course is profit driven that is uh and you and you've seen with a consolidation of hospitals and closing of hospitals how poor communities have lost access to medical care um so you already have that assault um and then in terms of the passport um you know that's that's one more way to register you and it's one more way to exclude you and everything is more difficult when you're poor uh not just in terms of uh of the logistics but the access because the access is disproportionate it's like voting i mean if you go to a poor area in georgia the lines are 12 hours long and if you go to a fancy white neighborhood suburb outside of atlanta you can vote in 20 minutes so the whole system now is designed against the poor and i think that uh that passport system will be no exception thank you for that sam and chris um aaron can you bring up um christian koslov [Music] hello is it my turn yeah okay um so uh uh hi chris i appreciate the the talk um we disagree like on most things but i have a few questions asked um so given that from your writings it sounds like you attack crony capitalism and that crony cap by like kaplan is a product of the state um so like wouldn't it logically follow that you know we should be attacking crony capitalism and not capitalism itself um and because i think that the best care for society uh would be a free market which you contend it doesn't exist like what do you think well i don't know how after 2018 anybody can pretend the free market exists i mean that was socialism for the rich on a massive scale i mean if if people really believed in the free market then all of these banks aig and citibank and they all would have gone under i mean it's just it's a fantasy it doesn't exist the the i mean my problem with capitalism is that it is it brings with it a kind of ethic and that ethic is one of exploitation of deception uh of hoarding of inequality and you know i have a dark enough view of human nature to know that there are people who are in any society who are driven by that but it has to be heavily regulated because once it takes over i mean this is why marx called capitalism at its core revolutionary force because once it takes over and and go back and marx was right about this that what it does is begins after it devastates the system which it has already done in the united states it cannibalizes the various structures that make capital is impossible so they want to privatize health care they want to privatize education they 60 of intelligence work are done by private agencies like bose allen hamilton i have to go to these halfway houses that are all privatized and they're not trying to provide any kind of care to people making that transition from prison uh to freedom uh there it's just all about exploitation so uh you know you don't want for instance uh capitalists to control your health service so you create a system as we have where parents are uh forced to bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters so uh but the whole notion of a free market especially now is a myth i mean you know all these large financial service firms are being given money at virtually zero percent interest uh and then of course how do they make their money it's as soon as we can pay our credit card on time we're paying 18 interest i don't even know whether that's capitalism or not and i think it's just extortion okay uh and i have a second question um in your writings uh you also attack like capitalism for problems of our environment you may make a lot of comments about our environment and our issues yeah in our environment but i have to ask like what is your opinion on like nuclear energy um given that it's clean and efficient and like it's safe uh but but it's also really regulated so like do you also believe that fossil fuel has not made humans like also like improved on in their lives for example who is it improved i mean whose lives it's it's not improved for the people in the global south it's improved for those elites in the industrialized north uh and we create most of the pollution and they pay most of the cost in terms of nuclear power you know they're that it's it's a matter of storage uh you know you had in japan with a tsunami uh you know when these reactors get hit uh they poison the entire environment around it so chernobyl i mean there's all sorts of examples so when you talk about it being safe and controlled given the incredible longevity of this radioactive material and the fact that you have this stuff often stored in barrels uh in sand pits i mean uh everybody knows that there is or they will put them down in mines eventually the storage facilities corrode and then what do you do so you know i think the fact is we by severing our reliance on fossil fuel at the same time we also have to radically reconfigure our own relationship to the environment in terms of our own consumption and our lifestyle that also has to go with it thank you christian um andy hillely asked what's your take on the current muslim holocaust in china his his words well i i mean i i i from a distance so i've not been there and as a reporter i am always somewhat skeptical of places i haven't reported from i don't think there's any question that the uyghur community is targeted and that the forms of surveillance you know many of them facial recognition cameras put up in public areas etc are kind of what's coming to us but at the same time these are kind of the only muslims america seems to care about anywhere in the world um and that means that they have a vested interest in uh promoting and perhaps even exaggerating those human rights abuses as a way to demonize china but i don't speak as an expert but that uyghurs have been targeted i mean uyghurs have long been targeted in xinjiao that's not anything new and you know it's what chomsky calls you know acceptable and unacceptable victims so you know when i covered the war in central america they were catholic priests were murdered by the death squads in el salvador and the reagan administration didn't say anything and at the same time the communist government in poland killed a catholic priest it was all over the front pages of every paper and you know they couldn't they couldn't stop talking about it and and so the uyghurs have been adopted by imperial powers as a way to discredit china and i don't want to defend china's you know totalitarian system but uh the chinese have lifted 180 million people out of extreme poverty i mean and now those are world bank figures by the way they're not chinese government figures think of that chris um you mentioned glenn greenwald earlier today that you read his article uh there's a lot of controversy surrounding him lately especially since he just said that tucker carlson and steve bannon are true socialists how would you uh square that i saw that and quite i know glenn and uh admire a lot of his work i don't know how he could tag tucker carlson and steve bannon his socialist i that that argument kind of went i didn't get that one it's probably because you're not on twitter chris i'm not on twitter but you can't get it as chomsky says i'm not on twitter because you can't say anything meaningful on twitter but i mean i i don't know what he means by that i had a bannon and and i first of all i've never watched carlson in my life i don't have a tv so i've never seen him not once uh he might be our next president so you might you should probably check him out i guess i'll be surprised when he comes uh but i don't know what glenn meant by that i just don't okay um why don't we do a last question before we let you go chris um sorry there was just a oh hello i don't understand this is from an anonymous person hello i don't understand why should we only use peaceful protests when the state seems used to suppressing peaceful process as seen in blm which seems to preach only peaceful protests but get demonized how do we get people to react when they're in their own bubbles okay so that's two questions i mean there is a moral aspect to not using violence although you know by extension i used violence i uh when i was covering northern iraq after saddam withdrew the stories saw saddam hussein put a price on my head and on the head of other aid workers and journalists who were there uh one of whom a friend of mine a photographer german photographer lizzie schmidt was killed others a sweet swedish film crew had their car blown up they were very badly injured a guy from care was shot and killed so i had seven bodyguards and they certainly would have pulled the trigger if we came under attack so uh uh you know there are moments when uh i accept the necessity of violence um i just think it's important to realize that revolutions well and you know who wrote about this quite presciently of all people with a lennon even though lenin's brother was executed for being involved in a plot to assassinate the czar lenin himself kept trying to stomp down anarchist violence because he saw it as detrimental to the revolution revolutions work because they're primarily non-violent in the same way that even though there was an armed wing to the anc by the time the apartheid regime was overthrown what brought it down were massive non-violent largely non-violent protests especially out of the townships as well as the sanctions that were imposed from the outside on the apartheid regime so uh the you know revolutions work when uh you essentially when regimes are so discredited that nobody wants to defend them i mean and you just go back and look i mean for instance when the shah fled iran the next day the head of the armed forces said that the armed forces wouldn't fire in the streets of tehran or come or anywhere else to defend the regime that's it it was over and that's the moment you need to reach but it's very hard to reach that when you use violence even if you look at the cuban i mean one of the one of the biggest damage that uh you know the most damaging thing that the cuban revolutionaries did and i i loved i think jay's fascinating figure uh is this whole foco theory uh in fact what brought down uh batista and the cuban regime were nationwide strikes uh which crippled the country uh and when batista fled the country uh fidel and the barbudos were uh you know four days away they had hop into trucks to get into havana so yes they were certainly but then the mythology of the revolution came uh you know centered around the foco being that kind of violent group that that led uh members of students for democratic society to form the weather underground even though the north vietnamese told them not to uh in the anti-war movement uh and then that saw of course uh che killed and uh executed on the orders of washington uh on the orders of the us government uh in bolivia when he tried to build a kind of focal in bolivia so um you know i i i you know if i was in iraqi or afghani uh and my country was being occupied by us nato forces yes of course then uh you know the in in wars of occupation you are only going to drive the occupier out through violence primarily although again you have gandhi's example in india but then people say would gandhi have been able to do it without the british press which is a kind of fair question also you have to accept that the british ruling class and the military was decimated after world war one so they didn't have the bodies either uh in order to occupy the empire but uh i mean my argument within the united states is that isn't going to work uh uh there is a moral component to it um but uh when faced with uh the possibility of annihilation as i was in sarajevo i didn't uh i fully understood why people by the muslim-led government in sarajevo you in fact i was quite angry at the international community for the arms blockade which meant that the muslims had small arms of small mortars and the serbs were dropping katusha rockets and the equivalent of 155 howard there's a 90 millimeter tank rounds on us by the hundreds day in and day out it was just uh you know unacceptable so there are moments when um you'd you i would put it this way you don't have a choice but to use violence uh but to go down the route of violence by challenging the ruling elites in the united states is i think is a disaster um we can't do that language i mean we have 36 000 people in the american armed forces that are in special forces units seals marine range i've seen these people at work these are desk clubs and they have an efficiency to kill that we're never going to be able to replicate um and so if we go down that route we're going to lose that's very clarifying thank you chris thank you everyone for attending this event it was a pleasure to host it and again thank you chris for sharing your knowledge and experience with us all right thanks for inviting me good night and good luck everyone

Channel: BC Student Government

Views: 267,805

Keywords: Chris Hedges, Brooklyn College, bcstudentgov, Politics, Post Trump, Biden, Trump

Id: 69pEzsfX8Aw

Length: 88min 35sec (5315 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Centaurea16]

Nice interview.

"The ruling elites ... are headed for the dustbin of history."