“I won’t stop resisting. you can’t use the word ‘hope’ if you don’t resist.”

Joshua Scheer

In this wide-ranging Q&A, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges answers questions directly from his readers and viewers about the crises defining our age: the genocide in Gaza, the disastrous war with Iran, the collapse of the Democratic Party, Trump’s authoritarian movement, the power of Wall Street and the unchecked militarism hollowing out the American empire.

But beneath every exchange lies a deeper question: What does resistance mean when the institutions meant to protect democracy have surrendered to wealth, war and corporate power? Hedges argues that politicians cannot save us without movements capable of holding them accountable—and that hope means little without the courage to act. Drawing on history, literature, war reporting and his own confrontation with The New York Times over Iraq, he offers a stark but deeply human defense of moral resistance: victory is never guaranteed, but surrender is a choice.

Question From A Viewer:

There has been a surge in the popularity of DSA candidates, along with a severe backlash against Flock cameras and data centers. How much hope does this give you that freedom will ultimately prevail in the United States?

Chris Hedges:

I don’t have much hope. I wish I did.

The problem with DSA candidates—and I support them; I even give money to the DSA—is that they are unmoored from any real movement. I also didn’t like the way they treated my friend Kshama Sawant, whom I think is a remarkable political figure.

When she served on the Seattle City Council, she achieved a great deal because she had an organized base through Socialist Alternative. She helped raise the minimum wage, stop evictions and secure renters’ rights.

The more the DSA attempts to accommodate the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, the more it deludes itself about its power.

That said, I support candidates who say the right things about universal healthcare, raising the minimum wage and, in particular, the genocide. The genocide was key for me. Obviously, I have a personal interest in it because I spent a lot of time in Gaza. I was never going to vote for any candidate who funded the genocide. That isn’t even a political issue—it is a moral one. If you compromise on that, you have no red lines.

The problem is that once these candidates enter institutions of power such as Congress, they are rendered impotent. They can’t pass bills. They are often forced, as AOC has been, to collaborate with truly repugnant figures such as Pelosi, who have done tremendous damage to our country.

As I have said many times, the rage of many Trump supporters is not expressed in a way that I find productive. But the rage itself is legitimate, and these people have a right to be enraged. They were completely betrayed. Trump played upon and manipulated that despair quite effectively. Yes, they embraced a kind of fascist project, but the betrayal was real.

It is movements—movements, movements—that keep a democracy healthy and strong. Our movements, particularly the labor movement, have been consciously dismantled and destroyed. That goes back to the Powell Memorandum of 1971. I write extensively about this in my book Death of the Liberal Class.

Question From A Vewer:

You have described the political parties as a veneer or façade. Who is really in control?

Chris Hedges:

“Both political parties serve the same interests: big business, the billionaire class and corporations. We have undergone what John Ralston Saul called a ‘corporate coup d’état in slow motion.’ It is over. They have won. The left is paralyzed and divided.”

Question From A Viewer:

You come from a Calvinist background, and your work often evokes Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. How can tragedy help us act in such a bleak political moment?

Chris Hedges:

“You can’t get much darker than Calvin. That is the lesson of Greek tragedy: Fortuna, fate. Even when fate is against you, there is nobility in resistance—even if you do not succeed.

“I am deeply worried, but I won’t stop resisting. You can’t use the word ‘hope’ if you don’t resist. I resist to maintain my integrity and dignity—what, in the Christian tradition, we call the soul.

“In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you succeed. What matters is that you hold fast to the moral imperative to stand with those whom the theologian James Cone called ‘the crucified of the earth.’ And if you truly stand with the crucified, you are often crucified yourself.”

Hedges’s warning is as bleak as it is urgent: American fascism did not emerge from nowhere. The Democratic Party’s surrender to corporate power created the conditions for Trump, while Wall Street and the billionaire class tightened their grip on both parties and hollowed out the institutions meant to serve the public. Even education has been deliberately weakened, because people who understand how power works are harder to deceive, control and exploit. But despair is not an excuse for surrender. When the political system has been bought and the truth buried, resistance becomes more than a strategy—it becomes a moral obligation.

Chris Hedges Answers His Readers: Resistance in an Age of Collapse

Clean transcript. Timestamps, verbal fillers and obvious transcription errors have been removed. The speakers’ meaning and conversational voice have been preserved.

Hi, welcome to this Q&A. We actually have quite a few questions. I’ll try and get through as many as I can. The first is from Barry Kaufman. Am I being too cynical in seeing candidates like El-Sayed gushing over a Kamala Harris endorsement or Mamdani endorsing Hakeem Jeffries as signs that they are just the latest incarnations of AOC. So the problem is that these candidates including AOC are kind of useless without movements to keep them honest and they will play the political game. Excuse my dog here. They’ll play the political game.

This olive to their advantage and game the system the best they can. I mean AOC of course now wants to make a presidential run. And in order to do that they don’t rely on movements or labor or unions or this kind of stuff. But they have to rely on the system as it’s set up. Karl Popper in the Open Society and Its Enemies said the question is not how do you get good people to rule. Most people who are attracted to politics are mediocrities at best. But how do you keep political figures from doing a lot of damage?

And this is again the point Max Weber makes especially in his book Politics as a Vocation that shorn of movements it’s impossible to hold a system in check or create a system that is responsive to the base. And that’s what unfortunately over the last few decades the billionaire class has done along with corporations quite successfully going all the way back to the 70s and that’s break movements. So I don’t have any animosity I don’t particularly like AOC but I don’t have any real animosity to Mamdani. But without mobilizing a base he’s he’s going to play to where the centers of power are and those centers of power are unfortunately located in the hierarchy of the Democratic party and the hierarchy of the Democratic party is beholden to its donor class its corporations and everyone else.

This is River Musics. Other than the horror now being perpetrated by the Israelis, has there ever been a time in history when those who were genocided committed a genocide themselves? Yeah. I mean yesterday’s this is what Primo Levi I think understood which is why he was an anathema within Israel that yesterday’s victimized become today’s victimizers and I watched it in wars that I covered perfect example would be Kosovo so I was in Kosovo when the Serbs held it the Serb especially the paramilitaries and the police were carrying out horrific atrocities against Kosovar Albanians.

And I spent a lot of time reporting on the plight of Kosovar Albanians. And when the Serbs withdrew, the Kosovo Liberation Army and others started attacking and carrying out atrocities against ethnic Serbs who had remained behind in Kosovo. So that’s actually a very normal cycle within history. Israel of course seeks to perpetuate this myth of themselves as eternal victims. That serves their interests. But the Palestinians are of course maybe I should close that door. My other dog is whining. So the you know the great resistance leader Marek Edelman he was the deputy commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising the only one to survive the war and he was a fierce supporter of the Palestinians right to resist the settler colonial project in Israel of course he was Jewish and announced that not only did the Palestinians have the right to resist, but they had the right to resist with weapons just as he and others had done in the Warsaw Ghetto.

So yeah unfortunately the problem is power and once any group including a group that has previously been victimized has power then they are quite capable of carrying out the kinds of atrocities and abuse and even genocide that were perpetrated upon them. In fact, there may be more proclivity to do it because they will justify that those atrocities in the name of the atrocities that have been committed against them. I mean, it’s that great line from W. H. Auden’s poem, I and the public know what all school children learn. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.

That’s from September 1, 1939. Genghis Man, what do you think of the Guardian letter condemning both Israel and Iran and subsequent retraction of signatures by prominent academics who signed on to the letter? Yeah, I mean, I read it quickly. I didn’t quite get the point. And I think that what they were I think the danger is they were create trying to I mean people like Angela Davis signed it. It creating a kind of moral equivalency between Iran and the and the United States and Israel and I think that’s unfair. I’m no friend of the Iranian regime.

I was in thrown in jail in Iran. And then another time I was deported in handcuffs from Iran on a carried I mean escorted onto a Turkish Airlines flight in handcuffs. So but the attacks against Iran were carried were a kind of classic form of imperial overreach. It was a war crime under post Nuremberg laws. Preemptive war is a war crime. They were unprovoked. And I and I think that probably unintentionally what it did was if not mask obscure the war against Iran. Diane, please keep the door open. I like the dog sounds.

Okay, you can come dog set for me. That’d be great. They’re two rescue greyhounds and I don’t know, they only make noise when I put on the microphone because they sleep about a day. Joseph Gabriel, I keep hearing that the US is close to munitions depletion yet Israel continues to bomb and pillage with impunity. How is this so given Israel is completely dependent on the US for military support supply?

Yes, Israel depends for about 70% of its munitions come from the United States in especially its missiles and so the depletion are the interceptors and that’s what’s depleted. These are the THAADs, Patriots, all of these missiles that are used to block incoming Iranian missiles. And you they’re very expensive. I mean the Iranians spend anywhere between $500,000 and a million dollars for their ballista on their ballistic missiles. These interceptors run on average $4 million. You have to fire more than one in order to block. And so we’ve and we’ve depleted our supplies.

Say they have moved patriots from you know global stockpiles around the world and use them in I mean they’ve prioritized Israel use them to block incoming missiles. The problem is they take so long to produce. So that’s what the issue is. It’s it’s the depleted stockpiles of interceptors. And that’s by the way why after 40 days both the United States and Israel wanted to end the war in Iran. Because their interceptors were reaching such dangerously low levels. It also caused great consternation among the Gulf states because Israel was prioritized and so these interceptors were moved from the Gulf to Israel to protect Israel and leave Gulf countries like Kuwait etc and Jordan everywhere else more exposed.

Joseph Gabriel I keep hearing that the US Oh, we asked that question. Bill Ator. Remember when Republicans used to pretend they cared about the national debt? Is there a way to stop the militarized madness of Golden Dome, more nukes, a Trump class of battleships, and more trillion spent on needless genocidal weaponry?

Are we not, as Ike said in 1953, crucifying ourselves on a cross of iron? Yeah. The problem is that She’s all right. She’s okay. Oh, come on. You have to go keep You have to go keep Jet company or he gets upset. Say the word treat and then she’ll go. I don’t have a treat. Huh?

She’s not. That’s all right. Okay. So yeah the problem is that the military is a state within a state. The military is it doesn’t even get audited. It’s beyond control. It’s has a budget of over a trillion dollars and now proposing a budget of 1.5 trillion. And that’s how empires die. This is what the historian Arnold Toynbee writes in his great study of the collapse of empires. And he attributes the pivotal factor to the collapse of empires is a military that can no longer be controlled that that essentially disembowels the country and that’s exactly what’s happening.

So education, infrastructure, social services, it’s all collapsing so that we can feed endless war and hypermilitarism and that’s how empires die. And it’s this unchecked militarism that is the death blow according to Tonby of empires. And there is no mechanism. I mean the the budget the proposed budget for the Pentagon will go into Congress and they’ll give the Pentagon more than they’ve even asked for. So I don’t I mean I think that you know Alfred McCoy the historian argues that the only way the this hypermilitarism will be broken is when the US dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency.

And that once that happens and we’re already seeing it by the way with the what do we have 40 trillion in debt or something that we have to service we’re already seeing that. So once people don’t want in essence don’t want to buy our debt and we fund our empire through debt then there’s a massive currency collapse and the liquidity that we have access to in order to sustain this military project is gone and the empire very rapidly contracts. That’s McCoyy’s argument that is the only mechanism that I’ve read about that at this point will curb the appetite the appetite of the military adventurism and endless wars that have defined this country and bled this country you know and bled other countries since Vietnam.

Love the shirt. My kids hate these shirts. So, the only people ever compliment me on these shirts are like old men like myself, but I like them. So, there’s been a surge in popularity of DSA candidates, plus a severe backlash against flock cameras and data centers. How much hope does this give you that freedom will ultimately prevail in the US?

I don’t have much hope. I mean, I wish I did. The problem with the DSA candidates, and I mean I support them. I even give money to the DSA, but again, they’re unmoored from any real movement. I also didn’t like the way they treated my friend Kshama Sawant, who I think is a remarkable political figure when she was on the city council in Seattle, she achieved and because she had an organized base through Socialist Alternative, she achieved a lot raising the minimum wage, you know, stopping evictions, you know, reners rights, all this kind of stuff.

And I think the more the DSA attempts to accommodate the hierarchy of the Democratic party, the more it dilutes itself and its power. All of that said, I find these candidates who do say the right stuff on sort of universal health care and raising the minimum wage and in particular the issue of the genocide. So, the genocide for me was key. Obviously, I have a personal interest in it that I spent a lot of time in Gaza and I was never going to vote for any candidate that funded the genocide.

I mean, that’s not even a political issue. That’s just a moral issue. You don’t there’s you have no red lines at that point. And so yeah, I think the I just I think the hard I think that the problem is that these candidates once they get into the institutions of power like the Congress, they’re just they’re rendered impetent in the sense that they can’t pass bills. They are forced often like AOC to collaborate with figure really repugnant figures like Pelosi who have done the tremendous damage to our country. And as I have said many times the rage of many Trump supporters it’s it’s not expressed in a way that I find productive or at all.

But the raid the rage is legitimate and these people have a right to be enraged. They were totally betrayed. And you know Trump played and manipulated that despair quite effectively and yes they embrace a kind of fascist project and all that but the fact is the betrayal is real and again you know it’s it’s movements movements that keep a democracy healthy and strong and our movements in particular our labor movements have and quite consciously dismantled and destroyed and that goes back to the Powell memo of 1971 etc. I write a lot about this in my book death of the liberal class.

Bobby Thorne, lots of political analysts are saying right now there is no way for the US to continue its war against Iran in the long term or at least to any effective extent. Is it possible that these analysts may be wrong? I recall many political analysts saying the Ukrainians would surrender any day for years and yet the war rages on. What are the odds?

We are in a similar situation with Iran. So no, the US can continue the war with Iran. The problem is the what you’re flirting with is economic catastrophe. So I just did a taped a show today with John Mearsheimer who I think is really great and which we will put out tomorrow that is or something on the Iran situation. The situation is that the longer the Strait of Hormuz is essentially blocked so some tankers get out we don’t know how many it used to be 100 a day you know maybe 10 are getting out maybe 15 a day.

It appears that there’s no oil. The Saudis were getting out about six million barrels a day through its port on the Red Sea. That appears to have been blocked by the Houthis in the Bab el-Mandeb. You food is going to become a big issue for two reasons. One of course the price of diesel and the price of fertilizer is I think about a third of the world’s world’s fertilizer or something comes through the straight. And the fact that Ukraine can no longer export. So Ukraine’s kind of the bread basket for especially Europe.

So food prices and so fuel prices, so gasoline’s gone up 23%, diesel’s gone up by 50%. Winter or colder weather is coming. And the longer the straight is essentially blocked, the more precarious the world economy becomes. Our strategic petroleum reserves have are at the lowest level since 1982. Now a lot of this is not it’s not public information. So those of us on the outside are guessing. I it’s certain that if this is not resolved at some point we are going to fall off a cliff. At some point we are going to experience economic catastrophe.

Is that within weeks? Is that within months? I don’t know. And I don’t I mean maybe there probably may be some people who know but that assessment is not being made public. And unfortunately Trump I mean the economic sanctions that the Treasury secretary announced there’s just no way they’re effective because they rely on other countries to abide by them. China has already said they won’t. China buys 90% of its oil from Iran. And you have countries like the UAE. Iran has made very clear that if the UAA adopts these sanctions, Iran will destroy the UAE and it has the capacity to do so.

Remember, all of our bases, Bahrain and all, they’ve all been obliterated, by the Iranians, certainly with probably Russian and Chinese intelligence. So, the targeting has been very precise. The radar stations are gone. And Trump is unfortunately, you know, between Hegseth and Trump, we’re we’re dealing with two extreme incompetence. The sanctions are not going to work. And that’s clear. They’re not going to work if you can’t get other countries to abide by them, even though the Treasury Department has threatened those countries with secondary sanctions. It’s just it’s it’s so unless the United States can accept a new modus operandi which at its core means that the Iran will control the Strait of Hormuz.

There was free passage before the war and exact tolls from those ships. I don’t see I mean Iran is now drawing up a new list of conditions in order to open the straight and it won’t look like the first memorandum of understanding which was in phases. At this point Iran is going to demand reparations. They’re going to demand that their frozen assets about hundred billion dollars are released. Yeah, I think that, I mean, John in the interview, which will be out tomorrow, called it the greatest strategic plunder in American history.

It certainly probably is. We have in essence been driven from the region in the sense that our bases don’t function anymore and they’re not going to be rebuilt, I don’t think, because they’re vulnerable. You know it’s a classic case of imperial overreach. So the the longer this remains unresolved the more dangerous becomes in terms of economic collapse which Trump and those around him are flirting with by failing to face reality and resolve what’s happened. Comrade Cranky, to be a progressive Democrat, don’t you have to support the banderites in Ukraine and you must forget about Gaza.

So, I don’t think the progressive Democrats forget about Gaza, but you’re right, they really do support the fascists in Ukraine. I was always I won’t get into Ukraine, but I did not support the expansion of and it was a de facto NATO expansion into Ukraine. I mean, I had I was in Eastern Europe and covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe in ’89. So, I was there. And in order to reunify Germany, you needed the you needed the Soviet Union under Gorbachev to accept reunification. And the deal was and I was in the room with Hans-Dietrich Genscher and James Baker.

The deal was that NATO would not be expanded beyond the borders of a unified Germany. That was promised. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the hubris of unipolar world and then of course the arms industries who made billions by reconfiguring Soviet-bloc countries to be compatible with NATO. We kept pushing up towards Russian borders and although Ukraine was not a NATO country, there were significant numbers of NATO advisers in Ukraine and so there’s a there was a cable was written by William Burns that was in the Wikileaks leaks when he was ambassador to Moscow and he said look you know Ukraine is across the political spectrum in Russia.

Ukraine cannot become part of NATO. It’s just too threatening. Russia was invaded three times, once by Napoleon and twice in the 20th century in the first world war and the Second World War through Ukraine. There’s historical trauma there. It’s just completely unacceptable to the Russians and Gorbachev, Yelson, Putin all reiterated this. Now, you know, Putin took the bait. You know, it’s a war crime what he did, but he was clearly provoked and it was, you know, was unnecessary. It didn’t need to happen. Random letters, X XP. Okay. Can you speak to the new executive order on the bulk energy system and what it authorizes the energy sector to do?

Okay. I I can’t I don’t know much about it. So, I don’t want to start Could the Democratic Party be called fascist since it has turned state into a branch of corporations and created state mass incarceration? No, I don’t think the Democratic Party is fascist. I think the Democratic Party facilitated and is responsible for the rise of fascism because it is bankrupt. And all writers on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, Fritz Stern, Robert Paxton, etc. Argue that it’s a bankrupt liberalism that gives rise to fascism. So the Democratic Party gave us Trump.

The Democratic Party gave us fascism because it became beholden to corporate and oligarchic interests at our expense while continue very hypocritically to mouth liberal democratic values. There’s a book Richard Rorty wrote Achieving Our Country which kind of brilliant and very is brilliant kind of predicted what would happen and he said that there would be blowback by a betrayed working class not only against the democratic party but against the supposed democratic and liberal values that it says that it’s it espouses because of course part of this which you know figures like Hillary Clinton do is schooling the deplorables.

Those people who don’t speak in the approved language or don’t embrace the boutique activism that is supposed to replace economic justice. And that’s exactly what’s happened. And Trump embodies that. Gregory 36769 in crime and punishment. What finally breaks through Raskolnikov’s self-enclosed worldview? Suffering, love, or something else?

Well, so I am teaching this fall in East Jersey State Prison and I am teaching Crime and Punishment and I’m always fascinated by what my students what my students see in books like that because they see things I miss. And we will do a Q&A on crime and punishment. Yeah, I what is it that the I mean I think it’s probably suffering and love, but you know, we I promise to spend a whole hour on the book sometime later this fall. This is C. Balor 77. I’ve been stunned that so many have been brainwashed by MAGA.

Have we gotten dumber? Or has the strain of anti-intellectualism, narcissism, hatred always been closer to power than we realized? So the when I when I wrote American Fascist, the Christian right in the war in America and this is really constitutes the hardcore base of Trump. These people have been living in such despair that they essentially embraced magical thinking to survive. Magic Jesus, you know, was going to take care of them. And these megaurches function as cults. Trump, the hardcore base around Trump is c is a cult. And cult figures, you want your cult figures to be omnipotent.

Because the more powerful the cult figure, the more you feel protected. I mean, Margaret Singer in her book Cults in our miss goes into this in great detail. And so, it’s a severance from a reality-based world. It’s not necessarily being stupid. It’s being so emotionally broken that you just have nowhere else to go. The issue of education, I mean public education used to be one of the crown jewels of American democracy that has been systematically degraded and destroyed including great public universities. City University of New York for instance was a great university which for free trained you know Colin Powell went there all sorts of figures the sons and daughters of immigrants who didn’t have any money so yeah our education system has clearly been under assault and totalitarian systems and fascist systems they want an uneducated population.

It’s one of the reasons I teach in the prison. My students are incredibly bright. I mean, the students I have, these are these are this is in the college degree program offered by Rutgers. I mean, they’ve turned their cells into libraries, but they never had a chance. They never the school systems they were in were completely dysfunctional. The communities that they were in had no stability. One of the things that they endure is not only mass incarceration, which seizes a disproportionate number of men within the society, but evictions. That’s an important there’s every six months because there’s no money.

They’re being thrown out on the street. And it just becomes impossible to find the stability and the energy in order to educate themselves. But once the you know the in every system even in our capitalist democracy it’s a conscious effort to keep the underclass uneducated because they’re much easier to manipulate once they understand mechanisms of power and how it works. They’re less susceptible to the machinations of power and the abuses of power. And that’s why you know going all the way all the way back to slavery the if an enslaved person was found that they could read they’d often be executed.

So yeah the the education system is has deteriorated significantly. And that’s by design and it’s always been degraded for the poor and the underclass and that’s why radical labor movements spend so much time carrying out education. So if you read Emma Goldman’s memoir, these people are working a day in sweat shops on the Lower East Side and then going to Yiddish Marxist study groups at night. And any radical movement or any labor movement, education is a huge proponent because it is the goal of those who have power to keep those they are subjugating in the dark about how power works and it is the goal of revolutionary movements to rip back that veil and expose for those who are being exploited the machinations of power.

That’s why I teach in a prison. Honestly, you wrote a book called Death of Liberal Class. We one see the death of the conservative class. We have seen the death of the conservative class in this sense with especially turbocharged by the Clinton administration. The Democratic Party transformed itself into the Republican party and the establishment Republican party was displaced by the Trump cult. And where did they go?

They went to join the Democratic the hollowed-out Democratic party. So, establishment Republicans George Bush, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney. Remember Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney, and, bragged about, being endorsed by Dick Cheney, who I think left office with a 13% approval rating or something, and frankly should be in the Hague. Well, he’s dead now, but should have been in the H. And so that conservative party maybe just became honorary members of the Democratic Party, a Democratic party that no longer stands for anything. This is what happens to immigrants in detention during economic collapse.

Well, that’s a good question. What happens to immigrants, it’s already happening in the sense that these detention centers are dangerous. They lack and I have been down to Delaney Hall which is here in New Jersey. They people die within these centers. They lack adequate food, medical care. They just become, you know, they’re they’re kind of treated like cattle. It that is already with in detention centers and we hear periodic stories about the kind of abuse people in these detention centers endure. But I would say what happens in a time of economic collapse is they just become full-blown concentration camps.

They’re pretty close to being concentration camps right now. And they don’t just hold immigrants, they hold the quote unquote radical left. They hold all of those people who are already being demonized in society, but with economic collapse that’s kind of turbocharged because they’re scapegoed. Mano, what potential is there for either revolt or reform considering the power the state possesses and have shown no compunction about exercising against any who protest?

Well, the doors are closing very fast. I wrote a column that will be out Monday about with the gist of which is that it lists all the things that the Trump administration is doing to fix or invalidate the elections, the midterms. And I said e, you know, if that happens, either we carry out nationwide strikes and, disrupt the business of government and commerce or we’re finished. Because if the Trump administration as it is clearly stated goal u makes reform impossible through the electoral process, there’s no exit. Then we’re done and then we’re going to enter a really frightening time.

And I did a I did a show with I think I have the book somewhere. Where is it? Well, with the Turkish edge Tamularan we’ll look it up. She’s really sharp. So she talks about the consolidation of power by Erdogan in Turkey which she blames correctly on neoliberalism and that the seeds of fascism are embedded within neoliberalism. And then said you know you think you and Europe and everyone else are immune. You’re not. So I look at these elections as you know I’m worried and I mean at that point you know if you remain a dissident you’re really your two options are exile or probably certainly becoming criminalized if not imprisoned.

And I think we do stand on the cusp of creating a really frightening authoritarian state given the tools that the government has, wholesale surveillance, the creation of ICE, which is, you know, just our version of the brown shirts. It’s it just it wouldn’t take much to make this country, which is already pretty ugly if you’re an immigrant or pretty ugly if you’re of color and poor, really ugly for everyone. This is John. Why no focus on the main power structure, Wall Street?

Wall Street owns corporations decides to 90% of oligarchic wealth. Well, that yeah, of course, that’s the main structure. I mean, the Democrats and the Trump Republicans are just their puppets. And you’ve seen that the power of the billionaire class and the enrichment of the billionaire class, especially Silicon Valley and the open embrace of fascism by figures like Elon Musk. So you know the kind of veneer or the facade or the are the political parties but both political parties serve the same interests which is in essence you know big business as the billionaire class and the corporations we’ve undergone I’ve said this so many times it’s almost a cliche we’ve under gone a corporate coup d’état I’m stealing this from John Ralston Saul corporate coup d’état in slow motion It’s over.

They’ve won. This is, the left is paralyzed and divided. You have a Calvinist background. You teach Greek tragedy. How might tragedy help us act? Shakespeare. Yeah, I do have I mean, you know, and you can’t get any much darker than Calvin. Yeah, I mean, that is the Greek tragedy. It’s Fortuna. It’s fate. And even if you know fate is against you the there’s nobility and resistance even if you don’t succeed and I I am very bleak and worried and I but at the same time I won’t stop resisting. You can’t use the word hope if you don’t resist.

I to the extent I can want to maintain my integrity and my dignity. And you know in the Christian religion we call that our soul. And in the end it doesn’t matter if you don’t succeed. It matters that you hold fast to these moral imperatives to stand with those the theologian James Cone called the crucified of the earth. And if you truly stand with the crucified, in the end, you’re often crucified. And I think that’s just another I mean that you know I don’t not a very orthodox believer but that orientation to the world which comes out of I mean I grew up in the church my father was a minister as you know I went to Harvard Divinity School and in fact I’m ordained as a Presbyterian minister although I don’t advertise it much that’s just a different way of looking at the world that that it that what is pract practical, what is achievable, that in many ways is irrelevant.

One stands unequivocally with the oppressed no matter what, whether you can succeed or not succeed. But of course we can’t succeed if we don’t stand with the oppressed. So, I remember Bill McKibben who’s done amazing work. One night we had a long talk and he accused me of being a cynic and I said, “Bill, I’m not a cynic. I just you don’t know how to read power.” and I think you’re naive in terms of your reading of power. I mean, remember he had people surrounding the White House when Obama was president chanting, “We are your supporters.” And I think that’s just a misreading of Obama and a misreading of the power structure Obama serves.

So you know one resists because of factors or of goals that have in the end nothing to do with finally succeeding. One of my favorite plays is Cyrano de Bergerac. And I think having covered war for as long as I did, you are acutely aware of how brief life often is. I mean, many of the people that I worked with are killed. You know, we’re not here on this earth for very long. We’re certainly not going to bring about the utopia in our time. We, you know, we fight and we for issues of justice as best we can.

And and then hopefully those who follow us continue in that struggle. But it’s kind of a never-ending struggle. This is also Max Weber. But there’s a I think there’s there’s a book I read it’s called on killing which is it was by a sociologist and it was really interesting and he and he talked about how killers were haunted by usually from childhood phantoms these figures of authority that have been abusive towards them and that these phantoms stayed with them throughout their life. And I’m not gonna see if I can find well somewhere over here too many books but I thought it was really interesting and then I thought but then also for those of us who stand up against injustice were also we have our phantoms as well.

So my father was he was a World War II veteran but he was an in the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement. My uncle was gay and he had I was there as a boy. People walked out of his church and especially on the issue of gay rights. He took a lot of blowback even excluding from the institutional church. And it was an important lesson for me that you’re you’re not rewarded for virtue. You’re not rewarded in this world at least materially for taking a moral stance.

In fact, you’re usually persecuted and reviled. And that was a good lesson to learn as a boy young. And in a way when you see people take those kinds of moral stances you can’t betray them. And they give you I mean I’ve told this story so you may have heard it but my father was pushed out of the church for his calling for equal rights for the LGBT community and you know marriage and ordination of gays etc. And when I denounced the Iraq war and was called in for a formal reprimand at the New York Times, I realized I had I was told I was no longer allowed to speak publicly about the war.

I’d been the Middle East bureau chief for the paper. I speak Arabic. I’ been spent a lot of time in Iraq. And I remember thinking, well, I can muzzle myself and pay fealty to my career, but to do so would be to betray my father, and I can’t do that. It was really came down to that. And I remember leaving the New York Times was at 229 West 43rd Street. Then I remember leaving the paper and really articulating for the first time what it was that he’d given me. And that was freedom.

I didn’t need the New York Times. I didn’t need the imprint tour of the New York Times to tell me who I was. I knew who I was. I was my father’s son. And that’s just a very I think it you know it’s I’m no friend of institutional religion. I mean certainly institutional religion has a lot of blood on its hands and in every war that I covered the institutional religious you know the Serbian church the often the Catholic church the Catholic church was kind of split in Latin America when I was there because you did have liberation theology but you know the hierarchies they embraced you know the genocide in Guatemala etc.

But that religious impulse that is what I you know still embrace that and that I think that’s protected me in the sense that I’m not I don’t succumb to the kinds of highs and lows the emotional highs and lows of American society. I don’t I don’t care in the end whether I succeed in that sense. I mean, I’m just never going to betray the Palestinians. I don’t, you know, and if that means Trump gets elected, that’s not my problem. I I won’t betray them. And that’s just a different way of, I think, looking at the world.

And it gives you, I think, a kind of protection in the sense that you’re clear about whatever moral stance that you have to make. And you don’t you not only don’t expect to be rewarded for it, but you’re quite conscious that you probably won’t be succeed and you may even be persecuted for it. But that severs it from its own practicality, from, you know, the practical world of politics and political organizing. Recent commentators have been referring to ICE CBP as evil and criminal. However, all countries have an immigration and customs police.

Do you believe that employees who work there are evil or misled? I believe that they are complicit and evil. I don’t know that they’re evil, but I think what ICE is doing to families is evil. You know separating children from their parents is evil. Persecuting people who have never committed a crime because I mean let’s remember this is pretty racial because of where they come from is evil. And you know I spent 5 years in Central America covering the wars there. I saw what we did to Honduras, Salvador, Guatemala. And how we empowered killers within these military establishments who were fused with the narcotraficantes.

I am acutely aware of large corporations that I mean 50 when I covered the war in Salvador 50% of the people were landless literally. So we bear a tremendous responsibility for these the migrants including NAFTA. Remember the small farmers in northern Mexico are wiped out by NAFTA. So, yeah, I think that organizations like ICE engage in evil and those people who work for ICE or bet ICE or abetting evil. This is Cavano. Do you agree with Bernie Sanders assessment that open borders is functionally a right-wing cause that would make working Americans poor given our current global capitalist system?

Well, this gets to the issue of the minimum wage. I mean, why do especially in the agro business, why do they use migrants because they pay them slave wages? I wrote a book called Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt with Joe Sacco. And he and I just finished a book that will be out in October called Requiem for Gaza. We interviewed 29 families in Egypt who had recently left Gaza and then we tell the story of the genocide through their experiences. But you know what?

We wrote it out of the poorest pockets of the United States, including the tomato fields of Florida. And there we interviewed migrant workers who were literally chained inside a truck at night. And they were told that if they went to they were slaves and they were told that if they went to the authorities, their families back in Honduras would be killed. So, I lost drag of the question. But Oh, yeah. So, I mean, the fact is they don’t want to pay fair wages. And the minimum wage has been suppressed. If the minimum wage kept pace with productivity, it would be over $20 an hour.

But that of there’s a whole system of debt peonage because debt peonage is the way the oligarch and the billionaire class now make significant part of their wealth. And that’s by design as you know and debt peonage is a form of social control as any African-American knows. This is Brian. You said Reinhold Niebuhr was one of your intellectual influences. What did Niebuhr teach you about power and human nature that you still carry with you after everything you’ve lived?

So, I do like Niebuhr and I’ve read I think everything Niebuhr wrote and usually more than once. I they call him a Christian realist. I think the best critique of Niebuhr and he had some serious flaws is in James Conen’s book, the c I think it’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree. A cone was an amazing theologian, an amazing person and one of my closest friends. So Con’s critique is that Niebuhr didn’t understand race and he didn’t understand empire. He thought that American hegemony was done reluctantly which of course is ridiculous.

And he didn’t understand violence. I think all of that is true. However, what neighbor came out of Bart if you’ve ever read Bart. So after world war before World War I there was this idea of the myth of human progress that this was embraced by things like the Chautauqua movement and Rauschenbusch and the Christian socialists and I remain very rooted in that tradition but it had a very Pollyannaish view that we could perfect the world and World War I obliterated that and this was Bart’s Carl Bart’s kind of imploded that theological naive and neber comes out of that.

So he understands human sin which he understands the danger of power. Neber you know became progressively more conservative as he became more embraced by the establishment. But his first book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, which is was a very the two most important books I read as a young college student were that was Moral Man and Immoral Society because I think neber gave me the language by which I could speak in a religious way about the world and the brothers Carol Matsov dsioski’s great work and I went with Susan Sontag we were about to go into Sarajevo and it To Susan’s credit, she didn’t go in during the ceasefires.

She went when it was being hit with hundreds of shells a day. It was very dangerous. So, we were in split and we you went into Sarajevo in your armored car at dusk or at dawn because there were sections of the road on Mount Igman where the snipers opened fire on you and in the halflight of the dusk or the dawn it was harder for them to see the car although they hit a lot of cars. So we said, “Okay, we’re not going to talk about what’s going to happen tomorrow morning at 4 in the morning.

We’re gonna decide what was the greatest book ever written.” and it came down to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov. The problem being that in Dostoevsky’s work, he doesn’t really articulate love the way Tolstoyy does. Anna Karenina is really about Tolstoyy’s own rel and his own relationship with his wife. It’s not so much about Anna Karenina. But the Brothers Karamazov asks the fundamental questions about life. And moral man and immoral society which was by the way a very important book for James Conen who was the great u you know black liberation theologian.

Who whose books are incredible. I’ve learned so much from him and from his books. Martin & Malcolm & America and all sorts of other books he wrote. It it’s it I think it the power and I think this is also true of DTvki and certainly true of Shakespeare is that they understand human nature. They understand the capacity we all have for evil. And this is that whole I mean actually if you look at Islamic theology they talk about the various levels of jihad and that there is jihad which is you know going after an enemy but the according to the prophet is the highest jihad is the struggle within the evil within you and I think this is something that neber Shakespeare and Dostoevsky all grappled with which makes all of them extremely important.

Niebuhr was a very good writer as well. So yeah, and I just reread a couple years ago the nature and destiny of man, which is probably his most academic work, but it’s it’s really obliterating the whole idea of the myth of human progress that somehow we are destined as this is Pinker, you know, that we are destined as human societies to evolve and become better and better, which figures like Niebuhr or Calvin, if you want to go back to Calvin, thinks is ridiculous. Lesson which I think is ridiculous grain of truth.

Can you characterize and explain the divisions within Islam between the Sunni and the Shia? How it plays out in the Middle East? What is the relationship between these groups and the smaller Christian communities? Are there any religious leaders who are trying to unite these groups?

That’s a whole hour. But I’ll try and so there is a split between Shia and Sunni without question. However, Hamas is a Sunni group and it Iran which is Shia has a strong supporter of Hamas. They’ve had differences with Hamas but nevertheless supports Hamas. There’s a Shiism has a cult of martyrdom. I don’t want to be glib, but it’s there. And I think that’s fundamental not only to understanding Shiism, but understanding Iran, Iranian culture, Iranian society. You know, the the divisions are exacerbated by religious fanatics, whether Sunni or Shia. They aren’t within the day-to-day life.

At least in my experience in the Middle East, those religious divisions are not always that stark. I mean, you know, I covered the war in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia within the urban centers, you had a mix of Serb, Croat, and Muslim. There was intermarriage. There was the rural communities tended to bifurcate along ethnic lines. I think that’s also true often in the Middle East. So I would draw a distinction between urban centers and rural but yeah I mean cohabitation I mean there was I mean this is part of the tragedy of the Middle East.

There used to be a huge Jewish population in Baghdad and Cairo. And I’m not saying that there weren’t religious there wasn’t religious persecution or there was but these people there’s still a Jewish community. It’s small in Iran. Iran by the way is only 60% Shia. The rest is there’s a mix Azerbaijanis and Zoroastrians. I mean there’s Iran is really a multiethnic society. So yes once you once those extremes become hardened then there are you know then as in with any fundamentalism the that fundamentalism pits itself against other forms of fundamentalism.

I don’t know that’s kind of a vague answer and I’m not an expert on it but you know that’s what I saw in the Middle East. So we have one last question. This is from Starch Manning. Is the growing class consciousness in the US encouraging in any way to you?

Is the DSA popularity surprising or encouraging? Yes, the growing class consciousness is encouraging. I think people are sick of the status quo as they should be. I think that class consciousness was exploited quite effectively by Trump. And I mean he’s a con artist of course. And I mean for me the real tragedy is that you had two candidates speaking to the reality you know, back in the when Trump first ran and that was Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and when I wrote I wrote a book called America the farewell tour which was out of Durkheim.

So is Durkheim wrote a book called suicide where he asked what is it that drives individuals or societies to commit acts of suicide you know or to embrace and he called it that’s where you get the term anomie the rupture of social bonds and you had mainstream candidates refusing to address the social inequality and the despair and the dislocation and disenfranchisement. But Bernie Sanders did and Trump did. And of course, the Democratic Party hierarchy sabotaged the Bernie campaign. They were never going to allow him to be the nominee. And huge donors in the Democratic party like Lloyd Blankfein said openly that if Sanders was the nominee, they would fund Trump.

And so I was in Anderson, Indiana, which is where the old GM plants used to be. Now they’re just these giant the weed choked lots. They’re huge surrounded by cyclone fencing because they literally move the factories to Monterrey, Mexico. And instead of paying union wages with benefits and retirement plans and they’re paying $3 an hour to Mexican workers in Monterey and what was fascinating is that these old UAW workers voted for Bernie Sanders. But when Clinton became the nominee, they voted for Trump. So that class consciousness is there. And I think the DSA does speak to that class consciousness.

I think as a political institution because it doesn’t have a mobilized and militant base behind it, is weak. But at least they’re speaking to people’s reality in the way that Bernie I have issues with Bernie by the way. I mean, I don’t think that his decision to work within the Democratic party or the idea, you know, he talked about a building a political revolution, you don’t build it an election cycle and then him deciding to go out and campaign for Hillary Clinton, etc. So, the Democratic party is part of the problem.

And, but yes, I think that growing class consciousness is a positive. The question is whether it’s too late. Because we the Trump administration and go back to what I said earlier in its effort to game the midterms is really rapidly consolidating fascism. I mean I don’t shy away from that word and of course I call the Christian right fascist over a decade ago and took a lot of heat for it but they are fascists. I mean they use the misuse the Christian religion to sacralize the worst aspects of capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy etc.

What frightens me is that we don’t have the organized movements that we had for instance in the 1930s with the breakdown of capitalism when in remember in the 30s we were fighting off fascism. Fascism was embraced by Henry Ford, all sorts of oligarchs and segments within American society. Forbes magazine put Mussolini on the cover and praised everything that he did. And so this time around with the social inequality and perhaps the looming breakdown of capitalism the oligarchic and billionaire class has eviscerated those of us who do stand for social inequality, those of us on the left who might be able to effectively fight back.

That’s my biggest concern. So thanks and thanks for enduring my dogs. Oh yeah, I admit I kind of spoil tremendously, but anyway, they were all on racetracks, so they deserve it. And I want to thank Melena, who’s been sitting behind the camera, and just came back from Italy, very tan, and Max, who’s in LA, who produced this. Thanks, Close

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