The Chris Hedges Report Podcast

This article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published January 19, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full TextNEW YORK: “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” like all great pieces of art, takes a straightforward story — the battle to save the life of a 6-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, trapped in a car in Gaza surrounded by murdered family members — and elevates it to an archetype. This story is as old as time. It lies at the heart of all religious and moral literature. It pits the cruelty and heartlessness of power against the empathy and compassion of the powerless. It asks us what kind of a life we want to live. Is it a life defined by hubris, domination and violence? Or is it a life defined by compassion, justice and self-sacrifice? These are moral, not political questions.To nurture, preserve and protect the lives of those demonized in war is to be branded a traitor — a subversive, the enemy. It is to risk death. War, and especially genocide, is the quintessential expression of what Sigmund Freud called Thanatos, the death instinct that drives humans towards the destructions of others and themselves. Those who fight for Eros, for life, are eliminated. This schism is at the core of the film. It is the struggle between good and evil, light and dark. And, as so often happens in war, Thanatos prevails. This almost certain defeat gives unquestioned nobility to those who defy the forces of death.Israel and its supporters do not want the outside world to see the bureaucratic machinery that perpetuates its mass slaughter, but I suspect, even more, it does not want the world to see the humanity of the Palestinians who resist.It was hard to find a screening. I traveled for over an hour to see it at the Film Forum in New York City, which had just one showing at 4:45 in the afternoon. I understood why. Despite critical acclaim, an Oscar-nominated director and industry heavyweights like Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix behind it, the film — directed by Tunisian filmmaker, Kaouther Ben Hania — faced major difficulties in getting an American distributor — reportedly out of “fear” and disagreement “with the film’s politics,” according to a report by Deadline.It is not only devastating, not only a cinematic masterpiece, but it rips back all the layers of rhetoric and propaganda to expose the fundamental struggle between the Israeli occupier and the occupied. The struggle is, yes, a conflict about the theft of Palestinian land. It is, as well, a conflict about a violent and lethal occupation, one that has become full-blown genocide in Gaza. But it is also the ancient struggle between the forces of life and death.Anyone who follows Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza knows the story of Hind Rajab. On Jan. 29, 2024, the Israeli army ordered the evacuation of the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza. Six members of the Hamadeh family, along with their 6-year-old niece, Hind, crammed themselves into a black Kia and attempted to flee. They did not get far. An Israeli tank fired on the car, killing everyone except Hind and her 15-year-old cousin, Layan. Layan was able to contact the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) on her dead father’s phone.“They are shooting at us. The tank is next to me,” Layan tells the PRCS dispatcher, Omar Alqam, an emergency medical worker based in Ramallah.“Are you hiding?” asks Omar, played by Palestinian actor Motaz Malhees.“Yes, in the car, we’re in the car, the tank is right next to us,” Layan says.“You are inside the car?” Omar asks.There is the sound of gunfire — 62 shots in six seconds — as Layan screams.The line goes dead.“Hello? Hello?” Omar says.There is no answer.The PRCS immediately calls back.Hind picks up the phone. She tells Omar that Layan has been shot and everyone in the car is asleep. Hind is trapped in the vehicle surrounded by her dead relatives, who are covered in blood.It is raining.For the next three hours, frantic emergency workers seek permission from Israeli authorities to approve a route for an ambulance — which is eight minutes away — to rescue the girl. The film focuses on the frustrations, desperation and hopes of the rescue workers who try to move a boulder up the Sisyphean hill of Israeli occupation.Rather than recreating the horror of a small, terrified girl trapped in a car with the blood-soaked bodies of her dead relatives, the film uses the recording of Hind’s voice — shown on the screen as a spectrogram — to tell the story.The focus is on the Red Crescent workers who try to reassure and comfort Hind. They plead desperately with the Red Cross and later the Palestinian Ministry of Health, who act as intermediaries with a unit from the Israeli Defense Ministry known as Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), for a safe passage for the ambulance into an area designated a restricted zone. The

This article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published January 19, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full TextThe war on Iran and the obliteration of Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs.Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.Resources – as the Venezuelans know – are openly stolen. Food, water and medicine, as in Palestine, are weaponized.Let them eat dirt.International bodies such as the United Nations are pantomime, useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished. The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.They spew the same hypermasculine tropes. They spew the same vile, racist cant. They spew the same Manichaean vision of good and evil, black and white. They spew the same infantile language of total dominance and unrestrained violence.Killer clowns. Buffoons. Idiots. They have seized the levers of power to carry out their demented and cartoonish visions as they pillage the state for their own enrichment.“After witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world,” writes Pankaj Mishra in “The World After Gaza.” “The shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil – the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilized societies – cannot be overstated. Nor can the moral abyss we confront.”The subjugated are property, commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The Epstein Files expose the sickness and heartlessness of the ruling class. Liberals. Conservatives. University presidents. Academics. Philanthropists. Wall Street titans. Celebrities. Democrats. Republicans.They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers. They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts. They exist in another reality, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,” a world of private Xanadus where they hold Nero-like bacchanalias, make their perfidious deals, amass their billions and cast aside those they use, including children, as if they are refuse. No one in this magic circle is accountable. No sin too depraved. They are human parasites. They disembowel the state for personal profit. They terrorize the “lesser breeds of the earth.” They shut down the last, anemic vestiges of our open society.“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life,” as George Orwell writes in “1984.” “All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon be purged — is an instrument of repression. The judiciary exists to stage show trials. I spent a lot of time in the London courts covering the Dickensian farce during the persecution of Julian Assange. A Lubyanka-on-the-Thames. Our courts are no better. Our Department of Justice is a vengeance machine.Masked, armed goons flood the streets of the United States and murder civilians, including citizens. The ruling mandarins are spending billions to convert warehouses into detention centers and concentration camps. They insist they will only house the undocumented, the criminals, but our global ruling class lies like it breathes. In their eyes, we are vermin, either blindly and unquestionably obedient or criminals. There is nothing in between.These concentra

This article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.Text originally published January 19, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full Text:Donald Trump’s threat to cancel the midterm elections is not a feign. He attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and said he would not accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost. He ruminates about defying the Constitution to serve a third term. He is determined to retain absolute control — buttressed by an obsequious Republican majority — in Congress. He fears, if he loses control of Congress, impeachment. He fears impediments to the rapid reconfiguration of America as an authoritarian state. He fears losing the monuments he is building to himself — his name emblazoned on federal buildings, including the Kennedy Center, his scrapping of free entry to National Parks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and replacing it with his own birthday, his seizure of Greenland and who knows, maybe Canada, his ability to put cities, such as Minneapolis, under siege and snatch legal residents off the streets.Dictators love elections as long as they are fixed. The dictatorships I covered in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans staged highly choreographed election spectacles. These spectacles were a cynical prop whose outcome was preordained. They were used to legitimize iron control over a captive population, mask the enrichment of the dictator, his family and his inner circle, criminalize all dissent and ban opposition political parties in the name of “the will of the people.”When Saddam Hussein held a presidential referendum in Oct. 1995, the only question on the ballot was “Do you approve of President Saddam Hussein being the President of the Republic?” Voters marked “yes” or “no.” The official results saw Hussein win 99.96 percent of some 8.4 million votes cast. Turnout was reported at 99.47 percent. His counterpart in Egypt, the former general Hosni Mubarak, in 2005 was re-elected for a fifth consecutive six-year term with a more modest mandate of 88.6 percent of the vote. My less than reverential coverage of the elections held in Syria in 1991, where there was only one candidate on the ballot, President Hafez al-Assad, who reportedly got 99.9 percent of the vote, saw me banned from the country.These spectacles are the model, I expect, for what comes next, unless Trump gets his deepest wish, which is to emulate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia — whose security detail assassinated my colleague and friend Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — and hold no elections at all.Wannabe president-for-life Trump floats the idea of canceling the 2026 midterm elections, telling Reuters that, “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” When President Volodymyr Zelensky informed Trump elections were not held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump gushed, “So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”Trump told The New York Times he regrets not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. He wants to abolish mail-in voting, along with voting machines and tabulators, which allow boards of elections to post results on election night. Better to slow the process down and like the Chicago political machine under Mayor Richard J. Daley, stuff boxes with ballots after the polls close to ensure victory.Trump’s administration is prohibiting voter registration drives at naturalization centers. It is imposing nation-wide restrictive voter ID laws. It is reducing the hours that federal employees have to leave work and vote. In Texas, the new redistricting map blatantly disenfranchises Black and Latino voters, a move upheld by the Supreme Court. It is expected to eradicate five Congressional Democratic seats.Our money-drenched elections, coupled with aggressive gerrymandering, mean few races for Congress are competitive. Recent redistricting has, so far, all but guaranteed the Republicans another nine seats in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio and six for the Democrats, five in California and one in Utah. Republicans intend to carry out more redistricting in Florida and Democrats plan a redistricting ballot initiative in Virginia. If the Supreme Court continues to gut the Voting Rights Act, then Republican redistricting will explode, possibly cementing into place a Republican victory whether the majority of voters want it or not. No one can call redistricting democratic.The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United took from us any real input into elections. Citizens United permitted unlimited money from corporations and wealthy individuals to rig the election process in the name of protected speech under the First Amendment. It ruled that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporat

This article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor. Text originally published February 8, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full Text:I don’t expect much from politicians, corporate tycoons, the presidents of prestigious universities, billionaire philanthropists, celebrities, royalty or oligarchs. They live in narcissistic and hedonistic bubbles that cater to their self-worship and moral depravity. But I do expect a lot from intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky. The explanation by his wife Valéria - Noam suffered a severe stroke in June 2023 and is incapacitated - of their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is filled with the fatuous excuses used by all those who have been outed in the Epstein emails and documents. According to Valéria, she and Noam were “overly trusting.” This led to “poor judgment.” She writes that she and Noam were ensnared by dinners with luminaries at Epstein’s mansion, flights on his private jet nicknamed the Lolita Express, a literary reference to the sexual exploitation of girls Noam would have recognized, financial assistance, trips to Epstein’s ranch and the use of one of Epstein’s apartments in New York. Like everyone else outed in the Epstein files she and Noam “never witnessed any inappropriate behavior from Epstein or others.”Noam’s advice to Epstein on how to handle press inquiries into his crimes, like Noam’s letter of recommendation for Epstein, was, she insists, the result of Epstein’s taking “advantage of Noam’s public criticism towards what came to be known as ‘cancel culture’ to present himself as a victim of it.” After Epstein’s second arrest in 2019, she and Noam “were careless in not thoroughly researching his background.” She ends by expressing “unrestricted solidarity with the victims.” Her letter regurgitates the formula of everyone outed in the Epstein files. I know and have long admired Noam. He is, arguably, our greatest and most principled intellectual. I can assure you he is not as passive or gullible as his wife claims. He knew about Epstein’s abuse of children. They all knew. And like others in the Epstein orbit, he did not care. From the email correspondence between Epstein and Valéria it appears she particularly enjoyed the privileges that came with being in Epstein’s circle, but this does not absolve Noam’s acquiescence. Noam, of all people, knows the predatory nature of the ruling class and the cruelty of capitalists, where the vulnerable, especially girls and women, are commodified as objects to be used and exploited. He was not fooled by Epstein. He was seduced. His association with Epstein is a terrible and, to many, unforgivable stain. It irreparably tarnishes his legacy. If there is a lesson here, it is this. The ruling class offers nothing without expecting something in return. The closer you get to these vampires the more you become enslaved. Our role is not to socialize with them. It is to destroy them.Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible’s list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actorText originally published January 8, 2026.The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Full Text:All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war. War will save the empire. War will resurrect past glory. War will teach an unruly world to obey. But those who bow down before the idol of war, blinded by hypermasculinity and hubris, are unaware that while idols begin by calling for the sacrifice of others, they end by demanding self-sacrifice. Ekpyrosis, the inevitable conflagration that destroys the world according to the ancient Stoics, is part of the cyclical nature of time. There is no escape. Fortuna. There is a time for individual death. There is a time for collective death. In the end, with weary citizens yearning for extinction, empires light their own funeral pyre.Our high priests of war, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, are no different from the fools and charlatans who snuffed out empires of the past — the haughty leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the militarists in imperial Germany and the hapless court of Tsarist Russia in World War I. They were followed by the fascists in Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Adolf Hitler and the military rulers of imperial Japan in World War II.These political entities committed collective suicide.They drank the same fatal elixir Miller and those in the Trump White House imbibe. They too tried to use industrial violence to reshape the universe. They too considered themselves to be omnipotent. They too saw themselves in the face of the idol of war. They too demanded to be obeyed and worshiped.Destruction to them is creation. Dissent is sedition. The world is one-dimensional. The strong versus the weak. Only our nation is great. Other nations, even allies, are dismissed with contempt.These architects of imperial folly are buffoons and killer clowns. They are ridiculed and hated by those rooted in a reality-based world. They are followed slavishly by the desperate and the disenfranchised. The simplicity of the message is its appeal. A magic incantation will bring back the lost world, the golden age, however mythic. Reality is viewed exclusively through the lens of ultranationalism. The flip side of ultranationalism is racism.“The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” wrote Yugoslav-Serbian novelist Danilo Kiš. “Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell — it’s other people (other nations, other tribes). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own image — as nationalists.”These stunted human beings are unable to read others. They threaten. They terrorize. They kill. The art of power politics between nations or individuals is far beyond their tiny imaginations. They lack the intelligence — emotional and intellectual — to cope with the complex, ever-shifting sands of old and new alliances. They cannot see themselves as the world sees them.Diplomacy is often a dark and deceptive art. It is by its nature manipulative. But it requires an understanding of other cultures and traditions. It requires getting inside the heads of adversaries and allies. For Trump and his minions, this is an impossibility.Skillful diplomats, such as Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian Empire’s foreign minister who dominated European politics after the defeat of Napoleon, do so by crafting agreements and treaties such as the Concert of Europe and the Congress of Vienna. Metternich, no friend of liberalism, adroitly kept Europe stable until the revolutions of 1848.I reported on Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state, as he negotiated an end to the war in Bosnia. He was bombastic and enthralled with his own celebrity. But he played the Balkan warlords off each other in the former Yugoslavia until they acquiesced to stop the fighting — with some help from NATO warplanes that pounded Serb positions on the hills around Sarajevo — and signed the Dayton Peace Accords.Holbrooke had little regard for the diplomats who diddled in conference halls in Geneva while 100,000 people died or disappeared in Bosnia, an estimated 900,000 became refugees and 1.3 million were internally displaced. He had a loathing for military commanders who refused to take risks. He detested the Croatian, Serbian and Muslim leaders he had to corral into signing th