By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

Is there some connection, — not quite official but it may as well be— between censorship and presidential politics? I pose the question as a survivor of the Russiagate years, when illiberal liberals started talking about “free-speech absolutists,” and when corporate journalists cheered the censoring of unincorporated journalists so long as it was called “content moderation.” 

I cannot answer my own question, honestly. But as this November’s elections draw near, a new and aggressive campaign to suppress dissent — in social media, at airports, on campuses, and elsewhere — is hard upon us. This is a trans–Atlantic, trans-national operation. Let us not fail to take note. 

Straight off the top, you probably noticed that the Democratic Party’s openly undemocratic elite refused to allow any speaker of Palestinian background to address the convention in Chicago last week. We can read this, disgraceful in itself, as an indication of how the Democrats intend to deal with the Gaza crisis and other such foreign policy matters if they succeed in extending their power another four years. 

Yes, they will continue supporting terrorist Israel and the Nazi-infested regime in Ukraine just as they have to date, but they will avoid talking to you and me about the imperium’s gruesome business as they conduct it. Silence on such matters will be as gold to these people, especially between now and Nov. 5. Kamala Harris, or the cynical operatives busily inventing Kamala Harris, are selling “joy” this political season, not any kind of sober, responsible view of our circumstances. Harris is supposed to ride into the White House on a carpet of good vibes. Gaza, the war in Ukraine, Washington’s provocations at the other end of the Pacific: Nah: All such questions are bad vibes.

One of the things the Russiagate years exposed was the close collaboration between the Democratic Party and the national-security state. People who know their history have long understood that “the intelligence community” — so odious, this term — has been, from its beginnings in the late–1940s, more liberal than conservative in its culture and sensibilities. Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing defeat in 2016 consolidated this relationship. It is now hard to tell where the Democratic Party ends and the national-security state begins.  

I have been, since the Russiagate years, perfectly comfortable with the term “Deep State.” And here it comes again, reliant as always upon its appendages in the Big Tech social media platforms and the more repellant quadrants of corporate media as they attempt to extinguish all other-than-approved opinions and perspectives.        

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Of the many recent incidents of censorship, suppression and intimidation, the one that got me to the keyboard concerns Sharmine Narwani, who founded, three years ago this month, an online journal of news and comment called The Cradle, as in “the cradle of civilization.” Narwani, based in Beirut, now writes columns regularly and edits features for the English-language version of the site. She calls The Cradle a collective effort, “an online magazine covering the geopolitics of West Asia from within the region.” Those last four words are the ones that matter most to me.

Last week — on the first day of the Democratic National Convention, indeed — Meta permanently banned The Cradle from Facebook and Instagram, the holding company’s most trafficked social media properties. Narwani now stands accused of “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence.” This ruling came without warning. All Narwani got was this:

Your account, or activity on it, does not follow our community guidelines. No one can see or find your account and you can’t use it. All your information will be permanently deleted. You cannot request a review of this decision.

How’s this for the sound of liberal authoritarianism? Big Brother could not have got down the poetry of fascistic finality any better. 

Narwani, who earned a master’s degree at Columbia University in international affairs before joining the Great Craft, writes forthrightly and without regard for however much her reporting may shock the comfortably misinformed. Hers is not the stuff of beach reading, which is where its strength lies. Narwani’s investigations at the height of the CIA’s covert operation in Syria were  especially distinguished but proved simply too honest for American media — The New York Times, The Guardian, Salon, and so on — to continue taking. When Huffington Post stopped accepting her work, it scrubbed her entire archive. 

I published a long, two-part interview with Narwani in 2019, shortly before she seems to have concluded, very wisely, that there is no getting truthful reporting of her kind into a mainstream media scene wholly given over to the imperium’s propaganda machine. It was Narwani who first taught me that “the Middle East” is better understood as “West Asia.” I saw in The Cradle’s pages, in other words, the true power of perspective when it is decentered — or, better put, properly recentered. 
Losing alternative perspectives is precisely what is at stake in this new round of censorship. Narwani wrote last week (the italics are hers):

Meta’s accusations of [The Cradle] “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence” largely stem from posts and videos that relay information or quotes from West Asian resistance movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah — blacklisted by many western governments  — who are an essential part of the news stories unfolding in a region on the precipice of a major war. 

It is also essential to recognize that these are major West Asian political organizations that have deep institutional and civic roots within Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen and are part of the very fabric of these societies. They are represented in governance, run schools, hospitals, and utilities, and disperse salaries to millions of civilian workers.

I am very pleased Narwani made this important point. We lose all such density of understanding when power—political power, media power, Big Tech power—affixes the label “terrorist” to an organization, a person or a group of people. All are thenceforth rendered two-dimensional, while we are rendered ignorant—precisely the intended state. And in this new wave of censorship, the drift is that journalists, too, can be accused as terrorists or of acting as their accomplices. 

Just as I was thinking through Meta’s permanent ban of The Cradle, I came (a little late) to the case of Andrew Napolitano, who, in a previous life, was a Superior Court judge sitting on the New Jersey bench. Judge N.’s daily webcast, Judging Freedom, has become must viewing in my household (and many others, by the numbers). Napolitano has a gift for clipped, succinct questions that call forth the insightful replies of an extraordinary list of returning guests. Ray McGovern, Chas Freeman, Jeffrey Sachs, Alistair Crooke, John Mearsheimer, Larry Johnson — these are top-drawer names, all of them unwelcome in corporate media.

The censors arrived in June, when YouTube, a Google property, took a segment of Napolitano’s program off the air and assigned it a “first strike.” Get three of these and YouTube, long distinguished as one of the most aggressive censors of dissenting opinion, will remove your webcast permanently, with Meta-style courtesy.

When I asked Napolitano about this the other day he replied in a note:

We were told by YT — with no notice — that the strike was due to an on-air conversation I had with a guest back in June of this year. The 20–second conversation addressed the well-known and well-documented Nazi origins of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion and the propensity of many of its members to bear swastika tattoos. The same subject has been addressed in the NY Times and on CNN and elsewhere.

YT called it hate speech. We ran it through standard and respected AI platforms, and all concluded that this was not hate speech. Of course, Google agreed with its offspring.

There are a couple of things to note about this—three, now I think of it. 

One, it is by now tiresome in the extreme to have people in the propaganda apparatus pretending there are no neo–Nazis active in Ukraine when the Kiev regime is shot through with them and when Azov and other such groups, driven by a visceral hatred of Russia and its people, lead the most effective battalions in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As I and numerous others have pointed out, and as Napolitano suggests, the country’s neo–Nazi elements have appeared and disappeared in mainstream Western media according to passing geopolitical exigencies. Judge N. got paddled for making reference to common knowledge. 

Two, when we consider the caliber of Napolitano’s regular guests we have to conclude that the operators of the censorship machine are shifting gears. What has been until now a somewhat spotty, swatting-flies operation shapes up to be a pervasive threat to free speech and the right to dissenting opinion from which not even our most distinguished minds are immune.   

Finally, I will take this opportunity to assert that the notion of “hate speech” and all efforts to outlaw it are wholly objectionable in any society purporting to be democratic and come to, at the horizon, nothing short of thought control. Contempt may be a nobler sentiment, but hatred is an altogether human emotion and we all have a right to it. The Germans, who are way ahead of Americans in this line, are a good indicator of where the suppression of “hate speech” leads: It leads to a polity that no longer knows itself because its people, fearful of prison or fines, no longer live their lives, so to say, publicly. All becomes furtive. 

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When Scott Ritter was pulled off a plane in June, just as he began a journey to St. Petersburg, Russia, to attend an annual conference, it was obvious there was a degree of performance or demonstration in the conduct of the New York police and the State Department, which authorized the operation. Ritter, once a U.N. weapons  inspector and now a commentator on military and foreign affairs, had his passport confiscated and cannot, for the moment, travel. State could have got this done without all the theater at Kennedy. 

Who knew at the time where this would lead? Who knew it was the front edge of an effort to intimidate journalists of various kinds with the direct threat of prison on charges of terrorism or working as an agent of a foreign power or who knows what? 

Earlier this month, while Ritter was marooned in his suburb of Albany, the FBI raided his home and removed all his electronic communication devices, along with many crates of documents. As The Times subsequently reported, this is part of an investigation into whether Ritter acts as a foreign agent when he writes for RT International, Russia’s equivalent of the BBC, or participates in some of RT’s  broadcasts. 

The operative statute is the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the question at issue is whether Ritter transgressed when he failed to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. “More searches are expected soon,” The Times reported, citing officials. “Criminal charges are also possible.” 

Now just a damn minute. More searches? Criminal charges? When the BBC’s U.S. correspondents are similarly investigated — unthinkable, of course —  I will take this invocation of FARA seriously. But our censors, as the record shows again and again, have no special concern about acting in a serious manner. Power has no such obligation.  

I must now fear for people such as Chris Hedges, who had a program on RT America before the U.S. government effectively shut the network down — and at which point YouTube deleted the six-year archive of Hedges’s RT America program, “On Contact.” I have my own views of the wisdom or otherwise of working for RT International, if not RT America, which in practice served as a haven for dissident Americans of various stripes, but will set these thoughts aside for now. The idea that Hedges, top-to-bottom a professional the whole of his career, could get marked down as a foreign agent is simply preposterous. 

Did I say “preposterous”? Ah, I come to the case of Richard Medhurst.

Medhurst, born in Syria and a British subject, has an enviable knowledge of West Asian affairs and is a vigorously outspoken critic of Zionist Israel’s terrorizing campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza. Traveling through London last week—he resides in Vienna—Medhurst was not detained at Heathrow: He was arrested and held in solitary for nearly 24 hours under Article 12 of Britain’s Terrorism Act. He has not been charged with any crime—and I reckon he won’t be, so farcical is this exercise—but he will remain under investigation for three months. 

Here is Hedges on the Medhurst case, and I hope he will forgive my ellipses:

The arrest of the reporter Richard Medhurst, who has been one of the most ardent critics of the genocide in Gaza and Israeli apartheid state … is part of the steady march towards the criminalization of journalism…. 

It is designed to have a chilling effect on reporting that elucidates Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank, as well as the active collaboration in this extermination of the Palestinian people by the U.S. and U.K. governments…. 

If we do not vigorously oppose Medhurst’s arrest, if we do not denounce the use of terrorism laws to attempt to silence journalists… Medhurst’s arrest will become the “norm.”

There is more where all this comes from. John Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower who was convicted of exposing the CIA’s torture program, was recently escorted to his connecting flight in Toronto and detained in Washington as he flew home from Athens via Canada. “There’s no good news in these stories,” Kiriakou writes in a review of his and other cases in a Consortium News piece published Tuesday under the headline, “The Slide into Authoritarianism.” “This is the future, unless we stand up to fight it.” 

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My mind drifts back to the Democratic National Convention as I consider these events. I think of all those dreamy, worshipful faces, eyes uplifted, to which the cameras turned in the course of the speeches delivered by various  party elites, and, of course, Kamala Harris when she formally accepted her nomination last Thursday evening. How innocently eager they seemed to have something, someone, they can believe in. How lost they were to the world as it is all around them. And how cynical the illiberal liberals who run the party as they manipulate the emotions of these people while condemning them to ignorance of the imperium the party is committed to sustaining.   

Edward Luce, formerly the Financial Times’s Washington bureau chief and now one of the FT’s more readable commentators, ran a column on the convention under the headline, “‘Gaza’ is the word Democrats dare not whisper in Chicago.” A day into the proceedings, The Intercept put out an item headed, “Democratic Party Unites Under Banner of Silence on Gaza Genocide.” 

That is how it was, more or less, at the DNC in Chicago. There was plenty of talk of AIPAC, the antidemocratic American Israel Public Affairs Committee — a foreign agent if ever there was one — but only in the streets outside the convention hall. Harris finally raised the Gaza crisis, during her acceptance speech, but boyo, did she blow through that topic with haste. This was “strategic vagueness”—that adorable phrase The New York Times has coined to make a virtue of Harris’s weather-vane vacuousness—at its very finest.   

It was the usual thing when Harris devoted a few sentences to Gaza: Her White House will shed more crocodile tears for the suffering of Palestinians, but the unwavering, unconditional support the “Biden–Harris administration” extends to apartheid Israel will remain unwavering and unconditional. When you hear Harris say, “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself,” as she stated last Thursday, it is the recipient of AIPAC funds speaking in the code the Israel lobby understands: Worry not. You will get what you have paid for.

My take: It will be silence on the imperium’s doings between now and Nov 5. And if Harris is elected in November, getting her through the following four years will require an escalated version of the censorship regime the national-security state and Big Tech imposed on dissenting voices during the Trump years, but with one difference: The objective then was to take down our forty-fifth president; this time it will be to sustain our stunningly unqualified forty-seventh. 

https://scheerpost.com/2024/08/29/patrick-lawrence-the-sound-of-enforced-silence/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report

This interview is also available on Rumble and podcast platforms.

“Genocide is the moral imperative of our era,” declares Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in this episode of The Chris Hedges Reports as she continues her campaign for the U.S. presidency. Joined by running mate, Professor Butch Ware, the two make their case as to why they should earn the vote of every disenfranchised American, stuck in the woes of personal domestic struggles and the atrocities committed abroad on their behalf by a self-serving empire.

Stein’s view is clear when looking at how the election is shaping up: “Forget the lesser evil, there is no lesser evil. You have two genocidal candidates, one conducting genocide right now and the other promising to finish the job.”

Stein and Ware hammer down that while the military-industrial complex may seem like a foreign policy issue, tackling it is key to unlocking solutions at the domestic level. Stein says the bloated defense budget, which reaches into the trillions of dollars when all expenditures are accounted for, is one of the primary obstacles she aims to take down. “This is why we are not providing for the health care, the housing, the education, getting people out of debt, dealing with the climate emergency, ending the carceral state and having a restorative system of justice and addressing the issues of poverty and hopelessness, which drive crime in the first place,” she explains.

Ware remarks that the dynamic between Americans who feel trapped into voting for Democrats out of fear of Trump is deeply toxic, fueled by the narcissism of the candidates themselves. “As soon as you sign on the dotted line, they get right back to business, murdering people with your tax dollars, putting it in their pocket, letting your neighborhoods dissolve and break down,” Ware tells Hedges.

Ware makes clear that there is a choice for resistance and dissent on the ballot in November: “We have to end this toxic cycle of abuse, because they have people spellbound into thinking that there is no way to resist, but you absolutely can resist right now by voting Green.”

Chris Hedges

Max Jones

Diego Ramos

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Diego Ramos

Chris Hedges: There is only one way to end the genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that supports the genocide. 

This does not mean that we do not have a choice in this presidential race. We do. Dr. Jill Stein from the Green Party and independent candidate Cornel West are vocal critics of not only the apartheid state of Israel and the mass slaughter in Gaza, but the U.S. war machine.

The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump. Kamala Harris has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden. There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter. 

In short, we are told in election cycle after election cycle impotent. We must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the shipment of hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to facilitate the genocide, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.

Joining me to discuss the imperative to defy the two ruling corporate parties and Israel’s ongoing genocide is Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein and Green Party vice presidential candidate Professor Butch Ware. Jill, let’s begin with you. The Green Party, I think, has been very successful in this election cycle, on getting on ballots. And that’s no small feat. I worked, as you know, with Ralph Nader, and watched how, in particular, the Democratic Party threw hurdle after hurdle in front of his own ballot access. So lay out where we are.

Jill Stein: Absolutely and thanks for having us on Chris. It is, you know, genocide is the moral imperative of our era. It really is the key focus, the point of departure for our campaign, ending genocide, ending empire, ending the war on working people and the war on democracy, they all go together. They’re joined at the hip. But we’ve got to start by ending this genocide, which absolutely can be done. Ronald Reagan did it with a simple phone call, as did Dwight Eisenhower. That can be done, and we need to hold the U.S. and the White House and the Biden-Harris administration absolutely accountable. That is why we are in this fight as the only anti-war, anti-genocide, pro-worker, climate emergency choice that will be on the ballot pretty much across the country. The Democrats, as you’ve said, Chris, they are pulling out all the stops knowing that they cannot compete with us in the court of public opinion. They try to simply wipe their competition out and throw us off the ballot. They announced back in March that they would be hiring an army of corporate lawyers to basically try to nitpick us off the ballot. They’ve been trying to do that. 

They also have been advertising publicly for paid positions to manage infiltrators and spies in order to mess up our campaign, and they have also hijacked our public matching funds. We’ve earned, at this point, well over $300,000 worth of matching funds, which were granted and which were appropriated, and then the Treasury Department, the Democratic Treasury Department, basically took those funds and said they’re not giving them to us until after the Democratic and Republican conventions and those candidates had specifically declined the funding. The thought that Democrats and Republican candidates, that Trump and Harris would be using public funds is preposterous, because then you can’t use private funds, so they would have to give up their billion dollar campaigns and run on basically $17 million, which is all that’s in the fund right now, because they raided the fund. At any rate, they’ve been pulling out all the stops to keep us off the ballot. We are now on track for at least 40 states where we will be on the ballot, and then we’ll be write-ins in at least another eight states. So just about across the entire country, for almost every voter, you will have an anti-genocide choice. And we can’t stress enough, don’t let them talk you into genocide. Don’t let them talk you out of your humanity. This is not a done deal. We can stand up and force this issue, as you’ve said, Chris, this is the only way that we are going to stop this genocide, is by forcing the hand of the White House. They can do this in the blink of an eye.

Chris Hedges: Let’s also make clear that it isn’t just obstruction tactics in terms of ballot access, but they keep you off the presidential debates because it’s so expensive to get airtime. The national media essentially erases your exposure. Speak a little bit about how they conspire to block your presence on the political landscape.

Jill Stein: In every way imaginable. We’ve had one interview on mainstream media, that was after I was assaulted by the police at the Washington University in St. Louis as part of the Gaza encampment. They came at me, the videos are all over social media, they came at me using a bicycle as a battering ram. After that, that bought me one interview on CNN which focused on Zionism and on why Zionism is not Judaism. It is not antisemitic to oppose Zionism and to oppose the ethnic cleansing that has been really part of the program since the beginning of the Zionist state. That was the only coverage I’ve had on mainstream media. Even DemocracyNow! has refused to cover our campaign. We’ve had one, maybe two mentions in headline news, but no interview whatsoever. It’s just outrageous, the kind of Trump fear that has been whipped up to try to silence political opposition. And if I could just speak to that briefly, you know, where did Trumpism come from? You know, the big surge from the Democratic Party into Republicans happened in 2010 after the Wall Street bailouts. After 7-8 million homeowners were thrown out while Wall Street banks were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars after the Wall Street crash, the housing crash in 2008. So that’s where the beginning, you know, of the shift happened. Democrats lost 1,000 seats in state legislatures. They lost 64 seats in Congress. They lost 12 seats in the Senate and 12 governorships. 

So that’s where people began to shift. And remember, it was the Democrats’ policy of this so-called “Pied Piper strategy” that lifted up Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, that made him viable, that gave him a lot of press attention. And you know that policy worked so well, the so-called “Pied Piper strategy” that the Democrats continued to use that. They spent $50 million in 2020 basically supporting, I’m sorry that was 2022, supporting extremist Republicans because Democrats wanted an easier candidate to be in the general. But in the meantime, they changed the culture of the Republican Party, and they launched the careers of these nut cake extremists. So you know, that’s where extremism comes from, that plus the neoliberal agenda of Democrats, which has been privatization, austerity, big tax giveaways to the wealthy and endless war. This is what has deprived some 30 million workers of jobs over the last several decades. Starting with NAFTA and beyond, you’ve had this really horrific agenda that has been driving the American workforce into utter desperation and despair. This is where the embrace of demagogues comes from. 

So, you know, the notion that either that the Democrats will solve the problem of right wing extremism, that’s absurd. Also the notion that it’s not already with us. You know, that the Democrats are extremists themselves, and one only need look at the cop cities, which are being run under democratic governments, democratic city councils, as in Atlanta, where you have these extremely fascistic police forces. These cop cities are being built all over the country. You have complete militarization of the police. You know, it is this right wing agenda foisted by the Democrats that is pushing the electorate to the right. And it is the Democrats. they are not the lesser evil here, they are the actual perpetrators of genocide. There is no more fascistic, a mark of fascism, than conducting genocide. We don’t have to wait for Donald Trump in order to see fascism in this country. It is alive and well, and we do not avoid fascism by promoting neoliberals or by promoting the fascistic Democrats. We have to stand up and fight for what it is that we want and our values. Witness France. France finally beat back the right wing by actually putting forward a true left agenda. The Democrats are not the answer. They’re more the cause of the problem of fascism in this country. 

Chris Hedges: Yeah, this is a point Ralph Nader often made, wholesale surveillance, NAFTA, militarization of police, massive expansion of our carceral system, the evisceration of due process and civil liberties, as anyone who spent time in a court in a poor neighborhood knows, with coercing people to plea out. You said it, essentially, what you’ve done is created a system where you just flick a switch and it becomes fascistic. Butch, let’s talk about Gaza, something that is extremely important to you, personally, to me, personally and why we are now, I think, facing a moral imperative to step outside the system.

Butch Ware: Man, I think that I would begin in my answer by tethering it to what Jill has just laid out for us, right? Why do they not want us on the ballot, and why do they not want us on the stage? And the reason is, is that the American people do not want this genocide. Okay, so let’s just picture this for a moment, and I’ll use this to get into Gaza. Let’s picture Dr. Jill Stein standing on that stage, okay? And she looks to her right and sees Kamala Harris and says that this one is a war criminal, okay? ICC and ICJ have concluded the following things in consecutive order, okay? That the Zionist entity is an illegal apartheid state, okay? It is conducting an illegal genocide in the midst of an illegal occupation. So that means that Team Blue are war criminals, okay? They shouldn’t travel, right? So then look further to the right there, and we’re, by the way, we’re here, I don’t even think of us on the left. I think of us in the center, what used to be the center, right? Angela Davis talked about the left has moved so far to the right that it’s disappeared. I actually think that this is the center for American people. I think people want representative democracy, but let’s keep with the imagery. Now you look further to the right and you see the Red team with the orange lunatic, actual criminal, multiple accounts. And so Dr. Jill Stein then says, the American people do not want this genocide. A majority of American Jews do not want this war to continue. They want a ceasefire, but we have no representative democracy up on that stage. 

So Dr. Jill Stein can go up on that stage and say, one of these parties is not run by a criminal. One of these parties is not run by a war criminal or a fascist that tried to overthrow the government on January 6. Listen, we were worried about the matching funds. We still ain’t get them. We were worried about the Secret Service. We still haven’t gotten that. But maybe that’s for the best, because the Secret Service did not exactly cover themselves in glory on that day, did they, when they deleted all of their cell phone data and when whatever happened to Trump on that podium happened. So thank you. We will take private security. Last thing that I’m going to say on this, right? It’s the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding conducted polling, okay, January, sorry, comparing the Biden results in 2020 with January 2024, and you can look this up. This is a matter of public record. If you put together the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, states that all have significant African American populations and significant Muslim populations, okay? The polling indicated that specifically in the Muslim community, Biden got 65% of the vote in 2020. As of January 2024, that was 12%. There has been a slight uptick, still not to 20%, for Kamala Harris, they are getting eviscerated in the Muslim community and in the Arab community. So they are desperately afraid of us getting on that stage. Next set of questions in the ISPU polling is why? What’s the reason? Well, it’s the genocide, stupid! Right? That we’ve got 200,000 people, 10% of the population of Gaza, has been wiped out. That’s Lancet, that’s from a month ago. Who knows what the number is now, right? And we’ve got people that are being bombed into flight, a trail of, not just a Trail of Tears, right? A trail of blood and sweat and tears and starvation. Bomb them in one place, tell them it’s safe, chase them to another. Shoot them when they come for the food. Shoot them when they hide in the school. Blow up the hospital, right? The reason why they do not want this pressure is because a ceasefire is coming. And when a ceasefire comes, the Zionist entity collapses because international observers will enter Gaza Strip and will find an Auschwitz every two blocks. 

So that is precisely why they do not want us on that stage. They do not want us on that ballot. They want the American people to think that they do not have a choice. They want to silence us, but we have more than enough ballot access to win the electoral college. Last thing that I’ll say about this is that I was raised in the Black Muslim tradition. Converted to Islam when I was 15 years old after reading the autobiography of Malcolm X, that’s where I learned to be a political fighter. And a lot of people know that Malcolm has been a personal inspiration to me, but not everybody knows what Muhammad Ali meant to me, and I’m just going to tell you this, when he got into the ring, I was minding my business, teaching my university courses, organizing, organizing protests, campus activism, at the encampment, all of those things. I would not have run for office if not invited, but when Jill tagged me in, I’m coming in to win. Okay, so Muhammad Ali did not get in the ring with Sonny Liston talking about a protest vote or being a spoiler, he came in to knock that sucker out, and that’s what they’re afraid of. Last thing I just talked about Dr. Jill on that stage, man, put me up on the stage with JD Vance and Tim Walz, and you will see how privilege preserves mediocrity. And I’m not just talking about racial privilege, I’m not just talking about class privilege. I’m talking about political privilege. These two parties have dominated the terrain with their duopoly for so long that they have become soft and pathetic, weak, pitiful political characters, right? I’ve heard the term as a historian, what kind of political athlete is he? What kind of political athlete is she? These are subpar athletes. Kamala didn’t really win anything. She was coronated. She didn’t win. These are mediocre candidates. And if we ever get the chance to make our case on stage in front of the American people, we will show that to the world.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the DNC, we’ll start with you, Jill, you were there. I don’t regularly read Kristof, but I did read one of his columns and it had this throwaway line that I would have preferred that the voters choose, as if that was just an aside. I almost fell out of my chair. But let’s talk about the farce that took place, completely choreographed, they didn’t allow anyone, let’s go back to the primaries. I mean, they wouldn’t allow anyone to run against Biden. And then, when Biden was faltering, every Democratic politician who ended up, of course, carrying out a kind of party coup, ensured us that he was sharp and and meant his mental acuity was, you know, preserved, etc, etc. But let’s just talk about the whole process, because it’s vaudeville, it’s burlesque.

Jill Stein: Totally. It was a theater of the absurd. It was a display of decadence. It was joy before genocide, or joy, you know, in the face of genocide, it was just shameful, an abomination, really hard to stomach. You had everybody on stage, Republicans, families of Israeli hostages, Oprah, everybody’s on stage. But not the Palestinian delegates, not the loyal Democrats who happen to remind people that there’s a genocide, they just wanted their party… You know, to my mind, it was like the height of fiddling while Rome burns, while our humanity goes up in flames, it’s an effort to party down. And there was the ring of corporate suites on the upper level, which were paid anywhere from half a million to several million dollars a piece for each of those suites. That tells you where the real power lay here. What was really going on at that convention, those suites which were off limits to the public and to the press, that is like the power behind the throne here. Kamala Harris, true to the process that you’ve described, you know, she’s had the kind of circle closed around her to protect her from any kind of scrutiny. It’s like what was done for Joe Biden, you know? And then finally, the truth had out, you know, that there was no there there. Well, it’s no secret that there’s no there there with Kamala Harris, either. She’s a complete chameleon to the degree that she has beliefs whatsoever. But, you know, she’s had a very hard time expressing her beliefs over the past many years, and tends to talk herself in circles. 

So she’s not done a single interview, she’s not been in a debate. She’s not had a single vote cast on her behalf. Her website lacks policies, it’s all about merch. You know, to me, it’s just mind boggling that people allow themselves to be bamboozled again. This is like Obama mania 2.0 and you know, where did that get us? Obama, it was all about hope and change. Now it’s just about joy, joy and hope. Hope is back, joy is back. And what did we get with Obama? You know, his very first appointment was Larry Summers, even before Obama was in office, the truth was out that this was… No, this was not about hope and change, this was about serving Wall Street more than ever, doubling down for Wall Street. And that’s what went on to happen. And Obama took us from, what? Two wars to seven, massively accelerated the production of fossil fuels, all the while saying, you know, all of the above, it’s all of the above were doing great things for renewable energy, which nature doesn’t care about. Nature cares about fossil fuels. People care about renewables, but the climate could care less, you know? So it was just BS with Obama, and we paid to the teeth for that, and now people are allowing themselves to drink similar Kool Aid. But let me just say, what we’re seeing right now is the PR circus. We’re not actually seeing what happens because people’s material needs are not being met. They’re not being addressed. I was outside with the Poor People’s Army, which had marched 100 miles from Milwaukee, which was homeless people, people screaming about their dire healthcare needs, about the needs for schools and education and to get out of debt. That just had no presence whatsoever in the Kamala Harris agenda and not at the DNC. So, you know, it remains to be seen what happens and I think it’s really important for people not to drink the Kool Aid, to not allow ourselves to normalize the torture and murder of children on an industrial scale. What goes down in Gaza is not going to stay in Gaza. This is basically, you know, setting the agenda from here forward. It’s very important that we stand up and to recognize that the endless war machine of which genocide is a symbol is robbing us blind, is consuming half of our congressional budget. This is why, you know, over a trillion dollars a year, if you add the associated costs, the VA, the security agencies and so on. If you add up all the costs here, this is why it’s over a trillion dollars, and this is why we are not providing for the health care, the housing, the education, getting people out of debt, dealing with the climate emergency, you know, ending the carceral state and having a restorative system of justice and addressing the issues of poverty and hopelessness, which drive crime in the first place. 

The migration crisis, which itself, is a product of US policies. The most critical thing we can do to address the migration crisis is to stop causing it in the first place, and then we can provide the infrastructure. Instead of spending billions on a wall that doesn’t work, we can instead spend that money on the migration attorneys, on the civil servants and so on, so that people can be quickly processed, background checked and provided papers so that they can work. And in that case, you know, migrants are not a burden to their communities. In the least, they are an incredible resource which actually makes the country safer and more prosperous. So we can solve these problems, but having this unbelievably overblown, toxic, dangerous military which goes hand in hand with a war on working people and a war on our democracy here at home, we don’t solve any of it. It doesn’t serve any of us. This is why, as Butch was saying, this is why they don’t want us in the mix, because we can remind people of the actual realities here and do a reality check on the nonsense, on the absolute spin and propaganda that’s being forced down our throats. We need to stand up. Forget the lesser evil, there is no lesser evil. You have two genocidal candidates, one conducting genocide right now and the other promising to finish the job. We need to stand up, forget the lesser evil, fight for the greater good, like our lives depend on it, because, in fact, they do right here and right now.

Chris Hedges: I covered the civil wars in Central America for five years, and of course, it was our military assistance that created these despotic failed states, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala. I was there, I covered it. That’s why Karl Liebknecht, the great German socialist, on the eve of World War I, called the German military the enemy from within. And Arnold Toynbee , the great historian, said empires die when they finally cannot control their military machines. Butch, during the DNC, which I admit I didn’t watch. I only read about it and saw whatever clip somebody sent to me, but they played the race card and they played the class card, so you had black billionaires, I mean, it was it, and as Jill said, of course, all the corporate sponsors were up there, I’m sure giving standing ovation. But let’s talk about the rhetoric that was used by these figures who spoke, including with [J. B.] Pritzker, who proudly bragged that he was a real billionaire, as opposed to Trump.

Butch Ware: Man, how much time do we have? So let me just say this. So as a professor that teaches, I literally have a class at UCSB called “Black Revolutionaries,” and it’s about resistance to white supremacy in anti-slavery movements in West Africa and through imperialism and so forth. I’m a lifelong student and teacher of the Black radical tradition, so let’s just go with Frantz Fanon, right? One of his most famous books, “Black Skins, White Masks,” okay? And this is what we are looking at with the weaponization of Blackness in order to justify genocide. This is Black skin, white mask, Blackface minstrelsy. I’m not going to pull any punches, and I just want to say this. I mean, I said this before on an Instagram Live, Kamala is to politics what Drake is to hip-hop. It’s cosplay Blackness that is designed to disempower our communities, and is a fundamental betrayal of the Black radical tradition that was hip-hop music and that now, again, this has become toxins. So I’m just going to give… I said that Muhammad Ali was one, we heard “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” I wrote a little bit of a rhyme, okay? Because I saw Kamala’s coconut memes, right? And everybody’s, oh, coconut memes, coconut memes. So here we go: 

I seen them coconut memes. 

You got the wrong imagery. 

It ain’t about falling out the tree. It’s about mentality. 

Brown on the outside, yeah that’s a coconut to me, 

but when you open it, you find a colonizer in the mind. 

This is the people’s revolution, and the people know the time. 

Ask Cam about reparations, [inaudible] and shuck and jive. 

About 10 days ago, was teaching, got a call from Jill Stein, 

asked what she’s bringing to the nation, laying back in reparations, 

promising cash payments and freeing Palestine, 

liberation of the Congo, Sudan and Riker’s aisle. 

No more locking brothers up on the pettiest of crimes. 

No more Latinos up in cages, no dividing of the races. 

Drug epidemic, treat with rehabilitation, instead of time in jail. 

Disempower the cartels. 

Now, what do I mean by this? We have people that are just Black imperialists and are overlooking an actual emancipatory agenda. In Britain, the term “coconut” is the equivalent of the American term “Oreo.” It’s something, “Oreo” is Black on the outside, white on the inside. The similar term for our indigenous brothers and sisters, derogatory term was “apple,” red on the outside, white on the inside. They got the coconut memes all wrong. That is a Black imperialist, and they are weaponizing this sacred tradition of resistance to white supremacy in order to justify genocide, and not on my watch. I’m sorry, this means too much to many of us. And it doesn’t just have to be Black radicals. It’s also anti-Zionist Jews, like my running mate, Dr. Jill Stein. Like Jill, I’ve heard you say, not in my name, right? Well, not in my name either! And that’s why I think that this is such a powerful, powerful duo, right, is that we can stand as a white, Jewish medical doctor, okay? And as a Black Muslim history professor, not politicians, public servants, and we can say that you guys are spellbound by this duopoly, right? And we are going to, as a medical doctor and a professor, we are going to heal and educate this nation to get them out from under this fascist spell. 

Last point, Chris, I saw your piece where you talked about Nero’s Guests, right? And this is the thing, Dr. Jill set it up, so I’m going to knock it down, right? Yes, fiddling while Rome burned. But as you pointed out, Nero was conducting live crucifixions, burning people alive, and people are attending dinner parties. So the question isn’t about Nero. We understand Nero’s motivation. Nero’s motivation is that he is a deranged, power drunk lunatic, and certainly both of these parties have reached that station. The question ultimately becomes, what is wrong with us? Why are our hearts so dead that we can walk through this spectacle of charred corpses and throw parties in Chicago.

Chris Hedges: That’s it. Let’s talk about class. They played that class rhetoric and the utter mendacity of it was, I mean, how many mansions does Barack Obama and Michelle Obama… Let’s be clear, Michelle Obama was a corporate lawyer before she went to the White House, pulling down a quarter of a million dollars a year, but they played that class rhetoric too. So talk about that, Butch.

Butch Ware: Okay, it’s actually tapping into a deep psychological need, okay, which Dr. Jill Stein is going to address through reparations, rather than through individualist capitalist exploitation. So try to stay with me. Back at home, I know you guys are staying with me, but sometimes I get a little academic, so pardon me. So W.E.B. Du Bois said of capitalism, a system of universal selfishness cannot bring social good to all. But what has recently substituted for an actual liberatory agenda in the Black community is individual excellence, right? That is Black excellence, and what that masks is that it is usually acquired through complicity with oppressive systems. And this goes to the corrupt bargain that the American Empire has always offered to Black America, right? Is that if you hold the bag, we’ll do the stealing, and you can have your share, right? And that’s what we see. We see those Black criminals who are happy to hold the bag, right, and they get their share, okay? And because of that, they are bought and paid for. We know what Malcolm called them. 

Malcolm called them house Negroes, and he said that they can afford to do these things because they live relatively good, but they are actually selling out their people. And what did he say about this? He said… what happened with Joe Biden? Joe Biden is faltering. Malcolm said, when the master gets sick, the house Negroes say, What’s wrong, boss? We sick? So Kamala comes in, boss, we sick? How can we weaponize our Blackness to help this party get back on its feet? And it is built on a class divide. So this is an absolutely criminal weaponization of class difference and racial difference that is designed to silence what has been the overwhelming majority, right, of the Black response to this genocide, which is that the Black community has been at the forefront of the resistance to this genocide, alongside Palestinian-Americans, anti-Zionist Jews, anybody with a functioning heart, and it, for me, is deeply disappointing. As someone, I’m the son of a locksmith with a sixth grade education. My father earned his living with his hands. My grandfather earned his living with his hands. To see the class and racial dimensions weaponized in this way, to me, is an affront to everything that I’ve learned about liberation.

Chris Hedges: Great. Let’s talk, Jill, about where you’re headed, what you’re doing. What do we, you know, have just a few weeks left? What are you and Butch going to be focusing on? Where are you going to be?

Jill Stein: So first we’re completing our ballot drives, and that’ll go on for about another two weeks or so, and then we’ll basically be back out on the trail. And we have been very involved in connecting with the abandoned Biden community, now it’s abandoned Harris. And they have not been talked into drinking the Kool Aid. To their credit, they are continuing the fight, and they are mobilizing their community, and we will be a part of that mobilization. We are hoping to be working jointly with many of the Arab American and Muslim groups, as well as the anti-Zionist and anti-genocide groups. We’re also doing outreach to the African American community, to the post incarceration community, to the communities in poverty. So we’re really, you know, one out of every three voters did not vote in 2020 and they deserve to vote. And our intention is to get out there and to let people know that there is a choice that is pro-worker, that is supporting marginalized communities, post incarceration communities, that we support reparations, we oppose the carceral state. We provide an economic bill of rights that would provide a job. We are fighting for a $25 an hour minimum wage, health care as a human right for everyone. We call for an immediate rent control across the country, a federal program of rent control, because half of Americans right now are just barely hanging on to their housing, are extremely stressed paying 30 to 50% of their income to keep a roof over their heads. We can provide Medicare for All and save a half a trillion dollars a year. We want people to know that the crises that face us in virtually every dimension of our lives are actually solvable. 

This can be done right now by cutting the military budget, by using other efficiencies we can actually afford. By declaring a climate emergency, we actually unleash over half a trillion dollars a year in emergency funding that can be used to create good, high quality union jobs right now, while creating this emergency transition to phase out fossil fuels and provide sustainable energy, transportation, housing and agriculture. So there’s a whole lot of jobs to be created. There’s a whole economy to be revived. We can do this. And in fact, starting on day one, even without congressional action, the president alone can declare the climate emergency and unleash well over half a trillion dollars to start dealing with this. Medicare for All actually saves us money, it doesn’t cost us money. Our job now, once the ballot access is behind us, is to get the word out. And I want to encourage people to go to JillStein2024.com and join the team, make a contribution if you can, or just sign up and volunteer, because at the end of the day, this is about us, especially on social media, getting the word out. It’s about, you know, politics 101 is all door knocking. It is phone banking, and it is tabling, because a lot of Americans are not going to vote. They are not going to drink the Kamala Kool Aid, and they’re certainly not voting for Donald Trump. And they’re left, you know, they’re basically left holding the bag. So we want to get out, especially to disenfranchised voters, and let people know, to the students, you know, to all the opponents of genocide who are basically boycotting this election. There are so many people who are boycotting because neither party is meeting our needs in the least so just by getting the word out, we want to show that we are strong. We are here. Every vote cast for our campaign is a vote against genocide. It is a vote to dismantle the empire and to use those resources here at home for what is absolutely critical in our lives. Every vote is a shot across the bow that we’re here, we’re getting organized. We’re not going to be intimidated. We are not going away. 

You know when we see a genocide rolling out with the incredible ferocity, the blood and the gore of the daily massacres, you know, this is what the future looks like. The U.S. is no longer the dominant power in the world, but it thinks that it is. It is still behaving like it is a monopolar world ruled by the U.S. We are brewing nuclear conflict in at least three areas around the world right now. This militarism is impoverishing us and it is endangering all of us. You do not have a nuclear conflict anywhere that doesn’t go into the upper atmosphere and create nuclear winter, which can end civilization with the exchange of a modest number of moderate sized, you know, so called tactical nuclear weapons. Our leaders are absolutely criminal in this regard as well. So our job is to get the word out and to assure people that these crises are absolutely solvable right now, it’s all about us standing up. As Alice Walker said, the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we have it to start with. We have the numbers, we have the values of the American people. We have their needs at heart, and we actually have the game plan and the strategy to solve these crises. So, you know, however far we get, it’s just really important that we stand up and we fight back. We fight like our lives depend on it, because, in fact, they do. So we have a world to save right now, we have nothing to lose and we have everything to gain. That’s what we’ll be very busy doing over the next, you know, whatever it is now 70 some days.

Chris Hedges: We should look at the U.K. elections, I was in Blackburn campaigning for Craig Murray on an anti-genocide ticket. When you actually look at the numbers of people who did not support Labour, the Labour got less numerically votes than Jeremy Corbyn did, and they lost several safe seats, including, although Craig didn’t win, including in Blackburn. And what happened immediately after the election, the U.K. government resumed funding for UNRWA, and there are talks of at least beginning to limit some of the weapons. That’s the pressure we have. Having worked for Ralph [Nader], I was aware that his polling was often three, 4% sometimes higher, but then when people went into the booth to vote, that polling was diminished. And Ralph always said it’s fear. They made them afraid. And this political moment means that we can’t be afraid. We can’t genocide alone means that we have to stand up. Thanks. Go ahead.

Butch Ware: Oh yeah. So Jill said so many things, and I just wanted to add just a very small piece to this. So we have this incredible opportunity. They say that we are throwing our vote away, but here in the Green Party, we want to abolish the electoral college. But for now, we have it. The reality is, is that in all but about four or five states, Americans are throwing their vote away, no matter what they do. Because of the Electoral College, it’s already decided which one’s going to be blue, which one’s going to be red. So make your vote count. You have the equation backwards. You can register your dissent from genocide by voting Green. If you are a Muslim, like I’m a Muslim, write it on the holy tablets in the heavens that you said no. If you are an atheist, then write it in history that you said no. That ballot echoes down through the ages, and it can allow us to consolidate the kind of power that will allow us to resist this duopoly in future election cycles. I said that I’m not in it to play a spoiler, we are in it to build power. And the last thing I’ll say is you asked about what Dr. Jill is doing. Dr Jill, I told you about this yesterday, is that we got news just yesterday that we have a verbal confirmation to do the Breakfast Club with Charlamagne tha God, okay? And that is an opportunity to really get in front of a lot of people. Here tonight, we are in Washington, D.C., at the Marriott courtyard, New Carrollton. 

Jill is going to be Zooming in to talk. And what I decided, in trying to help pull this together, and I hope you like this idea, Jill, is that we can talk about the reparations platform, because that’s what sold me. You said two things that made me jump on this ticket, okay? And I’ll try to be brief. You said, about reparations, you said they act as though it is incalculable, but it has been calculated many times by specialists. It is between $10 and 13 trillion U.S., and I am in favor of cash payments to the descendants of the enslaved. And I was like, whoa. And you know what? On Breakfast Club, they’re going to be like, Whoa, right? Tonight in D.C., that’s going to catch people’s attention, right? And then the last thing is that you said that the goal of the Greens was to dismantle the American Empire. We know that you’ve been on the front lines for Palestine. We saw you get arrested. But this is a foreign policy that is actually about pulling those bases back, to keep Americans safe and to keep the rest of the world safe from American Empire. Last piece is this, we are in, those of us that are on the kind of left political spectrum, many of these liberals, and I’m not a liberal, never been a liberal, you know, progressive, radical, revolutionary somewhere in there. But many of these liberals are in this toxic relationship. They’re being gaslit by narcissists, okay? Because what happens is that they say, I’m sorry, baby. I know I promised you healthcare. I know I promised you housing, and I know that I spent all our money on guns and ammo shooting up that other side of town, but I promise, baby, this time, it’s going to be different. This time I’m going to take care of you. And they lie with their social program and gaslighting, and as soon as you sign on the dotted line, they get right back to business, murdering people with your tax dollars, putting it in their pocket, letting your neighborhoods dissolve and break down. We have to end this toxic cycle of abuse, because they have people spellbound into thinking that there is no way to resist, but you absolutely can resist right now by voting Green.

Chris Hedges: Great. That was Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein and Green Party vice presidential candidate Professor Butch Ware. I want to thank Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges] Max [Jones] and Diego [Ramos], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com, thanks.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/04/the-chris-hedges-report-campaigning-against-genocide-w-dr-jill-stein-butch-ware/

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