Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Journalist Chris Hedges on Media, Terror, Gaza, and More
Video Transcript
September 24, 2024
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It's Friday, September 20. 

Tonight: As I often say on this show, one of the purposes of the twice-a-week After-Shows that we do for our Locals community is to hear suggestions from our viewers about topics we should cover and future guests we should invite. Without a doubt, the person whom our viewers have most frequently and vocally demanded that we speak to is the former New York Times reporter turned independent media powerhouse, Chris Hedges. Why haven't you put Chris Hedges on? When is Chris Hedges coming on? What can we do to help you get Chris Hedges on? And we've been helpfully hectored for months this way by our loyal viewers. 

The reality is that I am a long-time fan of Chris Hedges. I was reading his work even before I entered journalism, and we have been trying for months to find a time when he can come on. The stars finally aligned this week, and we sat down with him for a full hour just a couple of days ago, in a wide-ranging discussion about wars, past and present bipartisan foreign policy dogma, corporate media repression, state propaganda, the 2024 election, and so much more. There are really very few people in Western journalism who understand the Middle East better than him. A fluent speaker of Arabic, he covered multiple wars and conflicts in that region for years for The New York Times, including spending months, if not years in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Israel, as well as covering the wars in Kuwait and Yugoslavia in 2002 and 2003. However, he was forced out of The New York Times because he revolted against their attempts to dilute his reporting to make it align with the institutional ideology of the paper, and most of all, to try to control what he could say. While that may seem a risky move for any reporter to leave The New York Times as an established war correspondent, especially back in 2003, before the advent of exploding and far-reaching independent media, it turned out to be, unsurprisingly, the best possible move for him. Since that departure from The New York Times, both on independent news outlets and on his outstanding Substack page, Chris has broken major stories, providing some of the most informed and developed knowledge of U.S. policy in the Middle East and in general is completely free to express himself however he wants without the slightest fear of consequences. 

Independent media is not a panacea. Earlier this year, Hedges was let go by the ostensibly independent left-wing site, The Real News Network, apparently as a result of his insistence, relentlessly, vocally, and uncompromisingly criticizing Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democrats in the lead-up to the election. But we would be a lot less informed and challenged without Chris Hedges's ongoing ability to thrive thanks to independent media. We are thrilled to show you our discussion with him, not only because it temporarily will put a stop to the hectoring from our audience now that we've had him on, but mostly of all because his perspectives are so worth hearing. 


Interview: Chris Hedges


G. Greenwald: Chris Hedges, it's so great to have you on the show. I have to say that our audience has been hectoring us for months, if not longer, saying why isn't Chris Hayes on the show? Why isn't Chris Hedges coming on? And I kept saying it's not for lack of effort. We just haven't been able to align our schedules. And I'm so glad that finally, we were able to do so. And I'm thrilled to have you on. 

 

Chris Hedges: Well, thanks, Glenn. I'm happy to be here. 

 

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. So, there are a lot of substantive issues about U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics that I want to talk to you about but before I get to that, I want to talk about media and how media has changed and how it's enabled people like you to find an audience without being constrained by corporate media. Because if people ask me who are the journalists who have become most influential in independent media, you're definitely one of the 3 or 4 people I would instantly say are among the top. And the irony of that is that when I first got to know you and know your work, you were not in independent media. You were in the very opposite, sort of the belly of the beast, at The New York Times, right after the immediate aftermath of 9/11. For those people who don't know the story, because I think it's such a revealing story about how corporate media works and how it worked back then, talk about the reasons why you're not any longer with The New York Times. 

 

Chris Hedges: I would say there were two major reasons. I spent seven years in the Middle East, much of that time covering Gaza. I was based in Cairo. The Jerusalem bureau for The New York Times did not really cover Gaza, they made very little effort to cover Gaza. So, I would be sent from Cairo and live in Gaza for weeks at a time. I was very frustrated with the way The New York Times covered Palestine and the way they did it, which was different. I went on to cover the war in Yugoslavia, for instance, and it wasn't like this at all. So, if I was reporting on, let's say, an airstrike on a refugee camp, in Jabalia, or somewhere else, they would pepper the article with, you know, I may have been interviewing an eyewitness, but that immediately would be followed with a different account coming from the IDF out of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or somewhere. It had the effect of essentially neutralizing the story. By the end of the story, you could believe whatever you wanted to believe. And that was very difficult. 

Finally, in frustration, I used my vacation time to go to Gaza to write an article called “A Gaza Diary,” where I spent 10 days living in the refugee camp of Khan Yunis with a great cartoonist, Joe Sacco, who wrote “Palestine” and “Footnotes on Gaza,” and I said, I'm not going to interview any official, I'm not going to interview any PLO official, I'm not going to interview Hamas officials, I'm just going to write, day by day, what it's like in this refugee camp. That was an eruption at The Times when it was printed. And I was told although I'm an Arabic speaker, I think they only had two or three at the paper at the time, that I would never cover the Middle East again. So, that was the first blow. 

The second blow was the call to invade Iraq. I had spent a lot of time in Iraq. I had not only gone into Kuwait in the first Gulf War – I was not embedded, I was what they called a unilateral, which meant that I wasn't part of any military pool but I had grafted onto a Marine Corps unit, had gone into Kuwait with them and then stayed on in the Middle East for The New York Times, covering the destruction of the stockpiles and Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical weapons, mostly in artillery shells. So, I covered all of that. I knew he might have had a tiny residue, but I knew he didn't have weapons of mass destruction. I knew it was a lie. I knew the whole premise of invading Iraq, which of course had nothing to do with 9/11, was the fiasco it became certainly up until Gaza, you know, the greatest war crime. I mean, you have to go back to Vietnam or something. And I couldn't keep quiet about that. So, I spoke very publicly on big media programs, and that angered The New York Times, especially after I was booed off the commencement stage and I was given a formal written reprimand from the paper. Though under guild rules, you get the reprimand done in writing, I was called into the office of an assistant managing editor, Bill Schmidt, and given the reprimand, presented with the reprimand and then if I violated that reprimand, if I continued to speak about the war, then I, under guild rules, could be fired. I wasn't going to stop speaking about the war and that ended my career at The New York Times. 

 

G. Greenwald: The debate that is just eternal, that people on the left and right have, is over the bias of The New York Times. What is the ideological posture of The New York Times? Conservatives internally insist there is some left-liberal bias or whatever, and then you have people on the left or even liberals who insist that it has this kind of institutional conservative bias. For me, I've always thought that the ideology of The New York Times kind of allegiance to the foreign policy community, the U.S. Security State, and it's hard to, especially these days, place it on the left or the right. But I'm wondering and I think there are a lot of people who haven't lived through that history post 9/11, the Iraq war, or people who just did but decided to forget about it. In those instances where The New York Times was diverting your stories, basically negating the things you were reporting with IDF statements, giving them equal weight, and then, especially, with this idea that you somehow couldn't speak out against the Iraq war, even though many, many New York Times journalists were free to speak out in favor of it and were doing that, would you say that the reason was that the Sulzberger family, or The New York Times, just institutionally has this ideological bias in favor of Israel, in favor of wars? Or was it more just the kind of post-9/11, uber jingoism that prevailed where, you know, I would say the majority of people in corporate media decided that their patriotic duty was to align with the War on Terror or post-9/11 policies of the U.S. government? 

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
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The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
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There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
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We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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