Zohran Mamdani’s emphatic victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary has shaken the core of American politics. A self-described democratic socialist, Mamdani ran a campaign centered around affordability as well as relentless denunciation of the genocide in Gaza. Mamdani drew the ire of Zionists, right-wingers and the billionaire class not only in New York City but across the country, including calls for his deportation by Congressman Andy Ogles and subsequent slander by President Donald Trump.

Former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who is now running for Washington state's 9th congressional district, weighs in on her fellow democratic socialist’s journey on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

Sawant has been a standout figure for working class representation, winning a $15 an hour minimum wage in Seattle during her city council tenure as well as the Amazon Tax, which helped fund affordable housing. She says Mamdani’s victory should be celebrated, especially because it shows the Zionist lobby can be defeated not just in the U.S. but in a state home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.

Despite this encouraging repudiation of the billionaire class in the wealthiest city in America, Sawant emphasizes the need to continue the fight and make sure Mamdani sticks to his original promises.

“If you don't understand that careerism is one of the death knells of winning anything substantial for the working class, then you will sell out even with those good intentions because you will make it about yourself and you will immediately get the memo that in order to fight for working people, you will need to be in battle mode every single day when you enter City Hall,” she says.

Mamdani’s alignment with the Democratic Party is concerning, according to Sawant, pointing to a pattern in which groundbreaking campaigns, like those of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, have fallen short of delivering promises for working class people once in office.

“At the end of the day, the Democratic Party is a party of capitalism itself,” Sawant asserts. “The working class loses out more and more and is subjected to more and more misery with every passing decade that you're not going to stand up for working people.”

So far, Mamdani’s campaign has made strides to inspire the American working class. “It's a real boost of confidence for working class people nationally to see that yes, working people will fight alongside you if you put forward demands that make a huge difference in their lives and which reflect their anger, their just anger at the Wall Street billionaires,” Sawant says.

There is not much more that can be said about the unfathomable levels of devastation the genocide in Gaza has reached. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has been chronicling the genocide and joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to shed light on the current situation in Gaza, including parts from her upcoming report on the profiteers of the genocide.

Israel’s siege on the Palestinians is leaving the population starving, and Albanese lambasts other nations for not stepping up and completing their obligations under international law. “[Countries] have an obligation not to aid, not to assist, not to trade with Israel, not to send weapons, not to buy weapons, not to provide military technology, not to buy military technology. This is not an act of charity that I'm asking you. This is your obligation,” she explains.

Albanese compares Gaza and Israel’s siege to a concentration camp, stating it is unsustainable but also allows the world to witness how a Western settler colonial entity functions. “There is a global awareness of something that has for a long time been a prerogative, a painful prerogative of the global majority, the Global South, meaning the awareness of the pain and the wounds of colonialism,” Albanese tells Hedges.

In her forthcoming report, Albanese will detail exactly how Palestine has been exploited by the global capitalist system and will highlight the role certain corporations have played in the genocide. “[T]here are corporate entities, including from Palestine-friendly states, who have for decades made businesses and made profits out of the economy of the occupation, because Israel has always exploited Palestinian land and resources and Palestinian life,” she says.

“The profits have continued and even increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”

The ultra-wealthy hover above the realities of the world around them like extraterrestrial aliens. Their material reality physically separates them from the rest of society with gated communities and private jets but paradoxically, their very wealth also severs them psychologically, unable to understand the reality of the 99%.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is professor and author of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More, Rob Larson.

Larson begins by bringing attention to basic data points that nakedly reflect the state of the world and particularly the U.S. when it comes to wealth inequality. “[The] richest 1% owned 35% of all US wealth and that's cash, that's real estate, that's all kinds of investment portfolio assets… the bottom 50% of all US households, very similar to the bottom half in most regions of the world, you're looking at about 1.5% of the national wealth is owned by that half of the population,” he explains.

This gross wealth imbalance produces a number of problems within a society, including the wealthy’s overreaching influence into policymaking. Tax breaks, deregulation and other neoliberal doctrines have defined the last few decades of American politics, and that imbalance means “that's more cash chasing the same number of assets, and it just tends to have the effect of hideously inflating every asset market, making housing out of reach for so many people, making the market absurdly overpriced,” Larson spells out.

Hedges and Larson go on to describe the evolution of elites and the psychology behind handling obscene wealth, from personal relationships to the way they dress. Both agree, however, that it is possible to continue the fight against this inequality through labor organizing and local community building.

Journalist A. J. Liebling famously said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Today, in a world dominated by corporate capitalism — including subservient politicians and careerists — the press’s freedom has been eroded to mere margins. Journalist and writer Patrick Lawrence joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle the decline of journalism, which he details in his book, Journalists and Their Shadows.

Lawrence defines what a journalist is meant to do and be, a definition he attributes to John Dewey. A journalist “has to stand outside of power and present to readers and viewers the known considerations whenever a question of national policy was at issue, and engender a public debate so people could draw their conclusions and register those conclusions.”

This is no longer the case. “Context, history, causality, agency, and responsibility are all essential for us to understand events in the world around us. And none is permitted to any effective extent in corporate media,” Lawrence explains. Drawing on examples of reporting from the Vietnam War up until the Iraq War and even the current war in Ukraine, Lawrence dives into how the views from the State Department became the views of the press and anybody who differed from that would be cast out.

Lawrence points to psychological disruptions within journalists as a result of the nature of their work as part of the reason why the press has deteriorated. “The corruptions in the press begin with the corruptions of the personalities who want to get paid, want to be promoted, and so on,” he says.

Instead of employing the Socratic process of reasoning, mainstream journalists today have agendas they must serve. “[Reasoning] has been turned upside down in our hyper-ideological polity such that you draw your conclusion first and then you reason backwards,” Lawrence declares.

There are few pieces of literature that remain as prescient and relevant throughout history as John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Thomas Jefferson, Malcolm X, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Paine and dozens more drew inspiration from and studied Milton’s grand work and the revolutionary themes within it.

Professor Orlando Reade, in his book, What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost, examines the epic poem’s influence in the four centuries since its publication and joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss this history.

Reade begins with the historical context of the poem, which was after the seventeenth century English revolution that overthrew the monarchy. Milton’s work, Reade and Hedges explain, embodies critiques of both monarchy and revolution.

“The reader is presented with a figure of Satan that seems a lot like Milton himself, a failed revolutionary recovering from a disastrous defeat and often articulating arguments against God, who Satan calls a tyrant, that Milton himself had made against the English King,” Reade explains. “So the great mystery of Paradise Lost is trying to figure out why Milton gives us a Satan that seems so much like himself.”

The historical parallels found within Paradise Lost clearly resonate with figures in history, especially those in the struggle for freedom and abolition. Reade emphasizes how many times the poem is referenced throughout this history.

“This is not an epic poem that spends much time celebrating the heroic deeds of men. It's not a macho poem. It's a poem for which the most heroic acts are true to the New Testament. They're humble and often quiet acts of love, of forgiveness, and so on,” he says.

The narratives surrounding Israel and their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians took decades to create and embed into the West’s psyche. The Holocaust, decades after its end, became a central part of the Jewish and Israeli identity. Enemies of the Israeli state were conflated with Nazis. The physical location of Israel became essential to Christian evangelicals who believe the second coming of Jesus Christ was to take place there.

The late Amy Kaplan, in her book, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, explored how these narratives developed through popular culture and the media’s reporting on the Israeli government’s actions throughout the 20th century, particularly in the United States. Professor Joan Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and adjunct professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss Kaplan’s book and how prevalent it is in the face of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

“Part of the invincible victim story is that Jews have to always be alert about defending themselves against any sign that the Holocaust is about to reappear and then attribute it to Palestinians, the possibility that they will bring another Holocaust,” Scott says. “So the whole defense industry of Israel, the whole occupation of Gaza and the West Bank become a way of arguing against the possibility of another Holocaust.”

When it comes to Christian Zionism, Scott explains that cynicism in the Israeli government tolerates the antisemites within these groups “because they're bringing a large sector of the American population, a powerfully politically influential sector of the American population, certainly now with Trump, to support the activities that Israel is engaging in.”

In a world gripped by daily catastrophes, there is one that affects all but lacks the attention it deserves. The climate crisis — pervaded by ecological collapse, war, endless resource accumulation fueled by capitalism — is the issue of our time. The warning signs are there but as author Eiren Caffall tells host Chris Hedges, people are not able to handle the facts regarding the “fragility of our ecosystem, and [they] just don't really have a great way of managing the emotional impact of that.”

Caffall joins Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss her novel, All the Water in the World, and her memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary. She explains that climate talk is often a tough pill to swallow because it deals with ideas of impermanence: “I think we are struggling to talk about our climate grief, our experience with the eco-collapse as a collective, as a planet who are all confronted with the evidence of our mortality.”

As someone who has dealt with loss and trauma her whole life as a result of inheriting polycystic kidney disease, a genetic illness that has plagued her family for over 150 years, Caffall employs a unique perspective when it comes to preserving her family’s stories and art.

“That sense of it is vital to protect whatever stories we can in the face of great loss is kind of baked into my background, my childhood, my understanding of my role as an adult to tell the stories of the dead, to hold on to the culture of those folks, to make sure that there's a continuance,” she tells Hedges.

Caffall understands the need for stories like hers to create the empathy that is lacking in a world that continually sees violence as an answer to problems. “I just think actually it's that vulnerability and that presence that's the real tool that we need to be able to move carefully through the world that we're being confronted with at this moment and in a possible bleaker future.”

On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Chris Hedges speaks with filmmaker Alex Gibney about Gibney’s documentary series The Dark Money Game, which examines the “labyrinth of mirrors” that facilitates untraceable corruption through the American political system. Although both the Democratic and Republican parties have served the interests of the billionaire class since well before the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court ruling in 2010, the removal of restrictions on political spending created a system by which corporations could route millions of dollars in bribes through an intricate, opaque network of nonprofit organizations and super PACs.

FirstEnergy, a failing Ohio nuclear power operator, exploited this network to pay $60 million to former Ohio State Representative Larry Householder, in exchange for his support of a “Clean Energy” bill that would award FirstEnergy $1.3 billion in benefits. Ohio Confidential, the first documentary in Gibney’s series, follows the affair, which was subject to an FBI investigation, and which offers a view into mechanisms of illegitimate influence which are rarely visible to the public. Nonetheless, Hedges notes, the FirstEnergy story is likely a “microcosm of the whole system.”

The second film in the series, Wealth of the Wicked, portrays the contradictory but effective partnership between the anti-abortion Christian right and the billionaire class, which has used a variety of sordid tactics to sway the Supreme Court towards conservative and pro-corporate decisions. For example, Gibney describes how wealthy donors would “engage in a kind of romance” with justices, offering expensive gifts and pursuing “friendships that ultimately would have the effect of turning their perspectives...”

The faster the dark money flows through the American political system, the greater the power of the billionaire class to oppose regulations and steal wealth. “It's a series of interlocking favors,” Gibney observes, “but all these interlocking favors, which—let's face it—are traditional tools of the political system… are made possible and made far more corrupt by the application of tens of millions of dollars, which to the public is completely invisible.”