The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’re here in the Real News Network studio in downtown Baltimore and I could not be more excited to have legendary independent journalist and filmmaker, the one and only Abby Martin here with me in person. Now, some of you may not know this, but Abby is actually a Real News alumnus. And Sister Abby, I know it’s been a minute since you’ve been back here in your old stomping grounds, but I just wanted to start by saying on behalf of the entire team here, welcome back to Baltimore. Congratulations on all the incredible essential work that you’ve done and we are all just so proud of you and so honored to be in this struggle for truth with you.

Abby Martin:

Oh my gosh. Well, the feeling’s more than mutual, Max. I mean, just being here back in the studio just brings me back to just the origins of Empire Files. Being in the Real News studio, working all hours of the night trying to knock out those weekly documentaries. And it was just such a cool crew to be a part of and it’s so amazing to be back.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and what an incredible journey you and the Empire Files have been on since then. And we are of course here today to talk about your blockbuster new documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, which is engrossing, expansive and frankly, terrifying investigation into the existential threat that US Empire in general and the US military specifically pose to humanity and to our planet. Now, I know that this project was years in the making and projects of this magnitude can often start as one thing and then become something much greater by the end of it. And so I wanted to start by asking, what is this documentary? Where did it start and what did it become by the time you and your co-director, Mike Prisner, were finished?

Abby Martin:

Wow. It was a long journey indeed and it was five years in the making, as you mentioned. And it started off during COVID with the birth of our first child and kind of joining our passions together, Mike, as an anti-imperialist, anti-war veteran organizer and me as an anti-war journalist who had been advocating against US imperialism my entire career as an advocacy journalist. So I advocate for issues. I wear my bias on my sleeve and I find it very refreshing in this kind of world of access, journalism and corporate media. And so combining those passions together and wanting to approach a subject that tackles the environmental impact of the military because of our obsession with the future, bringing a child into this world, having the responsibility of basically investing in the future. It is on our shoulders now. We’re all in. And so we saw that statistic kind of floating around that the US military was the largest institutional polluter in the world.

This is something that’s been kind of synthesized in academia when you look at just oil purchases, which the US military hadn’t even really disclosed until relatively recently. And there’s been some scholars who have addressed this in literature and studies, but no one had synthesized it in a cinematic way, certainly in a documentary fashion. But Max, once we got into the subject matter, every stone unturned is another documentary. And so we’re looking at legacy contamination of just radiation Agent Orange and then you look at the expansion of militarism all around the world with these 800 bases. Every base is a story. Every victim is another story. And then you add on top of that just the maintenance of the military arsenal, the actual infrastructure of the US military empire and how the entire thing exists as a self-fulfilling prophecy in order to maintain a fossil fuel infrastructure.

And it’s never been laid bare more with Trump in power with this kind of imperial belligerence when we see Venezuela, Greenland. So the documentary took a life of its own and started catapulting in every which way and kind of made us realize we wanted to prove the thesis here. We wanted to go into it not just talking about emissions, which is one story in itself, which we tackle. We wanted to tackle all of it. We wanted to go into the totality to sit someone down and inject them with the truth and you cannot walk away without having your brain rewired in terms of the way you look at the military in this country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, and I could say that as someone who’s watched it and was, like I said, quite terrified by what I was seeing and what you have given us kind of concrete evidence to prove. But I wanted to ask what kind of a monumental struggle that must have been to first research and then visualize the scope and scale of this problem. Could you just talk about that for a little bit?

Abby Martin:

I mean, especially when it comes to emissions, because this is something that’s been very secretive under the pretense of national security and not disclosed by the US military establishment. So it was unearthing so much data accumulated and synthesized by scientists independently to try to calculate these things based on just oil purchases. And then when you extrapolate that out and look at the lifecycle emissions, look at the application of the weaponry, the maintenance of this global supply chain, it totally becomes unquantifiable. And then you wrap into that the actual basically NATO, the machinery of the entire military empire, the great power competition with China, Russia, all of the building up of those arsenals and response to our aggression and belligerence. So it becomes simply unquantifiable and it was so difficult. And Max, at a point in the documentary, we bring in this philosopher and he says something really, really important where he says, number’s numb.

And he gives kind of this take on it’s so hard to get overwhelmed by the existential nature of US imperialism of capitalism because it’s so far reaching and all inclusive and all these issues are interconnected as we’re realizing more and more, but numbers, when you’re just looking at sheer facts and data, data, data, it can numb you. It can become meaningless. And I think we see that psychologically, I think with the genocide going on for three years straight, the data and the numbers become numbing. And so at a certain point it became more about just the storytelling and the emotion and collaging these narratives together to kind of give people that gut punch that it’s not about the numbers. Look, we proved the thesis over and over again, that’s done. But I think what really hits people is seeing how this is you, this is your children.

Your children are those children in Iraq. You are Alex Pretty. You are Renee Goode. You are every one of these victims of US imperialism because it affects every single person on the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I think back to the days of COVID-19 and when I heard those words in your documentary, Numbers Numb, that was the first thing that came to my head was sort of bearing witness to the monstrous spectacle of the bigger the numbers of people lost to COVID-19 got, the more numb people got to the human lives that were being lost. And I think there really is a terrifying truth there. And again, it speaks to the service that you and Mike Preisner have done in not just compiling what could be compiled in terms of the research numbers and from the emissions of all the military vehicles to the environmental impact of all the explosions and wasted munitions that are blown up or dumped into the ocean. I mean, the list is just so incredibly long and it’s impossible, like you said, to try to quantify it.

But I think what was even more horrifying to learn was that from Bill Clinton to now, all these kind of global US-led climate agreements don’t factor in the US military when they’re talking about our national emissions output.

Abby Martin:

Yeah, exactly. And people do not realize that. I’ve talked to several climate scientists, environmental academics, and they were absolutely flabbergasted at that fact that should be widely known, that militarism, not just US militarism, but every country’s militarism is excluded. Under the Paris Accords, they gave an option to opt in, but of course many countries are like, “Why would I do that? ” It’s not mandatory. Yeah, you know what? So it’s just completely insane and totally a farce that for the last 30 years of these international climate treaties, the US military has led the exemption of all military emissions and it’s gargantuan. It is completely gargantuan and totally hidden from this growing total. And so what’s astonishing to me is that why am I the first person to confront these major politicians at these conferences? Decades in the making, you see this bipartisan consensus for empire and just the acceptance of lying about this, of accepting it as normal and it’s totally outrageous.

And the whole dystopian nature of these climate conferences in general, which real news has covered extensively is just off the charts. I mean, it’s all about corporate profit. It’s all about how can we market this? How can we make money off of it? And then it’s like, well, no wonder you have a contingent of society that’s detaching itself less and less from that consensus reality that climate change is this existential threat that we need to globally cooperate on because simply the opposition to the fascist takeover, they’re not treating it like the emergency it is and they’re not acting accordingly. So it just makes it look like a money making venture and it’s really unfortunate.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Another word might be a racket.

Abby Martin:

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. It’s a goddamn racket. Yep.

Maximillian Alvarez:

There it is. I wanted to ask if you could sort of lay out this double helix death spiral of US wars and military imperialism around the world and like the climate crisis, like how those two things and how you unpack it in this documentary, but like how those two things are intertwined in the most monstrous way.

Abby Martin:

And this goes before obviously World War II with the advent of the war making industry, how because Europe was left in ruins, you had the US kind of concentrating the actual war machinery and that’s where you see the genesis of the war economy being a kind of a permanent footing in the US. It established well before that. I mean, we’re talking about the first extraterritorial military basis that were established through obviously the veins of the genocidal takeover in the first settler colonies here, but those first extraterritorial military bases were to protect extractive industries of fur and mining just to basically … I mean, we almost drove beavers into extinction just so people could have funny hats in Europe and then it became coal. So the first bases that were overseas were to access coal and to basically be infrastructural holding cells for coal. And of course, once the national security priority turned to oil, once oil was discovered and replaced coal, that’s when we saw that just completely combined where oil became the dominant priority for access and expansion.

And then like you said, it became the self-fulfilling prophecy where in order to expand the military, you needed more oil and more resources and then you need to justify the expanse of the military to get more resources. So now this massive empire around the world with 800 bases spread across nearly every continent, it maintains itself through the access to oil, the pillaging of every last vestige of natural resources on the planet. And that’s exactly laid bare with Trump’s rhetoric today. He is literally saying, “We need Greenland.” That is the last basically unbridled wilderness on the planet. I mean, the amount of coal oil and rare earth minerals that are under that ice, they are saying explicitly they need that for their national security interests. And so you just have to read between the lines here. I mean, you don’t even really have to. He’s saying, “We need the oil from Venezuela.

We need the oil from Iran.” That’s what this is about. You had the Bush administration spending about a year trying to propagandize us into complacency with invading a country that had nothing to do with nine eleven just to seize the oil, but they wasted a lot of time to propagandize us, ties with WMDs. And so now this mask is so ripped off where they don’t even need to pretend. They’re just saying explicitly, “We are trying to grab every last drop of oil because that’s ours.” So in a way, it’s an important moment, Max, because for the first time in my life, things are just very laid bare and I feel like people are really putting all of this together in their mind and organizing with that international scope with the US Empire being the machinery that’s oppressing all of us around the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think you’re right and it really makes me sort of reflect on the conditions that have made that more possible now than it was in the post nine eleven years. And I want to kind of break the fourth wall here and part of this question is going to be me asking if you could talk a bit about how this documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy embodies your own trajectory as a political activist, as a journalist, like from the Iraq war to now, because I’ll be honest, we would not be sitting next to each other, 23 years ago. I grew up very conservative. My family and I were totally bought in on the Iraq war propaganda. We were part of the US majority that just felt so hurt, shocked, and aimlessly hurt and shocked after nine eleven and trusted far too much in our own government to sort of tell us what to do next.

It took a lot of years for me to sort of uncouple myself from that conditioning. But at the time, I did not understand the kind of what to me was a left wing talking point of like, why would we be going to war with another country just for oil? What does that mean? And now here I am like nearly 25 years later being like, “Jesus, how could you not see what was right in front of you? ” So I guess first of all, how were you able to see what I was not? And I guess connect us from there to here like how the seeing of the monstrosity that was always there, like how more of us have actually come into the light and seen what we’re actually up against.

Abby Martin:

I think it all goes back to just my love for the environment, my love for nature, my love for humanity. I just really love people and I love connecting on an interpersonal level. I think when you look at this kind of death spiral, as you called it, this machinery of capitalism and the subjugation of the rest of the planet at the barrel of a nuclear armed gun to say subject or die to global capitalism, it is just so counterintuitive to like love, solidarity, having a habitable planet and future. And I never was able to really articulate that capitalism was the problem. I was kind of a confused anarchist, libertarian back when I was first being radicalized by politics, because I thought Bush was evil incarnate. I was just like, “Who the hell are these people? They’re demons. Why are they doing this? ” And then Nancy Pelot and then you slowly kind of unpack.

You’re like, “Hold on, the Democrats are part of this. Hold on. The media is part of this too.” But it was always so obvious to me because of my just repulsion for war. When the media started talking about Iraq, I was so confused, Max. I mean, I think it helped because I was surrounded by militarism at San Diego State University. I was just thrown into this where I was surrounded by military frat bros and I was just so taken aback. I mean, growing up in the Bay Area, so the proximity to Berkeley, the hippies, just that counterculture of the revolutionary fervor of Berkeley, Mario Savo and the free speech steps and things like that. And so that was always baked in, even though I was just kind of like a generic Demo from suburban Pleasanton, California. I think when the Iraq War started and the bombing of Baghdad, I was sitting in the cafeteria at San Diego State University and I felt nauseous.

I felt sick and people around me were cheering and I’ll never forget that moment. I just was like, “What’s going on? I’m so alone. Why people think this is good? This is sick. What did Saddam do to us?” I remember calling my mom, I said, “Did Saddam do something?” And she was like, “No, the media just started talking about this. ” And I just said, “What is happening?” And it was so hard to organize there, but it became so powerful to realize media was a tool to tell these stories because I started watching radical media. We were talking at the time, this was around 2003, it was like Democracy Now and Alex Jones. It was like a very weird … The internet was very strange, but you also had the capacity to do things. I mean, there was this egalitarian sense of the internet that was very exciting where you could build real friendships and find things that were just really like not … It wasn’t fed to you by the algorithm.

And so I was able to pursue so much knowledge and learn and be self-taught and how to do these tools. And so anyway, I’m going on this very long tangent to say it all synthesized for me very obviously, but it is also a journey I think for a lot of people. I’ve met people who are my age who said I didn’t know anything before October 7th, which brings me to your second question. I think October 7th and the genocide in Gaza has been an extremely revealing moment, catalyzing moment for tens of millions of people around the world. And I’m anecdotally, I can say that just traveling across the country with this documentary already going in rural, urban areas, driving everywhere, talking to people, everyone has been motivated by the fact that this government has subsidized and overseen this genocide and how it has been bipartisan and the failure of the so- called opposition and the Democratic Party to stop it and incubate what we now have.

It’s all just so crystal clear and it’s been actually really amazing to see the radicalization occur in circles that I never would’ve expected at all. Older religious people, I mean, but really it’s the youth. It’s the youth who are seen, they don’t have a future if they let this just grow unabated, if they let the data centers take over, they let the unregulated nature of global capitalism take over, unregulated nature of imperialism, which turns inward, which we’re seeing the ICE executions in the street. So I’d say there’s an explosion of consciousness around the world, synthesizing all these issues, putting Palestine as the cornerstone of our collective liberation and realizing how all these things interconnect. And it’s beautiful, Max, because on the streets during the Iraq war, Palestine was too controversial. In the streets were in Occupy Wall Street, Obama was off limits. And so it’s all burgeoning now.

It’s all right beneath the surface and people are so ready to hear that phrase national strike, national strike. They know we’ve been in the streets with sustained protests. I’m an activist and a journalist. Again, I’m an advocacy journalist, so I advocate my own activism and I embed myself in the people’s stories and people’s struggles and try to uplift those stories just as real news does. And so I’m speaking from the streets. I was just in the streets in Minneapolis. I’ve never seen energy like I have now and people standing up in solidarity with their brothers and sisters because they want to terrorize us in a submission and silence and fear and I’m seeing the opposite happen and that’s something extremely powerful and again, kind of incalculable in terms of like what will happen with this energy. It’s very exciting.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is. And this is a moment in history not to be wasted because it won’t be around forever.

And it also sort of makes me think about like again, what is so different between our moment now in the year of our Lord 2026 and our moment then in the post nine eleven years at the turn of the millennium. And I of course can’t help but think about my own trajectory, my own family, like what has changed in our lives since then? Well, a massive economic global financial meltdown happened. We lost everything that my parents had worked for, including the house that I grew up in and it’s been a very long kind of struggle to get back to a place of peace and normalcy for our entire family since then. And now as someone who goes around interviewing, working people around the country talking about their lives and their stories, I hear a lot of echoes of that similar trajectory for a lot of people.

And I guess that’s just a long-winded way of saying that at the turn of the century when we were as a country much more gung-ho about … Yeah, we have the right as the United States to go around the world telling other countries what to do. We have the right to spread democracy because it’s the best system in the world. We’re liberating people, we’re not doing something bad, yada, yada, yada.That was a time pre 2008 crash when the American dream was still plausible for a lot of us. You go out on the streets now, you talk to people now, no one believes in the American dream. I mean, if a handful of billionaires own everything and all of our money is just being sucked out of the public coffers and into the war industry. And so what I hear now when I go to these demonstrations in Baltimore, DC, what I hear now when I talk to poor and working class people in deep red Trump country districts in the Midwest or the South or here in the Mid-Atlantic, the common refrain that I hear is like, “Why is my money going there when we’re all kind of floundering here?” And I think that that is also a very significant sign of where we are as a country, but also a significant kind of mobilizing factor that presents an opportunity for people to look around and realize we’re all getting screwed by very identifiable villains.

And I wanted to sort of like hook that back into earth’s greatest enemy and ask who are the identifiable villains in this story that you’re telling and how do we take them on?

Abby Martin:

Yeah. I mean, the problem with capitalism and the status quo of neoliberalism is that everything’s been co-opted, superficialized, tokenized, our struggles have been bought and sold back to us. And so for the last 50 years, labor density, unions, that revolutionary undercurrent of all the progressive struggles, it’s been kind of co-opted into these corporate branding and marketing campaigns and it’s been really, really horrific to see because we’re getting back to our footing where people were in the 60s and 70s with this fundamental understanding of ideology and being able to articulate what we are fighting for and against. And so we’re getting back to that. I think Bernie and Democratic socialists of America and things like that have really resurrected the spirit of what we can all kind of orient ourselves around. But for the longest time, Max, I mean, I grew up very anti-communist. I mean, this was very, very baked in to American society because of the history against the ruling class.

And so what you see now is parasitic billionaires who have basically seized that distrust that did exist for exactly the reasons that you’re talking about, the disaffected masses who lost everything during the financial crisis, who knew that we were lied to about nine eleven and in the Iraq war, they don’t trust these people, but Trump was very smart in the way that they seized that momentum and siphoned all of the energy into this faux populism. And again, there was no opposition infrastructure to counteract that. And so a lot of us are kind of flailing saying, “How do we gain ground when they have taken over everything?” And then the Democrats kind of incubated it and laid the groundwork for them to take over everything because they’re basically Republican lights because everything is about making profit at the end of the day. And so I think what we need to do is realize we are all victims of propaganda.

We’re all at different steps of our journey of breaking out of that, but that’s all baked into all of us. And so approaching each other, and I’m not talking about fascists or people who are apologists for genocide. There are certain contingent of society that can’t be helped. They’ve succumbed to the darkness. They’ve been beaten down by the system and they’ve commodified everything. They have lost their empathy. I’m not saying that they’re born like that. I’m just saying that a lot of them can’t be helped right now and we need to let that go. But I think the vast majority of people are empathetic. They’re humanitarians. They want civil liberties. They want the foundation of what they believed America to be, human rights, the First Amendment, free speech, the beautiful things that make this country supposedly great. Those are the people that we need to reach out to with humility and empathy and reaching them where they’re at.

I’m talking about service members. I’m talking about veterans. They are not the enemy. They are victims of the enemy. The enemy is the top brass of the military, the government officials who are complicit in this, who are profiting off of war, who are invested in the war machinery, editors in chief at the New York Times, the Washington Post who are putting out the propaganda that sows the seeds for genocide, who perpetuate the status quo of this death cycle. Earth’s greatest enemy, that was the Biden administration. That was before Trump. That’s the status quo. That’s what we’ve accepted as normal, barreling us off a cliff, killing every last living thing on the planet, a finite planet. It’s collective lunacy and madness to go into this year after year knowing the outcome max. And I think people are so ready. They’re starving for this information. They’re sick of being gaslit and lied to and they’re realizing, “Hey, this is not the reality that I see.

This is not the reality that my neighbor sees.” COVID was very important for the ruling class. We were fighting each other about vaccines, about God knows what while they cannibalized every last industry. They siphoned every last drop of wealth. They pillaged everything. They gained what tripled their wealth in the last five years. And what happened to us atomized, isolated, siloed off, brain rodted on our phones thinking we can’t ever do anything about this. We lost. That’s what they want. Just like Barry Sanders in the movie says, “See what you see. Don’t be duped. See what’s right in front of your face.” And I’m not talking about on your phone, on your screen. I’m talking about in reality, vast majority of people are ready. They’re waiting for you to talk about these things because they don’t have the chance. They don’t have that opportunity or those avenues because Elon Musk wants them to believe something else.

And we have to ask, why is the richest man in the world showing us what he’s showing us? So when we get on our devices, yes, the advent of social media, the advent of Palestinian voices dictating their reality and taking back their agencies, been monumental, revolutionary, assisted to all of this, but we have to also be calculating strategic, creative, getting off of these devices and meeting like we used to because that’s how we win. We don’t win on here. That’s just one tool for us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put and vitally true. And we’re saying this as two media makers, you know, Media personalities. Media can only do so much and we are trying to do as much as we can with it and your new documentary is an incredible example of that. But I could not agree more with your last point that we’re not going to bring a coalition of poor working class regular people banding together to stop the destruction of our society and our planet online.That’s not going to happen.You don’t get 50,000 people marching through the streets of Minneapolis just by posting and sending emails. You have to have that in- person connection, which is all I’m hearing coming from Minneapolis. People are saying I’m both simultaneously more afraid of my government than I’ve ever been, but I’ve never felt safer in my own neighborhood because everyone’s talking to each other and everyone’s kind of working together.

We were already losing that basic infrastructure for society as such well before 2020. But I think COVID really did a number on what was left of our social infrastructure, on our social being. So many of us just stayed closed in, stayed cut off, stayed glued to our phones and our computers. And as you mentioned, the powers that be, the people who control the media, those platforms, they know that and they are manipulating that to the point that no one has an agreed upon basis of the reality that we’re actually all living in because depending on what feed you’re looking at, where you live, what your search history is, you’re going to see an entirely different world be outside your window than the person who’s living next door to you. And

Abby Martin:

That’s a

Maximillian Alvarez:

Very dangerous and dark place to be. But I wanted to kind of hook that back into something else that you said, which was the value of not only talking to service members and military veterans, but that was made manifest in this documentary. I mean, it’s important in and of itself because as you said, they are not the enemy. They are the victims of this monstrous machine. They are the human grist for the proverbial mill of US imperialism. But it also kind of hooks into the beginning of this conversation where we were talking about how hard it is to actually research and understand this topic of just how big of an environmental threat is the US military to the world. And it was so clear to me in your documentary that if you go and try to get answers to those questions from top government officials or military brass, you’re not going to get anywhere.

But when you and Mike Preisner are talking to veterans, the rank and file of the military, you get a very different perspective on the problem. And I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about how different that perspective actually is.

Abby Martin:

Okay. So there’s this hive mind that kind of operates in a similar fashion to how a corporate board would. So let’s say someone just has a conscience all of a sudden who’s on the executive board of Amazon or something, they would just be kicked out. You need to make money, you need to make more money than the last quarter, otherwise you’re not profitable. You’re a failing entity. That’s exactly how the US military operates. So when you’re looking at who’s sitting on the board of these board of directors of the defense contractors, they’re all interlocking with the media arms and all of these things. And that kind of explains this hive mind operational structure of a system that kind of works on its own. It doesn’t have a conscience, but of course it’s comprised of people who do and they can speak out and they have voices and they have their own minds, even though you’re beaten down in the military to not have your own mind.

So when you break out of that, when you see it for what it is, it’s such a powerful thing. I know hundreds of service members, because of my husband’s work, obviously, organizing soldiers and getting people out because anyone can get out of the military. It doesn’t need to be something specific. Anyone can file a CO packet and get out today. You never need to stay in and Mike can orient you through that. But it’s just so amazing to see people who are coming to the movie, watching it, who are active duty. My cousin who was a 20-year-old naval officer watched it and he was just like, “You know, because I don’t agree with your politics, but I’m here to support you. ” After the movie, he was just shaking. He’s like, “I’m ready to F and go, dude. I’m ready to fight.” And it’s just reaching people on a human level because I think especially when you reach out to service members, they’re victims, they’re not profiting off of this.

They don’t benefit from this system. They’re cannon fodder. They’re the human detritists that are going to be kicked out in the street like Levon, the homeless veteran at the beginning of the movie. He represents kind of the consequences of the system. I mean, he represents all of the destruction of the environment, the garbage that’s tossed in the ocean, every bullet fragment that’s exploded and the chemical exposure of all the toxins left everywhere that were bombing and shooting shells. And that story alone is so powerful, just one single homeless vet who was in a commercial for the army.

Levon:

First Air Cav Brigade. I was in US Army. I joined up in 2004, deployed out in 2006 and it was hell. I was at Camp Taji, seven miles south of Baghdad. I was one of the “Army of One” commercials. I was a guy with the helicopters.

Army Officer 1:

Everybody listen up. This is Levon.

Wenty:

Hey, Levon. I’m Wenty.

Army Officer 1:

You’re on the 120 today. So if there’s anything you need, just ask these guys. They’ll take care of it. All right?

Army Officer 2:

Welcome aboard.

Levon:

Thank you.

Army Officer 2:

You ever been around anything this fast before?

Levon:

He walks in and goes, “You ever worked around anything this fast before?” Yeah. My last job.

“Army of One” Commercial Narrator:

See how army training gives you strength for now, strength for later. GoArmy.Com.

Levon:

Yeah, it was all a lie. I have nerve damage, so I’m actually losing my hands. So I’m trying to use them as much as I can until they’re all gone. It hurts. It actually hurts. But that’s what the hydraulic fluid in service does. Laughing is the only way I can get through, otherwise I’m crying.

Abby Martin:

It encapsulates everything. It’s like you’re exploited, your story, your body, and then you’re thrown in the trash and you’re left to die with no help. And that’s the thing that veterans need to understand, whether it’s burn pits or agent orange, chemical exposure. There’s no help on the other end under this system. It’s just about churning your body out for profit. You’re just another commodity. And once you realize that you join the fight because you can always get out and you can make your own decisions and agency to realize it’s not worth it. It’s not worth your life. Your life has value and your life has dignity and you need to put it toward benefiting humanity and the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, that was very beautifully and powerfully put and it really kind of chills my blood hearing everything that you’re saying because it sounds so eerily familiar from the reporting that I’ve been doing over the past few years starting in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio. And we are having this conversation at the end of January 2026. I’m going to be back in East Palestine next week. It’ll be the three year anniversary since the Norfolk Southern bomb train derailed in these people’s backyards, turned their lives upside down, trained filled with toxic chemicals that in an industry that has been just cut to the bone on the labor side, on the safety side, but is making more profits than it ever has. And who benefits from that? The shareholders and the executives. Who bears the costs of that? The workers on the rails and the people in towns like East Palestine, Ohio.

And this is an entire region that has been poisoned by industrial or corporate profit seeking greed and government complicity and negligence. Our own EPA was telling people there, “You’re fine. It’s okay to go back home. The air’s safe. The water’s safe.” And here they are three years later telling me people are getting all kinds of weird cancers. People have to leave because they can’t stay in their homes without getting nosebleeds, rashes, their kids bleeding out of every orifice. It is a shit show, a monstrous shit show that is sadly not unique to Ohio. What I have learned going to different sacrifice zones so called around the country, talking to different poor and working class people here in South Baltimore, down in Georgia near the biolab fire that happened last year, moss landing like in California, this is everywhere and people are being poisoned and abandoned in the exact same way that you just described as like military veterans and the people living abroad who are if not killed by our munitions are poisoned by them for years and the rest of their lives.

So all of that is here at home as much as it is there abroad. And frankly, I don’t think your average American knows that when it comes to like sites of industrial and mass pollution here in the United States, the biggest portion of super fun sites that come from one source is the Department of Defense. It’s like military bases. It’s weapons manufacturing plants. It’s the kind of foam that they use to put out fires that puts forever chemicals in the water that we’re all drinking. And so I wanted to kind of bring it back home for a second and ask if you could talk about the vast environmental kind of impact that the war machine is having on Americans and like how that connects to the imperial monster of American militarism abroad.

Abby Martin:

You look at just legacy contamination of what the US did during the Cold War, during World War II. I mean, you even still see dead zones from World War I from small munitions, which just kind of shows you how detrimental these are in just training. I mean, even just training alone, like you mentioned forever chemicals. I mean, the firefighting foam that’s used extensively by the military. The military is one of the most pervasive users of PFAS contamination. There are safe alternatives there have been forever, but they just don’t use them because it’s, I guess, less cost effective and they’d rather just dump them all and contaminate water supplies. So people may know peripherally about Camp Lejeune, which is the worst water contamination event in US history. This is now a super fun site, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina military base where they dumped toxic compounds for decades.

And after they knew that it was toxic, they continued to do it and cover it up. And so a million people were poisoned harmed by this toxic dumping and there was a huge amount of poisoned infants that were stillborn babies. And what was most shocking about this, Max, is this could be looked at as like, “Oh, it’s just a 60 year old story. The government took care of everyone and they’ll never do it again.” Maybe they just didn’t know any better. Well, it’s amazing to think that now 60 years later, people are still dying. They have ailments, they’re generational and physically impaired from the toxic water contamination and there’s no database. They are trying to try every single individual claim and the judge said it would take over a century to try to actually give all of these people what they deserve. And of course a lot of them have died.

They’re just waiting for all them to die off so they just don’t have to deal with them anymore. But I think it really just explains how they deal with victims of burn pits, with victims of aging orange poisoning. They deny, they deny, they deny. They try to just resist doling out even a penny for the victims and then the site is left destroyed. I mean, it’s a super fun site. This is just a poison toxic site that doesn’t go through proper remediation. There are hundreds of them all across the US. Like you said, the vast majority are either US military installations or have previously housed military uses. So bullet manufacturing, you have the Hanford nuclear site, which is like a ticking time bomb that can poison three states at once in the entire river that supplies water to half the country. So these are serious problems that are not being dealt with because we don’t have a functional government that is going around saying, “Hey, how do we do this clean up properly?” No, no, no.

We’re just going to commit fraud. We’re just going to lie. Governors don’t want the black spot on their record by saying, “We have a super fund site. We need to clean it up. We need to divert resources.” They’d rather ignore it. And of course, the military is sacred. It’s worshiped so they don’t even want to combat it. In on amazing instance, Jay Inslee, who was the governor, previous governor of Washington who ran on climate change as his entire doctrine, he wouldn’t even criticize the military. He wouldn’t even answer a basic question on should these be included or not in emissions reporting. I mean, the cowardice is frankly horrifying and disgusting.

It’s so far reaching here. When you put legacy contamination aside, just again, the maintenance of the arsenal here at home. We have hundreds of bases here in the US. Every base is dumping forever chemicals in the ground. Every base has contamination. Some of them much higher than Camp Lejeune. We talked to a person who is testing the groundwater around bases in the US. He is saying he is finding ground contamination higher than Camp Lejeune. Why don’t we hear about this, Max? Why? This is the most base level big tent ever for a human being. Clean water, clean air, clean food. If we can’t build an opposition or an organizational infrastructure around that, what are we doing? What are we doing? So again, it’s this total ignorance, total ignorance of the military being actually not a benevolent force spreading democracy and human rights. A force for profit that is destructive, deadly, totally dissociated from human life, the sanctity of life.

It’s willing to kill everything and everyone on the planet. So Jeff Bezos can have another yacht. Is it worth it? Hell no, it’s not. Hell no, it’s not. And so this just brings it all home and especially with ICE, because at the end of the movie we talk about the militarization of the police. So that concept of the imperial boomerang, I mean, of course it’s always been our tactics of colonialism, genocide. They’ve always been circling back, right? But I think the visceral nature of it now where we see storm troopers masked, immunized in the streets, state executioners in military guard where you can’t even distinguish, is this Palestine? Is this here? What am I looking at? It’s here, baby. It’s here to roost. And so I don’t even … There’s no difference anymore. I think for a long time people were trying to convince people, “Hey, no, no, you should care about Palestine.

This is all going to come back up. And you shouldn’t care about it because eventually it’s going to come back home. You should care about it because it’s human life. It’s human life and it’s on our shoulders. This is our government doing this. ” But I think especially now people are saying, “Oh my God, it’s here. It’s here and we’re all of our liberations intrinsically tied to one another.” And I think it’s becoming so, so clear. And especially when you tie in the environment, Max, because it’s not just one life loss, this is the air, this is the water, this is our planet and it doesn’t stop with Palestine. It doesn’t stop with the Congo, the rainforest, it’s the lungs of the planet. Every drop of water comes back and that’s what’s so crucial about the collaborative nature of approaching this existential crisis is that instead we have the great power competition where we’re fighting, we’re preparing a war with China when we should be cooperating.

How can we approach these together to actually give us a fighting chance?

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to kind of end on that powerful note, right? Because as much fire as I’m feeling in my belly thinking about our collective duty

To respond to this moment in history for humanity, for life on this planet, for our children, our grandchildren, all of it. I am feeling more called to this fight than ever before at the same time that I, like everyone else who’s watching this right now am feeling more distraught about the state of things in the world right now and it seems like we just have a brick on the gas pedal careening in the exact wrong direction, not only in terms of tackling the climate crisis, but in that double helix fashion, like stopping the US war machine, Jesus, we’re only in the first month of 2026 and we’ve invaded Venezuela, kidnapped its president. US is talking about just going in and taking Greenland, invading Iran. It feels like the very monster that you photograph and document and detail in this documentary is on a murderous planet destroying rampage.

I know a lot of people out there are feeling like, “Oh my God, this can’t be stopped.” But I want to end on the note that it can

Abby Martin:

And

Maximillian Alvarez:

It must and what tools your documentary gives us to help make that a reality.

Abby Martin:

I think this is very important. Like we said, see what you see, don’t be duped. So see what you see, meaning the success stories, the things that the billionaire class does not want us to see the victories across the country, the mobilizations, the coalescing these movements, the burgeoning of consciousness. I mean, I always say empire, Zionism, it’s a paper tiger and that’s why the propaganda is so desperate and that’s why the violence is so extreme because the colonizer mind cannot beat a liberated on. They can kill. They can kill and destroy, but they can’t win. They can’t be victorious. And all an empire knows is that every problem is a nail. And so the more that they dig their own graves, the more people wake up, the question is, are we going to wake up fast enough? And I think that when we see success stories like last year, Max 35 data centers got stopped in the US, where is that on the news?

So it’s us seeking out the things that can actually reinvigorate our revolutionary spirit energy and not get despawned and paralyzed with the sheer, terrifying nature of it all because it is overwhelming. And again, it’s intentional to berate and barrage our minds like this. They’ve psychologically, it’s a psychic assault. It’s a physical assault. It’s an all body, all mind assault and they know exactly how to manipulate us. If they’ve learned anything from the last mass uprising, it’s that. And so I think having that consciousness, yes, they’ve wanted to individualize everything and that’s the whole problem with liberalism, capitalism, individualizing our struggles and the solution. Papers, straws, driving … Look, and I have solar panels. I’m a militant composter. You don’t get a shred of food past me. Ask my husband, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t understand who is the perpetrator, who’s actually at fault.

It’s not us, it’s them. And so while you need to act in your individual choices with whatever capacity you have, with whatever talents you have, build and guide that to the struggle, because if it didn’t matter what you said online, they wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars on propaganda to manipulate and curate our realities. If it didn’t matter what you did out there, they wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars on storm troopers to terrorize us and to make us feel scared to walk out of our houses, obey or die, comply or die, right? That’s what they said about Alex Pretty. You should have stayed inside. No, we have the right to assert our liberties. We have the right to do these things. So to kind of reclaim reality is like a revolutionary act in itself because it is a war on our minds. That’s the first step, joining an organization, getting out there, being a part of the community.

Because Max, we don’t do this. We don’t do this work because we know we’re going to win tomorrow. We do it because we have to. Like Chris Hedges said, we fight fascists because they’re fascists. We have to fight it because we brought children in this world and not just that, because I love this planet. I want my children to go scuba diving in Noko Bay. I want them to meet the Tugong. I don’t want him to think that I gave up because I just succumbed to the darkness. I want them to know that we fought till the end. And so we have to. We do it because we have to because we love life and we do it to preserve life and we win when we know that we can because guess what? We have the power. We have billions of people on this planet and the rest of the world is ready to go.

They’re waiting for Americans. They’re looking at us saying, “It’s time. It’s time for you guys to wake up because we don’t want our planet destroyed because if you’re out of control government and military empire.” So as crazy and dystopian as things may seem, and yes, indeed they are, there is an alternative path that is becoming more and more urgent by the day and I think people are realizing that more and more, that the status quo is death, that you’re in or out and I think a lot more people are choosing life. They’re choosing to be all in organizationally lending whatever they can to the struggle because we have to Max and I think once that consciousness flips, mass education, of course, is a very important tool. That’s why we do what we do. Once that flips, it’s going to happen quick. Occupy happened quick. That was amazing.

That was one thing that I was like, “This is going to end in a couple days.” And it lasted for months and months. That was beautiful, revolutionary. And we took that spirit and I think it still carries on with us today and we’re waiting for that moment and I think it’s really right around the corner. It’s coming. And once it’s here, it’s unstoppable and we need millions of people, civil disobedience, nonviolent civil disobedience, because we cannot fight the military empire with violence. We can’t fight it with military might. We shut down capital. That’s the language these people speak. We haven’t even tried to strike, but baby, when we do it, that’s going to send shockwaves through the world and we can move mountains when we stop business as usual.

ARTURO DOMINGUEZ:  Four presidents, one prime minister, a vice president, and a host of Republicans all involved in this. If you include Trump, it’s four presidents.

I mean, this is a pretty big deal. For our generation, it’s probably one of the biggest geopolitical scandals of our time in our region. And what they’re doing there mimics what they’re doing to us here by taking our rights and trying to force a right-wing government by gerrymandering districts and forcing Republican wins. It’s about exerting far-right dominion over all of us here in the US and in Latin America.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  On the morning of April 30, the Spanish website Diario Red and the television channel Canal Red began to release a series of leaked audio recordings between powerful right-wing figures in the Americas. 

They called it HondurasGate.

By May 6, the outlets had released a total of 37 WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram messages. 

What they reveal is a shocking network pushing to destabilize elections and undermine leftist leaders in the region.

It’s one of the biggest political scandals in the Americas in years…  And it implicates the Trump administration, Israel, Argentina’s libertarian president, a load of right-wing Honduran officials,  and many more in underhanded activities to take down political opponents… With thousands of dollars funneled into a right-wing propaganda outlet, allegedly located in the United States.

The messages have been independently verified twice, confirming that they are not AI generated.

And you have likely heard little if nothing about them.

Today, I will take a deep dive into the leaks to understand what they are, what’s at stake, and why they are so concerning amid Trump’s onslaught of threats and attacks against leaders in the region.

That… in a minute.

[THEME MUSIC]

This is Under the Shadow — An investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad, in the past and the very present.

This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.

I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcasts Brazil on Fire and Stories of Resistance. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America.

I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does.

This is Season 2 of Under the Shadow: “Trump’s Attack.”

Episode 11: “HondurasGate: Leaks Reveal the Far-Right Plan to Undermine Latin America’s Left.”

So… I want to begin with a little thought experiment.

Imagine for a second that leaked audio messages revealed that numerous top Republican lawmakers had colluded to create a fake news outlet to tank the reputation of leading Democrats in the United States and influence their state’s elections. 

Imagine these lawmakers talked about taking out, removing from office, or even killing their political opponents. About using violence to silence opposition.

Now imagine that the leader of this cabal was a convicted drug trafficker sentenced in US courts to 45 years in prison… who Trump pardoned late last year, with instrumental lobbying from Israel. And that Israel was interested in supporting the whole scheme’s destabilization plans.

That is the gist of the HondurasGate leaks. 

But instead of communications between Republican lawmakers, these leaks are audio chats between leading right-wing politicians in Honduras… although let’s be clear: Republican lawmakers are also mentioned.

The implications are global. The figures behind these conversations aren’t just trying to influence local or state elections. 

They discuss producing journalistic hit jobs on the leftist presidents of Colombia, Mexico, and the former presidents in Honduras. 

The people targeted in these messages — Gustavo Petro, Claudia Sheinbaum, Manuel Zelaya and Xiomara Castro — Are some of the most vocal leftist leaders standing up against Trump’s attacks on Latin America and the right wing wave that has spilled over Central and South America.

And in the leaks, these right-wing Honduran politicians talk about using real violence against resistance.

Now… before I dive further into the details, I want to give you the backstory, because so many of these leaks revolve around former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández and his push to now return to power in Honduras.

We covered his authoritarian government and the resistance against him in the first season of Under the Shadow. But here’s a recap. Remember, Hernández is a right-wing politician who ran the country’s national assembly in the wake of the 2009 US-backed coup against leftist president Manuel Zelaya. He then served as president from 2014 through 2022, during which time he won an illegal and fraudulent reelection in 2017 to stay in power. 

KAREN SPRING:  2017 rolls around. Juan Orlando Hernández decides he’s going to run for reelection — An illegal election, because the Honduran constitution forbids, or did forbid, second terms in office.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  I spoke with Karen Spring, the co-coordinator of the Honduras Solidarity Network in 2024, shortly after Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking. She covered the trial, and we released our conversation as a bonus episode in the first series. Here are just a few important snippets of our conversation, because they help to set the scene for understanding HondurasGate.

KAREN SPRING:  So, the United States had the opportunity to pull their support and say, no, no, no, no, no. This is not a legitimate election. But they went ahead. They didn’t say anything. They let him run for election. And then in the election itself, there was massive electoral fraud that was even called out by the Organization of American States, which is not known to be a progressive, a pro-quo institution, at best, and even the OAS said, you know, it’s too hard to determine if these results are legitimate. Maybe there should be new elections in Honduras. 

And so again, the United States had an opportunity to pull the plug and say, no, we’re not going to support Juan Orlando Hernández. But they just kept supporting him, and they basically certified the electoral results in December of 2017, and they allowed him to continue in office.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Hernández, or JOH, as he’s often called in Honduras, cracked down on the resistance to his fraudulent reelection with an iron fist.

KAREN SPRING:  So, during the 2017 electoral crisis, there were over 30 people that were shot and killed by state security forces — Basically individuals that went to the street, protesters that went to the streets to protest the electoral fraud, and as the US was certifying the elections, state security forces were shooting protesters. So, that’s over 30 to 35 people that have been documented. 

There were also hundreds of individuals that were detained, illegally detained, during just the 2017 electoral crisis. And then 22 individuals were held for months, and my partner is one who was held for 19 months in a maximum security prison. They were the political prisoners of the 2017 electoral fraud.

There were a few disappearances as well during the electoral fraud. In the Aguán Valley region alone, I think from 2013 or 2014 and on to the end of JOH’s term in office, or a second term in office, there were over 100 campesinos, or small farmers. And that doesn’t even include disappearances or individuals that were injured or imprisoned.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Washington didn’t say a word. The United States had his back. Hernández was their man. As Karen explains, he portrayed this get tough on crime image — While running hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.

KAREN SPRING:  A lot of drug money went into basically buying his victory to become president of Honduras. And when he took office, he presented himself as this great champion, this warrior who was going to lead the war on drugs in Honduras, to crack down on organized crime, and to basically stop migration to the United States and Mexico border. 

And so there were so many operations that Juan Orlando Hernández did together with the US and Canada. We’re talking about the Green Berets, special forces, FBI, SWAT teams, JTF Bravo, which is a military force based in Palmerola air base in Honduras, and even the Canadian military, DEA operations. They all partnered with Juan Orlando Hernández to crack down on drug trafficking. 

And so, as the US prosecutors say, that image that Juan Orlando Hernández promoted along with the US and Canada was fundamental to his conspiracy to traffic drugs. 

Without the US backing and helping JOH to build this facade, he might not have been able to traffic as much of the drugs that he did because he used that to shield what he was actually doing behind closed doors, and that was trafficking thousands of kilos of cocaine into the United States. 

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  In 2021, Xiomara Castro won the country’s elections in a huge victory for the left. She promised to fight corruption, stand for women’s rights, and improve the lives of poor and working class people. Her husband is Manuel Zelaya… remember the president who was ousted in the US-backed coup in 2009. Many saw Castro’s victory as the return to democracy in the country after the coup and years of fraudulent rule under Juan Orlando Hernández.

She took office in early 2022. Then on April 21 of that year… 

XIOMARA CASTRO:  Good afternoon, everyone. Today, Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, was extradited to the United States to face federal charges. Hernández is charged with participating in a corrupt and violent drug trafficking conspiracy to facilitate the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States from 2004 to 2022.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  In 2024, he was convicted by a New York court and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

It was a big deal. He was basically the first high-profile former president from Latin America to have been convicted and sentenced in the United States for drug trafficking since Panamanian president Manuel Noriega three decades before.

Karen Spring attended the trial in New York. She said it was a historic moment for so many in Honduras, to finally see a powerful political figure like this held accountable for his crimes.

KAREN SPRING:  I spoke to several Hondurans that flew in from Texas, they came in from the Washington, DC, area, Colorado, so many different areas, and they just said, we want to be here. We want to see this former president face justice for once in the history of Honduras, and especially considering everything that JOH, as people often call him, has done in our country and all the impacts that his two-term presidency has caused in Honduras. So many Hondurans talked about how seeing him there in the courtroom was just such an exceptional historical moment for them.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  And then… just a year later, on Dec. 1, 2025, President Donald Trump pardoned him. Hernández left prison the same day.

The timing was not by accident. See, Trump’s pardon came the day after high-stakes elections in Honduras. 

In the lead-up to that election, Trump did what he could to sway the vote in favor of the right-wing candidate and Hernández ally, the former mayor of Tegucigalpa, Nasry Asfura.

Just two days before the election, on Nov. 28, Trump announced his plans for the pardon over Truth Social. He called on Hondurans to vote for Asfura and threatened to cut off all aid to Honduras if the leftist candidate won.

It took more than three weeks — And a manual vote count amid allegations of fraud — For Asfura to finally be declared victor. He won by less than a percentage point. 

Afura took office in late January. It was a big shift. Since 2022, Xiomara Castro and her leftist Libre Party had, despite huge obstacles, attempted to undo many of the conservative measures set in place under Hernández and the preceding coup government.

And that brings us to the leaks… 

The leaks are all available online. I’ll add links in the show notes. They are all audio messages sent during the first four months of this year. Most of them are short, less than a minute long. And I want to walk you through these messages, so you can hear people in their own words. Because the content is shocking… 

Many of the communications are between Juan Orlando Hernández, President Nasry Asfura, and other leading right-wing politicians in Honduras.

Hernández has been in the United States since he was released from prison. Many of the messages are focused around his return to Honduras and… his future return to power. Hernández doesn’t mince words.

In one voice message from March 18, former president Hernández tells the conservative president of Honduras’ National Congress, Tomás Zambrano, that the 67-year-old Asfura, who entered office as president just a few months ago, is old and confused and that he should start taking orders from him. “Listen to me,” Hernández says. “I’m the one who’s going to set the pace from here on out.”

In another voice message from March 12, which Hernández sent to current President Asfura, he says, “We had spoken. I left a message that we were going to win the election. And that you had to support me in these moments. The presidency has to be returned into the correct hands,” he says, referring to himself.

“That’s what President Donald Trump wants,” he says. “And if you go against him, I will communicate it immediately, and your government will fall.”

There’s this tone in many of Hernández’s messages as if he’s a mob boss ordering around his minions… and demanding that they use political violence, if necessary, to maintain control and clamp down on opposition to their government.

In this message, Hernández is speaking to National Assembly President Zambrano, who Hernández has asked to be his “right-hand” man for his return to the country.

“You have to kill people,” he says. “For us to be calm you just have to do it. If you have to return to repression to control the country, it has to be done. You have to do everything you have at your disposal to not let go of power. And you have to make it seem that everything that will happen — Deaths, killings, and kidnappings — Is being done by the communists.”

Those words are all the more terrifying when we remember the scale of violence, including crackdowns on protests, arbitrary arrests, and killings of social movement leaders that took place during Hernández’s time as president. He’s held onto power through brute force before. 

And I will mention this again and again, throughout this episode, because it needs repeating… Juan Orlando Hernández is a convicted drug and weapons trafficker responsible for widespread human rights abuses who was pardoned by President Donald Trump. And he is now empowered to push Trump’s vision of stamping out the left in Latin America.

I can’t help remembering US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s quote about the ruthless Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1939: “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

The leaked messages get even more violent. Hernández sent this message on March 18, also to his guy, National Assembly President Zambrano.

“Honduras needs strength,” he says. “It needs logistics. It needs blood. If you want to control people, you have to oppress them. You have to squeeze them. Counter violence, generating violence. That’s what President Trump says, and you have to understand that he’s going to be there for forever. I don’t know how, but that’s just the way it is, and you have to listen to me. Don’t be so soft. Don’t let it get to you. Don’t be so soft. If not, you won’t be able to do the work. That’s what Pablo Escobar said,” Hernández says.

Pablo Escobar was a Colombian drug trafficker who ran the Medellín cartel in the 1980s. He was the most iconic and powerful drug trafficker in Latin American history… The focus of the Netflix series Narcos. And this reference from Hernández, spoken from one drug trafficker about another, speaks volumes about his mindset: Honduras is open for business. And he clearly believes he and his allies have the green light from Trump to unleash violence against anyone who Trump sees as an adversary or who gets in the way of their bid to accumulate power and push a far-right agenda.

That includes killing, jailing, and buying off members of the Honduran Congress. 

They’ve had their sights set on Marlon Ochoa.

He’s a leftist Honduran politician with Xiomara Castro’s Libre Party. He served as the country’s minister of finance in 2024. Over the last two years, he’s sat on Honduras’ National Electoral Council, the body that oversees the country’s elections. And he was the most vocal voice on the council claiming fraud in the presidential elections last year. 

“This was perhaps the least transparent election in the history of Honduran democracy. Not just for the buying of votes that happened on the day of the election. Not just for the intimidation that thousands of people faced in cities across Honduras. But it was also an election that was not transparent and also fraudulent,” he said following the vote.

Several of the leaked messages call for his murder.

This message is from Jan. 27, the day President Nasry Asfura was sworn in. Right-wing Honduran Vice President María Antonieta Mejía says, “We’re gonna take back the Supreme Court. We’re gonna take back national Congress. We’re gonna take back all of the powers of government,” she says.

She’s speaking with Cossette López-Osorio, a member of Hernández’s right-wing National Party, who serves with Marlon Ochoa on the National Electoral Council. 

López-Osorio responds: “We have to jail Marlon. We have to put him in jail. More than that, I would pay to have him killed.”

She takes it even further in another message:

“If I had a gun in my hand,” she says, “and I had Marlon, Salvador, and Iroshka in front of me, with the same bullet I would kill all three,” she says.

Salvador Nasralla is a three-time presidential candidate who also served in Xiomara Castro’s government, and who was Asfura’s closest challenger in the 2025 election. Iroshka Elvir is Nasralla’s wife, a former beauty queen and a member of congress with the conservative Liberal Party.

These right-wing politicians in Honduras are obsessed with Marlon Ochoa. They clearly believe that to take back complete power, they’re going to have to take him out. 

“From my point of view,” Cossette López-Osorio says in another message from two weeks later, “Marlon should be objective number one.”

Two weeks after that, she leaves another voice message.

“Listen, tell me how we are going to continue without taking out this bastard Marlon from his seat on the council? You can’t do anything. You can’t move anything. You can’t touch anything. We can’t do anything without having a clear idea of the impeachment process. Once we remove him from the council, we are off to the races. First, jail or death. That’s the way I see it: jail or death. Either blood, or he’s fired,” she says.

In another series of messages, they discuss plans to secure nearly $200,000 to buy off lawmakers to vote out Ochoa in a congressional impeachment of his council seat.

One of the voices here is that of former leftist lawmaker turned right-wing political power broker Jorge Cálix, who says he’s already spent too much of his own money on this.

Cossette López-Osorio, who originally called for Ochoa’s murder, comes to the rescue. This voice message is from March 13.

“I offer $110,000 of my own money, so you can begin this congressional impeachment of Marlon Ochoa. It’s so that we can find these sons of bitches. These congressmen that aren’t committing, and you get them on board,” she says.

Less than a month after the vote buying discussions, on April 9, Congress voted to begin a process against Marlon Ochoa to remove him from the electoral council. A week later congress removed him from the body. He was already out of the country.

After death threats against him and members of his family, Ochoa reportedly fled the country and was requesting asylum abroad. Hernández and his people were undeterred.

“I’m going to begin to look for him with the contacts that we have in US intelligence,” Hernández said. “And once we find him, then we’ll proceed with his capture or with whatever has to be done.”

This is terrifying, and I can’t let this audio pass without underlying just how sinister this is. It sounds like something from the dark days of dictatorship, when the security forces of the South American military governments collaborated on intelligence to take out their political opponents with the support of the United States.

But this audio is from just a handful of weeks ago: April 6. 

And it is not the only time the US or other countries are implicated in these leaks.

Israel is also mentioned. And this is key. In a voice message from Jan. 20, former President Juan Orlando Hernández refers specifically to Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The Israeli prime minister is going to support us,” Hernández says. “We are very thankful for him. They had a lot to do… everything to do, in fact, with the negotiations and my leaving prison,” he says. 

In another message, Hernández chastises allies in Honduras.

He says that some people are blocking his return to Honduras. He says, “You didn’t even pay the money for my pardon. It didn’t come from you. It came from a group of rabbis. And people that supported Israel… I am going to win the next elections in Honduras,” he says. 

There’s so much to unpack in this message. Was the Trump administration paid off to pardon Hernández? If not, what was the money for? For lobbying? That seems like the most likely possibility. But why would a group of rabbis, Israel, and Prime Minister Netanyahu be interested in Hernández’s release?

Because Hernández has deep ties with Israel and was a staunch supporter while in office. Hernández graduated from a leadership program run out of Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation. 

As president, Hernández traveled to Israel and he met with Netanyahu on multiple occasions. His government was one of Israel’s top allies in Latin America.

Netanyahu spoke to their ties during a joint press conference in September 2019, to commemorate Honduras’ opening of a commercial office in Jerusalem. 

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU:  We’ve had a great friendship, both personal — President Hernández and myself — But also between our peoples, our countries. There is an intrinsic cooperation because we’re sister democracies facing challenges that are obviously daunting, but we have the spirit and the ability to overcome it.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Honduras under Hernández was one of the few countries in the world to support Israel during a 2017 UN resolution vote rejecting Jerusalem as the capital. Honduras recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital in March 2019.

According to the Israeli government, Honduras under Hernández “was one of the two countries in Latin America, and five in the world, to most often abstain from resolutions opposed by Israel.” 

And it appears Netanyahu and Israel paid Hernández back in full by ensuring Trump’s pardon and his release from prison.

And the audio leaks show Hernández is trying to capitalize off his connections both to Israel and the United States… for himself and his right-wing allies now in power in Honduras.

In this message, he’s talking about how conservative lobbyist Roger Stone scored him a meeting with a group of Republicans. And he says, “It’s important that we speak with friends in Israel so they can support us with issues of logistics, intelligence, and other things. That’s really important for my return to Honduras,” he says.

In another message, he seems to follow up on that…

He tells Congress President Tomás Zambrano, “I sent you the people from Israel. They sent you money. I’m here in the United States, lobbying.”

It’s not by accident that, in mid-January, even before his inauguration, Honduran president Nasry Asfura traveled to Jerusalem to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu. 

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU:  I’m delighted to welcome you, Mr. President. We’re refashioning the relationship between Israel and Honduras to the traditional lines of friendship, but we also want to seize the future… with you and the people of Honduras. I look forward to working with your government, both in economic fields and agriculture and technology in any of the areas that I think are laid before us. You should know that as far as Israel is concerned, the sky is the limit.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Then on Feb. 7, just ten days into his term, Asfura met with Donald Trump in Mar-A-Lago, Florida.

It’s clear from the leaks the right-wing victory in Honduras — Fraudulent or not — Already means a win for Trump. 

Asfura speaks to Hernández in a voice message three days later about his trip to Mar-a-Lago:

NASRY ASAFURA:  President. It’s a pleasure to greet you. We already had a private session with the investors, and it’s very positive for the expansion in Roatan for the ZEDE and in Comayagua for Palmerola.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Palmerola is the other name of the Soto Cano Air Base, a Honduran military base that has long been the most important headquarters for the US military in Central America… as we looked at in depth in the first season of Under the Shadow. This is another reason why Honduras is so important for the United States and for Trump.

NASRY ASAFURA:  We’re going to push for another Palmerola, specifically right there in Roatan, where Próspera is located,” Asfura tells Hernández. We’ve already negotiated it. And also an interoceanic train, which we are going to hand over to General Electric.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Roatan is an island just off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. And Próspera is a big deal for free market activists, bitcoin bros, and its Silicon Valley investors like Peter Thiel. It’s what’s known as a ZEDE, a classification that would essentially allow rich and powerful private individuals and corporations to set up their own autonomous private cities inside of Honduras. 

Honduras’ Congress approved the ZEDEs in 2013, when the body was run by then soon-to-be President Juan Orlando Hernández. They’re kind of like the Freedom Cities that Trump hopes to create in the United States. 

The ZEDEs were rolled back under the Xiomara Castro administration. The country’s Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. But the Próspera ZEDE has tried to hold out. It’s taken Honduras to international arbitration for more than $10 billion dollars in compensation. 

Now, it seems Hernández and President Asfura’s close ties to Washington and the United States — And Trump’s close ties to Silicon Valley — Have the current Honduran government pushing to once again green light the private cities. 

I visited Roatan a few years ago to report on the Próspera ZEDE. Let’s just say… the whole scheme is another huge reason why Honduras matters to powerful and wealthy people inside the United States. And why Trump took such an interest in the election late last year. 

That and this idea of a new US military base in Honduras.

This was Vice President María Antonieta Mejía’s message to Hernández shortly after Asfura’s visit to Mar-a-Lago.

MARÍA ANTONIETA MEJÍA:  He went there to negotiate first the return of Juan Orlando Hernández, the expansion of the ZEDEs, the territorial expansion of the manufacturing plants, the possible creation of a new tax-free zone,” she said. “Roatan is going to be the central point for a new US base. A new US base for conflicts with Cuba, Mexico, and possibly Venezuela.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Of course, those are the top countries in Latin America that Trump has been either attacking or threatening over the last year. And the three main countries I’ve focused on so far in this season of Under the Shadow.

But military might is not the only way that Trump and his right-wing allies hope to influence the region.

Jan. 30, 2026. Three days into Nasry Asfura’s term. Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández makes a series of phone calls to both Asfura and Vice President María Antonieta Mejía’s. 

He asks for money to set up a fake news office in the United States with the help of some Republicans.

JUAN ORLANDO HERNÁNDEZ:  I need you to please send me, to Rosales’s bank account, $150,000, please. Because we are going to rent an apartment and set up an office to create a digital journalism outfit. Someone here from the team of the president of the United States is going to manage it. He’s one of the Republicans who is working with us. They’re going to set up a news website where they’re going to publish some important information about Manuel Zelaya and Xiomara Castro, he says.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Remember… Zelaya and Castro — Husband and wife, and both former leftist presidents. 

Asfura responds, “I’m going to transfer from the bank account of a friend. Let’s see if they can get it to you in cash. But tell me, what are we going to do with this. What do we get?”

Hernández says, “We’re setting up an information office, President. From here. From the United States. So that they can’t link it back to us there in Honduras. It’s going to be like a Latin American news site. I was on a call with [Argentine] President Javier Milei, and it was successful. Very, very, very good. And I think that with this, we can do some big things for all of Latin America. There are some files coming against Mexico. There are some files coming against Colombia. And most importantly against Honduras and the Zelaya family.”

Asfura tells him, “I think you also need some money for you. So, we are going to send you another $150,000, so you can survive a little more over there. We’ll take it out of INSEP,” he says, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Services. 

After his call with Asfura, Hernández spoke with Vice President Mejía.

He says, “I need this cash because we’re going to set up an office here, with the support of some Republicans, in order to attack and uproot the cancer of the left in Honduras and all of Latin America. I mentioned to President Asfura that we could talk with Javier Milei and he is supporting with $350,000. Also, another good friend of ours in Mexico is supporting, in order to focus on the issue of Mexico. We are pretty ready and hoping that this can really move forward,” he says. 

Mejía responds. 

“President, if you want, forget the details. I just want to confirm the amount. Now that I know, I will take care of all the details. $300,000 it is,” she says.

Money, taken from the Honduran Ministry of Public Services to support a convicted drug trafficker to set up a disinformation site in the United States to attack leftists leaders in Latin America… with the help of Republicans tied to the White House. 

This is a bombshell. The HondurasGate leaks have been covered in Latin America. But they have been almost completely ignored by every major news outlet in the United States.

Arturo Dominguez says this is the biggest story not being talked about right now.

ARTURO DOMINGUEZ:  This administration is just going balls out. They’re just gung-ho for overthrowing governments and taking control.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  He’s a Cuban American journalist based in Texas. He’s been reporting on HondurasGate and so many other things going on in Latin America. His latest piece in the Antagonist Magazine is entitled “How Far Will Trump Go to Destabilize Latin America?”

As we’ve looked at already, he says, HondurasGate is so much larger than just Honduras. It reveals the US and Israel’s concern for backing far-right allies in Latin America at any cost and doing away with their political adversaries across the region. This is not new. These are just the latest tactics to push this far-right agenda in the region.

ARTURO DOMINGUEZ:  And that’s basically the strategy that’s been the foreign policy strategy against Latin America that’s been in place for, I don’t know, a hundred, over two hundred years now. It’s all interconnected.

The US has been doing this to Latin America for a long time, and they were much more covert before. And I say this a lot, but the incompetence in the White House right now has lifted the veil on what the US used to do in secret. They’re doing it out in the open, blowing up boats, indicting Raúl Castro on bogus charges, kidnapping Maduro. You know what I mean? Like everything is just manufactured to create pretexts to exert dominion over other countries. 

And that’s what we’re seeing right now in Latin America, and even in Greenland. When you’re talking about the Western Hemisphere and our entire region, you include Greenland and Canada in there. And suddenly all the rhetoric about Greenland and Canada starts to make sense. It’s about control over them, just like it is over Latin America.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The HondurasGate revelations that Hernández is orchestrating a broader regional destabilization campaign are particularly concerning when it comes to Colombia: the country has high-stakes elections at the end of the month. 

Leftist senator Iván Cepeda is leading the polls, but the far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella is only a few points back. Many fear Trump will use his weight to try to influence Colombia’s vote in favor of De la Espriella, like he did in Honduras for Asfura.

Colombia’s Leftist president, Gustavo Petro, has consistently stood up to Trump and his meddling in Latin America.

This month, he called for an investigation into the leaks and their attempt to sway the vote on May 31.

He said the information in the HondurasGate leaks had to be investigated as a potential electoral crime. ”We are in an electoral season,” he said. “It is being planned with foreign money. It is forbidden by the Constitution to participate in electoral campaigns. And here, Minister of the Interior, we have to call the Commission of Guarantees to give this the attention it deserves.”

Arturo Dominguez says he doubts that any disinformation that right-wingers cook up now will have time to impact Colombia’s election. Still, the message is clear. 

ARTURO DOMINGUEZ:  I think the threat to Colombia is there. The threats of if you don’t elect who Trump wants, this is going to happen, remittances are going to get cut off, or aid, or partnership agreements, or stuff, and stuff will get cut off. 

MICHAEL FOX:  Arturo, you follow all this stuff really closely. How unprecedented is a leak like HondurasGate? Like, have we seen anything like this in recent years or decades?

ARTURO DOMINGUEZ:  In Latin America, there’s been some stuff that has been leaked out, plots to assassinate Petro in Colombia, things like that. But nothing this extensive that involves so many different presidents, prime ministers, lobbying groups. This is pretty deep. So the idea that you have all these countries pitching in and putting in money to influence elections in several countries in the region, it’s just nuts.

And the extent of this is just crazy when you start getting into this different, much more violent type of scenario where people’s lives are at risk. And threatening to assassinate somebody from the election board in Honduras just speaks for itself.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  I also reached out to Alberto Maresca, an Italian academic who focuses on Latin American foreign policy. He’s currently a PhD candidate in political science at Ghent University in Belgium. He’s also a columnist with the website Latinoamérica21.

I asked him whether Trump might ultimately be behind the whole network, or at least aware of its existence. 

ALBERTO MARESCA:  I don’t think it’s Trump, I think it’s Rubio.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  He’s referring to Marco Rubio, Trump’s Cuban-American secretary of state.

ALBERTO MARESCA:  I don’t think that Trump knows about it. I honestly doubt that Trump has an interest in this, especially now with what’s going on in Iran. I am sure that Rubio has a very second in, because this is something only a person with strong connections with Israel and the Latin American conservative sector has, which is the case of Marco Rubio. So, I’m pretty sure that it’s Marco Rubio that is networking those initiatives and those figures.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Could Rubio be the Trump administration Republican who Hernández says in the leaks is going to help set up this misinformation office? 

We don’t know. But it wouldn’t be out of the question. 

The US secretary of state met with incoming Honduran President Nasry Asfura in mid-January, even before Asfura’s inauguration. 

As for Israel’s role in the leaks and their support for achieving Juan Orlando Hernández’s pardon… Alberto says this is actually really consistent with Israel’s actions in Latin America, in particular in recent years.

ALBERTO MARESCA:  Well, this is very, very interesting, Michael, because by the time the HondurasGate audio came out, you had Israel and the president of Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu, meeting with several governments in Latin America, among which Panama, for instance. And in the leaks, you find that Israel would have supported this media campaign orchestrated by Milei and the US. 

If you read it through a foreign policy angle, which is what I do, this has been consistent with what Israel, since the genocide in Gaza, tried to do in Latin America: Find a place in which it does not get isolated, unlike Africa, unlike the Middle East, unlike Asia, and unlike even Europe. There are very few countries in Latin America that distance them from Israel. Chile under Boric, but they will be easily undone by Kast. Bolivia under Arce, and that is already being undone by the new Bolivian government. Brazil with Lula. And especially Colombia with Petro. But I can guarantee you that if a right-wing government gets elected in Colombia, that will be undone as well. So that has been the Israeli strategy. 

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Trying to find a region in the world, and this is the case of Latin America, where it doesn’t get isolated.

And removing Juan Orlando Hernández from prison is a helpful tool in that strategy.

Alberto has another piece of insight here that I think is really important to understanding how the HondurasGate leaks fit into Trump’s push in the region, and how so many of the region’s center and right countries have lined up behind the United States and president Donald Trump.

He calls this automatic alignment. It’s the focus of his latest article, “‘Hondurasgate’ and the tragedy of automatic alignment in Latin America.”

ALBERTO MARESCA:  Automatic alignment is an academic idea for which, contrary to nonalignment. Automatic alignment in the case of Latin America is aligned with the US and bandwagoning a bit the United States to its foreign policy because that would inherently benefit Latin America.

That’s why in my pieces I write about the tragedy of automatic alignment, which is the alignment of a given Latin American government to the US unconditionally. The ties with Israel, the acceptations of deportees from the US in Latin American countries. This is very important. Designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah as terrorist groups… all of this pertains to the Shield of the Americas.

CLIP:  On this history day we come together to announce a brand new military coalition to eradicate the criminal cartels plaguing our region.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  If you remember, that was Trump’s summit and initiative of more than a dozen countries that met in Florida in March and promised to fight narcotrafficking in their countries in collaboration with the US.military. I dig into this in depth in Episode 8 of this season.

ALBERTO MARESCA:  When in Miami we saw those right-wing governments standing together with Trump signing agreements that were not agreements at the end, were surrendering treaties, we believed, probably, that it was the usual rhetorical action without any consequence. Instead, it does have a consequence. It seems to me that there were a full set of demands that Latin American countries should abide by. And among them is the support for Israel.

So it is an automatic alignment with the global far right. Not even with the US and Israel as countries or governments in terms of bureaucracies with the global far right.

So, all those phases built a set of allies that under threat submitted to the US. They submitted because ideologically they were already inclined to do so, but then when they were threatened, they submitted. 

Now, those presidents, they went on board with so many initiatives with the US, among which is the Shield of the Americas. Then automatically they are obliged at the end of the day to do for the US what the US does not have the time or the resources to do.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Openly attack political opponents. Move against the leftists leaders in the region. Act as the United States’ attack dogs, with or without the direct order from the United States or Israel. 

ALBERTO MARESCA:  You don’t need to assassinate the presidents as you used to do or to replicate Jacobo Arbenz kind of events. You don’t need to do that anymore. And this is the tragedy of automatic alignment. You have Milei doing that for you. You have Noboa doing that for you. And this is the most successful foreign policy, honestly, in Latin America.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Or you have Juan Orlando Hernández doing it.

ALBERTO MARESCA:  That is automatic alignment. You need governments that are willing to make those interests going on even without the intervention of the United States in this case.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  He says Milei in Argentina is a great example of this. So are several countries in Central America.

ALBERTO MARESCA:  El Salvador is one of them, for sure. In the Caribbean you see several instances of that.

In the rest of South America as well. I’m… concerned about the region as a region, finding a unifying voice that can express autonomy in the international arena. Because if you don’t do that as a region, it is unlikely that a single country — Besides Brazil, that is a very special case — Can have such an ability.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Brazil, like Colombia, is another country in Latin America where big elections are coming up later this year. We can expect similar actions from the Trump administration against president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his reelection campaign. And if Hernández’s fake news outlet is up and running, it’s sure they will be churning out their own hit jobs… this time focused on Brazil.

I’ll be watching this race closely as we approach the October elections.

That is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. 

Please keep your eyes out for more. I wasn’t planning on bringing you a new episode so soon, as I’m hard in the midst of developing my new free speech podcast series for the lead up to the US’s 250th anniversary.

The first three episodes of that series drop in the beginning of June. Please check it out. It’s gonna be a powerful series looking at the attacks on free speech rights today under the Trump administration and how communities and countries are responding.

I’ll add links in the show notes here. 

And here is a sneak preview of the trailer. 

I hope you liked what you heard. Thanks so much, again for listening, following, and spreading the word.

I want to send a huge shout out today to Gloria Loves Bats. She’s a new supporter on my Patreon who has had great things to say about the show. If you haven’t visited my Patreon, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox. Or you can follow the link in the show notes. There, you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. You can find a ton of content there, exclusively for my supporters. 

As always… if you are looking for more information, news and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad… please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily, indispensable reporting.

The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album, “Ofrenda.” I hope you check it out. 

Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA.

This episode script was edited by Heather Gies.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.  

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we’ve got an important follow-up to a story here in Baltimore that we reported on back in April. To refresh your guys’ memory on April 9th, nearly a year after workers voted to authorize a strike, non-union city and commercially contracted security officers in Baltimore walked off the job on an unfair labor practice strike against their employers, Abacus Corporation, Metropolitan Protective Services, and Urban Development Solutions. The strike involved security guards stationed at city and commercial sites around Baltimore, including Harbor East, the water treatment facility, the Able Woolman Building, police stations, and housing developments among others.

In what has been a protracted years long effort to unionize with the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, workers have been fighting for more job security, better pay, accessible healthcare, and safer working conditions. And in the episode that we published just before the strike, I got to talk about all of that with Laura Dixon, a veteran security officer and Abacus employee and Jaime Contreras, Executive Vice President of SEIU Local 32BJ. And today we’re talking about the latest infuriating update from this story. On Friday, May 22nd, I got a press email from SEIU Local 32BJ with the title, City Security Officers Fired and Threatened after going on strike according to labor charges filed against city contractor. Now, according to the union, quote, “Non-union security officers have filed unfair labor practice charges alleging their employer, city contractor Metropolitan Protective Services, fired and harassed workers following a lawful strike that took place on Thursday, April 9th.

NPS, which employs at least 70 officers who protect 10 public housing units run by the Baltimore Housing Authority, among other sites, receives $15 million from the Baltimore Housing Authority and $6 million from the Maryland Department of General Services. Starting the day after officers went on strike, NPS also stopped bringing paychecks to Baltimore from their Hyattsville headquarters and instead required officers to drive over 30 miles to Hyattsville, creating a new barrier between officers and access to their pay. Seven officers reported losing their jobs or being removed from their schedule for actions that MPS permitted prior to the strike, including Victoria Cox for simply eating lunch in her car after two years on the job protecting Westport housing in South Baltimore, where Cox dealt with domestic violence, break-ins, and shootings. After the strike in early April, an NPS supervisor interrogated an officer over union involvement and told the officer that he could lose his job.

Multiple officers also reported being interrogated by a supervisor after their participation in the lawful strike. So as part of my journalistic due diligence, I reached out to NPS for comment on these allegations and I received a reply from CEO and president of MPS, Derek Parks, which says in part, “Metropolitan Protective Services, Inc. Maintains that no employees have been terminated due to union involvement. We fully support our employees’ right to choose whether or not to join a union. Of our 175 employees, only six have been removed from the schedule or terminated all due to licensing issues or performance concerns. We find these allegations to be without merit and believe they are being used by the union to exert pressure on the company.” So I’ve included the full statement from NPS CEO and President Derek Parks in the show notes for this episode so that you can read the full thing.

But for now, as we always do, we’re going to take you guys to the front lines of this struggle so that you can hear directly from the working people at the center of it. And I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by Victoria Cox herself. Victoria is a former MPS employee who worked to get to the rank of Sergeant. And we’re also joined by Daril Riley, a former MPS employee who’s been working there for 15 months and reached the rank of corporal. Both Victoria and Daril have had their shifts taken off the schedule and essentially their jobs taken away and they have both been put under investigation by NPS since the strike began. Victoria, Daril, thank you both so much for joining me today. I really, really appreciate it and I really wish we were meeting under less infuriating circumstances and I want to talk about all of this with you in the short time that we have.

And to start, I wanted to just ask if you guys could both remind our listeners where this strike came from. What are the key issues that you and fellow security guards face on the job? Why have you been trying to unionize and why were you prepared to go on an unfair labor practice strike in April? I just want to make sure that folks listening remember before we talk about what happened after the strike, what this is all about.

Victoria Cox:

Well, for one, I just want to say thank you for taking the time out to hear us. We need to be heard. Enough is enough. Things need to be stopped. I’m a little emotional because we’ve been riding it out for a minute without pay. We got families, we got bills. I just bought a new car. We got bills and stuff to pay and we’re behind. So basically I’m just reaching out for help answers. The investigation being investigated too long. The reason why I’m low emotional because two years is coming up and I’m a sergeant. I’m not understanding why is this happening. I did overtime. I even did fire watch for them on my days off and the union has really stuck by me supporting me. I just need answers and why is this happening? Ever since we’ve been on strike, things has been really like hell, truthfully help for us.

Change has been like every day since we’ve been on strike, things has been like a change every day. Every day is everything. More has been added onto us and we obeyed it. When I did the 16 hours and came in the next day at nine o’clock, I think I was rightfully deserved, rightfully deserved a break. And I took my break at 11:30. As I took my break at 11:30, they came marching down like military people and asked me why was I sitting in my car on my lunch break and even lied to me and said in post orders, “I’m not allowed to sit in my car for a lunch break.” And I asked them to show me that in the post orders. They couldn’t. I pulled it up. It was nothing there. I screenshotted, sent Gmails no reply nicely. And it started off, I said, “Good morning and good afternoon.” It also ended with, “Thank you.

Can you respond to me to let me know what am I under investigated for? ” No response. So today I have gotten a Gmail saying, “Oh, it got moved to higher up chief. We need answers. We have bills. We have family. This is not fair.

We are not taking off the schedule. If you’re done with us and we’re fine, tell us that so we can move on and get unemployment and go further.” But they’re not responding and not saying nothing to us. Right now, we’re not getting paid, noth. And it’s so unfair. I just need answers.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you so much for sharing that, Victoria. I really appreciate it and I completely understand why you’re feeling the way that you are. My heart breaks thinking about all the many working people I’ve talked to who are in situations like yours and just how callous these bosses are towards our pain, how callous politicians can be to that pain, how much the media can ignore it. And of course we’re doing our best here to sort of counteract that, but I guess I’m appealing to everyone listening to this that don’t let these stories and these injustices just fade into the background. Nothing’s going to happen here unless fellow workers stand up and demand accountability. And we’re going to talk more about that as this conversation goes on. And Darrell, I wanted to bring you in here and I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about what it was like working for you at NPS before the strike and then help remind our listeners why you went on strike and then we’ll talk about what happened to you after the strike.

Daril Riley:

Actually, before the strike, the job really wasn’t so bad. We didn’t have a whole bunch of rules or whatever. However, the job always been dangerous on most jobs is the police and then you. On our job, it’s us first and then the police. So we go into everything, like I said, head on, we get paid a little bit of money and we take all the brunt of the work. Like I said, we go in all kind of dangerous situations where it’s shootouts, where somebody got killed in the house, all that. We go first. The police is second to that, but we was really doing our job just fine basically until after the strike. So I mean, of course we want better situation because at the end of the day, we not the police. You know what I’m saying? But we acting like it, but we don’t get to pay that they get.

You know what I mean? So basically we was just trying to ask for better conditions for the job that we worked. I mean, we think we deserve it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I’m just remembering some of the things we talked about in that last episode. I mean, all the different things you guys have to deal with. And we also talked about the fact that it’s tough because most people don’t have good interactions with security guards. And so people tend to not want to sympathize with workers that they hear are security guards. But then when you listen to the kind of stuff that you guys deal with on your shift and the kind of pay that you’re getting and the kind of crap you got to deal with from your management, I think it’s really important that everyone hear that and consider the human being behind the uniform. And so talk to me about the strike itself. I mean, how were you both feeling going into the strike? And then let’s talk about how quickly things changed after the strike in early April.

Victoria Cox:

Well, wow. I’m going to take it a little bit and rewind it back and I apologize I didn’t bring this up. We also, me and my partner, which is Daril Riley was stuck at work for three days and they promised us that they were going to … I don’t know what the surprise was supposed to have been and we never got it. We stayed away for three days. They never called a checkup on us or anything. So we sucked that up, let it go, say, “Hey, well, we rolled it out. We still doing to do our job. We still was dedicated. I didn’t know it was going to go this far. We still continue to do our job.” But soon as when the union got involved, of course they said, “No, y’all don’t need no union, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” We said, “No, we need a union.” So of course I stuck out that sore thumb because I said, “We need this.

” So I made sure that I went up to a lot of the other officers. We got it done. Of course we go on strike and who faces biggest days on the poster mine. So of course I was a target. I was told by other officers that, “Oh yeah, we’re going to get her. She going to be the first one.” They were going after everyone that went on strike. But again, I kept a professional. Before I went on strike, I did. I told them I’m going on strike, but I have courage. And I did have coverage and I did the rightful thing. I just didn’t walk off the job. I didn’t abandon anything and I still did the rifle thing to protect my job and I still get treated like this.

I’m lost. I’m lost for words. So I just feel like they made it even worse. When we joined the union, it’s like, “Yeah, okay. Y’all not going to do what we say. We got something.” So it was like they was trying to find … I felt we were set up. They were trying to find something, something on us. So they said, “Let’s just pick with Sergeant Cox. She was sitting in our car, this just did 16 hours, came back nine o’clock. When all of us make 11:30, nah.” But I always cover myself by having proof. It was nothing said on the post orders. And then it was a smack my face the next day. The captain told me, “Hey, what so- and-so did 16 hours?” And I gave her 40 minutes and she went off post. I said, “I’m a sergeant, so what’s make her different from me?

” And she’s a new guard, so that’s why I’m hurting. I’m not understanding. I never have gotten written up either. I always was a yes or a person, even though when it was wrong, because at the end of the day, I have bills. I have bills to pay. I didn’t have a family to feed and now my family questioning me, what’s going on? And now I’m behind on some things. And I don’t even know, and I’m going to be honest with you, we even try to cash out with PTO. I don’t even know if they going to set that. And we’re in this interview right now and it’s crazy because I just got a call from Metropolitan and I got a text message from SOC telling me to call her. That’s what I wanted to bring up as well. I don’t know what this is about either.

What they going to say, no, I can’t get PTO now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So just to make sure that we’ve got it all clear here. So Victoria, we’re working at Westport Housing, you’ve worked there for a while. Like you said earlier, you’d never been written up, you did double shifts, you’re a team player, right? And then after working a 16-hour day, the next morning you come in and at 9:00 AM in the morning, you take your lunch break at 11:00 and you have your lunch in your car and then they use that to essentially take your shifts and your job and everything away.

Victoria Cox:

Yes. They literally told Fib and said, “Oh, you on your lunch break for a whole hour.” I’m like, “What?” And I’m not being funny because I have a monkey joke. Literally, they was walking down. I didn’t even really start my lunch this year. I was eating a banana and I continued to eat my banana as I was talking to them. But I also, when they were saying something crazy, I showed them a screenshot where the post order saying that I cannot leave the post or cannot sit in my car for a lunch break. They just had their head down. So they was really trying to find something on me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, this is just my ignorance of the situation. They’re trying to say that this is like a fireable offense.

Victoria Cox:

Yes. Under investigation,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yep. Yeah. I want to be careful for listeners because Sergeant Cox has not been fired, but is under investigation, has essentially been taken all off the schedule, which is effectively firing a person without firing them, but I want to be careful with the language that we’re using. And so Victoria, so they said that because you left your post to eat your lunch in your car, that’s why it happened?

Victoria Cox:

I have them laugh on this. I’m sorry, because it’s my nerves. I have to laugh on this because when they said I left the post, I swear if you go down there, anybody that hear this go down at Westport, they be like, “Wait a minute, I even showed pictures.” I did not leave the post at all where where I was at was right there that still said Westport. I was still on the property, still there. No restaurant carry out, nothing. I was sitting in my car on the side that still say Westport. I was still in … If that’s the case, if I was off the property, how did you find me?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And how soon did this happen after the strike? Oh,

Victoria Cox:

God. I’m going to say I’d say three weeks. Again,

Maximillian Alvarez:

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but from what you’ve been saying, it sounds like things were kind of getting noticeably worse

Victoria Cox:

Over the course

Maximillian Alvarez:

Of those three weeks.

Victoria Cox:

Yes. It seemed like ever since that happened, they would come down ain’t never their entire life because me and Corporal Riley kept saying, “Wait a minute, I’m Sergeant, you called. Why are they coming down here every day and they switch stuff up? All right y’all, y’all can’t be right here. Y’all can’t eat inside the building.” I said, “Well, I’m going to sit in my car to eat lunch.” Or, “I’m going to need y’all to start checking the front and unlocking it. I mean, making sure these doors unlock and lock.” It was things changed. It was changing every day, every day. And I even asked her when it’s pulled down raining, we said, “Yeah, I want y’all out here. Just keep walking, keep walking.” So if your legs start hurt, just keep walking or laying up against the fence. It just kept getting worse and worse and worse.

And now I guess they feel they won, “Well, yeah, we got her out of here on my lunch break.” And they also asked me why was he in his view? I said, “He’s not supposed to be alone. If something happened to him, then it’s not going to fall on me. ” So what is the problem? No one stands alone, correct? We supposed to be a team together and we were still on property. So if something did kick, we had the radios. We had to stop what we was doing and jump to it immediately like we always do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Daryl, how about you? Can you talk us through what this was all looking like from your vantage point after the strike?

Daril Riley:

After the strike, basically rules we never even heard of before, never even seen was now a rule that we didn’t know nothing about, you know what I’m saying? It was all new. They was basically just doing everything off the cuff, you know what I’m saying? After that, it was just like whatever, we’ll just find anything or whatever. But before then, these same things and all that with never an issue was never talked about or whatever. And the thing about it is everybody anyway goes off a property to go take their 30-minute break. You call it into command that you taking your 30-minute break so they know it. You call it in and then you call it out when it’s over. So two days before that, our captain came and said that one of the people from the contract said that we left the site or whatever.

I said, “No.” I said, “I left the site.” I went to Popeye’s. I said, “I called in the 30 minutes to command and then when I got back, I called it back out. ” And he said, “Well, that’s for us. That’s not for them.” So basically he was saying, “Okay, it’s really okay for the company.” But he don’t want the contractors to know that that’s what it is. But basically we got in trouble anyway because of it just after that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, I’ll qualify this by saying that I’m drawing this comparison just as myself, Max Alvarez, a journalist who’s interviewed workers in different situations across this country, including workers at Starbucks stores that have been unionizing or trying to unionize or successfully voted to unionize. This is the kind of crap that those workers have been telling me for years. They say, “Yeah, man, all of a sudden managers are writing us up for things that they have never written a single person up for ever before. They’re saying that they’re not retaliating against us for union activity, but suddenly my hours are getting cut and now I’m losing my healthcare. I’m being assigned shifts in another store. It feels like blatant retaliation and punishment for protected union activity for everyone listening, that is illegal. Employers cannot do that. It is illegal for an employer to retaliate against you or any other worker engaging in lawful concerted union activity.

Those are your rights. And what it sounds like here is that we have another situation where workers, yourselves included, engaged in those protected rights to walk out on an unfair labor practice strike and then faced what sounds like weeks worth of retaliatory action culminating in these BS investigations and charges that you guys abandoned your posts and got taken off the schedule. So that’s again, just my commentary and observation, but the question I want to ask you both because it’s a significant one is do you suspect that you were being retaliated against for engaging in the strike?

Victoria Cox:

Yes, I know for sure. I’m telling you, I have gotten a lot of phone calls that was backing me up and saying, Hey, and I’m not even being funny, but they said, I’m just letting you know since you’ve been on that strike, you’ve been on the news and you posted up. The major came to them and told them, which is unprofessional, that I was on the chopper board. They want to make sure they get rid of me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Daril, do you believe you were retaliated against for participating in the strike?

Daril Riley:

Yeah, of course. I mean, because the company never wanted it to begin with. They made all kind of snide remarks and basically tried to put us against the union. They never wanted. And then once we went to it and then once it was over, then basically they showing us that they never wanted this. And so basically that’s what we’re going through now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about what you’re going through now. As much as you’re comfortable sharing, nothing you’re uncomfortable sharing, but I know I got to let you guys go in a few minutes. And with the little time that we have left, I wanted to talk about what this has meant for you and your families, like how this has affected your lives and where the hell things stand now with this investigation, your jobs, and what is the union doing to help and what can people listening do to help?

Victoria Cox:

Well, I have to say this, and I’m sorry I’m getting emotional again. The God I serve, I know he’s going to have an answer for me and they always say when one door is shut another one open and thank God that I have a good support system and my fiance has really supported me through it all. They told me keep fighting, keep fighting, keep fighting. So without her and family members, trust me, you just don’t know. I probably had a nervous breakdown, but like I said, the God I serve and thank God I have them in my life, I will be devastated with how y’all be out here doing things I ain’t got no business doing. So I’m just asking those that’s listening to keep us in prayer and keep fighting and fighting for us and we just want answers. We need your help. We out here and been out of work with no pay, no unemployment and not understanding why.

Why? We just need help and prayer.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Darrell, please hop in here, but I just wanted to underline something that Victoria said for everyone listening in case we haven’t made it clear if you don’t get outright fired but you just get taken off the schedule, you can’t collect unemployment. So it’s like screwing someone over twice. They can’t work to pay their bills and they can’t collect unemployment to help with the cost of that. And that’s what Daryl and Victoria are dealing with right now. Daryl, please hop in here and whatever you’re comfortable sharing with folks, just tell us where things are for you, what the union’s doing and what folks listening can do to help.

Daril Riley:

Wow. I mean, basically the union has been great for us and very supportive and basically, I mean, I’m glad I’m with them and I mean, I’m glad I met those people. However, bills do still go on even though since pretty much now I’m at a standstill. I mean, I’m sure it’s fired because basically they saying that, but they won’t say that. So basically, like you said, I mean, no unemployment, can’t get my 401k out until something happened or whatever. So basically, I mean, I have a family, I don’t know how it’s going to be, really, really tough to support them. So I mean, right now, I mean, I really don’t know what. We just going

Victoria Cox:

To keep fighting. We just going to keep fighting. Like he said, the union has really, really has been reaching us even on holidays. They reach out to us to make sure that we okay. You need anything, let us know. So we just want answers and need you guys help. Don’t give up on us and we are not going to give up on you guys. We just going to keep fighting.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Victoria Cox and Darryl Riley. Victoria is a former employee of Metropolitan Protective Services who work to get to the rank of Sergeant and Daryl is a former MPS employee who’s been working there for 15 months and reached the rank of corporal. Both Victoria and Daryl have had their shifts taken off the schedule and essentially had their jobs taken away and they have both been put under investigation by NPS since they participated in an unfair labor practice strike in early April. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, please go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.

Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Joining us today again is William C. Anderson, author and columnist of Prism. If you missed our first conversation where we explore how Black citizenship has historically been called into question, you can find it on our YouTube channel. The history feels especially urgent this week following the United States Supreme Court’s ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act. This is clearly part of the continuation by the right to reverse black progress.

William, before you dive into your latest prism article which critiques the current left and offer a path forward, what is your assessment of what you see coming out of the Supreme Court this week?

William C. Anderson:

Yeah, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I saw the news, and I wasn’t surprised by it. I thought it was to be expected. As you might know, this is something that I wrote about in the Nation on No Map, and specifically I mentioned the 2013 Voting Rights Act decision in terms of the case with Shelby v. Holder, just following it up to that point because the book came out in 2021.

So with things being where they were at that stage, I was anticipating it getting to this point and becoming even more dismantled and even more deconstructed.

And the thing that I would say about it is it’s an especially personal matter for me because I’m from Alabama, From Shelby County, who brought the case against the Obama administration withholder. And in that original ruling at that point, one of the things that Chief Justice John Roberts had said was that something to the effect of that at 50 years later, things had changed quite dramatically and it was kind of implying that there was enough progress that had been made that is not necessary anymore to have something like the Voting Rights Act. And that’s what kind of underscores a lot of these white supremacists and fascist attacks on Black history and on legislation that has been beneficial to Black people. It’s kind of trying to illuminate some sort of postracial society that we know clearly doesn’t exist because they’re becoming increasingly racist. They’re not becoming less racist.

So it’s really just more evidence that if we really want to be able to see better conditions that are permanent and that are only making progress for the betterment of our lives and the sustenance and the resources that we need, then we have to have liberatory politics that actually push for those things in a way that is wholesale, that is comprehensive, that is expansive, and that’s not incremental. And that’s not to do anything or say anything that diminishes all of the blood, sweat, and tears that were put in by the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement across the board from the more radical ends to the more moderate ends of the civil rights [movement].

What is to say is that we should be able to learn from this history that no matter what, when we’re relying on the halls of the White House and Capitol Hill and representative democracy to try to do something for us that we know it’s not designed to do, that it’s always going to end up like this. It’s always going to be dismantled. It’s always going to be rolled back. It’s always going to be trying to correct itself to get back to serving white supremacy and capitalism in the fullest extent, and not doing anything that it’s not meant to do originally.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, I agree 100%. This week, Prism published a new installment of your series, Another Way Out, titled We Need a Mosaic Movement and you write, “instead of a call for resentment field, unity or traditional fronts, we can look to what former Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army members, and political prisoner Russell Maroon Schultz called The Mosaic.” Could you walk us through the core argument of your article and could you provide a brief introduction to the life and legacy of Russell Maroon Schultz?

William C. Anderson:

For sure. I’ll start with Russell Maroon Shoatz. And Russell Maroon Shoatz was a really interesting and spectacular and dynamic individual. He was a former Panther and Black liberation army soldier, and he became active in politics, I want to say in the 60s, and was a founding member of the Black Unity Council in Philadelphia, and they later merged with the Black Panther Party.

So he put in a lot of work. He has a deep history in movement and in struggle and he got locked up in 1972 for the first time, and he becomes a really extraordinary political prisoner because he’s writing, he’s thinking, and he’s developing over time.

And what’s so interesting about Russell Maroon Shoatz is that he’s prolific. He’s a prolific thinker and individual in the sense that he spends a lot of his time questioning. He doesn’t get incarcerated and kind of sit there holding the same position for 30, 40, 50 years. He’s asking questions the whole time. He’s developing, he’s expanding his analysis, and he is moving towards politics that are ultimately really, really interesting and fascinating.

So one of the things that I really appreciate about his work is that he was bringing in elements that I would say he wasn’t necessarily always speaking about or being influenced by. There were things that were coming to him later over time If you look at the chorus of his work, the development he had as a person.

And so one of those aspects is something that comes forth in the essay that I’m referencing in my latest column at prism. And this is from an essay called The Dragon and the Hydra. The Dragon and the Hydra is an essay that is an organizational study that looks at the maroons and the slave revolts and the struggles of African descended people in the Americas and the fights against slavery, colonialism and imperialism.

And what is so dynamic about this essay is that you can see a departure really with Schoatz and certain aspects of his past. So he is making a critique of democratic centralism, he’s making a critique of vanguardism, and he’s making a critique of some of the politics that are associated with the Black Panther Party. And he’s calling in to question even a lot of the projects of Marxist Leninism and the state socialist projects that were struggling in building national socialism.

So he is making a critique that is, I think, probably controversial in some regards for some people. And he also at the same time he’s critiquing these things, he draws from them still. He still talks about his influence, the influence that these things had in his life.

but he also brings in element. He says at the beginning of the essay, “I’m going to say a lot of things that sound like anarchism.” And he says, “I’m not an anarchist, but as long as anarchists are willing to stand on mutual footing in the struggle for intercommunal self-determination, that you should be able to see the overlap and see where things have parallels.”

So ultimately in this essay, Schoatz, he puts forth this organizational study and he says that it’s important for people to be able to learn from the past and not just keep doing the same thing over and over again. That’s at the core of that essay.

I was drawing on in the essay that I wrote for prism, it is about this last section that’s included in the collected writings of Russell Maroon Schoatz called Maroon the Implacable. And what is in that last section is called the Mosaic, It’s a section called the Mosaic. What is in that last section is a solution because he doesn’t just put forth the critique. He offers a solution for how people can struggle separately and autonomously but understand their collective interest as different groups, as different genders, as different ideologies, as different political backgrounds and so on and so forth.

And it’s not a traditional or typical call for a united front. It is a call for people to understand their common interest and to be able to have mutual respect enough to come together and to struggle to overthrow the conditions that are oppressing them.

So the core argument of my essay is about challenging what I feel is really a lot of silliness with the current state of the US left, especially with my generation and, unfortunately, a lot with younger generations than me, there’s just a lot of sectarianism, there’s a lot of beef, there’s a lot of conflict, and there’s a lot of issues over things that really don’t have anything to do with the current different denominations of the US left.

And what I mean by that is that the current US left doesn’t have control over anything. It doesn’t have any blocs that it controls. It doesn’t have any territory that it controls. It doesn’t have power in the government. It doesn’t have a party. It doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t have a military. These are different fragmented individuals who at best might have an organization that can do something in the community here or there or might be able to serve some interest or need in some other way, but this isn’t like some massive part of the US population. In the article I was saying, if you put all of these folks together, these different factions of the left, they don’t even equal half a percent of the US population.

So I was just trying to really say that this is a good time when we understand that fascism is not even at the door, it’s inside of the house. It’s a good time to let go of a lot of the rhetoric, a lot of the dogma, and a lot of the silliness that is just so prevalent on the US left, people thinking that they’re way more relevant than they actually are, way more powerful than they actually are and bring forth an analysis like what Russell Maroon Schoatz offers with the mosaic.

Mansa Musa:

Your critique of the left is blistering to say the least and rightly so. You state as it stands, we do not have an oppositional or even a functional left. We have leftists and leftism, and there’s a difference. Could you expound on that distinction?

William C. Anderson:

The current state of the left, the lefts, because it is different groups and different factions and sects. The current state of things is it is basically nonexistent.

When I’m talking about the left, I should first make the distinction that there isn’t really a functioning coherent unified or homogenous group that we know as the left. When people say the term the left, they oftentimes are grouping lots of different things that are in conflict with one another.

So some people say the left and they mean like liberals and progressives, and then maybe some of the more further left elements. Typically when I’m talking about the left, I’m talking about the historical movement that divided up in the struggle to ultimately build socialism. And I’m talking about the people who would identify as Marxists, as Marxist Leninist, as anarchist, who are formerly known as libertarian socialists in the socialist movement before the meaning of that term changed, and also talking about all of the different offshoots and developments within those respective things because then you have different types of people within each of those larger umbrella terms. That’s typically what I’m talking about, which is for some people, the more radical left. So I think that it’s important to first make that distinction.

Secondly, I would say that since it is not a functional opposition and it’s not really something that exists because it’s so fragmented and divided up into these different kind of sporadic groups, it’s interesting because a lot of what you see from within these different elements that I’m referring to is largely posturing because there’s no power base that warrants the level of arrogance that you see coming from a lot of people within these different factions of the left. If you’re not in control of anything and you don’t have the power to actually overthrow or to seize or to dismantle the oppressive instruments that you’re constantly talking about, then you have to operate from a place where you’re in touch with reality, the reality of yourself and the reality of what you are in the country that you inhabit.

So I’m ultimately a bit confused because when I’m saying that there’s a lot of posturing, I’m looking at these people who might reference something like the Black Panther Party as an endorsement of their ideology. Saying they’re a Marxist Leninist, and they say, “Well, the Black Panther Party used Marxist Leninism or Maoism or anything to push their organization forward and do this, that, or the third.” The thing is, okay, that wasn’t you though. If you’re a person who identifies as an anarchist and you glorifying the zapatistas and talking about what they’ve been able to accomplish and how it influences you, that’s not you either. You’re talking about Lenin and the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks and talking about what that means to you as a Marxist, that’s not you. You didn’t do that. You’re an anarchist talking about Nestor Machno and talking about what’s being accomplished in Ukraine with that army, that wasn’t you.

So I’m very confused by the posturing because if you’re not inhabiting the position to be able to affect change and to change things for the better in your own conditions in your own time, you can’t lay claim to the accomplishments of people from the past or the present that don’t have anything to do with you or don’t have anything to do with what you’re doing in your [crosstalk] community.

You can’t just look and say, “I’m this ideology, I’m an anarchist, I’m a Marxist Leninist, I’m a Maoist, I’m a Trotskyist,” and then lay claim to historical victories and project yourself onto them and then act as if they’re yours. That’s not how that works. Your accomplishments have to speak for themselves based on the praxis and the revolutionary activity that you self-organize within your own time and your own conditions.

And so you have all these people online fighting over things that they didn’t even achieve. You have people fighting over things that they have nothing to do with. Governments that they have no role in, no stake in.

And it just blows my mind because it feels like a lot of people have lost the plot, that we are supposed to be activating ourselves within our communities to build power so that we can decide together what kind of society we want to live in based on our unique conditions and time period. Not saying I’m an ideology that I chose off of Wikipedia and I’m going to then make a decision about what the future looks like based off of my identity crisis because I’m over here with all this talk and I haven’t accomplished anything.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, very well put. And there’s a lot of lip service and we in the age of social media, so you can give lip service to it and you can put your social media platform together, and that become your revolution. Your revolution is I’m more vocal in the social media network, but I have yet to feed people. I have yet to create a school. I have yet to create any institution or things that’s raising people’s conscience or creating an environment where people come together to talk about what kind of society they think we should live in.

But as we mark the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, how do you define their ultimate contribution to social justice? Additionally, in your book, The Nation on No Maps, Black Anarchism and Abolition, what land policy do you highlight as successful examples of self-determination and sovereignty?

William C. Anderson:

The interesting thing about the way that I feel in relation to the Black Panther Party and some of the elements of what I just mentioned is that, again, a lot of what I feel is a large misstep with people who have come along after, especially in my generation, is that there is a discussion and a sort of… What’s the word I would use? I would say that there’s a lot of discussion and reverence for the Black Panther Party that oversimplifies the legacy.

And as you know, Mansa, the Black Panther Party was an organization that had different chapters, and it had different eras, and it had splits, and it had internal fighting, and a lot of other things that went on over the course it existed.

So when you talk about the Black Panther Party and you homogenize it and make it into one thing, which is what a lot of people during this era that have come all along later do, you are not able to learn from the successes and the failures of the Black Panther Party. And unfortunately, we have to discuss failures in order to not repeat them. And one of the things that gets lost is how the Black Panther Party changed course a number of times, not just in terms of leadership, but in terms of politics.

So just a second ago when I was talking about these different people within the left laying claim to things that they have no right to lay claim to, one of the things that is kind of mind boggling to me is how the Black Panther Party is oversimplified to glorify certain ideologies, whether it be Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, or whatever the case, when the current fact of the matter is, I’m on here today talking about Russell Maroon Shoatz, who’s a former Black Panther Party member. Russell Maroon Schoatz’s critique of democratic centralism is a part of a larger thread, which is the discussion that I had with you last time I was on.

The larger thread that it’s a part of is that you had a number of people who after the dissolution of the Black Panther Party or who left the party became anarchist. Russell Maroon Schoatz doesn’t fall into that category, but you have people like Lorenzo Komboa Irvin, you have people like Ashanti Alston, Kuwesi Balagun, Ojoy Lutello, all these political prisoners and revolutionaries who became attracted to anarchism, Jenina Irvin, who was the last editor of the Black Panther Party newspaper.

And so not only do certain people change later within the context of the party and at the time that it was going through different changes and splits, you had someone like Huey P. Newton who brings forth his theory of intercommunalism, which I write also about in The Nation on No Map.

When he brings forth the theory of intercommunalism and he gives a speech at Boston College in 1970, Huey P. Newton is raising this issue about a lot of the Marxist Leninist dogma getting too deep within the party, about how they were supposed to be changing, and he starts asking questions about the nation and about the state, and you see a radical sort of turn is happening within the party.

This is something that Bobby Seal also spoke about. Bobby Seal also became increasingly critical of a lot of these elements, this sort of traditional sort of state socialism that had once been a big part of the party. And they talk about the development from Black nationalism to Marxist Leninism, Maoism towards that place that they had come, or that they had arrived at.

Another person who talks about it was Phil Marshall Don Cox. Phil Marshall Don Cox was increasingly critical.

So I just named a plethora of people The Black Panther Party who started saying, “Actually, we need to start rethinking this and moving away from this. And they start saying a lot of things that if they weren’t outright anarchist, become increasingly anarchistic in their thinking. Just think that it’s important, extremely important to notice that thread, to acknowledge it and not pretend like it didn’t exist, and to talk about what it actually meant and not freeze the Black Panther Party in one era and one chapter of its development of it as an organization.

So that’s one of my biggest concerns with my work and that’s one of the reasons that I write about Black anarchism. It’s not because I’m trying to be doctrinaire or create a new ideology, or bring forth a new ideology rather, to some people’s attention for them to become zealots about or so dogmatic about. I just think it’s important to be able to look at the bigger picture of the Black Panther Party and to talk about the entire scope of what happened, what occurred, and the changes that people made at the end of their lives.

Just like I was talking about Russell Maroon Shots at the beginning being a person who developed over time, so too was everybody else that you look at from the Black Panther Party. They all developed, they all changed, they all became people who departed from positions that they had once held.

And you have to acknowledge that. You can’t just freeze them as Marxist Leninist or this or that. That’s what they were and that means that this is good forever and that’s the way it is. You have to look at the entire picture.

And I think that one of the things that leads me to do is to call into question a lot of the necessity for the politics that they started to depart from, or did depart from depending on who you’re talking about, respectively. And that’s why when I talk about land politics, when I think about land, when I think about territory, I’m a person who tries to move away from the idea of just building a nation state and having borders and having a regime that creates oppression for some and not for others or has a ruling party or a ruling class. I don’t tend to think about things that way in relation to the land. I think that we have to have a more holistic and a more thoughtful approach that doesn’t rehash or recreate any of the trappings of colonialism or the class instrument that we know as the nation state.

Mansa Musa:

And we recognize like to your point, like the Republic of New Africa, Overdele and them, they had an ideological perspective of what they wanted in terms of land. And when we look at the evolution of the thinking of party members, when we came out with the constant theory of intercommunalism, it took a change of trajectory in terms of the thinking because now we defining what we see as our role and what we see as how we go about implementing our ideas in the face of oversurmounting repression, they never seen nothing like this. You being bombarded with misinformation, disinformation, and murders.

So to your point, it’s interesting to see how people, when they take and making a historical analysis, I’m kind of questioning what is their intent. Go back to your point, you referencing valid historical events and activities to substantiate your position.

But as we close out, talk about where we stand at and how we get out this quagmire that we’re in with this, how you think we’re going to get out this contradiction?

William C. Anderson:

Mansa, I think that one of the most important things that we have to do to be able to escape this situation, and this is a lot of the subject matter that I try to focus on in my column, which is why it’s called Another Way Out. And that is, to a large extent, a reference to Amy Cesare and his resignation from the French Communist Party when he said the world is in an impasse, but that didn’t mean that there was no way out.

I’m looking at the situation as someone who has has failed a lot. I say these things with all respect to the people who have come before me, the people who exist alongside me who are operating from a place of genuineness and sincerity, and the people who are going to come along in the future. It’s with respect to them that I truly believe in my heart of hearts that at this point, what we know as leftism in the United States, like I was arguing in the article, we have an abundance of leftism and leftists, I think that at this point in time that all of this has become a bit of a trap, and I say that because the way that it’s currently functioning, the level of disconnect that you can identify amongst a lot of young people, this Schoatz essay that I’m referencing, the Dragon and the Hydra, it’s from 2006, it’s from 20 years ago. It’s not A Really old essay. That was when I first started coming into left spaces That was around the time I first started entering left spaces.

Things have gotten much worse, much worse. I’m talking about the divide, the sectarianism and the anti-intellectualism that is becoming an increasing problem. A lot of the things I’m complaining about and critiquing are actually rooted in a lot of ignorance because a lot of this for people is just rhetoric and it’s not actually based in real world experiences or conditions that are outside. It is a lot of performance that comes from a place that doesn’t seem to have much to do with making the world better. It comes from a place of repetition that I feel is indicating and exposing that leftism as we know it in the US has become secular religion.

And what I mean by that is it is turning into something that it was not supposed to have any intention of being. It’s become a faith and a zealotry for a lot of people. When you’re constantly fighting about these accomplishments and these tenets and these associations of the past, that reminds me of religions. It reminds me of the way that people adapt institutional and oppressive fundamentalist and theocratic views and then start going around trying to bash people in the head with them and say, if you don’t do and adapt to what I say, then you’re the enemy and you have to go. And I don’t understand how that’s supposed to have anything to do with liberating people and the working class seizing the means of production. I think that that is completely being lost here. I thought we were trying to get workers in control of the means of production and we were trying to make sure that everybody was able to live and have resources and be happy and at peace. I did not think that this was supposed to be something that becomes so toxic and inundated with rhetoric that is completely based off of opinion with a lack of good faith arguments found hardly anywhere. When we’re at that place, this isn’t anything that’s taking us in a progressive direction anymore.

And so I think that that was one of the problems that was at the beginnings of leftism, Western leftism as we know it in Europe that has now reared its ugly head in such a way that a lot of the warnings that happened at the beginnings of the socialist movement have now become increasingly clear.

One of the things I think about is a letter that the person who coined the term “anarchist,” Pierre Joseph Prudon, wrote a letter to Marx during their time saying something to the effect of, if we’re not careful that this is going to start looking a lot like religion, these issues that we have amongst each other, these disagreements. And that’s where we’re at. That’s the same type of reasoning that Malcolm X had when he said, “We don’t need to discuss religion when we come together. Let’s leave it at the door and let’s figure out what we need to figure out together so that we can make progress.” That’s one of the turns that Malcolm made in his life.

And I just feel like this is where we’re at and we have to depart from it. We have to depart from this relationship that is completely and overly ideological and theoretical and not rooted in praxis and humble ourselves to say, we’re going to do what we need to do here to defeat empire so that we can change the world and change our community for the better instead of just talking all this ideology, ideology, ideology. I’m not here to talk about anarchism and Marxist Leninism and all of these things as some sort of proselytizing on a soapbox. I’m preaching at you trying to convert you to my faith. I’m here to talk about these things as tools. They all [have things to] learn from respectively as tools so that we can make progress and you need different tools in order to assemble a house that we can live in together.

And so I’m here to look at those things respectively in that way and to evolve and to grow so that we can get beyond them, not be trapped by them and have fights in the name of ghosts and dead people who are not here and not living with us. I’m not here to fight on behalf of no ghosts with nobody. I don’t have any time for that type of stuff. I hope that there are other people out there who feel similarly. I know that there are, who are willing to build something like what Russell Maroon Schoatz was offering with the mosaic, because I think that that’s the format that I find really inspiring right now to help us get out of this situation.

Mansa Musa:

Well, you definitely rattle the bars today, William.

And we want to remind our audience that when you find yourself in a space where you can’t afford to pay your rent, medical insurance is high, can’t afford childcare, you can’t turn left or turn right without losing something, the last thing you want someone to talk to you about is why you should believe a certain way and that belief system has not converted, has not changed nothing, has not changed your rent, has not changed your living condition. So if we want you to look at this particular podcast and recognize that we’re talking about thinking, we’re talking about understanding social, economic, political conditions enough to understand how to change them as opposed to like, before I can change them, I got to say, I got to tag myself, I’m a leftist, I’m a Marxist, I’m a Leninist, I’m a Stalinist.

No. To change social conditions, first you need to understand what the problem is and then come together collectively how to resolve the problem.

Thank you, William. You definitely rattle the bars today.

We ask our audience to continue to support the real news and rattling the bar, because guess what? We actually the real news.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And just once again, we’re looking at Israel-Palestine and the disaster that’s happening there to bring you the intimate details of what people are facing and what can be done. And we’re talking today to Robin Anderson, who has The Complicit Lens, which is an incredible piece of work. Robin is Professor Emerita of media studies at Fordham University, award-winning author of a dozen single and co-authored books. Her work examines films, television, media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. And she edits the Rutledge Focus Book series on media and humanitarian action and serves as project centered judge and contributes to the annual state free press and joins us here today and this latest book we’re talking about is The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.

And Robin, welcome, good to have you with us.

Robin Anderson:

Thank you for inviting me.

Marc Steiner:

Going through all this work that you did on media coverage and what’s actually happening in Israel-Palestine. I want to get to the bottom of things first and why the major media in America is so complicit in telling the lies about what’s happening in this war. I mean, there have been decades and decades of anti-Semitic stuff about the Jewish control of the media. That’s not it. There’s something really fundamentally deep about what’s going on here and why they are willing to tell the lies they’re telling and push the agenda they’re pushing. So let’s start there.

Robin Anderson:

Yeah. Well, the theme through the book is exactly what happened in the US media to just actually compel them to completely abandon their basic role as journalists. And I think the Israeli lobby is a big one. I devoted an entire chapter to talking about the influences in the New York Times and a few other press, but they’ve been watched and monitored by a group called Camera, by honest reporting. Just as students and faculty have been doxed, if they get identified, many of them have by Canary mission, they will call up their employers and they will tell them not to employ them and that has happened in numerous cases. So it’s not only journalism, it’s kind of the civil society and the public sphere and our discourse has for years been very constrained. I’m not sure that US journalists anymore, even though they’re supposed to be the seasoned professionals at some of the most prominent and legacy media, I’m not sure they know the background anymore of Israel.

I’m not sure that they understand really the international rules of war because if you’re blocked by the directives such as the New York Times and CNN, if you have your editors openly telling you to cover the press in a certain way, which is what we have, we had it at the CNN and the New York Times, and those are very influential legacy media sources. If we have them doing that over a period of a few years, you’re not proficient anymore really in understanding the rules of war or the Geneva Conventions. And then when you leave those basic core understandings out of coverage, either through self-censorship, editorial censorship, or simply just ignorance, you can’t tell the story.

Marc Steiner:

I want to get very specific here, the stuff you’ve written about in terms of the New York Times and CNN and exactly what they did, exactly what the leadership has told their reporters what they can and cannot do and how can they even be possible. But this is really explain that in greater depth.

Robin Anderson:

Well, I think that was so shocking and I think the intercept, well, a number of articles came out on the intercept, but CNN was putting all of its copy through its Jerusalem Bureau and the IDF had eyes on that stuff and CNN tried to play it down and say, “Oh, really? They hardly had anything to say.” And the staffer who had leaked to the intercept this information said, “Oh yes, every single word was shaped by Israeli censors.” So they told them, “No, there are things you can and cannot say. You can’t say genocide.” That’s a taboo word. But the really weirdly obscured things that a lot of us began to notice where you couldn’t identify Israel as the perpetrator of the dropping of 2000 pound bombs. So you couldn’t say you just had to say explosion. So a lot of people identified these headlines and indeed the press did not identify that these were Israeli bombs until the Israelis themselves would say, “Oh, okay.

Well, we got a Hamas commander.” As soon as they said they got a Hamas commander, then you could justify any loss of human civilian life and then you could talk about Israel having done the bombing. So lots of very strange things like that, that you can actually … So what I did in a couple chapters is look at the coverage and compare them to these directives. New York Times, same thing. New York Times was more explicit about pulling out any of the principles really of international law about occupation when the New York Times staffer that leaked it to the intercept said, “How can you not talk about occupation?” That is at the core of the conflict. We’re not able to represent this more accurately without talking about the occupation, but they couldn’t talk. So a lot of them, refugee camps, that’s very, very important. You have to know that these people in Gaza, many of them were refugees or the descendants of refugees that were victims of the Nakba.

So all of that background history allowed them to start the war at October 7th, say, “This was only Hamas. It came from nowhere, the evil of Hamas and therefore all of the subsequent reporting was either justified or retaliatory. They started it and they didn’t start it. There’s a long history of how Israel was constantly actually committing war crimes already before October 7th.

Marc Steiner:

So there’s a lot of what you said here. Before we get back to Israel and Hamas, which I’d like to do, given what you’ve written, what do you think the political dynamic is that allows the journalistic leaders and others in those two organizations, CNN and New York Times? Look, I read the New York Times every day and every Sunday. I mean, I’ve been doing it for the last 40 years.

Robin Anderson:

Sorry to hear that, Marc. Really.

Marc Steiner:

There’s a lot of good stuff from there, but this is not one of them. What the dynamic is that allows that to happen.

Robin Anderson:

Right. Well, I actually devoted an entire chapter to the New York Times and you really have to look at their Jerusalem bureau. Their Jerusalem bureau over a period of years has been shaped to be very Israeli focused and Israeli-centric. So right off the bureau in the New York Times in Jerusalem sits atop on the air above a house where a BBC reporter, a Palestinian BBC reporter had to leave his house, put his wife and children in a taxi, leave their things and never come back. So right away the New York Times has a vested interest in no right to return. That’s a major issue for Palestinians, the right to return.

And right away, well, wow, that geostructural bias, if they had the right to return, the New York Times, the House that they spent money on that Thomas Friedman presided in and all of these other bureau chiefs stayed there admitting that many times their children were in the IDF. And for one, Elizabeth Kershner, who’s still writing for the New York Times, her husband was intimately involved with doing PR for the Israeli military. So these are conflicts of interest of all sorts. At one point, one of the public monitors for the New York Times said, wow, wouldn’t you get a different point of view if you had somebody in the West Bank that could really see what the settlers did to people and all that. So if you get a different view of the situation, but they never did that. In fact, they listened to a canary mission, either a canary mission or an honest reporting briefing that criticized one of their photojournalists and he was fired from the New York Times well before October 7th.

So they got rid of Palestinian journalists at the same time they kept nurturing this very individualized point of view from Israel.

Marc Steiner:

So a couple of things here, but I want to take a step backwards for just a minute to explain to the people listening to us what the Canary Commission is. You’ve referred to it like three or four times here. People need to understand what it is.

Robin Anderson:

It’s originally an Israeli based organization that monitors students and faculty and other kind of people canary mission and has docs people and students and faculty at university campuses and many times it has resulted in students being sanctioned and faculty being sanctioned. Of course, I wrote about this happening at Hunter College in the book. Honest reporting is basically a propaganda organ, which not only creates their own media, propagandized media, but that also puts pressure. And this is external pressure coming into newsrooms and into universities where they’ve got no business in these kinds of civil society venues and institutions of higher education and legacy media that is supposed to know how to manage its own electoral boards and its own electoral staff.

Marc Steiner:

What you bring out in complicit lens, I mean, has very frightening in terms of what it means not just for Israel, Palestine, and what’s going on there, but for the future of media in this country. It’s not new that the media is influenced by people who own the media. That’s been a battle forever. Sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but it’s been a battle inside the media forever. But what you’re describing here is something pretty frightening. And I think that the whole … It’s one of the reasons I think they don’t really cover the opposition inside of Israel from Jewish Israelis saying, no, we’re not participating and why they don’t cover those things as well and what life is like inside of Palestinian villages. So I think this is a really, what you’ve written, what you put together is important for people to wrestle with in terms of how you get your information.

How do we know what’s really happening?

Robin Anderson:

Well, one of the reasons, as a consequence of this type of reporting, the media has lost legitimacy, terribly lost legitimacy, but young people particularly who don’t look at legacy media, if I was in front of a class and I asked my students who read The New York Times this morning, nobody would have. So they’re getting their information from their handheld devices and that’s where they’re getting their news and they were on their handheld devices when Palestinian journalists were being killed in large numbers for documenting things on the ground. So we as Americans, we had these two different realities really. We had the documentation and the visuals, the testimony, the aftermath, the pictures of rubble and the suffering and the Palestinians. And that I believe really accounts for so much of why the United States is now rejecting the state of Israel and for a very long time, the majority of adults in the United States has not wanted our government to send weapons to Israel.

So we caught onto that. And I think in this barrage of propaganda, I think it’s notable that we have resisted it and I think that’s really incredible on the part of the American people. In terms of I would like to talk about how we fix this and I believe-

Marc Steiner:

That was my next question, but go right ahead, please. I

Robin Anderson:

Believe these journalists and these editorial boards, they need to be held accountable. They really do. The three Israeli leaders including Isaac Hertzag, the president of Israel to kind of a figurehead Netanyahu’s the prime minister.

Marc Steiner:

Right, but the president doesn’t have much power inside the Israeli structure. Well,

Robin Anderson:

He’s coming to New York City. He’s coming to New York City and he’s being hosted and honored by the Jewish religious seminar.

Marc Steiner:

Yeshiva or Union Theological?

Robin Anderson:

Union theological

And he’s going to be here in May and a UN commission found that it is very likely that he is responsible for inciting genocide. So the rules of genocide, very much part, you can’t have a genocide without a language that incites it. And these people were inciting this language and saying how Hamas was animals by extension Palestinian people and Herzog came right out and said, Palestinian civilians are guilty. So I think he shouldn’t be coming to New York City at all. I think he should be being hauled up in front of the Hague. At one point in the CNN, one of the staffers said, “Many of us noticed that our anchors didn’t have much pushback, if any, to these Israeli leaders who at a time, and here’s the language of the incitement statute is it has to be a time of great tension. You have to be a public figure and you have to have a platform, a legitimate … You have to be on a mainstream media platform and they all fit that bill.

So that’s what we call incitement. And as the CNN staffer said, we came very close to that by not challenging these demonization of the Palestinian people, which also is another theme that goes throughout the book is over and over again,

Marc Steiner:

Palestinians

Robin Anderson:

In frame and in adjectives and in every way were dehumanized over and over again.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah. And as I was reading what you wrote, I thought about my friends in Israel-Palestine on both sides and how I remembered distinctly this big fight that took place when one of my friends who was an Israeli, these were theater people and I used to do theater with Israeli Palestinian companies. I said something about Palestinians and he spit on the ground. And then a fight ensued between him and one of the women in the company over that spit who was also Jewish. And people don’t realize how deep the divide is, I think, inside Israel. It’s not evenly split, but it’s a deep divide over where everything is going.

Robin Anderson:

I think recent polls that have come out of Israel have shown that the majority of Israelis thought that all of the Palestinian civilians were guilty as well and they were a threat. They’ve been propagandized now for a very long time, even though the newspaper Haretz is one of my major sources because after October 7th, when they called in the Hannibal directive,

Marc Steiner:

Which

Robin Anderson:

Is just kill everybody, don’t let anybody take any hostages. We don’t want to negotiate. When they called that in, you had Israelis pilots in Apache helicopters indiscriminately bombing the festival grounds when Hamas was trying to get their hostages, of course that’s a war crime. It’s true that Hamas committed some war crimes, committed war crimes. Nothing could compare, however, to what Israel has done. And at the time, what’s so fascinating is that the demonization again and again of Hamas, particularly in Palestinians as animals, they justified and served to cover up and to be the beheaded baby stories. As Richard Sanders, the filmmaker said, it wasn’t what Hamas did. It was what they didn’t do that the media reported on. So Hamas was guilty. They made stuff that was really over the top saying that Hamas did so they could carry out the genocide. And I think over time that the Israeli people have been incentivized and propagandized to believe that.

Marc Steiner:

When you look at American media coverage as you do with intensity, and it seems that it’s changed significantly over the last 10 years, talk a bit about your analysis about why that is and why- Oh Mark,

Robin Anderson:

I’ve been writing about media and war for an awfully long time.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, you have. Yes, you have. Yes, you have. That’s why I asked you the question.

Robin Anderson:

I see this whole … I think one of the really big changes was when the US media embedded with the troops during the war on terror. This did two things. It showed you one side of the war, the US soldier’s side and emphasized that side because they were right there over the shoulder. And then the other thing is they allowed them to talk about it as if it were a reality show. And so we had these entertainment frames coming in with the war on terror, first a reality show, the invasion. Then of course there was the rescue of Saving Private Lynch, which was just the movie plot to Saving Private Ryan. And then you had all of the first person shooter game soldiers would come back and help them with the technology, help them with making it look like real shooters. So for a long time, the whole beginning of the 21st century, war was turned into entertainment by our media.

Sadly, what happened in Gaza was that it was so horrible. The media tried something else. Well, I’m just going to say what the Israelis say and have this outlandishly pro- Israel coverage, but people had their alternative information sources and they were looking through their handheld devices at the suffering of the people in Gaza. And I think they understood finally that war is not a game. It’s not fun. It’s not exciting. It’s horrible. It’s destructive. It kills people. It puts them in conditions of catastrophic no water, no food and no hospital. One of the things that I read and was the hardest chapter for me to write, Mark, was the hospital chapter, Israel’s destruction of the healthcare system and the attacks on El Shifa and all the subsequent hospitals. And it was so outrageous the way the media covered that, just distortions and one-sided. And those are the real things that I would really like to see them held accountable for that

Marc Steiner:

Kind of thing. And I’ve covered some of that with doctors from Palestine in Gaza talking about what’s been going on. I’m curious how you think we get to that point where they’re held accountable and well, let me just stop there because the other part is a much deeper question that we may not have time to get into. Well, I’ll say it anyway, which is that hatred of Jews just bubbles below the surface in our world. Antisemitism just bubbles below the surface. This is exploding it.

Robin Anderson:

That’s right.

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely.

Robin Anderson:

And I put that in a number of places in the

Marc Steiner:

Book

Robin Anderson:

About how this is really building antisemitism. The way that antisemitism is defined as you cannot say anything against the state of Israel implies that all Jews now are for the state of Israel. That implies that it’s a monolithic community.

Marc Steiner:

And it’s not.

Robin Anderson:

And it is absolutely

Marc Steiner:

Not.

Robin Anderson:

It’s not. And so when Jewish people are against the genocide, that gets lost in that equation. And now everybody’s going to look to the Jewish people as having perpetrated a genocide. And I think that’s a real problem.

Marc Steiner:

And in terms of the media coverage itself, one of the things I thought about as I was reading what you wrote, it shows the power of the media to influence the world in extremely negative and dangerous ways.

Robin Anderson:

Yes. So as long as the perpetrators are genocide, as long as the global elites, as long as the West unquote can look at a newspaper and stay in this beltway, if you will, this beltway bubble or stay … I think the New York Times and legacy media know that young people who are anti-genocide, they know they’re not watching them. All they care about is the elites and the governments and the congressmen who are under the same influence that the media is. 82% of our Congress people take money from APAC, both Republicans and Democrats. We know the influence that this Israeli lobby has had and that is now becoming toxic. That’s beginning to change. And now we’re going to have the anti-APAC primaries. You take APAC, you’re going to get primaried.

Marc Steiner:

But you have APAC along with the conservative Christian world together are really pushing this agenda.

Robin Anderson:

They

Marc Steiner:

Absolutely

Robin Anderson:

Are.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah.

Robin Anderson:

Christian Zionism and Christian nationalism and white supremacists. I mean, I was just writing something about Pete Hegthest, Christian Crusade cross on his chest and as Jesuit priest said in the Pope, this is not Christianity. This is a cartoon version. This is actually a war game, Crusader Kings. This is actually gaming again, this twisted version of Christianity that now is marked that this is at the White House and Trump thinks he’s God and it’s really horrible.

Marc Steiner:

So before we have to close, I’m curious all that you’ve written, and I really do encourage people to read this, it’s incredible analysis that you put inside your work that we’ve only touched the surface so we may have to do this again. How do you see this unfolding in terms of our future, in terms of resistance to it and what it might all pretend?

Robin Anderson:

Well, I think we need to act to preserve alternative media in every way, independent and alternative media and the internet. We need to really focus on that. We need to find the parallels between AI narratives and the kind of empire boomerang that we have going on where so much that has happened in Gaza is now being repeated, if you will, in Lebanon and now the media just isn’t covering it. But I think we really need to look carefully at more of the mechanisms and interconnections that drive the media and that drive the military industrial complex. We’ve now also are entering an era of elite capture where billionaires, the Ellison family is now controlling CBS and they may well control other outlets. And I think these are incredibly dangerous and I think we need to focus our attention there. And I think holding legacy media for their coverage of Gaza Responsible is really primary.

I mean, maybe this is a fantasy of MindMark, but I see my book. I have fantasies of somebody holding my book at the Hague and calling out the media at the International Court of Justice and actually telling them for the rest of us how they manipulate the media frames.

Marc Steiner:

That could happen. I mean, I could see that happening. That’s a good idea. I like that idea. I think this is really important to explore in greater depth and also the contradictions that are involved and the dangers involved in this on so many levels. And I think that I want to encourage people, if you have a chance just to check out the book, The Complicit Lens, US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, it’s really worth kind of wrestling with and looking at, plus the articles you’ve written you can find that we’ll be linking to here in this interview. And Robert Anderson, I do hope we stay in touch. You have a lot to say. We’ve barely touched the surface what you have to say and I look forward to many more conversations.

Robin Anderson:

I do too, Mark. Thanks so much, Brad.

Marc Steiner:

Thank you for being with us today. Once again, let me thank Robin Anderson for joining us today. We’ll be linking to her work and check out her book on Gaza. It’s entitled The Complicit Lens: Our Mainstream US Media Covered Gaza. And in the coming weeks and months, we’ll be delving more deeply into all of this. And thanks to David Hebdon for running the program today, audio editor, Stephen Frank, for working his magic, Rosette Sowali for producing the Mark Steiner show, the Tylers Keller Rivera for making it all work behind the scenes and everyone here at the real news for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover, just write to me at mss@threwnews.com and I’ll get back to you right away. Once again, thank you, Robert Anderson, for joining us today.

So for the crew here at the Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.