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.

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.

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. The show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we’re talking about coal miners and workers in the coal mining industry and what the government is doing to help them or hurt them under President Trump. Mr. I love coal miners. It’s been a meme ever since the 2016 presidential election. Trump loves throwing on a coal miner’s helmet and lining up coal miners around him for the cameras. He loves talking about bringing coalback quote unquote. He loves talking about quote beautiful clean coal.

Trump and right-wing media are so obsessed with cultivating this image of him as the coal miners champion and this so- called blue collar billionaire who really gets the working class. And obviously the industry itself is all for it. Earlier this year, Trump was even crowned the quote undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal. And he was presented with this big stupid trophy by the Washington Coal Club, which is an advocacy group with financial ties to the coal industry. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s one video that the White House posted on Instagram in early February of this year.

President Donald Trump:

The most important people here today are those who get their hands a little bit dirty to keep America running at full speed. Our frontline coal workers.

Coal Miner 1 (Kayla Blackford):

My name is Kayla Blackford. I work at the Bear Run Mine. I drive a haul truck and I think what the president has done for the coal industry is really important and we’re able to keep electricity prices down.

Coal Miner 2 (Vernon Roche III):

My name is Vernon Roche III. I’m a coal miner in Alabama, Shoal Creek Min. We know that President Trump loves clean coal.

Coal Miner 3 (Drew):

Been in the coal industry for 16 years and the time with Trump being in office. It’s been a great deal for my family, from a small coal mining town in Southern West Virginia originally.

Coal Miner 4 (Scott):

Conveyor belts are the machines that we use to transport coal from 600,000 feet below ground to the surface where it goes to power plants that fuel America’s energy.

Coal Miner 5 (Matt):

We are thankful for President Trump’s commitment to coal to bring affordable energy to American people. It gives us the ability to sell coal to the power plants to get us to the extreme cold temperatures, the extreme heats in the summers when our energy grid would be struggling. It always has been and always will be affordable, reliable source for electricity.

President Donald Trump:

The really dependable form of energy that we have and that’s clean, beautiful coal.

Coal Miner 1 (Kayla Blackford):

Thank you, President Trump.

Child 1:

Thank you, President Trump.

Coal Miner 2 (Vernon Roche III):

For knowing the clean coal.

Child 1:

Clean, beautiful coal.

Coal Miner 3 (Drew):

Keeps the lights on.

Coal Miner 5 (Matt):

Keeps the lights on.

Coal Miner 4 (Scott):

Thank you, President Trump for knowing that clean coal keeps the lights on.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. So now that we’ve got that Trump marketing machine BS version of reality, let’s contrast that with the shocking news about what the Trump administration is doing to protect those coal miners that they call brave and claim to love so much. And in her latest report for in these times, Kim Kelly writes, “On May 1st, International Workers Day, Trump administration officials targeted the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, the FMSHRC, abruptly firing Commissioner Moshe Marvit, and closing down one of the agency’s three offices. In total, the FMSHRC lost 16 workers as well as the entire Pittsburgh office that day. Marvit has spent the bulk of his career, including 12 years as a supervisory attorney advisor at the FMSHRC unabashedly representing workers’ interests, both in court and as a freelance journalist for outlets like in these times, the Washington Post and dissent. The pro worker reputation preceded him when President Joe Biden first nominated him for a commissioner position back in 2022.

It took three tries to get him confirmed to his current role and he’s not giving it up without a fight. On May 7th, Marvit filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over what he calls his quote unlawful and unjustified purported termination, which has left a backed up FMS HRC even more shorthanded. The Trump administration’s war on coal miner’s health has become especially pronounced during the president’s second term, Kelly continues. The simplering Trump digs coal image the administration seeks to project is vastly at odds with the actions it’s taken to limit minor protections, endanger their health and exacerbate the black lung crisis consuming Central Appalachia, where one in five veteran minors has black lung and one in 20 has the most severe and totally disabling form of the disease. So to talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined once again by friend of the show.

You love her, you know her. She’s the one and only. Kim Kelly herself. Kim, for those who don’t know and have been living under a rock, is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia. She is a labor writer for in these times and regularly contributes to many other publications including The Real News Network, he first book, Fight Light Hell: The Untold History of American Labor and the Young Reader’s Edition, Fight to Win. Heroes of American Labor are both available from One Signal Simon & Schuster publishers. Kim, thank you so much for joining us against this. I really, really appreciate it. I want to just kind of jump in and toss it to you. Please pick up where I left off reading from your really important article, which we’ll link to in the show notes, but just break down for folks like what the hell is actually happening here with this little known agency that actually has really important consequences for the lives and health of coal miners and their families.

Kim Kelly:

So here’s the thing, the FMS HRC, I kind of think of it as like talking about a ship named after Hillary, the FMS HRC. A lot of acronyms. I mean, honestly, the acronyms of it all, that kind of plays into the issue here.This is a smaller, respectfully not that sexy little government agency that impacts a very specific group of workers and communities. And it’s being absolutely torn apart as part of this ongoing kind of Trump administration push to deregulate and de- skill and dethrone every possible government employee imaginable that isn’t expressly falling in line with their authoritarian project. I did get to interview someone with very deep knowledge of the agency. Obviously I had to keep their identity to ourselves because there’s only like 30 people left and he was just kind of saying it felt like the thought of someone in Trump world just kind of going down a list of agencies and like it’s their turn.

And this has happened to a lot of other like smaller commissions, boards, OSHA, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, their equivalent of this commission they got, got like the NLRB has gotten all types of jacked up.

It feels as if we’re in kind of a new stage of this dismantling. We had the Doge era where it was like really big, bombastic slash and burn Intel’s going through your computer, like lots of press coverage. And then Doge, it was KIA, took about back, shot, done with that. But this ongoing project has not ceased. It’s just become quieter and arguably more insidious because public attention has understandably shifted towards all of the other cataclysms that our country and our government is responsible for right now. But this came across my radar. Of course, we need to shout out Jordan Barab, the worker safety guy. He incredibly experienced runs confined spaces, fantastic publication. He reported on this first and that’s how it came to my attention. And honestly, the thing that stuck out to me besides the fact that it was about coal miners, coal miner safety is kind of my thing, but I recognize that name, Moshe Marvit, because I remember earlier fights to get him confirmed to this arguably pretty atypical, pretty non-controversial agency.

He’s a lawyer, he’s pro- worker, seems like a fairly inoffensive type of guy to end up on this type of agency that essentially deals with civil cases and worker discrimination cases, but he had a hell of a time getting confirmed and I think it is because he’s an outspoken worker advocate who’s written for lefty publications and was very clearly like pro- worker and he was nominated by Biden. It took forever for him to actually get confirmed and now he gets fired out of nowhere and it seems very clear that there is some kind of ideological purging kind of effort behind this and he is fighting back. The reason I wasn’t able to interview him personally, we chatted a bit, but I couldn’t speak to him on the records because he’s suing the government over this. I think Jordan mentioned that this was the first time in I think the 50 years of this agency’s existence that someone had been removed from the commission in this way.

And this commission was created as part of the 1977 Mine Act, which is really mostly one of our, I think, lesser known but more impressive pieces of labor legislation in this country is obviously coal miner specific, but it really did a good job of laying out very specific protections and building up agencies like MSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration. It’s a good law. It’s a good law. And this is something that obviously the people that run coal mines and make money off of coal mines and get their little clean, greedy fingers all over coal miners paychecks, of course there’s stuff in there that they would prefer not to have to deal with like safety regulations like worker safety laws, like union organizing rights. And something that stuck with me when I was talking to this anonymous worker at the agency, they were saying the fact that there’s three people left, one’s Republican, then there’s two Democrats whose terms end in August.

And with Moshi currently out of the picture, if they lose people, they lose the ability to have a quorum, which essentially means they can’t do anything. And I asked them, “Do you think more people will be confirmed? What do you think will happen?” And they said something that I thought was so interesting and terrible like, “Well, what if the reason that there isn’t a big rush to confirm even Trump loyalists is that they just don’t want to deal with enforcing this law at all What if they’re trying to kind of kill it by a thousand cuts by just chipping away at things?” And I thought that was a really astute and stressful observation to make because this is the thing, right? It’s not all like this onslaught against worker safety and human rights and every other possible decent thing that people are able to derive from this government.

So much of it has been big, bombastic, like big fights, but a lot of it has been happening behind the scenes in these little agencies, these smaller commissions, boards, federal, like places with beige offices that they’re not as exciting, they’re not as photogenic, they’re not going to get headlines necessarily, but they really have a very important role to play. There’s a reason they exist and they have an impact on people’s lives. For example, the FMS HRC, there are coal miners who are waiting for cases to be heard. There’s workers who have filed discrimination complaints over them being discriminated against for calling out safety issues at work. Those are people. There’s civil penalty cases in which MSHA has basically found that a mine is unsafe, that it’s engaging in unsafe practices or violating safety practices. Someone has to do something about that. I know it can be a little like red tapey and bureaucracy and all of this.

It’s a little convoluted reading up on this stuff enough to write a useful article took a little bit of time, but that’s almost kind of part of it, right? Like what they do in the shadows.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And that work done in the labor done in the shadows in these government agencies that you’re talking about, it is such a shame that we have so little understanding of that and the media is as culpable for that as anybody, but your average citizen doesn’t understand that and thus can’t see past the word and the hatred for the concept of government bureaucracy. And so when these cuts from Doge or Trump or wherever they are, the firings from Trump, the cuts from Doge, people just see a sort of attack on that bureaucracy, but they’re not seeing the people who are responsible for resolving these disputes and claims that matter a hell of a lot to coal miners who are spending their lives underground and trying not to be taken advantage of for it. They matter to … I interviewed some whistleblowers who were both fired from HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development earlier this year or last year and they were whistleblowers talking about how that agency has effectively become defunct and like the people like them who were lawyers who were responsible for ensuring that like battered women and people in life threatening situations get the housing that they need, that they’re not being exploited by like landlords or anything.

These are real people in life critical circumstances that all of that, like you said, Kim, is now just being sort of hushed and silenced at the same time that the media industry and the whole media ecosystem is going haywire. And so it’s a real crisis, but you are one of, again, those sterling examples of like a committed journalist who has maintained through the chaos a commitment to the coal miners that you report on, the industry, the working conditions in this industry, the environmental conditions. You’ve been doing excellent reporting on the black lung crisis in this country. We connected and worked together here at the Real News for years as you were reporting on the Warrior Met coal strike in Alabama. So with all of that knowledge and firsthand contact with people in the industry, I wanted to ask before I let you go, what state was the coal industry and coal workers in going into the second Trump presidency and how has whatever the hell this administration is doing, like for all it says it loves coal miners, like is it actually helping coal miners?

Is it helping the coal industry? What’s actually happening here?

Kim Kelly:

It’s interesting. I think back to the beginning, I guess of this, not even this one, I think back to like 2020, 21 in the earlier days of these things, and I remember talking to a minor in Alabama who had said, “Just so you know, I’m a Trump guy and he brought coal prices have been super high since he got in. ” And I was like, “Oh, well, have you seen any of that? ” And he’s like, “Well, no ma’am.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And that always plays in the back of my mind when it comes to this reporting because it is I think a true thing that coal industry interests have found the Trump administration to be positive at the very least just in terms of skewing the playing field in their favor and trying to destroy previously approved and funded renewable energy projects.

They’ve been pushing this coal line incredibly strongly against anyone’s conventional wisdom or scientific wisdom, really just like a fool’s errand and that’s endeared them to the industry movers and shakers. But for the workers, it’s been bad. It has not been bad. Wages haven’t gone up. The jobs aren’t coming back. I think we’re down to about probably less at this point. I think last year, the year before, it was about 33,000 coal miners left in the country. If I double check the stats now, I’m sure it’s gone down. And some of the big worker safety wins that coal miners across any political persuasion, because it is not a monolith, it’s not just a whole bunch of white guys voting for Trump. I’ve met plenty of people that do not fit that description and have talked to union representatives for the UAW that are very aware that they have a pretty diverse coalition of, well, not even coalition, just a diverse group of people in their union.

Retirees are one thing, but the younger folks and other generations, you’d be surprised. But a lot of the work that has been doing around these sort of community issues like the black lung crisis, like worker safety, like pensions, like black lung payments out of this fund, the existing black lung benefits fund for workers and former workers who have been diagnosed and disabled by black lung. A lot of that work actually started bearing some fruit during the Biden administration because there weren’t as many roadblocks. The one thing I learned through reporting on agency doings that I hadn’t known that much about before I kind of dove in was how pivotal it is that there is a nominally at least pro- worker or not cartoonishly anti-worker at least a person in the executive chair and then the administration because a lot of the people, especially pre-Trump purges that work in these agencies are just trying to get shit done, but their ability to do so can be either helped or hindered by who’s in charge.

So for example, in 2024, at the very end of the Biden administration, minors and their advocates, because they did the real work, they finally got this new silica exposure rule basically approved. The process is a whole situation, but we’ll just say they got it, right? They got this new rule that was going to limit the amount of silica dust that coal miners could be exposed to during their work days. This is not a new thing since 1974. We’ve known that silica dust is toxic, 20 times more toxic than coal dust. It is the absolute biggest factor driving the uptick in black lung cases and severe black lung cases among coal miners, especially those that are much younger have much less time underground. We’re talking late 20s, 30s, 40s folks dealing with the most severe and debilitating form of this disease. Silica is the biggest reason.

And up until this rule finally got through, coal miners were legally able to be exposed to twice as much silica dust as any other worker in the entire country because silicate is something that exists in a lot of other professions. There’s construction workers, courts countertop workers in California that are dealing with their own silicosis crisis right now, but we know all this workers have been trying to do something about this for a really long time. Finally got to the finish line, 2024. It was supposed to be implemented April 2025. What happened between those two things happening, Trump got elected all of a sudden that rule very specific, very much not something the coal industry wanted to deal with because it required them to follow some more rules and maybe spend a couple more dollars on safety equipment and engineering controls and ate into their profits the tiniest bit.

They didn’t want anything to do with it. And so this rule that took decades of activism and law being organized and by coal miners and public health advocates and everybody who wasn’t a total thickhead were trying to get this through and it kept being delayed, just kicked down. At first, I think it was a three month delay. Then it was like a six month delay. It just kept getting delayed, the implementation and enforcement to the point where the most recent development is that it’s been basically pulled back for more judicial review, further study, more changes for essentially they’re going to make it easier for the coal industry interest to come in and weaken it and just chop it all up.This is something that should not be controversial no matter what values you have. Making it so that fewer people get black lung seems pretty infensive, seems like a decent win even at the point where some of Cold State senators like full on Trump zombies came out earlier during the Doge era when NIOSH and black lung monitoring services were getting slashed up.

They’re like, “Oh, wait, wait, maybe can we keep some of that? ” And the administration pulled back. So all that to say, things have gotten worse. They’ve gotten worse. It’s just as dangerous, if not worse, because there’s this emphasis on coal and this emphasis on trying to open new mines and new coal fired facilities. It’s not going to be good for anyone but the people who have been making money off of these workers, blood, sweat, tears, and lung tissue for centuries now. And it’s really disappointing. We don’t expect anything good to come out of the kind of people that Trump puts in charge of these agencies or Trump himself, but it’s like, what is the constituency for killmore coal miners? Who is asking him and them to make it harder for workers to have safety discrimination cases heard? Who’s voting for that? It’s not like these are big popular … No one’s like, “You know who really deserves a comeup into those fat cats at the FMSHRC.” It’s like, who is this for?

There’s like one cold guy somewhere who’s like, “Yeah,

We got them.” And it’s just unfortunate. And I’ve been reporting this for a long time. This is one of my things I report on. I ended up being that guy. And the one thing that … Well, there’s a lot of things that make me sad, but one thing that makes me sad and frustrated when I share stories on social media like, “Here’s this article I wrote, please clap.” There is always, always some people, some commenters who are like, “Well, they voted for this. ” Well, that’s what they get. Who did they vote for? Who do they vote for? And that has been a recurring theme ever since I first started writing about coal miners, gosh, almost like six, seven years ago. There’s a real lack of empathy and a real sort of spitefulness from some folks who just assume that coal miners are all the same, they’re all the same kind of person, they all voted the same way.

And it’s just disappointing to see because I guarantee you, no one voted to get black lung and lose the ability to breathe or play with their grandkids or their kids. People being sold a bill of goods, I don’t think anybody deserves to die because they voted for someone who lied to them.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, I wholeheartedly agree. And it’s like the exact same thing I say to people who say those exact same comments when I’m reporting from East Palestine, Ohio or that train derail. They’re like, “Well, they voted for that. They deserve it. ” I was like, “Are you kidding me? Do you see what they’re going through?” How could you say that on a video that is showing you that they’re dying? Have we lost so much of our humanity that we can’t even empathize with each other on that basic level? And again, I could talk to you about this for days, but I know I got to let you go. And I want to underscore for people that that is why Kim’s work is so important and why we work so well together with Kim here at the Real News is because if you’re not tending to that human stuff, then you’re not actually interested in the truth, right?

You’re interested in an argument about the truth and how you can twist the truth into something else for your own purpose. We are reporters who care about human beings. So we go out and get the truth wherever it lives in the complex lives of complex people, like the ones that Kim is talking about. And Kim, with just a two-minute maybe wrap up, I wanted to end on that note, not asking you to speak for anyone or any group of people, but just any points you want to impress upon people who are thinking that way, especially in an election year. Well, they voted for that. Why should I care about that? What do you want them to know about what black lung actually does to your body? What do you want them to know about what it’s actually like to work in a coal mine or live in a coal mining community?

Just anything you want to leave folks with before we let you go and wrap up.

Kim Kelly:

So years ago, I made friends with a retired coal miner named Danny Witt and he got diagnosed with black lung in 1988, that’s the year I was born. So for my entire life, his lungs have been struggling to function. He’s had a hard time walking. He had to stop doing a job that he works to care for his family and put food on the table and he kind of got off easy in a way, which is a wild way to frame it. But Danny’s lungs are full of coal dust. I’ve met people my age, I’m 38. I’ve met people my age and a little bit younger who have lungs full of silica and they can’t breathe on their own. They can’t really walk anymore. If you’ve seen photos of what a lung with black lung coal miners pneumoconiosis, it’s government name, it literally turns black.

There’s a man named John Moore, a black father of three in West Virginia who he wasn’t even a career coal miner. He picked up some shifts while he was doing other stuff. He had a wig shop, he does events now. He was all over the place. He was hustling and he’s dying and he’s 42 and I don’t think he deserves that. I don’t think he voted for Trump, but he might have. I didn’t ask. I asked what he was doing to take care of himself and how his daughters were coping. And I think there is so much humanity that is missed when we give into these kind of divisions and this manufactured tribalism. I know there’s people that I report on that probably think I am just the worst godless calmy piece of trash. And you know what? Join the club. I’ve been online for a long time.

Not everybody has to … You don’t have to like me. I still don’t think you need to choke to death. I might wonder why does some tattooed broad from Jersey going down to Alabama all the time talking to coal miners? Well, because they remind me of my dad. He works in construction. He has terrible political opinions, but there’s a lot of things we do agree on and I’ve been able to move him a little bit towards the way to seeing the world I see it. Not that it’s the right way, but it makes sense to me. I think we need to give each other a little bit more grace. And it is easy for me to say that I’m a whitebroad from Jersey. There’s a lot of structural things. There’s a lot of racist things. There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t have to think about that other folks have to think about because of who they are Or how they’re born, where they’re from, how they identify.

And I understand why some people would be like, “Well, I don’t have any sympathy for these people. Why would I care? They don’t think that I deserve to exist.” And that’s fair. You’re allowed to think that. I get why you would. I would just ask if you have the time to think about it a little bit, maybe nobody should suffer. Maybe there’s some things we can sort out after the revolution. If we just have to ensure that enough of us make it there to have time to sit down and have those conversations.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, the indomitable Kim Kelly, freelance journalist and labor writer. Go find Kim’s book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor and follow more of her writing using the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. 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, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network across all our different platforms. And we’re doing grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real news newsletter so you never miss a story 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.

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. As we begin our conversation, it’s important to remember that since October 7th, 2023, when the Gaza War began after the kidnapping of Israelis, 73,000 Palestinians have been killed. Over 20,000 of them being children and the land itself has been totally devastated. The program today is dedicated to the Nakhba. The day of remembrance when almost a million Palestinians were forced to flee from their homes, forced to flee for their lives, to live the rest of their lives as refugees. One of those people is my guest today, who was a child when she and her family were forced to flee their home during the Nakba. Dr. Ghada Karmi is a physician, author of numerous books about Palestine, Israel, and the state of Palestinians. Her latest work is a novel called Mojana, a novel of medieval Baghdad.

And Ghada, welcome. It’s good to see you. Good to have you with us.

Ghada Karmi:

Thank you. I’m very glad to be here.

Marc Steiner:

So Ghada I… I’ve been covering Israel-Palestine for years now and been involved since I was a child since I’m Jewish, that family in Israel, Palestine, and then my Palestinian friends over the years as well. So it’s gigantic part of my life. And I’m just saying that to say I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a moment as dire as the one we face now, other than the Nakba itself, that we’re in that kind of moment. Could you describe just analytically where you think we are, what we’re facing when it comes to Israel-Palestine, this moment?

Ghada Karmi:

First of all, I agree with you. I don’t remember a time as bad as this and you say excluding the original Nakba, I would not exclude that because I think what I’m seeing now is worse than the Nakba that I lived through as a child in 1948. It is actually worse because always previously I never really believed in my heart of hearts that Israel would last for long, that it would survive and that we would not be looking at a situation where as in my case, because I was evicted with my family in 1948, I never believed that in my lifetime I would not be able to return to my homeland, which would be the same as saying that the state of Israel would have been terminated. That’s what I always lived by. And I think all Palestinians live with that hope in their hearts.

However, I have to tell you, for the first time in all those years, I have begun to doubt that.

Marc Steiner:

As you were speaking, one of the things I thought about as a young man, a very young man, I was in the Zionist groups. The last one was in Karsha Mahatzeer with the Marxist Scionists who believed at that time in a binational state where everybody lived together in peace. I raised that only to ask you in all your life as a Palestinian woman, as a scholar, as an activist, is that dream gone completely where people you think could live together in that space, have we actually, because of the oppression and Palestinians, completely terminated that possibility?

Ghada Karmi:

Yes. I have advocated for what I would call one democratic state

Marc Steiner:

Solution

Ghada Karmi:

For many years. Be careful not by national, not by national.

Marc Steiner:

Got you. I understand.

Ghada Karmi:

Indeed, I don’t recognize that there is another nation in Palestine. I don’t. And for many, many years, my vision for the future has always been that we Palestinians would return home to Palestine. We and our children and grandchildren, we would return that, number one, as a matter of priority. And number two, the question of what is to be the future for the settler community because this is really what we Palestinians think of Jewish-Israelis. They’re settlers and children and grandchildren of settlers apart from the very small minority of originally indigenous, what we called Arab Jews. The rest came from outside. So what is to be done with them has been a secondary matter, but I’ve always believed that it would be only a right, humane and moral to invite them to stay if they would like to stay with us in a democratic state framework and enjoy equal rights and equal citizenship with us.

If they’re not prepared to do that, then they must leave. And that is really my vision for the future. Now I have to tell you, as you point out so rightly, I’ve begun to doubt that because I look at the Israeli Jewish population since the Gaza genocide and we look at opinion polls and we see that a majority of ordinary Jewish people in Israel are in support of the genocide. They support the destruction of the Palestinian people. And I cannot, as an activist, ask my fellow Palestinians to contemplate embracing people like this and saying, “Why don’t we live together?” And we can forget the past, we can get on. It’s not true. It’s no longer true.

Marc Steiner:

When I think about this, I spent years working in the anti-apartheid struggle around South Africa and places like South Africa, like Israel, there’s two alternatives. A, is either the Jewish population in Israel, Israel-Palestine is wiped out or they’re forced to leave or there’s one democratic state. There’s a poster I have on my wall that I got in Cuba in 1968. It’s a map of all of Palestine, all of the Holy Land. And on one side is the Palestinian flag, the other’s an Israeli flag. And down the front it’s written one state, two people, three face. Do you think that’s an absurdity?

Ghada Karmi:

I don’t think it’s a possibility, no.

Marc Steiner:

Okay. Tell me why.

Ghada Karmi:

I don’t. You see the Jewish Israelis are settler colonialists. That’s what they are. So it’s like saying, if you rephrase it, you are saying the flag of the indigenous population, Palestinians and the flag of the settler colonists, Jewish Israelis. Now, how would you then imagine these two communities living together in an arrangement where the rights of the colonists are equal to the rights of the indigenous people? That is not the case. Now, South Africa is confusing. I respect your activism on South Africa and correctly so, but South Africa, you see the majority of the population were indigenous.

Marc Steiner:

Correct.

Ghada Karmi:

They were indigenous natives of the land. The minority of whites had come as settler colonists in the same way as Jewish Israelis, but much, much further back. Now, the disparity in numbers in the South African situation makes it a nonsense to say to this minority of whites, “You must have your own space and we have our own space.” It’s a nonsense. So of course it made sense. Here with Palestine, the problem is that it’s about half and off. So if you discount the exiles and the refugees who are living outside the area altogether, what you end up with is a 50% Jewish population, 50% Palestinian Arab population, but it doesn’t alter the basic nature of the Jewish population who are settler colonists and their descendants. Now, that’s not acceptable. I cannot, as a Palestinian, be asked to accept these people as equivalent to myself, especially given the suffering that they have caused for us Palestinians and especially in the last three years.

I mean, it’s not moral, it’s not right, it’s not human to ask the victims, which is us, to take account of the victimizers and say, “Well, no, nevermind all is forgiven. Let’s all live together.” It can’t be done.

Marc Steiner:

I’m very curious. I’ve read a lot of your writing and work you’ve done over the years and looking forward to talking about your latest work another day. So then what do you see as a solution? How do we get to a place where the out of destruction of Palestinians is stopped, the murder of Palestinian people is ended and we come to a place of peace. How do you see that happening?

Ghada Karmi:

Well, good question. I can’t see it happening, not given the present circumstances. And by that I mean not just the murderous Israeli leadership and to a large extent, the population, not just that, but the support that Israel still enjoys after all this, you can wonder, be astonished at the continuing support that this genocidal state still enjoys without that support. Now there’s an argument. Now, if you could actually work on the support end that the Western states and particularly the United States, if you could work on them and get them to give up on Israel, then I think there’s a very great hope that the whole thing will come to an end. But given the current arrangement where you’ve got a powerful Israeli state supported, funded, shielded by the West, which is very powerful, this combination, you can’t expect a small people like the Palestinians, given their friends who are many in the world, even men, you cannot expect them to fight that kind of setup.

It’s not possible. So your question is really a very good question. How do you do it? I wish I knew the answer. I know what it would take. I know the mechanisms which you’d have to remove in order to get that result. I wouldn’t know how you could persuade Western countries that are addicted, it seems to me. They are addicted to Israel or the idea of Israel. It’s quite remarkable. How can you get them to give up their addiction? I honestly don’t know.

Marc Steiner:

That’s really an interesting way to put it. I’ve never thought about it in the way you described it as an addiction. The piece I wrote that didn’t sit well with many of my fellow Jews was if there had never been a Holocaust, there would never be in Israel.

Ghada Karmi:

That’s true.

Marc Steiner:

And that is the reason that it exists. I mean, the United States refused to let Holocaust victims in. People went to Palestine took what wasn’t theirs and created a place for themselves. It’s refugees creating other refugees. I wrestle with this as well about how we end it. And I got exceedingly frustrated trying to find an answer. And I’ve had hundreds of interviews with people around this issue over the decades, but I’ve never felt that we’re at a moment that we are A, as I said, on a precipice of total disaster for both Israelis and Palestinians. And I don’t see how you stop that collision from happening.

Ghada Karmi:

Nor do I. Because if I go back to an earlier answer I gave you,

Marc Steiner:

Which

Ghada Karmi:

Is how do I feel at this moment? Well, I feel very, very hopeless because for the first time in my life I’m contemplating the physical end of Palestine. That’s something I never, ever thought would happen. But given the license that Israel has to do whatever it likes, it’s currently continuing this genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza and it’s continuing the ethnic cleansing that it’s getting away with on the West Bank.

So if it’s allowed to do that unhampered and nobody stops it and nobody’s strong enough on our side to fight it and to stop it, I can’t see any other future other than that they will succeed in emptying the land of a majority, let’s say not everybody, but a majority of Palestinians. So it’s looking pretty bleak, I have to say. And of course my concern is with the Palestinians, but you mentioned Israelis and I agree with you. I think Jewish Israelis don’t have a future. They don’t have a future now. Whatever they do to the Palestinians, they’re finished because imagine what is the future for Israel? What is it? Given it’s now completely exposed as a utterly belligerent state which cannot survive without perpetual war. It cannot. Now, how on earth can you imagine a future for its people with this way of life? Unless they accept at some point that they are actually like other people and they must settle down and stop fighting other people and killing them unless they accept that.

I don’t see any future for them at all. So even though they’re not my primary concern- Yeah, no,

Marc Steiner:

Right. I understand. They’re right. No, I do understand.

Ghada Karmi:

They don’t have a future and we certainly don’t have a future, not given the current situation.

Marc Steiner:

I had no idea the direction our conversation was going to take today, though I’ve been reading a lot of what you’ve written. I’ve been in touch with friends in Israel who are Israelis and family and friends who are Palestinians who live in Ramallah and other places in the West Bank, people I’ve known forever. And a bleakness took over in those conversations over the last week, thinking about you coming on as well. And so that’s why the tenor of my questions and discussion is because of what I see as a real hopelessness that we’re facing at this moment. For me, it’s the question I ask them is, how do we who have been so oppressed oppress another? How do we let that happen? Yeah. So do you think the era of dialogue and hope are really over?

Ghada Karmi:

Look, I’m reluctant to say anything is absolutely over.

Marc Steiner:

I understand. Yes, I understand.

Ghada Karmi:

Yes. But having said that, you ask the question which says, how can people who’ve been oppressed be so oppressive? Well, I can think of a mechanism which explains all of this.

You see, one of the self-defense postures that people can adopt when they are persecuted is to create an idea that they are very special and that they are better than other people. The fact that they’re being attacked by lesser people can be made to feel not so painful if you are encouraged to believe that you are special, that you are being attacked by a load of barbarians who don’t understand how special you are and how superior you are to them. So this idea of superiority I think has taken over with many, I was going to say most Jews, whether in Israel or out of Israel, that that is the mechanism. That’s how it was created, I think. So we end up with a situation where the oppression that Jews were subjected to was met by this feeling of we’re better than them. Okay, they can kill us, but we know we’re much better.

Now, if you carry that kind of mentality into Israel-Palestine, you’ve created a population of Jewish-Israelis who really do think they’re supremacist, that they are special, and that everybody else around them, the Palestinians first and foremost, are lesser human beings. So you can do with them what you like. It doesn’t feel that you’re oppressing them like you’re oppressing them because they are subhuman anyway. So that I think is one explanation that interests me a great deal and I would want to put forward to explain, as you say, this depressing reality that the people who underwent the Holocaust, or some of them did, or their children, their descendants can behave in the same way, by the way, as the Nazis. So that would be what I would say to that.

Marc Steiner:

So you’ve lost your home, been forced out of the country of birth and you’ve been teaching and working in medicine and as a scholar all these years, which is not easier to do given the situation that you face and face. And when we see Donald Trump in the White House who is probably around Israel, Palestine, Palestine, Israel is probably one of the worst presidents we’ve ever had and only kind of pushes the neofascist control inside of Israel itself and agrees with it with Netinyahu and his crew. How do you see it ending? I don’t often answer this question, nor do I get confused about how to ask the question very easily. But after years of being in a struggle, bringing Israelis and Palestinians together, running camps, fighting to end the occupation, all the things to come to the moment we’re on now, I really don’t know where we go.

I don’t know how we find the road to peace because it’s between the two people who are at odds and between the Israelis, oppression of the Palestinians.

Ghada Karmi:

Yeah, it’s very difficult to see. Now you could imagine a number of scenarios which would end it. I don’t know how likely any of them are or how likely or in what order they might happen, but you can see, you can see a way in which the whole thing would change. Let’s take Iran supposing that things become much more acute or dramatic with Iran, with President Trump, in my view, obeying Israeli orders and bombing the hell out of Iran. Now Iran will bomb the hell out of Israel,

There’s no doubt about that. So now imagine a scenario in which that happens and the Israelis cannot continue to hide behind no internet, no showing of anything, no publicity, no information about the damage that’s being done. It’s already, I gather Tel Aviv and other areas in Israel are badly damaged already by the bombing by the missiles from Iran and this could be very, very much worse to a point where the state seesis to function. If you add that to the fact that fewer and fewer young Israelis will volunteer for the army, which is already happening. And if you add that to the fact that the economy, which is not badly affected now as we speak, but will become affected in the future. So if you take a number of these factors together and don’t forget Hezbollah, which is also lobbying missiles over the border at Israel, that’s one possible scenario that could happen.

Now, I can imagine another scenario in which unbelievable as it seems at the moment, Donald Trump actually realizes the danger he’s in domestically and drops Iran and drops Israel in it and withdraws, just withdraws. So there’s another way because the main support for Israel, of course, is the United States. So if something threatens that, then Israel has finished, it’s had it. So that’s another possibility. Now, how likely all these are, I don’t know. I add to that a third factor which we are seeing, which is the level of popular support for Palestine and an accompanying disenchantment with Israel, particularly in the United States. Now, where does that lead? I don’t know, but here’s another potential which could make things very difficult for the Israelis. Looking at the situation in general and wondering which bit or maybe more than one of these scenarios could come together and would make an enormous difference to the outcome.

Now, if you then add the internal factor in Israel that is nevermind all this stuff from outside internally Israeli society is split.

Marc Steiner:

Yes.

Ghada Karmi:

There is a problem between the Orthodox, the right-wingers and the liberal-

Marc Steiner:

The secular population. Yep.

Ghada Karmi:

Yeah. And the Haredeme of the Docs which refuse to fight for the army and then maybe force to fight and that’ll create a hell of a big problem. So it’s like a cocktail of impending disasters, any of which or some combination of which would bring about the end of the current awful situation we have.

Marc Steiner:

There’s also one other factor in that you can’t forget that Israel’s also a nuclear power.

Ghada Karmi:

Yeah. I haven’t forgotten.

Marc Steiner:

No, no, I’m sure you have not. I don’t mean you’ve forgotten. I mean, we cannot forget that that exists and that if Israel feels its back is completely against the wall, it’s going to use that power.

Ghada Karmi:

Yeah. And that is really a real possibility. That’s what I meant by I hadn’t forgotten because it often crosses my mind that Israel is mad enough, honestly, it’s psychotic enough to do something like that.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah. I mean, one of the stories in Jewish history is about the Massada.

Ghada Karmi:

Sure.

Marc Steiner:

And it’s in the consciousness of everybody who’s Jewish. You grow up with that, just like you grew up in the Holocaust or my grandparents who suffered the pogroms and were almost killed by the Kasaks. So all that’s an oppressed consciousness and I can see the powers within Israel, especially the right wing powers with Israel, saying if we’re going to die, they’re all going to die.

Ghada Karmi:

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Very well put. And I tell you, it’s a terrible fear that I have. It’s Samson all over again. And in Arabic, the whole Samson story has a line in it on me and on all my enemies and perfectly illustrates the situation. Yes, it’s very frightening. I don’t know what we can do except to express our fear of such an eventuality

Marc Steiner:

And we have to keep fighting for the alternative. We have to keep fighting for the peace to happen and to make- Of

Ghada Karmi:

Course.

Marc Steiner:

Of

Ghada Karmi:

Course.

Marc Steiner:

You can’t give up.

Ghada Karmi:

Yes. But I need to say when you’ve said before earlier in this interview, you said again, you said about peace. Look, peace can only come about if people understand what the problem is as well as me, that there’s a tremendous amount of obfuscation, of confusion, of sentimentality, of all kinds of things have been chucked at this story. The Bible, the Holocaust, all these factors mean that in the end, people are actually confused. What does peace mean? What would it mean? Now in my terms, the only peace that I can envisage is one where we Palestinians go home. It’s very, very simple. We all have to go home. And of course, if we go home, then the whole structure of the current state of Israel automatically changes and in my view, for the better.

Marc Steiner:

The right of return. Gadakaria, I want to thank you for the work you do. I want to talk to you next about your latest book and I want to thank you for joining us today. It’s been an important conversation and I deeply appreciate you to being with us today.

Ghada Karmi:

It was a great pleasure for me to talk to you.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, I want to thank Dr. Ghada Karmi for joining us today for the work she does and we’ll be linking to her work, which is extensive. And thanks to Cameron Granadino for running the program today, audio edits received from Frank for working his magic, Rosette Sewali, for producing the Marc Steiner Show and puting up with me and the titles, Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes and everyone here at The World 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@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. And once again, thank you joining us today. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening and take care.