Chris Hedges discusses his recent commentary titled, “Trump’s Phantom Enemies,” which asserts the Trump regime is linking Cuba with domestic, communist subversion and is laying the groundwork for McCarthyite blacklisting and criminalizing of all left-wing, progressive, anti-war and anti-imperialist dissent.
Hedges was bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans for 15 years and author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a National Book Critics Circle finalist, and A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine.
SCOTT HARRIS: Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a New York Times foreign correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans for 15 years. Chris resigned from the New York Times in 2003 after he was issued a written reprimand for his anti-Iraq war graduation speech at Rockford College in Illinois. He holds a master of divinity from Harvard University. He’s the author of many books and was a National Book Critic Circle finalist for War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. His latest books include A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Pesistance in Occupied Palestine; Storming the Gate: Fighting Religion-based Oppression with Soul Force, co-authored with Mel White, and the Greatest Evil is War. Chris’ forthcoming book to be published this fall is titled Requiem for Gaza. Chris has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto.
Since 2013, he’s also taught college credit courses in the New Jersey prison system through Rutgers University. Chris had popular TV shows on both teleSUR and RT America until those cable channels were shut down in the U.S. A regular contributor to the news and commentary website, TruthDig, Chris and the staff there were fired by the publisher in 2020 after they went on strike in protest over the firing of then editor-in-chief Bob Scheer, as they demanded union representation. Chris is now a featured contributor for the independent news site ScheerPost, and his widely read Chris Hedges Report can be found on Substack. Chris, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate you making time for a conversation about your recent column titled, “Trump’s Phantom Enemies” which closely examines the Trump regime’s latest throwback to the McCarthy era. On July 20, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the State Department released a 100-page report titled, “Cuba, the Capital of 21st Century Communism,” which alleges that Havana was directing a decades-long subversion espionage, supported radical leftist movements within the U.S.
The report’s incendiary allegations not backed up by any evidence links a long list of American progressive organizations and activists to what’s described as the threat of far-left terrorism. As we begin this conversation, I wonder if you’d talk about this Trump-Rubio Cuba report and its significance in signaling what I see as at least three related targets. Number one, laying the groundwork to justify a future U.S. military attack against Cuba. And they’ve certainly laid the groundwork for that by the oil embargo. Criminalizing dissenting progressive activists to possibly move forward with indictments and arrests. And number three, possibly using the delusional claim that Cuba poses a threat to the U.S. in our midterm election in order for Trump to de-legitimize and manipulate the election outcome, an election that all polls tell us we’ll likely see the Republicans lose power in the House and maybe even the Senate.
So, I wondered if you’d comment on all that. We have Trump’s national security presidential memo of, it’s called NSPM-7, that denounces any American who questions capitalism, Christianity, or MAGA and is telling the world that they’re domestic terrorists.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yes. Well, this definitely lays the groundwork for an assault against the left. That’s not hidden. You have this 100-page report, which is a pretty remarkable non-reality-based document that demonizes all sorts of groups, Code Pink, as either front groups or fellow travelers. I mean, I found it just stunning in its mendacity. I mean, for example, it goes after the Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organization. This is known as the IFCO. This is an ecumenical social justice organization that was founded by the Presbyterian Church. And they describe this as part of Cuba’s, I’m quoting, “Cuba’s solidarity network, which facilitates radical agitation within the United States.” I mean, the whole notion that mainstream Protestant denominations—like the Presbyterian Church’s ordained Presbyterian minister—are fomenting radical agitation is absurd. But what this report is essentially doing is criminalizing any group that provides humanitarian assistance to Cuba, which I just want to flag is not a crime.
It spends a lot of time demonizing the National Lawyers Guild along with Democratic Socialists of America. Describes the NLG—the NLG is an important—all activists know it. It’s a very important legal organization where volunteer lawyers and they’ve represented me when I’ve been arrested in front of the White House for protesting the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. They describe it as, again, I’m quoting, “one of the most persistently relevant and insidious organization in Cuba’s U.S. network.” It calls them extreme left lawyers who defend radical street activists that, again, I’m quoting, “have played a key role in a disproportionate share of the far-left terror and violence that has plagued the United States from the 1960s up to today.”
It’s described or condemned really as a foreign influence operation because it provides legal assistance to activists who of course have a right to legal representation. That’s constitutionally enshrined. And if you look at the Trump administration’s assault with the withholding of federal funding to Harvard University, one of the demands is that they dissolve the law school’s chapter, Harvard Law School’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which provided legal assistance to those students and handful of academics professors who oppose the genocide.
So I mean, it’s a very, very disturbing report. I think it’s in many ways, and Ellen Schrecker, who’s the great historian of McCarthyism, has pointed this out. We’re really at a situation that’s worse than McCarthyism because McCarthyism blacklisted individuals. But what this administration is doing is essentially blacklisting institutions, including universities such as Harvard, Columbia, which unfortunately, their administrations have folded under this frontal assault.
So yes, it’s a very insidious and dangerous document. And I think as I do in my Substack column, you have to pair it with the assault against the elections. The poll numbers are very poor, as you pointed out, for Trump and the Republicans. But they are sabotaging in the name of national security. I mean, they’ve disbanded the bipartisan Election Commission. They are blocking mail-in ballots. They are forcing states to turn over voter rolls. They have appointed a slew of election monitors who are election deniers in a sense that they back Trump’s fatuous claim of having won the election and it being stolen from Biden. So all of this is very, very ominous for what’s coming. It provides the raison d’être for the assault against the “radical left.”
But really what this is, is shutting down any form of dissent. I mean, many of these groups, the National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, they go after Code Pink. And by name, they go after the co-founders of Code Pink, Medea Benjamin and Jodi Evans. These are nonviolent anti-war groups. And what they do in the report, a lot of the references in the report are really dated. I mean, they’re decades old, but what they try to do is tie these groups like the National Lawyers Guild or Code Pink, or as I mentioned earlier, the IFCO to the violent radical groups, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement of the 1960s, as a way to bolster their claim that these groups are terrorists.
And of course, once they’re condemned as terrorists, they will be tried under terrorism laws, which as we saw with the antifa, so-called antifa activists in Texas resulted in staggering sentences. So I think the report’s important and signals what’s coming.
SCOTT HARRIS: Do we know, apart from Marco Rubio, who in this administration, what ideologues are behind this Cuba report? Certainly Steven Miller, Trump’s architect of the brutal immigrant mass deportation campaign is part of this, but are there other fingerprints on this thing?
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, yes, it’s Miller. Rubio, of course, has long advocated more aggressive action against the Cuban government. I mean, let’s be clear, Cuba, it only has 9.3 million people. First of all, 90 percent of whom live in poverty. And now most of them live in blackouts because of the fuel shortages. There’s no electricity. The whole idea that Cuba is somehow an existential threat to the United States or warrants the language that this report uses is just ludicrous. So who are the … yeah, I mean, I think that this comes out of that cabal within the Trump administration. J.D. Vance would be part of this, that seeks to really silence any dissent. I mean, the priority for the Trump administration is not actually the “radical” left, but the Democratic party opposition. That’s who they have to eradicate first. And those entities, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, which they consider justifiably hostile to Trump and the Trump administration.
But the “radical left” or those they define as the radical left are certainly maybe not number one on the list, but certainly number two. I mean, I want to be clear, this report goes after mainstream political figures like Zorhan Mamdani or Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for being tools of Cuba. But the way the evidence they use, for instance, is so thin. They attack Mamdani because he refused to denounce a tribute to Assata Shakur. This is the Black revolutionary who was almost certainly framed for murder and fled to Cuba. She actually escaped from a prison in New Jersey in 1979 and fled to Cuba. I mean, that’s just insane.
Or going after Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, because she participated in a congressional delegation headed by Barack Obama on a visit to Cuba. So when you look closely at what they use as evidence to tar or slander and denounce these figures, and I think there’s 43 Americans who are named in this report, including figures like Hassan Piker and others, it doesn’t hold up at all.
It’s all innuendo and obviously I would say it’s evidence-free.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right. Well, Chris, should we be cautious and not take this report too seriously, given the fact that there’s a concerted strategy in the Trump White House to say or do something outrageous almost every day, normalizing what I think is vile anti-democratic and irrational policies? Could this be another case of just more nonsense throwing spaghetti against the wall, following Trump whisperer Steve Bannon’s theory of flooding the zone? Conversely, what’s the danger of not taking this set of bogus McCarthyite accusations seriously?
CHRIS HEDGES: No, I think you have to take it very seriously. I mean, although it’s not based in reality, the idea that the National Lawyers Guild or Code Pink are somehow subversive Cuban proxies trying to spread communism, they don’t care. I mean, fascist regimes are about denouncing dissidents as a mortal threat to the nation and then crushing them. And no totalitarian state is honest in terms of presenting evidence to justify this repression. It’s all traditionally fictitious. But you have to look at the language that is used. I mean, for instance, they go after Democratic Socialists of America and they say that the DSA serves, and I’m going to again quote, “As a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as a spiritual capital of third world radicalism.” It describes the DSA as, again, I’m going to quote, “A fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime.” It accuses Cuba of building, again, quote, “A sprawling revolutionary network that has shaped America’s most famous and influential extremist movements.” These networks, the report claims include, again, I’m quoting, “Powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations in the U.S.
It claims that these groups are either directly tools of Cuba or fellow travelers with Cuba. Again, I’m going to quote, “That has sought to undermine, degrade, destabilize America with spies and soldiers, but also with students and intellectuals, with terrorist cells, but also with solidarity committees and nonprofit networks with intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover.” This is really, really scary language because it essentially brands all of us. I am a supporter of the DSA and was Ralph Nader’s speech writer and am a socialist. It really brands us as not just traitors, but as terrorists. And so I think we have to take it very, very, very seriously. I think it is a very clear signal of where we’re headed and it’s not good.
SCOTT HARRIS: There’s no doubt that if Donald Trump wanted to order his lackeys at the FBI, Kash Patel, or Todd Blanche as acting attorney general—however that shakes out of the Senate—if he asked them to begin indicting or arresting the dozens of people in this Cuba report list, that order would probably be put into action knowing what we know.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah, no question. And let’s remember that some of these, I mean, they go after Ben Cohen from Ben & Jerry’s. They go after Amy Goodman. I’m going to talk about the people they name in the report. And I think I mentioned Hassan Piker and others. So once you start drawing up enemies lists, which is essentially what this is, that’s really, really dangerous because you’re not talking amorphously about the left or a group anymore. You are naming names, you are naming individuals who should be targeted.
I mean, now there are more amorphous passages. They go after the founder of Mother Jones, for instance. There are actually four founders of Mother Jones, most of them I know, Adam Hawkshield and others. And then what they say are several other unnamed, notable magazine editors, leaders of powerful labor unions and advocacy groups, think tank executives, and a suite of professors at top universities who they say are alumni of the Venceremos Brigade. This is the brigade that went down and picked coffee in Cuba and that kind of stuff. So really what you’re doing is libeling thousands of individuals and organizations as Cuban assets with nothing more than innuendo.
So we have named names, but we have that broader characterization. And who are these people? They’re media people, they’re labor people, they’re advocacy people, and they’re professors. And that is just the classic fascist playbook.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. And given what we’ve seen so far in Trump’s second term, the fascist playbook almost always wins, at least on a temporary basis, because it would likely take our broken court system months or years to address the illegality and unconstitutionality of these arrests if they happen. And by then the intended chilling effect on free speech would’ve been achieved, right? We only have to look at the Prairieland, Texas case that you mentioned earlier, the prosecutions of ICE facility protesters to understand this regime’s capacity to criminalize dissent.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah. And you’re right about the court system. So if you read the history of the rise of fascism in Germany or the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, you see that there were elements, especially within the judiciary that fought back. But they were eventually purged. And that purging, of course, is a fundamental part of the Trump administration. Federal judges are just being replaced right and left. Or the rulings that are made against the Trump administration are just ignored.
So you had, I think it was 92 rulings against Trump and ICE in the Minnesota courts and the Trump administration just pretended they didn’t exist. And of course, the Department of Justice, which has now been transformed into a vengeance machine, is not going to enforce it. So yeah, you’re very, very right. And then you see these amazingly draconian sentences in the case of those activists in Texas, I think they got what, 550 years total?
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah, it was insane.
CHRIS HEDGES: One of them got 30 years. He wasn’t even there. He was moving boxes of zines and propaganda or something around. So these sentences are just so wildly disproportionate to what’s happening, but they are a signal. And the signal is, don’t even think about it because we will destroy your life. And that’s what this 100-page report is really attempting to justify. So yeah, it’s really scary and it’s very serious. They’re not joking around, just like they’re not joking around about fixing or invalidating the midterms. We know that Trump essentially did not recognize the validity of the elections that he lost in the contest with Biden. He attacks the Democrats in all sorts of slanderous terms as corrupt and election manipulators, etc. etc. There is a buffoonish quality always to fascism. That was true in Italy, it was true in Germany, and it’s true here.
But that doesn’t mean these thugs are not very, very dangerous. And I think the other thing that’s always interesting about fascism is that it’s amazingly upfront about what it intends to do. It’s just so outrageous, people can’t quite accept that it’s ever going to happen. And I would caution people against writing off a report like this. It’s another signal of where we’re headed, and you’re right about the courts. Despite some very courageous decisions, the courts are not going to save us. The only thing that will save us if we can be saved is our mass mobilizations and in particular, strikes. A national strike would be good. But that kind of stuff, it takes time to organize. And especially with the decimation of labor unions, there are not a lot of dissident organizations that can carry out that kind of, can essentially put together that kind of resistance activity, unlike the 1930s with a breakdown of capitalism where you saw labor become pivotal in essentially preventing the country from becoming fascist.
I mean, there was a huge sympathy, especially a part of the business elite for fascism. But Roosevelt, who came out of the oligarchic class, and I’ve read his private correspondence where he talks about this, tells his brother, “If we don’t create or institute reforms—the federal government at the time employed 12 million workers who were unemployed—Social Security, etc. etc., then we will get revolution.” And of course, the spectre of the 1917 revolution in Russia still weighed heavy on the ruling class in Europe and the United States, but that threat is gone.
We don’t have a powerful enough left that it will frighten those people who want to create a fascist America from solidifying their power. And so yeah, I’m very concerned. I mean, as you know, I wrote a book. I spoke in New Haven about it when it came out in 2007, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, which I got a lot of heat for at the time.
I think it turns out that I was correct in terms of delineating the strong strain of fascism, which cloaked itself in American Christianity. And I speak as a seminarian, of course, the whole idea that Jesus came to make us rich, or blessed white supremacy—Jesus, of course, wasn’t white by the way, the Romans were white—or capitalism or imperialism, is heretical. It’s a complete distortion of the Christian faith. That’s something a lot of liberal Christians in the name of dialogue and tolerance were not willing to engage in at the time, I think to their detriment. And the Germans created the so-called, it was called the German Christian Church, which was just a Nazi front group. But I don’t see much difference between the German Christian Church and the Christian right.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Chris, given what you said about the general weakness of the left these days compared to the ’30s, what are some of the options for the national progressive community to defend against this Trump-Rubio threat to free speech? And of course, it’s not limited just to this 100-page paper on Cuba. It’s up and down the line. I wonder beyond being on the defensive, it seems going on the offensive against the regime’s unconstitutional and lawless repressive conduct might be the best option. As it seems too often, Trump’s sycophants set the agenda and everybody else just responds.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah. Well, I think the template was Minneapolis…
SCOTT HARRIS: Right.
CHRIS HEDGES: …with the ICE terror. That’s it. And they drove ICE, maybe not out of Minneapolis, but the hundreds of ICE agents that were deployed there had to be relocated. Now, ICE is still continuing its reign of terror. Of course, killed someone in Maine. I think the other one was in Texas. It is in airports looking for people who’ve overstayed their visas. So it’s not like we’ve shut down ICE. ICE is still now the most massively funded domestic “law enforcement” agency. I use that law enforcement term in quotes. These people are thugs and goons, and they are building detention or reconverting warehouses or building detention centers all throughout the country. And if anyone thinks these are exclusively for undocumented workers, they’re extremely naive. But I think Minneapolis was the guide. I think … that you can always tell the most effective movements by the response of the state.
So what are they doing? They’re attempting to criminalize people who record abuses by ICE on their phones. But yes, it’s only going to come by mucking up or thwarting the machinery of state power and commerce. I don’t know if we’ll succeed, but we can certainly slow it if we can’t stop it. Certainly I would support or do support attempts in the courts to stymie the designs of the Trump administration. But again, I think we have to recognize that with the capture of the Department of Justice and with the constant purging of judges, it’s probably a rear guard action. But we have to resist in every way possible because if we don’t attempt to halt this movement, which is essentially turning the United States very rapidly into an authoritarian state, then we may all be finished anyway. But we have no excuse left not to put our bodies on the line, not to do what the people in Minneapolis did, not to do what those people who mounted the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles and other cities have done.
You can see what they did to these courageous students on college campuses who stood up against genocide. The end result is that institutions like Yale and Harvard have essentially shut down, or Princeton, I live in Princeton, have shut down free speech. And I have 20 years overseas and covered all sorts of dictatorships from Augusto Pinochet’s Chile to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Once you shut down free speech on a college campus or university campus, which is really the last readout of honest, open, intellectual debate, that’s a very, very frightening development and signals the advance of the totalitarian state. So we don’t have a lot of time left and we have to take their rhetoric and what they’re doing, but in particular—their rhetoric very seriously.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, just a final question. Given mounting evidence and rising concern about Trump’s plan for the 2026 election and what was written in this Cuba paper criminalizing dissenters as terrorists, what in your view could and should be done now to prevent the next coup in November? And of course, given your reporting around the world, what are some of the lessons that you saw firsthand from the U.S. civil rights movement, but also pro-democracy groups around the world that have used the power of massive street protests and civil disobedience to defend democracy and defeat authoritarian fascist takeovers? You’ve seen it. What works and what should we be doing now?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, what works, so I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania that brought down those regimes. What works are a million people in the streets. You don’t actually need more than maybe 2 or 3 percent of the population that’s willing to get out in the streets. I think Minneapolis, again, showed us this. And I think there has to be planning to respond should the Trump administration attempt to fix, cancel, or invalidate the midterms. And I think all three are possibilities. And then we really have to shut the country down. That’s what works. That’s the only thing that works. And that means the highways get shut down, the bridges get shut down. Nonviolence, I’m obviously strongly grounded in the nonviolent civil disobedience movement, that works. It can work if we get the numbers because you can’t put a million people in jail. You just can’t.
Now, the state may use violence. It used violence in Minneapolis. Fascists use violence against nonviolent protesters, just as the apartheid regime in Israel uses against nonviolent (protesters) with the Great March of Return. I mean, they were shooting medics, shooting journalists, anyone, really. And unfortunately, we’ve reached a point where this state with its militias and goon squads, in particular ICE, will stop at nothing to crush our open society, what’s left of it, our democratic institutions as anemic as they are.
So we can’t be naive about the cost, but that’s what we have left. And I think we really have to focus on the midterms with the assumption that this may happen. And if it does happen, then we have to be prepared to respond and we have to know how to respond. And that is, as I saw in Eastern Europe, as I saw in the street protests that brought down Slobadon Milosevic. I was involved in the street demonstrations against Pinochet in Chile.
That is the only mechanism we have left to save ourselves.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Chris, before you go, please tell our audience about your soon-to-be-published new book, Requiem for Gaza, that’s out this fall. Just say a quick word, if you would.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yes. This is out in October. I did it with the cartoonist, Joe Sacco, who wrote Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza. We went to Egypt. We interviewed 29 families who had recently fled Gaza and we wrote the story of the genocide starting on Oct. 7 through the experiences of those 29 families.
SCOTT HARRIS: Wow. Incredible. We’ll look forward to talking to you about that book soon. Chris, thanks so much for joining us today for this important conversation about all the issues we covered. And please tell our listeners how they can find your writing online. Of course, the Substack page is very popular.
CHRIS HEDGES: Chrishedges.substack.com. And that has also the shows. I do a weekly show on the YouTube channel, but if you sign up to the Substack, you’ll get that too.
SCOTT HARRIS: Chris, thanks so much for all you do, speaking truth to power all these years. Appreciate you being here with us today.
CHRIS HEDGES: Thanks for having me.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’ve been speaking today on Counterpoint with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, Chris Hedges, one of our nation’s most important voices, speaking truth to power.
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