 individuals and media who do not adhere to the Western government enforced narrative on Ukraine is part of a long history in the U.S. or officially crushing dissent. With the advances of technology for both surveillance and censorship, we might be in the most chilling atmosphere yet for thought control. Will it too be brought down by its own excesses? The First Amendment has not prevented the U.S. from suppressing speech throughout its history. Just eight years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights, press freedom had become a threat to John Adams, the second president, whose federalist party pushed through Congress the alien and sedition laws. They criminalized criticism of federal government, quote, to write, print, utter or publish, or cause it to be done or assist in it. Any false, scandalous and malicious writing against the government of the United States or either House of Congress or the president would intend to defame or bring either into contempt or disrepute was banned. Congress did not renew the act in 1801. Freedom of the press and speech next came significantly under attack and lead up to the 1860 to 65 U.S. Civil War. Newspaper editors who campaigned for the abolition of slavery were attacked by mobs, sometimes directed by elected officials. In 1837, an editor was killed by a mob, one of whose organizers was the Illinois Attorney General. During the war, numerous editors and journalists were arrested in the north and throughout the war, newspaper reporters and editors were arrested without due process for opposing the draft, discouraging enlistments in the Union Army or even criticizing the income tax according to the First Amendment Encyclopedia. Well, formal censorship was excluded from the 1917 Espionage Act by just one vote in the U.S. Senate. The 1918 Sedition Act was a two paragraph amendment that was aimed at Americans who insulted the U.S. government, military or flag, and who tried to criticize the draft, military industry, or even the sale of war bombs. This law distilled the essence of enforced loyalty of the population to the symbols of military power and of the state. It demolished the idea that America is exceptional as it showed the U.S. enforcing the same state worship as most nations in history. The act with similar federal laws was used to convict at least 877 people in 1919 and 1920. Most infamously, the socialist presidential candidate Eugene B. Debs, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for publicly opposing the military draft in June 1918 speech. Publications such as the masses were also prosecuted. The Sedition Act was repealed by Congress in March 1921. During the First World War, the peculiar American practice of renaming food to erase the enemy began. Sauerkraut became a liberty cabbage. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, French fries became freedom fries because France opposed the war. Today, Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky have been removed from concert programs and living Russian artists have been fired. The Red Scare under Joseph McCarthy in 1950s was one of the worst periods of smearing and punishing Americans who were thought to be disloyal. Its end came with the excesses of McCarthy trying to find Communists in the U.S. Army. In the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, the Supreme Court made clear what the First Amendment stands for. Justice Hugo Black wrote, in the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The 2016 election and the Russia Gate fiasco gave the Democrats in Congress an excuse to use social media companies as proxies to shut down free speech it did not agree with. It also led to smearing of those who questioned the Russia Gate tale as being Russian agents. One of the great repression of repressed freedom and free speech was the arrest and indictment under the Espionage Act of WikiLeaks publisher Jolene Assange, who for three years has been incarcerated in the maximum security prison in London, awaiting extradition to the U.S. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has given the U.S. the excuse it needed to launch an economic war against Russia with so far as backfiring to try to bog Russia down in a quagmire with continual arms shipments to Ukraine and also to launch an information war, not only against Russia, but against U.S. and U.K. domestic dissent. Only one narrative is being enforced, which prohibits mention of Ukraine's recent history, such as the 2014 U.S. Baku in Kiev, the eight year war in Dumbass, as well as the role of neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Our guests today have all been either censured or smeared or both as they are among the leading dissidents in the West today. They are George Galway, a former British MP, leader of the British Workers' Party, filmmaker and broadcaster. Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times Middle East bureau chief, Jill Stein, a former U.S. presidential candidate for the Green Party, and Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marines counterintelligence officer, chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq and an author. Thanks all of you for coming on CN Live. George, I want to start with you. We went through a lot of history right now, but I think we are in an historic moment ourselves right now, an historic moment of repression that matches those earlier periods. So I'd like to ask you, and I want to ask all of you the same question, tell us how all of this has affected you personally. What do you think the reasons are for why this happened? And then I want to put this in this larger historical context, what this means to them. Well, thank you for the invitation to this illustrious panel. The specter of our friend Julian Assange is of course hanging, hovering over these proceedings, because as we said from the beginning of the witch hunt of Julian Assange on Good Friday, I can call it the crucifixion of Julian Assange, that it was not Assange the man that was being crucified only. It was the whole idea that the public had a right to know what their government was doing with their tax dollars and in their name. And the reporters who could bring those truths to the attention of the public were amongst our most treasured heroes. And Julian still languishes three years now behind bars in the horrific dungeon of Belmarsh jail, and God knows what lies ahead of him. There's no doubt that today's atmosphere mirrors, and I think your right probably surpasses the periods of history that you went through there. Paul Robeson of course had his passport taken away. I have been threatened with travel restrictions where I to continue the television work that I have been doing for almost an entire decade. So my passport taken away, I've been stamped by the false label Russian state media, which I never had by the way when I was presenting a show on Russian state media and was only given after I ceased to have a television show on Russian state media and ceased because the government made it a crime for me to do so. I'm being as I'm sure all of us are algorithmically strangled. My Twitter following 417,000 had been gaining 1,000 a day going like a runaway train and then suddenly hit the buffers when the Elon Musk story emerged. And I expressed the view that Oleg Garka he no doubt is, but I'd prefer Elon Musk to the kings of Saudi Arabia who it turns out presently are major shareholders in the Twitter company. As soon as I joined that fight, my numbers literally crashed to a halt and shadow bands and all the rest of it. Others amongst us have suffered far worse. Scott Ritter, a man I've known and worked with for well over 20 years now and have the highest admiration for his professional expertise and experience is literally wiped from many of the platforms that I've been following him on. The entire Uber, the entire library of the honorable Chris Hedges who in any sane America would be the secretary of state at least in the government is now missing, believe dead in the tombs of YouTube. I could go on, all of us are suffering this, but just like with my Julien Assange allusion, the point is not that we are suffering. The point is that the public who were following us might in the future follow us and learn our side of the story have been robbed of that possibility. And that is exactly what is going on now. It's the ability to know the public's ability to find alternative sources of fact and analysis. So as to arrive at a truth that they believe in has been effectively made extremely difficult and made very well soon impossible because bear this in mind Joe, that all of this is happening before the consequences of the economic crash brought about by Western policy and our misnamed leaders has really hit yet when economies begin to not just slow down, not just hiccup, not just experience levels of inflation, not seen for years or decades, but when that becomes a crash as well it might, then it will be even more important for the state to suppress any alternative analysis as to how we got here and what we must do now to get out. I hope that's not been too long for an introductory statement. Thanks again for the opportunity. Not at all George, we could listen to you all night. Indeed, the purpose of these sanctions was to bring down the Moscow government and governments in the West might instead be imperiled. Jill Stein, Jill, tell us again how this has affected you personally and what do you think the reasons are and again in historical context for this? Yeah, so not being a journalist, the issue for me has not been censorship, although no doubt I've been algorithmically suppressed for quite some time. In fact, we saw a really dramatic downturn in our numbers. This was probably back in like 2017 when our social media went offline for like 12 hours and then we came back and our communications basically, their reach was cut maybe by half or two thirds at that point and that continues. But for me, it was a matter of being smeared as a Russian asset and the, in a nutshell, I had attended a conference, it was a 10-year anniversary conference in Moscow in 2015 and it was part of a tour that I undertook as an early candidate where I went to speak with as many citizens, activists and people in government as possible and actually I was able to meet with Jeremy Corbyn in the course of that European tour, I was at the Paris summit, the climate summit and was actually able to meet with the second lead representative from China and I met with a number of Russian officials and had hoped to be able to talk to Putin, but unfortunately there was no translator when he sat down for 10 minutes at the table. I learned later that he spoke English but you couldn't tell, he walked in with people that I assumed were his bodyguards. They all looked like weightlifters and they came and sat down at the table briefly but spoke to no one. I mean, they spoke to other Russian speakers who were part of their entourage and the people who spoke English talked to each other. I had no idea who Michael Flynn was at the time, he was also seated at the table and gave him my elevator speech about being there to promote a peace offensive in the Middle East, a ban on nuclear weapons and a global green new deal and our conversation ended right there. The whole event had been completely public. I had been publicly fundraising in order to pay for the tour so as not to accept any money from foreigners. My speech was recorded and was public. The whole thing was public and it was essentially a non-event as far as the press was concerned until I received the Green Party nomination about seven months later in July of 2016. So this is like seven months after that event and then suddenly a picture that had been shot during the few minutes that Putin happened to sit at the table that was circulated and was used as evidence that I was a Russian asset that was being used as part of the Russiagate scandal. And then in fact, when the steel dossier which has now been thoroughly discredited and shown to have been funded by the DNC and the Clinton campaign or some combination thereof, it's been thoroughly discredited even by the Inspector General of the US Department of Justice and other authorities. It's been basically characterized as essentially internet rumor. And when I was called with great alarm by one of my neighbors to say that, I was in this important document of Russian interference and that I was part of it. I took a look at the document and I saw that just it was full of lies about me and my role claiming that I had been funded by the Russian government and was an asset for them. It was vague and the language was confusing but it cast a very dark shadow on my role. And I knew at that point that the whole thing was just a pack of lies because what was clearly documented in the public record was contradicted in my case. And it had all sorts of outrageous things to say about the role of RT as harming the US government because it promoted Black Lives Matter and because it promoted Occupy Wall Street and things like that. So it was clearly a very dangerous media outlet. So that's where it started and it basically hasn't ended. I was investigated for three years by the Senate Intelligence Committee because of that smear. I was very mindful as that rolled on of what had happened to Julian Assange and saw the potential for that to happen to any of us including me. And there was an effort in the mob hysteria and the feeding frenzy that was going on in the legacy media amplified in social media. I was just mindful that if they get away with criminalizing you and if they can build a big enough smear campaign then they will try to do that. So I was very involved in responding to that smear campaign. Of course the media wouldn't hear any of it. They weren't interested in the facts of the case or even a second side of the story. It was all smear on their part. But I waged a campaign on social media to just try to educate our followers and our supporters in particular which turned out to be incredibly helpful because then people could actually see the evidence weigh it themselves and we developed really a whole army of defenders on social media that still to this day continues to debunk the smears as they continue to circulate. That's sort of the story in a nutshell. Eventually after three years of investigation five different reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee put out. And by the way, they were not only investigating me and the campaign they were also investigating the recount of the 2016 election. We did a recount in three states that was trying to examine the software that was used in the voting machines. And although we found important evidence about the disadvantage of communities of color in terms of just the function of these very fallible machines and how they were further put at risk through the really the racial bias in the implementation of voting technology and the support for it which is far worse in communities of color and many of their machines had just sort of crashed on election day. We were able to document that but we were basically prohibited from doing the investigation of the software which we were trying to do at any rate that whole enterprise was also accused by the Senate Intelligence Committee of having been a Russian plot and funded to some degree by Russia. So all of those things were sort of put out into the public sphere where they continue to circulate and not being a journalist they didn't censor me in a major way. So I was able to combat the smears and remain a voice in the dialogue but for those who are journalists who have more powerful voices in this dialogue that really hurts us all for your voices to be shut down and I'll just end my opening comments by saying we're in an incredibly perilous moment. It's not only freedom of the press and freedom of speech but it's really democracy in all of its dimensions that are under threat right now. There are all these draconian laws now against protests. There are a whole slew of protest laws they're actually like 36 that have been passed that are as bad as a 10-year prison sentence for demonstrating on a sidewalk without a permit. They differ state by state and so now anyone who wants to go out and protest you have to know what the latest is in your state. Drivers can be given license to strike you and kill you if you are out in the street in some states as part of a protest. The corruption of our judicial system witnessed what the Department of Justice has approved and actually conducted this absolutely fraudulent orwellian campaign that they have conducted against Julian Assange is really the worst imaginable nightmare of a justice system which has really lost, it's worse than lost its way. It's just become a tool of suppression and the case of Stephen Donziger is another case in point. And where are the elected officials even in his own district? Where are they in standing up to protest this? The money in politics has gone absolutely off the charts. It was $6 billion in the 2016 election. It was twice as much in 2020. It's like look at whatever dimension you want to in our democracy. It is all crashing and burning right now and that's very much related to the war and that militarism has completely gone off the rails and is not only absorbing half of our discretionary budget but is putting us all at risk in this concocted war in Ukraine, which is really a US, Russia, superpower proxy war, which was absolutely predictable from the US military documents going back to the early 2000s which essentially established US military policy as what's described as a full spectrum dominance which is essentially taking on and taking out if need be any of the super powers that become economic competitors. And clearly that is an underriding or I should say really an overarching issue here. So we have a very big fight to fight. Dwight Eisenhower's granddaughter participated in a forum that I think Consortium News hosted at the outset of the war. It was really a wonderful forum. And one of the things she said was that her grandfather in his retirement, as he retired, his parting words were to beware of the military industrial complex that had reached really a state in which it had a life of its own and it was really a dominant driver and extremely dangerous. And the antidote to that is an educated populace and that depends on the free speech and debate and contesting that through the press. So thank you all for being that and sorry if I've gone too long here in my rage. Okay. We're re-streamed that. Chris Hedges, I don't know, have you ever thought you'd see a situation like this come about in the United States even despite that long history that Elizabeth and I read out. This is nothing new, but it hasn't been so bad for a while as a Christian. You know, because I was 20 years abroad, when I came back, the incremental deterioration was more dramatic to me. So I think I saw, I was able to juxtapose what the country was like when I left and what it was like when I came back. So I think from the moment I returned from being overseas for two decades, I knew we were headed towards a very bad place. There are all sorts of parallel, historical parallels. When you have a military as ours has become a state within a state, I studied classics of course, they become uncontrollable. I mean, at the end of the Roman Empire, the Praetorian Guard was auctioning off to the highest bidder, the role of emperor. And so this rampant militarism, again, you saw it in the Kaiser's Germany, leading to World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That pattern I noticed was being replicated. Of course, I spent my career overseas on the outer reaches of empire, so understood our empire worked. Empire is the external expression of white supremacy. Empire is, as Orwell reminded us, about markets. And this is Ukrainian conflict is about markets. They're all about markets. You can't talk about war if you don't talk about markets. The loss of the economic hegemony of the United States is being countered foolishly with the desperate effort to gain or regain military hegemony. It doesn't work. It never works. It sees late empire engage in all sorts of desperate acts of military adventurism. We can go all the way back to Vietnam. The architects of the 20 years of military fiascos in the Middle East, neocons, of course, it's kind of protean. They're neocons, liberal interventionists. They can change their name. They go from administration to administration, like Victoria Newland or Robert Kagan. I had to deal with L.A. Abrams, by the way, and Kagan who worked for him when I covered the wars in Central America. And their whole job was to discredit what those of us on the ground were reporting. And it included pretty vicious acts of character assassination. We were accused of being fifth columnists and secret members of the FMLN or the Santanistas or whatever. So, and these people have been at it for a long time. But when you read them closely, they're very, they're complete ideologues. They, history has stopped in 1945. Every act of diplomacy or attempt to deal with a multipolar world, it's 1938 in Munich and it's the new Neville Chamberlain. And then there's this vast black hole between 1945 and now the U.S. interventions in Indonesia, in Chile, in Iran, in Guatemala, of course in Chile, the CIA orchestrated the assassination of the Army Chief of Staff and President Salvador Allende. And why do they, you know, it doesn't matter how many fiascos they push us into. They even resurrected the domino theory that if we don't expand NATO, Russia is going to be at the gates of Germany. I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, by the way, as a reporter. We all thought in our naivete that NATO was obsolete. NATO was formed to prevent Soviet expansion into central and Eastern Europe. I was there when Hans Dietrich Gencher and James Baker and Margaret Thatcher, all these figures promised Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded beyond the borders of a unified Germany. But the problem is the military machine, and this was universally accepted. I mean, even Henry Kissinger, a war criminal himself, understood this. George Kennan later called the expansion of NATO to 14 states in Eastern and Central Europe, the gravest mistake of the post-Cold War era. But of course it was a billion dollar a year bonanza for the arms industry. I was in Poland a couple of years ago. There's billboards from Rayfian all over the place. Why did the war in Afghanistan get extended? Because it was lucrative and profitable to these corporations. We know from the Afghan papers that both the military and political leadership understood that this was a fiasco. And this is the problem, this rampant militarism. It's why Alexander Berkman called in the German military the enemy from within. They're unaccountable. They're a state within a state. And this is what kills off late empire because as you have that economic decline, and George is right, we are headed for some very serious economic dislocations, they seek to compensate for that decline. And then it goes back to deindustrialization, everything else, with more aggressive militarism, which is counterproductive. In terms of censorship, I fought the US government my whole life. I mean, and I go back to El Salvador, the Reagan administration made war on the press in the Middle East as well. Of course, I'm an Arabic speaker. I spent a lot of time in Gaza. And even people forget in the Balkans because after the Dayton peace agreement, I was reporting that all of the war criminals and warlords were still in power. This was under Clinton and Sandy Berger in particular, and Dick Holbrook and others were determined to crush my reporting because Clinton was using that as a prop for his election. So there's always been a clash with government. What's different now is the corrosion within the press itself. So when I began, there was a place for someone like me. Yes, I admit my editors often thought I was a management headache, but they needed people like me who would go into places like Sarajevo who would do this kind of work. And this was all my decision. I wanted to go there. When I volunteered to cover the war in Yugoslavia, the executive editor said, well, I guess the line starts and ends with you because all the other New York Times reporters wanted to be the Paris bureau chief. So the difference now is the corrosion within the press. That's why I'm such a fierce as everyone here is defender of Julian who has not committed a crime, of course, has done the most magnificent and important work of journalism of our generation. And also I've been very outspoken about removing figures like Alex Jones or Trump from media platforms because these entities are completely opaque. We know nothing about them. They know everything about us. And the quid pro quo, if you look closely, with the Democratic Party is that we will not break up your monopoly, but you work on our behalf. So remember, they locked the New York Post out of its own Twitter account. They discredited the contents which was about the contents on Hunter Biden's laptop. They discredited the contents on the laptop. The New York Times called it disinformation. It was right out of the Russian playbook. Silicon Valley, we don't know, because it's dark money, but spent presumably hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of the Biden campaign. And that's why I think the fiercest called for censorship comes out of the self-identified liberal elite because they don't want to accept responsibility for what's happened internally or even in terms of fiasco's overseas. And they magically want to wish away this neo-fascist movement. And this is what always happens in decayed societies or Yugoslavia is a good example. These types of figures are vomited up, a product of kind of despair and disenfranchisement and rage. And we're about to see tremendous blowback and the way that the Biden administration is responding is not to address the dislocation, the rupturing of social bonds, the economic misery, but essentially trying to erase critics such as myself. Just to close, why it was on RT? Well, first of all, I'm a strong supporter of the boycott divestment and sanction movement, which is a good way to get yourself banished from everywhere. But I'm on RT because there was this march against critics of the Democratic Party, critics of imperialism, critics of Israel. And so they put you in a marginalized space and then they demonize that space. That's how it works. So as George said, six years of my show's on contact. And by the way, there wasn't one show on Russia. And in fact, anytime we mentioned Putin, it was not flattering. And I could point you to shows, but they don't exist on YouTube anymore. But we know why they removed it. When you look at the 2017 Director of National Intelligence report, the seven pages on RT, it's all about, again, as Jill said, giving voice to Occupy Activists, anti-fracting, that's why they, as they lose credibility, as they become more frightened of a popular backlash than that, this is what always happens in decayed systems, then that censorship becomes more and more draconian. And that's what's happened. But, and I'm on Substack now, which is where my friends Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibi are, but they'll go after Substack. I mean, that's a subscriber surveillance working for me. I'm resurrecting my show. I think it comes out today with Cornell West, my television show, my column, all of that gets resurrected. But they know what they're doing and they're frightened and they have every reason to be frightened. And they know who the targets are and it has zero to do with Russian propaganda. Of course that becomes, and just in terms of dinner, Jill, I want it on the record that I used to have dinner when I covered the Middle East with Momar Gaddafi. So I don't know where that puts me. I hope there are no photographs of it, Chris. There are somewhere. Well, no. I don't care. On Jill's Twitter thread, some crawl always shows up with that photograph. I mean, it's amazing. Scott Ritter, you recently kicked off Twitter for good. Tell us what you think of all of this. Well, I mean, look, I'm not a journalist. I don't even play one on TV. I'm not a politician. George knows that. And Jill, I hope it's not disrespectful. I have nothing but the highest respect for people who choose public service. I went to different, I'm a simple Marine. And when I say simple Marine, I want to put an emphasis on simple and Marine. What you see is what you get. There's not too much complicated here. I'm probably the most conservative person on this panel too. But we can agree on something. That is the search for truth. When I say simple Marine, I say that with pride because the Marine Corps actually trained me to be an intelligence officer. I know in some circles that's seen as the hiss of death, you're Satan personified. But for me as a military intelligence officer, even though that's an inherent contradiction in terms, it's about the search for truth. I mean, as a combat intelligence officer, there's the old saying, if you lie, you die. And it really is that simple. Combat is the ultimate truth teller. If you lie about something and people take action on that lie, you're going to get yourself in a position where you're going to get killed or other people are going to get killed. And I was told from the very beginning that my job was never to tell my boss what he or she wanted to hear, but to tell them what the facts were and to assess those facts as honestly as possible so that they could make a decision based upon that. And it was a simple job. Really, telling the truth is not hard. If you educate yourself, if you empower yourself with knowledge and information and then you honestly and objectively assess the facts, the truth shall set you free. I mean, even the CIA is corrupt of an organization as it is as those words, as you enter, the truth shall set you free. And at one time when I was not working for them, but I used to go there all the time, they meant it. It was the honest goodness search for truth. And some people say, well, that's all nice, but reality doesn't work for it. Tell that to the second lieutenant who showed up in his battalion brand new and was told by his boss, what do you think about intelligence? I said, sir, intelligence runs operations. He said, good, you're right, my operational, you're running training for next year. Second lieutenant. And then I turned around and did crazy things like ask infantry regiments to join us, tank giants to join us, and got 300 airplanes to show up. And then four-star general said, what the hell's going on in 29 Palms, California? And I found myself in front of a four-star general trying to explain why I was, why I was having the largest exercise in the Pacific and it was being run by a second lieutenant. And I explained to him, sir, the way we're fighting right now, the Russians will kill us in a heartbeat on the battlefield. We're doing everything wrong. My job is to get my battalion ready to fight a war against the Soviets and win. He heard me out, he went, you're right, son. And he changed every second lieutenant by telling the truth. When I was a weapons inspector in the Soviet Union, I had to go up against the Center for North Carolina, Jesse Helms. He was fabricating the story about the Russians hiding 300 missiles. I used my intelligence skills, assessed the factory, wrote a paper that said, they can only produce 60 to 80 missiles a year. So the 300 missile thing is impossible, given what we know about production. I was called before the Defense Intelligence Age. This time I'm a captain. And I have a general and a whole bunch of colonels yelling at me that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, that I'm ruining their budget, that they need those 300 missiles to be there in their budget so they can justify a billion dollars worth of equipment to just counter them. I said, they don't exist. They can't exist. The truth shall set you free. I won. I was arrested by General Schwarzkopf for telling the truth. I was fired by General Schwarzkopf for telling the truth because I was saying, you're not killing scuts. But once they listened to me, they set me free, gave me a medal, and we went on our way. I survived all that though, because I was on the inside. I was an insider. I was part of the team. I wasn't seen as a threat. I was seen as somebody who's trying to do right by the team. I then went on to the United Nations and spent seven years searching for the truth about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. And when I resigned and I started to speak out against the policies of the United States, how they were corrupting that process, I was no longer a member of the team. And from that moment on, I had been attacked. I was told by the head of the CIA station in New York City the day I resigned. He said, if you go through with this, the FBI is going to hunt you down and they're going to do something that I can't say on this show and a part of my body I can't say on the show, but use your imagination. And he was right. The FBI came after me hard, continued to come after me hard, the truth shall set you free. I was vindicated on Iraq. Everything I said about Iraq was correct not because I'm some sort of genius. I'm not. I'm a simple intelligence officer who applies the techniques necessary to accumulate data, assess data honestly, and give honest assessments. I did the same thing with Syria on chemical weapons. And today I'm doing the same thing in Ukraine. Now, people will say, you're always picking the wrong side. No, the truth has no sides. The truth has no sides. I can guarantee you that if I felt that Vladimir Putin was wrong and was invading Ukraine on a lie, I'd be out there leading the charge against Vladimir Putin. I can guarantee you I'd do the same thing against Bashar al-Assad. And I'd do the same thing against any American president. And unfortunately every American president seems to be telling lies and leading the bad fight. So that's where I am in the search for truth. On Twitter, I'm not a social media guy. I joined Facebook to talk to my family. My daughter got me on Twitter in 2018 because I wrote a book about the Iran nuclear deal. She said, you got to market yourself. I said, well, how do I do that? She said, go on Twitter. I went on Twitter. It took me three years to get 4,000 followers. I thought that was a big deal. Then this Ukraine thing comes up. And it starts to explode. George talked about how his account was going crazy. When I got suspended for the first time for questioning the narrative in Bucha, my account, I think had just gotten over like 14,000. By the time my suspension was lifted, I was up to 60,000. And by the time they suspended me again, I was getting close to 100,000. It was out of control, which is why I'm convinced the algorithm finally said, you must delete, you must delete. And they did. The excuse they gave was absurd, literally the most absurd excuse in the world. That I was somehow abusive and I was harassing simply by telling the truth. What I thought was the truth. I'll be the first one to admit, I don't have the same insight into what's going into Ukraine that I had with Iraq. Iraq, I was on the ground doing the job. Here, I'm a long distance observer, but the techniques of observation and evaluation that you're trained as an intelligence officer to apply to any given set, apply to Ukraine today. And simply looking at the available data set, you cannot help but draw the conclusion that it was the Ukrainian national police, namely because you have all the elements. You have motive. They don't like Russian collaborators. How do I know? They said so on their website. You have the intent because we have a commander from the national police ordering his people to shoot people in butchers on the day in question. And you have the evidence, the dead bodies lying in the street in the white armbands carrying the Russian food packets. So that's why I put out there. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. Could there be other data out there that I'm not aware of? Absolutely. But it's not there. So as an intelligence officer, I take the available data, I assess the available data and I provide assessment based on that available data and Twitter found that objectionable. They find just about everything I do objectionable but it's not just Twitter. Look, right now I'm lucky I have a chance to write for consortium news and I'm grateful, Joe. Thank you very much for that opportunity. And Joe has been wonderful. I put out an idea and Joe either ignores me which tells me he has no interest in that idea or he comes back to he says, go for it. And when he says, go for it, I go for it. And the only pushback I ever get is on facts where he says, can you sustain this? You've made this assertion. How do you sustain? And that's what an editor's supposed to do. That's the job of an editor. I have no problem. I don't call that interference. I wrote for other outlets and I'll name them American conservative and Truth Dick. American conservative always had an issue because they said our funders, the people who fund us have a problem with what you're saying. Really, not because it's not true but because it's ideologically not aligned with what you claim you stand for which is supposed to be journalism, open, free reporting about the facts. And Truth Dick was conservative, of course, is conservative. Truth Dick was very liberal. They had the same problem. I would say things and they'd say, well, the people who write our paychecks aren't too comfortable with what you're saying. One thing about Twitter, when I started to get a following, I got a phone call from RT. They said, we'd like you to write for us. And so right off the bat, I have to say that Twitter brought me to the attention of RT, which means Twitter has not just the ability to inform people, but it can empower you with opportunities. I mean, I think some people actually capitalize on their following by engaging in some sort of YouTube type stuff. Chris, you know about it. I'm not blaming you. That's a wonderful way to make a living. I don't know how to do it. And I probably don't have enough of a following to do it successfully, but people do that. So you can't sit there and just say Twitter is only social media. It's not. Twitter is a very, very effective means of communication and it is a mean of empowerment, both in terms of knowledge and information, but also in terms of sustaining your life through employment, making money. So here was an opportunity that came to me from RT. And RT has never once told me what to write or told me how to write. The way it works for RT is I wake up in the morning and look at the news and I fire off a text that says, I'd like to pursue this story. And RT, unlike Joe, well, if they don't like it, come back and say, I don't like it. So I know. But they'll say, no, we already ran a story on that. We don't think you're gonna add anything to it. So no, usually they come back and say, tell us a little bit more and I'll lay it out and they go go for it. And like Joe, when they say go for it, that means write it. The only time they come back at me is that they have a problem with the facts. It's never about the content. It's never about the message. They've never told me what to write or how to write. And yet RT has been criminalized here in the United States, criminalized for the simple reason that they are allowing things to be said on their platform, they can't be said anywhere else. They can't be said in the American conservative, even when I was allowed to write for them. And once they found out I was writing for RT, they dropped me like a hot potato. So you can't say it on the American conservative, on an American platform, you can't say it on Truthdig. Well, they've self-destructed, but even then they would come back and no, RT is there. And now I come at it from the American perspective and the intelligence option perspective. Let's say that someone else is writing on RT. I want to read it. Why? Not because I endorse RT, not because I endorse the Russians, but because I want to empower myself with a different point of view. I want to, and I'll give you this little word. I used to travel to London all the time, George, you know that. And I used to stay in nice posh London hotels because other people were paying the bill. And in the morning, you go down for your wonderful British breakfast. And one of the wonderful things about a British breakfast for me isn't just the food. Get rid of the tomatoes and everything's nice. It's all the newspapers that would be laid out for you to read. And I'm talking about the Guardian, the Independent, the Times, and the Sun, if you wanted the naked girls on page six. So you get this, but when I picked up the Guardian, I knew exactly what the Guardian was about. They wore their bias on their sleeve. Same thing with the Times. Same thing with the Independent. And I'd read all these newspapers and I'd put on my bias filter. And I'd filter out the bias and I'd accumulate the data and suddenly I had a very nice picture of what the truth was because I looked at everything. In America, you can't do that. It won't let you have access to the bias anymore. They force you to consume only that which is approved by the government through mainstream media. It's the most un-American thing possible because in America what makes this country, the greatest country in the world is the ability of the American people to engage in a town hall meeting. Norman Rockwell painted a picture about it. And I love that picture. I got it hanging on my wall. Man standing up in the church, talking a piece of paper in his hand. Everybody listening to him and when he's finished, you know someone else is gonna get up with a piece of paper in their hand and they're gonna listen to him. And they may be saying the exact opposite thing, but there's no fist fight. There's no gun fight. It's a dialogue, the discussion to inform and empower the constituents so that they can empower themselves with information and knowledge to hold their elected representatives accountable for what they do in their name. That is the very definition of democracy. And Twitter was a wonderful tool for them, a wonderful tool. There's a lot of people on Twitter with a lot of power. I'm not just talking about the average blue check. I'm talking about people with real power, real clout, and you have the opportunity to engage with them. Sometimes irresponsible, there's some pain it's on there, but that's what happens when you have 288 characters that are unfiltered, but you can filter itself, block mute, whatever you want. You can select the people that you wanna interact with. And if you select right, you come off the Twitter experience much better for it. And Scott, you're saying the bad dialogue, by the way, I think it's page three, not page six. Okay, well, I'll tell you what it was. You're saying now the dialogue in the US is gone. We're gonna move on to Elizabeth who has a few questions for George, or I don't know if you could stay much longer, George. So it's your turn, George. Sure, yeah, I wanted to ask, first of all, I mean, I know we've talked about Assange a little bit, George, you spoke about it at the beginning, but I wanted to ask specifically, do you think that the treatment of Assange is having a direct, you know, it's set a precedent that we're already feeling the effect of, because the conversation is always this will in future, you know, effect press freedom, effect the freedom of speech. Are we already seeing it now? Well, you know, I'd like to think that there was a body of British journalists who, if not for the chilling effect of Julian Assange's treatment, would otherwise be writing the truth. But if I said that, I'd be a liar. There's an older age here. Thank God you cannot bribe or twist the average British journalist, but when you see what unbrived he'll do, you realize there's no reason to. So there was no need for a chilling effect for the vast majority of British journalists because, hey, they were already frozen so far as the proper exercise of their duties and responsibilities. The great Irish journalist whose sons and grandsons and granddaughters are still around in journalism today, Claude Coburn, is the origin of the quotation that nothing is true until it's been officially denied and the proper relationship of the journalist to the power is that of the dog to the lamppost and so on. I'm afraid all of that died a long time ago and maybe wasn't even that much alive when Coburn was saying it. But as Francis Bacon described, self-censorship as the arrow that flies in the night, there's no doubt some of that. Chris talked earlier about those of us who write about and talk about what's happening in Palestine on Good Friday in the dawn. One of the holiest places in Islam was stormed by Israeli forces, firing weapons and throwing tear gas bombs and arresting hundreds of worshipers. But you won't read much about that in the British media or anywhere else in the so-called West and what you will read when it eventually is covered will be almost the precise opposite of the truth. And there is no doubt that that is the result of self-censorship. A very close friend of mine, once a very senior journalist in the English media and with high responsibilities within it, told me that before you write the word Israel, your finger kind of pauses over the eye because you know that as soon as you have written that and as soon as you have published what you would like to say that you will be assailed in an organized and very powerful way and you will sustain damage and over a period maybe even permanent damage as a result of that. That's why I'm wearing a hat by the way, I sustained damage over that very subject. So Julian is of course a warning to everyone not to overstep a mark which we didn't even know was there. We thought that reporting on war crimes was a good thing and would be appreciated at least by a substantial section of the population but that turned out not to be true. But I'd be lying if I said that I thought there were a whole bunch of journalists just straining at the leash if only that hadn't happened to Julian Assange. Now a question I think a lot of audience members are probably asking is what can we do? As journalists what can we do first but then secondarily as an audience what can we do? Are there any different platforms you all suggest? What is it that the audience can do especially? Is that to me? Yes. I believe in a thousand flowers blooming so I'm on every platform I've ever heard of and because by the grace of God I have six children who know more about these things than me I'm on platforms I don't even know I'm on and had never heard of before but I now hear people say to me I saw you on such and such. I'm trying to remember the I can't even remember the name of the platform. I saw you on such and such and I had no idea I was on it so get on as many platforms as possible. I hope that Musk low down oligarch that he is at least supplants the kings of Saudi Arabia at Twitter on his avowed manifesto of free speech principles. He may be lying and it may not last but it's got to be better than what we've got at the moment. So don't fall for the argument from people who say we can't have an oligarch owning the media. These are people who don't appear to know that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post without damar from them. Get on, learn the techniques that we are employed in right now. This as I said earlier, quite illustrious quite high profile panel will attract a vast number of viewers. Not just live but long into the future. And when Chris Hedges writes about it and so on it'll get another lease of life. Learn these techniques, learn how the camera works the microphone works, the computer works, the lighting works learn how to market what you are saying learn how to speak in a way that will be understood not vulgar, not the sun, not page six or page three. No, but know that oftentimes people like us speak to each other in a language that is not understood by the mass of the people to whom we must reach. So learn, learn, learn, study from the experts and it can work. I have every Sunday, the mother of all talk shows now on every platform you can think of. It's average viewership over the last seven weeks is 1.15 million. That's what you call a mass audience. It knocks into a cocked hat, all the Sunday sofa shows in your country and in mine. So we are many, they are few. They're powerful and we are not, but we are many and they are few. And if we can get our people to rise up and shake these shackles free, then I believe that we can be victorious. Truth can win, truth can set you free. Joe, did you have any more questions for George? George, let me ask you and then I want to ask the others about whether we're going to exit this period. I had mentioned at the beginning that there were excesses by McCarthy when he went after the army. There's always an end to these scare periods. How do you, none of us a billionaires on this panel. And so we don't own our own press. We still depend on others, whatever it's a social media or corporate media publication. So we're in the situation where we need to be coming out of this kind of depression. Will it end with the war when the war ends or are we in a permanent breakdown now in a permanent period of oppression? Sorry to tell you, I think it's the latter. I think we are in a permanent period. This kind of, Chris knows the classics far better than me but it seems to me like the last days of Empire which will probably outlast at least some of us on this platform, maybe not the youngest amongst us. I think we're in for a tough time. But we've got clever people. We've got ingenuity, technological ability. We can, even if it's more difficult, we can still be found on this plurality of platforms that I speak about earlier. I don't, I think that McCarthyism went too far, yes, and that therefore ended but it was also regarded as not actually necessary anymore. It was a response to what was seen as an existential threat by the existence of the Soviet Union. But I think by the 60s it was clear that that threat was not actually existential, that whatever Khrushchev said, they were not going to bury us and that they were in for a long period of hegemony. And that period is undoubtedly coming to an end now. There will be new Twitters. There will be new Facebooks. There will be new Instagrams. These things after all are only blackboards. You don't need to be Einstein to invent them. You don't need to reinvent them either. You just give them another name. If Musk fails at Twitter, I feel sure he'll open a new Twitter called probably called Musk. And it might smell as bad as the last one or it might be marginally better, I don't know. But history is never over, never, ever over. It's never the end of history. And we've got to do what we can to keep on speaking. Some of us are more vulnerable than others in terms of loss of income and even physical harm and so on. I happen to not be, I don't have a problem about income. And I have absolutely no fear of being rubbed out as a matter of fact as a religious believer, being rubbed out by these people would be of considerable assistance to me in getting through the pearly gates. So I feel like a free man. And I think all of us as far as we are able need to act as if we are free men and women. And Chris, since you say you want to do a piece maybe about this, if you have any questions you want to ask anybody here? No, I mean, I think that I would just echo what George said. I don't think we're headed for a good time. I look at Julian's book that he published a few years ago, Cypherpunks. I mean, he saw the effective use of digital technology and wholesale surveillance as presaging a very frightening kind of corporate totalitarianism. And of course he's right. But as George said, these people are terrified of the truth. I covered East Germany. All the typewriters were officially registered and their typographic samples were held by the Stasi. So you couldn't type anything on an East German typewriter. It was also true in the Soviet Union that they couldn't directly trace. But this gave rise with heavy censorship again in the later days of the Soviet Union and East Germany when these regimes had lost all their credibility to the Samizdat publishing, which were kind of self-publishing entities of Voslav Havel's The Power of the Powerless. I think Volgakov's Master Margarito was also, and these just became, and the whole, Havel's whole thesis in The Power of the Powerless is that the more these people seek to cover up the truth, the more powerful the truth becomes. And there's always a way to disseminate it, although yes, the screws are certainly tightening. I expect, we already hear noises, but I expect them to go after sub-stack because this allows, gives people such as Glenn Greenwald and Mike Tabie, Matt Tabie and myself a platform that they know who the enemy is. But the tighter the control becomes, the more incendiary the truth becomes. And I think the history of dissident movements, especially in totalitarian states, is such that, yes, they can restrict the size of the platform, but they can't restrict the truth itself, of the Gulag Archipelagos and other Samizdat publication that circulated hand by hand by hand. And that slowly chips away at the foundations of any totalitarian state. But I do think that's where we're headed. I think that, especially with the midterms, I expect the Republican Party, which is just a cultish party around Trump, to certainly take control of the Congress because of the stagnation and inability of the Biden administration, very similar to 1932 with Frans von Pappen and the aristocrats in Germany who were frightened of fascism as they should have been. But their response is to recreate the Ancien regime that nobody in Weimar wants. We're in a very similar historical period that ensures the rise of these new proto-fascist movements. I think that's where we're headed with this time. Of course, they're gonna come back with a vengeance because the self-identified liberal elite attempted to cancel them out. They are going to perpetuate that cancel culture, that's culture of censorship on steroids. It's going to get very ugly and we have to also acknowledge, as George said, that economically the dislocation is going to become very severe, already at over 8% inflation. So it's gonna be a tough time. But if those of us who hold fast to that imperative of truth and are not afraid to speak it and there will be costs, there always are costs in the end, then eventually it may take time, but eventually that center of power will atrophy until what always overthrows these centers, and of course I saw that in Eastern Europe, is when the police and the foot soldiers will no longer protect it. They'll no longer sacrifice for a corrupt and discredited elite. That's what Crane Brinton and his book on revolution points out, that no revolution succeeds until those on the ground tasked with defending it defect or eat portions of them defect because that creates paralysis. I saw that in Leipzig. Honecker sent down an elite paratroop division to fire on the crowds. Leipzig was the epicenter of the East German opposition movement and they wouldn't do it. Honecker lasted another week in power. But I certainly think that if we draw historical parallels, the seizing up of the American system of power, it's captured by a cabal of obscenely rich and corporate oligarchs is one that will ultimately leads to its own demise. When will that happen? I don't know, Aristotle wrote in politics that when you have an aristocratic elite like ours that takes power and deforms all of the mechanisms of power to serve their own interests, then your only two choices are revolution and tyranny. What's it gonna be? Yes. You can't tell, you can never tell. It could be, go back to the 1930s. We had very powerful union movements. The Communist Party was a very important part of opposition, which we've kind of erased from American history. They saved us from a nascent fascism that many people in the ruling class, Henry Ford and others embraced. Remember, McCarthy was used to destroy the bonus encampments that were set up. And we got Roosevelt, I've read Roosevelt's private correspondence to his brother and he's quite cognizant of the fact that if he doesn't begin, these are his words, if he doesn't begin to offer concessions to a struggling population, massive unemployment and everything else, we'll get revolution. These are Roosevelt's words. And so he provides new deal opportunities, including employing 12 million unemployed people not out of the goodness of his heart. He came from the ruling oligarchic elite, the only probably person with a conscience in the White House was his wife, Eleanor. But because he understood the consequences of not doing so. And at the end, Roosevelt said that his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism. But these people are so obtuse. And again, this gets to Marx's late stage capitalism where capitalist entities begin to cannibalize the very structures that allow them to remain in power without any kind of regulation or control. And I think that's what we're seeing. So yes, Germany went another way. Italy went another way with the same kind of economic dislocation. I think the left has been so weakened within the United States. Labor unions have been decimated and destroyed. We do see a nascent movement, the Staten Island workers at Amazon, for instance, but they're still very weak. And Amazon may never even recognize the union. They'll certainly do everything they can to destroy it. That could see our blowback essentially come in the form of a more traditional authoritarian system. We were saved from a coup on January 6th because Donald Trump is inept and spent most of his time tweeting in front of the television set. But if you get a Tom Cotton or a Mike Pompeo that come out of the military, that understand how to orchestrate these kinds of things, of course, there's already heavy voter suppression orchestrated by the Republican Party, then I think we could very well see the snuffing out of what's left of American democracy. And then we'll be reduced to writing by hand our articles and our novels and passing them around. Like you were describing. Well, that is not, you know, don't stop because of course I used to work for the New York Times. I'd write a front page story in the next day, the State Department would have to hold a press conference on it. I understand what the power of a platform like the New York Times can do. And I was of course pushed out of that platform but that doesn't, so your power may be diminished but that doesn't mean you don't have power. If as long as you have the courage to speak the truth. As long as we have internet access to publish and we have the freedom to do that. Joe, I wanted to bring you in here. Yeah, well, I love the note that Chris ended on, you know as long as we have the courage to speak the truth which brings to my mind the words of Alice Walker saying that the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we have it to start with. And, you know, I would add to the, you know the very, you know, the grave concerns about press freedom censorship, you know the overarching concerns about our democracy which are very interconnected with that. I would add to that also, you know a very climate dystopian view of the future as well and the speed with which that is progressing right now is absolutely jaw dropping. And, you know, there are events potentially in the very near future which the facts would suggest are accelerating towards us right now. One being, you know, major food shortages in the United States as well as around the world but people always think, oh, it's somewhere else but here too, specifically the Colorado River which is drying up, has been drying up for the last couple of decades is almost at the critical level right now where it won't get over the dam. And the Colorado River supplies the California agricultural system which provides half the fruits and vegetables for the entire country. All right, and that's just one river system, major water system which is in big trouble and could really begin to manifest pretty soon. So there's that and then there's also what's happening with the Antarctic ice sheets right now one in particular the Thwaites Glacier which will lose its break. Right now it's against a backstop. The shelf of that glacier has three to five years and then it's gone. And at that time that Thwaites Glacier which holds two feet of sea level rise is going to accelerate and it could be as soon as a decade or two or maybe several decades but we are in for a very heavy storm very quickly and all of this is happening right now with 1.1 degrees centigrade of temperature rise and that's going to rise to 1.5 degrees in the next two decades. So things are really accelerating in a way that is going to be massively destabilizing. And it's true that destabilization may further trigger the movement towards demagoguery and the fascist state. But it also may completely, it may be so destabilizing that even they can't assert power or not in their usual way. So I don't know what we're in store for but I think it's really important to act on that we need to have the courage to speak. And the other point I wanna make is that people are not buying what is being force-fed to us what's being shoved down our throats now and all sorts of data makes that clear. Not only the epidemic of diseases of despair and the declining lifespan in the US people are really very much at the end of their rope and in despair right now and very much primed for not just embracing autocrats cause the autocrats are there and a lot of people aren't buying that either. The disapproval rates right now of Democrats and Republicans are very high and do not differ very much. The approval rate is about 30% for both major parties and the disapproval is 44 and 48%. So people are widely rejecting the political options that are put in front of us. And if you look at polls there's about a 25% confidence in our government institutions there's 29% confidence in the mainstream media the lowest in the US among 47 industrialized countries. So people widely revile our symbols of power across the spectrum right now. And if you look at young people the approval rate is 21% for government and 50% of people between the ages of 15 and 25 50% are hopeless, 25% have considered doing harm to themselves within the last two weeks. I mean, these are absolutely staggering statistics for what they say about the wholesale rejection of the system as it exists right now. And there's rising support for really transformative and progressive change. The word socialism right now has a very high approval rating among the younger generation. People are looking for much more progressive and transformative solutions right now. It's gonna be a real, it's anybody's guess how we are going to communicate given the suppression, the surveillance and even the availability of the internet and the climate uncertainties to all sorts of social infrastructure right now it's anybody's guess but there is widespread rejection of where we are and where we're going. And I would just again reassert what Alice Walker said biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we have it we really do have that power and I think it's really incumbent on us who are not brain dead and there are so many who are brain dead out there among mainstream media and our revered institutions there are so many who are completely disconnected and living inside of their own echo chamber that people are very hungry. We see that in statistics as well that it's about a 62% it's an all time high right now people who are looking for other political options. And so it's really important that we not be made to be hopeless that we not be brow beaten into learned hopelessness and learned helplessness because actually that's, they are quaking in their boots the empire is doubling down because its days are numbered and it's really important that we continue to stand up and fight as hard as we can in as many ways as we can peacefully of course to make that change happen people are really ready for it and if we build it they will come. It's really interesting Julia talk about these polls because outside of the dialogue between the media and government there's an entire country out there and if you recall during Russiagate most people didn't buy it even bipartisan or they didn't put Russia on their list of their most serious concerns have to get it and being able to afford a doctor and a food, et cetera. So like number 10 on that list and we're seeing the same thing now of Biden is desperately trying to blame Putin for the pump Putin pump the gas petrol prices the gas prices in the US blaming Russia for that people apparently according to reports or some TV reports I saw don't buy and they're not buying it they see through these people. That's right. It's a hunger that you were talking about which is why George is seeing his numbers go up emotes why stocks, Twitter feed exploded why our readership of the sort of news has tripled in the last month and a half because people want to hear and all the alternative you're absolutely right. Yeah, yeah and people want another alternative. They're also not buying the war. We're told we're supposed to pay higher food prices corporations are seizing the opportunity to do war profiteering of all sorts not only on gasoline and fossil fuels but everything across the board. And then there are supply chain issues the cost of food of course is really going up because of global food shortages that certainly are related to the war but people are being told they're supposed to sacrifice and feel good about this and people don't people are outraged and going even before the war it was something like 62% of the public who said they were really having trouble keeping up they were not able to keep up people are struggling economically like George was saying and everyone really that we the public everyday people are really being thrown under the bus right now can't afford healthcare. Congress in all of its wisdom recently appropriated some of 14 billion approximately for Ukraine half of which is military expenditures while it couldn't come up with 13 billion to support healthcare and prevention on COVID for the uninsured couldn't come up with money for a to extend the child tax credit and here we are pouring half of our resources into these wars which are essentially endangering us and really just going into the wallets of the war profiteers the merchants of death. So the whole system is really disgusting and predatory and is killing us literally and figuratively economically in terms of our health, our climate and the environment in every way it deserves to be absolutely overthrown and people know that they are not buying this. I think the recovery from this war hysteria is going to be much quicker than it was after 9-11 because in 9-11 we were attacked there was all that rage and grief related to this attack on US soil. And so we went into attack mode and it took a very long time to get out of it. I think this is gonna be really different. I think already you can see people are not into this war and the more it blows back on us the quicker people are going to be to reject it. So I think there is a silver lining here which is potentially even bigger than the cloud and this is very much an opportunity like we haven't seen for a long time to really trigger alliances. I mean, for this Earth Day, I'm involved with the coalition which is bringing to Earth Day the reality of the war. How can we not consider war, militarism and nuclear weapons environmental issues? These are absolutely as critical as the climate regrettably and could happen on a much shorter timeframe. And we have found suddenly all these groups are really interested and willing to participate. That's at earthdaystrike222.org if anyone is interested. It's a fledgling grassroots kind of thing but lots of people are sort of looking at Earth Day as an opportunity to say that the future of the planet and the people on it are not only about climate and environment as traditionally defined we need to redefine it in a much bigger and more unifying way that builds solidarity and that hastens our actions that are transformative. We're talking about a global green new deal and an economic bill of rights essentially and the restoration of our institutions of democracy getting money out of politics and publicly financed elections and ranked choice voting that eliminates this hysteria about parties and candidates and independence that actually challenge this system that is throwing us over the cliff. So it's funny that I'm just seeing the chatter out there in all kinds of ways that are already breaking the chains of this latest episode of just rampant wild militarism. I think there is a very good chance that it will pass. And as to say the Democrats are doing a horrible job things are looking good for the Republicans in the upcoming elections. However, what have the Republicans promised? Absolutely nothing. They are only running on the incompetence of the Democrats and they're right about that but they have nothing to offer in exchange. So there are all kinds of ways that the current crisis has all sorts of avenues to make inroads into this. We're at a breaking point and there are all kinds of ways to turn that into a tipping point. And that's what we got to do. Scott, when you were at the duty, did you or senior officers around you give a damn about what the public thought back home about the war? Do you feel you needed public support back home or is that out of your mind? You're muted. So, the camera's there, sorry. I'll say this, during the Gulf War, I had an aunt who I love very much, artist, liberal, is the day is long, lived up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, hung out with her liberal friends. These are some of the most wonderful people on the planet. And I called about a day before the desert storm began. I went out, pre-internet, and I got my AT&T number called in and I called. And she told me that, she said, can you listen? I said, listen to what? She said, there's a, we have a meeting. They're pounding the drums of peace. We're sending a signal to the heavens to bring peace down on the earth and that you'll be, and I'm like, hey, thanks very much. Then I hung up and I didn't give a damn about it because my job is to go to war. I don't really give a who, but anybody's doing back at home because it doesn't matter. I am solely focused on the job of closing with and destroying the enemy through firepower and maneuver. That's what war is. I hate to be pumped about it. If you're going to send me to war, I'm going to kill people. I'm going to kill a lot of people. I'm going to make sure they don't kill me because that's how I win. And if you don't like it, don't click the ensuite. And that's sort of my message to America. You know, when you talk about militarism, it comes down to this. If you have a son or a daughter, do you want their hands drenched in blood? Yes or no. Because if you're for war, a soak in blood because that's what you do. And one thing that should come out of this Ukraine conflict is that war is damn ugly. Chris knows this because he's seen it. You know, we got used to copacetic war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only ugly dead people we saw were the enemy. We didn't get to see the ugly dead Americans. A lot like we're seeing the ugly dead Russians with bodies literally blown apart, literally blown apart. And that's just the reality. Americans, you talk about the military. The military is just this offset. We are not a reflection of American society. We're not meant to be a reflection of American society. We're not democratic. We can't be democratic. We can't be, we're not a social experiment. We're not an organization where we say we're gonna test this theory, this theory, this. And unfortunately today it's become that. And I will tell you, if we go to war today, we're gonna get our butts kicked all over the place because we're focused on everything other than killing. The military exists only to kill. That's it. If you're focused about anything else, you're going to die. And I hate that. I know that's today in today's politics, the proof is in the pudding. We just got our butts kicked in Iraq and Afghanistan by goat herders and villagers. The world's most sophisticated military, but the most highly trained people got beat by a bunch of villagers and goat herders. Why? Because we're not in the business of killing. Hell, we kill people, but we're doing other things besides that. We're playing social experiments. We're playing geopolitical experiments. We're not focused on natural accomplishable mission. But that's a different point altogether. When we talk about, instead of talking about the military, we should talk about the Americans that empower the military, because that's the real problem set. It's not what the military is. I'm gonna tell you right now, you will never have to worry about the 82nd Airborne coming down to Washington DC and gunning down demonstrators. Not as long as there's a bunch of lieutenants and captains and majors and lieutenant colonels who took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. When you get up in the cranes of colonels and generals, I think they get a little corrupted by politics and power. That's where we get the revolving door into industry. The military industrial complex comes in and corrupts everything. But below that, we have some people that are trying to do a job. And they're doing it because, not because of the best paid people in the world, but because they actually believe in something. They take an oath that they believe in. And if you tell them to go and shoot down American citizens in the street, they're gonna tell you to pound sand. So I don't think you have to worry about the coup from above. I also don't think we have to worry about the revolution from below though, either. I'll tell you why. I talked about being a simple Marine, but I was also a simple firefighter for a while. That means that I sort of was in touch with the average American in a way that most other Americans aren't. Firefighters are actually some of the most progressive liberal people in the world, even if they're politically conservative, because if you ask a firefighter where in their community, the homeless Somalis are, they'll tell you exactly where they are because they respond to them every single night. They'll tell you where the unwanted pregnancies are. They'll tell you where the drug addictions are. They'll tell you where all the problems in society are, and they have ideas on how to fix it. So these are people that are socially engaged. And in 2016, I was playing golf at one of these elite liberal golf institutions where all the elite, powerful left-wing liberal Hillary Clinton supporting people were, and they said, who do you think's gonna win the election? This was in August, and I said, Donald Trump. I said, why? I said, because America has lost faith with Hillary Clinton. It's gonna be a close election, but you guys think that she's anointed, she's not. Donald Trump's out there winning the hearts and minds of people, and they're gonna vote, and they won the election. You talk about people not being happy with the choices. I'll give you two numbers, 76 million and 81 million. 76 million in 2020 was the second largest number of Americans to vote for somebody in the history of the United States. They voted for Donald Trump. 81 million was the largest number of votes any presidential candidate got in the history of the United States, and that was Joe Biden. And they both suck as presidential candidates. They're the worst possible candidates. They're despicable human beings with track reaches of doing nothing right for America. But at the end of the day, that was the choices they had. They had no other choices, and they allowed the political games of one upsmanship, either or black and white, no nuance whatsoever, and most importantly, ignorance. Ignorance of the very things they're supposed to care about. I spoke until I was blue in the face in the lead up to the Iraq War, empowered with more knowledge and information about the reality of WMD than you could imagine. And I got nowhere. Why? Because the American people are collectively the most ignorant people in the world about the world they live in. One of the reasons why they're ignorant is they have no time, no time at all. These are people that get up early in the morning, they work late at night. When they turn on the news, it's not to be informed, it's to be entertained. I sat down with them, I go Monday night football with these guys. I talked to them and they talked about Iraq and they're like, oh, well, you know, it's got, we don't know all you know, so we're just gonna sit back here and be ignorant about it. And then we turn on the thing and they'd watch number 12, run an end around. And they said, why are you running that play? I said, what are you talking about? Statistically speaking, that's only a 30% play on this situation. If you're first around, I'm like, how do you know this? Well, we read the sport. I said, you've got time to learn sports statistics and apply sports statistics and a real time analysis on TV. And you don't have time to learn about a war where your fellow Americans are gonna be killed. And the answer was no, they don't have time for that. They don't wanna make time for that. The biggest problem with America is that we have allowed ourselves to be wrapped in a cocoon of comfort. And with that comfort comes complacency and nobody wants to rock the boat. Not only that, because we live on these margins of efficiency, nobody can rock the boat. How many people can truly afford to lose their job by going to do a demonstration? Not many. So how many are gonna go to the demonstration? Not many. How many people can actually commit to build a grassroots organization and make it succeed? Not many. So how are you gonna do that? Not many. And here's the danger in that. Because so far we've had two political parties that exploit this ignorance and this comfort and this complacency to get people to vote even when they hate the candidates. And I can guarantee you right now in the upcoming elections, the Democrats are gonna lose because Republicans are gonna vote against them, not for the Republicans, against the Democrats. And there's, God forbid, a chance that Donald Trump will become president again. Why? Because Joe Biden's so bad, not because Donald Trump's so good. And there's no other option put out there for them that the system will accept. And this is why it's dangerous because eventually the cocoon of comfort is gonna collapse. Eventually the economy isn't going to be able to sustain this. Eventually people are gonna get hungry. Eventually people are gonna get desperate. And when that happens, ain't no vote on election day gonna solve it. And if you wanna see a nation that's going to collapse overnight, watch what happens when you ratchet up all the pressure on these complacent comfort Americans. You know, I used to joke back in the series, Chris, well, I hopefully get this reference. Like, you know, Lebanon used to be the, sort of the Paris of the Middle East and all the bankers. And you'd always look at the Lebanese guys in the late 60s, early 70s. And they were wearing, man, they got the bell bottoms and the silk shirts button down here with the old chain. They got the air going and the glasses. And you just look at them, the modern day term is politically incorrect with soy boy. You know, just these soft little girly men who, you know, oh, we're just so happy to be Lebanese men. And then the civil war came and those men overnight turned into the hardest killers the world has ever seen. Guys were stone cold killers. Gone was the perfume, gone was the gold, gone was the silk, on was the camouflage. They had guns in their hands and hatred in their eyes. These were the same people that I called soy boys derisively a few years back. What are you trying to say, what are you trying to say? It's going to happen. America's going to self destruct the revolution. You're saying there could be violent revolution, even though it looks like we will be violent revolution, not could be violent revolution with violence is in the American DNA. We're gunning people down in the streets every single day. We give guns out like it's candy and we have a political system that can't control it. We have more cops per capita than anybody in the world. And yet the cops are murdering people. The people are murdering people and we're still wrapped in a cocoon of comfort. When that cocoon collapses, it's over for America. Yeah. I don't see any way out of this. I wanted to ask you a slightly more mundane question, which was I remember when you were on Donahue show in the lead up to the war and you were talking about the WMD. What happened to Donahue show? Well, Donahue show had the audacity to swim against the grain. They brought me on, they brought some other people on, they tried to educate the American people about the reality of the potential conflict, what the case for war was and wasn't. And they were told by their masters to knock it off. Donahue refused to knock it off. He was a big name. He attracted a big audience and so they closed them down. And he was the top rated show on MSNBC, wasn't it? Absolutely. It tells you that it's not necessarily about money, it's about power. Yeah, that's a good point. So you're off Twitter now, Scott. And how much do you think that's gonna hurt your message? Did you have your analysis of the war in Ukraine? Well, it's not gonna hurt mine. I mean, Twitter was an interesting platform. I enjoyed being on it. It wasn't my life, it isn't my life. Doesn't affect my thinking at all. I will continue to write. And as long as outlets like Consortium News, RT and anybody else who will pick me up, put it out there, I will do it. If not, George and Chris have both said that there's other ways to do it. And I will continue to do it because we have to. Because the revolution I'm talking about, I don't want. I don't want that revolution. I want to avoid that revolution by empowering people with knowledge and information so that they find a solution to these political problems before the whole system comes collapsing in. We're gonna erase it next time, though. I don't know about anybody else on this panel. This show has really bummed me out. And I don't know how to enliven it to make a nice exit from the show. But I'd like anybody else to please make some comments and maybe ask each other some questions. I have a discussion going here because not a good situation that we're in, is it? Well, there's no point in sugarcoating it if any of us genuinely believe that the Elysian fields were just over there and all we had to do was walk over to them. I'm sure we'd say so. But because we don't believe that, we can't pretend that. For me, you know, Scott said he's the most conservative person here. Maybe I'm the most, the opposite of that. Well, I'm conservative on some things, but I believe that the choice is, as Rosa Luxembourg put it a hundred years ago, almost exactly, that the future of the world, the dichotomy is socialism or barbarism. We will have socialism or we will have barbarism. In the end, the rest was just lipstick. We had a long period. I was lucky enough to be born into it and grow up during it when social democracy was thought necessary and could be afforded by those that rule and own and control the society. We needed to be given healthcare. We needed to be given education free. We needed to be provided with public housing and so on. And I got all of these things. I used to go to a hut in our housing estate and get cod liver oil and orange juice and malt to build me up all from the state. I lived in a public house given by the state. My father worked in a factory that the state had directed to go there, an American company, national cash registers from Dayton, Ohio. My school was just a few hundred yards away and so on. That was a period of social democracy. Capitalism could afford it then and thought it was necessary then. After all, otherwise we might choose to follow other stars than the stars and stripes. So we were given that, but none of that exists anymore. People, as Dr. Jill said, are being forced into despair, particularly our young people. Her statistic about the number of people who had thought about harming themselves in the last couple of weeks was simply horrifying. And I speak, as I say, as the father of several young children. So, capitalism cannot solve these problems. I'm sorry for Scott. That revolution is not going to be avoided. All we can avoid is its successes. All we can avoid is its form. But its content, a transformation, an absolute transformation from what we are now and to what we will have to be, cannot be avoided. For me, war, famine, pestilence, disease, environmental destruction and so on, are any luck to play a part of the economic system that we call capitalism. And you can no more have one without the other than that's just wishful thinking. So we're not gonna agree on that. And in any case, I have to go shortly, if you'll forgive me, but we're not gonna agree on what the future will be. But what we can all agree on and have all agreed on is that what we have now is simply not good enough. This is not as good as it gets. This, if it's allowed to continue, will take us on a spiral that we don't want to contempl. It will be barbarism. It is pretty barbaric now. Certainly barbaric in the Yemen right now. It is sliding towards barbarism. And if we don't put the brakes on and get the maximum number of people grouped around a set of ideas and immediate demands that will put the brakes on, then we are in very, very serious trouble. Your society and mine, Oscar Wilde said we were two people divided by a common language. But I think that's no longer true. Your country and mine are becoming one. Not your choice or my choice, but we are becoming one. And we must respond as one. And the more I look at it, the more obvious it is that your problems are really the same as our problems and that your arguments for change are really the same as ours. And as we've got the same language, it's probably a good idea that we talk to each other more and more often. I have to take my kid to the football. Now that's soccer where you are, but it'll always be football to me. If you'll forgive me, I'll take your leave, Joe. Appreciate you coming on. And I wonder if Chris has a last word or if we could wrap it up. Chris? Well, only that I think the system, the ruling elites understand that we have no interest in the perpetuation of their power. There's a reason, as Jill said, the elections keep costing more and more. There's a reason why we're only given an alternative when in electoral politics, which is to vote against that which we hate, not that which we support, that's all by design. And I think that that gets back to what we spoke about at the beginning, which is why they are imposing harsher and harsher forms of censorship. Their response is not to ameliorate the discontent, the problems that create this kind of discontent and despair, but to blot out those voices that point it out. And it's our job, no matter what they do, if we have any integrity or dignity left, is to keep raising our voice. And if that means that that is, I end up with the only voice I have and I teach in a prison in a prison classroom, then that's what I'll do. But I think everyone here is fairly, I have a much harsher critique on the military than Scott was active military that shut down the bonus marches, also were deployed against the miners of Blair Mountain. Actually, I spent a lot of time in the Marine Corps and I kind of liked the Marines, but I did find the higher up you go, the more political games and lies they told, Westmoreland being a perfect example. But yes, we are a militarized society and the elites will attempt to use these forces, either the paramilitary, a quasi-military, police or militarized, of course. I mean, that's what our history shows. So it's all coming, it's not good, but we can't use the word hope if we don't resist. Joe? Yes, Joe. May I throw in a final word as well? Sure. Yeah, so also responding in part, well, to your take on this discussion and also to some of Scott's statistics, I wanna throw out that in 2016, I know the numbers better there than in 2020, the largest voting block were those who chose not to vote at all. And those who did vote were voting largely against the other candidate. And to the extent and people in overwhelming numbers wanted inclusive debates so that they could hear from other candidates aside from the parties of War and Wall Street, people wanted to hear what the other options are. And so it was 100 million voters or eligible voters who chose not to vote at all. And 75%, actually more than 75% were saying they wanted to hear, they wanted to know. And this is the whole reason why censorship is running strong right now because the empire knows how vulnerable it is because people are really chomping at the bit and what they are hungry for is a much more progressive people-oriented agenda, as George was saying, it's socialism or barbarism and people have had quite enough barbarism. As Martin Luther King said, it's either chaos or community and we are seeing that fall in the force. As an environmental, you know, wonk, I myself, you know, went through my fit of utter despair, I would say 20 years ago, 25 years ago, which is what made me an activist because the writing was on the wall about really the collapse of our physical and environmental infrastructure at that point. And I was absolutely horrified. And after working with physicians for social responsibility and other nonprofits that were trying to educate our, you know, help educate people and to educate our power holders, it didn't work. It was really clear that it didn't work. And at the end of the day, you could talk to the legislature to your blue in the face, but if you can't pay their campaign contributions, your policy, you know, is not enacted. You know, that's been proven over and over. The study by Gillens and Page at Princeton and Northwestern like six or eight years ago, you know, documented that in inordinate detail. The system is extremely corrupted, but the people are not. And, you know, I would find when I got tricked into running for office, I was able to get into a debate running for governor in Massachusetts. And that debate was held in a TV studio. There was no live audience. And the ideas that I put forward, you know, about essentially a Green New Deal, although it wasn't called that at the time about downsizing the military, cutting military and putting those resources into domestic needs at home, about the right to higher education and to healthcare as a human right. Those ideas went over like absolute lead balloons inside of the debate studio. But when I walked out, I was mobbed by the press who told me I had won the debate on the instant online viewer poll, which nobody knew was actually going on. And it like completely changed my worldview because I had entered into this political stuff out of absolute desperation, out of feeling like, you know, we were, we had a large coalition of healthcare and public health and labor and so on and environmental groups that were trying to promote what was really motherhood and apple pie, you know, it was a green economy and green jobs and we couldn't move it at all. But, you know, it turned out that actually the public buys that the public is into that. And I had thought, you know, it was hopeless. And I was only doing politics because everything else had failed, why not try that? And, you know, it completely transformed my worldview to see that when we can get the word out, when we actually can educate people, people are ready to be transformed. You don't have to change their minds. Their minds are already there. They just need to know that there are options. This is eminently doable if we are able to do an end run around the inherent, you know, censorship and suppression that's built into the system. So I think there's every reason to be hopeful if only because the system is trying to make you hopeless. And the, you know, the censorship and propaganda campaigns are really orchestrated in order to, you know, to create this false sense of hopelessness when there's actually enormous power and enormous potential that can be harnessed. So I would say as an act of political defiance and disobedience, it's really important to resist the campaign to make you hopeless and to realize that we do have power. Things are not going to be easy. They're going to be very difficult. They are extremely perilous and it's going to get worse. But that doesn't mean that we, you know, do not have really transformative options that are available to us right now if we insist on, you know, on refusing to be silenced and refusing to be made powerless to our own future. People are not buying the future that we're being handed right now. So it's really in our hands to redefine that future. That was wonderful, Jo. I'm feeling better already. Thank you. You're a doctor. So I might hopeful note before we slide back into the abyss again, I want us to thank George Galway, Chilstein, Chris Hedges, Scott Ritter, Elizabeth Voss and our producer, Kathy Woven for this long and let's say interesting discussion. For CN Live, this is Joe Laurier. Goodbye. If you are a consumer of independent news and the first place you should be going to is Consolidate News and please do try to support them when you can. It doesn't have its articles behind a paywall. It's free for everyone. It's one of the best news sites out there that's been in the business of independent journalism and adversarial independent journalism for over two decades. I hope that with the public's continuing support of Consolidate News, it will continue for a very long time to come. Thank you so much.