 So welcome and thank you for joining this conversation on the impacts and implications of an indoctrinated citizenry by mainstream media and US government propaganda to peace. And there I say the future of life on this planet. As Abby was just mentioning, as I told her how many people were coming, you know, right now we need to be together and supporting each other and listening to sanity as it really is, I feel like a suck into madness. So thank you for being here with us. And I'm just thrilled to share the next hour with our guests, Abby Martin, Chris Hedges, and Lee Kemp. And I'm deeply, deeply grateful for their time here today and for all the time they devote to unmasking the fire hose of lies and propaganda we are fed each day. And I want to thank our co-hosts and partners on China Is Not Our Enemy campaign, where we have called out PBS for censoring a documentary they produced on China, taking their people out of poverty, called Voices From The Frontline, China's War on Poverty, and our partners are Pivot to Peace, Veterans for Peace, China Working Group of Veterans for Peace, and World Beyond War. And thanks to this team here for your support, Shay, who runs our Divest From War campaign, is supporting on tech, and Ali is supporting with posting links, as we mentioned them, and also getting us your questions. So to start, I want to raise up a courageous truth publisher, Julian Assange. And all our guests today have been tireless in their efforts to support Julian. Not only was Julian censored in so many ways, including I remember back to PayPal closing down WikiLeaks receiving any funding, you know, like we'll talk today about how they choke off the funding, but also he's now held in prison for telling the truth. And this week is when Julian will be married to Stella Morris. So please, please, please send some love to them. Today they launch their wedding website. It's assangewedding.com. There's places for you to send love and celebrate love even in the midst of imperialist, violent, hegemonic insanity. We are peace activists and lovers. So here we are in the rage of war with everyone losing their minds to the notion that more weapons and NATO are a good thing. The people of the US bombarded by propaganda while voices of reason are censored, which is normal. But has it reached catastrophic levels? Each of our guests is experiencing a restriction on their voice and their funding. I see it as sanctions in the hybrid war on peace. So, you know, if they starve your voice, it will be silent. I wear my, we will not be silent teacher today. So we'll start the conversation a few minutes. I just want to wait until more join. So I thought I'd start with the definition of censorship, the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. And may I add in this conversation or a threat to US hegemony, the first amendment of the United States Constitution protects freedom of speech and expression against all levels of government censorship. Despite the word having great emotional pill in the West, it is now more than ever the wrong way to frame the issue. Slaves and indentured farmers in the South could hardly believe they had freedom of expression, much less the right to publish. Publishing started as a white male capitalist phenomenon. Censorship has always existed as the economic privilege of those with capital. The claim that only the state censored is a liberal and certainly outdated concept. Our problem today is far beyond even the Orwellian construct of manufactured consent put forward by Chomsky. There are numerous new phenomenon since 1995, but here's a couple. Humans have limited attention capacity. Time in the day, number of ideas, places buying for their eyeballs. Electronic media in all forms now massively exceeds any individual human capacity. Humans are forced to limit their intake. Controlling the new gateways like social media is vastly more important than suppressing an idea. Since we spend so much time interacting with phones, computers, games, and TVs, gargantuan amounts of data become available to the owners of the underlying platforms. With the advent of behavioral economics, both the US government and the large platform, data monopoly owners, can now massively influence our thinking, emotions, and behavior. The internet began as a US Defense Department project, and Facebook was funded by CI, a related private equity. US focuses mainly on controlling social media as that is where people go. They have relied on private companies censoring, which we'll hear from Abby about, to help reduce the outcry against government censorship. They use massively sneaky ways of removing people or ideas that the US intelligence seems important to be removed. These three guests give their voices and lives as lifelines to truth, and I daresay sanity, in the midst of all the conspires to drive us mad, demoralize us, and shut us all up. It is frightening what is happening, and really important to hear each of their stories, as what is happening to them is meant to affect each of us. Later, we'll hear what we can do to help their voices stay elevated, and what we can do, in general, about the suffocating of truth that happens all day every day. So I want to start with Abby Morton. Abby is a journalist, TV presenter, filmmaker, and radical, amazing activist. She founded Empire Files and co-founded the Citizen Journalism website Media Roots, and serves on the board of directors of Media Freedom Foundation, which manages projects censored. She is currently working on a film to expose the cost of military to global warming, Earth's greatest enemy, and recently answered a lot of questions about Ukraine with Bayan Becker, helping 150,000 viewers out of the fog of war. Thanks for being with us, Abby. Thank you so much for having me. And I want to start with values, because I think it's so important for us to start with where we're rooted, as so many people aren't rooted, and therefore are easily used. So why are you so committed to exposing the truth about the U.S. Empire? Well, I think the Iraq War really radicalized me. That was really the turning point in my political awakening. I mean, it propelled me into activism. And of course, the mainstream media's complicity as well as the bipartisan consensus to sell the war and the unaccountability for the war criminals that perpetuated the war made me realize that it was impossible to generate awareness about the U.S. government's crimes without having a medium to share that message. And so really my initial role in this entire movement was through anti-war activism, Jodi. I think similarly speaking to probably a lot of Code Pink's audiences, I was naturally repelled and revolted at the fact that my government, in my name, was perpetrating numerous illegal wars of aggression, occupation, and subsequently this 20-plus-year bombing campaign of several countries that has never stopped. And it's just this completely normalized thing in the periphery that we are just at war with several nations. And through this mass awakening and through the generation of several independent media websites and facilitating citizen journalism and basically urging people to become citizen journalists themselves to tell the news that they want to tell, of course, my journey through RT being one of the only available platforms to really uplift voices like these. But through all of this, I mean, you realize, you know, you kind of get dosed in the truth and reality that you are living in the belly of the beast. We are very privileged American citizens who basically externalize all the violence and barbarism. And the cognitive dissonance of the majority of people in this country is greatly disturbing. And really this Ukraine war hysteria and war drive really makes you realize that the media is just absolutely complicit and telling people what they should care about and really prioritizing conflicts over others. And as Chris Hedges so aptly says, what victims are worthy and which are unworthy. And, you know, as peace-loving people and as anti-war activists, I think first and foremost, we have moral consistency and our values are consistent. And so we're outraged by war wherever it is. And the thing that a lot of people in this country don't understand is that war is a permanent state with the U.S. Empire. And that's something that we need a great education campaign about and really utilizing this moment in time to generate a movement, an anti-war movement that's rooted in anti-imperialism and international solidarity. Because really as American citizens and of course people living in the West, that is all we can do is generate opposition to our governments and to stop them from escalating the already dangerous tinderbox that they've created with their policies. Thank you, Abby. And you say that as, you know, this conversation is about the censorship. And that's why they're censoring you so that a movement can't happen. So that so much just information happens that confuses and demoralizes people. So next, Lee, I want to bring you up. Lee Camp is a comedian, activist, journalist and television host. He was the host of Redacted Tonight on RT and uses his voice to educate wherever he is invited, including while live on Fox News calling out the network for being a parade of propaganda and a festival of ignorance. Lee, you moved from being a comedian to an activist to a journalist and a television host to expose the truth about the U.S. empire. Why? Why? Well, I, first of all, thanks for having me, Jody, and thank you, Abby, for joining us from the future. I was doing, I just wanted to be a stand-up comedian and I was doing stand-up comedy and I started writing comedy when I was 12, started performing at 17. And it was nothing that political. I wasn't that political. But two things happened, mainly after college, because I think most people that end up becoming informed get their education after college or without college. One was realizing the reality of America, what America was responsible for going back hundreds of years. As with Abby, the Iraq war was very pivotal for me. I wasn't that aware before it and then seeing the bombs drop on television like it was a movie happening and really having no understanding as to why we would be doing this to an entire country, it kind of blew me away. And so then I went through a transformation where I was kind of getting bored with the standard comedy. They call it observational comedy where Jerry Seinfeld's probably the best known for it where you have no real strong opinions except your strong opinions are reserved for how exciting it is to get a parking spot or how upset it is not to get a parking spot. Like that is the entirety of your political stance. And I was moving beyond that both in my personal life. And then I started putting it into my stage act because part of it was, that was the type of comedy I enjoyed. I enjoyed making people think while I was making them laugh. But also I, there are very few venues left in American culture where you get to speak unscripted on a stage to a bunch of people. One may be just speeches, protest speeches or something. But one of the very few left is stand-up comedy where you, no one tells you what to say, you write your own script and you go up there and you talk about whatever you want and rarely are you censored. And so I kind of felt like if I've been given the gift of a stage with people standing in front of me, then I felt like I should be talking about all the important things that I cared about in my offstage life. And so I started putting more and more into it, meaning politics into my comedy and still getting laughs. I was never the type of person that wanted to just become a political speaker and leave all the comedy by the wayside. So I was still doing fine on stage, still getting tons of laughs, but talking about important issues. But that's what basically made it impossible for me to get on television. I've never been given a spot on a late night show. I've had one scarce appearance on Comedy Central. For the most part, even though all of the bookers and everything knew of me, I didn't realize then, but now I understand that being anti-war, being anti-imperialist, being anti-corporate America, you are anathema to the corporate state. You are a problem, honestly. You are a problem that needs to be dealt with by the white blood cells of the American society, which are the mainstream media, the corporations that control the gates, etc. They jump up and they try and stop the infection, which is someone speaking out against the American Empire and revealing the truth of our endless war and our endless killing. And so it kind of went from there. And that's how I ended up at RT America, as I've told people. Well, until my show was canceled, well, the whole channel was canceled two weeks ago, is I knew there was no other network across the entire United States that would let me be completely uncensored, completely free to write my own words every day. And and so I did that for eight years and five hundred some episodes. And it was an amazing thing. And so now to see the entirety of the bulk of work, eight years, if you count the clips that were put up over a thousand video clips, all banned globally on YouTube and my podcast deleted from Spotify, I get that I am not the most tragic figure in the world right now. There are plenty of people that have a harder time than me right now. But I think it speaks to something very scary and very upsetting about American society and the ability to have a discourse that involves anti-war voices, anti-imperialist voices. And clearly that is not allowed. And this is not a new thing. If you look back in our history books, you know, you go back to World War One and anybody against the war was called treasonous. Eugene Debs locked up, professors kicked out of universities. Columbia University famously said that anyone giving, you know, basically comfort or advising anyone to even consider being anti-war would be kicked out of the university. And all the mainstream media, of course, doing the same. So this is nothing new, you know, that we're doing it again. We're doing the same ramp up to war that we did with the Iraq War invasion. And some people may go, well, yeah, but this is different. We're trying to stop the war in Ukraine. But in fact, as we know, the US government loves the war in Ukraine. And furthermore, we're really ramping up to the largest cold war we've seen in decades. Thank you. I love your passion. And, you know, also could we think we say to be effective, you know, we need to be disarming. So I think humor is disarming and why you're able to speak to a much larger audience. So thank you for using humor, because looking at a lot of it, mostly you just want to cry. So next, I want to bring up Chris Hedges. Chris is a journalist, Presbyterian minister, political commentator, and author, and was a former reporter for the New York Times. But, you know, as a critic of US imperialism, not allowed in the New York Times. I have to say, I have watched, I've, like, born witness to the silencing of Chris's voice over the past 20 years. I want to just, the deepest gratitude for Chris that he never loses his heart or his passion. Matter of fact, I want to say it gets just stronger and more searing. Because, you know, he's been, people have been trying to shut Chris down for a very long time. And, you know, for the last few weeks, he's been writing with a fury. You can find him on salon, your post, the Daily Post, that's right, the Daily Beast, Mint Press, and now on Substack, where he's turned to find the support he needs to live. But, you know, Chris, this isn't new for you. And, you know, why for this audience are you so committed to exposing the truth around the, the violent US empire? Well, it's personal, because I spent 20 years on the outer reaches of empire. I covered the wars in Central America, particularly El Salvador, Nicaragua for five years. I spent seven years in the Middle East, months of my life in Gaza. In fact, covered the Civil War in Yemen, Algeria, the First Gulf War, the Kurds. So it's, it has a kind of visceral, emotional power that makes me angry. Anybody who's not angry after leaving Gaza, I know, Jodi, you've been there several times, doesn't have a heart. And, and so that suffering that we carry out that, that the violence that we use to subjugate, these aren't abstractions to me. I've seen them. Journalists, especially during the war in El Salvador were targets of the Reagan administration. Anyone who seeks to report honestly about the Palestinians, and Abby's done some good work on this, you are immediately thrust into the wilderness. But I think it's because of those relationships, because I've watched it, I've watched the lies, I've been in refugee camps in Gaza, listening to the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force talk about surgical strikes against, you know, bomb makers and the whole block is blown away. I can see the bodies of the children. So I think those experiences give you not only an understanding of what empire is, an empire is really the external expression of white supremacy. I was with the Marine Corps in the first Gulf War as a reporter, the whole language that soldiers and Marines use to describe Iraqis, or anyone else in the Middle East is racist. And it's about objectification and dehumanization, which is always, as Primo Levi understood, the prerequisite before the real killing begins. So I think because as a reporter, for many, many years, I was writing on the mechanics of empire, and juxtaposing the reality on the ground with the lies that empire told about itself, and that unfortunately, are amplified quite effectively back in the United States by courtiers on CNN and MSNBC and anywhere else, that you kind of feel because you have a kind of privilege that for instance, a Palestinian and Gaza doesn't, it's the largest open air prison in the world, they can't travel, they can't work, and whatever cost you pay, and as you mentioned, I was very critical of the calls to invade Iraq and then the invasion of Iraq, which saw me issued with a reprimand from the New York Times to stop speaking out about the war, which I wasn't going to do when I left the paper, but whatever indignity or marginalization you suffer, it's nothing compared to the suffering of the people that I've seen in places like Gaza and that I care about. So that's really what drives it. And then, you know, I do, I don't wear it on my sleeve, I don't, I kind of hide the fact that I am come out of a religious tradition, but I do come out of a strong religious tradition. My father was, he'd been our veteran, he was a Sergeant North Africa in the Army in World War II, came back fiercely, anti-war, was involved in the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, very unpopular, all of those decisions, and particularly the institutional church had a hard time with his support of GBLTQ rights. His youngest brother, my uncle, was gay, so he kind of had an intimate understanding of how gay people had suffered. And of course the church had really been extremely cruel to people like my uncle. So, you know, it was a kind of fealty to the tradition in which I grew up, that you had a kind of moral imperative to speak out. And I do think that, especially having studied a lot of theology and ethics, there were no surprises. You understand the cost. You don't expect to be rewarded, in fact, you expect to be punished. And if you do it long enough, i.e. amplifying the voices of the oppressed, they're going to treat you like the oppressed. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate Medea's comment in the chat that Chris Hedges is a force that gives us meaning. You know, we've heard from three of you your three different experiences, but I think at the heart of each of you is heart, is empathy, and is compassion, and is the outrage that happens when you watch the violence of lies and the violence of the US Empire. So now I want to go back in the same order, starting with Abby, now let us know, like, what's happening to you right now. Because, you know, and maybe a little bit of like, is it different from the past? Because you've had this experience, and you know what it's like for people who want you to shut up. But what is your experience now, and what are your heightened concerns, if there are any? Yeah, I mean, I have the unique distinction of having this happen twice. First, I had to shut down empire files due to sanctions on Venezuela. Well, actually, no, Chris, you share my experience. You went through the exact same thing. I followed right behind you. You went the opposite way where you went to RT because our only other capacity to do this kind of journalism was already shut down through the coup in Venezuela. I had a I had a I had a show on Telesore, as you did. Exactly. Exactly. So Chris and I are in the same boat. Really, Jodi, this is it's extremely dangerous the time that we're living in. This is the culmination of a year's long campaign. First, it started with the algorithmic censorship in the wake of the DNI report. This was an intelligence report that was supposed to be the conclusive end all be all determination of how Russian propaganda brought us Donald Trump essentially what you really saw in this report that was overseen by 17 intelligence agencies was really just kind of a cursory attempt to indict RT for covering things that essentially are forbidden viewpoints in the corporate media, things like capitalism, alternatives to capitalism, things like third party candidates. Here we are in this supposed democracy where this was so controversial, but it had to be written up and into an intelligence report as an example of how shows like mine specifically calling out breaking the set as sewing discord and fomenting radical discontent on our airwaves. So really what the DNI report showed was that this is not about Russian propaganda. This is not about lifting up Putin or his narratives. This is simply about covering things that the corporate media failed to do on an institutional and systemic level. And that is why RT was so dangerous. And that's really why it had to be shut down. And so in the wake of this report coming out, you saw the algorithmic censorship taking root where you had giant Silicon Valley corporations essentially doing the bidding of the State Department. I mean, in a country captured by corporations, the corporate media is essentially de facto state media. So there really is no differentiation between the two. And so Silicon Valley acted accordingly. They preemptively changed the algorithm on all of these websites. And so basically every anti-war outlet that was doing really important journalism in a post 9-11 world got completely constrained, backpaged into oblivion. They just simply weren't found or searchable anymore, unless you already knew that they existed. So that was the beginning wave. And then it just continued to happen where you had the sinister state media labeling only on selective media outlets, of course, ding, ding, ding, the outlets that are not, you know, U.S. Empire allies and junior collaborators around the world. So it was basically China, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, very predictable, right? So that started to happen. And then, of course, the FAR registration slapping on Russia-affiliated state media, basically making it completely impossible to operate as a journalist working for Russia today. So they really made it so that it was untenable to work there and really untenable for guests to even go on the network. And really all of that was leading us to where we are today, where these media officials and politicians were clamoring to eventually just ban the entire network altogether so they can synchronize the messaging and make it completely uniform to prepare us for exactly the situation that's unfolding right now, where we have wall-to-wall propaganda that's just completely one-sided. And I'm just going to speak for myself. I think that we should have the Russian perspective, especially when everything is being infantilized into a binary of good and evil. I want to know why Putin is doing this, and it's not because he's an evil arch-villain in a cartoon movie. There's a very complex geopolitical analysis that I want to understand, and that includes what he is saying and doing. And so to cut us off from what Russia is saying and doing and why they are doing this, why is that? It's because they don't want us to have a diplomatic solution here. They don't want us to understand exactly why this is happening, how it's happening, because then we can understand how it can be stopped and how the war can end. So they want to treat us like children and basically use censorship as a tool to just infantilize us all and make us bow down to the State Department narratives that we know are inherently untrustworthy. And this is all, of course, in a post-911 world where they have proven themselves time and again to toe the State Department line, even if it's a matter of life and death and especially if it's a matter of life and death, when it comes to selling war after war. And what's really terrifying alongside this suffocating censorship that's now become normalized and even celebrated and applauded by many people, by liberals who want to sanitize the reality of all the things that offer complexities of the situation. It's not binary. On top of that, what's really terrifying is that once you have this strong uniform narrative pumping into people's brains, then it becomes very easy for the world to act accordingly and completely exfixate a nation of tens of millions of people and punish the poorest people in those countries. So countries like Russia and obviously Latin American countries in the global South are going to be affected by these sanctions as well. And that is also being applauded, celebrated without even understanding how this is going to exacerbate the situation, how sanctions are an act of war, and how really what we need to be doing is calling for peace and de-escalation. And when you see people like Jen Psaki saying, no, we're not involved in the talks. We're just involved in sending weapons. This should be a very alarming statement for everyone who is extremely concerned about the violence that's unfolding. What is our role? Because again, as Westerners, as Americans, that's all we can do is pressure our governments to stop contributing to the violence and barbarism that's being done in our names. That includes shipping nearly a billion dollars of weapons into the hands of Ukrainians who are being used as cannon fodder in this war. Thanks, Abby. Ouch. One other just quick question, because you talked about getting kicked off, you know, our tee being closed down, but didn't something happen to all your YouTube? Oh, yeah. Sorry, I was in such a ranting and raving that I forgot to talk about actually what happened to me. You know, my show ended in 2014. And of course, just as Lee and Chris experienced, it was completely hands off. I had full editorial control to the point where I actually called out Putin. I called out Russian aggression. I called out the intervention in Crimea. And it wasn't just that token statement. I went on for months and months and months to give really comprehensive nuanced debates about Russian incursion in Ukraine and the geopolitics of all of that. And so it really was an incredible platform. The reason that I left had nothing to do with politics. It was just a managerial dispute. And so here I am, you know, fast forward to 2022, knowing that the censorship wave had gained momentum to the point where the second Putin does something criminal that mirrors what our government does all the time. This is when the hammer is going to be put down. And so me, alongside Chris and Lee, our entire archives and catalogs of all of our hundreds of shows, critical interviews and segments and monologues about U.S. empire, about capitalism, I mean, just go down the line, thousands of segments purged in the blink of an eye, completely removed from YouTube and purged globally. I mean, this is absolutely insane. This is the modern equivalent to book burning of unsavory material. And it's a huge archive of anti-imperialist work that is purged forever from the historical record, memory hold for eternity. And really, that's where we're at because it just has that affiliation with RT. It doesn't matter the content. And actually, that's exactly why they did it because they understand very well, based on the DNI report, the very content that they do not want out there because it challenges what they're trying to do, Jodi. Yeah, unfortunately, yes. Thank you. So, Lee, you kind of mentioned earlier, you know, the closing down of RT and your experience. If you want to say anything more about that, but also one of the things that I've appreciated you've talked about is the diversity of the team at RT and how you found that different from other shows you've been on. So, Abby kind of talked about the freedom of speech that you're given, but if there's anything else you want to talk about being a voice at RT. Well, yeah, I mean, just in terms of the workplace there, it was well over a hundred employees and it was one of the most diverse offices I've been in or seen. You know, it was people from many different nationalities, but mostly Americans. But, you know, every race, color and creed, there really wasn't any standard political beliefs or anything. But in terms of, yeah, what's been happening, the almost within three days of each other, so RT shuts down, so the show's canceled, all of the YouTube videos banned, as Abby mentioned globally. And then my podcast, Moment of Clarity, also deleted from Spotify. And this is on top of years of really shadow banning on Facebook and other platforms, and mainly YouTube. I had one of my biggest platforms was Facebook. I spent probably 10 years, you know, around the center of it was probably around the time of Occupy, building up my Facebook page and had 330,000 followers. And then starting in 2016, almost instantaneously, it never gains any followers and the posts are shown to about 1%, maybe less, more like 0.1% of the followers on that page. So, you know, this is a tactic which I think in many ways is more effective than deleting or suspending people from accounts because it's very hard to, for those who are hit by it, the victims of it, to even really get any leverage or belief in the fact that, oh, my page is shadow banned, no one sees my posts anymore. And people go, oh, you're probably just imagining that the New York Times wrote about me the other day and said, because Lee Camp's numbers were waning, he claimed he's shadow banned. It's like, no, this went from thousands of shares a day to just about zero. But it's almost more effective. And it's done to, you know, thousands if not millions of people in one way or another, maybe mine is a larger example. But, you know, we're put into these filter bubbles and we think that people are seeing our posts. But, you know, I think it's mainly people that already agree with you. You know, if you look at my Twitter feed, about half of the posts talk about how Julian Assange needs to be freed. And then other people have never heard the name Julian Assange. So it feels a lot like these tools that were supposedly for making people aware, spreading information have now been used to silo us. And we think we're still getting messages out. And oftentimes, it's a room of a thousand people yelling about Julian Assange while no one outside of that is hearing the message. And obviously, you know, the solution is we must build up the alternatives. I don't think we should just delete all our accounts, because these are still some of the largest tools in the world for creating awareness, even with all of the suppression and the algorithmic suppression. But, you know, I just want to say that. And I don't think this should be anything that surprising. But the truth is, they're suppressing us and deleting us and banning us from these platforms, because we are dangerous. We are, we do make people aware. We're dangerous to the ruling elite that want to continue this American hegemony forever, and that are willing to kill millions. You know, the estimates now are 6 million have died from our wars on terror, our war on terror over the past 20 years, a million directly, 5 million indirectly. And so people are dying from these things, and we're making people aware of that fact and aware of alternatives and aware of the truth they're not getting. And, you know, I'll just speak for the other two on the panel here. They were incredibly pivotal in waking me up and giving me opportunities. And, you know, so in that way, they are dangerous, you know, Chris Hedge's books were incredibly important to me in my education and understanding of the way our nation works. And Abby Martin has been incredibly influential to so many, but also I wouldn't have had a TV show without her. So, you know, these people are very dangerous. I'm surprised you even let them be on video here. Thank you so much. Thank you for more dangerous voices is what we need. So Chris, I want to turn to you, because, you know, I first to share what's happening to you right now. And then, you know, you've experienced this for so long. But how is now different, if it is, and what, you know, what do we need to be concerned about? Well, I have a long career in American journalism. I started covering the wars of Central America in the early 80s. And I've watched the walls close in, especially I was a newspaper reporter, the as newspapers atrophied and lost significant revenue from advertising 40% of newspaper revenue used to come from classified ads. Once Craigslist came, they were hit. And then as algorithms was perfected, and sellers didn't need newsprint or even television to connect them with the buyers that could connect with them directly. The journalism, of course, went into a tailspin. If you pick up any Philadelphia inquire, Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, these used to be substantial operations when I began all had foreign pages. I mean, both Baltimore Sun, the inquire and the globe actually had their own foreign correspondent. It's all gone. And with that economic assault, these news organizations became more timid because they wanted to appeal to the revenue sources they had left. And so there was room for someone like me within mainstream journalism when I began. But that space has now been so constricted that it, you know, it's what Dorothy Parker once said about Catherine Hepburn's emotional range as an actress that went from A to B. That's kind of what you get. So, you know, everybody hates Putin, everybody supports Biden's pumping of, Abby said, these weapons systems, hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons systems, you know, that, of course, what they want to do is turn the Ukraine into Chechnya or the old Afghanistan when Brzezinski funded the forces that would become the Taliban or al-Qaeda. That's what they, but of course, again, the people who will truly want to make Russia bleed, but the people who will really bleed will be the Ukrainians. It's a very cynical kind of policy. And it makes the ability to negotiate a settlement extremely difficult when you have this constant infusion of weapons coming into the Ukraine to perpetuate the conflict. So, yeah, there's less and less space. You know, that my attacks on the war, I spent seven years in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. I'm an Arabic speaker. These weren't opinions. These were grounded and an understanding of the looming debacle to prove correct, but there wasn't any mystery among any Arabist. And I even the Arabists that I knew in the State Department and the CIA, the military, they were all in complete agreement, but they couldn't speak out. And so, if you did speak out among all my colleagues who were reporters in the Middle East, there was no disagreement. But they realized that if you were going to stand up, it was a career killer, which it was. So, this wasn't some kind of a need. This was, you know, it was months of my life in Iraq. I get it. But it ran counter to the narrative. And so, of course, I was completely shut out of the discussion. And they were bringing out these insane figures like Elliot Abrams and others. Anything about the Middle East, nothing about Iraq. But, of course, they parroted back that official narrative. And so, they were given a perch. Jesse Ventura was also at RT, never got his show at MSNBC. I had to give him a big check. And Phil Donahue was pushed off. They were very unforgiving to those of us who spoke out against the war. And they made sure that we remained completely exiled. So, of course, I had a show on Telly Sur. And then, Telly Sur crashed and burned. And they gave me, it was the same show. It's a very wonky show. It should be on it like one in the morning on some PBS channel. Most is writers. I mean, I did a show on the 100th anniversary. It was one of my favorite shows on James Joyce's Ulysses scholar at Trinity College Dublin. I mean, I actually did a show they didn't broadcast on Moby Dick. But it was really grounded. It was interesting. A lot of those writers couldn't get any play with their books. There's a lot of good books out there. Small presses, OR, Seven Stories Press, Haymarket. And so I was giving them, and I was as a writer, I don't like being interviewed with them. I read the books. So I was very conscientious about reading the books. So it was a wonderful run. And I loved it. It was really great. And I think it probably bored the people who ran RT in Washington. Misha used to call it his intellectual show. I think he watched it, but usually with the sound off. So it was, you know, this is a kind of show that should have been part certainly of our public broadcasting system. But isn't the last show that was done nationally by PBS was Bill Moyers, the last show that dealt seriously with power. And then once he was, and he wasn't funded by PBS, he was funded by a foundation. So yeah, there's been, you can't talk about these subjects. And if you do talk about these subjects seriously, then you are, and as Abby and Lee both laid out, you are, there's all sorts of mechanisms to make sure you're shoved aside. So I've followed my friend Matt Taibi to Substack. And I think it'll work. I mean, I'm hoping that it brings in enough subscribers. And I will go down to the real news and reconstitute my show and write my column for Bob Shear. I was laughing about how we're dangerous because remember, Bob used to be the editor of Rampart. So I think with Spiro Agnew or somebody said there's a bomb in every issue, which I would think is the highest compliment you can pay to any journalistic publication. And I'm very loyal to Bob. Bob is trying to run his website basically from a social security check. So nobody's making money, money, there is no money, let's be honest. I love this story with Bob. He was constantly trying to make money with Ramparts. He doesn't like me when he says this because he says he's a good business person, but this is a true story. So he was desperate to get advertising. So he took a Pan Am ad off the back of Time Magazine, and he put it on the back of Ramparts and then ran around to show corporations and businesses that it was a responsible magazine because look, I got Pan Am and Pan Am suit him to take it off. I love Bob and I'm loyal to Bob and we'll never leave Bob. Because it is about the truth, it's not about... We were all fired from Truth Day. There's another issue. There you go. Another progressive site crushing a union. This publisher was kind of funny. Chris, you and I are following each other from one firing. Well, I think it speaks to the narrowing. I mean, I think, you know, Chris, when you start and you say, I was a New York Times reporter and you're talking about, you know, people who are more serious and more educated in the State Department and the CIA and then to this, what I think Abby said, this infantilization of U.S. brains that over these couple of decades is staggering. It's really staggering. And we see the effects of it. And we hear, you know, we need to build a movement. But, you know, as Lee says that, you know, only if it's the throat of who can actually get information, they have to be fighters to get it. You know, they have to really like work for it. But you know, Jody, you can get it. It's in print, but nobody reads anymore, which frightens me. I don't own a TV. I'm not on social media. I have a Twitter account, but I don't run it. I guess I'm on Substack now. But I don't, I don't, I read every night. And if you look at the old radical movements, you read like Emma Goldman's autobiography, these people are working 12 hours on sweatshops in the Lower East Side. And then they're all going to anarchist study groups in Yiddish. Education is key to, you have to understand systems of power. It's why I teach in a prison, because they don't have access to social media. And I make my students get the TV out of their tier, out of their, they actually are in a wing. And these people are so brilliant. And, but we, but I wrote a book, of course, on it, Empire of Illusion, the end of Literacy in the Triumph of Spectacle. But you can't get it from images. You can't get it electronically. If you want to understand cultural hegemony, you have to read Gramsci. You know, if you want to understand dual consciousness, you have to read Du Bois. You know, you have to remain grounded. And, and of course, it's so tempting and all the dopamine hits. And, but I think it has had a very pernicious effect, especially on the left, because however well intentioned they are, they're not actually grounded in, in theory. So Cornel West and Richard Wolfe and I had this idea that we would give a talk every year and, you know, Marx, which I did not want to do, frankly, with Richard Wolfe, but I did, or Du Bois, you know, or, you know, so Luxembourg, we did Marx, there was another. And so, you know, all these figures in the hopes that people would then actually sit down and study because education is power. When you understand how systems work, when you understand, then you can fight it. And these systems are very good about putting up, you know, all sorts of propaganda to essentially fool you about who they are and how they operate. And they're very, very good at it. I mean, the public relations industry is maybe, you know, after the arms industry, one of the most evil industries in the country. So I just, I think that part of what the left has to do is, because there are great thinkers. I mean, I'm not a Leninist. I'm kind of an anarchist, I guess, but I don't like labels too much. But I read Lenin. I mean, you know, you got to read Lenin. And you got to read Marx, at least the first volume of capital. You got to read it. And that does give you the weaponry, the intellectual weaponry, by which you can then begin, because you understand where the weak points are, you understand why they're doing what they're doing, you understand what they're going to do next, but you're never going to get that off a screen. Chris, thank you. You answered my next question was where do we go from here and educate yourself to the systems that we live inside of, which, you know, brings us back to how I started is where are we grounded. And so we started with your values. And then where are we grounded is how we don't get used. And then how we become valuable to others. And education and political education, so important and so rare. So thank you for that piece, because if we're going to build a movement, it has to be on an understanding of the systems we live inside of. So, Abby, I want to turn to you, you know, to our audience that so wants to know what do we do in the face of this depression, these depressing stories you've just shared with us. It's the end all be all question. What do we do as journalists who have experienced the constriction and just the blatant censorship that's happened. And, you know, a lot of people I'll just say this really quickly. A lot of people have said, you know, YouTube's a private company, they can do whatever they want. Well, yeah, that's technically true. But this is a curtailment that's happening on behalf of the state. And we have to be really honest about that. Because when we first joined all the social media companies and the advent, you know, the proliferation of social media with the initiation of the internet, it was basically painted as this egalitarian thing that all of us could utilize these faculties and basically compete with huge corporate media outlets and stuff like that. And so we did, right? Remember that mantra under Google, don't be evil? Well, I mean, really what they did was just acquiesce just like every other major corporation to the whims and desires of whatever the Pentagon wants at the end of the day. And of course, tasking themselves with being the arbiters of what is and what is not reality. What is and what is not truth. It's a very dystopian reality that we have to wade through. But I think critical media literacy is the first and foremost thing that we need to teach ourselves. And of course, people are strapped. I mean, I just read a statistic while Jen Psaki is telling us all to strap up at the gas station and buckle up for the Putin tax for gas prices rising. I just read an article that says that over 60% of Americans now are living paycheck to paycheck. I mean, yeah, it might be easy for people like George Tanaki or Jen Psaki to suck it up and pay more at the gas station. But I don't think that they realize how average Americans are struggling paycheck to paycheck. They can't afford this. And again, that goes back to these grievances that are very prevalent and pervasive across this country. People are suffering. People are dying needlessly because of the structural violence of capitalism. That's not allowed. You are not allowed to see these things on our airwaves. That's why five corporations control and constrict everything that we see. So going back to what do we do about it, I think like Chris said, we need to go back to kind of the old school measures of how organizing worked peer to peer, meeting up and study groups, teaching these things, right? How do we navigate the reality that we live in today? How are we navigating the propaganda that's coming at us in a very insidious fashion? Because they've really perfected the art. And so now we're left kind of to figure it out on our own, which can be very overwhelming for people who don't have the time and the resources to do that. So what I always encourage people to do, aside from, of course, being a citizen journalist, utilizing the tools that are available right now. But then again, the whims of these networks and new tech companies that are trying to give us alternatives could end up inevitably doing the exact same thing to our content. And so really, newsletters, something like Substack is good because you can generate email addresses and have carry that over to whatever projects you're doing. But I always tell people, follow the journalists that have proven themselves, that have shown themselves to have moral consistency. All of us, you know, Chris put his job on the line at New York Times. I put my job on the line to speak out. I mean, Lee has proven himself over the last decade. You can trust us. And there's several other people who have proven themselves as well and paved out their own editorial freedom and paved out a space and niche that shows that they are trustworthy. And so that's really all we can do. Support and back the journalists that you trust because really it's so insidious that everything is really propaganda and everything has questionable funding. I mean, really, if you're kind of picking apart where are we getting our news from from all sources, it's all questionable. Vice funded a hundred, I mean, millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia. And they have the audacity to pick apart Kremlin backed media as propaganda. It's like, well, what are you guys doing? So it's really across the board, I think to have critical media literacy, we need to do the work. And that includes getting off the internet and definitely getting off Twitter, because as Chris mentioned, this is designed to trap us. And it's designed to demoralize us and to make us feel like we have no agency and we can't do anything about what the oligarchy is doing. And that's exactly by design. Thank you, Abby. And thank you for all you do to ground us and make us smarter. And so Lee, in the question of what can we do, can you add to that? Um, start a survival garden. Tomatoes. Yeah. No, I look, I agree with everything that Abby just said. I think that when you when you study protest movements, the ones that have the impact are the ones that interrupt business as usual. The the co-host of my podcast, Common Sense, Eleanor Goldfield has said all all protests that don't in some way interrupt business as usual are not protest. They're parades. And so that's fine. We can have those. Those actually can be important in letting people know of a cause, letting people know of of what's going on. But just they should be viewed that way. And the ones that tend to actually change the the, you know, change governing, change laws, change moments in history, those are the ones that generally interrupt business. They are the they are the pipeline fighters that have that have made the pipelines in certain next, you know, certain examples too expensive to continue because it's just lawsuits and people constantly fighting in courts to try and have people removed from from training themselves to equipment. And, you know, it's the tree sitters. It's it's these the the lawsuits that are fought in court to slow down these businesses that are exploiting our land, destroying our world, destroying our environment. And, you know, you can keep going down the the example list. It's BDS. It's because that is that is having an impact. So, which interrupts business as usual again. So those are the ones that I see hope in. And then in turn outside of protests, I see hope in communities that have been working together throughout this pandemic and beyond mutual aid groups have been incredibly vibrant throughout this pandemic and and they continue and, you know, there's there's plenty of other examples, you know, like food, not bombs and things like that that they're they're in their community and they're fighting every day and they're feeding people and helping people and making them aware. And that's where I see hope. It's it's not in, you know, the Twitter fights that are going on right now. So I think that's incredibly important. And I am so sorry I'm so thoroughly enjoying this, but I do have to run because it's family issues. But this has been an honor to be on this panel with you guys. And if people want to check out patreon.com slash Lee camp, maybe there'll be something to follow redacted tonight, one day down the road and keep fighting everybody by Lee. Thank you. So I think you have some really good starts here. So first of all, support the truth tellers. And that's, you know, Abby and Chris and Lee. And let's not forget Caitlin Johnstone, who I would have on but she's committed to just writing. You know, there are voices out there that I that we can be tuned to I call them my tuning forks. You know, when you're lost, tune in, you know, read what they've written, listen to what they're saying. They are tuning forks for us. And that's super important. Because as the ground continues to be constantly pulled under underneath you, the tuning forks are important. And supporting them is important. We put links in the chat for you to support everyone and and support Abby's film. Because we need the story of how war is also destroying the planet and life on the planet that that needs to be told. So Patreon, sub stack, get on there, support these voices, share these voices, understand the systems we live in media literacy. And yes, I love that Lee ended on a cultivating your local peace economy and planting a garden and being engaged. And I want to thank Shay and Ali of the Code Pink team for helping to make this action. This happened because you can join Code Pink Congress every week and and learn we're here to teach and bring voices that can share the truth. China is not our enemy is trying to debunk all the necessary information and propaganda around China, which is super frightening, and support us in calling for negotiations and peace in Ukraine. And Join Code Pink every week, we give you a way to be engaged. And someone asked, how do you stay positive? And I would say, you know, it's staying engaged. And we see that in our three guests today, that they're up against the most depressing information. But they have a commitment out of their hearts to telling the truth, to sharing it, to taking some responsibility. So if you could take a piece of that responsibility today, and feel that responsibility, and then be responsible to share, stay engaged, you'll be able to stay as positive as they and even find some humor in your day. Because, you know, it really is all about being human, staying human, as they try to turn us all into robots. Thank you, Chris and Abby, and Leon is absent for all you do. So, so important, so vital to life. That deepest, deepest gratitude. Information is power. And it's a beautiful thing. Thank you so much, Code Pink, and everyone needs to support Code Pink. And thank you all for being here, because that was your commitment. And may we continue peace and love and power. Thanks. Bye.