For $5 a month, become a Useful Idiot! Get extended interviews, Thursday Throwdowns, and a chance to have your comment read on the show in the Absurd Arena at http://usefulidiots.substack.com Or find us on Locals at http://usefulidiots.locals.com Watch the full interview with Chris Hedges here: https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/chris-hedges-rallies-for-a-left-right?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Join the Absurd Arena live chat with Katie and Aaron every Tuesday at 12pm est at https://usefulidiots.substack.com/chat Rage Against the War Machine Rally on Feb 19: https://rageagainstwar.com/#home Chris Hedges substack: https://chrishedges.substack.com/ “If we do not build left-right coalitions on issues such as militarism, health care, a living wage and union organizing,” warns Chris Hedges, “we will be impotent in the face of corporate power and the war machine.” Award-winning journalist Chris Hedges returns to the show to argue for a left-right alliance and explain why he’s speaking at the Rage Against The War Machine rally on Sunday. The stakes are too high to not form a coalition: “We’re flirting with a nuclear holocaust.” “The Democrats made a conscious decision to become the Republican Party,” he says. They consciously and very cynically decided to sell out the underclass for political expediency. But the damage they did, the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of families that they destroyed, we don’t talk about it. There’s just no accountability.” But people, on both the left and right, who were terrorized by these policies, know who hurt them. “They know what the Democrats did to their neighborhoods by militarizing police and creating internal armies of occupation. I teach at a prison and half the students wouldn’t be there but for Clinton. They know who did that to them.” But fighting the powerful from just one side has shown not to work: “It’s much scarier for politicians when you have people from both sides of the political spectrum making demands than it is from just one side.” A left-right coalition can’t be bought off, it can’t be smeared as partisan. It’s a movement. This is why Chris Hedges is joining activists from all across the political spectrum to rally this weekend to Rage Against the War Machine. If you can get to DC this weekend, your voice can make a difference. Watch the extended episode where Chris Hedges discusses how the silence on the Nord Stream story is an indication of how degraded the media has become, how mainstream consumers may never learn the truth of Russiagate, and his disgust for the leaders in our government: “These people are really frightening, amoral, they cover themselves in the veneer of Ivy League degrees and cloying snobbery, but they’re very limited intellectually. They’re drunk with their own power and hubris, and of course they have made a very good living being shills for weapons manufacturers. They’re pimps of war.” Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown where the White House takes a break from covering up the chemical explosion that devastated East Palestine, Ohio to cover up the other major story (not) in the news: Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s groundbreaking reporting that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. And join the Absurd Arena live discussion board with Katie and Aaron every Tuesday at 12pm est. It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices