The events of the last few years: Gaza, the Epstein files and more, have revealed that the new order of things is the open predation of the powerful on the rest of us.
A Bright Future – by Mr. Fish.
Gaza is only the start.
The new world order is one where the weak are obliterated by the strong, the rule of law does not exist, genocide is an instrument of control and barbarism is triumphant.
The war on Iran and the obliteration of Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order.
The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs.
Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.
Resources — as the Venezuelans know — are openly stolen. Food, water and medicine, as in Palestine, are weaponized.
Let them eat dirt.
International bodies such as the United Nations are pantomime, useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished.
The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.
Ruins of Beit Lahia, in the Gaza Strip, destroyed by Israeli bombardments, Feb. 23, 2025. (Jaber Jehad Badwan. Creative Commons ASA-4.0)
They spew the same hyper-masculine tropes. They spew the same vile, racist cant. They spew the same Manichaean vision of good and evil, black and white. They spew the same infantile language of total dominance and unrestrained violence.
Killer clowns. Buffoons. Idiots. They have seized the levers of power to carry out their demented and cartoonish visions as they pillage the state for their own enrichment.
“After witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world,” writes Pankaj Mishra in The World After Gaza:
“The shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil — the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilized societies — cannot be overstated. Nor can the moral abyss we confront.”
The subjugated are property, commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The Epstein Files expose the sickness and heartlessness of the ruling class. Liberals. Conservatives. University presidents. Academics. Philanthropists. Wall Street titans. Celebrities. Democrats. Republicans.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein and President Bill Clinton. 1993. (Ralph Alswang / White House)
They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers.
They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts.
They exist in another reality, what The Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,” a world of private Xanadus where they hold Nero-like bacchanalias, make their perfidious deals, amass their billions and cast aside those they use, including children, as if they are refuse.
No one in this magic circle is accountable. No sin too depraved. They are human parasites. They disembowel the state for personal profit. They terrorize the “lesser breeds of the earth.” They shut down the last, anemic vestiges of our open society.
“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life,” as George Orwell writes in 1984:
“All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon be purged — is an instrument of repression. The judiciary exists to stage show trials.
I spent a lot of time in the London courts covering the Dickensian farce during the persecution of Julian Assange. A Lubyanka-on-the-Thames. Our courts are no better. Our Department of Justice is a vengeance machine.
Masked, armed goons flood the streets of the United States and murder civilians, including citizens. The ruling mandarins are spending billions to convert warehouses into detention centers and concentration camps.
They insist they will only house the undocumented, the criminals, but our global ruling class lies like it breathes. In their eyes, we are vermin, either blindly and unquestionably obedient or criminals. There is nothing in between.
ICE and Border Patrol agents on Nicollet Avenue on Jan. 24, 2026. This follows the shooting death of Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti. (Chad Davis / Flickr / CC BY 4.0)
These concentration camps, where there is no due process and people are disappeared, are designed for us. And by us, I mean the citizens of this dead republic. Yet we watch, stupefied, disbelieving, passively waiting for our own enslavement.
It won’t be long.
The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.
The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls what is happening “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”
Oh, the critics say, don’t be so bleak. Don’t be so negative. Where is the hope? Really, it’s not that bad.
If you believe this you are part of the problem, an unwitting cog in the machinery of our rapidly consolidating fascist state.
Reality will eventually implode these “hopeful” fantasies, but by then it will be too late.
True despair is not a result of accurately reading reality. True despair comes from surrendering, either through fantasy or apathy, to malignant power.
And resistance, meaningful resistance, even if it is almost certainly doomed, is empowerment. It confers self-worth. It confers dignity. It confers agency. It is the only action that allows us to use the word hope.
The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted.
They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.
They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.
“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in The Sane Society.
We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Lebanon and Iran. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media.
The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza.
Those who name and denounce this evil are smeared, blacklisted and purged from university campuses and the public sphere. They are arrested and deported.
A deadening silence is descending upon us, the silence of all authoritarian states. Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, and see your broadcasting license revoked, as the chair of the F.C.C. Brendan Carr has proposed.
We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us.
They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.
Those are the only choices left.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
This article is from Scheerpost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This interview is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.
Views expressed in this interview may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
As Bobok points out, Hedges has been writing about (exposing) these issues and concerns for years, but not, as one might suggest, from a lack of imagination, rather from an increasing understanding of the forces moving social/political systems; these writings are acts of personal and social courage, to allow one’s self to see an unvarnished reality and speak it.
I can’t but agree with Hedges’ description and argument, though I think that it doesn’t go to the must fundamental issues, to the driving pressures points: there has to be and will be social/political responses to our great numbers and the immense damage our technological prowess has done and continues to do to the only viable living space that we know of for sure in the universe. The human biological/psychological platform is proving capable of creating the present conditions, but utterly incapable of responding adaptively to the consequences.
There will be no piecemeal solutions, no social justice, no economic equity, no environmental stability without confronting and responsibly controlling and limiting our powers to change the world and ourselves. I don’t see how this can happen, only that it must. Otherwise, what we have seen up to now of the depravity of distorted insanity associated with unlimited power over material and living things will play out in the most unfortunate ways.
As usual Mr. Fish’s depiction of the evil entities in our midst reveals their ugly faces.
I hope Mr. Fish can one day show us the evil and ugly insides.
The law of the jungle rules the world now.
The Jewish supremacists just murdered Larijani bc they viewed him as the Iranian leader Trump would most likely reach out to in order to come to an agreement to end this dangerous fiasco.
I don’t think otherwise intelligent liberals quite understand what we’re dealing with: these paranoid hegemonic Jewish supremacists demand a “Greater Israel” regardless of virtually any cost. Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and the rest of their ilk want more than anything to use gentile boys from the US heartland as cannon fodder to orchestrate regime change in Iran, there’s absolutely no moral compass holding them back from doing this.
Furthermore, notice how all the pwogwessive groups who organized the dumb but very well attended “no kings” rallies are merely sitting on their butts now doing absolutely nothing while the most potentially dangerous war of the 21st century rages out of control.
The Schumers, Soros Dem establishment et al desire this war, every bit as much as the Trump regime! The American people have been bamboozled and hoodwinked by a warmongering mass media that definitely doesn’t have the interests of any of us in mind.
Meanwhile the criminal starvation blockade against the valiant Cuban people goes almost totally unmentioned (or buried) in our establishment press. The entire country sans electricity, Cuban mothers giving birth while incubators are completely inoperable.
Anyone who listens to or reads “mainstream press” is a fool.
“They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters.”
But was this country not conceived as a world of slaves and masters? Was this country not born of genocide? Are then slavery and genocide not the true ideals of this country from before day 1?
Most Americans, I suspect, hear the jackboots pounding the road outside. Most Americans, even some who are steadfast in their obliviousness, sense the air is heavy with a coming storm of oppression. The hallowed freedoms that form the centrepiece of American exceptionalism feel increasingly threatened – because they are on the chopping block. In a last gasp Empire, when the culture is decaying under pressures of depraved, inhuman, authoritarian rule, psychological defense mechanisms become more common and extreme. The emotional need to believe in comforting fictions will always be fortified against reality. But even credulous corporate news consumers can’t remain ideologically blinded to soaring petroleum costs, mounting inflation, tech encroachment on jobs, and eventually, finding themselves at the business end of Federal militias and detention centres for American citizens – always their intended purpose. Others are nihilistic, finding a peculiar satisfaction in cynically appraising the corruption and dehumanization of oligarchs and corporations that gleefully demolish the remaining vestiges of democracy. They are as passive as any Fox News or MS Now viewer. As Chris Hedges says, only unblinking awareness of what is before us, and determination to resist it in whatever pragmatic way possible can justify hope in these lugubrious times.
The answer is yes. Swept under the rug for the entirety of European occupation of this land.
I’ve been fighting Amerikan imperialism most of my 80 years; my father suffered in a WW2 POW camp in Nazi Germany after being shot down in flight; now those demons are running the world…. how frightening!
Culture Wars latest issue has a fine education by Erik Meyer on the Articles of Confederation and its betrayal.
Tens, hundreds, of millions –probably billions, maybe more — of Single Points of Failure in the digital apparatus of the empire are waiting for someone to make a mistake.
Mutiny among the paramilitaries is too much to hope for, but poor kids who have enlisted for technical training or a college education probably are not morally dead inside.
The empire can be destroyed.
Small acts of kindness toward humanity by quiet individuals trapped in roles for a paycheck can easily do the job.
I’ve been reading this same column from Chris Hedges for the last fifteen years or so. The names change, they may be repeated, but the point of the writing never seems to change. It is engaging, but it always reads the same: people have been trapped and doomed for a long, long time by a powerful and remorseless class of people, now morphed into the ‘Epstein class.’ Well, for once I would hope that Chris would open up and suggest a response other than that ‘…meaningful resistance is almost certainly doomed.’ Smiling wanly, maybe waving a feeble hand goodbye to onlookers as you’re being led away to the death camp, doesn’t float my boat. I understand that Mr. Hedges has received a Christian education, and might consider meaningful resistance in the spirit of imitating Christ, the ‘What would Jesus Do’ question. I don’t think there’s a cross big enough to support all the victims of evil that exist now, in this moment, to climb up and hang upon. That’s what Jesus did. We must do something else and quit wringing our hands. This world is worth fighting for, our families are worth fighting for. And I mean to use the word “fighting” as a verb, and not an idea. We must physically lay our hands on the money-lenders and impolitely throw them out from this temple. And there will be blood, no doubt about it, as at Calvary. But is there salvation without the shedding of blood?
Listening to Reverend Barber the other day (I was hungry and you fed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was a stranger and you welcomed me) quoting John from the Bible quoting Jesus I believe. This is very good advice, and especially so for those Christian Nationalists. I am an old man and I can assure you that life is better living it this way.
The “killer clowns” have not seized the levers of power.
The highly educated, well informed ‘western European’ has voted them into power.
Assuming the elections weren’t rigged in the first place…