The twisted “truth telling” of Chris Hedges and Francis Boyle

A progressive flavor of fascistic hypocrisy

The twisted “truth telling” of Chris Hedges and Francis Boyle

The twisted “truth telling” of Chris Hedges and Francis Boyle

I want to address a tragic aspect of the opposition to totalitarian power in the United States that is so distasteful as to be taboo. That is the emergence of a hypocritical group of progressive operatives, men and women with tremendous intellectual capacities, who have chosen to hold up a false progressive, truth teller flag, in return for various favors and broad recognition.

These treacherous public intellectuals, who skillfully blend fact with fiction like master alchemists, are promoted by corporate media interests, which often poses as anti-establishment oracles of truth.

These guys have large audiences; they are not blocked out from the media like us real truth tellers, and that are held up as models, even idols, for wannabe political activists to imitate. I will not list all of these individuals who float between Democracy Now, the Real News, and Common Dreams because it is not hard to discover who they are.

They have made tremendous compromises in order to obtain their fame and their media access and the deal with the devil that they made came with a real price. I want to focus on two individuals here: Chris Hedges and Francis Boyle.

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, a man who acts as if he is standing up for the man in the street, never responded to any of my emails back when I tried to contact him 14 years ago, and he also refused several efforts by third parties to introduce me to him. That is not important, but it is telling.

I admire Chris Hedges for his carefully crafted writing, his powerful rhetorical skills, his ability to summarize books, or even a corpus of books and articles, in a seamless and three-dimensional manner that is both intellectually engaging and emotionally riveting for an audience.

I wish I could write as well as he does. Even today, although I disagree with much that he says, I find myself picking his articles out of the pile of links I get because they are better written, of higher quality, than much of the other material out there. That being said, his writing, and his broadcasts, are far more formulaic, and unquestioningly ideological now than was the case five or ten years ago.

At first, back in 2001, his failure to engage with, his decision to cover over, state crimes and deep institutional corruption was irritating for me. He gave consistently false testimony concerning the 9.11 incident, including dismissing and denouncing those who spoke the truth. He wrapped up this hypocrisy in the mantle of victim, suggesting that he was the one being blocked out of the media when in fact he was constantly featured as a high-profile public intellectual.

The truth is that Americans who are targeted, subject to constant harassment, in the United States by the hidden powers who defend global finance, should not waste time contacting Chris Hedges. He is not interested in your case and he will avoid you like the plague while marketing himself as the fearless truth teller.

It got much, much worse under the COVID-19 regime. Hedges embraced much of operation COVID-19, dwelling on real inequity in healthcare as a way of remaining silent on the clear criminal intent behind masks, social distancing, and vaccines.

So also Hedges stayed far away from the Federal Reserve fraud that allowed the billionaires to pay off all public intellectuals and other important figures by printing up trillions of dollars by magic and thus creating an invisible parallel economy that permitted them to run the entire show—including propping up plastic truthtellers and cardboard messiahs of the conservative and progressive flavors.

Let us consider the recent episode where Hedges takes on the important issue of private equity in an interview with Gretchen Morgenson, the author of Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon (Times Books)

The show is advertised in this manner:

“The Chris Hedges Report with Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Gretchen Morgenson on how Private Equity billionaires bought up America and turned workers into serfs” (link)

Let me first say that anyone who is telling the truth about America will not win a Pulitzer Prize and will not be able to publish books with any publisher that produces “best sellers.”

Listening to the interview was extremely interesting. Gretchen Morgenson presented the major figures in private equity in the United States, and described their strategies for taking over businesses, gutting them, and thereby destroying the economy for the majority of Americans. Her understanding of the details of private finance was impressive and quite informative.

Yet there were two glaring holes in her polished and professional presentation that reflect similar weaknesses in her book—weaknesses which are not oversights but rather the cost of buying one’s way into a corrupt system by posing as a half-way truth teller.

First, Morgenson does not address the process by which money is created and its value is determined. That is to say, she ignores, passes over, how the Federal Reserve is used to generate trillions of dollars of cash out of thin air which is given to banks and corporations as stimulus and that thereby creates inflation—thus transferring wealth from the workers to the elite.

Understanding the corrupt manner in which the value of money is set is fundamental to understanding how private equity functions and how billionaires become billionaires. To leave that part of the equation out suggests that billionaires are simply mean people who are greedy, not the natural product of a criminal form of government. This silence of this distinguished intellectual concerning the fundamental state crime is a bitter and a devious one.

The other gaping hole came in their discussion about what to do. It was not that the Hedges and Morgenson threw up their hands and said that nothing could be done; and yet, for them, the response of citizens to these crimes were vague and unfocused, floating up into the aerial realm of policy and priorities.

Neither of them suggested that these men should be jailed, that their assets should be seized, or and the complete story of their criminal enterprises (for it is plenty criminal) be revealed the world. Although there are legal and moral grounds for demanding the immediate arrest of all these investment billionaires, these two public intellectuals were as silent as the grave about that obvious step.

Moreover, they did not offer any contact information for a citizens’ movement where you could talk to them and join a real movement to take on private equity.

In reality, Hedges scam is to talk about organizing citizens without ever actually doing it and without ever, ever, offering his audience a way to reach him, or his friends, to join a movement as an active participant.

In an odd way, Prison Planet’s Alex Jones is a bit better than Hedges in that although he is far from honest, and clearly is trying to make a buck where he can, he does at least offer suggestions to citizens as to how they can feed themselves, become economically more self-sufficient, as the country decays into chaos. Hedges, however, wants you bought into the existing system, hoping that somehow Cornel West will save us all. He does not suggest how you can grow your own food, or create potable water; how to survive if things fall apart.

The failure of those attacking others hypocrites for their inaction to then refuse to offer a road to real political action is a bitter betrayal.

The viewer of the interview with Morgenson is left worried, angry, even a bit afraid, but there is no where to go and nothing to do.

Chris Hedges interview with Jeff Sharlet on “The Chris Hedges Report” (October 28, 2023) put out under the title “The Trump movement is turning America fascist” is one of the most insidious and damning examples of the treason of the “progressive” intellectuals, specifically the betrayal of working people by Chris Hedges and Jeff Sharlet.

Hedges asked Jeff Sharlet questions about Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, his book about Christian nationalism and the rise of a new fascistic ideology in America. Much of what Sharlet explains about American politics is accurate, but Sharlet purposely, and deceitfully, suggests that there are no grounds for being drawn to Trump and his supporters because they speak a truth that the establishment progressives are afraid to touch.

After the two of them spend 45 minutes trashing the fake left and hypocritical liberals for their compliancy and their trepidation on the one hand, while suggesting that all followers of Trump are poorly educated ignorant people who are drawn to magical thinking and irrational sexual impulses of violence and revenge on the other hand, when the two have crowned themselves as the defenders of truth against a hypocritical left and a fascist right, they then launch into a brutal attack on Trump and his followers as the foolish believers in bogus “conspiracy theories.”

They carefully avoid a discussion of those conspiracies (lest they ring true for the viewers) but they take a moment to talk about the COVID-19 vaccines.

Hedges sets up a line of argument in which it is assumed that all questioning of science policy is led by irrational fascist Christians. Sharlet then explained the situation in the military,

"I think that fragmentation (in the military) has been developing for years along these fault lines, especially through Christian right organizations in the military; that's really dangerous. There were a number of state national guard commanders who decided that they were not going to follow the vaccination orders. This put them in a low-level mutiny against the Biden administration. Biden could have --I am not a great fan of Biden--but I'll say that he could have said, "Alright. No, no, you are complying. I'm nationalizing you and you're going to do this.” Seven states let it ride. Again, I don't like to get that far off the ground, I think it was the right thing to do in that case; it was not worth the fight. I think it's only a matter of time until someone picks a fight."

The clear message is that forced vaccinations with the dubious COVID-19 vaccine were scientific and those in the military who opposed were irrational “Christian fascists.”

Deviously, Hedges and Sharlet create their own radical progressive flavor of fascism with a level of hypocrisy that is hard to match. In line with the engineered debate about the January 6 “insurrection” that suggests that anyone who questioned the Biden administration’s legitimacy was a card carrying MAGA terrorist, Hedges and Sharlet follow the marching orders of the militarized left.

What does it matter if they say they are against war, if they refuse to even acknowledge the “silent weapons for quiet wars” of the COVID-19 regime?

Francis Boyle

Francis Boyle has been a leading figure in attacking the unconstitutional and criminal actions of the executive and judicial branches, starting with the Bush administration. His work drafting articles of impeachment for President George W. Bush were an important contribution to political accountability.

His efforts to impeach Bill Clinton, and his meticulous work drafting articles of impeachment for George W. Bush and members of his cabinet culminated in the impeachment resolution against vice president submitted by Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) in April 2007.

His expose of the true nature of US intervention in Ukraine was equally valuable for Americans.  

Sadly, Boyle, like Hedges, similarly pulls back from identifying the wealthy families and individuals who call the shots behind the regular suspects like the CIA and Department of Defense. He does not offer a clear description of how decisions are actually made and the nature of an evolving class society.

What is different between Hedges and Boyle is that I had multiple occasions to meet and to correspond with Boyle, and to meet with him.

Francis Boyle is a professor of law (emeritus) at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and he was a colleague of mine there when I was subject to the very worst of the political persecution between December 2000 and December 2004 (when I was forced out and left unemployed). I even have various emails he sent me at the time which I will refrain from sharing here.

The three meetings that I had in person with Professor Francis Boyle at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2004, and the email exchanges that I had with him over the next five years, embody the special kind of hypocrisy that has enabled the dark forces of privatized intelligence working for private equity to take over the United States.

For all the hand-wringing over specific approved incidents, there was not a peep out of Professor Boyle about the brutal wars at home between December 2000 and the 2004 election against those who demanded truth about the military government in place at the time that tried to assert absolute control.  

I sought out Professor Boyle in the spring of 2003 at his office at the College of Law at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He clearly knew exactly who I was.

He was quite welcoming and we had a short discussion about American politics, and about the sad state of the University of Illinois, in which we agreed on all the important issues.

I avoided mentioning anything about my own situation because I had learned that bringing up how I was subject to political persecution was a sure way to permanently end relationships with colleagues at University of Illinois. Yet I thought that ultimately Professor Boyle, granted his brave writings, would be different.

Sadly, for all of his brave posturing against the Bush administration, Boyle adopted a “know nothing” response to my case, and most likely to most every case of state approved oppression in the United States during those dark days that was not pre-approved for public consumption. During our first meeting, his avoidance of any discussion about the repressive regime did not bother me so much.

When we met again a few months later, however, things were different. I was facing unemployment as a result of both being put on medical leave for 18 months on trumped up charges of mental illness and subject to a show trial tenure review that would have been funny if it had not been so discouraging.

I told Professor Boyle that I was going to be dismissed from the University of Illinois for totally inappropriate and inaccurate reasons. I told him that the entire process was political and linked to my actions opposing government policy I explained that I had never suffered from mental illness, and that I had been put on medical leave without a single medical test and that the denial of tenure had nothing to do with my work as a professor.

Boyle was silent when I spoke about political persecution. He did not ask for details, nor did he offer an opinion. This silence seemed rather odd to me in a man who had marketed himself as the great defender of due process.

He did offer, however, to speak with the associate director of my department, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Professor David Goodman, about this case.

I received an email from Professor Boyle a week later inviting me to stop by his office. When I did so, he told me he had a nice meeting with David Goodman, whom he had known from many years ago that they had discussed various matters, including my tenure review.

Professor Boyle said, “I told David that you have been a valuable member of the community, but David insisted that denial of tenure was based entirely on academic standards which you had failed to meet.”

Professor Boyle was not interested in discussing any other possible aspects to this case.

That was an eye-opening event, but it was not the end of my interaction with Professor Boyle. After I ended up working at the Korean Embassy in Washington DC (unable to find employment at any American institution) and then was forced to move to Korea to find work in 2007, I continued to correspond with him and he wrote back on occasion. The message that he kept repeating in his email to me, even after I sent him details about my case, was that I should just develop my career in Korea, take advantage of my opportunities, and enjoy my life.

Boyle, the constitutional lawyer who was bravely defending whistleblowers and demanding criminal investigations of politicians, just told me to give up any hope for due process and to accept my fate. He was not interested in discussing my case in a public forum, or offering me any legal advice.

I do not deny Boyle’s real contributions, but I felt that for him to offer to help me and then do absolutely nothing, was worse than what other faculty members had done. I would have preferred if he had simply said, “I can’t help you.”

For all his qualities, Professor Boyle was of the same feather as other “approved” whistle blowers and truth tellers, like Doug Valentine, James Corbett, or Seymour Hersh, men who select which state crimes they will talk about and are, for all their indignant righteousness, still following what the man told them to do.