Listen to the full interview on our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-us-on-86104940 The US is escalating a bipartisan Cold War, pumping up the military industrial complex, fueling proxy wars and gutting what’s left of the welfare state. But there is a split in the ruling class on how best to guarantee US hegemony. On one side is the far-right America First crowd led by Trump, who claim to want out of Ukraine. That’s only because they want to divert the country’s Cold War resourc...
Jul 14, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-on-of-85896805 France is on fire after police were filmed shooting and killing unarmed 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, a French citizen of Moroccan and Algerian descent, in the suburbs of Paris during a traffic stop. This shocking display of French state violence triggered large-scale protests, particularly amongst the country’s Muslim, African, and Arab populations, long boiling over racist and classist structures stau...
Jul 10, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-or-us-85690029 In 2003, Mohamad Youssef Hammoud, a Lebanese-American, was sentenced to 155 years in prison on allegations of "providing material support" to the Lebanese organization Hezbollah with funds garnered from cigarette smuggling. Characterized by prosecutors as an “enemy combatant” and “terrorist financier,” he was the first person in the United States to be charged for material support to an all...
Jul 06, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Access the entire interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-rise-84975377 The power of the dollar sustains U.S. imperialism. But rising multipolarity, an overuse of U.S. sanctions, the rise of alternative trading arrangements that sidestep the dollar, and a very obvious crisis of western capitalism have led to panic about a decline in dollar hegemony. What gives the dollar so much power in the first place? What would a world without dollar hegemony look like? What would it m...
Jun 22, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Listen to the entire interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-wins-84859698 In popular culture, Canada is seen as the nicer version of the US, the harmless northern neighbor. Behind that shiny exterior is a country that plays a crucial supporting role in US aggression abroad and providing it with a layer of liberal respectability. Canada remains the “good cop” to the US “bad cop” in wars and coups from the Middle East to Latin America. This is no great departure for a count...
Jun 20, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-us-84510217 The Gulf states have been reliable partners of U.S. imperialism since their inception. But that hasn’t stopped them from deepening their ties with Russia and China, leading to tectonic shifts across the Middle East that have many DC insiders losing sleep. What’s behind these shifting alliances across the Gulf? Will they continue to oppose the new Cold War? Or are they too wedded to the U.S. to truly forge paths independent o...
Jun 13, 2023•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Why is Iran under constant US attack? Is it really about women’s rights and democracy? Or is it because Iran, since its revolution, has been a staunch supporter both ideologically and materially, of resistance to US imperialism across the Middle East? To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek was joined by Nina Farnia, Assistant Professor of Law at Albany Law School, a longtime activist and a scholar of Critical Race Theory, with a focus on US imperialism and its impact on domestic law. This is jus...
Jun 08, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-how-w-83919972 After Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the British Labour Party, the right wing of the party joined with the Israel lobby and the Israeli state to bring down Corbyn and purge the party of leftists using false accusations of anti-semitism. The witch-hunt continued even after Corbyn’s downfall. No reporter has covered the weaponization of anti-semitism in British politics as rigorously as Asa Winstanley, associate edito...
Jun 01, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s a new era of global power dynamics where countries sometimes have the option to say no to the U.S. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle East. Almost 12 years after being kicked out of the Arab League, Syria has been welcomed back into the fold by many of the U.S.-allied countries that tried to destroy it. All this time Israel was banking on normalization with Saudi Arabia and the opposite happened, with China overseeing a Saudi peace deal with Iran. Why? What does this multipola...
May 26, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast According to U.S. politicians, military leaders and the media, everything China does on the international stage – brokering peace deals, expanding economic initiatives, building ports — is part of an aggressive campaign to weaken the United States. While China is becoming more assertive diplomatically, is the U.S. interpretation of why accurate or is it projection and delusion? And how does it relate to China’s internationalist past? What does it mean for the future of the Global South and the w...
May 23, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast See full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/83205814 Collaboration between the US and fascists is a pattern that stretches back to the end of World War II and NATO’s founding, when the US and British intelligence services established secret far-right terror network armies across NATO countries made up of fascists, Nazi collaborators and actual Nazis. This is just the first half of this episode. The second half is available for Breakthrough News Members only. Become a member at htt...
May 18, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the U.S. we’re taught that North Korea is a horrible backwards dictatorship where every person is captive to an evil regime run by a mad man who has an inexplicable hatred of the U.S., freedom and democracy – and is always on the edge of launching a nuclear missile to destroy the world. This, we’re told, is the reason we have to isolate the country and occupy South Korea with thousands of U.S. soldiers. The purpose of such a simplistic narrative is to prevent Americans from getting curious ab...
May 10, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last April, Pakistan’s Imran Khan was ousted as Prime Minister, which he blamed on an American-backed coup due to his non-aligned foreign policy. His removal has been followed by political instability that continues to roil the country with some of the largest protests in Pakistan’s history, both in support of him but also in opposition to the traditional ruling elites. The current government has responded by cracking down on Khan and his supporters, and preventing new elections. To help us unde...
May 05, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Since taking office in 2018, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, has reasserted more state control over Mexico’s natural resources, nationalizing its lithium reserves, while vocally opposing US interference in Mexico. So it’s no surprise that the corporate media in Washington is following along with the program of labeling him a strongman, an authoritarian, and anti-democratic. while U.S. politicians like Lindsay Graham invoke drugs and violence to threaten military intervent...
Apr 27, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast With Saudi Arabia and Iran making peace as part of a deal brokered by China, much has been made about the absence of the U.S. and what it means for U.S. hegemony. But what about the implications for the region? What might it look like in practice? Who are the potential spoilers? And why did this happen now? Also, what does it mean for the U.S. empire's greatest global partner, Europe? To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek was joined by Adnan Tabatabai, the co-founder and CEO of the Germany...
Apr 21, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast The historic deal brokered by China for a Saudi-Iran rapprochement reflects not only a changing region, but a shifting world order. While the US focuses on its proxy war in Ukraine, with US officials essentially blocking meaningful peace discussion both there and in Yemen, its “strategic competitor” China now looks like the adult in the room. Its diplomatic initiatives have become a force for stability in the biggest conflict regions, from Yemen to Syria. To better understand what's going o...
Apr 18, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rania Khalek of Breakthrough News and Zoe Alexandra of Peoples Dispatch sat down with Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum, the head of government in Mexico City and one of the founders of Morena, the party of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. She is a rising figure in Mexican national politics and a leading contender for the 2024 presidential elections.
Apr 15, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Before 2011, Syria was a relatively stable country that had decent electricity, one of the best medical sectors in the region and produced much of its own food and medicine. Today Syria has collapsing infrastructure, dire food insecurity, crippling fuel shortages, severe brain drain and only has control over part of the country’s territory. Mainstream US media places all the blame on President Assad while covering up the role of US sanctions. To discuss the decades-long US war on Syria, Rania Kh...
Apr 10, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast When most people in the West think of the war in Ukraine, they think of February 24, 2022 when Russia launched its invasion. But for 8 years prior, there had been a war raging in the eastern part of the country that received little attention because its reality was inconvenient for mainstream Western narratives. In the Donbas region, an estimated 15,000 people had died following what many there described as a US-backed coup in 2014 that gave rise to an anti-Russia government and helped empower f...
Mar 28, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast To discuss the war on whistleblowers, the U.S. government’s prosecution of Julian Assange and how the case against him poses a threat to journalism everywhere, Rania Khalek spoke to Kevin Gosztola, managing editor of Shadowproof, co-host of the Unauthorized Disclosure podcast and author of the newly published book “Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange.” You can purchase Kevin’s book here: https://www.project-censored.org/shop/p/guilty-of-journalism-the-political-case-a...
Mar 24, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Whatever happened to Ukraine’s foreign fighters? What are the parallels between Syria and Ukraine? And where does the Cold War against China fit into it? To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek was joined by investigative journalist Seth Harp, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and author of the forthcoming book The Delta Force Murders, which will be published by Viking Press. Seth’s articles discussed in the episode: https://theintercept.com/2022/06/30/ukraine-azov-neo-nazi-foreign-fighter/...
Mar 17, 2023•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Africa’s Sahel region is experiencing historic shifts as anti-colonial sentiment sweeps across the region, with the French military being kicked out of one country after another after failing to rout insurgencies fueled by their own policies. France and its allies have responded by blaming disinformation, authoritarianism, and the west’s favorite boogeyman: Russia. Meanwhile the security situation in the Sahel continues to deteriorate. To help break it all down, Breakthrough News journalist Euge...
Mar 17, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Middle East is drowning in anti-Iran propaganda emanating from Western, Gulf and oligarch-funded outlets that seek to turn the populations in the region against Iran and other institutions deemed to be “backed by Iran.” In Lebanon this plays out in a sectarian narrative that portrays Hezbollah as an Iranian proxy and depicts Shias as agents of an Iranian occupation of the country. This pattern has also been replicated in neighboring countries in an attempt to turn people against the regional...
Mar 07, 2023•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh joined Rania Khalek on Dispatches to discuss his latest bombshell on how the Biden administration destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline using remotely triggered explosives with the help of the CIA, US Navy divers, and NATO member Norway. This means the US targeted the critical energy infrastructure of its most important European ally, a major violation of sovereignty in what essentially constitutes objectively an act of war against Germany. But G...
Mar 02, 2023•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Two years into his presidency, Biden’s foreign policy has been defined by the war in Ukraine and a weakening American hegemony, one that also characterized Trump’s time in office. Some argue the American empire is in decline no matter which party is in control. So where will U.S. foreign policy go from here as the new Cold War era drags on? Does it even matter which party is in charge anymore? How are anxieties of a U.S. decline playing out in the media and in popular culture? And where does tha...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast With the United States hyper focused on Russia and China, it’s easy to forget that the empire is still up to its old tricks in the rest of the Global South. What does the insatiable U.S. imperialist appetite mean for the resource-rich countries of Latin America? After all, that copper, gold, zinc, silver, lead, iron, and natural gas in Peru, the lithium in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, and the oil in Venezuela isn’t gonna steal itself. How is the Cold War with Russia and China playing out throug...
Feb 13, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast To understand how this new Cold War might play out, we have to understand the foundations of the original Cold War of the 20th century. What was NATO’s role? What did it mean for the Third World back then? What does it mean for the Third World today, particularly those countries that seek an independent, sovereign path? What is the danger of rising fascist movements? And what are the lessons for anti-imperialists who live and organize in the imperial core? To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek ...
Feb 09, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s widely accepted that humans are driving climate change and environmentalism has become mainstream. But what if “humanity” in the abstract isn’t to blame? Is it true that humans are inherently bad for nature? What if the real culprit is the systems we’re forced to operate under — capitalism, imperialism, colonialism— perpetrated by particular sections of humanity over others? So who, or what is to blame is really to blame for climate change? What are the limitations of the mainstream environ...
Feb 03, 2023•2 hr 33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Bitcoin, Stablecoin, Tether, Blockchain, Coinbase, Binance, Etherium, Luna, Celsius, Circle, FTX, NFTs: What’s all this crypto jargon really about? What stage of capitalism does it mean we’re in? How has digital currency been impacted by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine? What are the geopolitical implications for the US cold war with China? And what’s the significance of the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried? Could we see an even more dramatic unraveling in the crypto world in the future, one tha...
Jan 27, 2023•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast The year 2022 was defined by the war in Ukraine, the expansion of NATO, and continued encirclement of China as the U.S. prepares for “great power conflict.” But the US empire is so overstretched, that sanctions have become the favorite form of warfare— to disrupt and isolate many countries at once. Could they backfire in 2023? To discuss this and more Rania Khalek was joined by Bikrum Gill, who teaches at the department of political science at Virginia Tech. Mentioned in the episode: https://dev...
Jan 24, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
