To the West, the concept of the rules-based order functions either as a list on paper to be ignored, or a strict set of laws to be weaponized. Omar El Akkad, Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, has witnessed many instances, both in the West and in the Middle East, where banners of virtue are used to justify hypocritical behavior. El Akkad writes about such instances in his new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss them.

In the West, El Akkad admits there is a tendency of including indigenous land acknowledgements at gatherings like literary festivals and while it may be honest, he argues it continues the same pattern of theft. “You steal land, you steal lives, and what's left to steal at the end but a narrative? The narrative that absolves all that came before,” he tells Hedges. This has always been the playbook of colonialism, he explains. “We can all be sorry afterwards.”

With regard to the genocide in Gaza, Western media brushes over the daily acts of brutality with “neutral,” unassuming language. Akkad recounts the description of children being killed as as bullets colliding with their bodies, and says “What [they’re] trying to do is give someone on the other side of the planet who has the privilege of looking away the language with which to look away without feeling a pang in their conscience,” El Akkad says.

Many in the West are quick to pillory resistance movements in places like Palestine, but resistance and the right and methods of resistance, El Akkad illustrates, belong to those under oppression and occupation. He explains:

“I have zero right to tell anybody anywhere who lives under occupation and injustice how to resist that occupation and that injustice. There is no acceptable form of resistance in the view of the institutions doing the oppressing. You engage in boycotts, that's economic terrorism. You try to march peacefully, you are shot with the intent to kill and or maimed. You boycott cultural institutions, you are being illiberal. You take up arms, you are a terrorist, and you will be wiped out. All you can do is die. That is your only acceptable form of resistance.”

The material needs of working class people in America continue to be obscured and co-opted by politicians and people claiming to know what’s best on both sides of the political aisle. While Republicans and right-wingers address some of these needs head on, they do so by luring people through empty rhetoric and culture war distractions. On the other side, Democrats and liberals police and enforce a cancel-culture paradigm built by elites that also distracts and divides the proletariat from ever engaging in meaningful connection and change.

Catherine Liu, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss her new book, “Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.”

The PMC, as Liu calls it, is a group of courtiers made up of academics, media figures and cultural elites who hover above the working class and dictate the aesthetic direction of “progress,” notably without ever addressing the material needs of the workers it claims to look after. They stifle debate, discourage dissent and issue dire punishments of anyone who dare challenge their rationale. After the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, the liberal PMC blame “people who are concerned with bread and butter issues for the defeat of these candidates that have been promoted by [Democrats,] a party completely captured by one segment of capital who are trying to show the American worker that they are idiots, they are racist, they're anti-immigrant, they're transphobic, they're homophobic, they're sexist,” Liu tells Hedges.

Liu points to a podcast appearance by Democratic campaign managers and their response to not combating Trump on a simple advertisement because of focus group testing as an example of the PMC’s disconnection from their constituents. “They were in a box. They didn't go outside. They didn't talk to Americans. They didn't talk to people. They don't know people.”

Farah El Sherif, writer, academic and Visiting Scholar at Stanford, is uncompromisingly blunt in her assessment of the Middle East. The decades of repression faced by an entire people have produced a fragmented society—culturally and through colonially imposed borders. To help understand why the Muslim world is so broken, corrupt and full of contradictions, El Sherif joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

“The systemic repression that Muslim communities worldwide experience is inextricably linked to the interventionist, expansionist, supremacist American-Israeli Western project,” El Sharif says. Though the region has grown to have perceived independence from its former colonial states, El Sharif explains that the imperial agenda and the manufacturing of a Muslim menace continues.

The psychological and physical damage runs so deep that many give in to their oppressors in hope of selfish prosperity, while others look at themselves as less than deserving of a dignified existence. The genocide in Gaza proves to be the most crucial litmus test, as the leaders of fellow Muslim countries stand by and witness the slaughter of their own people in exchange for “petty crumbs” from Western powers and the Zionist state.

“A lot of Muslims even internalize this war on terror rhetoric and they themselves start being apologetic and say, Islam is peaceful, Islam is this, Islam is compatible with democracy, Islam is compatible with civility,” El Sharif explains. “I see that as a sign of decimated consciousness, not just double consciousness. They don't know their own faith, they don't know their own history, and so they start being apologetic about it, and that is a position of weakness.”