U.S. Militarism Is Destroying the Planet, According to Abby Martin

25:19You're just pulverizing into toxic, abestos-laden powder going all around the world. This has no confines. This has no borders. Pollution is global. So this was the real problem, is trying to quantify this stuff and realizing how big it is. And that's not even the cleaning of the engine parts. That's not dumping the toxic waste just to make these machines mission ready to fly around in pointless patrols. I mean, when you look at that and the callous disregard to just the environment of just maintaining this stuff, it really becomes really, really shocking. Or the blowback on our own people. I mean, one of the most sort of like emotional parts of the film is you talk about what happened, the segment on Camp Lejeune.

26:05Can you just tell everybody, explain what happened to Camp Lejeune exactly in North Carolina? Yeah, Camp Lejeune was the worst water contamination event in U.S. history. It affected up to a million people. It was a story that was over 50 years ago. And so people look at it and they think, oh, you know, the military command and top brass were dumping all these toxic chemicals and toxic waste into the water wells unintentionally. Right. They didn't know any better. And this is a problem with a lot of legacy contamination with Agent Orange and nuclear radiation. You say, oh, well, they didn't know any better.

26:39That's false. They did know better. There are always safe alternatives. But even in the case of Camp Lejeune, they were dumping it intentionally for years after they knew the tests showed that the water was toxic. And so you had Marines drinking this stuff. You had them bathing their children, the babies in this stuff, pregnant women drinking it on the base. And so what that resulted in was the deaths of so many newborn babies resulting in a thousand babies who had died that you have a gravesite called Baby Heaven at this Marine Corps base. And this is something that is so unknown. You would think that this would be a completely standard thing that we learn about in textbooks, in our history books, but we don't.

27:21We don't. You know why? Because this is the modus operandi of the military. They'll lie. They'll cover it up. and then when finally you can't deny it, they'll deny the claims for decades. They'll deny them just like the burn pits, just like the first responders of the 9-11 toxic dust. They're used as cannon fodder and for propaganda purposes and then they're left to die and they're left riddled with diseases that they're never cared for. And that's what you see today, 60 years later. These people are still being denied claims. They're still dying and sickened by the toxic water and they still are left with no answers.

27:57It's absolutely horrific, these predatory law firms that are trying to capitalize on this tragedy. And I think it just shows you this is what the military does. They do this to their own. It's not their own indigenous people. It's not just indigenous people around the world with no environmental regulations. It's people here that they're killing and poisoning. I mean, it's astounding because I consider myself a fairly, you know, well-read person. I didn't know about any of this until I happened to be driving down I-95 in North Carolina a few years ago on my way to a wedding and seeing all of these billboards from those law firms on the side of the road saying, you know, if your claim was denied over Camp Lejeune water poisoning, you know, call us and being like, what's this all about?

28:42And then, you know, starting to look into it. But, yeah, I mean, no, you don't hear about it in the media. You don't hear about it in textbooks. And now you have PICAs dumping and contamination. I mean, just the fact that that was, you know, that's such an old story. But there are so many sites that are comparable to the toxic contamination that Camp Lejeune had. I mean, we interview a man named Pat Elder, who's the director of military poisons, and all he does is test the water wells and waterways coming out from domestic military installations as well as military installations abroad. And he has found that the levels of contamination are much, much higher than Camp Lejeune today across the country.

29:22And if it's that bad here, you can only imagine what the hell they're putting into the dirt in our bases, countries overseas, where there are, to your point, no protections and no legal remedies at all. So back to sort of the thesis of the film. The cynic in me would say that, look, even if you zeroed out all of the Pentagon's emissions, I mean, China emits 12 billion metric tons of CO2 a year. Would you really meaningfully change the climate trajectory that we're on? Assuming that the Pentagon was just literally shut down, all of our bases returned to the earth, what would happen? Yeah. I mean, look, we're in a globalized system, right?

30:08So you cannot look at China in a vacuum in terms of their emissions. First, you have to look at the cumulative emissions. That's a huge problem. The U.S. accounts for 25 % just from the industrial revolution. Okay. So then you look at the absorption of all the manufacturing from the West. They're manufacturing and developing our products. So that's another problem. Then you factor in, like I said, US-led military emissions. Of course, if you look at just the institution, yeah, it's absolutely insane. 270 ,000 barrels of oil per day on paper just to maintain the arsenal and to feed the oil dragon.

30:46That's a lot. That's a shit of emissions. But that's not just what we're talking about. We're talking about a global system that is enforced by the military. For the longest time, people have pointed to big agriculture, to big oil as the main polluters, and they're right. That's correct. But they have a military that enforces their domination and their systems of control. And that military is our military. It's the American military that has always been an enforcement arm for an unsustainable fossil fuel infrastructure. And it basically imposes the dictates of global capitalism at the barrel of a gun.

31:26And we see what happens if countries like Venezuela and Cuba don't bow down to the dictates. They get overthrown, black bagged, destroyed, bombed. That's what's happening. So you can't even really look at just on paper in terms of emissions and say China's worse because there's so much more to that. It's literally a machinery of death and destruction. It is a machinery that is enforcing the domination of fossil fuel. That's what's so crazy. I mean, you look at China, just a modicum of central planning. They are trying to do their best with, you know, there's plenty of critiques to go around, of course.

32:07But I'm not a Chinese citizen. I'm an American citizen and I'm living in a country that is imposing, subjugating the planet, billions of people under its boot and in my name. So yes, I think that at this point, we don't really have a choice. And I have heard people say, look, it's better that we're on top because if we weren't on top, then China or Russia would be, and it would be worse. And yes, it's really bad that we run on oil, but hey, the world doesn't run on butterflies, sweetheart. And so like, isn't it, you know, and so we need it, right? We need it. Just like this general in the movie told me, Like, you know, we have to keep we have to keep all the alternative energy systems at bay.

32:47OK, this is this is a completely like fan. This is a complete fantasy based on just falsehoods. I mean, I mean, what evidence is there that Russia or China would do the same sort of imperial conquest that we have done? What evidence is there that Russia or China would be polluting the planet in the same fashion with the same callous disregard of the environment? I mean, I had someone on the Rimpak warship tell me, Abby, you're so naive. My wife's an environmental lawyer. He's like, he's like, Russia and China don't care about the environment and they don't care about international law. We do. And I looked at him and I said, but Russia and China aren't doing this stuff.

33:26They don't, they don't traverse around the planet. Russia has like what, six bases overseas? Six bases. China has one. It's like they don't have this system. So it shows you just this kind of self-rationalization, this weird legitimization of this system, because you think that we have the ordained right, that you are chauvinist, that you think that we have the right to do this around the world. And I think that's a very, very depraved, perverse mindset. No, I agree. And I think, again, this goes back to what we're talking about, awakening to this after Iraq. And you have to sort of wonder if, you know, there's people out there, younger people, you know, in Gen Z who are looking at what's happening in Iran, in Venezuela, soon to be Cuba and are going to have sort of a similar awakening to the one we had 20, 25 years ago.

34:16Abby, I want to ask you about this moment in the film, which sort of made me laugh. You're at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021. So first of all, it's just like weird to look back at video footage from that period because like everyone's wearing their masks and you're all six feet apart as though like that was going to do anything. Anyway, Nancy Pelosi is there and you're asking her how she can justify raising the Pentagon budget, given what the military does to the climate. Walk us through that exchange. And I'm asking you today, which is funny, because Pete Hegseth, as we are speaking right now, is sitting in front of Congress asking for one point five trillion dollars for the for the new Pentagon budget.

34:54That's that's a 50 percent increase. I mean, I don't know if he's going to get that. Probably not. But what does that tell you that that that's what they're going for? Right. Yeah. Yeah. What's fascinating about the documentary and what you're talking about, I mean, the 2020 era where basically it was the Biden era. So it was it was this kind of incubation period that got us to where we are today. It's the neoliberal order that was this was the status quo. And so I'm at one of these conferences in Glasgow talking to leading politicians who are supposed to be on the forefront of of climate advocacy.

35:28Jay Inslee, for example. This is what he ran on for president. And he literally can't even answer a question if military missions should be counted or not. He just runs away from me. Nancy Pelosi says something very dystopian. She says that the military is actually the solution, that as things get worse, they will need the military as the refugee crisis becomes worsened, as the borders become more unstable. Basically just saying the quiet part out loud. that the military is going to be needed to further securitize the borders. And so what this is saying is they don't want to actually count military missions or literally count to the military, or I'm sorry, look to the military as one of the problems, as one of the drivers of climate change.

36:15They are just tacitly admitting it's too late. Even if that were true, that the military has been exacerbating this problem, the military is simply the solution. They have no creativity or ingenuity outside of that tunnel vision. Military is the solution. And you saw this repeated by every single so-called progressive politician. In fact, she, you know, I, I asked her the question, how could we take these climate conferences seriously if you're not counting military missions? And she literally fields the question to Frank Pallone, a New Jersey, uh, congressman. And he's like, we need a bigger Navy because the oceans are going to rise.

36:52I mean, it's seriously like a cartoon. It's like we're in an Acme cartoon. I mean, how do you wrap your mind around this logic? Yeah. But what it really shows you is this logic of green imperialism. It's the Elizabeth Warren solution. It's like we can't see the forest through the trees, so we're just going to double down, triple down, and we're going to kind of talk about a market-oriented approach to the problem that the market has caused to have this infinite model of growth on a finite planet is causing us. But we're just going to talk about the anxiety. I mean, I remember the panels there were so cartoonish.

37:31It was like, let's talk about climate anxiety. But they don't want to talk about the elephant in the room. Right. Now, all those UN conferences are like beyond depressing to have to sit through, having covered many. So what are the core arguments of the film is basically, you know, what we've been talking about, right? The climate movement and the anti-war movement are two sides of the same coin and that they've been sort of like kept artificially separate. What do you say to a climate advocate listening or, you know, I'm trying to think of my, you know, my parents, not even climate advocates, but sort of like my boomer parents who are, you know, very much on this side of, you know, climate activism.

38:07But they would they would argue like, look, we need to be focused on carbon policy, on renewables, EVs. And this military argument, you know, it might be true. In fact, it probably is. But it's a distraction from what is politically achievable. I don't even know what politically achievable is in this realm anymore. But talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, and I think that's the danger, right, is this status quoism being towed and perpetuated by most of the corporate media, by the ruling class, people who are deeming this completely insane system where the wholesale slaughter of infants has been deemed normal, the fact that the U.S.

38:42and Israel has flattened the moral threshold to the fact that we don't even know how to respond. to any of these problems anymore. And so we just kind of cede to the inevitability of the worst outcome. And we compartmentalize it. And I think that's the biggest problem. We have to realize that this is not acceptable, that this is not compatible. Having a global military empire is completely uninhabitable with the future of the planet that is a sustainable, habitable place for our children. So let me explain how. So it's not just the oil purchases. It's not just the maintenance of the arsenal. I think people can look at that and justify that and say, look, we need to have a military.

39:24OK, I disagree that we need a military empire with a thousand bases around the world. But if you want to argue the existence of a huge military, several times bigger than the next five combined, fine. But what that does is basically it just commodifies nature to the point where you are degrading it. Where, you know, like, for example, I mean, the natural consequence of having this global military empire is someone like Trump, where you're saying to feed it, right, just to feed the nature of the beast. You need the oil in Venezuela. You need the oil in Iran. This has always been a bipartisan push from Democrats and Republicans.

40:03This is something that's unacceptable. This is the uniparty at work. This is the uniparty in practice. So, you know, it's been a 60 year plan to destroy all the last vestiges of independent countries so we can pillage and plunder them. That's not acceptable. OK, even if you're a liberal and care about the environment and you think that Democrats are less bad than Republicans, that is a completely insane notion and belief that we have the right to do that. And what that is doing is destroying the environment. You look at World War I, even with small armaments, there are still dead zones there from just the weapons that were used in World War I.

40:40The dead zones and superfund sites across the country, across the world, from the extractivism to, you know, for nuclear, for all of these chemical products, all of that has destroyed so much of the environment many times over. The toxic legacy contamination in Iraq. There are still kids being born today with congenital heart failure. All of every single bullet fired. 250 ,000 bullets is the conservative estimate for every single person killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Every bullet is a toxic explosion of carcinogens, depleted uranium. That's going to be impacting people for millennia. OK, but but beyond that, beyond that, what this military is doing, it is it lives on oil.

41:27OK, you can't green a global military empire. You can't. You simply cannot. You can't hybridize Bradley fighting vehicles. You can't slap solar panels on bases and call it a day because the entire machinery, the entire apparatus of the military empire is maintaining this infrastructure to extract oil and natural gas. That's why all the bases are around the arteries of capital and oil flowing in the Middle East. That's why the U.S. has subsidized this colonial outpost of Israel in such an extreme way, because it uses it as its attack dog to tamp down on countries that are not bowing to the dictates, on countries that are oil rich.

42:07That's why it has all these Gulf client states around that area. It all goes back to the domination of oil and the necessity to to take every last drop and to control every last drop. So it goes so far beyond just the arsenal and the amount of oil that the arsenal is depleting. No, no, no. It's so far beyond that. It's the entire globe. It's the entire world system and order that is impeding our ability to have renewable energy. That's impeding our ability to have the ingenuity of creatively collaborating with countries like China and Russia to get us out of this mess, to get us out of this short-sighted insanity of warfare as the only thing.

42:52This hyper-competitive short-sighted insanity, it's collective suicide. So that's what I urge people to do. If you are an environmentalist, if you care, just like I do, about composting, I'm a militant composter, okay? But I know that my green bags that I put into my compost bin every day, It's not going to make a dent if the military is dumping 20 million pounds of toxic waste into the environment annually just in the U.S. to clean thousands of tanks that it will never use. Okay, I know that that's not going to make a dent if the U.S. has 600 Boeing Pegasuses that are flying gas stations that one flight mission is the same as me driving 100 years straight.

43:36That's not going to make a dent. So what I encourage people is you have to understand the perspective of being anti-war, being anti-empire, and basically just understanding that you cannot be an environmentalist unless you incorporate anti-imperialism in this ideology. We are not going to make a dent as environmentalists, as people who care about the future of the planet, if we don't confront this global military empire. It's not about being defenseless. It's not about not having a military. It's about not having a military empire that dominates the planet and basically hoists up weapons contractors and oil barons as kings and queens.

44:21No, you're very eloquently put. I'm just laughing because I'm thinking about this experience I had a couple weeks ago where my daughter, who's in preschool, was around Earth Day, and they were learning about recycling. And so she came home and she was like very excited to explain to me how recycling works. And I was in the middle of reporting a story about how we had just – the Americans and Israelis had just bombed these oil fields in Iran and it was like raining petroleum on Tehran. And it was just this like cognitive dissonance of like this sweet little four-year-old who's like, oh, yeah, I'm going to be able to make a difference because if you recycle the plastics and you set it apart from the papers.

45:03And that's what they're teaching them. And obviously they should. I'm not anti-recycling. But having that experience while literally watching oil come down as rain over actions that we're doing in a war of choice in Iran was just one of those moments where I'm just like, what planet am I on here? Right? No, exactly. And then you realize it was a marketing campaign. That's what recycling has always been. It was a marketing campaign by the big plastic polluters. polluters just like how the the whole concept of uh climate footprint was created by bp to to off offload their responsibility to me and you so we have to be like oh my climate footprint is though that's like a real thing i mean look the onus has always been on the consumer because we're living in capitalism and so to be a good good capitalist and good consumer we buy better and we buy right and that's going to save the planet exactly it's a joke and it's we've been hoodwinked into this system and I think people are just realizing how far gone we are and how dangerous this rhetoric has been and how much it's benefited just the big polluters all along and left us to be diseased and left to die.

46:14Abby, I can't let you go without asking a little bit more about Israel. You mentioned it. You've reported extensively on Gaza from Gaza, Palestine, going back to your first visit when you were invited, actually, I believe, by the Israeli government. And then what you what you witnessed sort of radicalized you. Can you just talk a little first of all, when was that? And just talk a little bit about what it is that you saw then. Yeah, I Gaza was is an issue very dear to my heart. I worked with several Palestinians who had lost many of their family members back during Cass led in 2009 and then 2012.

46:49And so I was always just so confused that this third rail issue that it wasn't you weren't able to talk about it, even my colleagues in alternative media. And so I had an Israeli spokesperson invite me to come see it firsthand and told me I was dead wrong about what I was saying about Israel. And so I went firsthand and holy it was much worse than I ever could have imagined. And that's on a government sponsored trip. Oh, no, no, no. This was just him being like, come, come see. Oh, no, the government definitely would not have taken me around the West Bank. Yeah, right. But no, I mean, it was incredible.

47:19I mean, When you step foot in the West Bank and the first thing I saw was a line of people walking up this huge hill and an ambulance that had police walking around it. So there was two things that were really stark right at the beginning. It was one makeshift checkpoint that were forcing Palestinians two hours out of their day to just take this unnecessary route home. And then another thing is an ambulance was stopped and they were checking the ambulance and, of course, delaying medical treatment to a Palestinian who was probably bleeding out. So very shocking right out of the gate. I mean, every day there was another war crime, another atrocity.

47:53I went to a funeral when I was there and was attacked by Israeli soldiers. And then that was just in the West Bank. I mean, no one that I had met in the West Bank, being Palestinian, had ever said anything remotely anti-Semitic, anything that was bigoted or hateful. They just said, why are they moving right up against my village? We just want to live in peace. And I was just so taken aback by just that inverted reality that I'd always heard from the media and my politicians of what Palestine was like, what Palestinians were like. They were so welcoming. And then I stepped one foot into Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and it was just this really, really just visceral nature of hatred, bigotry, and genocidal fervor that was being espoused by Israelis.

48:40it was really, really horrifying just how casually racist the Israelis were. I mean, I would just go up to people on camera, just as I do everywhere I go, and just kind of take a snapshot of where people are at. And I just said, what do you think about the situation? Knowing that I'm an American, filming them on camera, and I mean, Jesus Christ, you should just see for yourself. Check it out on Empire Files. It was really, really, really shocking. And it was just, the writing was on the wall. I mean, I saw it back in 2016 at a time of relative calm. I knew this was a society too far gone. You know, this is a society that was so fascist, unapologetically so, that the second there was any political capital, the second that October 7th happened, I knew that they could not help themselves but to go full genocidal.

49:29But I think it was really shocking for the rest of the world to see Israelis speak for themselves because they have been hidden and shielded from us, from Western audiences. It's usually handpicked spokespeople use to placate and speak to us, but to see Israeli society unabashed, it's been really, really startling. And of course, that harsh juxtaposition to actually see what Palestinian life is really like and to see it in 4K through the genocide. It's been And it's been horrific. And to see it still ongoing with corporate media playing along as dutiful stenographers, it's been shocking to say the least.

50:07No, it has. I was watching that video that you're discussing. We'll link to it. It's really something. Again, you did this 2016, 2017. So this is years before October 7th. And you speak to these just sort of like everyday Jewish Israelis in the center of Jerusalem, and they are supportive of apartheid at best, genocide at worst. If this was what the Israeli street was saying back then, what the hell is it like now? What is the mentality there now? Yeah, I mean we see it. We see it. We see the lack of protests. We see the lack of attempts to do anything to stop this bloodletting. There's a handful of people on the streets.

50:53There's a couple hundred anti-Zionist secular Jews, and they all know each other. That's how few and far between there are. And it's not just anecdotal. We see it in polling, poll after poll. Over 90 % of Israeli Jews support this. They support the bombing of Iran. They support the starvation of babies. and they support the genocide unapologetically. And this is really, really devastating, and that's why we call for boycott divestment sanctions because we have to have some sort of external pressure campaign mounted from the outside of Israel, just like it was in South Africa apartheid. Yeah. You know, I've been critical of Israel for a long time.

51:31You've been much more critical and much more prominent in your criticisms of Israel, and you've done the legwork that I have in terms of actually going there. You know, I also covered 10-7 when it happened, a horrific, horrible attack by Hamas, you know, some of the worst videos I've ever seen in my life. And frankly, I empathize with the Israelis after that attack. But that government has been nothing short of maniacal in the years since. But my point here is the question that I'm trying to get to is I've noticed in my own reporting, in my own commentary, that there has been much less pushback when I criticize the Israeli government, specifically Netanyahu and his sort of like band of psychos, you still get you still get some people being like, oh, you know, you're being anti-Semitic or you're towing the line or you're starting to sound like Tucker Carlson or something.

52:19But it's less than it was. It's less than it was. I will I can write and have conversations now that I would not have been able to have with a mainstream media backing me even a couple of years ago. Is that just coming from someone in a more independent line of work? Do you see that as well? Or am I off base? Oh, yeah. I mean, Gaza changed the world. Yeah, Gaza changed the world. Now people understand it's the connective tissue between so many issues, and they realize it's the testing ground for the rest of the world, and they also realize it's kind of the hub of lies. It's a perfect encapsulation of everything that's wrong and everything that's good, right?

52:59It's like it's the precipice of like the abyss and hope. I mean, it's everything that's awakened humanity in the best way, but it's also just the moral abyss of how everything's collapsed in on itself. And that includes just the propaganda, the desperate, desperate propaganda where we are being told black is white and up is down. when we can see with our own eyes genocide day after day after day. So I think at this point you'd really have to be such a true believer and so invested in propping up Israel to not actually admit that it's a genocide. But I think you still have the problem where it's being pinpointed on Netanyahu as opposed to the entire society and Zionism writ large.

53:49And I think that's similarly to the problem of just kind of castigating Trump Trump as an anomaly, as a king, as an aberration. And I think it's a far deeper rot than that. Well, this is just why, you know, when people say, oh, like, obviously, I'm against anti-Semitism, I'm against all forms of hate. But, you know, people will make the point like, oh, there's been this shocking rise in anti-Semitism in the U.S. and around the world, as though it has no, as though that just sort of came out of nowhere. When in fact, right, I mean, we, People have been bombarded on their phones for the last three years with the Israelis doing things that are unconscionable.

54:30So like what do you expect is going to happen? I'm not articulating this very well. I'm sure it will still get clipped and I'll get in trouble for it. But it feels – if I'm lucky – it feels just a little bit like – back to our original point that like even though the algorithms are a disaster and have made the world worse in every way, the internet does still have that ability i think to to to to put these images in front of people in ways that you're just not going to see if you watch the nightly news or read the new york times every day right 100 i mean that's the problem with israel claiming to represent all jews i mean that's the problem with putting the star of david on uh the flag um carving the iconography of the jewish religion as part of the genocide i mean it's it's really really horrific um but then of Of course, you have organizations like the ADL basically counting every single time someone says Free Palestine or holds up a Palestinian flag as incidents of anti-Semitism.

55:26So it's really hard to even kind of pinpoint what is going on and why. But of course, I mean, when you have the so-called Jewish state committing genocide in 4K gleefully, unapologetically, and with complete impunity from the rest of the world, it's going to cause anti-Semitic, you know, an increase in anti-Semitism. And it is really horrific because it is actually making the global population, the global Jewish population much, much less safe. Well, this is exactly the point. And I was just having this conversation with a dear friend of mine who's Jewish, Zionist. I love her to death. And she was saying some of my commentary in the newsletter has been towing the line or whatever.

56:12And she's saying she was making the point that it was maybe making her and her family less safe. And I feel horrible having to think that way. I don't – I mean it's terrible. But then again, I don't believe that to be the case. And the point that I made to her was your beef is with the government of Israel, right? It's not with me. It's not with regular Americans who are sick of seeing stories of children or journalists being killed every day for doing their jobs or just living. Yeah, yeah. I remember it was called Blood Libel when it was just – it was one publication that posted all the children who had been slaughtered.

56:49And it's like, well, they are slaughtering. It's like to literally state facts is not an anti-Semitic trope and it's not blood libel. This is the truth. They killed 20 ,000 children. I wish it wasn't true, but reporting on these facts does not make it a trope. I'm sorry that Israel is doing the most horrific, heinous shit possible and imaginable. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but we need to be angry with them and it needs to be stopped. It's not the way that it's reported on or the facts that exist. It's the fact that it's being done. Right. Before I let you go, I did. I promised I wanted to talk to you about Tucker Carlson.

57:32I don't want to talk very long. I've just I'm fascinated by this guy. I've been following his career a long time and I've been watching a lot of his his most recent content just to get a sense because I think he's going to run for president. OK, so you I'm not I'm not on an island there. So this guy was the number one cheerleader for the Iraq war back in the day. Now, to his credit, in his defense, he has apologized for that, which not a lot of these neocons or at least former neocons have done. So I actually give him a little bit of credit for at least acknowledging he was wrong about that. I mean, I'm sure it's duplicitous and I'm sure that it's for some reason that he's doing that.

58:11But when you watch him lately, he's all over the place now. He's become very pro-Islam, flirting with anti-Semitism, but open to all sorts of conspiracies. But he's also – he's putting some of these ideas that you're talking about into a – on a platform that will reach people that you, frankly, with all due respect, just won't reach. I mean he is reaching a lot of Fox News watchers or also sort of younger men particularly who may not watch Fox News. So where do you see him in sort of this ecosystem that you exist in? And can there be – can somebody like him bring value from sort of like a leftist perspective to these issues?

58:57Or is it all just cynicism and he's just doing this to A, B test what platform to run on in 2028? I think you hit it on the head right there. I think it's another Bannon trick. I look at Tucker as a good old psyop. as someone who's been rooted in conspiracy culture for many, many decades. I definitely have seen the trajectory of Tucker Carlson. I remember when he was speaking to our grandparents in his bow tie, selling the Iraq war and demeaning and disparaging left. I mean, we don't have to look back too far on actually trying to foment regime change propaganda for Venezuela, for Iran. I mean, this was not too long ago that he still was on Fox News with extremely racist, xenophobic rhetoric that, again, laid the groundwork for the entire administration's foreign policy agenda that we see today.

59:57So look, I, you know, of course, of course, I'm, of course, I want to forgive people if they, if they have a moment of awakening and reckoning. I don't necessarily think that's what happened with Tucker. I think that he's playing us all. And I think that his close friendship with Trump basically convinced a lot of people who claim that they were well-intentioned by basically failing to criticize Trump or hold him to account the entire first term, because they kept thinking that this salient strategy was going on Tucker Carlson's show and somehow talking to Trump and that they would be like talking, they'd have Trump's ear.

1:00:33So that was like a really bizarre thing that happened in the first term. But then, of course, you know, these people still took him at his word and they just think that Tucker somehow is in their corner. And this includes a lot of leftists. And I find it very alarming because if you just strip down Tucker's rhetoric about Israel, not only is it anti-Semitic coded, but it gets into a very weird territory where all of a sudden it's not about Palestinian lives. It's not about where I'm coming from, which is a critique of actual power. It just kind of folds back into nationalism and xenophobia. And that's he won't.

1:01:08He will never criticize. Well, I shouldn't say that, actually. He has criticized some elements of sort of like of the capitalist system. But it's it's always feels ancillary to the point that he's trying to make. Of course. And it's always going to fold back into the right wing. And that's the problem, is that when you have him kind of hinting to the fact that, oh, he still has Trump's ear and oh, no. oh, hey, Trump agrees with you. Like, hey, I'm going to tell Trump. I'm going to tell him. And so he still has this kind of modicum of trust and credibility where he's really, really close with the administration.

1:01:39Very close, in fact, that, hey, maybe he too can reach Trump and stop this madness. So it kind of gives you this inside baseball thing. But at the same time, does he really give a s***? Is he just a cynical snake that understands where the current's going? that he wants to capitalize on the anti-Israel rhetoric and fold it into his future presidential run. My question is, why was he at the White House when the Venezuela oil was sold off to the oil companies? Why was Tucker Carlson there applauding and celebrating Trump? That's interesting. So again, if he's this big anti-regime change, anti-interventionist guy, it seems like he was pretty comfortable with the black bagging of a sovereign leader to steal and pillage their oil right after it happened.

1:02:24So look, all of this is a game. I always think, see what you see, don't be duped. You have the richest men in the world who are curating our reality and providing us with the information that we see on social media. They're the ones basically juking the algorithm. So why is it that I don't subscribe to Tucker Carlson, but I see his face every time I go online? Why do these people want me? It's like, why do they want me to like Tucker Carlson? I always have to ask that. There's always something hidden behind what we see. And that's the intent behind the algorithm, behind the tech people, of why they are pushing this person on us.

1:03:03No, that's a great place to leave it. Abby Martin, tell people where they can watch the film. Earthsgreatestenemy.com. Check it out. Empire Files is our investigative series. and it's up there for members of YouTube, also Patreon members, but earthsgreatestenemy.com is where you can watch it on Vimeo. Check it out. Thank you so much for having me on. It was a great honor. Oh, Abby, it was so much fun. The Fearless Abby Martin. Do check out the film. It's great. It's also just very well done. It's just like, it looks really good, like aesthetically. I don't know if that means anything to you as the director.

1:03:37It means a lot. Okay, good. I enjoyed it. We'll link to all your work in the description. Abby Martin, everybody. Thank you so much. Thank you.