Strawberry Elephant

SponsorBlock, Timestamps, and Generated Summary below:

SponsorBlock Timestamp:

1. 0:00.000 - 0:10.022 Intermission
2. 45:40.000 - 45:59.850 Endcards/Credits

Video Description:

Timestamps:

1. (0:00) Intro
2. (2:16) The Silent Feud Between Israel and Kirk
3. (12:52) Netanyahu and Kirk
4. (19:54) Netanyahu’s courting of alt media
5. (23:19) The coming crackdown
6. (30:57) Years of Lead
7. (35:38) Rittenhouse
8. (39:30) McCarthyism
9. (45:22) Outro

Generated Summary:

Israel, Charlie Kirk, and the Weaponization of Murder: A Discussion with Max Blumenthal

This video features Chris Hedges interviewing Max Blumenthal about the assassination of Charlie Kirk and its implications for the United States, focusing on Kirk's relationship with the Zionist lobby and the potential weaponization of his murder.

Key Points:

• Charlie Kirk's evolving stance on Israel: Initially supported by the Israel lobby, Kirk later faced pressure from his grassroots base due to Israel's actions in Gaza. This led to Kirk inviting figures like Tucker Carlson, who criticized Israeli influence, to his events.
• Netanyahu's alleged attempts to influence Kirk: Blumenthal reports that Netanyahu personally offered to re-fund Kirk's organization with a massive infusion of Zionist money, which Kirk refused. This refusal reportedly left Kirk feeling frightened.
• Netanyahu's courting of alt-media: Netanyahu has been increasingly engaging with alternative media outlets, particularly right-wing podcasters, to bypass mainstream media and directly influence American public opinion.
• Weaponization of Kirk's murder: The Zionist lobby is allegedly using Kirk's assassination to target critics of Israel and the left in general, pushing for measures like revoking passports of those accused of supporting terrorism.
• The Red-Green Alliance: Netanyahu views the "marriage of radical leftism and Islam" as a significant threat in the U.S., using this narrative to justify crackdowns on dissent.
• Agenda of Mass Repression: Blumenthal argues that Kirk's death is being exploited to push an agenda of mass repression, criminalizing anti-Israel activity and expanding the powers of secret police.
• The influence of Zionist figures in US Politics: Blumenthal highlights the influence of Zionist figures like Stephen Miller in shaping US policy and the pressure exerted on politicians to align with Israeli interests.
• The chilling effect on free speech: Blumenthal describes a "dystopian scenario" where individuals are being doxxed and losing their jobs for expressing critical views of Israel or minimizing Kirk's death.
• Netanyahu's overcompensation: Netanyahu's repeated declarations of Charlie Kirk being a true friend of Israel felt like overcompensation and fear of the truth getting out.
• Listening Devices: Allegedly, listening devices were planted by Israeli agents on Secret Service emergency response vehicles during one of Netanyahu's visits to the US.

About Channel:

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, author and commentator provides compelling story telling, archive interviews & show content covering US foreign policy, economic realities and civil liberties in American society.

Background:

The parameters of acceptable journalist inquiry has dramatically narrowed over the nearly four decades I have been a reporter and author. Newspapers, where I began my career, have atrophied or died. The electronic media is in the hands of a half dozen corporations that impose a uniformity of opinion and ban the views of us who decry the crimes of empire, the permanent war economy, the apartheid state of Israel, our money saturated political process and social inequality. Whistleblowers, the life blood of investigative journalism, have been virtually silenced through a combination of wholesale government surveillance—the reason Edward Snowden immediately left the country after revealing that we were all being watched, tracked and monitored by the government—and the misuse of the Espionage Act to prosecute those who reveal government malfeasance and crimes. Julian Assange, who never committed a crime, is on the verge of being extradited to the United States and spending the rest of his life in prison, setting a dangerous legal precedent that criminalizes anyone who possesses or publishes government secrets, as other investigative reporters and I did at The New York Times. Algorithms imposed by digital media platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, shadow ban critics or, as in the case of the New York Post, which was locked out of its own account so it could not disseminate the contents found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, censor them. America’s premier investigative journalist, Sy Hersh, who exposed the war crimes at My Lai and Abu Ghraib, has difficulty publishing in the United States.

My television show on TeleSur, which was later broadcast on RT America, went off the air when these two media outlets where shut down. The staff of Truthdig and I were fired by the wealthy publisher when we went on strike to protest her attempt to fire the legendary Editor-in-Chief Bob Scheer and demand a union. Bob, who had been a columnist for The Los Angeles Times, had been fired from the paper for opposing the Iraq war, similar to my own experience at The New York Times.

Substack is the last best hope for me to retain my independence and do the journalism and writing I find meaningful and impactful. The great investigative journalism, I.F. Stone, a victim of the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1960s, unable to get a job even at The Nation magazine, founded I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which he printed in his basement. This Substack is an updated version of his weekly, begun for the same reasons and determined to replicate Stone’s fierce honesty and independence.

Corporations will not fund us. The model of relying on the wealthy does not work. The commercial press, along with National Public Radio and PBS, also heavily dependent on corporate funds, has been largely neutered.^[[1] https://chrishedges.substack.com/about]

Edit:

1. Added missing SponserBlock Timestamps; added source to About Channel section
2. Fixed about channel section naming

On Monday, North Carolina lawmakers will return to the state capitol with plans to tighten rules around bail and pretrial release for people accused of crimes. The proposed legislation would require that people arrested in the state pay a cash bail to be released from jail before trial if they have a prior violent offense on their record.

The push comes on the heels of the fatal, unprovoked stabbing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a commuter train in August. Footage of the attack went viral and was amplified by some right-wing commentators and political figures, including President Donald Trump, as proof that lenient bail policies are allowing violent criminals to roam the streets.

The alleged attacker, Decarlos Brown Jr, had a long criminal history and had been released without posting bail after his most recent arrest. It’s not clear that the newly proposed bill, had it been law at the time, could have prevented Zarutska’s death. The maximum sentence for the crime in Brown’s most recent arrest — for misdemeanor misuse of 911 — is 120 days. A retired North Carolina judge noted that even if Brown had been denied bail altogether, he almost certainly would have been released by April, long before the August stabbing.

...

Republicans in New York are also working to advance new bail laws that would limit pretrial release, more than five years after a hotly contested bail reform package was signed into law. Currently, the state is somewhat of an outlier on pretrial release due to a 1971 law that makes it illegal for judges there to consider a person’s “dangerousness” when setting bail. The bill proposed earlier this month would allow considering dangerousness, and make it a key factor in release decisions.

...

Then there’s Texas, which passed comprehensive and bipartisan bail-stiffening laws earlier this summer, including limiting the situations where people are eligible for cashless bond – or released without paying money. Voters there will also consider a state constitutional amendment this fall that would ban bail altogether for defendants charged with certain violent crimes.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250922120736/https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/09/20/texas-trump-jail-new-york-bail

Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel returns after suspension sparked fears of censorship.

Comments

Grassroots unions across Italy called for a 24-hour general strike on Monday in solidarity with the people of Gaza, citing reasons that included the “inertia of the Italian and EU governments” to address the humanitarian crisis in the territory.

From Milan to Palermo, Italians poured on to the streets in at least 75 municipalities across the country. In Genoa and Livorno, dock workers blocked ports over concerns that Italy was being used as a staging post for the transfer of arms to Israel.

In Rome, more than 20,000 people gathered outside the Termini train station waving Palestinian flags and chanting “free Palestine”. Michelangelo, 17, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) he had turned up to support “a population that is being exterminated”.

Comments

President Donald Trump publicly vented at Attorney General Pam Bondi on Saturday, saying the lack of criminal charges against top adversaries was “killing our reputation and credibility.”

“We can’t delay any longer,” Trump posted on Truth Social in a message directed to “Pam.” “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” He specifically lamented the lack of criminal charges against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, three of his most prominent political antagonists.

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New type of detector enables deeper understanding of the universe

The underground “Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)” near Jiangmen city in the Guangdong Province, which was prepared with the participation of researchers from the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), has successfully completed the filling of its 20,000 tons of liquid scintillator and begun data taking. After more than a decade of preparation and construction, JUNO is the first of a new generation of very large neutrino experiments to reach this stage. Initial trial operation and data taking show that key performance indicators met or exceeded design expectations, enabling JUNO to tackle one of this decade’s major open questions in particle physics: the ordering of neutrino masses—whether the third mass state (ν₃) is heavier than the second (ν₂).

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37896595

• Hacker News;
• Lobsters.

Fuck Charlie Kirk btw

Before you go thinking about re-subbing...

In case any of you out there didnt know.

Originally Posted By u/Average-Joe-6685 At 2025-09-22 07:29:16 PM | Source

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In order to back claims (from Trmp) that the left is a violent threat, the DOW (formerly the DOJ) has quietly removed all information regarding right-wing violence and statistics.

https://theconversation.com/right-wing-extremist-violence-is-more-frequent-and-more-deadly-than-left-wing-violence-what-the-data-shows-265367

Originally Posted By u/Valkyriemome At 2025-09-22 08:36:03 AM | Source

https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/115241698154319868

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman sat down with longtime political prisoner and Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier for his first extended television and radio broadcast interview since his release to home confinement in February. Before his commutation by former President Joe Biden, the 81-year-old Peltier spent nearly 50 years behind bars. Peltier has always maintained his innocence for the 1975 killing of two FBI officers. He is expected to serve the remainder of his life sentences under house arrest at the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Nation in Belcourt, North Dakota. In a wide-ranging conversation, we spoke to Peltier about his case, his time in prison, his childhood spent at American Indian boarding school and his later involvement in the American Indian Movement (AIM) and more. “We still have to live under that, that fear of losing our identity, losing our culture, our religion,” Peltier says about his continued commitment to Indigenous rights. “The struggle still goes on for me. I’m not going to give up.”

AMY GOODMAN: In a Democracy Now! global TV/radio broadcast exclusive, we spend the hour with longtime Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier. In February, he was released from a federal prison in Florida after spending nearly half a century behind bars for a crime he says he did not commit. President Biden, on his last day in office, commuted Peltier’s life sentence to home confinement. Biden’s decision came after mounting calls by tribal leaders and supporters around the world in a decadeslong community-led campaign fighting for his freedom.

In the ’70s, Peltier was involved with AIM, the American Indian Movement. In 1975, two FBI agents and one young AIM activist were killed in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Two AIM members were later arrested for killing the agents. At trial, the jury acquitted them. Leonard Peltier was arrested later, tried separately and convicted. Peltier has always maintained his innocence.

Notable supporters of Leonard Peltier over the years included Nelson Mandela, Pope Francis and Amnesty International. Supporters of Peltier say his trial was marked by gross FBI and federal prosecutorial misconduct, including the coercion of witnesses, fabricated testimony and suppressed exculpatory evidence.

After being released in February, Leonard Peltier returned home to live on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Reservation in Belcourt, North Dakota. September 12th was Leonard Peltier’s 81st birthday. People gathered throughout the day, visiting him to celebrate this first birthday in almost a half a century where he was home. We got there on his birthday. The next day, Saturday, we spoke in his living room in his first extended TV/radio broadcast interview since his release from prison.