Israel's long-awaited strikes on Iran have targeted military and industrial installations in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam, with air-strikes also reported in the Syrian cities of Damascus and Homs.  It is now Iran's turn to retaliate in the escalatory tit-for-tat game, as the brink of regional and even world war looms ever closer. In Episode 249 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg advocates a neither/nor position that rejects the militaristic and reactionary regimes of both Zionism and political Islam, and looks to a secular order in the Middle East.

In Episode 248 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg examines the New York Times coverage of the ugly turn in the pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, and warns against the targeting of Jews in the guise of a misguided supposed "anti-Zionism." The ongoing genocide in Gaza urgently demands protest, but just as urgently demands tactically and analytically astute protest that does not play into the cynical weaponization of the accusation of anti-Semitism by Zionist propaganda. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

The bellicose and authoritarian Russian state's propaganda exploitation of the anarcho-pacifist novelist Leo Tolstoy is an obvious and perverse irony. But a less obvious irony also presents itself. Like all fascist regimes, that of Vladimir Putin is stigmatizing and even criminalizing homosexuality and other sexual "deviance." Following alarming reports of "concentration camps" for gay men in the Russian republic of Chechnya, Moscow began to impose an anti-gay agenda nationwide. A 2020 constitutional reform officially enshrined "traditional marriage," while a "gay propaganda law" imposes penalties on any outward expression of gay identity, resulting in police raids on Moscow gay bars. The "LGBT movement" has been designated a "terrorist organization"; media depictions of same-sex love are banned as "deviant content." Yet the venerable littérateur now glorified as a symbol of Russian nationalism may have himself been gay. In Episode 247 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Javier Sethness Castro, author of Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography (Routledge 2023).

With Lebanon under bombardment and the world awaiting Israel's response to the Iranian missile attacks on its territory, fears mount that Iran's nuclear facilities could be targeted—which, in addition to being an environmental disaster in its own right, could represent the crossing of a moral threshold toward the use of nuclear weapons. So two theaters of the world conflict—the Middle East and Ukraine—now constitute a looming nuclear threat. Meanwhile, the other horsemen of the apocalypse continue their relentless advance—climate change, cyber-based disinformation and the ultimate replacement of humanity by artificial intelligence. In Episode 246 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg looks for glimmers of hope in emerging signs of human resistance—such as the East Coast dockworkers' strike, which is demanding a ban on all automation at the ports.

In the first CounterVortex meta-podcast of February 2018, we noted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' decision to advance the minute hand of its Doomsday Clock to two minutes of midnight, citing the threats of nuclear weapons, climate change and "cyber-based disinformation." The clock was most recently moved to 90 seconds to midnight in January 2023, in light of the Ukraine war—the closest it has ever been. The clock did not move forward in 2024, despite Israel crossing the genocidal threshold in Gaza—a conflict now spreading to Lebanon, with potential to ignite the entire Middle East and even the world. The threat of Iran being drawn into the conflict could bring its patron Russia nose-to-nose with Israel's patron, the United States. This comes just as Vladimir Putin has announced a revision to Russia's nuclear weapons doctrine, allowing a first strike if its territory is attacked even by a non-nuclear state that is backed by a state with nuclear weapons. This appears to add frightening credibility to the mounting nuclear threats from Moscow. All this as the "normal" functioning of the capitalist system continues to compel the apocalypse. The some 50 left dead by Hurricane Helene in the US South are among hundreds killed in extreme weather events around the world in recent days—obvious signals of global climate destabilization. The multi-faceted systemic crisis portends imminent human extinction.

Once-time peacenik icon Tulsi Gabbard has joined Robert F. Kennedy Jr in defecting to the now openly fascist and even Nazi-embracing MAGA camp—actually becoming members of the Trump transition team. Meanwhile, the Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, likewise enamoured of Vladimir Putin and the dictators in his orbit (including mass murderer Bashar Assad), is being represented by a former Trump attorney in her bid to get on the ballot in swing state Nevada. Beyond the threat that she could serve as a spoiler and throw the election to Trump, this raises questions about the cooptation of segments of the American left by MAGA-fascism. It is no longer just the old-school sectarian "tankie" left that's in danger of taking the fascist lure in a Red-Brown alliance, but the pacifist, cannabis-friendly "green" left as well. In Episode 244 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg raises the alarm.

Four Black nationalists affiliated with the Uhuru Movement, an arm of the African People's Socialist Party (APSP), are on trial for acting as agents of a Russian propaganda network, in what they are calling "the free speech trial of the century." Regardless of whether their activities were protected by the First Amendment, the case reveals the very strangest of political bedfellows. Tucker Carlson, who similarly serves as a conduit for Russian propaganda, is also mentioned (although not charged) in a new federal indictment. Carlson is scheduled to appear onstage with JD Vance later this month, and recently hosted an uncloseted Nazi-nostalgist on his Twitter program. The absurd irony of the APSP platforming Kremlin demonization of Ukraine as a "Nazi" state is heightened by Russia's serial massacres of Black Africans in its new military adventures on the continent. The Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), which seemingly cultivated Uhuru/APSP, is similarly cultivating white supremacists, who are overtly Trump-aligned and marched at the Charlottesville hate-fest in 2017. The ultimate stateside beneficiary of this Kremlin-orchestrated propaganda effort is of course Donald Trump—who as president in 2020 sought to unleash the military against that year's Black Lives Matter uprising. Yet while too many "radicals" take the Kremlin bait, once-reviled "liberals" like the National Urban League actually take a more progressive position on Russia and Ukraine. In Episode 243 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg explores how the American radical left went through the proverbial looking glass, including with analogies from the (last) Cold War.

Amid global protests over the genocide in Gaza, the hypertrophy of digital technology and its colonization of every sphere of human existence continue to advance, portending the ultimate eclipse of human culture and real life, the death of literacy, and the hegemony of saturation propaganda. While the Arab Revolution of 2011 was facilitated through social media, those same platforms are today being used as conduits for propaganda and disinformation lubricating the reconsolidation of dictatorships. This is all about to get much worse—with propaganda especially getting exponentially more sophisticated—through the advent of artificial intelligence. What is urgently mandated—ultimately, even to be able to effectively oppose genocides and dictatorships—is a revolution of everyday life, reclaiming human reality from digital totalitarianism. The uprising in El Salvador against the mandatory imposition of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 still stands as a glimmer of hope, pointing the potentiality of this kind of revolution—even if the aspiring autocrat Nayib Bukele, who made Bitcoin a national currency, put down the uprising and is now consolidating an authoritarian regime. Bill Weinberg rants against the digital Borg in Episode 242 of the CounterVortex podcast.