The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Earth’s greatest enemy is the title of a new blockbuster documentary by legendary independent journalist and filmmaker, Abby Martin. It is an expansive, engrossing, and frankly, terrifying investigation into the existential threat that US Empire in general and the US military specifically poses to humanity and to our planet. Recently, right here in the real news studio in downtown Baltimore, we had the honor of hosting the Baltimore premiere of this vital documentary, and we had Abby Martin herself here in the flesh for the event. And some of you may not know this, but Abby is actually a real news alumnus. She started her renowned investigative series, The Empire Files, right here in this studio. So it was truly genuinely special to welcome Abby back here to her old stomping grounds and to watch, engage with, and celebrate the essential work that she and her co-director, Mike Prisner, have done with this new documentary, which everyone needs to watch.

And you can learn more about Earth’s greatest enemy by checking out the links that we provided in the show notes for this podcast. And what you’re about to hear are sections from the live panel discussion that I had with Abby after the documentary screening here in The Real News Studio. And we were also joined on stage by the brilliant Dharna Noor, who is a fossil fuels and climate reporter at The Guardian and is also another star real news alumnus. So here we go. I hope you check out Earth’s greatest enemy, and I hope you enjoy this conversation with me, Dharna Noor, and the one and only Abby Martin.

Dharna Noor:

It’s very surreal to be having this conversation with you in this building because I remember one, when the Empire Files launched out of this building and having these early discussions with you about the sort of undeniable need to address all of these sort of what I think are sometimes called excesses of US militarism, but I think what the film makes really clear are kind of essential components of that history. And I don’t think that I would’ve become a climate reporter if it weren’t for some of the conversations that we have had in this building over the years discussing how the climate crisis has been fueled by these systems that have fueled so many other kinds of destruction. I guess my first question to you is just like, we’re at this moment right now where we’re seeing, I guess, again, what we call maybe sometimes the worst excesses of fossil capital and militarism on display.

As you mentioned before the film, there was this just horrible series of attacks on Venezuela, the capture of Nicholas Medoro, these plans to take over Greenland to capture critical minerals needed for, yes, clean energy, but also for military equipment that are more accessible because of global warming, because of the climate crisis that the military has helped fueled. Armed with all of this research and all of this information, what has it been like to see some of this play out?

Abby Martin:

And can I just say one round of applause for Darna, because she actually was a part of the movie. I don’t know if you saw your name in the credits, but Darna has been a part of this and I’ve leaned on Dharna and her work for quite a while. And so it is surreal actually to come full circle to be back at real news at the Genesis of Empire Files and to be sitting on stage with these amazing journalists. I mean, I think like the film displays, to have the backdrop of the Iraq war and the impunity given to Iraq war criminals and kind of growing up through the era of kind of seeing the writing on the wall when we don’t hold people accountable for crimes. And when these standards are set, I mean, when Obama can say, look forward, not backward, then we get someone like Trump and then we get Gaza.

And so the testing grounds have been set and I think that, and it’s just the whiplash. I think of all of these things coming to a head and ratcheting it up so quickly because of the incubation from the neoliberalism, because of the Democrats failing to stand up to any of this because they’re part of that status quo, the bipartisan consensus of this horrific machinery of this death spiral. And so I think with Trump’s second term to see the kind of unbridled nature of just complete lack of regulation whatsoever, just free for all of global capitalism, taking the last vestige of any drop of minerals, oil, and just having it laid bare. I mean, I think that’s the most amazing part of what we’re seeing now is there’s no pretense whatsoever. The human rights, democracy charade, it’s totally out the window and we’re just saying, “We literally are going to just steal and pillage every last drop of oil because we need it.

” So in a way, it’s very clarifying, but it’s also just so dystopian because I knew that it was coming, but I didn’t realize how quickly it would all happen and how quickly it’s happening where now you have Marco Rubio and all of these complete unabashed psychopaths who are just kind of attaching themselves to Trump to say, “How quickly can we barrel through our agenda with this dying decaying fucking fascist and get Cuba and get Iran and Venezuela and Greenland?” And there’s no end in sight. And I think the most … It’s really horrifying to see just the Democrats on full display as like the complete utter abject failure to get us to this point. But in a way, it’s very clarifying and good because it’s a moment that we can seize that I’ve never seen before in the history of my little life, 41 years.

So it’s exciting as dystopian as it may be.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m curious for your thoughts on this, Abby, because the title, Earth’s greatest enemy, is us, right? It’s our government, it’s our military. And we talked about this earlier today, like I was not where you were during the Iraq war. My family was the kind of family that bought into the whole thing and thought people like you were crazy. And we believed the lies that we were told. And now here I am in 2026 watching Trump say like, “Yeah, we’re going in for the oil. It’s not about spreading democracy.” And I’m like, “How could we have been so stupid and duped and how could we believe that what the government was telling us back then?” And I’m also thinking about the fact that the world is well aware that we are their greatest enemy and they are very tired of our bullshit, not just now, but for centuries even.

So how much of this fight to dismantle the US military industrial complex needs to happen from within and how much of it is going to depend on the rest of the world like not taking our shit anymore?

Abby Martin:

I think the rest of the world’s ready. I think we’re seeing them build the infrastructure with bricks and all these other alternative systems to try to combat this hegemony of the boot on their throats that they’ve been experiencing for generations. And it’s just a matter of Americans waking up and solidifying these concepts that have been obviously extremely apparent to the rest of the world, living at the receiving end of these policies, sanctions, warfare. They don’t have collective memory loss like Americans do. They are literally impacted every single day by this military machine. And so I think Americans back in the 60s and 70s, there was much more of a critical awareness of what the systems were that were oppressing us, how all of these issues intertwined. And then of course we saw a lot of whitewashing, rehabilitating of the CIA. I mean, back a couple decades ago, it was like, yeah, the CIA is the most evil entity in the planet, we need to destroy it.

It was like even Bernie Sanders was like, “Let’s destroy the CIA.” But then after nine eleven, you had this huge rehabilitation process of just the entire federal government. And even with the Snowden leaks, you had it kind of like government good, I’m sorry, government bad, private industry, good. Private industry spying better than like Google, no evil, government evil. And I think now we’re realizing everything’s been folded into this kind of infrastructure of the police state, of ICE, of genocide. Silicon Valley is part of that system. And so it’s all been part of this propaganda apparatus to, again, whitewash and rehabilitate the ruling class. And so it’s taken a while. So I think living through the war on terror has really woken people up. But again, Trump seized on a lot of this energy, folded into the right wing, and the right wing has strengthened so much because of the failure of the opposition to really critically analyze our material realities and orient people accordingly.

And so I think right now I’m finally seeing for the first time people synthesizing these things, people having that international framework, but of course it lies on our shoulders. We are in the imperial core. We are the only ones that can actually change this. The rest of the world’s been ready. They are waiting for us because they don’t want to fucking die at the hands of our insane, belligerent military empire. They want a fighting chance for their kids. We are so deeply propagandized, but if we just coalesced this energy, all of these atomized struggles and we put it under the same umbrella, we would win. We would win and we can. And that’s the thing that we need to really seize and capture is the energy right now, the fact that Minnesota is ground zero for that inward turning of the military industrial complex, the state executions, the immunity, it’s indistinguishable now, right?

And so I think people are completely waking up. They’re sick of being gaslit. And like we said before, Max, the propaganda is so desperate and extreme because they know they’ve lost the consciousness of the world. And that should be instructive for us because the more desperate and unhinged they are, the more capacity we have to organize around the truth and reclaim our reality.

Darn, I wanted you to actually talk about your, I mean, just the whole maintenance of that fossil fuel infrastructure and how the empire necessitates war in order to maintain fossil fuels. It’s kind of like the trope like no war for oil, but like through your research, how have you found that to be the most true and apparent thing of all?

Dharna Noor:

Yeah, it’s interesting. I was actually going to ask you about this, about like the … I mean, I guess I’ll just say, I don’t think there’s such a thing. I don’t think that there’s such a … I mean, no blood for oil is like a meaningful, I think, cry in the face of the kind of horror that we’ve seen in Venezuela and Iraq and so many other cases. And also, I think what’s so important about the film is that it makes really clear that the foundation of this country is built on resource extraction by violence. There’s resource extraction happening in the United States and often that happens by violence. Look at West Virginia and how we’ve extracted coal there. And also, as the film mentioned, the first overseas bases were put there to extract more coal for the military. And these two things I think are really kind of inextricable from one another.

And I guess one kind of proposed solution that you see to that from the Department of Defense and others is this idea that you can just green the military. And I guess I’m curious what you’re … I don’t know. I think the film does a really incredible job of showing the importance of data. And then also, as Barry Sanders says in the film, kind of looking at the numbing effect of numbers also.

I think one effect of this kind of increasing concern about militarism and the climate crisis and their interlinkages that we’ve seen are these efforts to kind of quantify the emissions impacts, for instance, of the genocide in Gaza or Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. Oftentimes these are military interventions that have created more planet warming pollution than entire countries. But I guess I struggle sometimes with wondering, those are important numbers to have, but also do they obscure more than they sort of clarify? So after grappling with all this data and all this research, I guess, what do you think the role of data collection is? Do we need to do more of it? Is it a distraction to simply focus on the numbers?

Abby Martin:

I mean, yeah, no, it’s a really good point because someone brought up the … I think this is just so obvious to all of us is that numbers kind of are rendered meaningless as our facts. We are completely past any sort of reality-based community or fact-based consensus and we’ve seen how dark it can get. I mean, the release of that AI video of the woman being arrested and that was protested at the church because there was like an ICE agent that was the pastor. It’s a fucking crazy thing. And then they released this AI video of her. And I fear that let’s say ICE just unleashes a barrage of bullets and kills a bunch of protesters one day. They would just release an AI deep fake video of protesters throwing a Molotov cocktails. It doesn’t even matter what happens half of … Well, again, we’re giving way too much credit to MAGA by saying half the country.

It’s a small contingent of fascist apologists who would just believe whatever their cult leader says. So it goes beyond just proving the truth and synthesizing this data. And I think it has to go to the emotional relationship that you have with the people that are impacted by this. And I think that’s apparent for everything. It’s like COVID really siloed us off and made a lot of people succumb to this kind of like dark arena where you’re just in your own head and on your screens and being brain rotted. And I think that the second that you talk to people and you relate to people and you reach them where they are, you get that human impact of why they are the way they are, why they believe the things they do. And that’s what we try to do with this story. It’s like, yes, we wanted to prove the case, and I think we did tenfold, that US imperialism is the greatest threat, and we can continue to throw out those numbers, which we did.

And they are very overwhelming, right? When you look at the scope and scale of this all. But when you dig into the human impact and you see that Kim is like, that’s like my mom.

She’s like my long lost sister, someone who’s just like dedicating her life, no accolades. She’s not going to get fucking on a magazine. She’s just doing it because she wants to. Someone needs to hold them accountable. Someone needs to count the dead of those babies. And so I think that those are the stories that are going to change minds. They’re going to rewire brains. And so it is of course important to synthesize the data. We need to have that. We need to be armed with the facts and be confident with the truth. And now let it be known because you guys have known how bad this is. You probably already knew in your heart this information. We’ve all been watching genocide for three years. Nothing’s worse than that. And in fact, when making the documentary, I was so worried, why would people care about the earth if they don’t care about children being blown up?

No one’s going to give a shit about this, but it’s the opposite. It’s the opposite. I was beaten down into that dystopian kind of pessimism because of just the way that the system berates you and makes you think that everything is just worthless and pointless. But once you get out and you’re in the community, you’re like, no, no, no. The vast majority of people agree with this. The vast majority of people get it. They’re empathetic and it’s very motivating actually. And so I think, yes, numbers numb and they can be completely overwhelming, but you can’t let the system paralyze you. That’s what they want. They want us to be terrorized. This is a full fledged assault on our minds, on our bodies, on reality. So if you just reclaim reality, right? You reclaim your feelings, let yourself feel because this is fucking crazy. None of this is normal.

Genocide is not normal. That’s not the status quo. That’s not the world that I want to live in. I don’t want to open my phones and see children being murdered every day. That’s not okay. We can feel, we can have emotions. We can talk to people, “Hey, have you been watching this too? Hey, it makes you sick. Let’s talk about it. ” These are the conversations we need to have and the numbers only take you so far, darn. I think we’ve seen that in the way that people kind of deal and process information. I don’t think we’re meant to process the information like we are now. We’re not meant to see every horrible thing that happens in the world within five seconds, and it’s really traumatic and we have to get … And that’s why I’m doing this tour in person to kind of unpack the trauma of what they’ve done to us together, because it’s a lot.

It’s a lot.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I really appreciated the attention in this documentary to the super fun sites, the sacrifice zones here in America. And I, as someone who goes around to sacrifice zones interviewing working class people who live there, it’s horrifying how massive this problem is and how ignorant most of us are to how poisoned we already are, let alone the fact that the majority, not the majority, but like the largest single polluter source for superfund sites is the Department of Defense. That’s more than any one corporate polluter. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we’re just days away from the three-year anniversary of the bomb train derailment by Norfolk Southern and East Palestine, Ohio. I’m going to be there next week, right? I mean, there are towns like East Palestine all over this country. You mentioned the cold, Darna, that comes out of West Virginia. Dr. Nikki Fabricant, are you in the audience right now?

Where does that cold come through? Yeah. Baltimore. South Baltimore. It comes through car after uncovered car daily through South Baltimore, 20 minutes that way. People are breathing that in for generations. People over there, just 20 minutes from where we’re sitting, are walking around with oxygen tanks, and it’s just normal. We’ve accepted this unacceptable reality as normal, and we’re not learning the lessons like from East Palestine, Ohio, Red Hill, South Baltimore. But I really am thankful to you for highlighting just how serious this problem is, particularly when it comes to the Department of Defense and the government run sites that are poisoning us. The question that I wanted to throw is one about perspective. And like you said, so much of this is knowledge that maybe we already had. Maybe we had learned it one time and pushed it under the rug because it was too uncomfortable to face.

And I’ll be honest, I have had trouble facing this for many years. As an individual who’s well aware of what we’re facing, I kind of gave up on the future. I basically accepted that the future’s no longer a thing to plan for. Just do as much good as you can while you’re here now. That changed when I became a father and I tear up watching the scenes with you and your family, your children. I wanted to ask how you would sort of impress upon folks the need for that perspective change on what we think we already know and how vital that perspective change is to getting somewhere we haven’t been before.

Abby Martin:

Yeah, it’s a great point. And yeah, I kind of had a similar trajectory when I had a kid, even though I’ve always maintained revolutionary optimism because I kind of have to have like this militant current of hope, otherwise I’d be too sad. But I think my sheer love for humanity and nature has always driven and motivated me. And it continues to double down my motivation the second that I meet someone who is invigorated or has had their minds changed by my journalism or anything that I’ve done in the past. And so it continues to make me more committed. I always felt like I had no choice being just an American. We are born into the system, we’re in the Imperial Core, it’s on our shoulders. But when I had a kid, it was like, okay, now I really, I am all in. We are completely invested in this and we have to do everything with every fiber of our being because we have no choice because we have to fight this, right?

Even if we don’t win, even if we’re standing on the shoulders of giants for generation, even though it’s been a centuries long struggle, the arc of justice is very, very wide. It’s not going to happen tomorrow. And it is a huge, seemingly insurmountable fight, but that’s not why we do it. And yeah, you take breaks for mental health. You have to do what you can. You give whatever capacity and talents that you can, but we have to fucking do it because I’m not going to let these parasites rob our future without a fight. And this is just one tool in the arsenal. This is just one tool in the arsenal. And I would recommend it’s a beautiful thing to have this internationalist lens, right? That’s first and foremost, orienting your perspective internationally. This is an international system. All of us are impacted by it. This is a very clarifying thing.

Let the truth liberate you and free you, right? Reclaim the truth first and foremost, because they’re gaslighting us every day. So that’s the first thing to kind of build the foundation upon and then realize the agency that you have as individuals. Of course, all of us can do our part, but we have to have that collective unity and agency. We have to build organizations. We have to build big tents around pushing back the data centers because the richest people in the world who are controlling our algorithms and curating our reality, they don’t want us to see the success stories. They don’t want us to see how people have beat these in their communities, how 35 data centers last year got canceled across the country, divestment campaigns, hugely successful across the country. None of these are known because they don’t want us to see that. They want us to be despondent, paralyzed, terrorized.

So it’s about getting out of that, getting out of that and saying, “I’m not going to accept the state of reality that they’re pushing on me and beating me down. I’m not going to succumb to the darkness. I’m going to have militant hope because we have to. ” Because if we didn’t, then what’s left? We’re going to succumb to the billionaires. We’re going to succumb to Elon Musk. No, no. We’re not going to give up our planet for Jeff Bezos to have another yacht. I’m sorry. We’re not going to give up all of our clean water and electricity for these fucking parasites. I don’t even know what your question was, Max, but now I’m just ranting, baby.

Dharna Noor:

You guys got to give an audience up.

Abby Martin:

Sorry, was your question, how did I get it financed? Okay. Yeah, we did an initial fundraiser where we got a hundred grand and we got another grant to get it started, but then I was just leaching on Patreon and people were just like, “Why am I paying you Patreon money?What the fuck are you doing?” I’m like, “I swear to God, the movie’s almost done. Just wait two more years. Please keep donating to us.” But no, it’s crazy. I mean, look at the state of media. The real news is the biggest infrastructural alternative media project there is. And it’s incredible that this exists and everyone needs to be aware of it, invested in it, paying attention to it. Darna’s another incredible journalist, please follow her work. There’s not many of us left. That’s the thing. I think the Gaza genocide has revealed just how the cowardice, the complicity, the horrific nature of the corporate media and how they tow the status quo and it’s completely unacceptable at this moment in time.

But yeah, I mean, it’s really hard. And the thing is, the reason that I don’t have this up online now is because I still need money. So that’s why I’m doing the tour. I’m trying to get licensing still. I’m trying to go through legal avenues to get this up and to let the baby fly and to change the world. But money is the name of the game. And we live in fucking capitalism and it really sucks how expensive this stuff is and the quality that I wanted to make it. And we tried to get it distributed. I went to Hollywood and talked to these environmentalist liberals who were very wealthy and they were just like, “This is the new inconvenient truth.” And I was like, “Oh, well, that’s great. Can you help me then?” They’re like, “No.” Because you can’t just come out of the gate with an adversarial movie about the military.

You have to talk about the good things the military does too. You can’t talk about Palestine. This is making our funders really uncomfortable. So it was very clear that we had to go totally grassroots, just like Gaza Fights for Freedom. This is not going to get on Netflix. So basically it’s a huge grassroots effort. I need everyone’s hands on deck. If you were impacted this by this, I need everyone to tell their friends, families, colleagues. Because of how short form everything is, because of the lack of a consensus reality, because of just our brain rot living on our advices, we don’t have the impact of media like we used to. And so it requires someone sitting down with someone you know and love to be like, “Hey, watch this. Hey, just watch this one part.” There’s 20 different entry points for everyone to relate to and that’s what’s so powerful about it, but I need your help.

IMDB, letterbox, getting it on social media, help me. It’s not me, it’s us. I’m like, Bernie, it’s not me, it’s us. But I want to hear from you guys also about like what, Darna, you’ve been working in establishment media, you’ve been talking about these issues, you’ve been synthesizing them. Have you seen a space of like more critical analysis of US imperialism in these circles too? And like what gives you hope to continue being a journalist in this bleak ass landscape?

Dharna Noor:

I mean, I think as you sort of said, hope is a practice, right? Sometimes it’s really hard to look out in the world and be like, “Yes, for sure. I’m feeling good.” But yeah, I mean, do I think that there’s more space for this kind of critique? Yeah, I mean, I think as you mentioned, the genocide in Gaza really woke people up. I think that the sort of insanities of the second Trump term, I think have forced people to come to terms with the sort of bipartisan consensus around some of these issues that maybe we were not willing to grapple with before.

But I mean, that said, you’re absolutely right that the media has been so complicit in the kind of perpetuation of false narratives here. I do think that we are in a place right now where in some ways, in some places that is beginning to change and I also don’t think that there is … I mean, the fact that as you’re saying, like Hollywood funders are not willing to put it on the line for a film like this, I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like to have those conversations even just three years later and how much worse it could have been. I think you’re also right that there needs to be a robust independent media ecosystem because these are the kinds of stories that so often are not going to be told in their completion in so many different venues. So we’re all super lucky to get to have seen this today.

I just have to say, I don’t know, the number of people who I’m just like, “Oh, if you won’t listen to me, maybe you could just watch like 15 minutes of this is pretty stunning.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you. Yeah. Abby has saved us from a lot of frustrated conversations with family members, hopefully. So just a couple quick rapid fire points. First of all, please, please, please, please support Empire Files. Go buy some merch outside on your way out. Like Abby said, tell everybody you know about this documentary and the incredible work that they do. Secondly, I want to pick up on something Abby said earlier about how there is hope in the fact that for the same reasons everything feels so hopeless, like there is actually something to discern there about the weakness of our oppressors. There is a reason why Donald Trump from first administration to second has put so much effort in courting the oligarchs of media and exercising through his entire camp, control over media platforms, right? It’s because yes, he’s a thins in piece of shit who can only deal with a reality that reflects his own narcissism and he stamps out any proof to the contrary, but blown up on a global scale, you’re going to run into reality at some point, right?

I mean, you can do all the AI deep fakes of protestors crying when they’re not actually crying, all the AI deep fakes of people in Minnesota, just being unsympathetic characters. But then when 50,000 Minnesotans march through the fucking street in Minnesota nice fashion, you can’t AI and lie your way out of that. You have to make the reality on the ground undeniable and in turn, you make resistance irresistible. And that is where we are all based, right? We are all part of that fight. And what I have seen on the ground as the editor in chief here and as a reporter myself, as someone, you guys may have seen me out there in the streets with y’all filming during these protests. I was in DC last night filming a vigil for Alex Pretty that nurses held in Washington DC. And what I see there is that light of people coming together, coming out of their holes, coming out of their homes, and that light gets brighter the more people that are there.

And we in the media, our job is to refract that light to as many people as possible. And you can achieve incredible things with very little resources, but we need your help to be able to do it. You can change the narrative. You can force reality into visibility when they are trying to invisibilize it, but you have to be there. You have to push it. You have to be active as a consumer and seek it out because if you just sit there and let your newsfeeds determine your own perception of the reality that you’re in, you’re essentially surrendering your entire brain over to the people who were all there at Trump’s inauguration saying like, “Yeah, don’t worry, we got you. We can mind control these sheep so that you can do whatever the fuck they want. ” And they’re not going to do anything because they’re going to see a reality outside their window that doesn’t exist.

And they’re going to be so afraid of it that they’re not going to actually go out into the street and do anything. So prove them wrong.

Abby Martin:

Yeah, no, it’s a great point to see what happened in Minneapolis. They shoot people dead in the streets and instead of being holed up in their homes, people are out facing down ICE agents. People who never even participated in protest before, I’m seeing them interviewed, nurses, teachers, community, just religious leaders just saying, “If I don’t stand up now, I understand what’s coming next. We don’t have time to waste.” And it’s incredibly inspiring in sub zero temperatures to be out there. I was just out there two days ago, the unanimous community of just rejection of ice, the rejection of this brutalization and terrorizing of their neighbors is just absolutely inspiring and incredibly beautiful to see because that’s what they want. They wanted everyone to just be cowering in fear. They’re shocked that people are not. And what does that say? Because when you have love, again, like the colonizer, they can’t destroy the love and that’s what they are not accounting for because this is machinery built on death, destruction, short term profit.

They’ve completely succumbed to the darkness. They have no understanding of life and empathy anymore. We do. That’s how I had a family. That’s how I met my husband. That’s all of my friends here, Lee Camp. I met all of my friends through the struggle, through this movement. So it’s all of my love, my family, and my community. And so I don’t know anything else. And I encourage everyone to get involved because the love is there. That’s what life is. Life is about finding something outside of yourself to fight for. And that’s what this is. It’s right in front of us.

Speaker 4:

So my question is about what role do you think China will play?

Abby Martin:

Goodness gracious. China, China, China. China, China, China. Last question. And Dharna and Max, you take this away.

Speaker 4:

Countering US imperialism, setting a better example because I guess my naive perspective is that if the world’s going to recover from climate change and go into the future, China will be leading the way. So I want to know what your guys’ perspective is on that.

Abby Martin:

I mean, I think one important point, a funny note, the shirts out there, which everyone’s going to buy me more than I leave, it says the US military is the world’s largest polluter. And I had someone actually be like, “That’s actually China.” And I was like, “Okay.” Well, I just kind of like made a movie about this. But it was just really funny because it’s like even if you were just talking about the emissions from China, they’ve absorbed all of Western manufacturing and you cannot look at that in a vacuum. And then of course, it’s not just emissions, right? You extrapolate all of this. And then you look at something that’s just remotely a planned economy. The fact that they now have dealt with the pollution problem, they have mostly … The fuck, not Teslas, but whatever the fuck the Chinese alternative is.

Dharna Noor:

BUID.

Abby Martin:

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it’s incredible when you actually strategically plan. And it’s not just a complete goddamn free for all for billionaires, for like five billionaires to just profit endlessly. It’s quite astonishing how you can turn a population around of that many people. But again, it’s just this great power competition. It’s the fact that this lack of collaboration with these global superpowers and instead they’re building up their military arsenal because they’re preparing for war, because they’re reacting to this horrific beast of US imperialism. So I don’t want to give too much credit to China because I wish they did more to stop what’s happening, especially with Israel, but I will say I do think it’s amazing that we have some sort of multipolarity to like hopefully stop the unipolarity of like US imperialism just completely destroying the planet. And I don’t think that China wants to be destroyed.

So I hope that they can step up and stop this madness. I don’t know. I don’t think we can count on Russia, that’s for sure. So yeah, it’s Max and Darna, why don’t you close this out here with China? Any China commentary? China, China, China.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I got a thought that like is more about like kind of how we are perceiving China. This always baffles me when I talk to people who in whose minds like China plays such an outsized role and who can tell me so little about China. Like do you know what their neighborhoods look like, where they shop, what they eat? I mean, like the knowledge gap of your average American of what China actually looks like and who Chinese people actually are is massive. And you start to understand why, if we’re looking at it through that kind of propaganda lens, because like if you ever been on a goddamn train in this country, like chugging along, like spewing gas, and then you see like the videos of their goddamn trains getting you across the country in an hour. If more people here knew, it’s like, yeah, we could have that too, except all your money is in like the hands of eight fucking billionaires.

There would be riots. I mean, I think that speaks to, again, the powerlessness that is admitted by power when they put so much emphasis on propagandizing us into oblivion. And I just want to end on that note and hook that back into Minneapolis, right? Because right now, if you’re surveying like right wing and MAGA like media, they cannot figure out Minneapolis. They are just like, how are they doing this? They’re paid. They’re getting paid. Soros is behind this. And this goes right to Abby’s point, which I want to leave you with because it’s a real like Lord of the Rings, every great epic battle story you’ve ever been told revolves around like the side of the good, having something that the side of the bad wants to extinguish but can never do so because it doesn’t understand what makes it eternal. And like we have that.

They don’t. They can’t figure it out. So even if we lose, we know we are on the side of the good and the right light and justice, and that is a side worth fighting for and a cause worth dying for. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Real News Network Podcast. Thank you to the brilliant Abby Martin and Darna Noor for this incredible discussion and thank you to everyone who came to our studio for the Baltimore premiere of Earth’s greatest enemy. If you want to learn more about how you can watch the documentary or how you can set up a screening yourself, use the links that we provided in the show notes of this podcast. And if you want to get more coverage and hear more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of the Real News Now.

Share this podcast with people in your circles, your friends, family, and coworkers. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and go to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. For the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.