Chris Hedges

On April 15, 2016, Hedges was arrested, along with 100 other protesters, during a sit-in outside the U.S. Capitol during Democracy Spring to protest the capture of the political system by corporations.

Commenting on the 2016 election during an interview on The Real News, Hedges asserted that the modern American Left's embrace of neoliberalism resulted in a dysfunctional democracy and has given rise to a Trump presidency, which he characterizes as "proto-fascist". Hedges argues that logical result of neoliberalism is neofascism. At a March 2017 speech delivered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Hedges insisted that resistance to the Trump Administration must be broadly socialist and anti-capitalist in nature:

He contended at the Left Forum in 2015 that with the "denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism", Karl Marx has been "vindicated as capitalism's most prescient and important critic". He said that Marx "foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites."

On September 20, 2014, a day before the People's Climate March, Hedges joined Bernie Sanders, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and Kshama Sawant on a panel moderated by WNYC's Brian Lehrer to discuss the issue of climate change. Hedges and Klein also participated in the 'Flood Wall Street' protests that occurred shortly thereafter.

On November 11, 2014, Hedges published an article explaining why he and his family have become vegan. He explained that this is "the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species".

In a December 15, 2014, article, Hedges compared the actions of ISIS today to the way Israel's founding fathers acted in the late 1940s.

This resistance must also be accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist, anti-capitalist society. Because the enemy in the end is not Trump or Bannon—it is corporate power. And if we do not stop corporate power, we will never dismantle fascism's seduction of the white working class and unemployed."

On October 5, 2014, Hedges was ordained a minister within the Presbyterian Church. He was installed as Associate Pastor and Minister of Social Witness and Prison Ministry at the Second Presbyterian Church Elizabeth in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He noted having been rejected for ordination 30 years earlier, saying that "going to El Salvador as a reporter was not something the Presbyterian Church at the time recognized as a valid ministry, and a committee rejected my 'call' ".

In October 2012, Hedges publicly supported Jill Stein, the candidate of the Green Party of the United States, in the 2012 United States presidential election. On April 7, 2013, Hedges delivered the keynote address at the Green Party of New Jersey state convention.

In June 2013, Hedges and numerous celebrities appeared in a video showing support for Chelsea Manning.

In 2012, after the Obama Administration signed the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, Hedges sued members of the U.S. government, asserting that section 2021 of the law unconstitutionally allowed presidential authority for indefinite detention without habeas corpus. He was later joined in the suit, Hedges v. Obama, by activists including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg. In May 2012 Judge Katherine B. Forrest of the Southern District of New York ruled that the counter-terrorism provision of the NDAA is unconstitutional. The Obama administration appealed the decision and it was overturned. Hedges petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, but the Supreme Court denied certiorari in April 2014.

Hedges appeared as a guest on an October 2011 episode of the CBC News Network's Lang and O'Leary Exchange to discuss his support for the Occupy Wall Street protests; co-host Kevin O'Leary criticized him, saying that he sounded "like a left-wing nutbar". Hedges said "it will be the last time" he appears on the show, and compared the CBC to Fox News. CBC's ombudsman found O'Leary's heated remarks to be a violation of the public broadcaster's journalistic standards.

On November 3, 2011, Hedges was arrested with others in New York as part of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, during which the activists staged a "people's hearing" on the activities of the investment bank Goldman Sachs and blocked the entrance to their corporate headquarters. Hedges has appeared on the syndicated Democracy Now! television program; on Breaking the Set on RT (formerly known as Russia Today), and on CBC's George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight.

On December 16, 2010, he was arrested outside the White House along with Daniel Ellsberg and more than 100 activists who were protesting the war in Afghanistan.

In a March 2009 column, Hedges warned that human over-population and mass species extinction are serious problems, and that any measures to save the ecosystem will be futile unless we cut population growth, and noted that, "As long as the Earth is viewed as the personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by everyone from born-again Christians to Marxists to free-market economists, we are destined to soon inhabit a biological wasteland."

On December 8, 2009, Hedges identified as a "radical Keynesian" during his lecture at The New School, entitled "Empire of Illusion".

In the 2008 United States presidential campaign, Hedges was a speech writer for candidate Ralph Nader.

In March 2008, Hedges published a book titled I Don't Believe in Atheists, in which he expresses his belief that new atheism presents a danger that is similar to religious extremism.

In his December 29, 2008, column for Truthdig, Hedges stated that "[t]he inability to articulate a viable socialism has been our gravest mistake. It will ensure, if this does not soon change, a ruthless totalitarian capitalism". He elaborated upon this in a 2013 interview with The Real News, claiming that, "the left has been destroyed, especially the radical left, quite consciously in the whole name of anti-communism", and:

According to Jack Fairweather in Mother Jones: "The impact of the article ... was immediate: Op-eds ran in major papers, and the story was taken to a wider audience through cable-TV talk shows. When Condoleezza Rice, then President George W. Bush's national security adviser, was asked about the report at a press briefing, she said, 'I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilizing.' " As late as 2006, according to Fairweather in the same article, conservative magazines including The Weekly Standard and National Review continued to use this article to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Hedges was an early critic of the Iraq War. In May 2003, he delivered a commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, saying: "We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security." His speech was received with boos and his microphone was shut off three minutes after he began speaking.

In 2001, Hedges contributed to The New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, the University of Toronto and Princeton University, where he is a visiting lecturer in African American studies.

Three of Hedges' articles were based upon the stories of Iraqi defectors, who had been furnished to Hedges by the Information Collection Program of the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress. The program promoted stories to major media outlets in order to orchestrate U.S. intervention in Iraq in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Most significant of his reports in this period was a November 8, 2001, front-page story about two former Iraqi military commanders who claimed to have trained foreign mujahedeen how to hijack planes without using guns. Hedges quoted a man whom he believed to be an Iraqi general: "These Islamic radicals ... came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco. We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States". The two defectors also asserted there was a secret compound in Salman Pak facility where a German scientist was producing biological weapons.

Hedges wrote two more articles that year that were informed by Chalabi-coached defectors. The second one, claiming that Iraq still held 80 Kuwaitis captured in the 1991 Gulf War in a secret underground prison, was also found to be baseless.

Hedges was a columnist for the progressive news and commentary website Truthdig. He hosts the program On Contact for the RT (formerly Russia Today) television network. Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, West Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years (1990–2005).

Hedges received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Colgate University in 1979. He received a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University's Divinity School (where he studied under James Luther Adams) in 1983. He studied Latin and Classical Greek at Harvard and speaks Arabic, French, and Spanish in addition to English.

Christopher Lynn Hedges was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the son of Thelma Louise (née Prince) and the Rev. Thomas Havard Hedges, a Presbyterian minister. He grew up in rural Schoharie County, New York, southwest of Albany. He graduated in 1975 from the Loomis Chaffee School, a private boarding school in Windsor, Connecticut. He founded an underground newspaper at the school that was banned by the administration and resulted in his being put on probation.

Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, and visiting Princeton University lecturer. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction; Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009); Death of the Liberal Class (2010); Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), written with cartoonist Joe Sacco, which was a New York Times best-seller; Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt (2015); and his most recent America: The Farewell Tour (2018).