Medea Benjamin, Chris Hedges – Trump’s Crackdown on Anti-War Activists

Earlier this month activists from the nonviolent anti-war group CODEPINK confronted Donald Trump and his cabinet, including JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth at a Washington, D.C. restaurant. They shouted, “Free DC, free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time.” Trump angrily ordered his security to “get them out of here.” Trump issued threats against the activists. He claimed one of the activists was a “paid agitator,” and said he is looking into having US Attorney General Pam Bondi bring RICO charges against the protesters “because they should be put in jail.”

“What they are doing to this country is really subversive,” Trump said. RICO charges, or charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, were originally designed to combat organized crime. The campaign against dissidents, or those whom Trump refers to as “the radical left,” has intensified since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, elevated immediately after his death to the status of a martyr.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told CNN that the Department of Justice may investigate groups that have protested Trump, also referencing the protesters who interrupted the dinner. “Is it, again, sheer happenstance that individuals show up at a restaurant where the president is trying to enjoy dinner in Washington, D.C., and accost him with vile words and vile anger?” Blanche said on CNN. “Does it mean it’s just completely random that they showed up? Maybe, maybe, but to the extent that it’s part of an organized effort to inflict harm and terror and damage to the United States, there’s potential, potential investigations there.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, told Axios in an email: “Left-wing organizations have fueled violent riots, organized attacks against law enforcement officers, coordinated illegal doxing campaigns, arranged drop points for weapons and riot materials, and more.”

‘The Trump Administration will get to the bottom of this vast network inciting violence in American communities,” she went on. “This effort will target those committing criminal acts and hold them accountable.”

Joining me to discuss the drive to silence all dissent is the activist and CODEPINK cofounder Medea Benjamin. Medea, who has protested with CODEPINK against wars whether waged by Democratic and or Republican political leaders, was arrested inside the U.S. Capitol a few days ago when she asked Rep. Darrell Issa about Israel’s attack on Qatar. Issa refused to answer. His staff attempted to seize her phone and called police. She was charged with “impeding a congressperson.”

As a veteran anti-war activist, we’re now talking decades, how does this moment compare with other moments of resistance?

Medea Benjamin

Well, thank you for having me on, Chris. It’s always good to be on with you. This moment is a very dark moment, a very scary moment. We’ve certainly had moments in my lifetime where people that went up against administrations were charged with all kinds of ridiculous lawsuits and during the Iraq War, we received a lot of threats as CODEPINK when it was U.S. soldiers who were fighting and dying there. But this is a much more wholesale attack on free speech, much more than I have seen before.

Chris Hedges

Well it’s not hypothetical. So we have seen a series of measures, I mean law firms, for instance, that defended people who were critical of Trump or Trump opponents. Of course, the assault on universities, the purging of comedians such as [Stephen] Colbert and [Jimmy] Kimmel. There’s a kind of institutional dismantling that perhaps is unlike anything we’ve seen since, I don’t know, maybe the 1960s with the rise of the anti-war movement?

Medea Benjamin

We certainly haven’t seen this level of attack on us as CODEPINK, and we’re part of a much larger constellation of organizations that have been the victim of lawfare with all kinds of ridiculous lawsuits against us. In the case of CODEPINK, that we are somehow connected to Hamas, which is crazy, but it takes a lot of time and resources to fight these lawsuits.

And then we’ve had a series of members of Congress and high-level members of Congress like Tom Cotton, who is the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, say before a hearing of all of the heads of the intelligence communities in the country that CODEPINK was funded by the Chinese Communist Party.

We’ve had the head of the Judiciary Committee, Senator [Chuck] Grassley, say that the FBI and the Department of Justice should investigate us for violations of Foreign Agent Registration Act, as if we were some foreign agent. We’ve been accused of being foreign agents of Iran, of being foreign agents of China.

We’ve had members of Congress say that we should be barred from coming into Congress. We have had members of Congress, one of my favorites was the in the Natural Resources Committee, a letter that included as proof that we were representing the Chinese government was that we wanted the Pentagon to have to measure its carbon emissions.

And who but the Chinese government would want to see that happen. So all kinds of attacks. As I said, we are one of many, many organizations. And it’s harassment. It’s sapping of our time and energy. And it certainly does make people feel very nervous about standing up to this administration.

But I must say, Chris, that we have found more and more volunteers coming with us in Congress as we go around every single day trying to get our members of Congress to represent us and not Israel.

Chris Hedges

I want to ask about Antifa. So Trump sent out on Truth Social that he was declaring Antifa to be a terrorist organization. Antifa is an amorphous group with no hierarchy or real organizational structure. And then of course in the same breath he’s talking about going after funders of groups that he doesn’t like, like George Soros.

Did you see that declaration that Antifa was a terrorist group as a way essentially to tar all resistance groups by tying them, I mean, however absurdly, to Antifa? I mean I read that quote from [Deputy Attorney General Todd] Blanche, which talked about stockpiling weapons and I mean, just complete fantasy. But I just wondered what your reaction was to declaring Antifa a terrorist organization.

Medea Benjamin

Well, luckily I was able to read your column very quickly after and I felt very much reassured in my own thinking because over the years I too have been the victim of attacks by groups related to Antifa like the Black Bloc.

In fact, I got a pie in my face one time that might sound funny but it felt very aggressive and I was followed around as I toured the country on a book tour by people who said that I was a, I think they called it a part of the NGO industrial complex that was trying to destroy the revolution.

So like you, I have had my run-ins with groups like Antifa and yet when I see that that kind of designation to a group, as you well know, that is so amorphous, it is the beginnings of saying, if you can go after this group and nobody stands up, then you can go after the next one and the next one.

What I really have been heartened by is seeing how the reaction has been in the UK to the designation of Palestine Action as a proscribed group, as they call it there. Here, I guess it would be a terrorist group. And it has really been heartening to see the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been arrested standing up to Palestine Action and showing how ridiculous the state is when it arrests people in their 80s, people who are blind, professors, merely for wearing a shirt that says, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”

So I think we have to be ready in the US to do that kind of collective support as this administration takes swipes at group after group, person after person, whether it’s Mahmoud Khalil and we see the tremendous support that he has gotten or groups that we might not like.

Chris Hedges

Before we talk about your rest, let’s talk a little bit about what CODEPINK does. I love your confrontations. I don’t actually do them myself. I let you do them and then I watch them. But talk about CODEPINK’s tactics, what you do.

You call people out in committee hearings and I don’t know how many committee hearings you’ve been dragged out of. But let’s talk about what you do, what CODEPINK does and why you do it. And perhaps we can talk about your recent arrest.

Medea Benjamin

Well, first let me say the things that people don’t see because it’s more behind the scenes. And that is all the chapters that we have across the United States that are doing work both on boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns, that are doing work to try to stop bad laws from being passed in their state level or their city level or get good ones passed, calling for an end to weapon sales, or putting pressure on their local officials as well as their representative in Congress.

And those of us who are in DC and go around week after week inside Congress, we’re also doing that kind of day-to-day less visible work of going to offices. Remember, there’s 435 members of the House and 100 in the Senate.

That’s a lot of offices that we visit on a regular basis, including all of the Republican offices, because we’re just waiting for the dike to break there and for it not to just be Marjorie Taylor Green and Tom Massie and the Republicans, but for a new flood of Republicans who start seeing the light in terms of where their base is.

So we go around from office to office and what we have been focusing on lately is this piece of legislation called Block the Bombs because it’s a specific bill that allows us to focus on one member of Congress after another and pressure them both in their constituency and in DC to sign on to that.

And we’ve been doing that methodically so that now there are 50 members of Congress who’ve signed on to that and every week we get a few more and we do a similar kind of thing in the Senate. Now what you see is when I go in and bird dog, or other members of CODEPINK, what we call bird dogging, members of the House and the Senate as they’re walking through the halls or in the hearings or when they’re coming in or out of a hearing or when they’re walking outside over to the Capitol.

That’s our time for one-on-one with them. And if there people that we like, we don’t video them, we talk to them, we have good conversations and we say, what else can we do to stop this genocide, to get the food in, to stop the slaughter.

And when there are people we know that continue to support sending weapons to Israel, continue to say things like there is no starvation in Gaza, which is something that we hear quite often, or the only reason that food is not getting in is because Hamas steals it all, then we record those and we put them out for everyone to see.

And I think it’s been quite revelatory to people not only in this country but in other places because as I’ve traveled around in other countries they said, wow, I didn’t know how undemocratic your country was until I started started seeing those videos and seeing how these members of Congress don’t represent the people.

They just represent their donors, whether it’s the AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] donors or the weapons industry, and certainly don’t represent what’s in the national security interests even of the United States, much less showing that they have some heart for the people who are suffering so much in Gaza.

So that’s really been a very important thing, I think, that we’ve gotten out to show people exactly who some of these members of Congress are.

Chris Hedges

Well, you call out their hypocrisy. There was a video of you at, it was some kind of Republican Christian convention, where you asked people the simple question, will you pray for the children of Gaza? And they ran from you as if you had leprosy. And then of course dragged you out.

Medea Benjamin

Yes, I often go to these Christian gatherings and say, let’s hold hands together and pray for the children of Gaza. And when I say, let’s hold hands and pray, they take my hand, they’re ready to pray. And then when I say for the children of Gaza, they’re like, oh no, we can’t possibly do that.

So yes, calling out their hypocrisy in so many different ways. And also when we put out the videos, we often put a tag of how much money they are getting from AIPAC because that’s important for people to know as well.

Chris Hedges

You’ve been a staunch foe of AIPAC, that’s consumed a lot of your time and energy. When AIPAC meets, I’ve attended some, you’ve held kind of rival gatherings. Talk a little bit about the AIPAC lobby, its power in the genocide.

Medea Benjamin

It’s funny, Chris, because if you remember in past years, AIPAC used to have these enormous conferences with like 10,000 people would come and they’d take over the whole convention center and the members of Congress and the administration, they would fight with each other over who would get top billing.

They all wanted to be seen and heard there. And that has changed tremendously. I mean, since October 7th and the genocide, many of them are embarrassed to be seen at these AIPAC gatherings. The AIPAC gatherings are a lot smaller.

What’s really interesting to me, Chris, is that we’re now seeing people who are not necessarily progressive Democrats, very middle of the road, two of them from North Carolina, Valerie Foushee and Deborah Ross, recently coming out and saying publicly they wouldn’t take money from AIPAC, as well as [Morgan McGarvey] from Kentucky who said he wouldn’t take money from AIPAC.

So I’m not saying AIPAC is not a tremendous force and has so skewed the policies of our government, but I’m saying that there are starting to be cracks and that there are members of Congress who are starting to be embarrassed by their affiliation with AIPAC, embarrassed that the public knows how much money they’ve taken from AIPAC.

And Chris, I think it’s important for your viewers to understand it’s not just the money that AIPAC gives to them. It really is the fear they have of being targeted by AIPAC because when we put out these videos and show the amounts of money, sometimes it’s a huge amount of money.

You know, some have taken a million dollars over the course of their career, but some have only gotten about $30,000 and yet they tow the AIPAC line. Maybe because they’re Christian Zionists and they have some misguided belief that God told them to support Israel, but oftentimes it’s because they don’t want to be on AIPAC’s hit list.

We have seen through the years not just the recent way that AIPAC has taken out Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, but it goes back and it goes back even to Jewish members of Congress like Andy Levin who is taken out by AIPAC.

So they want to keep their heads down. They don’t want to be targeted by AIPAC, but yet as more and more constituents are confronting their members of Congress in the town halls and their local offices, we are seeing more members saying that they don’t want to be affiliated or seen as AIPAC puppets.

Chris Hedges

Can you juxtapose, and you’ve been outspoken about this, the proxy war in Ukraine and what’s happening in Gaza and the US response?

Medea Benjamin

Well, it was so interesting during the war in Ukraine how we were pushing members of Congress to come out and call for negotiations. And you probably recall, Chris, the 18 members of Congress, the progressive Democrats, who soon after the war began came out with that letter that said, thank you [Joe] Biden, for all the money that you’re giving to Ukraine, and we’ve got to support Ukraine in this war.

But negotiations might be a good thing. And they were so pilloried by their own Democrats, by the higher-ups in the party, that within 24 hours they withdrew that letter. And ever since then, they don’t talk about it. And so it’s only been the Republicans who have said, why are we fueling a foreign war when the American people don’t want that?

And I mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene, that’s how we first began a relationship with her because she was so outspoken about that. So we see that there are still members of the Republican Party who say we don’t want to keep spending our money on foreign wars.

But when they say foreign wars, they’re talking about Ukraine. They’re not talking about Israel. And when we use the same logic to say, well, what about Israel? And you call yourselves America first, but are you America first when you are allocating all of this money to Israel that could be used here in America? And they don’t want to hear that.

But that’s why I say the dike is about to break because as you well know, Chris, there are so many influencers in the Republican Party who have changed their position on Israel that I am just waiting to see some more consistency among the Republicans when they say we don’t want to fuel foreign wars, they’re not just talking about Ukraine.

Chris Hedges

Let’s talk about your arrest. Was that the first time that you were attempting to converse with a member of Congress, I think you were just in the hallway, right? Was that the first time that you were arrested for that activity?

Medea Benjamin

Yes, we’ve been arrested many times in the hearings and we know when we speak up in the hearings that we’re at risk of arrest. And there are many groups that come to the Capitol that stage beautiful acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. We’ve seen Jewish Voice for Peace, we’ve seen Christians for a Ceasefire, wonderful actions that the Mennonites have done and they know they will be arrested.

But in this case, I was doing what I do on a regular basis, which is walk down the halls, I find a member of Congress and I run after them and ask them will they comment on some issue of the day. This was the day after the Israelis had attacked the Hamas negotiators in Qatar and I thought it was important.

You know there are journalists all over Congress who are constantly putting their microphones in the faces of members of Congress. I wasn’t even near [Darrell Issa]. I was following behind him or aside him and I asked him what he thought of Israel’s attack on Qatar.

And he was so nasty and went into his office and I just gently touched the door opening a public place in the office. I mean anybody can walk into his office. And he immediately told his staff person to grab my phone and he said that I was violating the law by entering his office.

First, I wasn’t in his office and second, it’s no violation to enter a congressperson’s office. Well, I just thought, I said, you’re out of your mind and you’re nasty and if you touch me, it’s an assault. And I went away thinking, what a nasty guy. And then about 15 minutes later, these very nice police officers came up and said that Darrell Issa had lodged a complaint against me and wanted me arrested.

I showed them the video and they looked at the video and they said, there’s nothing there. You didn’t do anything wrong. And so I was there for a long time while they were debating whether to let me go, which I thought would happen, or to arrest me.

But it turns out, the Inspector General got involved, Issa wouldn’t drop it, and so he had me arrested. And I have to go back to court on October 9th. And I think this is part of an attempt by members of Congress to give me a stay-away order, which means a judge in the interim, between your case coming up and being adjudicated, they can tell you you can’t go back into Congress.

And given that there are members of Congress like this very right-wing woman, Anna Paulina Luna, who has asked the speaker to keep CODEPINK out of Congress, I think this is part of that activity. I am hoping that the judge will see how ridiculous it is and will drop the case, but you never know.

Chris Hedges

Let’s talk about Trump and RICO and his statements in the Oval Office about CODEPINK.

Medea Benjamin

Yes, there were a group of CODEPINK women, four women, who had gone into a restaurant where Trump ended up having dinner. And they were able to be very close to him and shouted out their opposition to U.S. troops, the National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., as well as the occupation of Palestine. And they were told to leave.

They were escorted out and it was all very civil actually. And then after that we hear him talking about these horrible people, he calls these leftist lunatics and maybe they should be arrested for RICO.

I mean I think that’s just him mouthing off just like he said Soros should be arrested and everybody should be arrested because really it was just a prime example of the use of our First Amendment rights.

Chris Hedges

And why is that activity important, you know, confronting figures in power, which is of course one of the primary activities of CODEPINK.

Medea Benjamin

CODEPINK, since our founding, and it’s over 20 years now, we’ve confronted every single president in power. We’ve confronted the vice presidents. We’ve confronted the secretaries of state, just like we confront the members of Congress in Congress, because we think they need to hear from us. And so often they isolate themselves. They have press conferences, but oftentimes it’s very selective who gets to ask a question and how they’re asked.

We think that they need to be confronted when they are doing horrible things like making wars and every single one of our presidents has made war. Whether it’s [George] Bush during the terrible invasion of Iraq or it was [Barack] Obama and when we confronted him about the use of drones for killing anybody he wanted to anywhere he wanted to and the continuation of holding people in Guantanamo [Bay].

It’s up to us and I feel that it’s a duty of citizens to confront our officials when they are doing such horrible things — war, torture, extrajudicial killings, we have to speak up.

Chris Hedges

Do you think that direct confrontation has an effect on power?

Medea Benjamin

I think it does. I remember when I confronted Barack Obama and it was actually kind of a conversation that we were having and they were trying to arrest me and I remember saying to the officer, shh, you better not arrest me, I’m having a conversation with the president, which gave me more time and we had a back and forth.

And when I was finally dragged out he said the issues that that woman brings up — it’s funny he said young woman because I’m 10 years old older than him — are issues that are worth listening to.

And those were the issues of how can we be holding people in Guantanamo that never had a trial, that never were convicted of anything? How can we be killing U.S. citizens like Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old U.S. citizen killed by a U.S. drone strike?

And also about the U.S. involvement in war that we shouldn’t be in. So I think, yes, that was an example where we did have a real conversation. And we see how those kinds of interactions, those kinds of interruptions of power also inspire other people. And it might not inspire them to do that kind of direct confrontation of somebody like a president, but it does inspire them to directly confront their member of Congress.

And I don’t know if you saw during the August recess, Chris, all the different people who confronted their members of Congress at the town hall meetings. It was just beautiful to see. And so I think those direct confrontations do have an impact.

Chris Hedges

But I can’t see Trump or [White House Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller or JD Vance having a conversation with you.

Medea Benjamin

Well, you never know. I think you have to try it. I mean, we have had conversations with Marco Rubio when he was a senator. And yes, sometimes it’s just yelling back and forth. But I think we need to try to have, whether it’s a conversation or whether it’s a what we call strategic interruption, we have to keep doing that.

And that’s part of defending our right to free speech. You know better than anyone, Chris, how it’s being assaulted in so many different ways. But if we don’t keep using it and keep pushing it, we will definitely see it taken away.

Chris Hedges

Where do you see us going, especially after the kind of deification of Charlie Kirk as a martyr? I mean I listened to the rally in Arizona. I mean, especially [Stephen] Miller was kind of full on fascism. Where are we headed? What do you see coming?

Medea Benjamin

I see that we’re in for very, very dangerous times. I think this administration is using everything that it has, including the courts, to take away our basic rights. I think whether it’s going after immigrants, the way that ICE is just acting like [Nazi secret police] Gestapos on our streets and kidnapping our neighbors.

I live in Washington, D.C., and it pains me when I walk out of my house around the block and I see armed National Guard in my community. It is horrific. And then to see the way that our free speech rights are being violated on a daily basis.

The way the police have cracked down so much on the poor university students who were the moral center of this movement against genocide and have been so harassed and intimidated. We see it on all sides and the way that our universities are so attacked, you know, this is basic core issues that we will be dealing with for decades to come when they take away our right to study certain issues or they impose the way that even in our elementary and high schools we are allowed to talk about things like what is a genocide and is it only a genocide when it relates to something that the Jewish community wants us to talk about.

This is stuff that’s going to take decades to unravel but I think it’s cyclical, we’ve got to hold on to our seats and go through a very, very hellish period ahead, but we’re going to come out on the other side.

Chris Hedges

Let’s talk about the weaponization of anti-Semitism that, of course, was used by the Trump administration to go after the universities, which capitulated and from the beginning acknowledged, I think with no basis in fact, that these campuses had a problem with anti-Semitism.

I have taught at Columbia, went to Harvard, I’ve taught at Princeton, the idea, not that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist, but the idea that these institutions fomented anti-Semitism was nuts. Then, of course, the demonization of undocumented workers or migrants to justify this explosion of ICE and the building of detention centers.

And now of course the idea that there was an organized group responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which is called the radical left. I mean all of these things are completely fictitious, but they’ve been used very effectively to close the iron doors, to shut down what’s left of our very anemic open society.

Medea Benjamin

Yes, and I see that it is also happening so much on the local and state-wide levels. I see that the last week there were about 250 members of locally elected officials who were in Israel during a time of a genocide and they were being indoctrinated so that they would go home and reinforce or impose new legislation against boycott, divestment and sanctions, that they would impose new restrictions on what can be taught in the schools.

This has seeped into so many areas of our lives that it is very hard to see how we can move forward as the noose keeps tightening. On the other hand, when I am in Congress, you know, I’ve seen 14 hearings already on anti-Semitism.

And so many of them are just ridiculous, as you say, you know, somebody had a poster in their room that offended somebody or things that are like, I’m sorry, you could have just asked somebody to apologize for a comment that they made and it would be over. But instead, they’re making it out like this is more important than the genocide that is actually going on.

And it, of course, is a distraction from the genocide that’s going on. And one of my hopes is that the younger generation is not falling into this trap, that the younger generation is a generation that is opposed to U.S. policy in Israel, that they have during things like the encampments — I mean, you saw, the beauty of these encampments when they were Muslims and Jewish students praying together, and it was like a vision of the society we want to see in the future.

Well these students are not going to let go of that. That’s going to be with them as they move forward. There’s a new generation of young people. We see it when we go into Congress and you see these Congress people that hold on to their vision of Israel that they’re going to keep giving our money to and the staff people nodding in support of us when we go in or running after us in the hallways to say thank you for coming in, we’re working hard to try to change our bosses’ mind. There is a huge generational gap and that generational gap is what will save us.

Chris Hedges

Well you see it with [New York City mayoral candidate Zohran] Mamdani.

Medea Benjamin

Absolutely, I mean how beautiful is that? I mean I’m in New York City right now and it just feels so good being here knowing that he will be the next mayor. I’m pretty sure he will be the next mayor and that will change things and it has already changed things.

You see people around the country who are now excited about running for office who know exactly how they should portray themselves as they went for office because he’s such a wonderful role model of that. So yes, that is so hopeful.

Chris Hedges

Although not endorsed by [Chuck] Schumer or [Hakeem] Jeffries, and I just want to close by having you reflect a little bit on the Democratic Party. I mean, in many ways, the Democratic Party transformed itself into the War Party. But talk a little bit about the Democratic Party and whether you believe it’s reformable from within.

Medea Benjamin

It’s pathetic, it’s disgusting. It was disgusting under Biden, it’s disgusting under Trump. When you think now would be the time for them to be the party of opposition and really be out there, it’s irredeemable. You and I have been supporters of third parties for a long time, both worked on Ralph Nader’s campaign, been always trying to get a strong third party going because I don’t see any way that the Democratic Party can lead us into the kind of future we want.

On the other hand, as we are trying to build and look for leaders of a new third party, we have to move and support those Democrats who are trying to change the party from within. I support groups like Progressive Democrats of America. I support the progressive Democrats like Rashida Tlaib and Delia Ramirez and Ilhan Omar and you know there are a number of good ones. So we work with what we have but we build for something much better in the future.

Chris Hedges

Great, thanks, Medea. And I want to thank Diego [Ramos] and Victor [Padilla], Thomas [Hedges], Sofia [Menemenlis], and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.