“The 2024 election fried our brains – the Democrats couldn’t hold a primary because they were too busy holding a body upright.”

A drunk Anderson Cooper hides under his umbrella, grimacing as comedian Whitney Cummings roasts Dems and CNN itself, live on air during CNN’s New Years Eve celebration. Things only got more awkward from there:

“It was amazing that the pro-choice party didn’t give their voters one when it came to the presidential candidate,” Cummings goes on, “Kamala was forced on us so hard you’d think she was patented by Pfizer.”

More silence from the CNN hosts, who seem to now be wishing they hadn’t just taken shots on air. How, in a world where CNN is so lax on facts that the network just allowed a correspondent to fake a prisoner rescue in Syria, do they let on a comedian who outs them for refusing to cover Biden’s cognitive decline and the Democratic Party’s lack of a primary process? Must be the booze.

So we flip over to CBS where the panel there is actually admitting this blunder (coverup) openly – what is going on?? Is 2025 a new year for corporate media? Will they start telling the truth? Will Thursday Throwdown become an outdated relic?

Luckily, the rest of this week’s episode proves there’s still a lot of BS for us to cover. From Fox News’ coverage of the homelessness crisis, in which their expert who argues that the unhoused are criminals who want to be homeless is revealed to have been arrested for stealing funds during his tenure as Homeless Services Consultant, to Antony Blinken’s farewell tour in which he shows off his wonderful acting skills, to some rare Useful Idiots coverage of lefty-media infighting, there’s more than enough craziness on the news waves to fill hours of Thursday Throwdowns to come.

Watch it with Katie and Aaron so you can laugh instead of cry at it all. Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe to watch the full episode here:

Watch our full interview with Norm Finkelstein from October 11 here:

“I think the reasonable conclusion is that Gaza is no more. There's nothing left in Gaza.”

Monday the 7th marked one full year of genocide in Gaza, the darkest era of a decades-long occupation by Israel, which has now begun to spread into the broader Middle East region.

This week we’re joined by Gaza expert and Useful Idiots fan-favorite Norman Finkelstein to look back on this genocidal year.

Norm points out that this is not, as Western and Israeli media claims, an “Israel-Hamas war.” This is not war. This is genocide. And Israel is not targeting Hamas; they are killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, and picking off journalists, health workers, and children.

“I read this letter,” he tells us, “from sixty-five physicians from around the world who gave testimony as to what they observed. And every one of the physicians testified that the children who were coming into the hospital had bullet wounds to the skull or to the chest. No shrapnel. It wasn't bombs and shrapnel. It was targeted bullet wounds to the skull and to the chest of children. What does that have to do with war?”

“There were fifty-four disabled children who used the school in the convent complex. They fired two shells at it. What does that have to do with war?”

Norman also recalls meeting Hezbollah members, and shares what he got wrong about the organization. “Israel, he says, “is willing to kill for material benefit, and Hezbollah and Hamas are willing to die for survival” He also recounts his time meeting Hamas leaders, and explains Israel’s unfair advantage:

“Israel is the entrenched, concentrated manifestation of Western imperialism. It's got deep roots. It's got the whole Western system behind it, that Western system which won't let go. It will nuke China before it lets go of its global dominance. And in order to defeat it, it requires a very long-term struggle and intense calculation.”

Subscribe for the full interview where Norman explains this despair, and the generational hopelessness which lacks historical precedent.

“Our generation,” he laments, “has, for good reason, lost the belief, the conviction that we have the force of history behind us. That we have the force of justice behind us. Our generation believes there's a good chance we'll be defeated. There's a good chance we're not going to win.”

But that doesn’t mean we should give up.

“The only thing I can say as a conclusion is you never know. You can only know one thing for certain: If you do nothing, it can only get worse.”

It’s that certainty that he says keeps him going. “If you resist, there are moments where it looks very grim. And then there's that folk song, it's always darkest before the dawn. It's this hope that keeps me carrying on. It's always darkest before the dawn.”

“There's another reality. There's something in the human constitution that simply can't do nothing. In the face of such death and devastation, you just can't.”

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He’s the author of the new book Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine and host of the Scott Horton Show – it’s Scott Horton! And he’s joining Useful Idiots this week in a Santa hat to bring us the much-needed gift of finding out WTF is really going on in Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East.

A theme of this interview – and much of our reporting these days – is that so much of what was previously dismissed and smeared as Russian propaganda is now admitted openly as fact. Two glaring examples: the US and UK prevented a peace deal that had been negotiated between Ukraine and Russia right after Russia invaded in February 2022. And the idea that this whole conflict is a US proxy war.

When we reported these on our show, we were called Putinists, Russian propagandists, and, by some really clever haters, useful idiots.

But today, either everyone has fallen for these Russian talking points, or the West has finally realized it can’t hide the truth much longer as mountains of evidence prove these to be true. Just listen to Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister who famously warned Zelensky not to finalize the peace deal, describing the war now:

“We are, let's face it, we're waging a proxy war. But we're not giving our proxies the ability to do the job. For years and years now we've been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs, and it has been cruel and we need now to give them what they need.”

He admits that this is a proxy war, but using Ukraine as fodder against Russia isn’t the cruel part. The cruel part, according to neocons, is that we’re not giving them all the weapons possible to fight and die on our behalf.

That’s the perspective that Scott Horton takes apart in this week’s episode, giving a very detailed account of the US role in provoking the proxy war in Ukraine and the methods to prolong it ever since.

Subscribe to hear the full interview with Scott Horton where we discuss how so-called anti-war President Trump has stood as firmly by NATO as anyone else, whether actual Ukrainians want western support, and a complex look at the Middle East where Scott reveals the country that spies on the US more than anyone else.

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Aaron Maté Silences Piers Morgan Panel with Facts on Syria & Palestine

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