Eclipsed from the headlines by the war in the Middle East, Russia launches a new offensive in Ukraine with an unprecedented wave of drone and missile strikes across the country—even hitting an historic monastery in Lviv. Meanwhile, two young Russian poets, Artyom Kamardin and Yegor Shtovba, remain imprisoned on "state subversion" charges related to public readings of anti-war poetry. They join other imprisoned poetic anti-war activists, such as Daria Kozyreva, and numerous artists and activists imprisoned for opposing the new dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. The recently passed Russian rocker Nikolay Komyagin, frontman for the post-punk band Shortparis, was also an icon of artistic resistance. Long known for their defiant sound, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine they released the music video "Apple Orchard," on an anti-war theme—resulting in them being blacklisted from major venues in Russia. In Episode 320 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg places these courageous voices in the context of a dissident tradition in Russia under the dictatorships of the czars, the Soviets, and now Putin—from Leo Tolstoy to Shortparis.

In Episode 319 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg resumes his rant against the hegemony of digital and cellular technology—and takes heart from the local New York chapter of the Luddite Club: smart, free-thinking youth who are eschewing cellphones and social media in favor of "real life." Despite the cynical predictions of some, the chapter is true to its values and refreshingly doesn't even have a website—although a documentary film about them is in the works. In other glimmers of hope, the New York City nurses' strike that just ended in victory had as one of the key demands safeguards against workers being replaced by artificial intelligence. And the recent India AI Impact Summit in Delhi was disrupted by a protest action.

As Trump and Netanyahu rain death down on Iran, the ayatollah regime paints any would-be protesters as pawns of the "enemy" and promises deadly repression. This positions the civil opposition poorly for any resumption of the uprising that the regime drowned in blood mere weeks ago—and points to the paradoxical reality that Trump and the regime are de facto (at least) collaborators against the Iranian people. In Episode 318 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg repudiates both those who would rally around the reactionary and criminal regime in the name of opposing the US-Israeli aggression and those who would rally around Trump's reckless and criminal war in the interest of opposing the regime. Instead, he offers statements from Iran's anarchist and dissident-left opposition that continue to advance an uncompromising neither/nor position.

As the architecture of total surveillance falls inexorably into place, cellular technology comes to colonize more and more of daily human existence. Accepted in the banal interest of "convenience," this trajectory ultimately ends in not only the extinction of human freedom, but the abolition of humanity itself—an idea openly embraced by the fascist tech bros as "transhumanism," and warned of by CS Lewis in his eerily prescient 1943 work The Abolition of Man.  In Episode 317 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg urges a revolution of everyday life, in which we start saying no to the relentless encroachment of cellular and digital technology.

Plans by Trump's fascist tech bros as well as Putin and Xi to build AI-run nuclear reactors on the Moon open jurisdictional dilemmas that far outpace the modest UN efforts to put a regulation regime in place for artificial intelligence. These plans are unveiled just as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the symbolic hands

A last-minute "permanent ceasefire" may mean that northeast Syria is back from the brink of Arab-Kurdish ethnic war. But ceasefires have repeatedly broken down since fighting resumed earlier this year, with Damascus demanding disbandment of the Rojava autonomous zone, and the integration of its institutions—including its military wing, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—into the central government. While the new pact sets a more "gradual" pace for this integration, the Kurdish aspiration to regional autonomy and the central government's insistence on centralization may prove a long-term obstacle to peace. In Episode 315 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg weighs the odds for avoiding a conflict that holds the potential for escalation to genocide, with the connivance of the Great Powers that so recently backed the SDF to fight ISIS.

Trump's Greenland annexation drive is only secondarily about the strategic minerals, but fundamentally driven by a geostrategic design to divide the planet with Putin. Even if his belated and equivocal disavowal of military force at the Davos summit is to be taken as real, the threat has likely achieved its intended effect—dividing and paralyzing NATO, so as to facilitate Putin's military ambitions in Europe, even beyond Ukraine Also at Davos, Trump officially inaugurated his "Board of Peace," seen as parallel body to the United Nations that can eventually displace it—dominated by Trump and Putin, in league with the world's other authoritarians. In the Greenland gambit, the territory itself is a mere pawn in the drive to establish a Fascist World Order. In Episode 314 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg calls for centering indigenous Inuit voices on the future of Greenland, and universal repudiation of annexationist designs.

As ICE agents open fire on protesters in Minneapolis, Portland and Los Angeles, Trump frames his military threats against Iran in terms of human rights and democracy—an atypical nod back to the neocons. Following mass deadly repression, the protests in Iran appear to have abated—for now. In Minnesota, both Trump and protesters are turning up the heat. Trump's blatant hypocrisy highlights the imperative of international solidarity. The challenge for stateside protesters is to repudiate the calumny that the Iran protests are CIA or Mossad astroturf, and recognize them as a genuine self-organized popular uprising. The challenge for Iranian protesters is to repudiate Trump's bid to exploit them for his imperial ends, as well to reject the ambitions of the reactionary "crown prince" Reza Pahlavi to install himself as leader. In Episode 313 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg urges that explicit mutual support between the anti-authoritarian struggles in the US and Iran is what can move the historical process forward at this grim hour.