Welcome to Downstream, Shop from the Tropical Paradise that is North London. I'm so excited to be joined by

Abby Martin, the host of the Empire Files, advocate, journalist, all-round anti-imperialist firebrand.

We talk about Gaza, Trump, Russia,

and what it was like to be politicized by the War on Terror,

so stay tuned for all of that.

Abby Martin, welcome to downstream. I'm so gassed to have you.

I am so thrilled to be here. Thank you so much Ash, I'm a huge fan.

So I suppose the first thing that I wanted to ask you is that as a Brit, when you're looking at American

culture, particularly when you're young, it just seems so optimistic

it's got this can-do attitude and that's the impression that we got from watching all of your romantic

comedies when you know we were like eight or nine years old and then

something really happened around the war on terror where that sunny optimism

became to my eyes quite insular, paranoid, thin-skinned.

So as a genuine full-time yank from your vantage point,

how did your sense of what it meant to be American change during the War on Terror?

Yeah, I think my story is a pretty commonplace with a lot of young Americans that were radicalized through 9-11 and subsequently the Iraq war.

I was a senior in high school when 9-11 happened. I was just completely vapid in my own bubble.

I grew up kind of in this staunch Democratic Party family

who were the new Democrats,

so we were like, you know, just followed in line

with the Clintonites, not really understanding why we supported the death penalty or we were, you know, harsh on immigration, but that's just what we were told, you know, the Democratic Party stood for at the time.

So I was living in the suburbs, this kind of white flight 20 minutes away from the

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