If you wanted to build a citizens’ movement against the corporate duopoly and the genocidal war machine that fuels it, you could do a lot worse than starting off at Integrity Media’s annual Independent Journalism Awards.

At this year’s ceremony, held September 17 in Chicago, I ran into:

John Mearsheimer.

Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Max Blumenthal.

Sam Husseini.

Briahna Joy Gray.

John Kiriakou.

Glenn Greenwald.

Aaron Maté.

Anya Parampil.

Ray McGovern.

Katie Halper.

You get the drift.

Troublemakers.

“Integrity Media was created to support journalists and media platforms committed to truth, transparency, and public service, free from political pressure, corporate agendas, and censorship,” said the group’s founder, Chicago criminal defense attorney Leonard Goodman. “We’re nonpartisan. We will never try to tell anyone what to say or what not to say. We support truth-seekers who are not welcome in corporate media.”

Among those supported by Integrity Media?

Capitol Hill Citizen.

Chris Hedges Report.

Counterpunch.

Electronic Intifada.

Glenn Greenwald.

Glenn Diesen.

Mondoweiss.

Norman Finkelstein.

ScheerPost.

Scott Horton.

And the list goes on. (See the awards ceremony program here.)

At the awards event in Chicago, people gave insights into the state of America’s political economy.

You had to be there, because it was overwhelming.

But two of my favorites were from the journalist Glenn Greenwald and the CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou who exposed the CIA’s use of torture.

Greenwald received the group’s Excellence in Journalism award and also moderated a panel on whistleblowers starring Kiriakou.

In accepting his award, Greenwald laid out the remarkable stories of journalists who could have easily cashed into American corporate culture, but chose a different — not necessarily easier — path.

“Just look at my fellow award recipients,” Greenwald said. “Max Blumenthal’s father (Sidney Blumenthal) was an extremely well-connected Democratic Party operative. He had that path laid out for him. I think it’s fair to say that Max chose not to pursue the path of being a Democratic Party operative and instead chose a much more difficult one, to the point where his journalism is now provoking a criminal investigation and other forms of persecution by the U.S. government.”

“We have Briahna Joy Gray (Bad Faith Podcast), who graduates from Harvard Law School, has the whole world at her feet, and gets a very plum job as press secretary for a major presidential campaign (Bernie Sanders campaign) – something that makes careers, very lucrative careers, in Washington and the media. As she talked about, she chose not to do the minimum necessary to pursue that career, which is to endorse the Democratic Party and Joe Biden. Instead, she refuses to do so, loses her place in this political class in Washington, and then gets fired from her media job because she refuses to stop following her conscience and condemn Israel.”

“And we have Jamie Kalven (Invisible Institute) who is doing this remarkable work on police brutality in the most marginalized neighborhoods (in Chicago), where there is very little money and very little mainstream prestige. Yet somebody does that work solely because their conscience leads them to do it.”

“I think everybody in this room whose work I know is represented by that trait. I can’t even mention all the people, because I would go on for an hour – which I might anyway, even though I’m trying to confine myself to 10 minutes.”

“But I do want to talk about one person in particular who has been a longtime political and intellectual hero of mine, and who I think exemplifies this trait as well as anybody — Professor John Mearsheimer.”

“When I started writing about politics, it was late 2005. Although we all should recognize how much progress we’ve made in the ability to speak openly about the evils of the Israeli government, the evils of its influence in our country, and the relationship the United States has in being complicit in funding and arming it – we do have a lot more space than ever before – back in 2007, there was almost no space. In fact, talking about those things guaranteed your expulsion from mainstream institutions. Doors were shut. Careers were jeopardized because of it.”

“John Mearsheimer, who has a very prestigious position in the world as a scholar of international relations at the University of Chicago, together with his partner Stephen Walt at Harvard, writes an article on one of the most rigidly enforced taboos in our country – the influence of the Israel lobby.”

“It is so taboo that, despite their positions as leading scholars at our leading institutions, they can’t even get it published in the United States. They have to go to London in order to get it published. Then they write a book on it.”

“It was one of the first times I understood the dangers and risks of speaking out on Israel, because the campaign launched against them – this disgusting, grotesque, multipronged, intense attempt to destroy their reputations and careers by branding them antisemites – was something that I found so impressive in the way they responded. They continued to persist in the scholarly demonstration of their argument.”

Israel’s control of U.S. foreign policy was a theme throughout the event.

Tucker Carlson was not at the Integrity Media Awards ceremony, but he would have fit in and been welcome by many in the audience.

Leonard Goodman and Integrity Media President Patrick Sullivan host a podcast called Unfettered Speech. Carlson was a guest on that podcast earlier this year.

“I’m a Jew from the north side of Chicago,” Goodman told Carlson. “And I agree 100 percent that this is a very dangerous situation to be following blind allegiance to the needs of another country.”

“I think it’s bad for the US. I think it’s bad for Israel because I think that they’re not going to survive into the future without learning to live side by side with their neighbors. They can’t just continually mow the lawn and brutalize their neighbors.”

Carlson got into trouble with NPR’s Steve Inskeep and the lib Dem establishment (again) earlier this month reiterating that sentiment — telling Inskeep that Trump went to war with Iran because Israel made him do it. (Not like this was news. In March 2026, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that the United States went to war with Iran because Washington knew an Israeli action against Iran was coming.”)

“I had flown back from Tel Aviv from Ben Gurion Airport after seeing the ambassador, and two days later, I was in the Oval with Trump alone,” Carlson told Inskeep. “I said, this war is not about Iran’s nuclear program, which you told me and the world that you eliminated last summer in June.”

“This war is being pushed by Israel,” Carlson said. “And he looked at me and said, yes, you’re right. But in the end, we all die anyway. So it doesn’t matter. That’s exactly what he said.”

We all die anyway?

At the Integrity Media whistleblower roundtable in Chicago, Kiriakou told deep state stories about Israeli influence over the United States.

“I sat next to a guy at the CIA for years, he’s a dear friend,” Kiriakou said during the whistleblower panel moderated by Greenwald.

“His wife sat ten feet away from us. And when I was transferred to Bahrain in the 1990s, he and his wife were transferred to Jerusalem. They were overt CIA employees. And so when they arrived in Israel, they were re-declared to the Israeli Mossad, where the station chief takes them to Mossad and says — These are my officers. They’re here to work with you.”

“Well, the wife was there to work with them, and the husband was taking a sabbatical to learn Arabic at one of the universities. They went to a welcome party, it’s called a hail and farewell party, at the ambassador’s residence in Tel Aviv. When they got home, all of their living room furniture had been rearranged.”

“And they said — Okay. All right. Well, this is what they do, just to tell us that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want it. We get it.”

“A few months later, at the ambassador’s Christmas party they drive back from Tel Aviv, and people had defecated in all of the toilets in their house. Another message, we can come into your house anytime we want, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“When they were getting ready to leave at the end of their two year tour, the Ambassador had the farewell party for them. And when they got home, the dog was under the dining room table whimpering. Somebody had cut its tail off and wrapped the stub in medical tape and gauze.”

“Yesterday, I was talking to the son of one of my best friends.”

“He’s a member of one of the SEAL teams, and he had just returned from a joint military exercise with the Brits and the Israelis. And he said first, this is just a few weeks ago, he flew to the UK and bought a cheap laptop computer, one of these $200 laptops you buy at Target, so that it had nothing on it, just so he could access his emails.”

“He took it with him to the UK, had it in his backpack, went to the, you know, hello, how are you meeting to say — I’m from SEAL Team Four, nice to meet you.”

“Got back to his room, opened up the computer. The entire computer was in Hebrew. The whole thing. He has no idea how to use it, what to do with it.”

“From the UK, they went on to Israel, and getting back to this, you know, scatological thing, this obsession that the Israelis have. In his hotel room, somebody had defecated in the toilet, but then used his bath towel to wipe himself, and then laid it out on the bed for him.”

“This is two weeks ago, and we’re giving them $2.8 billion in free weapons, or missiles, rockets that you and I are paying for.”

“So why do they do this? Because they know that they have political cover. On Capitol Hill, nobody dares challenge the Israelis. If you do, you’re gonna get primaried, and you’re probably gonna lose.”

“I’ll give you another example, and this is kind of a selfish one. And I don’t really care, I’m just using it as an example.”

“I get a call from a Texas State Senator about a year ago, and he said — Hey I’m a Texas state senator, and I wanna make a John Kiriakou Day in Texas.” He said, “We do like 140 of these a year.”

“You get a certificate with a gold seal, and it’s signed by the governor, and it’s nice. You put it in a frame.”

I said — “Oh, my God. Thank you so much.”

“He calls me a couple of weeks later, he said — This John Kiriakou Day, it’s not gonna happen.”

“I said — oh, that’s a shame. Do you mind if I ask you what happened?”

“He said — yeah AIPAC killed it.”

“I said — AIPAC in Austin, Texas?”

“And he said — Oh, they’re in all fifty state capitals. It’s just not just Capitol Hill. It’s all fifty state capitals, and now it’s the big cities, the city councils.”

“You can’t do anything without AIPAC saying it’s okay. Or at the higher, you know, federal national security level, without Mossad saying it’s okay. And they know that they can fuck with you in any way they want, and nobody on Capitol Hill is gonna have the guts to say a word.”

“So why not? They think it keeps us in our place.”