Netanyahu's Speech To Congress; Project 2025: Untangling Fact From Fiction with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Netanyahu’s Address to Congress (2:26)
Interview with Kevin Roberts (17:32)
RETURN: Netanyahu’s Address to Congress (48:37)
Interview with Max Blumenthal (59:45)
Outro (1:35:46)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
I'm Michael Tracy filling in for Glenn Greenwald, who's probably laughing at me, at least in spirit, wherever he may be while he's away.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, you may have heard of him, was in Washington, D.C.
today and delivered another one of his magnificent, soaring addresses to a joint session of Congress that predictably evoked mass adulation and euphoria.
So we will review the fallouts in graphic and possibly sarcastic detail.
Next, we will talk to the president of the Heritage Foundation to discuss the much-buzzed-about Project 2025.
This is a document that's become a major bone of contention in the 2024 presidential campaign.
I'll raise some aspects of that plan or project that you probably won't hear discussed very much anywhere else in the so-called mainstream media, but I'll take care of that for you.
And finally we'll be joined by journalist Max Blumenthal, hopefully well known to many of you out there on the internet, who's been surveying the wreckage out there in Washington DC at the Netanyahu address, or in the perimeter anyway, and he'll tell us about all the insane security protocols that I understand have been imposed to ensure a wonderfully smooth visit
For the Prime Minister of our greatest ally, that being the Jewish State.
Before that, a few programming notes.
System Update is available in podcast form on Spotify and every other podcast platform, so check that out.
And if you would like to support System Update, you can sign up to Glenn Greenwald's Locals Community at greenwald.locals.com.
For now, welcome to a new edition of System Update, starting right now.
So Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was in Washington, D.C.
today, and man, he caused a bit of a rancor, didn't he?
He addressed a joint session of Congress.
He was invited to do so by the House Speaker, Mike Johnson.
One of his solemn duties, of course, I guess that being Johnson, is to ensure that the Prime Minister of Israel has a platform in the United States, which I suppose he had been sorely lacking until today, but that void has been filled and Netanyahu made his views known to an American audience, which I guess again had been sorely lacking them until just this afternoon.
Now we have a couple of clips that I want to go to and we'll discuss various aspects of the address and the elation and jubilation and All the endless applause lines that were rattled off.
I think in order to determine how many ovations were given, you'd have to perform a very complex and advanced statistical analysis, because I couldn't really finish counting them myself.
And, you know, one thing that's notable, and we're going to discuss a bit hopefully, I don't know why I say hopefully, because I'm the one running the show, so it gets it all up to me, isn't it?
One thing that was notable is the total uniformity among particularly the Republicans.
In their fervent, unswerving support, not just for Israel, but for the current government of Israel, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving Prime Minister of Israel.
Now, of course, the Democrats in the House of Representatives and the Congress writ large are almost as uniformly supportive of Israel in practical terms, meaning on a substantive policy level, they almost entirely vote for similar, you know, weapons provisions, financial support, that sort of thing.
But the Republicans definitely wear it on their sleeves a little bit more as like a partisan point of pride that they're the ones standing in ardent affirmation of their support for Netanyahu in particular, whereas the Democrats, you could tell, sort of want to distance themselves from Netanyahu as a persona.
And yeah, they're gonna always stand stalwartly with The Jewish state, but they want to demonize Netanyahu as, you know, tainting the glories of Israel and that sort of thing.
And also on the Republican side, there is the issue of the evangelical religious fervor around Israel, meaning among evangelical Christians who have sometimes, you know, outright apocalyptic views as to the heavenly status of Israel and how Jesus will literally return from the heavens.
To preside over earth and rule over us all at the second coming and thus the United States must unfortunately support Israel to hasten that second coming.
I mean it almost sounds a little bit like a joke when you describe it but I promise I'm trying to be as impartial as possible in describing what that conventional view is.
So let's go through a couple of these clips, shall we?
Here is the first one that I want to share with all you beautiful people.
Here is Netanyahu explaining what a fantastic ally of Israel the current alleged president Joe Biden has been.
I thank President Biden for his heartfelt support for Israel after the savage attack on October 7th.
He rightly called Hamas sheer evil.
He dispatched two aircraft carriers to the Middle East to deter a wider war.
And he came to Israel to stand with us during our darkest hour, a visit that will never be forgotten.
President Biden and I have known each other for over 40 years.
I want to thank him for half a century of friendship to Israel and for being, as he says, a proud Zionist.
actually says a proud Irish American Zionist. - Okay, so why do I play that particular clip?
Well, I don't know how BB could be very much more effusive in his praise of Joe Biden.
And he's right in that Joe Biden has provided to Israel more military support for an ongoing Israeli war effort.
That any president in U.S.
history, now there are different ways you could potentially quantify that, but I would postulate that it's pretty indisputable that Joe Biden has been a greater friend to Israel than any president in U.S.
history since the founding of Israel if you quantify that by the amount of armaments that that U.S.
president has provided Israel so it can conduct its war effort, not to mention the diplomatic support, the military support, the economic support, the spiritual support, if you will, Netanyahu even mentions there that Joe Biden still goes around very proudly and unabashedly proclaiming himself to be a proud Zionist.
He uses that term despite being Irish Catholic, so that's an interesting phenomenon that may be perhaps slightly unique to U.S.
politics.
I raised that because what has one of the main critiques of Joe Biden been from Republicans, including Donald Trump, for the past nine or so months?
It's been that Joe Biden is insufficiently aggressive in his support of Israel.
It's that he's been damningly derelict.
In arming and aiding and abetting Israel.
It's that Biden has actually pandered to the pro-Hamas wing, allegedly, of the Democratic Party.
That's been the conventional attack line on Biden.
And it clearly does not line up with the praise that's been heaped on Biden by Netanyahu.
It doesn't line up with the objective data in terms of the quantity of armaments supplied and so forth, the number of UN Security Council resolutions that have been vetoed by the U.S.
at Israel's behest.
That's all been under the Biden-Harris administration.
Now we'll get to Kamala a little bit later.
Well, I want to now draw your attention to a clip that you might not have noticed, actually, from that fateful presidential debate in late June between Trump and Biden, when Biden was still the full-throated, presumptive Democratic nominee.
Obviously, everybody was fixated at the time on Joe Biden's cognitive deterioration.
It was hard, really, to keep one's focus on anything else.
But I'm a very shrewd person, I suppose, so another exchange caught my eye that I think has some relevance to the topic at hand.
So let's view that, please.
You gotta ask him, as far as Israel and Hamas, Israel's the one that wants to go.
He said the only one who wants to keep going is Hamas.
Actually, Israel is the one, and you should let him go and let him finish the job.
He doesn't want to do it.
He's become like a Palestinian, but they don't like him because he's a very bad Palestinian.
He's a weak one.
President Biden, do you have a minute?
Okay, so there's Donald Trump accusing derisively, as a term of derision, Joe Biden of being a, quote, Palestinian.
I guess to signify that Joe Biden is in hock to pro-Palestinian elements in the Democratic Party, that he has some sympathy for perhaps Hamas or some other form of Islamic extremists.
This all the while, Joe Biden, as we have established hopefully, has sent more armaments to Israel in furtherance of an ongoing war effort than any president ever.
Now, how do you square that?
I mean, you can't really, but evidently Donald Trump figures that one of his strategies in 2024 would be to say variations of, if you don't vote Republican this year, you ain't Jewish.
Remember when Joe Biden, now Donald Trump hasn't literally said that quote, it would be amusing if he did, but do you recall back in 2020 when Joe Biden said, if you vote for Trump, you ain't black?
That's basically what the Republicans and Trump are going with for the 2024 election to Put fear in the hearts of American Jewish voters that if they vote for a Democrat, then, I don't know, they'll have to do a mass exodus from the United States and go where exactly?
I'm not sure.
It seems like the United States probably stands alone in human history as a safe haven for Jews, but the Republicans are really invested in making Jews feel that they are extremely unsafe and in grave peril if another Democrat gets in and, I don't know, does what exactly?
Continues to fund and arm Israel virtually without Reservation.
So let's go to another clip from our friend, Bibi, who made sure to establish his bipartisan credentials by additionally heaping praise on the Republican nominee, that being one Donald J. Trump.
You may have heard of him.
Let's hear that, please.
We could call.
I have a name for this new alliance.
I think we should call it the Abraham Alliance.
Just for some context there, Bibi is proposing that a new alliance be established between Israel and the Gulf potentates that Israel has increasingly aligned with at the facilitation of the U.S.
to basically freeze out the Palestinians From any real settlement to their situation.
So that's what he's suggesting there, and he would name it after the so-called Abraham Accords that were generated under the Trump administration and spearheaded by Jared Kushner, who Trump assigned to the Israel-Palestine portfolio, I guess due to all of Kushner's amazing experience in the realm of Middle East negotiations.
So let's proceed.
- I want to thank President Trump for his leadership in brokering the Stark Abraham Accords.
- Okay, so listen to that ovation.
That's the Republicans in the House who pretty significantly outnumbered the Democrats today because at least a subset of the Democrats claimed that they were boycotting the speech, or at least they were not attending, right?
So Bernie Sanders wasn't there.
Elizabeth Warren wasn't there.
Others who you may be familiar with were not there in some brave act of defiance, I guess, because they figured that sitting and listening to a foreign leader give a speech was some statement of something or other.
I don't fully understand the logic there.
I'm not a huge fan of BB myself.
But I certainly wouldn't be opposed to necessarily just sitting and hearing his remarks.
It doesn't necessarily indicate that I agree or disagree with them, right?
I'm telling you my views now by verbalizing stuff out of my mouth.
My presence at a speech doesn't really signify anything one way or another, but politicians, I guess, have a different calculus where they're always going around deliberating on what the symbolic impact of where they Park their posterior indicates.
But let's continue.
And you hear that the Republicans, who outnumber the Democrats here, extremely vociferous in their ovation.
I don't know if I've ever heard Republicans in the House give a more frenzied ovation for virtually anything.
But on the topic of Israel and Trump's support for Israel, they are hooting and hollering up a storm, that's for sure.
So let's continue.
Like Americans, Israelis were relieved that President Trump emerged safe and sound from that dastardly attack on him, dastardly attack on American democracy.
There is no room for political violence in democracies.
I also want to thank President Trump for all the things he did for Israel, from recognizing recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, to confronting Iran's aggression, to recognizing Jerusalem as our capital, and moving the American embassy there.
Okay, so there you have it.
The hooting and hollering reaches a high fever pitch, you might say.
And so this gets to one of the perhaps conceptual conundrums at the heart of the current Trump campaign or MAGA movement, America First movement, etc., which is how do you reconcile the Israeli Prime Minister Bombastically proclaiming Trump to be the greatest president ever with regard to Israel, on Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, etc, etc, etc.
Trump was just the best ever with regard to Israel.
And how do you square that with this notion of America First, which is a very fluid concept.
Everybody has a different definition, who you talk to about it at the Within the Republican Party, as I did when I covered the Republican Convention last week in Milwaukee for this show.
And so that's something to perhaps ponder.
And with that, we wanted to move to an interview with the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts.
Who is somebody of interest because the Heritage Foundation has been in the news quite a bit recently.
The document that that think tank produced, colloquially referred to as Project 2025, has become a major point of contestation.
Among the Republicans and Democrats as it relates to the 2024 campaign.
My working sense is that there are many aspects of that document, which I actually took the liberty of reading at least large portions of, that have not really been discussed much in the so-called mainstream media.
So I'm glad to be joined by Kevin Roberts.
Hello, sir.
Michael, thanks for having me.
Looking forward to an intellectually honest conversation, whatever someone's political beliefs are, about Project 2025.
So thanks for having me.
I appreciate that.
So if you listen to the chatter in much of the liberal-oriented media, obviously they've converted Project 2025 into what they think is going to be their goldmine of an attack line against Donald Trump and the Republicans writ large.
And I did something, I guess, a bit unusual by media standards, which is I read the document.
And there are portions of it that stood out to me as really getting no discussion whatsoever, at least as far as I've ascertained.
And those, for me anyway, have to do with national security and foreign policy.
So I wanted to discuss a few of those items with you, if you don't mind.
So there's one bit.
So obviously there are some recommendations that are made in terms of how to reorganize the bureaucracy of the federal government, including the intelligence services.
And one prescription that is made is that Section 702 of FISA, the Surveillance Act, ought to be renewed and reauthorized.
And that's been fairly controversial Including among the right because you know the fourth amendment requires a warrant and this Authority is seen as authorizing a warrantless surveillance and only barely passed the house in April in terms of renewal and I think actually speaker Johnson cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of that reauthorization of FISA so the
Section of the Project 2025 that I'm referring to here says that Section 702 should be understood as a quote, essential tool in the fight against terrorism, malicious cyber actors, and Chinese espionage.
And so it says that these authorizations need to be properly maintained and accountable, but that they should be retained nonetheless.
So what is your sense of what Project 2025 proposes for that particular authority, FISA?
It's been controversial throughout the Trump administration.
He's criticized certain, Trump has criticized certain aspects of it as having been abused, but the fundamental authority, the document does propose be retained.
Yes, thanks so much for this conversation.
We need to have more discourse like this in the United States, regardless of someone's political beliefs.
I'm really grateful to answer the question about the policy detail.
And Michael, I'll make two points.
One, from the standpoint of Project 2025, what you've read there is what's in the Mandate for Leadership book, the conservative promise, this conservative policy manual, if you will.
And keep in mind, we wrote that two years ago, so well before the most recent vote on the issue.
And the second point that I'll make is, we do believe that the underlying authority of Section 702 should continue to exist.
But especially those of us at the Heritage Foundation, which has facilitated this project, believe that there need to be very stringent, serious amendments added to that.
And so during the last legislative conversation, the last legislative fight, Heritage, of course, just one part of Project 2025, was vocal about some of these amendments being added to the bill so that we could better protect innocent Americans.
All of that to say that this has been extended into what would be the next presidential term, and either for Mr. Trump or it looks like, you know, Ms. Harris is the nominee for the left.
And I think at that point, we'll have the conversation about making those amendments again, so that we can better protect Fourth Amendment.
Yeah.
Also on the intelligence community, which, again, raised a bit of a paradox for me because I've seen a lot of people on the right online who are actually in favor of Project 2025, anticipating that what's so great about it is that it will fundamentally overhaul the intelligence anticipating that what's so great about it is that it will fundamentally overhaul the intelligence services and maybe combat the deep state, which has become a main
And also Donald Trump obviously rails against it because he feels understandably aggrieved by elements of the national security state that use unprecedented tactics to undermine him, whether it was through the Trump-Russia investigation, the Mueller special counsel investigation, etc., in his 2016 campaign and then also etc., in his 2016 campaign and then also in the early part of his first term.
I want to just read a quote here.
Here's what it prescribes for the intelligence community.
That is the Project 2025 document.
It says, quote, an incoming conservative president needs to use these intelligence authorities aggressively to anticipate and thwart our adversaries, including Russia, Iran, North Korea, and especially China.
Now, That seems like the purpose of these bureaucratic reorganizations that are being proposed is to better entrench American primacy, right?
To better expand American hegemony and to combat alleged adversaries, which is very much in keeping with the standard mission of the intelligence services.
Whatever tweaks you might want to make around the margins of how it's bureaucratically organized.
Would that be a fair summation?
I think you're on the right track.
I would put it a slightly different way, not to be argumentative, but just for the sake of clarity.
We do want all of the law enforcement, military, intelligence agencies to continue to exist to serve the interest of the American people, that is to be focused on our adversaries.
But the clarification that I would make for you, Michael, is that especially when you're using the term deep state, we need to eradicate those components of those agencies that have been turned against the American people ourselves, including and maybe especially considering what they've done to Mr. Trump.
I can tell you, even though I'm sure many members of your audience are not in this category, as a Roman Catholic who happens to like the Latin Mass, we've been targeted as quote-unquote domestic terrorists by the deep state.
Pro-lifers have been targeted by the deep state.
I no more want people on the political left to be targeted by the deep state because they're going about their respective affinity groups than I do myself want to be targeted.
I think that's the bifurcation we need to make here, that we need the government to do its job properly understood, which is to be focused on our adversaries.
We also need the government, especially these unelected bureaucrats in these intelligence agencies, to stop spying on us, to stop weaponizing the deep state against us.
The best way to understand this project, which is that it is a corrective against those abuses, and we look forward to the opportunity to be part of any effort that is going to achieve that aim.
Right, but fundamentally the powers and authorities of the intelligence apparatus will continue to be arrayed against, for instance, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and especially China, which they're arrayed at now.
You might quibble or contest various aspects of how those powers have been directed inward, and I would probably agree with a lot of that myself, but fundamentally the main You know, directive or purpose of the intelligence services will remain in place.
So there will be in a sense bipartisan continuity on that score in terms of how those intelligence resources are marshaled.
Very well said, and thanks for putting it that way.
And one good way to think about this, both in respect to the specific point that you're making about intelligence agencies, as well as a larger point about the purpose of Project 2025, is to restore constitutional order, to restore the proper role of these agencies, but also, and very much related to this particular conversation thread, to restore the proper role of each of the three branches of government.
And I really do believe that The American people, maybe two-thirds, three-quarters of the American people understand that over the last several decades, there's been a real change, to put it mildly, in that constitutional order.
And basically, this is a policy blueprint, particularly with these intelligence agencies, so that they can be focused on what they're supposed to do, which is equipping us with information about our adversaries while not turning that information against us inwardly.
So as you probably are aware, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, was in Washington, D.C.
today.
He addressed a joint session of Congress.
He received many vigorous ovations, particularly from the Republicans, but also, I don't know, maybe half of the Democrats or so.
There's still a lot of bipartisan continuity on that issue as well.
So I want to just quote to you a portion from the Project 2025 document that does address itself to Israel.
And now we should note that this document was written before the events of October 7th, 2023, correct?
Correct.
OK, so here's what here's one of the goals that the document sets out.
It's to ensure that Israel has both the military means and the political support and flexibility to take what it deems to be appropriate measures to defend itself against the Iranian regime and its regional proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Now, does the Heritage Foundation, maybe if you want to update the document for the more recent events, does the Heritage Foundation really have a grievance with the amount of, quote, flexibility that the Biden administration has afforded Israel?
As I mentioned in my introduction, I think there's a very good case to be made that Joe Biden has provided a greater quantity of armaments to Israel than any president in history.
Not to mention the diplomatic support, the political support, the other forms of support, like symbolically going to Israel after October 7th.
Now, I have some substantive objections to U.S.
policy vis-a-vis Israel, but if what you're after is unflinching, unswerving support for whatever Israel thinks is necessary to defend its own security, it seems like Joe Biden has fit the bill for your purposes, hasn't he?
Or are you anticipating that a Republican administration under Donald Trump would go even further?
I don't know how much further you could go, but maybe there's some universe where it does go further that I can't currently envision.
Well, I will say that President Biden has been better on Israel than he was on the withdrawal of Afghanistan or from Afghanistan.
But I would not go as far as to say that at Heritage or for those of us with Project 2025 that we think he's commended himself well.
In fact, we do believe that in ways that maybe reading between the lines here, Michael, The president and his administration have really handcuffed Israel.
They've prevented Israel from achieving the number one objective that needs to happen, which is getting American hostages back.
Actually, President Biden and Vice President Harris truly deserve real scrutiny about that.
But the second thing is they've really prevented rather actively sometimes, the Biden-Harris administration has, they've prevented Israel from fully prosecuting this war against Hamas.
And I think that while, of course, it could be worse, I don't think we're necessarily going to grade them on a curve here, considering there were 20,000 protesters pro-Hamas in D.C.
today, tearing down an American flag, and we're allowing that to happen on our soil.
I think it's an indication of what the Biden-Harris administration has done in the Middle East.
But let me push back on you there because the protesters, and I'm not in Washington D.C.
so I didn't go interview them myself, but I would assume that the protesters who are outside the Capitol today were not in favor of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris for that matter.
In fact, they would have been very fervently protesting the current policy of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris because they view it to be excessively supportive of Israel, which they view as having unjustly pulverized Gaza and oppressed the Palestinians and so forth.
So I don't understand this conventional Republican line that tries to associate the current Democratic administration with the protestors who are literally protesting them.
I mean, how is that being conflated?
I understand the political salience and why you might want to conflate those things, but it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense logically.
Yeah, I appreciate the question.
I'm just talking as a policy conservative, not as a capital R Republican.
Well, the reason they were protesting is because they believe that Biden and Harris should be doing nothing for Israel.
But it doesn't follow logically that their protesting that means that Biden and Harris have acquitted themselves perfectly, which is, again, not to be argumentative, sort of the underlying premise of your first question.
Our point as policy conservatives is that Biden and Harris should be doing more to support Israel in the name of peace than they have.
We understand that the protesters create an immense political problem for them, which is why Vice President Harris found it more important to be doing a campaign event than to serve her constitutional duty of being present for a major head of state, giving a major address to Congress.
That's a problem for the left to answer, I would respectfully submit to you, although I'm very happy to have the policy conversation in terms of what those of us who are conservatives would like to see.
Okay, so moving on, there's another section of the Project 2025 that has to do with foreign military sales.
This is in the section on the Defense Department.
It was authored by Christopher Miller, who was an acting defense secretary toward the tail end of the first Trump administration.
And he declares that, quote, the United States must regain its role as the arsenal of democracy, because in his view, there has been a nosedive.
That's an exact quote.
U.S.
Government Foreign Military Sales, meaning of armaments to foreign countries.
Now, on some portions of the right, there is an increasing skepticism or hesitation about what's sometimes unflatteringly referred to as the military-industrial complex, which is composed by, at least in large part, Defense contractors, arms suppliers, arms producers, right?
And what Project 2025 wants the next Republican or conservative administration to usher in is even fewer limitations On the ability of arms manufacturers to sell their wares around the world.
In fact, one of the policy prescriptions in this section is that Congress should have even less oversight in reviewing the notifications that, by custom, are sent from the State Department to Congress about imminent or upcoming arms sales.
So you want even less, I guess, congressional oversight over how these Arms corporations or arms producers are receiving taxpayer largesse because they're hugely subsidized.
I mean, these are basically state-subsidized corporations, right?
I mean, there's not much free market in that industry.
So, what do you make of that description that I just gave of that particular section?
Actually, it sounds like you and especially those of us at Heritage, most of us at Project 2025, agree more than we disagree about the overarching objective here.
And that is, we do want a very lethal, sparingly used American military I think what you're getting at there with that comment, or that part of the project, is that we are arguing for a greater efficiency for the speed of munitions deliveries.
You think about our great ally, Taiwan.
There's been a real issue with the delivery of munitions for many years.
I hear that all over the world as I I travel for my job.
The point is not to have less oversight, but to have greater efficiency for the sake of protecting Americans.
I happen to agree with you, all of us at Heritage do, Michael, that we have to have a dramatic overhaul of our defense industrial base.
We are spending way too much money on outdated munition systems and not having a serious enough policy conversation about what the next war will need in terms of munitions.
Congress gets in the way because of the politics of this.
We're not saying that Congress should get out of that.
We're actually arguing that Congress should muster some political courage to have these very important and difficult policy conversations.
And that thread really is the overriding theme of the Department of Defense component.
of Project 2025.
Something I might add has pretty significant bipartisan support, which is that we sort of revitalize Reagan's peaceful strength, do so in a way that is fiscally responsible, but that most of all, also protects American interests at home and abroad. - So you mentioned Taiwan.
Also in that DOD section authored by Christopher Miller, he prescribes that the U.S.
should, quote, prioritize the U.S.
conventional force planning construct to defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Now maybe I'm crazy.
But it seems like going to war with China is maybe something that should be debated and deliberated ahead of time before we just kind of presumptively commit to it as a nation.
I mean, that could be catastrophic.
I mean, the casualness and almost the frivolity with which that prospect is discussed, I have to say, especially within D.C.
think tank circles.
Never ceases to amaze me.
So are we just kind of assuming that a second Trump administration or a forthcoming Republican administration would just operate on the working assumption that should there be some sort of Chinese incursion, meaning the PRC into Taiwan, meaning the ROC, that would automatically obligate the U.S.
to commit, you know, unknown Military resources and effectively begin a war with China?
I mean, that's a almost a mind-boggling concept and it seems like that's the implicit assumption in a lot of what I see, not just in Project 2025, but I have to say, you know, pull up any, virtually any DC think tank policy paper on Taiwan and you'll see something similar.
Well, let me let me allay your concerns, my friend.
First and foremost, President Trump, I think even for people on the left, deserves an immense amount of credit for having started no wars in his presidency.
He is a man of great peace.
Obviously, he speaks for his policy priorities, not me or anyone with Project 2025.
But if you look at President Trump's Public pronouncements, both as president and since, about the question of Taiwan.
What you should expect from him, just based on his own public record, is that there would be great peace, that he would go out of his way more than any other president to avoid a direct conflict with China.
And we ought to celebrate that across the political spectrum.
I'm a historian.
It is an amazing historical record as it relates to peace under his presidency.
But the second thing to your wonderful point about D.C.
think tanks, I say that leading a D.C.
think tank.
Heritage, you may not know, has been leading the effort on the political right to get us out of this neoconservative adventurism that has really cost way too many American lives and way too much money.
In fact, we're often called the restrainers or the prioritizers.
And as it relates to Taiwan, we are huge advocates to arm them for the sake of deterrence, so that the United States does not have to send our own very precious military men and women there to do that.
So there's a much larger context here that I think is an important part of the conversation.
And I mentioned the context, not to be evasive, but for the exact opposite.
There is a movement afoot, Michael, on the political right to move back to our roots of being much more restrained as it relates to just sort of flippantly talking about defending this country or that country.
And I think that's the kind of thing that ought to allay your concern legitimately.
Well, I do think there's a fine line between deterrence and provocation or instigation.
We were told before 2022 that U.S.
policy in Ukraine was geared toward deterring Russia.
In fact, that was one of the grounds on which Donald Trump started sending lethal weaponry to Russia for the first time in 2017.
And so I want to just move to the Russia portion of the State Department section of the Project 2025 document.
And so this is by Kiran Skinner, is I think how you pronounce her name?
Dr. Kiran Skinner, yes.
And she basically seems to posit that there's a conservative viewpoint that's become a consensus, or at least she's trying to present it as a bit of a consensus, that issues both isolationism and interventionism.
And she tries to relate this concept to Ukraine.
And she says that basically the final calculus on that is that continued U.S.
involvement must, quote, be fully paid for, limited to military aid, while European allies address Ukraine's economic needs and have a clearly defined national security strategy that does not risk American lives.
Okay, so I was at the Republican Convention last week in Milwaukee.
I talked to a lot of Republican members of Congress about Ukraine policy.
A large number of them, who voted even against the Ukraine funding portion of the National Security Supplemental in April, told me that they have no real principled opposition to funding or arming Ukraine.
In fact, rather, they echoed basically the logic that's spelled out here in Project 2025, which is that to the extent there is U.S.
involvement in Ukraine, it must be more narrowly tailored.
So you want it to just be military aid rather than economic aid, like, you know, funding pensions or that kind of thing in Ukraine.
And they want European allies to pick up a greater share of the burden.
Well, I mean, the EU in February, I think it was, passed another 50 billion euro to actually, you know, subsidize a larger portion of that economic aid component.
And in terms of a clearly defined national security strategy, well that's just basically a process argument saying that we need something that's a little bit more clear cut in terms of the policy framework set out by the administration.
My point is, there's no underlying principle of opposition to intervention in Ukraine here, so far as I can tell in this document.
And that does seem to be reflected in an emerging consensus view within a lot of Republican elected official circles.
Yeah, if I follow your question, and I've been, I guess, more deeply involved in this question than practically any conservative who's not an elected official in D.C.
the last couple of years, I can tell you what the principled objection is, and that is we ought not be sending $200 billion to any country without having a very clear strategic objective, and it's one that has become a slippery slope toward having our own military on the ground.
In fact, I'm a little surprised if there's a difference of opinion between you and me on this, because I love where you were going with your point about Taiwan leading up to something you and I no doubt would agree on, which is that there must be declarations of war more often when in fact there is war.
Obviously we hope that there isn't a lot of war.
This case is becoming close to that.
We've been told for two years that Ukraine could win this war.
Obviously we want them to, but it's also become very obvious in the last six months, even among EU leaders who've been sort of selling us a bill of goods, that the Ukrainians cannot win.
I think what the upshot here is that if President Trump wins, if you listen to what he has said the last few months about this issue, that we can expect a move toward protecting Ukrainian sovereignty while also understanding that we've got to bring this conflict to an end.
That underlying principle is not just American restraint, It's not just a process argument.
It's an argument about constitutional authority and having a conversation as a country about what is in the best interest of the United States of America.
That I think we need more of rather than less of it.
I don't disagree at all about the lack of constitutional authorization for a whole bevy of U.S.
military interventions, including Ukraine, going on right now.
So no argument there for me.
I'm just noting that in Project 2025, it effectively endorses the continuation of arming Ukraine.
And it doesn't declare, it doesn't say that, well it says, limited to military aid.
U.S.
involvement must be fully paid for and limited to military aid.
No, it's a misreading of it.
If I may say so respectfully, what we're trying to do is impose a criteria that Congress has not filled.
They've not stated the strategic objective.
They've not talked about the criteria for getting out of there.
There is a terrible lack of transparency.
If that criteria doesn't exist, then that is not at all a blank check to continue in Ukraine.
Okay, let's just pull that up on the screen really quick, if the control room could do that, just so people are aware of what I'm referencing.
This is the Russia section, and I just want to have people for the record.
So this is basically the conclusion in the State Department section of Project 2012.
Go on a little further, please.
Thus, with respect to Ukraine, U.S. involvement must be fully paid for, limited to military aid, while European allies address Ukraine's economic needs and have a clearly defined national security strategy that does not risk American lives.
So if military aid is what U.S. involvement must be limited to, isn't that an endorsement of the continuation of military aid?
I guess I'm not sure what I'm misreading.
No, no.
The aid that we have sent there, the $200 billion that I've pointed out, isn't just military aid.
It fails that criterion.
It fails the criterion of transparency.
There has been huge objection by none other than Mitch McConnell to having a much stronger Inspector General there.
And I just disagree with you, Michael, that we've actually fulfilled that third part, which is that there's some sort of strategic objective that's been articulated here.
I'm not arguing that.
A strategic objective has been adequately spelled out by the Biden administration.
In fact, there hasn't been.
It's just been strategic muddle.
They don't actually spell out what the end point even is.
In May, Biden authorized Ukraine to start using U.S.
weaponry to strike inside territorial Russia, and we don't even know what the geographic range of within Russia that Ukraine is permitted to strike it.
So I'm not arguing that, I'm just noting that it seems like this argument endorses continuing the war in Ukraine.
But maybe I'm reading too much into it, people should look at it for themselves.
I do wanna ask you one final question, and you'll have to indulge me, 'cause this might sound like an MSNBC type question, but I hope I've established that that's not the approach I wanted to take with this interview.
But it is true that Donald Trump keeps denouncing and disavowing Project 2025.
He did so just again today on Truth Social.
Why is Donald Trump so rabidly distancing himself from Project 2025?
which is, I mean, it is true that a lot of people who are alum of the first Trump administration were involved in crafting this document, including Christopher Miller, whose section on the Department of Defense we were just discussing, and Ms. Skinner on the State Department.
So what's going on here? - You definitely earned the benefit of the doubt, not for that to be perceived as an MSNBC question.
So don't worry about that.
I've enjoyed the conversation.
But to cut to the chase, look, President Trump is running a presidential campaign, and the left has succeeded in mischaracterizing almost everything about Project 2025.
And so I think the former president hit the nail on the head today when he said, don't believe this, I think he called it disinformation from the left, don't believe them.
That's the key thing.
I think it's incumbent upon us.
Who are behind Project 2025 to continue to correct the record.
They've gotten only two things right.
The first is, as President Trump has indicated, the campaign is totally separate from this project.
That's been the way things work since the beginning.
But secondly, the one thing that the left gets right is that we do want to eliminate the U.S.
Department of Education.
It's a very popular concept.
And this fifth generation educator who only went to public schools looks forward to American education being improved as a result.
Well, Ronald Reagan campaigned on abolishing the Department of Education in 1980.
And famously, the Heritage Foundation would boast that Reagan came into office in 1981 with binders full of Heritage Foundation recommendations and personnel to hire.
And lo and behold, the Department of Education was never abolished.
And I think even in 2016, Trump indicated that he would be open to abolishing the Department of Education.
So that's just a longstanding kind of D.C. conservative ambition.
So there's nothing particularly new about it.
Whatever you think of it on the merits, the idea that it represents some like dramatic new apocalyptic totalitarianism.
That's absurd.
I mean, I think if there is a more legitimate critique to make, it's just that it's bog standard D.C. conservatism, frankly.
Well, you know, as you've discovered, I would quibble with you in a friendly way about that last point.
But I'd rather that policy conversation, which to your credit has been so intellectually honest, than the mischaracterization that has happened on purpose.
I mean, even Kamala Harris's campaign staffer today admitted that they were purposefully misconstruing Project 2025.
And to the credit of both USA Today and CNN, they did a fact check on them and basically have landed where you have, which is we might have policy differences about Project 2025, but it certainly is not some dystopian plan for ending the United States.
Quite the opposite, we want to restore self-governance.
So thank you, Michael, for being such a good conversationalist on the issue.
Well, I certainly would not be surprised if a Kamala Harris staffer deliberately misconstrued something for political purposes.
So, you know, my face does not have a look of shock on it upon hearing that.
Well, Kevin Roberts, I appreciate you coming on, having what I hope was a substantive discussion about an issue that's become really contentious, obviously, in the current campaign.
Hopefully this added to people's understanding of what Project 2025 entails.
And once again, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you immensely.
Enjoyed it and look forward to seeing you again.
Take care.
care.
All right.
Thanks.
Okay.
So that was Kevin Roberts and that was hopefully illuminating for many of you on I actually wrote something for my own personal site or a substack on mtracy.net.
Sorry to do a shameless plug, but what I wrote was headlined Project 2025 is basically just Project 1981.
And what I meant by that is that this idea that Project 2025 represents this, like, tyrannical overturning of the constitutional order is belied by the fact that the Heritage Foundation really is just the standard D.C.
conservative think tank, whatever you may think of it.
So the idea that they're going to, like, blow up the American system of government just makes no sense, yet that's how it's been largely depicted in the hysterical, liberal-oriented media because they wanted an attack line against Trump.
Now, there are legitimate critiques to be made of lots of the stuff in Project 2025, much of which I mentioned with Kevin Roberts.
But none of it really aligns with these hyperbolic liberal fantasies, which really have no basis in reality.
And in fact, on a lot of the core national security and foreign policy prescriptions in that document, the liberals are fully aligned with Project 2025.
They should be cheerleading.
And dancing in the streets at how much bipartisan consensus Project 2025 really portends on combating Russia, on marshalling U.S.
military and intelligence resources to fight China.
There's tons of bipartisan continuity that is elaborated in this document, as I think at one point Kevin Roberts even affirmed.
So, that's something interesting to note.
And, I don't know, maybe we'll cover Project 2025 a little more.
I'm, in a way, hesitant to spend too much time talking about what DC think tanks do.
Because, I mean, they're really just... I mean, if you talk about Washington consensus...
That's what you're referring to for the most part, DC think tanks.
And yet, Democrats and MSNBC are having everybody light their hair on fire and run around in circles over the most conventional, almost banal stuff.
That really is annoying.
Okay, I want to now go back to a few things from the Netanyahu address today.
And as we're awaiting for Max Blumenthal to join us shortly, he will be triumphantly striding onto the screen relatively soon, at least we hope.
And yeah, so one thing that I wanted to pull up was Rashida Tlaib.
Here she is.
Rashida Tlaib was in the, she did attend, interestingly, the Netanyahu address today.
Now Rashida Tlaib is a huge apparition in Congress.
She is a Palestinian lineage herself, and she's been adamantly critical, fiercely critical of Israel, of even the Biden administration's policy on Israel.
But unlike some of her Democratic or Progressive, with a capital P, colleagues, she did not boycott the Netanyahu speech today.
Instead, what she did, as you can see by glancing at your screen, is that she attended the speech, she sat and she listened, and she held up some sort of sign there that says, guilty of genocide.
Now, whether the Israeli war effort in Gaza can be rightly called a genocide is not even something I want to delve into right now.
I think the term genocide is frankly overused.
I'm going to get killed by that by some of the audience, but I just think it has lost a lot of its conceptual value and just gets...
Use way too often just to make people all emotionally exercised, frankly.
Maybe I'll do a segment on that on a later day.
That's not to excuse anything about the Israeli war effort.
I just think that terminology has been chronically overused and it kind of obscures more than it reveals.
But the point is, Rashida Tlaib, she was there accusing Netanyahu of being guilty of genocide.
Now if Netanyahu is in fact, quote, guilty of genocide, who's his chief abetter?
Who's his chief enabler?
Right?
Who made possible the genocide that Rashida Tlaib and others are claiming has been perpetrated by Israel?
It's the United States, right?
It's Joe Biden.
It's Kamala Harris.
Now, to Rashida Tlaib's credit, and we would love to have her on the show, I think we reached out to her staff today and unfortunately didn't get a response, but, you know, the invitation is still there and open.
To her credit, she has not yet endorsed Kamala Harris.
Now, AOC, on the other hand, You might be familiar with her, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She did come out and endorse Kamala Harris the instant that she could.
Now, she had also been a big booster of Joe Biden.
She's not one of these squad members or progressive members who is trying to leverage their endorsement to extract some kind of concession from the Democratic standard-bearer or the Democratic ticket.
No, she's in the fold completely and is not trying to extract anything so far as we know.
So she was on, you know, she's riding with Kamala or, you know, coconutting with Kamala or whatever the latest meme is instantaneously.
But Rashida Tlaib is a little different.
She is not endorsing Kamala yet.
And that is to her credit at least.
She's one of the rare Democrats.
Who it actually occurs to, to attempt to exert leverage on the party.
Republicans usually are a bit more open to doing that, including even if it leads to the embarrassment of top party officials, whereas Democrats tend to be usually a lot more deferential, although I guess the ouster of Biden recently kind of challenges that view, so maybe it's a little bit more complicated now, but nevertheless,
Democrats have, at least traditionally in recent years, been a bit more hesitant to do anything that might interrupt their, you know, rigid conformity within their party leadership.
But here's Rashida Tlaib, who has not yet endorsed Kamala, and that could be consequential because Rashida Tlaib represents a district in Michigan.
Which is a critical state, and therefore has a through line to some of the constituencies or demographics that Kamala Harris, if she becomes not just the presumed nominee, or the presumptive nominee, but the actual nominee, she would have to galvanize those voters behind her in order to have a chance of winning Michigan.
And here's Rashida Tlaib kind of standing in the way of that, at least temporarily, By, you would think, I mean, the only logical thing that makes sense here is that Rashida Tlaib is accusing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of being facilitators of a, quote, genocide.
Because the U.S., as we all, I think, should be well aware of by now, is the chief arms supplier and operational coordinator and diplomatic enabler of the Israeli war effort that's ongoing and could expand into the North.
of Israel with Lebanon and Hezbollah at any moment really.
I mean that could be one reason why Netanyahu made his jaunt today to the U.S.
to continue gathering support.
So that's something else I think to be mindful of.
Now I do want to go to one other thing here.
This is the, Netanyahu, when he was lauding Trump, was singing Trump's praises for something called the Abraham Accords, right?
And Abraham Accords are what Trump goes around touting as having brought an oasis of peace and tranquility to the Middle East.
Now what was the main purpose of the Abraham Accords?
And in fact, a lot of this is replicated in Project 2025 in terms of what they want to suggest for a second Trump administration or a forthcoming Republican administration.
They endorse the policy framework of the Abraham Accords continuing.
And I have it here on my card that I'm going to pull up because it's really interesting.
And I'll find it in a moment.
But the point, what they basically say in Project 2025 is they want to continue the framework that was established by...
The Abraham Accords, which is to effectively bypass the Palestinians as having any real say in their fate as a cohesive society, and basically just have the U.S.
buy off Gulf autocracies with arms deals and with other giveaways like the United Arab Emirates, like Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.
Those were the original signatories of the so-called Abraham Accords.
In exchange for recognizing Israel.
And so what the Project 2025 recommends is that they want to continue that framework, but also include Saudi Arabia.
The Biden administration, I guess one of his big feats that he's trying to accomplish, meaning old slow Joe, before he's ushered out into actual official retirement, although maybe he's in semi-retirement now, it's hard to tell, is to include Saudi Arabia in the Abraham Accords framework by making Saudi Arabia an official treaty ally.
And I just want to point to this, and maybe Max can comment on this, But this is the Abraham Accords original framework for what they prophesy some kind of future Palestinian state would look like vis-a-vis the West Bank.
And as you can tell, this is the brilliant brainchild of Jared Kushner.
It looks like some deformed piece of Swiss cheese.
This is what they were saying was going to be the tenable Palestinian state.
Now, of course, nobody in Palestinian civil society viewed that to be remotely tenable.
And so, you know, the Abraham Accords, as much as it's heralded as having brought forth this outbreak of stability and peace and tranquility in the Levant, meaning the Israeli-Palestine conflict, you could argue that it actually set the stage for the outbursts of violence that occurred on October 7th, and then the subsequent pulverization campaign that Israel has waged within Israel.
Okay, so now I do want to turn to Max Blumenthal, who I'm told is joining us live from his car.
I have no sound.
He has no sound, he says.
We'll try to get him sound.
That would be good for him to have sound.
And you got it.
Now I can hear you.
You can hear me?
I know, Max, you enjoy nothing more than hearing my voice, so hopefully you can hear it now.
Well, you're looking great, and you're looking rested and ready down in Rio.
I have to confess, I wasn't able to get a front row seat for Netanyahu's speech.
I was out with the protest.
I've been out with the protesters since about noon, and was treated to various volleys of percussion, grenades, tear gas, pepper spray, and yeah.
But I wasn't surprised reading the transcript of Netanyahu's speech or seeing the lowlights.
I wasn't surprised with anything that took place.
I'm shocked, Max, because I thought I spotted you in the audience next to Jerry Nadler and Josh Gottheimer applauding Netanyahu for saying how great of a job Joe Biden and Donald Trump have done in supporting Israel.
Maybe I mistook you for somebody else.
No, I was backstage with Netanyahu and Pastor John Hagee, but I wasn't in the photo.
Tony Perkins got in the way from the Family Research Council.
So yeah, I mainly just saw the day of rage that erupted around the Capitol.
So describe to us the security situation in D.C.
right now because I was in D.C.
not too long ago while the NATO summit was happening and you know they basically turned the convention center area into a fortress.
They have all kinds of militarized police patrolling and checkpoints and you can hardly get from one street to another.
And you told me earlier today that there's something comparable going on with respect to the Netanyahu speech which would be Pretty amazing because it's not that uncommon for foreign leaders to come address joint sessions of Congress.
It happens actually pretty frequently from Japan or India or wherever, but evidently when our so-called greatest ally or the only democracy in the Middle East sends its prime minister or head of government to come address our legislative branch, they have to crack down Yeah, great question.
such extreme fashion in order to enable Bibi to have a wonderfully seamless address and receive all his endless ovations.
So just describe what the security situation has been like.
Yeah, great question.
I was actually shocked at how many police were on the streets.
And I got the sense that the police, through whatever coordination mechanisms they were using, whether it was Amtrak police, U.S.
Capitol Police, Park Police, or the NYPD, which sent 200 officers to D.C., they all were being prepared for some kind of Hamas attack Or the possibility of Iran using its forces within this protest movement to actually stage some kind of lethal attack on the U.S.
Capitol or on Union Station itself, which is, you know, next to the U.S.
Capitol.
So the entire Capitol was surrounded with rings of militarized police.
There was nowhere you could go where you didn't encounter police who looked like They were dressed—the Montgomery County Police looked like they were dressed to go to a renaissance fair.
Like, they had their shield, their club.
They were wearing full body armor.
It was 95 degrees out.
It was like a sauna.
And they were ready for a reenactment of a Braveheart battle scene.
It was absolutely absurd.
The police were ordered to wear their gas masks at all times.
The D.C.
police had tons of undercovers in the crowd who were obvious, tons of surveillance, helicopters overhead, and lots of tactical police along with less lethal weaponry, rubber-coated steel bullets, as I said, percussion grenades.
There was an initial kind of tussle with some protesters and they pepper sprayed a lot of people, including journalists, in the face.
I was near that.
And there was nothing about the protest that was violent.
So, what really struck me was that this all took place, this gigantic show of force.
I should mention also the Amtrak police were not letting anyone in Union Station at all without a ticket.
And this is a, you know, major gathering place for just people after work and people on Capitol Hill.
Right after Donald Trump's near assassination attempt, Which was obviously the result of a Secret Service failure, or if you want to get conspiratorial, Secret Service stand down.
And in the shadow of January 6th, which was the last time I saw the Capitol covered in that much fencing and fortification.
You know, people in DC were referring to it as Fort Netanyahu, kind of.
Half-jokingly, the last time I saw it like that was after January 6th, and I was at the January 6th protest, not as a protester, I just, you know, wanted to observe what was taking place there.
And it was obvious, the police stood down.
There were hardly any police there, and they allowed this riot to take place, and to rampage through the Capitol.
With very little resistance, so it really kind of highlights who's in charge right now.
We also have Joe Biden shrinking from public view.
Many people are wondering where Joe Biden is.
He's supposed to meet Netanyahu tomorrow, and I don't believe he's addressed the U.S.
public yet to explain why he withdrew from the presidential race.
So, Netanyahu was referred to by Dana Bash at CNN as akin to a US president delivering a State of the Union address.
This really tells you how much power Israel has over our political system, even though, as we can discuss, Netanyahu appeared more isolated than he's ever been.
Well Max, on January 6th, you may not have stormed the Capitol, but I would surmise that your mere presence there desecrated the temple of democracy.
So I'm not sure you should have admitted that in public because it implicates you in that day that will go down in history as like a double Pearl Harbor times 9/11.
I wanted to ask you, I wanted to ask you, you read the transcript of Netanyahu's speech.
Netanyahu did bring up that there was this alleged plot that was Iranian backed to assassinate Trump.
Now, there had been also these alleged plots against John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.
In retaliation for the drone assassination of Soleimani that Trump ordered in January of 2020.
And they tried to connect that to the assassination attempt last weekend.
So I'm not sure how valid that connection was.
Obviously, it could be political opportunistic for that to be connected.
But I wanted to get your take on how do you distinguish the nature of Republican support for Israel at this point versus the nature of Democratic support for Israel at this point, particularly within Congress?
I don't know that I can really recall many times when Republican members of the House have been so vociferous in their hooting and hollering and cheering for virtually anything.
When Netanyahu lauded Trump for being such a stalwart supporter of Israel, it looked like all the Republicans were having a collective orgasm.
Whereas the Democrats now at least have to give the appearance of being more tepid.
Now I think they're signaling tepidness toward Netanyahu himself who they can villainize and try to separate from Israel writ large and just use Netanyahu as this boogeyman because he has been more He's affiliated with Republicans over the years.
Remember Netanyahu basically endorsed Mitt Romney over Barack Obama in 2012, so this would be nothing particularly new for him.
But the fervor among Republicans did stand out to me.
As you may know, I was at the Republican convention last week in Milwaukee and went around asking a lot of Republican members of the House how they reconcile the idea of America First.
With also declaring their unshakable support for Israel, and let's just say their answers were always not especially coherent.
So how do you distinguish the nature of Republican support versus Democratic support for Israel as of today in July 2024, at least vis-a-vis the elected official class in Congress?
Well, just first on the Iranian plot, I mean, the source for that plot was one unnamed human source.
Which could be anyone.
And it seems like the plot was kind of concocted to kind of lay the groundwork for Netanyahu to pin Trump's assassination on Iran and to interrupt diplomacy with Iran so who could the human source could have been someone introduced to the Israeli intelligence.
And, you know, there's a history of that.
Going back to the Cafe Milano plot, the phony plot against this Iranian opposition figure, Masih Alinejad, who's paid by the U.S. government to advocate for war with Iran.
And so that's highly suspect.
With the Republican Party today, there are so many contradictions that you're so good at exposing and pointing out about the hypocrisy of America firsters cheering a figure like Netanyahu.
And within the America First movement, there are those who seem to support Israel or Netanyahu on the most puerile basis, simply because they look at the protesters outside and see blue-haired
A few blue-haired, gender-fluid people wearing funny clothes who are giving the finger to the cops and they just decide they hate them and that they hate queers for Palestine and Palestine is woke and therefore Israel is the right side to support.
And next, BB played into that today.
BB said in his remarks something like, oh, and we have these gays for Palestine who are always out protesting on college campuses.
So he was playing right into the beating heart of the culture war argument that Republicans use for their support for Israel.
Yeah, I mean, like Marjorie Taylor Greene condemning Jewish Voice for Peace for staging a kind of protest sit-in inside the U.S.
Capitol because, you know, she had been under so much attack by the media for January 6th, and she said, well, here's the insurrection and the liberal media supports it.
It's so puerile and so detached from what America First should be about.
The only Republican you see really embracing it In a principled way is Thomas Massey, who said, I'm not going to be part of a PR operation for the State Department and for war with Iran by being a part of this speech.
But you don't feel the Christian Zionist enthusiasm from a lot of the Freedom Caucus figures.
You feel like Well, they have nothing to gain by opposing Israel or supporting the Palestine Solidarity Movement, which is overwhelmingly progressive and would reject their support.
And then you have Christian Zionists who really have been cultivated by the Israel lobby as what they, you know, I think it was, An AIPAC official referred to it as Israel's safety belt in the Bible Belt.
And with the Israel lobby, you have a very top-heavy institution.
They don't have a grassroots base.
And so in the early 80s, they started cultivating evangelicals and did so very successfully.
And now you have a generation of Republican congressmen who see, they have no interest in discussing the issues.
For them, this is about revelation.
This is about creating a landing pad for the Messiah.
You met some of them at the Republican National Convention.
And John Hagee, the leading Christian Zionist figure in the United States, who heads Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, has thousands and thousands of parishioners, is extremely wealthy through all the money he takes in.
His organization, Christians United for Israel, was actually set up by AIPAC, and he has been almost created as this important political figure exclusively within the Republican Party by AIPAC.
You know, in some ways, it's a positive development for the Israel lobby.
They had feared that there would be anti-Semitism in middle America, that evangelicals wouldn't want to support the Jewish state, and so they managed to pull off this feat.
But at the same time, if you actually look at AIPAC's positioning, its rhetoric, They're hiring more and more people out of Republican offices on Capitol Hill.
They're focusing increasingly on the Republican side.
They are losing massive support, not just among the progressive grassroots, but among elected Democrats.
And you saw over half of the House Democrats boycotted, close to half of the Democratic Senators boycotted the speech.
So, AIPAC's strength had always been that Israel was a bipartisan issue, that there was no daylight between either party in Israel, and that's gone.
And this is really the legacy of Netanyahu, who, as you know, and probably most people watching know, is a card-carrying Republican.
Who spent a lot of his time as an opposition leader in the 1990s hanging out at AIPAC offices and palling around with mostly Republican politicians and lobbyists and he found that he was more successful selling them on his idea of Israel as a bulwark against terrorism and on the idea that the Palestinian state was an existential threat to Israel.
So liberal Zionism which the Democratic Party had always adopted as its official ideology, which held out that Israel wanted to make peace if they could just find the right Palestinian partner, has been basically extinguished, not just within Israel, where Netanyahu and the Likud Party and more extreme where Netanyahu and the Likud Party and more extreme elements within the settlement movement, the messianic settlement movement, the temple movement, which we can talk about more, are incipient, but also within the Democratic Party, there just really is no base for we can
But also within the Democratic Party, there just really is no base for we can be, Israel can be democratic and exclusively Jewish.
So I managed, I went, I broke away from the Palestine solidarity protest and I went to a small liberal Zionist protest outside the Capitol where they were trying to square the contradiction of Israel.
Israel being still a potentially good democratic country and Netanyahu just being the bad boogeyman, this was put on by a liberal Jewish group called Trua, and they brought other, there are many Israelis there who are family members of the hostages who blame Netanyahu for extending the war and allowing their family members to languish and die in Gaza, usually from Israeli bombings.
But the things they were saying were just delusional.
It was like they were talking about an Israel that exists in the canyons of their imagination, and not the Israel that we see today, where Netanyahu is basically a centrist figure.
They're saying America and Israel were founded on democratic values and the belief in equality, and we need to get back to that.
So that's just gone.
And so, too, Are the hopes, I think, of the families who wanted a deal, who thought, well, there could be a deal with Hamas.
Hamas clearly wants a deal.
They want to release the hostages and get Palestinian prisoners out.
I think Netanyahu wants the hostages to die or be killed, and so does his support base in Israel, and there's strong evidence that that's You know, that's almost an official policy, because it deprives Hamas of leverage.
And if there are no hostages in Hamas's hands, there's nothing that can stop Israel from rampaging through Gaza, maintaining a permanent presence, and tormenting and killing larger numbers of Palestinian prisoners in Israel's dungeons.
So Max, I want to read to you a quote that was given to me by Congressman Cory Mills, Republican of Florida, last week at the Republican Convention.
He says that he believes that Donald Trump understands that the Constitution is, quote, framed upon what are the Christian Judeo beliefs.
And Mills therefore says that, quote, you understand the prophecy of revelations.
Now he says revelations plural, and it's revelations singular in the Bible.
So a lot of people who claim to believe the apocalyptic final book of the Bible don't understand what the book actually is titled, which is odd.
But he says, and it talks about the people of Israel who are God's children and who will fly on the back of an eagle.
It talks about the mountain of God, which is essentially Russia.
So that's Congressman Cory Mills of Florida.
Talking about the Book of Revelation, which is literally apocalyptic, eschatology, as the basis for his imperative to support Israel.
Now he'll also tie it in with what he claims are U.S.
strategic interests and this kind of thing that are more secular bent, but the biblical imperative really is there and it's potent and unless you just disbelieve that their religiosity is authentic, I don't know how it couldn't be hugely influential in dictating the worldview on this stuff, and if we could also show you the clip of me interviewing Congressman Andy Barr of Kentucky, also at the Republican convention last week.
Let's go to that.
Do you see there being any tension between the America First point of view and also so stalwartly supporting Israel?
It seems like there might be some tension there.
At least some conservatives have complaints about that.
If anyone is confused about that, let me set the record straight.
Being pro-Israel is America First.
Plain and simple.
So there you have it, Max.
That's about as unambiguous a statement as you can get, I would think.
It reminds me of George H.W.
Bush saying, read my lips, no new taxes.
But this is about Israel first and America first apparently being interchangeable concepts for these Republicans.
At least that's how they work through the seeming contradictions in their own minds.
So what do you make of those quotes?
I mean, I understand the thinking, and with respect to Cory Mills, he's expressing a very common view of Christian Zionists who are premillennial dispensationalists, dispensationists, who believe that there will be a series of dispensations or crises and wars that herald the return of Christ, and the major war will be between Gog and Magog with Iran, Russia, and China
Comprising the forces of Magog, who will be destroyed by the holy forces fighting from Jerusalem.
This is all articulated in John Hagee's kind of like pulp novel-like books like Jerusalem Countdown.
And, you know, it might sound absolutely insane because it is, but this is how it's understood and why there's so much support for conflict with Iran within the Christian Zionist quote unquote heartland.
And it all makes sense.
And it all sounds like it could be America first too, because Israel, well, they think Israel's like us.
Israel's supported by us.
Their leader speaks English.
He's not Hamas.
They don't have beards.
They're not swarthy guys who live in tunnels who worship Islam.
Like, they seem to be more relatable.
Netanyahu does a really good job of seeming American and Israeli at the same time.
But when... when the shit hits the fan, And conflict with Iran actually takes place.
It's not going to seem so America first.
And we already saw the consequences of this supposed America first policy when Donald Trump assassinated or when Donald Trump.
Heeded the lobbying pressure campaign of Netanyahu and Mike Pompeo to assassinate Major General Qasem Soleimani.
There was a de facto cover up of how many U.S. service members at the al-Assad base in Iraq suffered traumatic head injuries and had to be evacuated out to Rammstein Air Base in Germany for urgent treatment. - Right.
In the next round, it's not going to be traumatic head injuries.
There will be ships being sunk.
There will be casualties to American soldiers.
And we've seen with the USS Eisenhower, an aircraft carrier that has been at sea for the longest deployment, I think since World War II, of any battle carrier group, that the sailors are getting a little bit anxious, and they're not really enjoying parrying missile attacks from the Ansar Allah de facto government of Yemen, the Houthis, and they're just sick of being at sea forever.
This is sort of leaked out in the media through some social media postings of the soldiers.
But what they might start to understand is that they're there to protect shipping routes from the Houthis in order to protect Israel's strategic depth.
They're not actually protecting the United States.
They're not protecting our shores.
They're not advancing American interests.
What would advance American interests and end the Houthi blockade Which would also end the Hezbollah attacks on northern Israel, is the U.S.
president actually exerts some leverage and forces a ceasefire, which would be the easiest thing for an American president to do when you have, in Israel, its prime minister rushing to Washington to beg for weapons.
Because Israel cannot survive another day without these constant supplies of 2,000-pound bombs, thousands of tank shells, the 155-millimeter howitzer shells.
It would have to negotiate for peace immediately without that.
This all could have been ended with one phone call, but they won't do that.
So the idea of Israel being America first or being what Alexander Haig, Reagan's Secretary of State, called America's unsinkable aircraft carrier hasn't fully been put to the test because the United States has not directly engaged with Iran and Iran's allies, who have gotten more militarily sophisticated since, I would say, the last major war with an Iranian ally and Israel in 2006.
And finally, Max, what about Donald Trump himself?
Purportedly, he's the big kingpin of the America First movement, right?
Mike Pompeo just had another prime speaking role at the Republican convention.
Donald Trump has gone on Fox News relatively recently and denounced anybody who has a skeptical interpretation of various aspects of the October 7th attack as the new Holocaust deniers.
He has, at the debate we played a clip earlier, he was attacking Joe Biden.
Everybody was fixated on Biden's cognitive deterioration.
They may have missed that Trump tried to derisively call Biden a Palestinian, as though Biden hadn't been supplying these endless armaments to Israel for the past nine months, and actually been a more generous Provider of largesse to Israel than I think any president in U.S.
history, but the critique from Trump and the Republicans is that actually Democrats are somehow pandering to the pro-Hamas faction of the party, which is like, has all the political leverage or something.
What do you anticipate for a second Trump administration?
You mentioned John Hagee earlier.
Do you know who gave the opening benediction?
At the inauguration of the new U.S.
Embassy in Jerusalem, which Trump brags to this day that he's the one who finalized.
And it was attended by Jared Kushner, and Charlie Kirk, and Candace Owens even, and Friedman.
You know who gave the opening benediction?
Can you guess?
I don't remember, was it like Kenneth Copeland?
No, it was John Hagee!
John Hagee, Pastor John Hagee, John Hagee met frequently with Trump at the White House.
Now, it's unlikely that Trump himself is a believing pre-millennial dispensationalist, right?
But he has no qualm with elevating the most freakish Theologically blinkered adherence to that doctrine and giving them major roles of influence and even some policy related power in the administration.
And there's every reason to think that that would proceed in a second administration because Trump's going around and basically doing a version of when Biden In 2020, famously said, you ain't black if you vote Republican or if you vote for Trump.
Now Trump's basically saying you ain't Jewish if you vote for Democrats because of Israel.
So what are your, what are your forecasts for a second Trump term in terms of Trump's individual proclivities on the issue?
Yeah.
I mean, if I, if I were completely cynical and all I believed in was power.
Which seems to be Trump's mentality, then I would say that that's a brilliant ploy to tell Jewish voters in areas where they're heavily concentrated that Trump cares more about Israel than The Democrats do.
And for those who vote on the basis of Israel, which most Jews do not, that might be an effective appeal.
And you can see Trump is gathering more Jewish support than previous Republican nominees had from that element.
More like religiously observant, religious nationalist Jews.
You know, they love Trump.
So why not do that?
I mean, Trump's general strategy is to try to slice off as much as he can from various minority groups that had been core constituencies for the Democrats.
Remember, in 2016, Donald Trump made an appeal, an explicit appeal in his own words to the LGBTQ community, and he could barely read all the letters.
But he got the alphabet soup down and he said that I will protect you against Islamic terror.
because that's the number one threat to your community.
So in some, I mean from a cynical point of view, what he's doing He's smart.
He's also trying to make sure that he keeps Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late casino baron Sheldon Adelson, whose wealth also sponsored the career of Benjamin Netanyahu, in his good stead.
So he's got a $100 million pledge from Miriam Adelson's Super PAC.
And Max, let me interrupt you for a second.
Let's pull up the image of Miriam Adelson who was spotted in a VIP booth at the Republican Convention.
There she is.
Doesn't she look fantastic?
Yeah, that's her.
And she's flying nationally by Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz, Carrie Lake, and then Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia.
So anybody who's anybody who wants to ascend through Republican Party circles obviously wanted to be spotted with Miriam Adelson in her special little booth at the convention.
And she will direct the money against you, and she will use the money to destroy you.
And Sheldon Adelson, as I reported at the Gray Zone, he was a CIA asset.
We can assume that he's an Israeli intelligence asset.
This is not just Miriam Adelson.
She's a front for some of the more powerful elements in the world.
And so there's no reason to think that Donald Trump would somehow decide to make a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
We should believe him when he says that he would like to starve Iran, that he would like to cancel diplomacy with Iran.
We should believe him.
But at the same time, there's a problem, which is that if Donald Trump were president right now, I think these protests against the
Genocidal assault on Gaza would be much larger and more energetic because liberal organizations would have sent their constituents out into the street to try to make this bloody war, and what has basically been a failed war for the Israelis, all about Donald Trump, the same way that they tried to make the Iraq war all about Bush.
And when you see Trump joined at the hip with Netanyahu, it's also bad for Netanyahu.
Because Donald Trump doesn't do what Biden and Blinken are doing where they're saying, oh, well, you know, after this war is all over, we're going to work for a Palestinian state and a two state solution.
Trump is content to openly allow Netanyahu to annex the West Bank.
And so the fantasy peace process that has always allowed Israel in a much more elegant way to put new facts on the ground, to build more settlements and then blame the Palestinians for not wanting peace is gone.
And so he loses the media as well.
So I think there's a danger there for Israel and the special relationship when both Trump and Netanyahu are joined at the hip together in office.
And who comes after?
Another question to consider is, I mean, Netanyahu's isolated right now.
He's facing criminal trials, corruption trials, if the war ends and his coalition collapses.
Everybody knows that.
He feels desperate.
With a Democratic administration in office and would be disappointed if somehow Kamala won regardless of how pro-Israel and how bought off by AIPAC she is.
So there's a good chance that Netanyahu could be leaving the scene at some point in the future, in the near future.
I mean, he's the longest serving Israeli Prime Minister.
What comes after Netanyahu?
And what comes after Netanyahu is even weaker and more unstable than Netanyahu ever was.
Netanyahu essentially is Israel right now.
And so I think Israel is walking in, is kind of entering the abyss.
And it's in a state of instability politically, but economically.
It's heavily reliant on its tech industry, which is seeing dwindling investments from foreign venture capital firms that it depends on.
Its population, especially more educated population, is leaving.
Its population, which is more working class, cannot return to their homes in the North and the South.
They're relying heavily on government subsidies.
Its credit has been downgraded.
It's in a real existential crisis, and it has no clear way out of this war, where it's now directly not just facing Hamas and Hezbollah, but also the Houthis, and that could expand even further.
So I just – I think we need to look at this Netanyahu visit as just another day in the imperial decline tragic comedic slasher flick that we've been watching for so long.
Yeah, I agree.
Obviously, with Trump in power, that acts as an accelerant on any organized liberal protest movement.
So if Trump were the one presiding over the Gaza War for the past nine months, you would probably have seen liberal NGOs realize that they can mobilize their resources to oppose U.S.
foreign policy because they could personalize it as about Trump or right-wing fascism and how there's a commonality between the U.S.
and Israel in that regard.
Whatever else, but with a Democratic power, it does sap that protest activity.
So it would have been like the 2020 George Floyd protests, but transferred into an Israel-type scenario just because the presence of Trump really just acts as that fuel to the fire.
And Max, you reminded me that tomorrow on the show, I want to wear my new Trump-themed yarmulke.
That I was honored to receive at the Republican Convention last week.
I think it would really befit the mood of the programming.
So thank you for giving that reminder.
And with that, Max, I want to thank you for joining us live from your car.
You look swell.
I hope I look good.
We all look good.
The viewers look good.
Everybody looks good.
So, Max, nice job as always, and we'll talk again soon.
Thank you.
Yeah, I apologize for not being in my home studio, but next time.
Don't apologize.
You have nothing to apologize for, Max.
Never.
Never give up.
Never surrender.
All right.
All right, Max Blumenthal, thank you.
Thanks so much for having me on.
Enjoy your time there.
All right.
All right, well, that was Max Blumenthal, and this was my first full edition of the System Update Show, filling in for Glenn Greenwald as he luxuriates in some undisclosed location.
So keep tuning in for me if you enjoy me.
I'm not even sure I enjoy myself, so I'm not really that certain I can honestly recommend that, but hopefully you'll indulge.
Yeah, so follow me, I guess, on Twitter slash X at mtracy.
I'll be promoting various stuff related to the show over the next week or so.
You can go to mtracy with an E. That's mtracy.net.
And I'll also be posting various things related to the show.
And tomorrow we'll be back with more system updates.
