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Dec. 7, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
03:24:19
NO NUCLEAR WAR : A Call for Reason [Live Event] - National Press Club
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The less I have, the harder they are to get out.
Yeah, there's emails.
Daydreams, where do they go when the wind goes whistling down the plain?
Colors burst before my eyes like art through paint into the rain.
God threw, beamed into the rain.
When I was young, I'd go running through the forest, chased by men in uniforms, running after unicorns.
It was a land formed in my imagination, a passion navigation where life begins again.
Sunlight bursting on my eyes, hands raised to try and stop the pain.
Search for meaning in the sky.
My whole world's suddenly gone insane.
My whole world has gone insane.
The world marked.
The wisdom of a child.
No consideration through future generations.
The simple pleasures of life without violence.
The stalled sounds of silence.
How I earn this again A sage for simply Smell the windless Free Come with me Come
with me Come with me
As my nightmare melts into a dream.
Frightened, I wonder why my whole life was never what it seemed.
Life was never what it seemed.
I was a child then, searching for life's meaning, in a world that was once teeming with creatures wild and tame.
I am a soul who dreams, heart, purpose, don't believe in your forms, I'm a human being.
I don't believe in unicorns.
I am a soul who dreams of higher purpose.
I don't believe in unicorns.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Welcome to the National Press Club and to this event, A Call for Action, The Dangers of Nuclear War.
I opted to start with this video because this video premiered on September 28th of this year at an event that was held in Kingston, New York.
The kickoff for what we called Operation Dawn.
Operation Dawn was four questions that I was asking the American voters.
Simply, what would you do to save democracy?
To save America, to save the world through your vote in November.
Basically, to say no to nuclear war.
Because at that point in time, not a single candidate was talking about the danger of nuclear war.
It's as if the conflict between the United States and Russia didn't exist.
Well, my daughters were very scared.
This video, by the way, was a song written by my daughter, the twin daughters, the illustrations.
We're done by my other daughter and her fiancé is sort of a replication of the drawings they did as children.
You know, their father, it's tough to be the father or the child of a weapons inspector because he comes home full of doom and gloom.
And it scared them.
And they were scared to death about the danger of nuclear war.
So they created this artificial world that allowed them to escape.
And this video captured that.
It's what motivates me to do what I do.
Saving the lives of my children.
Saving the lives of your children.
Saving the lives of all the innocent people in America and around the world whose existence is threatened by the imminent danger of nuclear war.
Now, Operation Dawn was not a one-time event.
We had other events.
We had a very successful panel discussion in New York City.
And we had another successful event in November.
But now, here we are.
This is a continuation of this.
Why?
Because we are on the cusp of a nuclear war with Russia.
The danger of a nuclear conflict today is greater than it has been at any time in our history.
There are people who say, well, Scott, what about the Cuban Missile Crisis?
A, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union in 1962 pale in comparison to the nuclear arsenals that exist today, both in destructive power, deliverability, etc.
Simply put, back then we could destroy a continent or two.
Today we destroy the entire world.
But the thing that's missing is that back then we were talking to our adversaries.
We're having conversations.
Khrushchev was speaking to Kennedy, either directly or indirectly.
Ambassadors were talking to them.
Today, because of the Biden administration's orders, there is no viable dialogue with the Russian Federation as we are lurching towards a nuclear conflict, one that will destroy life as we know it on the planet.
Now, we're going to get to this in just a second.
I don't want to steal Dr. Postal's thunder here.
The danger is manifested in a number of ways, and one of it is the sense of helplessness we get as Americans.
I don't know if you've been watching what's been happening in Washington and D.C. lately.
On November 20th, there was a gathering by the Center of Strategic and International Studies.
They invited Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan.
He's the J-5 Director of Plans and Operations for...
They're the ones ready to fight the war.
And he gave a keynote address, but he also answered questions, and I believe it was the second question asked by the moderator, dealt with the risk of nuclear war.
And he, of course, started off with the standard, nobody wants to fight a nuclear war, right?
Nobody wants to fight it.
But he's the guy who writes the nuclear war plan.
And then he turned around and he said, but we are ready to fight a nuclear war.
We are ready to engage with the Russians in a nuclear exchange, he called it, as if that somehow diminished this destructive reality of a nuclear war.
But that's not the part that scared me, because every iteration of strategic command in the history of the nuclear force of the United States has been prepared to fight a nuclear war.
That's their job.
They're prepared to fight it.
But if you recall back in the...
Therefore, they should never be fought.
So what Rear Admiral Buchanan said afterwards is not only that the United States is prepared to fight a nuclear war, they are prepared to win a nuclear war.
And the methodology of victory, while vague, Was that we would, after we won, prevailed in this nuclear conflict, we would retain sufficient nuclear weapons capacity so that we could deter other nuclear adversaries.
In this day and age of nuclear parity, where the last remaining arms control treaty, New START, gives roughly 1,550 nuclear deliverable systems to each side, how do you win a war?
He said, you don't want to use all your nuclear weapons to win.
You have to have some left over.
But if you have some left over, how do you destroy much with reduced?
And the answer is in the plans that he has written.
Nuclear preemption.
The preemptive use of nuclear power so that we can maximize destructive capacity, eliminate as much of the retaliatory capacity of the enemy, and still retain sufficient nuclear strike capability to deter other people.
It is part of the Biden administration's nuclear posture, which was published in 2022, and it's been incorporated in the latest iteration of the presidential nuclear employment guidance, that is, telling strategic command how to fight the war.
So nuclear preemption is how we are going to have a nuclear engagement with the Russians that we win.
Now, I don't know if there's representatives of the Russian embassy here today, but yeah, I just told you.
We're going to nuke you first.
But you know that.
That's why you're so upset with what's going on with the Atakums missiles.
Atakums is not a nuclear-capable missile.
It's a tactical missile.
It's an American-made system that's been provided to the Ukrainians, and Ukrainians have used it to attack targets inside Russia.
The problem is Ukraine can't do that on their own.
In order to do these targeting, Ukraine has to receive intelligence information from the United States that's put together by specific targeting teams within the Department of Defense.
That means that we are planning the attack against Russia.
Then we have to provide the communications capacity so that the system can guide itself to the target and communicate with satellites.
Again, American satellites, American guidance, American encryption.
It's an American missile being facilitated for its launch by the United States of America.
And the only thing Ukrainian about is the finger that pushes the launch button.
The Russians have rightfully said that this constitutes an act of war against Russia.
Legally, it does.
One other thing I want to leave you right now, whether it's official or not, America is at war with Russia.
We are fighting a hot war with Russia as we speak, because attack missiles.
Are being launched against Russia, and that can't happen without American permission and American facilitation.
Now, why would the Russians equate that danger to something that could lead to a nuclear war?
Because preemption.
One of the concerns that the Russians have is that the United States and NATO will initiate strategic preemption with conventional preemption, that is to use conventional weapons like Atakums, Storm Shadow, Scalp, to initiate an attack, follow that up with a nuclear preemptive attack.
To decapitate Russian capabilities.
So every time we fire and attack them's missile, the Russians have to say, is this it?
Has the balloon gone up?
And so they have adjusted their nuclear posture to lower the threshold so that they say, if a nuclear power provides conventional strike capability to a non-nuclear power, and that non-nuclear power uses that to strike Russia, that meets the threshold requirement for Russian release of nuclear weapons in response.
But the Russian nuclear planners also have to say, if America's getting ready to launch a nuclear preemptive attack against us, the only way we can prevail is to preempt the preemption, which means they have to be prepared to launch a nuclear preemptive attack.
And that's where we are today, ladies and gentlemen.
That's where we are.
I was losing sleep.
I couldn't sleep for months because of this problem going through my head.
No matter how I crunched the numbers, we ended up in a nuclear war.
On Thursday, though, I went to Congress.
I went there in the company of Medea Benjamin and her fantastic colleagues, and we met with representatives and we met with their staff.
And on Thursday night, I slept like a baby.
Why?
Because the problem is difficult.
We know that.
But what we found out is there are members of Congress who are aware of this issue.
There is actually a bill that has been written and put on the floor to the Foreign Affairs Committee, identifying ATACMS as the issue.
Other members of Congress are preparing letters to go, and we're putting more pressure on Congress.
We have the ability now to get Congress maybe to do something, not to stop the Biden administration.
They're not going to stop.
But maybe to put pressure on.
The incoming Trump administration to take some action.
So that's why we're here today.
We're going to have three panels.
The first panel is going to be about nuclear war.
The goal of this panel is to scare you to death.
Not irresponsibly, but based on the reality of the situation we face.
The second panel is to try to engender some hope.
But it'll be frustrating because we're going to be talking about what can be done to get the Biden administration to stop.
Carrying out an act of war against Russia.
Let me talk about that real quick.
We spoke to a representative who we have to respect the discretion of the talk.
I said, you know, as my understanding, the U.S. intelligence community is briefing Congress and the White House that the Russians are bluffing.
And that's why Biden has gone forward so aggressively.
And he said, no, I had that briefing.
That's not what they said.
They said the Russians aren't bluffing, but the Biden administration is ready to have that nuclear war.
And this is after an election where the American people said no to escalation in Ukraine and no to nuclear war with Russia.
The Biden administration is acting in a manner that totally deviates from the will of the people.
This is the dangerous situation.
So how can we get Congress to do something to reverse this?
The third panel is going to be how can we take that same desperate need for intervention and apply it to what I call MAGA MAHA.
MAGA is, of course, Make America Great Again.
Donald Trump's movement, Maha's Make America Healthy Again, Robert Kennedy Jr.'s movement.
They came together, unlikely comrades.
They've now unified to make America great and healthy again, apparently.
But don't belittle it, because the moment RFK Jr. joined the Trump team, Operation Dawn, that effort we kicked off back in September, we reached out and I asked them to do something.
To get the Trump campaign to make a statement.
I made that same request to every single campaign out there.
Jill Stein's campaign, Kamala Harris' campaign, and now I made it to the Trump campaign.
They did it.
RFK Jr. and Donald Trump Jr. wrote an op-ed piece that was published on The Hill where it said we need to stop the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine and we need to make sure we prevent a nuclear war.
Ladies and gentlemen, this effort works.
This effort works, but we can't rest on our laurels.
We have to continue to be aggressive in making sure that we, the people, do what we can to put pressure on the decision makers so they make the right decisions so that we get to see Christmas, so that we get to celebrate New Year's, so they get to live year after year after year.
So again, thank you very much for coming.
Now what I'm going to do is introduce our first panel.
This panel.
It's designed to scare you, as I said.
We have two distinguished fear-mongers.
Dr. Theodore Postol, he is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is a weapons expert.
He used to advise the director of naval operations, I believe, about strategic nuclear war planning.
I have known him over the course of the last three decades.
He first came to my radar when he said that American Patriot missiles weren't shooting down Iraqi Scud missiles.
And of course, everybody said, pa, you're wrong.
He was right.
And today, he's right about a lot of things.
And he's going to talk to you about the dangers of nuclear weapons.
And unfortunately, he's right again.
We also have Colonel Larry Wilkerson.
Colonel Larry Wilkerson has a distinguished career in the United States Army.
Helicopter pilot in Vietnam, flew 086 Cayuse, I believe was the helicopter.
And then he went on to a career that eventually brought him into Washington, D.C. He was the chief of staff or a senior advisor to Colin Powell.
And Colin Powell was a national security advisor to Ronald Reagan.
And I thought it was from 1989 to 1993.
So we had some crossover, not that you knew me, but Colin Powell was the national security advisor when the INF Treaty was signed.
Played a role.
And then Colin Powell went on to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Larry was with him there.
And then when Colin Powell went on to become the Secretary of State, Larry Wilkins became the Chief of Staff for this.
This is a man who knows Washington, D.C. inside and out at the highest levels.
And he's going to talk about, well, I'll let him talk what he's going to talk about.
But first of all, I'd like to turn the floor to Theodore Postal and, sir, scare'em.
Well, I hope what I'll do is just simply tell you the truth.
I'm certain that if I do my job properly, you will be scared.
So anybody who understands what I'm talking about will be scared.
Do we have the slides being projected yet?
I can't see behind me.
Okay.
Since our concern during this panel is...
Scott and I and Larry agreed that we wanted to brief the audience first about the effects of a single nuclear detonation on Washington.
It's on a scale that you can begin to comprehend.
The problem with nuclear weapons effects is they're on such a large scale that it's very hard.
From human experience to conceptualize what's actually happening.
What I'm going to focus on is the effects of a single 800 kiloton nuclear detonation over Washington.
And why don't we put up actually slide three, if you can.
And the a single Sarmat article.
A long-range missile, Russian long-range missile, or an SS-18, carries 10 of these missiles.
So we're only talking about one-tenth of the payload of a single missile.
The Russian military command has about 400 of these that can be launched within minutes of a command.
So they're very quickly launchable.
Incidentally, they have to be because they are under threat from American ballistic missiles, which would have a very high probability of destroying these missiles in their silos before they could be launched.
The Russians are fully aware of this, and I do not know directly, but I can assure you from my own experience as a nuclear planner in the United States.
That they have taken what they judge to be the most appropriate measures to assure that these missiles can be launched on short warning, if need be.
And this is a danger in itself, that the launch times are highly compressed.
The Russians can also launch about 1,600 kiloton bombs from land and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
I can talk about those in a question and answer period, but they are very close to as damaging as the 800 kiloton warhead because nuclear weapons effects scale slowly with yield.
Let me focus first on the bomb of 800 kilotons, which is shown to you on the screen here.
What you're seeing now is the fireball.
Since the bomb is intentionally detonated at an altitude of about one mile over the city, it'll be clear shortly why the choice of one mile.
It doesn't have to be that, and it could be detonated at the ground or at another height of burst, but it's a reasonable guess.
And when the detonation occurs, an enormous amount of energy is released in a few months.
And because there's so much energy, the temperature goes up during the period of peak energy output to about 100 million degrees Kelvin.
The center of the sun is about 20 million degrees Kelvin.
So you can imagine how intense.
The environment is during this very short interval of output.
The energy radiates from this tiny volume of space, mostly in the form of X-rays, very short wavelength light, electromagnetic energy.
And the X-rays are absorbed by air.
So because they're absorbed by air, They quickly go out at the speed of light, and they will heat a small volume of air, about 300 feet in diameter, to a temperature of about a million degrees.
So we have cooled within a millionth of a second to a ball of just a million degrees.
Just a million means nothing to you.
Mass of air, which has not even moved at this point because it's happened so fast, begins to expand violently at about a million miles per hour.
So it acts like a fast-moving piston on the surrounding cooler air, compressing the air into a shockwave of enormous power and extent.
So the fireball, when it reaches its maximum, which is shown here in this diagram, It radiates at a temperature of about 8,000 degrees Kelvin, and the surface of the sun is about 2,000 degrees Kelvin, so it's hotter than the surface of the sun.
And in fact, this fireball is radiating light and heat at a rate probably two and a half times, well, two and a half times.
It's determined by physics.
Two and a half times the equivalent area of the fireball, the equivalent area of the surface of the sun that's covered by the fireball.
So since the sun is 90 million miles away and the fireball is only a few miles from the surface of the Earth, it can set fires at fantastic ranges.
In this case, about six to seven miles.
From the detonation point.
And the fires, as I'll show you shortly, are what generate the enormous amount of damage.
Most people are focused on the blast pressure.
The blast is almost irrelevant.
And if you take the fires into account, you would find that the number of prompt deaths from a nuclear explosion of this kind of yield will easily, easily be three or four times larger than what the...
Joint Chiefs of Staff would tell you when they briefed you if you were the President of the United States.
We still, we do not include the effects of the fireball.
We are focused on blast, which is minimal, almost non-existent relative to the fireball.
In the diagram, you see a kind of smudging of the ground below.
That's because the ground is going to explosively disintegrate.
Due to the enormous amount of light and heat from the fireball.
So, for example, if you were underneath the detonation point where, of course, the brightness of the fireball is going to be most extreme, literally surfaces like asphalt would explosively evaporate, causing shockwaves of their own.
I mean, that's how enormously intense the light and heat from the fireball would be.
If we go to the next slide.
We see that when the fireball reaches its maximum diameter, it's basically, it's got about 1% the density of air inside it.
And the pressure from this very hot air is roughly equal to the pressure of the air around it.
So the compressed shockwave from the earlier rapidly expanding fireball expands as a shockwave.
And in the next diagram, we see why the one-mile altitude might be chosen.
If we go to slide five, what happens is the shock wave, the primary shock wave, will reach the ground, and you'll get a secondary shock generated by reflection off the ground.
And at the junction between the secondary and the primary shock, You get an adding of the overpressure from the two different shocks.
Basically, in this case, a doubling of the overpressure.
So you can extend the range at which the blast is most damaging.
It's kind of an irrelevancy, I want to underscore, because the real effects of the fireball are it sets fires over vast range.
If we look at slide six, I've just inserted a diagram of the expanding, well-known mushroom cloud.
Everybody who's grown up under the nuclear threat knows this phenomenon.
And this is like 30 or 40 seconds after the...
So it's a long time, you know, half a minute, more than half a minute.
The fireball.
It'll be rising at about 100 miles per hour, 150 miles per hour.
But what ultimately happens, as shown in slide seven, is the fireball will continue to buoyantly rise until after maybe 10 or 12 minutes, it reaches the bottom of the stratosphere at about 12 miles altitude.
And earlier in the process, it is sucking air behind it.
So if you were on the ground at a range of maybe a couple of miles and lived through the initial shock, you wouldn't be living long after that, but somehow survived the initial shock.
You would experience a blast wave, a more lower high pressure, but longer in extent, pulling.
Pulling in, pushing in toward the detonation point.
In other words, first the shockwave comes out, knocks things down, and then it starts sucking in, pulling things into the fireball direction, into the ground zero direction.
In the next slide, I show you the area that would be set on fire, the reddish area, the yellow area is the area almost certainly that would be on fire, but the reddish area is absolutely without doubt.
Would be on fire.
And it's important to understand that the area on fire, the size of the area on fire, in addition to the amount of combustible material on the ground, determines the intensity of the firestorm that will be created by this mass fire.
Just a very simple way of thinking of it.
Choose the next slide, please.
What happens is if I have a pancake on fire, so there's a tremendous amount of energy per unit area being generated by just combustion and nothing to do with the nuclear weapon except it's fire.
But it's covering an area of maybe 150 square miles, because that's how much is on fire simultaneously.
Now, if you just do a thought experiment and double the radius of this area, of this area,
So you can see how the area on fire, the larger the area, the more intense the winds into the fire zone are going to be.
And we know from experience, we have actual computer models we have now done, now that we have more modern technologies, that the air temperature in this fire zone will be well above the boiling point of water, And the wind speeds on the ground, so we're talking in the streets, will be hurricane force or more.
So this is not...
If we just look for a second at the only historical data we have, let's look at slide 10. This is a photograph from the sky of Nagasaki prior to the atomic bombing there.
And the full width of the photograph is about a mile.
It's a small area relative to the area that would be completely destroyed by the higher-yield weapon, which would be 150 square miles, not a few square miles.
But what I find useful about this photograph is it's close enough to give you a feeling that this is a city.
It's not so far away that everything is smudged out.
The next photograph shows you what that area looked like after the attack.
And this is kind of an understatement of what you would see in the target area from this 800 kiloton warhead.
So I'll close with two images that will be shocking, but I'm not showing them to you just because I want to shock you.
I want to tell you.
Explain to you why these weapons are different.
So I'm emphasizing the fire.
In the next slide, you see a man in the street.
This is a man who died in the street in Hamburg from a much less intense hostile environment from a firestorm initiated in 1943 in a mass fire raid.
It's just fire that did it.
Large area was set on fire simultaneously.
The wind speeds.
We're well into hurricane force.
The man, understandably, chose to try to run.
And, of course, he just went out into the air.
Clothes were burnt off him.
He was overcome immediately.
There were lots of bodies found like this.
And for those who made the devil's choice of staying in a shelter, you can see the next slide.
The shelters became superheated, turned into ovens.
In this particular case, carbon dioxide from partially burned upper sections of the buildings filtered in, but these people would have been roasted anyway.
And this was the kind of bodies which, incidentally, they would disintegrate into ash once the shelters were opened up.
I'll end with one other comment.
And that enormous cloud that I showed you earlier, one minute after that cloud has been formed by stabilized, well, it'll be a couple of minutes stabilizing, the radioactivity in that cloud is about a million times larger than the radioactivity released.
At Chernobyl, at that particular moment, one minute.
The radioactivity diminishes tremendously, very fast.
So at one hour, it would be 5 or 10,000 times greater than what was released at Chernobyl.
And one day, it'll still be 100 times greater.
Those materials are going to be falling out of the cloud.
That's a phenomenon called fallout.
And that's going to create an additional hazard many, many miles, 50, 100 miles downwind, as well as in the target area as well.
So this is just a very brief explanation of what could occur if a single weapon out of thousands were detonated over Washington.
I'll stop here.
Those of you who would like Just write me a little note at postal@mit.edu and I'll be happy to send you a slide deck with all the latest and greatest pictures about what happens when a nuclear attack occurs.
I'll need a couple of days to do it because I'm still traveling.
But feel free to just write me.
I'll be happy to send it to you.
Thanks.
Thank you.
I just want to, first of all, thank you very much for that.
I don't feel very good, and you shouldn't either.
Before we move on, I just want to remind you that Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan glibly said that the Biden administration The Biden administration is willing to sacrifice the lives of tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of Americans for what?
And now that leads me to the question to Colonel Wilkerson.
Sir, you've been in government.
We've had nuclear weapons for a long time now, since Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
We had the Cuban Missile Crisis.
We had some other crisis, but we have never used nuclear weapons in anger.
Now we have an administration that says they're ready to use these weapons in anger.
What has kept us from using nuclear weapons and what is different about today that makes the probable use, that's my word, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but the probable use of nuclear weapons a reality?
Articulate the difference between then and now.
Yeah, let me give you a little history first.
I know you know it, Scott, but I find increasingly that a lot of Americans don't.
And this came home to me as a professor for 16 years at the College of Women and Mary with my very bright students and at the George Washington University here with equally bright students for six years.
They had no idea that things like a pamphlet I would hand it out to them and let them look at it.
It instructed you on how to build a bomb shelter in your backyard.
It instructed you on how to stock that bomb shelter, water, food, and other things.
And it instructed you very detail-wise in how to establish emergency procedures for you and your family.
In order to follow the signals that would come out, hopefully, and you would be able to evacuate your home and go into your bomb shelter.
They looked at it askance.
They couldn't believe that their government had put something like that out.
I tell you that, I reiterate that, just to tell you how ignorant we are today.
As opposed to how knowledgeable we became over the length and breadth of the Cold War.
Now, I was born in 1945.
By the time I was a sentient human being, if you will, I had to listen to my father, who had served in World War II as the B-17 guy over Europe.
And was thoroughly fed up with that, so he transferred to the Army.
It was the Army Air Force then.
It wasn't very difficult to do.
And he was in the Army National Guard in South Carolina.
He commanded a rifle company in the Army National Guard.
Well, I remember his concern expressed to my mother about going to Korea.
And I got a, you know, as an eight-year-old, I sort of had an interest in these things.
As I passed through my high school years and so forth, I paid a lot of attention to them.
All to say that we were increasingly very aware in this country and became critically aware, I think, by the time of the first Reagan administration that we could disappear and that we needed to have truly good leadership in order to prevent that.
And if we had any empathy at all for the rest of the world, to prevent the destruction of the world, because it was becoming increasingly clear from scientific studies and analysis, some of which you've heard here, that the human race probably would not survive a general exchange of nuclear weapons.
And as Scott has pointed out, they're even more powerful today.
If you saw the movie Oppenheimer, I fully believe that Oppenheimer was as much concerned.
With what was going to come out of Manhattan, not at Los Alamos, but with Edward Teller and others pumping the reasons, for example, what was going to come out eventually, which has indeed come out.
Much more powerful weapons, weapons that can destroy the planet.
Maybe not push it off its axis and send it spiraling into the sun four billion years early, but certainly do enough damage to limit our ability to live here, maybe foreclose it altogether.
Just the nuclear winter alone we found in analysis from a strike of medium number of missiles between India and Pakistan, and we did this because in 2002 they came very close to doing it, would probably cause a nuclear winter because of the drift of the clouds.
That would affect farming in the United States all across the West in some of the most prolific states and maybe even cause a dramatic food shortage, just a small exchange between nuclear weapons states, India and Pakistan.
I reiterate all that just to tell you that today we are talking to no one.
Throughout the far more serious, in my mind, crisis over Berlin in 1961, When they built the Schrandmeier, the Wall of Shame, we were on the verge of nuclear war, and it was existential for the Soviet Union.
The German Democratic Republic, the GDR, East Germany, was disappearing.
10,000 people a week were crossing into West Germany.
200,000 crossed into West Germany in that year.
They were disappearing.
That was existential for Moscow, and they were going to go to nuclear war with us.
There was no question in General Bruce Clark's mind, who was then commanding the army over there, turned his tanks around.
They were parked in the concern with the gun facing in.
He went out immediately and said, "Turn your tanks around.
Have the gun passing out.
Oh, by the way, upload your basic load in your tanks now." It was a serious moment and it took a lot of talk and it had a lot of talk between almost everyone involved on both sides.
And what we finally agreed to do, and the archives are finally reflecting this in some respects, you can find them at the George Washington University National Archives Group, we actually acquiesced in the building of the wall.
And I say acquiesced, we didn't help, we didn't pour concrete or put a wire up.
But that 140, 150 kilometer eventually wall, we just stood and watched it go up.
We didn't do anything about it because we knew that was the only solution to the problem.
So when Ronald Reagan went and said, "Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down that wall," he was telling him to tear down the wall we helped him build.
We knew we had to do that.
And then along came Cuba, as Scott said, and it was much more dramatic.
Much shorter time frame, 13 days, Adelaide Stevenson showing the pictures up at the UN and the crisis that resulted.
And it was very serious there.
I'm not trying to downplay it.
But we've been here before, but we talked.
We talked.
And we prevented it.
Now, fast forward.
April 10th, 2001.
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are trying to take over the United States government.
Despite the inexperienced man sitting in the Oval, they knew they were really the executive power for the United States.
One of the things the Vice President wanted to do immediately was to start a war, or get as close to a Cold War, is a better way to put it, as possible with China.
That was the ripe target to do it.
Voila!
All of a sudden, an EP-3, which is a very slow, lumbering naval reconnaissance plane, It's flying south of Hanan Island, one of the most militarized places in China.
And it strays a little close to Hanan Island, and this had been happening for weeks, and we had told the commander out there to cut it back a little bit.
We knew something was going to happen.
The Chinese Air Force came up to bounce our plane and scare it to death.
And one of their very best pilots, in fact, he was later told to be their very best fighter pilot.
He really got a kick out of, you know, making the cockpit in the EP3 turn brown is the way they put it.
So he did an afterburner up right in front of the cockpit of the EP3 going, you know, maybe 160 knots, something like that.
He's going about 700 knots and he's in full afterburner.
He clips his wing on the front of the EP3.
He's dead.
He goes down.
In the South China Sea, he's dead.
The EP3 is so crippled it has to land on Hainana, Iowa.
Much secret gear on that plane.
The crew is not able to destroy it all in time before the Chinese security people get out there and surround the plane.
So we've got an emergency, a real emergency.
Just what Dick and Don were looking for.
Colin Powell gets on his cell phone.
Cell phone, mind you.
Calls the Chinese party, leadership party, which is traveling in South America.
He gets Xi Jinping on the line.
Not Xi Jinping.
Geez, I just lost his name.
No, the man who knew more about North America than anybody in China.
He's dead now.
Anyway, really bright man, spoke fluent English.
He gets him on the line.
And he apprises the Chinese leadership party of the crisis that's just occurred in the South China Sea.
They haven't got word yet.
So within 24 hours, Powell has fixed it.
He fixed it simply by they agreed to a communique that would be in Chinese, and we agreed to one that would be in English.
And in the Chinese one, they would not apologize.
In the English one, they would, and vice versa.
And it was all solved.
Now, the story continues in that we sent Admiral Joe Pruer, four-star admiral, former ambassador to China for us, very good man.
We sent him to sort of do obeisance, you know, to apologize sincerely and sort of get the thing back on even keel again.
The Chinese were very...
And they said, OK, if you'll tell your Pentagon to send an equivalent rank emissary, we'll give you the plane back.
Rumsfeld sent a Navy junior grade lieutenant.
The Chinese chopped the plane up in pieces and sent it back to the Pentagon cash on delivery, as you might imagine.
My point there is that we averted a serious crisis by talking later.
George Tenet would come over and chew on Powell for about five minutes in his office for using his cell phone to talk to diplomats across the world.
Powell let him chew for a moment and then said, get out of here, George.
I'm not going to even accuse you of letting the NSA monitor my telephone calls.
I bet you have transcripts, which George did.
I'm doing diplomacy.
And I'll damn well use the cell phone if I have to to do diplomacy.
And if it's an emergency, I'll do it every damn time.
And he was sincere about it.
And when he talked to Sergey Lavrov, the Russian, yes, he was the Russian foreign minister then, too.
Actually, I guess he was.
Yeah, he was the foreign minister then.
Not the ambassador.
He was the foreign minister, I think.
Maybe he was the ambassador.
At any rate, he liked Sergey.
And Sergey liked him.
And they talked all the time.
They talked about personal things.
They talked about families.
They talked about their countries.
They talked about Perestroika and Glasnost and all the things that Gorbachev had brought and Yeltsin at that time and how much Yeltsin drank, silly, all the time.
They talked about everything in the world to talk about, and they talked about serious diplomatic issues.
We are doing none of that today.
I had lunch along with three or four other people with the Russian ambassador several months ago.
In fact, it was almost a year ago.
At the time, he was shooting vodka so fast I knew he was concerned.
He must have had six in the lobby where we had the reception and then another ten at lunch.
So he didn't deter him a bit.
He gave a great salt.
As we were leaving, I walked up to his aide and I said, can I approach the ambassador for a question and a comment by myself?
He said, well, certainly, certainly.
So I walked up to Antonov and I asked him how it was going.
He said, they won't talk to me.
I don't even talk to anyone in your government.
Well, he's gone now and they haven't put an ambassador back in Washington for seven months.
And I made a query and he said, well, why should we put our best man there or anyone there?
Well, they used to put their best person here, as you might imagine, because they won't talk to us.
So we're not sending an investor.
All to say, the most important component of stopping what Dr. Postol dramatically and graphically gave you a presentation about is non-existent now.
Non-existent.
There is a mandate in the Biden administration.
That no one talks to Russia.
The only exception I've been able to discover that makes any difference is Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, who has a channel to his counterpart or someone like him in Russia with whom he can talk in an emergency, and they do from time to time talk.
That's the most important missing ingredient today, and it makes absolutely no sense, and it makes me want to put Joe Biden behind bars.
It is absolutely absurd.
And at the same time that Powell would talk to Sergei all the time and on his cell phone, he would talk to the Chinese ambassador.
He didn't like him as much, but he would talk to him.
The main reason was because he didn't do small talk.
And Powell thought small talk was an instrumental part of good diplomacy.
Because if you don't have empathy for the other person's position, how the hell can you do good diplomacy?
And you don't establish some sort of empathy either way unless you can talk to one another in a more or less friendly, personal fashion.
And that's why the cell phone was so important to Powell, because it had become the instrument of communication in the world, as all of you well know.
The last point I'd like to make is this: Just what was demonstrated here for a moment or two by the expert in the power of these weapons, and I hope I have given you a little insight into in terms of the past and the present and how different they are.
And I should have chronicled also Scott's point about we, we the empire, the American empire.
Have single-handedly eliminated every nuclear weapons treaty that we devised during the Cold War painstakingly, carefully, and with great reason to do so on both sides.
We've destroyed them all, every single one of them, including the most dangerous of all, the INF Treaty, in terms of the weaponry.
Because that weaponry is the kind that Scott was talking about.
It's the kind that's easy to move, easy to hide, and easy to shoot.
It's that intermediate force that's the most dangerous and appeals to people like me in the military as being just another military weapon with a lot more striking power.
So it's a very dangerous weapon and we're proliferating those again now.
And we have no treaty whatsoever.
So if you want to wake up tomorrow morning to a mushroom cloud or two or three or five thousand, let your government continue on its present path.
And I have to say I take exception to some people that say, because I've done a lot of studying of the people he's apparently going to appoint to principal cabinet positions and him himself in his first four years.
And I don't think there's relief coming with this particular individual, certainly not from the people he's putting in cabinet positions.
So this is not going to relieve itself anytime soon.
In my view, it's going to get worse.
And I could finish, I won't, I've taken too long already, but I could finish by telling you how I think I could design for you a very, very believable, credible, not incredible at all scenario where we and our poodle in London march ourselves into a nuclear war in Ukraine with very logical steps taken along the way.
In mass, in total, would be utter illogic.
The one thing that's mitigating against that right now, I should say militating against it, is what I really predicted about six or seven months ago.
NATO's falling apart.
If you've checked Germany lately, it's not just Slovakia and Hungary.
France is falling apart.
I doubt Macron is going to survive, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens, how they consolidate any kind of government.
France always has a problem with that, especially when this sort of situation occurs, because they don't have the kind of constitutional fabric to push this situation into a place where they can fix it.
They just have to fix it some way.
And Germany's falling apart because we did Nord Stream, and because their economy is collapsing.
And Schultz is very short.
I'll raise my right hand and put it on the Bible and guarantee you that.
So it's falling apart except for our poodle in London and basically us.
And we're going to get to the point where it's a matter, and this is horrible to say, it's a matter of Joe Biden's pride or Donald Trump's pride or the collective conglomerate of our government's pride.
And we're going to do something really stupid.
And I take exception to what Scott said.
I know he didn't mean to say it the way he said it.
We did use nuclear weapons in anger twice in 1945.
And we will be the one who uses them first again in the 21st century.
guaranteed.
Okay, well...
I have a...
It's a challenge that Colonel Wilkerson's aware of before, but I'm going to start off with Ted.
You just scared everybody, hopefully, to death with that large nuclear explosion.
When I read the literature, for instance, what Donald Trump did when he was president, We created a new category of weapons called usable nuclear weapons, low-yield nuclear weapons, a W-76-2, a low-yield weapon that goes on the Trident missile on the Ohio-class submarine.
We have a new B-61 gravity bomb.
And these take up the terminology.
They call them usable nukes, as if we can use them and win and prevail.
So here's my challenge to you.
You're somewhere in Washington, D.C., and for whatever reason, you enter an elevator, and the decision maker for the United States enters the elevator with you.
Now, I don't know if that's going to be Joe Biden, and I'm not being too facetious here.
I personally think that Anthony Blinken is calling a lot of these shots regarding Ukraine and the use of nuclear weapons.
So I'm going to say it's Anthony Blinken.
The Secretary of State arrives, and it's just you two.
The elevator's going up.
You're getting off at the same floor.
You got three-minute elevator pitch.
How do you convince Tony Blinken that there's no such thing as usable nukes, that you can't win a nuclear war, and a nuclear war should never be fought?
Because he's ready to use usable nukes to fight a nuclear war, and he believes they're going to be fought.
The elevator door is shut.
The clock's running.
30-second elevator pitch.
Dr. Postol.
I don't think it's possible.
I think this is a man who doesn't listen.
I don't think he thinks, in fact.
I mean, when you look at his behavior as Secretary of State, all you can do is shake your head when he does something.
I mean, imagine, for example, going to the Chinese and telling them, we don't like you trading with Russia, so stop.
Like, the Chinese don't really take that seriously.
What he just did with the Ukrainians is he said, we're sending you weapons.
Go take your 18-year-olds as they come out of high school and throw them into the meat grinder that is what is left of the Ukrainian army after it has been slaughtered and sacrifice those young innocent people along with the Innocent people you've already sacrificed.
I don't know what you say to a man like this.
Larry has more experience about these things.
I'm going to give Larry a different challenge.
We're going to start off with your answer.
First thing I would tell Tony Blinken that he's the worst Secretary of State we've ever had.
That wouldn't get me very far.
What Theodore Postal is saying is this is hopeless.
That we have people in charge who are incapable of carrying out the kind of intellectual exercise to understand the insanity of that which they have wrought.
And left to their own devices, we are all going to die.
This is why I couldn't sleep at night for a long time, ladies and gentlemen.
It's this reality as you run the numbers and you look at the people involved.
In 1983, NATO ran an exercise called Able Archer.
There's an aspect to this, which was Able Archer, which is a nuclear command post exercise.
Long story short, we were going to test the release of nuclear weapons.
It was just supposed to be an exercise.
But the Soviets were monitoring the deployment of troops, the deployment of aircraft, and now this nuclear test.
And the Soviets believed that we were actually getting ready to launch a nuclear preemptive strike.
So the Soviets responded by putting their nuclear forces on alert, putting aircraft with nuclear weapons on strip alert.
The SS-20 missiles were put on full combat alert.
We were this close to going to war.
We were supposed to have a guest here today, Mel Goodman, from a former CIA analyst.
Unfortunately, Mel is sick and couldn't make it today.
But Mel was going to talk about Abel Archer and what he did to help save the world, that he jumped over Robert Gates, who was his boss.
When he tried to say, hey, guys, if this exercise goes on, we're going to have a nuclear war.
And Gates said, don't worry about it.
Russians will never do that.
Soviets will never do that.
He jumped over and went to Casey, who was the director of the CIA, who briefed Ronald Reagan, and the exercise was stopped a couple days short because they didn't want to send the wrong signal, and we lived.
But now here's the thing.
Because we don't want to spend our whole life rolling dice like this, do we?
You know, we need...
I'm going to put you on an imaginary airplane that's going to Europe.
And for whatever reason, it landed in Moscow.
And you got off the airplane.
They say, you can't leave till tomorrow.
We're taking you to a hotel.
And you come into the hotel lobby.
There you are at the elevator.
It opens up.
You get in to go all the way to the top.
And Vladimir Putin steps in.
And it shuts.
And you're there with Vladimir Putin.
Given what Theodore Postal just said, that Tony Blinken's not functional.
This government is insane.
We're preparing to fight a new...
How do we convince Vladimir Putin, as I like to say, to steal that line from Jerry Maguire?
Help me help you.
What appeal would you make to Vladimir Putin to tell the Russians, give us a chance?
I think I'd have to say something like, I appreciate your situation.
I understand how you may look at it.
I understand how dour and dire it looks to you, how existential it looks to you.
But I don't think you're a man, and I've listened to you, and I've listened to your foreign minister at length.
I don't think you want to destroy the world.
So how about just a reaction rather than a preemption?
Okay.
I like the answer, but it still scares the hell out of me.
That was the purpose of this panel.
The purpose of this panel with these two fine gentlemen was to be real.
And this is the point I want to leave as we close this panel.
This was as real as it gets.
This is why I couldn't sleep at night.
This is why I still have trouble sleeping at night.
Because this is reality.
This is the hard, cold facts of where we are today with a system that is ready to fight a nuclear exchange with the Russians to win, and they aren't using the tools that we normally use to stop the sourcing, the communication that Colonel Wilkerson talked about.
So now that I've made life hopeless for you, we're going to bring an end to this panel.
I'd like everybody to give applause to Peter Postel and Colonel Wilkerson.
We're going to see if we can inject some hope in this situation.
Thank you.
And I'd like to invite the other panelists for the panel to come up to the table, and I'll introduce you once you've taken your seats.
Oh, let's...
Thank you.
I think we have Max Blumenthal and Margaret.
Kimberly is coming up.
I'll enter some more.
They're all seated.
Dan Kovalec is also.
I'll start.
I'm sorry.
I'm probably fumbling this, but do the introductions.
We have a wonderful panel here.
The purpose of this panel is to inject hope, or at least try to inject hope.
Into the situation we face today, which is left to its own devices, there will be a nuclear war.
The one thing that we're looking at right now, and this is something that came out when I roamed the congressional office buildings, is that Congress is not very well positioned today to do anything.
We're just in one of those unique time periods where an election took place.
We have a Congress leaving in two weeks.
It's hard to get legislation going.
But I believe, through the tool of Congress, is our only chance to get the Biden administration to change tax.
So that's why we've assembled this panel.
We have Dennis Kucinich.
He's a former mayor of Cleveland, former congressman, an all-around good guy.
An unsuccessful campaign for office, but a noble campaign nonetheless.
We have Dan Kovalec.
He is a civil rights attorney, a very experienced activist.
We have Margaret Kimberley, who is a journalist, a writer of some note, also a social activist.
And we have Max Blumenthal.
He is the editor of The Gray Zone and an important part of the alternative media today.
Dennis, I'd like to start with you, if I can.
You've been in Congress.
You've operated there.
You know the realities of Congress.
Here we are, December 7th.
What can be done?
How can we get Congress activated?
What can Congress do?
What are the tools available to Congress to get the Biden administration to change course?
And specifically what I'm talking about is to get the Biden administration to stop allowing Ukraine to fire ATAKAMS missiles against Russia.
First of all, Scott, I think on behalf of everyone here, we want to thank you for your leadership and bringing us together and for your personal courage and being willing to step forward to challenge this establishment, which would destroy this country if it's left unchecked.
Today, I published on Substack a piece called Biden's Nuclear Going Out of Business Sale.
And I would urge you to check it out because it bears on the discussion that that this panel will have, but also on on the remarks of Colonel Wilkerson and Dr. Postel.
I want to thank my wife, Elizabeth Kucinich, for her.
And I would urge you to go to it when you get a chance.
Scott, as you know, I've been in the House of Representatives for 16 years.
I ran twice for the Democratic nomination for president, challenging these wars.
And I led the effort in not just doing it from the floor of the House, but also taking
I just want to create a quick context here, and that is so much of our international policy is generated by aggression.
You know, if you look at Bohmian physics, which I would urge you to study, even though, you know, you think, what does that have to do with what's going on right now?
Well, there's this idea that, you know, the world is a hologram of the brain, which is a hologram of the world.
In a sense, you know, we're creating this world with our consciousness.
It's not just, you know, who are they, it's who are we.
It's the responsibility that we have for being able to Even monitor our own thoughts, which could, you know, impel aggression.
Thoughts are real.
Consciousness is real.
And when we think of aggression of any kind, even in our interpersonal relationships, we create the pretext for the wars outside, because what is innermost becomes outermost.
And so, you know, thoughts are real.
Consciousness is real.
Words create worlds and aggression and deception.
And we're now at a point where in this magical thinking that is disguised as US statecraft, we're thinking we're going to suspend the laws of cause and effect as we keep launching offensive missiles into Russia.
this this This whole approach that we're taking towards international relations is an exercise in human destructiveness.
Years ago, a philosopher and a social psychologist by the name of Eric Fromm wrote a book called The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, which reads like a textbook for this time, which talks about the impulses that cause people to want to destroy each other.
And the necessity of human unity.
Now I use that as a backdrop to talk about what we can do.
I know as a member of Congress how groupthink is one of the most powerful functions within a political party.
And right now, the Democrats have not been and will not.
I don't necessarily challenge the Biden administration.
This is one of the reasons why I had to step away from the party during the last election because, hey, it's for war.
I'm not.
But what's happened and what's happened with all political parties, political parties are essentially a reflection of dichotomized thinking of us versus them, whoever they are.
And with that comes into the mob, black versus white, rich versus poor, up versus down, you know, inevitably destroying what threatens us.
And, you know, if reality is indeed socially constructed and culturally confirmed, we've created a violent society which we're projecting.
Worldwide.
And as a result, putting ourselves in a world in jeopardy, which Ted Postol and Larry Wilkerson have described.
What has to be done right now?
Well, the fact of the matter is that Joe Biden and not only Biden, but the head of the UK, the prime minister and the head of France.
Have all violated their own nation's constitutions, which would do not allow executives to be able to take action absent approval of a legislative body.
So, I mean, right now, you know, as soon as you say, well, this is an impeachable offense, people start clutching their pearls or they run to their computers and send out a message.
Kucinich says Biden ought to be impeached.
Well, you know, we're past that right now.
It's too late.
Congress must act.
Now, let me explain.
Because I've had the rare opportunity to sue one president after another over this question of Article I, Section 8, the responsibilities of members of Congress include whether or not to declare war.
We are in a state of war right now with Russia.
We're in a state of war that we have created by emplacing these offensive missiles and launching them with our personnel and data into Russia.
Now, executives don't have the ability to do that.
Only Congress does.
People say, well, what can Congress do?
The reason why impeachment in this case is ineffective and the reason why even court action is ineffective.
Previous courts have ruled that Congress's essential power is the power of the first.
And so we need to be calling members of Congress now, saying to cut off funds, freeze the funds.
And they need to take action to do that now.
Congress must freeze the funding, cut off the funding, and at least go out there and make it an effort to say, in doing that, It sends a signal to Russia that there are cooler heads that are ready to prevail in the United States, because if we don't do that, Scott, and this is why you brought us all together, we are looking at the potential of the unthinkable.
And, you know, we all look around and we think this reality that we have is guaranteed.
No, it's not.
People throughout the 20th century thought that there was 100 million people who died in wars in the 20th century.
And they were very modern at their time.
It was all modern then.
It's modern now.
Well, we have to shift the consciousness of this country.
It's not going to happen overnight, but it needs to start happening.
That's one of the reasons I proposed the Department of Peace 20 years ago, that we need to start looking at the violence in our society, in ourselves, And looking at grabbing onto that transformational impulse, that instinct within us, as the poet described it, that reaches and towers.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for that.
One of the big aspects of this panel is to talk about constitutional issues.
And that term is thrown around a lot.
I throw it around a lot.
I took an oath to defend the Constitution, as anybody who has served in this government has.
And Dennis, of course, carries the Constitution in his pocket because this is the essence of who we are and what we are.
There's one thing and one thing alone that defines the United States of America, and that's this document.
Without this document, there is no constitutional republic.
Without this document, this country doesn't exist.
And yet, we tend to function without anybody referring to this document and acting in a matter which says if it does exist, it's an impediment, not an obligation.
Well, this is like you hold this up to the people in D.C. on Capitol Hill, and it's like holding up a crucifix to a werewolf.
So, Dan, I want to turn to you.
You're a lawyer.
You've dealt with human rights, civil rights.
You know the Constitution.
The way Dennis was talking, it was about the duties and responsibilities of Congress to take action.
What are the duties and responsibilities of we, the people of the United States of America, when it comes to turning that document into something that's living, breathing, and viable when it comes to stopping a nuclear war?
First and foremost, our duty is to put pressure on our Congress people to act right now.
And I do think that articles of impeachment would be appropriate, not just to try to stop the Biden administration from doing what they're doing in leading us to nuclear war, but it would send a message to the incoming Trump administration as well, that this would not be tolerated.
And so the Constitution allows for the impeachment charges to be brought against federal officials.
So that could also, by the way, include Blinken and Jake Sullivan, who I think would have to be included in this, as part of Congress's oversight and investigatory responsibilities.
And it can be, the impeachment can be started by a lawmaker introducing an impeachment resolution.
Or the House initiating proceedings by passing a resolution authorizing an inquiry.
So we need to get a few sympathetic congresspeople to start this procedure.
And then a committee on the judiciary would generally have jurisdiction over the impeachments, although a special committee could be set up.
And if a simple majority of the House votes for an impeachment hearing to be convened, the House would appoint members by resolution to manage an ensuing Senate trial on its behalf.
So, I mean, this is obviously something that could be done.
Recall that Trump was successfully at least impeached twice.
He was not removed from office, but impeachment.
Hearings were convened.
And by the way, one of them was brought, one of the impeachments was brought because he was threatening to end armed shipments to Ukraine, if you recall, kind of ironically.
Well, and as former Congressman Kucin has just pointed out, there's a number of bases for impeaching Biden.
And again, Blinken and Sullivan.
And that is, as you mentioned, the War Powers Clause of the United States Constitution itself, which only allows Congress to declare war.
We have not declared war on Russia.
I think that people need to understand that.
While, you know, the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson just admitted we're in a proxy war with Russia, right?
And while everyone knows that, we haven't declared war on Russia.
And so what Biden is doing by authorizing these attackums to be sent deep into Russian territory, and by the way, these attackums, as I understand it, have to be programmed by personnel from either the United States or Britain, from the countries that have provided these missiles.
And that is why, of course, Putin has said if those attackums are delivered from Ukraine, And by the way, when he says that, he's mirroring almost the precise language that John F. Kennedy said during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He said if the Soviet missiles were launched from Cuba on any country in the Western Hemisphere, he would consider it missiles launched by the Soviet Union.
And he would respond in kind.
So these acts, again, are violative of the War Powers Clause as well as the forgotten War Powers Resolution of 1973, which, again, is rarely invoked, but also makes it clear that the power to declare war is within that of Congress, not in the executive branch.
Meanwhile, the other thing that is being violated here is the United States neutrality legislation, which actually makes it a crime to, again, for anyone to start a war with another country that we're at peace with.
And again, technically, we're at peace with Russia.
We have not declared war on Russia.
The last article or the last article So in any case, I think it would be significant at least to start the process, to send a message that Congress that represents the will of the people wants to avert nuclear war.
And as Scott said at the beginning of this event, I think if anything we know from what happened, In the elections for president, the people made it clear they want to end the war in Ukraine.
And I think they made it clear they want to end all wars.
At least that's what they were promised.
Now, I also agree.
I believe it was Lawrence Wilkerson who says, I don't expect that Trump will follow through with those promises.
But I do believe that's what people want.
And for Biden to have turned around and done this in – I don't know if that's still on the table, but that had been mentioned.
For him to do that right after the election and to greenlight these attackants to be sent into Russia is an obvious breach of the will of the people.
I just want to say a couple things, and this actually builds upon what you said.
Dennis, you were talking about this, how people have the will to destroy others.
I think it's really important to see how things relate.
I think, honestly, what's happening in Gaza at the moment, when people wonder, oh, come on, the U.S. wouldn't start a nuclear war.
They're not, you know, they're not, you know, have no desire to do that.
When you look at what the U.S. is supporting in Gaza, where, They're not nuclear weapons, but the tonnage is much greater over the time that it's been bombing Gaza into oblivion.
Ninety percent of the people of Gaza now live in tents.
And just today, if you've been following the news, Israel's been attacking a hospital in northern Gaza that killed four doctors.
Again, and the U.S. is supplying Israel with weapons every 16 hours so they can do that.
The U.S. is willing to do that to engage in what is an abomination happening in Gaza.
The same leaders are willing to start a nuclear war.
Thank you very much.
I'll just give you my takeaway real quick.
Being a citizen is hard work.
It's not easy work.
Learning the Constitution and learning the things that Dan and Dennis are talking about doesn't happen just by breathing air.
You have a duty and responsibility as a citizen.
You have to learn this stuff.
You have to breathe it, bring it into your body, and you have to live it.
Otherwise, this thing we call a constitutional republic is not going to survive very long.
Margaret, I want to ask you a question.
We speak of the will of the people, manifested in November.
But, you know, that's only the will of the people who voted for the guy who won.
There's a whole bunch of people who voted for the other person.
And they're not necessarily happy with the outcome of this election.
And yet here we are where we're trying to put pressure on...
Politically, it's a difficult call.
But it's one that if we don't do, we can all die, including those people who voted for the losing side.
How do we collectively engage the demographic that lost the election?
And get them on our side, not the side of the Republicans, on the American side, to stop this mad rush to nuclear war.
Well, thank you, Scott.
Ever since you invited me, I've been pondering this very difficult question of popular action and the movement that we need.
And I'll tell you a little story that happened to me just yesterday.
I was talking to a relative and telling her that, And she says, oh, what are you doing?
I said, I've been asked to speak.
And she said, about what?
About the risk of nuclear war.
And I went on to say that, you know, Biden has authorized missile strikes deep into Russia.
And this puts us at risk of hot war with Russia.
And she said, well, I don't see anything wrong with that.
What's Putin doing over there anyway?
Now, this person is an intelligent person, reads the paper, but what did Mark Twain say?
What did Mark Twain say?
If you don't read the paper, you're uninformed.
If you do, you're misinformed.
But I tried to explain that, you know, she said, well, how did this start?
what was Putin doing?
And I said, well, I...
And that this conflict did not just begin in 2022 in the role the U.S. played.
Thank you.
And, but still there was this, Now, this person grew up the way I did when we were kids.
The Vietnam War was wrong.
It was fundamentally racist.
And that kind of thinking has disappeared over time.
And so that now there are very few people in this country who are not war hawks.
And I actually think liberals Are the worst.
I think the people who voted for Kamala Harris are more likely to disregard what we're talking about, to be in favor of some kind of military action.
And this didn't happen overnight.
We used to have, and I'm not going to say the media always did its job.
But I'm convinced today, would the Pentagon paper story be in the paper?
I don't think so.
Would the Washington Post print the activists who broke into an FBI office and the Washington Post printed the materials?
Would that happen now?
It would not.
So we have people who are thoroughly indoctrinated.
Yesterday I was listening to the story about TikTok, the court case that has gone against TikTok.
Every story said, TikTok, the Chinese company.
It's not.
I know Tom Cotton tried to say, you're from China, aren't you?
You're from me.
And the guy's like, no, I'm from Singapore.
It doesn't matter.
Over and over again, the Chinese company that actually isn't.
And this is why people are so confused.
And, you know, the person I was speaking to, there's something very sad that has happened to black people over the years.
There's been this terrible political regression.
If there was one group of people who were anti-war, if there was one group of people who were skeptical about anything that Congress or President said, It was black people.
28 years ago, in the run-up to the Iraq War, we at Black Agenda Report, the late Glenn Ford, may he rest in peace, wrote an article about the difference in support for the war.
White people were generally in favor.
Black people were opposed.
And that was very typical.
But then something happened a few years later.
First black president.
And in 2013, when the issue of Syria first came up, most Americans were opposed to the U.S. being involved.
I mean, they got proxies and got around it.
But at any rate, most Americans did not want the U.S. to be directly involved.
But black people were more likely to be in favor than white people.
In just a few years.
And I think Obama's ascension to the presidency didn't just impact black people.
I think liberals felt, ah, we have a black president.
Don't we have a wonderful system?
The anti-war movement of 2003, Thousands, I think millions, I think it's accurate to say millions of people protested.
That would not happen now.
Because that movement, it was more anti-Republican, anti-George Bush.
They got this, what did somebody call Obama?
Some guy called him clean-cut and articulate and supposedly a progressive, supposedly anti-war.
And the movement died.
And so that's the other thing I want to point out.
Electoral politics is not the way.
Electoral politics kills movements.
So I think we have to stop thinking about electoral politics resolving this issue of having a population that's ready for war.
So the Kamala Harris, you know, people...
In their one debate, they talked about who loved Israel more, but not much else.
But there is a bright spot.
We saw protests, especially students, about Palestine, about the genocide, and we saw the hammer drop.
Kids suspended from school.
Professors fired.
People threatening to never hire them again.
Or even if you pass the bar exam, we're going to say you can't be a lawyer.
But that does show us that people are ready to fight for justice and to have a culture.
And people are angry.
You know, it seems unrelated, but this incident a few days ago where the CEO of a health insurance company was shot and killed in Manhattan, and people are gleeful, sharing funny memes, telling horror stories.
It tells you people are fed up.
Now, how do we channel that energy, that energy about one particular injustice?
That's the question.
So we've seen the protests about Palestine.
We've seen this kind of odd situation with the reaction to the killing of that healthcare CEO.
But it tells us the people can be reached.
But it's got to be something new.
And I was listening to what the congressman said.
We have to change the culture.
Of this country.
The culture of this country.
The founding of the country.
It's history.
It's militaristic.
It encourages violence.
It starts at the top.
You can't be surprised at their school shootings when the U.S. has the biggest military in the world and uses it so freely.
So we have to find, talk about and think about changing the culture of this country.
Because those members of Congress, those who get it, I think it was last year that a few of them wrote a letter about a ceasefire in Ukraine.
And they repudiated themselves a day later because somebody got to them and told them to.
And they said, oops, sorry.
And there was some crazy story about everybody didn't get the draft or something like that.
No, the hammer dropped on them and they went along.
So it's got to be outside of electoral politics, outside of Congress.
We have to talk about how to move the people because the people are ready.
And if more people, not even most people, if a large enough minority of people knew what we were talking about today, I think we would see a movement to stop this madness.
I First of all, thank you very much for that answer.
Believe it or not, I actually spent a lot of time trying to write these questions and to lead a discussion and a dialogue.
But the thing about when you write a question, you don't know what answer you're going to get.
I sort of knew what Dennis was going to say.
He's a congressman.
We're talking about Congress.
Okay, so we're comfortable with that set.
I knew what Dan was going to say.
He's a lawyer, constitutional lawyer.
We can sort of predict what he's going to say.
I can't predict what Max is going to say, but I think I have an idea.
We were talking about the media because we're comfortable with the media.
Margaret, you just did something that is phenomenal.
And I'm going to ask this of everybody who's watching this, streaming, everybody who's here today.
Take this clip and separate it and study it because that's the way forward.
That's the way we're going to have to go to solve it.
And I thank you for your answer.
Thank you very much.
Now, Max, Margaret's not going to get anywhere, however, her message can't be heard.
And she brought up a couple challenges.
Would the Washington Post today allow the Pentagon Papers to be published?
The answer is no.
Would mainstream media do...
I just want to...
But you know what?
It doesn't matter because we're streaming out to millions.
We're getting an impact through this.
Cooperation that CNN and MSNBC and the mainstream media can't get.
So my question to you, Matt, is the mainstream media dead?
Is there a role for alternative media?
And how do we make alternative media the alternative to mainstream media?
What are the checks and balances?
What do we do about quality control?
You're the editor of the gray zone.
You've come under a lot of criticism for your approach, but you've also come under a lot of praise for your success.
So the floor is yours, sir.
How does alternative media work?
Yeah, thank you.
You said my remarks would be unpredictable, and I didn't really prepare, so I don't know exactly what I'm going to say.
I'm going to kind of freestyle, but before I do, I think I came up with one solution where Margaret's asking about the way forward.
I think if we could just appoint Benjamin Netanyahu as CEO of Kaiser Permanente, we might start seeing some progress in the world.
Certainly celebrations would go global.
Well, this video just got kicked off of YouTube, but that's okay.
Yeah, you just got demonetized.
We're streaming.
We just got demonetized.
I'm just thinking of career possible opportunities for him after his coalition with various Nazis collapses.
So the media, yes, mainstream media is collapsing before our eyes.
Look at the view counts that they get on Facebook.
MSNBC's YouTube channel or their Nielsen ratings.
Just how many people are watching Ari Melber, my former colleague at The Nation magazine?
It's about 30,000 to 40,000 people who have the TV on in the background who are 75 and older.
No offense.
I mean, I see most of the people here older.
That's the way it always is at dissident events.
I say never trust anyone under 30. But we are actually at the gray zone.
Our live streams get more viewers than MSNBC on like daytime MSNBC, you know, where they're like...
Scott Ritter kills us.
I mean, when Scott speaks, people listen.
People want to hear us and Scott more than they want to see.
Four woke pro-war professors with funny glasses on an MSNBC panel.
I mean, it's just the way it is.
It was not always this way.
I mean, it's technology, but it's also because of the nature of the empire today, the nature of corporate mainstream media, where we are at this point in history and the rising consciousness in the public, especially since October 7th, which is really galvanized activism among younger people.
And just, you know, I have some reflections about that.
I wasn't setting out to be some alternative media guy.
I wanted to be like – I used to work with Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow impersonator at The Nation.
I knew him, but he just kept on the straight path with the Democratic Party wherever they went.
He wasn't seeking the truth.
I started out, you know, just hitting the Republicans during the Bush era.
And I was thinking, if we could just get the neocons out and get Bush out, then everything will be fine and the war will end and the wars will end.
I wasn't really seeing things quite clearly enough during the Bush era.
It took Obama to kind of wake me up.
It also took Palestine to wake me up.
So after I wrote a best-selling book called Republican Gomorrah, which is about the political psychology of the Republican Party under Bush, which was really controlled by the Christian right, actually a different Republican Party than Trump's Republican Party.
They weren't having as much sex as Trump's Republican Party is.
I mean, they got some freaky characters in the MAGA base right now.
They were like, you know, pious.
But I got on Terry Gross on NPR.
She booked me.
She's like, Max Blumenthal, you've been going to a lot of tea parties.
And I just gave her the rap.
Within seconds, my book was in the top 10 on Amazon.
I was beating all the AstroTurf, BulkBot, right-wing authors, Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin.
And so I had a bestseller.
So I went back to my publisher and I was like, you know what?
I want to do a book on what the real Israel is that Americans don't know.
And they had to say yes because they didn't expect me to do this well.
That book was published by Nation Books through the Nation magazine.
It was called Goliath, Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.
I think that has stood the test of time.
If anything, I went too soft on Israel with that one.
That came out in 2013.
And when that book came out, first of all, it was when many people who had supported Obama started to realize that they had been had.
Potentially bamboozled, even hoodwinked.
And so there was a good audience for it.
But there was enormous resistance at the Nation magazine and within the progressive media that I thought was going to be so supportive because the progressive media just supported the Democratic Party.
And there was a guy who is completely irrelevant now.
Had a lot of power at The Nation magazine, Eric Alterman, who wrote 13 attack pieces on me inside the pages of The Nation for besmirching the great reputation of Israel.
By the end, he was defending Netanyahu as a liberal.
And, you know, I saw him at the airport a few years later, like customs, and I walked up to him and I was like, thank you for helping sell my book.
I couldn't have done it without you.
He was shaking.
He didn't know what to say.
Like two years ago or three years ago, Eric Alterman wrote a book about how fascist Israel is.
It's like a boring version of my book.
And that's what just keeps happening again and again.
So I was pushed out of the nation, though, because of that.
It just got too uncomfortable for them.
Then the whole apparatus of progressive media that started during the Bush era, Truthdig, Alternet, all these publications that I was writing for started to collapse.
And I was sort of was forced into alternative media simply because I wanted to tell the truth.
And it wasn't going to be possible within the progressive base of the Democratic Party anymore.
And so I started this thing called the gray zone and really like, um, I, It's a nonpartisan site, and we try to put forward the original investigative reporting that we think a decent media should do.
We really found our voice, I think, when I published my investigative series on the Syrian white helmets.
It was one of the biggest...
Thank you.
funded by USAID.
A total intelligence operation cooking up chemical attack events and all sorts of atrocities to convince the Western public that we needed to support a regime change war on Syria and that the US Air Force should be Al Qaeda's Air Force.
This group needed to be exposed and no one had touched it except for journalists like Vanessa Beely and others who were In alternative media, but we're just constantly being denounced as Assadists.
And I think we helped move the reality of the White Helmets.
We forced more of the public to grapple with that reality.
Then we started to find more of a voice, you know, joining forces with Aaron Maté to challenge the Russiagate deception, which has been fully discredited because so many, so few people...
It was about paving the path for the war that we've been discussing here today and grooming.
The Democratic Party's previously anti-war base as fanatical neocons who want to join forces with the Cheneys, which all happened.
But Aaron became like the buzzsaw.
I mean, like I couldn't keep track of all these characters.
Kortman and Bleeker had a meeting and like, no, they were actually, Konstantin Kalimnik was actually got a contract from USAID.
He wasn't a Russian agent.
This was the guy who was said to be like the final piece in the puzzle connecting Russia to Trump.
Go on and on and on.
But October 7th happened.
And everything felt like it was coming full circle from Goliath.
And we had been challenging the proxy war in Ukraine, explaining why this really happened, how it was provoked, how it was actually, you know, we were being told Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
That was part of the talking points.
And what we set ourselves to the task was to show how this was the most provoked invasion in history.
Then October 7th hits.
And, you know.
The West and the most undemocratic countries on the planet, the Gulf monarchies, wanted to normalize with Israel and put the Palestinians in the dustbin of history.
October 7th shattered that, but it put another heavy burden.
On our backs, those of us in alternative media, which was to counter the mainstream media manufacturing consent for what has become the Holocaust of our time.
And we are still living through a Holocaust over a year later.
And I knew it would happen.
All of us who dealt with Israel in the past.
Part of its national culture is to produce what they call Hasbara.
That's the Hebrew word for explanation.
And it basically means propaganda.
And all of its citizens are told, you know, be ambassadors, learn Hasbara.
So as soon as October 7th happened, Israel commenced with the Hasbara, pipelined through its assets in U.S. media.
Arch-Zionists like Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, former APAC researcher Wolf Blitzer, and they pumped out some of the most cynical propaganda I've ever seen, about 40 beheaded babies, about a baby being cut from a woman's fetus, and then about the mass rape by Hamas on October 7th, for which there was no forensic evidence, no survivor testimony.
And it was really just left up to us and alternative media, and I would recognize Mondo Weiss, Electronic Intifada for doing so much good work on this, to hit back and actually successfully cause a scandal at the New York Times, an internal scandal, when they started to try to push this.
Atrocity propaganda, specifically around sexual assault, they actually had to take down their podcast that was supposed to hype up this front page article and then make the case that it does deserve the Pulitzer Prize.
One of the co-authors has been fired.
They're just mired in scandal at the New York Times.
Every component of that piece, Screams Before Silence, has been dismantled by alternative media.
And I think so many people in the public who hadn't paid attention to what we were saying on Syria.
Which, by the way, the whole PSYOP was about delivering Syria to the West and Israel, who hadn't paid attention to what we were saying on Ukraine because they were inclined to hate Russia for whatever reason.
It's conservative.
It's anti-gay for whatever reason.
So many people started to finally see it, that the entire corporate media was not just fundamentally incapable.
Of telling the truth, but was actually of a part with a system of genocide, a system of ethnic cleansing.
They are stenographers for the perpetrators of a Holocaust.
And so that's kind of where we've wound up today, where just the public...
and they've turned to us, and they're turning to so many.
Black Agenda Report, everyone on this panel.
And history is everything we've been talking about.
Since the Obama era, it's not only been proven, we've been proven correct.
You know, we've been proven correct about the OPCW deception, about all the chemical attacks.
We've been proven correct about Russiagate.
It's all gotten to the point where we are now, as Scott is pointing out again and again, on the precipice of nuclear or nuclear extermination.
We are in World War III.
Look at what's happening in Syria.
The overrunning of Syria by Highly organized, well-armed, al-Qaeda-aligned bandits with the backing of NATO and the Turkish government, and from the South, criminal mafias, which have just taken over Daraa.
None of this would have been possible without Ukraine, because it was Ukraine that forced Russians to redirect a lot of their airpower that was at the Hameim airbase to the Ukrainian front, and it wouldn't have been possible without the Israeli blitzkrieg on Lebanon, which weakened Hezbollah.
Which had been defending Syrian territory.
This is not just a Syrian civil war.
This is World War III already.
Those of us in the media who just wanted to tell the truth, we've been forced into this space called the alternative media or independent media.
But I think the rest of the people who have been paying attention in our societies, who want truth, who want peace, are along with us for the ride.
And so what do we do?
All we can do in the media is political education, which I think builds a healthier culture.
And so I just wake up every morning.
I normally wouldn't wake up in the morning, but I have a kid now, so I have to take her to school.
I like to be creeping while everyone's sleeping.
But I wake up in the morning, and I just think, maybe this won't work.
Maybe Congress won't listen.
They probably won't.
but I'm just going to be the biggest bastard I can be today.
Thank you.
And so should you.
Okay.
Well, thank you.
Okay.
First of all, Max, call me afterwards.
I want you to promote my book.
Apparently you can make sales happen.
We're in the lightning round because we have a limited amount of time.
But I'm going to break from it because we have a distinguished former congressman here with us today who's honored us with his presence.
And so instead of asking you my trick question, I'm going to turn the floor over to you for you to reflect on what this panel has said, what your observations are about what's been said here today by this distinguished panel.
Thanks very much, Scott.
I...
Poet says hope springs eternal, right?
We have to be aware and get what's going on in this moment.
And if we fail to do that moment, we'll be lost.
We must understand that danger is at our door.
And that the government, which is supposed to be a government of the people, has gotten away from us.
That is turned a deaf ear to the concerns that we have.
That people we've directly elected, which is what Article 1 of the Constitution is all about.
Members of Congress must return frequently for approval.
They don't believe in their own power.
This is part of the problem.
They believe that they have to go along with leadership.
They believe that there's always going to be a tomorrow.
Again, this idea of tomorrow's guaranteed has to be challenged.
Scott, you know, every one of us, I would hope, with the life instinct that we're given, this blessed life that we're given, also has to be aware that this gift is not unlimited, that we're here for a limited period of time.
But if we fail to challenge what's going on right now with our involvement, Yes, as hackneyed as it sounds, challenging members of Congress to step up to their constitutional responsibility to cut off the funds, to freeze the funds, to direct the president.
It's a co-equal branch of government.
They've got to be informed of that again.
It's the first among equals, Article I versus Article II.
Do I have hope?
I always have hope.
Hope is the next breath we take, right?
But Max's analysis of what goes on in the media, Margaret's awareness of the social implications, Dad's understanding the history.
You know, we have a convergence here of awareness.
And it's a chance to raise our consciousness.
We are not victims here of the world we see.
We become victims of the way we live.
And if we believe we don't have power, we don't have power.
And if we summon that inner instinct for life and for liberty and pursuit of happiness, it isn't just taking back the country, which is a political slogan.
It's about reclaiming the essence of self-government.
It's about reclaiming.
It's about being presidents of our own lives.
And reflecting that power back on those who we send to represent us, and if they're not representing us, and I will tell you they're not, we have to demand now, if it means going to congressional offices, calling up, I mean, all these things.
We have to raise the temperature of this, lest we see the temperature raised in the way that Dr. Postal described, which is really about extinction.
Yes, I'm hopeful, but it's the old question about faith and good works, right?
So let us be about good works.
Let us be about a consciousness of life.
Let us be about rejecting this nihilistic, almost necrophiliac impulse that people have where they're in love with death.
Well, we have to take a stand for life.
In all of its manifestations today, now, challenge this established thinking.
Don't let them get away with this.
This is our world, too.
It belongs to us as much as they think whoever they are belongs to them.
So thanks to all of my fellow panelists here, and thanks to all of you.
This is the start of something new, Scott.
And if we can get through this moment with our personal involvement and all those who are watching.
We're about to fulfill the prophecy of one of my favorite English poets, Alfred Lord Tennyson.
He said, "Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world." Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world." Thank you.
Thank you very much.
This is why there's congressmen and then there's Marines.
Beautiful words, inspiring words.
And I think that presentation is going to be a standalone segment that people are going to look at for motivation going forward.
Thank you very much.
Now we come to the rapid fire part.
You probably understand the format.
Dan, you're in an elevator.
I thought an elevator.
In Congress.
I was waiting for that.
Door opens, you enter, and the Speaker of the House steps in.
Door shuts.
You got 30 seconds to tell him what the hell to do with the Constitution.
Go.
I would say that he should initiate articles of impeachment against Joe Biden, which should have been done a long time ago, by the way.
I mean, can I just say.
How can he have the mental capacity to be president and to be in charge of the nuclear football?
Everyone, Congress, the Democratic Party, have abdicated their duty to ensure that this country is being led by someone who can actually do the job, and everyone knows he can't.
So now it's being led, apparently, by unelected officials like Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, who do seem willing to blow up the world before Trump gets into office.
I mean, I guess that would be my spiel right there that I would think he would be sympathetic to.
And I want to just say one thing.
You know, Congressman Kucinich used the word Necrophilia-ism to describe our leaders.
And I would use the word nihilism.
There is a nihilistic tendency within our leadership.
And again, when you look at what is happening in West Asia with the destruction of scores of UNESCO sites, churches, mosques, ancient markets, ancient Roman ruins.
In Syria, in Gaza, in Lebanon, the U.S. is responsible for and has been since 9-11, which, by the way, according to Brown University, the wars after 9-11 killed over 4.7 million people in the Arabic world.
In addition to that, all the destruction of ancient antiquities and our own history, our own history.
We are being led by mad people.
And that has to be recognized and that has to be stopped.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Margaret, I had an easy one for you, but in lieu of the fact that you knocked it out of the park with your response, you're in Philadelphia in a building, I don't know, going to the bank or something, and the elevator opens up, you step in, and in steps Kamala Harris.
And the door shuts.
You have 30 seconds, or however long your elevator pitch takes, to get Kamala Harris to agree to put pressure on Joe Biden to stop a nuclear war before his term ends.
Floor's yours.
You know, the first thing I'd say to her is, so where's that dustbin of history?
But anyway, now she's a, well, you know, I would say to her, You are capable.
We have seen you in moments.
Get rid of the nervous laugh.
Get rid of the word salad.
And speak up.
And now's your time to do it.
Stop fooling around.
You thought you were going to be president.
That was never going to happen.
Now you're a human being who can stop World War III.
Who can stop a hot war.
Pull it together.
And go talk to Joe Biden and then tell the American people the truth.
And if you can't, there's your dustbin of history.
Just get in it.
Write your memoirs.
Don't try to run for office again.
You're a nobody and you will never be unless you stand up as a human being.
Thank you.
I'm going to look into the camera.
And speak to Kamala Harris directly what she said.
This is your chance to be relevant.
Do something for the good of the people.
Do something to help save America.
Do something to stop nuclear war.
Max, you go on a vacation to Texas.
I don't know why.
You're in Dallas at a big building.
Yeah, and the door opens up, you step in, and Elon Musk follows you, and the door shuts.
Elon Musk has said that X is the number one news generator today.
It's the most important, not just social media outlet, but the most important media thing out there.
You got 30 seconds.
What are you going to do to fix Elon Musk's approach to media?
Oh, I mean, if that wasn't for Elon Musk, Idiot king of Twitter, we'd all be banned from there.
It's just a fact.
He's not someone I want to lobby.
I would ask him if there was any worse torture than going to Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro, which he had to do after he made some anti-Semitic comments.
And how does the quote-unquote richest man in the world get pushed around like that?
Is there some more powerful force lurking above him somehow?
I don't know.
That's what I'd want to know about.
I'd want to pick his brain.
And I would recommend some books to him.
I don't know if he reads books.
He names his children after quadratic formulas.
He donates his sperm to employees.
He's a transhumanist.
He's coming up with a chip for our brains.
So I don't know if he'd be interested in my book recommendations, but maybe you all would.
And this is relevant to comments here.
First, of course, you know, Anya Parampil's Corporate Coup, if you haven't picked it up yet on Orr Books.
She's coming up next.
Dan Kowalik's The Case for Palestine.
Dan's books are like the perfect books to distribute to people who are on the fence.
They're educational tools in the tradition of Chomsky.
In some cases, more digestible or accessible.
Scott Ritter's book is essential.
All of his books are gripping.
And there's a book I want to recognize, someone who was murdered a year ago yesterday named Rifat Al-Arir, who has a book out now called If I Must Die.
Published by Orr Books, Anya's publisher.
Basically, after Anya's book came out, I just approached her publisher, Colin Robinson, who's a fantastic person, one of the few true anti-war publishers left in this country, and connected him with a close friend of Rifat, and they just took it the rest of the way.
And it's an important compendium of a book by someone who was really one of the...
So many academics and nobles of the Gaza Strip have been murdered deliberately by Israel.
He also was, I think, the most influential, going back to Elon Musk, the most influential Twitter X account in English from Gaza.
And he was, you know, live tweeting his experience fleeing from the bombs, but also maintaining a really good sense of humor.
About all of the propaganda that was being deployed to justify the genocide.
And at one point, this guy from one of these fake rescue groups in Israel called United Hatzalah, an ultra-Orthodox group, goes to Sheldon Adelson's casino in Las Vegas to the Republican Jewish Coalition event to raise money.
And he claims that they found a baby who had been baked in an oven on October 7th.
A complete lie.
His own organization even rescinded it later.
And we thought made some...
Like, did they, you know, salt the baby or something?
You know, everyone was just mocking it.
And so Barry Weiss, who is one of the most astroturfed and therefore influential ultra-Zionist pundits in the country, who's just completely had her whole career propped up by Zionist billionaires, Bill Ackman and figures like that.
Basically puts a target on Rifat's back in a thread about the New York Times because they had published a piece by him at one point.
And she said he actually celebrated the baking of a Jewish baby alive by Hamas.
His direct messages start to fill up with death threats and promises of vengeance from active-duty Israeli soldiers who are saying, I'm coming to Gaza to kill and rape your entire family.
I'm coming to get you.
He received a phone call a few days later.
Or weeks later.
He said on Twitter, if I am killed, Barry Weiss is responsible.
He received a phone call a few weeks later while sheltering in a school from the Israeli army, and they said, we're coming for you now.
He left the school because he didn't want to put other people in peril, went to his sister's house, only place he could go, in Shudaya, east of Gaza City, under attack by the Israeli military, and they killed him in a targeted strike.
And they've assassinated many soldiers.
It's never been explained why they targeted him for his assassination, but it seems pretty clear.
This was death by Zionist media.
He was killed for his words.
The same way, you know, we hear about people who were killed by Pinochet for their Victor Hara for his songs and various dissidents throughout history who have been killed by Mussolini's men.
This is what Israel's doing.
They're killing people for their words.
They're destroying culture, as Dan said, all across the Middle East, but they're destroying our contemporaries, our colleagues, our cultural pillars.
So if there's one thing you can do, buy Rifat's book, If I Must Die.
It's now in the top 100 books, I believe, on Amazon, all books.
Get it on the bestseller list.
I think that's a form of resistance, and it's something we can do.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I wanted to say that...
Just kind of a buzzer shot here to use a basketball analogy.
I'd like to direct everyone's attention to that amazing poster that was created, and no nuclear war with the president eating an ice cream cone.
And imagine for a moment that it's not a mushroom cloud, but the Holy Spirit.
Imagine there's some religious, some prayer, some meditation that might create a whole new condition.
So I'm looking at that right now after all the discussions I've heard, notwithstanding the religious views of anyone here.
I'm thinking maybe that could also be the Holy Spirit, and maybe we could get Joe Biden to call upon his own off-stated religious instincts to reflect upon the consequences of his decisions.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for the panel.
Dennis Kucinich, Dan Kovalec, Margaret Kimberly, and Max Blumenthal.
Thank you.
It's time for the last panel, so I'd like to invite the panelists up.
We have Garland Nixon, a well-known journalist, activist, former Fox News commentator, and currently just all-around good guy.
We have Wilmer Leon, the host of Connect the Dots.
Dr. Wilmer Leon, a man who has connectivity with urban America and all of America.
We have Anya Perenpel.
She is the smarter half of the Blumenthal family, and as you said, the author of a fantastic book on Venezuela.
And we have Jose Vega, who just, he's an activist, well known for his interventions, and a man who has just run for Congress.
This is the kind of activism we want.
And I'd also like to invite up to join me, Medea Benjamin.
Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of Code Pink.
More importantly, from my perspective, she's the person that made the intervention in Congress Thursday possible.
She's the reason why I can sleep well at night.
And for that reason alone, but also for her years of activism, I've asked her to moderate this panel.
This is a panel about how we can intervene into MAGA and MAHA, make America great again, make America healthy again, and get them to take action to stop a nuclear war.
Before Donald Trump becomes president on January 20th.
Medea, the floor is yours.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, I want to say how amazing it was to have Scott in Congress the other day.
And I also want to recognize and please stand up if you've been with us in Congress during this last year sometime.
and let's thank these people who have been doing this work.
Thank you.
So I agree with Margaret Kimberly that the way we're going to make change is through a grassroots movement.
But in the meantime, we don't have a lot of time.
And we have a Congress that doesn't represent us.
We have a White House that is in transition now.
We have a president coming in who we don't know where he stands on these issues because he has such a crazy mix of people.
That he has brought in or is bringing in or trying to bring in to this administration.
So I hope that as part of this panel we can talk about how we can prevail upon the people who will be coming in to send a message to Russia like Scott has been trying to do that we do not want to go to war with them.
And what we are going to do To build a real movement that will force the people in this administration who have instincts that are more in line with ours to prevail as opposed to the others who have instincts like the traditional war hawks.
So if we can start out with Garland.
Garland Nixon, in your amazing radio interviews and the work that you have done for many years.
You have looked now at the MAGA movement and also the MAHA movement, which is Make America Healthy Again.
And do these have an actual mandate when it comes to the issue of saying no to war?
Do they understand, if they do have such a mandate, do they understand that this mandate exists and what could they do about it?
Well, a couple of things.
I think that the people who supported change, whether they'll get change or not, we're not sure, but the people who supported change, I think there were numerous reasons why people supported Donald Trump and many people stayed home, just didn't vote for anyone, people who were completely frustrated.
But I think a lot of the people who took these actions probably didn't think.
I want this or that.
Some did.
But a lot of people acted out of anger, out of frustration.
They're sick and tired of being sick and tired.
I talked to a lot of people.
Prior to the election, I predicted that Trump was going to win.
And I went on the radio the week before.
I said, I don't think he's going to be close.
The reason was, I went to Baltimore City.
I seen a brother driving down the street with a Trump sticker on.
And I said, that's it.
That's over.
The Democrats don't have a chance when I see a brother driving down the street.
A little true story.
And his hat turned sideways.
And a Trump sticker.
And I knew what that was about because I talked to people in the black community.
They were tired.
They were tired of being lied to over and over.
And they just would try anything.
As Malcolm X, you know, talked about the field slave.
When someone came to the field slave and said, do you want to run away?
Their lives were so miserable, they'd say, any place is better than here.
And I think that's what a lot of people did.
And now I think what the job that we have.
It's to understand for all of the reasons that people had to drift away from or push back against what's become mainstream politics, I think we have to understand that our job is to direct their energy now.
To understand that people were mad, they were angry, and now they're kind of in flux.
They're looking at it and saying, okay, Trump won.
I don't know what to make of what he's going to do.
I'm looking at his tweets.
I don't know what to think.
And I think we need to bring people together and direct that energy in a positive way.
And I'll say this right now.
I think this is important.
Just before I came up here, I picked up my phone and I looked and I saw Danny Highphone, Judge Napolitano, the gray zone.
Myself.
Just five or six different YouTube channels.
And I counted 10,000 viewers.
And literally, it wasn't over 10 seconds that I scrolled down on YouTube and the live.
10,000 viewers watching this.
And I know that that's just a fraction of the numbers that are watching on YouTube, etc.
On various other platforms, etc.
So what I'm going to say is this.
The people that are watching, the literally tens of thousands of people that are watching right now, I'm going to say it's not good enough just to sit and watch this.
We got tens of thousands of people this very second watching this.
If you're watching on YouTube, click on that little thing that says share.
And underneath, you can copy or you can click Twitter.
Elon Musk, Donald Trump, whoever the senator is for your state, whoever the member of Congress is for your state.
Right now, we can only do but so much, but you are the force multipliers this very second.
Because we might not, you know, it's great to talk about all the wonderful things we would like to do, but we might not have that kind of time.
So I am asking the people that are watching right now, and even the people in the audience, if you got your phone, pull out your phone, find it wherever you can, click share.
And if you know who your member of Congress is, hopefully you do.
If you don't find out real quick, you got to.
Share this with Elon Musk.
Share it with Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr.
Any name that you can think in the Trump sphere, the Biden sphere, any name that you can think of that will be of value, share this.
Tens of thousands of people can act this very second, and that's what I think is critical.
So let me just say, as part of sharing that and contacting your congressperson, I think what Scott had put forward as something so, so simple, just tell them to urge Biden to rescind the authority to use attackums inside of Russia.
Very, very simple and must be done immediately.
So let's see.
Let's turn to Wilmer Leon then.
Who in his many years of radio has tried to look at what the left is saying and what the right is saying and where is there some common cause between them.
And we had Margaret Kimberley talking about the Harris voters.
And then there's a lot of people who are not Trump or Harris voters and don't want to see a nuclear war.
How do we bridge those people who put themselves in different ideological self-determinations?
How do we bridge them together to come together to say no and do something to stop nuclear war?
Great question, first of all.
Thank you.
Before I answer that, let me say, in listening to Congressman Kucinich, and in listening to Professor Kowalik, I have come up with a new concept called necrophilic nihilism, which is a fascination with human death while denying the fundamental aspects of human existence.
Thanks to the both of you for helping me create that.
Well, you know, first of all, I think when we look at The dynamics of this election, one of the things that became incredibly apparent to me was there was very little daylight, Medea, between the Democrats and the Republicans.
For example, we can look at the policy towards Cuba, and we can see what former President Obama tried to do in relieving a little tension towards Cuba.
Donald Trump came in, reimposed the policy.
And even though Joe Biden promised to further the Obama policy, he doubled down.
So that's just one example.
We can look at, for example, the Iran nuclear deal.
And we know what the Obama administration did as it relates to that.
We know Trump came in.
And put the kibosh on that.
And then Joe Biden running on, we are going to re-initiate the JCPOA, which he could have done very simply with a pen and a napkin.
He could have done that, but did he do that?
No.
So we also have this stereotype.
It's probably not as prevalent now as it was when I was growing up, but we have this stereotype.
Of Republicans being the warmongers, being the hawks, and the Democrats being the doves.
And what we have now come to understand that Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas, they pay both sides of the equation.
So understanding that very little daylight between.
The fiasco that we now know as Ukraine was started by Joe Biden, a Democrat.
It's interesting now that when we listen to the rhetoric from the campaign, it was the Republicans that sounded sensible on this issue, even though I really don't.
In fact, when you listen to what Donald Trump is proposing, And we all know that that's utterly ridiculous.
It's a non-starter.
But he's proposing that.
So again, what we have are two wings of the same bird that are basically working towards the same agenda, The rhetoric might be a bit softer, but the interests that are being served are the same.
So what are we to do?
Well, I think what we've got to do is what we're working or starting to do with this, and that is change the narrative.
We have to take control of the narrative.
You know, it was the patron saint Of the Republican Party and of conservatives, Ronald Reagan.
If you all remember the Reagan-Gorbachev statement, nuclear war is unwinnable.
Therefore, it should not be fought.
I never thought that I'd sit on a panel like this and quote Ronald Reagan.
But as they say, even a blind squirrel can find a nut in the forest sometimes.
And on that point, he's correct.
There's something about, what is it, mutually assured destruction that some people don't seem to understand what mutual means, what assured means, and what destruction means.
And Professor Postle, are you still here?
Have you done any research?
On whether or not radioactive isotopes and fallouts impacts Republicans differently than it impacts Democrats.
Have you done any research in that area?
Oh, well, is that something that you think is worth looking into?
Because obviously, there are some people who see this in some type of binary construct as when...
Or win or lose.
They don't understand mutually assured destruction.
They think that there's some winnable element here when everybody loses.
And that seems to now have just gotten lost in the conversation.
This is a no-win game.
And the other thing that I find incredibly frustrating is many of us sit here, not here, but here, and as though this is a new issue.
We've been at this game since World War II.
And we've been having these discussions.
Since the end of World War II.
Dr. King told us what war is, now he wasn't talking specifically about nuclear war in this statement, but war is an enemy of the poor.
And that he watched the development of this ideology and this mindset, and he now saw a country that has gone insane on the concept of war.
And that insanity seems to only Have multiplied, only has grown.
It has not relinquished.
So we have to, and Garland's suggestion about those that are watching this and sending this, that's a great way of starting to reclaim the narrative.
Our politics, to a great degree, has become so tribalized Now becoming reduced in many regards, the dialogue is becoming reduced to the least common denominators.
We talk in soundbites.
We don't even really engage in dialogue.
It's so tribal.
It's you versus me.
There's very little interest in common ground.
And so it has become very easy to lose control of the narrative through Soundbites.
Immigrants are pouring over our border and they're going to rape and pillage and do all that kind of foolishness.
And, you know, of course, we have Haitians in Springfield eating dogs and cats and, you know, all the things that they do.
And so it's been, it boiled down to the least common denominators.
And so that's why I believe it is imperative.
Through events such as this, we have to reclaim the narrative.
There is no winning side.
The Secretary of State needs to understand.
Anthony Blinken needs to understand.
There is no winning side here.
You push the button and it's game over.
What part of that Is Tony Blinken here?
Okay, Tony, look.
There is no winning side here.
You push the button, game over.
And final point, I don't think President Putin is bluffing.
Don't play that card.
He's got two aces.
And I think there may be another one in his deck as well.
No bluff, dude.
Don't push the button.
We all lose.
So Wilmer talks about changing the narrative.
And I think one thing that we can recognize that is brilliant about Donald Trump is that he taps into the sentiment of people, in this case, not wanting to go to war.
And we might not believe that he's able to solve the problem in Ukraine on day one.
But certainly that idea that he could solve this is something that appealed to a lot of people.
So, Anya, I think you are particularly in just a fascinating position where there are some people that see you as part of the left, like...
How do you see the ability to take that sentiment of people that Trump tied into and turn it into some real politically viable action?
Yeah, well, I think look at where Tucker Carlson was this past week.
Look at who he was talking to.
He was talking to the individual, Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, who Anthony Blinken should be talking to.
And unfortunately, I don't think, if I'm putting myself in the Russian perspective right now, that there is anyone other than maybe Trump himself and people around him in the administration so far.
That I would trust speaking to.
Marco Rubio is not someone who embodies the America first, isolationist, paleocon style conservatism that Trump wants.
Instead, he's the opposite.
He's the traditional neocon who went to Libya to cheer on the destruction, the native destruction of that country, who went to the border of Venezuela to cheer on the U.S. attempted invasion there in 2019 when you remember they had those aid trucks that are really just going to be delivered by the U.S. military.
And, you know, he's had this whole history, this very bizarre history, actually, that I write about in the book that Lahton.
He claims his family fled Cuba under Castro.
In reality, immigration papers show his family came three years before the Cuban Revolution.
So he his family actually fled the U.S.-backed dictatorship.
And yet he came up with this story in order to get elected in Florida.
Not only that, but.
His brother-in-law, Orlando Celia, was actually jailed for running drugs, being one of the main, the primary Miami drug cocaine kingpins of the 1980s.
And Marco Rubio himself lived in the home when he was a teenager, out of which he This is all in the Miami New Times.
You had former Miami police officials saying it's bogus for Marco Rubio to claim he had no idea that this was going on when he was living in that home.
His brother-in-law later came out of prison and Rubio even featured him on the stage at campaign rallies.
But for some reason, while you have the media obsessing over Pete Hegseth for pro...
They ignore anything critical about Marco Rubio.
He's not a controversial appointment at all, you notice.
Instead, they have to bring up Tulsi Gabbard.
Yesterday, I saw ABC wrote a report claiming that she...
And even after we told her that this was not a legitimate source, she kept reading it, sending it to us.
So that's what they target as something that's bad, that Tulsi now...
And if she's reading RT, I think that's a good thing because if you're dealing with the Russians, you should be getting their perspective on the world instead of shutting them out the way that we've been living for the past four years.
So the question, I think, of whether or not Trump can succeed in this second term in achieving peace in Ukraine or anywhere else is whether or not figures like Rubio are selected and going to work to undermine Trump or if Rubio is selected knowing that Trump can replace him at any time and if he betrays Trump, he can become like Mike Pompeo or any of these other dead political figures.
He's never going to have a career afterwards.
Or is he coming in Thinking this is a big opportunity, I should probably listen to my boss and not try to undermine him every step of the way.
I mean, I would give Rubio the chance to actually carry out a foreign policy dictated by Trump, even though I'm not super confident that's going to happen.
The other issue that I have, even with Tulsi and the nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary I was encouraged to see him join forces with Trump, and there are a lot of things that I really like and appreciate about RFK.
I think he speaks about Russia totally level-headedly, but what blows my mind is the inability for someone like him to grasp the reality of Israel, of Zionism, and the occupation.
and and do you During his presidential campaign, we got criticized for kind of drilling him too hard on this one issue, Israel.
People would say, oh, it's not fair for you to just talk constantly about Israel when he's so good on other issues, we should give him credit.
That's true to a degree, but for me, you can't talk to me about peace.
You can't even talk to me about free speech and our rights here in the United States if you're going to side with the Israel lobby.
The Zionists in the Middle East.
You're not going to have peace, and we're not going to have free speech and rights here.
We're not going to have the right to demonstrate or to even speak about the crimes that Israel's committee in Gaza right now.
And an issue from even RFK Jr. and Tulsi is that there's this common thread of the influence of the Miriam Adelson Money Network, the largest donor to Trump.
She spent $100 million at least.
That we know of on his campaign.
And both RFK Jr. and Tulsi, for as great as they are, they both went and kissed the ring.
Tulsi's taken money from the Adelson group in the past, taken pictures with Rabbi Shmuley, the now kind of infamous character.
I think she probably regrets that photo at this point.
And I think RFK Jr. should regret it as well because he was doing campaign events with this individual and even participating.
So that's a little bit odd to me.
The fact that there is this common thread, even when it looks like someone is alternative or, Well, they still come together on this one issue of being part of the Zionist lobby influence.
And look what happened to Matt Gaetz, one of the kind of more rebel nominees that Trump put forward for AG, one of the most outspoken members of Congress who has not taken money from AIPAC or the Israel lobby.
He voted against legislation.
We're criminalizing anti-Semitism speech that's actually an attack on our rights as Americans.
So I thought, hey, if this is the kind of Republican Trump is going to put in AG, it's probably the best we can get.
Someone that's willing to even say that they're not going to criminalize free speech.
Wow.
Well, he didn't last long as a nominee, you notice.
And the person that they switched him out with, Tam Bondi, is really similar to Matt Gaetz in a lot of ways, except on this one issue.
And so there will be no Make America Great Again if Tulsi and the team go in there and they are going to side with the lies that have come in the media and from Israel itself.
Because we can't have a coherent America First policy if we're putting Israel first.
And the time to really break that egg or have that discussion is now because we don't have any time.
I think there's too much of a there's this.
They get Russia really well.
And I'm impressed a lot of times when you hear people speaking on even Fox that like some of the mainstream commentators understand that we can't just go and poke the Russian bear.
But there's this blind spot for them or pretty much like a rabid.
Even those people say, well, it's because we have to peel Russia away from China and we have to pivot to China.
J.D. Vance, the VP to his credit, even though he wrote this excellent op-ed opposing escalation with Russia, he did say, you know, we need some of those weapons or an arsenal in case we have to pivot to Taiwan and China.
And so that's dangerous as well.
I think MAGA is going to get it wrong if they think that they can.
Drive a wedge between Russia and China, or if they think that these conflicts are happening in a vacuum.
That's, I think, the point that I want to end on.
As you look in Ukraine, you have NATO at odds with Russia in the Middle East, everything that's happening around Syria and Israel.
I don't think we should separate those wars.
What's happening in Syria is directly linked to what's happening in Gaza and Lebanon.
And then now you have even the US talking about the Korean Peninsula being involved in this conflict, claiming that there are North Korean troops fighting in Russia.
And whether or not that's true, if that's the mentality that the US and South Korea are operating on now that they're trying to push South Korea to directly arm Ukraine with lethal weapons, it really feels like a global war.
And it also feels like these are all these conflicts that were frozen or supposed to be frozen in time after World War II, but that have actually just been roiling.
and now it's coming to a head with World War III.
You have Korea, which was one of the Then Israel, which was created right after World War II and has been in constant conflict with its neighbors since.
And then you have NATO, the direct outcome of World War II being pushed to the ultimate place that NATO is always going to lead, which is direct confrontation with Russia.
Also interesting that these also happen to be points where Trump himself, as president in his first administration, tried to actually make peace.
He went to Korea.
I mean, I thought that was a great initiative to see an American president go to the demarcation, to the demilitarized zone, and meet with the North Korean president, talk about ending U.S. military drills with South Korea.
That was encouraging.
That got overturned.
What was it, 2017 or 2018?
That was, again, a very encouraging, hopeful, inspiring moment.
Got overturned by his, you know, Bolton and Pompeo write about how they worked to overturn everything that was agreed upon in Helsinki.
And then with NATO and or in the Middle East, I think that was his weakest point because he's got the Kushners in his ear there.
The influence of the Israel lobby, I think, will be the test that Trump faces now, if he especially wants to talk about driving out the deep state.
So I think there's a chance that there could be some good, because Trump's instincts, based on what I've read in the memoirs from some of his former officials, can be good, even with Venezuela.
Bolton and Pompeo write about how Trump was begging them to meet with Maduro directly, and they were like, no, you can't do that.
It's definitely not going to happen with Rubio in power, but I think that if Trump learned his lessons and can actually get people like Rubio to carry out his policy and threaten them, say, I'll make you embarrassed and you'll never have a job in Washington or anywhere again unless you do what I say, that there's some hope that, especially when it comes to Russia, we could see a resolution.
But right now...
I'm just so sad about everything that's happened in Syria over the last week, as if Gaza and Lebanon weren't enough.
So peace can't come soon enough.
That's, I guess, the point that I'll end on.
Thank you.
Well, thank you, Anya, for a pretty amazing analysis of the different factors in play and the different characters in play.
And that I think I want to go to you, Jose, as somebody who is trying to build a movement and as somebody who has done these very, very brilliant interventions in trying to even take on the icons of the left, whether it's AOC or others, to push them where they're not good and to expose them.
What are the best tactics that we can use as we go forward and thinking now in trying to influence people who will be part of a Trump administration?
Is it confronting them directly or is it finding common ground and trying to work with them?
Well, thank you, Medea, for that introduction and that question.
And I want to thank all of the panelists.
I guess I'm the last speaker of the day.
So I won't make this too long, but I, I, in considering your question, I want people to think about the fact that in April of 2025, it'll be the 250th anniversary of the founding of this country.
And frankly, I am tired of hearing people, uh, uh, And you go to where he's buried today and it looks like crap.
His grave is all just like eroded and it's dirty and it is in the poorest congressional district in the country.
You can't think of a better visual metaphor than what people today, Americans today, actually think about their own country.
The reason we remember these people is not to remember the worst of them.
It's to build upon what they actually left us.
To be proud of American history is to be proud of people like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said the choice today is no longer between nonviolence and violence, but nonviolence and non-existence.
And I am a big believer in creative, nonviolent, direct action.
I was 15 years old when I was on Carnegie Hall sharing a stage with Bernard Lafayette, of all people.
I had no real business being up there, and he commanded everybody to take nonviolence internationally in your own home and everywhere you can put it.
Because that's the only way forward.
because the real power is in ideas and it's in thinking it's in action it's in the future if you don't That means you don't have a plan for now.
See, I happen to believe that electoral politics can work because I ran as an independent candidate.
I ran as an independent candidate and I found people who were younger than me, slightly older than me, people who are stalwart and passionate and brave, who stood up to people like Nancy Pelosi for the first time and called her out and yelled at her and called her like this crazy muck witch that she is.
I am proud that my campaign was able to be a vehicle.
For people who were trying to do the right thing and didn't know where to start, as a way for them to say, you know what, I want to do the right thing and I want to go help Jose take down Richie Torres, one of the worst scumbags in the country and the world, who is currently illegally occupying the congressional district in the 15th congressional district in the Bronx.
The entire point of running that electoral campaign was what we did, especially towards the end.
The last two months of our campaign was the most powerful campaign, I think, that defined anyone in the country or defined any campaigns in the country.
It was suggested to me by one of my dear staffers that we get up at four in the morning so we could be at the UN at six in the morning when all the world leaders were coming in to give them leaflets about updated briefings.
about the fact that Putin had just updated the nuclear doctrine to use nuclear weapons on non-nuclear states, that's Ukraine, of course, but also the fact that there was a doctor who was being censored.
His name is Dr. Mark Perlmutter, who's been trying to get heard by any U.S. official that would have him.
And we print.
We stood in front of the Algerian missions, the Nigerian missions.
The Brazilian missions.
We stood in front of all these missions.
We flagged down anybody walking in and we were talking to them.
We were getting their contacts.
That was us.
When Mark Perlmutter wanted to speak at Mount Sinai about what he saw, a doctor who was in Gaza for three weeks who testified.
That he was on the phone with Chuck Schumer's office in Gaza as bombs were raining behind him, and he had to tell the secretary lady, oh, that noise behind me, those are bombs.
I'm sorry.
I can't do anything about that right now.
When he wanted to be heard at Mount Sinai, it was planned a month ahead, and it was canceled 24 hours before.
Where the hell were other people trying to get him another place, another venue?
Why did it have to be the LaRouche candidates who got him another place so that he could actually have a place to be heard and speak?
That was because we ran an electoral campaign on the basis of nonviolent, creative, direct action.
So I happen to think that it can work.
I'm tired of the whining.
And I look at people like AOC who should have been talking to people like Mark Perlmutter who was in Gaza or talking to people like Dr. Feroz Sidhwa who published this article in the New York Times about what the doctors actually saw and when there was all this slander.
You know, the article said, you know, that there were bullets found in children's head, but it was all fake.
And then it turns out that it was independent forensic analysis done on the evidence, and it turns out it was all real.
So, you know, where was AOC calling that out?
Talking about trans bathrooms is what she was talking about at the Capitol.
Oh, no, this is the biggest civil rights issue of our time.
How about the civil rights issue of not getting blown up in a mushroom cloud?
Okay.
So I'm going to have to unfortunately stop you, and we don't have time for the lightning round, which is very unfortunate because I did want to ask you all what you would say if you were in an elevator with...
But I say that because Scott and I did have a chance to meet with people on the left, like George McGovern, and we got a chance to meet with people on the right, like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And we were quite astounded that with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, about wanting to stop sending U.S. money to Ukraine.
And yet, as we were going into her office, she had a sign that said, There are only two genders, male and female.
Trust the science.
And the day before she had gone out to the Supreme Court to yell at people for wanting to support trans rights.
So when you have people that you don't agree with on a lot of other issues, How do we work in this next period is so important.
So I think in the lightning round, I want to ask you all, the elevator with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and where do we go as we are looking, as we are seeking, and it is so necessary to find that common ground, how do we do it?
You know, go back to something I said a second ago.
You know, I was looking on my phone, and what I saw was there were people who were on X sending out, I guess they're still called tweets, and they had at Elon Musk, at Marjorie Taylor Greene, at all of these names.
And I would say this, that we, if any of them are watching, hopefully they are, you know, Elon Musk, you're the richest man in the world.
If you don't act, you'll be the richest man in a graveyard.
That's not a fun place to be.
What good is it to be a member of Congress when you're dead?
And there's no Congress.
One of the things we're doing, and we have to keep in mind here, is there's a discussion about what's going to happen after Donald Trump becomes president.
I think we've got to make that discussion, what's going to happen if Donald Trump becomes president.
Because we have an issue right now.
Look, what happened recently in South Korea?
Last week, the South Korean president declared martial law and they were able to stop him, etc.
I suspect Tony Blinken had something to do with that.
You know, South Korea is a colony.
That didn't just happen.
He didn't do it unless he was given permission or told to do it.
In the same way that they've got a race going on to January 20th and they're trying to start more trouble in Ukraine and they're trying to start more trouble in Syria, rest assured they want some war going on on the Korean peninsula and there's nuclear weapons there too.
So we saw how the people of Korea came out immediately in the middle of the night.
And they surrounded the national parliament and they demanded that there be an immediate end to martial law.
And that was incredible grassroots power that they and the members of their parliament came back in and reversed it within eight hours.
So Wilmer, how do we get to the How do we get that gumption that the people of South Korea had to demand policies that are good for us?
I'm going to speak to that from a very, very limited perspective.
I'm an African-American political scientist.
And one of my mentors, Dr. Mac Jones, wrote a piece a number of years ago called A message to a Black political scientist where he said, it's our obligation to do our analysis through the perspective of our lived history as African Americans.
So to answer your question from a very narrow perspective, in 1964, a group of three Japanese writers and a group of, and I hope I don't mispronounce this too badly, Haiba Kusha.
Thank you.
Atomic bomb survivors.
They went to Harlem.
And they met with Malcolm X. And Malcolm was very clear in 64 on where he stood on this issue.
We've had since 1945, we've had W.E.B.
Du Bois.
We've had Bayard Rustin.
We've had Coretta King.
We've had the Black Panthers.
We've had Dr. King.
All of these individuals in black leadership that were on the right side of this issue.
Margaret mentioned former President Barack Obama.
I think one of the reasons why he was elected was to sell neocolonialism, colonialism, and American imperialism.
So to answer your question, to use that as the preface, I ask black leadership today.
I ask Vice President Harris.
Where are you on this issue?
Where are you?
There were very few policies you were able to articulate on the campaign trail, which is one of the reasons why you lost.
It had nothing to do with people didn't want a black woman president.
It was you didn't have anything to offer anybody of substance.
Where's Congressman Hakeem Jeffries on this issue?
Linda Thomas Greenfield, the American ambassador in the UN.
Where are you?
On this issue.
Y 'all, silence is deafening.
You're on the wrong side of leadership.
You're on the wrong side of history.
You're on the wrong side of the issue.
Where is the Congressional Black Caucus?
What is supposed to be the conscience of the Congress?
They're unconscious.
So if we want to coalesce, you coalesce around positions of strength.
Otherwise, it's called capitulation.
It is imperative that the black community, African-American leadership, get on the right side of this issue.
That's how you deal with the MAGA people.
That's how you deal with the other knuckleheads that can't wait to push a button and end the world.
So, Anya, you are in an elevator, and in comes Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.
Now, she led the effort a long time ago now, almost three years ago, at the end, well, just three weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to get 30 members of Congress, the most progressive members of Congress.
To sign a letter that said, "Thank you, Biden, for your magnificent work getting economic and financial support to Ukraine." But it would be good to start a process of diplomacy that might lead to a ceasefire within 24 hours that was rescinded.
And she, as the head of the Progressive Caucus, has not said a word since then, nor have any members not only that signed that letter, but Democratic politicians.
So you're in the elevator with her.
What do you say?
See, I struggle to speak with these.
Maybe it's because I used to think that the Democrats were the party that represented me or represented peace.
So now when I see them, I just want to insult them.
I'm like, why did you crush everything that I believed in?
I mean, what is it going to take for you guys to grow a spine?
You know better.
That's the thing about these.
And that's what Obama frustrated me so much about Obama was it's the sense of they know better.
They're aware that their administration, the Democrats, are stifling peace and are acting as belligerents.
So what is it going to take for you to have your moment in history?
I think that's really the only way to appeal to some of those people.
In some ways, I would have an easier time approaching someone from MAGA and just making a case about hard U.S. interests, because that's, I think, the most convincing argument.
You can't convince anybody with...
A lot of people in power don't really care about that.
But if we were just saying, like, look, we don't want to die.
It's not in our interest to have this war.
That, to me, should be the easiest case to make.
But the frustrating thing about progressives is that they know better.
So I would just say, look, it's time for this party if it wants to survive as a party, because honestly...
It's time for people that stand for peace to retake the reins, and this is actually an opportunity for you to define the party as progressive once again and to elevate the principles that she and other members of the Progressive Caucus claim to stand for.
Otherwise, they're going to go down on the Titanic, which is the Democratic Party, if they want to become the party of war and they want to be the progressive.
This is what's so interesting.
The populist base of the Republican Party actually took over that party through Trump.
But the Democrats completely sidelined any progressive or grassroots base.
They actually are just so undemocratic, right, that they pretty much just had consistent elections that were rigged in order to prevent the populace and the progressives from coming into power.
So I think if they don't, if people like Pramila Jayapal don't do it, then it's going to be up to others to protest.
And if that's what she wants her legacy to be, good for them.
I mean, I don't have much hope in the progressives, to be honest.
Just a very specific thing for those of you here or watching this, if you will do us the favor of contacting your member of Congress, especially these ones that had called for A ceasefire early on and became afraid of it.
Tell them to sign on to this bill that was put forward by a conservative Republican, and we don't care that it's a conservative Republican, do we?
It is H.R. 10218.
Prohibit the transfer of attackums to Ukraine and prohibit the U.S. from supporting the operation of these attackums inside of Russia.
So, Jose, you are in that elevator.
And who walks in that elevator but General Lloyd Austin.
Oh, Jesus.
He comes in there.
This is a general that you know used to be on the board of Raytheon before he became U.S. Secretary of Defense.
But, like a lot of people in the military, they know what's going on.
They don't want to go to war with Russia and certainly don't want a nuclear war.
So what would you say to him?
Wow.
It's not really my style to find someone in an elevator.
Usually I figure out where they're speaking and then I'll stand up and denounce them.
You got lucky.
I got lucky, I guess.
What do you say to somebody who's actually tried to kill their conscience?
And I really mean that, right?
Because, you know, you have people like AOC who...
So the way I intervene on her was calling her a coward, a hypocrite, saying she supported Nazis in Ukraine.
And I just like denounced her because you see it when she looked at me, she's like, there's a crisis in her mind where she knows I'm right, but she knows she's also selling out.
And there's like a conflict where she's like, well, you kind of have to keep selling out in order if I ever want to get my green new deal passed.
But I think, I made a mistake where, with Pompeo, I said, you're a killer, you're bloodthirsty, you're this, you're that.
And I think somebody like Lloyd Austin might be the same way, where he'll say thank you.
It's like, yes, I love being bloodthirsty.
I would probably start to ridicule Lloyd Austin in some way or another.
That's actually how you kind of get at them, is not by calling them the things they want to be, but you ridicule them.
But I would say something, and that's what I would just kind of like end on the note here is that, you know, silence is consent.
The truth defies silence.
Stand up, intervene, declare your independence, and be like Medea Benjamin, who has done interventions for decades and has proven that to be true.
So as we wrap up this panel, I want to say that you don't have to wait for some serendipity to be in an elevator with one of these people because Anthony Blinken himself will be testifying in Congress this Wednesday at 2 p.m. in 2172 Rayburn, the number of the room.
If any of you want to come and join us, And have a chance to try to say something to Anthony Blinken, please join us.
And you can reach us, any of the people here that go around with Code Pink.
We would love to have you come.
And Larry Wilkerson is going to join us on Thursday in Congress as we go around meeting with different members.
So thank you to this wonderful panel here.
And catch him in the elevator.
We might get lucky and catch Anthony Blinken in the elevator.
So everybody think of what you would like to say to Anthony Blinken.
Thank you so much.
Yes, yes, it can happen.
So let's give a big round of applause to this panel.
And Scott will round us out here.
Well, thank you very much.
Again, Garland Nixon had to leave, but a big round of applause for Garland Nixon.
Wilmer Leon, Dr. Wilmer Leon, Anya Parapel, Jose Vega, Madea Benjamin for coming in and doing the panel.
And for the other members of the panel, Theodore Postol, Larry Workerson, Margaret Kimberly, Dan Kovalik, Dennis Kucinich, the great Dennis Kucinich, and Max Blumenthal.
We love you.
Max, I just want to say this to But after listening to him, if you don't give him the equivalent of what you gave Tucker Carlson to start his X channel, you're failing America.
That's the kind of journalist you want.
So I want to appreciate everybody who came here today.
You made this possible.
I want to give my thanks to the people who are watching.
This was fantastic.
The panelists, the organizers, Jeff, Norman, Morgan, everybody who came together to make this happen.
You know, we learned some things today.
We learned that working in Congress is hard.
But we learned that being a good American citizen is harder, which means we have a duty and responsibility as American citizens to work harder.
We've heard from Jose, Margaret, Wilmer, Garland, the works on what we need to do and what we can do.
And it's very important that we do it.
Medea mentioned a bill.
This isn't just a bill, ladies and gentlemen.
This is the equivalent of the cure for cancer.
If you want to stop a nuclear war, you must stop the Atacum's missiles from being launched against Russia.
This bill will do it.
I don't know what everybody here and watching is doing between now and January 20th, but if you're not every day picking up the phone and calling your congressional representatives, calling your senators and saying, what are you doing about this bill?
Make them lose their sleep so that you can live forever.
This is the cure for cancer.
This will stop a war.
Let's bring it to life.
Make those phone calls.
It's what we need to do.
Now I'd like to do something in closing.
I want to address the Russian people and the Russian government.
Put this here together, not just for the American people, but for you.
Today you heard voices.
Voices of Americans who said, we don't want a war with Russia.
Voices of Americans.
Voices of Americans who are demonstrating through their presence here, their words and their actions, that they're not just saying this, they're living this, they're breathing this.
We don't want a war with Russia.
We heard a lot of voices, but there was one voice that I heard throughout this event.
It's the voice of a little girl.
Her voice is the most important.
Because if we fail, she dies.
That little girl and all the little girls and little boys out there.
It is our responsibility as humans, as parents, as adults.
To make a better world for the youth of America, of Russia, of the world.
Please, to the Russian people and to the Russian government, listen to that little girl's laughter.
Help me help you.
You help me help you.
Let's find a way out of this mess.
We are in a bad position.
It looks hopeless sometimes.
But we had voices up here today.
They were saying we are going to work until the last dying breath of our bodies to ensure that there isn't the last dying breath of our bodies so we can keep little voices like that little girls sounding our ears, bringing joy to our lives.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for coming.
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