Judging Freedom - Aaron Maté: Is Trump a Neocon?

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Aaron Maté: Is Trump a Neocon?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, November 14th, 2024. Our dear friend Aaron Maté joins us now. Aaron, a pleasure. Thank you very much. Before I ask you if Donald Trump is a neocon and what you think about Huckabee, Heggs, Seth, Rubio, and Waltz, what is your understanding of what happened at the soccer match in Amsterdam? I'll refer people to watch the Gray Zones coverage of this. Max Blumenthal and our colleague Wyatt Reed did a full breakdown of just the lies in the U.S. media portraying what happened in Amsterdam as sort of anti-Semitic pogrom against Jewish people, when in reality, pro-Israel hooligans were harassing people, were attacking people, and they faced a retaliation.

And because our media in the U.S. is so subservient to the Israeli narrative, they painted all this as some sort of anti-Semitic attack. And for some reason, and I get to understand why, there was Israeli agents accompanying the pro max max told us that mossad accompanied them why would mossad uh you know we all know what soccer matches are like they they draw the often not always and not exclusively hooligans not just in amsterdam but in london and elsewhere sure why would Mossad be accompanying these characters, unless this is some sort of a Netanyahu stunt to create sympathy for the Zionists?

I mean, great question. There's so many questions surrounding Netanyahu right now. He's facing what should be two major international scandals. The first being, as you've covered, the revelation that his office passed on fake documents to portray Hamas as refusing to reach a ceasefire deal, which could then therefore justify Netanyahu's Scorched Earth campaign to abandon the hostages and kill as many palestinians as possible and new revelations uh that the netanyahu office ignored warnings about the attack on october 7th oh i didn't know about the new warnings that are the new revelations about warnings on october 7th

from whom did those warnings come do you know, the revelation is basically that the Netanyahu government tried to blackmail people into not coming forward with revelations that there were warnings prior to October 7th. This is a mini scandal brewing inside Israel, received almost no attention inside the U.S. with the exception of Seymour Hersh, who wrote a column about it on a sub stack. But that's the revelation, that the Netanyahu office was engaged in basically in blackmail to shut people up from raising the fact that there were warnings prior to October 7th about a looming attack. You know, Netanyahu also is facing an issue covered by Haaretz, but not by the Western press, that he has been ordered to give public testimony in one of his corruption cases on Monday, December 2nd. He has made an application to avoid it, saying his time is needed defending the nation, and the court has rejected that application. Now, I don't understand enough about how the Israeli judicial system works. In America, you cannot compel the defendant to give testimony against himself, but apparently in Israel you can,

even if the defendant is the prime minister. I also thought these cases were in abeyance while he stays in office but apparently one of them uh max knows which one this is this is the guy i think from long island that is alleged to have given netanyahu cash in a coke can you know about this case i don't know how you'd fit cash in a coke can wow they, they must have cut it open and peed it out, put the cash in, put it back in, and shipped it over there. I'm not familiar with that one. But the corruption that is planned for all of us to see that doesn't require any digging is the corruption inside the Trump transition team, where Trump is staffing his transition, his new administration with Israel firsters like Mike

Huckabee. And we know why. It's because he's been bought off by Mary Madelson and other pro-Israel donors. That is the Israel first policy that the Trump transition is putting on display. And it's amazing. We thought things were bad under Biden and it's hard to imagine them getting worse. But I do think Trump will be giving Biden a run for his money. Here's the putative United States ambassador to Israel. I know him well. We worked at Fox for a couple of years. He's the former governor of Arkansas. His daughter is now the governor of Arkansas.

She's the former press secretary for the president. Some of this will tear your stomach, Aaron. Chris, cut number four. Basically, I mean, there really is no such thing as, and I have to be careful saying this, because people really get it. There's really no such thing as a Palestinian. There's no such thing as a Persian.

There's such a complexity in that. There's really no such thing. That's been a political tool to try to force land away from Israel. The two-state solution, if we mean two governments holding the same piece of real estate, is irrational and unworkable. If there is a two-state solution, the Palestinian state needs to be outside the boundaries of the nation of Israel. There's plenty of land in the world that we could find a place and say, OK, let's let's create a Palestinian state. There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It's Judea and Samaria. There's no such thing as a settlement. They're communities,

they're neighborhoods, they're cities. There's no such thing as an occupation. This is, well, I'll ask you, is this typical of Christian nationalists who believe that God the Father gave a certain amount of a geographic area to the Jews and that authority and dominance and hegemony descends down to the current generation yeah and the part they leave out when speaking to the public is that they also hope that their fanatic support for israel will hasten the rapture in which uh most jews will be killed and uh and then jesus returns i mean that's that's, that's the part of this that always gets left out

and that underpins, unfortunately, the so-called support for Israel that people like Mike Huckabee represent. It's sad. I've always thought, Judge, and I'm curious your thoughts on this. I've always thought that Mike Huckabee is a very talented politician.

He's a good orator. He's funny. But seeing his communication skills being put to use, projecting this evangelical vision of Israel and denying Palestinians their right to exist and their past, it's so scary. And we have to think about the implications of this person becoming the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Again, it's hard to imagine a world in which things get more sadistic than

they have been under the Biden administration, which feigns concern for Palestinian life while taking part in the extermination of tens of thousands of Palestinians. But Trump really is putting together a team that is just as scary, if not scarier. And the fact that Mike Huckabee can be put forward as a serious candidate for being the ambassador to Israel while openly saying the Palestinian people are not a real people and calling for their ethnic cleansing as he's done, saying that if they want a state, they can go elsewhere, just not inside Palestine. Very, very scary thought. And it's amazing that it's not a scandal yet inside US. I mean, so far, the outrage over Trump's picks have focused on his picks for defense secretary, for the Justice Department,

for the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, not on an evangelical fanatic who won't even acknowledge that Palestinians are real people. I wonder what this tells us about Trump, Aaron, the commitment to Mrs. Adelson in return for $100 million, I guess, is more ironclad than the most fanatic Zionist president the country has ever had, and that's Joe Biden. It sounds like it might get worse. I'm going to play a clip for you from Pete Hegseth, whom I also know, with whom I also worked for a number of years at Fox, which if you haven't seen it, will turn your stomach. I mean, these guys have such a profoundly distorted view of history and of humanity um it's not hard to believe that they will be confirmed matt gates is another story

that is one of total disqualification for the job we can talk about him uh in a minute. But Huckabee and Hegseth might be right up the Republican alley, certainly the neocon alley, certainly the Zionist alley, and to my dismay, but not surprise, Donald Trump's alley. Absolutely. And look, there's a tweet that Donald Trump put out in 2015, where he was mocking Marco Rubio, who's now his pick to be secretary of state. And Trump said of Marco Rubio that he's a puppet of Sheldon Adelson. Sheldon Adelson was right to invest in Marco Rub and it's Trump who's the puppet of the Adelsons to the point where he's now picking another puppet of the Adelsons, Marco Rubio, to be his secretary of state. Listen, Judge, you know Trump personally. I'm curious your thoughts on this. It just strikes me that his political instincts can usually be pretty on the mark.

He has his finger on the pulse of the electorate. And that's why during this campaign he talked about being the president of peace. He exploited Democrats' support for the genocide. He went to Michigan and talked about bringing peace to the Middle East. He put out a flyer aimed at Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in Michigan with a picture of Kamala Harris superimposed over the rubble of Gaza. And the caption said, we did it, Joe. So Trump knew that putting himself forward as a man of peace who would end the genocide would do well electorally. But now that he has the job, what is he doing? He's completely selling out those people who thought he would bring peace

by appointing an even more fanatically pro-Israel administration than the previous one. I'm sorry to say that you're correct. He doesn't care about the truth. He only cares about the acquisition and exercise of power uh this cast of the characters that he has nominated some of whom as i've told you i know well um i actually know all of them but i know well huckabee and uhgseth. Rubio, I know just from interviewing maybe a half a dozen times. Gates, I don't know. I think I interviewed him once a long time ago. These interviews, of course,

were when I was at Fox. It shows you a very dark side of Donald Trump. And Benjamin Netanyahu should be happy because Donald Trump is going to, well, I don't know how he could be happier than with what he has now. Did Joe Biden turn down any request that Netanyahu made, as far as we know? As far as we know,

he paused one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs after ensuring that Israel already had all the 2,000-pound bombs that it needed. So even Biden's one pause of U.S. weapons was completely symbolic because, as his officials made clear, we've already given Israel plenty of 2,000-pound bombs, so we can pause this one. And of course, what does Israel do with those 2,000 pound bombs? It just flattened entire neighborhoods of Gaza, flattened schools, flattened mosques with the goal of making Gaza unlivable. And that's the legacy that Trump, despite his campaign suggestions to the contrary, is now continuing inside of Gaza. The one person who I find interesting in Trump's picks so far is Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi Gabbard, I do know. I've interviewed her before. And Tulsi Gabbard has, at times, been very brave in taking on the establishment.

She spoke out against the U.S. proxy wars in both Ukraine and Syria. And especially on the latter, in Syria, she took a lot of hits from the establishment for her stance. She went to Syria in 2017 in a bid to try to speak to the government there and the people there to see the impact of the U.S.-led dirty war, in which the U.S. knowingly fueled an insurgency that was dominated by al-Qaeda. And Tulsi Gabbard was a very rare voice against that.

She also criticized the corruption of the DNC in rigging the primary against Bernie Sanders. And she gave up a role as a rising star inside the party to speak out against the bias against Bernie Sanders and against the support for disastrous proxy wars. And even on the issue of Israel, just a few years ago, she was talking about Israel carrying out an illegal military occupation. When Congress member Ilhan Omar was attacked for criticizing the role of AIPAC in Congress, Tulsi Gabbard defended her and declined to call that anti-Semitic. Well, meanwhile, everybody else was denouncing Ilhan Omar as being anti-Semite for simply pointing out that AIPAC buys people off in Congress. So that was Tulsi Gabbard a few years ago.

But over the last year, as she's gotten closer to the Trump camp, it's like a different person when it comes to Israel. She's talked about Hamas as being a group that wants to impose Islamism on the entire world, which is just not true. Hamas is an Islamist group, but its goal is simply to resist military occupation. Whenever you think of it, its goal is not global at all. It's simply to resist the occupation and theft of Palestinian land. And she's also demonized the very brave college protesters who stood up to the genocide on college campuses across the country. zero experience in the intelligence community. And the professionals will run rings around her if there's any vestige of humanity left in her. I couldn't agree with you more. You know, the real power in the intelligence community is the NSA and the CIA,

and they will continue to be run by acolytes of Donald Trump. So I don't know what he expects of her. Just some breaking news. It's not our end of the world, but it is breaking. That the Trump transition team has announced that RFK Jr. will be nominated to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. That will be a very interesting, very, very interesting hearing in the Senate, given his views. It will be. And again, that RFK Jr., similar to Tulsi Gabbard, is someone who, and this is the angle of RFK Jr. that I follow, you know, he was very outspoken in criticizing the U.S. proxy war inside Ukraine. Very knowledgeable and would

platform some of the guests that you feature regularly on your show, including yours truly. I did a podcast with him. I know he also interviewed Scott Ritter and I believe also Douglas McGregor. And he was very critical of the U.S. and its role inside Ukraine. And he previously called Donald Trump a warmonger for his policies when he was in office but also when it comes to israel for reasons that i can never understand rfk was a fanatic supporter of the israeli government even to the right of joe biden if that's possible to believe so you know at one point he told me to stop texting him about israel that it was driving him crazy and we didn't communicate for a few months.

And then we got back to around the time his mother passed away, we got back to communicating. But he is a fanatic about Israel, and he was very, very clear. He said the same thing to McGregor and to Ritter, to Gerald Salenti and to a few others of us that were involved in these communications, don't talk to me about Israel. My mind is made up. Well, here's somebody whose mind is also made up. This is repellent. And if you haven't heard it, I apologize, but you need to hear it.

Pete Hegseth, a date unknown, but here he is championing Zionism like you've probably never heard it championed by an American who purports to be a Christian. Cut number 10. Anyone that wants to take the stage and talk about dual loyalty is dead wrong. What this organization represents, what Western civilization represents today is an understanding that Zionism and Americanism are the front lines of Western civilization and freedom in our world today. And what better time for that relationship? From the scrapping of the terrible Iran deal to the embassy move, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state

and the recognition of the Golan Heights. This president is a true friend of the state of Israel. It is an eternal bond, an unbreakable bond that represents faith and freedom and fidelity to historic religious and cultural traditions, the opposite of secularism and Islamism and anti-Semitism. This reminds me of Rudy Giuliani at Madison Square Garden. This is the rantings of a madman with profound misunderstandings of the forces on the planet. And Trump wants to give him an $850 billion budget and 3 million human beings to manage and command. When he speaks there about Israel being on the front line of Western civilization,

it reminds me of a quote that's attributed to Gandhi, although I'm not sure if Gandhi actually said it, but it's just folklore that this is what Gandhi said, that he was asked what he thought about Western civilization, and Gandhi is said to have replied, I think it would be a very good idea. So that's what I hear when I think about the notion of Israel being in the front line of Western civilization. To the extent that's true, it underscores that this is a civilization of barbarity, of supremacy. That's what Israel is. It's a supremacist state. And why people who call themselves America first can degrade themselves and degrade their country by talking about how Israel is at the vanguard of civilization and we have to defend it, it's beyond me. It's just, how can I look at the reality of the last year? I mean, put aside one of the longest running military occupations of the world prior to October 7th, just of the last year of mass murder.

But yet both our parties, from Trump to Biden, are behind this. Look at Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton sounded indistinguishable from these people when he went to Michigan right before the election and talked about how Jews have an ancestral right to the land because of what their bible says and he talked about israel had no choice but to kill all these palestinian civilians because hamas uses them all as human shields so this fanaticism is off the charts and it's bipartisan um here's a clip just for a little bit of humor of kevin mccarthy the former speaker of the House, commenting on Matt Gaetz, the President-elect's intended nominee to be the Attorney General of the United States, cut number 11. And I'll give you the truth why I'm not Speaker.

It's because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old. An ethics complaint that started before I ever became speaker, and that's illegal, and I'm not going to get in the middle. That stuff is all going to come out. He practiced law for two years. He never prosecuted a case. He never worked for the DOJ, never appeared in court, wasn't a judge, didn't write a law review article, never taught law school, all these things that the Attorney General of the United States, who whatever party is in, is usually recognized and recognizable as one of the 25 or 30 best lawyers in the country. I mean, you can't put Matt Gaetz anywhere near that category. So I don't think he will actually be an attorney general. I mean, I don't know if he's going to get confirmed. He'll be a clerk

who'll do whatever Trump will tell him to do. And Pete Hegg said the same. Trump will say, bomb Tehran, instead of saying, well, wait a minute, you got to consider the ramifications. You want us to destroy some bridges in Tehran. Somebody's going to destroy some bridges in Dallas. Do you really want this to happen? Oh, no, no, no. Hegseth will say, when do you want it done, sir? And Trump will say, you know, prosecute so-and-so, fill in the blank.

And a real AG would say, well, there's no probable cause that so-and-so committed a crime. Matt Gaetz will say, we'll indict him tomorrow. That's what we're confronting. Yeah, yeah. Well, listen, I will say about Matt Gaetz, and I know he's facing, you know, allegations or rumors of a very serious sexual misconduct. And that will play out. I understand that there'll be more released about that in the coming days.

And, but I will say though, you know, he, he is one of the few people in Washington who's called for pardoning Edward Snowden, which, which to me is one.

Okay. I didn't know that. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Yeah. But I also, listen, I want to say on this issue of, you know on this issue of Trump's likely weaponization of government in his favor, I mean, I think that's fair to expect. But nothing that Trump does, I think personally, can match the obscenity that was Russiagate, in which the president of the U.S. was framed as a Russian agent, as a Russian conspirator, based on a conspiracy theory paid for by his

political opponent, Hillary Clinton. And the FBI used Clinton's funding of the Steele dossier as source material. They used that ridiculous Steele dossier for investigative leads and as sort of a roadmap for their investigation. I've written about this extensively. It's now pretty amply documented. And we don't even have to, and we still don't even know all the full details, but what we do know is enough. So I do think Trump now is still, and his supporters are still driven by vindictiveness

for that whole experience, and the fact that there's been no accountability. John Durham, under Trump's watch, carried out an investigation. But as I've written about, John Durham approached the Russiagate scam artists with kid gloves. They obviously were too powerful to go after, people like Hillary Clinton and John Brennan, the former head of the CIA, who was all over Russiagate. So of course, nothing can justify Trump exploiting the government for his own ends at any department, whether it's his blind support for Israel in service of Miriam Adelson or using the DOJ to go after his political enemies. But I just want to say that Democrats do not have a leg to stand on when it comes to hypocrisy because they weaponized the government

to go after a president, an elected president, undermine his presidency with a completely fabricated charge that he was a Russian asset. And we're still living out the consequences of that disaster, of the Russian disaster, and the refusal to have any accountability for it today. You are such a fair-minded person. You should be a judge. You are such a fair-minded person.

I know what you think of these people that the Democrats went after because of their moral turpitude, but just the way you phrase it reminds us that there were two sides to all these stories. Here's another character. This is Lindsey Graham with a mustache, otherwise known as John Bolton, on Matt Gaetz. This must have been yesterday, cut number eight. It must be the worst nomination for a cabinet position in American history. I think this is something that falls well outside the scope of deference that should be given to a president in nominating members of his senior team. Gaetz is not only totally incompetent for this job, He doesn't have the character. He is a person of moral turpitude.

And notwithstanding how difficult it may be politically, this is a nomination the Republican Party should oppose. Well, I think a lot of people are going to be intimidated by Trump. This is the way he governs. And I think it may never come to a vote on the floor. If the new leadership in the Senate goes to the president and says, you cannot endanger Republican senators by forcing them to vote in favor of this nomination. And if you don't want to have a real internal party battle, this nomination needs to be withdrawn. You know what he will probably do? Ask the Senate to go into adjournment. Now, the rule is they'd have to adjourn for 10 days, which is almost unheard of in the modern era.

But if they do, he can make Matt Gaetz a recess appointment. So I don't know where all this is going to take us. I'm down in the dumps so that Trump is showing this neocon side to him. But I think all of these people, Rubio, Hegseth, Mike Walz, Matt Gaetz, are just going to become clerks to execute the decisions that Donald Trump will make. They will not be in a position to exercise independent judgment, to restrain him, to warn him of the dangers that he hasn't, that he hasn't foreseen. And Netanyahu must be, notwithstanding his own legal troubles and exposure of his chicanery,

he must be ecstatic. Yes, he must be ecstatic. Yes, he must. And on the issue of Walt, the incoming National Security Advisor, my friend, the journalist Mike Tracy, pointed this out, that in Trump's announcement of Walt as his National Security Advisor, the biography was listed, but Trump omitted the part of Walt's biography where he worked as an advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, which is a pretty curious omission.

Trump just campaigned against the Cheneys during his campaign, and then he goes ahead and appoints a former advisor to the Cheney as his national security advisor. And then, of course, doesn't have the courage, the intellectual honesty to tell his supporters that that's who he's appointing, listing that as part of his background. That speaks to the Trump con that he just pulled off. But he got a very big assist from the Democrats who have just committed so many self-owned, so many own goals,

not least facilitating a year-long genocide and refusing to back off of it. While we're doing all this, we might as well play what Chris just dug up from the archives, which is Jared Kushner at Harvard. Once Gazans leave Gaza, Netanyahu is never going to let them back in. Maybe, but I'm not sure there's much left of Gaza at this point. And so my sense is,

I would say, how do we deal with the terror threat that is there so that it cannot be a threat to Israel or to Egypt, right? I think that both sides are spending a fortune on military. I think neither side really wants to have, you know, a terrorist organization enclaved right between them. And Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable to, if people would focus on kind of building up, it's a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel's perspective, I would do my best to move the people out

and then clean it up. And build McMansions on the beach. Yeah, it's an open call for ethnic cleansing to build some nice waterfront properties. That's the Trump administration plan, or at least the Trump administration approach in a nutshell. I don't know if Trump will be as extremist as his son-in-law. Certainly, he took a lot of advice and counsel from Jared Kushner in his first term, and that helped give us October

7th because October 7th was at least partially motivated by Trump's so-called Abraham Accords, where he was pursuing all these side deals with Gulf regimes to sideline Palestinians, in which Palestinians would get nothing and Israel would become normalized. And so Jared Kushner played a major role in the disaster that we're in today. And the Trump team so far is signaling that it only wants to double down on that approach. Aaron, thank you very much. These are such unpleasant topics, but your intellectual honesty always shines through and moves me. I'm thrilled to be your friend and colleague and thrilled that you come on with us each week. We look forward to seeing you again next week. It's a 4, 4.30, 5 o'clock. Colonel Larry Wilkerson on what is Trump trying to do to the State Department and the Defense Department, both of which he once worked.

And, of course, the boys, the Intelligence Community Roundtable. What is Trump trying to do to the intelligence community in which they both worked, they being Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thanks for watching!