Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Trump’s Neocons

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

Max Blumenthal: Trump’s NeoconsSee 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 Wednesday, November 13th, 2024. Max Blumenthal joins us now for his regular weekly time with us. Max, no matter what we talk about, it's always a pleasure to be able to interact with you. Absolutely. Thank you. Before we get to the designation of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and the likely designation of Marco Rubio, I want to ask you about Amsterdam. What is your understanding of what happened there? Because you know the one-sided version of it that we're all getting here. Well, Israel is the little boy that cried pogrom once again. And we are witnessing one of the biggest media hoaxes since beheaded babies and babies baked in ovens on October 7th. and with the same objective to justify Israel's existence as an

ethno-supremacist state and to justify its genocidal policies against Palestinians. The media, it's almost like they're mandated to lie about what happened and present fascistic hooligans who a liberal-dom dominated media would never in any other situation defend as basically the modern incarnation of Anne Frank hiding in a hidden annex somewhere in Amsterdam from anti-Semitic truncheon bearing thugs. What really happened and what we have been able to detail meticulously at the Gray Zone is that over 100 hardcore veterans of Israel's reservist forces and actually escorted by Mossad agents to Amsterdam rampaged through the streets of central and western Amsterdam, ripping down Palestinian flags, attacking people who were displaying any Palestine-oriented symbol, menacing bystanders, pouring beer on people, attacking private property the day before a match between Ajax, the local Amsterdam football club, and Maccabi

Tel Aviv. These thugs are notorious in Israel for attacking anti-war protesters, Palestinians. And then the next day after their match, they went out without any police anywhere and began gathering metal pipes and attacking anyone they could find who looked Muslim or Arab, attacking taxi drivers until they were finally stopped and set upon by Dutch citizens who were local Muslim youth, mostly, many of them of Moroccan background. And they were beaten and overwhelmed. And that was somehow characterized as a pogrom. Then the police gathered up this mob of hardcore hooligans who are clearly being led around using military-style urban warfare tactics and tried to escort them onto a bus rather than arresting them while they

were attacking private Dutch property, escorted them on a bus to their hotel. But before they got on the bus, and this is all on video, they started attacking Dutch private property, again, stoning homes that were flying Palestinian flags in Amsterdam. And we've learned that 10 were, we've since learned 10 were arrested. The Dutch king, the Dutch leadership has said that they were the victims. The Israelis were the victims. Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, even Ro Khanna, Justin Trudeau, they've all said these are victims of antisemitism, as has CNN, the New York Times, and Washington Post. And the New York Times was just forced to issue an extremely embarrassing correction where it acknowledged that a video in which it said that Jews were being chased by Muslim anti-Semites

actually showed Israeli football hooligans chasing local people from Amsterdam. They just issued that correction. So again, the biggest media hoax, the biggest disinformation propaganda stunt that we've seen since Israel started to justify its genocide after October 7th? And where are the counter disinformation experts and the fact checkers to call this out? They're nowhere to be found. Well, they're to be found in the gray zone, thanks to you and the researchers of your team. But what was Mossad's involvement? This is the first I've heard of that. Great question. The Jerusalem Post reported that Mossad, this is before the match, before Tel Aviv-old Dutch YouTuber nicknamed Bender, showed when these Maccabi hooligans were operating in central Amsterdam the night after the soccer match.

They were operating with clear leadership, using military tactics. They were avoiding breaking up and scattering from the group so they would avoid running. They were clear veterans. They were gathering metal pipes from construction sites, actually throwing them at police cars. Yes, the Dutch police were attacked by these hooligans and the Dutch police have lied about it. But it appears clear to me that the Mossad was not just there to protect them, but to actually instigate a scenario that has benefited Israel's propaganda, that they are the victims of anti-Semitism and that Europe must learn from them.

Clearly Mossad wasn't stopping them from inciting violence, instigating violence outside their hotels. So the whole thing was a Netanyahu administration, I don't know that he personally knew about it, stunt, complied with, fortified by an incredibly pliant and ignorant of the truth Western media. Exactly. And at the tail end of it, Netanyahu announced that he was going to send flights with more Mossad agents into Amsterdam to evacuate these poor victims of antisemitism. The flights never arrived. They never needed to. He spread more

propaganda about them having been taken hostage by possible Hamas agents. This too was accepted lock, stock and barrel by the Western media. And it was part of the PSYOP that Netanyahu pulled that has yet to be corrected. One of the only Western corporate media outlets that attempted to correct the record was Sky News with a factual report about the Israeli hooligans incited the violence deliberately. And that report was pulled. It was deleted from the internet and a new report was uploaded that was one minute longer that was jam-packed with Israeli propaganda. So you actually got to see how the sausage was made when Israel phoned in the quote-unquote correction. Has a single Israeli been arrested and prosecuted? Well, no one's being prosecuted, but the Dutch prosecutor has just confirmed quietly that 10 Israelis were arrested, but they were let go. And at the Gray

Zone, we published an article, Wyatt Reed and myself, on how one of those arrested was actually a minor. These hooligans were actually using 12 and 14 year olds to attack their targets, which included undercover police officers. And a 12 year old was filmed attacking with a wooden club, an undercover Dutch police officer and was arrested. And the Dutch police just let him go and let him go back to Israel without any charges. Do you think any other foreign hooligan could come into a country and get away with that? I mean, we just had a reporter, Jeremy Lafredo, who was nearly jailed for a long period in Israel just simply for doing factual journalism. So it's pretty obvious. Do the police carry handguns in Amsterdam, do you know? I mean, they were carrying shields and clubs and there was tear gas, but so too were the Maccabi Tel Aviv thugs.

And they were allowed to march through these streets and now they're being portrayed as victims. So, I mean, you can just see Dutch leadership across the board is so colonial in their mentality and so owned, so owned by the whole transatlantic system that also runs through Tel Aviv, that they cannot defend their own sovereignty against a band of foreign genocide zombies terrorizing their own citizens. And that includes Geert Wilders, who claims that he is the hero of Dutch sovereignty and patriotism, but it turns out he'll only stand up against Muslim citizens of the Netherlands and not against foreigners who basically underwrite his career from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Let's take a step, before we get to Trump's nominees. Let's take a step

back from the granular and look at the big picture. Why would the Netanyahu people even do this? In Amsterdam? Yeah. Why would they think that this would help them with their PR disasters around the world? Well, any iteration of anti-Semitism justifies Israel's existence as a Spartan-like Jewish exclusivist state where Jews need sanctuary. And so Zionism has always fomented anti-Semitism, going back to the early days of, even before Israel was founded as a state, there were efforts to foment anti-Semitism deliberately in Iraq to compel the Iraqi Jewish community to move to the colonies in Palestine. In Egypt, all around the Middle East, they were doing this. But now the effort is to convince the world that

antisemitism is out of control, that Israel therefore needs to be supported and allowed to do whatever is necessary. And more than that, we must learn from Israel because we have this problem in our own countries with Muslims and migrants, and they know how to deal with them. That's always been Netanyahu's MO. Actually, in Netanyahu's first book, he warned Americans that if Palestinians were given a state, that Latinos who are citizens of the United States would seek to set up their own state in the Southwestern U.S. and secede from the United States. And therefore, the U.S. should learn from Israel while helping it prevent Palestinians from obtaining sovereignty. That's how Netanyahu thinks, and it's largely worked if

you look at how he was received by Congress. Let's talk about the people that Donald Trump, Donald Trump's transition team has announced that he plans to nominate for various positions once he's inaugurated. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, whom I know very well and with whom I worked at Fox for probably seven or eight years, denies the existence of a Palestinian state that denies that the West Bank is Palestine, denies that Gaza is Palestine, denies that there's an occupation. Did Netanyahu pick him as a Christian Zionist nationalist to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel? Yeah, it's another Ad Adelson Netanyahu pick, a Christian Zionist. I mean, the U.S. ambassador has always been, I would always call them the U.S.-Israeli reciprocal ambassador. And it didn't matter who they were. But you've never had anyone so cartoonishly

slavish to Israeli interests as Mike Huckabee. And this will contribute along with the selection of Elise Stefanik, who was granted an award, a lucrative award by Miriam Adelson, the Zionist mafia Don, or what would you call her? Donna? Donna, right. Donna. Sorry. Yeah, I you edit. Donna Malzohna. Sorry. Yeah, I like that. She gave Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, likely Trump's ambassador to the UN, a cash award for berating presidents of universities because they permitted the freedom of speech on their campuses. Do I have this right? Correct. Because they refuse to crush Palestine solidarity student clubs, like Students for Justice in Palestine, which would violate the First Amendment. And Elise Stefanik will be likely confirmed as UN ambassador to the United Nations.

But I mean, look at the current UN ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. She's sort of a banal figure. She often doesn't show up, and she's an automatic vote for anything Israel wants at the UN. That's the way they've always functioned at the UN. Even Samantha Power denigrated her reputation by shilling for Israel at the UN. But now we have someone who is just so connected to Israel, who finds her true constituency when she goes and addresses the Knesset and not U.S. Congress, that it's going to lift the mask on the special relationship and really show how the tail is wagging the dog. And I think that is in some ways a positive development because it is going to deeply damage the hegemony of the US

that Israel relies on for diplomatic cover. Now, I mean, it doesn't mean that the UN system will change or Israel will be ejected from the UN as it should be. It's just going to expose the whole farce of the special relationship, as will the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem. I mean, she's being criticized because she has no military or intelligence background. She's not from a border state. She's from South Dakota. It's obviously another political PR pick. She's telegenic. She's a loyalist. She introduced a bill in March called Protecting the Security of God's Chosen People to Crush Speech Critical of Israel. And she was basically bribed to do it by the Israel

lobby. There's only one rabbi in all of South Dakota. Israel lobbyists just came in, told her to introduce this bill, and she frames it in Christian Zionist terms, God's chosen people. It's a complete clown car being driven by the Likud party straight into cabinet level positions of the Trump administration. And we haven't even gotten to Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth yet. We'll get to Rubio in just a second. Is this the woman that shot her dog? Christine Noem. Yeah. Oh yeah. She like executed her dog. And then did RFK throw the dog in Central Park? I don't know, but she executed her dog. RFK threw a dead bear. And she like boasted about it on Twitter.

Threw a dead bear into Central Park. I don't know how he came upon the dead bear, but these are strange, strange people. Let's go to Rubio. Did I see something by Anya that Rubio and now

convicted and resigned from the Senate, my home state, former Senator Bob Menendez, actually engaged in or financed terrorist activity in Latin America, in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Well, Rubio being a Cuban American like Bob Menendez is just burrowing from within government in the U.S. to use the U.S. to get revenge on the revolutionary socialist government that he blames for forcing his family out. And he actually lied and claimed that his family fled Cuba under Castro when actually they left under the US-backed Batista regime, that dictatorship. So he lied about that, but he wants regime change in Cuba. He wants regime change in Nicaragua and Venezuela, and he's willing to use any means necessary, which is why in 2018, he was part of the humanitarian aid stunt that the Trump administration staged at

the Colombian border. He was right there. He was up late at night, kind of sweating, just geeking out on Twitter, tweeting photos of Muammar Gaddafi being killed next to Nicolas Maduro. The whole thing failed. He lied about Maduro burning the aid trucks that were coming in when in fact it was the Colombian thugs tied to narco cartels that had been hired as a muscle, which burned the USAID trucks. We exposed that at the gray zone. And Marco Rubio is back to get revenge. He'll use Foggy Bottom and all of the machinery of the State Department to try to topple these governments on behalf of his family and the Miami Cuban Mafia in South Florida. This is someone who has had interesting firsthand experience in the world of the cocaine cowboys in 1980s Miami. Nicholas Maduro refers to him as Narco Rubio. And Ani and I always started to look into why that was. And as the Miami New Times reported, Marco Rubio got one of his first jobs working for his

older brother-in-law, Orlando Cecilia, who was running a major drug operation out of the house that Marco Rubio was living in, in Doral, Florida, running $75 million, storing $75 million worth of cocaine in one of the bedrooms of this house. He wound up doing like 12 years in prison and Marco Rubio claims he didn't know what was going on there at all. This is another deeply disturbing pick. It's someone who has lusted for the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, who has not only been supported by Adelson, as Donald Trump himself acknowledged in 2015 on Twitter, but also by Paul Singer, who is the ultimate never-Trumper, neocon billionaire

backer. And Marco Rubio, in complete contradiction of Donald Trump's supposed America First agenda, which includes hardening the border and building the wall. Marco Rubio was the Republican author of TPS, temporary protective status, for Venezuelans while he was seeking to destroy Venezuela's economy. This is the ultimate cynicism in politics. He forces, by supporting the destruction of a country's economy, a migration wave to the North. Then he compels the US government to welcome them all in without hardly any vetting process, leading to this Venezuelan migrant crisis in the United States. And he's doing it just to build up a domestic lobby for his regime change agenda. And he's being rewarded for this by Trump,

who demagogued the Venezuelan migrant issue all the way to winning his election. I just, I've never seen such levels of hypocrisy. Max, this is a nightmare. This is worse than what we have now. In turn, we haven't even gotten to Pete Hegseth yet, with whom I also worked at Fox for 10 years. So Ambassador Charles Freeman says the job requires strategic reasoning, management skills,

empathy, and the ability to articulate a policy. He can articulate a policy as long as it has to do with killing. But in terms of strategic reasoning and management skills and empathy, where is that in the Hegseth that you know or know of? Well, you worked with him for 10 years, so I would have to ask you, but I mean, it looks like Trump just continues to recruit from the Fox News green room and not from any professional positions. I mean, that's where he found John Bolton, by the way, watching Fox. How did that work out for Trump? Hegseth, I mean, he's obviously there because he's a loyalist.

Trump wants to take on the woke generals. He considers the Pentagon brass and the people around them consider the Pentagon brass to be an impediment to the America First agenda. We're going to see the culture war that Tommy Tuberville waged with the quote unquote woke generals play out to a much greater degree if Hegseth manages to be confirmed. And in some ways it'll be kind of fun. It'll be time to take out the popcorn and watch the military industrial complex eat itself alive. I don't have any sympathy for those generals. They are extremely political. with them. But Hegseth appears to be a complete clown who's not just unqualified, but compromised by a foreign entity that is currently committing genocide. And we know which entity that is. Right. Hegseth actually on air advised President Biden, that Biden would take his advice, but this is what he believed in, to bomb cultural sites in Tehran. Yep. So if one of the jobs of the Secretary of Defense is to inform the president of the natural and probable consequences of the president's bellicosity, this Secretary of Defense, if Hegseth is confirmed if there is a confirmation Trump wants his people

in without a confirmation another story for another time he's going to enhance Trump's bellicosity rather than warning him of the natural and probable consequences of it if it comes to pass yeah I mean Hegseth represents the version of America First that was put forward by Lindsey Graham, which is just American force should be used promiscuously without any regard for international law or any institution or for blowback. heavily by another Fox News personality who had to be basically removed because he was too anti-war, Tucker Carlson, along with other figures, more traditional conservatives like Kurt Mills, on the issue of Iran because Hegseth wanted to march straight into war with Iran after the killing of Qasem Soleimani. Pete Hegseth, as I said, he's been compromised. He's been taken on propaganda trips through the occupied territories by the leading sponsor of violent settler activity, Atteret Kohanim. He was taken to occupied Hebron, where the most fanatical violent settlers exist

in a complete apartheid system where there is this road actually marked Jews only, Shuhada Street. And he claimed while in Hebron that it was the Jewish settlers who are besieged, living under siege in a holy site. He sees everything in an upside down Christian Zionist compromised way, and he will be in charge of the Pentagon, which means that Netanyahu will be in charge of the Pentagon, and even more extreme elements like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. It will be one of the most frightening times for US national security if you actually believe, as he doesn't, that the U.S. has different diverging interests from the apartheid state of Israel.

In another pro-Israel propaganda speech before one of these groups that apparently was paying him, Hegseth said that American and Zionist interests are absolutely intertwined and that he fought, he suggested that he fought in the military so that his sons, Gunner, Boone, and Rex, I don't know if they were, he had a naming competition with Sarah Palin, but so that they could be, they could actually fight on the front lines for Israel. So this is how he sees the world. And I think this fundamentally compromises or exposes what has always been there. It exposes Israeli influence over the agencies,

including the Defense Department. I want to go to Belisiel Smotrich, who made an extraordinary statement the other day, which I think Netanyahu agreed with, but not on tape. But you tell me what you think. Cut number nine. I have instructed the settlement division in the Ministry of Defense and the civil administration to begin professional and comprehensive work to prepare the necessary infrastructure for applying sovereignty. In his first term, President Trump led dramatic steps, including affirming the legality and legitimacy of settlements in Judea and Samaria.

Alongside this, there were the Abraham Accords, peace for peace. Those accords, a set of agreements facilitated by Trump's first administration, saw Israel normalize relations with four Arab nations. We were on the verge of applying sovereignty over the settlements in Judea and Samaria, and now the time has come to do so. Does he have the authority to do this? Didn't he proclaim himself the governor general of the West Bank and Netanyahu didn't do anything to disturb that proclamation? He is a civilian figure, but the lines are blurred. It's nice of him to acknowledge that the Abraham Accords was a pathway towards Israel annexing the West Bank and completely dooming the Palestinians as a people, ending the whole question of Palestinian statehood. It helps explain why October 7th happened, why Yahya Senwar launched that operation. And now we can see the Netanyahu coalition and its most extreme figures lifting or openly proclaiming their agenda as Trump names the most Israel-first administration

in American history, which also includes his national security advisor, Mike Waltz, who's a former Cheney aide. So this goes hand in hand with Netanyahu naming Israel Katz as his new defense secretary, sorry, a minister of Defense. And Katz today suggested that Israel would begin laying plans for bombing Iranian nuclear sites, Iranian nuclear facilities in his first ever meeting with the war cabinet. This was announced, this pick was announced on the day of Donald Trump's victory, partly to suppress media coverage of Netanyahu getting rid of his previous minister of defense, but also because Netanyahu was so sure of a Trump victory. So this has all been prepared and we're careening towards a major regional war, a major military confrontation. And the only thing that seems like it will stop this agenda

is the success of Iranian ballistic missiles. Haaretz, before we conclude, Haaretz reported this morning that an Israeli court on the application of the Israeli prosecutor ordered Netanyahu to testify in one of his corruption cases the first week in December, and he's trying to get out of it for a variety of reasons, claiming national security. Honestly, Max, I thought those prosecutions were held in abeyance while he's the prime minister. If Haaretz is correct, and I have no reason to dispute what they're saying, the cases are proceeding. Am I right? Is my understanding correct? that there is no change in the circumstances surrounding Netanyahu's corruption trial, or there are no circumstances that have affected the testimony that he would deliver in this criminal trial. This is all about the gifts that he was receiving when he was previously in office and out of office. Gifts from, guess who? Arnon Milchan, who is the Hollywood mogul who sponsored the career of Netanyahu's rival Lapid, but also who helped South Africa obtain nuclear technology when it was an apartheid state.

Milchan was a Mossad operative working in Hollywood, and he was giving Netanyahu lavish gifts, cigars, champagne, I mean, really expensive cigars and champagne. Is this the guy that somehow managed to get cash inside of empty Coca-Cola cans, or is that another one of Netanyahu's benefactors? Well, I get them all confused, but I think you're talking about the right guy. Milchan is known, this is case 1000, and he's known for these kind of sneaky gifts. And then you also have James Packer, who is a lesser known Australian billionaire, who was basically paying Netanyahu or giving him gifts for favors.

This is just the way business operates in Israel. It's not hugely shocking. Ehud Olmert, remember him? He's a Haaretz columnist who's portrayed as this sort of pro-peace figure, when he was in office, he was taking literal bags of cash from a Jewish multimillionaire in New Jersey. This is this part of the corrupt Israeli tradition. But obviously Netanyahu,

if he's going to go back to trial, if Avichai Mandelblit, the prosecutor, is still pushing, then Netanyahu is going to do everything possible to keep these wars going. Right, right. What are you doing Monday afternoon? I think it's in the evening. You're moderating a debate. I have to be fair to you because somebody is your opponent, even though you are my friend. Apparently I'm moderating a debate on zero hedge between you and somebody else. Yeah, it'll be a debate. It could be a discussion. I don't know how it's going to go, but it'll be me and Viva Frye, who's a Canadian libertarian on more on the conservative side,

who's a very big supporter of the Trump America first agenda. And we're going to talk about Donald Trump's cabinet picks. And, you know, I think this is, this is not MAGA, it's MEGA. It's make Israel great again. It's the most Israel first administration in US history, unless you think, and you're a Christian Zionist, that Israel and the U.S. have the same exact interests. I don't know how you can consider this to be America first, but we're going to talk about that at Zero Hedge. I believe it's going to be from 7 to 9 p.m. Eastern time, and Judge Andrew Napolitano is going to moderate. Looking forward to it, my dear friend. Me too. Regards to Anya, and thank you very much for your time.

It was terrific today, Max. Thank you for all the knowledge you brought, as you always do in these controversial and dark days. Thank you, my friend. All the best. See you Monday night. Thanks a lot, Judge. See you soon. Of course.

Coming up this afternoon at 2.30 on all of these topics, and boy, is he hot, Phil Giraldi. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!