Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/13/23 Max Blumenthal: MSNBC Goes After the Twitter Files and Israel Descends into Violence

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

Max Blumenthal joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to talk about Matt Taibbi’s interview on MSNBC and what’s going on in Israel. They start with Matt Taibbi, who has been the subject of some serious heat from the establishment after his reporting brought attention to the scale of government censorship happening on social media. They talk about Medhi Hasan’s failed attempt to discredit Taibbi’s revelations in an incredibly hostile TV interview. Next they move to Israel. Scott has done some interviews recently about the disturbing developments in Israeli politics, but things have recently turned violent. Blumenthal explains what’s happening and helps us understand what it all means.   Discussed on the show: Goliath by Max Blumenthal “Beware the Red Heifer” (Antiwar.com) Director and writer of “Killing Gaza,” Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project and the author Goliath, Republican Gomorrah and The 51 Day War. Follow him on Twitter @MaxBlumenthal. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, April 13th, 20203, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, you guys, it is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com and I'm the editor of the new book, Hotter than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

You can find my full interview archive, almost 5,900 of them now. In fact, today I'm doing six, and so we'll be at 5,900 of them. Going back to yesterday, April 12th was the anniversary, the 20th anniversary of the show. So you can find almost 6,000 interviews,

20 years worth there at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show. And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. And our guest today is the great Max Blumenthal from the Grey Zone. And he hosts a show

called The Grey Zone here on Pacifica in Los Angeles every Tuesday at 5 o'clock. Welcome back to the show. Max, how you doing? Good. Great to be back. All right. Well, happy to have you here on the show, we got so much to talk about. First of all, I want to give you a chance, if you could, to address for a minute the

controversy about Matt Taibi, our guest on the show last week. And right after I recorded my interview with him for the show last week, he went on MSNBC and there was a giant controversy about it. And Mark Hamill says that Matt Taibi's totally discredited now, Max. Is that true? Well, Mark Hamill's, I'm glad he took a break raising money for weapons for World War III. between the between NATO and Russia is that guy the biggest let down since jar jar binks or what yeah I mean jar jar he actually makes jar binks look good but um I didn't know Matt tybee was interviewing

with you um but tybee's been making the rounds and he gave MSNBC's meti hasan who in my opinion is the biggest opportunist in media an interview and he's in time and um hasan isn't kind of an ambush artist. He actually has a book that he recently promoted here with former White House Press Secretary Jen Saki called The Art of Winning a Debate or something. It's all about jumping down your opponent's throat and interrupting them constantly and just attacking them with a gatling gun full of pre-prepared facts that catch them off guard. And that's what he does. You know, he did that to Noam Chomsky. He did it to Slavo Gizek. These are people who aren't used to, you know, the cable news scream fest. And Taibi's similar. He's a straight,

shooting journalist who had reported the Twitter files, which revealed state covert state censorship of dissenting opinions, including opinions that the state censors knew to be true on Twitter and other social media platforms. This was one of the most important disclosures of the year. And everyone on the left and right, anyone who believes in dissent or free speech should support it, but it was framed in terms of the culture wars, then a lot of dishonest actors on the left said they hated it because it showed that conservatives were being disproportionately censored and they hate Elon Musk because he's the richest man in the world and Taibi was Musk's boy.

Because, I mean, how else were you going to get access to the files unless Elon Musk gave you permission he had bought Twitter? So Taibi goes on Mehdi Hassan's show on NBC Peacock. And what Hassan was trying to do was make it look like the entire thing was a fraud. All the Twitter files, Taibi's congressional testimony were a lie by trying to nail him on these really picky un points. He argued with Taibi over an acronym he used about whether Sisa, which is a wing of the Department of Homeland Security, had flagged 80,000 Twitter accounts.

or it was EIP, which is a nonprofit, which is actually, I think, a subsidiary of Sisa. But this was at best peripheral to the facts that Taibi brought forth. And then Mehdi Hassan went and he nailed him, he screamed at him and Taibi didn't even know what Hassan was referring to initially. So he said, I have to go back and check.

Well, okay, I actually, maybe I got that wrong. And then Hassan does this victory lap. blue MSNBC America cheers him on and he makes it look like the Twitter files were fake. David from the Iraq War neocon and Bush speechwriter who crafted the axis of evil phrase which helped sell the lie of Iraqi WMD and Iraq's alliance with al-Qaeda, these were two of the biggest lies of the century. He tweeted, the Twitter files were fake. Russia Gate was real after this interview.

And in reality, it was Hassan who made the factual error. Taibi got it right about CISA flagging accounts, this Department of Homeland Security wing. And he nailed him on nothing of value. And at one point, when Taibi pushed back, he said, you had nothing to say about Hunter Biden's laptop, which was a major scandal that was officially buried. and which 50 former CIA agents declared Russian propaganda completely lying at the height of the 2020 election. Medi Hassan said, I never said anything about Hunter Biden's laptop.

Now, all you had to do was search his Twitter history to find that, in fact, he had a lot to say about Hunter Biden's laptop. He said it was no big deal, and then he said it was Republican propaganda. So who's the liar here? This is just a classic case of the way that cable news and particularly MSNBC managed to frame every important issue in terms of the culture wars and then take their base of viewers that are caught in this clockwork orange style propaganda echo chamber and divert them away from learning facts that could be inconvenient to the objectives of the dominant political establishment or political sect. that essentially rules our country. It's not just the Democrats who are behind this sect, although MSNBC represents the Democratic Party.

It's also the corporate Republicans, the never-Trumpers, the Republicans of the Uniparty. I mean, we're talking about a bipartisan, pro-war, pro-censorship, anti-free speech uniparty that Taibi exposed and Medi Hassan was sort of the hatchet man brought in to make it look like he had lied under oath, in congress yeah it's pretty amazing all right it's anti-war radio i'm scott horton talking with

max blumenthal and um so just real quick before we break into this other stuff can you just sum up for us real quick then if the story is not that oh matt taibi got all his facts wrong and is a servant of the evil billionaire overlord weapons contractor what is the truth what is the narrative that you took out of the Twitter files or have taken so far, Max? Well, we've been writing about this at the Gray Zone and I have been writing about it since the trigger point

or the signal event which helped consolidate the control of the intelligence services over what we see and here, which was the election of Donald Trump and the introduction of Russia Gate, the idea that Trump was under the control of Vladimir Putin somehow either financially or politically or ideologically and that Russia had

interfered in the election and swung it to Donald Trump. And we were writing about, I actually was writing about during the first days of ushering in the gray zone about this dashboard called Hamilton 68, which claimed to track Russian bots. It was run ostensibly under the watch of the German Marshall Fund. But it was really run through this nonprofit called the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which was sponsored by the U.S. government, European governments, and was essentially an intelligence front. And they brought in these spooks to create this phony dashboard that then reporters would cite and say there's been heavy Russian bot activity around the parkland shooting or there's been

heavy Russian bot activity seeking to amplify Colin Kaepernick's take a knee campaign, protest police brutality. And if I took a look at the dashboard and the people behind it and was able to conclude and demonstrate in clinical detail, I didn't have access to any files, that the people behind it, specifically this character, Clint Watts, were complete frauds and had no experience either in the world of online data, in the online data or tech world, but who also were just serial liars. And that Clint Watts actually lied under oath to Congress, not Matt Taibi, but this was back in 2017. And then I looked at the actual, the way they manipulated data.

And some of the sites that they were tracking as vehicles for Russian bots, they just grabbed out a thin air. They were tracking like stars and stripes, this military outlet, and they were tracking the intercept, and they were tracking just any random site. It made no sense. And no reporter bothered to look into it at all as they constantly reported on this. I mean, if you're listening right now, just Google Hamilton 68, you'll see NPR, the New York Times, publishing front page stories on Russian bots essentially dictating how social media functioned. And the point of that was to create the momentum for government censors from the intelligence agencies

to be able to come into the offices of social media companies in Silicon Valley and say, let us decide what the public sees and hears. Let us tell you what you can have on your, what should be censored, what account should be removed. And Twitter actually had an internal debate. It's director of, I can't even remember what his title was, But he was basically the arch censor, the central inquisitor at Twitter.

His name was Yol Roth. He was encountered by Hamilton 68 and all of these spooks. And he said, you know, I actually don't even find these people credible. And I'm pro-censorship. I think we should try to mollify them and kind of keep them at arm's length. But ultimately, what Yol Roth and his team at Twitter did was let them start to dictate to them, which accounts can and can't be seen. And of course, they also started targeting pro-Trump accounts

because this was an effort to kneecap Donald Trump and ultimately get them off Twitter, which succeeded. So the people at Twitter knew this was fake. They never got any real data from Hamilton 68, and they never went to the press and never told the press, you know what, you're all being lied to, you're all a bunch of suckers. So this all came out in the Twitter files.

We know about these internal Twitter deliberations and them concluding Hamilton 68 was fake and that there actually were literally no Russian bots, which had any influence on anything in the United States political sphere during the Trump era. And so we were dealt a gigantic fraud. The Twitter files exposed it. Taibi had this story. And of course, the mainstream press that reported on this sham of Russian bots and Russian meddling did not touch it.

I mean, it was like the biggest blow to the Russiagate narrative. But it's only one of many pieces that were exposed in the Twitter files. I mean, one other thing I could quickly point to is that the sensors from the Biden administration were ordering Twitter to remove information that was factual about vaccine injuries, injuries from the COVID-MRNA vaccine. They said even though these testimonies of injuries are true and these are real people, we should not allow them to have access to the public or to fellow members of the public, fellow citizens, because it will promote vaccine hesitancy.

So they're censoring true information that interfered with their political and, I would say, financial objectives. Again, one's very significant for the public to see this. It's as significant as anything we saw appear in WikiLeaks, and it's been buried, and now the messenger is being shot in broad daylight on MSNBC. Yep. Well, that's why it's up to us. And a good thing we have radio shows here on KPFK. And I guess here's a good place for me to splice in my fundraising pitch. We have all this Israel-Palestine stuff going on with this far right-wing government coalition come in with Netanyahu again. And, you know, controversy at the Alaksa Mosque and, of course, rockets and bombs. So I don't know, when's the cut on point here? But you want to take us back? a few weeks and fill us in what's going on well a few weeks ago all the headlines were about the so-called pro-democracy protests in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were what's left of

Israel's supposedly enlightened society liberal Israelis had flooded the streets to protest judicial reforms or what they would call judicial manipulation by benjamin nettingyahu who is at the helm of the most far-right coalition in Israel's history And these judicial reforms were going to give the politically elected body of Israel's government, the prime minister's office and the parliament, which is dominated by the right, the Knesset, more control over the judiciary. For liberal Israelis, the judiciary, the Supreme Court specifically is like a holy sanctum. also for liberal Zionist American Jews who want to believe in the lie of Israel as a sort of

tortured democracy. Israel's Supreme Court was once headed by the most famous justice in Israeli history, a liberal named Aharon Barak, who ushered in Israel's basic laws. And these laws are a substitute for constitution in Israel. They're sort of recommendations to other judges. And they do provide some basis for human rights or individual rights. There otherwise is no constitution in Israel. There can't be because there are too many warring factions. And they fight over religion and culture primarily. So Aharon-Brock also happens to be the mentor to Elena Kagan, who's a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

So these protests, they had huge currency. And liberal media in the U.S. was focused heavily on them. They started to do real damage to Netanyahu when he fired his defense chief. And this led to military reservists. Everyone in Israel, every male, after completing their military duty, has to participate in reserve duty. Some military reservists, many of them announced that they were not going to participate in their reserve duty.

you had the Air Force pilots who tend to come from more centrist or elite cultural backgrounds in Israeli society. They said that they're not going to participate in training over this. Low-level Mossad employees then went out into the street. And there's a recent leak from these Pentagon files that have been appearing in a trickle that asserted that the Mossad itself was seeking to stir up these protests against Netanyahu. So the point is that, Netanyahu was in political trouble. And he faces as his chief opposition, a coalition that was before preceded him known as blue and white. They don't have any compelling single figure. There's no single figure as popular as well known as Netanyahu. But as a coalition, they could

topple him. And they have a lot of former generals, Benny Gantz, for example. I mean, these are not exactly humane, left-wing, peace knicks, but they have a lot of people ready to enter power if Netanyahu falters. And Netanyahu has been holding his coalition together. This is another important piece to understanding the background here. They've been holding his coalition together through a small, openly fascist, religiously supremacist party called Outsma Yehudit, or Jewish power. They hold basically three seats, two seats.

But if he doesn't have this as part of his parliamentary coalition, then his coalition falls apart. And so the two figures associated with this party, Idemar Ben-Govir and Bezalel Smotric have been given important roles in his government, figures who were persona non-grata just a few years ago because they are so openly fascist, they want to forcibly expel, if not exterminate all Palestinian citizens of Israel. Smotrich advocates for religiously or ethnically segregated maternity wards for Arabs and Jews. Ben Gavir has been a participant in race riots in the occupied West Bank. He represents the most extreme violence faction of the

settlers. He's been given control of the Israeli police. And they've tried to neuter him and kneecap him and not allow him to command the police, but he effectively is the security minister of the police, particularly in the West Bank. Smotrick is the finance minister, so he gets to just channel loads and loads of money into the settlements. And so this is infuriating Netanyahu's opponents, although they don't exactly have any that much concern for Palestinians. So Netanyahu, in order to try to turn down the temperature, he cuts a deal with Ben Guvier. And he says, I'm going to give you a private militia, basically your own little death squad of 2,000 men. You can go and recruit them from the hooligans of the far right

soccer clubs like Betar Jerusalem. And you just stop pushing these judicial reforms that are making everyone so mad. And he agrees. And which is just insane in itself that this fascist, extremist settler is going to get his own private militia. The person he wants to run it is a former colonel named Avinoam Emuna, who is actually filmed during the 2014 assault on Gaza, saying, shoot Palestinians in the back as they flee and don't cry. That's our job in going into Gaza. Hey, guys, Scott here for Leo Hamel fine jewelers out of San Diego at Jewelry StoreSD.com.

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and always at the right price. They deal nationwide over the phone at 61929-299-1500. That's Leo Hamill find jewelers out of San Diego. Go to Jewelry StoreSD.com to check out their fine selection and to find out more. Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com. And if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else. But not only that, they'll be free of commercials.

How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scott Horton Show.substack.com. Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton Show and Libertarian Institute shirts, shirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's libertasbella.com. So all of this continues to build for Netanyahu.

The protests are starting to wane a little bit, but he's in trouble. You can even see in the U.S. opinion sections, like the two most important members of the Likud lobby in the U.S., who emerged as supporters of Netanyahu and the Likud Party and have made it further than anyone in the sort of Beltway Commentariat, Jen Rubin at the Washington Post and Brett Stevens at the New York. times. They're both creations of the Israel lobby. They have criticized Netanyahu heavily. So along comes the perfect crisis for Netanyahu, which is over the Al-Axa mosque. And this is the third holiest site in Islam. Traditional Orthodox Jewish prayer forbids Jews

from praying there. And the worshippers at Al-Axa consider it to be the most vile desicqqqqs. creation of this holy ground that Idemar Ben-Givir and his fascist cohorts have been attempting to invade the mosque and pray there for months. Ever since Ben-Givir came into power as security minister, he was using the opportunity to have Israeli police escort him to the base of the mosque and force all worshippers out. So early April is around, early April's Passover, which is interpreted by the settlers in an extremely ethnocentric way, and it culminates with the 10 plagues, the killing of the firstborn of the Gentiles, which they use as justification for killing Palestinians, and the holiday of Ramadan during the beginning of the hot temperatures

in Jerusalem and across the Holy Land. It's the perfect season for conflict, and Ben-Gvir goes on Israeli national TV and calls to storm the Al-Axa compound. He calls for rioting at the Al-Axa compound. His followers and pals who want to destroy Al-Axa and replace it with a third Jewish temple to usher in the Messiah begin attempting to pay off local Arabs in Jerusalem, 5,000 shekels to hide a lamb or sheep in their home so that they can smuggle it into Al-Axa and sacrifice it to God as they are commanded to do, which would have just been atrocious. So they were planning to go in on, I believe, April 4th or April 5th. And so that night, Palestinian worshippers stay late after evening prayers for a traditional

Muslim ceremony where you pray after evening prayers. But it was also an active resistance against the settlers. The Israeli police come in. I mean, these are actually the border police. They call them the Magav in Israel, and they're notoriously brutal. They come in and they just start beating Palestinians with truncheons, trying to force them out,

shooting them with rubber bullets, shooting them with tear gas. It's the most violence we've seen there at the Alaksa Mosque, and it sets the region on fire. Now, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, who actually have access to weapons, heavy weapons like rockets,

They have declared that their factions, their armed factions and their leadership in Hamas have declared that they will not allow Palestinians to be humiliated in Jerusalem. And actually, the last three wars or military escalations we've seen between the armed factions in the Gaza Strip and Israel have been triggered by events in Jerusalem in which the armed factions in Gaza, who had the ability to respond militarily, did so. And so they did so. They fired rockets and rockets came in into Israel's north from southern Lebanon, where there are many armed factions allied with Hezbollah.

These were not necessarily Hezbollah, but Hezbollah, the largest and most powerful armed resistance faction in Lebanon gave the green light. And so rockets flew into Israel's colonies in the north and in the south, and Israel responded, not necessarily by attacking heavily, by trying to assassinate the leadership of these factions, but by bombing essentially open fields. Netanyahu did not want a major escalation, but he got what he wanted because that escalation did turn down the temperature on, or at least relieve the political pressure he was facing internally from his domestic foes. And Now we're sort of, I think we're sort of at an interregnum between one conflict and another.

And where it's heading, I can only assume we'll be another escalation. Well, I got to tell you, Max, I saw a tweet the other day about this parade of so-called settlers or colonists on the West Bank flanked by IDF. It was, I don't know, high hundreds, if not thousands of people. And the caption at least said that they were going to the different Palestinian cities on the West Bank to Hebron and Janine, I guess. And I'm not sure the whole list. And so I was wondering if you know about that. And is that the portent of the next conflict you're talking about there? Well, yes. I mean, this is serious. You have thousands trying to march to one colonial outpost in the West Bank. And this has happened. at the highest point of violence in the West Bank since the Second Intifada. In many ways, it is an Intifada.

And the settlers, they want to push the Palestinians deeper into violence in order to trigger a response from the Israeli military. I mean, that's kind of what this is about. So the Palestinians in the West Bank had been not only under the control of the Israeli military and its so-called civil administration, which runs a military dictatorship in the West Bank, but also the Palestinian Authority, which functions kind of like a Vichy regime

or the way that the Indian police function in the reservation system where they can only arrest Palestinians. Their job is to prevent Palestinian armed resistance and coordinate with the Israeli military. In 2007, the Palestinian Authority, not the Israeli military, wiped out the last vestiges of Palestinian armed resistance in the Balata refugee camp of now.

And for the first time since 2007, starting last year, early last year, we saw a group emerge called the Lions Den in the West Bank, which has been taking on Israeli settlers and specifically fighting the Israeli military in and around Palestinian cities. And one key flashpoint has been Huara, which is a town right outside Nablus that has been a real site of settler violence, settler rioting. And the lion's den cuts across all factions. It's young people who don't want to be part of Hamas. They don't like the Palestinian Authority, which is run by Fatah.

They don't want to be part of Palestinian Islamic jihad. They just want to be fighting the occupation. They're attacking checkpoints, and we've started to see attacks inside Tel Aviv. There was an attack recently that just killed a tourist and wounded seven people. We haven't seen these since the second Intifada, and there's been a shooting attack in the West Bank, I think just today. This is all due to the increased violence of the Israeli military and the settlers who function as kind of their wild dogs on a leash, you know, can kind of push the parameters of violence further than the military is able to and then allow the military to come in. And last year, in terms of Palestinian deaths in the West Bank, the death rate was higher than at any point since the second intifada.

So I think we're seeing at a very, at a low level, a war unfolding already. It's essentially low intensity warfare every day in the occupied West Bank and to a certain extent in East Jerusalem where there's increased access to weapons among Palestinians. All right. So in the short amount of time that we have here left with Max Blumenthal, he's the author of Goliath. And a real expert in Israel spent years over there writing this book about this. And you brought up this stuff that just sounds completely crazy. But can you shed light please on this stuff about rebuilding the Third Temple and sacrificing animals and starting the Third World War here? well before the destruction of the second temple people who want who are affiliated with the more extreme factions of the religious nationalist settler movement believe that jews did not pray at the western wall they actually sacrifice animals in large in masses they sacrificed many many animals and they want to bring that back they consider prayer at the western wall in the old city of jerusalem to be an act of

Jewish submission to secularism, and they want to flood that area in the blood of sheep. They say so. And these are people who have attempted for decades to hatch a plan to blow up the third holiest site in Islam, the Al-Aqa mosque, because it's at the site of what they call the temple mount, where the third temple should be rebuilt. They've put forward a blueprint for plans to build the third temple with, you know, high level architects and they've started a nonprofit called the Temple Institute. They have a temple movement that's getting popular across Israel. And it's all about messianism and ushering in

essentially Armageddon for Jews. It's the eschatology that's gained so much popularity with Christians in the United States gaining popularity in a constant low-intensity war zone among Jews. And, you know, they are defying traditional Orthodox, Jewish Orthodox authorities in calling for Jewish prayer at the Aalaxa compound. Basically, ultra-Orthodox Judaism says that you cannot pray at the Temple Mount, where the Al-Axamask is, unless you are sprinkled with water that is blended with the ashes of a red heifer. And so what the temple movement, is done, is they coordinated with a Christian Zionist in Texas to bring red heifers to Israel so that they can slaughter them and get their ashes and begin to purify Jews as they

head to Al-Axa to get that little restriction out of the way. You know, I got to tell you, Max, there's an article by Justin Romando 20 years ago called Beware the Red Heifer, and it's about how some born-again's, I guess, associated with John Hage down in San Antonio, had paid for them to genetically engineer. of pure red heifer. No restriction on that in the Bible. But unfortunately, it has to grow to a certain age to be certified pure red. And these kept coming out with a little bit of white left on the tail. But, Raimondo is right. I mean, it took them until 2012 to be able to genetically engineer them. But as soon as they could do that, they brought them over. And that is in

place along with the tactics that I discussed at the beginning of this interview of actually attempting to bribe Arabs to smuggle lambs or sheep into the Yaloxa compound to allow them to slaughter them there. All of this is coming to a head and it's fueling regional violence. I mean, it's sort of kindling the flames for a regional war. I mean, I should say that one of the key figures in this temple movement is a extremist rabbi named Yisrael Ariel who was arrested along with a group called the Jewish Underground for attempting to bomb the Alaksa Mosque back in 1981, he also participated in assassinations and bombings

of Palestinian mayors in Bethlehem and Ramallah and the West Bank who were trying to organize Palestinian resistance, civil resistance to the occupation. He's an actual murderer, and he is one of the mentors of this figure, Idemar Ben-Govir, who is in the Israeli governing coalition and is in charge now of his own private state-backed militia. So you can really see the progression from just straight-up religious-inspired terrorism

to government control and influence over what takes place not only in Israel, but across the region, through this governing coalition. Yeah, it's just amazing. And now, so, I don't know, 10 years ago or something you told me that I'm spending time over there, You said the political spectrum is from Dick Cheney and then go from the right there until you get to Mussolini or something. And I guess there's a small group of,

you know, so-called liberals in Tel Aviv or something. But, I mean, the labor movement or the Labor Party is essentially nothing. But so it's moved even further to the right than that since then, basically. Or it's got the people on the furthest fringe from them now have more power than really ever before is the point. Well, when ISIL

was in the news, the Islamic State in the Levant, I came up with this phrase that trended on Twitter as a hashtag and actually generated headlines, including an Israeli media, J-Sil, the Jewish state and Israel and the Levant, that's who's in charge of the government right now. I mean, their best political or historical parallel wouldn't be Mussolini, it would be ISIS. And they have the same end-time's vision that ISIS has, the same. viciousness, brutality, and inhumanity towards those of other religions, and the same, and more U.S. support than ISIS got, and ISIS did get a considerable amount. Which is a lot, yeah.

All right. I'm so sorry that we're all out of time, but that's a great place to end it. Thanks very much for your time again on the show, Max. You're great. All right, thanks a lot, Scott. All right, you guys, that's Max Blumenthal. He wrote the book, Goliath, and he did this great movie called Killing Gaza, which you can watch on the internet.

It's so good. And he, of course, is the director of the Grey Zone project over there. Tons of great journalism there. That's at the Greyzone.com. And he's here on Tuesdays at 5 o'clock on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. And that's it for me. I'm Scott Horton. I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.

See y'all next week.