Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/27/24 Eli Clifton on the Nuclear Industry, AIPAC and Donald Trump’s Biggest Donors

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

Eli Clifton returns to the show to talk about some of the recent reporting he’s done at Responsible Statecraft. They start with a couple of reports Clifton highlights about the status of nuclear weapons around the world today and how much of our money is being spent to produce and maintain them. They then move on to money in politics, discussing AIPAC’s funding of Jamal Bownman’s primary defeat and the concerning group set to become Donald Trump’s biggest donors. Discussed on the show: “World spending on nukes explodes to more than $90 billion” (Responsible Statecraft) Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen “Bowman crushed by GOP-fueled AIPAC cash” (Responsible Statecraft) “TikTok investor Jeff Yass wants to shape US foreign policy too” (Responsible Statecraft) Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and Investigative-Journalist-at-Large at Responsible Statecraft. Follow him on Twitter @EliClifton. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; 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

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys welcoming back to the show the great eli clifton you know for many years he would pile around with the great jim lobe over there at interpress service and the lobe log and he's now the co-founder of the quincy institute with treata parcy and and Andrew Bacevich, and he writes over there, of course, regularly at responsible statecraft.com, nope, dot org, I meant to say, in cooperation with our good friend, the great

editor, Kelly Vallejo. So, very happy to talk to you again. Eli, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me back. Absolutely. Happy to have you here. Man, I want to talk to you about this great article that you wrote. You're so good on this stuff, the lobbying, the military industrial complex financing of America's foreign policy establishment and all their horrible

stupid policies that they all pretend to believe in for the money and this one this one's the worst world spending on nukes explodes to more than 90 billion

and by nukes you mostly mean thermonukes which is even worse the much gianter H-bombs $90 billion dollars and that every how often that's uh well 90 billion dollars that's uh well uh it was 90

91 billion dollars uh was the and well 10.8 billion dollars increased an annual global spending bringing it up to 91 billion dollars that is per year per year that seems like a lot of money yeah i mean it's it's a gigantic uh jump and you know it's it's easy to say well you know hey, you know, China must be building up their nuclear arsenal, which indeed they are. But, you know, when you really take a closer look at it, it's that, yeah, okay, so spending went up by $10.8 billion between 2022 and 2023, but that actually wasn't just evenly distributed across the, you know, nuclear powers. That was 80% of that increase came from the United States alone. And those were obviously U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Why do I get the idea that the American taxpayers and the Chinese taxpayers would pay vastly different amounts for the approximate same nuclear weapon to the Americans just get completely soaked for this stuff? Yeah, and I mean, when you look at, you know, who really profited from this, you know, and you look at the list of companies that, you know, this is a really great report, incidentally, and I should give full credit to who did it, which was the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. I can. And, you know, they identified, you know, well, so who are the top companies who are benefiting, you know, this is all publicly disclosed information, and it's Honeywell International, Northrop Grumman, B.A.E. Systems, Lockheed Martin, and general dynamics. So, you know, when we talk about nuclear spending, you know, we very often talk about it in these really broad terms of, you know, global spending or even U.S. spending. But, you know, let's be very clear here that a lot of this money, if not the majority of it, is really, a transfer from the U.S. government to a series of a very small list of companies who are producing nuclear weapons for the United States. Yeah. And you know, it's funny in a way, like to focus on the money and not the danger of the things going off. But it is a whole huge subject of itself. I don't know if you remember decades ago back when The Simpsons was funny, Mr. Burns complaining about these do-nothing nuclear weapons or blowing all this money on.

They just sit around collecting dust. He would rather put them to use, you know? Well, you know, actually, that's a really good point because, you know, I guess he would be satisfied with what's currently going on, which is despite all of this increased spending, the absolute number of nuclear warheads in the world actually has continued to decline since the end of the Cold War. So that's, in a sense, the good news. There's less of them just sitting around collecting dust.

The bad news is that the number of nuclear weapons deployed for use with missiles and aircraft has actually gone up. So, yeah, the absolute number of weapons in the world has gone down. That's very often the metric that we see used of, you know, well, how close are we moving toward Armageddon or not is how many nukes are in the world. Good news on that front, bad news when it comes to what's being done with the ones that are still out there. Yeah. You know, it's funny because if you weren't a foreign policy expert, you might have thought that after the Cold War with the Soviet Union was over, which was 15 years after the Cold War with China had ended, that we could have focused on, you know, never mind Utopia. I have a book that says abolished nuclear weapons. I know people kind of get, they think that'd be more dangerous than having them, which there's an argument for that. But, you know, the Pentagon said that we could tur the whole world with 200 nukes that's all we would need and that was according to them and so all the rest of this is just essentially corporate welfare and you know crazy game theory strategies of weirdos and wackos who shouldn't be in charge of making these decisions for other humans at all

absolutely and you know i think that what you've touched on is is you know there is an important disagreement that does go on between, you know, folks in the largely and sort of in the restrainer restraint camp of foreign policy thinking who do say, you know, hey, we can all agree there's too many nuclear weapons, we can all agree they're very dangerous, we can all agree that too much is being spent on them. But there are some people who say, yeah, we should probably come to get, you know, get the number down to, you know, they do actually serve an important deterrence value, and we should get the number down to, like, as you said, something like 200. And then there's folks that say, actually, you know, the overall, it's not worth the deterrence value because of

the dangers they pose and the numbers should actually be zero. And I think there's an important debate to be had there, but we are so far from being able to have a debate on that that actually would matter. Because when you look at the number of, you know, the amount of spending, the number of warheads, we're pretty far from that. And I think one thing we can, a lot of people can agree on is that there are far too many nuclear weapons in the world. We are spending far too much money on them and you know when you talk about you know utopia well there's a lot of things you can do with with the funds that are that are going into to nuclear weapons you know um you know 387 billion dollars has been spent on weapon on nuclear weapons globally between 2019 and

2023 you know the world food program stated in 2021 that over nine years uh for a total of 360 billion um they could uh have ended world hunger that's just one just one thing you could do with that money. And there's a host of other options as well. You could spend that money blowing up the IRS and let the American people fight their own hunger. The point is that there's a huge tradeoff going on here that we're not talking about. That is money that could go to a host of other issues, you know, depending on one's own preferences and political beliefs. But again, we're so far from being able to actually have that debate because this money is going out the door with very little debate or discussion about it. Yeah. Now, you know, if we go back to, geez, I guess it was about 10 years ago or maybe a little

more 2012 or so when Obama got the new start deal through the Senate, he had to make this compromise. I love this. This is the kind of thing that would be in like a comic book about some horrible dystopia where you have something called the Nuclear Weapons Caucus, which is a group of senators who work really hard to make sure to keep the federal government, you know, tax money and Federal Reserve printed paper money flowing to their states for the care and feeding of the nuclear weapons industry in their states. And it's just like any other racket that you have in America where you have companies rent seeking off the government and lobbying with senators and all like, oh, here we're talking about H bombs. So we're like, and I know I'm a broken record for people who've been

listen to this show for a long time. I say this a lot, but like, because my mind, my own mind's eye, Eli, would have it where the military tells the Senate, hey, this is how many nukes we need, and then that's pretty much how they get their nukes. But no, it's all just like, hey, Senator, we got a real great deal going on H-bombs this month. We got to get rid of these H-bombs, and you have like a push, a supply-side push from the, from Honeywell and Lockheed and Northrop and B.A.E. Let's make more nukes and sell them to the government because we make lots of money on those.

And we're talking about machines that can kill a whole city full of people at a time. But to them, they don't care. To them, you know what it is? It's like the diffusion of responsibility. Hey, if the senators didn't want the H-bombs, they wouldn't buy the H-bombs. That's up to them. You know what I mean?

It's like a prosecutor who doesn't really believe the guy did it but says, well, let's let the jury decide. This kind of thing, you know? I mean, there is The quiet part that doesn't get set out loud is that these companies that I just listed off, their board of directors has a responsibility to their shareholders, and the responsibility is to maximize the stock value of the companies. It is not to serve U.S. national security. It is not to advance any definable notion of the interests of the United States or any other

country that they are selling these weapons to. Their sole and prime primary, and actually their legally obligated responsibility is to maximize the stock value by probably by maximizing profits. And in the case of these companies, it's not like they're selling Cheetos or Budweiser. They are selling weapons that have a very limited number of customers of one or two or three countries at the very most per company. And so, you know, it's pretty clear, you know, that the motivations here are to get these governments to allocate public monies to buy these, you know, not just sitting any world-ending

weapons. And, you know, this ICANN study does a really good job of laying out a lot of interesting data here. And it points out that, as you just said, there's a supply-side push. The companies spent $118 million lobbying governments in the U.S. in France alone, where they could find the data on it. And I'm sure this is true in the other countries as well. Those are the two that have enough disclosures we could see it in 2023. And they donated more than $6 million to think tanks. who are in many cases researching and writing about nuclear weapons in 2023. So, you know, we could say, yeah, okay, I mean, people like to imagine, I think, that it's exactly what you just described the way it should be, which is that, you know, the military says,

hey, we need this, and, you know, here's our reasons for it. And then, you know, then the government says, okay, you know, we're going to, you know, you guys are the experts, so, you know, we're going to respond to what the needs are. But that's not what it looks like when you look at how the money is moving. Why are these companies investing over $100 million in lobbying? Why are they putting money into think tanks who do research on nuclear weapons? Is this really for somehow the greater interest of the United States or of the countries that they're selling these weapons to? Or, as I talked about earlier, is it in the interest of the shareholders of the companies, which is to maximize sales, maximize profits, maximize stock value?

Yeah. And, you know, the real outrageous part too is, and I'm not good at cutting percentages live on a microphone, but $6 million isn't even chump change to these companies. The absolute, you know, remainder that they have to spend keeping the Kagan's fat so that they can keep selling nuclear weapons is its own remarkable thing, you know? Just the ratio, the pittance that they have to spend keeping the Kagan's fat so that they can keep selling nuclear weapons is its own remarkable thing is its own remarkable thing, just the ratio. just the ratio, the pittance that they have to spend, the tax money that they all got for free anyway, on their giant markups anyway, you know? Absolutely. It's a drop in the bucket. And again, frankly, if your responsibility is to try to maximize your sales, maximize your revenues, maximize your stock value, it's a no-brainer. Even the lobbying money at over $100 million, it's a no-brainer. It just makes sense. Hey, I've never seen Kimberly Kagan other than just a headshot.

Is she a gigantic, gluttonous beast like her husband, fat-neck Fred, too? Her brother-in-law, Robert. I'm sure Google Image can answer that question real back. Your sister-in-law. You're in D.C. I thought you might have seen her at one of these gatherings or something. Oh, no. I'm in New York. So I have a safe distance from the so-called swamp. Oh, yeah. Lucky you. Okay. I'm sorry. I had that one, wrong. I just know that, like, looking at her husband, Fred, like, this guy's a war hawk? Jeez. I don't think I'd follow him in a battle anywhere, you know? Got a surge into Afghanistan, huh, Fred? But no, I mean, that's the Institute for the Study of War. That's Fred Kagan's wife's Kimberly Kagan's think tank, which is one of the most important things in D.C. just in the last 10 years here, right? Certainly. Yeah. And I think the Institute for Study of War, a number of other think tanks in D.C., you know, it gets into the fact that, you know, conflicts we're in right now have really

undermined, you know, the efforts to, to limit, if not reduce the number of deployed nuclear warheads. You know, these are all seen, for the most part, the exception of Ukraine as being, and even Ukraine largely gets overlooked, as being, you know, these are all seen as very conventional conflicts where the use of nuclear weapons seems really unlikely. But, you know, this, another great study that was just done by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Cypri, you know, pointed the fact that. you know, these tensions, you know, over Ukraine, the Gaza War, it's all chipping away

nuclear diplomacy, which had kind of been making progress in trying to make the world safer from the likelihood of the use of, as you put it, these city-ending weapons. You know, last year, Russia suspended its participation in the last remaining treaty limiting Russian U.S. strategic strategic nuclear forces. You know, the U.S. suspended sharing its own nuclear weapons data with Russia, which is required by the treaty, sort of in response to Russia's pulling out. And, you know, there's the repeated threats from Russia about using nuclear weapons and, you know, the Israel-Hamas war, which has pretty much upended an informal agreement between the U.S. and Iran, since Trump abrogated from the JCPOA, there was kind of an understanding it seemed between the Biden administration and Iran about trying to de-escalate nuclear tensions. So that conflict, you know, that sort of undermined efforts to tamp down tensions.

And it's obviously undermined efforts to engage Israel, which has never acknowledged this nuclear weapons program. So all of these things are, you know, chipping away at, you know, what is, you know, maybe kind of a fragile equilibrium that had been reached. And I think the SIFRI study does a good job of showing that, you know, these are conflicts where we're not talking about nuclear weapons. It's not like nuclear weapons are currently being used. But it's all working to the detriment of what really were decades of work to try to either eliminate or dramatically reduce the number of warheads in the world and certainly the number that are deployed. Yeah. Well, George Bush tore up the ABM Treaty and Donald Trump tore up the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty and threatened to let New Star expire. if he'd been reelected.

And then now, as you said, the Russians have suspended their participation in New Start, which like all other things being equal, seems like that right there is probably the greatest crisis in the history of humanity. We have no treaty at all.

We're about to restart, or we could, there's no legal limit anyway, on restarting the entire arms race of the 1960s here. Maybe we'll get back up to 10,000, tens of thousands of nukes, because there is not a single treaty limiting H-bombs and ICBM totals right now, it seems like the whole world should be on general strike

until these guys knocked us off and get back in these treaties and figure this out. Yeah, I mean, it's just intolerable. And, I mean, as you just pointed out, you know, that this is, this is not, this was not new effort. This was something that had been going on, well, you know, since, you know, now It's been going on for something like 50, 60 years, efforts to try to really limit the number of nuclear weapons in the world. This was a priority of, you know, of American presidents, of Soviet leaders, of this was seen as, you know, something that was existential and something that really had to be managed and that a lot of work, a lot of diplomacy, certainly a lot of man-hours went into trying to create a, you know, a global system, a global set of agreements that could. limit the number of these weapons in the world. And it wasn't done out of any sort of, I think, altruistic sense. It was done out of a sense that this was in everyone's really strong self-interest

because people were worried about the dangers of these weapons and what it could mean if any conventional conflict escalated to being a nuclear one. Those aren't conversations that I think we're having these days, especially as we have, you know, a growing number of wars. emerging around the world right now. We have, and certainly escalating tensions with China as well, these are, this should be sort of top of mind. It should be something that's being discussed. And instead, you know, other than these two really excellent reports, which I can't recommend highly enough, it's not getting, it's not entering into the political discussion. It's not entering to the discourse. It's certainly not getting pick up in the media. Right. And that's the real problem with the things is that

nobody even thinks about them. They're not discussed. The idea is that they stopped being a problem back at the end of the Reagan years. And that's not really a thing that anyone cares about or thinks about anymore because we're friends with the Cold War, right? The perception is, yeah, with the end of the Soviet Union, somehow this problem just went away. Well, the nuclear weapons did not go away. The Soviet Union might have. The nuclear weapons, Russia still has the world's largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The United States is second. Nothing changed in that sense. but our willingness to engage with it seems to have somehow evaporated with the end of the Cold War. And obviously that's to all of our detriment.

Yeah. Well, and as I've always heard it, it sure seems right, that the menu of choices, as they call it, of options for how a nuclear war is to be fought, is extremely limited. And it's basically use them or lose them. And so everybody just launches everything. In other words, if atom bombs start going off at all, fighting over Belarus 15 years from now or something, the whole world dies. Yeah. And, you know, Annie Jacobson's book that came out earlier this year is, I think, a very good introduction for people to that idea. Essentially, of the futility of it and of the, you know, while concepts like that,

like escalate to deescalate, get thrown around, there's really only one outcome. There's no limited exchange of nuclear weapons. There's no time for that. It's, as you put it, use them or lose them. Everyone's going to launch all their weapons is the most likely scenario, or certainly one which everyone prepares for, and which the systems are designed to incentivize. And one could argue what the weapons themselves kind of lead one to end up doing. um and the outcome and in the book i encourage people to read it uh i hope you've checked it out it's it's a page turner um it's pretty bleak i know well i'm kicking myself because when i read it i was just reading it to poach a few footnotes and i just got them like from the sidebars i

poached a few footnotes from that and when i got to the end of the book oh because i'm writing a book about russia issues right now that has a nuclear war chapter and stuff and uh and then i got to the end of the book and i realize oh it's this newfangled thing that they do where there's no numbers in the text for the footnotes. Instead, they just cut and paste a little bit of the text as the marker for the footnote in the back. So it turns out that actually there's 100 pages worth the footnotes and that if I'd been paying attention, I could have been poaching so much more of her work there and didn't.

And then also at the same time, I wasn't thinking, because it's the other part of my brain, I guess, that thinks, hey, you should jot down some notes so that you can interview this lady about this, huh? But no. And there were so many great points in there that I could have. a great discussion with her about but now I don't remember and I'm not going to go back and reread it so I mean I think she did a great job in I mean it's a compilation and I mean she acknowledges it that she's drawing from a lot of interviews from a lot of public source information

now but what she has put together is sort of I mean you probably have a sense for it is as a minute-to-minute development of how a nuclear war would really happen and I think it's in that sense it's actually pretty much a masterpiece in showing how fast it would go and also that you know these notions that there are no off ramps there's no opportunity to to reflect on what's happening um it would go really fast there'd be imperfect information the information was supposed to take the off rate three years ago yeah yeah yeah um yeah no and you know what's funny too is that fictional scenario in there where we nuke north korea but the russian um ruining it for everybody put your fingers in your ears um russia thinks we're nuking them

And so they nuke us. Well, they just signed a mutual defense pact. So now it wouldn't even take the misunderstanding anymore. So thanks a lot, Joe Biden. You know, the diplomacy of this era is just, if we survive, it'll be legendarily bad. It'll be known as, you know, some of the most dangerous and ridiculous kind of thinking and planning going into these things. I mean, what could Trump be thinking? And he says, you know, if you go back just a couple years, and he very well could be the president again in a year from now, you know, he was like, look, what we want to do is we want to tear up all these treaties and then sign a new grand bargain with Russia and China.

But America and Russia are thousands of nukes ahead of China. So they don't want to sign up any kind of grand deal like that. And then what? It's going to include mid-range and long-range missiles and all these things? like the possibility of really doing that is pretty slim. Could have stuck with what we had that was not perfect, but had limited us to

7,000 nukes instead of many more, you know? That's exactly right. And, you know, that's the, I think sort of the, unfortunately, the people get that these weapons are dangerous. That's why they like the idea of these, you know, I think Trump, to some degree, tapped into that

the notion of, you know, a grand bargain, for lack of a better term to limit the number of nuclear weapons. But you can't do that when you've torn up the existing efforts to constrain the two largest nuclear powers in the world. That has to always be, in my belief, the top priority. If you want to then later on bring other countries into that, fantastic. But the idea that you can achieve that when efforts at arms control between the U.S. and Russia have ended, it's just not going to happen. Even if China wanted to, for instance, engage in reaching some sort of arms control agreement with the United States, the United States

couldn't do that without having an agreement in place with Russia. It's just so clear that those, if you can't get an agreement between those two countries, I don't see how you can possibly make progress anywhere else. And I think with sort of heightening tensions between the U.S. and Russia, you know, there's become increasingly this notion of, well, maybe there's, maybe there's a third way, maybe there's an alternative, maybe there's some way to still make progress either as a grand bargain or, or somehow not with Russia as part of it. And that's just, that's a fool's errand. Yeah. It's a very dangerous thing to do. I know. I mean, the politics of this era right now are so dumb. I mean, there was a period there where during Russia Gate

when I forget if they were discussing the INF tree I think it was in a discussion of the INF treaty where Diane Feinstein starts looking around and says to the other senators on the committee that like well you know like we still want to keep the nuclear treaties and stuff right like in other words we've been pretending all this BS about Russia and everything

but like when it really comes down to it we're not getting rid of the treaties are we guys and they're like huh Oh, I don't know. They're so caught up and acting out this script of this fiction that they're living. And when it comes down to the brass tax, they hadn't even really considered it. Like, wow, are we really sacrificing all international arms control right now, huh? You know, but I think it's an interesting issue to look at because it's so clear that this is, it's not the only example, but perhaps it's a microcosm or a good example of the thinking and foreign policy that's occurred since the end of the cold.

war and arguably through the global war on terror, where there was a notion that, you know, the United States could kind of do whatever it wants with very little consequence, and that, you know, notions of, you know, rules-based order or treaties or multilateral agreements, we're really just, you know, kind of a thing of the past and just constraints on the United States being able to do the things that it wants to in the world. And in many respects, it is true that since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been pretty well insulated from consequences from, you know, its actions, be it, you know, invading the wrong country after 9-11, going into Iraq, or, you know, within the past nine months, it's sort of ironclad support for Israel as Israel takes actions that could in no way be perceived to be advancing U.S. interests or security. But be that as it may, the United States doesn't really face too many consequences. And, you know, I think with something such as as nuclear weapons, you know, the consequences aren't going to be felt until they're truly existential. So I think it's a very dangerous, dangerous example of this thinking because it's

pretty easy to say, yeah, we can tear up those treaties and, hey, look, the sun's going to come up tomorrow. And you're right in that sense. But you have also just put not just the United States, not just Russia, you put the entire world at greater risk as one continues to act in that way, especially around issues like nuclear weapons. And unfortunately, and I think that example you just pointed out with Dianne Fein being like, are we really like, are we going to get rid of these? And people, the committee, you know, clearly hadn't really, weren't terribly concerned about it, is a great example of that where it's like, hey, you know,

we're talking about something pretty serious here, which has really serious implications. But the foreign policy establishment, many in government, maybe in certainly members of the House and Senate, it, you know, I think it's been kind of conditioned in more recent years not to think about these existential dangers like nuclear weapons and to think in a more short-sighted way about, you know, lifting whatever constraints that they perceive as existing on the United States. People say to me, Scott, how do you get so much work done all the time? Coffee.

It helps keep me from falling asleep. And it tastes really good because I get it from Moondose Artisan Coffee at Moondoseartisan com. Moondose is kind of the anti-starbucks, in that their coffee tastes real good. They have lots of great choices, representing all kinds of regions, blends, and flavors. I'm drinking the Ethiopian presently. Hey, wait, also, do you like saving money on good tasting coffee? Right now, you can get 10% off and help support this show if you just go to Moondoseartisancoffee.com slash Horton. Find the link and the QR code in the margin at Scotthorton.org. That's Moondoseartisan coffee.com Horton.

Hey guys. I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug of salt or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org. So keep that in mind.

And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. well folks sad to say they lied us into war all of them world war one world war two korea vietnam iraq war one syria afghanistan iraq war two libya syria yemen all of them but now you can get the e-book all the war lies by me for free just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at scott horton dot org or go to scotthorton dot org slash subscribe get all the war lies by me for free and then you'll never have to believe them again well and you know i mean especially with the work that you do uh that i borrow so heavily from and the focus that you have is and of course

it makes sense there's so much truth to it right all these different interest groups the public choice theory kind of behind america's national interest it's actually honeywell's national interest and you weren't even thinking about that and that kind of thing but it's kind of hard for me to Except I know it's really true, too, that a big part of what keeps it going in the Congress is something just as cheap and stupid as people being afraid to be called soft on communism or soft on terrorism or soft on Vladimir Putin. And if there's an enemy right now, old Saddam Hussein, we got to preempt him, you look like a wimp if you don't want to fight.

and they're going to say that oh geez you favor the foreign interest over your own country and these cheap smears right they'll call max cleland a coward when he lost three limbs in vietnam or do whatever they want you know what i mean and so but the deal is is they are cowards and they're terrified of being called a coward and so they all lay down on their bellies and none of them are willing to stand up and say look Vladimir Putin is essentially a center-right conservative who doesn't mean us any harm at all. How do you like that? And it could be a lot worse. None of them are willing to say that because somebody's going to then call them names. And that really is a lot to do with it. And I hate to admit it because it's so lame. But look at the history since World War II. That really is how it is, right? Well, I mean, I think what you're describing is, you know, it's not just one or two of these issues. It's, yeah, you're afraid of being called a coward. you're afraid of being called weak on defense if you're if you're talking about cutting the defense budget you're afraid of being called you know somehow you know a stooge for a foreign power if you suggest that it's not in the vital interest in the United States to enter into a conflict with you know in the case of Russia you know the world's country with the world's largest nuclear arsenal and you're but those are only the things you're willing to even say out loud and as you just described there's also the stuff that happens more quietly which is the law of which is the campaign contributions, which is the jobs that they sprinkle into your district,

if you're a member of Congress, for every one of these prestige weapon systems and certainly in the nuclear weapons, you know, work that goes on. You know, they make sure that the benefits of that are felt, you know, within districts and that those contractors and subcontractors are vocal in talking to their members about, you know, the jobs that they're bringing into the district or into their state. So you have both, you know, these sort of public political pressure but also, you know, the quieter behind-the-scenes ones, which, you know, I think you start to get a little peek at it with some of these numbers that were thrown around in the report about, you know, over $100 million in lobbying, the money going to think tanks. That's not stuff that's really, you know, outward facing so much. You don't see that talked about. It's not something that the companies are broadcasting or talking about. It's not something the politicians are talking about. But to be very clear, there is an effort going on to fund and, I believe, to help shape those. research, which, you know, is then being fed back to members of Congress to help justify these expenditures.

And that's on top of, again, the lobbying, the jobs, you know, the real political pressures that they face. So unfortunately, you have a number of aligned interests influencing these members of of Congress, and it doesn't feel like the costs are very high for just going along with it, right? because, yeah, maybe you've just made, you know, yourself in the world a little more likely to enter into nuclear Armageddon. And, you know, maybe these are public resources that could be used for, you know, a host of other things, including, you know, you could just cut taxes. You could spend it on ending world hunger.

You could, depending on what your political beliefs, there's a whole lot of different things you could do with that money other than put it into these companies. But you're not going to feel the direct benefit of it in that sense. So I think that there's sort of, you know, there's the short-term gains. and then there's the long-term costs. And, you know, I think that most members are, you know, on a two-year horizon in terms of their thinking about their cost-benefit analysis. And it's hard for them, I think, to look away and to try to break free from it when that's their horizon.

Yeah. Well, this morning I was looking at this news story about, like, what is this? I'm squintence on my phone. Oh, I can't see anything anymore because I'm old. and uh my glasses broke and saw squintin and i was looking and oh what happened was this guy's house fell into the river because the dam burst and the river became huge and washed away you know eroded a huge amount of land and his house fell into the damn river and i thought man you know what that guy needs is for his money to be spent on a war seven thousand miles from here

I bet that's how he feels about it, too. Yeah. Why would Americans need their dams to not explode, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I mean that, I mean, that, you know, I think that you just hit on one of the issues that, you know, is frequently cited and it does actually have pretty good resonance with folks across the political spectrum when they see how their money is being, tax dollars are being spent, and then they, they look at infrastructure in the United States, and, you know, you have bridges collapsing. You have roads that have potholes in them. You have schools that need to have work done on them. And some of this work gets done, and clearly not enough of it when you have problems with dams.

You know, that's sort of some basic functioning of government there, right? You can't have dams exploding. That just doesn't work. And I think that, you know, I think more and more people are starting to ask some serious questions about it's not just the amount of spending we do. It's not just the amount of taxes we pay, it's what it's being used for and what's being prioritized and what isn't being prioritized. Yeah. You know, I got a real good picture of my head of the way, what's her name again? Annie Jacobson describes when the H-bombs go off, there'll be like a tornado when the winds change direction back up, back toward the explosion again as they get sucked up into the mushroom cloud.

and that people, living people, will be sucked into the mushroom cloud at hundreds of miles an hour, right, and tossed straight up into the air and burned and radiated a debt that way. And I was thinking, you know, we should try to avoid that from happening, you know, if we could not have that. That sounds like an undesirable outcome. That's what I'm thinking. It seems like we could build a consensus around that, you know? Flip side of it is if you're running for office, you know what that means? you're not going to have to run for re-election.

Yeah, exactly. Hey, we're all dead. Nobody wants to die alone, you know? That'd be really exciting to have an H-bomb, destroy your whole city. I don't know. Yeah, I'm sorry, man. I'm going to let you go now, you poor guy. I'll tell you one more thing.

It won't be in the form of a question. I'll just say a thing to you. John Kirooku just sent out a thing, part one of his new podcast all about Abu Zabeda, who it turns out is two guys. He had a cousin with the same name. And it was a giant crazy story of the Terror War years with John Kiriaku, the guy who arrested one of them in Pakistan in 2002.

And, of course, I know you know all about that probably. But anyway, that sounds really exciting. I'm going to check it out. Yeah, very cool. All right, listen, I love your journalism. You've done such great work for so long. And I'm sorry, we went on and on about nukes, and I didn't get a chance to ask you about the Israel lobby stuff.

Well, hell, you got time? We can talk about a little bit about this. Or you got to go. We can talk a little bit about it. Sure. Okay, yeah, let's do it. I'm sorry. I just get so caught up in the nuke thing.

It drives me crazy. Yeah. But no, man, so listen, for people who ain't too familiar, Eli is really an expert, just like we're talking about with the financing in the military-industrial complex sense. He's also a real expert on the Israel lobby and the way that their money influences our elections here. So we have Jamal Bowman, who I really don't know anything about us, if he's one of these kind of annoying squad types. So I'm interested in the stories that it was really A-PAC.

Got him. I know that they just swung at the king Thomas Massey and missed. And so we'll see what develops there. But it seems like APEC is being very open this season about taking on their enemies in the midst of this conflict in Gaza right now, huh? Yeah. I mean, I think that's clearly the top line. But when you start to, you know, scrape away and look a little more under the surface, There is a really interesting thing that just happened here. And, you know, what just happened to Jamal Bowman where he lost in his Democratic primary and it's a district, you know, that's mostly sort of been Westchester here in New York. And what happened is that it became one of the most expensive primary campaigns in the United States.

And A PAC's super PAC called the United Democracy Project, they spent approximately $15 million. supporting his opponent, his opponent, who's Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who was perceived to be more in line with sort of the A-PAC line about supporting Israel. And what gets more interesting here is it's not just, okay, so what, you know, APAC swings in. It's a relatively, you know, heavily Jewish district, so, you know, they think that they can make this an issue there. But it's also a very democratic.

district. And what's really curious here is that, is that APAC, when you really look at where they, or the United Democracy Project, I should say, where they raise the money from in this election cycle, a whole lot of it came from Republican mega donors. So their biggest donor was Jan Coom, the founder of WhatsApp. He's a billionaire. He contributed $5 million in this cycle. But others, you know, like, I mean, really, really, you know, down the line Republican voters. and donors, like Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot founder and hedge fund manager Paul Singer. These are some of the Republican Party's biggest donors. And an APAC, which, you know, historically has had, you know, much deeper, you know, connections

and influence within the Democratic Party is suddenly tapping into Republican mega donors to fund their efforts in a Democratic primary. And I think that, you know, it's hard not to look at this and really kind of come to the conclusion that if APAC has to rely so heavily on Republican mega donors in order for them to inject their issues and to try to shape the outcome of a Democratic Party primary, how is that not symptomatic of really a weakening pro-Israel consensus in the Democratic Party and in the left side of the U.S. political spectrum. Yeah, you know, I'm behind on the polls, man, but Eric Garrett's to anti-war.com is really great on this, and we talk about this sometimes. And he was telling me that the polls were saying, this is a few weeks back, I don't know, a month ago, or six weeks or so, that 80% of Democratic voters want to ceasefire right now. So that ain't the left. That ain't even progressives. That's just liberals and center left Democrats, right? So you have essentially a small handful of billionaire donors and you have the chiefs of the party versus.

versus everyone else, meaning like tens of millions of people, the entire party, basically. Yeah. I mean, and that's what, I mean, and I don't have a clear answer to this, but like, whatever happened in this primary race with Bowman, he lost by 17 points in a district that, you know, APAC and the United Democracy Project kept saying, you know, actually feels really strongly about about, about Israel and about these issues. why did they have to raise millions of dollars from Republican mega donors in order to boost Latimer in a Democratic primary? Shouldn't they have been able to raise that money from Democratic donors? Shouldn't they have been able to raise that money from inside the district, which they did not? Hey, is this what's behind the push to have some kind of online confirmation of Biden before the convention

to try to prevent any sort of dissension there? That's certainly one of the reasons that I think that that discussion is going on, is that it would prevent, I mean, look, I mean, the optics would be very, very challenging if there was dissent, if there were protests outside, if there were protests inside the convention in Chicago. I bet they're going to keep protesters 10 miles away or whatever. They're just going to not allow it at all, right? I don't see how you can keep them out, because what do you do with some of the delegates? And the delegates have been chosen. some of them are probably going to protest i would imagine given those numbers you just threw out there about the democratic party i don't see how i would hope so protesters out of the convention itself and i don't see uh and yet you can keep them miles away but that doesn't mean you aren't going to still have it doesn't matter how far away they are they're still going to be there

they're still going to be you know in you know clashing with police or what have you you're still going to have television cameras there um it doesn't really matter uh if they're directly outside they're not going to be able to shut down the convention or limit people's access to it i'm pretty i'm pretty sure the chicago police can handle that much but that doesn't change the optics yeah uh and optics we could be heading towards something that that could be pretty striking and and could be very uncomfortable it's funny you know someone said to me the other day where's antifa and the black block and BLM and all that during all this palestine stuff and it seems like that more or less is the same constituency and i wonder if they're if they're if they

have a plan and what their plan is. I mean, some of those leftists are considered the Democrats to might as well be Republicans anyway, as you're describing them here. Yeah, I mean, but I mean, I think what's potentially, if that's all it was, I don't think that there would be even the discussion about, you know, or the idea of limiting the, somehow taking the convention online or to really try to take extreme efforts to police what goes on at it. Because those folks, you know, aren't huge in numbers and certainly weren't going to be inside the convention itself. I think what we're talking about here is probably something more reflective of exactly what we're talking about. That, you know, it's not just, you know, the progressive wing of the party. It's not just, you know, folks who are

somewhere to the left of where the party even is. These are, you know, in many respects, you know, these sentiments are held by mainstream liberals. Certainly some folks on the right as well, you know, Thomas Massey's a great example of that. I just think you've seen greater growth of those sentiments right now sort of in the center left than left and far left. And, you know, it's to the point where it's going to pose a pretty serious challenge at some point to the Democratic Party itself. And I think that, again, what we just saw in the Bowman race here in New York was, you know, it's definitely an indicative

of some shifting political wins and shifting trends in where the money is coming from. This is not something that APEC was able to raise money for from Democrats. That's the bottom line. They had to raise money to influence Democratic primary. They had to raise the money

from Republicans. So when APEC says that they're bipartisan and they work with both sides, that's true, but it seems like they can't raise the money they need from Democrats anymore. And that's a huge shift. But I mean, there are some extremely wealthy Democratic donors. You have a profile here of Heim Saban, which I just think it's so funny that he's the guy who bought the rights to somebody else's thing, this Japanese TV show, The Power Rangers,

that was such a big hit with kids in the 1990s. And he made all this money and he spends all this money keeping America Zionist, basically. But so where was he? And by the way, like, you know, you know how people are with the smears and the accusations and so forth. Like, I read a thing in the Wall Street Journal that said, hey, and this was maybe a year or two ago, but $500 million at Apex plans to spend on the campaign season, you know, that's a lot of money. And they were brave enough to go ahead and name some names and say some things. But, I mean, this is really what it comes down to is you have extremely wealthy Jewish. Zionist donors like Heim Sabin. And can you name a few more names for us just so that this is like science and not mean bias as like in the accusations against people all the time?

Well, I mean, obviously Heim Saban, his wife, Cheryl Saban, are pretty major Biden donors. And there's others. I went through sort of a list of his major victory fund donors and saw that a number of them have made pretty, you know, or either through their philanthropy or they made have shown that they have a pretty, you know, one-sided interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to put it, to put it mildly. Haim Saban is obviously a really, really big one. Mobile gaming pioneer Mark Pinkus has also, is pretty clearly out there on that. You know, venture capitalist, Reid Hoffman, who does stuff with, like, with the IDF, actually, in their signal intelligence units. It's folks like that who are, I think, pretty active in trying to shape Peter Lowy is another one, Casey Wasserman. You know, I think it's really important, though, to note that, you know, because so often people say, oh, you know, these are Jewish billionaires.

Well, the vast majority of American Jews, when you look at, you know, how we vote, you know, don't prioritize Israel. it's actually not the top line issue for most Jewish voters. It's a pretty low-ranked issue in terms of its salience, regardless of how people may feel about Israel or Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's not swinging votes with American Jews. Now, there are a small number of donors who, you know, I listed some of them here, who I think do prioritize it more highly. And, you know, certainly a number of them, a significant number of the top. top donors to Biden's victory fund, which is sort of his super PAC, are going to be, or folks who feel very strongly about that.

Now, that's not in line with the Democratic Party writ large, as we've just talked about. I don't even think it's in line with, you know, the vast majority of American Jews. These are a small number of people who, I think, are getting to have an outsized influence due to the size of the campaign contributions that they're prepared to make. Yeah. I'm sure a Jew somewhere has made a line graph that shows that no matter what religion you are or your background, the richer you are, the more right wing you get. And so that's, you know, especially when you're talking about these giant corporate oligarchical chieftains and whatever, you know. Of course they get along with Netanyahu and Lakud. They see themselves in him, you know? And so that's the real key to it, right? Is that they, ain't so liberal. They're too divorced from regular people. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a compelling case to be

made that, you know, when you when you're operating at that level, that, yeah, you're, you may have a feel a greater sense of alliance with with other folks that operate with great deals of power such as Netanyahu. Yeah, exactly. You know, and also,

you know, in all fairness, you know, Israel has done a very good job of appealing to and reaching out to, you know, people like Reed Hoffman, you know, where they, you know, they'll say, you know let's like let's let's do something together on you know how technologically advanced the IDF is or something um they've been pretty good at trying to connect with Silicon Valley um so i mean it is a two-way street i would just say that hey um i'm sorry i'm behind on your archives here but but i'm looking at the headlines can you tell us a little bit about this guy

jeff yes this is very interesting just the head and subhead here yeah so jeff yes so jeff yes is one of the largest shareholders in the company that really owns TikTok. And he's also very, very, very active in supporting Donald Trump. He was a major shareholder in the, what does it call, the sort of shell company around truth social. He had not at the time given direct campaign contributions to Trump, but is seem to be really helping to prop him up at a financial level. And I sort of dug deeper into some reporting have been done on YAS's activities in sort of the judicial reforms in Israel.

But I went and looked more closely at philanthropy that seemed to be tied to him and found him just giving to some really, you know, some really, you know, far-right stuff to the David Horowitz's, to the Center for Security Policy, just really rampant anti-Muslim and conspiracy theory promoting groups. And it just sort of took a look at the fact that, you know, this guy is, you know, positioned to be one of Trump's biggest financial supporters going into the election cycle here and has, you know, just shoveled millions and millions of dollars into these groups. It also appears like he certainly was tied to, whether he wrote the check himself or not, but certainly he was very close to a very shadowy contribution of one and a half million dollars to citizens

for a nuclear-free Iran, which was A-PAC's advocacy group set up to oppose the JCPOA during the Obama administration. So that sort of ties him to what's actually the largest identified, targeted contribution to oppose the Iran nuclear deal. Yeah. Great. And, you know, that's the thing is I know a lot of people, even Democrats and former Democrats and Americans of all kind of stripes, in a way, want to welcome Trump as just at least not one of them and by them I mean just the American establishment overall

right he's not a Clinton or a Bush he's kind of this somewhat roguish outside figure or whatever and yet he's like the most Zionist of all he's like he you know Bill Crystal and all of the boys hate him except for Bill Crystal's brother-in-law

Elliot Abrams who works for him but uh I mean, he might as well have David Wormser and the whole Dick Cheney crew on his staff as far as his foreign policy goes, as far as his Israel policy went for four years, right? Well, I mean, and this is something I really focused closely on is that in all fairness to Trump, and when he was running in the primaries in, what was it, 2015, 2016, he actually was saying stuff that nobody else on the debate stage was willing to say. He said the United States needed to be a more neutral arbiter between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and his main issue with the Iran nuclear deal at the time was that he didn't like that the Iranians were buying more Airbus planes than Boeing. Those were his big issues. Now, something changed right when he clinched the nomination, and all of that went out the window. And I can't say with certainty what changed, but I know something else that happened right about then,

which is that he needed to raise the money to run a general election campaign. And I know there's the perception that, you know, that he's a billionaire and can afford to campaign, finance his own campaigns. Well, he can't. He needed outside money. And the Adelson's came in. And the Adelson's have made it very clear that their top issue, if not their only issue, that they are giving enormous amounts of, of, campaign contributions for and they are the biggest donors to the republican party is israel and suddenly trump changed turned on a dime and never went back he you know he he moved the u.s embassy to to jerusalem

he pulled out of the iran nuclear deal and there's discussions now about whether um you know what what he would be doing in a second term uh to to to help you know be in line with the addlesons again but you know obviously expansion of israeli control over the west bank is one of the things that's being discussed. And, you know, there's a great profile. I encourage you to read it in New York Magazine on Mary Madelson. She's lining up to be the biggest campaign contributor in this political cycle. It's rumored she'll be giving, you know, somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million

to Trump's a general election campaign. And she is not doing that for any other issue that anyone can identify other than Israel. She speaks about it publicly. This is not a secret. She talks about it. And the profile is excellent, and I think it really helps to explain who will be having influence over Trump if he is the next president, who will be probably having a say and shaping U.S. foreign policy, certainly in the Middle East, and what those views are. And frankly, they're pretty extreme. And I don't see any explanation in descriptions of Mary Madelson of her justifying it in terms of anything about, you know, the U.S. interests or U.S. national security or keeping the United States out of wars.

It's purely about, you know, advancing, you know, some notion of a greater Israel that is, you know, something like from the river to the sea. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting, too, that their fortune. know how relevant this is that their fortune comes from casinos in macao and what the hell is that it's just so funny to think that that money has so much influence over america's you know pseudo born again republican party uh such as it was you know regan's party here um that this is where all the decision making power flows from but let me narrow you down on a thing that you said there because i had heard this somewhere but the only link that somebody sent me was no

good. Whatever the source was, I didn't like it, or I don't remember anymore, but I remember thinking it wasn't good enough. But you just said it, and I know that you know what you're talking about and got it from somewhere real, which is the idea that there's a specific bargain, at least in the wind here, to be made. And the idea is the annexation of the West Bank or what, the further removal of Palestinians? It's been discussed as a likelihood. I think at this point it is speculation. I think that, you know, in the more near term, though, that there's absolutely no question that one thing that they would, you know, certainly that Mary Madelson would want to see from Trump is, you know, obviously a continued flow of weapons to Israel, sort of basically

unconditional support for whatever it is that Israel wants to do in Gaza, let alone, whatever Israel wants to do with Lebanon. Yeah. I mean, it's a fluid situation right now in Israel, in in in Gaza and certainly on the border with Lebanon so it's a little hard to say I think exactly what the ask would be right now other than that certainly any efforts to try to constrain Israeli behavior would probably be thrown out the window again maybe we'd be surprised maybe Trump would show an independent streak on this I know a lot of people are are hopeful that he would I think it's important though to you know at least ground them in in the history and in the reality that there's no evidence of him doing that on

on issues that are of importance to the Adelson's. Again, the last time he showed an independent streak on the Middle East was before he had, before he desperately needed their money. Yeah. It was funny too. Right now desperately needs their money. And to be clear, that doesn't just end once they cut the check to him. And if he becomes the next president, he's going to need their money again for the

midterms because the Adelson's are smart. They don't just give money to the presidential campaign. They're also the biggest donors to every Republican congressional campaign via party super PACs. So if Trump wants to hang on to seats in the House and Senate for his own legislative agenda, he's going to desperately need them again. So the dependency on them does not end here, even if Trump is a second term president now. But you know what, though, didn't the New York Times confirm that, yes, he is a billionaire? And couldn't he just sell a few damn buildings and just finance the Republican Party himself? well there's being a billionaire and there's also how much that's already leveraged uh he's clearly not

as liquid as as one would need to be to do that yeah all right or he's not inclined to do so i mean maybe it makes more sense to to raise the type of money that's necessary from folks like the addlesons and uh you know it seems as if they're probably the quid pro quo at some level attached to that but maybe that's the art of the deal yeah oh i mean it was so clear wasn't it that there was a direct link on, for example, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, if not the recognition of the goal on Heights, although I bet that probably was part of it too, right? Yeah, perhaps even, you know, I think probably quite possibly leaving the Iran nuclear deal as well.

Yeah. Again, his big issue with it, he never said he would even consider leaving it when he was a candidate in the primaries. It was that he would try to get Iran to buy more Boeing plans. Yeah. I mean, just a couple of weeks ago, he was accusing. Biden of abandoning Israel because he temporarily held up delivery of the 2,000 pound bombs. The one-ton bombs are used on these poor people over there.

Yeah. And Trump goes, oh, you sell out to the dirty Muslims. Oh, God. This is what we're going to see in our debate tonight, right? Who can cowtow to Netanyahu worse? I think that's quite possibly what we're going to see. Goodness gracious. Anyway, I'm sorry for ruining your day so much.

much, but you've made mine. You're great, man. Thank you for coming on the show, Eli. Thanks for having me. All right, you guys, that is the great Eli Clifton. He does such great investigative journalism at responsiblestatecraft.org because he is the co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which, you know, people were skeptical about that. But all it ever was, guys, was our best friends from the American Conservative magazine and from Jim Loeb's blog, all in this giant,

marriage of awesome article writing i don't know who could possibly complain the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scotthorton org and libertarian institute dot org