Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/22/26 Nick Cleveland-Stout on Israel’s Increasingly Desperate Effort to Win Back the American People

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Scott interviews Nick Cleveland-Stout from Responsible Statecraft about his reporting on the Israel lobby’s multifaceted attempt to influence the American public. Discussed on the show: “Trump pal funneled millions of Israeli gov't cash into US media” (Responsible Statecraft) “Israel targets X users, right-wing media with $2 million ad push” (Responsible Statecraft) “Trump acquired at least $10 million in defense stocks last year” (Responsible Statecraft) Nick Cleveland-Stout is a Research Associate in the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute. Previously, Nick conducted research on U.S.-Brazil relations as a 2023 Fulbright fellow at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Follow him on X @nick_clevelands Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; Expat Money https://expatmoney.com/scott; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, guys, let me take a second to tell you about expat money at expatmoney.com slash Scott. It's a guy named Mikkel Thorup. He's a great guy. I've met him. And he's been an expat for many years and knows the rules and regulations all around the world about buying property and or other investments, how to protect your neck, even get citizenships and passports from other countries and everything you need to know

to be an expat, whether you're afraid of the coming collapse or just fighting. modern day price inflation, find out what you need to know about how to protect your neck at expatmoney.com slash Scott. Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest, reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country? Because the babies are making it. We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton show, libertarian foreign policy, mostly.

When the president doesn't, that means that it is not only... We're going to take out seven countries. They don't know what the fuck. Stand doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now here's your host, Scott Horton. All right to you guys, introducing Nick Cleveland Stout.

He is a regular writer. It's got a better title than that. Over at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, welcome to the show. How you doing? Thanks so much for having me, Scott. I'm doing well. How are you doing?

I'm doing good. Happy to have you here. And I've got a couple of articles at issue here. And there's been some more that have come out recently by others and all that. But I think you're really breaking the original ground here. Trump Powell funneled millions of Israeli government cash into U.S. media. And then here's one follow-up. Israel targets ex-users, right-wing media, with $2 million ad push,

which is a hell of a lot. And I got one more story I want to ask you about on a day. different topic if we have time. But let's start with this. Who is Brad Parscale and what are his companies and what is the deal of interest here? Yeah. So just to set the stage a little bit, you know, Israel was clearly caught flat-footed by the total cratering of American public support for Israel in the last few years. And historically, they've been able to rely a lot on pro-Israel organizations based here in the U.S. that are American-led, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Christians United for Israel,

organizations like that. But being caught flat-footed in the way that they have been with more Americans actually sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis for the first time, Israel clearly felt as though they needed to kind of put their thumb on the scale, so to speak, for the first time, and that they are actually now having to register a lot of contractors under Farah, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is, you know, I'm sure your listeners are well aware, but like the U.S. is transparency law that requires foreign agents of foreign governments to disclose a little bit about what they're doing on behalf of foreign governments. So Brad Parscale is former, is Trump's former campaign manager,

and he is far in away the largest recipient of this newfound cash flow coming in from the Israeli government trickling down to contractors across the U.S. that are willing to try and influence American public opinion on behalf of Israel. And so he's received, or his contract, is for just under $50 million over the course of one year. And Parscale is doing a lot of things we can get into all that. But he's very much embracing this kind of, I guess you could say, kind of the new frontiers of influence. Like it's not, you know, traditional lobbying as we know it.

It's far more covert and expansive and embracing new techniques across digital techniques, I would say, which is sort of his bread and butter. I mean, this is the guy that people remember on the 2016 Trump campaign who hired Cambridge Analytica. Now, so I read a thing I'm sorry, I forget if this was Arthur Bloom or somebody else, man.

I used to be so good at keeping my footnotes straight. But I read a thing where he was saying, listen, I did take some money for some things. But then he said that he was, that money was not getting spread around to his other jobs, basically. So that even though it looked like, say, LaMedia was now, you know, under this, under the influence of this money. in these marching orders, that that wasn't right.

But then when I read your article, I was like, wow, but it sure sounds like it a lot. So can you square that circle for me a little bit? Totally. Yeah. So I think what you're referring to here is, yeah, Parscale, Par scale is doing a number of things on behalf of the Israeli government. And I'll just run through a few of those real quick that are, you know, confirmed. You know, I've reported about them in that article in some of the, cases he's even confirmed this. One of those is that he is trying to influence chatbots. He is

creating a number of websites in order to try and influence the training data of chatbots and get chatbots to pick up the Israeli narrative a lot more. So, you know, there's a bunch of different websites. They'll say things like, you know, Israel is not committing to genocide. They'll cast doubt on the killing of Heinrichs. They will do a number of things. A lot, related to the US-Israel military relationship as well, arguing that there needs to be a qualitative edge. You know, the typical Israeli narrative talking points. So that's one thing that he's doing.

Another thing that he's doing is, you know, and this is that he is leading a mass texting campaign. He's hired a firm to text a bunch of Americans saying, you know, and it's using kind of a, what appears to be a maybe human assisted, but likely chatbot. The text Americans asking for their views on Israel. And again, we'll lightly push. Oh, really?

Did you talk to them? Yeah. Well, not very much, but, you know, I don't really like responding to AI stupid intrusions, but I've seen people on Twitter talking about getting them to. And it's always like, oh, I'm Sarah from the Israelis who only want peace foundation or whatever. You know, yeah, right.

And it's even wilder than that, too, because they won't, like, you have to kind of do a little bit of digging to know that it is the Israeli government. And I think a lot of Americans kind of have their antennas up around this kind of thing anyway, so they sort of implicitly know. You know, like people have been fooled enough times that they are aware now. But when they initially reach out, they'll say, hey, this is Sarah from Friends for Peace or Partners in Peace. Like, it's these make-belief peace organizations that don't exist. And contrary, though, to the antenna up thing, I think you say in one of your pieces here, they at least claim to have great results from this. They get people to engage with these chatbots, and then they feed them some talking points

and get them to soften their stance on Israel. And at least they claim that it works. So pay up. Totally. I mean, that's the idea. You know, and so yeah, there's that mass texting campaign, which, you know, I haven't gotten a text yet. I don't know. I don't know what that's about.

It seems like everyone I know has gotten the text at this point. I want to talk to Israeli government shopbats too. So Brad Parscale, if you're listening, you know where to find me. But, and then there's kind of this other bucket, which is, as you described, a little bit less clear. So those two buckets are like, you know, 100% confirmed. They're doing this. They've stated this in their filings. Then there's sort of the unknown, which is the degree to which par scale is.

influencing Salem Media, which is this massive Christian conservative media conglomerate that hosts a number of fairly high-profile conservative media shows, Scott Jennings show, Laura Trump Show, I believe, is on there, a bunch of different shows. Charlie Kirk Show used to be on there. And then a bunch of like radio, local radio shows as well. But in his initial filing, he said that he was going to be integrating pro-Israel messaging into Salem Media properties. And within that article that you referenced, I at least identified that he's done ad buys with Salem Media. You know, he's funneled $500,000 worth of Israeli funding into Salem Media. You know, I don't know exactly what that's been for, what those ad buys have gotten them.

So there's at least like a relationship there. And I should also mention Parscale is the chief strategy officer. at Salem Media. So he's in a position of enormous influence within one of the most influential conservative media networks to actually do the things that he's saying he will do on behalf of the Israeli government.

So that's a little bit unclear. And then the other thing that I think you were getting at is that there was this time article which said that Parscale is also paying influencers. And it went through And this is something that we know, we already knew that Parscale paid influencers. He has a company called Influensible, which, you know, openly, openly advertises that it is paying social media influencers for different campaigns.

A lot of them, you know, like Texas-based campaigns, you can find, you know, Texas Tribune articles about Influensibles work, you know, for related to like Ken Paxton, for instance, in the past. But what was new here is that time was reporting that, Parscale was actually also engaged in a lot of pro-Israel influencer work. And what he denies is that he was paying influencers with Israeli government funding. He says that he was paying influencers to do pro-Israel work. The implication is sort of that it is with domestic Christian clients.

There's a quote somewhere in there where he, where he alludes to that. And so that's kind of one of those, those unclear points. But, you know, at the end of the day, like, he's, you know, he's on a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government. A lot of it is for the same kind of work.

You know, for some people, it might not even matter, right? Like, if the, if the, where the funding is coming from, because the end result is the same. But that is sort of the, one of the unknowns at the moment. expanddesigns.com. They run my websites. Maybe you got some websites and you need someone competent to run them, someone who does what they say, when they say they're going to do it and does it right the first time. Expanddesigns.com.

All right. You guys, me here for tax attorney Matt Sersely at agaristaxadvice.com. And he is just a real hawk. He serves small businesses and high income professionals who are on the run from the rest. Revenuers, and his job is making sure that you don't have to pay those sons of bitches one penny more than you absolutely have to. That's Matt Sersley, your new tax lawyer. He's at agoristtaxadvice.com. Here's the Wall Street Journal on the same question. Israel's $50 million experiment to change U.S. public opinion. Boy, when the Wall Street Journal resents your Israeli heavy hand in American propaganda, you might be overreaching a little bit there.

Wow. And so, well, here's one thing that I'm curious about. I wonder if you've seen much about this while studying this beat. What all has changed over at TikTok since it got bought out by the Israeli lobby, the guy from Oracle Ellison bought it. And then with a stated intention of purging all the truth about what was happening in Gaza off there. So I wonder if that's made a difference for them. Yeah, it's a good question.

I would be interested in, you know, the same kind of, the thing is, like, a lot of these algorithms are in such a black box that, you know, anecdotally, like, it certainly seems to be the case that TikTok is purging content that is, that can be deemed critical of Israel. You know, a lot of accounts that were posting that kind of content before, you know, maybe a couple of years ago, were, are now like shadow. band, you know, like Netanyahu in his interview with 60 Minutes blamed TikTok as like the reason why so many young people have been disillusioned with Israel. There's this, there's this go-to, it's such a

go-to scapegoat that there has been a consistent, like the Israeli government will consistently scapegoat the influence efforts and the Hasbara, the, you know, the lobbyists. themselves, the contractors, without actually questioning the policies themselves. And I think that that's, you know, that was on full display in that 60 minutes interviews, an interview when he says, well, the reason that all these young people are disillusioned is because TikTok's algorithm is feeding them this. Instead of like, oh, maybe it has to do with the images that they're seeing on their screen. Maybe that's something to do with like, you know, the fact that hospitals are being blown up.

A lot of evangelical Christians have broken in support with Israel because they're seeing churches get blown up, right? Like, this is something that people are seeing with their own two eyes. And so, you know, when he met with influencers, I think it was September of last year in New York, like he said, the most important purchase that's happening right now is the purchase of TikTok. So we know that Nanyahu and Israel have just a vested interest for sure. And they believe that that purchase was incredibly important. And I think anecdotally, I think it seems to have a, you know, change the content and change the algorithm a little bit. But again, you know, these kinds of things are hard to, I think, quantify.

Yeah, I mean, no question about Ellison's motive in buying TikTok and taking control over CBS and now CNN and whatever it is. It's all I can do is try to cheat. You know what I'm talking about here? Come on, guys, we've got to figure out a way to hire 700,000 chat bots to harass everybody who is better on this to, you know, make them stop. it just goes to show what position they know that they are in. And by the way, so I wanted to, this is maybe a little bit outside of our conversation,

but just a little, it's really, I think, worth showing here. From that same time magazine article, they have a source from the Israeli foreign ministry. Okay? And the Israeli foreign ministry official tells them that the ministry as an institution, its leadership, I guess, had concluded that Hasbara was not working, and that the likes of Carlson and Bannon were normalizing the turning against Israel on the right in a way that was really dangerous for them. They wanted to figure out.

But here's the way he put it, though, and they're paraphrasing here, but pretty tightly, I would imagine. They feared Vance and his allies were steering the American right, toward an isolationism fundamentally at odds with Israel's strategic interests. And of course, isolationism just being their smear term for the cowardice of non-interventionism, right? Nobody calls Mexico an isolationist country. The only real isolationist country is maybe North Korea, right? The hermit kingdom or whatever.

There's no one in America that calls themselves the isolationist. But what are they saying? that if the American right doesn't support overall American domination and imperialism and foreign adventurism, then the American Empire won't be available to do Israel's bidding. And so Americans cannot have peace because that's against Israel's strategic interests. And geez, all tied together with the same argument that, yeah, and CNR Hasbara isn't working anymore. So now it's DefCon too. We've got to figure out what to do to prevent the right from turning to peace.

We can't let this happen. Let's promise them the rapture again. Let's have our chat pot text them again. Let's do something. You know? Right. A lot of it feels like, yeah, when Gideon Tsar, the Israeli foreign minister, when he first came in, part of the offer of him becoming foreign minister was that he would get a huge budget to do exactly what he

wanted to in terms of Hasbara. And this to me, like when I read that time article and I saw those quotes, I was like, oh, it's like this is the scapegoating. Like this is then recognizing that this plan is not working. You know, they come out with all these metrics, right? Oh, it's getting X amount of impressions, X amount of, you know, likes on Twitter or TikTok, whatever. none of that matters.

None of that translates to, like what matters is public opinion. Like that's ultimately what they're trying to capture here. And specifically public opinion of conservatives, you know, people in the mega movement, as you've identified, as, you know, Vance was talking about, evangelicals and young people. Like those are the three main demographics.

If you read Israeli procurement documents for some of these contracts, like they lay that out very, very explicitly, that they are worried about opinion polls. But then whenever it comes to like press releases, they never talk about opinion polls. They always talk about the metrics. And so they've, you know,

they don't have a response for a lot of this. And now they're starting to scapegoat. And they're saying, oh, well, you know, we hired Parscale because we wanted someone who's within Trump's orbit. You can just look up any news article from the last, like, like did they miss the last you know five years or whatever like parscale is not within trump's orbit um if if they wanted someone who was close to trump they hired the wrong guy um so i read that a

little bit as kind of like trying to pass the buck you know oh we thought we'd get this one thing but we actually got another i think they hired par scale because they weren't really trying to win over elite opinion they're trying to win over public opinion and they saw par scale as the guy the digital guru who had the tools to do exactly that and that hasn't worked either. You know, poll after poll shows that Americans across all these demographics have just broken so sharply. And, yeah, Vance in that interview, this is the other thing with those influencers who were being

paid by by par scale. You know, Vance was on Rogan the other day, and he was making the argument that, you know, a lot of these influencers have been paid to. these conservative influencers who are oftentimes Trump aligned are being paid to attack the ceasefire what was then the ceasefire. And, you know, now quite successfully. And attack Vance in particular for being, you know, the person that is most closely aligned with, you know, brokering a ceasefire and a vision for a more diplomatic approach within the administration with Iran. Hey, when you're done with this Scott Horton Academy courses, head on over to the guy who came up

with the idea. Tom Woods and his Liberty Classroom. Just look at the link in the right-hand margin at Scott Horton.org. All right, guys, let me take a second to tell you about expat money at expatmoney.com slash Scott. It's a guy named Mikhail Thorup. He's a great guy. I've met him. And he's been an expat for many years and knows the rules and regulations all around the world about buying property and or other investments, how to protect your neck, even get citizenships and passports from other countries and everything you need to know to be an expat, whether you're afraid of the coming collapse or just fighting modern day price inflation, find out what you need to know about how to protect your neck at expatmoney.com slash Scott.

Which is a huge deal, by the way. You know, it sucks because you almost can't talk about it without sounding like, oh, you're advanced partisan and, oh, do you have the greatest of faith in him as the leader. That doesn't have to be the case at all, right? Simply the fact that he's saying, listen, it's not just that the Israelis are complaining and their partisans are complaining. They have paid foreign agents of Israel

doing a coordinated campaign to sabotage the vice president's mission that he was assigned by the president to go and negotiate an end to this stupid war that Israel essentially browbeat our idiot president into launching and that he's now sort of kind of trying to find a way out of. And they're obstructing.

And it's not just a matter of opinion when it's all a bunch of paid sock puppets. And you know, isn't it funny? Like in terms of the, not even long term, but even just like the medium term or immediate kind of reaction of this, isn't it sort of just like affirmative action, which makes you kind of wonder how they got that job or whatever? Like now every time I'm on Twitter, and some Zionists attacks me or attacks the Palestinians

or justifies whatever Israel's doing. Now, I got to wonder whether they only got in because of the color of their money that they took in order to go out there and say their stupid opinions. Are there no honest Zionists left? It's sort of like conscription. Well, if it was a just war, why would you have to conscript able-bodied young men

to go and fight in the thing? Wouldn't they go and fight if it was truly in the thing? defense or truly for America's, you know, most dire national interests or some kind of thing. I think there's even like a risk that, and, you know, there's a chance that, that a lot of this has even like backfired on Israel because like, I think there are a lot of people that feel the same way that you're, that you just described that think, well, okay, I know Israel is paying some of these influencers. a lot of this appears to be a coordinated campaign

or, or, you know, in Par scale's case, maybe it's, you know, some domestic client that's paying these influencers, but, you know, to make pro-Israel posts. And that's not being disclosed, you know. When you're seeing like an ad for Nike shoes or whatever on your timeline, like you're aware that it's an ad or if an influencer is post in that, it'll say paid partnership.

But you don't have that with Israel, with pro-Israel posts. And I think one of the effects of that, you know, they might think they're getting away with something. But I actually think there's a case that it's the opposite where it's like people, people are like they expect that and they're negatively polarized by it. It makes them more suspicious next time they see a lot of these posts because they just have no idea which posts are paid for, which are not. So some people might just assume they're all paid for or they just won't know what to believe. I mean, even that they're fake, that they're not even real people at all. It could just be a stupid chatbot sitting there, you know? Yeah.

It's, yeah, well, and, you know, it's the same thing with all of the AI slop and whatever, where it just leads not to everybody, well, I guess it cuts both ways. We'll see, right? Some people get fooled, but some people are just going to fold their arms and just not believe anything anymore at all, you know? Yeah, yeah. I think the AI stuff is, um, the, the, the prong of Parscale's influence operation

that maybe has the most legs in terms of what it might be able to deliver. You know, given that it's like a relatively, you know, these aren't trafficked sites. Like I've looked at the monthly traffic of these sites. They're not made for humans. There was a Horat's article today that was like, oh, Parscale made all these websites and nobody visited them.

And my reaction to it largely was like, well, they're not made for people. Like they're made for robots. And so, you know, we're going to get to, we're going to see these, these websites get picked up more and more. You know, it's a thing that, that companies have been doing for a while. We're going to start, we're starting to see foreign governments do it. You know, it's not just Israel, although Israel is, I think, one of the first to really engage in this. And so I think that's an area where, you know, at least right now, like people are using chatbots for asking these kinds of questions more and more, you know, is Israel community in a general?

genocide, you know, how many people have been displaced in Lebanon, all these kinds of questions that people go to chatbots for information on. And I think there is a real fear and risk to Israel being able to manipulate those answers. So I think that's the prong that I think there's the most risk for foreign influence. Who's Mike Shields? Yeah, so Mike Shields is a long-time ally. of Parscale. They kind of came up in the Republican movement together and, you know,

Shields' wife and Shields and Parscale, they were kind of a trio in Washington recommending each other for different jobs. And ultimately then, so they've worked together

for a long time, but Shields now runs a company called Convergence Media, which is a pretty active company in Republican politics. You know, it does a lot of all kinds of different digital consultancy type work for different

Republican GOP candidates. And Convergence Media is the company, so Shields' company, is the company that's largely staffing this par scale operation. So, you know, I think it's like a majority of the staffers on the contract come from Shields' company. There's also this weird thing where, like, it seems like convergence media and Shields

don't want to be named explicitly in the Farah filings. You know, they're not registered under Farah. I should say, Mike Shields is registered under Farah, but the company is not mentioned in the Farah filings. But my co-author, Jackie and I, we were able to track down that one of the largest, if not the largest companies that's being subcontracted on Parcales work is this LLC called Portman Road Strategies, which if you look at the business filings, is a Shields company. So Shields is getting a huge payout from all of this. He's getting paid, or at least his LLC is getting paid. I think

it was like $5 million, or it's already been paid $5 million. And who knows how much it's been paid now, that was a couple months ago at this point. So Shields is one of the more important figures in the contract. The other person that I think is really important to Parscale's role in a lot of this is a guy by the name of Tim Dunn. People might be familiar with Dunn. He's a Texas billionaire, oil tycoon, also very, very active in Republican politics. He's known as kind of a kingmaker in Texas politics.

and he is, I should say, he's not registered under Farah and there's not necessarily any indication that he is, you know, I want to be careful with my words here. He's on a lot of the, he owns a lot of the companies that are involved in the contract. For instance, there's this company called Jackson Parker, which he co-owns with Parscale. Him and Parscale are also longtime allies.

And it appears as though he is a major backer of a lot of the work that Parcale is doing. The two of them have set up shop together. Dunn is also on the board of a number of pro-Israel organizations, such as the Israel Allies Foundation. So he's also very close to Parscale and involved in this work. Those are kind of the two, I think, most important figures in Parscale's orbit. And now, what's the connection to meet the press? I don't know if this even counts anymore.

I guess it probably still does in D.C., but it used to be that the Sunday morning news shows, and that one in particular, were extremely important and influential in, you know, setting the policy or cluing in the educated classes to what we're really up to kind of thing. Meet the Press?

Yeah. What is this? You write about how one of their guys received all this money, one of their producers or something received all this money, right? And that, when you are? Yes, yes.

Thank you. Yeah, yeah. So this is, I have a piece out today with Julian Cooper, a colleague of mine here at the Quincy Institute. And yeah, so there's, there's, so the Parscale stuff is just one of like, I should say, really a ton of different contracts that are new contracts that are working for Israel. It's the biggest one by far, you know, don't, don't have hurt your eyes.

I think that's the most important one. But there are a lot of other ones. And so this article from today is looking at one of those firms that's kind of flown under the radar. I haven't really seen any reporting on this. It's a firm called Targeted Communications. And they got $10 million from Israel over the course of just a few months to pitch a lot of media outlets on TV bookings on behalf of Israel. They also placed a bunch of ad buys and a bunch of conservative media, right? bar, daily caller.

They also bought a bunch of ad buys in X and promoted an ad campaign called Freedom Not Terror, which is similar is really promoting similar Israeli narratives. I won't bore you since you're probably familiar with a lot of these kinds of narratives, but claiming there's no genocide, all these things.

And yeah, and one of the people on that contract though is a guy by the name of Matthew Gorman, and he is also an NBC contributor. And, you know, I'm not the first to point this out, actually. I think Ryan Grimm had a tweet on this a month or so ago, where he pointed out, like, hey, there's this guy, Matthew Gorman, who is an active NBC contributor while he's a registered Israeli foreign agent. So there's all these, like, you know, ties with, you know, a lot of these people working

on these contracts, like, have multiple rules. You know, they might be an Israeli foreign agent. They might be an NBC contributor by day, Israeli foreign agent by night. You know, there are other people writing different blog posts. So, yeah, that's just one example. Yeah. All right, you guys, let's talk about crowdhealth at join crowdhealth.com slash Horton and or use the promo code Horton there to join crowdhealth, join crowdhealth.com.

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It tastes just like my show. It's great. Sort of. Well, no, it's Ethiopian and Sumatran coffees blended for your mornings. It's the first thing I do when I get up is for myself a pot of coffee and then I drink it. See, that's why this mug is almost empty. Oh. And the deal is, it's so good.

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kind of payola and corruption and just friends helping friends or whether that could actually be something really meaningful, right? Yeah, who knows? Under Farah, there is supposed to be like, you know, you're supposed to disclose everything that allows,

I think the wording is like meaningful public evaluation of your work on behalf of a foreign government. And so typically, you know, firms will disclose who they're contracting, who they're reaching out to, how much they're being paid, who they're working on behalf of. But this firm, working for Israel, detailed a $750,000 payment to just some unidentified firm.

And, you know, we don't know who it is. We don't know what it was for. You know, just I think the line item just said consulting. Who knows what that means? So there is a degree of transparency that I think this firm is just not meeting. Yeah. I thought it was funny. I don't know.

I'm a pretty outdated guy myself. But it just seemed like the way y'all chose to end, I think the second piece here with Hillary Clinton's old advisor, Mark Penn, of low, so many scandals for us old guys going back to the 1990s. But it ends with Mark Penn saying, we just got to tell the young kids about gay rights in Israel. Then they'll love Israel. And it's just like, come on.

It's so tired. They even, they coined a term for this probably 10 years ago or more pink washing. And of course, their major crisis here is the crisis of confidence on the right. And this is how they're going to win over all the conservatives is by emphasizing that Israel is the gayest country. in the Middle East or who do they think they're fooling with this crap at this point, you know?

Exactly. Yeah, I had to revisit some of those old scandals. I was on his Wikipedia page and was unfamiliar with some of his greatest hits. So that was fun. But yeah, Penn, yeah, I mean, it's a tired argument and it's pretty lazily made by Penn. you know, like, here, I'll get the, I think the exact quote here is young people don't know which side is democratic. They don't know, they don't know about gay rights in Israel. They don't know the basics.

And then he says that he is going to win back a significant number of people that are confused and misinformed. So it's like this idea that like people. The other file rights, the Israeli state does a lot. lot to protect pedophiles to Mark Penn as long as you're at it, dude. And Penn's company, the reason I included that quote from Mark Penn is that he runs this company, Stegwell Group, that does a lot of pro-Israel work. You know, it runs, for instance, the October 7th project, which is kind of like this PR project jointly run by like APEC and the ADL, Jewish Federation's of North America, is also in

involved. But Stegwell, Mark Pan, is the one kind of coordinating that effort. And then there's also, he also owns SKDK, which is this Democratic-aligned firm, which is kind of the politics where he comes from, right? Democratic-aligned firm that was hired by Israel on a $600,000 contract to run a bot farm on behalf of Israel. And, you know, they ended up, they say they ended up not doing the Bot Farm stuff. They ended the contract early, but they still did a lot of work on behalf of the Israeli government. And Stagwai should also just make clear is also the parent company of targeted communications, the company that's been doing all these ad buys. And so that's the connection there. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, I hope you stay on this beat. It's responsible

statecraft, of course, the Quincy Institute. And it's Nick Cleveland Stout and with Jacqueline Sweet on this one and with Julian Cooper on the other here. And there's more, we don't have time for this, but I just love this headline. And it's a hell of an article to read. Trump acquired at least $10 million in defense stocks last year. And it reminds me that I think it's my first book or have these quotes of Trump at the end where he goes,

the first one is like 10 times harder than I, Guy, Eisenhower, ever went after him. He's like, oh, the merchants of death. they love blood, they love money so much because everything he says is so hyperbolic he can't stand it, right? So then the other one, he's like, they love war so much and I'll tell you why too.

It's because of the money. They love the money. And so they'd have war forever if it was up to, and then the third quote is, we love Raytheon and Boeing and Lockheed and we want them to succeed. And that's why we're passing this giant budget to give them all this money.

And like, it's amazing. He's done the same thing with like how he views conflict. of interest. Like in the first term, you know, it's like, oh, you know, we're, my family's not going to be involved. Like, they're not going to, you know, like, that was a frequent talking point by people on the left of like, okay, what is, what is Trump going to do now that he's won? Like, how is he going to handle his businesses? And so that was the first term. And then now, he gave an interview to the New York Times a few months ago in which he said, he was asked

about his conflict of interest. And he said, I found out that nobody cared. That's a direct quote. Found out that nobody cared. So he's clearly, you know, thrown caution to the wind. And, you know, he might be right. Like, what are people going to do? How are people going to restrain him at this point? And, you know, $10 million in defense stocks is honestly a drop in the bucket

compared to some of the other conflicts of interest that he has, especially like with his sons and Whitkoff's family owning WLF, the Emirates have invested in. So it just goes down the line. It's crazy, and the Democrats already blew their whole wad twice impeaching him over nonsense. Pretty hard to imagine they could even try a third time. We're going to all have to ride this out somehow, man. Yeah.

All right, Nick Cleveland-Stout, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Thanks much for having. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc., Moondos, Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books. Fools Aaron, enough already, and my latest, Provote,

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