Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/5/24 Max Blumenthal on a Disappointing DNC Amidst the Holocaust of Our Time

Episode Date: September 7, 2024

Scott had Max Blumenthal on Antiwar Radio this week to talk about his experience reporting from the Democratic National Convention. He explains how he was able to confront so many party VIPs, the extremely disappointing foreign policy speeches, why he thinks the protests outside the convention failed and more. Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project and the author Goliath, Republican Gomorrah and The 51 Day War. Follow him on Twitter @MaxBlumenthal. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: 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

For Pacifica Radio, September the 5th, 2004, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com, an author of The Book, Enough already time to end the war on terrorism you can find my full interview archive more than 6,000 of them now going back to 2003 at scothorton.org and at youtube.com slash scott horton show and all your favorite podcatchers and video sites and so forth slash scott horton show and of course i'm here every thursday from 2 30 to 3 on kpfk 90.7 fm in l. and our guest this week is the great

Max Blumenthal, author of the 51-day War, Goliath, and the management of savagery, which is just the Max Blumenthal version of Enough Already, which is just fantastic. And he runs the Grey Zone. He's the director of the Grey Zone, and he does investigative journalism and hard-hitting stuff, and he's got a crew of writers and journalists that work for him, like Aaron Matey and Kit Clarenberg, that'll just knock your socks off. And he's such an important part of American. journalism welcome back to the show happy to have here max hey great to be back uh good to have you

here and thank goodness i'm not on twitter right now because i'm busy writing a book about other things but i heard tell that you went to the dnc and you got to do all kinds of journalism about the protesters and about the democrats and the party people and the the crowd and interviews and all kinds of things so please tell us you know what all did you learn there if you want to start with the protesters or start with Schumer or whatever you got well there's a lot more to report and i think you're going to want to follow up with me because i'm working on some reporting about the fallout from the convention and you know what i saw there was pretty depressing from the point of view of someone who's anti-war dismaying from the point of view of

someone who opposes the genocide israel's carrying out in the gaza strip uh which is now more morphing into the gossification of the occupied West Bank. The Democrats entered the convention with a lot of momentum as Kamala Harris was sort of installed in the place of Joe Biden. And that took the wind out of the sales of what was to be a major protest there. And I have my theories on why, which I can kind of expound on later, why the numbers were not what I was hoping for, not what I expected. I was hoping that the protesters would be able to send a real,

really strong message of rejection of the Democrats' policy of basically bear-hugging Netanyahu, which is what Joe Biden proceeded to do just days after October 7th. And for a reporter, from a point of view of a reporter, I wasn't credentialed. And that kind of worked in my favor because the credentialed press was all kind of penned in like a kind of VIP section away from the floor. They were given passes to go on the floor for a half hour. only which is the only place where you could actually meet the VIPs and get in their faces and none of them really wanted to ask the hard questions as you could

see the press wasn't even pushing for a Kamala Harris interview which she eventually granted to Dana Bash who is one of the biggest pro-Israel fanatics in the media and so I got tickets one night and I went with my colleague Wyatt Reid down to the basement of the United Center after we passed through this giant securitized city within a city, which was designed to prevent the protesters from getting anywhere close to the United Center. And once there, we found a section near the floor where VIPs might be entering. We posted up there for about four hours, and we managed to confront everyone from CNN's Wolf Blitzer, who was a former communications director for APAC, the main arm

of the Israel lobby in Washington, to Senator Cory Booker, one of the biggest recipients of APAC money in congressional history, to Steny Hoyer, the long-serving Democratic rep form of majority whip, who is, I think, the largest recipient of APAC money in history. Then Chuck Schumer passed by, Senator Chuck Schumer, who led the bipartisan rally for genocide on the national mall in, I believe, October or November of last year. And, you know, they just kept coming at us and we kept peppering them with questions about why the Democrats refused to set a red line on Israel's conduct in the Gaza Strip, where it is killed, injured, disappeared, or detained a full 10% of the population in a year, almost

a year. Nothing could be said back to us that made any sense to the extent that they even tried. most of them walked away. And it really showed the kind of posture the Democratic Party elite was taking toward journalists who wanted to ask about this issue. They didn't want to deal with it at all. They didn't want to deal with it to the extent

that the uncommitted movement, which had garnered 100,000 uncommitted votes in Michigan alone, along with tens of thousands more during the Democratic primaries in a show of protest against the Biden administrations, Bear Hug BB policy was denied even the opportunity to have a Palestinian speaker address the DNC in a vetted speech, a very milk toast vetted speech after the family of an Israeli captive in Gaza spoke.

So only the Israeli narrative was able to be presented on stage. And then when Kamala Harris finally delivered her acceptance speech. of the nomination she made some gestures of concern towards civilian casualties in Gaza stating that far too many have lost their lives in the passive voice they could have died i don't know in a hurricane or some other natural disaster maybe they died from monkey pox who knows actually many are dying of disease now and polio has arrived in the gaza strip but kamala made it seem as though they were just dying and she was concerned about it. But most of her energy was reserved for condemning Hamas, including for systemic sexual violence on October 7th, something that

never happened that is the product of a Israeli propaganda hoax, which Kamala Harris routinely promotes and platforms. And then she threatened Iran and the Yemeni Houthis with more military force. And this followed a day of just straightforward neo-conservative rhetoric from figures like Jason Crow, the Democrat from Colorado, who joined with Liz Cheney to prevent or to issue a bill that would have, that condemned withdrawing from Afghanistan at any point. In the summer of 2020, based on the Russian Bounty's hoax. Based on a complete media hoax. Yeah, Charlie Savage is absolute shame that story that he'll never live down.

It's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton. I'm talking with Max Blumenthal. He's describing his trip to the DNC, the big convention and his interviews with everyone. I just want to chime in one point here was they even had in their platform. They condemned Trump for not bombing Iran after he assassinated Soleimani. And then they hit an empty corner of an American base in a symbol. symbolic retaliation, which did lead to some concussions.

And then they said that Trump, the Democrats, said Trump was a wimp for not bomb in Tehran. Yeah. My God, man. Kamala Harris attacked Donald Trump during her nomination acceptance speech for doing diplomacy in on the Korean peninsula. And she vowed that she would never, ever conduct any negotiations with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. 80% of South Koreans who want to reunite this Korean peninsula and end the war to actually have an armistice and reunite with their families in the North will be denied that under a Kamala Harris administration because Korea has to be one of the front-facing forward position de facto bases of the U.S. military when it pivots to Asia, if it ever can, extract itself from the Middle East and pivot to Asia and initiate the war, the

coming war with China. So this is clearly part of her agenda along with endless hostility to Russia, attacking Trump for signaling that he might end the Ukraine proxy war and ever negotiate over a piece of land in eastern Ukraine that no Americans can even locate, let alone care about. This is a neo-conservative administration. It really represents the third coming of Bush's second term. I should, honestly, I should say the fourth coming of Bush. his second term because the interregnum of Trump and Obama was very much like George W. Bush despite their rhetoric. Yeah.

Such continuity there. And look, Trump is saying that Chuck Schumer's a Palestinian. The Democrats, they're all Palestinians. Yeah. And if you're a real Israel hawk, you should vote Republican. He said that on the Mark Levin show. And then he brought up, I think you and I may have discussed this before. Trump noticed this and said it one time and he really likes it.

And so he thinks this is a great talking point. And so he keeps saying over and over and over again, what an absolute tragedy and catastrophe it is, that Israel no longer completely owns and controls and dominates the Congress, that anyone is allowed to speak against them now is the worst atrocity. And he goes on and on about the protesters. This is the guy who's supposed to be standing up for free speech as, you know, compared to the Democrat censors. and he talks like college protesters opposing killing people or traitors to America for opposing Israel. Well, I don't think Trump can do anything more in Palestine than is currently being done now. Israel has carte blanche in the Biden administration.

They exercise no leverage to prevent Israel from doing whatever it wants. That's why Netanyahu, in his psychotic speech, denouncing the president. protests in Israel against him for failing to secure the release of the hostages and prisoners of war in Gaza, that he declared, and this was completely missed by the whole American media, that he can resist U.S. pressure indefinitely. And it's because there really is no pressure. When he was asked about Biden, grumbling about Netanyahu, not wanting to make a deal, he said, well, Tony Blinken said that I offered Hamas a generous offer.

And Blinken did do that. And Netanyahu probably asked Blinken to do that because that's how he has played one U.S. administration after another. So I don't think there's anything more that Trump can do. He just, the rhetoric he deploys is nakedly anti-Palestinian, exterminationist, catering to the Republican base, which has large, like a disproportionate number of Christian Zionists in it. And he's telling us what he'll do. The threat from Trump, it really relates to Iran, that he would take the leash off

Israel, and he himself would authorize more U.S. military action against Iran, along with intensified sanctions, although the Biden administration hasn't really done anything to move back into the Iran deal. The Iran deal is effectively dead. Back to the Democratic Convention. Yeah, I was just going to say because the spirit of this whole thing. It was so telling that the speeches leading up to Kamala Harris were CIA former officers and the former director of the CIA.

I mean, other than Jason Crow, who was a U.S. military veteran and a right-wing Democratic militarist, you had Elisa Slotkin from Michigan, who is former CIA. It was a full-scale neocon speech. It could have been written by the, you know, Bill Crystal and Bob Kagan, attacking Trump for possibly ever pulling U.S. troops back from across the world, ending the Ukraine proxy war. I mean, in this speech brought her into the spotlight and earned her massive standing ovations. And then Leon Panetta spoke, again, to praise Kamala Harris. These are the people that are really controlling Kamala. And this is what we saw with the Trump era is that the Democratic Party became the party

of the CIA and the FBI and the security services, the secret security services, that just simply want to preserve the establishment. And I could have sworn when the Democrat started floating the idea of a secret surprise celebrity guest speaker, when everyone started wondering, is it going to be Taylor Swift? I thought it was going to be George W. Bush. Hang on just one second for me here. You guys, I'm so proud to announce the publication of the Libertarian Institute's 14th book. It's Israel, winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War, Undue influence, Deceptions, and the Neocon Energy Agenda by Gary Vogler,

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It's really good. Make sure and click the link in the margin at Scott Horton.org. The McCain family's all lining up to endorse Kamala right now as we speak. I saw John McCain has a son. who came out to condemn Trump for his PR stunt at the Arlington Memorial there. It's like, I didn't even know that John McCain has. Is he going to run for Senate now, too? What is this world?

I mean, look at the McCain Institute. It's just a gigantic money laundering scheme for an influence peddling scheme for military contractors who feed off of corporate welfare. And then they go and proceed. see the, you know, people who've come out of the McCain Institute, like Kurt Volker, they're basically lobbyists for Raytheon, and then they go into positions where they get control over what's taking place on the Ukrainian battlefield and inside Ukraine politically. So the ghost of McCain looms large, and it really looms over the Democratic Party at this point. The Democratic Party

fetishizes, quote unquote, moderate Republicans who are willing to denounce Trump. That's why one of the biggest bozos in Congress, Adam Kinzinger, was able to gain a prime time speaking slot. He was someone who was a backbencher, a one-termer, wasn't really a conservative, was just a tool for the defense industry and, you know, emerges on C-SPAN, as a CNN commentator after crying about January 6th in a performative display where he cried for democracy. and he, you know, has become a star within the Democratic Party. And Kinsinger's main issue is Ukraine, just supporting billions and billions of dollars being flushed from the pockets of the American taxpayer through Ukraine and back into

the defense industry, back through the defense contractors who were reaping something like 60 to 70 percent of all Ukraine aid. Yeah. Well, and that's what the Democrats especially tell us to love about it. They openly proclaim that the military industrial complex, that's a terrible conspiracy theory when it's a negative, is the defense industrial base. And it's really great for the economy when the government prints money and spends it on weapons of destruction, even though that's obviously a net loss for everyone other than the arms manufacturers themselves and the generals with their pensions and their golf courses, everyone else loses clearly. and yet they openly proclaim the greatness of the defense industrial base, don't you call it the military industrial complex,

because only a kook like Dwight David Eisenhower would call it something like that, consider it a negative and a danger. Yeah, and just being in the halls of the DNC, you'd see people walking by with their corporate pins on. I saw a guy wearing a Johnson and Johnson pin. You know, the VIP boxes were filled with defense. lobbyists that's who's that's who is paying the bills for the DNC and the media was not really the media as we understand it most of the many of those I met

who are credentialed media were teenage influencers who are simply getting their first chance to do national media be part of the press corps and were there simply to promote Kamala Harris on TikTok and Instagram they were literally credentialing, I met two 14-year-olds who were the only other people trying to doorstep and ambush VIPs, but they were just wanting to ask them about climate change and they were there as part of some environmental group to promote Kamala's green agenda. They're literally 14 years old. No one was asking hard questions that I saw, you know, you had the usual partisan warfare and complaints about different gaffs that the speaker's made. Let me ask you this, Max. There is a big

protest movement now and you're a guy who's been around and come from the anti-war left and know a lot about this. So I wonder if you have advice for people because, you know, the students are back in class now and they got two months to raise hell until the election. So, you know, where is their energy best spent, do you think? Well, the fact that the campus is the base of anti-war activity is sort of depressing. It shows how neutralized every other area of society has been. If you look at the protests outside the Democratic Convention, the largest one might have been 5,000 people.

It mostly consisted of the, I don't want to say professional activist class, but of people who are veteran anti-war activists, along with third-party activists, many of them from sectarian socialist parties that have no interest in dealing with the Democrats, but who often ape their positions and alienate a lot of Americans. I mean, one of the protests on the first day was for Palestine and queers and abortion. It's like, how can we section off things as much as possible to make sure that Palestine is unrelatable as possible to people who don't already agree with us? And don't the Democrats already aggressively support queer rights and abortion rights?

Isn't that already part of their platform? So what are you protesting for? This is one of the sectarian socialist parties protesting. Then what you didn't see were the major Muslim groups bringing out busing their constituents in, bringing people in from mosques as they did during the major protest in D.C., the first major protest, which took place, I think, late last year. And it flooded the streets of D.C. It was a powerful show. And that's because I think so many of these Muslim groups, their leadership has decided Kamala is likely to win. The media is pushing hard for her victory, and we want to negotiate with her when she's in office.

So we don't want to antagonize her or appear as her enemy outside the Democratic Convention. So that's my theory on why the protests essentially failed to materialize. Then you had the uncommitted movement itself, which staged a really sad sit-in outside the convention as Oprah Winfrey spoke, guaranteeing as little media interest as possible. Oprah was kind of a surprise celebrity speaker, looked great after so much Ozempic and was really occupying the camera. And only a few alternative media outlets were there to cover this sit-in. It wasn't disrupting business as usual. It took energy out of the convention, which should have been disrupted by these delegates who had been told that they could not have a speech. And why was their demand to simply have a vetted speech with a milk toast message after all they had done?

It almost felt as though they were preparing for a Kamala administration in which they too would seek to court her and negotiate with her. And so so much of the energy from the anti-war movement, which tends to be on the left, but isn't limited to the left, has been co-opted by the Democrats since Obama. We saw this resurgence under Biden, this old crotchety, militaristic white man who had whipped the vote for the Iraq war and lied about beheaded babies. but it just seemed to be gone when Kamala Harris emerged. And so there's a lot of criticism to go around. But what's going to take place on campus, I think, is students confronting unprecedented repression. All these new rules have been instituted to prevent them from gathering, banning on campuses across America, camping, erecting tents on lawns, spending the night on lawns, holding protest

signs even on campus, these laws were enacted under pressure from the Israeli government's cutouts in the U.S. and the Zionist billionaire class that controls these university administrations. And so I think what the students are doing is fighting not just against the Holocaust of our times, but fighting one of the most epic free speech battles. And they can win people over. If they frame it that way, uh, as the right seeks to sort of paint them as a bunch of masked lunatics, uh, in, in, in order to avoid dealing with the actual issue at hand. Let me give you five minutes at the end here, Max. Yeah. You called it the Holocaust of our time. That's pretty hyperbolic language. Why don't you tell us for five minutes what's going on

in Gaza and in the West Bank that you think the people at L.A. need to know about here listening to KPFK today. Well, you can just go on any social media. I think Twitter X would be the best one and watch children be burned alive in their homes in the Gaza Strip day after day. I'm not exaggerating like I can point anyone in any second to video of this one video I saw last week of a woman in Han Yunis screaming as she arrived home following an Israeli air strike on her home her home was in flames and her children were inside and they burned to death. So that's what that's what Holocaust is just. a term that refers to a giant conflagration. We're witnessing a genocide in which, as I said, about 10% of the population is maimed, disease-ridden, disappeared, or dead. Numbers might be even higher, and the numbers will continue to go up even if there's a ceasefire, which doesn't seem to be in the, you know, likely in the near future. So what's happening in the Gaza Strip is Israel

is simply tormenting the population in order to create pressure on Hamas to accept its terms in Doha, which essentially mandate a permanent Israeli presence that severs the north of the Gaza Strip from the south. Israel's created a two-kilometer wide corridor, cutting the north off from the south. The north is where the majority of the population is from, and most of them are displaced, to prevent them from being able to come back. It's called the Netserian corridor. Then you have a corridor that Israel's attempting to establish between the southern city of Rafa and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. And Netanyahu is arguing that he has to do that and create that corridor with a permanent Israeli or long-term Israeli presence before he can

negotiate for the release of the 100 hostages and prisoners of war who are still alive inside the Gaza strip. And the longer this takes, the more he puts military pressure on Hamas. So we just have this outraged sweeping the U.S. media over six dead Israeli hostages. One of them, Hirsch Goldberg-Pollin, is an American citizen who went to fight in Israel with the Israeli army, was taken captive on October 7th. And his death has sparked the most outrage. Tony Blinken is called him an American hero. Language he didn't use for American service member whose service members who've died defending Israel's strategic depths since October 7th. The outrage is so out of proportion with the amount of death in Gaza. But how did they die? Why were they killed? I think this

is important to understand because as Netanyahu refuses a hostage deal and a ceasefire, he is simultaneously attempting to quote unquote liberate the hostages through military action now this took place in d'arabala about a month ago when israel embarked on a daring and tebe style special forces operation to rescue one hostage noa argomani who was a young woman who was taken at the nova electronic music festival she was alive in the gaza strip she had shrapnel in her head because because she had been nearly killed by an Israeli airstrike. And now Israel was going to liberate her. They were found out, they were caught,

they had gone in in disguise as a humanitarian convoy. Hamas security opened fire. And so Israel launched massive air strikes with six 2,000 pound bombs on an open air market near where Argomani had been located to clear the path for its special forces, killing over 150 people. They got her out, and this led to a change in Hamas policy, where they determined that

if the military, the Israeli military, was getting close and they were under pressure, rather than allow them to capture the hostages while they're massacring large amounts of people, they would kill the hostages. And so that's what they did with these six hostages because of Netanyahu's policy of rejecting a ceasefire deal, releasing Palestinian prisoners, political prisoners and hostages. and instead continuing to pursue the military-only path. And it's been a disastrous policy that's resulted in death. Large protests erupted in Israel demanding a ceasefire.

Netanyahu has said, no, no, we're going for the Philadelphia corridor between Gaza and Egypt. And that's how we'll finally cut off the oxygen to Hamas. It's a delusional fantasy that he can end Hamas there. but it's what his base in Israel demands of him, and they run around wearing hats, you know, Netanyahu fanatics in Israel, who are a very powerful constituency. You'll see them in the streets of Israel with blue hats on, modeled after the red, make America great again hats of Trump, and they say total victory. So total victory means endless war.

It means continuous genocide. And the Biden administration, the Biden, Blinken, Brett McGurk, Kamala administration, has shown no willingness to finally put its foot down and suspend arms sales to Israel. It just authorized a $20 billion sale of weapons to Israel. So it means Netanyahu's policy has been ratified, even as Biden grumbles about Netanyahu. Since the Iraq war, it's the most disastrous, abuse of diplomacy I've seen the U.S. engage in. Yeah, at least since Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Yeah, I guess, you know, it's hard to choose.

And Ukraine. Just continuous. But yeah, I'm glad you brought those up. I mean, it's the addiction to regime change. The U.S. is pursuing the Israeli policy of regime change in Gaza, just as it did against all of these other perceived enemies of Israel. Yeah. All right. Listen, I'm sorry.

We're out of time. Everybody, that's Max Blumenthal. He runs the Gray Zone. He writes great books. And you should pay close attention to him on Twitter and to all of his guys to write and over there at the Greyzone.com. Thank you, sir. thanks a lot scott all right you guys and that's anti-war radio for today i'm your host scott horton i'm at scott horton dot org i got 6,000 interviews going back to actually

1999 for you there and um i'm here every thursday from 2 30 to 3 on kpfk 90.7 fm in l.a i'll see you next week