All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Eli Clifton.
He is from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and the website is responsiblestatecraft.org.
The brand new group led by our good friends Trita Parsi, Andrew Bacevich, and Eli Clifton, among others.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Eli?
I'm doing great.
Thanks so much for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
First of all, can we talk about the Quincy Institute a little bit, and go ahead and address the controversy of George Soros and Charles Koch dollars, too, while you're at it?
Well, thank you for letting me address that up front.
It is a new think tank.
We launched formally, finally, last week.
We have, what is it, 14 people, I think, on staff.
We have 40-some fellows, nonresident fellows.
And the mission of the Quincy Institute is to end the endless wars and to get the United States back on a grand strategy and a footing of what we call responsible statecraft, based off of sort of restraint or progressive realism, the notion that the United States has overextended itself militarily and can better serve its own interests as well as further its values by engaging with the world in a different manner.
And we think that's through diplomacy and by making the use of military force the option of last resort.
Okay, right on.
And what about those donors?
Oh, about those donors.
You know what?
First of all, I want to say it's great that you're asking about our donors, and I love it that interviewers ask us about it.
Especially because donors are sort of your speciality, and that's what we're going to be talking about on the show today.
That's what I'm about to pivot to here.
I think it's awesome.
I know a lot of people in Washington and who are involved in projects in Washington think it's uncouth to ask those questions.
It's the right question to be asking.
And in starting Quincy, that was some of the first stories that we got that we had Charles Koch Institute and OSF, Open Society Foundation, which is George Soros, funding us.
And what I tell the interviewers who ask about this is I'm happy to talk about it, and I hope that they ask those questions of everyone else that think tanks in Washington.
But the gist of it is, is you're exactly right.
They were two of our seed funders from the very beginning, alongside a number of other great foundations like Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Plowshares, and the ARCA Foundation.
And they came together.
And obviously Soros and Koch, they don't agree on a lot of things, probably on most things.
But the thing that they do agree on in this case is about the fact that foreign policy in the United States has become detached from any defensible notion of U.S. interests or a decent respect for sort of the rights and dignity of humankind and all Americans.
And that for whatever reasons that they may disagree on it, I think they agree, actually.
It's that we've become detached from some notion of the national interest and of furthering American interests in the world.
And it's become instead this sort of zombie foreign policy and a pursuit of endless wars, which seem to have had very little success in achieving the goals that they were supposed to achieve.
And I would just, in fairness, point out, this is actually not the first time that Charles Koch and George Soros have collaborated together and funded projects together.
Several years ago, they did some criminal justice reform work, for which they got well-deserved praise for having come together on it.
So they certainly know each other.
I don't think George Soros and Charles Koch know each other, but the foundations know each other.
And, you know, they look for opportunities to collaborate.
And when they see one, and I think on this case that they identified early on, that what we were doing was something that was firmly in both of their wheelhouses.
And it was something that, you know, it could be strengthened by it being the appearance of the reality of a trans-partisan alliance of funders, as well as activists, advocates and politicians.
Yeah.
Well, now, so I asked Andrew Bacevich a little bit about this, and he said, well, listen, we never had a conversation with anyone about what we're going to say, nor would we give that responsibility to anyone but each other and ourselves.
So there's, I guess, the original steering committee, as when the thing was announced, it was you and Trita and Andy Bacevich.
And I know that for $10 million each, you guys wouldn't sell out and start changing your story.
You know, for the world, you wouldn't.
I know all three of you for years and years now.
I don't know the others personally.
But you know, that's an important point.
And you know, that on one hand, you could go, well, they back people who serve their interests.
But as you're saying here, it's just restraint is all you're preaching.
Now, if I catch you going around supporting color-coded revolutions in Eastern Europe, we'll have to have a talk about that.
But I don't expect that to be a problem.
Exactly.
I mean, we were very clear from the get-go about here's what we wanted to do.
And you know, in total credit to OSF and to CKI, from the very beginning, they saw what we were doing, and it was something that interested them.
They were pretty clear that this was something that lined up with something that they'd be interested in supporting.
And you know, they haven't told us what to do.
And it's been, you know, we've told them, hey, here's our plan.
And they've said, that sounds like something that we'd like to support, let's say alongside our other funders.
And I really do think it's important to give them credit as well, because, you know, when you have George Soros and Charles Koch funding behind you, for better or for worse, that becomes, you know, the story of who you're supported by.
And I understand that.
Hey, as a journalist, I've written those stories.
I understand that when you have those types of names, those types of wealth involved, that's what you're going to talk about.
And that's important.
And I say, I defend and I understand every single journalist who asks us about that, because that is the top line story for them.
But you know, speaking from, you know, from the institutional standpoint now of the Quincy Institute, we want to give some credit where credit is due to some of our other institutional supporters.
And that's why on our website, you can click on the donors tab, and we list it out, you know, the other foundations that have been supportive of us.
So yeah, in fairness to the others, they've also been involved since the very beginning.
And we've had a wide array of institutional and individual funders that have been with us from the moment that we sort of proposed this idea.
Yeah.
So I originally had written a piece for antiwar.com.
My original title was, I think it was two and five sixths cheers for the Quincy Institute.
And then my boss made me change it to three quarters, because he thought that people wouldn't get the point about making it five sixths.
So it gave you two and three quarters cheers, but I mean, you know, it could have been nine tenths or something.
I love you guys.
I know this thing is, it's already great.
And I know it's going to be great.
And listen, I mean, I've invested, I know a lot of other people have invested quite a bit of, you know, optimism, and hope that you guys can really make a difference with some of this influence that you'll be able to wield with this new institution.
And for somebody like me, who really, I know very well your track record, as well as Trita's and Andrew Bacevich, I'm really excited about the potential here for what you guys can accomplish.
And the kind of attention that you guys can bring to the kinds of things that we've been talking about all this time.
So I'm just, I think it's huge.
You know, and in terms of the, there are other co-founders, the ones I'd like to bring attention to, I mean, Stephen Wertheim, obviously has been very, very outspoken about ending endless wars.
I haven't talked to him in time.
Yeah, but the person who I think actually is perhaps the most fascinating that we should be looking at in this is our board chair, Suzanne DiMaggio.
And most people don't know her.
And that is, I think, first of all, a damn shame, but also really indicative of how we have put this emphasis on military solutions to our problems in the world, and not on the diplomatic solutions.
And she has been a tireless advocate of diplomacy, leading track two efforts with the countries that we say we don't talk to, like Iran and North Korea, to really try to advance humanitarian concerns, getting prisoner swaps and transfers to happen, to open the door to dialogue that can lead to things like the Iran nuclear deal.
And to really try to advance the notion that, hey, we are not isolationists.
We are about greater engagement with the world.
And we think that engagement should be through diplomacy, through talking.
And someone like Suzanne has had just an amazing, fascinating career and accomplished so much.
And we should be learning so much from her.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right, so now let's talk about somebody else's donors here, Trump's and the Republican Party's here.
Trump's stuck between ending endless wars and his hawkish mega donors.
And so, you know, I know you have all kinds of complicated and nuanced things to say about donations and influence.
So there's a segue here, you know, about just how much these dollars matter.
It's not an outright bribe, but then again, you know, you'd always hate to risk funding that you did get and this kind of thing.
This sure matters a lot more to the GOP than to some guys like you, but that's got to be part of it, right?
Because after all, there's a reason Northrop Grumman finances the Institute for the Study of War or whatever it is, and they probably don't say, all right, we're counting on some really good warmongering out of you this year, guys.
But they know that that's what they're getting for their dollars and that kind of deal.
And it's the same thing inside the GOP, right?
I think that's exactly right.
And, you know, and I think if you want to drop barrel to Quincy, it's, hey, you know, we put together our plan of what we wanted to do, and we have funders who said, yeah, we want to support that.
And you can go back and look at the record of our funders and you might find things in there that you don't like, but you're also not going to find things that are hugely inconsistent, especially in recent history, with what we're proposing.
Now, in the case of Trump and his biggest funders, there's a couple of things that happened.
First is that Trump, when he was an early primary candidate in 2015, was saying very different things than he said from when he was the nominee or when he was elected president.
He was talking about how his biggest complaint with the Iran nuclear deal at the time, when everybody else on the stage, remember, was saying, on the Republican primary stage, was saying, oh, well, you know, it was the worst deal ever.
It's terrible.
We're giving Iran permission to make nuclear weapons, making all these sorts of lies about the deal.
Trump's biggest complaint about it was, is that he thought the Iranians were going to and were moving to make bigger deals with Airbus than they were with Boeing, with the sanctions relief.
That was his biggest complaint, that he thought the Iranians were going to spend more with Europeans than with the Americans.
Now, obviously, that changes over time.
But another example is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where he was, again, an outlier on the debate stage, when he said he thought the United States should probably take a step back and be somewhat of a neutral arbiter in the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Again, that was considered to be, you know, that he was grabbing the third rail, that the Christian evangelicals would never be able to tolerate that or vote for him.
And again, that's not how it played out.
He was able to do just fine with them, with those positions.
And he also talked about the Iraq war being a mistake, again, something that nobody else on the stage was willing to talk about, and he was willing to do so.
So there were, I'm not going to say these are his instincts or his true beliefs, but he certainly saw that there was political mileage to be made out of these positions that stood apart from the status quo, in both political parties, for that matter.
And he did well, I think, as a candidate on those issues.
Now, as he gets closer to the nomination, you see him start to change on these as he moves closer to securing the backing from Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas Sands billionaire based in Nevada.
And he's the biggest Republican Party donor there is.
And Adelson has some pretty extreme views.
He's talked about how we should, Jerry, before the Iran nuclear deal was struck, he thought that the United States should drop a nuclear bomb somewhere, as he put it, the Iranian desert, and tell them that the next bomb was going to hit Tehran if they didn't give up their nukes.
He was a tireless advocate of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
And he's, at least in the past, had a very close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Now, Trump actually warned about Adelson, and he said when Marco Rubio looked like he was moving closer to getting Adelson's backing than any other candidate, he said, hey, this is, you know, that Sheldon Adelson wants to turn Marco Rubio into his perfect little puppet using his money.
So there's that actual warning from Trump about Adelson and about that he will expect something in return for his very, very lavish campaign contributions, which Newt Gingrich had described as that, you know, that Adelson's primary and central interest is Israel.
So this is all out in the open, what Adelson's interests are, why he funds candidates, and even Trump is warning, hey, Adelson wants something in exchange for his money.
But then everything changed right around the, when Trump gets the nomination at the convention, Adelson and Trump are photographed together, and we see it from there on out that Trump pretty much abandons most of these earlier instincts or messaging or sort of populist political positions, some of which involved actually saying some sensible things about foreign policy.
And he becomes very much somewhat in the mold of Sheldon Adelson.
He takes on eventually John Bolton onto his team.
John Bolton eventually leaves, as we all know.
But he's willing to embrace some really hardline measures.
He abrogates from the Iran nuclear deal.
He does move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, following through on that campaign promise.
And he doesn't really make many serious efforts to end the adventurism in U.S. foreign policy that's gone on in the Middle East since at least 9-11.
So that's sort of the short version of it, as I wrap that up, of why and how I think Adelson-Trump relationship is reflected in the foreign policy that we got out of this administration.
And it's not just Adelson.
He's backed up by people like Bernard Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, who says Iran is the devil, and people like Paul Singer, the billionaire hedge funder, who also eventually, after being a never-Trumper up until Trump wins the election, Paul Singer had been warning about the dangers of Trump, and suddenly he hands a million dollars to Trump's inaugural committee.
And Singer has been a big backer of a lot of the, alongside Marcus and Adelson, of some of the most outspoken think tanks and politicians in Washington trying to push us towards a war with Iran.
Mm-hmm.
Well, and on that note, especially on the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, I think I had expressed to you before my mistaken impression that that was really more, I think, a Cliff May, and these guys is a bunch of kooks, man, but I don't pay enough attention.
You corrected me and said, actually, their whole board and staff represent a very kind of wide swath of the Washington consensus, and the most prominent kind of staffers and people with influence in government.
And so therefore, they have far outsized influence, almost.
Would you compare them to what, like AEI, or not the Council on Foreign Relations, would you, in terms of the amount of power they have?
Well, I would caveat that.
I would say with this administration, I believe that the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has probably had the biggest influence on foreign policy of any think tank in this country.
And so when I talk about they have this very broad swath of membership in their leadership, if I'm remembering what you told me right, that part is right, but they still do have a very neocon take on everything.
Absolutely.
And, you know, during the Obama administration, I would say that FDDs still punched above their weight, and they did so a combination of ways.
One was through the Treasury, where they had very good relationships, but more importantly, on Capitol Hill, where, you know, regardless of who the president is, they've maintained a very strong presence on Capitol Hill.
They testify an amazing amount, amazing number of times that they'll appear before congressional committees on issues related to sanctions, to Iran, to the Middle East more broadly.
They are really a foreign policy shop that punches above their weight.
And I think also, when you look at AEI, you look at Heritage, you look at some of the other big think tanks in Washington, or even on the left with Center for American Progress, these are all shops that do things besides foreign policy.
Foreign policy is, you know, sort of a secondary priority, a tertiary priority for them.
FDDs first and only focuses on foreign policy, and really foreign policy in the Middle East.
So they have this niche focus, this really targeted emphasis on, frankly, you know, pushing the United States towards wars in the Middle East.
You know, their fellows have been the ones talking about how bombing Iran is necessary, and they've been at this for, you know, well over a decade.
It's been a very consistent drumbeat from them, trying to push towards maximum pressure, towards more sanctions.
And then every once in a while, the mask kind of slips, and they actually talk about, you know, the preferable outcome is military action against Iran.
And I think, as you've just pointed out, yeah, their influence with this administration in particular has been really, really, really extensive and exceeds any other foreign policy outfit in Washington.
Now, I don't know if they ever meant this at all or not, but part of it, and they never really expressed this very well, it could have been their most powerful campaign kind of talking point, honest or not, that Trump's so rich he can't be bought, he doesn't need these guys' money.
If it comes down to it, he could even spend some of his own fortune on TV ads and whatever.
And then the idea was essentially that he's so old he could just retire, he's just doing this because he loves you.
And he doesn't need the money of any of these people, and that's why he's up there.
And, oh, Hillary Clinton, boy, she's a slave of her super PACs, he would say stuff like that, you know.
But not me, I don't need one.
But I guess then at some point somebody told him, yeah, but what about Congress?
Who's going to pay to reelect the Republicans in the House and the Senate?
We still need Sheldon Adelson for that.
And then I'm pretty sure that you had told me before about how much money he had given in 2016 and 2018 to the Republican Party for their congressional races, and that it was hundreds of millions of dollars, correct?
I think you're dead on.
Well, yeah, it was hundreds of millions.
So Sheldon and Miriam Adelson together in the 2016 and 2018 cycles gave over $200 million.
When you put together Sheldon and Miriam Adelson and Paul Singer and Bernard Marcus, they put in more than $250 million.
That's more than a quarter of a billion dollars into the presidential, and more importantly into the congressional races, because that's where the money starts to really add up, right?
Now I think there's a couple of things that go on, to take a step back to what you were talking about there.
First of all, Trump was basically never self-funded once his campaign required serious, serious money.
He turned to people like Sheldon Adelson to help foot that bill.
Either he doesn't actually have that money, or he didn't want to spend it.
But I think we probably are focusing on the right thing here, which is that Congress, Congress, Congress.
It's expensive.
You need to fund these campaigns.
If you want to keep members of Congress loyal to the president's agenda, then you need to have a unified funding structure around that.
And not to be too cynical here, but I think Trump from pretty early on knew that there was a likelihood that he was going to face an impeachment and a removal vote in the Senate, or impeachment vote in the House and a removal vote in the Senate.
And you're going to need some big funders to be able to twist arms of Republican House and Senate members if you're going to be able to survive that.
So in a sense, I would say that his biggest funders and the GOP very much have him over a barrel at this point.
And I think that happened a long time ago, when he realized that he really, really, really needed these GOP megadonors to be in line with him and for them to be willing to tell the members of Congress who they helped elect and reelect that they needed to vote with the president on any number of different matters.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, is it just you and your interest that focuses on these four very prominent Zionist billionaires who are so close to the Likud party and so singularly focused on Israel?
Or is it really just that the other billionaires are not showing up, that these are the billionaires that he's counting on?
And where the hell are the rest of them?
They're Republicans mostly anyway, right?
Well, you know, a lot of them did.
I think a lot of Republican Party megadonors did back off with Trump because they were uncomfortable with a number of the things that he was saying and doing.
For whatever reasons, especially the Adelsons and Bernard Marcus came in as two of the top or three, I guess, Sheldon and Miriam Adelsons do give separately, and we should recognize that.
Bernard Marcus are just two of the top donors alongside Robert and Rebecca Mercer, father and daughter, who also funded for reasons that we can speculate about at a high level.
But the Adelsons and Marcus really were two of the top ones giving money to outside spending groups with no limits to support Trump's candidacy.
I think you see more of the other typical Republican Party funders in the House races because it's easier to find politicians there who might more closely reflect their values.
And Trump is a tough one for a lot of these people to really get behind.
And you see Paul Singer came in, he's funded more of the House races.
He didn't fund Trump as a presidential candidate.
He only funded Trump for his inaugural committee, but he gave a million dollars.
And I think we should pay attention to Paul Singer here because there's something very, I would say, concerning about Paul Singer's behavior around the 2016 election.
From very early on, he was beating the drum about Trump being a very dangerous candidate, leading the Never Trump movement of the Republican Party, even a split within the neoconservatives, which seemed to be backed, at least the Never Trump wing of that, by Paul Singer.
And Singer went so far, and it's easy to forget this, as that he funded the initial research that went into the Steele dossier, the Steele report, trying to link Trump to evidence that the Russians had compromise on Trump, or that Trump was engaged in shady business dealings with Russian interests.
And Paul Singer went from, I guess, believing or speculating that this president or presidential candidate was fundamentally compromised, to actually giving money to his inaugural committee.
And I don't think anybody's really explained how you go from one extreme to the other, other than that he probably did believe it at the time when he was funding the Steele dossier.
He might still believe it, but he also sees that he has either business interests or ideological interests and political interests that lead him to still want to maintain influence with Trump.
So he throws in his hat with Trump at the very end.
Yeah, at the end of the day, hey, if you can't beat him, join him.
You are talking about the presidency here.
It's kind of all-important.
Exactly.
But that's after you've said, hey, this guy might be dangerously compromised.
I can't believe that anybody ever really believed that, but I guess somebody did.
It sure makes for a great story.
We know that.
And if you did believe that, then that seems like some kind of stunning hypocrisy.
To turn to that and say, well, but I'm going to give you a million bucks because you won.
And now, so people might recognize that name, Paul Singer, and he's really important.
But he was in the news, I think it was just last week, that Tucker Carlson did this big thing that I guess got around on the Internet.
Kind of a special report about this small town in, I think, Indiana, where Paul Singer came in, bought up a big part of this sporting goods company, and then essentially forced them to sell it.
And he made a couple of $10 million off the thing or whatever.
But then the company was closed down and consolidated with the new owners and whatever, and this town in Indiana just suffered thousands of job losses over it.
And how, you know, this guy doesn't care.
And he also mentioned Greg Palast's reporting about Singer buying up sovereign debt of third world nations and then using the international court system to gangsterize them out of billions of dollars in the worst way.
The vultures, they call them.
And then this is the guy who's using that fortune, then, to push for this pro-Likud policy in D.C. inside the, I don't know about both parties, but at least the Republican Party, then.
Yeah, I mean, he's pretty solidly a Republican.
He is known as one of the biggest fundraisers and bundlers and megadonors to the Republican Party.
So his influence has really been exclusively on one side of the aisle.
But yeah, he has a whole history of engaging in vulture capitalism, as it's called.
Argentina was probably his most prominent and high-profile target, where he bought up Argentine debt.
You know, you could buy this debt from developing countries at pennies on the dollar, right?
Because there's, hey, it's priced because there's a low likelihood that you're going to see a full return on that, if anything.
So you buy it at a steep discount, which is what he did.
And then he waited until all of the other debt holders settled, and all of them settled for less than 100 cents on the dollar, or most of them did.
And then Singer used the international court system and a series of legal cases to strong-arm Argentina into repaying him, I believe it was, at 100 percent of the debt.
And obviously, the huge profits that he could make from that were reutilized to pay a team of lawyers and engage in extensive legal actions, including at one point, I believe, that they temporarily seized an Argentine naval schooner that was used for, like a sailing ship that was used for naval training, and somewhere in Africa they managed to get it held as somehow a seizure based off of unpaid debt.
So he operates with sort of a global network in trying to squeeze these third-world countries out of money.
And to be clear, as you were talking about earlier with Tucker Carlson, Singer's projects, his financial projects, as they were, are very often inside the United States as well, buying up companies, buying significant shares of the companies, and then trying to squeeze them to, as he would put it, become more profitable, or as the people, the companies sometimes put it, trying to essentially cannibalize them for an uptick in the stock value and for some short-term profits.
Yeah.
Which is the same thing.
It's like, hey, this is a really nice bar, guess what?
I'm your partner in this really nice bar that you run here, Eli.
And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to liquidate all your stuff, and then I'm going to burn it down and take the insurance money.
And you better not resist, or else you're going to get burned down with it.
I think that's certainly how some people who have been on the receiving end of his funds efforts would feel, yeah.
Yeah, man.
Just doing business in the USA like the whole place is North Jersey or whatever, right?
This is how we do it.
Yeah, man.
And then, so tell me all about the reason that I shop at Lowe's, and I don't want to know about Lowe's founders, but this guy, Bernard Marcus, the founder of Home Depot.
Yeah, so Bernard Marcus, he's the co-founder of Home Depot, I guess, alongside, I believe, Ken Langone.
And both of them, I believe, are actually big Republican Party supporters.
But Marcus has been the most outspoken going on television during when the Iran deal was being negotiated.
He was talking about how, let's see, he was saying that Iran is the devil, literally went on Fox Business and said, Iran is the devil.
And so you can't do a deal with the devil.
But he said a lot of kind of concerning things, talking about how, first of all, he said, oh, his worldview is shaped by, in another interview, he said, oh, my worldview is shaped by Ronald Reagan's notion of peace through strength.
But then he went on to talk about how Holocaust victims were weak and submissive.
He referred to concentration camps as detention centers and concentration centers.
And this bizarre thing, because Israel wasn't even a state then, he said the Israelis, quote, weren't like the other Jews.
They didn't walk into the ghettos, didn't walk into the concentration camps, didn't walk into the ovens, which is sort of a horrific thing to say about victims of the Holocaust.
But I think it goes back to his notion that, you know, that the only the true strength out there is obviously in Israel, which is, you know, he speaks about openly.
I don't think we're putting words in his mouth about his feelings on that.
But coming at the expense, really, of other Jews, frankly speaking, saying that they were somehow weak and that it was somehow, you know, the degree of victim blaming that goes on there is really quite, quite shocking and really concerning.
And he has, yeah, he has these obviously hawkish, radical views, as he's expressed.
And he contributed $7 million to groups supporting Trump's candidacy.
And he gave over $13 million in campaign contributions supporting GOP House and Senate races in 2016.
Then he kicked in another $8 million to GOP midterm campaigns in 2018.
The guy has a lot of money.
He's a billionaire.
And it would seem like a significant amount of his interest in engaging with at least foreign policy in his political giving is based off of, you know, worldviews and positions that are decidedly outside the norm and probably I would characterize as kind of extreme.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's an interesting thing to hear about.
I've heard just from time to time and not too often, but occasionally it squeaks through, is Israelis complaining.
They have a bunch of American lacunic billionaires like Sheldon Adelson, and I'm assuming his same group of friends here, or colleagues, peers here, who support Likud in Israel.
And I've heard them complain, I don't know if this is true, that they might not have a Likud government at all if foreign donations from American billionaires to Israeli political parties and candidates were banned, and it was actually just up to the Israelis to decide that they might actually have a different situation there.
Well, I think it's worth noting at the bare minimum, that's an interesting thing to speculate about, but putting aside speculation, there is something kind of interesting here that you see that, hey, the Republican Party's biggest donor, biggest supporters, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, have at least historically been solid supporters of Likud in Israel.
And in doing so, they appear to have used that influence to make the Republican Party very much aligned with Likud, as well as kind of tying the notion of being pro-Israel to being pro-Likud and to allow no daylight between Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu and the U.S. or at least the Republican Party.
And in doing so, they've kind of covered up the fact that, hey, there actually are other political parties in Israel.
It does have a pretty vibrant political culture.
Now, we can criticize ways that it might be constrained or ways that it certainly is not all-inclusive of the people who live under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, but it is a vibrant political culture and one with a lot of complexities and one that has at least multiple views to it and competing perspectives that go beyond just the Likud Party and Benjamin Netanyahu.
But when you have the Republican Party's biggest donors being, or in the case of Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the Republican Party's two biggest donors being very much aligned with Likud, it seems like that is trickling down into the Republican Party itself and the whole notion of being pro-Israel is really becoming being pro-Likud and pro-Netanyahu.
And that is to, I think, the detriment of a well-researched and educated engagement with Israel from the Republican Party.
It's really just become no daylight between the Republican Party and Likud.
Yeah.
Well, and the whole thing just sounds like a racket, too, at this point.
There's so much money at stake.
If you're not on board for this, you don't have access to that money.
Like, say, if you're a House candidate, it's really important that you're on the, quote, right side of all these issues or essentially you're left out in the cold and everybody else is riding on a bankroll.
Absolutely.
There's no way you don't take these issues into consideration.
If you are a House candidate or a prospective House candidate, because you know you're going to want to get access to that money if you're going to have run a successful campaign, especially if you're in a competitive district.
So this has become probably, I would speculate, it is becoming a litmus test for House and Senate Republican candidates.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, this is the kind of stuff, guys, that we're going to be able to continue to look forward to at the Quincy Institute.
Great journalism like that of Eli Clifton here.
Trump stuck between ending endless wars and his hawkish mega donors.
It's at ResponsibleStatecraft.org.
Thank you again, Eli.
Thanks for having me.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at FoolsErrand.us.
