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 fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Hey, guys, check it out.
I got Grant F. Smith on the line again, and he, of course, is the founder and the director of IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P.
That is the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P.org.
And he is the author of Big Israel, and most recently, The Israel Lobby, Interstate Government, which is about the most absurd work of nonfiction I've ever read.
Not that any part of it is inaccurate, but just what, you know, the reality it describes is just something else.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Grant?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
Very happy to have you here.
So first of all, before we get to the business here, would you tell us about your stand-in for your Israel Lobby conference that you do every year that you've been carrying off here in weekly one-off speeches by these great guests and things?
Yeah.
So we couldn't do the Israel, or transcending the Israel Lobby at home and abroad, which was this year's theme at the National Press Club in our usual time slot, or even a, yeah.
So we had to postpone it to March 5 of 2021 because of the pandemic, but we've been having these little sessions called Extra, and they're all available at IsraelLobbyCon.org, where some present and some past speakers and some have never spoke at the conference speakers, but all related to the Israel Lobby are coming on and giving little one-hour sessions with Q&A.
The last one we did was with the distinguished Professor Walter Hickson, who's written, he's almost done with two books on the Israel Lobby.
The one that's out is Israel's Armor, but he's also spoken about and written extensively about American settler colonialism.
So he was on and did this piece called Settler Colonialism from America to Palestine.
It was fantastic and really made a lot of parallels about the two countries and what they're doing.
And so you can check that out at IsraelLobbyCon.org.
Cool.
And yeah, you know, that's the thing of it.
I'm not sure exactly when this happened in the culture, Grant.
You're just a little bit older than me.
Maybe you could tell me, but by the time I was in high school, the standard account was the revisionist account.
That, boy, Manifest Destiny, that was some overblown BS.
And boy, the American Indians, if we'd done them right at all, it seems like you'd be able to find one, you know?
They're gone.
Like, yeah, unless you go to Oklahoma or Arizona, just forget it.
You could live your whole lifetime in this society and never see an Indian in your life.
So something must be wrong here, right?
The Discovery Channel ran a big series, How the West Was Lost, and told it from the point of view of the Lakota and these kinds of things, right?
So then the idea was that, look, we're glad we have this country, but yeah, I wish we hadn't taken it so badly or our forebears and ancestors hadn't taken it in the way that they had.
Some kind of thing like that.
But then when it comes to Israel, then there's this cognitive dissonance where they're really doing the exact same thing again, only we're not supposed to feel like we regret our own history and the way that we've learned it, you know?
Am I making sense at all?
Do you understand what I'm talking about?
Yeah, you're making sense.
No, I understand exactly what you're talking about, and it is kind of cognitive dissonance because the U.S., as Hickson even mentioned, buried in the depths of an authorization to fund the military-industrial complex was an apology for all of that, as if that matters.
So the U.S. has apologized, Canada's apologized formally, and yet we're financing pretty much the same thing on an ongoing basis, you know, vis-a-vis the Palestinians.
So it's a really awkward situation, and, you know, the last video clip we played in the session was President Trump saying that, you know, we need to redo our history.
We can't be having that sort of perspective at all, and he commented on how that would likely impact academia, because he's still a tenured professor.
So very interesting chat.
Very interesting.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny, too, because you can see what he's rebelling against.
There's this whole scandal about the New York Times and the author of the 1619 Project this week walking back their kind of foremost claim that the more important way to understand American history is that forget the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.
In fact, that was just fought in favor of slavery, that really the basis of all understanding of American history and its true founding should begin with the introduction of slaves to the state of Virginia in 1619.
And then they just said, you know what?
Not only are we erasing that from the New York Times, then the author went on Twitter and started accusing everyone who ever wrote that of lying about what she ever said, and this kind of craziness.
So you can see why.
In fact, I was just reading a thing, it was interesting this morning, Grant, at the World Socialist website.
They're Trotskyites, and they have been railing against this 1619 Project and saying this kind of social justice, divisive sort of revisionist history is actually totally wrong and erasing the gains of the Revolutionary War and even the Civil War to abolish slavery in the South and say that essentially it's always been all the whites versus all the blacks and this just crazy way of framing this kind of thing.
According to these Trotskyites, these leftists, they're saying, look what you're doing.
You're giving the space now to, oh, and not, see, not the Social Justice League, the New York Times, who ran this whole thing and pushed this whole thing in the name of racializing the 2020 election because it was supposed to hurt Trump.
Now that Russiagate's falling apart, remember he's caught on tape.
Now that Russiagate's falling apart, we got to make it all about race.
And so these Trotskyites are saying, now you've given Donald Trump, of all people, the standing to say he's the one who's going to protect the legacy of the Declaration of Independence in the most absurd fashion and yet one that could only be believable this year in the face of the ridiculous social justice left, which I thought was a pretty insightful take from Trotskyites.
Yeah, it's, well, I mean, it's amazing what you find on that website that doesn't get widely circulated.
They've got a lot of good journalism.
I should give them more credit.
They do.
They do.
And it's, it's, you know, fewer and fewer index hits in Google News.
But they do.
They've got a really, at times, final word on a lot of things like that.
So it's very interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyways, and this is also a reason why there shouldn't be government school in the first place.
And certainly there shouldn't be national government control over the schools.
I mean, who in the world would want a nationalized curriculum, whether it leans pro-Christian right or whether it leans pro-secular left?
I mean, this is the kind of fight that you end up getting into over stuff like that.
And these these fights are tremendous.
And the, you know, the throw weight of the weapons people are bringing to these debates, whether it's over textbooks, whether it's over curriculum, is amazing.
And yet there's relative oligopoly textbook printing in this country.
And the textbook printers like, you know, Prentice Hall and others, National Geographic, they're very susceptible to any threat to, you know, their revenues for these textbooks.
And I've looked into some of these textbook fights and they just get nasty.
They're just devolving into slug fests as each group maneuvers to have the final word during revision periods, which are mainly all at the state level anyway.
So it doesn't seem as though having decentralization has improved that at all.
And you still have terrible problems.
Hopefully we're going to talk about Virginia.
Virginia's got real problems in terms of, you know, any sort of accurate portrayal of its own history, much less now they're starting to get a ton of pressure from various Israel lobby type groups trying to insert their view of history of the Middle East.
And it's just it's just outrageous.
It's like no academics allowed here.
This is just going to be a political slugfest based on campaign contributions.
So it's it's ugly.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry.
I got to interject here that someone just posted the link of a shot of Ron Paul from his hospital bed on Facebook, given a thumbs up with a big smile.
And the left half of his face seems perfectly symmetrical with the right half right now.
There you go.
That's great.
Probably anybody listening has probably heard the news that Ron Paul had a stroke live on the Liberty Report on Friday.
But here he is apparently.
And from what I had already been told, he walked to the ambulance himself and didn't even want to go to the hospital.
But a tough old guy.
So here he is.
And apparently he's doing great.
So that sure is a hell of a relief.
Yeah, he's definitely in good shape, so that helps.
Yeah, man, that's what I wanted to hear was, well, you know, because strokes, they could go either way, maybe.
You know what I mean?
I like to hear that.
Oh, it was just one of them little old kind that you're not supposed to be too upset about.
I'll take that.
All right.
Yeah, man, the little old kind.
That's all.
Let's go with that.
God damn.
OK.
Good old Ron.
All right.
Now.
So, yeah.
Now the textbook fight is obviously a great segue into the power of the Israel lobby in America.
They are relentless.
And textbooks is just one of the issues I saw.
I don't know if you saw this.
I'm sure you probably saw this on the license plate.
Yeah.
Oh, OK.
No, no, no.
Well, the license plate, you can bring that up if you want.
I was going to say the first time the first time Zoom ever censored an academic discussion, it was Palestinians being shut down at the insistence of the Israel lobby.
Yep, yep, I saw that.
I saw that a couple of days ago and it's well, it's interesting.
It's and then they managed to squeeze out a little bit of content on YouTube and then suddenly they shut down there, too.
I think we're just only going to see that growing.
But I think more concerning is if you follow Ali Abunimah over on Electronic Intifada, they're just shutting down scores of reporters and affinity type pages on Facebook because they've got this new former Israeli government censor working on their board.
And Facebook is turning into a territory where you really have to apparently follow their unwritten guidelines and not not discuss this type of stuff.
So it's kind of sickening.
It is.
It's just completely crazy.
And, you know, I always wonder, but I guess my balance is off on this.
It seems to me that over the long term that they generate so much ill will for their country that by making Americans feel so taken advantage of.
And why should it be that if we got to fight for our First Amendment, it's against the political fifth column of our closest ally and best friend in the world, Israel.
They're our best friend.
And why don't they get the hell away from our First Amendment?
Apparently they don't care about us at all.
And I think it doesn't backlash against them in the way it makes me mad, but that doesn't cut it.
Right.
So in other words, it's perfectly a smart policy to continue to just push your luck all the time and get away with blue bloody murder all the time because the backlash never comes.
Well, I don't know.
It's you know, I think the awareness is certainly building.
And if you ask people in polls, you know, do you approve of the this redefining anti-Semitism as including criticism of Israel?
Virtually no American agrees with that.
And at least Congress was not willing to even put that out on the floor a couple of years ago when the entire Israel lobby infrastructure of this country was pushing for it.
They wanted they wanted that kind of censorship in U.S. law and they couldn't do it.
And so I think maybe we've already begun turning a corner where even representatives know they can't get away with kowtowing like that, that nobody's going to put up with it.
Yeah, well, I hope that that's right, because you know what, if there's a line in the sand anywhere, it's got to be Amendment one.
Nobody can tell you where to go to church.
No one can tell you you have to.
No one can shut down your printing press or your website or, you know, better find some technicality, I guess, to shut down your website.
But you know what I mean?
The rest of the peaceful assembly and all of this kind of thing, the five major protections of the First Amendment, if we're not willing to fight for that, then what are we even doing here?
Might as well move to Canada or Mexico.
Exactly.
And, you know, just think about it.
Some person is spending all their time building up a Facebook presence, getting followers, gathering people, and then they just arbitrarily shut them down.
That's a reason why I've never invested much in Facebook.
I'll repost stuff there for people who want it.
But it's I don't think it's a place worth investing your content in, frankly.
I know I quit it back in 2014 and then luckily I quit Twitter.
I think was it a year ago or two years ago now?
I think one year ago.
Yeah, I remember that.
And I'm so much better off, too.
And I admit that sometimes I look at some Twitter accounts, but I never log in.
In fact, I deleted my log in from my Mozilla so that I can't.
Wow.
I don't even remember what my password is.
I'd have to ask my buddy.
So you've got a cold Twitter.
That's right.
So I have no temptation to look at my notifications or retweet anything.
I just scan, you know, Aaron Maté for the latest Russiagate debunkings and a couple other things.
And that's about it.
You know, but but I see even my good friends on there.
I see how, you know, the medium is the message.
And it just Twitter just make just ruins everything.
And also on Facebook, they were, you know, they make you jump through all these hoops to show your content to the people who signed up to see it.
And all these things where you're really they make it where you're really working for them.
And right.
In a way that, yeah, I don't feel comfortable with.
I don't like when people tell me what to do.
So, you know, an uncompensated data entry job with no real payoff and a giant cutoff switch next to the.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Or yeah, that's completely arbitrary.
And then might be flipped by an algorithm that don't even know anything, much less know you and what you're about, you know.
Right.
I think the fact that so much is hidden in terms of algorithms and how they're managing everything that, you know, it's just too intransparent to rely on.
So but there are a lot of users there.
And, you know, they've opened up some possibilities for people who are kind of face high entry barriers to any other things.
Right.
Yeah, that's true.
I mean, it does.
And really, I kind of regret having to leave it in a way because they really have done just in the last 10 years has completely changed everything in terms of, you know, post my space, like starting, you know, starting really with Facebook and Twitter.
It really changed.
Remember 2014, where you had the Gaza assault and the Mike Brown, you know, Ferguson assault at the same time.
And that was the first time that the American people in the polls ever sided with the Palestinians.
And it was because on Twitter, the Israeli propaganda could not compare to the reality of what they were doing.
And it was the truth won out.
It was right.
It was like one of those things like that was what the free press is supposed to do.
That's how it's supposed to work.
And it did work in that way.
And it's, of course, done a lot to radicalize people against police brutality, too, because it took all these local news stories and turned them into national news stories without asking Tom Brokaw for permission first, you know.
Well, but that's the problem now, because Twitter seems to be implementing something now where if you take a mainstream journalist to task like a Tom Friedman or, you know, point out to the ADL that actually their own sordid history has some major issues, they can not only obviously kind of cut you off, but they can hide your response to whatever they were saying now.
And, you know, the accountability that Twitter was creating as people could really take journalists to task with facts and point out what they were saying that was incorrect.
Now they're starting to soften that.
So it's it's becoming less and less useful.
I know you already you're not obviously, you know, care about that.
Probably kind of in the broader sense.
I am.
I mean, for my own interest, I do have, you know, my volunteers who still run my pages.
So I get some traffic from those, I hope.
And, you know, I guess and so it is, you know, still something.
But it is also it's important as a phenomenon and all that, because all this is brand new.
And so then you have, you know, what happened with MySpace was they had this ridiculous layout, right, where the background wouldn't change, but the text scrolled over it.
And we're just they just paying themselves into such a corner with that.
For some reason, they just couldn't change.
So there had to be really a mass exodus from there to Facebook the way it was at that time.
But now with all the discontent about how Facebook and Twitter work, what happens is it's all the people who got kicked off and people who are marginal and not welcome.
They go to the alternatives like Gab and I don't want to name all other names and, you know, characterize anybody.
But essentially the different alternatives to these end up being inhabited mostly by the marginalized first.
And then they become known as the place where those marginalized people are rather than the place that is what we all hoped Facebook and Twitter would be in the first place.
And so you don't have the mass migration.
All the everybody in the middle set the very, very far fringes of whichever curve are kicked off.
Everybody else stays.
Right.
So that's the network effect.
Everyone's got to be there.
It's not as valuable.
And, you know, so, well, it's that's where, you know, a bunch of options don't solve the problem, unfortunately.
Yeah.
Well, and then, you know, like you said, and it's the world socialist story that covered this probably better than anybody about the Google D rankings were then even just having your own website, your own blog for other people to share about on the social media channels.
That might not even get you anywhere because they might derank it to the third and fourth page where you don't exist anymore, which is that the World Socialist website did the best journalism showing how they did that to them and to a lot of us, a lot of libertarians and leftists.
Essentially, it was who's anti-war.
That's who got targeted.
Right.
You know, you could see it.
I mean, it was very transparent if you're following the Webstat rankings, how everyone just suddenly fell off a cliff that was any good and did the same tsunami swamp the Washington Post and the New York Times.
No, it was a very particularized change in algorithms, site specific.
And it really was a shadow deplatforming.
But, you know, people are smart.
They can see what the Webstat rankings are.
Yeah.
But unfortunately, you know, the days of people just kind of typing whatever into the URL bar to see what they can find or, you know, finding things from just searching on the topic, that's all kind of changed much more toward retweeting things and finding links that are served up to you by these other bots all the time.
So well, you know, the bot is everything.
Then, you know, there's a solution for that.
They just do what I do every morning.
It's good.
Anti-war dot com and read the headlines and then follow the articles.
If you just start in the right place, Scott, you know, that's what I do.
No, I really do do that.
Of course I do.
Of course.
You'd be crazy not to.
How could anybody ever behold anti-war dot com for what it is one time and not make sure that that's their number one bookmark?
I mean, of course, it's the most important project on the Internet.
I ain't saying that because I have anything to do with it.
I have anything to do with it because that's the damn truth.
That's all.
Yeah, I mean, it's true.
It really is true.
And I've been an avid fan for years and years and years and years going way back.
I don't want to mention when I first started following it.
Why not?
There's ninety nine for me.
Because you already put me is so much older than you, Scott.
I just don't think I could handle another like.
Was it ninety five for you?
No, no, no, no.
I mean, I was on the Internet in ninety five.
It was more like ninety eight.
Something like that.
That's pretty good.
Yeah, I want to I want a badge.
I want a badge.
Yeah, no, it was cool.
I remember in those days in late 90s, listening to right wing AM radio talking about antiwar dot com all the time.
San Antonio radio, they'd be covering the Kosovo war and the top of the news would top of the hour news would say something.
And then the talk show would come on and the caller would call in and go, that's not true.
Haven't you seen antiwar dot com today?
So that's right there.
Like, yeah, those people now, where are those people now?
Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe they're back.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, really, the right wing has never been as antiwar as they are right now.
You know, whether Donald Trump has ended the wars or not, he has certainly led that sentiment that these wars are wasteful and stupid and wrong.
And being a tough guy isn't as important as being smart on issues like this.
That is true.
Which I mean, if you and I had conspired, we could have never come up with this, that what we'll do is we'll get Donald Trump to tell them, one, I'm your leader.
And two, these wars are stupid.
Don't you think so, too?
And that that would work on them, right?
That that would change the right wing in such a dramatic way as it has in this country, you know, outside of D.C. and Virginia and New York City, of course, you know, but.
Well, I wish it was a message more politicians would feel gutsy enough to take on, and it just doesn't seem like it is.
That's true, but that might be changing.
I don't know.
I mean, it seems like the whole new generation of young right wingers and they can flip on a dime.
I know if Donald Trump attacks Iran, I guess it'll all be about how necessary it was.
But at least part of them will have to remember that they spent time defending the America First doctrine that we should not be the world empire.
It's not worth it to try.
Which, of course, is perfectly reasonable.
You know what I mean?
It's not like anybody is wrong when they think that, you know, geez, the Earth is pretty big for us to take over, you know, and we're just one part of it.
Yeah, it's just.
I don't know.
I again, I just wish that we could hear more articulate voices doing anything, but just pounding war drums constantly.
And it's, you know, I'd like to see it across the across the spectrum.
And be something that people could actually say, I have a record on this, too.
I've been I've been saying this for decades.
And there's, again, a handful of people have been doing it.
Right.
Well, and you're certainly one of them.
And so let's get back into this most wonderful book of yours and the latest developments here.
It's the Israel Lobby Interstate Government.
And I'm going to, you know, probably mischaracterize this a little bit.
But then you clarify for us.
But something like they came up with this Israel lobby group and they had it as an agency, sort of like as an affiliate of the legislature in order to essentially provide for a lot of subsidies and protections for Israeli companies to enter the Virginia marketplace and compete with established Virginian businesses in this kind of thing.
But then they got in some hot water over that.
And so what they did was they officially made this Israel lobby group that they had somehow finagled into the legislative branch.
They then moved it into the executive branch.
And so now it's like an officially close.
Yeah, that's close.
They started off in the executive branch in the governor's office.
Oh, and then they moved to the legislature.
Then they moved to the legislature.
Well, I got it all backwards, Grant.
No, but it was close.
It was close.
But, you know, the governor's office was chafing because the governor's office by 2018 wasn't believing any of their claims of job creation or investment.
And they started actively criticizing their performance results.
And so they thought that they could get keep their budget and gain more influence and be able to do things like name their executive director without the so-called interference of the governor's office by reconstituting inside the state legislature where they could have the benefit of lots of outside campaign contributions, really allow them to appoint their own people and keep their projects going.
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And and then, as you've talked about on the show, you demonstrate in the book and you've written all these great articles about these different companies that are involved in all of this scamming.
And it's also ugly.
And you put out this new video this morning, expropriate, capture and marginalize the energics business model from Palestine to the US.
So let's start with Energex.
And Energex, who is it and what's their deal and what they do to the Palestinians before they got to Virginia?
Yeah, so they're a renewable energy company.
They're owned by Ohlone Hetz.
And what they did was expropriate 24 acres of West Bank territory, put up a bunch of fences around it and start generating electricity without sharing any of it and basically sending it all to Israel.
And they've also done wind projects in the Golan Heights and run into all sorts of opposition from the residents there who think they're expropriating agricultural lands and are making all sorts of arguments about how it's affecting the environment, how they're, again, being cut out of any upside.
And so they sued them in Israeli courts.
So now they're they're bringing sort of these bad practices to Virginia.
And the whole point of the video that was released this morning called Expropriate, Capture and Marginalize the Energex Business Model is really that they're bringing the same sort of corporate DNA to their Virginia projects.
And so down at the beginning of the month, I went down and visited one of their proposed sites near Endless Caverns in Virginia, in the county of Rockingham, and checked out why they're locating there and did a little bit of research on how much this is going to cost the property owners, because any property owner who's not actually leasing the Energex is going to want to know if this is going to hit their land values.
And it turns out that it will.
Anyone within 100 feet, according to an LBJ School of Public Policy, is going to take about a $26,000 hit to the value of their property if the deal goes through.
And this is something that, you know, Energex has a bunch of its own studies it's created showing that, oh, no, this actually helps you.
But this is right in the middle of a tourist heavy site because Endless Caverns is right up in the hills with all sorts of camping and outdoor recreation opportunities.
And they're going to put this giant solar energy site there, as opposed to, you know, at a former dump or swampland or some someplace where it probably should go.
And one of the reasons they seem to want to do that is there's a giant substation there.
It's just easier for them to kind of wreck a scenic tourist area than it is to do it somewhere more appropriate.
So the videos about some of the problems with Energex, the fact that they've got people inside government, people who are working at the Virginia's Real Advisory Board, who are also working for Energex.
They're getting all these government subsidies that nobody else can get.
And some of the ones I mentioned are they've gotten 33 percent of all the CARES Act PPP loans, forgivable loans that have been distributed in Virginia for more than $350,000.
They got two to five million.
The governor is pumping a ton of money into them to subsidize their human resources as they build a new headquarters in Arlington County.
And, you know, there are hundreds of solar companies in Virginia.
And the politicians aren't, you know, pumping up their businesses.
They're not getting free money.
And so there's this unique sort of privileged status that Energex has in being able to get all this stuff.
And in doing some FOIA work around Energex, just as follow up to the book, The Israel Lobby Under State Government, we've seen that, you know, yeah, they won't pay any property owner for the value of the diminished, you know, property values.
They do typically shift $50,000 to the Board of Supervisors of the county to get their deal to pass.
And in that video is a little clip of a smart county lawyer who said, you know, that's actually illegal.
We're not going to take your proposed sweetener.
But some counties have.
And so this video is really about how this really works, the inside sort of self-dealing, the fact that Energex projects, you know, they report in confidential government papers that they're typically worth twice as what they actually are in terms of capital investment.
And if you really like that sort of thing, you can see me getting thrown out of a Board of Supervisors meeting for telling them about what a terrible company this is.
Yeah, which I thought was really great and good.
Although you need to bring your cameraman with you next time.
But yeah, I know that was like a video of a zoom video of a zoom video.
But yeah, that's how we get it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what?
For a zoom video of a zoom video of a zoom video, that was pretty damn good.
I got to say, yeah, you take what you can get.
You know what?
Yeah, you pulled it off.
But listen here.
So here's the thing about that.
Is there anybody telling them to go to hell except you right now?
Yeah.
Virtually everybody surrounding the proposed site that doesn't want the scenic tourist area to be destroyed.
So they're really being, you know, getting organized about this by themselves.
Yeah.
And I mean, there are obviously really good reasons that they're opposed to it.
But in this particular site, one of the best reasons is that they really have a beautiful valley there and they want to preserve the tourist values.
There are all sorts of bed and breakfasts there, all sorts of other sorts of attractions, a beautiful creek that really rely on people wanting to go there.
And I don't know if you've seen some of these things.
I mean, I think solar energy is OK.
I just think it doesn't belong in every single place on the planet.
And in this particular place, they they really don't belong there.
And then and most of the people don't want it there either.
Yeah.
Well, that's good.
I mean, I wonder if, you know, there's a way that the connection can really be made, that this isn't just an energy company, that this is part of this weird, corrupt deal with this now legislature tied government agency.
Right.
And that's here.
That's really the issue that I brought to the board of supervisors meeting.
And it was that this company shouldn't even be here.
And it wouldn't be here unless there was a lot of really corrupt government activity going on.
But what brought the gavel down was saying, look, you know, these guys sitting right over here next to me from Energex, they're going to offer you $50,000 to make all these problems go away.
And they don't like hearing that sort of thing.
They also really don't like hearing anything about the outside world.
I mean, these boards of supervisors want to keep everything focused on strictly land use issues in this particular parcel.
And they don't really want to hear about whether this company is a bad actor, you know, on the UN watch list, whether it's suing people outside of the country.
And it's it's difficult to bring that sort of perspective in.
I think it would be difficult anywhere, but it was particularly difficult in Rockingham County.
Yeah, that's a hell of a situation, man.
And, you know, a lot of perverse incentives around for people to, you know, go along and get along or, you know, maybe good ones for people to go ahead and get involved and fight about it.
Let it come to a head like this, you know.
Well, it's just absolutely outrageous.
I mean, I know you were already interested in this issue beforehand.
Me, too.
But this is particularly galling, even if you're just, you know, some Virginian hearing about this with whatever brand X politics.
This whole thing is completely crazy.
Right.
And it really does cross.
I mean, this is not clearly you can't really politicize this or say this is a conservative or progressive issue.
I mean, the people all over the map, there are some people who fervently believe that, hey, this is my land.
You know, I can't make the money out of agriculture that I used to.
I've got loans.
You know, I should be able to use it any way I want.
And that's certainly a valid perspective.
But there's also the perspective of, hey, I'm an adjacent landowner.
What you're going to do is obviously going to drive down the value of my property.
And plus, I have a B&B and no one's going to want to look at that thing.
And plus, the company's got a terrible record, not just overseas, but it's got a terrible record in Virginia in terms of cutting down trees and not doing what it said it was going to do in terms of just keeping the things out of sight.
And, you know, so, yeah, I mean, it's it's a complicated issue.
And I can't say that every single Virginian is going to take one side or the other.
There's obviously a complex mix of issues going on.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, let me see what I'm missing here, man.
Got distracted by late breaking Ron Paul news here.
Yeah, that's a big deal.
Yeah, you know, it really is.
The longer he's healthy and putting out good propaganda, the better it is for all of us, that's for sure.
So and now what are the other worst deals other than Energex that the Viab has pushed on the people of Virginia here so far, Grant?
Well, one of them is Project Jonah, which is a big project that was originally slated to put a tilapia farmer out of business.
And it's a major operation.
I mean, they want to invest two hundred million dollars and get a bunch of state money.
And there's a very shady investment bank in Singapore that's trying to put the deal together.
But basically steamroll Virginia companies with all sorts of government subsidies.
The other is Trans Biodiesel, where a Viab vice chairman brought in an Israeli company.
The project flopped and then he passed all the losses on to a big state investment pool called the Tobacco Commission.
And there was an OIG investigation.
But nobody nobody really took a took a hit for that except for Virginians.
There's Sabra Dipping Company, the most subsidized food company in the entire state, I think, which is just sucking in millions and millions of dollars to build, expand and compete against companies in other parts of the U.S. that don't have all these massive government subsidies.
There's another company called UBQ, which is owned by the same person as Sabra Hummus, who's trying to get a bunch of free money to build up a garbage to plastics business in a state that already has too much plastic.
So if you go through the book, the Israel lobby, interstate government, you're going to see all these wacky deals.
Now there's Orin Safety Glass, a military contractor that came in and immediately defrauded the U.S. Army, the Virginia Israel Advisory.
Well, that's a big one, too, right?
This is bulletproof glass for your MRAPs and this kind of deal.
Exactly, exactly.
So, you know, Viab is about to launch a PR campaign where they're going to claim that this company's created a bunch of jobs.
There's no evidence of that.
But they shelled out twenty five thousand dollars in taxpayer money to get a university research unit to say it's great.
So there's all sorts of stuff still going on.
And again, these portfolio companies are just sucking in massive amounts.
I mean, none of this.
When Americans think about aid to Israel, they're not even aware of this stuff because it's all done at the state and again, federal level, but not not counted as foreign aid.
It's all foreign aid.
They're bringing in companies that really couldn't probably even survive much longer.
Some of them because they're just not very well run businesses.
They're not really viable, but they're all flocking to Virginia.
And it's crazy.
It is.
It's completely bananas.
And I really had a lot of fun reading your book because of just how absurd and outrageous it all is.
Shocking, but not surprising, as they say.
Some of it even surprising just because I wouldn't have thought of that.
But OK, I guess you can do that.
All right.
If you have if you have if you have enough clout and if you're making the right campaign contributions, this whole scheme is it wouldn't exist if it weren't for targeted, ongoing campaign contributions, whether it's Haim Saban giving Terry McAuliffe almost a million dollars or some of the other big donors.
That's what it's all about.
It's about these targeted campaign contributions where later on the ask is, look, we really want a memorandum of understanding to be signed between Sabra Dipping Company and Virginia Tech or, hey, we really want you to, you know, give Energic some more benefits and we want them to get licenses.
It has nothing to do with economics and has nothing to do with advancing the economy of Virginia.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Clearly, it's all at the expense of the average citizen of the state.
But right.
Yeah.
Anyway, on it goes.
Well, thanks very much for writing about this as always.
And I really hope that people will get the book.
It's The Israel Lobby Enters State Government by Grant Smith.
And the website, again, is IRMEP.
That's the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
Find out about all those great books there and go to IsraelLobbyCon.org to watch the videos of these people putting on their presentations that they would have given at the great conference this year that hopefully we will catch up and do in 2021 there.
Absolutely.
IsraelLobbyCon.org.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
You were going to say after absolutely something?
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's not a replacement for the conference.
It's extra.
And yeah, thanks for keeping this story alive to be continued.
Yes, absolutely.
Thanks very much, Grant.
Appreciate it.
All right, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSRadio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
