THT Cliff May.txt
English (US)

00:00:00.000 — 00:00:14.040 · Speaker 1
When you spend that kind of money, you can have an enormous influence if you're spending on an influence buying operation. And if part of that is don't talk about us. Talk about the Jews. Talk about AIPAC. Talk about the Israelis.


00:00:17.720 — 00:00:38.400 · Speaker 2
Welcome to the honest. Take the show that goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and about the people covering it. I'm Ben Chertoff, and my guest today is Cliff May, the man who spent a quarter century watching the same lie get refunded, renamed, and walked back into the room.


00:00:43.520 — 00:02:43.760 · Speaker 2
Cliff May built a think tank a week before the world changed. In the first days of September 2001, two people he knew, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Jack Kemp, came to see him with a warning. America, they said, was taking a holiday from history, telling itself the enemies were gone and they asked him one question is anybody actually connecting the dots?

Days later, the towers came down. Before all of that, he'd spent a decade at the New York Times, a foreign correspondent, an editor for the Sunday magazine. He knows the mainstream press from the inside. And almost immediately, in the rubble of nine over 11, he watched a different story take shape. Not 19 hijackers, not al Qaeda.

It was a lie. But it wasn't a new lie, because May will trace it for you from Soviet disinformation desks to the Jews, pushed us into Iraq to Israel, dragged us into Iran, to the version in your feed tonight. The facts change. The villain never does. And here's the part he wants you to see. The lie isn't just old.

It's paid for Qatari money, Chinese money, Iranian money. An influence machine whose oldest instruction is the one you just heard. Don't look at us. Look at the Jews. May cause what? We're living through a cognitive war. Israel, he says, is winning almost every battle on the ground and losing the one that happens on a screen.

And he'll tell you plainly it's not a fair fight. He founded the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy. He hosts the Foreign Policy Podcast, and he's been tracking this machine since before most of us knew it existed. Cliff may. Welcome to the Honest Take. You went from editing the New York Times Sunday magazine to founding a think tank in the rubble of 9/11.

That's not that's not a career pivot. That's a calling. What changed? What broke?


00:02:44.120 — 00:06:56.670 · Speaker 1
Well, it was a longer journey than that. I was when I was at the New York Times. I was an editor of the Sunday magazine for a time. I was in New York City. Reporter. Back in the days when you when you liked to see your byline on the front page, on a newsstand on the street. I was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, particularly in Africa, and for about three years, and I was a Washington correspondent.

It was a long journey. But look, the the simple answer is this. And if I only had a minute to talk to you about it, I would say, look, after nine over 11 everything changed. But this actually, I'm going to tell you a little bit longer story on this. It's the back story and it's more interesting. And that is about a week before nine over 11.

Two people I knew from my journalistic career at the times came to see me. One was Jeane Kirkpatrick. She was American ambassador to the UN under Ronald Reagan. Wonderful woman. Really brilliant woman. And the other person was Jack Kemp again. Some people remember he was quarterback for the Buffalo Bills.

He was a congressman and a very well known one. He ran in the primaries. Guy lost to George H.W. Bush, became HUD secretary, ran in the vice presidential slot with Bob Dole. Okay. They come to see me and I say, great to see you. What's on your mind? They said, well, we think America is taking a holiday from history.

We think we're taking a premature feast out of that. Berlin wall fell. The Soviet Union is no longer a exists. We think we have no enemies and we don't. We think that that may be problematic. So tell me why. Because who hit us in Beirut in 1983? Who hit us in New York City in 1993, who hit us in Saudi Arabia in 1996, who hit us and blew up two of our embassies in Africa in 1998, who blew up the USS Cole with a suicide bomber in a boat, um, not far from Yemen in 2000.

Cliff, we could give you another ten examples of this. And what we don't know is, is anybody looking at these and trying to connect the dots and see what's behind this, what are the motivations? What's the ideology? Who's involved in it? Is anybody like studying what's going on here. Because we think there's something interesting and threatening going on.

I said, great, interesting thesis you've got there. What do you want me to do about it? They said, find out. Is there anybody looking at it? Maybe university campuses, middle East studies department, I don't know, something like that. Maybe news media is working on this. Maybe if you sense, you can find out the intelligence community is working on this.

Maybe there are organizations. Find out what's going on on this. I said great assignment. I'm on it. Talk to you soon. Within a week, as I said, what happens? We have we are attacked on on 91101. And of course I meet with them again. And I said, wow, this is what you kind of feared and anticipated, isn't it? They said it's exactly what we feared and anticipated, though sooner than we and sooner than we thought it would happen.

But it's happened now. What have you found out, Cliff? I said, best I can tell, nobody is looking at this stuff. Nobody. They said, why is somebody looking at this stuff. I said, I'm not sure. I'll tell you a theory. It's all over. All this terrorism is justified and driven not by an ideology, but by a theology.

And nobody wants to touch religion with a ten foot pole. At which point they said, that's fascinating. Your next assignment, if we want to create some kind of organization that would just work on this, this issue, national security, post-Cold War, what would it look like? How would it be? Whatever. Figure it out.

I went away, I came back with a memo. It had a name, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Because from what I could tell, these forces using terrorism, these forces consider themselves jihadists. That was kind of a new order for a lot of people back then. Consider themselves Islamists. Kind of a new word, are we?

I said I came up with it. They're they're threatening the democratic societies in the world. So we'll be so it's the foundation for Democrat for, the foundation, for the model to defend democracies.


00:06:57.750 — 00:08:29.010 · Speaker 1
And I gave them a mission statement and I gave them a business plan. And they said, we like this very much. We think this is exactly what what needs to to happen. And I said, great, tell me if I can do anything more for you. And they said, no, sit down. You're going to do this, you're going to quit your job and you're going to do this.

I said, really, I did. Why you're going to do it? And there were two reasons. They had their reasons. They didn't want to look for six months for somebody. They wanted to get this going immediately. Two things I would say from from my point of view. One, I knew two people who died on nine over 11. One in New York, one in Washington.

Two as a young journalist, I had covered the revolution in Iran, and I had understood then, and I can tell you how. Um, but even more of the years that this was not an Iranian revolution, it was an Islamic revolution, very different. And yes, it was Shia and it was Persian, but that also galvanized the Sunni Arab world because the radicals, the fanatics and the Sunni Arab world, they said to themselves and each other.

What a humiliation. This is the first modern nation state committed to jihad against America, Israel and the West. And it's not Sunni and it's not Arab. Where's our state committed to jihad? It should be the Saudis. But those royals are having too good a time. Skiing and summer. It's shopping in Paris, drinking whiskey with their infidel buddies in Washington.

And from that seed grew al Qaeda. So that's how I got started.


00:08:29.370 — 00:08:56.550 · Speaker 2
Within days of nine over 11, the the claim emerged that 4000 Jews were told to stay home from work that day. I don't know if you remember how quickly this stuff spread, but it was fast. Uh, you're already you were just coming out of the media world then, do you do you remember how fast that spread, how you first found out about it.

And did that tell you anything about what was coming?


00:08:57.470 — 00:10:54.920 · Speaker 1
I don't remember specifically. You're right. There were immediately there were the anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli slanders. Um, actually, I would argue they got less traction back then than they do now in an age of social media. Um, you know, the you know, if you take the New York Times, where I work for a lot of years, the times lean left, but it wasn't far left, which is kind of become since and we were pretty good as reporters, as editors, as foreign correspondents to fact check.

So that stuff got out there. But I don't think you would see it. I don't think you'd see a podcast, as we recently did from the New York Times, with somebody like Hassan Piker. You know, who, you know. Uh, so I so, you know, there were always lies and slanders. That's there's nothing new about that. And don't forget, the concept of this information goes back really to the 1930s.

It was one of the tools of the Soviet Union. Our our English word disinformation comes from the Russian word disinformation. And, and and that's what they and the KGB did this on a regular, very regular basis. They put out disinformation, not misinformation. Disinformation. Disinformation means you get it wrong.

Disinformation means you're purposefully misleading people. That's what you're trying to do. And when they did that, the Soviets did that all the time. The Russians still do it very much, but in a way, it's easier to do. You can do it through TikTok now, and that means millions and millions of people will hear disinformation on various things, not least regarding Israel.

Because TikTok still, I would say, is controlled by the Communist Party of China, which is the strongest Communist party. I would say in all history, stronger than the Soviet Communist Party was there. You can have that conversation. So this is nothing new. Um, but I think it's actually it's worse in the current age than it used to be.


00:10:54.960 — 00:11:17.680 · Speaker 2
Let's trace how that developed. After nine over 11, the Israel Mossad, uh, conspiracies came out. And then with Iraq, it was Israel pushed America into war with Iran. Now it's Israel also again, it's Israel dragged America into war. Um, is this the same conspiracy wearing different clothes?


00:11:18.000 — 00:13:31.600 · Speaker 1
Yeah, essentially it is. It's the same people hating, the same hating Israel, hating Jews. Zionists will call what you will. It's all the same very much. And with in terms of the war in Iraq, I was FTD was fairly well established, not as large as it is now. And so I was fairly well early involved in that discourse.

And I know very well that what the Israelis were saying is, well, no, don't worry about it. You don't need to worry about Iraq. I mean, Saddam Hussein is terrible. He's terrible for his own people. He's no threat to us. And I'm not. Of course, there was a belief that he was developing weapons of mass destruction.

There was that belief because Saddam Hussein was insisting, telling everybody, I've got that he was doing that because it made him look stronger, threatened his enemies in places like Iran. But the Israeli point of view, and I heard her from a lot of Israelis back then, is if the US wants to get kinetic with anybody, he should be with the Islamic Republic of Iran for the reasons you and I just discussed, that that is the nation state committed to jihad.

Sure, Saddam Hussein might like to commit jihad, but he didn't really have the resources. Again, the Israelis had stopped him from building nuclear weapons back in the 1980s when they bombed the facility. People. But people thought because Saddam wanted them to think that that he had built back better.

But it turns out he had, um, did he have chemical weapons? Did he have biological weapons? Was he looking for them? There was reason for suspicion. After all, he had committed genocide using chemical weapons against the Kurds in the in in Iraq in the northern part of Iraq, which is Kurdistan or part of Kurdistan.

So he had done that. He had committed genocide for real, not the kind that's being, again, another slander against Israel. And he had used chemical weapons. So there was plenty of reason to worry about him. But he wasn't the threat at that point that the Islamic Republic of Iran was. And all the Israelis I knew were making that point.

I mean, you know, do what you want to do. The Americans will back you. We're happy to have you do what you want to do. We don't like Saddam Hussein. Good for the world rid of him, for sure. But from our point of view, that's not a priority at all. So the idea they pushed for that, they pushed Bush, President Bush for that.

That's just ludicrous.


00:13:31.640 — 00:13:51.020 · Speaker 2
The but the Iraq version, it got academic legitimacy at a certain point with the Mearsheimer and Walt's Israel lobby thesis that mainstream the idea that Israel controls far American foreign policy. I mean, how much damage does that do to have it move into academia?


00:13:51.700 — 00:15:00.120 · Speaker 1
Well, a lot of academia has gone far, far left or in and very anti-Israeli. And Mearsheimer is very much an example of that. And I'm sorry about that, because he teaches at the University of Chicago, which is not only a credible university. My son went there. My son studied with him, and and he wasn't bad to my son, and my son wasn't following him and said, he's really gone off the deep end now.

It started, as you say, way back with this whole idea of the Israel lobby. Um, but that was at a time when he should have recognized the extent to which Middle East studies departments were being taken over and had been taken over, particularly by a Qatari money that was Saudi money that the Saudis, I think, have made an interesting shift over the years.

But the Qatari money has been huge. And what they do is they give money and they say, we got some professors to recommend, and I'm sure you want diversity. So you'll find this guy, Ahmed Al-Walid. He's wonderful. You want to take him on and put him on. And of course, he is a muslim Brotherhood spokesman and not necessarily an academic.

And Mearsheimer is, you know, is I would also say kind of a


00:15:01.200 — 00:17:08.930 · Speaker 1
not a serious academic in many ways. He, he has a he very much has an ax to grind against. Uh, and he's not alone in that. And our universities are not alone in that. But it's not you know, he doesn't look at Qatari influence. He doesn't look at Chinese influence. He looks at the influence of who? Oh, the Jews.

Oh, the Jews. Um, hey, you know, he looks at AIPAC. That's the lobby. Oh, my God, all he does is say we want a good, solid relationship between Israel and America. And I just remind you that the current in the Pentagon, it has been saying recently, like rightly, it's been true for a long time. Oh, really? No, no, it Israel is a model.

Allah. Why is Israel a model ally because Israel contributes to the security not only of Israel but of America. Israel doesn't say to America, sorry, we're a consumer of security, but we can't offer it. No, they can and they do. There's really no other country doing it. We've seen this in the most recent, uh, war in the Middle East, where we're seeing American pilots on F13, F-35s and Israeli pirate pilots and F-35s, and they're essentially flying in formation.

They're speaking together in English. You can't be F-35 pilot in Israel if you don't speak good English. Uh, that's a requirement. And they're coordinating. Okay. What are our targets? Who's going to take that one? That's good. I'll take that. You'd say totally working together as one. And the Pentagon is very right to say that's the kind of allies we like to have and should have.

And, um, and that's unusual. So anyhow, I'm ranting a little bit, but I think it's very it's important to understand that this about the US and when AIPAC works to better the relationship. All they're doing is what, you know, what Greek Americans do, what Italian Americans do, what any American group cares about, where they come from, their roots.

They have a right to to try to better their relationship. But that's all it is. And to to demonize that, and only that, as Mearsheimer has done, um, is slanderous and and disreputable.


00:17:09.089 — 00:17:39.210 · Speaker 2
So we've obviously looked into a bunch of this the amount of money that AIPAC gives that the entire Israel, you know, Israel lobby gives to lobbying and to even to campaign efforts is minuscule when you compare it to, uh, Qatari money that's coming in, just like what you just said. We know why one gets all the attention and why one doesn't.

But what is stopping this, the the actual narrative from getting out?


00:17:39.390 — 00:20:24.270 · Speaker 1
Um, for one thing, when you have the kind of money to spend that the Qataris do. And watch this space. PhD has been studying and counting the money to see how much it is, and we'll have that out pretty soon. When you have that kind of money, you can buy off lots of people. You can buy PR firms, you can buy lawyers.

Just keep them on retainer. They can they can work against you. I talked to very young people in this town who have said, yeah, and not people of great influence who said the Qataris have offered me, we'll give you this much money a month. There are things we will ask of you, but not right away. The Qataris have spent.

When you spend that kind of money, you have an you can have an enormous influence if you're spending on an influence buying operation. And if part of that is just don't talk about us, talk about the Jews, talk about AIPAC, talk about the Israelis. You can you can do what you can do a lot with that. Um, and you have the backing also of various very, you know, Well, you got the backing of Russia.

You got the backing, obviously, of Iran. You got the I'm sorry to say, you got the backing of the Chinese Communists, uh, for for their own purposes as well. Keep in mind, this is something that FTD has been saying for a number of years at this point. There is now an axis among Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang.

It is a serious and aggressive anti-American alliance, and it's very much an anti-Israeli alliance as well. A lot of people, people I know, probably people you know, who thought, oh, the Israelis can be great friends with the Chinese. Chinese can make it. They're great at building tunnels and bridges, and they're cheaper than anybody else.

And these really should have really good relations with them. But the Chinese have. The communists have no loyalty. They have their own or their own interests. And that hasn't worked out. I would say the Chinese have been helping Iran, even even during this last year of war, sending precursor chemicals for missiles to to the range and probably helping with targeting.

We know the Russians have. When I say targeting, I mean targeting Americans as well. So, um, you have enough you have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend to buy influence. You do with colleges, you do it with K through 12 as well. We're studying that here at PhD. Also. You can do it through the media and the news media if you can.

Um, it's very, very doable. And it's very hard to, you know, to, to, to fight back. It's a David and Goliath struggle. And the Israelis, I think, and those who are who support the American Israel relationship and certainly the existence of continued existence of Israel, they're the David, not the Goliath.


00:20:24.870 — 00:20:34.550 · Speaker 2
You you mentioned K through 12. Do you do you know how much money is being pushed into those curricula we.


00:20:34.550 — 00:20:42.930 · Speaker 1
Do at FTD? I'm not sure we've announced the money yet, but again, we have a we have a research project ongoing on exactly that currently.


00:20:43.330 — 00:20:43.730 · Speaker 2
Hmm.


00:20:43.770 — 00:23:33.880 · Speaker 1
I can't tell you. And I wouldn't tell you if I knew because I'm not sure. We've we've we've announced it. We want to do it our own way. But we have we have some very, very smart researchers working on exactly that subject, I have to say, when I mean, I knew about it in terms of colleges and really the first we've known about it for more than 20 years.

Uh, Martin Kramer, if you remember, wrote a book I can't more than 20 years ago, I think I was new at PhD called Ivory Towers in the sand, which was about the takeover of Middle East Studies Department. I don't think he recognized the extent to which and the money was being spent and all that. But it started a long time ago, I knew that.

And then when I was told, no, no, it's not just it's not just that, it's also K through 12. And we started our research and started talking to people like, you know, teachers of, I don't know, sixth grade. And they'd say, oh yeah, the Qataris are so nice to me. They wanted to help with my teaching and they brought me to Qatar and they put.

I flew first class and stayed at a five star hotel. And then and I said, well, you know, well, we said, and what did they do after? Oh, they just wanted to help us. Well, of course, they, you know, suggested some curriculum, you know, sent us some textbooks and some maps and, you know, very helpful to us just starting understanding.

And, you know, there are several there's something called I think it's Academic City in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Um, and there are several American campuses. They're all underwritten by the Qataris, and they're even teaching things like journalists teaching journalism. Qatar also has Al Jazeera.

They own Al Jazeera. What's Al Jazeera? Well, I mean, it is a well-funded, uh, platform media platform, um, really for Qatari propaganda and Muslim Brotherhood propaganda, you'll find people who are, you know, have left the BBC and are now on Al Jazeera in English, and they're all throughout the Arab world.

And their hostility towards Israel is blatant. Uh, their hostility towards America may be somewhat more subtle, but it's but it's recognizable. And I should mention we also have a program right now, research project on Al Jazeera specifically to understand more about it. Not that we haven't understood a great deal.

Fouad Ajami, if you remember, he was a wonderful academic. Fouad Ajami was a Lebanese Shia scholar, um, and lived in America, but I think he taught at Princeton, was a friend of Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of the Middle East. And I remember him very early on writing in the New York Times Magazine about Al Jazeera and saying, this is going to essentially saying this is going to be a muslim Brotherhood propaganda outlet.

He got that very early on, for I did.


00:23:35.120 — 00:23:39.400 · Speaker 2
To the point where it's now banned in many Gulf states, which.


00:23:39.400 — 00:23:40.760 · Speaker 3
I think is something that is that.


00:23:40.760 — 00:23:45.560 · Speaker 2
Is really lost on on the American audience. Um.


00:23:46.000 — 00:23:56.720 · Speaker 1
And the Muslim Brotherhood is banned in many Gulf states. Yeah, yeah, we have Muslim Brotherhood. Um, I would say fronts here in the United States and many of them in Europe, of course, as well.


00:23:57.880 — 00:24:07.879 · Speaker 2
You wrote back in, I think it was you wrote in 2008 about conspiracy theories in the Arab world after nine over 11, that the


00:24:08.880 — 00:24:20.840 · Speaker 2
persistence of these beliefs may reveal a pathology 20 years later. Same conspiracies are now mainstream in America. You know what happened?


00:24:21.760 — 00:26:34.180 · Speaker 1
Well, we're talking about the virus spread and zero has had an influence here. Plenty of people have thought maybe very many people still do here is just, you know, a news organization with some Arab perspective again, that the plenty of Arabs would say, no, it's not. But there, there, there is that belief, um, that it's sort of taken root here.

Um, and, and yes, there has been this very, you know, Islamism has been creeping in to the media, uh, to entertainment. Um, I'm, I'm sorry to say very much into the Democratic Party in some parts of the, of the Republican or right wing sphere as well. I mean, Tucker Carlson is a good case. He's buying property in Qatar.

Really? The beaches are that nice there. I thought I would have think San Diego or Miami or. But oh, sure, you know, South Carolina. But no, Qatar is where he's thinking of buying property, and he thinks it's wonderful there. But of course, he also thinks the grocery stores and the in Moscow or just fabulous.

Uh, now Qatar is going very far And I think President Trump does see that. It's very that's very ironic to me because it hasn't happens. Tucker Carlson's father, Ambassador Richard Carlson, worked at FTD in our early years. And he was. I mean, there's nothing I've said today or I'm going to say today that he would disagree with.

He was totally on track. That's why he joined with us. He and I knew each other a bit, and he was thinking of starting an organization like FTD, and it was like a lot of work to do. And he said, maybe I just, you know, join with you. And I said, you're hired and made him. I think it was a deputy chairman or something like that of FTD.

At the time. Jack Kemp was chairman, something like that. And he was a he was, you know, a very good colleague and friend and a great raconteur and storyteller and certainly, you know, didn't just didn't dislike Israel, on the contrary, didn't dislike Jews. Never, never, never. I would have I think I would have known.

So. It's particularly ironic and kind of sad to me. To see what Tucker has me has become at this point.


00:26:34.220 — 00:26:55.220 · Speaker 2
You know, we talk so often about the horseshoe theory. This the. Tucker Carlson on the right. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens. Yeah. Maggie. Hassan. Hassan. Piker. Grayson. Mondo ice on the left. Um, they really have now just joined completely. Um, did you see that? Did you foresee that happening?


00:26:56.260 — 00:27:11.700 · Speaker 1
No, certainly. I can't say I did not to the extent that it's happened. Um, on the right, there were always, you know, people, tiki torches who didn't like Jews. Right. And we saw that. Um,


00:27:13.420 — 00:27:31.280 · Speaker 1
is there a precedent for all this? If you're thinking about it, yes, there is. Um, to give you one good example, there was a terrorist years ago that went by the name or was known as a Carlos the Jackal. You remember Carlos the Jackal at all?


00:27:31.640 — 00:27:32.520 · Speaker 2
Yes. The name?


00:27:32.560 — 00:27:32.800 · Speaker 3
Yes.


00:27:32.800 — 00:28:11.880 · Speaker 1
I think his actual name was Ilich Ramirez, and his father was a Marxist. And they named him Ilich for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. And he. He was a far leftist, but he became very quickly involved with a Palestinian and other Islamist terrorism. He may have been responsible, by his own admission, for, I don't know, a thousand deaths to bombings and organizing.

You know, it was a very infamous and deadly terrorist. He that eventually ended up in a French prison. And two things happened in that prison. One is that he converted to Islam,


00:28:13.400 — 00:28:55.500 · Speaker 1
uh, as a far left Lenin, you know, Marxist-Leninist. And two is he wrote a book. But essentially what he said in that book is that we on the left, we in the left need to join forces with the Muslims who they Muslim revolutionaries because they are huge in numbers and they have the force and the ability, and that's the only way to go.

We have to we have to do that with we have to join with them. If we want a revolution against American imperialism and hegemony against capitalism, that's that's how it has to work. That's what what he said. And even when I go back to 1979, and I was a young journalist again covering the revolution in Iran,


00:28:56.580 — 00:34:57.790 · Speaker 1
uh, initially it was a very there was a broad revolution, initially not the least, for example, the Toda, the Communist Party of Iran. They thought, okay, Ayatollah Khomeini, he's okay. He'll be, you know, he'll be a spiritual guide. And it's kind of traditional in a way, and that's okay. But this is the revolution we need.

And so we, the communists of Iran, have to join together with the Islamists, whatever they call them, and with the bazaars, the businessmen who are upset, and the students and the Social Democrats and will all join together in this revolution and oust the Shah and create a better society. Well, the Shah left in January of 79.

Ayatollah Khomeini came back in early February of 79. And I think in the spring it was there was the official declaration of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Um, before very long, the the the, the, the Islamic revolutionaries who took control under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were jailing and murdering, executing thousands of communists, social democrats, heretics, infidels, whoever they saw.

Not only is not, they have to be opposing him. It just wasn't going to. They just weren't going to share this revolution with these other groups. You know, a lot of people fled the country. If they got out, that was great. But those who stayed. They ended up. A lot of them just ended up, uh, Uh, executed or imprisoned?

Um, lots and lots. Despite that, as you as I'm sure you know, over the summer of 79, there was a lot of sort of grumbling. What's this revolution brought us? The women are in shadows. They're covered. Um, a lot of the young people who didn't want to go back to the factories were being told to give up their guns because nobody else for you to shoot.

They didn't like that. Uh, all that kind of this kind of malaise that set in over the summer led to, I would say, the seizure of the American embassy and the taking of the hostages, diplomats, of course, prominent among them for the next 444 days and very importantly, um, Ayatollah Khomeini watched this, wanted to see what the Americans could do.

And he famously said and became a saying within the regime, the Americans cannot do a damn thing to us. And that became solidified when Jimmy Carter tried to rescue the hostages. And that failed. You know, catastrophically, helicopters crashed. And then ever since then, they have been saying, we can do what we want to do build nuclear weapons, um, thousands of missiles.

The Americans cannot do a damn thing to us. Now, the Americans and the current administration have done a few damn things to them that are that are serious. I think there's been significant progress. I think it's very clear now, people like David Albright, who I consider to be a signatory to the best nuclear expert, said that before, say, the 12 day war of June of last year.

This regime was within months, maybe weeks of developing a nuclear weapon, of acquiring a nuclear weapon. It's now been set back. He would estimate 2 to 3 years. I don't think that's enough. But that's a signature achievement, uh, for sure. Uh, Of course. On the 12th day of the 12th Day War, President Trump ordered that Fort Dough be bombed with B-2 stealth bombers and massive ordnance penetrators mops.

Could the Israelis have destroyed Fordow? Maybe. It probably would have taken weeks. Um, whereas a massive ordnance penetrator. You can do it in a day. I think that President Trump believed, and I understand this, that after the 12 day war, the those who rule Iran would say, okay, we've been walloped really good.

We don't want to experience that again. Let's pull in our horns. Let's tailor back our ambitions. It's enough. And of course, they didn't say that at all. They immediately went to work building more missiles and more drones by the thousands, hiding them in what's called missile cities, subterranean fortresses, and digging deeper than ever.

For example, a pickax mountain with the idea that we'll put a centrifuge will put our nuclear facilities so deep underground that they can't be reached even by massive ordnance penetrators dropped from B2 bombers, so that we can achieve our conditions or achieve our ambitions and fulfill this Islamic revolution.

Which and the purpose of this has been stated and chanted repeatedly since 1979. Death to America, death to Israel. That doesn't mean we really want you guys to trim your carbon footprint. It doesn't mean we really want you guys to be nicer to us. It means what we want is to wipe you out, because the goal of the Islamic revolution is to reestablish Islamic dominance in the world.

People. If they're not studying good history, they don't know that Islamic empires, caliphates, inmates ruled most of what I call the civilized world for more than a thousand years. That ended with the fall of the Ottoman Empire just following World War one and the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War One.

This followed just a few years later, in 1928, by the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood, which again is dedicated, as is the regime in Iran, reestablishing the dominance of Islam and Islamic power in the world and bringing down America and America's allies. And America has no more reliable, and I would say no more valuable ally than is.


00:34:57.830 — 00:35:19.330 · Speaker 2
The West wants to look at it through the through the lens of their own moral, uh, understanding. Whereas in the the mullahs don't care about people dying, what would it what is it going to take to get liberal democracies in the West to understand


00:35:20.530 — 00:35:21.610 · Speaker 2
the difference.


00:35:21.610 — 00:36:26.399 · Speaker 1
Well, it's it's, you know, it's in a way it's a failure of imagination. And I understand that we tend to think that people are like us. We tend to think they are rational actors. We tend to think they do cost benefit analysis. We don't imagine. It's hard to imagine people who don't do that. Um, I did, you know, two things occurred to me.

I grew up in New York City, and I thought, what a constant growing up, I thought, as most New York City, what a cosmopolitan town. People from all over the world. Yeah, but there are people from all over the world who kind of think like us. That's why they're in New York City. Only when I became a foreign correspondent, that I kind of realized, oh, there are people who are very different from us.

And even within that take let's take Iran as an example. Um, there there are two readings of Shiism. She is she is theology. Let me say, what we might call the is called the quietest. We'd say, And I guess I need to give a little theology here. There are Twelver Shiites, as it's called. That means they believe that the 12th Imam, about a thousand years ago


00:36:27.680 — 00:37:06.800 · Speaker 1
went into occultation, disappeared, was hidden by Allah. This is the 12th Imam and the quietest. Believe he's coming back and he'll be the Mahdi, essentially the Messiah when he comes back to bring peace and justice and all good things to the earth. Um, but the timetable that's up to Allah. It's not up to us.

That's to be the quiet school. Then there's the Khamenei's school, their reading, his reading, and his followers, his acolytes. They're reading. A theology is that we can speed the return of the 12th Imam. We can speed the return of the Mahdi through conflict, bloodshed, and martyrdom.


00:37:07.920 — 00:41:20.060 · Speaker 1
That's what we can do. And so we want that. So the idea that, oh, we all want peace or the or the idea that most diplomats, you know, taking courses at Georgetown before they joined the Foreign Service. Think I'm a diplomat. My job is to reconcile competing interests. No, that doesn't work with them. First of all, they don't want to compromise.

They want to win. Nothing else they have. And if their interest is death to America, you don't want to reconcile that interest with your interest, because what's the middle ground of that? Well, I will do it. But maybe a few years later and in a way that if you think about it, the JCPoA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 19 2015, the Iran deal that President Obama did, it was sort of that.

Well, how about we give you a patient pathway? Not now, but a few years from now, and then you can join the nuclear weapons Club and you can say to yourself, I bet by then they'll be more like us. They'll liberalize. But a lot of this, a lot of the provisions that that were in that deal would have sunset it by now, would have sunset it by now and others would have and they're obviously no more liberal than they were.

We keep thinking people will become more liberal. Same thing with China, if you think about it in 2001. But when I started PhD, as I mentioned, I was worried about jihadism. Kind of a new word, Islamism, kind of a new concept kind of thing. I'm worried about terrorism. I wasn't worried about Russia. I kind of thought it was going to evolve the way, say, Poland has evolved.

And we were worried about China. Why? Because in 2001, what happened? We brought China into the World Trade Organization. It was kind of bipartisan consensus on that. President Clinton was very much in favor of it. There may have been some grumbles on the right, but not a lot. The idea was will help make the Chinese richer, and then they'll become more moderate.

When people have more money, they want more political power. Why would their rulers, their leaders, not give it to them? No skin off their nose? I mean, that's what's going to happen. And of course, that's not what happened at all. In a way, it was a noble experiment because we didn't try it. We wouldn't know that.

That it didn't happen. But when you experiment, you know, political experiments are to run in a laboratory. You don't. You have to do it in real life. And that was run. And what we got instead is, is our is the strongest communist party in history, which is absolutely dedicated to replacing the US as the preeminent power in the world.

We know that. We know it in large measure because Matt Pottinger, who chairs our Asia program when he was in the National Security Council, he's somebody who speaks fluent Mandarin, a fascinating guy, a brilliant guy. He became, he figured out, okay. XI Jinping doesn't tell us to tell the truth and the speeches that we translate, but he must be communicating with 100 million Chinese communists and tell them what's really going on.

They have to know so they can be his followers. So he began to read the speeches and the articles being written for the Communist Party cadres, And he said it was like, you know, sitting down to meals of sawdust every day. But once he got through them, he could see what the motivation was. The motivation was what XI Jinping calls were moving to move us into an era of common destiny.

And what that means is a world in which the Chinese Communist Party rules with its, you know, it has that longest. But why would Chinese communists be allied with Islamists and Tehran, or neo imperialists and Moscow, or cultish dynasty rulers in North Korea? Well, because we all, they all have a common cause, and the common cause is to weaken, wound and eventually replace the United States to make the United States a former great power, like Britain is a former great power, like France is a former great power like the Netherlands is a form of great power, like plenty of former great powers around so that a hundred years from now people say, really?

America used to be that powerful. I didn't understand that. God, they don't look so strong now. That's that's that was the idea.


00:41:21.620 — 00:41:56.300 · Speaker 2
I want to get back to the information space here since that that is such a key, uh, front in this, in this war, you've you've talked about how what's happening now is a cognitive war where Israel is winning militarily, but losing the information war. Our I mean, is the conspiracy theory is that the the the best, the sharpest arrow they have in their quiver now in terms of, uh, turning, uh, sentiment.


00:41:56.660 — 00:46:18.970 · Speaker 1
Well, I mean, this goes back a long way. It goes back, first of all, to Soviet, uh, attacks on Zionism and on Israel. Once early on, I mean, Soviets voted for at the U.N. for four, recognized the Israel. I think they recognized Israel before the US did, I believe. Um, and they can talk about why they did it, but they they became an enemy of Israel, and they began to, uh.

And they were always and against Zionism. Important point I think we need to make is that before there was an Israel Zionism, there was a reasonable debate you could have over Zionism. Is it a good idea to create, to recreate a Jewish state in part of the ancient Jewish homeland? Is that a good idea, or is that too much?

I mean, the Arabs are going to die. What should you do? Once there was a state after 1948 and fought a war of independence against all its Arab neighbors who wanted to destroy it. It was Zionism just means you're in favor of this state continuing to exist. That's all it means. If you're an anti-Zionist, you want the disestablishment of Israel.

Well, how does that happen? The idea that it's going to happen because they're going to just say, oh, uh, we'll just bring in everybody and make everybody in Gaza and the West Bank, Israeli citizens and the Jews will be a minority at that point, and I'm sure it'll work out just fine. Well, that's kind of ludicrous, since there is not a there's more than 20 Arab states.

And the fact of the matter is, in none of them does any minority have equal rights, religious or ethnic. I mean, again, even in the best of them, it just doesn't exist. The Christian look at, you know, the oppression of Christians in Egypt, for example, the oppression of Baha'is in Iran, not just Jews and Christians, but Baha'i in particular.

Um, it's just not there. So if you don't. So that's unrealistic, that it's just going to be some nice transition and Hamas will come and shake hands and say, now we're fine, let's go. Let us run for Knesset then. What do you mean? Well, I think you mean a genocide. You mean a holocaust. You mean the destruct.

The only other way to disestablished Israel is to kill. The kill. Is to do what Hamas was attempting to do. But Hezbollah says it wants to do. But the Iranians say it's death to Israel and death to the Israelis. That's what it means. So if you're if you're an anti-Zionist, you are either in favor of a second Holocaust within 100 years or you're disinterested.

You're you have no feelings on it one way or another. Um, and part of it is what we've seen. So much of the mainstream media has become so left wing again. I'm an alumnus of The New York Times. I was very proud to be there, but the 1619 project was a dreadful thing, essentially saying America was born out of racism and slavery.

It wasn't born in 1776. It was born America was born somehow in the United States before there was the United States, when the first slaves came to a British colony in the American South. It makes no sense. And yet the times went with it. And a lot of, you know, the BBC has been just dreadful covering anything to do with Israel.

I mean, just way beyond what I could ever have imagined it would be. And Sky news has been, I'm sorry, Sky news is terrible. Well, you know all this better than I do because you follow it every single day and it's just slanders and stuff that they don't manage to check. And, uh, terribly anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist perspectives just put into this.

And so, you know, very hard for, for a lot of people in a lot of places, unless they work, unless they really work at it to understand the truth, they're not getting it from the major media. Um, and, uh, and that and, and so they have an advantage in the cognitive war. And listen, not everybody in the Muslim world hates Israel by any means, but quite a few do when you're talking about a population of 2 billion Muslims or something like that, compared to, I don't know, There are fewer than how many Jews are in their world.

Less than 20 million. Um, you're kind of, you know, you're kind of outnumbered, and a lot of the media is outnumbered, and you have the Russians and the Chinese and all that. So it's a cognitive war, but it's not a fair fight.


00:46:20.050 — 00:46:39.690 · Speaker 2
You wrote Know Thine Enemy in April, arguing that we need to be precise about who America is fighting in, in this information sphere, in the information war. Who who is the enemy? I mean, is it state actors like Iran, social media influencers, legacy media? We're just talking about the BBC.


00:46:40.250 — 00:47:58.790 · Speaker 1
Well, it's I'm afraid it's all of the above. Is is the problem? Um, yes. Look, the Islamic Republic of Iran is the most important. I think enemy Israel has. Because if it didn't exist, if it collapsed or if it was simply really crippled, um, they would not be able to underwrite, uh, Hamas as it has, uh, Hezbollah as it has, and it continues to attempt to.

The Houthi rebels of Yemen, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the various Shia militias that are preventing Iraq from being a free and democratic country and have been since the US bugged out in 2011. So the reality would be very different if this regime were to collapse, and I should say it would also be very different for the people of Iran.

I'm totally convinced that the overwhelming majority know that Islamists rule is dreadful. They are not. They were. They were freer and more prosperous under the Shah. They may or may not want something like that back, but they certainly want to be free of the reality of the past 47 years in which the clerical class has been the ruling class.

And I'm not sure people always understand that when you talk about


00:48:00.710 — 00:50:59.840 · Speaker 1
Khomeini and then after 1989, Ali Khamenei as a supreme leader. That's a bad translation. He's. He is. He is considered way beyond a leader. He is considered to be essentially the deputy of Allah on earth. Okay. The a, I mean, and I'm not sure his son, who quickly became the Supreme leader after his death.

Mojtaba. Mojtaba. First of all, I'm not even sure he's alive. I'm not sure he's conscious. I'm not sure he has. He is seen as having that religious authority. Which would suggest that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. No, it's called Islamic, not Iranian. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard is in is mostly in control.

There are politicians as well. My guess is they don't. They don't have guns, so they don't have power. And but you used to have the spiritual power and the military power. And they were kind of joined. I'm not sure there's much spiritual power left. I think it's mostly the military, but that means that people like the commander of the IRGC, uh, General Ahmad Majidi, um, he appears to be a true believer.

Getting back to what we're saying, and if that's so, he's perfectly willing to sacrifice his people. Khamenei. You know, Khamenei talked about that in a way or not. He said early on, this revolution is not about the price of watermelons. In other words, he wasn't worried about people being poor now not having watermelons at all.

I don't know, I don't think so. Think of the extent to which Hamas was very pleased to use its civilians, its children, its women as human shields, which gets back to using immoral is illegal under international law, under American law. You'd think they'd be criticized for that. No. America. Israel is criticized for that.

They built tunnels under Gaza that, you know, beyond what, the London Underground or the Paris metro. I mean, huge those tunnels could have been Uh, utilized as the best bomb shelters the world has ever seen. But Hamas wouldn't let a woman or a child who wasn't Hamas in those tunnels know they had to stay outside.

Their job was to die because if they died, they can make A or B, they were martyred and they made a contribution to the cognitive war because they knew how. I mean, they did understand how this would be covered. And so now you have the look you had the slander of the Zionism. Is racism going back, I believe, 1975, you have apartheid, even though there's no place in the Middle East where Arabs and Muslims have rights on a scale that they do as citizens of Israel to million.

About a muslim Arabs in Israel have citizenship because they didn't decide to kill Jews back in 1948. They started I can live in this state and they're the most prosperous as well as


00:51:00.920 — 00:53:46.719 · Speaker 1
Arabs and Muslims. I think outside of a state that is usually oil rich. Um, so I don't know. So that's so okay there. And now, of course, since the genocide slander, the population of Gaza has grown over the past 20 or 30 years. Grown. That's not how you commit genocide. It's it's a total slander. And yet it's out there and you have people, some people that I would have thought a month ago as reputable, uh, saying.

Yeah, I think I kind of think that's right. I kind of think I kind of think it is a genocide of sorts. Uh, in a way, they're saying the Israelis have no right to defend themselves, or they say, well, the Israelis went too far in defending themselves. I don't understand that concept, because if the Israelis went too far, that would mean that the that Hamas said, no mas, I surrender, give up.

And they continued. But since Hamas never surrendered, how can you say they went too far? They obviously didn't go far enough. In a war, if your enemy doesn't surrender in every war. A history I know of. Then you haven't gone far enough. So what were they supposed to do? I think they were supposed to die meekly, as Jews have many times over the centuries when they couldn't defend themselves.

Um. This is this is tough. But I'm again, we're seeing. I'm seeing it from, uh, I was seeing it from a columnist at the New York Times, you know, like yesterday. You know, this is a genocide. The Israelis went too far, um, in their fight against Hamas, which still exists, which still has weapons. And, by the way, which is still oppressive towards the poor people of Gaza.

By the way, he went should also know that before this war, that, uh, yeah, war began on October 7th, 2023. Gaza was not a terrible place by any means. By Middle East standards. It had shopping malls, it had Mercedes dealerships, It had beach resorts, it had restaurants, it had libraries, it had theaters.

It had all that. Was it great. I'm not sure if you went from there to the capital of Jordan, you would say, I see a huge difference between between the two. And part of the reason the Israelis didn't understand is that Hamas tried to give the impression and did so successfully that we want quiet to, you know, the Hamas leaders had their villas on the ocean.

And they were saying, you know, we've got 17,000 Gazans every day going to Israel for jobs and getting paid more than they could and not being unemployed than they would in Gaza. Can we get that number up to 30,000? The Israeli said, yeah, I think we can't. I think we can if we get quiet. And what the Israelis didn't understand, like other Westerners didn't understand, is somebody like Siniora says, I don't want these, and


00:53:48.400 — 00:54:21.300 · Speaker 1
he really means it. I don't want a villa. I don't want a Mercedes. I want to kill Jews, okay? I want to fight for Allah. I want to fight jihad. That's the meaning in life. And I'm going to do it. And. And that's what he was planning. And a lot of Israelis thought. I don't believe that's what they mean to actually do and implement.

It's performative when they rehearse too many or those Israelis who did see this coming and they were kind of ignored. But it gets back, really to what you were saying earlier on, not being able to imagine people that different from us.


00:54:21.820 — 00:54:56.360 · Speaker 2
If you were to sit down with a student of TikTok University who who has learned all of this from from the social media world and learned this, you know, upside down worldview, how do you. I don't know. I mean, it's something that we deal with every day. How how do you get through to that? How do you correct that narrative?

What do you think as as a former newspaper person who's somebody who has who has spent your, you know, a good deal of your career communicating to people.


00:54:57.200 — 00:55:38.640 · Speaker 1
Um, I fear, and this is why it's so, um, disturbing that the Qatari Muslim Brotherhood influence, even in the US, begins from K through 12. That at a certain point, only very exceptional individuals can say, wow, everything I learned was wrong. There are such individuals. We have some working for us here at FTD.

We have a fair number of people of Arab and Muslim and Iranian background, and some of them in their youth were pretty Islamist and they woke up to it. For those who are kind of really smart, really extraordinary individuals, most people are going to value what they are taught to value as children.


00:55:39.800 — 00:57:36.570 · Speaker 1
And so it's you. I mean, you have to try you have to keep doing it. Do you do what you can? But it's it's not like you're going to sit down with them and, and, you know, keep in mind you cannot reason somebody out of a view or position they weren't reasoned into in the first place. If it came emotionally, if it came through other means, it's not going to happen.

You're not going to do it. So I'm not you know, I don't think of myself as smart enough that I'm going to persuade or convert to, um, my, kind of my kind of values, Judeo Christian values, a great swath of humanity. And I don't think we're trying to do that. That's beyond our means. What we're trying to do is look at the threat matrix and then examine the best policy options and try to advise policymakers and legislators.

Here's here's why we think this is the best option. Here's why we think this is the worst option. And here in the middle is one that you might want to consider. I understand for political or other reasons. It's not bad. It's not the worst, but it's not optimal either. And that's what we're doing. We're engaged continually in policy debates on national security.

One other thing I didn't mention is when I was starting PhD, part of the concept was there are other think tanks. This would not be a think tank, that would be a department store, only a boutique. We will not do tax policy. We will not do health care policy. We will not do urban planning. A lot of things we won't do, we won't do and lots of things the Manhattan Institute does.

Wonderful thing. We're not we're just going to do one thing. National security. National security. That's all we're going to do. And again, initially we thought that mainly meant the threat from jihadis. But now we also see it as the threat from this axis of aggressors. The four nations I met, the four regimes I mentioned Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, Tehran.

And they were foremost in, I would say, endangered, beleaguered democratic societies most. And that's Israel.


00:57:37.810 — 00:59:32.129 · Speaker 1
And, you know, a couple of years ago, it was looked more in danger than it is now. It's Ukraine. Actually, I don't think the US is giving Ukraine the support it should, but it's it's holding up, my gosh, in some ways brilliantly. Uh, Taiwan. Uh, endangered. Working on it. Uh, South Korea a little more problematic in some ways.

Those are the those are the most. There's also countries like Lebanon, which I think is not a democracy at this point. I think it has been in its past. I think it can be again, but not so long as Hezbollah has a has more gun power than the than the LAF, the Lebanese Armed Forces, and can intimidate the Lebanese Armed Forces and penetrate the Lebanese Armed Forces.

Interestingly and ironically enough, if Lebanon is to be liberated and become free again, you know who has to do it? The Israelis, nobody else can do it. You again, there was a UN resolution 1701 after the 2000 2006 war. Okay. The UN peacekeepers are going to come in. Make sure Hezbollah doesn't build up forces in the south of the Litani River in Lebanon.

They turned a blind eye. They could see it going on. They did nothing. Absolutely nothing useful. It's been billions of dollars. Um, the lamp, I don't think is capable of disarming, uh, Hezbollah or whatever the government, even the government, wants it to. Even if, as has happened, the US spends hundreds of millions of dollars on the LAF, which we have.

Uh, the Israelis may be able to disarm, uh, Hezbollah. If Trump gives the green light or another president. But if they don't do it, uh, Lebanon will be what it has become, a failing state. Which is sad, because when I was a young correspondent, everybody wanted to go to Beirut. It was, you know, it was it was in a way, it was the most dynamic Arab capital.

There was. There were, you know, restaurants and mountains and ocean and


00:59:33.730 — 00:59:48.490 · Speaker 1
Arab banking system, and it was considered a great place to go if you could get a sign there as a foreign correspondent, that was so much better than almost anywhere else in the Middle East other than Israel, certainly. And, uh, or Africa, where I spent a lot of time.


00:59:48.490 — 00:59:54.709 · Speaker 2
When you look at the mainstream media coverage now, we'll go back to Tehran and Iran. What


00:59:55.910 — 00:59:59.030 · Speaker 2
what is getting missed in the coverage?


00:59:59.750 — 01:01:04.090 · Speaker 1
Well, there is there is very actually there's almost no coverage in the sense that you can there is no way that a foreign journalist can work in Iran today. And that's been the case for a long time. And be honest about what goes on there. So not that long ago, you know, a BBC reporter who I know was there saying, oh, it's and this is, you know, oh, it's Family Day or something like that.

Here in Iran, people are cheering for this regime. And, you know, she's not doing any reporting. She's cheerleading for the regime. You can't do honest journalism there. That's been the case for years and years and years. It's way too dangerous. They'll hold you hostage. So there's no journal, and then the internet is down.

So you with the stuff gets out through Starlink. You can see, you know, people will post things. Um, there's there are ways you can talk to Iranian Americans, for example, who managed to talk to people back there. But there's no real legitimate coverage of what's going on in Iran. And then the debate over it is, is is purely is, you know, very partizan at this point.

There are, you know, listen,


01:01:05.210 — 01:01:15.970 · Speaker 1
sorry to say this, the New York Times famous columnist said I'm, you know, I'm torn. Um, I don't want to see the regime win, but gosh, I don't want to see Trump win,


01:01:17.770 — 01:01:59.720 · Speaker 1
you know? And, um, so that's a that's the situation to really understand what's going on in Iran, in the Middle East, you have to work hard or you go to these website and you will find lots and lots of really good articles, research information. Um, we have a you know, I think we have the best Iran team anywhere.

Um, Iranian Americans, some born there, some born here, um, working very hard on this. I think, you know, we're doing great research on this and many other subjects that have to do with national security and foreign policy. So I'll end with that little unpaid commercial message.


01:02:00.240 — 01:02:03.440 · Speaker 2
Cliff May. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.


01:02:06.480 — 01:04:39.400 · Speaker 2
Here's what stayed with me. We started out taking apart conspiracy theories the 9/11 hoax, the Iraq lie, the story where Israel is always the hidden hand. But the conversation kept widening out into Qatari money, into Iran, into what Cliff calls the cognitive war. And throughout all of it, he kept coming back to one idea.

These aren't misunderstandings. They're a method. Take a real wound. 911 A war, a grievance. Strip out everyone who actually caused it and slide the same old face into the empty seat. The Jews, Israel, AIPAC and somebody he says is paying to keep that seat filled, because while you're staring at Israel, you're not looking at them.

Cliff won't promise you that. We can argue our way out of this. You can't reason someone out of a position they were never reasoned into. If they came to it through a feeling, through a feed, through ten years of being taught who to blame, a better fact isn't going to save them. So he's not selling hope. What he's selling is precision, not counting the insults, meaning the enemy.

He wrote an essay this year called Know Thine Enemy, and that's really the whole thing. Follow the money to Doha, to Beijing, to Tehran, instead of taking the bait and following it to the Jews because the missiles get intercepted, the narrative doesn't. And if the only people willing to trace the lie back to who started it are the ones being blamed by it, then the deflection wins.

So the antidote isn't a comeback. It's refusing to be the mark. It's knowing the history. It's being the person who says, I've seen this lie before and I know who's paying for it. You can find Cliff's work at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and on his podcast, Foreign Policy. Wherever you listen, links are in the description.

If this episode made you think differently about your scroll, do me a favor leave the show a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify, wherever you're listening. It's the single biggest thing that helps new people find us. And if you're not already subscribed, hit the notification bell and follow Honest reporting on Instagram x TikTok and Facebook.

I'm Ben Chertoff. This is the honest take and we'll see you next time.