Radio War Nerd EP #556 — Max Blumenthal on End-Stage Zionism & MAGA

Wait had no clue subscribers gots free copy - been using your thesis displayed in the civil war series basically in so much of my worldview ever since getting schooled on the whole northern generals embarrassing shameful truth . Very interested in reading - how to get in touch w a copy ?

Great interview, excellent guest. I really enjoyed hearing from 3 intelligent knowledgeable men who can discuss different classes of people and world events without descending into tribalism or ego wars. Great work.

The apologism for Fuentes' insane white supremacism is some absolute horseshit from Blumenthal who should know better, he may value his 'sources' on the right and want to thread the needle in how he talks about their movement but he sounded fucking pathetic here. Fuentes is clearly a canny political operator and a highly influential figure on the right but he does that by taking the most heinous position on every subject possible so he can always position himself as the true voice of the right and make anyone who adheres to social rules of polite society (not being an insane fucking racist nazi) seem a fraud or a shill. It's not exactly political genius it's just an exploitable niche that any charismatic creep willing to embrace nazism could have filled. The push and pull on the right between the financial imperative of supporting Israel and bending the knee and how that's opened a space for outright nazism to occupy a position of legitimacy and influence is an interesting subject to analyse but Blumenthal has destroyed his critical faculties with nonsense grievances about identity politics and fucking vaccines to lean on tired old lazy analysis about frustrated white males becoming nazis because someone made them wear a mask or criticised them for misgendering. It's a shame because he's a brilliant journalist and analyst and I can understand that becoming an outcast in his field because of political and financial pressure is enough to drive anyone mad, but he really sounds like he thinks Candace Owen etc don't have agency and were forced into becoming horrifying fascists because Zionists bullied them or something lol the idea that republicans represent their base based on this analysis is just bone headed, idiot twenty year olds who watch Fuentes aren't fascists who desperately needed their voices heard and represented, theyre fascists because they watch Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, describing it as some kind of positive model for democratic representation is just nonsensical. There's just no evidence whatsoever that JD Vance virtue signalling to Groypers helped win the election, they won because an insanely unpopular democrat regime alienated practically every demographic expected to vote for them while also fielding an already unpopular incumbent whose brain was visibly deteriorating. Blumenthal is just doing the Yglesias bullshit of blaming wokeness for everything that happens because he doesn't like saying his pronouns at meetings or something. Wokeness in all its forms basically barely exists outside of twitter let's be honest. Ames and Blumenthal are just parroting narratives from the right wing grievance machine about white males being discriminated against because annoying libs with pronouns in bio have been rude to them on twitter

This hostility to wokeness and pronouns and whatever is such catnip for older white cishet guys... Finkelstein loves complaining about this shit too. It's not real. You are imagining it because you want to indulge in a fantasy where you are oppressed. You're not. (Bad things happening to you as individuals is not the same thing as systemic oppression.)

Max half-approvingly ascribes to Maga a "lefty feeling combined with extreme anticommunism". That's one of the better definitions of fascism I've heard.

Very disappointed in y'all letting him get away with "tucker carlson would be left wing if it wasnt for woke :((" and even more disappointed you somehow agree. Tucker Carlson's entire stated mission is class warfare against the working class. Even if you are really dumb enough to believe pronouns make people fascists, you cant pretend a committed fascist is just accidentally fascist. This shit is just odious reactionary whining and Im disheartened that you can agree with it.

Have some relevant personal experience & insight for the 'woke'/'idpol' stuff, not even really throwing in my 2 cents, just my observations to take or leave Been through masters degree & teach now, as well as being heavily involved in irl left organizing since 2015. Not exactly seniority lol but puts me front & center to see this trend develop, peak, & imo now it is already largely irrelevant. Meaning the really excessive & obnoxious 'idpol' stuff largely burnt its own base out & the otherwise sympathetic just got fatigued with it. These days see basically none of the 'woke' bogeyman stuff & far more of ppl complaining abt it. In 2015 when i first got involved & was in undergrad that shit was everywhere & it was genuinely toxic, demoralizing, & politically detrimental. But btwn 2015-2020 it seemed to reached its peak and rapidly die off. And what im describing are these inherently narcissistic & competitive pity contests, which WERE real and im sure still exist in holdouts. They were also obv unsustainable. From what i saw it was always basically a minority of resentful bullies using the language available to them to enable being assholes, using moralism and shame as a shield. And that was and is a very different thing than the existence of a niche ettiquete around a conception of identity, which certainly persists in a lot of the active left and to some extent beyond but not NEARLY as much as the cultural backlash to it seems to suggest. Again i almost never see this shit irl. And really i guess this is my 2 cents now but as far as a subculture of ettiquete goes, so what, even if its weird & alien to you, i dont see where the level of resentment comes from for some people. its like being furious at vegetarians or smthing. if youre in a situation where thats both the norm & youre shamed for not embracing it while being basically respectful, i genuinely sympathize, i have been there and it sucks. and makes perfect sense to retain some personal resentment about that treatment. but ultimately people being judgemental moralists is certainly not exclusive to 'woke', which ik we all know but it feels like its still treated as a different thing. at a certain point it just feels something like reddit atheism thats still hanging onto resentment for the satanic panic

At the risk of being called an astroturfed sockpuppet ZOGbot, I'm just going to add to the chorus that I'm a cishet Jewish white guy (pause to catch breath) very active in Palestine solidarity and union organizing circles in a big city and have never gotten any stick over my identity despite the existence of some of the new ID-based rituals around pronouns et cetera, which I also think are mostly silly but respect out of respect for the people I organize with. It seems Max, who is dead-on about Israel, Judaism, and US empire and a great investigative journalist, is suffering from serious grievance at the high handed treatment he's gotten from polite liberal society and has been reversed polarized against the blue hairs in a way that has really blinkered him. That he's swallowing hook and line & sinker the latest pivot from among the most naked and unprincipled opportunists in US politics in the form of Owens and Tucker is proof of that imo. Their anti-Zionism is fruit of a poison tree - they may be criticizing Israel now, at long last, because it benefits them, but they are not principled in their opposition and cannot be genuine allies in the struggle against Zionism and imperialism more broadly.

I think it's telling that so much of the opprobrium being thrown at Max is coming from people who have a very similar writing style, one which common in the Twitter/Bluesky community. It's not surprising that they're converging on this post. That community seeks to mash every cause together into a single package which you can take or leave, and they have been in total denial about how they come off to everyone outside of their communities.

The casual transphobia is wild but not surprising. “I’m annoyed by pronouns,” is the new “I’m not gay,” for insecure men

pretty solid episode. on the “white, heteronormative” criticism complaint everyone is commenting on: i don’t think it’s surprising that straight white people, men in particular, are regarded with a level of suspicion when they’re in spaces where there are people of color or queer people. i’m not someone who does that, but i get it.

So interesting to hear Max's perspective on this stuff as someone who straddles the line between right and left dissident circles. Great episode

Israel broke the ceasefire in about 4 hours. No ceasefire is coming. That’s like asking the Einzatsgruppen in 1942/43 to freeze killing all the Baltic jews or something. That type of evil doesn’t stop

I'm gonna guess whether or not someone encounters open hostility in left wing spaces as a cis-het white guy depends heavily on where and when they attended a meeting of one of those groups. Even the DSA likely varies considerably in culture depending on chapter and location. There isn't really an organized "left" in America outside college campuses, certain urban centers, and I guess a scattered few militant factions in certain labor unions.

1:41 Max: "Dictatorship is coming to america for the sake of Israel" John: "well thank you for your visit".

Obviously the Left (the actual one, not the one that has any money or influence over the upper classes) needs to keep improving but I think Max is a little hard on them. Like sure, directing sexual and racial politics as the main effort was a flawed approach (idpol should be piggybacking on class analysis rather than the other way around) but there was a good 30-40 yea period where Marxism was just a non-starter as a thought process, the indoctrination was that good and the material comfort allowed us to ignore it. So, this new movement has to reinvent the wheel and find the real history of the Soviet union etc and take lessons and critiques from those attempts. We're starting from 0 again basically. Then again his wasn't the most acerbic critique, but I do try to point out my argument whenever I get a chance.

Considering what Max said about being a "cis white male" and "heternormativity" --- These things are especially true in the 18-20 year old crowd, liberal arts students who like to cling to seemingly transgressive ideas about intersectionality and gender. If you look into the history of some of those sectors of Academia where those ideas emerge from, you do find funding and influence from organizations like the Ford Foundation and other groups founded as instruments to be used in the US soft power cultural cold war. The general legacy of 60's counterculture as a covertly CIA encouraged movement ultimately served to displace mass class-organization politics, get youth involved in drugs, and imbue them with hyper-individual liberationist attitudes that still pervade to this day. As a result a lot of young hip rebellious spaces, of which the Palestine movement has become very much a part of, are monopolized by younger liberal arts type-kids who in many cases are viscerally, in a limbic-system response type way, skeptical of people appearing "heteronormative" or "straight-laced" if you will. I can see why Max, as part of an older generation, feels alienated when he goes to meetings and is expected to play along with new acts of cultural signification that have become standard fare for "left" or even just broadly "radical" or "radlib" circles. After all, such an intensive focus on sexual politics has become very much a "radlib" token of recognition in the White Collar and corporate world, including the Kamala-Biden democratic party centrist faction. I was arguing with another user called "Etienne" in the comments of this episode who then blocked me, which I think is cowardly. I was making useful and verifiable points about the utilization of sexual politics by the establishment as a means of accomplishing US soft (and ultimately hard) power goals domestically and in color-revolution scenarios. If you want to be honest about how US empire operates, you have to be honest about the role that cultural issues like these play in how it extends its tentacles and influences domestic cultural politics. Right wing cultural reactionaryism is, in some ways, (and I know this is a crass way of putting it, and I'm not trying to equate the two in terms of moral value) the other side of the same coin. On the other hand, it is kind of baffling to see a bunch of anonymous accounts on here suddenly trashing Max Blumenthal with tons of replies and likes from other anonymous accounts, speaking about him in a very disrespectful and dismissive way. Is this the excuse you were all waiting for to disparage a very accomplished and admirable person for his expression of one particular opinion about a niche cultural phenomenon?

This poor guy's brain was broken by Wesleyan undergrads in 2015, I prefer when they talk about Palestine and less about his media career

ironically being unable to sit through a pronoun exchange (which i do very regularly whenever i work with specifically anarchists in the UK palestinian liberation movement, but not at all when i work with muslim communities in the very same movement) would suggest that that an "anti-woke" obsession on max's part is more important than being a part of a local palestinian solidarity movement. I'm a big fat white cishet guy and even if you have firm beliefs about the inefficacy of identity politics (which is absolutely the case for me also!), is it not something you can look the other way on to try and be a part of a moment and opportunity that is bigger than yourself? extremely frustrating, as overcoming all of these endless anarchist vs trot vs socialist vs islamist vs (about a thousand other vaguely sociopolitical groupings) bouts is a toll you must not just pay, but enthusiastically ignore in order to try and even tickle the fundamental complicity of the entire western sphere. Appreciate the investigative work max does, but suspect we might all be more effective if we made a conscious effort to move beyond this adopted right wing war on they/thems

Max Blumenthal and Candace Owens, true red-brown alliance, USA is now '90s Russia.

Don't understand why Max finds that discussing government planned assasinations so unbelievable. Has he read his own published material?

You really should look at Danny Cassolaros research on the Syndicate birth of the ADL. The ADL was a creature of Meier Lansky's, they act like criminals because they are criminals.

Great to see that Max is a “friend of the show” once again

Why is ozzy the episode art

Even if the wars somehow cool down, the ulcer of settler violence will lock public opinion in place. When the social reaction comes--and it will come--we need to try to deflate the groypers and ensure that it's only directed against Zionists, and Zionists of all backgrounds. Ideally against ethnonationalists generally.

Blughhh yeah cmon guys demonization of white men is just lazy. You're referring to an over represented online and campus phenomenon from ~2012-2019. Like what are you trying to say, that DSA is anti white male? Have you been to a DSA meeting?

MAX!!!

I'm a cis hetero white dude and I've never felt condemned or anything like that in left wing spaces. Anecdotal for sure but I can't help feeling that all this "leftists hate white men" shit is a total strawman.

I’m a straight white guy and I never experience any alienation with the pro-Palestine crowd. Great interview though, RWN is therapeutic.

When Max starts complaining about pronouns I immediately roll my eyes and lose interest ngl

Blumenthal describing Joe Kent as antiwar. Please. A CIA officer, army ranger, current trump official, defender of Eddie Gallagher is antiwar?

I saw Randy Fine in public a few months ago, the temptation to go off on him was so strong but I knew he would just play the victim.

Max is a good journalist for the reason any yankoid is capable of being one, hes an annoying contrarian. I was nodding along and found a lot of the stuff interesting and illuminating but thinking that Tucker and Owens have seen the light? Come on man. They're just nationalists and see overseas involvement as not worth it, it's not that fucking deep.

The idea that tucker or anyone close to him would be potentially an anti war leftist is utterly absurd. If in fact thats what max is saying at 1:08 mark. Total nonsense. Tucker is pro war and was one of the main cheerleaders of the iraq war. Any time i hear someone taking him seriously looses credibility in my mind.

Hi guys: I am a subscriber for years now but don’t get the newsletter, did not get John’s last book and would really like to get Civil War book.

Oh snap I can tell from the thumbnail that this will be a banger 🔥

Great episode. Appreciate the fine work by all of you.

Such a good episode it actually drove me to comment. To the point of Yasha's theory on the internet and its relation to the current state of discourse, I think Elon's X serves two purposes: To create an allowance for anti-Arab/anti-Muslim rhetoric to flare back up (as it has on the right since 2024) and to create self compromising circumstances. Every Republican group chat is filled with racist/cancelable jokes, so party bosses always have dirt on their underlings.

Max is an all time guest, he’s been incredible the past 5 years since COVID

I'm sorry, but it's fucking astonishing to me to hear ANYONE taking an "Israeli ceasefire" seriously after the last 2 years. Israel has already announced a new and massive bombing campaign in Gaza "to destroy the Hamas tunnels," which is why they're blaming Hamas and their tunnels for that dipshit who drove over an unexploded Israeli munition. None of this is done. This is the intermission where Netanyahu & company get to "save the hostages" and "allow" hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to "return to Gaza City," which no longer exists in any meaningful way, where they will be slaughtered like cattle in Israel's "anti-tunnel" bombing campaign. The information divide on Gaza is asymmetrical and jumbled – nobody there knows all the geopolitical shit available to a Westerner, and no Westerner knows 1% of what's actually happening in front of these people's eyes – to the degree that the Gaza Palestinian I've known longest, basically since October 7, is JUST beginning to consider that there may be no "move home again" when this "ends." This person is from Jabalia. Jabalia, as mentioned, has been 100% removed from the face of the Earth, which *I've* known for months, but which the survivors packed-at-gunpoint into Rafah can't be sure about, because the only people who could tell them are dead. The other person I know best is from Beit Hanoun. Mutatis mutandis. This "ceasefire" inaugurates the Final Solution phase. Israel is going to give Palestinians a moment to "self-deport" to Egypt via the newly-opened Rafah border (and call it a "humanitarian PR coup," which will succeed politically, because we're the same fuckin' species of self-regarding swine we've been so far!), once these theoretical Gaza emigrants see that their hometowns now exist exclusively in language, just names for missing things – and when the overwhelming majority do NOT "self-deport," they'll coincidentally be standing on top of some Hamas Tunnels™, which have the nearly magical propensity to exist only beneath things that Israel already wants to destroy. What we are watching right now will become the retrospective "So why didn't they leave?" clause. The exact dates and times of every goddamn instant in this "ceasefire" will be used to whitewash a genocide until the end of any recognizable world. Oh, and Israel has just announced that it's restarting the total blockade on aid, so the famine will be tearing Gaza's flesh from its fucking bones, minute by minute, during all of this. Unless someone or something decides to intervene on a massive scale, Israel will finally have its Museum of the Extinct Race by this time next year, and who wouldn't trade Prague, or for that matter Madagascar, for the Gaza Riviera?

The banter about Trump and Miriam Adelson in the Knesset had me cackling so hard I sprouted new neural pathways

Miriam Adelson is looking like Eddie the Head

BANGER!

Good episode except for the weird part about "white men" and politics. Feeling under attack as a "hetero-normative white dude", is very strange.

Miriam looks like she fell asleep face first in her gravel driveway after eating a gallon of paint, and I think she enjoys freaking people out with her appearance, b/c she's a true super villain.

Max is great. It really annoys me how he’s an Unspeakable among some progressives for either Russia/Syria apologism (which I can accept argument about to a degree) or for actually talking to Republicans

Max himself is an entire wiki on Zionism.

Anyone know how to get a link to the book? TSHBH? Can’t seem to find the link.

Max Blumenthal Heavyweight Champion

Great episode.. maybe one day we will get a full series on the conflict

She looks great!

this'll be a hoot

Love seeing Mark, John, & Max reunited! Especially for such a timely and historically relevant topic playing out in front of us in real time.