The Mike Pence Operation Seems to Have Sided With the Likud Blackmail and Extortion Network
Something has gone wrong in free-market evangelicalism, where do the Kochs come down?
Former VP Mike Pence is in Reason this week singing hosannas to the gods of the marketplace. I see no sign he has gotten the point. One can think of Mike Pence as the nexus between evangelicals and the Koch network. Jared Kushner pushed for Pence as VP for exactly this reason.
In Washington we are, sad to say, a long way from Edmund Burke’s Speech to the Electors of Bristol, in which Burke promises to always take counsel from his constituents, but insists on reserving his independent judgment. The whole concept of representative government depends on this. The more common thing in Congress today is to recruit some idiot, and install a brain through the well-developed staffing pipelines on both left and right. This is risibly obvious when it comes to a guy like Pennsylvania’s Lurch Fetterman, who is not in control of his own office, which suits the people who pull the purse-strings of the Democratic Party just fine.
Mike Pence is a very good man, but he’s not a smart man. When the Indiana scarecrow arrived in Oz, the Wizard of Wichita granted him a brain in the form of Marc Short, who has labored long in the salt mines of the Kochtopus.
There’s a third piece, though, which is the Israelis. It was Jared Kushner who pushed for the selection of Pence. Marc Short was a big part of that marriage, and of course Kushner sort of screwed him in the end. Chris Christie could have told him that would happen. I don’t care for Christie’s opinions about foreign policy, but he did a great job locking up Jared Kushner’s gangster father.
During the January 6 situation, Kushner refused to help reconcile Trump and Pence, telling Short, “I’m too busy working on Middle East peace right now, Marc.” The Likudniks, of course, wanted to keep Trump in office. If you think they’d refrain from backing the January 6 riot, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
The Gaetz situation was in progress during all of this, and it was obvious from the reporting in The Daily Beast itself that it was a blackmail operation (Barry Diller has withdrawn it for sale, guess he couldn't find a buyer—that free market sure can be tough), though nobody in the press called it out as such except me.
Gaetz upset the Israelis with his position on Iran war powers, and he upset Bill Barr by calling out the DOJ’s Chinese drones, and the latter opened the investigation on him. This was sort of the old conservative machine in action, which as shown previously on this blog, has an enormous China problem. It didn’t work this time, and the operation against Gaetz has now been exposed in full. A guy working in the Israeli consulate in New York was involved in the extortion piece, the jig is very much up.
Gaetz is a free-marketer who supports a restrained foreign policy, exactly like the Kochs do (though maybe he’s biding his time, in his family tree are Upper Midwest populist Republicans). But Marc Short, a Koch operative, went after him anyway, siding with the Likud blackmailers and extortionists, as you can see in this clip from CNN.
This is Marc Short losing the plot and becoming a disgrace to Virginia. Short’s a UVA guy and Gaetz went to William and Mary.
The reason why the Koch operation doesn’t like Gaetz is because Gaetz doesn’t staff his office through their pipelines—the Wizard of Wichita didn’t get to put a brain in him, he’s trying to be more of a congressman in the Burkean style. I think that’s a good thing.
I guess my view is that you’re not a patriot if you support what they tried to do to Gaetz. This where the rubber meets the road for the Koch network. They don’t like neocon foreign policy. One of the reasons we had neocon foreign policy is these Israeli blackmail and extortion operations. The Pegasus scandal raises the prospect of this stuff becoming very widespread. Are they going to say no to it?
I reject the premise that it’s anti-Israel, let alone anti-Semitic, to be clear about this. Ask any counterintelligence officer, and they will tell you the same thing. The position I’ve articulated on this blog is in line with the opinions of a large majority of American Jews, the trouble is you aren’t allowed to say it in the Republican Party. I hold it to be a moderate position, not an extreme one. Frankly, it’s insulting to a great and ancient religion to assume you have to look the other way at criminality and spying to be a friend.
The world is changing very quickly—it is Chabad, religious Jews, who seem to be taking the lead in trying to bring an end to the Ukraine conflict, and my prayers are with them in that. One of the people who died while I was on the trail this month was Pat Robertson, who once said God made Ariel Sharon sick because he pulled out of Gaza. I’m not bothered in the least by evangelicals participating in political life, but I am bothered by this sort of thing, as was the Israeli government when it happened.
If the Gaetz situation had gone the other way we’d probably have a new Zondervan volume about how a dentistry scion made good took out a congressional sex trafficker and cleared the way to ethnically cleanse the West Bank per biblical prophecy, and how the free market magically got Don Gaetz to give up $25 million to free a spy from Iran. That’s a pile of vomit a lot of evangelicals would be happy to return to. I suppose I wouldn't dispute that God works in mysterious ways.
I’m sure some aspiring libertarian could even be persuaded to make a case that the Greenbergs were serving a need in the free market by joining the wave of Florida doctors who flooded the country with oxycodone. Before Ron DeSantis even thinks about sending troops to Mexico, he might consider throwing a few of these drug dealers in lab coats in prison. He should probably work on demonstrating that Florida isn’t a mob-run state, especially after his picture with Joel Greenberg.
We also have to make space for a moderate position on Israel because of American Muslims. If the Likudniks want to amp up the Islamophobia, go do it in France, where they have a huge unassimilated Muslim population that causes big problems. American Muslims by contrast are, for the most part, prosperous, well-behaved, fairly conservative, and they don’t care for the woke stuff. They do notice how unbalanced all the Israel propaganda is, though. Republicans should try to earn their support, which will be increasingly important in places like Michigan.
The big picture is that there has been a cartel-ization of both the Democratic and Republican parties, with power concentrated in a very few hands. Cartels are efficient and powerful. But they can also be pretty unstable in times of major transition. What you need to deal with a cartel is a little of that Jeffersonian magic, the most American form of media dissemination, the committee of correspondence. Come to think of it, Substack kind of works like that.
It should be obvious after ProPublica’s reporting on Paul Singer and Justice Alito last week that the FedSoc/social conservative operation has some big problems. What in God’s name is the Judicial Crisis Network doing intervening in a sovereign debt case on behalf of a hedge fund? What does this have to do with originalism? The word for this is corruption—rank, filthy corruption. I don’t really think it’s going to work for the next GOP president to outsource judicial nominations to Leonard Leo. Again, it’s not really about ideology, it’s that because of the structure of these pipelines, there are hidden litmus tests that get in under the wire.
Miscellany: Arnon Milchan, an Israeli spy in the movie business, is making good by testifying against Bibi in his corruption trial. I think that’s wonderful.
Everyone is freaking out about a Breitbart hit piece on Pedro Gonzalez, by Matthew Boyle, who’s a former colleague. I’m not going to tell you he should have said that stuff. He’s also wrong about some of the history. I have a pet peeve about the John Birch Society. “Members of the JBS were unafraid to call out subversive Jews,” Gonzalez apparently wrote. He’s buying into some of the anti-JBS propaganda here, because there were also a lot of Jews in the John Birch Society, and they kicked out anti-Semites. John Birch preached the gospel in China, so I’m not surprised a lot of people in Washington don’t like him.
Anyway, take it from Breitbart’s chairman, the company was “conceived in Israel”—the picture that accompanies the article has Bibi in it, and their EIC is South African. I don’t think of Breitbart as an especially American company, let me put it that way. I prefer to buy American when it comes to news. One of the people who tweeted out the article was Arthur Schwartz, who was involved in the blackmail effort against Gaetz.
The role Breitbart plays in the Israel lobby is to “load the gun,” as it were, full of cranks who can then be cancelled by other pro-Israel journalists when advantageous. That they’re doing the cancelling today is a sign that things have gone a little pear-shaped. The real story of the cancellations during the Trump administration was to use the Breitbart pipeline to put a bunch of far-right guys in government, then let a Buzzfeed reporter cancel them, putting greater pressure on the White House, and then leaving Steven Miller as the only person standing who can articulate an immigration-skeptical position. Ask anyone who paid close attention to the Trump White House, Miller was constantly undercutting other restrictionists, and nobody quite knew why. Well, that’s why. Miller has a personal incentive to never solve the immigration issue because he’s from a family of slumlords that benefits from a vast underclass in a legal grey area. He’s an example of a very common phenomenon in Washington: someone who’s paid very well to pretend to solve a problem, but not actually do anything about it. If the Cato Institute were smart, they’d be singing his praises!
The line you probably want to use with someone who’s tempted toward radicalization in a groyper-like direction, is, “don’t be a Nazi, Bibi has uses for those.” It’s slightly offensive, but it gets the job done, and it works better than an appeal to a common nationalism or something. You have to appeal to self-interest and pre-existing bias. Pedro went for Ron DeSantis, which is probably the wrong move, because a paleocon like him will always be playing second fiddle to a Koch-neocon foreign influence-peddler like Christina Pushaw and the Israelis. I sort of think of Ron DeSantis as a trap for all the people who thought the Trump thing was just about will-to-power. Keep the free-marketeerism, the subservience to the Likud Party, and add testosterone. That’s not what this is about. It actually is vitally important for Republicans to learn to think about economics in a more sophisticated way, for geopolitical reasons, and because of the changing structure of financial markets due to fintech and crypto.