Wednesday Interview- Max Blumenthal

POSTED BY Raleigh Elizabeth-Smith, 29 August 2007

Tuesday, we had a chance to sit down and talk with reporter-blogger Max Blumenthal and his videographer Thomas Shomaker about what the future of journalism, the '08 Election, a "crisis of blackness" and the quiet war on black men, and what the biggest threat to the United States actually is. This is the first in our new installment of Wednesday interviews with journalists, bloggers and anyone else who will sit down with us to talk about what's actually going on in America.





Looking at the ’08 election, what do you think about the candidates? Do you think there’s going to be any "star power" with Thompson and Giuliani?

Max: Fred Thompson is a fresh breath of halitosis. That's pretty much all I have to say about him. Rudy Giuliani is a great example of family values. You know, his daughter calls him a sociopath, his son won't talk to him, won't appear with him in public, he's — what is it? — his third wife? After leaving his second cousin and having an affair with a staffer. So I think the family values wing of the Republican Party, which is the Republican Party, is going to appreciate him a lot. And he's lying about his record left and right. Mitt Romney is going to be the guy. I wish Giuliani were going to be nominee, because I would love to see him systematically dismantled in the general election.

What that guy did to New York deserves some sort of political punishment.

Do you think America's ready to elect a black man?

I don't know the answer to that. My answer to that is that racism is still very real and that particular black man is stuck between a rock and a hard place because he has to be black enough; he has to be authentically black. His blackness has been challenged because he's biracial, at the same time he can't be too black or he'll be pigeon-holed as Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, and he won't win over voters in Iowa. So I just think there's a crisis of blackness in the political arena right now that Barack Obama embodies, and if he is elected, he will redefine America's concept of blackness; it's an interesting issue.

Tom: The question I have about that is, I definitely think there are a large, large number of Americans who would not vote for a black man for president; at the same time, an overwhelming percentage of those probably aren't going to vote Democratic anyway. So I think the real question is how many Americans would be subtly uncomfortable by the idea, people aren't outright racists at all; people who probably have black friends, but they would not in some way feel comfortable with that and they might not even recognize that, but it might sway their support to someone else. I think that's the real question, because I think that's the real racism that really is much more widespread.

Do you think Hillary's going to face the same thing being a woman?

Tom: Absolutely. Absolutely. I actually think it might be harder for Hillary as a woman than for Obama as a black man.

Max: I think Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are really distractions from the real question, which is: Is America willing to embrace women's rights and is America willing to embrace black men on their own terms? Which means talking about issues like abortion, which democrats are scared to talk about, and issues like prison, which Democrats, particularly at the state level; a lot are in the pocket of the prison guard's union. So you have an enormous amount of black males basically warehoused in prisons for non-violent crimes, over 50 percent of the federal prison population is in jail for nonviolent drug offenses, what's basically going on is a war on young black men.

It's a quiet war that everyone's afraid to talk about, and America is not, I don't know if America's ready to resolve this war in a just fashion. And Barack Obama's election isn't going to do it, if anything, it's just going to be a way of papering over what mainstream America's opinions are of black males. And I'm speaking as a white Jew.

Max and Thomas were hired by the Campaign for America to make a video at the Take Back America conference this summer, but they describe the experience as a "disaster." In the end, the video wasn't even shown.

What happened with that?

Max: Before I say that, I want to say, those sons of bitches have not paid me or Thomas yet the meager amount of money they promised. This is the Campaign for America's future, an organization that purports to care about "working class;" I find it really ironic.

Tom: And since we had expenses, we're actually in the red for this project.

Max: They asked us to do a video and I think some of the younger members of the organization wanted something that would be a little bit humorous, and a light-hearted take on a liberal conference. I thought what we produced was light-hearted, it wasn't as hilarious as our other videos, but I thought it was at least adequate. And the older members said of the video that it didn't meet the threshold of dull earnesty that they think defines liberalism. These are the stereotypical humorless liberals, and at the head of this organization of humorless liberals is Robert Borosage, who is directly responsible; he should be held accountable for bringing us onto this project for not paying us. They're refusing to pay us. The whole thing was a disaster; we were almost forcibly removed for asking Sen. Sherrod Brown why he voted for the Military Commissions Act.

So, do you think people just can't take a laugh?

Tom: I'm not sure. I guess they just thought they were overly cautious. They were so afraid to offend anybody there, a donor, or supporter, anybody. Long story short, it was a good working experience, and when the Huffington Post wanted to hire us for two more videos, this time at R\right-wing conferences, we jumped at the chance.

Max: I think Tom has said it all, and what I said was kind of jumbled and fraught with resentment. But I'm pissed off, I want my damn money!
We should have never gone on board with some liberal organization as their flacks or whatever. It was our mistake.

And then there's the video "Rapture Ready: The Christians United for Israel Tour" from the 2007 Washington-Israel Summit, a frightening look at the bizarre politics of Christian evangelicals, Jewish Zionists, Pastor John Hagee, Joe Lieberman and Tom Delay.

What do you think of Joe Lieberman?

Max: Joe Lieberman, I have heard from people in Washington, Joe Lieberman privately told people that he thought the war in Iraq would be good for Israel and that explained part of his support for it. I think Joe Lieberman is a malignant figure in Washington, and in our video, he described Pastor John Hagee, a guy who's made blatantly anti-Semitic statements in his books, which I pointed out in my video; he compared him to Moses; he said he commands a flock that's even greater than the flock Moses commanded. What Pastor Hagee wants to do is plump up the Jews like a Thanksgiving turkey and then shove them in the oven. And Joe Lieberman just embodies the cynicism and desperation of the Jews who are like concentration camp capos who fermented this alliance with people who ultimately want to kill or convert them.

And, you know, Joe Lieberman — our video is the perfect document of Joe Lieberman's malignance.

Tom: Especially also when he decided to commend former Sen. Rick Santorum as a long-time fighter for the American people.

Max:Yeah, and all the good he's done in America; like comparing homosexuality to man on dog sex, for instance. I mean what Rick Santorum is doing? Now that he’s out of the Senate, he's devoted his career to mainstreaming bigotry and islamophobia, and he's producing a film that's going to essentially fan the flames of bigotry by portraying Middle Eastern Muslims as terrorists, and you know he's doing it all as fodder for a unilateral war against Iran, which is just not in the interest of anybody.

So when you guys go someplace like the CPAC conference, how do people respond when they see you? Do they know who you are when you walk in?

Max: In the Generation Chickenhawk video, they recognized who I was from my video at CPAC, and forced us to stay in a corner since they didn't have any excuse to kick us out. They said you couldn't film, which prompted me to entertain myself and others in the general vicinity by invoking the ghost of Jose Limon and doing an interpretive dance, also incorporating Ralph Macchio into the repertoire that I displayed, and I think that they were so jealous of my dance styles that they had to remove me, and Thomas managed somehow to fight through this phalanx of Republican lobotomy patients and film it all. It made great footage.

(Max also told us how he got into journalism in the first place — and it wasn't just growing in the house of well-respected reporter and Clinton aide. After Max finished at Penn, he got involved in the world of hip-hop — sadly, he did not perform for us — he even had a developmental deal with Artemis records. They liked the political themes in his music, and it wasn't long before those were back in his professional life, too.)

Max: I got into journalism sort of as a side job. My girlfriend at the time was really an innovating video artist who went to Juarez, Mexico, to do a video on the serial killings of women, and she said, "You know, your music is cool and all that, but you're really a writer." And she brought a tape recorder against my will, and we would go meet families of victims and she'd break out the tape recorder and say, "you’re going to interview them. You're going to write an article."

And we went on a hunt for dead bodies with these families, looking for their daughters, we went into the maquiladoras where the dead women were all working which sprung up after NAFTA was signed.

I e-mailed David Talbot who was running Salon.com at the time, before John Walsh turned it into a San Francisco culture rag, and he said, "Just give us an article."
And I gave them a a 4000-word article, got like $300 for it, and a year later, it won the online journalism award from the Online News Association-USC Annenberg. And it was a really good moment for my family, because the award ceremony was in Chicago, where my family's from, and my uncle and grandfather had just died.

So it was a good moment for us and it sort of motivated me to do more journalism; more political journalism, and watching the forces that had tried to destroy Bill Clinton and indirectly destroy my father come into power was really illuminating for me. And it illuminated what my parents had always been trying to tell me about what the Right's agenda was and their mode of operation and how anti-democratic they were.

And so, I was there, living in Los Angeles basically renting out an attic with two friends who were essentially apolitical. Most of the people I knew were either in community activism and had very little interest in national politics, and I was just alone writing these articles; but sooner or later, I started to blog and began attracting an audience and making an impact — and that became a full time career. But to support that I had to deliver pizza, I had to teach disturbed kids, I had to do moving jobs, industrial work, anything I could to support that.But I really, really think it's starting to pay off now, and that's sort of my story.

I don't think I've ever told that story before.