#and did his whole bar mitzvah that way completely ignorant of what any of the words said

[necromancy-savant]

re: your tags on that post about the overlap between conservative christianity and certain queer activist spaces, have you ever heard of messianic judaism and are you sure that’s not what you were raised? they’re basically christians who pretend to be jews

(if you find this an inappropriate feel free to just ignore me, i don’t mean to pry, just to open you up to possibilities)

Yes, I have! And weirdly, I was told to be wary of them and that they're not Jewish at all. My dad at least had the sense to know that. We were just very Reform, and while I don't want to say anything about the Reform movement as a whole, at this particular synagogue it felt, to me personally, too laid back for me to feel like anyone was taking it seriously or respected the congregation's intelligence it

[musicempath]

ZOEY CLARKE LOVES MAX RICHMAN: a masterpost

As the finale draws nearer day by day, I decided now was the perfect time to do an idea I’ve had kicking around in my head for a while: an in depth look at every moment, subtext or text, that shows Zoey Clarke is in love with Max Richman. I’ll be going episode by episode documenting every lingering look, every moment of jealousy, every line of dialogue that shows that Zoey’s feelings for her adorable best friend go beyond being simply platonic. Because they do, and I can.

Onwards and upwards for some rambling!

1x01

Her soft smile at Max when he has his pure of heart, dumb of ass moment, asking if 50/20 is low for a blood pressure reading. Zoey loves one (1) adorable idiot.

Right before Max starts singing I Think I Love You, there’s a little smile and squint she has as Max struggles to put what’s going on in his head into words. Nothing special. Just a little moment of fondness worth noting.

During I Think I Love You, as shocked and a little bit terrified of Max’s sudden confession as she is, you can see her soften up when she gives him her hands to spin her around in the chair. Out of the blue confessions of undying love are scary, but they’re made slightly less scary when you’re also. Y’know. In love with that person too.

1x02

Sucker! This is gonna have a lot of different points, but to start out with there’s the fact that she can’t hold back her smile when Max sings the opening line to her. Even as she’s trying to stop the heart song from stealing her big, introductory speech thunder, she can’t stop smiling.

And then there’s the thirst. By the end of his heart song, Zoey is quite literally fanning herself with her notecards. She may not have admitted it at this point, but she’s absolutely attracted to Max on some level, and watching him seductively sing Sucker to her made her confront it at least a little bit.

It’s also worth noting that once the song is over, Zoey is flustered. Extremely so. When she refers to her memo and its section How Not To Be Distracted In The Workplace, she glances at Max. At the Golden Gate Grind with Mo, Zoey even says “Max is becoming a major distraction at work.” Zoey hasn’t referred to any of her other workplace heartsongs as major distractions, though, so what makes Max different? The fact that the feelings are mutual and she isn’t ready to admit it.

Moment one of Zoey not saying she doesn’t feel the same way for Max comes at the Golden Gate Grind with Mo. It would be so easy for her to say that she just doesn’t like Max in that way. But she doesn’t. She just says that with everything going on in her life, she wants things between them to stay the same and that she doesn’t want to live in the awkwardness.

At her parents’ house! When Max brings the butterscotch pudding over from Hand-Picked. There are so many individual moments in that one scene, but especially when Max is crouched down, talking to Mitch one-on-one, you can really see just how much Zoey cares for him. There’s a lot of love as she watches her best friend with her dad.

“Is it too early to say friend for life?” no it is NOT and don’t even get me started on how much that journal entry reeks of an early crush that went nowhere back when Zoey first started out at SPRQ Point that maybe she thought faded into friendship but really just got stronger over the years and she just ignored it.

Longing and wistful look at Max and Autumn on a date at the Golden Gate Grind through the window. This was the start of Jealous Zoey™. To be further documented in later episodes.

1x03

Cute side-eye at Max when he says “Dude, Joan is crushing us,” as they’re leaving from a late night at work. Actually the whole time he’s complaining about wanting to crash and she bursts his bubble that they already have plans she’s giving massive hearteyes. Or getting a bit tight-lipped once Autumn is mentioned.

“C’mon, whiskey sour, this body has got to move!” “Oh, sorry guys, her body is very bossy, apparently.” “Okay.” Zoey’s face during this whole exchange is just so telling like you can already tell that Max and Autumn’s relationship is grating on her, and it’s NOT just because new couples are annoying either. And then the air spanks. She definitely had that jealousy nausea watching that.

“Max is in... a very handsy relationship,” and also “Not jealous. Just aware,” are also really great examples of how Max and Autumn’s relationship is getting to Zoey. However much she’s insisting she’s not bothered, even Mo can tell that it’s killing Zoey to see Max with someone else. Even if she’s also totally hung up on Simon at the same time.

1x04

"You can take the fifth and stop telling me about it!” More Jealous Zoey™. You can tell by Max’s reaction to this that it’s definitely not how Zoey would typically react.

Honestly, I know Zoey’s trying so hard to give off this I’m so supportive! air while talking with Max about his plans for a couples trip in Napa with Autumn, but you can really tell that she’s gritting her teeth through it the whole time. “You could stand to tone it down a little bit,” more like “Please stop feeling so strongly about Autumn instead of me it makes me wanna barf.”

Zoey’s little headshake when Max says he got to second base at several bar mitzvahs. He’s an idiot, but he’s her idiot. It has those vibes.

1x05

Have I said we’ve reached peak Jealous Zoey™ yet? Because if I have, I was lying. This is where we start to find out that there’s trouble in paradise for Max and Autumn post!Napa, and Zoey? She is living. She’s grinning the whole time Max complains about Autumn and her face when Autumn goes in for a very unreciprocated smooch from Max is just. So damn pleased with herself. Basically, Max is miserable with Autumn, Zoey can see it, and she could NOT be happier about it.

Also let’s talk about how completely at ease she is with Max that she lets him see her with a sheet mask on for a minute. It’s such like... a married couple moment and I adore it.

1x06

Vindication for Jealous Zoey™ as she gets the deets on Max and Autumn’s breakup. Smiling at Max being an absolute dork insisting that he nailed it and would at least get a nomination if awards were given out for Best Breakup. Again, he’s a dumbass, but he’s her dumbass. 

“And I’m...staring at your nipples!” AKA the moment that collectively made all of us lose our shit because of shirtless Skylar Astin. This entire scene is pretty much the epitome of banging a book titled Zoey Clarke Is Attracted To Max Richman against our heads. She can’t stop staring at his chest. We know it. Max knows it. He even jokes about it. This is pretty much the level of flustered during the Sucker scene dialed up to an 11. When Zoey leaves Mo’s apartment we even see her throw one last look at shirtless Max for the road.

I’m! Gonna! Be! But part one because the slower reprise is a whole different ballgame. This is Zoey at her weakest moment, I think, overwhelmed with everything that happened at the engagement party and crying because she just got a call about her dad falling and being rushed to the hospital, and Max doesn’t even hesitate to jump in and help Zoey. And this is the first time we don’t see any resistance from Zoey whatsoever about hearing a love song from Max. Even though she’s crying, she’s also constantly shooting Max these loving little looks as he’s singing and trying to lead her through the crowds on the streets and get her to her dad.

Which of course leads into the scooter scene where Max literally threatens to throw down with a stranger if he doesn’t give up the scooter. And then proceeds to ride the scooter with Zoey since she doesn’t feel comfortable riding it by herself. Even though she’s an absolute mess when she gets on, you see her visibly calm the longer she rides the scooter with Max. Max is her rock and he makes her feel safe.

The hug! At “I’m here if you need me. Always.”! When Zoey pulls away she looks down at Max’s lips and then back up into his eyes and you cannot tell me that she didn’t fully expect and even want Max to go in for the kiss. The disappointment when he leaves without kissing her is so palpable on her face.

I’m! Gonna! Be! Part two! The first moment that it actually hit Zoey like a freight train that she might like Max in a romantic styles kinda way. This is probably the most romantic song Max has heart sung to her at this point, and instead of being confused and a little terrified or annoyed and very flustered, she’s smitten. The way we see Zoey look at Max in this moment is very akin to how she’s looked at her family, particularly her dad or her dad and mom at times, and if that doesn’t tell you the absolute depth of love she’s feeling for him at that moment I don’t know what will. Zoey could literally have run out onto that street corner to plant a big ol’ smooch on Max because of his little reprise, and it would’ve been wholly believable based on her reaction to him singing.

1x07

There’s a definite Moment™ between Zoey and Max as the credits are rolling and she’s teasing him about crying at the ending that gets interrupted when Mo flicks on the light. This is our first glimpse at what Zoey and Max’s friendship dynamic was like before her powers revealed his feelings for her since the pilot, and the tension between them has definitely ramped up even MORE since that moment Max sang to her from the street corner.

“I need more Max in my life,” honestly this plus the way she looked at him as she touched his shoulder just made me scream because this is classic flirting. I mean this is textbook flirting. Flirting 101 would cover this on the very first day. And even Mo notices it and points it out.

“After I got the power... You sang to me. Love songs. Lots of love songs.” “I did?” “Yeah.” There’s so much that could be said about Zoey’s body language in this scene, but the little smiles she gets as she says “Lots of love songs,” and then “Yeah,” probably are the most telling. We’ve seen Zoey show a wide array of emotions to Max’s heart songs in the moment, but to smile about them in hindsight is a huge sign that she thinks of them fondly.

Zoey’s conversation with Max on the balcony. Just the entire thing. Again, it would be so easy for Zoey to say that she just doesn’t feel the same way about Max. But she doesn’t. Her answer for Max isn’t that she isn’t interested, it’s that she doesn’t know how she feels. And that she hasn’t let herself figure out how she feels out of fear of losing him. And though Zoey says she hasn’t considered going down a romantic road with Max, this conversation makes it pretty clear that she’s at the very least thought about it in passing and isn’t against the idea of them being more than friends. She’s just scared of what happens if Max becomes the latest casualty in a series of disastrous relationships. “It is not a rejection.” (I mean it kind of is but not in the sense that’s easiest to handle) “It’s all coming from a place of love.” 

1x08

Zoey’s in her own little world in that scene in the elevator with Max walking into work, not really looking at Max much besides quick little glances for his reaction, but once he starts talking the hearteyes are turned up to an 11. 

Pressure! The entire scene after Zoey finishes making a fool of herself in front of the big boss with Zoey giving meaningful looks to Max and talking about the Chirp but also absolutely talking about Max at the same time. “It’s there to help you and back you up in any situation,” and yes by it she does mean Max and that look in her eyes is absolutely mortification mixed with love.

I’m Yours as a scene and song also have to get mentioned. Not to break down every little piece of body language on Zoey’s end (because that in itself would take up a whole meta) but to point out the fact that the music starts well before Zoey actually starts singing. She knows the song is coming on. She can feel it. But she doesn’t fight it. It’s the ONLY song she doesn’t fight besides Crazy which took her by surprise and How Do I Live which was for her dad. Also, anyone who insists that this song is purely platonic is deluding themselves. This song being meant in a romantic way is obvious both from the lyrics and the choreography.

Which of course Zoey tries to deny immediately afterwards in the most transparent and obvious way. The fact that Max picks up on this is less a testament of him being pushy and more that he’s been friends with Zoey for five years and knows what a Zoey who is bullshitting looks like. That was bullshitting at its finest worst. 

The confrontation with Max after her song to Simon. “I’m not sure I knew I had those feelings until I sang them,” is a pretty accurate (and also inaccurate) way to describe Zoey’s complicated relationship with her feelings for Max. They’ve been there. There’s been so many clues along the way that they’ve been there. But Zoey has very pointedly ignored them until she couldn’t anymore, and you can see in her face as Max confronts her with his own interpretation of the situation that she knows he’s right about a few things, however much as she doesn’t want to admit it.

When she opens up to Max. This is probably the first time we’ve seen Zoey be this honest with Max about her dad’s condition and how it’s affecting her, and it produced a scene that’s so sweet even after their mess of a confrontation. The effect that Max has on a thoroughly dejected Zoey is incredible, especially as he jokes about hating her “just a little” and makes her smile.

1x09

She holds back when she’s telling Max what the I’m Yours Zoey would say to him about the promotion, but the way she looks at him is full of love but just... tentative about it. Hesitant. Like she isn’t ready for the full emotions dump but there is absolutely a full emotions dump waiting in the wings for when she is ready.

1x10

I could say something about the fact that the reason she “forgot” about it being the day that Max moves to the six floor is because she’s been avoiding it, but let’s instead talk about the rest of that conversation because there’s definitely a lingering sort of longing that hangs in the air before Zoey brushes it off with the “it’s only two floors we’re being ridiculous” attitude. She’s also giving him massive sad hearteyes as he walks away and Here I Go Again starts to play.

“Max is probably miserable on the sixth floor” not really a Moment™ per se but it comes into play later when Zoey takes it very personally that Max is happier on the sixth floor than he ever was on the fourth floor. Troubles with Max are not the source of her anger this episode, but this is definitely a moment of petty jealousy that adds to her grief anger.

Zoey after The Boy Is Mine, when Max is describing his reasoning for staying on the sixth floor and keeping the code there. Obviously, there’s a personal element to his reasoning in saying that nobody wanted him there and nobody fought to keep him re: Zoey, but you can absolutely see how personally she takes it that he’s upset with her. And she also assumes that it’s because of her romantic “rejection” and not the fact that, as he said, the only time they wanted him back was because they needed something from him. Not because they actually WANTED him back. The assumption is telling.

“I’m sorry to break it to you but your lumbar support is actually 4th floor property,” this line could be played off as playful, but it isn’t. It’s bitter. And biting. Jealous Zoey™ has risen from the dead and is back in a big way, conveniently fueled to bigger heights by her grief related anger. The rest of this scene is just filled with tension in a way that her other outbursts (barring the one with Simon who she also has feelings for) aren’t. Also, when she turns around as Max stomps back toward her post “You’re calling me selfish?” she’s clearly mad horny.

1x11

Comes into work the next day. Tries to talk to Max like she didn’t totally just tell him that he didn’t deserve the promotion and that he basically sucks. Is very visibly bothered when he proceeds to ignore her because she hasn’t even tried to apologize to him. Then proceeds to take Leif’s recruitment as a personal affront because in true Zoey fashion, she’s sometimes definitely more than a little self-absorbed. Also everything Max does with regards to the 6th floor is about her because she’s Jealous Zoey™ now.

Cue the bar scene. Zoey is only slightly less awkward than poor Leif is at the karaoke bar with Max. We then see more bitterness from Jealous Zoey™ as she “warns” Max that Leif is ultimately going to betray him and stab him in the back. Just because she ultimately was correct doesn’t mean she deserves a pat on the back for it. 

Bye Bye Bye and all of Zoey’s progressive reactions to it. From confusion mixed with a little bit of hurt to offended and internally screaming to full blown HORROR. In reality, all Max is doing is ignoring her, but in Zoality, he’s ready to be completely done with her. Full stop. And Zoey hates it and is not prepared for that at all.

The longing and wistful look she gives to Max’s empty desk after her mom’s text. She misses him.

Pining Zoey™ during Get Together. It’s the looks she gave to Max’s empty desk turned up to an 11 now that she’s staring across at Max who, like her, isn’t joining in with the big group song between the 4th and 6th floors.

“And if I had to die tomorrow, I couldn’t stomach being this far apart from you.” Honestly everything about this scene is peak Pining Zoey™ hanging up the jealousy and admitting that she both wants and needs Max in her life. And! “I’m not saying I expect us to go back to the way things were, but maybe with time...” “Somehow we get back to...” “Whatever we are?” First of all that look that she’s giving him second of all she could’ve said friends. I repeat. ZOEY COULD HAVE SAID FRIENDS. Zoey has a habit of choosing her words around Max very carefully, particularly when it comes to the state of their relationship. It’s extremely significant that she didn’t just say friends. Not to mention she’s also showing a lot of growth saying that she doesn’t expect them to go bak to the way things were compared to previous times where she insisted on returning to the status quo from before feelings were out in the open. Zoey, after all that pining and jealousy, is ready for some kind of step forward in that moment.

[theculturedmarxist]

ROBERT SCHEER: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case Max Blumenthal, who I must say is one of the gutsiest journalists we have in the United States, and have had for the last five years or so. He’s, in addition to having considerable courage and [going] out on these third-rail issues — like Israel, being one of the more prominent ones — and challenging some of the major conceits of even liberal politics in the United States about our virtue, our constant virtue, he’s done just great journalism. I really loved his book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” which came out in 2013, because it was based on just good, solid journalism of interviewing people and trying to figure out what’s going on.

I’d done something a half century earlier, or not quite that long ago, during the Six-Day War in Israel, where I went over when I was the editor of Ramparts. And I know how difficult it is to deal with that issue, because I put Ramparts into bankruptcy over the controversy about it. [Laughter] So maybe that’s a good place to begin. You know, you dared touch this issue of Israel, and it didn’t help that you are Jewish. I guess you are Jewish, right? Do you have a background, did you practice any aspect of Judaism? Literature, culture, religion?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: I’m a Jew who had a bar mitzvah, and I even had a bris.

RS: Oh. [Laughs]

MB: And you know, I’ve continued to pop in in synagogues here and there on High Holy Days. I guess you could say, you know, when the rabbi asked, you know, asked me to join the army of God, I tell him I’m in the Secret Service. But I’m definitely Jewish, you know, and it’s a big part of who I am and why I do what I do.

RS: Well, and I thought your writing on that, and your journalism, was informed by that. Because after all, a very important part of the whole experience of Jewish people as victims, as people forced into refugee status, living in the diaspora, was to develop a sense of universal values, and of decency and obligation to the other. And I think your reporting reflected that. However, my goodness, you got a lot of heat over it. And it’s the heat I want to talk about. I want to talk about the difficulty, in this post-Cold War world, of actually writing about the U.S. imperial presence, or writing critically about what our government does, and some of its allies.

And I think Israel is a really good case in point, because we have one narrative that said in the last election we had foreign interference, mostly coming from Russia. And we talk about Russia as if it’s the old communist Soviet Union, with a top-down, big, organized party — forgetting that [Vladimir] Putin actually defeated the Communist Party, and even though he had been in the KGB, and most Russians had been in some kind of official connection with society or another. Nonetheless, Russia really has gotten very little out of whatever interference it did. Israel, that is very rarely talked about, interfered in the election in a very open, blatant way in the presence of Netanyahu, who denounced Barack Obama’s major foreign policy achievement, the deal with Iran, and has focused U.S. policy mostly against the enemy being Iran, and ignoring Saudi Arabia and everything else.

And the interesting thing is that Israel’s interference in the election, and Netanyahu, has been rewarded over and over — the embassy got shifted, the settlers got more validation, now there’s a big peace plan that gives the hawks in Israel everything they want. So why don’t we begin with that, and your own writing about U.S.-Israel relations. It’s kind of odd that there’s — or maybe not odd, maybe it’s just because it is the third rail — that there’s been so little discussion about Donald Trump’s relation to Israel and his payoff to Netanyahu.

MB: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to chew on there. I would first start with just an observation, because you mentioned that we’re in a post-Cold War world — well, we’re not in a post-Cold War world anymore, we’re in a new Cold War. And for all the attacks I got over Israel, which were absolutely vicious, personalized, you know, framed through emotional blackmail, attacking my identity as a Jew, calling me a Jewish anti-Semite — the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is this right-wing racket over there in L.A., made me the No. 4 anti-Semite of 2015. You know, I was right behind Ayatollah Khomeini. But you know, the worst attacks, the most vicious attacks I’ve received have actually been from centrists and liberal elements over my criticism of the Russiagate narrative that they foisted on the American public starting in 2016, and also on the dirty war that the U.S. has been waging on Syria, and how we at the site that I edit, the Grayzone, started unpacking a lot of the deceptions and lies that were used to try to stimulate support among middle-class liberals in the west for this proxy war on Syria, for regime change in Syria. This was absolutely forbidden, and that attack actually turned out to be more vicious and is ongoing.

With Israel, you have a situation where you have, not maybe a plurality, but maybe a majority of secular Jewish Americans, progressive Jews, who have completely turned their back on the whole Zionist project. And it has a lot to do with Netanyahu. Netanyahu is someone who came out of the American — out of American life. He went to high school in suburban Philadelphia, he went to MIT, he was at Boston Consulting with Mitt Romney. His father ended his life in upstate New York as Jabotinsky’s press secretary, the press secretary for the revisionist wing of the Zionist movement that inspired the Likud party. So Netanyahu is really kind of an American figure, number one; number two, he’s a Republican figure. He’s like a card-carrying neoconservative Republican.

So a lot of Jews who’ve historically aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, who see being a Democrat as almost synonymous with being Jewish in American life, just absolutely revile Netanyahu. And here he is, basically the longest-serving prime minister in Israel; he’s completely redefined the face of Israel and what it is. And he’s provoked — I wouldn’t say provoked, but he’s accelerated the civil war in American Jewish life over Zionism. And what I did was come in at a time when it wasn’t entirely popular, to not just challenge Israel as a kind of occupying entity, but to actually challenge it at its core, to challenge the entire philosophy of Zionism, and to analyze the Israeli occupation as the byproduct of a system of apartheid which has been in place from the beginning, since 1948, which was a product of a settler colonial movement.

That really upset a lot of people who kind of reflect the same elements that I’m getting, who are attacking me on Syria or Russia. People like Eric Alterman at The Nation. He wrote 11 very personal attack pieces on me when my book “Goliath” came out in 2013. Truthdig, you, Chris Hedges, it was a great source of support. And you, you know, you opened up the debate at Truthdig, you allowed people to come in and criticize the book, but kind of in a principled, constructive way. Whereas Eric Alterman was demanding that The Nation censor me, blacklist me, ban me for life, and was comparing me to a neo-Nazi by the end, and claiming I was secretly in league with David Duke. And that was because he had simply no response to my reporting and my analysis of the kind of, the inner contradictions of Zionism.

And so to me, it was really a sign of the success of the book, that someone like Alterman was sort of dispatched, or took it upon himself to wage this really self-destructive attack. And in the end, he really had nothing to show for himself; he wasn’t arguing on the merits. And that’s just what I find time and again with my reporting is, you know, you get these personal attacks and people try to dissuade you from going and touching these third-rail issues, but ultimately there’s no substance to the attacks. I mean, if they really wanted to nail me and take me down, they would address the facts, and they really haven’t been able to do that.

RS: Right. But Max, if I can, let’s focus on the power of your analysis in that book, which is that it is a settler colonialism. And Netanyahu actually is — we can talk about the old labor Zionists, you know, and what was meant by progressive Zionism and so forth. Even at the time of the Six-Day War when I interviewed people like Moshe Dayan and Ya’alon and these people, they all were against a full occupation of the West Bank. They didn’t act on that, unfortunately. But they were aware of the dangers of a colonial model. But right now you have a figure in Israel in Netanyahu, who is, very clearly embodies a racialized view, a jingoistic view of the other, which is really, you know, very troubling. And he’s embraced by this troubling American figure.

And so what your book really predicted is that the settler colonialism was a rot at the center of the Israeli enterprise — and historically, one could justify that enterprise. I don’t know if you would agree. But even the old Soviet Union, I think, was the second, if not the first country to recognize Israel. There was vast worldwide support for some sort of refuge for the Jewish people after such horrible, you know, genocidal policies visited upon them. But what we’re really talking about now is something very different. And that is whether political leadership, and interference and so forth comes mainly for Democrats, very often; obviously, for republicans and Bible-belters and all that, who seem to like this image of the end of time coming in Israel. But really what’s happening — and it’s not discussed in this election, except to attack Bernie Sanders, who dared make some criticisms of Israel in some of these debates — you have a very weird notion of the Jewish experience, as identified with a very hardline, as you say, sort of South African settler colonialist mentality.

And so I want to ask you the question as someone–and we’ll get to it later — you grew up sort of within the Democratic liberal establishment in Washington. Your parents both worked for the Clinton administration, were close to it. How do you explain this blind eye toward Trump’s relationship to Netanyahu? And ironically, for all the Russia-bashing, Netanyahu and Putin seem to get along splendidly, you know. And that doesn’t bother people as far as criticizing Netanyahu. So why don’t we visit that a little bit, and forget about Eric Alterman for a while.

MB: [Laughs] Well, he’s already forgotten, so we don’t have much work to do there. But there’s a lot, again, a lot to chew on, a lot of questions packed into that. You know, just starting with your mention of Moshe Dayan — who is a seminal figure in the Nakba, the initial ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in 1948 to establish Israel — he was the southern commander of the Israeli military. And he later kind of became a kind of schizophrenic figure in Israeli politics; he would sometimes offer some kind of left-wing opinions, and then be extremely militaristic. But you know, when it came down to it, Moshe Dayan — like every other member of the Israeli Labor Party — was absolutely opposed to a viable Palestinian state. He even said that we cannot have a Palestinian state because it will connect psychologically, in the minds of the Palestinian public who are citizens of Israel — that 20% of Israel who are indigenous Palestinians — it will connect them to Nablus in the West Bank, and it will provide them with a basis for rebelling against the Israeli state to expand the Palestinian state.

The other labor leaders spoke in terms of the kind of, with the racist language of the demographic time bomb that, you know, we need to give Palestinians a state, otherwise we will be overwhelmed demographically. And so the state that they were proposed was what Yitzhak Rabin, in his final address before the Israeli Knesset, the Israeli parliament, called “less than a state.” He promised Israel that at Oslo, he would deliver the Palestinians less than a state. And if you look at the actual plan that the Palestinians were handed at Oslo — which Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority chairman, didn’t even review before signing — the map was not that different from the map that Donald Trump has offered with the “ultimate deal.” And they’d say, oh, you get 97% of what was, you know, offered in U.N. Resolution 242 in 1967. But it really just isn’t the case when you get down to the details. What the strategy has been with the Labor Party, and with successive Israeli administrations — and with Netanyahu until he got Trump in — was to kind of kick the can down the road with the so-called peace process, so that Israel could keep putting more facts on the ground.

So it was actually Ehud Barak of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Rabin’s successor, who moved more settlers into the West Bank, by a landslide, than Netanyahu did. Ehud Barak actually campaigned on his connection to the settlers. And then Netanyahu capitalizes on the strength of the settlement movement to build this kind of Titanic rock of a right-wing coalition that’s kept him in power for so long. And if you look at who the leading figures are in Israeli life — Naftali Bennett, who was from the Jewish Home Party, he comes out of the Likud party and he’s someone who was an assistant to Netanyahu. Avigdor Lieberman, who was for a long time the leader of the Russian Party. Yisrael Beiteinu, this is someone who came out of the Likud Party, who helped Netanyahu rustle up Russian votes. It’s a Likud one-party state — but then you have, culturally, a dynamic where starting with 1967, the public just becomes more infused with religious Messianism.

The West Bank is the site of the real, emotionally potent Jewish historical sites, particularly in a city like Hebron. And the public becomes attached to it and attains its dynamism through this expansionist project, and the public changes. A lot of people from the kind of liberal labor wing became religious Messianists, started wearing kippot, wearing yarmulkes, the kind of cloth yarmulkes that the modern orthodox settlers where.

RS: OK, but —

MB: Today you not only have that, you have a new movement called the temple movement, which aims to actually replace Jewish prayer at the Western Wall with animal sacrifice, as Jews supposedly practiced thousands of years ago, and to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque, and practice Jewish prayer there. This is not just a messianic movement, but an apocalyptic movement that is actually gaining strength in the Likud party. So when you mentioned Donald Trump’s “ultimate deal,” there’s one detail that everyone seems to have missed there, which is prayer for all at the Dome of the Rock, at Al-Aqsa. That means there will be Jewish prayer there, officially, that Palestinians must be forced to accept that and destroy the status quo, which has prevailed since 1967.

RS: I know, but Max, before I lose this whole interview here — because I think that’s all really interesting; people should read your book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.” That’s not the focus of this discussion I want to have with you.

MB: OK.

RS: And I want to discuss, in this aspect, the whole idea of Israel as a third-rail issue for American politics.

MB: Yeah.

RS: American politics. And the reason I want to do that is there’s obviously a contradiction in the Jewish experience, because Jews — as much or more so than any other group of people in the world — understand what settler colonialism does. They understand what oppression does, they’ve been under the thumb of oppressors. And so I would argue the major part of the Jewish experience was one of revolt against oppression, and recognition of the danger of unbridled power. And that represents a very important force in liberal politics in the United States: a fear of coercive power, a desire for tolerance, and so forth. And we know that Jews have, in the United States and elsewhere in the world, been a source of concern for the other, and tolerance, and criticism of power.

And the reason I’m bringing that up is it seems to me it’s a real contradiction for the Democratic Party, which you know quite a bit about. And in this Democratic Party, there’s this great loathsome feeling about Donald Trump. And many of these people don’t really like Netanyahu. You know, the polling data shows that Jews are, you know, just about as open to the concern for the Palestinians as any other group. And Bernie Sanders, the one Jewish candidate, is the one who dared to bring up the Palestinians — that they have rights also, that they’re human beings. He’s being attacked for it as, like you, a self-hating Jew. And so I want to get at that contradiction. And, you know, full confession, as a Jewish person I believe it’s an honorable tradition of dissent, and concern for the others, and respect for individual freedom. And I think it’s sullied by the identification of the Jewish experience with a colonialist experience. It is a reality that we have to deal with, but that’s not the whole tradition. And I daresay your own family, whatever your contradiction — and I should mention here your father and mother both were quite active in the Clinton administration, right.

And your father, a well-known journalist, Sidney Blumenthal, and your mother, Jacqueline Blumenthal, was I think a White House fellow or something in the Clinton administration? I forget what her job was, but has been active. And they certainly come out of a more liberal Jewish experience, as do most well-known Jewish writers and journalists in the United States. That’s the contradiction that I don’t see being dealt with here. Because after all, it’s easy to blast Putin and his interference, but as I say, Netanyahu interfered very openly, but in a really unseemly way, in the American election by attacking a sitting American president in an appearance before the Congress, and attacking his major foreign-policy initiative. And there’s hardly a word ever said about it. It doesn’t come up in the democratic debates. You know, and the — as I say, there was this incredible moment where Netanyahu, after coming over here and praising Trump for his peace deal, as did his opponent, then he goes off and meets with Putin. And so suddenly it’s OK, and yet the Democrats who want to blast Putin don’t mention Netanyahu, and they don’t mention his relation to Trump.

MB: Well, yeah, I was trying to illustrate kind of the reality of Israel, which just, it’s gotten so extreme that it repels people who even come out of the kind of Democratic Party mainstream. And the Democratic Party was the original bastion in the U.S. for supporting Israel. So my father actually held a book party for my book, “Goliath,” back in 2013. It’s the kind of thing that, you know, a parent who had been a journalist would do for a son or daughter who’s a journalist. And he was harshly attacked when word got out that he had held that party in a neoconservative publication called the Free Beacon, which is kind of part of Netanyahu’s PR operation in D.C. You know, it was like my father had supported, provided material support for terrorism by having a book party for his son.

But the interesting part about that party was who showed up. I didn’t actually know what it was going to be like, and it was absolutely packed. I mean, they live in a pretty small townhouse in D.C, and there just was nowhere to walk, there was nowhere to move. And I found myself in the corner of their dining room shouting through the house to kind of explain what my book was about and answer questions. And a lot of the people there were people who were in or around Hillary’s State Department, people who worked for kind of Democratic Party-linked organizations — just a lot of mainstream Democrat people. And they were giving me a wink and a nod, shaking my hand, giving me a pat on the back, and saying thank you, thank God you did this. Because they cannot stand the Israel lobby, they despise Netanyahu, and they’re disgusted with what Israel’s become.

And we had reached a point by 2013 where it was pretty obvious there was not going to be a two-state solution, and that whole project, the liberal Zionist project, wasn’t going to work out. You know, and the fact that they just could give me a wink and a nod shows also how cowardly a lot of people are in Washington. They weren’t even stepping up to the level my father had, where when his emails with Hillary Clinton were exposed, it became clear that he was sending her my work. And he was actually trying to move people within the State Department toward a more, maybe you could say a more humanistic view, but also a more realistic view of Israel, Palestine and the Netanyahu operation in Washington. Working through [Sheldon] Adelson, using this fraud hack of a rabbi, Shmuley Boteach, has kind of their front man. They ran like a full-page ad in the New York Times painting me and my father as Hillary Clinton’s secret Middle East advisers.

And then one day in the middle of the campaign, Elie Wiesel died. You know, someone who is supposed to be this patron saint of Judaism and the kind of secular theology of Auschwitz, who had spent the last years of his life as part of Sheldon Adelson’s political network. Basically, he had lost all his money to Bernie Madoff, and so he was getting paid off by Adelson. He got half a million dollars from this Christian Zionist, apocalyptic, rapture-ready fanatic, Pastor John Hagee. He was going around with Ted Cruz giving talks. And so when he died, I went on Twitter and tweeted a few photos of Elie Wiesel with these extremist characters.

And I said, you know, here are photos of Elie Wiesel palling around with fascists. And the kind of Netanyahu-Adelson network activated to attack me. And ultimately it led — I actually, within a matter of a few days, it led to Hillary Clinton’s campaign officially denouncing me and demanding that I cease and desist. And so, you know, I looked at the debate on Twitter, and a lot of people were actually supporting me. And it was clear Elie Wiesel, this person who was supposed to be a saint, was actually no longer seen as stainless, that the whole debate had been opened up by 2016.

And now when we look at the Democratic Party and we look at the Democratic field, you know, Bernie Sanders — he’s better than most of the other candidates, or the other candidates, on this issue. After we put a lot of pressure on him in the left wing-grassroots — I mean, I personally protested him at a 2016 event for his position on Palestinians, and we shamed him until he took at least a slightly better position, where you acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians. But what we’re hearing, even from Bernie Sanders, doesn’t even reflect where the grassroots of the Democratic Party — particularly all those young people who are coming out and delivering him a landslide victory tonight in Iowa — are. The Democratic Party is not democratic on Israel, but it’s no longer a third-rail issue. You can talk about it, and the only way that you can be stopped is through legislation, like the legislation we see in statehouses to actually outlaw people who support the Palestinian boycott of Israel. So we’re just in an amazing time where all of the contradictions are completely out in the open.

RS: OK, let me just take a quick break so public radio stations like KCRW that make this available can stick in some advertisements for themselves, which is a good cause. And we’ll be right back with Max Blumenthal. Back with Max Blumenthal, who has written — I mean, I only mentioned one of his books. He wrote a very important book on the right wing in America that was a bestseller; he has been honored in many ways, and yet is a source of great controversy. And I must say, I respect your ability to create this controversy, because it’s controversy about issues people don’t want to deal with. You know, they want to deal with them in sort of feel-good slogans, and it doesn’t work, because people get hurt. And including Jewish people, in the case of Israel. If you develop a settler, colonialist society, and that stands for the Jewish position, and you’re oppressing large numbers of people, be they Palestinian or others, that’s hardly an advertisement for what has been really great about the Jewish experience, which I will argue until my death.

It was represented by people like my mother, who were in the Jewish socialist bund, and two of her sisters were killed by the Czar’s police in Russia. And they believed in Universalist values, an idea of being Jewish as standing for the values of the oppressed, and concern for the oppressed. And most of their experience in the shtetls, and out there in the diaspora, had been being oppressed.

And so I don’t want to lose that there. But I wanted to get now to the last part of this, to what I think is the hypocrisy of the liberal wing of American politics, or so-called. And now they call themselves more progressive. And it really kind of centers around Hillary Clinton. And whatever you want to say about Bernie Sanders — you know, Hillary Clinton’s recent attack on Bernie Sanders, that no one likes him and he stands for nothing and he gets nothing done. And I think this is a, you know, a person that I thought, you know, at one point — despite her starting out as a Goldwater girl and being quite conservative — I thought was, you know, somewhat decent.

And I’m going to make this personal now. I was brought to a more favorable view of Bill and Hillary Clinton, in considerable measure, by your father, as a journalist at the Washington Post, and then working in the administration. And I respect your father and mother, you know, and Sidney Blumenthal and Jacqueline Blumenthal, I think are intelligent people. And I once, you know, went through a White House dinner; I think I only got in because your father put me on the list, and Hillary Clinton said I was her favorite columnist in America — no, the whole world — and it was very flattering. But I look back on it now — Hillary Clinton has really represented a kind of loathsome, interventionist, aggressive, America-first politics that in some ways is even more offensive than Trump. When Trump said he’s going to make America great again, Hillary Clinton said, America’s always been great. What?

MB: Yeah.

RS: What? Slavery, segregation, killing the Native Americans — always been great? You grew up with these people, right? You were in that world. What — so yes, they can come up to you at a book party and say, yes, it’s about time somebody said that. But what are they really about? That they — you know, you mentioned Syria. You know, their great achievement, they created a mess of that society. And she’s the one who went to, said about Libya, oh, we came, we saw, and he’s dead. You know, sodomized to death. So take me into the heart of the so-called liberal experience.

MB: Well, first of all, since you invoke Sidney Blumenthal so frequently, he has a — I think his fourth book in a five-part series on Abraham Lincoln out. And you know, these books address Lincoln almost as if he were a contemporary politician. It’s a completely new contribution to the history of Lincoln, and if you invite him on, be sure —

RS: I’m familiar with it, and I’ll endorse it —

MB: If you invite him on, you can ask him, I would love to hear that debate —

RS: I certainly would, and I have — as I said, I have a lot of respect for your father and mother. I’m asking a different question. Why do good people look the other way? Or how does it work? Just, you know, to the degree you can, take me inside that Washington culture. And where there’s a certain arrogance in it, that they are always, even when they do the wrong things, they’re just always accidents. They’re always mistakes. You know, it never comes out of their ideology, their aggression. So I want to know more about that.

MB: I mean, I saw all these — so many different sides of Washington. And so — and I was always supported by my parents, no matter what view I took. So I don’t feel like I have to live in my father’s shadow or something like that. They remain really supportive of me. I have a new book out — it’s not really new, it came out last April. It’s called “The Management of Savagery,” and it deals substantially with my view of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, but particularly the Hillary State Department, the Obama foreign policy team, and the destruction they wrought in Libya and Syria. So, you know, I put everything I knew about Washington and foreign policy into that book. And so I really would recommend that as well.

But, you know, how does it work with the Clintons? They were — they set up a machine that was really a juggernaut with all this corporate money they brought in through the DLC, the Democratic Leadership Committee. It was a very different structure than we’d seen with previous Democratic candidates who built — who relied heavily on unions and, you know, the civil rights coalition. And that machine never went away. It kept growing like this — kind of like this amoeba that began to engulf the party and politics itself. So that when Bill Clinton was out of power, the machine was passed to Hillary Clinton, and the machine followed her into the Senate. And the machine grew into the Clinton Global Initiative, which was this giant influence-peddling scam that just cashed in on disasters in Haiti, brought in tons of money, tens of millions of dollars from Gulf monarchies, and big oil and the arms industry — everything that funds all the repulsive think tanks on K Street through the Clinton Foundation.

And everyone who was trying to get close to the Clinton Foundation, whether they were in Clinton’s inner circle or not, was just trying to gather influence. That’s why you saw at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, behind her, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was basically Jeffrey Epstein’s personal child sex trafficker, just trying to cultivate influence with people who have this gigantic political machine.

So that’s why so many people, I think, have stayed loyal to this odious project, and have looked the other way as entire countries were destroyed under the direct watch of Hillary Clinton. Libya today — where Hillary Clinton took personal credit for destroying this country, which was at the time before its destruction, I think the wealthiest African nation with the highest quality of life — is now in, still in civil war. We’ve seen footage of open-air slave auctions taking place, and large parts of the country for years were occupied by affiliates of Al Qaeda or ISIS, including Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. It was immediately transformed into a haven for the Islamic State.

This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton. There would have been no Benghazi scandal if she hadn’t gone into Libya to come, see, and kill, as she bragged that she did. And in Syria, she attempted the same thing; fortunately failed, thanks to assistance from Iran and Russia. But this was, it consisted of a billion dollars, multibillion-dollar operation to arm and equip some of the most dangerous, psychotic fanatics on the face of the planet in Al Qaeda and 31 flavors of Salafi jihadi. Hillary Clinton said we can’t be negotiating with the Syrian government; the hard men with guns will solve this problem. She said that in an interview, and that’s her legacy.

Beyond that, you know, I in Washington grew up in a very complex situation. I don’t know what view people have of me, but I grew up in what was – D.C. when D.C. was known as C.C., or Chocolate City. It was a mostly black city, run by a local black power structure with a strong black middle class, and I grew up in a black neighborhood. And I kind of saw apartheid firsthand, where I saw how a small white minority actually controlled the city from behind the scenes. And then, you know, and I saw that reality, and then I went to school across town in the one white ward to a private school, and I got to know some of the children of the kind of mostly Democratic Party elite. And so I saw both sides of the city. And it was through that other side, and also my parents’ connection to the Clintons, that I — I mean, I barely interacted with the Clintons. I’ve had very minimal interaction with them ever.

But I did get to meet Chelsea Clinton once. And you know, for all my reservations about the Clintons or what they were, I thought you know, she was kind of an admirable figure at that time. She was a — she was a kid, she was an adolescent who was being mocked on “Saturday Night Live” because she was going through an awkward phase. She went to school down the street at Sidwell Friends, and I met her at a White House Christmas party; she was really friendly and personable. And you know, since then, I’ve watched her grow into adulthood and become a complete kind of replication of the monstrous political apparatus that her family has set up, without really charting her own path. She just basically inherited the reign of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. She does paid talks for Israel. Her husband Marc Mezvinsky, he gambled on Greece’s debt along with Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. You know, the squid fish. I mean, there’s just — I mean, as a young person, seeing someone of my generation grow up and follow that path, do nothing to carve out her own space — it just absolutely disgusts me.

And now Hillary Clinton is still there! She won’t go away! She’s not only helped fuel this Russiagate hysteria that’s plunged us into a new Cold War, but she’s trying to destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of young people who are saddled with endless debt by destroying Bernie Sanders. And it’s because she sees her own legacy being smashed to pieces, not by any right-wing, vast conspiracy, but by the electorate, the new electorate of the Democratic Party. And I absolutely welcome that. I think, you know, tonight in Iowa, a landslide Bernie victory, one of the takeaways is this will be the end of Clintonism. It’s time to move on and hand things over to a new generation. They had their chance, and they not only failed, they caused disasters across the world.

RS: So this is — we’re going to wind this up, but I think we’ve hit a really important subject. And I want to take a little bit more time on it. And I thought you expressed it quite powerfully. But the error, if you’ll permit me, is to center it on the personality, or the family. And I don’t think Clintonism is going to go away. Because what it represents — and I know you —

MB: It could be become Bloombergism, you know?

RS: Well, that’s where I’m going. I think what Clintonism represents is this triangulation, this new Democrat. And I interviewed him when he was governor, just when he was campaigning. And I did a lot of writing on the Financial Services Modernization Act and on welfare reform, and all of these ingredients of this policy. And what it really represents — no wonder they’re rewarded by the super wealthy. But the Democratic Party lost its organizational base with the destruction of the labor movement and weakening of other sources of progressive class-based politics, concern about working people and ordinary people.

And what Clinton did is he came along, and he had a sort of variation of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, how he got the Republicans to be so important in the South. And it was this new politics, this redefinition. And it’s not going away, because it’s the cover for Wall Street. It’s the cover for exploitation. And the main thing that happened from when you were young — or born, actually; you’re 42 years — it’s 42 years of, since Clinton really, and you can blame Reagan, you can blame the first President Bush, you can blame other people, and certainly blame the whole bloody Republican Party. I’m not going to give them a pass.

But the fact is, what the Clinton revolution did was it made class warfare for the rich fashionable, in a way that no one else was able to do it, no other movement. And it said these thieves on Wall Street, these people who are going to rip you off 20 different ways to Sunday — they’re good people, and they support good causes. And you mentioned Lloyd Blankfein, you know; “government” Goldman Sachs, you know. Robert Rubin came from Goldman Sachs; he was Clinton’s treasury secretary. And the whole thing of unleashing Wall Street and getting, destroying the New Deal — that was a serious program to basically betray the average American and betray their interest. And that’s why we’ve had this growing income inequality since that time. That’s the Clinton legacy in this world, really, is the billionaire coup, the billionaire culture.

MB: Yep, the oligarchy was put on fast-forward by the new politics of the Clintons. What they promised wasn’t, you know, a break from Reaganism, although there was certainly a cultural difference. They promised continuity, and that’s what we saw through the Obama administration. Obama presided over the biggest decline in black home ownership in the United States since, I think, prior to World War II. You mentioned Glass-Steagall; this set the stage for the financial crisis; NAFTA, destroyed the unions, shipped American jobs first to Mexico and then to China, and destabilized northern Mexico along with the drug war that Clinton put on overdrive, creating the immigration crisis that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump.

Welfare reform — all of these policies were just, were odious to me and so many people at the time, but there was just this desire to just beat the Republicans and out-triangulate them. Now that we’ve seen the effects on them and so many people have felt the effects, you have an entire generation that sees no future, that realizes they’re living in an oligarchy, realizes that the alternative to Bernie Sanders is a literal oligarch, this miniature Scrooge McDuck in Mike Bloomberg, and they’re just not having it.

I don’t know if Hillary Clinton understands this history; I don’t think she sees it in context. She just blames Russian boogeyman and fake news for everything. But the rest of us who’ve lived through it really do, and it’s the continuity that is so dangerous, especially on foreign policy. I mean, the Libya proxy war and the Syria proxy war, the stage was set in Yugoslavia with NATO’s war that destroyed a socialist country and unleashed hell on a large part of its population. And we still don’t debate that war. The stage for the Iraq invasion was set in 1998 with Bill Clinton passing the Iraqi Liberation Act, which sent $90 million into the pocket of the con-man Ahmed Chalabi and made regime change the official policy of the United States.

It’s tragic that Bernie Sanders voted for that. But we have to see the cause and the effect to understand why so many people are in open revolt against that legacy. And you’re right, it goes well beyond the Clintons. It’s a program that markets right-wing economics and a right-wing foreign policy in a sort of progressive bottle. Now what they’re trying to do with the label on that progressive bottle, the way they’re trying to preserve it — we see it a lot through the [Elizabeth] Warren campaign — is through a kind of neoliberal identity politics that divorces class from race and gender, and attempts to basically distract people with needless arguments about Bernie Sanders saying a woman couldn’t have gotten elected in a private conversation that only Elizabeth Warren was party to.

So I’m really encouraged, I guess, by the results that we’re seeing. We’re talking tonight on the eve of the Iowa caucus. I’m encouraged by those results, just because I see them as a repudiation of the politics that have just dominated my life as a 42-year-old, and just been so absolutely cynical and destructive at their core. But I would just remind anyone who is supporting Bernie Sanders and listening to this — he’s not just running for president. He’s running for the next target of a deep state coup, and the deep state exists, and will respond with more force and viciousness than it did to Donald Trump, who actually has much more in common with them than Bernie Sanders.

RS: I didn’t quite get the grammar of that last paragraph, not any fault of yours. You said he’s not just running — can you —

MB: He’s running for the next target of a deep state coup, the forces of Wall Street. You know, the —

RS: Oh, you mean he will be the target.

MB: He will be the target.

RS: Yeah, you know, it’s — you just said something really — OK, I know we have to wrap this up, but it’s actually just getting interesting for me. [Laughs]

MB: Sorry about that.

RS: No, no, no, come on, come on. [Laughter] What I mean is, I do these things because I learn, and I think, and you know, my selfish interests. And really the question right now, I did a wonderful interview with Chomsky on this podcast, and he took me to school for not appreciating the importance of the lesser evil. And I’ve lost sleep over it since. You know, well — and we always fall for that, you know. On the other hand, some of the things you’ve been talking about, you know — and this is going to get me in big trouble — but you know, Trump is so blatant. He’s so out there in favor of greed and corruption.

He’s so obnoxious. And actually, in terms of his policy impact — not his rhetoric, but his policy impact — is he really that much worse? Well, for instance, you mentioned NAFTA. The rewrite of NAFTA, even before, you know, some progressives got involved in it, it was a substantially better trade agreement than the first NAFTA. You know, he hasn’t gotten us into Syria-type, Iraq-type wars.

He actually — so I’m not — you know, yes, I consider him a neofascist; rhetoric can be very dangerous. He’s obviously spread very evil, poisonous ideas about immigrants and what have you, you know, I can go down the list. But the people that you’ve been talking about, that–you know, and I voted for all of them, and I’ve supported them — are they really the lesser evil? You know, or are they a more effective form of evil?

MB: I mean, to understand Trump, we just have to see him as the apotheosis of an oligarchy. In its most unsheathed, unvarnished form, he’s just lifted the mask off the corruption, the legal corruption that’s prevailed, and been completely unabashed about it. Donald Trump was targeted with this kind of Russiagate campaign, which was partly run by Clintonite dead-enders who wanted to blame Russia for her loss, and to attack Donald Trump with this kind of McCarthyite rhetoric. But it was also being influenced by the intelligence services — figures like John Brennan and James Comey, and neoconservative hardliners who could easily jump back into the Democratic Party. And they were just seeking a new Cold War, to justify the budgets of the intelligence services, and the defense budget and so on.

But at his core, Donald Trump, what he’s actually done, especially domestically, I think outside of the immigration stuff, is he’s been kind of a traditional Republican. And he won a lot of consent from Republicans in Congress when he passed a trillion-dollar tax cut. He’s given corporate America everything he wanted after kind of campaigning with this populist, Bannonite tone. So in a lot of ways, Donald Trump does share more in common with the Democratic Party elite — with a lot of the figures who’ve been nominated to serve on the DNC platform committee, who are just from the Beltway blob and the Beltway bandits — than they do with Bernie Sanders.

And I think that if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination, there will be an effort to McGovern him. To just kind of turn him — turn this whole process into McGovern ’72, hope that Bernie Sanders gets destroyed by Donald Trump, and then wag their fingers at the left for the next 20 years until they get another Bill Clinton. I think that they don’t know how to stop him at this point, but they’re willing to let him be the nominee and go down to Donald Trump, because Bernie Sanders threatens their interests, and the movement behind him particularly, more than Donald Trump does.

RS: You know, they will stop Bernie Sanders, and they will do it by the argument of lesser evilism. And you see the line developing —

MB: But who is the lesser evil, Bob? I mean, Joe Biden is like this doddering wreck. There is no other candidate who seems even remotely viable against Trump.

RS: No, no, no — I understand that. I’m telling you what — well, it seems to me there’s — you know, you want to talk about fake news, the, misreporting of Bernie Sanders — in fact, the misreporting of what democratic socialism is. I mean, he’s now branded in the mainstream media as some hopeless fanatic because he dared to defend democratic socialism. Democratic socialism has been the norm for the most successful economies in the world, even to a degree when we’ve been successful. That was the legacy of Roosevelt, after all, is to try to save capitalism from itself. That’s why you had some enlightened government programs, you know, right down the list, and that’s what saved Germany after the war, and that’s what France and England and so forth, that’s why they have health care systems.

But the mainstream media has actually taken a very moderate figure, Bernie Sanders, and demonized him as some kind of hopeless ideologue, right? And as you point out, Bernie Sanders is hardly a radical thinker on issues — particularly, as you mentioned, about the Mideast and so forth. What he is, is somebody who actually is honoring the best side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: you can’t let these greed merchants control everything, you have to worry about some compensation for ordinary people. That’s what Bernie Sanders is all about. And it should be an argument that has great appeal to people of power, otherwise they’re going to come after you with the pitchforks. Instead the mainstream media, in its hysteria, you know, has taken this word “democratic socialist” and used it to vilify him.

But the point that I want — and we will end on this, but I’d like to get your reaction — that came up in my discussion with Chomsky, who I have great admiration for. But it is this lesser evilism. And I think while, yes, people in their vote can think about that, they can vote that way — I’ve done it much of my life; I’ve voted for all sorts of evil people because they were lesser. But as a journalist — and I want to end about your journalism — as a journalist, I think we have to get that idea out of our head. And it means being able to be objective about a Donald Trump when he comes up with his NAFTA rewrite, and say hey, there are some good things in it, including the fact that you have to pay $16 an hour to people in Mexico who are working on cars that are going to be sold in the United States, OK. And what the liberal community has been able to do in the mainstream media, MSNBC, is Trumpwash everything.

Which brings us back to your critique. They’ve been able to say — they’ve made warmongering liberal and fashionable. They’ve taken the — they’ve made the CIA now a wonderful institution, the FBI a wonderful institution, [John] Bolton a wonderful hero. And I want to take my hat off to your journalism, because you have — and I do recommend that people go to your website, the Grayzone. Because you have had the courage to say, wait a minute, what’s called a lesser evil can’t be given a pass. Because in fact, maybe in some ways, or in many ways, it’s a more effective evil. We know what Trump is; he stands exposed every hour of every day.

But you know, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton — and I’m not trying to pick on them, but you know, they represented this embrace of the Wall Street center — they were much more effective in redistributing income to the rich. You know, you can talk about Trump’s tax break, but the real redistribution came with letting Wall Street do its collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that caused the destruction of 70% of black wealth in America, 60% of brown wealth in America, according to the Federal Reserve. So really, in this election, people have to think — you know, yes, I’ll hold my nose and I’ll vote for the lesser evil. But what’s that going to get us? Does it get us a more effective evil, a better-packaged evil? Last word from you?

MB: Well, I mean, one of the things that we do at the Grayzone.com, our mission is to oppose this policy of regime change that the U.S. imposes across the world against any state that seeks some independence from the U.S. sphere of influence that wants to craft its own economic policies in a socialist way, like Venezuela, Nicaragua. We, you know, we exposed a lot of the deceptions that were trying to stimulate public support for regime change in Syria, that would have been absolutely disastrous. And in all of these situations, we don’t stand alone, but we stand among a really, really small group of alternative outlets who don’t play the lesser-evil game on regime change.

Where we say, well, this leader or that leader are horrible, and they are evil dictators, but we should also be kind of suspicious of the, you know, of the war that the U.S. might wage. Or we should be critical of these brutal economic sanctions that have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans through excess deaths. We say — we actually look at the alternative to the current government and show that there actually isn’t the lesser evil, that the alternative is far worse. In Syria it was Al Qaeda and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood; in Venezuela it’s Juan Guaidó’s right-wing, white collar mafia, which is a front for Exxon Mobil. Same thing in Nicaragua.

And you know, as much as I respect and I’ve learned from Noam Chomsky, he plays that lesser-evil game on regime change. He’s trashed all of the, all of these governments. He celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we saw what happened to Russia after that. So it’s important to look at lesser evilism through a historical context, and then we can apply it to the United States as well. Look at who’s been sold to us as the lesser evil that we had to support. Well, we’ve been talking about them, Bob, for the last half hour, and they’ve subjected Americans to the same evil the Republican Party has, for the most part. Maybe they’ve limited it to some degree. But now there’s actually an option for something that I’d say is moderate in the United States.

You’re right — Bernie Sanders does nothing, and proposes nothing, outside the framework of the New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. I don’t even think he’s a democratic socialist. I don’t know what that term really means. He’s a social democrat. And he is someone who at least offers a change from the consensus where the government actually starts to intervene to prevent people from dying excess deaths across the country, from the opioid crisis, from poverty, from homelessness. Eighty percent of new homes that have been built in the U.S. in the past two years are luxury housing. And you know who else is supporting Bernie Sanders besides all these debt-saddled youth? Active duty U.S. military veterans who are sick of permanent war. $160,000 in campaign contributions have been given to Bernie by active duty vets. That’s something like eight times more than have gone to Joe Biden, who is involved at the forefront of almost every American war since Gulf War I.

And we’re really capitalizing on that at the Grayzone. We understand the American public and the western public are sick of being lied into war, and they’re sick of being pushed into lesser evilism, whether it’s abroad in countries that are targeted by the U.S., or at home. And so we’re just there providing balance and exposing whatever the lie is of the day.

RS: Let me, as an older person, end with a little editorial about what — and I agree with the thrust of what you’ve been saying — but why I think this word “democratic socialism” is important, not just social democrat. Because it acknowledges the vast harm that has been done by the left in human history. It’s not just the right, it’s not just the corporate elite, and it’s not just the oligarchs. That people got hold of a message of concern for the ordinary person. It happened in religion too, after all, you know; structures were developed, people who claimed they were following the message of Christ, and they ended up building edifices to the exploitation of ordinary people.

I think what Bernie Sanders represents — and I’ll ask your response, but what I think he represents, the reason he’s so authentic — he actually believes in the grassroots. He actually believes that an ordinary person in Vermont can make intelligent decisions about the human condition, and about justice and freedom. And I think the reason Bernie Sanders can survive the rhetorical assaults on his leftism or his socialism, is that what people of power in the capitalist world have managed to do is identify this cause of social justice, a notion of democratic socialism with totalitarianism, with elitism.  And Bernie Sanders — and this is a good night to celebrate Bernie Sanders, if it’s true; I hadn’t caught up with the news, but if he’s really doing that well in Iowa. Because I thought he would get 1% of the vote four years ago when he started; I never thought this would happen.

I think what makes Bernie Sanders authentic is his respect for the ordinary person. He is the opposite of that leftist elitist–and you have them as well as rightist elitists — who thinks they have to distort history to protect the average person from reality. And Bernie Sanders is — he speaks truth about what’s going on. And at a time when people on the right and the left have nothing but contempt for most of the politicians, and journalistic leaders and everything else, for having betrayed them. So I think Bernie Sanders is a ray of hope. I wish he would be around a lot longer, but then again, I wish I’d be around a lot longer. But it’s nice to run into Max Blumenthal, who’s half my age and has all of that spirit that I’d like to see in journalism. So thanks, Max, for doing this.

MB: Thank you, Bob. It’s a real honor.

RS: And by the way, I ignored that last book of yours. Could you give the title again and how people get it?

MB: It’s called “The Management of Savagery.” And let me pull it off the shelf so I can actually read the subheader. You can edit this. It’s called “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump.” And it’s really kind of my look at the, sort of how the politics of my lifetime and my generation has been shaped by foreign policy disasters that an unelected foreign-policy establishment has subjected us to.

RS: Full disclosure, I actually have not read it, and I will get it as soon as I can.

MB: I’ll send you a copy —

RS: No, no, no, you got — it’s hard enough to make a living as a writer. I don’t think you should give these things away for nothing. I’ll get myself a copy. And I want to thank you again. I’ve been talking to Max Blumenthal, check out his work, check out the Grayzone. These podcasts are done basically for KCRW, the public radio station in Santa Monica, where Christopher Ho is the engineer who gets it up on the air.

At Truthdig, Natasha Hakimi Zapata writes the brilliant intros and overview of these things and posts them up there. Here at USC, Sebastian Grubaugh, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, really gets the whole thing going and hooks up everyone, thanks to him. And finally, there’d be no “Scheer Intelligence” without the main Scheer, Joshua Scheer, who’s the show’s producer. And we’ll see you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”

[thedupshadove]

G-d of My Father’s

Summary: An interesting fact about Newton Pulsifer comes further to light. Newt, as usual, frets.

Author’s Note: This was sort of written to be set within @jewish-kulindadromeus “HaSofer”, but I’m over-eager, which means that only Chapter One of that fic is actually up as I write this, which means that further chapters of that fic may render this one incompatible with it, which is fine as that author is within her rights to write whatever kind of story she wants, seeing how we’re not actually working together.

“Say,” said Crowley after the sixth time Newt overheard him giving Aziraphale some Judaism 101 lesson and interjected with a helpful clarification, extra information, or his own view on things only to hastily shut himself up, “how come you know all this? I remember asking you if you were Jewish and you said no.” In fact Newt had looked at the ceiling, stammered a bit, pulled his mouth into a thin Muppety line, rubbed the back of his neck, and then said no, but Crowley hadn’t given that much thought at the time, since that was barely more awkwardness than Newt tended to display when asked to make a definitive statement on anything. “What, did an old girlfriend teach you?”

“His current girlfriend could have taught him.” said Anathema pointedly, walking into the room. “Although I suppose if that were it he’d wax fondly about boyoz instead of babka.”

“No,” Newt finally forced out after exhaling the breath he’d been holding in since Crowley had started addressing him. “No, it…it wasn’t any girlfriend. It was, er, well it’s all stuff I picked up from my father’s old synagogue.”

“Uh-huh.” said Crowley in a much-is-becoming-clear-to-me voice. “Your father’s old synagogue. Your mother, I take it, not having one.”

“Right.”

“And may I further hazard a guess that your father, family obligations aside,  is not what one would call a pious man?”

“Oh, completely non-observant. And pretty well atheist too. Since well before he met my mum, mind, so don’t go blaming her.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it” Crowley deadpanned. “So, you were dragged to the synagogue sometimes, probably mostly for b’nai mitzvahs, and couldn’t help but absorb a few things. I see.” He made as if to turn back to Aziraphale.

But Newt suddenly looked distressed and a little defensive. “Well I wouldn’t say dragged.” he protested. “I mean they didn’t have to drag me. Why would they? It was something special, something wonderful. A day to be spent surrounded by relatives, plenty of whom I didn’t see very often. Getting to see some cousin have a shining moment. Good food, good music, good conversation, us kids sneaking off to go exploring or play hide-and-seek during the reception, what wasn’t to look forward to?”

“Alright, alright, I apologize.” said Crowley, seemingly a little taken aback.

But Newt seemed now to feel that not enough had been said. “And it wasn’t just b’nai mitzvahs either. I mean there were a lot of those, but there were some weddings too, and of course a few funerals. Those obviously weren’t fun, per se, but they were…good. In a way. Like, if this relative was going to die, I’d much rather that we’d all gathered and done this funeral than if we hadn’t. When I first heard that my grandfather had died I was just…numb, and it wasn’t until we were all standing around the grave and it was my turn to shovel in some dirt that I think it really hit home. And that was a good situation to have that happen in, I think. And we would go to the Seders at my aunt’s house pretty regularly.”

That made sense, Crowley reflected. If there was any one holiday that even the most secular Jew might go home for, it would be Passover, being not only very major and important but also placing such an emphasis on family and gathering and togetherness. And food and drink and storytelling and, if you do it right, laughter.

“I even…” some of Newt’s natural state of embarrassment seemed to have caught up with him again, but he soldiered on, powered by some inner spring of…something that needed to get out. “I even did the Four Questions a couple of times, until the cousins younger than me started getting old enough to take their turns doing it. But I remember my Dad teaching me how in the weeks before the holiday. Took me forever to get it right: I kept forgetting myself and using a soft ‘ch’.

“And sometimes Dad and I would just…talk about it. I mean, he didn’t keep any of the practices or rituals anymore except at family things, but I never got the impression that he, you know, really hated it now or anything. I would want to know something about what’s this holiday or why that rule or how come this is kosher but that isn’t, and he would tell me, and he never seemed to mind. Even seemed to kind of enjoy it. Not, I figure, from belief surging anew but,” Newt shrugged, “nostalgia, you know. And often that question led to other questions, and discussions, and sort of…arguments but without anger. I remember one time, after he’d got done explaining that ‘animals that walked on the ground’ had to have the right kind of hooves and the right kind of chewing habits, but any kind of bird was okay, I pointed out that perhaps our ancestors had not made a close examination of the usual behavior of the average chicken, and he,” Newt made an upward striking motion with his hand.

“He hit you?” Aziraphale gasped, shocked both at the sudden turn of the story and the fact that Newt’s tone hadn’t changed with it.

“What? No, no, no.” Newt said hastily, realizing his failure of communication. “He pantomimed dope-slapping me, but he didn’t actually make contact, and he was smiling. Smiling like he would sometimes when we had those talks. Like I was the biggest little smart-arse he’d ever met, and he loved me for it.” Newt was smiling too, now, bathed in his own nostalgic glow.

“Did he ever start one of these talks?” asked Crowley.

“Not often, no. The only times I can think of when he did were when they tried to teach us something about Judaism in school, and I’d come home and tell him about it, and it turned out school had got it wrong, or not given the whole picture.”

“So you grew up with Jewish family, going to Jewish events, celebrating (some) Jewish holidays, and getting a Jewish education at home pretty much for the asking.” Crowley clarified.

“That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

“But you’re not Jewish.”

“Well I’m not, am I?” Newt shrugged in agitation. “There’s a set of criteria, and I fall outside it.”

“Love,” said Anathema gently, “There’s been a lot of talk lately about reconsidering how strictly the matriliniality rule needs to be adhered to…”

“Yes, yes, I know about that. And it would be one thing if my immediate family really practiced Judaism regularly, or if I’d been bar mitzvahed myself, or anything like that, but we didn’t, and I wasn’t, so I’m not.”

“Well, that must be a relief then.” said Crowley, in a tone that could have pickled meat.

Newt stared at him. “What?”

“To have that escape clause.” he went on nastily. “I can understand why you would want it. Historically speaking, being Jewish has rarely been easy. Why be part of a weird minority if you don’t have to? So yes, you just go ahead and lean on that mother of yours. No one would blame you for pushing the…oddities of your heritage and past under the rug. No, don’t worry; you don’t have to be Jewish if you don’t want to be.”

Newt stood slack-jawed for a moment, then exploded. “Don’t say that, how dare you say that?” he demanded, with far more heat than it probably should have been safe to direct at a being like Crowley. “Haven’t you been listening? The times I spent…” he fumbled for words “…in Judaism have consistently been some of the happiest of my life. Laughter and connection and this…this feeling that I never got anywhere else. A feeling of warmth, of rightness. It was almost like believing in something. Not in G-d, maybe, but sometimes, even if it got more fleeting and less strong as I grew older and started to really understand the kind of half-breed hanger-on I was, sometimes, I believed that I belonged.

“And as to your veiled references to the fluctuating but ever-present antisemitism or just simple ignorance of mainstream society, trust me, I know. When I was younger it was listening to a classmate confidently explain to her friends that Jews weren’t allowed to eat leavened bread at all, ever, and not having the courage to interrupt the conversation and correct her, and more recently, it’s been these three co-workers at United Holdings who I can only assume think they’re funny. Or possibly they think that they can get away with it if they pretend to think they’re funny, which, to be fair, so far they have. But I  get to listen to them gathered around the water cooler across from my cubicle making Lynch-The-Black jokes and Gas-The-Jew jokes, and they both make me angry, but the second category undeniably hits a deeper, more personal well of anger than the first.”

Here he paused. “I’m not…proud of that, by the way. It would almost certainly be better if every cruel or bigoted joke I heard hit me just as hard as the ones that make me picture my father and my aunt and my closest cousin and my new little second cousin being dispassionately yet hatefully murdered. But that’s not how my mind works. I would even hazard to say that it’s not how most people’s minds work.”

Crowley, who had withstood the storm with equanimity, leaned in closer and raised his voice a hair. “So are you Jewish or aren’t you?”

“I-DON’T-KNOW!”

“Because it seems to me that your position right now is that people who tell you that you’re Jewish are wrong, and people who tell you that you’re not Jewish…are wrong.”

“Well…maybe! Maybe they are both wrong!”

Crowley’s voice gentled a little. “Then what’s right?”

Newt sighed and deflated. “What’s right is…that I can’t say I’m Jewish. But I’m definitely not not Jewish. And sometimes I feel closer to it than other times. And sometimes I can manage to be sort of okay with this ebb-and-flow relationship, and then sometimes I want to be really Jewish so badly my teeth hurt.”

For a moment, Crowley looked distinctly like he’d just gotten exactly what he was looking for. “Then why don’t you do something about that?”

Newt blushed again. “Because…because I never know where to start. Because even if I knew enough to just jump in and start doing more, it would feel wrong of me to decide that I was allowed to do so. But trying official conversion, and having to explain my particular position to a Rabbi,  always seemed to promise its own stew of awkwardness. So I’ve just…sat with this uncertainty. For years.”

Aziraphale glanced at Crowley, and an awful lot seemed to pass between them in quite a short time. “I think,” the Angel then said, “that I should quite like to have a classmate. Someone to collaborate with on homework. Someone to gang up on the teacher with, if need be.”– Crowley put his hand to his forehead in mock horror– “An extra brain to keep things interesting. If you think you can stand to bring yourself down to my level–”

“Oh, there’s loads I don’t know.” Newt interjected. “My ‘Jewish education’, such as it was, was incredibly piecemeal and haphazard, really just getting answers to questions I happened to think to ask. I’m sure that plenty of the basics will be new to me. Heck, you’re an immortal angel; you probably know a lot of things that I don’t.”

“Then we’ll make perfect complementary students, won’t we? Will you join us?”

And so, shaking almost imperceptibly, Newt sat down.

[heyoricohannah]

Post Bar Mitzvah Part 9:

After the song’s come to an end, and all the energy and contentment it caused throughout the room slowly leveling down, the six kids decided to leave the restaurant after giving Amber casual farewells, now standing right outside where they each talk in pairs.

Well, Buffy and TJ aren’t doing much talking, standing in-between Walker and Andi and Cyrus and Jonah, who might as well not even know that anyone else is still there.

“So I guess we’re the single ones of the group.” TJ says to her, not needing to worry about anyone else hearing him.

Buffy snickers. “Guess so.”

“Unless,” TJ looks through the window of the diner, keeping an eye on Amber who’s clearing up their tables.

Buffy scoffs in disbelief. “Keep dreaming, idiot.”

He grins at her. “What about you and Marty?”

Buffy turns hostile from just thinking about the turn of events. “We’re not talking about that.”

TJ understands.

“So I guess it was just a coincidence that your friends were here with you?” Walker teases Andi.

“Huh.” She chuckles. “I kinda kept them around just in case something bad happened.”

The rest of them return Walker’s gentle smile. “You mean if I ended up being a total jerk?” He grins.

“More like if I froze up and I had no idea what to say.” Andi giggles.

“Don’t worry. I was nervous too. It was kinda my first date.” He admits.

“This was a date?” Andi’s ecstatic.

“Yeah! Well, maybe not officially, but, we could have a do-over. Somewhere more...” He looks around to those surrounding them. “Private.”

They all chuckle.

“Yeah, that sounds nice.” Andi says. “Uh, before you go...” She properly introduces him to each of them.

“Nice meeting you guys.” He says to them. “Bye.” He hugs Andi once more, giving her a huge smile and feeling the rest of them keep watch on him as he walks off.

Once he’s out of earshot, the guys consider him pretty lucky considering just how much Andi and Buffy are squealing to each other.

“Owe.” TJ cringes and quickly covers his ears, making Cyrus and Jonah scoff.

“I’m sorry Marty ruined everything.” Buffy says to Andi.

“It’s fine, we got a good song out of it.”

Cyrus beams at Jonah after she says this.

“You okay?” TJ asks him.

“Yeah. Yeah, I am.” Cyrus keeps his answer honest.

“Good.” TJ pats his shoulder, admiring him with the others.

“I, didn’t want you guys to find out like that, but,” he glances at both TJ and Jonah. “But, now I’m just glad you know.”

“We are too.” Jonah smiles.

“Eh, I kinda knew.” TJ admits.

The others look at him and snicker.

“I didn’t.” Jonah says.

“Yeah, ‘cause you’re just that oblivious.” Cyrus teases, cracking them all up.

“So the girls already knew?” Jonah asks him.

“Yeah, what can we say, we’re just that special.” Buffy jokes, causing them all to scoff and smile.

“Let’s go.” She decides, quickly placing her hand on Cyrus’ back before walking down the sidewalk with Andi and TJ, letting Cyrus and Jonah have their space.

“You didn’t have to do that...” Cyrus smiles to him.

“Yes I did.” Jonah keeps it sincere, chuckling along with him and keeping a good eye on him. “You’re so brave, Cyrus.”

He grins. “So are you...” He gives him a light shove, having them giggle. “Thank you. For being a great friend.”

He smiles at him once more and begins catching up to the others, leaving Jonah smiling through the pain that that last word has brought him as he watches Cyrus in despair.

Things have already begun to grown so muddled, that he almost can’t feel himself continue forward.

That next morning at school before the start of first period, Buffy is still bad mouthing Marty to her peers, who are trying her best to calm her down about the situation.

“I’m never seeing him again. Never ever never ever never.”

“You do know you’re on the same basketball team, right? You’re gonna see him during the game.” Andi reminds.

“Buffy, it’s okay. I’m over it.” Cyrus says. “It’s not like you confirmed it to him. He has no real proof.”

“Eh...” TJ doesn’t exactly believe that.

“Excuse me.” Cyrus asks, he and the others confusingly looking at him.

“Well I’m just saying...” TJ doesn’t know how to continue.

“What.” Cyrus frowns.

“Nothing!” TJ defensively looks at him, the pitch of his voice increasing.

“It’s just...Sometimes you can be a bit—“

“Gay? Well what do you expect?” Cyrus asks him.

“I don’t know...” TJ suddenly takes it all back, making Jonah frown and the rest of them roll their eyes.

“I’m gonna talk to Marty after class.” Cyrus states, which has Buffy recoil. “Ugh. My whole morning is ruined now, I’ll see you guys later.” She walks off to class without another word.

“I still can’t tell if she’s more petty about what he did to me, or what he did to her.” Cyrus brings up.

“What did Marty do to her?” TJ wants to know.

“Nothing, really.” Andi says. “He told her he liked her, and when she didn’t want to move forward, they just stopped talking.”

“Why didn’t she want to move forward?”

“Because.” Cyrus starts. “She’s Buffy.”

That, she is.

After class out in the halls, Cyrus is surprised to see Marty actually approach him.

“Hey man...”

“Hey...” Cyrus wishes he knew what to say.

“Uh, I’m so sorry about yesterday. I was terrible. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.” Marty states.

“It’s okay. It’s not like you were using it against me or anything. Besides, you were right. I am gay.” Cyrus explains, returning his smile.

“You helped me come out to the guys, so, thanks for that.” He adds.

“Yeah.” Marty nods. “You have my total support, a hundred percent.”

Cyrus couldn’t be more relieved.

“Besides, you’re not the only one, right?”

“Nope.” Cyrus chuckles, thinking Marty is talking about the general world around them.

“I mean, Jonah did write that paper.”

“What...?” Cyrus asks.

“You know, on gay rights. It was pretty moving.”

Needing a few seconds to respond, Cyrus starts laughing nervously. “Yeah, but, that doesn’t mean...”

Does it? Marty assumed Cyrus was gay, and he was totally right!

“Oh, sorry, I uh, didn’t mean to jump to conclusions.”

“No, no, you’re fine.” Cyrus plasters on a smile, trying to shove away the abrupt conclusions of his own.

“And hey, before you go, do you think—do you think Buffy will ever forgive me...?” Marty asks.

Cyrus blinks, tutting lightly and thinking it over.

“I’m sure she will after she knows you and I are cool. But besides that whole thing, I think you should talk about what happened with you guys in the first place. I know rejection sucks, but, you should at least make ends meet before she leaves.”

“Leaves?” Marty’s head begins to spin.

“Oh.” Cyrus flinches at the realization. “You haven’t heard...She’s moving away soon with her Mom...”

“When?” Marty panics.

“We don’t know when, exactly, but, sometime in the near future.” Cyrus doesn’t know how much longer he can handle looking at his devastated expression.

“You should talk to her, Marty.” Cyrus says his last words to him before turning away and separating himself, his mind currently so distracted that it seems like TJ pops out at him from almost nowhere.

“So I read Jonah’s paper, and-“

“What? Dude.” Cyrus was hoping he’d be the one to remain loyal.

“And all I’m saying is no straight guy would write that.” TJ blatantly ignores his interruption.

“TJ, come on, don’t make assumptions.” Cyrus doesn’t need any of that.

“What? Why not? I’m allowed.” TJ feels personally offended. “I’m just saying, it’s something to think about.”

Cyrus glances away and exhales anxiously, getting Buffy’s attention after she sees her walking by them in the other direction.

“Buffy. Marty knows you’re leaving, so he’s probably gonna try and serenade you or something before time’s up.” Him and TJ give her double thumbs up.

“What...?” She practically squeaks.

“It’s fine. He and I are cool now.” He lets her know.

“Yeah, well we’re still not.” She claims.

“Buffy, you do realize that you’re the one who rejected him.” TJ says.

“What? No I wasn’t, what did you tell him??” In complete denial, she goes off directly at Cyrus.

“Nothing...!”

In response, all she can do is groan and roll her eyes before she stomps away, leaving Cyrus and TJ to look at each other fairly timidly.

At lunch, TJ seems to care about Gus and Jonah talking more than Cyrus does. By a whole lot.

Meanwhile, Buffy isn’t very happy about the fact that Cyrus keeps focusing on Marty.

“Cyrus why do you keep looking at him.” She snaps, sitting in-between him and TJ at their table.

“He’s nice, okay...?” Cyrus innocently looks at her.

“Oh please, this is exactly what you did with TJ.”

“Hey!” TJ happens to take offense. “I’m nice now! And Marty’s always been nice, he’s just acting the way he is now ‘cause he’s still in love with you.”

“Ew!” Buffy almost gags. “Don’t say ‘love’.”

“Why not?” Andi asks, right across from her. “Love is a good thing.”

“Maybe for you.”

“Yeah, love is stupid.” TJ decides.

“Who broke your heart.” Cyrus asks.

“Myself.” His blunt answer almost makes Andi choke on her milk.

“Hey guys.” Jonah comes up to them and sits down beside Andi.

“Why do you keep talking to Gus.” This is TJ’s first question.

“Because he’s my acquaintance, and we’re on the same sports team...” Jonah frowns.

“Yeah, so? It’s not even frisbee season, dude.”

“Are you sure this has nothing to do with him being ginger?” Jonah can’t help but wonder.

“Yeah.” Andi harshly accuses.

“For your information, I happen to find gingers very attractive.”

This brings on a discomforting pause between the five of them, until Cyrus sniffles, and Jonah clears his throat.

“What.” TJ demands. “What. What are you guys, ginger-phobic? Must I put on the South Park episode again??” He starts to frazzle.

“No...” The rest respond both shyly and simultaneously.

“So, you think Gus is attractive?” Buffy asks.

“Whoa Buffy. I’m not the gay one. Cyrus is.”

“So?” Cyrus asks. “That doesn’t mean I find Gus attractive.”

“Tasteless.” TJ says under his breath.

Overwhelmingly puzzled, others glance at each other with raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders.

During after-school practice, with the help of multiple basketballs found in the gym’s storage room, Buffy and TJ let the others get in on the action, which quickly distracts them both from focusing on what they came to do, which was focus for the big game on Friday.

“Jonah!”

Jonah wastes no time messing around with Cyrus, lifting him off the ground again and taking away his basketball, making the others slow down from running around and look over in appreciation.

“That’s a foul.” Cyrus giggles.

“You’re a foul. Just kidding no you’re not.” Jonah grins, the two of them laughing so much that he ends up setting Cyrus down.

“Ohh, he shoots, he scores!” TJ swipes the ball from Jonah, throwing both it and the ball of his own towards the net at the same time, both of them bouncing off the rim and onto the floor.

This leads them to all try and throw in their various basketballs one by one, giggling excessively and running around the gym like maniacs.

Again, Jonah grabs Cyrus and pulls him in close, unable to not crack up while jokingly advising him to apologize for ‘running away from him.’

“You’re so annoying.” Cyrus smiles, beaming forward and anticipating his reaction.

“What? What?” Jonah repeats himself, pulling Cyrus in by his shoulders and giggling so much into his ear that Cyrus almost falls forward guffawing.

TJ and the girls would be taking admiration to this, except they’re also too busy playing around and rambunctiously reacting to every single little thing that‘s said or done to one another.

“Hold on!” Buffy laughs to TJ and Andi who keep on chasing her around and pestering her with basketballs, coming to a stop and jogging over to the bottom of the bleachers where her phone rings inside her bag.

“Hey, mama.” She answers it, speed walking out of the gym to block out everyone else’s obnoxious noises that grow even louder when TJ and Andi begin a hectic game of one on one, whereas Cyrus and Jonah keep interfering by blocking their shots and getting in their way. After about a minute or so, their antics are put to an end when Buffy makes her dramatic return through the double doors.

They all stop and look her way, expecting to hear nothing good.

“Buffy...” Andi almost doesn’t want to hear her say it.

Yet she does.

“I’m leaving for Indianapolis on Saturday...”