Anti-war US Army veteran warns of hawks in Biden transition team
Moderate Rebels
Moderate Rebels
4.7 • 673 Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2020
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
President-elect Joe Biden's transition team is full of war hawks and weapons industry shills. We speak with US Army veteran Danny Sjursen, who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan before becoming an anti-imperialist activist and journalist, about what a Biden-Harris administration foreign policy would look like.
Sjursen, who previously taught at the United States Military Academy, also discusses how warmongering members of the West Point Mafia dominate the US government and military-industrial complex.
Follow Sjursen on Twitter at https://twitter.com/skepticalvet
Sjursen's website: https://skepticalvet.com
Sjursen's The Nation article "How the ‘West Point Mafia’ Runs Washington": https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/esper-pompeo-west-point
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is moderate rebels. I'm Ben Norton, joined by my co-host, Max Blumenthal, as always. |
| 0:09.6 | And we are also speaking with Danny Shurson. He is an anti-war veteran. You should definitely |
| 0:16.0 | check out his website, Skeptical Vet. You can find him on Twitter at Skeptical Vet. And he has a podcast also |
| 0:23.1 | where, you know, he talks about his perspective as an anti-war veteran. You can find that. It's called |
| 0:27.9 | Fortress on a Hill. You can go to Fortress on a Hill.com. Danny served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, |
| 0:36.0 | and he is deeply committed to the anti-war movement. |
| 0:41.2 | So today we're going to talk about a host of related issues about war, about the U.S. Empire. |
| 0:47.5 | Of course, everyone right now is talking about the election, the likely electoral victory of Joe Biden and the presidential election. |
| 0:57.1 | And, you know, there's still a controversy going on. |
| 0:59.6 | Donald Trump claimed it was stolen from him, although there's no evidence of that. |
| 1:03.5 | But there's definitely going to be a kind of political conflict. |
| 1:06.1 | But I think it's pretty safe to assume that Biden is going to be the next president. |
| 1:10.4 | And we've already seen, I would |
| 1:12.8 | say, some pretty negative signs of what his term is going to look like. And actually, |
| 1:18.5 | there's a good article that was just published in These Times by Sarah Lazar. The title is |
| 1:23.2 | one third of Biden's Pentagon transition team hails from organizations financed by the weapons |
| 1:29.1 | industry. So that's just the beginning, I think, of a series of signs we're going to get |
| 1:34.2 | that the Biden foreign policy team in particular is going to be very hawkish. It's going to |
| 1:40.6 | be run by a lot of these very aggressive, bellicose think tankers from K Street from the military industrial complex. |
| 1:49.0 | So I think, you know, we should begin this discussion here, Danny. Can you just reflect on what's going on right now in the U.S.? I should mention that you actually just published a book called Patriotic |
| 2:02.2 | Descent, America in the Age of Endless War. So maybe we can, you know, you can talk about |
| 2:08.4 | Biden, but also frame it in the context of your book. And in your book, you argue, of course, |
... |
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