From an interview at Vulture:
Josef Adalian (Vulture): On the flip side, it has to be a bit heartening that some conservatives who used to be sort of MSNBC “villains” are now on your network trashing a Republican president.
Joy Reid: One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with. I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together. [Laughs.] — www.vulture.com/...
David Frum, Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot are not our “friends”, not by any stretch of the imagination. They may share our distaste for Trump, but that’s where it begins and ends.
David Frum was in the Bush administration and a vocal advocate of waging war on Iraq in 2002. He’s the man who came up with the phrase “axis of evil”. Frum co-wrote a book with Richard Perle advocating war in Iraq, Syria and Iran (couched in the Orwellian term, “regime change”).
Our war in Iraq killed over 600,000 Iraqi civilians. Over 25,000 combatants aligned with the coalition forces died, as did approximately 35,000 Iraqi combatants. The Syrian conflict has resulted in almost 500,000 civilian deaths. That’s without taking into account the suffering inflicted on millions of civilians in the region, many of whom have had to flee their homes as refugees. Frum vehemently opposed Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and still advocates for a hard line on Iran, in tune with Trump. A war in Iran, would likely kill millions of innocents.
Jennifer Rubin has advocated throwing Arab prisoners into the sea to “turn them into food for sharks”. For the record, this is a war crime. She is an advocate and apologist for Israel’s hard-right Likud part, routinely defending the dispossession of Palestinians. She said the Obama administrations criticism of Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2014 (among other things), made it the “most anti-Israel in history”. This is the operation in which over 500 Palestinian children were killed, most while they were sleeping in their homes.
Max Boot advocated for the US to go to war directly in Yemen and to bomb Syrian government positions. As is, we are currently supplying bombs, aircraft and other weapons to the Saudis who have been relentlessly bombing the poorest country in the region. The Saudi war in Yemen has led to 10s of thousands of civilian casualties, a widespread famine and a cholera outbreak affecting hundreds of thousands. Many of the Saudi raids in Yemen are likely war crimes, and our forces have been actively participating in the operations, going as far as to refuel jets on bombing raids.
Frum, Rubin and Boot are neo-conservatives, regularly advocating the use of military force and war. They are not our “friends”. We are not “aligned with” them, and we will never be.
They do not have a people-centered ideology, they are no friends of the left. We may occasionally find ourselves on the same side of an argument, but that’s where it begins and ends. Their neo-con ideology is diametrically opposed to ours. We know that when someone demeans and devalues the lives of foreign others, eventually they will demean and devalue the lives and existence of others at home.
MLK’s explained this convincingly in his Beyond Vietnam speech:
[...] A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. [...]
So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones? [...]
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.
Surely this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroy, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours. [...]
I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. [...]
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
— kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/...