Since we are about to elect the first African American as president,
it is a very significant historical fact
and I take it—therefore, around the world,
criticism of the United States for being a racist nation will now stop,
right?
That's John Bolton.
A veteran of both Bush administrations,
one of the primary architects of the lie that started the war in Iraq,
and President Trump's third National Security Advisor.
Bolton was born in Baltimore to a working-class family,
but got scholarships to the elite private military academy McDonogh School,
where he first got into conservative politics.
McDonogh history teacher Marty McKibbin said he used to have friendly debates
with Bolton about things like the Vietnam War,
which Bolton ardently supported.
Behind McKibbin's back, Bolton referred to him as "Mao McKibbin."
Bolton was an enthusiastic student organizer for Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign:
I have no question that had I voted for that bill,
I might have softened some of the negro opposition to my candidates.
Bolton's pro-war attitudes went with him to Yale,
where most students were protesting against the war in Vietnam,
and for civil rights.
Bolton wrote in his autobiography of that time that he felt like a "space alien"
But his support of the Vietnam War ended...
when it became his problem.
Bolton joined the National Guard to avoid the draft:
he wrote in a Yale Reunion book.
After undergrad, he stayed at Yale for law school and interned for President Nixon's
first vice-president Spiro T. Agnew,
who would resign in shame during a criminal investigation.
One of Bolton's old friends remembered that even in college
and Bolton would create a career out of slipping into powerful non-elected positions.
He was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the Agency for International Development,
You'll teach him to sleep in a bed, to eat with a spoon, and make patty cakes.
What will that prove?
What if I could teach this monkey the difference between right and wrong?
the agency responsible for foreign aid for needy countries.
Bolton said his goal there was to
Another goal of his, apparently, was to verbally abuse his colleagues.
One employee said he tried to force her to lobby for less regulations on baby formula in developing nations.
She refused, citing studies that formula is dangerous in developing nations because of lack of access to clean water.
The employee alleges Bolton "shouted that Nestlé (a maker of formula)
was an important company,"
and then screamed that she was fired.
♫ Nestlé makes the very best, ♫
♫ chocooolaaateeee ♫
He didn't have the power to fire her, though,
so she was moved to a basement office as punishment.
Around this time,
he was taken under the wing of Reagan Chief of Staff James Baker,
and North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, famous for this ad:
You needed that job.
You were the best qualified.
But they had to give it to a minority.
Because of a racial quota.
Bolton himself would fail to get a job too, for a very different reason.
Accounts of his verbal abuse spread,
and he was reportedly denied a partnership at his old law firm
because of allegations of anger issues and emotional abuse,
that however, didn't preclude him from continuing to have powerful positions in subsequent Republican administrations,
but then:
The American people have voted
to make a new beginning.
[Applause]
Bolton spent part of the Clinton presidency, what he called the "wilderness" years,
working for conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute,
alongside right-wing luminaries like Dinesh D'Souza and Dick Cheney.
And then:
something happened in Florida.
There will be lots of suspicions on both sides about
the networks making the early call, the late
count that is going on, the missing ballot boxes in Broward county,
and if comes down to be just a few thousand votes, then we'll probably end up in court in Florida.
Bolton was pulled onto the team making sure the guy who lost the popular vote won the election.
He was dispatched to Florida to oversee the recount,
scrutinizing votes for Vice-President Gore
and working to swing the election towards Governor George W. Bush.
This is where he first got national recognition,
as America looked at recount photos and wondered
"who is this man and why does his mustache look like that?"
Bush would take Florida by 537 votes, and win the election.
Bush would return the favor by bringing Bolton into his State Department as
"Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs."
In this position, Bolton would play a key role in convincing the administration,
and America, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction,
triggering events that led to the war in Iraq,
a virtually universally-derided conflict that Bolton stands by to this day.
In more minor warmongering, Bolton delayed diplomatic talks with North Korea,
pushed for a resolution to threaten Iran,
worked to destroy a ballistic missile treaty with Russia,
went AWOL on important meetings about stopping nuclear proliferation,
and, despite seeming to care a lot about stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,
derailed the Biological Weapons convention,
refusing to allow inspectors to look at U.S. weapons plants.
The lack of U.S. participation castrated the convention,
leaving nothing in place to stop the spread of those weapons worldwide.
During his tenure, he made a few things clear:
he didn't care about the lives or well-being of foreign nationals,
he always considered war the best option, and he hated the United Nations.
In 2005, he was nominated to be the Ambassador to the United Nations.
His confirmation hearings were incredibly dramatic:
Bolton was accused of having a temper,
and his abusive treatment of staff was discussed at length,
including this by a young Senator from Illinois:
Trying to get a sense of whether this person's temperament
or his veracity is such that it would justify placing him in such a sensitive position.
He was also accused of trying to claim Cuba had biological weapons,
and then tried to fire a biological weapon expert who said that wasn't true.
He was asked what he would do in hindsight to stop or slow down
the Rwandan genocide and made it about logistics
rather than the massive loss of life:
At that time, knowing all that you know now, what action would you have taken?
I'm not sure that I can honestly answer that, Senator, because we don't know logistically
whether it would've been possible to do anything different than what the administration did at the time.
The two-day hearing led to many Republicans pulling their support for him,
and he was not confirmed.
But, President Dubya slipped him in anyway as a 'recess appointment,'
giving him a temporary role while congress was on recess.
Bolton served in the role for a little over a year, and resigned.
When that Chicago Senator from earlier was elected president,
Bolton brought his warmongering attitude back to the American Enterprise Institute,
where he wrote op-eds like the 'Three-State Solution'
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
"where Gaza is returned to Egyptian control and the West Bank in some configuration reverts to Jordanian sovereignty."
He made this weird video for a Russian gun rights group.
The Russian national government to grant a broader right to bear arms to its people.
The Russian politician who helped found the group is reportedly
under investigation by the FBI for donating money to the NRA
so that it could be funneled to Trump to influence the election.
He became a part of the secretive group Groundswell,
a collection of conservative politicians and journalists,
including Steve Bannon and General Michael Flynn,
who is being investigated for lying to the FBI.
The powerful group met to discuss their '30 front war' against the progressive movement.
Groundswell was a major voice in the conversations around making Benghazi into a big scandal,
and the concept of using the lie of voter fraud to justify voter suppression.
Bolton also chairs the Gatestone Institute,
a nonprofit that does a strange amount of studies proving that Islam is dangerous:
it helped propagate the lie of the 'no-go zone'
and the 'migrant rape crisis'.
It put out a false story that 500 churches had closed in London to be replaced with 423 Mosques,
calling London "Londonistan."
He started a Super PAC in 2013 to support Republican politicians that relied heavily on data from Cambridge Analytica,
which was caught in 2018 getting data from Facebook users through unsavory means.
Bolton's PAC got 5 million dollars from Robert Mercer,
the reclusive hedge fund billionaire who funded
Cambridge Analytica, the Trump campaign, and Breitbart.
And oh yeah, he appears on Fox News. A lot:
You've called for regime change in Iraq, Libya, Iran, and Syria.
In the first two countries, we've had regime change.
And obviously it's been—I'd say a disaster, I think we'd agree—
No, I don't agree with that and let me—
You don't think it's been a disaster?
No.
Which might be how he got the attention of President Donald Trump,
who appointed Bolton as his third national security advisor
(the first one, General Michael Flynn, left amid rumors of Russian collusion and lying to the FBI,
and the second left amid chaos in the White House.)
But will Bolton be confirmed in the Senate,
considering how much difficulty he had the last time?
Just kidding, it doesn't matter.
The National Security Advisor doesn't need to be confirmed by the Senate!
So now, a man with a history of warmongering, abusive behavior,
and skipping diplomacy will be in a role where he advises the president on issues of national security.
Check out what happened the first time he met the Secretary of Defense:
Secretary, it's so good to see you.
Thanks for coming, and it's good to finally meet you.
I heard that you're actually the devil incarnate. And I wanted to meet you.
He's been praised for his 'experience,' and yes,
he does have decades of experience in government and international relations,
but all of his experience is in making the world a more dangerous place.
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