Notes on the State of Israel and Reflections on My Texas Court Case and Juneteeth

You might think, my friends, that I am anti-Israel whatever that means. If you read my Wikipedia page you might even think I’m anti-Semitic.

I’d have my reasons, to be sure, for really hating Israel and Israelis. But I don’t. Hatred takes a lot of work and it’s hard to sustain it. You really got to work at it and I’m a little too lazy. I’ve got other things to do. So I simply refuse to do it. How could I? They already hate themselves so much so that they are fleeing their so-called state in increasingly record numbers. People don’t flee things that are working. Isn’t that obvious?

This is not to say that I don’t believe in justice. In fact I’d argue that nothing else animates me as much as justice. And at the root of every good drama is justice. We need the Bad Guy to get his just desserts. It’s important to us. But then we never consider what if we are, in fact, the Bad Guy in someone else’s story?

Yes, yes, it’s true that I have been smeared by Netanyahu front group, the Anti-Defamation League, which called me a Holocaust denier, and which allowed other investors to steal from me because after all I’m a Holocaust denier and therefore devoid of rights.

This is how you get otherized. There are many other terms that are used to steal from people. Don’t take it personally. In a weird way it’s a compliment to be smeared. No one steals from people with nothing worth taking.

And, in fact, it helps you build empathy with other oppressed people when you’re targeted by a criminal foreign state. What a gift indeed it is to be attacked! To think I could have gone my entire life as a white, relatively privileged man, in this country without knowing what it was like to come into contact with the federal court system. Maybe it’s for the best.

It’s become quite fashionable to ignore the people in front of you. I must confess that I do this more often than I ought to.

When I was departing for Fort Worth the other day there was a possibility that I could go to jail. I have my quibbles as to how likely it was that I was going to jail. Some people said very likely. Others, particularly those backed by foreign governments, seemed to celebrate it online.

On the way there was a homeless Black man in the park who asked me for food.

“Not right now, sir, I may have to go to jail.”

But then, I turned back and said to him, “You know, tell you what, if I am free in two hours, meet me in front of the CVS down the street. Get your friends and make a list of the stuff you want.”

“What if you’re in jail?”

“If I have to go to jail, I have to go to jail. But if I’m not in jail, we’re going to CVS. Pray for me and wait for me there.”

Sure enough there were federal marshals and even federal public defenders. I was sure to thank both of them for their time and service.

In my more romantic delusions I think that there’s a long history of people who were jailed leaving jail and becoming prime minister. Why not someone leaving prison and becoming president? And why not me?

Yes, it’s true that Hal Lambert — someone I foolishly turned into a tech investor — asked me to use facial recognition on the Palestinians and that I had refused.

I often think back to that moment — why is it that I said it would be a bad idea? — and why was it that I was so adamant. I didn’t really know any Palestinians.

But there are sacred peoples who act as reminders to the larger minority of the dangers we can face with conflict. These include Armenians, Native Americans, and of course, Jews.

Well, the truth is that I don’t want to be complicit in another person’s pain. Of course we all are all the time but maybe I could be even more mindful.

This was, of course, before I learned about the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 which effectively bars Chinese money from our tech stack.

When a nation state wants something from you they’ll often engage in transnational repression and in the modern era this can look like funding frivolous lawsuit against you, hacking you, defaming you, etc. Invariably, the U.S. government may get involved but they won’t necessarily help you as you might have hoped. And that is, if they get involved at all. You mustn’t get discouraged, though, for if you are of sound body and mind, mighty forces will come to your aid — not necessarily because they want to but because they have to in order to be consistent with what they’ve said about themselves.

But if someone can take something from you it never really was yours to begin with, was it?

Is the Land of Israel really theirs? No, I don’t think it is. I don’t think any land really belongs to anyone. You can be entrusted to it, to be sure, but that means you must do something to improve it.

There’s no doubt the technical mastery that the Israeli military has had on display these past few years. But technical alacrity does not a moral position make.

Still, let’s compare the focused dedication of the Ukrainian drone operation to the Iranian one. One was focused on minimizing civilian casualties whilst the other did anything but.

Like the wasps who sting a target only to die thereafter, I suspect Netanyahu’s days are number.

You can think of the rise in oil prices as a way to compensate Saudi and other oil producers — and Netanyahu asset Elon Musk, whose electric cars will look mighty tempting as the price of gas rises.

We’re also not supposed to understand this allowed attack on Iran for what it was — a trade. “We will call off the social disruption in Los Angeles, Mr. Trump, if you let us bomb Iran.”

We’ve already been all over how Los Angeleno Steve Miller is Bibi’s guy in the White House.

Are These The Steve Miller Riots? Is Miller Bibi's Guy in The White House?

What was Trump supposed to do? After all, the attack on Iran was 25 years in the making. Netanyahu has been called for it for decades. Of course no one really talks about how Netanyahu profits from all the black market oil from Iran when the price of oil increases.

I leaked my text messages with now Vice President J.D. Vance to the Washington Post to prove this point.

“If the GOP listened to Bibi we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, wouldn’t have done nation building in Afghanistan, and wouldn’t be threatening a war with Iran,” Vance wrote to me.

Vance lied. People died? It’ll make a compelling 2028 campaign cycle if it isn’t argued sooner.

I backed Umbra — the synthetic aperture radar satellite company at the heart of a lawsuit with Hal Lambert — because I was concerned about these Iraq moments.

Maybe I ought to have been more concerned about Pearl Harbor moments if the attacks in Iran and Russia are any indication.

Are there similar operations currently embedded on American soil? And if there are how would we detect them? Why with satellites, of course.

Viewed this way, might the drone sorties over the empty Los Angeles reservoirs have been the first attack? A very high ranking politician friend of mine from California says that he thinks that the enemies of Karen Bass waited until she was in Africa. “Of course it was an attack!” he screamed at me.

Satellites (like drones) aren’t really satellites but cameras in the sky. If we have more cameras in the sky maybe we will stop more lying about weapons of mass destruction in the New York Times. When I first met Umbra it was a joke and now its satellites are flying and verifying drone attacks in Russia and Iran. Some of these pictures are even in the New York Times. So in a very real sense I achieved my objective.

Now I’m not sure if an eye in the sky will lead to a more peaceful world — that remains to be seen — but I am sure it’ll lead to a more targeted one.

Wouldn’t it be nice if leaders could assassinate one another and wouldn’t have to involve the every day people?

It’s doubtful I’ll get the money I deserve from sourcing, incubating, and dreaming up the Umbra deal. Oh well! And yet the heavens remain American. Is it fair? Of course not. But I didn’t back the company to make money. I did it to make a difference. I did it for the legend.

In the end it’s sacrifice of the fittest, not survival of the fittest. Somethings are written in the annals of history and not reflected in bank balances. How could they be? Some successes are like a whisper in the wind. You might even call it the work of a nation.

There’s that word again — work. There are increasing numbers of Israelis who aren’t willing to put in the work.

I have concluded that this threat to Israel — and Israel’s willingness to use Chinese and Russian technology — will ultimately end the dual use companies which have cropped up.

Abolishing nuclear weapons is a worthy goal — even if Netanyahu is only doing it to avoid prison. You do wonder if perhaps Mossad itself tired of these endless wars and decided to speed run the Bush era policy that General Wesley Clark exposed. Maybe if we give Bibi what he wants we will be rid of him.

Silicon Valley seems to think the solution here is brain drain.

There’s a general hope that a lot of these Israeli companies will make it. I certainly have my doubts. A16Z wants to recruit capable IDF members. OK. Maybe that’ll work. But will they go back and fix the problems?

Maybe we will bring them here like we brought the Nazis after World War II. To watch them. But we must be careful here, lest we become like them.

Some years ago Peter Thiel advised me to read My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan. The book, which is quite beautifully written, details a lot of the misgivings that someone from one of the founding families of South Africa, had both before and after apartheid fell.

Since apartheid collapsed a number of South Africans decamped here — you know them as the PayPal mafia — and have caused quite a bit of disruption here. As they flee their fucked up system they can’t help but bring its habits here.

Only when Musk, Sacks, Thiel, Friedberg and Botha account for what they’ve done to America can they be made American. Some of them won’t make it but that doesn’t mean their kids can’t or grandparents can’t.

There is a seat for everyone here. The same thing is true of our Israelien friends. You have to take up the responsibilities of American life for us to fully trust you. We don’t have dual loyalties here.

You’re either with us, or against us, to borrow your phrase said by our President.

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There are things that are yours just by virtue of your humanity — your life, liberty, and your pursuit of happiness — and it’s these things that we, as Americans, afford to ourselves and our posterity. It’s my hope — just as it was the hope of our founders — that such things might be extended to all the people of the earth. This phrase — all men are created equal — was to be constantly labored for, if never quite achieved, and there is much work to be done there. There’s that work “labor.”

I want you to think about this often. This larger question of what can someone take from you. I want you to think about all the things you need to do to defend a thing and how, in the final analysis, it all rests upon people willing to fight for our wonderful country.

What if ownership itself is a fiction? Isn’t it kind of a ridiculous idea — to own something ? You can’t really take it with you. It’s not yours when you are born.

No, what really matters isn’t what you own but what you keep and, to be honest, you shouldn’t keep all that much. It’s not really what you keep but it’s what you control and how you come to control it. In our system, control rests on the consent of the governed.

Our Israeli friends are all about control. Control of the narrative. Control of their health. Control of their people. Control of other people. But doesn’t it seem as if all their efforts to control things are collapsing at last? Ask yourself how much you’re willing to let yourself be controlled by others without your consent.

I’m neither pro-Jewish, nor pro-Israeli, but nor am I against it. You can’t be for a race of people — or against one — if you want to be a good American. Ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 it’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of people’s race, religion, creed, national origin, and so on. Here we are all e pluribus unum if we pick up the duties of being an American.

Nor, do I suspect, can you hurt someone without hurting yourselves. The Israeli government would be wise to remember this truism of the world. The claim of being a chosen people can lead quite quickly to being a master people with predictably bad consequences.

The implicit and explicit deal with the people of the United States and Israel is that Israel will be like us. That they will behave like us. But that’s less and less true as time goes on and the haredi and others refuse to take up the burden of citizenship. They would prefer to eat while others work. This, of course, doesn’t work. And I would argue it’s rather un-American. Didn’t Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Grant and Mr. Sherman settle this matter?

Mr. Lambert did not really do the work necessary to source the Umbra deal. Nor did he do the work on a number of other deals and he is getting the reputation he deserves even if I say nothing at all.

But even there, how different am I from him? In some sense I created him. Isn’t this always the case? He lists himself on Instagram as a “space investor” and he tells himself all kinds of stories about Clearview.Ai, the company he’s now the co-CEO of.

Did I really co-found it? Unofficially? Yes. Officially? No. But does it matter? Not really. I didn’t work in the business so I wasn’t in charge of the business. But isn’t this always what bad people say?

So, in a very real sense, I deserve it. I deserve going there and getting lied about in the press. Not necessarily for this thing but for others I’ve done. You never really get done in for the things you actually did, do you?

To be sure I maybe don’t deserve all of it but I certainly deserve some of it.

The judge in my case is a very good man. I oftentimes feel for judges. They have to sit there every day and look at people. It’s hard to look at people and keep faith with humanity. And, it seems, he found it hard to look at me.

“Until Mr. Johnson is brought up on federal, state or criminal charges one day, this behavior by him will never end,” he said. He didn’t “want to make a martyr of me.” Well, thank you, Judge.

But my behavior has already ended. I don’t do business with the Hal Lamberts of the world. Or the Hoan-Ton Thats. And I don’t do business with people who lie or hurt other people.

You might say I’ve been going through a lot of reflection, a lot of soul searching over the last few years. Quitting — or at least vastly reducing — alcohol can do that for you. So, too, can routine exercise, which I rarely do.

I hope one day to pray with Hal Lambert and even, perhaps, especially with Netanyahu. They may both be too far gone.

Now returning to my friends from Fort Worth and indeed, from across the world who have been with me from DC to the Middle East and the Great State of Texas.

Thank you for everything you did for me.

So happy to be fed, free, and alive.

I wear so very proudly what you’ve given me to protect me.

There are signs everywhere you look — even in the tea you bought at CVS.

“What worries you, masters you.” — John Locke. So true.