Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : An Arch Zionist Career Collapses

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

Max Blumenthal : An Arch Zionist Career CollapsesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? the government. What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best, which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, April 16th, 2006, Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, my dear friend, thank you for taking the time to join us. Thanks for accommodating my schedule. I want to ask you with some length about the story that the Greystone broke about it suddenly being criminal to report on a trial, a person that's on trial for free speech. But before we get to that to, well, what the White House claims is breaking news, the president says there's a truce between Lebanon and Israel. Well, Israel who's been slaughtering Lebanese civilians. Was Hezbollah involved in these negotiations?

I don't think so. I haven't seen this truce announcement looking it up right now. He's announced a ceasefire, a 10-day ceasefire. So sort of a temporary ceasefire, which obviously relates to Iran, but this was done over the heads of Hezbollah, but also because Hezbollah has been deterring Israeli ground troops around the east-west axis of Bint-Jubel, where Israel was initially forced out of Lebanon when its occupation ended in 2000 and where it was defeated in 2006, Israel's been suffering a lot of losses. So I think there are many, there's a convergence of factors here.

And we can talk about the Lebanese government and the overall negotiations, but this does not mean a cessation of hostilities. And it's something that I think the Trump administration, the Trump administration, the government has to do to get to round two in Islamabad with Iran. That's what I think is to read. But the Iranians are not naive. They know that the Israelis are still going to be killing civilians, claiming that they're Hezbollah.

They know that the Israelis are utterly unreliable in complying with any kind of a ceasefire. Why would they even shake hands with these people? Okay. Okay. This follows the 10-day pause in the fighting follows the negotiations between Joseph Aoun, the Lebanese president, and then you have Lebanese Prime Minister, Noaf Salam, who are basically puppets at this point. And they have no monopoly on violence. They don't have control over force of arms inside Lebanon. Hezbollah does. And so what they did, was they agreed to negotiations with Israel and the United States in Washington, D.C., in violation

of the Lebanese constitution, and completely sold out the population of southern Lebanon that is being assaulted and ethnically cleansed. And they have no ability to prevent Israel from invading if they achieve this fantasy buffer zone. Only Hezbollah has the ability to deter Israel. So similarly, similarly, after the Black Wednesday massacre by Israel after the ceasefire with Iran was announced, in which over 365 civilians were killed all across Lebanon, it was Iran that got Israel to stop attacking all across Lebanon by threatening to counterattack and

bombard Israel with ballistic missiles. It also closed a strait of Hormuz in retaliation for that. attack because it was a explicit violation of the terms of the ceasefire as announced by Pakistani Prime Minister Shabaz Sharif. So this is all about Iran exercising its leverage and Hezbollah deterring Israel on the ground. The Lebanese government has sold out the entire country. They have violated the ceasefire. They are accepting Israel's violations of the ceasefire agreement signed with Hezbollah last year. And at the same time, they're calling for Hezbollah to disarm.

So that ceasefire agreement actually called for no Israeli forces to be in Lebanese territory by meeting with the U.S. and Israel in Washington. The government of Aoun and Salam are basically giving the green light to Israel to violate Lebanese sovereignty. So it's Hezbollah that's fighting for Lebanese sovereignty. The Lebanese government, which has a neo-colonial army, which cannot, and it is basically forbidden from fighting Israel, can do nothing to defend Lebanon.

And they're selling Lebanon out before our eyes. And all they got was this 10-day ceasefire, which I assume Israel will use to rearm. I mean, all of this is to give Trump something to boast about, But the Iranians are not naive. They know exactly what's going on. Yeah, the Iranians also know that a massive attack, the U.S. could be preparing for a massive attack. I mean, just look at the movement of U.S. troops. Look at the way that the negotiations in Islamabad went down, where Netanyahu basically called J.D. Vance and said, no, sorry, you have to

introduce some nuclear obstructionism and close negotiations as Iran's delegation is preparing for a second round. Meanwhile, one of Donald Trump's top allies, who is actually one of Netanyahu's top assets in the U.S. media, Mark Tiesin, at the Washington Post, called for the U.S. to kill Iran's entire delegation, which included our friend who's an American citizen, Mohamed Mirandi. So it was effectively a call for killing an American citizen, slaughtering diplomats. It would have completely ended any possibility of any negotiations going forward. And that's the Israeli agenda here. And Israel has Trump completely under their control.

So there's every reason for Iran to expect the U.S. to violate this ceasefire as it realizes the Strait of Hormuz cannot be opened. Now what is Trump up against here? He's up against the hard rocks of reality. imposing a blockade of the blockade, which is already failing on the ground. Some ships are getting through. But the reality he's going to have to face is one thing at the top of his agenda is a trade agreement with President Xi in China. And they're supposed to meet in one month.

Trump is blockading oil to China, very cheap oil, that China needs to power its economy. Trump is blockading oil to India as well. So he's going to run up against that reality. And if Israel or the U.S. begin attacking Iran again, fulfilling Trump's promise to destroy civilization, attacking its power plants, the Gulf states will be destroyed, the vassal states, especially the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. And when it gets hot in the Gulf, I don't know if you've ever been to that region in the summer, there's no way to survive without air conditioning and they're not going to be able

to have air conditioning. They're not going to have desalination plants. And you will see a mass exodus from those countries. The UAE is already collapsing. Hotels are closing. People are leaving. The expats are leaving. And that is why the UAE and its tyrannical leader, Mohammed bin Zayed, are pushing the U.S. right now for a ground invasion because they believe that they cannot survive unless Iran is totally destroyed. So I don't see how Trump succeeds in opening the Strait of Hormuz without standing down and cutting some transactional deal with Iran. But at the same time, I don't see how Trump survives by defying the Israelis, which is what thou would entail. And they're already putting pressure on him right now. I mean, Mark Levin is freaking out about Iran, digging out its

it's missile cities. That's a signal to Trump. So Trump has no way out of this. Our friend Mohamed Miranda said that he wasn't in the room. He did make some personal observations of Vice President Vance, but of course he was in constant communications with people that were in the room, that Vance was nervous, ill-prepared and couldn't give a simple yes or no answer without getting on the phone. Whereas the chief Iranian negotiators, foreign minister Arachi, whom you and I have met, and the head of the Iranian parliament, had full authority to cut a deal right there. They were backed up with scientific data, with all kinds of information about nuclear this and nuclear that. The Americans were backed up by Krista and Wykhov.

Yep. Israeli assets. Why do you think Trump has set up Vance for failure? Well, let's first of all understand the Iranian delegations point of view. They knew that these talks were not serious. They knew who they were dealing with. Right. But they sent some of their most serious people to show that they truly want a deal and that they are not rejectionists.

And they left Western governments and especially the U.S. and Western media with no space to accuse them of rejectionism. And they put the onus on the U.S. and clearly revealed that the U.S. was taking dictation from Netanyahu, from Tel Aviv, and that it sent a bunch of buffoons there in order for this to collapse. And the chief buffoon was J.D. Vance, who I think he took his wife. Like, why would you take your wife to some high-stakes negotiation? It was like some tourist visit for him.

Like, I get to go to Islamabad and look like a diplomat. She's in the middle of a pregnancy also. Yeah, it was weird, okay? I mean, none of these guys have the technical wherewithal to make these negotiations. I don't know what experts they brought with them. Many of the key experts, Nate Swanson, the head of the NSC's Iran desk, was fired under instructions from Laura Lumer. So I don't know what they were, if they had any expertise there, it was all a hoax. and the Iranians knew that. But the collapse of the negotiations was clearly damaging for J.D. Vance

as he walked away. If you look at the polls, most Americans are blaming Trump and his war on Iran. A new Ipsos poll shows this for their dire economic straits. So J.D. Vance takes to fall. Meanwhile, the Secretary of State would normally be the person you would expect to be negotiating a high stakes ceasefire like this. But where was Marco Rubio? He was ringside in Miami near his old congressional district at a UFC fight with Trump, who was actually booed coming into UFC. And if you watched UFC leading up to the Trump's election, this was like Trump's lion's den. This was Trump's base.

He, you know, he's very close to Dana White. Dana White has a phony White House position. Trump got booed so hard. They had to crank the, you know, kid rock. soundtrack up to 11 to cover that up. Marco Rubio, however, was cheered. He was staying ringside with Trump in avoiding these negotiations, and it was pretty clear that he was shiving J.D. Vance in the back along with Donald Trump.

This wasn't a Secretary of State. This was a clever mafia wise guy who's just waiting his chance to probably be ruined by Trump, but hoping that he will be the presidential nominee instead of J.D. Vance. What does Vance's play? Well, he's getting humiliated in so many other ways. There's Trump comparing himself to Jesus Christ, then Trump attacking Pope Leo. Leo is a very progressive pope.

He's an American pope from Chicago, and he is harshly condemning the imperial war on Iran, the war in Lebanon. He just paid pilgrimage to resistance fighters in Algeria. You can kind of seek a Catholic Muslim alliance. cropping up in opposition to the Zionist evangelical corporate Christian alliance that Jerry Falwell and Reagan helped broker. Max, only you could put your finger on this with such precision and articulation. A Catholic Islamic alliance against the Zionist and American Christian nationalists.

And so where does J.D. Vance fall in the middle of it? Well, J.D. Vance converted to Catholic. And then purported to lecture the Pope on theology. Well, he was set up by Trump. Are you loyal to Trump or are you loyal to your Pope and your church? And I mean, you're the Catholics, so you understand how serious it is to defy the Pope. And J.D. Vance lines up with Donald Trump, of course. And he has a book coming out about being a Catholic.

So how's his book tour going to go down? He's probably going to be treated the way Trump was. that UFC fight. Exactly. So J.D. Vance's only hope is that Trump will be impeached or somehow does not finish this term and he becomes president simply by dint of being number two. And that may be one of his considerations for remaining in that position as he is completely encircled by Israeli assets, as the Mad King humiliates him, as Marco Rubio shives him in the

back. and as Joe Kent is rumored to be replaced by Sebastian Gorka. Oh, good Lord. Israel first fanatic who faked his bio and lost a position as a counterterror advisor in Hungary because he was suspected of being an MI6 asset. So I don't see any way for J.D. Vance to recover from this unless Trump somehow leaves the stage. Let's not forget a week of campaigning in English to a Hungarian audience, restating the remarkable and catastrophic political downfall of Victor Orban.

Yeah, that was another huge humiliation for JD-Vant. He was sort of like busted down to traffic duty. They kind of like kept up, they wanted to keep him out of the way. And so they sent him off to Hungary. And Orban loses after 16 years in power to Peter Magyar, who's, basically a Soros asset. Like this resounding defeat. And J.D. Vance, again, bears some responsibility for that.

Are there still jury trials in Great Britain? Tell us about the expose that the Gray Zone made about this horrific case. A woman is on trial for speech and has somebody else is in trouble for reporting on the trial. Well, we reported this story about the direct action process. protest group, Palestine Action, because the British media is forbidden by court order from mentioning any of the facts that we could report as an independent American news outlet. Think about that. I think it relates to the intro of judging freedom. Freedom's most perilous hours now, not because we face these totalitarian enemies in Iran or Russia, it's because our

Our own supposedly liberal democratic states are collapsing inward, and it's the national security state that's hollowing out any iteration of democracy. The U.K. is the front line of that trend, and it's doing it all for Israel. Palestine Action is a very effective direct action protest group that has occupied and damaged Israeli state-owned weapons factories inside the U.K. run by Elbit Systems. And they have forced those factories to leave because the damages are too high. The cost of doing business is too high. So they're raising the cost of genocide.

And when they go on trial, British juries learned that these activists were actually saving lives, not killing people, not harming people, and that they were harming weapons, and the juries acquit them. So the British national security state has been attacking the jury system. There is a judge named Jeremy Johnson who used to be a barrister for the MI6 and the metropolitan police of the UK, and he's ruling on this case. And the jury in this trial of six Palestine action activists who are known as the Filton Six, the jury is not allowed to know that if they convict these six on criminal charges,

like damaging property, et cetera, the judge will then have the latitude to to convict them for terrorism, sending them away for long terms. So the jury doesn't even know that this is actually a terrorism trial. The British state has attempted to prescribe Palestine action as a terrorist group. And in doing so, in one day, 500 British citizens were arrested for carrying signs in Trafalgar Square that read, I support Palestine action because you are not allowed to declare your support for a terrorist organization. I actually, during a Pierce Morgan episode where they were trying to sandbag me on Iranian regime

change riots, I dared Pierce Morgan to declare his support for Palestine action just to expose the sham and hypocrisy of Britain accusing another country of being oppressive. So the British media is not allowed to report any of this. What's more, the defendants in this trial, the Filton Six, are not allowed to mention Israel. They're not allowed to discuss the Gaza genocide, and they're not allowed to mention the target of their action, Elbit systems, which means they're not allowed to provide any context to the jury on their motives. The whole case is a stitch-up, and the only reason that the British public knows about it is because we were able to report

on it at the Gray Zone, and because a very courageous British member of parliament named Zara Sultanah, someone who should lead the Labor Party if it hadn't been taken over by Israel in the national security state, invoked parliamentary privilege two days ago to reveal this classified information in parliament, which, again, the British media is still forbidden from reporting. So you can read about it at the gray zone, but you heard about it here. And I hope everybody in the UK is watching. How could the jury not know what's going on?

Are they sequestered? Are they prevented from communicating on their mobile devices or watching anything on their computers or their television sets? I don't know if they're sequestered, but inside the UK, they're in kind of an information blackout, and they're not allowed to consider terrorism. I know that. The judge has done everything possible to prevent the jury from learning this. So if you're a British reporter and you discuss this, even on Twitter, X, you could go to jail. What does Trump think he gains by attacking the Pope? Well, I think a lot of, I think Trump thought that this would be an effective play to some elements in his base, some evangelical elements who traditionally have been anti-Catholic as well. as well as to the kind of anti-immigrant element in his base,

because the Catholic Church is seen as advocating for Latino migrants coming across the border who are Catholic. And the Catholic Church has always been seen as hated by nativist elements, going back to the Ellis Island era. The Christian right, its strength has been based on this concept of co-belius, religion, which a Catholic operative in Washington named Paul Weirich, who I'm sure you knew, helped hammer out with the moral majority in Jerry Falwell. Paul Weirich was running around trying to convince these evangelical pastors in the 1970s that abortion should be this major issue, and they were not interested,

and that it would be a way of splitting the Democratic base and peeling Catholics off and making them Republican, but they weren't interested. He said the only thing they cared about was school desegregation because they couldn't have these private Christian schools which recover for segregated schools below the Mason-Dixon line. He eventually convinced them that abortion and the culture war, the gay stuff, all that was the way to completely shatter the old Democratic Party coalition. And it worked. And that's how they formed the moral majority. Now under Trump, by attacking Pope Leo and by essentially attacking the Vatican, Trump is threatening to unravel the real basis of the Christian rights strength,

leaving the evangelical corporate wing, the Pete Higgseth wing, that reads off quotes from Pulp Fiction as passages from Ezekiel before the Pentagon. That wing exposed. Doug Wilson, Pete Hegsett's pastor, is deeply anti-Catholic, and they've excluded Catholics from their services. So they're weakening the Christian right. And what Donald Trump is doing is completely turning even conservative European leadership against him, not just in Eastern Europe, but under Georgia Maloney, Trump is being condemned.

And Georgia Maloney's opponent, the opposition leader, delivered a ferocious speech condemning Trump's attacks on the Vatican and his attacks on Maloney. And the entire Italian parliament stood in opposition to Trump across party line. So this is what Trump is doing with his attacks on Leo. He must be so distraught over the disaster of the Iran war that he's unable to think clearly at all. Yes. Yes. And he's surrounded by a collection of duffuses. I mean, he's listening. Mark Levin is one of the people he may actually be ghostwriting Donald Trump's truth social posts. We have to consider how isolated the Mad King is and how little, how unable he is to think through this situation. His only option is to immediately stand

down, find an exit ramp, and move on. But he's controlled by Israel, and they will not allow him to do that. And so now he is running up against some of the most powerful institutions in the world, including the Vatican. Wow. Max, thank you very much for all this. And here I thought we were going to talk about Swalwell. So who cares at this point? I mean, small ball. Small ball is small well. Right. Max, thank you very much, my dear friend. Fantastic analysis, as always.

All my best to you and your family. Tell your father how much I'd love that piece that he wrote in The Guardian. Yeah, maybe he'll come on someday. That would be wonderful. Bill and Hillary would be shocked. Let's talk about Hillary next time. You got it. You got it.

Well, what a great tenacious, intellectually honest. personally courageous young man. Coming up at 2 o'clock, more of all this, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. And at 3 o'clock, Colonel Douglas McGregor, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.