The Tucker Carlson Show - Max Blumenthal on His Iran Trip, Being Detained by Trump & the Globalist Chokehold on American Media

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Max Blumenthal has been reporting critically on Israel for twenty years, in the face of censorship and death threats. Now he’s been detained by the Trump administration. (00:00) Blumenthal's Trip to Iran and Getting Detained (25:05) The Paid Propagandists (1:00:43) Leaked AIPAC Audio (1:05:53) What Is Israel's Big Picture Goal? (1:43:17) What Happened to TPUSA? Max Blumenthal is the founder and editor of The Grayzone, an independent American investigative journalism outlet. He is the author of several books and producer of numerous documentary films on US and international politics. TheGrayzone.com  Paid partnerships with: American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://www.AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Brooklyn Bedding: Get 30% off sitewide with promo code TUCKER at https://brooklynbedding.comRedmond Salt: Use code TUCKER for 15% off your first order at https://redmond.com/tucker Joi + Blokes: Use code TUCKER for 65% off your labs and 20% off all peptides and supplements at https://joiandblokes.com/tucker Battalion Metals: Shop fair-priced gold and silver at https://battalionmetals.com/tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Max Blumenthal. Thank you for doing this. So I guess it shouldn't surprise anyone that if you're a journalist and you've been taking a position and reporting on stories that are in direct contradiction to the official story in Washington, that at some point, you know, someone's going to get heavy with you. And so I want you to just describe if you don't mind a couple of things that have happened to you recently. So everyone knows what the stakes are. So you got detained at a U.S. airport recently. Can you explain what happened? Yeah, and this wasn't the first time the Trump administration had gotten heavy with me over my reporting.

I was actually arrested and jailed on first false charges that were dropped quickly during the first Trump term. That's a long story, but we've reported on it at the gray zone. And I was spent a couple days in jail. I spent a couple days in D.C. jail over completely false, bogus charges. my house was essentially raided by like the police surrounded my house, took me out into a wagon and took me to jail for completely false charges that I had assaulted a woman who was an ally of Juan Guaido at the time. That's like to make the long story short. And, you know, I wish I had had legal representation that encouraged me to sue at that time because it was just completely

fake. Right after Trump came in, in January, I was stopped, coming back from a vacation abroad with my family and shown a list of names and asked, you know, basically, do you know these people, which is far beyond the scope of authority of customs and border protection? And I said, do they pull you out of customs line? Yeah, yeah, they were waiting for me. Mr. Blumenthal. And they said, we've been watching you on Judge Napolitow. I watched your last appearance on Judge Napolitow referring to Judge Andrew Napolitano, but kind of like, you know, tap on the shoulder, like Big Brothers watching. And I remember those names, I actually didn't recognize them until afterwards.

One of them was Susan Benjamin, which happens to be the birth name of Code Pink, co-founder Medea Benjamin. And then the other names were like Arab names or Muslim names. And I think one of them might have been Mahmoud Khalil, who is now, was like arrested and was one of the Columbia students who was arrested. And they tried to deport him and put him in an ice facility for a long time. I didn't know, but it signaled to me that once it started, it started to all make sense once I saw what they were doing. Israel's in charge now and they want some, they want to crack down. They want to criminalize activism and even journalism that contravenes their objectives. So, you know, the war breaks out in Iran on February 28th. It doesn't break out.

Trump executes Israel's wishes and Netanyahu's greatest fantasy attacking Iran. We can talk about why that happened later, but I was observing it closely, reporting on it. I, you know, as you were as well, so I wanted to go there. And I had gone the year before

without any incident coming back. I participated in a public media festival. In Iran. In Iran. I did a documentary on Iranian Jews and what life is like for them in the Islamic Republic. I did reporting, I interviewed negotiators, like top negotiators as the negotiations were about to collapse.

This was like a month before Israel launched its first war on Iran, which ended with Operation Midnight Hammer. So anyway, the major war, Operation Epstein Fury or Epic Fury breaks out. And I'm observing it very closely, so I wanted an opportunity to go. I got that opportunity because Iran's foreign ministry was giving out press passes to mainstream reporters, you know, from NBC, from CNN, as well as, quote unquote, influencers who wanted to go and cover the funeral of the man that Trump assassinated on February 28th, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini. And it was going to be the largest funeral in history. And indeed, it was. I witnessed it as a reporter. I covered a lot of things there. which I can talk about in detail, but one of the things I was reporting on was evidence of U.S. and Israeli war crimes. For example, I visited a neighborhood

in eastern Tehran that had been just completely destroyed Gaza style, and it was destroyed without much reporting. I actually hadn't been aware of this neighborhood where it was just block after block of destruction and speaking to people on that street with tears in their eyes telling me how entire families were liquidated, in their sleep, going to the home where a family, what was left of the home, a family of 12 was

killed in finding the clothes of small children on the ground, the clothes that resembled the clothes that I dress my children in every day, the same age. It was very upsetting, and I've had an obligation to report on this. There was actually graffiti on the wall by a building, a giant apartment building, civilian apartment building that had been completely destroyed in the middle of the night. It said, evidence of U.S. crimes. And that's actually, that's what I was producing, providing as a reporter on the ground, visited a synagogue, 50-year-old synagogue that Israel had bombed.

Nothing was bombed around it, really, that I could see. These kinds of things were... Was it an active synagogue? It was an active 50-year-old synagogue called the Rafinia Synagogue in central Tehran. I was one of the first American reporters to visit it. My colleague Wyatt Reed had also visited it. And, you know, several other sites, Gandhi Hospital.

Did anyone ever explain in the coalition, U.S. or Israel, why we would bomb a synagogue in Iran? Well, Israel always offers the excuse. There was some IRGC site nearby, and it was a mistake. But it wouldn't have been the first synagogue that Israel's bombed in the region in order to compel Jews to move out of their historic home in order to seek sanctuary within the so-called Jewish state. And it raised serious questions about what? would have motivated them to do it. And I raised those questions in an explainer that I filmed there. It's the kind of thing that would piss Israel off, especially when it's a Jewish reporter, an American

Jewish reporter. So as I was... Bombing synagogues was not kind of on the program, I thought. No. The synagogue didn't seem to present a national security threat to Israel. What does threaten Israel is to have a community of 10,000 Jews in a Muslim country like the Islamic Republic of Iran, who are recognized as a national minority under the Constitution and who are not experiencing anti-Semitism there. It kind of stands at odds with what Zionists want us to believe about Muslims and the Muslim world. Kind of. Yeah. So they might want to frighten them to leave as they did with the Jewish community in Iraq when the Zionist underground with Israeli help bombed Jewish community centers in Baghdad as the

Israeli historian of Ishleim documented in 1952, 1953. So anyway, I'm doing this reporting. I'm reporting on the, I've reported from the funeral. Trump has previously said, you know, that these large crowds you see at funerals of Islamic Republic leadership who he or Israel assassinations are AI. So they don't want actual American reporters on the ground there, especially me when my perspective is very well known. So while I was there, I was targeted online by a collection of entities and figures who are completely connected to Israel. And no one else. Like it was an Israeli propaganda operation targeting me.

Laura Lumer was obviously leading the way on this. This was not an organic uprising of American citizens online. Yeah, I mean, it was funny. When I went in 2025, I was, you know, tweeting from Iran. I was producing journalism the same way, and nothing like this happened. But this time, it was different, and it wasn't organic in the sense that a foreign state was guiding this, and they wanted to character assassinate me online. So besides Laura Lumer, we'll talk about in a second, there was Canary Mission.

They were targeting me. They created a dossier about me. They said something like I dedicated my life to, the Ayatollah, some really insane statement. And that I was there to be... Had you officially endorsed him? What they were... Yeah, essentially that I endorsed him

for like leadership of the world, that I was there to basically pray at his grave. And by the way, if I had done that, if I had converted to Shia Islam and prayed and paid homage to the late Ayatollah, that would not have been against the law in the United States as far as I know.

I think I would have been within my rights, but I was just there to report. and that's all I did there. In any case, Canary Mission attacks me. This is a group based in Israel, based in a foundation, it's like a front group called Megamot Shalom, and its writers come out of,

many of them come out of the Wexner Foundation, named for the best friend of Jeffrey Epstein, and they are American-Israeli dual citizens. The guy who bought his house on Fifth Avenue, that same guy? That same guy, yeah, and who I think helped Howard Lutnik by the house next door.

So I'm being targeted by vice grad. May I ask, is there evidence that he helped Howard Lutnik by the house next door? I'm pretty sure that they helped him by the townhouse next door. If not, we can edit it out or I'll retract it, but I'm pretty sure that's the case. Amazing. They definitely shared a wall. Yeah. But this is totally peripheral to the story I'm telling.

The story I'm telling, the point I'm making is I was targeted. by a foreign government for contravening their propaganda objectives as a reporter. Canary Mission has been used by the State Department under Trump to determine which green card holding students they should arrest in the street and deport for writing an op-ed, criticizing Israel for their student paper. Home ownership has always been at the center of the American dream. It is an actual asset, a place people work their entire lives to build, a place of stability and security and real value.

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boxing them and preventing them from gaining future employment. And this is an Israeli group that's meddling in our society and trying to ruin the lives of Americans who are exercising their First Amendment rights. So now they're targeting me. Another group was Vice Grad 24, which seems to be, you know, shilling for the UAE as well as Israel. And then Laura Lumer comes in and demands that Mark Wayne Mullen arrest me, have me hauled off the flight, that my passport be revoked,

basically that I be denaturalized as a natural-born U.S. citizen, for what? For what? For simply reporting from Iran. And, you know, then maybe they can find some facts later with which they can use to criminalize me. So she said this in public? She tweeted this. She said, you know, if Mark Wayne Mullen is worth anything, he will do this.

She called for my home to be raided at 5 a.m. She called, she specifically called for Rubio to yank my passport. She boasted that she had called the FBI, the State Department, and DHS on me. How does she have this? She's boasted of calling law enforcement on over a thousand people in the U.S. So this is well, this is like typical behavior. And so I come back and I'm like kind of knowing what to expect. What did you say they're going to get heavy with me?

Because Laura Lumer has become their go-to propagandist and they use her, they kind of outsource her. But also she's able to frighten people in the administration like Mark Wayne Mullen, who she was attacking a week later calling him Mark Wayne Muslim. And I think she was calling him all sorts of names because he wasn't doing enough deportation. So it's like his asses on the line from someone who just a couple of years ago was chaining themselves to Twitter headquarters. Someone who was because her Twitter account had been pulled. Someone who earlier this year justified a mass shooting at a U.S. mosque. Someone who, I mean, we know she called some black Democrats black ghetto bitches and she's seen as so outlandish.

but people in the Trump administration are frightened over and other people are using her. Why would they be frightened of her? Because there are powerful forces behind her, including some extremely powerful Zionist crime bosses. I mean... You're absolutely right there afraid of her. I have seen it.

I mean, who's behind her? Who is behind her trip to Ukraine? I mean, how do you get an audience with Zelensky like that? and then you're meeting with Andre Beletsky, the leading neo-Nazi in Ukraine and whitewashing him. And then you're going to a energy plant for a company called D-Tech, which just seems completely random,

whose board member is Jeffrey Piat, the guy who is handing out cookies in the Maidon in 2014 with Victorian Newland. Who owns D-Tech? It's Renad Akhmatov, who is one of the richest men in Ukraine, who's like a de facto crime boss in Kiev is involved in all kinds of corrupt activity.

You know, who's got her pushing for the removal of sanctions on Venezuela's government even when Maduro was in power? Probably some pretty powerful businessmen who might own Venezuela's sovereign debt who want to collect on their debt. Who's pushing her to target anyone who gets in the way of Israel's genocidal agenda

in the Middle East? I mean, we could choose between any number of major Israeli or pro-Israel warlords from Miriam Madelson to Bill Ackman. I don't know who they are. But I think we could all agree this is not the way like a country does diplomacy, right? Well, this is what happened to MAGA. They've driven out everyone who believed in anything Trump campaigned on in 2016, like national sovereignty, for example, America.

first rather than Israel first, not continuing the Ukraine proxy war. Zelensky's now asking for $28 billion from the U.S. All of these things were what I think motivated you to campaign for Trump, and now you're being targeted as one of their main enemies. Laura Lumer is attacking you right now, along with other figures who have a very murky relationship with the Trump administration, like this Genica Pound's character, Data Republican, who was just exposed or exposed herself as a special Pentagon employee. But we thought she was just a pro-Maga influencer. So what is MAGA anymore? What do you mean a Pentagon employee?

Like a special employee of the Pentagon who's been hired by the Pentagon and has a dot-siv email. This was reported in the Washington Post, yes. So this is someone who's... who's like attacking people politically online all the time. Yeah. Who's getting paid in U.S. tax dollars to do that? I don't know how much she's being paid, but she exposed herself as such.

Let me make this point about just this is where MAGA is. Like Laura Lumer is the face of MAGA right now. Yeah. And when that's the face of your movement, it doesn't stand for anything anymore. Except the raw, the raw Machiavellian exercise of power. Yes.

And looting. And looting corruption and genocidal bloodlust, which is something she represents. She's, you know, after this mass shooting that killed three people at a mosque in San Diego, this May, she called for ICE to raid the homes of the victims. What? Yeah. And in addition to saying the whole thing was a false flag to elicit sympathy for Muslims and that all Muslims in America should be deported. So this is the person who, you know, people are answering to in the administration and everyone's seeking to use her as well.

Then what's the difference between saying that and like all Jews should be deported? Like once you decide that an entire ethnic group or religion is evil because of how they were born, how is that different from any other variety of that? it doesn't seem any different to me at all, and it all seems disgusting. I think it disgusts most people, but this is what they've been reduced to. And so who is using her? How is Israel able to move this administration

to the point where they're even that focused on me that they're willing to not just detain me, but confiscate my phones on my way back, with no suspicion of any criminal activity. I've stepped on your story like 10 times. What happened when you got back? No, it's my fault because I told it the long way. Well, there's so much going on.

I mean, it's... But I wanted to kind of prompt everyone watching this, like help them understand why this happened. Yes. It happened explicitly because Israel didn't want me reporting from inside Iran and they thought that I could be... that they could exploit my vulnerability coming back from Iran to have something terrible happen to me

in this area in our country where you are told when you enter you have no constitutional rights which is a huge problem when you... You're an American citizen. I'm an American citizen you're an American citizen, you have no rights when you crossed a border. You have no other passport, correct? Correct. So how do you

forfeit your American constitutional rights? Once you are called in for secondary inspection or questioning by customs and border protection when you arrive from another country you know you get like the red x and then they put your passport in a plastic box and they send you back there cbp tells you you do not have you essentially do not have the same constitutional rights and so after questioning but you're on u.s soil this is in what airport was this this is dulles appropriately named international airport and so i come back and uh

you know that all happens to me i got the four s's on my um ticket coming back. I am questioned and they're asking me questions that seem to follow the same line that Lumer or whoever was handling her or backing her was pursuing. And I was very cooperative with them and polite. I figured, you know, I don't really have,

like I can be transparent here and be polite with them rather than if I refused. And you do have the right to refuse those questions, but then you're just going to be there for hours and hours and hours. And they're going to use that essentially to punish you. At the end of the questioning, they and they searched my bags and everything, which they wouldn't have a right to do to you outside of there without a warrant and individualized suspicion.

They then demanded that I opened my phones. And anyone watching this, if you're concerned about having your phones opened or seized, pay close attention to what I'm saying. they said, we're just going to check for evidence of criminal activity and CSM. And so just give us your pass codes. And I said, that's what I said. And they said, it's child sexual material. And you're looking at you like, and so your natural reaction would be like, I don't have it.

I don't have that on my phone. Were you calling me a peto? Like, what the hell's wrong with you? Here, just take my phone. Those are my kids, you know. But I'm not stupid. So I was like, no, that is a viable. of my constitutional rights, and they said, well, then just give us your phones.

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them like my laptop like if you think i'm this criminal and i'm some irgc agent why wouldn't you take my digital camera or my laptop you know you had hunter biden on a few weeks ago like what if i have the laptop from hell no it's just like they were trying to harass and punish and intimidate me and to satisfy laura lumer and whatever zionist crime bosses are behind her A few days later, I go to Janine Eunice, who is a lawyer, who is a true... So what happened at the end of the story? Did you get your phones back? Well, I'm going to tell you how I'm back.

So I go to Janine Eunice. She's a true free speech warrior, not like the fake free speech warriors who only defend the free speech of conservatives or, you know... Whatever interest they represent. Yeah, whatever. And then when, you know, when someone says, Israel did a naughty thing, then they want them to be in prison. So she's not Alan Dershowitz. She's not Alan Dershowitz or Ben Shapiro.

Her feelings only care about facts. She's argued at the Supreme Court against the Biden administration's policy of banning social media accounts that had criticized Biden in a lawsuit filed by Republican governors. she was one of the major critics of the whole COVID lockdown mandate policy from a constitutional perspective. Now she is the president of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and she's doing these very important legal actions defending the rights of Americans who are basically being targeted for criticizing Israel. And so she filed a lawsuit demanding my phones and all the data they had taken back. A few, I would say, within 24 hours,

I got a call from CBP telling me my phones are ready for pickup. So they were holding them for days and days and days. Your phones? Yeah, and they said, we're going to hook them up to machines. And what I understand that they do is they do hook them up to machines and run a program called Celebrite through the phones to brute force open them.

That's an Israeli technology. So they're using Israeli technology to get into your phone. Once they get in, they can scrape metadata, access deleted text messages, deleted. Your whole life. Your whole life. And without a warrant, warrantless seizure is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. So we filed this lawsuit.

We actually went to court at the 4th District in Northern Virginia. Not the 4th. Yeah, the 4th District in Northern Virginia, a veteran judge declared her opinion, stated her opinion, that my Fourth Amendment rights had been violated. and that the government was going to have to produce some level of discovery to explain what they did with my phones. And we've expanded the lawsuit. It's now a Fourth Amendment and First Amendment-based lawsuit seeking injunctive relief, basically, that they stop harassing me. And this is for everybody. This is for every journalist. This is for every American who believes they're entitled to their Fourth Amendment constitutional rights at the border. if the government suspects that you've committed a crime,

they can get a warrant very easily and search into your phone. But without it, they can't. And that's what the fourth district has found in cases like Belmonti Cardozo versus the U.S. government, which the government lawyer wasn't even familiar with. So we're enforcing precedent and we're trying to establish and reinforce the precedent

to protect the constitutional rights of Americans, which I was denied. because a foreign government did not like me reporting from a country which they have attacked, where they have committed war crimes and where they seek to commit further crimes and to basically carry out regime change, that's what this all comes down to. So the whole situation is escalated. Escalated from that? Yeah.

Since we filed this lawsuit, the, I don't even know what to call them. these Israel First forces in the U.S. are retaliating against me. Weirdly, on Shabbat two weeks ago, three of the biggest Israel-first Neanderthals in Congress, Randy Fine, Randy Weber, and someone I'd never heard of before, Keith Self, released a letter on congressional letterhead through Laura Lumer's Twitter account,

calling for me to be investigated. and they didn't produce any evidence that I had done anything criminal. They just pointed to my journalism from Iran and my journalism in general, which had upset Israel, including my investigations into what really happened on October 7th,

me being one of the first reporters in English language or US media to produce massive amounts of evidence or point to the evidence that Israel had killed, killed many of its own citizens on October 7th by initiating something called the Hannibal directive, which enables the Israeli army to kill its citizens if they believe they are going to be taken captive and become political collateral, because the price of letting them go over

the Gaza border alive is more than the price of killing them. And I was heavily attacked for that in Israeli media, even how are at the supposedly left Israeli publication called me, yeah. Is that a real concept? Yeah, it's a real concept that's been confirmed. It's been confirmed even by the former Israeli defense minister. A colonel serving on that day said they enacted a mass Hannibal. It's been confirmed that in Kibbutzbury and Israeli tank crew was ordered to fire into a home in which 12 Israelis were being held captive. Come on.

They killed the hostages on purpose? They knowingly killed the hostages. and we reported on that at the gray zone. We were one of the first sites. It's so evil. It's hard to get on the loan survivor witness to that provided testimony in Hebrew, in Israeli media, and we then conveyed that testimony

to an American audience at the gray zone. So they dedicated like a paragraph to my reporting on October 7th. Anyone watching this right now, you can find a documentary called Atrocity Incorporated or Atrocity Inc. in which I detail all the reporting that I did on October 7th on how Israel, in many cases, fabricated atrocities

like 40 beheaded babies or Hamas carrying out systematic mass rape in order to manufacture consent for genocide. But there was also the fact that they may have killed hundreds of their own citizens on that day. My reporting was eventually corroborated by the same publications that were attacking me. Yediot Aronaut in Israel reported that in an article co-authored by Ronan Bergman, who also writes for the New York Times,

over 70 cars were targeted by Israeli helicopters heading towards the Gaza border with all like many occupants inside. Haaret said a free fire order was given on that day and you know, possibly hundreds of strikes were carried out under the auspices of the Hannibal directive. So, I mean, this is a skis. getting a little bit off base from the conversation, but about 400 Israeli soldiers were killed. Their bases were targeted on October 7th.

Those were active duty combatants who were enforcing the siege of Gaza. And so they were the main targets, but there were many other Israelis who were sort of caught in the crossfire seized as captives during a moment of opportunity. For example, the Nova Electronic Music Festival, which had been extended for another day,

right next to the Gaza border. And then the helicopters come in and start targeting everyone. Another person who seems to have been targeted under the Hannibal Directive was named Gal Abduh, and she was photographed outside of a car, which had been, it looked like it had been blown up with a hellfire missile.

She had rigor mortis. She was wearing a small dress because she'd been at this rave, and her legs were kind of spread because she had rigor mortis. So she becomes the subject of a front page New York Times investigation called Screams Without Warrie.

words about how Hamas had committed mass rape and they called her the girl in the black dress whose legs were spread found by her car her family comes out and says this was totally false our daughter was not raped the new york times tricked us and it very much appears that she was one of those cars that was targeted by the israeli military so you know all of this reporting that i've been doing and over the years i mean ever since i've been reporting i mean you you You were around a lot of the kind of neocons and pro-Israel characters in Washington, and you heard what they said about me over the years. They hated you with a unique passion, I would say.

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So they're looking for any opportunity to basically silence me by locking me up and they have full control over Trump and the Trump administration. Their best asset is Laura Lumer. right now for whatever reason and uh this was kind of their moment so they they get these three figures to call for me to be investigated by the state department and FBI and in the letter they call me they say I've been cultivated as an asset by the IRGC which is complete defamation like just there's no basis for they have no basis for saying that it's just defamation that but typical of Randy fine and you look at who they are. Like, who is Randy fine? This guy is desperate to shut down the Constitution for Israel.

He's even made littering a hate crime in Florida punishable by five years in prison because some anti-Jewish goofballs called the Goish Defense League or the Goyam Defense League were like through leaflets on the ground. You know, he's enforcing the IHRA definition in Florida of anti-Semitism, which is if you criticize Israel, you're an anti-Semite. The majority of the definitions in the official list of definitions pertain to the state of Israel, not to Jews. Yeah, he said he would like to see, I think he said he would like to see the streets of Gaza overflow with blood.

I actually challenged him in Congress on his call for Gaza to starve away, which was an interesting example of genocidal intent. He said, Gaza should starve away. And I said, do you think, like, how do you think you would fare in Gaza? Given your... He'd be last man standing. Yeah, I'm sure. You know, it's ironic to have a figure like him calling for people to be starved.

And he's like a walking advertisement for the American Nazi party. I mean, no one produces more anti-Semitism than him. And he actually said at a meeting of the Republican Jewish committee that he's glad that people are, like, that Thomas Massey is blaming the Jews in his words for being thrown out of Congress. He took personal credit for throwing Thomas Massey out of Congress. And he's someone who's clearly acting on behalf of Israel. Then you have Randy Weber who wears an Israeli tie on the House floor. This is tragically the guy who replaced Ron Paul in Texas. Not exactly a libertarian who believes in the Constitution. He said that the U.S. has to attack Israel because Israel's the apple of God's eye. And he's

Keith Self, I don't know what he does. He's like introduced a bill to stop Sharia in Dallas, so like the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders won't be wearing burqas. And Laura Lumer, I mean, it's pretty clear. She's being backed by some pretty powerful Zionists. And they're calling me a foreign agent. Like, that's like having child protective services called on you by Jeffrey Dahmer and Jeffrey Epstein.

It's like you can't overstate the irony of that. But that's what they did. They put that letter out there. And do you think that you're under investigation? How would I know? Right, you wouldn't. I wouldn't know. And this administration seems to be capable of anything.

So I don't know where it can go, but I also wear it as this letter as a badge of honor. I mean, coming from four of the worst people on the planet, singling me out and calling for me to be investigated, criminally investigated for my journalism. I mean, so much of the letters dedicated to my journalism, to me, it's confirmation that, I'm doing the right thing. There's something going on that I don't understand that doesn't make sense in conventional terms and you alluded to it a second ago when you described Randy Fine

as like an agent of the American Nazi party because he inspires anti-Semitism. So if I've got a product or a place or a person, I'm trying to make more popular, if I'm trying to defend, if I'm selling the Apple iPhone, I'm telling you all the things the iPhone does. It's amazing. It's a camera.

It's a weather channel. It's everything, right? I don't. make you hate iPhones or telephones or technology, if I'm trying. But the people making Israel's case in public are people like Randy Fine. Yep. Who is just named the 45th most influential Jew in the world by the Jerusalem Post. But why wouldn't you get someone who is appealing and not hateful and not laughing at pictures of dead children as he has who's like,

It seems like an intentional effort to inspire hate against Israel, actually. That's what it looks like to me. Yep. What is that? Well, that's Zionist logic. I mean, Zionism needs anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is the fuel for Zionism. What would happen if Jewish life were normalized in the West?

It would be a disaster for Zionism because there would no longer be a, a way to justify Israel waging war after war, building walls and de facto concentration camps around the indigenous intermention unless it were a sanctuary for Jews who were experiencing anti-Semitism and had nowhere else to go. So it's needed. Then you have a whole anti-Semitism industry. What would Jonathan Greenblatt do without the specter of constant anti-Semitism? Which is why they have to keep redefining anti-Semitism to be pretty much anyone who's upset with the mass extermination of children and does anything about it as an anti-Semite. Or anyone who we don't like.

Anyone who we don't like. It used to be what, anyone who hates the Jews. Now it's anyone who the Jews hate. But I wouldn't even say the Jews. I mean, this is like a contingent of Jewish life, which is increasingly extreme and lives in its own echo chamber. Jonathan Greenblatt, like what would the ADL is like a multi-million dollar organization

with a command center in Silicon Valley. It has its eyes and ears within law enforcement agencies. He basically brags about it being an auxiliary force of the FBI and that they're conducting spying operations inside activist organizations. With Jewish life, we're normalized and we were just like, hey, we love America. We are experiencing a golden age.

here, we're like the Episcopalians. His gravy train would immediately end, and he'd have to go back to being a bottled water salesman, which is what he did before he was at the ADL. Well, I actually grew up in a country that was kind of like that. I mean... Me too. Yeah, I mean, I was, we were talking about dinner last night. Like, I don't remember, and I would have remembered since I was around a lot of this stuff

as a kid, I don't remember there being like stark, angry divisions. And I don't know, golden age, I don't even, but it was great. As far as I recall, maybe I missed it, but I never heard anybody express hate toward anyone else ever, not one time. So I'm not imagining it, no that I'm saying it out loud. And Israel can't be at peace either because of Zionist logic. Huh. With, if, imagine, if Israel were at peace.

Yeah. First of all, it would be like Israel was in 1966 when the society was uncertain of its own survival and all of these different groups were at each other's throats, the Ashkenazim and the Mizrahim and the religious and the secular within the country. Then they had 1967 and it was like,

suddenly the country became dynamic. And what else happened in 1967? American Jews became very deeply interested, the baby boom generation. And they started going to the Kibbutzim and they brought their guitars. A lot of emigration that year from the United States, Israel. Yeah.

And so Zionism became this dynamic global force with 1967, which was a war of choice that Israel launched that was totally unnecessary. And they portray themselves as this underdog. Now they have to be in constant war because, like, think about all of the Jewish or the Zionist billionaire class in the U.S. A lot of them aren't even very particularly religious. I don't think Bill Ackman is that religious. I saw someone say he rapped Tifilin for the first time after October 7th with Bill Ackman.

This guy runs around wrapping Tafelan on people. If Israel's at peace, it doesn't need you anymore. And you have nothing to do. And then your identity, your identity comes into question. Like, I don't have anything to do. I don't have anything to donate to that makes me feel Jewish. that country doesn't need me anymore.

What do I do? What am I? Am I going to actually go and observe real, like, Talmudic rituals? Like, am I going to actually do Shabbat and put my cell phone away, my smartphone that I write 7,000 word posts on all the time? Am I not going to drive to dinner in the Hamptons on Saturday? So, I mean, it's this, Zionism has become a central pillar of identity

for so many American Jews who wouldn't know how to otherwise be or feel Jewish. And for them, they need this transcendental identity as they start to experience mortality. Sheldon Adelson, I mean, he got into Israel late in life and he said, I want an Israeli wife. And Miriam Adelson comes in and now she's directing his whole empire. So it has to be in a state of war. And Netanyahu is a master of it. He understands the thinking of American Jews and what they need. He understands how Zionism can be carried forward.

And he cares more about that than he does about the actual reality of Jews in the world, or even Jews in Israel, who are in a state of complete social crisis right now. Yes. Lots of people are using peptides to get in shape. Not all peptides are the same. If you take them, do you really know what you're ingesting? Probably not. Joy and Bloaks makes it very simple. You start with an easy online health assessment, then if necessary, your licensed clinician will order comprehensive lab work to understand exactly what prescription is best for you.

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by going to joy and bloke's.com slash Tucker and using the code Tucker at checkout. This is one of the biggest discounts to any of our partners have ever offered. That's joy and blokes.com slash Tucker. Can you just give a short summary of what that crisis is? Well, first, I don't think these were, I mean, first of all, I did a book, I published a book in 2013 called Goliath. And that was a portrait of Jewish-Israeli society from the inside. I spent off and on, like I was going for a few months and I come back for a few months and write, off and on for five years, I was working on that book. And it's mostly about Jewish-Israeli society.

It's a portrait of a society that was poised to commit genocide. And why that... You saw that then? I saw it then. And, you know, I took a look at the psyche of particularly Jewish-Israeli youth. And, I mean, you can just look at the polls that the Israeli Democracy Index conducts. And, you know, the vast majority of them have genocidal attitudes, at least anti-Palestinian attitudes. And they're more hostile to Palestinians than their grandparents were, for example.

So right now, Jewish-Israeli society. they don't necessarily care about the fact that most people in Gaza are living in tents and their faces are being devoured by rats at night. There's no empathy there. But internally, they're in crisis because part of the population that's producing the most children and giving them like a positive child replacement rate, birth rate, are the ultra-Orthodox. And the secular members of Israeli society or the religious nationalist members who believe in Zionism, they have to subsidize all ultra-Orthodox men to simply be there and read Torah all day.

And so there are constant bills being pushed to force those ultra-Orthodox men into service in the Israeli military. And what are they saying? The Torah forbids killing, we will not do it. And they've been having huge protests around Israel. Like you could call them anti-Zionist protests. They get very little attention in U.S. media. They block traffic. and the secular part of the society

or the Zionist part of the society hates them. I don't think hate is an overstatement based on what I've seen. Yeah, in many ways they hate them more than they hate Hamas. I totally agree. I've seen it in Israel. It's sad actually to see it. The division is so bitter.

Yeah. And this is going to, this bitterness is going to grow along with the bitterness of the world towards Israel. Then you have all the, these reservists, like who served in Gaza, who committed horrific crimes, there's a film out right now that's coming out a documentary that is getting rave reviews called Naza. And it's made by Yuval

Abraham, who's an Israeli journalist and a filmmaker, I think her name is Rachel Shore. These are Israelis, Israeli lefties. And it consists of 24 interviews with Israeli soldiers. Most of them were like in military intelligence involved in targeting on rooftops and you can't see their faces, their voices are altered. And they're describing the most sickening crimes you can think of. One of them talks about how they were hacking into phones. I guess this is Unit 8200, their cyber division, hacking into the phones of young girls in Gaza to determine when their fathers would come home. And then they would order an airstrike on their home and listen to the girl burn alive through her phone. The soldiers are comparing themselves.

to Nazis in this film. And now Israeli ministers are calling for stripping the filmmakers of their citizenship and punishing them. Netanyahu just a few hours ago released a statement calling the film a blood libel. Then you have other reservists who you can see them in Knesset. They're like, we're not getting the support we need. We're all on drugs and we're all suicidal. They are playing out their trauma in a different way against their wives, against themselves. And they see these ultra-Orthodox men who aren't serving,

and they want, they want them to be forced into service, or they're going to go crazy. And the ultra-Orthodox parties are keeping Netanyahu's coalition together, United Torah Judaism. And I think there's a good chance Netanyahu could win. So this crisis is going to increase their civil strife now. Could it be a civil war later? Very possibly, especially if Netanyahu doesn't have a big war to distract

everyone like the war on Iran. And should we condemn the ultra-Orthodox? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys here? You got a secular Israeli in Tel Aviv who loves to go hang out in

Berlin and have vacations in Bali or wherever they go and they're totally secular but they participate in the Israeli military. They help find targets in Gaza. One of them just told this group breaking the silence that they asked they asked their commanding officer for a target and they were told there are two million targets just find anything you want so they go and do

that and they believe in political segregation that the Palestinians have to be segregated for them from them behind walls so they can have their European lifestyle and their raves inside their little what former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak called their villa in the jungle and then you have the ultra-Orthodox what do they want? They want religious segregation in a very traditional Jewish way. They want to live a kind of medieval Jewish lifestyle, but they have no interest in Palestinians. They don't care.

As long as they're left alone, the Palestinians are immaterial to them. They don't want to kill them, but they don't see them as particularly like, they're indifferent. So who's the bad guy and who's the good guy here? The ultra-Orthodox are saying, killing is against the Torah. And they are going to be forced into the world's biggest, most ruthless killing machine if these bills go forward. That's Zionism.

And so we're moving towards the terminal stage of Zionism in our lives. And it's creating crisis here and it's creating crisis there. And we don't know where it ends. That's what the end is real. And yet all of a sudden, despite, I've lost track of how many fronts Israel is fighting on. According to Netanyahu, it's eight. We are the eighth front in the United States. He said that at a meeting with U.S. influencers who seem to be on Israel's payroll.

I don't even know what that means. I mean like attacking you. Well, sure, sure. I am a target in his war. You are the top target probably. And it's a propaganda war. It could turn into something else if the situation grows more dire for Israel. But right now it's an information war.

And it's a legal war. And it's a political war. So if some kind of economic collapse are imminent, what would the signs be? Well, the behavior of the central banks that control money supply might be a good clue. So let's take a look at the world's largest economy. That would be China. China imported nearly as much gold in the first half of 2026 as it did during. all of 2025.

Why? Well, because, of course, they're hedging against coming instability. But it's not just China that's doing this, buying up more gold. Central banks around the world are doing the same. They're dumping U.S. treasuries and buying gold, and they're doing it at historic rates. Huh, that's worth paying attention to. So how are you going to prepare for what's coming? Are you ready?

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It's also obviously disgusting. But it's just a lot of stuff. It's expensive. It's a lot of things to pay attention to simultaneously. But at the same time, and this does amaze me, Israel seems to be like everywhere. All over Latin America, Africa, Somaliland, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia. All of a sudden, there Israel-related stories popping up in all these countries around the world and you're like, wait a second. First of all, how do you have time to do that?

Second, what are you doing? And third, what is the point of all that? What are we watching? Yeah. I mean, these are... Am I imagining this? Trump has won every... Trump has won every election in Latin America over the last two years. I mean, these are candidates that Trump incorporated controls. Most recently, I think it's Abolardo de la Espriela in Colombia. And in one of the first speeches he basically pledged loyalty as after he won abelardo who was the former lawyer for the cartels pledged loyalty to israel why israel what does columbia have to do with israel i think it was avo morales the former president of bolivia he called columbia the israel of latin america they were getting a lot of israeli weapons training i mean going back to um 1984 this will help explain

some things about this very weird phenomenon but the Congress passes the Boland Amendment during the height of the Contra War that requires that required Reagan or any executive to sign off on covert action

great piece of legislation you know back remember when Congress used to do intelligence reform so that was the last real attempt was the Bowman Amendment yeah so Ephraim Rios Mont was a U.S. backed dictator who was also close to like the Christian right, Christian Zionists like Pat Robertson.

He was the first evangelical president. And Israel comes in and says, we will supply him. We'll give his soldiers Uzi's to basically mow down the Mayans and what's left of the Guatemalan insurgency and destroy entire villages and we will train them. Rios Mont said that our model for the Guatemalan soldier is the Israeli commando. And Reagan won't have to sign a off on anything, and we will show how valuable we are as a U.S. ally. So, yeah, Israel provided them with the computer they used and the surveillance systems to round up activists who opposed his rule. And from there, you know, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship with these pro-US governments that were seeking to destroy their supposedly leftist opposition. But it's like

across the board, like Ecuador. They have a billionaire president who was born in Miami, Danielle Noboa, and I saw a report a few weeks ago that in Ecuadorian schools, they're now going to teach Holocaust education. And there's nothing wrong with learning about the history of Jewish genocide or the genocide of others in World War II, but it just seems a little bit on the nose. And he's, of course, extremely pro-Israel,

as all of these leaders are. Juan Orlando Hernandez was collaborating with Israel as he was, in his words, shoving cocaine up the Yankees' noses, which led to him being jailed in a federal prison in Miami along with his brother, who was marking bags of cocaine to the U.S. with his initials, Tony Hernandez. Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez because they needed to legitimize his national party so they could win another election in Honduras. What happened in Venezuela? As soon as Delci Rodriguez, who Trump says, we'll do whatever we want, comes into power following the violent abduction of Nicholas Maduro and Celia Flores, his first lady, there's an earthquake, a very fortuitous

earthquake, which brings in, who else, Israeli rescuers. I mean, they'll rescue people all around the world except in the Gaza Strip where they have destroyed like 80% of homes. And they come in, I don't know how many people they rescued, but the next thing you know, Delci Rodriguez is meeting in Mir Flores Palace with Israeli military officials. And Israel's relationship with Venezuela is then normalized. In 2009, Hugo Chavez, the nationalist leader of Venezuela, whose first priority was sovereignty, kicked out the Israeli ambassador in protest of Israel's assault on the Gaza. strip that year. And actually the first time I ever saw Delci Rodriguez speak, she was wearing a

kofia to show her solidarity with Palestinians. Next thing you know, the U.S. is in charge, is in Israel's on the ground. Why would that be a priority for anybody? Like, who cares what Venezuela's posture toward Israel was? Yeah, yeah. Why would Maduro's son have to go do a very public meeting at a pro-Israel synagogue in Caracas? Actually? Yeah. We never, But it seems totally irrelevant. I mean, it's across the world. It has no historic relationship. Well, nobody has a historic relationship with Israel. It's been around since 1948. Like, this whole thing has no grounding in like a practical understanding of the world. Like, what is, I'm just confused.

I mean, here's one, like, concrete thing Venezuela did that Israel got out of this. Venezuela removed itself from the international criminal court. a country that whose diplomatic corps ever since the ever since ugo chavez came into power in 1998 has emphasized the importance of international law and the geneva conventions to guarantee their sovereignty because they've been under constant attack from the u.s so they they leave they remove themselves as a signer of the rome statute and leave the iCC because what did the ICC do? They indicted Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes in Gaza. And Netanyahu essentially boasted that this was being done on behalf of him by Marco Rubio when Marco Rubio sanctioned the ICC

like days before Venezuela did that. What is another thing Israel gains out of Venezuela? The Iran war is failing. It is failed. one of the biggest political problems for Trump is the price of oil in U.S. strategic oil reserves, strategic petroleum reserves. The SPR has been at a lower point than 19, it was since 1983. And so Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. The U.S. just signed a deal at gunpoint with Delsey Rodriguez to exploit one-fifth, the Venezuela's oil reserves. And this means that the oil will be instantly transferred or transferred as soon as possible in violation of the Venezuelan constitution with no guarantee of any return to Venezuela to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And then it will fuel the drive for World War III in a war for Israel. So there are many things Israel can extract from this relationship. I just don't understand why, you know, whatever you think of what the Trump administration did in Venezuela, and, you know, it's kind of hard to defend, impossible to defend, really.

But at least you thought, well, maybe it was for the United States. But it seems like the first thing they did when they arrested the leader of the country was to force the new leaders to make nice with Israel. Like, why is that the number one priority of our State Department? The same reason the U.S. went to war on Iran. I mean, this is an administration that's acting on Israel's behalf. It's a slave to Israel. Absolutely. I mean, and in many cases, personnel is policy.

So look at the kind of people in the administration. Susie Wiles, she controls everything the president sees and hears. And you have to get through her to meet with the president, which is why, like, when you. You saw the photos of the administration when they launched the war on Iran on February 28th. There was Team A in Mar-a-Lago, and what was it? Susie Wiles, Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe and Trump.

And then there was Team B who was on the outside, Joe Kent, Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance, the so-called restrainers. Susie Wiles wasn't letting them in the room. And she never was. What was Susie Wiles doing before she was in the Trump administration? Well, she was a major lobbyist. But she also was working for Netanyahu.

And no one knew that when she came in. It was subsequently reported by the Washington Post that when Netanyahu was in a little bit of political hot water and was campaigning for re-election, he called in these super Trump consultants, including Susie Wiles, to help him stage Trump-style rallies. So she literally worked for Netanyahu.

You know, it just goes down the line. Like Harmeet Dillon, she's the head of the Office of Civil Rights in the DOJ. which really increasingly looks like the Office of Israeli Rights. Her law firm is currently, I think she put her brother in charge of it. She's not technically in charge of it. It's called Dillon Law. They are representing a federally registered Israeli foreign agent called Show Faith by Works.

They're listed on the FARA form. Show Faith by Works, their job is to basically propagandize evangelicals for Israel, geo-fence their churches and distribute Israeli propaganda. propaganda. I got leaked audio from an APAC congressional meeting. It was a private off-the-record event. And someone who identified themselves as a 40-year veteran of APAC said, you know, the importance of our lobbying is we go down to congressional districts and recruit people right when they come into Congress. One of them was John Ratcliffe. He said, we went down to Dallas. We heard he was running. He was really good. We've loved working with him ever since then.

Marco Rubio is another one, and Mike Walt is another one. These are our lifelines inside the administration, he said. And of course, Marco Rubio's career has been sponsored heavily or advanced by Paul Singer's donations. Paul Singer being a major Israel first billionaire. So you look at the personnel in there, and look at what happened to anyone who tried to resist their agenda, which was essentially Netanyahu and Israel's agenda, they're not in there anymore. they're like sitting at this, they come by this desk and talk to you,

look at what happened to you. So it just simply follows that Israel will get more or less what it wants. What is the big picture goal? Because like, I think any rational person assessing the facts, as we find them right now in mid-September, 2026, sees the U.S. and the UK really is the last. allies that Israel has in the world and the populations of Bowdo-Wall speak for my country, the population here is becoming aware of the cost, excuse me, of this relationship and

aware of the genocide in Gaza, et cetera, et cetera, like people are mad at Israel. It's just obvious and young people especially. Yeah. So like if you're Israel, you're not stupid. You know that this is, this relationship is going to change, not to your. benefit. What's your plan? What's their plan? What are they doing right now? You mentioned the UK being a key Israeli ally. I just wanted to mention something that recently happened. Andy Burnham comes in and he recognizes where public opinion is in the UK on the Israel question.

So he announces some form of sanctions or that they're not going to buy products from the occupied territories in support of a two-state solution, which is by this point dead. It was a symbolic move. Israel went bonkers. They shut down Heathrow Airport in two hours and 35 minutes. Well, there you go. So hours after his announcement,

Heathrow Airport's air traffic control systems had a glitch. Yeah. Coincidence? It was it? I don't know. Just kind of odd. I had family members stuck in the airport that day, so a couple of them. So I don't know.

Was there any foreign software at work in that airport? You know, I don't think the UK is going to come out and say, we point the finger at Israel and escalate the situation. I mean, they essentially, Israel essentially toppled the leader of the labor party prior to Kirstarmer. They have a lot of power in the UK. What are they doing in the UK? They're destroying whatever's left of democracy there through the courts in order to prosecute activists from this group, Palestine action. Yeah.

Which is, and this is. Correction terrorists. Terrorists. They are now defined as terrorists by the Trump administration because Israel told them to define these British activists as terrorists almost on the same day that Trump lifted sanctions on the leadership of al-Qaeda in Syria, which we can talk about in a second. So what they're doing in the UK is they're having these trials of these activists

who have removed or stopped production of Israeli weapons at four state weapons. facilities owned by Israel, Elbit systems, in the UK. And what they do is they'll come in, they do direct action where they'll like smash up the clean room, they will vandalize some things, they try to avoid harming people. And then they go to court, they go on trial, and they have been exonerated or let out

in case after case by juries of their peers because the juries sympathize with the argument that what these activists are doing is actually saving lives as Israel's committing genocide in Gaza, and that the harm that they prevent is worse than the harm that they caused. And so this has become a real threat to the, not just the British system, but the Israeli project of essentially occupying Britain, and it's war machine as well.

So now what's happening in these trials is the jury won't be told that they're terrorism trials. They think that they're convicting them or acquitting them on criminal charges, and then the judge applies the terrorism charges after. The media is not allowed to know about that either. The media in Britain is not allowed to report on these trials. So we've been reporting on them at the gray zone because we're American. And one of the barristers who's defended Palestine action has himself faced contempt of court charges

because his defense was too effective. He was defending his clients too effectively. So they want to bring that system here. They want to Israel needs to de-democratize Western societies in order to maintain control because the population is turning against them. They need to

brainwash youth and bring like Prager You curriculum into state education systems. They basically need to jail journalists in our country who have interfered with their propaganda objectives like me

and they will activate all their assets to do so, but what they ultimately want, and it sounds kind of extreme, but this is what I've had to conclude, they want global control. As the world forms into a more multipolar world and U.S. Empire seems to be receding somewhat, Israel is still determined to gain control at the heart of Eurasia. And that's where Iran is situated. So imagine, imagine if they achieved regime change in Iran. There was a group associated with, I'm going to forget the acronym for it, but it's like the lobbying group for Reza Palavi, the Potomac-Maryland-based self-proclaimed

crown prince. And they put forward a white paper for like the day after in Iran. And the white paper, it said basically the Mossad will come in and help us purge the Islamic Republic, will carry out a mass purge. Israel will be assisting us in, uh, renunciated. renewing the economy, and they're basically putting Israel at the center of everything in Iran, post-Islamic Republic, post-Iatollah. So Israel gets control of this strategically located country that represents a 3,000-year-old civilization with control over the waterway through which 20% of the world's liquid natural gas passes. What do Russia and China do then?

Certainly Russia would have to deal with Israel, and China probably would as well. and then Israel has the United States pretty much under its thumb through Trump or some democratic tool like Joe Biden was and they have Russia and China being forced to deal with them directly as they exist at the heart of this country

that's being plundered as Venezuela is. What they're doing in Latin America? I mean, that's what they would do in Iran. So that's the objective. But do they have a plan? Did they have a plan? Did Netanyahu actually have a plan?

No. He marched, right into the White House. Remember when he came in February 3rd? Yeah. I remember I was like, I was getting trying to get across town and they were shutting down traffic. It was like a presidential style visit. There were helicopters everywhere. We knew what he was up to. But we found out the details later. He marched into, or maybe you already knew them, he marched into the situation room, sat at the head of the table, Trump sat to the side, which doesn't seem very Trumpian to me. And David Barnaya, the Mossad director at the time, was brought in. And, and David Barnaya, the Mossad director at the time, was brought

in on a big screen. He's now the head of a U.S. weapons company, which is just absolutely, absolutely wild. Yes. He's in the private sector now. Private sector. And they give Trump his marching orders. You are going to bomb this meeting of the Ayatollah and his advisors in Tehran on February 28th. We know it's taking place. And Trump just said, okay, all right, boss, I'll do it. And no one was willing to stand up to Trump. He was surrounded by a bunch of yes men. And that was the plan. And Netanyahu said, look what happened. I don't know if he said this,

but I know what Trump was thinking was, look what we just did in Venezuela. We're going to get an Iranian Delci Rodriguez. Maybe it'll be Reza Palavi. And it'll happen in four days. And he was also, he believed his own bullshit about the protests in January, which I can talk about, which were

absolutely like a militarized operation, instrumentalized by foreign intelligence services, including Israel and the U.S. Very violent. But he believed that the Iranian people are going to come out into the streets and just sweep away this regime.

And the opposite has happened. So Israel actually had no plan except to get Trump in the war to get the U.S. in a state of constant escalation with Iran for as long as possible. That was their only plan. And look at the result. It has been disastrous

for the U.S. economy, as you've been saying, week after week, it's been disastrous for Trump politically. He's at historically low approval ratings. There was a poll out today I saw that showed that most people who believe that the war is affecting their pocketbook interests are going to vote Democrat, 64%. Of course. And the deficit is 40 trillion. This has a lot to do with the war. The war is going to cost over a trillion dollars. Once you factor in in 10 years, inflation, the cost of paying veterans and the rising costs of weapons and so forth, the U.S. is expending munitions to the point where it's having to reposition dad batteries and pack threes from other supposedly more strategically significant locations. So it's been a blow to U.S. Empire. The U.S. as a maritime power is being

kind of exposed as a paper tiger. Like, it's sailors can't reach land. until they go to Thailand, as they've been having food rationed because they were being supplied by bases that were put out of service by Iranian missiles. So it's been a total disaster because Trump followed Netanyahu's marching orders. And that was the only plan.

There's no real long-term plan. No, he's an instinct player, Netanyahu is, obviously. And his instinct is aggression and expansion. It's worked incredibly well. I don't think it'll end well for him. But it doesn't answer the question. Everything you said is consistent with what I know to be true. I think that's exactly what happened.

But it doesn't answer the question why Trump, who intensely dislikes Netanyahu, as everybody does, why would he sit in the subordinate position in the situation room? Why would he take orders from Netanyahu? He took orders from him before the 12-day war. Netanyahu said we're doing this and Trump followed him. That's a fact, I'm not guessing. And Rubio confirmed that in his meeting with the gang of eight when he came out.

That's right. He said, we did this because Israel was going in and we couldn't just leave them alone. Yeah, but, I mean, last summer, even. Same thing. Same thing. And, yeah, BB called him and the sit room said, we're doing it this week. And the rest is sad history. But the point is Trump went along with the leader of a country of nine million people who he dislikes personally

and who was under indictment in his own country. So that's not a picture of power, at least conventional power. Why would you listen to a guy like that? Why would you follow a guy like that to your own political death? What am I missing? Really? You think that's what it is? I mean, that's one big factor.

And you would, I mean, Miriam Adelson is someone who Trump has said has visited him more, along with her late husband, Sheldon, in the White House, than anyone. And when he was speaking at the Knesset, he said, well, I don't know if she really cares about America, Israel's her cause, but she's an important person. I mean, he openly said that. He's, like, very important. Who was, I mean, you were at the inauguration. Who had the best seat in the house better than any member of Congress or incoming secretary?

Who breezed right through the magnetometer without being checked at the church service that morning with Trump? I mean, I was there. She walked right past me and everyone else standing in line, blew right through without a security check. She's not even an American. She's an Israeli warlord, essentially. Yeah. And I was born here, and she marched right past me and Charles. Charlie Kirk was standing right there.

And it was like, this is not a good sign at all. I remember watching it, and I was thinking, we're going to have a war with Iran. Just looking at her right behind Trump. I was like, that's what's going to happen? And we're talking about, what, $300 million of donations to Trump over the years or to his PACs as well. But he got elected. That's where the, of course, I completely agree with you. And I should say you're from Washington as I am too.

So we've spent our lives watching this. So you're right. But by this point, Trump has been reelected. He wanted to get reelected to be vindicated. They called him dead in the water. They called him a criminal. He called him all these things. And he gets reelected president.

So it's like he doesn't need the donors anymore for the Republican Party, but he doesn't care about the Republican Party. So he's basically throwing away his entire legacy, his family's future. All of this is being destroyed because he's following Israel. Why is he doing that? Well, let me just tack on a few things to the point I made before and then move on to another more psychological motive that, a theory about his psychological motives. So about a week after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, his podcast, which was being broadcast on Salem Media, was effectively taken over by a federally registered Israeli foreign agent, which was. was being, yeah. It's called Clock Tower X, which is operating this gigantic, I don't want to say multi-million. It's like 100 million, 50 million. It's one of the biggest foreign lobbying contracts ever. It's operating it on behalf of the Israeli foreign ministry. It's being run by Brad Parskow, who was Trump's chief of staff in 2020. Remember, he got Baker acted, like his house was raided. On video. On video. It's a very ugly scene. He was fired.

I'm actually surprised they fired him given who else they don't fire, but he had created Trump's whole Facebook strategy, including the seemingly bots and probably he was a talented guy. Israel hires him, plucks him out of the wilderness, and he takes over Salem Media, which is one of the largest pro-Maga, pro-Republican, conservative media platforms. They had Charlie Kirk's podcast,

but they have Scott Jennings podcast, who's being talked about as possibly the next White House press secretary. All these people are kind of like involved with the Israeli foreign ministry now. And if you don't like that, then you can leave, but none of them are leaving. And who got a 30% stake in Salem media?

Laura Trump, Trump's daughter-in-law, and I believe Don Jr. So they are seemingly involved somehow, in this contract. And then they also have, themselves are doing business with Israeli drone companies, which are getting contracts

also to do anti-dron technology in Iran. There's all kinds of incentivization to maintain this relationship. But the breaking away from the relationship, and we were just talking about what happened in the UK

at Heathrow, the day that Andy Burnham did a symbolic... What happened in Spain? remind me well oh the seuta the yeah exactly they get invaded you know give the middle finger to Israel the next thing you know Morocco is sending tens of thousands of people into your country yep yep and like every pro-Israel influencer and Israeli official down to idamar ben Gvier was like aha this is what you get you know f around and find out um so you know not doing not following the

program laid out to you by benjamin Netanyahu February 3rd is also de-incentivized. Yes. And this really needs to be... De-incentivized. That's a soft way of putting it. Yeah, you're terrified. So, back in, what was it, 2020,

Mike Pompeo and Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Trump to assassinate the second most powerful official in Iran, who's the head of the Quds force for the IRC, Qasem Soleimani. Only one person in mainstream media criticized that decision. I'm not bragging.

It's the only thing I'll brag about, I was that guy and I took a huge amount of crap for it. I remember. But I thought that was the beginning of war with Iran seemed obvious to me. And it was also the beginning of something else where you know, you bring the U.S. and Iran into a cycle of escalation. And that's what Netanyahu needed to get. He needed Trump to begin to escalate with Iran and he wanted Iran to retaliate.

The Iranian retaliation for Soleimani's killing in Iraq as he was on his way to a peace conference was pathetic. And everyone I interviewed in the Iranian establishment believes that today, if they had hammered U.S. bases the way they're doing now, that this war wouldn't have happened, but that they allowed themselves to be set on this course to war. But what happened with Trump was, he also began to be kind of a psychological prisoner of the retaliation. Right.

And the Israelis started to exploit his worst fear. How was assassination different from murder? So, yeah, I didn't even mention assassination, but you know where I'm going. Assassination is murder? And the distinction that we make between the legitimate use of forced by the state and homicide is either imminent self-defense. Someone's coming at you and you have to kill the person to protect your life or the lives of others or a process sanctioned by the state called a trial. Yeah. So any killing outside of those two is murder, right?

Yeah. I thought that was, aren't those the definitions or no? I would think so. but even if you believe assassination is legitimate, you have to think about the consequences of a figure like Soleimani being taken out. And how do Iranians regard him? Millions of Iranians saw him as a hero

who prevented ISIS from swamping their country with jihadist fanatics who would come and kill them because they were Shia. And he was a direct U.S. ally in the fight against ISIS, who is very effective in defeating them. Actually, ISIS attacked Iran's parliament in 2017, killed a number of civilians,

and Trump essentially mocked Iran and said, if you support terror, you will get terror in return. So Soleimani was fighting that whole project. And again, he was a national hero. Many Iranians wanted revenge on Trump for that. The Iranian establishment does not have a policy of assassinating because they did not want escalation. They wanted negotiation.

But all of these plots start, getting rolled out through the FBI that always seemed to involve confidential human sources and informants who are pushing these mentally vulnerable characters. One in particular involved Asif Mershant, who was a Pakistani national who had traveled from Iran. He was led into the U.S. despite having been flagged on a terror watch list. And apparently all of the intel that got to the FBI about Mershant was coming from Israel. What happens as soon as Mershant comes into the U.S., he's seeking some sort of like business deal or something,

they throw a confidential human source, the FBI at him, who starts pushing him to enact a plot to assassinate Trump. He seems to be going along with it. And his defense in court was, like, I felt like I was a doomed man and there was nothing I could do. he had a very weird trial

but the plot was to have a mob at a like a group of people create a distraction at a Trump rally and then to have a sniper exploit the distraction to target Trump

Butler happens soon after Butler PA Thomas Matthew Crooks who's sort of one of these lone wolf guys who I mean you exposed that he did have a social media

footprint but they were just like he's seemingly quite a large social media footprint which he was clearly in contact with people from foreign countries who we don't who's identities we don't know yeah it didn't seem like there wasn't anything you could find or any investigators could find that connected them to iran oh i don't think he did any connection to iran right well the day after the butler pa plot misses trump's ear by a millimeter the fbi rushes down to houston i think it was houston where marchant was being held in prison he had just been arrested, and they interrogate him about Butler.

And then Mike Walts, who is, I think he was in Congress at the time, one of the lifelines of APEC, one of Israel's greatest allies in Congress, he starts using the opportunity to try to point the finger at Iran for Butler through the Butler investigative commission. war Israel initiates war in June on Iran it's unclear what the U.S. is going to do the war is not going very well for Israel

I think they underestimated Iran's capacity to hit back and to recover after its leadership was assassinated and Netanyahu has a desperate interview on Fox News with Brett Baer where he's trying to get the U.S. into the war and he said Iran is responsible for Butler and he said Iran is responsible for two assassination attempts on Trump. He's referring to Butler and the Mar-a-Lago attempt by Ryan Ralph, Ryan Roth,

which I can talk about in a second. But he understands that's the way into Trump's head is such a liar. And Brett Baer is astonished. He said, what are you talking about? Do you have intelligence on that? And Netanyahu said, yeah, through proxies. But it's just his own BS. And he's trying to push Trump to get into the war by saying Iran's trying to kill you. You have to take them out. So after Trump flash forward, what, eight months, Trump carries out Netanyahu's wish to assassinate Ayatollah Ali Khomeini and his staff and his children and his grandchildren. And Trump comes out and said, I got him before he got me. So clearly, this psychological pressure and a lot of these very dubious assassination plots were affecting the way he was thinking, He actually, during the 2024 campaign, he went on a decoy flight because the FBI told him that IRGC agents were in the country with manpads.

And he went on Steve Whitkoff's jet and left the rest of his staff to go on Trump Force One. So then, so I was in Iran to see this funeral and I was stunned by the amount of anger there. This is after the signing of the MOU. The anger ended the MOU, like along with Trump violating aid of it. terms, but people were in the streets crying, they were furious, they considered Soleimani a hero, but killing how many was like another level. And what they would say is, you know, we considered him to be a father, a teacher, a guide, how could you do this? He was 87 years old. And also, you slaughtered our children and Minab, like, you slaughtered 130 school children on the same day

you killed him. Like, we're not going to take this. We're a strong nation, and we want retaliation. And that means that Trump has to be targeted. And people were holding signs that said, kill Trump. A woman, one woman held up a gold chain and said to me, you know, we're basically collecting a thousand chains for the person who will exact, who will get justice for what was done to how many, like a bounty. So I went, I interviewed the mayor of Tehran, who had run for president, is in the more conservative camp, a critic of the MOU, like a very big critic of the current reformist leadership

that wanted a deal. His name is Ali Reza Zakhani. And I asked him, like, is this the policy now? Like, what do you think of all these calls to target Trump and Netanyahu in the streets from people who are furious about this? And I should also mention he was a friend of Soleimani's

and of Hassan Rouhani, died a mysterious death, the former president, who probably should have, who could have been the next Ayatollah. And he said to me, you know, we have to respect their call for sacred justice if we support the revolution. And, you know, he goes on it. But justice could be achieved by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Justice could, like, revenge could be achieved by removing U.S. bases from the region. Revenge could be achieved through actually rolling back the empire that has been suffocating us. And that's kind of the response of the Iranian establishment. They do not want to target Trump.

They don't see any point in it. I also interviewed an Iranian academic who understands her society much better than me. And she reinforced that point and said Trump is just a figurehead. It wouldn't make any sense anyway. Abbasaragchi, the foreign minister, current foreign minister, current foreign. foreign minister said, Trump is doing a good enough job of destroying his own career in society. Why would we want him dead? And I believe that that's the case. So right after that funeral took place, this is July of this year, NATO happens in Ankara. And the Israelis feed intelligence

to the Secret Service that Trump is going to be, there are IRGC assassins with, again, with manpads, remember that, who are in the country and he can be targeted and according to many reports in mainstream media, Trump was hidden in a food cart it's like a scene out of like a Leslie Nielsen comedy from the 90s. He's hidden in a food cart

and taken out of Air Force One and put in another decoy flight. So the Israelis manipulated Trump into this epic humiliation of hiding in a food court as they had manipulated him into war by exploiting his greatest psychological vulnerability, which is his fear of mortality and his very legitimate fear for the safety of his family. How is this resolved, do you think, the war against Iran? It's going to be a protracted war.

And I think it could escalate right. before the midterms. I saw a report about Trump appointing two unnamed advisors. It's an axios today, which is never to be trusted, but it's an important indication of what Trump administration's thinking, because it's basically like a bulletin board for them. Two U.S. officials are putting forward a post-election plan for the Middle East. Well, they have no plan, and it's going to fail,

and the war will likely continue as a protracted war, there are many dangers in that, as Joe Kent has pointed out, former director of Counterterrorism Center at DNI, who is now considered an enemy of this administration because he told the truth and tried to prevent this war. He's one of Trump's only real friends in the entire administration. I would agree. Just to say he told the truth in a way that Trump really needed to hear.

It was almost nobody else would. The fact that they consider Joe Ken an enemy says everything about that. Well, he believed in America first. Yes, sincerely. So many others who've held on seem to just believe in Trump Incorporated. He is warning of a nuclear strike. I think that's the most dire scenario. I don't think a U.S. ground invasion is very likely.

Iran's economy is suffering. Like when I talk to people I know there who are just like regular middle class people, They are suffering inflation, but they're not going to head out into the streets anytime soon and seek to overthrow their government. There is a real coming together that I saw in Iran. I was like walking through the Taj Rish market in northern Tehran. I was like, you know, just wanting to get some souvenirs on my way out. And, you know, that's an area where the opposition to the Islamic Republic is very strong. where wealthier, secular Iranians live, and, you know, talking to shop owners

and people around there, you see so many women without what, not wearing hijab around there. And you go into the malls at night or the hotels, women are, like, they're dressed like they're going to a club in the United States. Just to give you an idea of the, you know,

the vibe there, the atmosphere. And people were just, when they said, I said them from the U.S., they're never furious with me. They just wanted me to know how furious they were about the murder of the, the girls and the kids in Minab.

And there's a rally around the flag effect. So they're willing to take economic pain. The question is, are we as Americans willing to take so much economic pain? Like gas prices went up like 20 cents this week per gallon. Are we willing to take that for Israel? Are we willing to take more dead American soldiers for Israel who are like black and brown kids who are just trying to advance in life and maybe save up money through the military who are being wasted at,

these bases that no Americans even knew existed, are we willing? I don't think so. No. So what I can say is like this war is just opening up contradictions that didn't exist before between the American public and the Israeli agenda and Trump has been caught in between and he's siding with a foreign country. Except the pain hasn't really started and it was yesterday the diesel fuel on which the entire economy runs, hit 10 bucks in California, a gallon. Yep. That's the, what, the Zionist price hike.

Yes, it's not even, I mean, our fuel pumps aren't even designed to register $10, right? I mean, they're going to have to change the pumps. So that, you can imagine this becoming not just a squeeze or a downturn, but a catastrophe where people in the United States get poor and people in other countries starve and like the cost is really high if this straight remains closed and if the red sea remains closed because of Yemen it's an epic epic catastrophe i agree with robert kagan who said that this is a greater catastrophe for the u.s than vietnam he's coming at it from a different angle than me and it's it's it's an economic catastrophe because it threatens the dollar as the global reserve that's correct currency the 40 trillion

dollar deficit is costing the U.S., the confidence of investors permanently. So that's what they're risking here. And this war is a major factor in that. And how long, so this is like another way to gauge what's actually happening. So Trump does follow commodities prices. Get them on your phone. And he is worried about it. He's absolutely worried about fuel prices, for example, and not just fuel.

Food. those prices go up, he really feels that. The only way out is to constrain Israel. So it's just, it's a binary, it's a choice. It's like disaster at home or loyalty to Israel. And he's, at least as of right now, he's choosing loyalty to Israel. So like, what could possibly explain that behavior? I just think it's the weirdest thing I've ever seen.

And like nobody's being held accountable in the administration. Pete Hags, Seth, he's not being held accountable. He's hiring propaganda. as secret special employees. They just put Erica Kirk essentially, they just made Erica Kirk essentially a Pentagon propagandist too. She was appointed to the board of the Air Force Academy. It's an absolute joke what they're doing.

There's no, there's no sense from Trump that anything that has happened has, that anything hasn't gone according to plan. He keeps saying the Iranian military is destroyed. The Iranian Navy is destroyed. The U.S. controls the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, Ansorala, the Houthis, are advancing and taking unprecedented amounts of territory from the fake Yemeni government,

which is based in a hotel room in Riyadh. They could close the Bab al-Mandeb, which is another extremely strategic waterway. What would that do to the U.S. U.S. economy. There are more cards that Iran can lay down on the table if Trump doesn't start to pull back and find a way out of this. I think he probably does want to find a way out of it. He just doesn't know how. Well, he can't do the one thing that's necessary, which is to constrain Israel. And I just don't understand why. I mean, no matter how much money they promise you or radio shows they

sponsor or whatever they're doing, in the end, you're looking at like becoming the most unpopular president in the history of our country. Yeah. And I mean, his is the midterm strategy is all about getting out the base. It's, you know, Trump won because he went beyond his base. And people who would not have even voted decided to vote for Trump in 2024. His base is dwindling. And part of this also is weaponizing the government to target dissenters and calling everyone to the left of Barry Goldwater in 1964, a communist, the insane anti-Muslim hysteria that they're trying to whip up, exploiting the 25th anniversary of 9-11. They're calling me a socialist and accusing me of being too pro-Muslim.

Yeah. Then you know things have gone completely crazy. But that's all they have left is a very dwindling, cult-like base that largely consists of, you know, Fox News boomers. Is mad about Sharia law? I know they don't like Sharia law because it's... prohibits usury, so I get it, okay? But just kidding, sort of. But sorry, it does. But no, but the point is, I'm not defending Sharia law. Of course, I'm an Episcopalian. However,

I don't remember the last time I was frustrated by Sharia law. It's not like an issue in this country. Prices are an issue. Lack of opportunity is an issue. Drugs are a massive issue. S-S-R-R-I's that are making everyone crazy and causing mass shootings. There are a lot of issues, right? but Sharia law? They're running on Sharia law? Like, who thought this up? That's their strategy against Abdul-Sahid. You know, you saw Jesse Waters ask him about that in their...

That's the candidate in Michigan I supposedly endorsed. That you supposedly... I think like some Manhattan Institute front group said you officially endorsed him. Which is absurd. I don't know anything about him. Did you? Of course not. I don't endorse anybody.

I'm a podcaster, but moreover, I just know the guy he's running against who's a loathsome person who is exactly that Mike Rogers is exactly the Republican you run if you want to lose. And they ran on before he lost. Yeah. Because no normal person ever vote for Mike Rogers. He is the embodiment of everything that is ugly, immoral, and stupid about the national security state. Yeah. He is a tool of repression.

I mean, he's totally for warrantless spying and searches and, like, everything that a conservative should be against. Mike Rogers is not a conservative, to put it mildly. So I said, this is craziness here. Mike Rogers? No way. And they're like, well, you endorse the Muslim guy. Okay. He's like the distillation of everything disgusting about the neocons.

Actually. Craven, stupid. But mostly just doesn't care about the United States and what's happening here. People will say, oh, well, Max Blumenthal, he's a leftist. If we Google them, it says far left. So fine, it's not about me or what I think about this race. It's about what Michiganders think. And their economy is linked to Canada.

Trump kind of screwed Mike Rogers with initiating a trade war with Canada. I mean, so much of Michigan's exports depend on Canada. Cars are being assembled, like they're getting parts from there. So, I mean, there are all of these kitchen table issues that are being completely ignored for these boutique fanatical causes like creeping Sharia. And there's not, Trump is not setting the stage for a new generation of conservatives to come in enthusiastically and support whatever comes after him. I think what happened to TPSA is a great kind of metaphor for what's happening overall with MAGA. It's sort of like a microcosm

for what's happened to Maga, with the untimely death removal of Charlie Kirk, who was being forced to reckon with the fact that his base, the young conservatives, were done with Israel. They were sick of it. They didn't think it comported with America first, and he was starting to get in tune with them. I see no evidence, just in case anyone's watching this and trying to call me some conspiracy theorists.

I see no evidence. I have no evidence that Israel was. responsible for his assassination. But what happened was with one bullet, one of the greatest threats to Israel's control over the movement he represented was removed. He was like the only guy with that level of power who could get in the Oval Office with Trump, who was even willing to lobby Trump against joining the Israeli war on Iran back in June 2025. He was the only one who could get in the way and get in tune with the younger conservative base that was filling up TPSA events, and he's gone, and what replaced him?

Erica Kirk, who seems to be herself a complete tool for the national security state, which is why she's on the board of the Air Force Academy now, whose mother was a defense contractor who helped kind of launch her first foundation, and who has allowed Israel back into the building. Remember, I mean, I broke the story about Dr. Bob, Bob Shillman, the largest donor to TPSA, who is an Israel first centa millionaire, who also sponsored the career of Laura Lumer. He wanted his name on a building at TPSA's campus in, I think, Scottsdale.

And days before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, he denounced him at a private gala, an awards gala in L.A. and said, I'm not giving him the $2 million. I managed to confirm that and reported it. It's true. I don't know if Bob Schillman is funding TPPUSA, but I uncovered a contract. Why did he not give the money?

What was he mad about? That's a great question that I haven't explained. Charlie Kirk was opposing the war on Iran. He was questioning the, he was questioning the pro-Israel control over himself. He went on Megan Kelly's show in May of 2025, or was it later, and complained about Jewish stakeholders and supporters who are becoming hyper-controlling and demanding and telling him that he has to care obsessively about a foreign country.

I also exposed how there was a secret influencer summit convened by the pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman in the Hamptons in August of 20th. and Charlie Kirk was there and he was screamed at by this Zionist lawyer, Natasha Hausdorff, because he started questioning why he had to center everything around Israel and why he couldn't host you at his youth conferences. That's what they were demanding. No Tucker Carlson on the stage. I spoke at a lot of them and really enjoyed it, everyone, you know. So now it's like TPUSA, if you look at the way it's talked about in the conservative grassroots, like any,

or any organic person would talk about it, it's seen as an op or like a sciop. It's regarded with deep suspicion. And I got a leaked contract between them and a group called the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which is a very shady organization, which is the second largest non-governmental donor

to the government of Israel. Its president is based in Israel, and they had pledged $700,000 to TPSA in May of 2025 when Charlie Kirk was alive. And he was, I think what he was saying about Israeli control over the movement, about Iran, was threatening that donation as well as many others. But under Erica Kirk, it's very clear that that donation has continued. And now the TPSA faith events that you see, including one recently in El Paso,

where an Israeli flag was draped on the stage, Those are being sponsored in part by the international fellowship of Christians and Jews. And these events are in churches? They're in churches. And this is just... Why would an American church put, by the way, any national flag in a Christian church? I've never understood that. But certainly a foreign flag in a Christian American church.

Like, why would you do that? Yeah. Well, if you are the international fellowship of Christians and Jews, you basically want them to be, good little foot soldiers for this foreign country's agenda by exploiting their interpretation of the Bible and the end times, the international IFCJ, this group, they have an agenda to plant three million flags in churches globally. But also what they do, they're a deeply corrupt organization. Their founder who's now dead, Yaquille Eckstein, he paid himself $1.2 million. He paid his family hundreds of thousands of dollars. They raise money.

from poor and working class Christians around the, not just in the U.S., but in Latin America, where like half the population lives below the poverty line and they give it to Israeli organizations and extremely wealthy pro-Israel American Jewish organizations

like the Jewish federations. They also are giving money to failing media organizations like Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire, which has had to lay off executives, they have like dwindling viewership, He's been bleeding YouTube subscribers. And so he has a paid partnership with IFCJ,

and he hosts interviews with their new president, Ja'I.L. Eckstein, who else gets paid partnerships with them? Mark Levin, I think has one. Ted Cruz, and this is wild, this is so wild. Ted Cruz has a paid partnership with IFCJ and... Now? Now, and... He's a sitting senator.

Well, you know, seemingly. that would be legal because they're technically a non-governmental group, but he's also taking ads, ads are running on his show on I-Heart Media from the Israeli government itself. And I-Hart media has an arrangement with Ted Cruz to donate that revenue to a pack, I think it's called Truth and Courage, associated with Ted Cruz that supports his re-elections. What? So indirectly, it looks like the Israeli government is supporting Ted Cruz, whose offices, basically um wait is that illegal can a u.s senator take foreign money for a campaign you would think it would be but uh i don't know pam bondi got rid of the foreign corrupt practices division

of the department of justice which is involved in farrah right when she came in uh so there there there's all kinds of this is this is shady i don't know why it's legal it was upsetting charlie kirk um and now there's no resistance to Israel or these Israeli proxies. Actually, after Charlie Kirk was killed, the IFCJ International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which channels money from working class Christians to powerful Jewish groups and Israel, hosted an event in Jerusalem alongside the Israeli foreign ministry,

and they gave an award to Erica Kirk in the name of Charlie Kirk. And they wanted to basically claim Charlie Kirk and bury this whole thing, that he was, this whole crisis that he had caused for them. And Erica Kirk started getting criticized when word leaked that she was going to accept the prize

because, you know, as we understand, younger conservatives are not very happy about the way Israel is influencing the U.S. government. And so Andrew Colvitt, who's their PR guy, said, no, this is all fake. Erica Kirk had nothing to do. do with this. And it was too soon. It was too soon for them to embrace Israel. But then she goes on a

town hall with Barry Weiss on CBS, like a very eerie and cringeworthy town hall. The whole thing felt staged. Barry Weiss tried to humiliate her, really, I thought. There was an element of that. Barry Weiss being the self-proclaimed Zionist fanatic, who is the editor-in-chief of CBS News installed by Larry Ellison's son, who's himself very connected to Israel. And Erica Kirk said, why would anyone hate Israel? Me and Charlie went there and we walked when we saw the Bible come alive. How could anyone hate that place? Charlie loved Israel.

And so she's already trying to reverse his position. She was asked, do you oppose the war on Iran? And she refused to answer the question. So that's gone. But what's also gone is TPSA's credibility. And since I published that leaked contract and my whole analysis of everything that's happened over the past year at the gray zone. All we've heard from TPSA is that a statue of Charlie Kirk was defaced at their campus,

and that's all they're focusing on. They're not responding to anything. Like Andrew Colvin didn't respond to me. And I hope they produced CCTV footage showing that, and they catch whoever did that, which is disgraceful. But that's what they're focused on. It's so sad to see. And I really have, obviously, I know all those people,

and I've tried to get, and I like a lot of the most of them, really. I like most people. But I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and they're in a super tough spot and I get it. Oh, yeah. One thing I really do resent is the idea that when you bring up stuff like this, they, some of the people you mentioned will say to you, you know, you're kind of obsessed with the Jews.

It's like, well, I'm in no sense obsessed with the Jews, obsessed with my kids. And a lot of things, but not the Jews at all. other people are obsessed with Israel in a way that's really destructive and ugly, I think. But it's not even, quote, Jews who are doing this. It's the Christian Zionists who are doing it. And so it's like not a good faith response at all. Why is there an Israeli flag in a church at your event? Shame on you.

Like it's super simple. And they'll be like, oh, you hate the Jews. Okay. Nope. Don't hate the Jews. Hate that behavior. Isn't the point of Christian Zionism to make Christians obsessed with the Jews? because you place Jews at the center of history

and you are dependent on the Jews in order to achieve the rapture. I've read the New Testament a lot, like every day, and I just don't see any of that in the New Testament. So I really don't know what it is exactly. I think there are an awful lot of very nice Christian Zionists who are decent people, and I would give them my routing number

and have no fear of theft. However, there is a spell that settles over people, and you wind up with a lot of people, including some I know, who are like, no, no, no, we need to support people who reject Jesus as they kill Christian children because Jesus wants us to. And it's like, can you hear yourself? That is not what the New Testament tells us. Like, I'm just, I don't know where you're coming up with that. Well, yeah, I mean, that would be one Christian interpretation. I don't think it's a Christian interpretation. Another Christian

interpretation comes from Pastor John Hage, which is that all Jews need to be gathered in the quote unquote holy land, which is greater Israel in order for the rapture to take place, and that Hitler actually was part of the rapture because he helped establish Israel through the Jewish genocide in Europe, and that Herzl was also part of the rapture, and that he brought, he created this concept through which Jews could be in gathered. He said that. He called it. Hitler was a hunter, and Herzl was a fisher, something like that. he also said that that the anti-

I mean he said so many bizarre things but the point is they want Christians to be obsessed with the Jews and they want them to be phylo-Semitic to the point where I get deeply uncomfortable philosemitism feels like the other side of the coin of course

from anti-Semitism have you ever heard the ads that IFCJ this Israeli based group which is sponsored TPSA has been running like all across the radio in the U.S. They come on and they say, you can save one Jew for $700, you can rescue a Jew from a life of anti-Semitism by sending them on one of our freedom flights to Israel. Give us your money and save a Jew.

And it's like, look at the state of Jewish life in the U.S. Do we need to be saved? I mean, this is crazy, but they've convinced people that they have to give them their money to do that. I think that's such a smart point. I used to, yeah, they used to hear this from, you know, I knew a couple black leaders who I didn't agree with on a lot of things, but they always hated white liberals and I did too. We hate them for different reasons, but they dislike white liberals because they would have this sort of fake, worshipful attitude like, you're holy because you're black, and they're like, it makes me uncomfortable. Like, I'm just a person. It's important to treat people as

human beings and not obviously denigrated or dehumanize them, of course, that's evil, but also not deify them. That's also evil. Like they're people, just like us, just like me, just like you. Do you know what I mean? Like there's a very, that is the flip side of hate, actually. Yeah, yeah. And you are told in Christian Zionist churches, and there's actually a film, I'm forgetting the name. It was made by Israeli filmmakers, showing a church in Appalachia, where the pastor is telling young people that the Jews are better than you. Those are his exact words.

It's going viral on X right now, clips of this film. But I've seen that, you know, going to Christians United for Israel conferences and seeing the way they treat me when they see my name is Blumenthal. How do they treat you? They're like, oh, Blumenthal, wow.

Well, you know, you're Jewish, and we just believe that, you know, you are special and you are blessed. And they want to be Jewish. they blow shofars and they wear talit you know the jewish prayer cloth and they they basically like impersonate jews it's kind of like a minstrel show um i had the same reaction like a black person would have to seeing like al jolson you know in his prime and and and in israel's behind this whole thing apact helped set up that organization uh they are dependent on that organization and they are

running a basically philosemitic minstrel show across the heartland so how does this i mean it doesn't feel like this whole moment can end well like what's your how do you think in the end this is resolved i don't know well like what's going to happen to me when i walk out i don't know i mean by the way i don't think you've said i mean i know you haven't said anything hateful or unfair i i you know you said a lot of things i haven't personally reported, but I think you're a meticulous reporter. I don't think you've been attacked too much for being wrong. I think you've been attacked for having unpopular opinions, which are two different things. Yeah. I mean, how will this all end? From my point of view, I can't. We've got two worse. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not Professor Jang. No. I kind of love that guy.

Every time we had him on, I must have gotten 100 texts. He's, this is an op. It's a sci op. And it's like, okay, first of all, what isn't? But I'm not even or whatever. But I still think he's interesting. Yeah, I, I, I crossed past with him in L.A., so I interviewed him driving around, and we were like driving around Skid Row, and I was just getting his impressions, because I'm in favor of engaging with people with different perspectives. Oh, me too. And I got the same thing, like 100, 100 people, probably from another perspective saying he's an op or he's this or that. But don't you think he's interesting as a thinker? It was an interesting conversation. I avoid, people love to hear people make bold predictions and then try to back it up

and double down even when they're proven wrong. Of course. Oh gosh. And I'm just not going to, I'm not going to do that. I guess I just feel like we've got simultaneous crises accelerating at once. You've got this war in Eastern Europe. You've got this war in the Middle East and you have the collapse of the two-party system. What hasn't collapsed? But I mean, it's been revealed as fake. and you have very intense discontent at the center of both parties, and then you have this looming financial disaster. That's a lot at once. Yeah.

It would seemingly be a major blow to unipolar U.S. power. Yeah. I think, you know, the whole world of that the whole psychological world that the neocons created in the 1990s as reality. Like they actually convinced the American political class, a large section of American society, and U.S. corporate media, that their worldview was reality.

And they got the Iraq war out of it and so on. They did. That reality has completely shattered. And what we're going to see is just an increasing, growing clash between our, I don't know what to call them. It would be crude to call them the ruling class. But that's what they are. A 0.1% of the United States who is increasingly afraid of the rest of the public knows they no longer have consensus for their agenda. No leadership in either party has real credibility or identity after.

Trump. We can't even, no one can even visualize who the Democratic candidate might be. That's right. There is a deep-seated fear. Or the Republican candidate, for that matter. There's a deep-seated fear of stochastic violence or terrorism from the 0.1% carried out by lone wolf individuals like Luigi Mangione against the ultra-rich, as well as direct action protest. and they're classifying everyone as terrorists, which we all saw coming after the Patriot Act was passed, and now it's sort of reaching its culmination. And so what we can say is the U.S. will be less democratic.

The U.S. public will be less economically stable. The country will be more politically unstable, and there will be more and more desire for a kind of political insurgency, yet there's no clear leadership. Who are the leaders right now? Who are the figures that people look to? One of them is you.

I never would have thought that, although, you know, having known you for several years, I'm not entirely surprised that now you can like walk through an airport in a liberal city and people are like approving of what you're saying. People look to comedians. like Jimmy Dorr or Tim Dillon,

comedians have far more credibility in our culture than politicians and people are looking for real credible independent journalism that isn't corporate journalism because they finally understand the point that Michael Parenti made

in his book, Inventing Reality, which is one of the most important books about the media, which is that the concept of reality or of objectivity within the media is a ruse or a device which corporate media enforces in order to enforce their own

ideology, which is now coming out. What is their own ideology? It's whatever Palantir's ideology is. It's whatever Larry Ellison's ideology is. It's whoever their corporate master's ideology is. And of course, they are militantly Zionist as the U.S. population is turning against a special relationship with Israel. So in that respect, it's a generally good time for media. And the problem is there's no political leadership to guide this anywhere. And it may be off limits in our political system that will be exposed very shortly. Yeah. I mean, there is a red line there somewhere. I mean, it's one thing to talk about what changes we should have on a podcast, say, It's another thing to try to affect those changes in the political arena.

And that's when we find out exactly. Yeah, I mean. What's up? Yeah, I mean, I agree. But I think do Americans want a violent revolution? No. No, of course. They want to see real reforms.

And we haven't seen them. I don't think there have been any important reforms in my entire life. Never. All we've seen. We still have carried interest in the tax code. NAFTA. And what happened to Ross Perra when he came. campaign against it. The Federal Communications Act, the deregulating media, no real antitrust

legislation, nothing to bring down prices. I mean, it's just a constant conveyor belt of deregulation, and still the public has nothing to hope for right now. So that's, so I don't, So what can I say? It sounds like a black pill, but I just got to say one thing because I can't, and it's about me, so I'm embarrassed. But I just have to say it because I just realized it. So 1996, 30 years ago, I'm working at the weekly standard for Bill Crystal with Bob Kagan, David Brooks and the whole cast of neocons. I got along with them all, John Podhardt's, and I'm 26 or whatever, and Bill Crystal assigns me a piece on Ross Perot. and basically my marching orders are he's crazy go prove it so i write this piece and it was my first cover story and it was called is he nuts and bill crystal called around and got me in every tv show to promote this piece or whatever and i remember feeling it was a decently written piece was incredibly

nasty in the way that young people write really nasty magazine pieces as i know you know and it was it was 25 years before i realized i've been completely used to my shame i mean i agreed to it. I did it. It's all my fault. But I was used to stop Perrault, not because he was crazy. Everyone in politics is crazy. He's like one of the least crazy people in politics. He's like one of the least crazy people and probably married to the same woman his whole life, right? He wasn't crazy really compared to what? Lindsay Graham, John McCain? No, because he had a take on economics that wasn't populist exactly, but it wasn't neoliberal. And that was the real threat. And they hated him for that.

Yeah. Yeah. And he was a extremely wealthy, eccentric character who is comfortable in his rank, who couldn't be pushed around and didn't care. Smart. That's the fear or the fear of someone like a Roosevelt taking on the economic royalist who comes from American aristocracy. I think there's a fear of you for the same reason that you just feel too comfortable in who you are.

I don't know if you would ever consider running. I have no interest in running for anything ever, but I certainly feel comfortable in who I am and I'm not intimidated by them. that's for sure. Who are these people? Yeah. That's how I feel. But anyway. Yeah.

And I want, you know, that's how I come out of this whole episode of being targeted by Randy Fine and Laura Lumer is like, I'm not going to be intimidated. I'm going to escalate journalistic activities. I was actually a couple weeks ago, not far from here in Vermont at the Bread and Puppet farm. And that's, you know, one of the, it was one of the, it was one of the, the first and now the last sort of anti-imperialist puppet troops, and they put on this really fun anti-war circus, and people come from miles around to watch it, and I gave a talk there. They hosted

me to talk in a barn. And I learned about the history of Bread and Puppet. It was founded by this figure named Peter Schumann, who's now 92. His family were liberal Germans. They were not Jewish, but they opposed the Nazi regime. They fled Nazi Germany. He met a woman, Elka, Nearing, I believe her name was, who helped him sharpen his politics. And I learned about her grandfather, who was named Scott Nearing, who apparently with his wife, had a farm not far from here where we're sitting, and he helped popularize the homesteading movement. Scott Nearing was one of the major opponents of World War I. He saw it as kind of a war for the plutocrats, that the only winners of this war in which, like the senior class of Princeton was liquidated in minutes in battles,

was the plutocracy. And you know, you read his arguments then and what he was saying in debates. It's very similar to what I'm hearing now from opponents of the Iran War. And he ran for Congress in New York against Fiorella LaGuardia, who was coming back from World War I as this great war hero. and the Republican Party and the Democratic Party closed ranks and essentially conspired to stop Scott nearing from winning a congressional seat

because he opposed what both parties truly agreed on. He opposed the duopoly back then. He was prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He was basically driven out of polite society and that's how he got into homesteading and selling maple syrup. He thought it was the only way he could have intellectual freedom and it brought him up here to where you spend a lot of time. And so I think we have to

consider that like politics within both parties is increasingly off limits to people who think independently and are willing to call out bankers' wars. Where is the path forward? And I don't have an answer to that. I'm a journalist. Could there be a third party, including in this in this upcoming presidential campaign that could actually bring people together that could put the divisive culture war issues to the side and focus on what people really seem to be agreeing on.

Opposition to AI superintelligence, Skynet, opposition to data centers taking over our resources and communities, opposition to flock cameras, opposition to the special relationship with Israel, which is driving us to war destroying our economy. Support for like reforms. Do you think that's possible in America anymore?

I haven't the faintest idea. I hope so. I hope so. But I do think it'd be tough with the current system. I do think. But I don't know. We'll find out. It's mid-September. We've got the midterm elections, the first Tuesday in November, and I think it'll be a much clearer picture after that. I will be reading you as I always do, and I'm just grateful you spend all this time here. Max Blumenthal. Great seeing you. And good luck, man. They want to hurt you, but I'm thankful for you.

Same to you. Thank you.