Tucker interviews Max Blumenthal

Video

Some things that particularly interested me are in bold. One thing that stood out was that TPUSA under Erika Kirk has a complete about face, with her getting an award from an Israeli organization and saying how much Charlie loved Israel. And the Christian Zionists with Israeli flags in their churches, and horrible politicians like Mike Rogers in Michigan. And Ted Cruz’s podcast being sponsored by Israel.

Tucker [00:00:05] 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 someone’s gonna 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?

Max Blumenthal [00:00:38] Yeah. And this wasn’t the first time the Trump administration had gotten heavy with me over my reporting. Um, I was actually arrested and jailed on first false charges that were dropped quickly, uh, during the first Trump term. That’s a long story, but we’ve reported on it at the gray zone. And, uh.

Tucker [00:00:57] I spent a couple days in jail.

Max Blumenthal [00:00:59] I spent a couple days in DC 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 uh Legal representation that encouraged me to sue at that time because it was just completely fake Uh, 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.

Tucker [00:01:46] I said they pull you out of customs line

Max Blumenthal [00:01:48] Yeah, yeah, they were waiting for me, Mr. Blumenthal. And they said, we’ve been watching you on Judge Napolitto. I watched your last appearance on Judge Napolit, referring to Judge Andrew Napolitano, but kind of like, you know, a tap on the shoulder, like big brother’s 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 a crackdown. 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 now, 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. I 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 is a like a month before Israel launched its first war on Iran which ended with Operation Midnight Hammer. So anyway the the 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 Khamenei. And it was going to be the largest funeral in history. And indeed it was. Um, I witnessed it as a reporter. I covered a lot of things there, which I can talk about in detail, but you know, what, what, one of the things I was reporting on was evidence of us and Israeli war crimes. For example, I visited a neighborhood in Eastern Tehran that had been just completely destroyed Gaza style and it, you know was destroyed without much reporting. Um, 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 and 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 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

Tucker [00:05:37] We’ll see you later.

Max Blumenthal [00:05:38] An active synagogue. It was an active 50 year old synagogue called the Rafi Nia synagogue in central Tehran. I was one of the first American reporters to visit it or my colleague. Wyatt Reid had also visited it And you know several other sites gandhi hospital

Tucker [00:05:54] ever explain in the coalition, US or Israel, why we would bomb a synagogue in Iran?

Max Blumenthal [00:05:59] 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 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 say, 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 Avi Schleim documented in 1952, 1953. Um, so. So anyway, I’m doing this reporting. I’m reporting on the, I’ve reported from the funeral. Uh, Trump has previously said, you know, that these large crowds you see at funerals of Islamic Republic leadership, who he or Israel assassinates 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 Who are in completely connected to Israel and no one else like it was it was an Israeli propaganda operation targeting me. Laura Loomer was obviously leading the way on

Tucker [00:08:06] This was not an organic uprising of American citizens online.

Max Blumenthal [00:08:10] 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. Um, 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, um, character, assassinate me online. Um, so besides Laura Loomer, we’ll talk about in a second, there was Canary mission, they were targeting me. They created a dossier about me. They said, um, something like I dedicated my life to the Ayatollah, some really insane statement.

Tucker [00:08:48] I was there to officially endorsed him.

Max Blumenthal [00:08:51] 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’d converted to Shia Islam and prayed and made homage, 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 the Wexner Foundation, named for the best friend of Jeffrey Epstein, and they are American-Israeli dual citizens.

Tucker [00:09:35] All bought his house on Fifth Avenue, that same guy.

Max Blumenthal [00:09:38] That same guy, yeah, and who I think helped Howard Lutnick buy the house next door. So I’m being targeted by vice grad. May I ask you, sir?

Tucker [00:09:48] Evidence that he helped Howard Lutnick buy the house next door?

Max Blumenthal [00:09:51] I’m pretty sure that that that they, um, helped him buy the townhouse next door. If not, uh, you know, we can edit it out or I’ll retract it, but I’m pretty sure, that’s the case. Amazing. Uh, they definitely shared a wall. Yeah. Um, but that’s, this is totally peripheral to the story I’m telling. The story I am 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 like writing an op-ed criticizing Israel for their student paper.

Tucker [00:10:34] Wait, an Israeli propaganda outfit funded by Epstein’s financier has worked with the State Department to decide who to deport?

Max Blumenthal [00:10:43] It’s been reported that Marco Rubio State Department was relying in part on Canary Mission to target students. And Canary mission was founded in 2015 to ruin the lives of US college students who were participating in Palestine activism on campus by doxing 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 Visegrad 24, which seems to be, you know, shilling for the UAE as well as Israel. And then Laura Loomer 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, for what? For what? For simply reporting from Iran. 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 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 this 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 Loomer has become their go to propagandist and they use her. They kind of outsource her, but also she’s able to, uh, 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 deportations. So it’s like his ass is 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 US 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. So why would they be frightened of her? Because there are powerful forces behind her, including. Some extremely powerful Zionist crime bosses.

Tucker [00:13:42] You’re absolutely right, they’re afraid of her. I have seen it.

Max Blumenthal [00:13:44] I’m in. You know who’s behind her who 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 boletsky the leading neo-nazi in Ukraine and whitewashing him and then you are going to a energy plant for a company called D tech, which just seems completely random, whose board member is Jeffrey Piot, the guy who is handing out cookies in the Maidan in 2014 with Victoria Newland. Who owns D tech? It’s Rinat Akhmetov, 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. Uh, 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 wanna 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 Adelson to Bill Ackman, I don’t know who they are.

Tucker [00:15:06] But I think we can all agree, this is not the way like a country does diplomacy.

Max Blumenthal [00:15:12] But this is what happened to MAGA. They’ve driven out everyone who believed in anything Trump campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, like national sovereignty, for example, America first rather than Israel first, not continuing the Ukraine proxy war. Zelensky is now asking for $28 billion from the US. 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 Loomer is attacking you right now, along with other figures who have a very murky relationship with the Trump administration, like this Jenica 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 .civ email. This was reported in the Washington Post, yes.

Tucker [00:16:17] So this is someone who’s attacking people politically online all the time, who’s getting paid in U.S. Tax dollars to do that?

Max Blumenthal [00:16:27] 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 Loomer is the face of MAGA right now. And when that’s the face of your movement, it doesn’t stand for anything anymore except the raw Machiavellian exercise of power. Yes.

Tucker [00:16:51] And looting.

Max Blumenthal [00:16:52] And looting, corruption, and genocidal bloodlust, which is something she represents. She’s, you know, after the, 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.

Tucker [00:17:30] Then then what’s the difference between saying that and like all Jews should be deported like what’s 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. It all seems disgusting

Max Blumenthal [00:17:49] I think it disgusts most people, but this is what they’ve been reduced to. And who is, 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.

Tucker [00:18:16] Activity. I’ve stepped on your story like 10 times. What happened when you got back?

Max Blumenthal [00:18:20] No, it’s my fault because I told I told it the long

Tucker [00:18:22] Well, there’s so much going on, I mean, that’s…

Max Blumenthal [00:18:25] But I wanted to kind of prompt everyone watching this, like help them understand why this happened. 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… But you’re an American citizen. I’m an American Citizen. You’re an America Citizen. You have no rights when you cross the border. You were born here.

Tucker [00:18:58] You were born here, you have no other passport, correct? Correct. So how do you forfeit your American constitutional rights?

Max Blumenthal [00:19:07] Once you, so 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 US soil. What airport was this? This was Dulles, appropriately named International Airport. And so I come back and that all happens to me. I got the four S’s on my ticket coming back. I am questioned and they’re asking me questions that seem to follow the same line that Loomer or whoever was handling her or backing her was pursuing. And you know, 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 gonna be there for hours and hours and they are going to use that. Essentially to punish you at the end of the questioning, they, and they searched my bags and everything, which, you know, they wouldn’t have a right to do to you outside of there without a warrant and individualized suspicion, right? They then demanded that I open my phones and you know anyone watching this, if you’re concerned about having your phones opened or sees pay close attention to what I’m thing. Said, uh, we’re just going to check for evidence of criminal activity and CSM. And so just give us your pass codes, which, 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 pet? You’re calling me a pedo. Like, what the hell’s wrong with you? You know, here, just take my phone and there’s those are my kids, you know, but I’m not stupid. So I was like, no. That is a violation of my constitutional rights. And they said, well, then just give us your phones. And from there, if you don’t give your phones, they have, I’ve been told, revoked people’s passports temporarily. So they took two phones I had. Oddly, they didn’t take my other devices or seem that interested in 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 was just like they were trying to harass and punish and intimidate me and to satisfy Laura Loomer and whatever Zionist crime bosses are behind her. A few days later, I go to Janine Younis, who is a lawyer, who is true. I’m sure what happened at the end of the story, did you get your phones back? Well, I’m gonna tell you how I got them back. So I go to Janine Eunice, she’s a true free speech warrior. Like not like the fake free speech warriors who only defend the free speech of conservatives or.

Tucker [00:22:20] Whatever interests they represent.

Max Blumenthal [00:22:21] Yeah, whatever. And then, and then when, you know, when someone says Israel did a naughty thing, then they want them to be imprisoned. So she’s not Alan Dershowitz. She’s not Allen Dershawitz 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, they do hook them to machines and run a program called celebrate through the phones to brute force, open them. That’s it. 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 without a warrant. Warrantless seizure is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. So we filed this lawsuit. We actually went to court at the Fourth District in Northern Virginia, not the Fourth, yeah, the Fourth 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 gonna have to produce some level of discovery to explain what they did with my phones. Yeah, 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 you have, 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 Belmonte 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 at 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 has escalated. Because- 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 US are retaliating against me. Uh, weirdly on Shabbat, uh, 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 under on congressional letterhead through Laura Loomer’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. Uh, 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 U S media to produce. Massive amounts of evidence or point to the evidence that Israel had killed many of its own citizens on October seventh by initiating something called the Hannibal directive. 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 killing them And I was heavily attacked for that in Israeli media. Even Haaretz the supposedly left Israeli publication called me

Tucker [00:27:07] Yeah, is that a real a real concept?

Max Blumenthal [00:27:09] Yeah, it’s a real concept that’s been confirmed. It’s been even by the former Israeli defense minister, a colonel serving on that day said they enacted a mass Hannibal. It’s being confirmed that in Kibbutz Berry, an 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 hostage, 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 one of the lone survivor witness to that, provided testimony in Hebrew and 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 Atrocities 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. Yediyot Aronot 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 like many occupants inside. Haaretz said a free fire order was given on that day and possibly hundreds ofstrikes were carried out under the auspices of the Hannibal directive. So, I mean. This is 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 like. 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 Abduch 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 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 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 reporting, I mean 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.

Tucker [00:30:38] So they hated you with a unique passion, I would say.

Max Blumenthal [00:30:42] 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 Loomer 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? Who, 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 Goyish Defense League or the Goyim Defense League were like through leaflets on the ground, um, you know, he’s enforcing the IHRA definition in Florida of antisemitism, which is if you criticize Israel, you’re an antisemite.

Tucker [00:31:52] The majority of the definitions in the official list of definitions pertain to the state of Israel, not to Jews.

Max Blumenthal [00:31:57] Yeah, he said he would like to see, I think he said he would 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 you would fare in Gaza, given your

Tucker [00:32:22] He’d be last man standing.

Max Blumenthal [00:32:24] Yeah, I’m sure, you know, it’s ironic to have a figure like him calling calling for people to be starved and he’s a 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, that 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 us has to attack israel because israel’s the apple of god’s eye and 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 burkas and Laura Loomer. I mean, it’s pretty clear she’s being backed by some pretty powerful Zionists. So, 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 you know This administration seems to be capable of anything so I don’t know where it can go but I I’d 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.

Tucker [00:34:22] 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 going to defend, if I am selling the Apple iPhone, I’m telling you all the things the iPhone does. It’s amazing, it’s a camera, it is a Telephones or technology if I’m sure but the people making Israel’s case in public are people like Randy Fine

Max Blumenthal [00:35:01] who was just named the 45th most influential Jew in the world by the Jerusalem Post. But why wouldn’t you get?

Tucker [00:35:10] 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

Max Blumenthal [00:35:26] Yep. What is that? Well that that’s 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 in the West? It would be a disaster for Zion ism because there would no longer be a way to justify Israel waging war after war. Building walls and de facto concentration camps around the indigenous Untermenschen unless it were a sanctuary for Jews who were experiencing antisemitism and had nowhere else to go. So it’s needed. Then you have a whole antisemitism industry. What would Jonathan Greenblatt do without the specter of constant antisemitism, which is why they have to keep redefining antisemitism 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 like. What did it, it used to be what anyone who hates the Jews, now it’s anyone who the Jews hate. That’s, 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 multimillion dollar organization with 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, uh, and that they’re conducting spying operations inside activist organizations. Uh, with Jewish life were normalized and we were just like, Hey, we love America, we are experiencing a golden age here. We’re like the Episcopalians he his 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

Tucker [00:37:28] 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, I 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 didn’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.

Max Blumenthal [00:38:03] 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 at each others throats the Ashkenazim and the Mizrahi 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. They started going to the kibbutzim and they brought their guitars.

Tucker [00:38:41] There’s a lot of immigration that year from the United States to Israel.

Max Blumenthal [00:38:44] And, you know, so Zionism became this dynamic global force with 1967, which was a war of choice that Israel launched that was totally unnecessary. Um, and they portray themselves as this underdog. Now that 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 like he he rapped to feeling [Jewish] for the first time after October 7th with Bill Ackman This guy runs around rapping to feel in on people Without if Israel’s at peace it doesn’t need you anymore and you have nothing to do and then your identity You know your identity comes into question like I don’t have anything to do I don’t have anything thing to donate to that makes me feel Jewish that country doesn’t need me anymore. What do I do? What am I? Like, am I gonna actually go and like 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?

Tucker [00:39:56] Am I not going to drive to dinner in the Hamptons on Saturday?

Max Blumenthal [00:39:59] So, I mean, it’s this is 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 it’s, they need this transcendental identity, um, as they start to experience mortality, Sheldon Adelson, I meant, 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. 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, the reality of Jews in the world or even Jews in Israel who are in a state of complete social crisis right now. Yes.

Tucker [00:40:56] Can you just give a short summary of what that crisis is?

Max Blumenthal [00:41:01] Well, 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 couple of months and write. Off and on for five years I was working on that book. And it’s mostly about Jewish Israeli societies. It’s a portrait a society that was poised to commit genocide. And why.

Tucker [00:41:32] You saw that then?

Max Blumenthal [00:41:33] I saw it then and, you know, I took a look at the psyche of particularly Jewish Israeli youth and you, 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 the 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 US media. They block traffic and the secular part of the society or the Zionist part of the society hates them.

Tucker [00:43:04] And what I don’t think hate is an overstatement based on what I’ve seen.

Max Blumenthal [00:43:07] Yeah, in many ways they hate them more than they hate Hamas.

Tucker [00:43:09] I totally agree. I’ve seen it in Israel. It’s sad actually to see it. The division is so

Max Blumenthal [00:43:15] Bitter. Yeah, and this is going to this this bitterness is going to grow along with the bitterness of the world towards Israel. Then you have all these reservists like who served in Gaza who committed horrific crimes. There’s a film out right now that just 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 are not getting the support we need. We’re all on drugs and we’re all suicidal. They, you know, 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 them to be forced into service or they’re gonna go crazy. The ultra-orthodox parties are keeping Netanyahu’s coalition together. United Torah Judaism. And I think there’s a good chance Netanyah who could win. So this crisis is going to increase their civil strife. Now, could it be a civil war later? Uh, very possibly, especially if Netanyahi who doesn’t have a big war to distract everyone, like the war on Iran, um, And what, and should we, should we condemn the ultra-orthodox? Should we, who are the good guys and who are 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 were. 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 Uh 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, they just, 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 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. We don’t know where it ends.

Tucker [00:47:23] That’s within Israel, and yet all of a sudden, despite, I’ve lost track of how many fronts Israel is fighting on.

Max Blumenthal [00:47:31] According to Netanyahu, it’s eight. We are the eighth front in the United States. He said that at a meeting with US influencers who seemed to be on Israel’s payroll.

Tucker [00:47:43] I don’t even know what that means. Mean like attacking you?

Max Blumenthal [00:47:45] Well, sure, sure. I am a target in his war. You are the top target probably. It’s a prop and it’s a propaganda war. Yeah. 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 illegal war and it is a political war. Right.

Tucker [00:48:10] So that’s a lot for any country of nine million people to undertake simultaneously. It’s also obviously disgusting, but it’s just a lot of stuff. It’s expensive. It’s a lotta 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 are 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.

Max Blumenthal [00:48:49] Am I imagining this? 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 Abelardo de la Espriea in Colombia. And in one of the first speeches, he basically pledged loyalty. After he won, Abelard, who was the former lawyer for the cartels, pledged, loyalty to Israel. Why Israel? But what does Columbia have to do with Israel? Ava, I think it was Ava Morales, the former president of Bolivia. He called Columbia the Israel of Latin America. Um, they were getting a lot of Israeli weapons training. I mean, going back to, um, 1984, this will help explain some things about this. Um, very weird phenomenon, but the Congress passes the Boland amendment during the height of the Contra war. Um, 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 um, so that was

Tucker [00:49:58] So the last real attempt was the Bowman Amendment? Yeah.

Max Blumenthal [00:50:01] Um, so Ephraim Rios-Mont was a U S backed dictator who was also close to like the Christian right, Christian Zionists, like, uh, Pat Robertson, he was the first evangelical president of, and Israel comes in and says, we will supply him, we’ll give his soldiers Uzis to basically mow down the Mayans and the what’s left of the Guatemalan insurgency and destroy entire villages. And we will train them. Rios Mont said that our model for the Venezuelan, the Guatemalan soldier is the Israeli commando. And Reagan won’t have to sign off on anything. And we will show how valuable we are as a U.S. Ally. So 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, Daniel Nuboa. And I saw a report a few weeks ago that in Ecuadorian schools, they’re now gonna 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 Hernández because they needed to legitimize his national party so they could win another. Win another election in Honduras. Uh, 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, uh, 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 Miraflores 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 Delce Rodriguez speak, she was wearing a kofi’a to show her solidarity with Palestinians. Next thing you know, the U.S. Is in charge is in Israel’s on the ground.

Tucker [00:53:13] Why would that be a priority for anybody? Like who cares what Venezuelans posture toward Israel?

Max Blumenthal [00:53:19] Yeah, why would Maduro’s son have to go do a very public meeting at a pro-Israel synagogue in Caracas?

Tucker [00:53:26] Actually, yeah, we never saw that it seems totally irrelevant. I mean, it’s it’s across the world It has no historic relationship. Well, nobody has a strike 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

Max Blumenthal [00:53:47] I mean, here’s, here is one like concrete thing Venezuela did that 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 Hugo 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 US. So they they they leave They, they remove themselves as a signer of the Rome statute and leave the ICC because what did the I CC do? They indicted Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes in Gaza and met Netanyah who essentially boasted that this was being done on behalf of him by Marco Rubio when Marco Rubio sanctioned the I C C like days before Venezuela did that. What, what is another thing Israel gains out of Venezuela? The Iran war is failing, it has failed. And one of the biggest political problems for Trump is the price of oil and US strategic oil reserves, strategic petroleum reserves. The SPR has been at a lower point than 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 Delci Rodriguez to exploit one-fifth of 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.

Tucker [00:55:52] 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?

Max Blumenthal [00:56:22] For the same reason the U.S. Went to war on Iran. I mean, this is an administration that’s acting on Israel’s behalf.

Tucker [00:56:31] Was he a slave to Israel?

Max Blumenthal [00:56:33] Absolutely. I mean, and in many cases, personnel, personnel is policy. So look at the kind of people in the administration, uh, Susie Wiles, she controls everything the president sees and hears, and, you know, you have to get through her to meet with the president, which is why, like when 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 at 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, JD Vance, the so-called restrainers. Susie Wyles wasn’t letting them in the room and she never was. What was Suzy 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 Suzy Wiles, to help him stage Trump-style rallies. So she literally worked for Netnyahu. Um, you know, it just goes down the line. Like Harmeet Dylan. She’s the head of the office of civil rights in the DOJ, which, you know, really increasingly looks like the office Israeli rights. Her law firm is currently she, she, I think she put her brother in charge of it. She’s not technically in charge. If it’s called Dylan law, they, um, 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. I got leaked audio from an AIPAC congressional meeting. It was a private off-the-record event. And someone who identified themselves as a 40-year veteran of AIPAK 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’d loved working with him ever since then. Marco Rubio is another one. And Mike Waltz is another. These are our lifelines inside the administration, he said. And of course, Marco Rubios 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 there’s an end to it. 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, they come by this desk and talk to you, uh, look at what happened. So it just simply follows that Israel will get more or less what it wants.

Tucker [00:59:36] What is the big picture goal? Because I think any rational person assessing the facts as we find them right now in mid-September 2026 sees the US and the UK really as the last allies that Israel has in the world. And the populations of, but while I’ll speak for my country, the population here is becoming Aware of the cost, excuse me, of this relationship, and aware of that the genocide in Gaza, et cetera, et cetera. Like people are mad at Israel. It’s just obvious, and young people especially. So like if you’re Israel, you’re not stupid. You know that this relationship is gonna change, not to your benefit. What’s your plan? What’s their plan? What are they doing right now?

Max Blumenthal [01:00:27] 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 like 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.

Tucker [01:00:56] They shut down Heathrow Airport in two hours and 35 minutes. Well

Max Blumenthal [01:01:00] There you go. So hours after his announcement, Heathrow airports, air traffic control systems had a glitch. Yeah. Coincidence.

Tucker [01:01:08] 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?

Max Blumenthal [01:01:21] You know, I don’t think the UK is gonna 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 Keir Starmer. They have a lot of power in the UK. What are they doing in the U.K.? They’re destroying whatever’s left of democracy there through the courts in order to prosecute activists from this group, Palestine Action, which is, and this is- terrorists. They’re 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 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 um exonerated or let out in case after case by juries of or 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 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 its 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 are… 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 allow 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 is himself has himself faced contempt of court charges because his of 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 PragerU 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 if they had achieved regime change in Iran. There is a group associated with, I’m gonna forget the acronym for it, but it’s like the lobbying group for Reza Pahlavi, 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, we’ll carry out a mass purge, Israel will be assisting us. In renewing the economy. And they’re basically putting Israel at the center of everything in an Iran post Islamic Republic, post Ayatollah. So Israel gets control of this strategically located country that represents a 3000 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 plan? Did Netanyahu actually have a plan? No, he marched right into the White House. Remember when he came in February?

Tucker [01:06:18] February 3rd.

Max Blumenthal [01:06:19] Yeah, they should, I was, and 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 or 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 in to the situation room, sat at the head of the table. Trump sat to the side, which doesn’t seem very Trumpian to me. And, um, David Barnea, 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 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 to, I don’t know if he said this, but I know what Trump was thinking was we did, look what we just did in Venezuela. We’re gonna get an Iranian Delcey Rodriguez. Maybe it’ll be Reza Pahlavi 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 US. Very violent, but he believed that 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 US in 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 US economy as you’ve been saying week after week. It’s been disastrous four 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. Expending munitions to the point where it’s having to reposition dead batteries and pack threes from other supposedly more strategically significant locations. So it’s been a blow to U. S. Empire. The U.S. Has a maritime powers being kind of exposed as a paper tiger. Like it’s, it’s it’s sailors can’t reach land until they go to Thailand, uh, 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, uh and that, that was the only plan there, but there’s no real long-term plan.

Tucker [01:09:27] 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 does answer the why Trump, who intensely dislikes Netanyah, as everybody does. Why would he sit in the subordinate position in the situation room? Why would take orders from Netanyahu? He took orders from him before the 12 day war. Netanyah said we’re doing this and Trump followed him. That’s a fact, I’m not guessing.

Max Blumenthal [01:10:08] 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.

Tucker [01:10:16] Yeah, but I mean last summer even the same thing and yeah, BB called him in 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 follow a guy? Like that to your own political death? What am I missing? Really? You think that’s what it is?

Max Blumenthal [01:10:48] I mean, that’s one big factor. And you, you, 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 Trump 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 meant, you were at the inauguration who had the best seat in the house better than any member of Congress or incoming secretary.

Tucker [01:11:16] Who breezed right through the magnetometer without being checked at the church service that morning with Trump? 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.

Max Blumenthal [01:11:29] She’s an Israeli warlord essentially. Yeah.

Tucker [01:11:32] And I was born here and she marched right past me and Charlie Kirk was standing right there And it was like this is not a good sign

Max Blumenthal [01:11:38] 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. Uh, and we’re talking about what $300 million of donations to Trump over the years or to his packs, um, as well.

Tucker [01:11:56] But he got elected that’s where the I of course I completely agree with you and I should say you’re from Washington as I am Too, so we’ve like spent our lives watching this so you’re right But by this point Trump has been reelected. He wanted to get reelecting to be vindicated They called him, you know dead in the water. They called them a criminal called all these things and he gets reelect a president So it’s like he doesn’t need the donors anymore for the Republican Party, but he doesn’ 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.

Max Blumenthal [01:12:32] Why is he doing that? Well, let me just make another 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 a week, about a week after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, uh, his podcast, which was being broadcast on Salem media was effectively taken over by a federally registered Israeli foreign agent, um, which was what, yeah. Um, it’s called clock tower X, which is operating this gigantic. Don’t want to say multi-million. It’s like a hundred million fifty million. It is one of the biggest foreign lobbying contracts ever It’s it’s operating it on behalf of the Israeli foreign ministry It’s being run by Brad Parscale who is Trump’s chief of staff in 2020 Remember he got Baker acted like his house was raided and they on video on video. It was a very ugly scene. He was fired I’m actually surprised they fired him given who else they don’t fire but He, uh, you know, and he had created like Trump’s whole Facebook strategy, like the, and including like the seemingly like 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 like, 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-drone 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 move. What happened in Spain? Remind me.

Tucker [01:15:06] 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.

Max Blumenthal [01:15:15] And like every pro-Israel influencer and Israeli official down to Itamar Ben-Gavir was like, aha, this is what you get. F around and find out. So, you know, not doing, not following the program laid out to you by Benjamin Netanyahu on February 3rd is also de-incentivized. And this really needs to be.

Tucker [01:15:36] De-incentivized.

Max Blumenthal [01:15:38] That’s a that’s a soft way of putting it.

Tucker [01:15:40] Yeah, you’re terrified.

Max Blumenthal [01:15:43] So back in 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 IRGC, Qasem Soleimani.

Tucker [01:15:57] Only one person in mainstream media criticized that decision. I’m not bragging, it’s the only thing I’m bragging about. I was that guy and I took a huge amount of crap for it.

Max Blumenthal [01:16:05] I remember.

Tucker [01:16:06] But I thought that was the beginning of World War III run, seemed obvious to me.

Max Blumenthal [01:16:09] And it was also the beginning of something else, where you bring the US 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 then 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 US bases is 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 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

Tucker [01:17:00] assassination is murder and the distinction that we make between the legitimate use of force 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 it. Aren’t those the definitions or no?

Max Blumenthal [01:17:28] 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 was 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 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 an escalation, they wanted negotiation. But all of these plots start getting rolled out through the FBI that always seem to involve confidential human sources and informants who are pushing these mentally vulnerable characters. One in particular involved Asif Marchant, 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 Merchant was coming from Israel. What happens as soon as Merchant comes into the US, he’s seeking some sort of 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 in his, 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. Um, but the plot was to have a mob, uh, 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. Um, 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 a- Quite a large-

Tucker [01:19:54] Quite a large social media footprint, which is clearly in contact with people from foreign countries whose identities we don’t know.

Max Blumenthal [01:20:00] It didn’t seem like there wasn’t anything you could find or any investigators could find that connected them to Iran.

Tucker [01:20:07] Oh, I don’t think it had any connection to Iran.

Max Blumenthal [01:20:09] 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 Merchant was being held in prison, he had just been arrested, and they interrogate him about Butler. And then Mike Waltz, who is, I think he was in Congress at the time. One of the lifelines of AIPAC, 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 investigation, 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. He said, Iran is responsibility for two assassination attempts on Trump. He’s referring to Butler and the Mar-a-Lago attempt by Ryan Roth, which I can talk about in a second. But he understands that’s the way into Trump’s head. He’s 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. Like, 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 Khamenei 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 man pads and he went on Steve Witkoff’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. Um, the, the anger ended the M O U like, along with Trump violating eight of its terms, but people were in the streets crying. They were furious. They love, they’ve considered Soleimani a hero, but killing how many was like another level, um, and what they would say is, you know, we considered him to be a father, a teacher, a guide. Uh, how could you do this? He was 87 years old. And also you slaughtered our children and Mina like you’ve 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. Um, a woman, one woman held up a gold chain and said to me, uh, you know, we’re, we’re basically collecting a thousand chains for the person who will exact just 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 Zakani. 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 he, I should also mention, he was a friend of Soleimani’s and of Hassan Rouhani, who 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 US 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. You know, she reinforced that point and said Trump is just a figurehead. It wouldn’t make any sense anyway. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, current foreign minister said, Trump is doing a good enough job of destroying his own, um, 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 man pads, 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 on 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.

Tucker [01:26:19] How is this resolved, do you think, the war against Iran?

Max Blumenthal [01:26:26] 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 the 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.

Tucker [01:27:21] He’s one of Trump’s only real friends in the entire administration.

Max Blumenthal [01:27:24] I would, I would agree.

Tucker [01:27:27] Which is to say he told the truth in a way that Trump really needed to hear, almost nobody else would. The fact that they consider Joe Kennan an enemy says everything about that.

Max Blumenthal [01:27:38] He believed in America first as sincerely so many others who’ve held on seemed to just believe in Trump incorporated. Yeah He is warning of a nuclear strike. Yes, I think that’s the most dire scenario I don’t think a u.s ground invasion is very likely iran’s economy 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 Tajrish 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 is to the Islamic Republic is very strong or wealthier secular Iranians live and you’re 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 are 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 I’m 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 girls and the kids in Minhab 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 make so much economic pain like gas prices went up like 20 cents this week Per gallon are we willing to that for Israel? Uh, 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. So what I, what I can say is like this. 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.

Tucker [01:29:51] 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

Max Blumenthal [01:30:03] That’s the what the Zionist price hike.

Tucker [01:30:06] Yes, it’s not even I mean, our fuel pumps aren’t even designed to register $10. Right? I mean they’re gonna have to change the pump. 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 enough, the Red Sea remains closed because of Yemen.

Max Blumenthal [01:30:33] 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 currency. The $40 trillion 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.

Tucker [01:31:06] But how long, so this is like another way to gage 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 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.

Max Blumenthal [01:31:46] And like, nobody’s being held accountable in the administration, Pete Hegseth, he’s not being held, accountable. He’s hiring propagandists as secret special employees. Uh, they just put Erica Kirk. Essentially, they made Erica Kirk essentially a Pentagon propagandist too. She was appointed to the board of the air force academy. Uh, it’s, it’ an absolute joke what they’re doing. There’s, and, and 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. U.S. Controls the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, Ansarullah, 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. 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 wanna find a out of it. He just.

Tucker [01:33:01] He just definitely does it.

Max Blumenthal [01:33:03] Know how.

Tucker [01:33:04] Well, he can’t do the one thing that’s necessary, which is to constrain Israel. And I just don’t understand why. As you, 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.

Max Blumenthal [01:33:20] Yeah. And I mean, his, his the midterm strategy is all about getting out the base. Um, 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, uh, 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

Tucker [01:33:57] They’re calling me a socialist and accusing me of being too pro-muslim. Yeah Then you know things have gone completely crazy

Max Blumenthal [01:34:06] but that’s all they have left is a very dwindling, cult-like bass that largely consists of.

Tucker [01:34:12] Fox News boomers is mad about Sharia law. I know they don’t like Sharia Law because it prohibits usury So I get it. Okay, but just kidding sort of but sorry it does but no but the point is Defending Sharia of course, I’m an Episcopalian. However, I don’t remember the last time I was frustrated by Sharia a lot It’s not like an issue in this country prices are an issue lack of opportunity is an issue Drugs are a massive issue SSRIs 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 what?

Max Blumenthal [01:34:48] Who thought this up? That’s their strategy against Abdul Sayed. You know, you saw Jesse Waters ask him about that in there.

Tucker [01:34:54] That’s the candidate in Michigan I supposedly endorsed. That you supposedly.

Max Blumenthal [01:34:59] I think like some Manhattan Institute front group said you officially endorsed him. Which is absurd.

Tucker [01:35:07] I don’t know anything about it. 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, Mike Rogers is exactly the Republican you run if you want to lose, and they ran him before he lost. Because no normal person would ever vote for Mike Rogers. He is the embodiment of everything that is ugly, immoral, and stupid about the national security state. He is a tool of repression. I mean, he’s totally for warrantless spying and searches and like everything that conservatives should be against. Mike Rogers is not a conservative, to put it mildly. So I said, this is craziness. You’re Mike Rogers? No way. And they’re like, well, you endorsed the Muslim guy.

Max Blumenthal [01:35:55] Okay, he’s he’s like the distillation of everything disgusting about the neocon

Tucker [01:36:00] Actually, actually craven Stupid like and and but mostly doesn’t just doesn’t care about the United States and what’s happening here

Max Blumenthal [01:36:09] People will say, oh, well, Max Blumenthal, he’s a leftist. If we Google him, it says far left. So, so fine. It’s not about me or what I think about this race. It’s about what Michiganders think and, uh, Their economy is linked to Canada, Trump kind of screwed Mike Rogers with, uh, initiating a trade war with Canada. I mean, so much of Michigan’s exports depend on Canada. Uh, cars are being assembled, 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 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 at TPUSA 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 theorist. 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 TPUSA 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 Shilman, the largest donor to TPUSA, who was an Israel first centimillionaire who also sponsored the career of Laura Loomer. He wanted his name on a building at TPUSAs campus in, I think, Scottsdale. And… Days before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. He denounced him at a private gala an awards gala in la and said i’m not giving him the two million dollars I managed to confirm that And reported it. It’s true I don’t know if bob shillman is funding tp usa, but I uncovered a contract what why?

Tucker [01:39:14] Did he not give the money? What was he mad about?

Max Blumenthal [01:39:16] Oh, 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 Israeli, the pro-Israel control over himself. He went on Megyn Kelly’s show in May of 2025, or was it later, and complained about Jewish stakeholders and supporters who are becoming, who are becoming hyper controlling. 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 2025. And Charlie Kirk was there and he was screamed at by this Zionist lawyer, Natasha Hausdorff, because he started questioning why he had to everything around Israel and why he couldn’t host you. At his youth conferences. That’s what they were demanding. No Tucker.

Tucker [01:40:19] Carlson on the stage, I spoke at a lot of them and really enjoyed it every one.

Max Blumenthal [01:40:23] So now it’s like TPUSA, if you look at the way it’s talked about in the conservative grassroots, like anything or any organic person would talk about it, it’s seen as an op or like a psyop. 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 TPUSA, uh, in May of 2025 when Charlie Kirk was alive. And he was, you know, 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 TPUSA 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.

Tucker [01:41:34] Christians 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

Max Blumenthal [01:41:50] 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 in the end times. The International, IFCJ, this group, they have an agenda to plant 3 million flags on in churches globally, but also what they do, they’re a deeply corrupt organization, their founder who’s now. Dead, Yaquil Eckstein, he paid himself 1.2 million dollars, he paid his family hundreds of thousands of dollars. They raise money from poor and working class Christians around the not just in the US, 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, Yael Exdeen. 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.

Tucker [01:43:26] Now? Now, and… He’s a senator, he’s a sitting senator.

Max Blumenthal [01:43:29] Well, you know, seemingly that would be legal because they’re technically a nongovernmental group, but he’s also getting, taking ads ads are running on his show on I heart media from the Israeli government itself. And I heart. 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 reelections. What? So indirectly, it looks like the Israeli. Government is supporting Ted Cruz. Whose office is basically a

Tucker [01:44:01] Wait, is that illegal? Can a U.S. Senator take foreign money for a campaign?

Max Blumenthal [01:44:06] You would think it would be, but I don’t know, Pam Bondi got rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Division of the Department of Justice, which is involved in Farah right when she came in. So there’s all kinds of, this is shady. I don’t know why it’s legal. It was upsetting Charlie Kirk. 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 Erika Kirk in the name of Charlie Kirk. And they wanted to basically claim Charlie Kirk and bury this whole thing, that, you know, this whole crisis that he had caused for them. And Erika Kirk started getting criticized when word leaked that she was going to accept the prize, because 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. Erika Kirke had nothing to do with this. And it was too soon. It was too 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 cringe-worthy town hall. The whole thing felt staged.

Tucker [01:45:44] Or Barry Weiss tried to humiliate her, really, I thought.

Max Blumenthal [01:45:47] 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 where the Bible, 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 TP USA’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, uh, all we’ve heard from TP USA is that a statue of Charlie Kirk was defaced, uh at their campus. And that’s all they’re focusing on. They’re not responding to anything. Like Andrew Colvett didn’t respond to me. Um And I hope they produce CCTV footage showing that and they catch whoever did that, which is disgraceful, but that’s what they’re focused on.

Tucker [01:46:55] It’s so sad to see, and I really have, obviously I know all those people and I’ve tried to, and I like a lot of them, most of them really. I like most people. But I try to give everyone the metaphor of the doubt and they’re in a super tough spot and I get it. But one thing I really do resent is the idea that when you bring up stuff like this, 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 Jewish, 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 were doing it and so like it’s 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 super simple and they’ll be like, oh you hate the Jews. Okay. Nope. Don’t hate the juice

Max Blumenthal [01:47:52] That’s that’s 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

Tucker [01:48:05] I’ve read the New Testament a lot like every day and I just don’t see any of that in the New Testaments. 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. 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.

Max Blumenthal [01:48:41] Well, yeah, I mean, that would be one Christian interpretation. I don’t think it’s a Christian. Another Christian interpretation comes from Pastor John Hagee, which is that, um, all Jews need to be gathered in the quote unquote Holy land, which has greater Israel in order for the rapture to take place and that Hitler actually was part of the raptures because he helped, uh, establish Israel through the Jewish genocide. Europe and that Herzl was also part of the rapture in that he brought he created this concept Through which Jews could be he gathered. He said that he calls it Hitler was a hunter and Herzl Was a fisher or something like that He also said that um That the the antique 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 phyllo semitism feels like the other side of the coin, of course From anti semit ism. Have you ever heard the ads that the IFC J this Israeli based group which is sponsoring TP USA has been running like all across the radio in the u.s They come on and they say you can save one Jew for through $700 you can rescue a Jew from a life of anti seme by sending them on one of our freedom flights to Israel. Give us your money and save a Jew.” 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.

Tucker [01:50:23] 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 had 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 like it makes me uncomfortable. Like I’m just a person It’s important to treat people as human beings and not obviously denigrated to humanize 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, you know what I mean? Like there’s a very, that is the flip side of hate.

Max Blumenthal [01:51:05] 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 the young. 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, Blumenthall, wow. Well, you’re Jewish and we just believe that, you know you are special and you are blessed and they want to be Jewish and they blow shofars and they wear a tallit, you 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 in Israel’s behind this whole thing, APAC helped set up that organization. Uh, they are dependent on that organization and they are running a basically phylo-semitic minstral show across the heartland. Oh shit.

Tucker [01:52:22] 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?

Max Blumenthal [01:52:30] I don’t know, will this podcast end well? Like, what’s gonna happen to me when I walk out of this bar? I don’t know, I mean.

Tucker [01:52:34] 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 you know, you said a lot of things. I haven’t personally reported but I I think you’re a meticulous reporter I don’t think you been attacked too much for being wrong. I think he’s been attacked for having unpopular opinions which are two different things

Max Blumenthal [01:52:54] Yeah, I mean, how will this all end, from my point of view, I can’t… We could get two wars… I’m not Professor Jiang. No.

Tucker [01:53:05] 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 Psy op. And it’s like, OK, first of all, what isn’t? But I’m not even sure. Whatever. But I still think he’s interesting. Yeah.

Max Blumenthal [01:53:16] Yeah, I, I crossed paths with him in LA. 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 a hundred, a hundred people, probably from another perspective saying he’s an opp or he’s

Tucker [01:53:36] This is interesting

Max Blumenthal [01:53:37] 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.

Tucker [01:53:47] Of course, oh gosh.

Max Blumenthal [01:53:47] And I’m just not gonna I’m not gonna do that

Tucker [01:53:50] 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 the war in the Middle East, and you have the collapse of the two-party system. Well, it hasn’t collapsed, but I mean, it’s been revealed as fake, and you’ve have very intense discontent at the center of both parties, and then you have this looming financial disaster. That’s a lot at once!

Max Blumenthal [01:54:16] Yeah. You would, it would seemingly be a major blow to unipolar us power. Yeah. I think. You know, the whole, the whole world of that, the, the whole, um, 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 the, and us corporate media that their worldview was reality and they got the Iraq war out of it and so on. 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 point 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 we no uneven 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 point one percent 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, uh, 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 who are the figures that people look to? One of them is you. I never would have thought that, although 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 Dore 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 idea? It’s whatever Palantir’s ideology is, it’s whatever Larry Ellison’s ideology is, whatever their corporate master’s ideology, 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.

Tucker [01:58:20] Yeah, I mean there is a red line there somewhere. It’s one thing to talk about What changes we should have on a podcast say yeah, it’s another thing to try to affect those changes in the political arena And that’s when we find out exactly

Max Blumenthal [01:58:33] Yeah, I mean. What’s up? Yeah, I mean, I agree. But I think, do Americans want a violent revolution? No. No, of course not. 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.

Tucker [01:58:52] We still have carried interest in the tax code.

Max Blumenthal [01:58:54] NAFTA and what happened to Ross Perot when he campaigned against it, uh, the, the, um, the federal communications act, the deregulating media, um. No, and real antitrust legislation, nothing to bring down prices. I mean, it was just a constant, uh constant conveyor belt of deregulation And, uh, still the public. Has nothing to hope for right now. So that’s, so what can I say? It sounds like a black pill, but I think-

Tucker [01:59:29] I just got to say one thing because I can’t and it’s about me so I’m embarrassed I just have to say because I just realized it so 1996 30 years ago. I’m working at the weekly standard for Bill Kristol Bob Keegan. Yeah, David Brooks and you know the whole cast and of neocons I got along with them all John put hearts and I’m 26 or whatever and Bill Kristal 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 called Is He Nuts? And Bill Kristol called around and got me at every TV show to promote this piece or whatever. And I remember feeling, you know, it was a decently written piece. It was incredibly nasty in the way that young people write really nasty magazine pieces, as I know you know. And it was 25 years before I realized I’d 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. Not because he was crazy. Everyone in politics is crazy. He’s like one of the least crazy people in politics. He married to the same woman his whole life, right? He wasn’t crazy, really, compared to what? Lindsey 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.

Max Blumenthal [02:00:51] Uh, 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 that’s the fear or the fear of someone like a Roosevelt taking on the economic Royalists 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.

Tucker [02:01:17] 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? No? That’s how I feel. But, anyway.

Max Blumenthal [02:01:27] Yeah, and that’s how I come out of this whole episode of being targeted by Randy Fine and Laura Loomer is like, I’m not going to be intimidated. I’m going to escalate journalistic activities. I was actually a couple of 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 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, Elke 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 I, you know, I went, 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 Fiorello 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 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 super intelligence, you know, Skynet. Opposition data centers taking over resources and communities. Opposition to flock cameras, opposition to the special relationship with Israel, which is driving us to war and destroying our economy, support for reforms. Do you think that’s possible in America anymore?

Tucker [02:04:47] I haven’t the faintest idea. I hope so. I hope, but I do think it’d be tough with the current system. I do you 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 spent all this time here. Max Blumenthal. Great seeing you. And good luck, man.