Tim discusses the tragic event on Sept. 10th that led to the end of Charlie Kirk’s life and shares his thoughts on the public’s reaction to it. Tim also sits down for an interview with journalist and editor of ‘The Grayzone’, Max Blumenthal, to discuss his recently published piece on Charlie Kirk. They discuss key events in Charlie’s life leading up to Sept. 10th and, specifically, his refusal to accept a massive funding offer from Benjamin Netanyahu. American Royalty Tour🎟 https://punchup.live/TimDillonSPONSORS: Morgan & MorganCheck out https://ForThePeople.com/TIM Or Dial Pound Law (#529) From your Cell phone If You’ve Been Hurt This Summer. Their Fee is FREE unless they win! Hims ED To Get Simple, Online Access To Personalized, Affordable Care for ED Visit https://hims.com/TIM for your FREE online visit Today! ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Subscribe to the channel:https://www.youtube.com/@TimDillonShow?sub_confirmation=1Instagram:https://instagram.com/timjdillon/Twitter:https://twitter.com/TimJDillonListen on Spotify!https://open.spotify.com/show/2gRd1woKiAazAKPWPkHjds?si=e8000ed157e441c8Merch: https://store.timdilloncomedy.com/For every $400,000 we gross in revenue, we are donating five dollars to end homelessness in Los Angeles. We are challenging other creators to do the same.#TimGivesBack
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Understanding Charlie Kirk's Final Days00:11:12
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Tim Dylan show.
We have an interview this episode with Max Blumenthal, who wrote an article in the gray zone with Trump Insiders talking about where Charlie Kirk was mentally in the last few weeks and months of his life and the things he was feeling and the pressure he was under.
I didn't know Charlie.
I had never met him.
I knew people that knew him well.
Everybody liked him, both people I know on the Democratic side liked him and people on the Republican side obviously liked him.
But, you know, that was one of the most disturbing things I had ever seen in my life.
The man is a husband, a father, even if he wasn't.
He's a human being.
He's sitting there.
He's engaging in conversations with people and he was brutally murdered in front of his wife and children.
I'm not a sanctimonious guy.
I dressed up as a dead healthcare CEO on Netflix.
I'm not someone who is out there being a purveyor of good taste, but I just don't understand how after witnessing that murder, you could be gleefully celebrating this attack.
I think you're at a very bad place spiritually, you know, in your life if you're celebrating the murder of a person like that.
I mean, again, this wasn't, you know, a lot of what I do on the program, we make fun of the news.
We make fun of what's happening.
A lot of it's dark comedy.
So I don't go out there and police people's reactions or tell them what to say.
But if that's the first reaction you have to that video is to celebrate this or, I mean, you can't be doing great.
You can't be doing great.
If you, you know, if you're celebrating the murder of this man, I don't think you're at a good place in your life.
And, you know, I, like I said, I saw the video I watched at one time.
I would not rewatch it.
I found it to be, I didn't know what I was watching.
I was on a plane to Austin with Louie, actually, and he was, he was doing shows down there.
And I saw this video and I was like, it was maybe the worst thing I have ever seen, you know, when I picked up my phone.
It was unbelievable.
And a lot of people I know, you know, people that I'm, you know, in their orbit comedically or for whatever reason were, you know, I understand people trying to be funny about terrible things.
I understand failed attempts at making things funny.
I've had them myself.
I get it.
But some people, the joy, the glee, the delight in this man's assassination, again, I don't understand how you could look at his wife who's collapsing in front of his casket, who's crying, where the children are asking where their father is.
I cannot get to that place where I can understand enjoying that.
And it scares me that there's a lot of people that are there and people that I kind of, you know, kind of somewhat know, not close friends, but like people that I am aware of and, you know, kind of, you know, have worked with and know from the life that I've lived.
Like I had disagreements with Charlie Kirk, some substantive ones.
I have disagreements with most people.
I don't, you do not have to agree with someone to not enjoy their murder.
This is something that should be obvious.
You don't have to agree with someone to not delight in their murder.
This guy's life was ended.
His family was shattered.
This is a this is it's inhumane.
And I understand that this is what's going to happen inevitably to people as the country drifts into this kind of schizophrenic fever dream where nothing is real and people are, you know, living online and they're radicalized and everyone's an enemy and everybody's dehumanizing them.
You know, and everybody feels for whatever reason that this type of thing is justified.
And it's only, it's a terrible omen for the future of America if people think that a guy who's willing to sit at a campus and engage and debate with students should be assassinated.
I can't understand that.
That's not something that I'm open to understanding.
I think it's a pathology.
I don't think it's a political point of view when someone's head is blown off in front of their children and for someone to say, oh, good.
It's not a political point of view.
That's kind of a deeply destructive pathology.
And I don't think that, you know, I understand, again, people trying to make a horrible situation funny and failing and saying, doing things that are in bad taste.
I've done them myself.
I get it.
That's not really what I'm talking about here.
That's not what I saw that was the most disturbing.
What I saw that was the most disturbing was the complete delight and joy in seeing someone cut down like that.
I don't agree with a lot of the people that run the state that I'm sitting in right now.
It's California.
I feel they've been incredibly destructive to my living in the sense that like, I think they've ruined large swaths of the most beautiful state in the union.
I think their policies have driven business out of the state.
They've increased crime.
And I agree with their policies on some things, right?
Like I'm pro-choice.
I'm pro-gay marriage.
I'm pro, you know, on a lot of the social issues.
I have kind of a libertarian view.
So like states like New York and California, I'll agree with them on certain things.
And then on other things, you know, I don't agree with them, right?
I don't agree with like, you know, like, like pick a gender day in preschool or whatever's happening.
Like obviously, there's, there's things that I don't agree with at all.
And I would never want any of the people that I disagree with to die.
I would never want any of the people who I politically disagree with on any issue to be shot in front of their children.
You know, I don't understand.
I think you're at a place in your life.
If you're enjoying that, you're at a very bad place in your life.
You're not at a good place in your life.
I mean, that's all I can say.
I cannot, I don't know many well-adjusted, happy people with their own children, their own partner, wife, whatever, girlfriend, boyfriend, a dog you like.
I mean, anything, anything that you love or care about, I can't imagine someone with that type of life seeing that guy's body tense up and then, and, and, and slump down, watching the last moments of his life and gleefully celebrating it.
It just to me is, I, I, I don't understand.
I can't, I was looking at some of these things kind of shocked.
And, and I'm, I'm, again, I'm not a sanctimonious guy.
I'm not a guy that like, I'm not a guy that like is offended by much.
I'm almost offended by almost nothing.
Not nothing, but when you're a person who's done comedy for years and you've been in this fucking world for years on the internet, you can't really be, you know, sensitive.
It doesn't work.
It's not, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it would be the death knell for whatever you wanted to do in any type of public life if you were sensitive or if you internalized everything or took everything to heart.
I mean, that being said, when you see somebody, you know, treating this like it's Christmas or, you know, you know, some of the reactions I've seen are from people that are deeply, deeply, deeply,
I guess, depressed or they've become, they feel hopeless or helpless and they're reacting in a kind of,
you know, in a, in a, in a state of rage and they're not, and in that, they're denying their humanity and they're not thinking about things like a human being.
I understand not liking someone.
I understand thinking their policies make your life harder.
I understand having fundamental disagreements with people, fundamental disagreements, by the way, not like little things.
I understand that there's, there's, there's people in my life I have fundamental disagreements with on major issues, big issues, and I still remain friends with them because I believe that humanity is incredibly important, you know, and that people respect the fact that people are human beings that come from different places, have different belief systems, have different faiths,
Fundamental Disagreements and Humanity00:02:39
have different ways of doing things.
And, you know, when, and Charlie Kirk was not a crazy extremist, he made inflammatory statements.
A lot of people make inflammatory statements, but if you listen to the context and a lot of what he said, the guy was not like a psychopath.
He had a definite belief system that, you know, he sat down and talked with people about.
If you're for the assassination of that person, I can't quite get into your head.
I said this in 2020 when people were talking about the need for violence, not only protests, violence.
And I said this goes to a terrible place.
If you stop having conversations, if you stop debating people, if you stop listening to people, or if you stop, you know, America doesn't have to be any one thing.
That's why there's 50 states and people that live in San Francisco don't necessarily have to agree with people who live in Maryland or people who live in Texas or people who live in Wyoming.
There are 50 state legislatures, 50 governors, you know, there's a reason and different states need different things, value different things, whatever.
You know, I just can't see the value in celebrating someone's death.
I mean, whenever there's a weapon, number one, everybody uses it.
So anybody celebrating this, it will come for you.
It will come for someone on your side eventually.
I don't understand, but I don't think people are thinking about that.
I think it's the raw visceral feeling that someone that they viewed negatively's life was cut short.
And they're enjoying that.
And it really is, it's fucked up.
The interview we're doing is actually really disturbing.
It's one of the more disturbing ones that I've done.
And it's a viral article that is going viral after this.
And it's trying to, again, it doesn't suggest that Charlie Kirk was murdered by Israel, but this article, which is going viral, is a disturbing portrait of a lot of the pressures that not only Charlie, but other people were under.
Questioning Israeli Influence in US Politics00:18:01
And another thing I just want to say, and before I go, because I know it's not like a, I mean, if I had a dispute with DoorDash and Kash Patel was investigating it, would I get, would I get the credit?
Would I get the DoorDash credit?
If Kash Patel was tasked with an investigation, would I get the DoorDash credit or would I not?
I imagine I would not.
I imagine if there was a discrepancy on a DoorDash order, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, would not be able to secure my credit of $11.90.
What is this guy doing?
I mean, this, the guy that did this to Charlie's, his parents turned him in.
I mean, what could Kash Patel run?
This is kind of an interesting question.
What organization could Kash Patel run credibly?
I don't know.
Anyway, Max Blumenthal.
Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of the Gray Zone, thank you very much for coming on.
You wrote an article that's going viral.
You wrote it with your wife, Anya Parrampil, about, you know, obviously this horrific event that happened in Utah.
And you were describing, you know, firsthand accounts of things that Charlie had told his close friends in the weeks leading up to his death.
And a lot of it concerned the pressure that was being put on him by Israeli billionaires for questioning some of the things happening in Gaza and then as well, some of the new anti-Semitism laws.
And how did you put together this story?
I mean, I know you don't ask a journalist to reveal their sources, but how exactly do you compile this piece?
Well, just to answer your question before I get into the piece, I have been following Charlie Kirk for 10 years since almost soon after he started TPUSA when he was a teenager.
And I was following him as a critic or an opponent.
I saw him as this kind of very hardworking, highly articulate, sort of like superhuman, ultra-conservative operative that the Israel lobby had basically hijacked.
And they were using him to create the biggest Republican or conservative youth movement in history, TPUSA, and use it to advance Israel's program in the U.S. alongside all of the kind of conservative social issues he wanted to push and recruit the youth and train them and make sure that they stayed completely aligned with Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel.
And these billionaire donors, they're American, but they're loyal to Israel primarily.
And they actually don't care about issues like abortion or LGBTQ or maybe some of them don't like mass immigration because they think immigrants might turn against Israel.
But their issue is Israel.
And Charlie Kirk was going to advance that for them.
And in exchange, he'd be built up as like the biggest conservative youth leader in history.
So I've been following him for 10 years.
I have no reason to say anything.
Obviously, I was horrified by his killing.
And I think it's a terrible omen for this country, but I have no reason to say anything positive about him or to think that he was anything less than a complete cadre for the Israel lobby.
And he's for he, they basically owned him.
They basically controlled him.
And he started to move away.
And I was hearing about, and just to tell you about how this kind of, this, this article came into being, I was hearing about this before he was killed that something through the grapevine.
I mean, I grew up in Washington.
I've been in the city.
So people talk.
And, you know, honestly, even though I'm more from the left, people from the Trump administration and around the Trump administration talk more to us than the Biden administration did.
They talk more to alternative media.
So I was hearing about the pressure that Charlie Kirk was under in the months before he was killed.
This was not unfamiliar to me.
And so I decided to go back to some sources that we had and ask what was, you know, for more details.
Well, even as somebody who you were a political opponent of his, I do, it's obvious, you know, seeing a lot of people gleefully celebrating his vicious murder, you know, obviously you don't have to agree with someone to not delight in their murder.
I mean, this is, I've been surprised, friends of mine, people that I know And your reactions to this have actually shocked me and shaken me a little bit.
I want to get back to this turn that he makes.
Do you have a time stamp on when he's starting to question really Israeli influence in American domestic politics?
Because I'm reading your article and you talk about your source is talking about Charlie kind of starting to question the amount of influence that Israel has in U.S., not only domestic politics, but foreign politics as well.
Do you put this right around the time that we attack Iran?
Is this before that?
Is this after that?
What do you know about his progression?
Let me just close a window here because I have some noise coming in.
He never comes back.
No.
So yeah, this is the, I'll come.
Yeah.
So this is actually one of the most fascinating stories I've witnessed in American politics.
It could be the theme of a film or a documentary or a book.
Charlie Kirk began coming under pressure from his own base.
I would say, I actually forgot which year it was, but it was like three or four years ago.
And it was called the Groyper Wars.
And Charlie Kirk would do these TPUSA tours around the country and young men would file in and they would, you know, you get to question Charlie Kirk and debate him.
And they hit him from an angle he never expected.
They were from this organization called the Groypers, which sort of follows Nick Fuentes.
They're anti-Israel.
They're kind of anti-Jewish.
Some people call them white nationalists, whatever you want to call them.
They're very anti-Israel and they believe they're the true voice of America first because the U.S. government has fallen under the control of this malign foreign power in Israel.
And so they would confront Charlie Kirk with the history of, for example, the USS Liberty, the U.S. naval ship that was deliberately struck by the Israeli military in the 1967 war in order to cripple that boat because it was a surveillance boat.
It was listening to Israeli communications.
And they killed over, they killed scores of sailors.
And they would confront Charlie Kirk with the difference between Israeli interests and American interests while holding up a cross.
And Charlie Kirk would just shut down the conversation because he knew that it would, if he would give an inch to them, it would threaten the relationship with his donors and TPUSA would collapse.
Now, after October 7th, the pressure was just too extreme.
The whole grassroots of the conservative movement, everyone under 35, started to question the U.S.-Israel relationship because they wanted to be America first.
And they saw Netanyahu just leading Trump around by the balls.
They saw Miriam Adelson, this Israeli intelligence asset billionaire, just calling shots inside the White House.
And a lot of them are pro-life and were horrified by the slaughter of babies that they saw in Gaza.
So the bottom dropped out of right-wing youth support for Israel to the point where now only about 25% of Republicans under 35 support Israel over Palestine.
So Charlie Kirk has to answer to his own grassroots base.
And you can hear he's starting to make some noises.
He's talking about October 7th possibly being an inside job.
Israel let it happen in order to carry out long-term political goals.
He starts to question whether Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli Mossad agent at a time when Epstein, the Epstein files were becoming an uncomfortable issue for Trump.
And it all blew out into the open at TPUSA's July youth summit in, I believe it was Tampa, Florida.
Might have been Tallahassee.
Yeah, Tucker gave the speech.
Right.
Right.
So Tucker gave a speech.
I mean, that was the seminal moment, but it wasn't just Tucker.
Megan Kelly had started questioning Israel and she's on stage calling Jeffrey Epstein a Mossad agent with Charlie.
Comic Dave Smith, who like myself is a Jewish anti-Zionist, but he more comes from kind of the libertarian world.
So he was welcomed on stage to debate a Zionist propagandist who works for Newsweek, Joshua Hammer.
Debate, no, that's not something you want, especially at this point, if you are like a pro-Israel enforcer.
And Dave Smith was openly talking about the slaughter of children in Gaza and the crowd was cheering in this cathartic way.
Then Tucker comes out, says, you should not be, you should have your citizenship yanked if you fight for a foreign army.
All right.
Hundreds and hundreds, thousands of American Jewish youth go to Israel and fight for their army instead of our own.
So that's a direct blow to not just the Israel lobby, but like the whole concept of Jewish communal life as it's understood by its leadership.
Then Tucker calls out Bill Ackman, who's one of the biggest Netanyahu moneymen inside the U.S., who's pulling strings at Harvard, getting them, getting their funding pulled unless they crack down on Palestine activism.
And he questions Bill Ackman.
He calls him a scam artist and said, how did he make $9 billion?
Like, where did it come from?
I mean, and Bill Ackman, the next day, he couldn't really answer the question.
He published like a 5,000-word meltdown Twitter post trying to defend his financial investments.
It was just bonkers.
I'd never seen anything like it.
And it was all Charlie Kirk's fault for sanctioning, for giving basically the people what they wanted.
And after that, he started getting publicly attacked.
Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, the two biggest Zionist enforcers in the media who are very close to Netanyahu, biggest forces lobbying Trump to wage war on Iran, went off on TPUSA, said, we can't be having a Big Ten if it includes Kooks.
Laura Loomer, we all know who she is.
She publicly attacked Charlie Kirk and said he basically had to step down.
He was getting attacked in pro-Israel media.
What we didn't know, which I learned, is in private, the pressure was even more intense.
He was being bombarded with text messages.
And at some point, Netanyahu personally called him and offered to basically fund his organization to new levels that he never even imagined, which meant, you know, Zionist Israeli takeover, complete recapture of TPUSA, an organization they basically helped create.
And Charlie Kirk turned him down.
Now, after Charlie Kirk was killed, we know that Netanyahu wouldn't stop posting about him.
Like minutes after he was killed, when his body was still warm, Netanyahu was posting about him, interrupting his seven-front war in the Middle East and his global assassination spree where he's trying to kill people even inside a U.S. ally in Qatar.
Can you remember any time that in the history of a political assassination that the leader of a foreign government has come out to deny that they were behind it?
I've never seen anything like that.
Right.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, it was, so Netanyahu has to ultimately deny that Israel was involved in an interview on Newsmax with Greta Van Sustran.
Newsmax is another like institution that Israel controls.
Its CEO, Chris Ruddy, was just in Israel with Netanyahu, basically shining his shoes in public.
So Netanyahu goes there and says, you know, this is like to accuse us of killing Charlie Kirk or having a role in this is like a medieval blood libel and the Holocaust.
And when Netanyahu says that, it probably leads some Gentiles to wonder if there was something to those blood libels.
I mean, when someone that sleazy and that blood-soaked links innocent Jews to the murderous campaign that Israel is carrying out, it's bad.
It's actually bad for the Jews when he says that.
But I've never seen anything like this.
And I've never seen anything like what Netanyahu was doing relating to a tragedy or a crime in the United States since 9-11.
Netanyahu blamed Muslims for Charlie Kirk's killing explicitly on Fox News.
He was trying to milk it as much as he could, but it blew back on him because he's become a prime suspect.
But after 9-11, Netanyahu said in comments widely reported in Israeli media, you can look this up.
He said 9-11 was good for Israel.
And it's the same way that he saw Charlie Kirk's killing as being good for Israel.
He thought he could, he actually probably thought a Muslim was responsible.
And he thought he could blame the left and the Palestine solidarity movement and get them shut down by the FBI.
And so in a way, he was kind of thrilled by what had happened.
And that fuels the speculation.
But the real issue was, as we learned from a longtime friend of Charlie Kirk who had spoken to him, I would say, a week or two before he was killed about this.
He was afraid of Netanyahu and he was afraid of these billionaire cutouts of Netanyahu, who had many of whom had funded his organization.
So let me ask you.
Let me ask you a question.
What would he be afraid of?
I mean, obviously, you know, you have an organization that's well-funded by people that expect something for their money, right?
They're not giving it to you for free.
Did you get the feeling that he was only afraid of reputational damage or, you know, losing money?
Or did his fears extend to his life?
Well, that's what Harrison Smith, who is a personality at InfoWars, the pro-Trump outlet, has said based on a source he spoke to.
I don't know him.
I don't know what source he spoke to, but he said this on August 13th.
So almost a month before Charlie Kirk was killed.
He said, Charlie Kirk fears that Israel will kill him if he continues ahead, providing space in the largest conservative youth organization in American history, which is the institutional grassroots apparatus of Trump and the Republican Party for Israel critics and even anti-Zionists.
So I didn't say that.
I don't have an, there's, I see, I can't see any hard material evidence that Israel had him killed, but there's this fear when you go against the Israel lobby and you're that powerful.
And it's a fear that I've been told Donald Trump shares.
I've been told that by several Trump insiders.
My next question is, does the president of the United States fear for his life?
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, obviously he fears for his life.
And I was told that he feared for his life before the two assassination attempts, one coming within a millimeter of striking his head.
I mean, let's not forget about that.
I mean, just to clarify, he doesn't fear for his life because of Ireland.
I mean, I've been told, yes, that Israel is a major source of concern for Trump.
I mean, think about it.
What would happen?
This is our ally.
If he suspended arms to a country that carries out assassinations all across the globe, that specializes in assassinations, that has an entire wing of its intelligence services, that conducts assassinations, including with household goods like pagers.
Spying on Allies: The Secret Service Fallout00:03:09
Would you not be scared?
So, yes, Trump is scared.
And what I learned from this source, who is a Trump insider, someone who talks to the, who has, you know, who talks to people in the Oval Office, people close to Trump, is that during one of Netanyahu's many visits to the U.S. this year, some figures in his retinue, Israeli agents, placed electronic devices on emergency response Secret Service vehicles.
The Secret Service found them and they reported this to the White House.
You know, these would be emergency response vehicles that would respond to an incident potentially involving the president.
All right.
Some people watching this might be dismissing me as crazy right now.
And I wasn't able to confirm this.
I can't just call up the Secret Service and have them tell me that.
But in 2019, three former high-ranking U.S. officials from the Trump administration told Politico that listening devices were found around the White House and at sensitive locations across Washington targeting President Trump.
They wanted to listen to his calls and communications, and they were planted by Israel.
You just go look that up while I'm speaking right now.
Boris Johnson, the former Israeli prime minister, wrote in his memoirs that Benjamin Netanyahu asked to use his bathroom, his personal toilet, and that British security found a listening device planted in his personal toilet immediately after Netanyahu left.
So Netanyahu himself dropped a listening device in the British prime minister's toilet.
Like never let Netanyahu take a dump at your house.
Let me ask you a question.
In your estimation, why do things like this not damage relations between the U.S. and Israel more or the UK and Israel?
You know, when an ally is found to be, now everybody spies on everybody, but when you are putting a listening device in the prime minister's bathroom or you're putting, you know, reportedly putting tracking devices on Secret Service emergency response vehicles, where is the fallout from that?
Is there any?
Is there any diplomatic fallout from that?
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, think of all the all the things Israel does.
Israel just is seeking to drag the U.S. into an all-out war with Iran.
Where's the fallout from that?
The fallout is among the people.
It's among the young people who watch your show, who follow social media, who know what's, don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Like they're paying attention and they have almost no power in this country on this issue because of Israel's ethno-supremacist bribery network known as APAC, which controls Congress with a hammer lock.
Look at like two of the few voices in Congress who spoke out about these issues.
Young People Wake Up to Social Media Horror00:06:07
Marjorie Bush.
Sorry?
Corey Bush was kicked out.
And Jamal Bowman Kicked out, but AIPAC spent almost $20 million and they were like backbenchers.
Like their own campaigns, they probably spent like $100,000 and they spent $20 million, like Super Bowl-style ads against them.
And none of the ads even mentioned Israel once.
And they come up with these fake stealth packs, like Americans for Democracy in their district.
So you don't even know it's an APAC ad.
And now they're going after Thomas Massey.
And Marjorie.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Yeah, okay.
Marjorie Taylor Green's safer in her district, but who is paying for the campaign against Thomas Massey?
It's Miriam Adelson and Paul Singer.
Paul Singer is another ultra-Zionist billionaire who is basically like Marco Rubio's pimp.
He owns Marco Rubio.
He's a vulture capitalist who runs Elliott Capital Management.
And he's very involved in Venezuela as well.
So these guys are running the show.
So let me ask you a question.
Trump is elected 2024.
Miriam Adelson's a huge donor, among others, right?
Bill Ackman's probably is another big donor.
Is the understanding, you know, we gave you a bunch of money, you're going to let us do anything we want.
And is there kind of a veiled threat that, you know, spoken or unspoken, that hangs in the air around Epstein, in your estimation, and the Epstein files and the nature of the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein potentially and Israeli intelligence?
What exactly, how does that factor into what we're seeing now with shaping a narrative?
It seems like that lobby's losing control of the narrative quickly, certainly with younger people, but with a lot of people.
The rise of independent media, the sheer audacity with which that, you know, APAC and people like that are behaving, Netanyahu.
What role do you think uncovering the truth about Epstein plays in the fear in the White House?
Are they afraid to release this stuff?
Are they implicated in this stuff?
Is it both?
And was this something where it was understood that they were there to extend the cover-up?
What do you think this is?
Well, Trump has personally said that he's concerned about all of the files and the names of clients being released or not necessarily clients, but associates, because it will smear some very good people.
I mean, he said that on the record, and he thinks he's one of them.
He was very closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein.
And this was the first time I've ever seen the Teflon Don get his mystique actually broken.
It was all over Jeffrey Epstein.
But it's not just about Jeffrey Epstein or one man.
I think it's dangerous to go too far down the rabbit hole on Jeffrey Epstein.
But we do need to acknowledge there was a strong Israeli connection there.
Jeffrey Epstein was working with Ehud Barak, former Israeli prime minister, defense minister, most decorated soldier in Israeli history on spinning out a series of security companies that were going to compete with the big time, the big leaguers like Palantir.
Barack was at his townhouse over 50 times.
He had met with Shimon Perez, former Israeli prime minister.
He had met with Ehud Olmer, former prime minister.
He'd set up meetings between JP Morgan and Benjamin Netanyahu.
And he was a pro-Israel guy who's close to Alan Dershowitz, too, who's like considered sort of Israel's propaganda lawyer.
So Jeffrey Epstein's sort of a stand-in for everything that frustrates people, especially younger people in this country about this two-tiered legal and political system where there is a kind of a class of 0.1 percenters who exist completely above the law,
who are like molesting people and carrying out all sorts of sordid financial crimes and bribery and manipulating institutions, buying CBS news and propagandizing the public in support of a genocide.
It's sort of like Jeffrey Epstein perfectly embodies the most disgusting specter or figure of this entire network that we have been sort of forbidden from talking about for so many years.
And now, I mean, it's like as long as there is an apartheid Israel, we're going to be waking up every day on social media and seeing images of shredded children.
And our legislatures are going to be filled with bills that will prevent us from doing anything about it.
So the frustration only continues to build as Donald Trump seems to block the release of the Epstein files.
Did you notice?
This is so crazy.
On the day Charlie Kirk was shot, and I mean, take this out if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm right.
No, I said you're right.
I think I know what you're about to say.
They voted, right?
The Senate voted to not release the Epstein files and almost like a straight party line vote.
Yeah, this is not good for American Jews.
This is not good for American Jews.
A lot of my Jewish friends are not, you know, they want Netanyahu out.
They think that they've made a wrong turn, obviously, in the years after October 7th.
What do you think the temperature is like right now between the Trump administration and Israel?
Is this an unbreakable bond that is being enforced by a fear, a mutually assured destruction?
What is the likelihood of us going into Iran again?
What is the likelihood of us doubling down?
I mean, there's a huge project now, or will be a very huge construction project, I believe, in Gaza.
I mean, they're moving people out of Gaza.
They're going to build a new Gaza.
Is the United States going to be providing peacekeeping?
Is it going to be NATO peacekeeping forces?
Is it going to be U.S. contractors going to boots on the ground?
Are we going to be funding it?
What do you know about what's coming next?
What's the next phase of what happens there?
Well, with Gaza, it's not a construction project.
It's a destruction project.
Well, right, but it will be eventually.
I mean, they're trying to move them out to do something.
Right.
They're trying to move them out to in what they call in Israel, Judaize the place, especially the north of Gaza.
And the religious nationalist movement in Israel, the settlers, they want that land.
They fought hard for it in this war, in this genocide, and they have Netanyahu under their thumb.
I mean, they are the linchpin to his political coalition.
There's not all those shiny pictures that you see and all the plans for the Gaza Riviera that make it look like Dubai.
That's not going to be happening for any Palestinians or non-Jews.
That's not what's going to happen.
The plan is to ethnically cleanse as many of them as possible, to even incentivize them to go out and give them subsidies to go out.
But Israel does not want them there.
The Gaza Strip, what was it?
85% refugees who were kicked off their land in 1948 when Israel was founded.
750,000 people were ethnically cleansed in 1948.
And so many of them went to Gaza and then they were just warehoused there.
I've been to Gaza twice.
When you go into Gaza, the first thing you see in the buffer zone when you cross in from an Israeli military base is a remote-controlled machine gun on a gigantic wall that stretches as far as you can see, pointing into Gaza.
That's the world they were living in before October 7th, 2023.
They were closed off from the outside world.
And then they had this gigantic, violent rebellion led by Hamas, and Israel's decided they must all go and they have to go through Egypt.
So that's just as bluntly as I can put it.
And it will be the crime of the century to watch 2 million people just be scattered like the wind into the world.
And where will they go?
Will they go to Europe?
Will they go to the United States?
People who have lived through one of the most horrific genocidal wars we've ever seen?
What kind of mentality will they be bringing with them?
Will it be good for those societies?
Well, it's Israel that is pushing that on the rest of the world.
So, you know, if you're worried about the border now, I mean, consider what Israel's got coming for you.
And although I think we should welcome people who have nowhere else to go, they should be in their homes.
Well, I think we should stop destroying their countries and then they'd have a place to go.
And that would be my own place.
Yeah, your question, Iran, what do you think the likelihood is that we get into another war with Iran?
And is that why, you know, is that way is the Israeli government right now lobbying the Trump administration actively to go back into Iran?
Is this something that you know or are hearing from anyone?
Yes.
And also from sources in Iran, they're prepared for this.
They think that this will happen 100%.
I would say 99%, just because I always like to hedge.
But, you know, my friends in Iran, who are just sort of regular people, tell me their whole society believes this is going to come in any weeks from now.
Why do you think this will need to happen now?
You know, ethnically cleansing of Gaza now, the war with Iran now.
Do you think Israel's looking at America and going, you know, we're in trillions of dollars of debt where, you know, maybe we'll default on the debt.
Maybe the dollar is going to fall.
Maybe our standing in the world is going to collapse.
And they need to get everything out of us right now.
Like it does, doesn't it feel to you like there's an immediacy to what is happening?
And I could be wrong about this, but like it does feel to me that they're like, we need all of it now.
It needs to happen now.
We need to, not only the cleansing of Gaza, but we need the Iranian regime move now.
We need to bomb Libya.
I mean, Syria and, you know, all of these places right now.
It does seem like, are they looking at the tide of populism around the world going, we're not going to be able to get this kind of money in 10 years?
Are they looking at America's financial standing and going, it's an inevitability that we're not going to have the money to give them?
What exactly is it about this moment where everything needs to happen now?
By the way, even though they're losing standing with every demographic in America, they're losing respect or they're losing control of the narrative, but they're still pushing ahead in a very aggressive way.
What is it about this moment that it all needs to happen now?
That's a great question.
And as he said, Israel can see the writing on the wall in the West.
where a new generation is rising and turning against it simply because they are sick of the slaughter, the manipulation, and the censorship.
But there's a new world rising in China.
There's a new world rising in Iran, which is at the center of Eurasia.
And a new world that is rising is not a world that America dominates.
And then in Washington, this relates to, I mean, this just brings it all back home to Charlie Kirk.
They have Donald Trump completely under their control in a way that they have never controlled a U.S. president.
And every president has basically given Israel what it wanted.
But with Trump, there are simply no red lines.
And after having demonstrated in Gaza that they could get away with anything they wanted, Netanyahu, who is nearing the end of his own life, who is the most historically significant Israeli prime minister since the founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion,
and has served longer than Ben-Gurion, who is actually someone from the United States, who speaks English as his native language, who grew up in Philadelphia, went to MIT, worked at Boston Consulting.
He sees that this is the last moment before Trump leaves the stage where he can get everything he wants.
And his dream for his entire political career was to destroy Iran, regime change in Iran.
And he believes if he can achieve regime change in Iran, then all of his problems in the region will, and Israel's problems in the region will disappear and Israel will be secure and consolidate its strategic depth for eternity.
So Netanyahu wants to be, he wants to leave this world with that as his legacy, but he cannot accomplish that in Iran, as we just saw from the last 12-day war without the U.S. military.
And so he has to manipulate the United States into not just striking Iran and sending a stealth bomber over there for some top gun style raid, but boots on the ground, all-out war, just like an unprecedented slaughterhouse.
And we're going to see tens of thousands of American troops killed for Netanyahu's dream if it's able to go through.
And so every time Netanyahu strikes Iran and tries to turn up the temperature in the region, it's always to get the U.S. involved.
And it's bad for the U.S.
It's bad for Jews.
It's bad for the global economy and therefore the world.
And that is why I'm always talking about this and why I think people need to understand the danger.
What do you think happens if they can't, you know, obviously there's members of the Trump administration that do not want to go along with this?
I would say probably Trump's one of them.
I don't think he sees a good domestic political outcome of going to war with Iran.
What lengths are they willing to go to make this happen?
Well, I don't, I mean, I think, I think attacking Iran in an unprovoked fashion, killing nuclear scientists, attempting to kill, I don't know, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, that would be the most extreme thing possible.
And it would lead to a catastrophic eruption of violence that would draw the U.S. in.
Do you think Israel is planning to attack Iran?
Yes.
How soon do you think that's going to happen?
Fairly soon because of the window I mentioned with Donald Trump, the midterms coming up.
Also, Iran is restoring its air defenses.
They may be improving.
Iran knows something's coming.
This is obvious.
So they can't allow Iran to rebuild its ballistic missile capacity.
They know that the enriched uranium is out there somewhere, but they may not know where.
They're afraid of nuclear scientists learning how to develop weapons.
So they want to kill them all.
It's very maniacal.
And Israel really feels like this is it.
Like they are at an existential moment.
That's why they're, you know, weaponizing Barry Weiss to take over CBS News.
That's why you feel so much pressure in our own society because Israel feels like after October 7th, they have to get this done now.
And Iran's not going to be able to do that.
I mean, nobody is my thing with CBS News.
It's a very powerful tool, I guess, when you're talking about boomers, but it has absolutely no relevance to anybody that's under the age of 65 years old.
You know what I mean?
When you see, I guess, Ellison is now thinking of buying Warner Brothers, right?
CNN.
I mean, they're thinking about Sanders just talked about it.
His group is buying.
What is it?
Correct me here.
They're Paramount and they're buying, they own Paramount, they own CBS, and now they're trying to acquire Warner Brothers.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I like Barry.
I mean, I think Barry's fun.
I don't know how much, you know, Barry enjoys me at the moment, but she did at one point.
But she has an agenda.
It's very clear.
It's a very clear agenda is that she's deeply supportive of kind of this Israel at all costs policy.
And they're going to install her at CBS.
Yep.
Yeah, as the ombudsman.
So she'll be, she'll be, I guess, tasked with determining the tone of the foreign policy coverage on CBS, domestic policy coverage, all of the coverage.
Presumably, and they just installed this figure.
I think his name is Keith Weissman as the ombudsman who will basically neutralize the news division.
And he is an Israel lobbyist himself who worked at this neocon think tank, the Hudson Institute in the Hudson Institute in Washington.
So it's very clear what their agenda is.
And I'm just pointing to it as a sign of desperation and not necessarily a sign of total control.
Well, the thing is, what I've seen over the last six months to a year, a lot of people are getting radicalized and going to very bad places, right?
We don't want a bunch of people in America to become Nazis, obviously.
We don't want people to become fascists.
We don't want people to embrace pathological behavior.
Barry Weiss does.
Yeah.
And Israel does because it reinforces Israel as a sanctuary for Jews.
They want anti-Semitism in this country.
And it also fuels their fundraiser, the ADL's fundraising.
So we have to resist that.
Yes.
Well, Max Blumenthal, do you, the source that you spoke to, I guess, for this piece, does that source believe that there's any potential, and I don't know if you covered this or not with the source.
Do they believe there's any potential that in any way forces outside of this gunman were responsible for Charlie Kirk's assassination?
I don't know if you covered that or not.
I mean, I state clearly in this piece that I have no evidence of an Israeli government.
Yes, did the source.
I understand that.
Did your source, who is a highly placed Trump confidant of some kind, did do they, I don't know if you can make an inference or if they had said anything to you, but like, were they considering that as a possibility?
Yes, I would say they're, they don't accept the official story or no one even knows what the official story is.
So a highly placed person in the Trump inner circle doesn't believe the official story of Charlie's murder.
I mean, no one does, but I would just say that the phrase I remember hearing is it feels like there's more at play here.
And I, you know, I'm, that's not the only person with more power than me in Washington that I'm hearing that from.
But I, again.
So you're hearing from multiple people that are connected and tapped in that they believe that there's more at play or more to the story than simply one radicalized young man.
I heard subsequent to publishing this story from another source who I would describe as a administration insider that corroborated the account in this story.
FBI Silence and Dangerous Hypotheticals00:04:45
First, that Charlie Kirk was actively and aggressively personally lobbying Trump against bombing Iran in June.
And two, that right now, the FBI is not being forthcoming.
And there's a lot of frustration with the FBI not sharing information.
So because, I mean, just to reiterate again, you're not a nut.
You're a reporter.
People may disagree with you.
You're anti-Zionist.
So there's a lot of people that are going to, you know, say that you're a little paranoid when it comes to Israel and that Israel's behind everything.
I'm just saying this is not what I'm saying.
I'm saying this is an attack that you've probably faced before.
But you're a reporter.
You're not a nut.
You're not a crazy person.
You grew up in Washington, D.C. You have connections to a lot of these people.
You have sources.
And you're not speaking to schizophrenics on the street.
You're not talking to crazy people.
You know, you're not, this is not things you're getting off message boards or a Discord.
You're talking to people in the know that believe there's more to the story.
That's pretty shocking.
I can only say that I wrote this.
I mean, some people want to say there was this prefabricated narrative on the right that the killer was a leftist or a Muslim.
They clearly wanted that.
Now, you know, people on the left are saying he was a Groyper.
I don't know what will be the case, but the reason I wrote this story was because I was able to get this background about Charlie Kirk and what was happening in his life and what was coloring his final days and the kind of pressure he was under, which tells a larger story about Israeli influence in the United States.
And that's just an issue I've been covering for years.
So that's why I reported this story.
I didn't report this story to prove that Israel has a direct role in his assassination.
Of course not.
But there is a real reason why many people who are not able to talk to people with any proximity to power believe that is the case.
And it's because the way Israel is conducting itself.
Final question to you in a hypothetical world, in a hypothetical world.
And I'm not, I know you're a reporter, so it's hard to entertain this.
Knowing what you know about what we talked about, about now is the moment and now is the time and everybody needs the money and everybody needs this Iran regime change.
And everyone obviously has that perspective and that interest, Netanyahu and Adelson, all these people.
In a hypothetical world, would the head of a campus organization that is hugely influential in grassroots political organizing and fundraising, do you think?
And again, this is not to say there is evidence of this, because obviously you have none of it.
In a hypothetical world, how dangerous is a Charlie Kirk to the people you're talking about?
How dangerous is him making a turn on Israel?
How substantive and dangerous is that?
And in a hypothetical world, is it dangerous enough where you would have to eliminate him in some way?
Well, I think if he had gone further than he was going and continued to give voice to the grassroots of his own organization, they would have eliminated him, but not physically.
I mean, they would have sought to have eliminated him politically or just to remove him.
And they were already calling for that.
Ben Shapiro, who's now running around saying he was Charlie Kirk's best friend, said just days, I think it was just days before Charlie Kirk was killed.
He said that you can't be at the front of the church giving space to kooks.
And then just a few days later, when Charlie Kirk was at the front of the church, he was struck in the neck by a sniper's bullet.
And then Ben Shapiro, within 24 hours, said, well, he's going to go on his own campus tour and pick up the bloody microphone that Charlie Kirk left for us.
So they did not want someone like giving space to anti-Israel critics or just the real mood in this country.
They needed to hold the line.
Who Steps Into Charlie Kirk's Wake00:01:23
So I don't know.
I think there are easier ways to get rid of someone and cleaner ways than assassination.
I've been the target of that for many years, but for sure.
And he was a gigantic threat to Israeli control over the Republican Party.
Maybe the biggest threat since Trump has proven so easy to move and manipulate and so afraid.
I mean, we can't overestimate Charlie Kirk's importance to the Trump machine and to the Republican Party.
He was sort of a unique figure, and I don't think he can be replaced.
It will also be interesting to see who steps into his wake.
And I might be having more.
I might have more to report on this, by the way.
Well, I appreciate it, Max Blumenthal.
The website is called the Gray Zone.
You guys do some really interesting stuff.
Anything coming up you'd want people to check out?
Well, yeah, just watch this space.
We might have more to report on this.
And I really appreciate you giving me the mic and giving me the space to talk about it.
And, you know, I love the work that you do.
Yes.
Well, I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Thank your wife for also she contributed to the story as well.
And, you know, thank you both of you.
And we'll have you back if there's new developments.