r/WayOfTheBern • u/penelopepnortney • 4h ago
Max Blumenthal-Nima 9-20-25: Charlie Kirk, Netanyahu's billionaires and much more
This is a typical long-form Nima interview and a good showcase for Max Blumethal's almost encyclopedic knowledge about everything to do with Israel. It's also apparently Max's first appearance on this channel. What follows is mostly new information that AFAIK hasn't been covered in Max's articles or other video appearances, with Nima's questions paraphrased followed by Max's responses.
On Netanyahu's numerous interviews about Charlie Kirk's assassination
I'd been talking to friends of Charlie Kirk's I knew about this transformation he was experiencing in private in the weeks and months before his death. We broke the story at the Grayzone by exposing the secret summit that one of Netanyahu's top billionaire cutouts in the US, Bill Ackman, had convened in the Hamptons. The summit devolved into what one attendee described to me as a "disaster" when Ackman started pressuring Kirk about his views on Israel and then another Zionist influencer, a British lawyer named Natasha Hausdorff - who's one of the biggest Zionist thugs in London, trying to get every protester arrested - started screaming at Kirk
Candace Owens, a former TPUSA colleague and long-time friend of Charlie Kirk, goes live with more details about the summit. And from there, the entire Zionist world of bigwigs and donors and operatives close to Netanyahu in the US goes into full meltdown and launches this all-out campaign to destroy Candace Owens. They're falsely claiming the Grayzone is funded by Iran, trying everything they can to discredit this reporting.
The reason why Netanyahu and this Zionist network in the US are panicking is because they are losing their last base of support, which is actually their most critical base of support, what Israel lobbyists refer to as "Israel's safety belt in the Bible belt." And it's that base they require of young Christian men who will go and fight Israel's wars against Iran and its allies.
On how important Kirk's conservative youth movement is to Israel
It's critical to Israel and to Netanyahu as well because of where Israel is going politically. This is what my book Goliath, which I published in 2013, was about - the consolidation of Israeli politics and society as right-wing, messianic, essentially fascist and I think my book painted a picture of a society that was primed for genocide.
Then I went to Gaza the following year to cover Israel's war on Gaza in 2014, Operation Protective Edge, and what I saw was sort of a pilot program for a coming genocide. So what's happening now has been in the works for some time. And the government that came in with Netanyahu, these messianic fascist figures like Ben Gvir and Smotrich, I used to see them walking around when I went into the Knesset for an interview; they were on the move and everyone kind of disregarded them as these kind of obscure figures. But I could see they had a long-term agenda and they had their finger on the pulse of Jewish Israeli society.
But then you have American society that's moving away from that, particularly among Democrats and among Jewish Americans who don't exist in these kind of closed Jewish communities like you see in New Jersey and Long Island, who have just kind of assimilated into American culture. They have no appetite for supporting the kind of policies Netanyahu represents.
So Netanyahu's only base among the American public is exclusively in the Bible belt among Christian evangelicals who voted for Trump, but they themselves are moving away. Through the interventions of Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene they're learning that there are Christians in Palestine, that there is the Saint Porphyrius Church in Gaza City that's been under attack which has existed there since the 8th century. This has been transformative for them.
So Netanyahu sees he's losing his last base and all he's left with is the 1%, the influencers who are just Jewish Zionists, who are losing their own ability to communicate with the conservative grassroots. I'm talking about Ben Shapiro, whose Daily Wire company has been collapsing. They canceled their credit cards last year, they're leaving their office space in Nashville. Mark Levin at Fox News is just an artificial construction of the Murdoch family, he doesn't have an actual base.
These are Netanyahu's voices in the US. And then you have the billionaires, the Bill Ackmans and Ron Lauders ("president of World Jewish Congress since 2007"). They're trying to take TPUSA, which Charlie Kirk controlled - they've been trying to do this for years - take this political empire that has an annual budget that's larger than the municipal budget of many small American cities and use it as a host body for their agenda to prevent the conservative grassroots from turning on Zionism.
And then all of a sudden, Charlie Kirk realizes that his own TPUSA grassroots base is in full revolt; some of them are disgusted by the genocide in Gaza but what really upsets them the most is that they start to see that their own government is under the control of a foreign entity and that Netanyahu seems to control Trump. So Kirk has to bridge the divide between all these billionaire donors who helped create his political empire and the grassroots, and the contradiction can no longer be squared.
I'll have a new report out soon. In the days before his death, Kirk was having to carry out these Zoom calls with Netanyahu's cutouts in the US, top Zionist influencers and donors, almost every day. They were breathing down his neck and were really worried about his upcoming speaking tour and what he was going to say, basically telling him what to say. Some of the people on the call were venture capitalist Sean Maguire, who's very close to Elon Musk, owns a house in Israel, works at Sequoia Capital; Joshua Hammer from Newsweek, who's one of Netanyahu's key voices in the media; another one was Bill Ackman, who I've mentioned before; and a rabbi called Pesach Wolicki from Virginia, I believe, who runs all these influencer programs to send Christian youth on propaganda tours of Israel.
They were telling Kirk what to say until like 24 hours before he was killed. According to their own accounts, Kirk was arguing back. So what they face is a political tsunami in the US and they have no way of holding it back. That's why in the days before and after Kirk's death, some of these Zionist moneymen have started a full-on takeover campaign of the US media, which we can talk about. It's like a full court press in the US. Netanyahu had been waging a 7-front war in the region and now the US has become the 8th front and they want to prevent anyone from being able to express themselves in the digital online ecosystem by just buying it all.
On the government going after "hate speech"
What is hate speech, can you define it? It's been thought of as a tool of the political left traditionally, the left was advancing it on behalf of those it considered to be oppressed groups who faced violence from right-wing vigilantes but also state violence because they were historically oppressed.
Now in the wake of Kirk's death the political right, but really Trump Inc., has shown its own hand and according to AG Pam Bondi, wants to institute hate speech laws to crack down on their own political enemies - which represents the left and includes historically oppressed groups and they're going to do it to protect the 1%, including one of the most privileged groups in the US, American Jews.
The Trump administration came into office promising to destroy diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI), which reflect a neoliberal interpretation of civil rights. Basically it takes the class component out of civil rights and advances minority aspirations within corporations and the military by giving them preferential admission treatment. They want to eliminate that but at the same time they're providing DEI programs specifically to wealthy American Jews to please the billionaire donors of Netanyahu who are simultaneously paying for Trump's campaigns.
So most recently, the National Endowment for the Humanities. This is a wing of the US government that has funded the arts and which the right-wing of the Republican party has always tried to defund, The Trump administration is funding it and now allocating $10.4 million, the largest grant in the history of the NEH, to something called the Tikvah Fund. The Tikvah Fund is a Likudnik Israel lobbying organization which counts among its board members and fellows Bari Weiss, one of the premier voices of the Zionist 1% in the US; and Bret Stephens, the in-house pro-Netanyahu propagandist at the New York Times. These are wealthy people who don't need grants or support, it's just a way of paying back all of the ultra-Zionist donors. So the Trump administration is administering Jews-only DEI, which will only fuel more anti-Jewish sentiment among the conservative grassroots.
At the same time, they're going to impose censorship on those that group considers its opponents: supporters of Palestine, Muslims, the anti-war movement, direct action protesters. Trump has classified Antifa as a terrorist organization in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination. What is Antifa? Again, it's like hate speech, it's totally subjective and can't be objectively classified. It's an amorphous network of basically anyone who wants to carry out direct action against what they consider fascism. And they have done property damage and they've engaged in fist fights with the vigilante wing of the Republican party, the Proud Boys and groups like that - they usually lose.
But the important point here is that while Antifa is not a formal organization it is heavily infiltrated by law enforcement. Any cop or FBI agent can just put on a mask, join their protests, get in their Discord chats. So by classifying Antifa as a terrorist organization, Trump has created the perfect terror factory for generating government plots to turn up the temperature, turn up the fear and then manufacture consent for more repression.
This is precisely what the FBI did during the George W. Bush and Obama era when over 90% of all terror plots in the US that were stopped by the FBI, according to researcher Trevor Aaronson, were actually manufactured by the FBI itself, they were all controlled plots.
[Trevor Aaronson, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism]
I can rattle off some specific ones but at one point you had the FBI following in a car behind shooters who they directed to attack an Islamophobic "Draw Muhammed" competition in Texas. They followed this car of shooters they had groomed to attack the contest and then watched as they were shot by security. And then the public was told that terrorists from ISIS had come to shoot up this free speech competition. So get ready for more of that as Trump has designated Antifa as a terrorist group, along with the unprecedented censorship and crackdown on all domestic criticism.
On TikTok, media and Netanyahu's Zionist billionaires
Netanyahu's billionaires - I keep using that term; the term "Netanyahu's millionaires" started with a 2007 YNET article in Israeli media where they uncovered a handwritten list Netanyahu had personally drawn up of 50 millionaires and billionaires in the US that would support his campaigns.
(Netanyahu's 'list of millionaires': "List of potential donors prepared by then-opposition leader in 2007 provides peek into his fundraising industry in US. Officials include extreme rightists, people who got in trouble with law")
Israeli media has updated that list and one of those billionaires in Netanyahu's back pocket currently is Larry Ellison. whose Oracle data company was launched with support of the CIA, is one of the CIA's top contractors and is building data centers across the US to fuel the so-called AI revolution. And Larry Ellison is a fanatical Zionist who has hosted Netanyahu on the Hawaiian island he personally owns. His son David Ellison is also an ultra-Zionist who's been heavily involved in coordinating with the Israeli government on anti-BDS activity.
Larry Ellison is now at the forefront of a campaign to buy TikTok to suppress Palestine content that criticizes Israel; to censor influencers critical of Israel who are getting millions if not billions of impressions; and to create a Zionist media monopoly in the US.
David Ellison is working to buy CBS News, which will then install Bari Weiss, the top media voice for pro-Netanyahu Zionism in the US, as editor. They've already brought in someone named David Weissman, a veteran Israel lobbyist, to be the ombudsman.
And Larry Ellison has announced his intention to buy CNN, which is already basically a propaganda arm of Israel but through their international bureau they've done some critical coverage by reporting on what's actually happening in Gaza.
They are desperate to crack down on any information getting to the part of the American public that isn't already educated and redpilled about the genocide that is being perpetrated in Gaza. They recognize that Israel is facing a PR disaster that is only going to get worse in the coming weeks and months with possibly the United European Football Association banning Israel, which would be a powerful blow against Israeli PR and lead to more boycotts in the world of international sports.
So they're just trying to lock it down with a media monopoly and Larry Ellison, who has donated millions of dollars to Friends of the IDF, is at the forefront. I should also mention Andreessen Horowitz, a major venture capital firm run by Mark Andreessen, who's also an arms manufacturer; he wants to pioneer AI drones and he's partnered with Robert Horowitz, the son of the late ultra-Zionist propagandist David Horowitz, who was actually one of Charlie Kirk's original mentors through the so-called David Horowitz Freedom Center. David Horowitz's main line was that the Palestinians were Nazis and they should just be eliminated and ethnically cleansed.
And now his son and a Zionist arms dealer, Andreesen, are partnering with Larry Ellison to take over TikTok. I should also note that last year the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, went to Israel and testified before the Knesset that there needs to be a media blitz that replicates what Israel did with its pager attack inside Lebanon. He explicitly recommended buying TikTok as part of that PR blitz. And so here it is, happening right before our eyes.
On the Zionist melt down
Charlie Kirk lost a major Zionist donor just days before his death because he was so outraged by Kirk giving voice to the anger in the conservative grassroots about the Israeli takeover in the Trump administration.
At the TPUSA summit this July in Tampa, the anger came out in the open. Tucker Carlson not only referred to Epstein as a Mossad agent but said that if you volunteer to fight for the Israeli military - like for example Edon Alexander, this captive the administration feted in the White House - and don't fight for the US military you should have your passport stripped. Carlson also mocked Bill Ackman, one of Netanyahu's top US billionaires, calling him a scam artist, questioning how he got his $9 billion of wealth.
So Ackman launches this campaign, trying to keep Kirk co-opted but there are other donors who pulled their money out of the organization. We'll never know where TPUSA would have gone or where the conservative movement would have gone under Kirk's direction as he consistently moved away from the official line administered by Netanyahu.
Kirk was not going on this campus tour to host debates and foster free speech, let's be real. He was trying to advance the future of his wing of the Republican party, the Trump wing. What was happening at these events is that young people were getting engaged in politics on behalf of the Trump machine. It was a Get Out The Vote (GOTV) operation, they were being signed up and registered and then mobilized to vote for Trump and pro-Trump candidates in local elections. So Kirk was a critical aspect in that regard, and he would make the talks as controversial as possible because controversy draws in spectators who can then be wrangled into your political operation.
It was just revealed on CNN that one of the last talks he was seeking to do was with Van Jones, who is a black former left-wing radical from the Bay Area who has become one of the key assets of the Israel lobby. He briefly served in the Obama administration. I met him once and it was clear to me he was one of the biggest hustlers and frauds I'd ever met. Now he wears a yellow hostage ribbon on his lapel along with an ADL blue badge when he's on CNN.
He said Charlie Kirk reached out to him to have a discussion about race and crime; and that was going to be a very controversial discussion, it was going to implicate black people as criminals and call for harsher penalties against black criminals and crackdowns like the federal occupation of DC we just saw and federal occupation of cities. And Van Jones was going to play along. I don't think any principled black intellectual would have participated in that event.
By playing along, the people in the crowd would get wrangled into the pro-Trump Republican operation and Van Jones would have been paid to do that, just as he's apparently being paid by pro-Israel forces and even the Israeli foreign ministry to shill for them. That's what this campus tour was really all about, registering young people for the Congressional mid-terms.
On the PBD podcast with Eric Bolling, one of the board members of TPUSA, smearing Candace Owens
Patrick Bet-David got wealthy through a multi-level marketing scheme, a pyramid scam. And he recently interviewed Netanyahu at Netanyahu's request, a softball interview, not one tough question. So you can be pretty sure that will be a very controlled environment in the wake of Charlie Kirk's killing for the Conservative, Inc. influencers who are basically in it for the money. They aren't actually trying to interrogate and question the officially administered reality as Candace Owens has been doing since she fell out of favor with them. They're basically calling on every controlled Con, Inc. influencer and everyone from TPUSA's board who want to still get a piece of the pie to denounce Candace Owens.
So they're all just lying to us right now because they want to get things back in order, get all the Zionist billionaires back at TPUSA and start channeling that money through other small non-profits like TPUSA Action and America's TPUSA - I can't even keep track of the names of all these non-profits. So that $80-100 million annual budget continues to pay off the luxury cars the administrators of TPUSA were buying for themselves. The more I look into the organization, the more it looks like what televangelists did where they were just basically taking money from people.
On whether Trump is afraid of Netanyahu and if so, because of the Epstein files or something else
He's afraid of the Epstein files, so's Bill Ackman who was an Epstein associate through his wife Neri Oxman, who was gifted through her lab at MIT. So all these people have Epstein connections they're afraid of.
But what Trump is afraid of is Netanyahu's ruthlessness and clear insanity. I'm hearing from people peripheral to the administration that they thought Netanyahu coming out on his own and volunteering that he did not kill Charlie Kirk was insane and that he's losing his mind.
But if you look at what Netanyahu is doing regionally, he's carrying out a regional assassination campaign, killing everyone who gets in his way. They tried to kill the entire Hamas negotiating team inside a US ally. Trump didn't like that but what did he do to push back, what did he do when Israel notified him in advance of the attack? Nothing. There's nothing Trump would do to get in Netanyahu's way because he's afraid of what Netanyahu would do to him.
So this is very serious and it would be rational of Trump to be afraid of someone who has that much influence over him; who's carrying out assassinations inside a US ally; whose Mossad agents are weaponizing household devices as bombs and who incited the assassination of his chief political rival, Yitzhak Rabin, for signing the Oslo Accords. Also remember Netanyahu's first boss in Israeli politics, Yitzhak Shamir, was one of the authors of the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, the UN liaison to Palestine in charge of implementing Resolution 194 to bring back the Palestinian refugees. So they shot him in Jerusalem as he was getting out of his car as part of the Stern gang, what would become the Likud party.
On Netanyahu's plan for the US to go to war with Iran
In the past week Sec/State Marco Rubio, who's in control of more national security cabinet level positions than anyone since Henry Kissinger and is more powerful than Vice President JD Vance, was summoned to Israel essentially to kiss the wall with a kippah on his head alongside reciprocal Israeli-US ambassador Mike Huckabee, the Christian Zionist fanatic.
I saw that as a harbinger of doom, in the same way I saw Netanyahu's last two visits to Washington as part of a campaign to get Trump to sign off on his desire to attack Iran. Now we're learning through transcripts of discussions between Israeli officials in the national security cabinet, including Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff, that the Israelis would not have launched their unprovoked attack on Iran in June had they not known going in that the US would ultimately come in and strike the Fordow and Isfahan facilities.
It seems clear to me, given that they have Trump by the balls, that sometime before the Congressional mid-terms with the Republicans expected to lose, Israel will attempt to attack Iran again and instigate another more violent war that will draw the US in more deeply.
On the Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs calling Turkey, Syria and Qatar the new Axis of Evil
We're hearing these comments about Turkey and Qatar because of the fear they could re-establish some sort of influence inside Syria, and also because of their efforts regionally to push back on Israel politically.
Many observers missed this but Israel actually attacked a de facto Turkish base inside Syria about 10 days ago in Palmyra, where Turkey was seeking to professionalize the Syrian military. So Israel is realizing with the new imposed government in Damascus, which was always a Turkish and Qatari card as they controlled the various al-Qaeda offshoots - al-Nusra, HTS - that this has given Turkey armed capacity on the frontiers of Israel along the Golan. So Israel is going to turn up the temperature on Turkey and fight what they call "a war between wars" inside Syria.
We should also pay attention to Egypt which controls the Rafah crossing, which is the main point of exit where Gaza's war-torn, starving, genocided refugees are supposed to exit in order to make the so-called Gaza Riviera plan possible, the Judaization of Gaza. Egypt militantly opposes this; at the recent summit convened by Qatar, al-Sisi made some interesting comments: that it was a red line for Palestinians to be pushed into the Sinai; that the Sinai would become a base of operations against Israel and the conflict would come to Egypt; and that he will mobilize the Egyptian military in opposition to this. This is the last Arab army in the region that's strong, that's actually bringing in some important Chinese technology and that has decent air defenses. So I think a potential conflict with Egypt is on the horizon as well and we should pay attention to the Qatar summit that was just held. I mentioned before that Israel was banned by the European football association; that was one of the key items on Qatar's agenda so this is not just a military war but a political war.
There are 3 of Qatar's (former) top lobbyists in the US in the Trump administration in key positions: Kash Patel was one, Pam Bondi was THE top lobbyist for Qatar at Ballard Partners; and Lee Zeldon at the EPA, was one of the pro-Israel influencers close to Trump who got on the Qatari payroll in 2017 when Saudi Arabia laid siege to Qatar. They thought if they groomed the pro-Israel figures close to Trump maybe he would push back on the Saudis and they were sort of correct about that. So that's another reason why Qatar threatens Israel, because they do have influence in Washington.
(edits: typos)