The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel
Sep 15, 2025
Transcript
The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly
polarized United States. political violence, including the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives
Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump seems certain to
expand. So does state repression of individuals and groups accused by the far right in the Trump administration of
fermenting the hate that led to Kirk's assassination. Trump blames the radical left for Kirk's murder, claiming it is
quote directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today and it must stop right
now. He vows to quote find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political
violence, including the organizations that funded and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law
enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our society. end
quote. If Trump means what he says, and I suspect he does, we will see the full
force of the federal government used to target Trump's opponents and organizations, including the Democratic
Party, the media, universities, and advocacy groups, which are already under heavy assault. More ominously, it will
give a green light to far-right vigilante groups to carry out violent attacks. Those blamed for polluting
America, including Muslims, the LGBTQ community, groups such as Antifa,
feminist liberals, the left, the undocumented, the poor, and people of color.
Joining me to discuss Kirk's
assassination, what it means for the United States, and the future of our disintegrating democracy, is Max
Blumenthal, editor of The Gray Zone, whose most recent article is, quote, "Charlie Kirk refused Netanyahu funding
offer was frightened by pro-Israel forces before death friends reveal,"
which adds, of course, another fascinating twist to this unfolding saga.
So, Max, before we get into the
ramifications of this assassination in terms of civil liberties and repression, let's talk a little bit
about the article that you just published about Kirk's
alienation or distance from the Zionist lobby. I know you've been writing about Kirk for some time.
Yeah, I've been writing about him since 2015, three years after he started TPUSA, which became the largest, most
influential conservative youth organization in history. And at that
time he was at the forefront of a massive infusion of Israel lobby cash
into his group through the David Horowitz Freedom Center which was basically making him the property of
Israel in exchange in exchange for this sort of Faustian bargain. He was going to be at the top of the conservative youth
grassroots or astroturf grassroots. And so all he he could talk about was
race, immigration, all the social issues, and take the most extreme lines possible, say whatever he
wanted as long as he pushed this so-called Judeo-Christian
relationship and constantly talked about the Judeo-Christian roots
of the country, and supported Israel and attacked the BDS movement, which was growing on campus at the grass roots level
whenever he could.
And so Charlie Kirk was actually at the forefront of
many of the blacklisting operations that have targeted college professors as well
as students. He was in the same circles as those who were
behind Canary Mission, which is now being used to target green card
holders, and visa holders, for deportation under Trump.
So I was covering it early on before anyone had heard about him. He
was a baby-faced activist then, but he was obviously very hardworking,
talented, a huge asset for them. And flash forward to
July of this year, Charlie Kirk is the most influential conservative activist,
period. He's on his way to possibly becoming the next president. Almost certainly would have become senator if,
even though he's from Illinois, and he runs TPUSA, which is major, there's a crisis taking place. Charlie
Kirk is under pressure from his own grassroots on the issue of Israel.
Israel's exerting under Netanyahu so much control on Trump, amid a genocide
that the grassroots have turned against, and if you look at recent polling,
Ugov polling, Pew polling, all of them show about only 25% of Republicans
under 35 support Israel over the Palestinians. If you actually pay attention to what Nick Fuentes, who's
the most influential right-wing America first
streamer says, they're not just upset over Jewish influence. They're not
just being anti-Jewish. They're actually upset by the same things that upset us. The deliberate starvation of the
civilian population unfolding in real time, and watching their president just fold to a foreign apartheid state.
And so this pressure was building within Charlie Kirk's camp, and Charlie Kirk himself was beginning to turn. And it
all exploded out in the open at the Student Action Summit, which I believe was in Tampa, Florida in July 2025. And
that's where Charlie Kirk brought Tucker Carlson, someone who had already turned on this issue, on stage to not only talk
about how Jeffrey Epstein was possibly a Mossad agent, but to call for those
who had gone and fought for Israel, American Jews who had gone to fought for Israel's military rather than the US
military, to be stripped of their citizenship.
And he called out Bill Ackman, one of the most influential
Zionist billionaires in the US, who is a Netanyahu cutout, who had been sort of manipulating and bullying Harvard into
submission. His money got Claudine Gay as president kicked out at Harvard. He mocked
Bill Ackman as a financial con artist. He literally called him a scam artist, and questioned where his money came from.
And the crowd was cheering and delighting in this entire spectacle. Megan Kelly from Fox was calling Jeffrey Epstein a Mossad agent.
Then Charlie Kirk
opened up the floor to a debate on the very issue of Zionism, and brought on an
anti-Zionist Jew, a comedian named Dave Smith, to debate a Zionist apparatchik at
Newsweek named Joshua Hammer. And Dave Smith mopped the floor with him. He's very effective. He was also
talking about human rights abuses, and the crowd was clearly with him.
And after this summit, Charlie Kirk was
bombarded with furious text messages, phone calls. There may have been meetings as well, very tense meetings as
well, with his donors, the people who built him up. And they said, "We built you up. We can take all of this away
from you if you don't stop this." And here they were laying down the law.
And this offended him,
alienated him. He was not used to being talked to like that, as though he were property. But you know, when you join the Firm, you don't get to leave. And at the same time,
I was told by a longtime friend of Charlie Kirk that he was frightened
by the way he was being treated. Basically a mafia was reading him the
riot act. And he wasn't the only one who was frightened.
I was told that. And the source is someone who knows people in
the White House.
Donald Trump's frightened. Donald Trump is afraid to defy Netanyahu. He's afraid about what
can happen. And I was told that during one of Netanyahu's or several of Netanyahu's recent visits to the US, I
think he's made four visits this year, which is unprecedented, listening devices were planted by
Israeli agents on the Secret Services' emergency response vehicles,
maybe Stingray devices, some kind of listening device, electronic surveillance device. This was
found by the Secret Service. It was told to the White House. Obviously, the White House kept it under wraps and this has,
you know, made people nervous inside the White House and the national security team, and this is not something
unprecedented. Politico in 2019 reported citing three former US officials saying that
Israel had planted stingray devices around the White House to spy on Trump's cell phone communications. Boris
Johnson, the former Israeli PM, wrote in his memoir that Netanyahu went to use his personal toilet. And afterwards,
his personal security team found a listening device in his toilet. Like immediately afterwards, Tony Blair told
his own team, "When you go to Israel, do not speak about anything sensitive in government buildings or
cars." So the I don't think I'm being fed a bunch of conspiracy theories here.
Trump, Rubio reveal extraordinary nervousness over Netanyahu after Qatar attack | Janta Ka Reporter
Janta Ka Reporter
Sep 16, 2025
Two significant developments involving Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the last two days have indicated an alarming sense of fear in the US administration in criticizing the Israeli attack on Qatar. While Trump performed a spectacular U-turn and denied being notified by Netanyahu before the attack on Doha, Rubio and his boss refused to give unequivocal assurance that Qatar wouldn’t be attacked again. Rifat Jawaid looks at the remarkable development plaguing the US administration.
And what I reported, based on background sourcing, matches up with the things that Charlie Kirk said in public, that he was
being bombarded by what he called Jewish stakeholders, meaning his funders, and that he felt
that he could not express his own views anymore as an American. And he was
starting to move in public.
So consider the consequence of a figure like Charlie
Kirk, who's on his way to basically inheriting the mantle of Trumpism at
some point, and who controls a large segment of that movement, taking the base away from the Judeo-Christian
relationship, taking it away from rock-solid support for Israel, as Israel is in a seven-front
war, carrying out genocide, and Netanyahu believes that he has this short window of time to basically carry out regime
change in Iran. It would have been catastrophic.
And I also learned from multiple sources that Charlie Kirk
actually took it upon himself personally to go to the White House, and personally lobby Trump against bombing Iran back in
June, and that he was shut down. Trump angrily rebuked him because Trump is simply afraid. He's completely
controlled at this point by Netanyahu.
So, am I saying that Israel killed Charlie
Kirk? How would I know that? There's no evidence for that. But how am I going to
not report this fascinating background about where the conservative movement in the Republican party itself
are going on the question of Israel, when I'm learning all of this after his death,
and there are so many unusual aspects
to the investigation, so many mishaps by the FBI, and such
strange behavior by the Israeli government and Netanyahu himself since Charlie Kirk's killing, that it has
fueled speculation by millions of people online that there may have been an
Israeli role. I mean, why wouldn't they speculate when Israel seems to assassinate everyone that defies it in
its own region, and has even dispatched thousands of pagers to
low-level Hezbollah members and their families to assassinate them. It's
something that we would expect in this atmosphere. But I am not making any direct claim that Israel
assassinated him. What I'm saying is I think they would have taken him out. The
Israel lobby would have taken him out for sure, but they would have preferred not to do it, or need to do it
physically. They could just defund him, and then castigate him, as they're doing with figures like Candace Owens, or
Tucker Carlson who have turned against them.
So this is just a fascinating look, and it won't
be my last one at Charlie Kirk's final days, and the political pressure he
was under.
How much money was he getting number one, and number two, can you talk about
Netanyahu's reaction, because you write about it in your piece, his interactions with
Kirk.
Well, this is something that was not known to the public and
I hope to be able to report this out in greater detail. But I
was told by a friend of Kirk, someone close to Kirk who was speaking to him in his last days, that Netanyahu
actually came in and personally offered to re-up Kirk's TPUSA
organization with a massive infusion of Zionist money. And
his budget at its height was something like $80 million. I mean,
we're talking about a lot of money.
Just watch the student action summit that became so controversial. There's
nothing like it on the left, or even within the Democratic parties' associated
organizations. It's very flashy. Look at Charlie Kirk's final moments. I mean,
it looked almost like he was running for president. It looked like a Trump
rally. And he had an enormous amount of former Navy Seals, and special forces guys around him, like
executive security. You have to have a lot of money for that. So, he already had the money, but he was at risk
of losing much of it. And Netanyahu comes in and says basically,
"Come to the dark side. Stop talking about this, and we will take care of you.
I will call my cutouts, and they'll have everything handled." And Charlie Kirk refused. And that was what I'm learning is that that was not the first time he refused someone close to Netanyahu in recent months. And it left
him feeling cold, and anxious, and even in the words of the friend, "frightened."
I've had some conversations with other
influential people in the right-wing influencer world since my piece came
out, and basically they want me to know that this is something they're
all facing at all of the major right-wing media organizations associated with Trump, that there is no
space for them to criticize Israel. And one figure I could point
to, I've actually been on his podcast, he's one of the top right-wing podcasters if you go to Rumble,
which is sort of the YouTube alternative because so many right-wing voices were being banned there, and even us Chris,
more on the left, we get demonetized left and right, and suppressed. So we've even turned to Rumble. But
you go to Rumble, like Tim P is one of the first. If he's live streaming, that comes up right away. And so he gets an
enormous amount of views. And when I went on his show right after
October 7th, he gave me the floor, and let me speak my mind.
Tim P was
summoned to a meeting with Netanyahu during one of Netanyahu's visits under Trump's second term at the
Blair House, where Netanyahu is staying with just a few other right-wing
GOP affiliated media influencers, and he was not allowed
to talk about what happened. I think one of his co-hosts, or guests, brought up the meeting on his podcast, and you
could see he was extremely nervous, extremely anxious. And it's like, "Was he
captured somehow by Netanyahu?"
I mean the pressure that Netanyahu himself is personally bringing on the right-wing
podcast world really shows his anxiety about the rebellion that's taking place
among the youth. And after my article came out, which got over 100,000 unique views on our website, then I did an interview with Tim
Dylan, who's a very popular comedian about this, which has erupted. It's
600,000 views now, just exploding across social media as people were
already talking about this issue.
Netanyahu takes to Twitter-X for the
sixth or seventh time since Charlie Kirk's killing, to declare that Charlie Kirk was a true friend of Israel. And
this time, it felt like Netanyahu was overcompensating,
and was afraid of the truth getting out, which is that as Charlie Kirk's longtime
friend told me, Charlie Kirk had grown to hate Netanyahu, as every US leader
has.
Remember the open mic with Macron, and Obama, the
hot mic in 2012 or something? They're complaining about Netanyahu, and they're like, "You think you have
trouble dealing with him. He calls me every day."
That's where Charlie Kirk was. He thought Netanyahu was a disgusting
bully, and manipulator.
So Netanyahu is worried that Charlie Kirk's base,
posthumously, will start to take on that
sentiment towards him. And you can see they're deploying Ben Shapiro
everywhere they can. Ben Shapiro is like the leading media asset for
Netanyahu in the United States. He just feels like astroturf to me. He
even jokes on Twitter about having six million followers, but he seems so unlikable and talentless, and he's
pushing a kind of warmed-over Trumpism that just doesn't feel
authentic. And he's on Fox News with the other major Zionist
enforcer in the media, who Netanyahu helped personally credit with convincing Trump to bomb Iran, Mark Levin, just
days before Charlie Kirk's assassination. And they were alluding to Charlie Kirk allowing Tucker Carlson on stage this summer and saying, "You can't have a big tent. You cannot allow these cooks in,
and you can't be at the front of the church allowing a congregation of anti-Israel nut jobs into your realm." Then Charlie Kirk goes to the front of the church 4 days later, and a sniper bullet hits him in the neck. And
Ben Shapiro comes out 24 hours later and says, "We need to go on our own campus
tours, and pick up the bloody microphone where Charlie Kirk left it." The subtext
is, "We're going to go on those campus tours, and we're not going to allow this anti-Israel stuff to come into our quote
unquote "church" anymore."
Let's talk a little bit about the
ramifications of this. One of the things that we've seen over the last few months as the genocide, as you said,
across the political spectrum becomes so repugnant, is Netanyahu's courting of
alternative media. He almost never goes on mainstream media.
Yeah. Great question. Netanyahu never goes
on Israeli media, and you know that from your years in
the region, and having Israeli sources who say that anyone who isn't Likud in Israel
constantly complains that Netanyahu will never talk to Hebrew language media. Because he can't take a
challenge. He wants to dominate, and get his
message across. And his message is best sent to Americans as long as he can
hold his tiny narrow edge in his coalition together by keeping the genocide going, and keeping the fascist,
messianic elements as his lynchpin. The Israeli public doesn't matter. The
hostages can all die. What matters is keeping his direct line to Washington,
and to Trump.
And the biggest challenge, once again, was Charlie Kirk. It
was the conservative youth who are in this open rebellion against Israel. And so on his last tour to the US, Netanyahu
sat down with the Neelk boys. I wasn't that familiar with them, because I
have an IQ higher than a grapefruit, and they cater to a very low IQ audience
that likes pranks, and fratboy kind of bawdy humor. And they themselves admitted
after the interview, which was like a softball interview where they asked Netanyahu,
"Do you like better McDonald's or Burger King more?"
And they admitted after the interview, that the questions were fed to them by Netanyahu's team.
Number two, they
didn't know who Netanyahu was, and after learning about it from more educated
members of their audience, they decided that he was the new Hitler, and they felt bad about interviewing the new
Hitler.
Netanyahu has carried out several interviews, with basically the most
vacuous podcasters in the US. And why would you even agree to interview Netanyahu? I mean, of course, he's a
world leader. So you want the engagement. But there must be some kind of financial incentive there. And if the pro-Netanyahu elements in the US, fronted by Barry Weiss, paid for by
David Ellison, the son of Oracle CIA contractor Larry Ellison, are going to
buy CBS News, and put Barry Weiss at the head of the editorial team, it's pretty
clear what's going on. They're not in just a seven-front war, they're in an eight-front war, with the United
States as the eighth front. And it's a hybrid war mainly focused on
propaganda. But when that fails, they will escalate.
Let's talk about that, because since Kirk's assassination, we have seen in particular the
Zionist lobby weaponize his murder to call for this quote "War against the radical left." Is it Brian Mast who pushed a
bill to authorize the secretary of state to revoke passports to quote, "kick
out terrorist sympathizers" out of the country? This of course follows
Tom Cotton's demand, after the genocide had started
on October 7th, for the justice department national security to investigate news outlets such as AP,
CNN, New York Times, Reuters, for publishing photographs of October
7.
They've weaponized this. You know, you have this
breach between Kirk and the Zionist and Israel lobby, yet at the same time,
his assassination, his elevation to martyrdom, is really being used by the
Israel lobby to go after everybody who not only criticizes
Israel, but everyone on the Left.
Yeah. I mean, they see the Left as the
main base of BDS, who elevated this issue to a national crisis.
The Left is their main target. Netanyahu sees a marriage of radical leftism and
Islam, what David Horowitz called the Red-Green Alliance, as the main threat in the US. And so in
his first Fox News appearance, before the suspect's identity, Tyler Robinson, was even known, Netanyahu blamed Muslims. He blamed
radical Islam for doing this, the same way that he declared in comments
reported in the Israeli paper Mahariv, in 2008, that 911 was good
for Israel. If Muslims could be found to be responsible, well, that's good for Israel.
It's also good for the GOP. The
Utah governor openly declared during a press conference that he was praying that the culprit would be a foreigner,
and "not one of our own guys," meaning Tyler Robinson of Utah.
He just openly admitted it standing right in front of Kash Patel, an immigrant from India. The FBI
director looked kind of uncomfortable in that position. The identity of the killer, and the
motive, was determined before Charlie Kirk's body went cold. And the agenda
was already there the same way that the Patriot Act had already been assembled prior to 9/11 2001. And it is an agenda
of mass repression, crushing dissent, basically criminalizing
what they consider anti-Israel activity.
And we've seen this week, with Brian ____'s bill, which is basically
Israel's agenda to strip Americans of citizenship if they're accused of providing material support, which can be
anything, to Iran and Israel's enemies, --
So, just to interrupt, Max, people who have provided legal advice to groups are
accused of providing material support to terrorist groups.
Yes. And there is no due process for them under this bill. Normally, it would go to a court. In this case, it's
the exclusive authority of the Secretary of State, someone created by the Israel
lobby, basically an AIPAC plant, Marco Rubio. And where is Marco Rubio right now? Marco Rubio is kissing the wall. Right now he's leaving the cotell in the old city of Jerusalem,
where he was forced to carry out this humiliation ritual, that every US politician who wants to rise does,
where they have to put on a keepa, and Netanyahu takes him to the western wall, and they have to basically kiss the wall. It's like, "Up against the wall, motherfucker. You want to be a politician?"
And he's there with Mike Huckabee, the Christian Zionist who
really believes in that stuff, who is basically doing genocide management for the US in Gaza
right now, overseeing the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation starvation siege. This is just a
shocking display to witness.
And then back home you have Steven Miller, who himself is an arch Zionist, who is
running the entire agenda for Donald Trump right now -- he's sort of the Rove-ian brains behind this
authoritarian crackdown that they want to implement -- telling Sean Hannity that, "We will put you into exile, and we will
take away your freedoms if you minimize Charlie Kirk's death. We will put you
into exile." What does that mean? It means taking away your citizenship. This is what they want to do. It's on
the table. It's playing out on social media in a vigilante fashion on a site called Charlie's murderers.com, who is doxing thousands and thousands of
Americans not only for celebrating Charlie Kirk's death, which I personally found to be deeply antisocial, that shows a lack of humanity, but
also minimizing his death, or calling him a racist, or like you, putting his
views in context. And they're losing their jobs. It's a dystopian scenario.
The right-wing is playing
cancel culture to the extreme. But it's playing to win, unlike the left, which was trying to enforce a
very narrow moral code by getting people, within their own
media organizations, canceled, and so on. The right is playing to win. They want to fully isolate Left-wing dissent from
society, and they're exploiting this in a way that raises a lot of questions
before there's been a full investigation of this shooting yet.
Tyler Robinson is
not cooperating. I haven't seen the confession. Apparently, everyone close to him is cooperating. We don't have the
information, but they don't care. They want to ram through this agenda which totally dovetales with what they've been
doing with ICE. This is ICE isn't just about immigration. It's about normalizing secret police in our society
that violate people's fourth and sixth amendment rights and are able to essentially kidnap anyone who is a
resident in the US and take them to de facto concentration camps. And the
budget, Trump's big beautiful bill, has put these secret police on hyperdrive.
The the the the kidnapping of Latinos who are suspected of being undocumented migrants is a pilot program for a larger
agenda. Yeah, without question. I mean, and of course, the expansion of these detention
centers uh are uh you know, regionally going to have in essence de facto concentration
camps dotted throughout the United States. What what what do you expect to
see coming? I they've gone after George Soros. Uh I mean the insanity of it, but what
are we going to see in terms of their game plan o over the next few weeks and months?
Well, I mean, I hate George Soros and what he's done across the world is malign. I mean, he's a CIA adjacent.
Well, let me let me just interrupt, Max. I mean George source did exactly what the aid uh democracy initiatives did
which is crush any kind of popular or resistance movements. I mean that's the kind of final irony but yeah
exactly and and you know this this this this relates to a wider
conversation I think about the left the postb left is the role of foundation
money in the left. I know Christian parent is working on a book about this. How this foundation money from the Ford
Foundation, Open Societies, was basically used to suppress and sort of
neutralize anti-war and class-based activism within the left and get people more focused on issues that didn't
threaten the Democratic Party, which was controlled by the rich, like anti-racism. not not not you know understanding the
racialized roots of poverty but just this vague concept of anti-racism and all of these other social issues. It's a
se it's a sort of separate conversation but where I think things are going in this country is very dark and res um
recalls the years of lead in Italy. The years of lead were u driven by or
punctuated and accelerated by political terrorism and political assassination.
It's uh it was a strategy of tension which was being orchestrated
by the intelligence services not just the Italian intelligence services that
were affiliated with NATO. the CIA was involved and um Israeli intelligence may
have been involved as well in the killing of Aldo Mororrow um the Italian
prime minister. So let's consider the 1969 Milan cafe bombing uh Piaza Fontana
bombing. This was like what what launched the years of lead and it was a false flag
operation that was carried out by staybehind armies recruited by the CIA
under Operation Gladadio from far-right fascist groups which would have collaborated with Hitler during his
occupation of Italy as well as like they were also recruiting within the mafia and it was blamed on left-wing
anarchists. That's not what I'm saying happened here. I'm just talking I I just I'm trying to make a larger point. The
reason that the security services did this was they feared they actually did fear in some way far-right fascism, but
their primary concern was communism and leftism in general. and they felt like
if the situation became destabilized and the public became afraid they would
adhere to the security states agenda which was in that case pro- NATO. Um I
also mentioned the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Mororrow. Um Aldo Morrow
was the last of a kind in Italian um politics. 1978 he was kidnapped by
the red brigades and it began it really accelerated the social unrest and fear
that the middle class Italian public felt after uh following like Gladio and
everything and he was held for days by the red brigades. They put him on a mock
trial and then uh after killing his security team and kidnapping him during
like um with his motorcade and they accused him of selling out the
working class and um making it Italy an imperialist state. But if you know,
historians have looked back at what Mora was doing and seen that he was actually
privately allowing arms to pass through Italy to Palestinian resistance groups,
that he was taking a um very not necessarily friendly stance toward
Israel, that he was a friend of unions and workingclass syndicates, and that
the Red Brigades had actually, I mean, this is confirmed, the Red Brigades had been infiltrated heavily by the
intelligence services. Many suspect the Israeli intelligence service. Um and it
crushed the national unity government and actually moved Italy further to the right to the point where now um Giorgio
Maloney I mean I Georgio Maloney sort of reflects this legacy as this right-wing leader. So the strategy of tension in
the US has been building since 2020. And I can point to one incident then that I
think is a a perfect microcosm of what I'm talking about. Kenosha, Wisconsin,
the Kyle Writtenhouse shooting, which is poorly understood by people on the left who supported BLM.
Kyle Writtenhouse was acting in a vigilante fashion to guard uh local
business with his weapon out along with other local men from
lutters and riers who were destroying local businesses in a completely nihilistic fashion. A group of prob
marchers was marching around soon after looting. They were not they were not smashing up businesses. They were just
marching randomly. And their own crowd had been seated with
people who had never protested before. or one of whom was a local mental patient, a young man who had just been
let out mysteriously of a local mental hospital and dropped off at their demonstration by police. The police
directed the marchers directly to where Kyle Writtenhouse and his group of
vigilantes were and several of the marchers began physically attacking Kyle
Writtenhouse. One pulled a pistol on him. Kyle Writtenhouse shot them. He also shot the young man who had been a
mental patient. And this inflamed racial hatred across the United States as Kyle
Writtenhouse was actually accused of going across state lines to hunt down black people. The police had no reason
to push the crowd and direct them to where Kyle Writtenhouse was except to inflame that conflict. Do I know that
there was some higher order there? No. But this was what I was seeing in my own
uh just just being out there in the country at the time. And it was also at
a time when COVID was beginning to grip the country and the unvaccinated were being pitted against the vaccinated. The
we're just constantly being pitted against each other by narratives that come from the top. And that is where
Trump wants this to go because Trump has promised a new golden age for the 1%.
It's not for the rest of us. And the 1% is has been terrified. Not just since
the Charlie Kirk shooting is primarily terrifying the podcaster class. Since the shooting of I think his name was
Brian Johnson, the United Healthcare CEO by Luigi Manion.
Steve Bannon, former Trump chief of staff, gave a talk to a group of
financial elites and tech elites. I believe it was in Silicon Valley. many of them were not Republicans. And he
said, "Here is our promise to you. Here's why." This was like, I think at the beginning of the second Trump term.
He said, "This is why you should support MAGA because this guy Luigi Manion went out and shot one of you. This is going
to happen more and more. We are entering a period of social unrest and social social turmoil and we will protect you."
So what we are going to see now is a policy crafted for the elite that is
terrified of this environment and at the same time a policy to drive us the rest of us who have nothing who are in debt
who are uh don't really see much of a uh
a financial future in the US. They're going to pit us all against each
other through a strategy of tension and then repress us all and let us say whatever we want online. We won't be
banned anymore. We can say whatever we want on Elon's Twitter X. We have freedom of speech. As he said, we have
freedom of speech but not freedom of reach. And that freedom of speech will be used to
surveil us further and ruin our lives if we are provoked into saying the wrong things. What kind of infrastructure do
you foresee uh in terms of I mean we've already seen the capitulation of
universities even the capitulation of mainstream media organizations such as CNN
uh how's how's what's the landscape going to look like how is it going to be
deformed it's going to look a lot like the McCarthy era and that is an in been a
major inspiration to the Right. Um, you know, we've seen right-wing
organizations like, um, what was it? Uh, CPAC, I think, was giving out like young
McCarthy awards back during the mid 2000s. Um, Steven Miller, I think, sees
McCarthy as sort of a hero. And so, what has the Trump
administration done? They have gotten Berkeley you UC Berkeley to furnish a na
a list of 160 anti-Israel anti-Semitic professors with
professor Judith Butler at the top of it. That's what we're seeing along with the
defunding of universities for allowing students for justice in Palestine to
exist for allowing protests on their campus. It's a the biggest free speech crackdown
possibly since the McCarthy era, certainly the most transparent one. And it's being conducted in many cases on
behalf of a foreign apartheid state. There's now a lot of um grassroots calls
I see online for a Charlie Kirk act. Remember, this is something the right always does is they name an act after a
martyr of their um culture comp, their culture war. They had the Lake and Riley
Act, a woman who was murdered by a Venezuelan migrant. And the Lake and
Riley act basus
of a crime and the requires law enforcement to jail them and sequester
them from society without any due process, which is unconstitutional. The Charlie Kirk Act that's being pushed
online is an attack on media independence and will do a a lot of what
the Biden administration was doing to online media, which is to censor and
punish any media organization or individual who's accused of mis or
disinformation. I don't. And so the right is basically picking up where the Biden
administration left off, just directing it against their enemies. I don't think that will um be the form that such an
act takes, but I expect some kind of Charlie Kirk act to take place. I expect
the uh investigation that the FBI is carrying out to be incomplete, just as
the investigation of the um um the young man who shot Donald Trump um what was
his name? Matthew. Um,
the Butler shooting, the Butler, PA shooting. Uh, we we it feels like that was shut
down. Ryan Ralph, the shooter who was the wouldbe shooter at Mara Lago, who was recruiting for the Ukrainian Foreign
Legion in Kiev and who had had meetings on Capitol Hill. We don't hear about that anymore. So I expect them to try to
sort of bury any uncomfortable or inconvenient facts there. And then
finally, I think there will be a push to label Antifa as a terrorist
organization. The same way that the British state and British intelligence
have labeled Palestine Action, an anti-war group that has never harmed a single person, which was carrying out
direct action against Israeli defense facilities, has been prescribed as a terrorist organization in the UK, which
means that you are not allowed in the UK to declare your support on a t-shirt for
Palestine Action without being jailed for supporting terrorism. And the
difference there though is that Palestine Action is a real organization.
It it was sort of an amorphous organization, but it had a brand. Antifa is not. And we don't even know what
Antifa is. And Antifa is something that, as you wrote in a piece that I think
really stands the test of time about black block, an aspect of Antifa back during Occupy Wall Street, is easily and
constantly and comprehensively infiltrated by federal law enforcement.
It's basically one of they're basically a chaos agent for federal law
enforcement, but they're not a real organization. You can't determine who's a member of it.
except through um what bullet engravings or t-shirts.
And so it allows if if Antifa is prescribed as a terrorist organization in the US, it pretty much allows anyone
on the left who gets involved in direct action or protest activity to be labeled as a terrorist as well.
I just want to throw in Ellen Shreker who did all the great work on uh McCarthyism, no ivory tower, her books
and etc. So she says this period is worse than McCarthy because there you
saw blacklists and people uh being pushed out of schools and universities. The FBI actually used to show up at high
schools with lists. Uh but she said here they're capturing institutions.
That's right. I mean they it's a it is a march through institutions
as and and they're also just simply eliminating institutions as well that can't be captured.
All right, thanks. That was Max Blumenthal. Uh, check out his great work
on the Greyzone. Uh, and thanks to Sophia, Diego, Thomas, and Max who
produce the show. You can find me at chris edges.substack.com.
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