Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, September 29th, 2025.
NAPOLITANO: Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, thank you very much, my dear friend. I have a lot of questions for you, and I know this presser is going on as we speak. Do you have any handle on what Trump and Netanyahu are announcing?
BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I wish that we were talking an hour from now so I could process more what’s actually taking place, but it does look like there is an agreement on a 21-point plan, which is basically a pacification plan that is deeply corrupt for Gaza. Most Israelis want to end the war. Netanyahu has been weakened, but he’s accepting it at least tentatively. And the Gaza International Board of Peace will be established with Trump at the top. At the bottom are low-level Palestinian and Arab technocrats, and Tony Blair is supposed to oversee the provisional authority. So he becomes the new L. Paul Bremer of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas members are given safe passage basically to leave. Who’s a Hamas member? Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections back in 2006. So anyone who voted for them has—that would be kind of a form of voluntary migration.
And Gaza City is still being destroyed as we speak, and Trump has stated that if Hamas refuses this deal, basically he’s made them an offer they are not allowed to refuse, and Israel has full authority to totally destroy them. There is a withdrawal plan which Israel is supposed to abide by. Can Trump enforce it? I doubt it. And, according to Trump, Arab and Muslim countries will be dealing with Hamas, meaning Egypt and countries that are very hostile to them. So they will be pitted against Hamas. Again, I wish I had more time to assess this.
Last point is Netanyahu seems a little disappointed, and there are rumors filtering out of the White House that Trump sees Netanyahu as politically weakened. And we’ve talked for months and months about how any ceasefire, however temporary—if it lasts for 60 days or more—would unravel Netanyahu’s coalition. And Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have already condemned this deal, and Ben-Gvir’s condemned Netanyahu for apologizing to Qatar for the recent attack, which obviously he was forced to do as part of this deal. So, he’s weaker than ever.
NAPOLITANO: And will his government collapse?
BLUMENTHAL: It’s possible. I, again, can’t really make an assessment now. I think his government could collapse upon implementation if he actually forces the military out in a way that does not provide the religious-nationalist settler camp with the new Gush Katif–style settlements that they’re seeking. Remember Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said that the final solution for Gaza is actually a real estate deal and it’s going to be Jews-only real estate. So Netanyahu is in peril now, and obviously Trump is frustrated with him. Trump has also made some bizarre comments about how Iran could join the Abraham Accords.
NAPOLITANO: I think I’m sure Netanyahu loved hearing that.
BLUMENTHAL: Yeah. Well, I mean, it would only happen after Iran’s government—its Islamic Republic—was destroyed and there was regime change, because Iran would never join the Abraham Accords and submit to Israel, which is what the Abraham Accords is about. So, all these problems, and we’re going to know, I think, in 72 hours, whether all sides actually are able to agree to this. Hamas agreed a week ago. Again, they’ve been agreeing to this since at least May of 2024, but this time they openly agreed to return all hostages in exchange for several conditions which had supposedly already been agreed upon. So, Hamas is demonstrating enormous flexibility. And again, this is after Netanyahu tried to kill their entire negotiating team in Qatar.
NAPOLITANO: What is your take on the meeting that you and Scott Ritter and Jeffrey Sachs and I and about 25 or 30 others had with President Pezeshkian of Iran last Wednesday?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, this was like a press conference for anti-war figures. There were activists there. There were journalists. There were pundits, and a very broad panoply politically was represented there, and Pezeshkian wanted to speak to the American public through us rather than speaking to the Trump administration, which cannot really be moved, in his view, at this point, because it is so subservient to Israel, as Tucker Carlson’s sources in the Middle East have been saying. Netanyahu is boasting about how he has Trump under his thumb.
So Pezeshkian warned in that meeting that war is coming. He said for sure they will attack again, referring to Israel and presumably the US. And he even grimly forecasted another attempt on his own life and stated that Iran has prepared five to six steps ahead of every contingency, including the elimination of its elected president. So the reason the meeting was held was Iran expects war at any moment. Just talking to contacts inside Iran, they’re all expecting it. Many were expecting it sooner, but they feel like the snapback sanctions—which were hypocritically imposed by the E3, the three European countries that were part of the P5+1 after the US ripped up the deal, the JCPOA—that the snapback sanctions were really the trigger for another potential war.
Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, has told TASS, the Russian wire service, that he is hearing from his own sources that Israel is preparing for a war on Iran, and this might be a way for them to blow up the 21-point plan in Gaza for Netanyahu to shore up his coalition. At the same time, Lavrov has said that his sources—and Israeli media has also said this as well, echoing Pezeshkian in our own meeting—the war will be more violent, and Iran’s government is much stronger than Israel understood during the 12-day war. And Pezeshkian said that his society—he’s a reformist president; he represents the urban middle class that wants a more socially liberal society—and he has been more critical of the Islamic Republic than previous presidents. And he stated that even harsh critics in Iran and opponents of the Islamic Republic united around the flag and behind the military because Israel killed so many civilians, and they were so offended by the unprovoked nature of that attack.
And what that really means is that Israel, in attempting this surprise attack, forfeited its ultimate objective of destabilizing Iranian society to the point where they actually achieve regime change and the streets become uncontrollable. And so Iran has a political advantage there going into what appears to be the next round of a more violent conflict.
NAPOLITANO: Forgive me if we’ve covered this before. Why did the Israelis bomb a prison, an Iranian prison? Was it an accident, or was there some diabolical purpose to killing prisoners and the people visiting them?
BLUMENTHAL: No, that’s a great question, and it connects directly to the last point I made. Israel bombed Evin Prison, and they thought—I mean, this is like the most extreme neoconservative delusional thinking—they thought by bombing this prison that they would send a message to the part of Iranian society that opposes the Islamic Republic that Israel stands with them and wants to actually liberate the prisoners in Evin Prison, many of whom are considered political prisoners, including people who have attempted to foment regime change as well as dissidents, and it’s always harshly condemned by the human rights industrial complex.
So Israel bombed the gates thinking they would send a message and that it would lead people into the streets. Instead, what they wound up doing was not only killing many prisoners, killing social workers, killing prison guards, killing families who were there to visit their dissident family members, and they wound up facing the harshest condemnation from some of the loudest voices supporting regime change, like Narges Mohammadi, condemning Israel for doing that. So, it completely backfired. And this really speaks to the delusional thinking that animates Israel’s war on Iran. There won’t be a regime-change war this time. It will be a war in which Israel seeks to drag the US more deeply into this conflict, which could lead to global economic disaster with the Strait of Hormuz being closed. And again, they think they have Trump under their thumb.
NAPOLITANO: Do we know any more about the efforts at the home of Bill Ackman in East Hampton, Long Island, New York to dissuade Charlie Kirk from his rejection of the Zionist ideology?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, you know, if I’d been an adviser to Pezeshkian, I would have told him to go before the UN and declare that Americans oppose war with Iran, including Charlie Kirk, who lobbied against it in the White House. Like, that would have really made waves. I reported that at The Grayzone, and Vice President J.D. Vance came out on Charlie Kirk’s show, sitting in his empty host chair, and corroborated what I said. And then I followed up by reporting on this secret influencer meeting where Charlie Kirk was screamed at by a Zionist fanatic influencer named Natasha Edroff, who heads a group called UK Lawyers for Israel. Their job is basically to get everyone who protests Israel’s genocide jailed. They’ve been behind the efforts to jail the Irish band Kneecap for condemning Israel from the stage.
So Charlie Kirk was facing all of these fanatical figures at a time when his own conservative grassroots is against the war with Iran—when he was against Israeli malign influence in the United States. And since I reported on that meeting, we’ve been learning so much about Israel’s influence operations in the United States through, for example, the meeting Benjamin Netanyahu held with young influencers who all appear to be on his payroll in one way or another outside the UN. I just debated one of them on Piers Morgan—if you want to call it a debate—and it was pretty bonkers. I mean, Hitler had influencers, too, but Leni Riefenstahl had talent. Like, I can’t believe some of the people that Netanyahu is recruiting. It’s like this short bus of right-wing racists. And then this influencer, Deborah Leah, asked Netanyahu:
What do we do to stop Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson from influencing all of these conservatives to oppose Israel’s designs across the region and in the US?
And he said—he called them the woke Reich. So he called American personalities Nazis. And then he said we need to basically buy TikTok, which is what is currently taking place, with Larry Ellison, the Friends of the IDF donor and Oracle billionaire who’s a friend of Netanyahu, buying TikTok with Andreessen Horowitz—Horowitz being Ben Horowitz, the son of the anti-Palestinian agitator David Horowitz. Netanyahu is saying—they’re basically saying—they’re buying it for Israel. Then they’re buying Paramount—Ellison and his son are buying Paramount—putting out an October 7th propaganda film on HBO Max this October 7th, and then they’re installing Bari Weiss, the voice of the Zionist 1%, as editor of CBS News, according to reports.
So, this is the agenda that was reflected at the Hamptons secret influencer retreat that I exposed, and it’s what’s making Netanyahu nervous. And why he’s doing this is he’s losing the last bastion of pro-Israel support in the US among the conservative grassroots. And let me close this window so I can get better sound here. We’re back.
NAPOLITANO: All right, we—Chris has this woman that you’re talking about asking a question of Netanyahu. Watch this.
So, something I would like to raise, which was actually my first published paper, was how you and the Likud party are cut from the same ideological cloth as Trump and the GOP in America. And so, specifically with Charlie Kirk’s assassination, who was a big mentor of mine—he’s my first mentor in the space. Evangelicals, from all my research, evangelicals are the reason that Israel has been supported in the public sphere outside of just Jews. So with Charlie’s assassination and with the kind of trajectory that we see with like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, I guess I’m curious about what’s another game plan if we lose evangelical support for the state of Israel. What’s our backup plan to be strong outside in the diaspora?
NAPOLITANO: Is this woman who calls herself a Jewish American princess— is she a Christian evangelical?
BLUMENTHAL: No, I think she’s Jewish. Her last name is actually Schwarzbein, which isn’t exactly a gentile name, but she just goes by Deborah Leah because that’s more influencery. And, you know, she went on the prerequisite propaganda tour to Israel, denied the existence of a Palestinian state. In my engagement with her, she came in pretty hot and accused me of being funded by Iran, which would be a violation of US sanctions law, and it’s also highly ironic that she would make that accusation because it’s not as though she’s well known for anything—no one had ever heard of her before. And she’s essentially a creation of Netanyahu and Israel’s billionaire cutouts in the United States as they seek to take over social media to prevent young people from continuing to rebel against this genocide that Netanyahu has unleashed in Gaza. And he’s obviously failing. But she’s part of a coterie of influencers who are all sort of anti-woke, conservative.
And it’s all because of Netanyahu’s problems with the conservative grassroots, where—according to every single poll of young Americans’ attitudes—Republicans under 35 now oppose Israel, are done with it for the most part. This is even happening in evangelical communities. It’s even happening to some extent within Mormon communities. And it really comes down to two simple things: the scene that we just saw there, where Netanyahu calls to buy US media for a foreign country—America Firsters don’t like that, and they don’t respect Israel-firsters within their ranks. And number two, some of them are actually consistently pro-life and don’t like waking up to social media showing them other people’s children being shredded every day because they’re designated as demographic threats to the ethnosuprematist, exclusively Jewish state. And that problem ain’t going away.
NAPOLITANO: Here’s another clip of influencers hired by Netanyahu.
Imagine supporting people who start wars just to lose the wars so they can cry about it and then try it all again.
You musty antisemites are literally obsessed with Jews. Now walk with me.
While you musty antisemites are stacking eviction notices, Jews are out here stacking up businesses.
“Jews control all the industries.” Maybe if you spent more time taking notes from successful people, you wouldn’t have to spend your nights and weekends spreading hate from your anonymous account with an anime profile picture.
Do you work as hard as Jews? Do you network like Jews? No, because you’re too busy cheering on a group of musty terrorists who smell like dirty earring backs.
And if we’re going to keep it real, you’re really mad because your income is giving side hustle.
Period.
How you gonna hate from outside Shabbat? You can’t even get in.
BLUMENTHAL: Yeah. Is that convincing?
NAPOLITANO: No, of course not. It’s absurd.
BLUMENTHAL: It’s obscene. And they’re literally rubbing it in the faces of gentiles who refuse to bow down to the Israeli order. This is a video I found on TikTok actually, and I tweeted it out, and I saw a lot of pretty prominent conservatives, who I wouldn’t describe as Israel critics, actually express disgust, including Tim Pool, who met privately with Netanyahu at the Blair House during his last trip to DC. So it’s not working.
That’s—uh, I forget the name of the woman who appears in that, but she was a budding sports journalist who is represented by the Hollywood agent Casey Wasserman, who is actually one of the top Zionist fundraisers for Joe Biden and for the Democrats, which is ironic because she’s being marketed as a conservative influencer. And Xavier D. Rouso, who is one of the figures who went to the secret Hamptons influencer summit with Bill Ackman, and every time I tried to ask him about it he’d tell me he has to go to three weddings in Italy, or he was wine-drunk— a really absurd character who was flown on the Israeli government’s dime, reportedly, to go into the Gaza frontier to a Gaza humanitarian foundation site and mock starvation in Gaza. He actually said that Hamas leaders are eating all the ramen and that’s why they’re on Ozempic. Again, I don’t know how that convinces anyone. It might amuse the death cult that supports what’s happening in Gaza, but I don’t think it convinces anyone else.
And this is a lot of money. I mean, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has ponied up for this year $150 million. And they’re not just paying conservatives. It looks like CNN’s Van Jones, who comes from the left, is in their back pocket as well. They’re getting everyone on board for the last final battle on the eighth front of Netanyahu’s global war, which is the battle for the American mind.
NAPOLITANO: He must know that he is hemorrhaging support in the United States. Have you—personally and The Grayzone—received backlash because of your coverage of the efforts by Ackman and company to intimidate Kirk before he died?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, we could, and I don’t know what could take place. What wound up happening was that my reporting was—some of it was—amplified or echoed by Candace Owens, who was Charlie Kirk’s comms director. She was part of this whole network and was flown to Jerusalem when the embassy—the US embassy—was moved by Sheldon Adelson on a private jet, I think with Charlie Kirk, and then she turned against them in a very strong way and has much more influence and cachet on the right and within Trump world than I do. And her livestreams about Charlie Kirk’s killings—I mean, if you watch one of them, they’re getting more engagement than pretty much anyone, especially anyone pro-Israel like Ben Shapiro, who’s an astroturfed creation. So, they went after her and really put a target on her back, and it was a complete meltdown that ensued for a week after the Bill Ackman Hamptons influencer summit, but they focused on her because she’s, I would say, a greater threat to their narrative.
And at the same time, they are obviously threatened by any real reporting that takes place around this. And there’s more to come. There’s a lot more to come. And we should look at the precedent that they’ve set in the Gaza Strip, where, in advance of the reoccupation of Gaza City, the Israeli army assassinated the last remaining well-known, internationally known journalists—especially Anas al-Sharif—but they also assassinated a Reuters correspondent in a hospital in Khan Younis—a double-tap strike. They assassinated the Associated Press photographer Mariam Dagga. That’s what they’re doing to journalists there. And as they continue to lose and fail on the world stage, I believe they will escalate their operations against investigative journalists who threaten their objectives.
NAPOLITANO: CNN is reporting—and maybe this came about when you jumped on this show—that Trump says there is no agreement, but they are close to it. And then, of course, he made a big deal out of Netanyahu’s reluctant and maybe politically suicidal apologia to Qatar for the airstrike, and then they left without taking any questions at all.
BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, of course. I mean, and Netanyahu will never ever take questions outside of a controlled setting. He was actually supposed to do an event at the synagogue that Ivanka and Jared Kushner attend on the Upper East Side yesterday with Mark Levin from Fox, but he will never meet with an Israeli journalist to answer tough questions. The Missing Persons and Hostages Forum in Israel is strongly behind what Trump is doing. The majority of Israelis, as we’ve discussed, have genocidal views, but the vast majority also support a ceasefire. They want whatever Jewish life is left in Gaza to be preserved. And if Trump lets this one fail and fails to exercise the massive leverage that any US president should have on the president of a tiny little apartheid colony—if he fails to do that—those hostages will be dead, and it will be another massive political failure that will highlight the real power dynamics, where Trump has essentially been controlled again and again. And the next event will likely be an attack on Iran. So, this is where the rubber meets the road, and Trump needs to exercise some leverage for the first time.
By the way, the apology to Qatar—that looks like something that Trump delivered in exchange for the $400 billion that Qatar put in the control of Trump Incorporated after his visit over there. So that was the leverage they had, along with three cabinet-level Trump officials who were former Qatar lobbyists. But it needs to go further.
NAPOLITANO: Wow. Max, thank you very much again. Your knowledge of this is encyclopedic, and I know you wanted to hear Netanyahu, who was on while we were on. I deeply appreciate your jumping on this. All the best to you, my friend. We’ll see you again next week.
BLUMENTHAL: Thanks a lot, Judge.
NAPOLITANO: Thank you. And coming up at four o’clock on all of this, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
