Hedges Report: Israel, Kirk, & the Coming Repression

Max Blumenthal provides important context on Charlie Kirk’s changing relationship with Israel and tension within the Trump administration in the lead up to his assassination, and discusses the political impact of his death.

By Chris Hedges
The Chris Hedges Report

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination will likely serve as the crux of a new era of political violence and repression in the United States. In the days since Kirk was shot at a speaking event at Utah Valley University, right-wing groups and figures have demanded mass censorship of all critical online speech directed at Kirk. President Donald Trump has effectively attributed the attack to the “radical left” and vowed to go after those he deems responsible. 

Mass doxing campaigns targeting people who contextualized Kirk’s politics or celebrated his killing has led to firings across the country.

Amid the online chaos, narratives surrounding Kirk’s assassin, stemming from incomplete reporting from mainstream outlets and a lack of clear analysis by the F.B.I., have further fueled confusion and outrage across the political spectrum.

Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to analyze the implications of the assassination. 

He also details his latest article, which reveals exclusive background information on Kirk’s flailing relationship with Israel and tensions within the Trump administration.

Kirk’s refusal to accept Zionist financial contributions as well as his deepening disconnection from Israel “left him feeling cold and anxious and even in the words of the friend, frightened,” Blumenthal tells Hedges.

Host: Chris Hedges

Producer: Max Jones

Intro: Diego Ramos

Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript: Diego Ramos

Transcript: Chris Hedges

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 and the Trump administration of fomenting the hate that led to Kirk’s assassination.

Trump blames the “radical left” for Kirk’s murder, claiming it is “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” He vows to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

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 against those blamed for polluting America including Muslims, the LGBTQ community, groups such as antifa, feminists, liberals and 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 Grayzone, whose most recent article is “Charlie Kirk refused Netanyahu funding offer, was ‘frightened’ by pro-Israel forces before death, friend reveals” which adds another fascinating twist to the 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.

Max Blumenthal: Yeah, I’ve been writing about him since 2015, three years after he started TPUSA [Turning Point USA], 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 for this sort of Faustian bargain.

He was going to be at the top of the conservative youth grassroots or astroturf grassroots. So he could talk about 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 BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions], the BDS movement which was growing on campus, 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 [the] 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 like 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 is on his way to possibly becoming the next president. Almost certainly would have become senator even though he’s from Illinois. TPUSA is major, but there’s a crisis taking place. Charlie Kirk is under pressure from his own grassroots on the issue of Israel.

Israel’s exerting, under [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, so much control on Trump, amid a genocide, that the grassroots have turned against it. And if you look at recent polling, YouGov 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 a civilian population unfolding in real time, and then 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 U.S. military to be stripped of their citizenship.

And he called out Bill Ackman, one of the most influential Zionist billionaires in the U.S. who is a Netanyahu cutout who had been sort of manipulating and bullying Harvard into submission. His money got Claudine Gay as president 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.

Megyn 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 like 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 we are 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 when you join the firm, you don’t get to leave. And at the same time, I was told by a long-time 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 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 U.S., I think he’s made four visits this year, which is unprecedented, listening devices were planted by Israeli agents on the Secret Service’s 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 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 U.S. officials, that Israel had planted StingRay devices around the White House to spy on Trump’s cell phone communications. Boris Johnson, the former [United Kingdom] 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.

[Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom] Tony Blair told his own team, when you go to Israel, do not speak about anything sensitive in government buildings or cars. So I don’t think I’m being fed a bunch of conspiracy theories here.

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 and 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 F.B.I. 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 claim, 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 not 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. But so this is just a fascinating, I think, a fascinating look and it won’t be my last one at Charlie Kirk’s final days and the political pressure he was under.

Chris Hedges: How much money was he getting, number one. And number two, can you talk about Netanyahu’s reaction and his, because you write about it in your piece, his interactions with Kirk?

Max Blumenthal: 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 that by a friend of Kirk, someone close to Kirk, who was speaking to them 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. You can just watch the Student Action Summit that became so controversial. There’s nothing like it on the left or even within the Democratic Party’s associated organizations. It’s very flashy.

Look at Charlie Kirk’s final moments. It looked almost like he was running for president. It looked like a Trump rally. And look at the amount of, he had enormous amounts 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 what I’m learning is 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 what they want me to know is that this is something they’re all facing. All of the major right-wing media organizations associated with Trump, that there is no space for them to criticize Israel.

One figure I could point to, I’ve actually been on his podcast, he’s one of the top right-wing podcasters. Like 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, like more on the left, we get like demonetized left and right and suppressed on YouTube.

Chris Hedges: Constantly, constantly.

Max Blumenthal: So we’ve even turned to Rumble, but you go to Rumble, Tim Pool is one of the first, if he’s live streaming, that comes up right away. And so he gets enormous amounts of views. And you know, I went on his show right after October 7th and he gave me the floor and let me speak my mind.

Tim Pool was summoned to a meeting with Netanyahu during one of Netanyahu’s visits under Trump’s second term at the Blair House where Netanyahu was staying with just a few other right-wing GOP-affiliated influencers, like 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 views, just unique views on our website. And I did an interview with Tim Dillon, who’s a very popular comedian, about this, which has erupted. It’s like 600,000 views now, just exploding across social media as people were already talking about this issue. Netanyahu tweets, takes to Twitter/X for like 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 U.S. leader has.

Remember the open mic with [French President Emmanuel] Macron and [Barack] Obama where they’re complaining, the hot mic, like in 2012 or something, and 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 he was a disgusting bully and manipulator.

And so Netanyahu’s worried that Charlie Kirk’s base posthumously will start to take on that sentiment towards him. 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 astroturfed to me. He even jokes on Twitter about having six million followers but he seems so sort of unlikable and talentless and he’s pushing a kind of form of warmed over softened Trumpism that just doesn’t feel authentic.

He was 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 complaining about Charlie Kirk alluding to him allowing Tucker Carlson on stage this summer and saying, you can’t have a big tent, you can not allow these kooks in, and you can’t be at the front of the church allowing congregation of anti-Israel nutjobs into your realm.

Then Charlie Kirk goes to the front of the church four days later, a sniper’s 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 gonna go on those campus tours and we’re not going to allow this anti-Israel stuff to come into our “church” anymore.

Chris Hedges: 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 just, as you said, across the political spectrum becomes so repugnant, is Netanyahu’s courting of kind of alternative media, almost never anymore even goes on mainstream media.

Max Blumenthal: Yeah, great question. Netanyahu never goes on Israeli media. And you know that from your years in the region and having Israeli sources, is that anyone who isn’t Likud in Israel constantly complains that Netanyahu will never talk to Hebrew language media. 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 like his tiny, narrow edge in his coalition together by keeping the genocide going and keeping the fascist messianic elements as his linchpin. 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 to that, 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 U.S., Netanyahu sat down with The Nelk 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 frat boy kind of bawdy humor.

And they themselves admitted after the interview, which was like a softball interview where they asked Netanyahu, what do you like better, McDonald’s or Burger King? They admitted after the interview that one, 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 U.S. And why would you even agree to interview Netanyahu? I mean, of course, he’s a world leader, so you want the engagement. There must be some kind of financial incentive there.

And if the pro-Netanyahu elements in the U.S., fronted by Bari Weiss, paid for by David Ellison, the son of Oracle C.I.A. contractor Larry Ellison, are going to buy CBS News and put Bari Weiss at the head of the editorial team. It’s pretty clear what’s going on. They’re not just in a seven front war. They’re in an eight front war. The United States is the eighth front and it’s a hybrid war, mainly focused on propaganda. But when that fails, they will escalate.

Chris Hedges: 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 “war against the radical left.” You had, is it Brian Mast has pushed a bill to authorize the Secretary of State to revoke passports to “kick out terrorist sympathizers out of the country.”

This of course follows Tom Cotton, November ‘23 after the genocide had started after October 7th, demanded a Justice Department National Security investigation of news outlets such as AP, CNN, New York Times, Reuters for publishing photographs, images of October 7th.

They’ve weaponized, you know, it was fascinating as you have it, once this breach between Kirk and the Zionists and the 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 just criticizes Israel, but I think everyone on the left.

Max Blumenthal: Yeah, I mean they see the left as the main base of BDS and elevating 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 U.S.

And so in his first Fox News appearance before the suspect’s identity, the main suspect being Tyler Robinson, was even known, Netanyahu blamed Muslims. He blamed radical Islam for doing this. The same way that he declared in comments to Maariv or reported in the Israeli paper Maariv in 2008 that 9/11 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 [Spencer Cox] 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.

I mean, he just openly admitted it, standing right in front of Kash Patel, an immigrant from India [Kash Patel was born in Garden City, NY], the F.B.I. director, who 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 have seen this week with Brian Mast’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 or pro-Hamas.

Chris Hedges: Sorry, just to interrupt Max, people who have provided legal advice to groups are accused of providing material support to terrorist groups.

Max Blumenthal: Yes, okay. And there is no due process for them under this bill. Normally it would go to a court. In this case, it’s left up to the exclusive authority of the Secretary of State, someone created by the Israel lobby, basically an AIPAC plant, Marco Rubio. And where’s Marco Rubio right now?

Marco Rubio is kissing the wall. Right now he’s leaving the Kotel in the old city of Jerusalem where he had to carry out this humiliation ritual that every U.S. politician who wants to rise does where they have put on a kippah and Netanyahu takes them 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 managing, he’s the U.S. wing of genocide management in Gaza right now, overseeing the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s starvation siege. This is, I mean, it’s just a shocking display to witness.

And then back home you have Stephen Miller, who himself is an arch Zionist who is running the entire agenda for Donald Trump right now. He’s sort of the brains, the Rovian 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 where it’s like a site charliesmurderers.com [this website has been taken down and replaced by charliekirkdata.org] is doxing thousands and thousands of Americans, not only for celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, which I personally found just deeply anti-social, to be a form of anti-social behavior that just shows a kind of lack of humanity, but also minimizing his death or calling him a racist or 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 sort of just trying to enforce a very narrow moral code by getting people canceled or going after people in the media within their own media organizations and so on. 

The right is playing to win. They want to fully isolate dissent, left-wing dissent from society, and they’re exploiting this in a way that raises a lot of questions before… there’s been no 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 dovetails with what they’ve been doing with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].

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 U.S. and take them to de facto concentration camps. And the budget, Trump’s big, beautiful bill, has put these secret police on hyperdrive. The kidnapping of Latinos who are suspected of being undocumented migrants is a pilot program for a larger agenda.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, without question and of course the expansion of these detention centers are regionally going to have, in essence, de facto concentration camps dotted throughout the United States. What do you expect to see coming? Now they’ve gone after George Soros, I mean the insanity of it. But what are we going to see in terms of their game plan over the next few weeks and months?

Max Blumenthal: Well, I mean hate George Soros and what he’s done across the world is malign. I mean, he’s a C.I.A.-adjacent anti-communist billionaire.

Chris Hedges: Well, let me just interrupt Max. I mean, George Soros did exactly what the [US]AID democracy initiatives did, which was crush any kind of popular resistance movements. I mean, that’s the kind of final irony, but yeah.

Max Blumenthal: Exactly. And you know, this relates to a wider conversation, I think, about the left, the post-BLM [Black Lives Matter] left, is the role of foundation money in the left. I know Christian Parenti 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, 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 sort of separate conversation, but where I think things are going in this country is very dark and recalls the Years of Lead in Italy.

The Years of Lead were driven by or punctuated and accelerated by political terrorism and political assassination. 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 C.I.A. was involved and Israeli intelligence may have been involved as well in the killing of Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister.

So let’s consider the 1969 Milan cafe bombing, Piazza Fontana bombing. This was like what launched the Years of Lead. And it was a false flag operation that was carried out by stay-behind armies recruited by the C.I.A. under Operation Gladio 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 about, 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 state’s agenda which was in that case pro-NATO.

I also mentioned the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro. Aldo Moro was the last of a kind in Italian politics. In 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 following like Gladio and everything.

And he was held for days by the Red Brigades. They put him on a mock trial. And then after killing his security team and kidnapping him with his motorcade and they accused him of selling out the working class and making Italy an imperialist state.

But historians have looked back at what Moro was doing and seeing that he was actually privately allowing arms to pass through Italy to Palestinian resistance groups, that he was taking a not necessarily friendly stance toward Israel, that he was a friend of unions and working-class 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.

And it crushed the national unity government and actually moved Italy further to the right to the point where now Giorgia Meloni, I mean, Giorgia Meloni sort of reflects this legacy as this right-wing leader. So the strategy of tension in the U.S. has been building since 2020.

And I can point to one incident then that I think is a perfect microcosm of what I’m talking about. Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting, which is poorly understood by people on the left who supported BLM. 

Kyle Rittenhouse was acting in a vigilante fashion to guard local business with his weapon out, along with other local men from looters and rioters who were destroying local businesses in a completely nihilistic fashion.

A group of pro-BLM marchers was marching around soon after looting. They were not smashing up businesses. They were just marching randomly. And their own crowd had been seeded with people who had never protested before, 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 Rittenhouse and his group of vigilantes were. And several of the marchers began physically attacking Kyle Rittenhouse. One pulled a pistol on him. Kyle Rittenhouse 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 Rittenhouse 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 Rittenhouse 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 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.

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% 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 [Thompson], the United Healthcare CEO by Luigi Mangione, 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.

This was like, I think at the beginning of the second Trump term. He said, this is why you should support MAGA [Make America Great Again], because this guy, Luigi Mangione, 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 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 don’t really see much of a financial future in the U.S., they’re gonna 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.

Chris Hedges: What kind of infrastructure do you foresee in terms of, I mean, we’ve already seen the capitulation of universities, even the capitulation of mainstream media organizations such as CNN. What’s the landscape gonna look like? How is it gonna be deformed?

Max Blumenthal: It’s going to look a lot like the McCarthy era and it’s been a major inspiration to the right. We’ve seen right-wing organizations like what was it, CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference], I think, was giving out like young McCarthy awards back during the mid-2000s.

Stephen Miller, I think, sees McCarthy as sort of a hero. So what has the Trump administration done? They have gotten Berkeley, UC Berkeley to furnish 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 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 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 culture, their culture war.

They had the Laken Riley Act, a woman who was murdered by a Venezuelan migrant. And the Laken Riley Act was an attack on due process. And it allows us to report any migrant who we may suspect of a crime and 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 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.

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 be the forum that such an act takes, but I expect some kind of Charlie Kirk Act to take place. I expect the investigation that the F.B.I.’s carrying out to be incomplete, just as the investigation of the young man who shot Donald Trump, what was his name, [Thomas] Matthew [Crooks], the Butler shooting, the Butler, PA shooting, it feels like that was shut down.

Ryan Routh, the would-be shooter at Mar-a-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 proscribed as a terrorist organization in the U.K., which means that you are not allowed in the U.K. 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 was sort of an amorphous organization, but it had a brand. Antifa is not. 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 Bloc, an aspect of Antifa back during Occupy Wall Street, is easily and constantly and comprehensively infiltrated by federal law enforcement.

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, what? Bullet engravings or t-shirts? If Antifa is prescribed as a terrorist organization in the U.S., 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.

Chris Hedges: I just want to throw in Ellen Schrecker, who did all the great work on McCarthyism, No Ivory Tower, her books, and et cetera. She says this period is worse than McCarthy because there you saw black lists and people being pushed out of schools and universities. The F.B.I. actually used to show up at high schools with lists. But she said here they’re capturing institutions.

Max Blumenthal: That’s right. I mean, it is a march through institutions, and they’re also just simply eliminating institutions as well that can’t be captured.

Chris Hedges: Alright, thanks. That was Max Blumenthal, check out his great work on The Grayzone. And thanks to Sofia [Menemenlis], Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges], and Max [Jones], who produced the show. can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”

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