Transcription
Yeah, me and my close colleague Ana Parimple got this story from a Trump official, someone who has been very well aware of how the sausage is being made, the kosher sausage inside the Trump administration. And this, and our story, was confirmed just yesterday by the Mossad director David Barnea, who came out and congratulated CIA director John Ratcliffe for the key role that he played in assisting Israel in assuring that the US would bomb Iran on behalf of Israel.
What we reported, sourcing a Trump official, was that Ratcliffe was essentially acting as the Mossad stenographer, taking everything he heard in briefings from the Mossad and key Netanyahu aides like Ron Durmer—hysterical WMD deceptions, claiming, for example, that Iran was going to hand over a nuclear warhead to the Yemeni Houthis within a week—and then he would go to Trump and tell Trump, "We have to bomb Iran. They're going to have nuclear breakout capacity in days. We have to do this."
And meanwhile, chief of staff in the White House, Susie Wilds, was making sure that Donald Trump was isolated with figures like Ratcliffe, the Mossad stenographer, and Sentcom chief Michael Carrilla, General Michael Carrilla, who has been just flitting back and forth to and from Israel to meet with his counterparts there and absorbing their worldview. He's been referred to in the Telegraph as Israel's favorite general, and he would represent the military. Ratcliffe would represent the IC, and Trump was just absorbing basically Israeli disinformation about Iran's nuclear program. And it was all thanks to Susie Wilds, who would exclude the dissenters like Tulsi Gabbard from key meetings like the briefing at Camp David on June 8th.
And we learned subsequent to our investigation that we published in the Washington Post that Susie Wilds actually literally worked for Benjamin Netanyahu. She went and basically flew in, was flown in in 2020 as Netanyahu feared that he was going to lose and helped him kick off a kind of American-style Super Bowl extravaganza of rallies modeled after Trump's rallies. So, the White House chief of staff literally was a Netanyahu employee, and then she's acting on behalf of Israel to isolate Trump among the Mossad's stenographers.
And then here's another element, Rick. We reported, or I reported in April, uh, off-the-record comments that I obtained from a private Apac meeting in Washington months before, where the new CEO of Apac, Elliot Brandt, was boasting about how he had cultivated John Ratcliffe ever since he was a freshman member of Congress, a backbencher from a small town in Texas, and that now if anything goes sideways in the Trump administration, he can get on the line with Ratcliffe and make sure that they have access. And who is "they"? I mean, it's Apac, but it's really Israeli intelligence.
So, what we're looking at is a kind of coup that took place, an Israeli coup of US intelligence and the Trump administration to lead the US into bombing Iran. And Trump is foolish enough to believe that this was a kind of one-off strike and that he's not going to be drawn in for more.
Oh my goodness. The thing you just said about Susie Wilds, I'm floored. So the person closest to the United States, the person who decides who gets to be with him, who gets to talk to him, who gets to go into his office, used to work for Bibi Netanyahu and is now running the president of the United States' schedule and essentially life.
Yeah. I mean, imagine that—that the person who controls all access to Trump, everything he sees and hears, went in voluntarily to work for Netanyahu. She doesn't seem to think Israel is even a separate country. And no one's more upset about this than her predecessor, former chief of staff Steve Bannon, who was the intellectual architect of America First, who has accused Trump of basically betrayal with what he did by bombing Iran. So this is a, you know, anyone who understands what America First means is outraged by this entire scandal. But this was sort of a footnote, and it should have been a much bigger scandal that Susie Wilds and also another former key Trump aide, Corey Lewandowski, went and worked for Netanyahu, and we didn't even know that.
And these people are all Zionists, correct?
I assume they would say that they are—that they might be Christian Zionists.
Yeah. No, it has nothing to do with religion being Zionist. As you well know, you're Jewish.
Well, what I was also—what—what the Washington Post also reported was that Susie Wilds kept demanding more and more money, or there wasn't enough money coming in. So, she eventually left the position for Netanyahu. I mean, these people are ultimately lobbyists.
Well, speaking of money, I'm wondering about Mr. Trump. And I know you listen, you—you—you can't read a man—what's in a guy's head or heart. But I wonder if it's easier to convince a guy that has taken so much money from, uh, you know, so much casino money in the past that he already feels kind of indebted to want to do this, you know, little favor for, uh, Bibi Netanyahu and blow the hell out of Iran.
Yeah. I mean, look at Trump's performance on Ukraine. He was the first president to send offensive weaponry to the Ukrainian military, but he didn't want to. He was even impeached over his initial refusal to do so. But he always does it. He always gets rolled. He always winds up filling his administration with neocons after campaigning against them. He clearly didn't want to go to war with Iran, but ultimately he did it because the pressure points are just so myriad. From Susie Wilds to the Mossad and its briefers in the White House to what you mentioned, hundreds of millions of dollars from the Adelson family to Donald Trump, along with, uh, Zionist donors that most people haven't heard of like Ike Perlmutter or Bernard Marcus. There's so many of them. But Donald Trump has come out and openly said that no one visited him more in the White House than Sheldon and Miriam Adelson. And that had an effect. I think $150 million flowed into Trump's campaign from Miriam Adelson just this year, but there are hundreds of millions throughout his career. And this has a serious effect, a clear effect. I mean, Miriam Adelson has testified in Netanyahu's corruption trials because she was so close to Netanyahu. So the points of leverage on the Trump administration are enormous.
And once Israel bombed Iran on June 13th, it was clear to me it was inevitable that the US would eventually have to follow. And what—what I think Trump thinks he did, because he doesn't want to get drawn into this very deeply, he actually wants a Nobel Prize and he wants everyone to love him—what he thinks is going to happen is that this will go away. But it's not going away because of the intelligence assessment that leaked from the Defense Intelligence Agency that Ford was not destroyed. And we all knew it wasn't going to be able to be destroyed. And Iran even announced that it had moved the 60% enriched uranium stockpile days before the strike. So now Israel's demanding—you can see the pressure building for the US to go back in. Trump getting asked, "Are you going to go back in?" and Israel announcing that this war is not even over yet. So Trump has unlocked a Pandora's box that I think threatens to destroy his legacy before it's even over.
Was that a Machiavellian play by Trump to start a war and then end it and take credit for stopping the thing that he started? Do you think?
Absolutely. I mean, Trump thought it was a brilliant diplomatic Machiavellian master stroke that he had given both sides the ability to claim victory and call it a day because I don't think he fully understands the Israelis, and that's what accounted for his tirade against Israel as he was on his way to NATO, leaving the White House where he ranted against Israel for violating the ceasefire and said he had to make the planes do a U-turn because they were going to do a munitions dump over Tehran, which they actually did. And, uh, then he condemned both sides for not knowing what the f*** they're doing. That's Donald Trump, uh, raging because his Machiavellian master plan to be seen as the peacemaker was disrupted.
What he doesn't understand is that Israel is operating under a very destabilizing logic. Like its system is fundamentally destabilizing, and it's in a race against time. Whereas time—while Iran may not have the technological or military advantage over Israel, they have time on their side, and all they have to do is continue enriching, rebuild their air defenses, get some, uh, you know, replenish their air force with Chinese, uh, hardware and platforms. Whereas Israel has to—they have to keep wiping this out continuously. That's why Israel—we see them bombing Lebanon, violating the ceasefire 4,000 times with Hezbollah. They can't allow Hezbollah to rebuild, and now they're going to try to do the same thing, what they call the Lebanon option in Iran, which sets the stage for another intense conflict.
Muhammad Morandi told me that he thought that Iran was kicking the hell out of Israel, especially some of the signs and videos and some reports that we saw that were coming out of Tel Aviv, and that they met—that—that that may have been the actual reason why, uh, Bibi Netanyahu was actually crying uncle and may have even requested for Trump to come in and stop the fight. Uh, do—do you give any, uh, credence to that?
Yeah, I do. Steve Bannon, former White House chief of staff, who's had met with Trump days before Trump bombed Iran, said that Israel demanded the ceasefire, that Trump rescued Israel.
Well, I think Israel did—did score some devastating or painful blows against Iran. I mean, they—they killed 29 senior IRGC officials. That's no small thing. Uh, they did a lot of damage against Iran's anti-aircraft systems. They were hitting Iranian ballistic missile launchers, forcing Iran to stage smaller, kind of hit-and-run volleys. But Iran, I think, won a political and psychological victory. They failed to establish deterrence, and Israel will likely come back for more. But the political blow and the psychological blow was enormous against a society that's essentially a settler colonial society that doesn't feel as connected to the land where many of its citizens can actually just go to Europe. There was a lot of economic damage that Israel suffered—unprecedented damage—and Iran managed to target Israel's knowledge economy, which is intimately connected to its death tech and military. We're talking about the Weizmann Institute where Israel has refined its nuclear and drone programs as well as doing advanced AI and gain-of-function research. It was completely destroyed. $570 million of damage. Billions of damage to Israel's tech sector. The Microsoft offices in, uh, Be'er Sheva were—were hit. Uh, for the first time, we saw Israel's Pentagon—Kirya—get hit on its grounds. It wasn't a direct hit, but this is—this—this shakes the psyche, the kind of colonial psyche of Israel. And I think if this war had continued, the political problems would have mounted for Netanyahu.
One interesting development out of Israel is that you can see how the war benefits Netanyahu politically today. He was supposed to sit and be interrogated for hours in one of his corruption trials, but he convinced the Mossad director and the intelligence and military chiefs to waive off the interrogation because Netanyahu has to assess the damage of this war and prepare for more.
I watched the Bibi Files last week. I thought it was pretty good. It made me think that in many ways Bibi became more right-wing, more entrenched, and does many of the things that he does because he fears that if he doesn't do that, he will no longer be in power and he's going to go right back into that courtroom. That seemed to be the story I got from that.
Have you seen it?
I have. And—and—and that's a really great point. I think that's the ultimate takeaway. Netanyahu would not be in power were it not for the most extreme messianic fascistic elements in Israeli society. The lynchpin of his coalition is the Otzma Yehudit or Jewish Power Party, which is a literally Jewish fascist party now represented by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who—and—and—and before that you had Itamar Ben-Gvir, and they were just demanding that Netanyahu break every, uh, or prevent every ceasefire deal in Gaza from taking place and go in harder and harder on Gaza, kill more and more. Now they're demanding, and successfully, that the Israeli military begin to target everyone associated with the civilian infrastructure of Hamas, including like money changers. So they're just slaughtering civilians across Gaza to keep Netanyahu's coalition together. And then you have the ultra-Orthodox parties who want to keep their men out of the military. And that's the other thing holding his coalition together. So Netanyahu is, um, always catering to his right or watching his right flank. And Netanyahu, I think, is a misunderstood figure in the West. He did not want to get drawn into a long open-ended conflict. He's always preferred shorter conflicts, and his ultimate objective was to get the US to bomb Iran. So he managed to do that on the condition that he stay in Gaza. And I don't think he bargained for having a Democratic administration in Washington give him pretty much everything he wanted to make this moment possible. So this isn't all on Trump's shoulders. This is—I still think this is largely Biden's fault, and that Biden bears the ultimate responsibility for keeping the most fascistic right-wing coalition together in Israel.
Well, yeah. I mean, your—your point is clear, and I'm not sure it was Biden because I'm not sure he was totally awake during his administration, but boy, he had some people working in the State Department. I would watch those State Department briefings sometimes, Max. And—and I was wondering, do these people—are they Americans, because they always sounded like they were just coming to the defense of Israel on everything, even when—when it was prima facie evidence that was put in front of them. Like, "Look at these two dead children." "I don't see any dead children. What are you talking about? What dead?" I mean, it was—it was really over the pale, beyond the pale in this case. Didn't—did you watch them? I mean, it was crazy.
Well, I was in the briefing room, uh, for a number of those briefings. And that's why I erupted at the final briefing of Tony Blinken where the rest of the press was treating him like some normal figure and just asking him technical questions after he presided over what I consider to be the Holocaust of our time. He could have ended it all with a phone call. There were ceasefire deals on the table in May of 2024 and even before when Hamas said, "We will not—we will release every hostage if Israel agrees not to invade." Blinken could have ended it quickly, but he was always obstructing it. And one of the things that I called out to him because I would have never been called on is, "Have you been compromised by Israel?" Because Tony Blinken comes from a long line of Israel lobbyists. His grandfather was a key Israel lobbyist even before the establishment of the state of Israel, who—who presided over a study on the feasibility of settling the land of Palestine. And the man who raised him, his father-in-law, was Samuel Pisar, was one of the top Israel lobbyists in France, consigliere, uh, to Mitterrand and also was the consigliere to Robert Maxwell, a Mossad agent who is the father of Ghislaine Maxwell. And this is what Tony Blinken comes from. And he says it openly in an Apac meeting in 2007. Blinken said, "I inherited my commitment to Israel's strength from my family," and no reporter has ever asked him about this. I don't understand why these aren't issues. The Secretary of State comes from Israel lobbyists. The White House chief of staff worked for Netanyahu. I mean, down the line, and the CIA director was cultivated by Apac ever since he came into Congress. All of these seem to be issues that the press refuses to talk about. It makes you wonder because our whole country is going through this America First, America First, America First movement. And there's this obvious giant freaking elephant in the room that is saying Israel First, Israel First, Israel First, not America First. And I'm starting to sense, especially on the right and a little bit on the left, that people are getting it and it's making them angry, and that it started with Gaza and it's kind of continued with, uh, Iran. Is that your read too?
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, whether it's the election of—of Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary making him the likely next mayor of New York to the programming of Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon on the right and the comments of Marjorie Taylor Greene that Apac should be registered as a foreign agent, you can see anyone who's not controlled by the lobby and who hasn't been co-opted is outraged about what they're seeing. And it's just a concern for human life is what it comes down to. Israel has slaughtered hundreds of civilians in Gaza.
Yeah. In the last 24 hours. Some of the most intense attacks that we've seen. They just bombed an area in Gaza City that, uh, well, it's sort of—it has been in ruins. But I used to work there, uh, with my wife Ana Parimple when we were there, and they were bombing journalists who were using it as an internet point to upload videos, and one journalist was killed and another one was severely—was badly wounded. This is what they've been doing day in and day out, and it's just causing so much outrage. That's why you hear at Glastonbury chants for death to the IDF, and the establishment just doesn't get it. They don't understand how hated they are for going along with this. But it's going to start making waves in US politics, and their only answer is censorship, de-democratization, and the criminalization of grassroots groups like Palestine Action in the UK, which was just proscribed as a terrorist organization, or—or calling people anti-Semitic, which is just not working as well as it used to anymore, especially since half the people you're calling anti-Semitic are Jewish and demonstrating inside Israel and in the United States.
It's like—
Yeah, exactly. It's like a Fellini movie. Like, "Wait, wait, wait. You're calling them anti-Semitic, but they're Jewish." It's like, "Well, it doesn't matter." It's—
And then for like real Nazis or people who hate Jews, it's just a badge of honor to be called an anti-Semite now. It's like, "Hey, I'm a—I'm a free speech warrior."
All right. That—and that's the dynamic that Zionists created. What do you make of—They've cheapened—Go ahead. Go ahead.
I was just going to say they've cheapened the allegation to the point where it's a badge of honor.
Yeah. And you know what it's doing, too? I mean, it—it's really hurting Jewish people around the world where people—I think are now going to—you know, somebody like you and so many others—you know, Americans who are Jewish or whatever the hell they happen to be, but you know, people will now identify their religion with the actions of a country that's doing some really bad things, which is incongruent and shouldn't happen, but I fear that it's going to—you know, by design—I mean, if you think about the logic of Zionism. The objective, as spelled out by Israel's first prime minister David Ben-Gurion in his memoirs, was an ingathering of all Jews in the world and construction of high population density low-rise projects all across the Negev desert to accommodate them. But how do you get all the Jews in the world to move to this Spartan settler colonial, consistently embattled apartheid state? It doesn't seem very appealing.
Well, you have to make their lives miserable in the outside world. And the only way to do that is through anti-Semitism. So the more anti-Semitism that Israel triggers and inflames by identifying as the Jewish state while it's slaughtering children and shredding them to pieces on camera day after day, the better for Israel to justify itself as a sanctuary for all the world's Jews who suddenly become hated in their own communities and say they can't feel safe at the Glastonbury festival because people are chanting death to the IDF. Well, move there. But the funny thing is things have gotten so bad in Israel, which is due for another credit downgrade, that, uh, nobody is actually moving there. All the Zionist billionaires who are complaining about Zohran Mamdani being the next New York mayor are all planning to move to Boca Raton next to my farm. Um, so the—here's the—here's the deal though. You just mentioned it. I was checking, and I think it's true. Israel is going through a net negative, uh, when it comes to immigration right now. People are not going to Israel. They don't want to live in Bibi Netanyahu's Israel. Isn't that—that is fascinating? Am I right?
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, Israel's tech sector is the one thing that's really sustaining the upper middle class and preventing a brain drain. One of the largest divisions—or the largest division—in the Israeli military is Unit 8200. It's their spying—cyber—cyber warfare division. Yeah. And to maintain, uh, in-country employment for all those, uh, highly educated youth—basically what's known as the Ashkenazi elite in Israel—there needs to be venture capitalists investing—providing capital for Israeli startup firms. And that is suffering.
Now, because of the damage that Israel suffered in this war, but because foreign direct investment depends on a stable environment. And for the first time, they saw that Israel's anti-aircraft defenses failed and that Israel is in a battle against a near-peer competitor. So foreign direct investment is down, uh, at record levels, and it already was before this war. It plunged by like 60% since 2023.
And I mentioned Israel's already undergone a credit downgrade. It's due for another. It cost $300 million just to sustain this war every day, and billions of dollars of damage in infrastructure has been inflicted by Iran's ballistic missiles. So there's a brain drain, another brain drain coming in Israel.
And what this leaves to sustain the Jewish population in this demographic trench war against the Palestinians is the ultra-orthodox who don't serve in the military and the settlers who, uh, demand so much from the state to pay for their lifestyle in the occupied West Bank. And that is not a very happy future for the so-called Jewish state.
I remember when I was, uh, spending some time in Israel. Beautiful country, by the way, great food. Uh, but, um, I was in a taxi, and I was talking to the taxi driver, and we saw some, uh, Orthodox, uh, folks, and they were walking by, and he had a pejorative name for them. Then I asked him, "Why do you not like those folks?" And he said, "Because they're lazy. They don't work. They steal our money. There are tax cheats." He just went on and on and on, and I thought, "Wow." So that's what they really think; there's a real dysfunction going on inside that society because of that. I think I think that taxi driver was right. He wasn't alone.
Yeah. I mean, the the the father of the main opposition leader in Israel, Ya'ir Lapid, his name was Tommy Lapid. He started a party. The whole party was just based on contempt and disdain and hatred of the ultra-orthodox, and their main agenda was to get them to serve in the military. And so one of the biggest political crises once this war ends in Gaza will be on whether to force the ultra-orthodox, the youth, to join the military. And the ultra-orthodox parties are in open revolt. They have protests all the time that turn violent, and you can see scenes of secular-looking Israelis beating ultra-orthodox Jews. It looks like 1930s Germany.
And the thing that's the thing about the ultra-orthodox, that's the paradox, is they believe in religious segregation. They want to be totally left alone in their communities where the men study Torah all day, do not work. The women work in like call centers, and they all depend on welfare from the state, and then they don't give back to the most important thing to Israel, which is militarily occupying and dominating the Palestinians. But from the Palestinian point of view, the ultra-orthodox pose very little threat. They're not attacking them. It's the secular and religious nationalists who pose the biggest threat because they believe in political segregation. So the political segregationists need to co-opt and dominate the, uh, religious segregationists in order for the state to continue because the religious segregationists, ultra-orthodox Jews, they produce like 10 kids per family. They're shooting them out like T-shirt guns. They're already 15% of the population, but only 1% of them serve in the military. Sounds like a line out of JFK, like a paradox or an enigma wrapped in a riddle. Wow.
Um, hey, finally, you mentioned this rapper. He's in the news, and I I was watching earlier, and CNN's going crazy with it, and the BBC's going crazy with it, and the New York Times and, uh, Lemon, everybody's writing about this rapper, horrific guy, because he said something nasty about the IDF, which, by the way, you should never wish for anybody's death. That's it is offensive to wish for people's death. I get it. But man, they're making it bigger than, you know, a war or an invasion or a battle. For example, I mentioned that investigators finally confirm what we all knew, that Ukraine had something to do with the Crocus attack here in Moscow, and it hasn't even gotten a mention in Western newspapers, but they're talking about this. What does that say? Well, this is this is very frightening to Western elites who who think that, uh, culture can be used as an instrument for controlling, as like kind of an imperial soft power instrument.
I mean, this is a BBC festival. BBC is basically part of the UK foreign office. It's been used as an information weapon against Russia. When I was in Iran, you know, BBC Persia would show concerts in the UK and, you know, they'd have, you know, gay pride flags, and this was something that they wanted to project into Iran. And now this concert has become a militant center for Palestinian solidarity. And they're calling not for the death of Jews or even Israelis. They're calling for the death of an institution which is at the center of an apartheid state. Uh, essentially they're calling for the same thing as the abolition of the South African defense forces; that was the lynchpin of South African apartheid. This is a, you know, it's a material demand, and, uh, it's very frightening to Western elites. This is the call of the the creed, the call from the heart of a generation, and the singer was previously the rapper was sort of previously unknown in in the rest of the world. Now he's becoming an international hero. He goes by Bob Dylan.
Now consider I mean Bob Dylan was, after he abandoned his commitment to the civil rights struggle and became sort of a narcissist, he got into Kahanism, uh, extremist, uh, Jewish nationalism. And he actually released a song in 1982. Not a lot of people know this called "The Neighborhood Bully," uh, defending Israel and accusing everyone who pointed the finger at Israel of being kind of unfair. So, you know, you're going from Bob Dylan, who was still considered a hero despite his momentary support for Israel, to Bob Villain. That's where the the the Zoomers, the Generation Z is. And it's it's frightening to an entire kind of Western so-called rules-based order that has propped up this apartheid state, and now the emperor has no clothes.
Max, before we finish, I want to ask you a little bit about you. I mean, you're just an amazing person. You're a courageous person. I mean, you could have been the most establishment person in the history of the United States if you wanted to. You went to the finest universities. You studied at almost specialty schools. Your father worked in the White House. You you literally could have taken the path that said, "This is a great system. I'm going to defend it, and I'm going to make a lot of money from it." And instead, you spend your time trying to point out what's wrong with the system. And you're as vehement about it as anybody out there. And also, by the way, as smart, uh, as anybody else out there. Why?
Um, well, not everyone thinks I'm the greatest person, but, uh, yeah, and I think my background there was a little overstated. Well, I mean, I've looked at your I've looked at your your you know, your your credentials in terms of your education and, you know, you you've been in the best and been surrounded by some of the best institutions that our country has to offer. Well, I mean, just to put it simply, I was, you my my my father's a scholar and a journalist, and my there are people in my family like that, and I was raised to question everything, and that's what I've always done. And I think that, you know, represents a tradition in Judaism that I'm trying to carry forward in the face of Zionism. And, uh, the more you ask questions, the more the conventional wisdom falls away in your hands. And journalism has provided me with an opportunity and an avenue for going out in seeking answers, going out across borders, across walls, into places where many Americans couldn't otherwise go. And I've learned some very interesting and compelling things. And what I think a journalist's job is, particularly in the West, is to tell people here what they're not supposed to know. And that's what we're trying to do every day at The Gray Zone. Tell people what they're not supposed to know.
So well said. Well, you're a courageous guy, and you do good work, and I'm glad you're doing it. And I said it at the beginning, and I'll say it again. If you're not subscribed and if you're not checking out The Gray Zone, you should be. You're missing out. It's that good. Max Blumenthal, as usual. Thank you, my friend. Good to see you again. We hadn't talked in a while. Thanks a lot, Rick. It's been too long. Good seeing you. Appreciate it.