Max Blumenthal: The MAGA Divide: Israel, Epstein, and Kirk Split Trump’s Base (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of American journalist Max Blumenthal’s interview on Judging Freedom Podcast with Judge Napolitano on “The MAGA Divide: Israel, Epstein, and Kirk Split Trump’s Base”, November 13, 2025.

The Israeli Prison Rape Scandal

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Hi everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, November 13, 2025. Max Blumenthal joins us now.

Max, before we speak about the causes of the crack up in MAGA, I want to ask you about the prison rape scandal in Israel. Is there an effect of this on domestic policy, that Netanyahu’s administration refuses to condemn what every other government in the world condemns: the forcible rape of a helpless victim?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: This is a major domestic issue in Israel, a major domestic story. And it’s because of domestic politics, post-war domestic politics, that Netanyahu, if he wanted, would have a very difficult time actually pushing for the prosecution of a small group of soldiers from, I think they’re called Force Unit 101, which severely, brutally raped kidnapped Palestinian male captives from Gaza in the Sde Teiman Torture center.

This small group is part of a much wider circle of Israeli soldiers operating in Israel’s archipelago of torture dungeons, which conducted systematic rape following orders that obviously went to the top and were handed down, presumably by Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who played an important role in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition.

But these men represent a constituency in Israel. One of them is named Meir Kshatrit. And he understood that he represented such a large constituency within Israel several months ago when this erupted, when this scandal erupted, that he actually took off his mask and went on national TV and then was hosted on Israel’s ultra-nationalist Channel 14 as a kind of hero on a talk show. So he had no problem revealing his identity.

He became a folk hero to a certain constituency in Israel.

That constituency is war veterans, reservists. And Israel is having a very hard time keeping those reservists in the field because of the exhaustion of two years of genocide, fighting on multiple fronts. And Israel’s actually handing out de facto bribes to these reservists just to keep them in the field. In any unit, they’re getting paid six to $7,000 a month, according to the former Israeli researcher and political economist Shir Hever, who’s done an enormous amount of research on the nature and state of the Israeli army. He calls it a glorified mercenary army.

And they’re just going between units making more money than the average Israeli citizen, basically being incentivized to commit war crimes. And so for Netanyahu to go against that constituency means it’s going to be harder to keep men in the field because they’re going to be committing war crimes and then they’re going to fear prosecution.

And they represent a voting bloc, not just within the religious nationalist settler voting block, but within Israel proper. And they have a lot of support in the military, within the Knesset. And so they were cheered, this group of torturing rapists, when they entered the High Court in Israel. They were cheered by their families, by average Israeli citizens, and by fellow reservists.

The Case of Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi

And the villain in Jewish Israeli society is named Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi. She is the Israeli army’s major general, a very high-ranking figure in the Israeli army who’s in charge of prosecuting soldiers who commit war crimes. Basically her job is to prevent any prosecutions and to paper them over.

But this one was so severe, she was presented with video of these soldiers anally raping a man with a baton, one after another, a civilian from Gaza in the torture center of Sde Teiman. And when she attempted to present a prosecution or an investigation, she was shut down. So she leaked the video and that’s her crime.

These soldiers, all their supporters, prepared to appear outside of her home. And she then disappeared for several days. And the Israeli police launched a nationwide manhunt, found her alive on a beach. It turns out she had attempted suicide by trying to take sleeping pills. They captured her, took her to prison, are now prosecuting her, and she’s currently under house arrest. And she is still afraid for her life because these soldiers keep showing up outside her house, threatening her.

That’s the state of play in Israel. The rapists are national heroes. And the one high-ranking Israeli army officer that was trying to hold them accountable is being prosecuted.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Can you play the B-roll? I mean, this is the scene in the courtroom that you described. The guys with the masks are the defendants hugging and kissing each other. And there’s the crowd. I guess the judge hasn’t come out yet. No judge will allow this in a courtroom, theoretically. Are they being prosecuted? I mean, they’re in a courtroom. Are there criminal charges against them since they filmed themselves committing these crimes?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, the High Court is going to decide whether they will be prosecuted or not. And this will have implications because, as I said, the purpose of the Israeli army’s legal division is to make sure that there are no prosecutions because they need to have a free hand against the enemy, against the terrorists. And that means torturing them, raping them, bombing them in their homes where they’re doing laundry, bombing an entire apartment building.

This is an actual testimony that just came out from an Israeli soldier that he was ordered to fire a tank shell into an apartment building, killing a dozen families because a man who was supposedly targeted was seen doing his laundry and he had just been given a lecture by his brigade rabbi on how everyone was guilty in Gaza.

We’re also seeing testimonies from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights about how prolific, how systematic the practice of rape is in Israeli prisons against Palestinian male captives. “I could not describe what I felt. I wished for death every single minute after I was raped. They left me alone, handcuffed to the bed, without clothes for many long hours. I could hear the soldiers outside speaking Hebrew and laughing.”

This is one of many testimonies that have come out and they are no longer viewable on YouTube. YouTube has deleted the Palestinian Center for Human Rights’ entire account, along with three other Palestinian human rights organizations’ accounts without explanation because the United States, under orders from Israel, sanctioned these NGOs.

Military Tensions: Iran and Venezuela

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Switching gears slightly, will the Israeli invasion or attack on Iran be delayed until after the United States attack on Venezuela?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, I just got off the phone with Netanyahu. We’re going to be doing an interview for Salem Communications, and he says no. I actually have no intelligence there. But it seems fairly obvious that the administration is prioritizing the Western Hemisphere in Operation Epstein Pedophile Distraction.

And that’s not just according to me. That’s according to the Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, who is a leftist who’s spoken out against Trump’s wanton massacre of his own citizens in the Caribbean who have never been proven to be drug dealers. And he’s now personally sanctioned. Gustavo Petro went before his people on national TV and said that a network of pedophile elites in the United States is launching this war to distract from their own crisis of the Epstein files. This is now an international story.

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And the USS Gerald Ford, the largest, most sophisticated aircraft carrier in the US Fleet, is now in the Caribbean, just miles from Venezuela, stacked with F-18A Hornets ready to attack a nation that poses no threat to the United States, which was ready to negotiate with the US to lower oil prices for Americans and help with our affordability crisis. And we have to ask ourselves why? Why is this happening?

And we also should conclude that this is likely to be sequenced so that an attack on Iran by Israel will take place at a later date, with the US rotating its aircraft into the Al Udeid air base in Qatar. And when we see that rotation and the bombers coming into Al Udeid along with Israel being supplemented with the THAAD missiles, because the US has to deplete its already dwindling supply to defend Israel, then we can expect an attack on Iran might take place.

And I mean, what’s telling is that Donald Trump contradicted his own National Security Council Director and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who initially declared when Israel attacked Iran without provocation last June that this was a unilateral Israeli attack and the US had nothing to do with it. Trump two weeks ago, sorry, a week and a half ago, said, “Actually we were part of that Israeli attack and we supported it and we knew they were going to attack and we provided logistics.”

And the Israeli military high command, Eyal Zamir, the Israeli chief of staff, they’ve openly come out and said, “We knew Trump was going to support us in helping extricate us from a war we started but couldn’t finish.” So I think we’ll know when this is going to take place. But first we have to see what happens in the Western Hemisphere, which is the clear priority for this Monroeist, neo-colonial minded administration.

The Epstein Files and MAGA’s Crisis

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: How has the latest on Epstein and what we learned about Charlie Kirk since his murder adversely affected MAGA, the President’s base in the United States?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, this all happened at once in July. July was one of the most pivotal months in the Trump administration. And I mean, I could feel it. We discussed it, we covered it at our livestream at The Grayzone.

The Epstein files shattered Donald Trump’s mystique not just within the country, but within his own base because his FBI director, Kash Patel, who’d been promising on every podcast he went on this radical disclosure to expose the deep state elites through the Epstein files. He told the MAGA hack Benny Johnson that the reason that the Epstein files weren’t released under Biden was because of who was in them, implying that they were going to hurt the Clintons more than Donald Trump, a close Epstein associate.

And he joined with Pam Bondi who said, “Oh, I have all of the names of the Epstein victims on my desk. It’s horrible. There’s more than we ever imagined. We’re going to get it out there.” They joined together to suppress the Epstein files in a joint memo at the behest of Donald Trump, who’s obviously very anxious about his own exposure in these files.

And now we can see through the House Oversight Committee email drop that Donald Trump is more exposed than previously known. And that according to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump knew there were victims, there were actual victims of abuse. Virginia Giuffre, where did she come from? According to Donald Trump himself, I don’t even know why he said this, she came from his own salon at Mar-a-Lago and was taken by Jeffrey Epstein. There’s a lot there.

And to the MAGA base, this showed that they were actually in with the pedophile elite, that Donald Trump was actually part of the deep state, that he was part of this sort of white-collar criminal class that exists above the law, that is not accountable to the public and that he was lying to them.

And additionally, the whole 12-day war with Iran in which Netanyahu had Trump like a puppet, like was playing him like a marionette a month before, showed them that he was not America First and that he was a complete tool along with the Gaza genocide.

Charlie Kirk and the MAGA Base

Charlie Kirk was experiencing this with the MAGA base because they were his audience. And at the same time he was being, he had a class of Zionist billionaires trying to puppeteer him on behalf of Netanyahu who were also keeping Trump in line. And he was not as easy to puppeteer as Donald Trump, as we now know. And he was chomping at the bit. He was upset with what he called “moral blackmail.” And the next thing you know, by September, he’s dead. I don’t know if there’s a connection there, but he was sort of a proxy for what was taking place inside the MAGA base.

And now the crisis continues and it continues to play out and will play out even more dramatically after Donald Trump had his FBI director, Kash Patel and Pam Bondi take a congresswoman from Colorado who is one of the most radical MAGA members of Congress, Lauren Boebert, into a room. We don’t know what happened in that room, but we have to ask why it was the FBI director and AG who were pressuring her not to sign on to a petition by Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna to release the Epstein files in the House.

And Boebert wouldn’t bite because she understands this is like the kiss of death among the Republican base now to support the suppression of the Epstein files. She wouldn’t go for it. But why are these two national security-related officials, sort of the faces of the deep state, is this a national security issue now? Were they showing her images of child abuse? We have to ask these questions now. I think this is more significant than the content of the files we’ve seen.

The Targeting of Thomas Massie

And now they have the votes. Massie has the votes. And who’s in the crosshairs now? It’s Thomas Massie. Donald Trump is trying to take out Thomas Massie. And who’s he using? An Israeli Likudnik warlord named Miriam Adelson to pump $20 million into his rural, lightly populated district to destroy him for these kinds of acts. So obviously the Epstein files are an existential threat. Donald Trump sees them as an existential threat.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Trump must know what’s in there, have a good idea what’s in there if he’s going to this extent. So let me make sure I understand this. Bondi, the Attorney General, and Patel, the director of the FBI, have done a 180-degree flip from where they were when they were on the outside and Trump was running for president and from where they were in the initial days of their tenure in office. Because the President must have said, “Cool this stuff, we can’t do it.” And MAGA is noticing. Profoundly noticed.

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The MAGA Base and the Rise of “Noticing”

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Profoundly noticing. I mean, that’s why you see figures like Nick Fuentes, who have been… He’s been sort of the main voice of noticing within that part of the base. His audience is just almost entirely under 35 and online. Why he’s been elevated so much in the last several weeks, and he has been gaining so much momentum.

And you see just within the podcaster world, who’s being discredited right now, who is completely lost their patina of credibility. It’s Ben Shapiro, whose yarmulke keeps getting bigger as his credibility shrinks.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Figuratively and…

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Literally, I mean, which is not a good thing for the fight against antisemitism. He’s whimpering right now and apologizing and spinning because a clip of him is reverberating across the Internet in which he says that young people do not deserve to live wherever they grew up and they should go where it’s affordable and not be whining about the lack of affordability in New York City, for example, that you don’t deserve to live there.

Which is something he seems to say to Palestinians while he says that he deserves to have a second country in the land of his imaginary ancestors. If someone wanted to spread antisemitism more than it’s already being spread, they would project that clip on the walls of abandoned factories across Ohio, because that’s the exact message that the MAGA base is disgusted by right now.

The Zionist Billionaire Class and Republican Infighting

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: The other mouthpiece disgusting MAGA is Mark Levin. I mean, why the Zionists are putting this buffoon, this grossly overweight, belligerent, unhappy, miserable person out there just to attack Tucker Carlson and the rest of us is beyond me.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I mean, the scene of him in Sheldon Adelson’s casino in Vegas, the Sands at the Republican Jewish Coalition wearing a shiny gold tie, declaring that it doesn’t matter what you say on your stupid podcast or on your radio show, we will still destroy you is just the perfect encapsulation of the anti-democratic mentality of the Zionist billionaire class for whom he’s a mouthpiece.

And this is fueling so much rage. These figures don’t really have a grassroots base. It’s fueling rage. And the rage is playing out in a very toxic way. But it’s going to ultimately poison the Republican Party for someone like J.D. Vance. And Marco Rubio will not be taken seriously at all because he is the absolute puppet of this 0.1% class element.

So it’s going to keep… This is like the story of the next two or three years. This will be the story of the midterms. The Democrats will not relent from the Epstein files. They finally figured out that this was Donald Trump’s Achilles heel. And now that Adelita Grijalva has been seated in the House, there is a majority for releasing the Epstein files.

And there will be all these proxy battles, like the reelection of Thomas Massie. There will be an attack on Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s positioning herself as sort of the voice of the independent right. And Donald Trump, as far as this king-like figure or victim, hero of the right is finished. He’s become… They increasingly see him the way that progressives saw Joe Biden a year ago.

The CIA Democrats and the 2025 Elections

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: You and I usually don’t talk domestic politics, but I’m going to guess you were not surprised with the election in Virginia for governor, her Annapolis roommate in New Jersey for governor, and Zohran Mamdani here in New York, ending the political career of Andrew Cuomo.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: No, I mean, it all connects.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Yes, it does connect.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: We can’t divorce the issues that we talk about every week about geopolitics or intelligence intrigues from these elections. It’s all integrated, which is why so many Americans who are paying attention are watching your show, because they understand that our politics are influenced by the politics of empire.

Abigail Spanberger is the new governor of Virginia. She’s being pushed as one of the new faces of the Democratic Party. The Virginia governor race was seen as a bellwether, and she was running against a black Republican Marine. It was kind of like choosing between cancer and lupus for someone who’s anti-war.

And who is Abigail Spanberger? Well, between 2006 and 2014, she was in the CIA and she held five passports. According to the media, she served somewhere in Western Europe and Los Angeles. But we’re not allowed to know. So for eight years of her professional career, the voters are not allowed to know anything or to vet her.

It’s the perfect candidate to put up for office because she’s vetting-proof. She’s like a mystery, the ultimate stealth candidate. We don’t know what she was doing at all. I mean, she was in Brussels. She had more passports than Jeffrey Epstein.

And then you got in your native New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, who was her pal and roommate on Capitol Hill, who comes from Naval Intelligence, who has a similarly murky background.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: And…

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Josh Shapiro is being hailed by the New York Times columnist Binyamin Applebaum as the future of the Democratic Party. The Pennsylvania governor went to Jewish day school with Jake Tapper. He wrote an article in college declaring that Palestinians don’t deserve a state because they’re too battle-minded. He went to an arms factory in Pennsylvania to sign shells with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Yes, he is extremely pro-Israel. You can see what they’re doing here by positioning these figures is to isolate someone like Zohran Mamdani and neuter him so that when Josh Shapiro, let’s say, gets the nomination in 2028, they’ll go to Mamdani and say, “Hey, Muslim, do you endorse Josh Shapiro the warmonger, or are you an anti-Semite?”

And I mean, there are so many… They’re going to stack the field with candidates just like Josh Shapiro. So the Democratic Party is facing a similar kind of civil war as the GOP. The difference is the Democratic Party’s constituent base is much more diverse ethnically, religiously and politically than the GOP’s.

The Democratic Party’s Internal Divide

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: This is a fascinating, fascinating analysis, Max. One that has educated me, even though I thought I knew New Jersey politics pretty well. I knew she had been in the CIA, I knew Spanberger had been in the CIA, and I knew that Sherrill had been in Naval Intelligence, but I didn’t know about the hiding of their backgrounds under color of law.

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So you have Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger on one side of the Democratic Party, and Josh Shapiro on one side of the Democratic Party. And Zohran Mamdani and AOC and Bernie Sanders on the other side of the Democratic Party. Wow.

And the Republicans, of course, will soon be the minority party in the Congress because Trump has no credibility any longer. And the more that comes out on Epstein, the more… Where’s the Christian right on Epstein? Where are those Christian nationalists? Where’s Mike Huckabee on Epstein? These people that don’t even use four-letter curse words. They’re willing to tolerate Trump sitting down with one of Epstein’s victims for three hours.

The Collapse of the Christian Right

MAX BLUMENTHAL: That’s a great question. What is the Christian right now? You know, I wrote my first book about the Christian right. It’s called “Republican Gomorrah.” And it was sort of about another Republican crack-up over cultural issues. They were the force behind George W. Bush. They were the real sort of grassroots get-out-the-vote movement that got Bush re-elected in the midst of the Iraq war.

Using cultural issues to distract from the coming economic crisis and from the fact that Americans were coming back in body bags and with their legs blown off from an illegal war based on a lie for Dick Cheney’s profits. And where are they now? What are they? We don’t see them that much, but they are part of this fight within the Republican Party. They’re trying to reassert control of that George W. Bush pro-war neocon coalition on behalf of Mark Levin.

And you realize the Christian right was always sort of astroturfed and that they were these charismatic gay-bashing preachers who were being backed in many ways by Zionist forces. Pastor John Hagee, he was recruited by AIPAC to lead this Christians United for Israel group. He was, before that he was sort of a notable local faith healer, Pentecostal faith healer in San Antonio. Then he becomes this national figure who helps actually propel Mike Huckabee to notoriety and who’s funding him.

Adelson had been contributing millions of dollars to a supposed Christian group. Robert Shulman, $250,000 a year. So the Christian right now stands exposed as an artificially created astroturfed get-out-the-vote organism for a wing of the Republican Party that’s increasingly discredited as Israel First.

And I had always seen them that way. But now you have young people in middle America or within the evangelical world seeing it that way. There are rumors that Charlie Kirk was converted into Catholicism because he was so disgusted with these evangelical pastors like his own pastor, Rob McCoy.

And there’s a fascinating interview that was conducted by Sohrab Amari, who is a former neoconservative, former, I guess, Iranian monarchist who used to attack me all the time and is now, you know, basically anti-war. He interviewed the son of Nikki Haley, someone who is positioning herself as the candidate of the neocons and the Christian right.

When she ran, I actually snuck into a meeting of the Christian right’s secret Illuminati Council, the Council for National Policy that she addressed and her son has basically disowned the politics of the neocons and the Christian right and declared that Israel is not a US ally, that it’s actually a burden on US national security, and that there should be a social safety net in the US but he still identifies himself as a kind of American nationalist.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Well, there’s a social safety net in Israel paid for by the American taxpayer.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: I think Christian nationalism is still very present in the United States and very potent, but it’s going to be channeled through a much more nationalistic and America-focused conservative youth movement. And I think the Republican Party, I don’t know how they’re going to adapt to that.

But this whole line of preachers, from Jerry Falwell to Christian Broadcasting Network to Pastor Hagee, they’re going to have to be put out to pasture at some point.

Ron Dermer’s Resignation

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Last question. What happened to Ron Dermer?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: What?

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Well, he has apparently resigned as Netanyahu, as the right side of Netanyahu’s brain. And I’m just wondering if you have any scoop on whether he’s disgusted with what’s happening or if he just wants to go back into the private sector. He’s the guy, I think, that was born either in Miami or New Jersey, but he’s American as well as Israeli, and he’s been the conduit between Netanyahu and the White House for years.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I mean, I think this isn’t his first resignation. It’s news to me that he resigned and you’re right, his father was the mayor of Miami Beach. But what I would assume happened is that Dermer felt that he was isolated. The Trump administration, and particularly Witkoff and Kushner, saw him as the impediment to the ceasefire deal they were trying to secure.

Dermer was the guy who always made sure that Netanyahu moved the goalposts on every ceasefire because the US wasn’t willing to use leverage or say, like, “Get this guy out of the room.” Netanyahu would always succeed in continuing the genocide.

And they finally isolated Dermer, and now the US has this de facto base on the frontier of Gaza where US troops are serving as, I don’t know if you can call them peacekeepers, but they’re monitoring the progress of the ceasefire, and that may have upset Dermer, and he may also be upset at his lack of influence at this point.

So this is sort of like another internecine war between the Jews of the Trump administration and the Jews of the Netanyahu administration. And Dermer is sort of the odd man out.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: You can’t make this up. And there is no better and more articulate and knowledgeable person to describe it than you, Max. What a fantastic conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much, my dear friend. And thank you for accommodating my schedule. How’s Anya? How are your kids?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, couldn’t be better.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Good, good. Tell Anya we miss her and when she’s ready to come back, she always has a home here.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: She’s watching right now.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Give your kids a kiss for me. Thank you, Max. All the best, my dear friend.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, she’s your biggest fan. Thanks a lot. Thank you.