Max Blumenthal on His Iran Trip, Being Detained by Trump & the Globalist Chokehold on American Media

Tucker Carlson (0:05)

Max Blumenthal, thank you for doing this. So I guess it shouldn't surprise anyone that if you're a journalist and you've been taking a position and reporting on stories that are in direct contradiction to the official story in Washington, that at some point someone's gonna get heavy with you. And so I want you to just describe, if you don't mind, a couple of things that have happened to you recently.

So everyone knows what the stakes are. So you got detained at a US airport recently. Can you explain what happened?

Max Blumenthal (0:38)

Yeah, and this wasn't the first time the Trump administration had gotten heavy with me over my reporting. I was actually arrested and jailed on first charges that were dropped quickly during the first Trump term. That's a long story, but we've reported on it at The Grayzone.

Tucker Carlson (0:58)

You spent a couple of days in jail, wasn't it?

Max Blumenthal (0:59)

I spent a couple of days in DC jail over completely bogus charges. My house was essentially raided by, like the police surrounded my house, took me out into a wagon and took me to jail for completely charges that I had assaulted a woman who was an ally of Juan Guaido at the time. That's like to make the long story short. And I wish I had had legal representation that encouraged me to sue at that time because it was just completely fake.

Right after Trump came in, in January, I was stopped coming back from a vacation abroad with my family and shown a list of names and asked, basically, do you know these people? Which is far beyond the scope of authority of Customs and Border Protection.

Tucker Carlson (1:46)

And I said- Did they pull you out of Customs line?

Max Blumenthal (1:48)

Yeah, yeah, they were waiting for me. Mr. Blumenthal, and they said, we've been watching you on Judge Napolito. I watched your last appearance on Judge Napolito, referring to Judge Andrew Napolitano, but kind of like a tap on the shoulder, like Big Brother's watching. And I remember those names, I actually didn't recognize them until afterwards. One of them was Susan Benjamin, which happens to be the birth name of Code Pink, co-founder Medea Benjamin. And then the other names were like Arab names or Muslim names. And I think one of them might have been Mahmoud Khalil, who is now was like arrested and was one of the Columbia students who was arrested, and they tried to deport him and put him in an ICE facility for a long time.

I didn't know, but it signaled to me that once it started, it started to all make sense once I saw what they were doing. Israel is in charge now, and they want some, they want a crackdown. They want to criminalize activism and even journalism that contravenes their objectives. So, the war breaks out in Iran on February 28th. It doesn't break out.

Trump executes Israel's wishes and Netanyahu's greatest fantasy, attacking Iran. We can talk about why that happened later, but I was observing it closely, reporting on it, as you were as well, so I wanted to go there, and I had gone the year before without any incident coming back. I participated in a public media festival in Iran. I did a documentary on Iranian Jews and what life is like for them in the Islamic Republic. I did reporting, I interviewed negotiators, like top negotiators, as the negotiations were about to collapse. This was like a month before Israel launched its first war on Iran, which ended with Operation Midnight Hammer. So anyway, the major war, Operation Epstein Fury or Epic Fury breaks out, and I'm observing it very closely, so I wanted an opportunity to go. I got that opportunity because Iran's foreign ministry was giving out press passes to mainstream reporters, you know, from NBC, from CNN, as well as quote unquote influencers who wanted to go and cover the funeral of the man that Trump assassinated on February 28th, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and it was going to be the largest funeral in history, and indeed it was.

I witnessed it as a reporter. I covered a lot of things there which I can talk about in detail, but one of the things I was reporting on was evidence of US and Israeli war crimes. For example, I visited a neighborhood in eastern Tehran that had been just completely destroyed Gaza style and it was destroyed without much reporting. I actually hadn't been aware of this neighborhood where it was just block after block of destruction and speaking to people on that street with tears in their eyes telling me how entire families were liquidated in their sleep, going to the home where a family, what was left of the home, a family of 12 was killed and finding the clothes of small children on the ground. The clothes that resembled the clothes that I dress my children in every day, the same age.