Yair Rosenberg | The Atlantic

The Worst-Case Scenario for AI and the News Is Already Here

2026-03-27T13:59:37-04:00

Last Thursday, the CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond interrogated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference in Jerusalem. This act of journalism was not unusual, but what happened next was. Diamond uploaded the exchange to social media, and the footage didn’t simply go viral—it became the locus of a mass digital delusion.

The clip racked up millions of impressions across X, Facebook, and Instagram, fueled not by interest in Netanyahu’s words, but by a conviction that the man speaking them didn’t exist. “That is such an obvious composite,” declared one of the most popular replies on X. “How are CNN journalists apparently in on this necromancer-y?!” Countless responses echoed these sentiments. “Netanyahu looks further away than he should,” the top comment on Instagram read. “Looks digitally edited.” Diamond’s reporting had been swarmed by a growing global contingent convinced that the Israeli leader is dead—and that everything we see of him today is the product of AI.

“What do you think about these Netanyahu AI videos?” Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in America, asked one of his show’s guests on March 20. “They think he might be dead.” Rogan went on to suggest that a recent clip of Netanyahu visiting a coffee shop was “clearly AI,” and that not only might the prime minister no longer be alive, but that “his brother got killed in a missile strike.” None of this was true, but Rogan was not alone in voicing the suspicions. “Is Benjamin dead?” Ayoub Khan, a member of the British Parliament, asked on March 14. “I suspect he is dead or at least very seriously injured. Yet the media is completely silent on this topic despite the social media meltdown around this topic!”

Famous people being prematurely buried by social media is not new. You’re not really a celebrity unless X has killed you off at least once. Mahmoud Abbas, the 90-year-old president of the Palestinian Authority, has been erroneously declared dead multiple times. What distinguishes the conspiracy theory about Netanyahu’s demise is its durability. Overwhelming audiovisual evidence, including recent videos of him interacting with journalists and ordinary people, shows Netanyahu to be very much alive. Still, the claim persists.

[Read: How doubt became a weapon in Iran]

“It was really kind of extraordinary,” Diamond told me. He had expected that the news conference he attended, which was broadcast live by various networks, “would kind of put it to bed, but obviously not.”

After Netanyahu posted the clip from the coffee shop, internet sleuths insisted that the beverage in the prime minister’s cup should have spilled based on how he was holding it. Netanyahu then posted a video of himself chatting with Israelis and encouraging them to follow the official safety guidelines for Iranian missile strikes; the digital detectives claimed that Netanyahu’s wedding ring disappeared in the middle of the clip. Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the left-wing media company Zeteo, commented: “I don’t want to be the conspiracy theory guy, and I swear I have resisted all the ‘Netanyahu is dead’ stuff… but this looks so fake.”

Days later, interviewing Senator Chris Van Hollen, Hasan winkingly asked him “a question the entire internet is dying to hear the answer on: Is Benjamin Netanyahu dead?” (An incredulous Van Hollen said no.) The video of that conversation now has more than 800,000 views on YouTube, outstripping most of the other content on Hasan’s Zeteo channel.

On March 16, just four days after Netanyahu’s most recent press conference, The New York Times contributing opinion writer Megan Stack pleaded, “Netanyahu, if you’re there, give a press conference or interview—the timeline has gotten unbearable,” adding that she thought he was “hiding out.” According to one outside analysis, from February 28 to March 19, the claim that Netanyahu was dead appeared in some “800,000 posts from more than 213,000 unique users, accumulating more than 430 million impressions on X.”

The Netanyahu conspiracy theory and its seeming imperviousness to evidence are the by-products of a corrupted information environment. In a world where AI can credibly simulate any possible image, people understandably begin to doubt even the images that are real.

This crisis was anticipated. In 2018, the legal scholars Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron warned that machine learning—and the convincing fakes it produces—would undermine people’s ability to identify fabrications. But they also cautioned about something they called “the liar’s dividend”: a situation in which pervasive fakery would allow propagandists to delegitimize reality itself. “A skeptical public will be primed to doubt the authenticity of real audio and video evidence,” the scholars wrote. “This skepticism can be invoked just as well against authentic as against adulterated content.” The unkillable myth of Netanyahu’s death is the liar’s dividend made manifest.

Of course, AI is not the only culprit here. Monetized algorithmic social media provides the perfect breeding ground for self-sustaining falsehoods. Journalists and traditional media outlets, for all their flaws, have editorial processes and professional incentives in place to point them toward reporting the truth. On social media, however, the currency is not accuracy but virality. If something spreads, it sells—literally, as posters are often paid based on engagement.

A conflict such as the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, which inflames millions of partisans, provides a ready-made audience for unscrupulous manipulators. Pro-Iran posters can churn out deepfakes of Tel Aviv being reduced to rubble or Netanyahu being bombed; pro-Israel posters can produce fraudulent images of Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, maimed in a hospital bed. The more people get their news from social media rather than traditional media, the more people will be prone to believe such propaganda—not because it is convincing, but because they want it to be true. This impulse to inhabit a digital dream world, rather than face the broken one that actually exists, is the engine that keeps delusions like the “death of Netanyahu” running.

[Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine]

After all, there are plenty of prosaic explanations for the various oddities raised by those pushing the nonsense that Netanyahu is dead. The Israeli leader’s facial coloring sometimes looks artificial because he famously wears heavy makeup in public appearances. The edges of Netanyahu’s hands in some of his man-on-the-street videos look blurred not because he is digitally rendered, but because the video is, resulting in an array of artifacts caused by compression and the iPhone’s autofocus and anti-aliasing features. Of the two Israeli flags behind Netanyahu during his press conferences, only one is visible from the diagonal side-shot on TV, not because the other has disappeared, but because that’s how camera angles and perspective work. Netanyahu’s son Yair did not go offline to sit shiva and mourn for his father; he recently flew to Hungary to address a conservative conference in support of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s reelection campaign.

Netanyahu himself has appeared in public numerous times, conversing on video with everyday Israelis and international reporters—not just CNN’s Diamond, but Fox’s Trey Yingst and ABC’s Tom Burridge. Netanyahu even posted a video mocking his doubters alongside U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. That all of these people are in on the same elaborate ruse would seem unlikely.

But reasoned refutations miss the point. Many people hate Netanyahu and wish he were dead. Monetized algorithmic social media allows mercenary opportunists to give these people what they want. The spread of this content enriches those peddling the falsehoods—who accrue followers and engagement dollars—but impoverishes the people they fool by making it harder for them to understand the world around them and act effectively to change it.

Intelligent political agency is impossible without a foundation of fact. Yet the rise of unrestrained AI, combined with the incentives and biases that drive social media, has served to supplant facts with consequential delusions, and helped mass-market them to the very people most inclined to believe them. Seen in this light, the embrace of Netanyahu’s mythical death isn’t a bizarre outlier, an eccentricity of the overly online; it is a preview of a new normal.

The Slow, Then Sudden, Death of the Hawkish Democrat

2026-03-20T07:00:00-04:00

The speech that arguably won Barack Obama the presidency was delivered six years before he ran for the White House and four years before he reached Congress. In October 2002, Obama, then a state senator from Illinois, delivered a blistering speech against the impending war in Iraq. “I don’t oppose war in all circumstances,” he declared at a Chicago rally. “What I do oppose is a dumb war.”

Years later, that stance would distinguish Obama from Hillary Clinton, the initial front-runner in the 2008 Democratic primary. The two contenders were largely in accord on domestic policy, which made their differences on foreign policy loom large. Clinton, like most Senate Democrats, had voted to authorize the Iraq War. But with that decision now deeply unpopular on the left, Obama leaned into his early opposition. His campaign produced supercuts of his anti-war sentiments over the years and even filmed supporters reciting the lines of his 2002 speech, in one of the earliest examples of viral video in American politics. The contrast proved consequential. Surveys showed that Democratic voters upset by the war broke for Obama, who narrowly edged out Clinton and went on to win the White House.

[David Frum: Can’t stop it, so lead it]

Today’s Democrats appear to have learned from Obama’s example and the Iraq debacle. On March 2, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, a swing-state politician and potential presidential contender, announced his campaign for reelection and delivered a broadside against another Middle Eastern war. “Eight months ago, President Trump lied to the country when he falsely claimed to have obliterated Iran’s nuclear program,” Ossoff told supporters. “Now he says he’s taken the United States to war for regime change without evidence of imminent threat, without having exhausted diplomacy, without clear objectives or a plan for the aftermath, and without the consent of Congress.”

Ossoff’s speech was powerful, but it was most notable for not being noteworthy. Numerous high-profile Democratic politicians, including moderates in purple states and some considering a run for the presidency, have expressed similar sentiments. Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, a veteran of the Iraq War, has repeatedly dubbed the Iran campaign “a dumb war,” echoing Obama, and warned about America being pulled back into the Middle East. California Governor Gavin Newsom accused Trump of “engaging in an illegal, dangerous war that will risk the lives of our American service members and our friends without justification to the American people.” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, a past and likely future presidential candidate, called this week for the withdrawal of U.S. forces “from this reckless and unauthorized war of choice with Iran.” The progressive standard-bearer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez predicted that Trump’s bombing would prove “catastrophic,” while on the other end of the party’s ideological spectrum, even Democratic candidates endorsed by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby group, distanced themselves from the war.

The contrast with the Democratic Party of yesteryear could not be more apparent. Back in 2002, Democrats with White House aspirations felt compelled to authorize the Iraq War, even if they would later turn against it. Many of these politicians had witnessed decisive interventions in places such as Kosovo, Bosnia, and the first Gulf War that had salutary outcomes and ended without devolving into quagmires. Influenced by this experience, Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden—the Democratic nominees for president in 2004, 2016, and 2020—all voted to back the invasion of Iraq. Today the dynamic has flipped, and presidential contenders are tripping over themselves to repudiate Trump’s war. Because so many have staked out opposition, these politicians are unlikely to be the next Obama. But they are ensuring that they will not be the next Hillary Clinton, a promising potential president whose support for a disastrous Middle Eastern war sabotaged her candidacy.

[Franklin Foer: Trump is betraying Iran’s pro-democracy protesters]

The reasons for this reversal are not just hindsight. Ever since Donald Trump assumed office, American politics has become polarized around his personality, with feelings about the president often dictating opinions about his policies. As a result, it has become very difficult for Republicans to oppose his agenda—and toxic for Democrats to support it. Moreover, unlike the Bush administration in 2002, the Trump administration has made little effort to sell the nation or the international community on its intervention, making military action less popular and easier for a poll-conscious politician to reject. Back in 2003, some 60 percent of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, including about 40 percent of Democrats, creating significant cross-pressures on ambitious liberal elected officials. Today nearly all polls show that most Americans oppose the current campaign in Iran, and that an overwhelming majority reject a prospective ground invasion. When it comes to Democrats in particular, the numbers are laughably lopsided. A YouGov poll released this week found that 81 percent of Democrats believe that war with Iran is “not justified.” Just 7 percent disagreed.

In short, both the ghosts of the past and the polls of the present have conspired to push the Democratic Party in a staunchly anti-war direction. And given that wars tend to lose popularity the longer they drag on, this is likely the most popular the Iran war will ever be among Democrats. If the conflict turns out to be a success for Trump, his opposition will have to account for its nay-saying. But most Democratic elected officials seem to prefer taking that bet over the alternative. Obama’s argument didn’t just carry the day in his primary; it reshaped his party entirely.

The Dangerous Logic of the Joe Kent Letter

2026-03-17T17:05:00-04:00

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When Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned today in protest of the Iran war, he blamed everyone except the person who launched it. In his resignation letter, addressed to President Trump, Kent portrays the president as a passive figure manipulated by others—“high-ranking Israeli officials” and “influential members of the American media”—rather than the most powerful person imposing his will upon the world. Again and again, Kent casts Trump, a two-term president, as someone swept up in events rather than driving them.

“I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term,” Kent writes. “Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.” The alleged shift, Kent claims, was due to an Israeli and media-driven “misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform” and “was used to deceive you.”

Setting aside its potentially anti-Semitic undertones, this argument fails on the facts. In reality, Trump telegraphed his bellicose intentions toward Iran for decades, and once in office, he escalated conflict with the country at every opportunity. In 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis, Trump agreed with a TV interviewer that “we should have gone in there with troops,” and said that doing so would make America “an oil-rich nation.” In 1987, The New York Times reported that Trump had told a New Hampshire audience that “the United States should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran’s bullying of America.” In 1988, Trump told a Guardian interviewer that if he were a political leader, he’d be “harsh on Iran,” and declared: “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island,” the country’s oil-export hub. (The United States bombed Kharg Island last weekend, and a contingent of Marines is now heading to the region, potentially to occupy it.) “While everyone is waiting and prepared for us to attack Syria,” Trump tweeted in 2013, “maybe we should knock the hell out of Iran and their nuclear capabilities?”

When Trump assumed the presidency in 2017, he quickly went to work putting his Iran impulses into action. He tore up the Obama administration’s nuclear deal in 2018 and assassinated Qassem Soleimani, a notorious leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in 2020. After returning to power in 2024, Trump picked up where he left off, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities last year and finally this year launching the current war on the regime after directing the largest U.S. military buildup in the region since Iraq.

Far from a deviation from Trumpism, the president’s Iran war is his ideology given final form. And Trump’s most fervent supporters seem to agree. A CNN average of recent polls found that 89 percent of MAGA Republicans approve of military action in Iran, compared with just 9 percent who disapprove. Kent conjured a vision of an anti-war president who never existed, while claiming to speak for an anti-war, “America First” base that is not in evidence, to blame external actors for an entirely predictable domestic political decision.

It is hard to believe that Kent, a decorated former Green Beret, was genuinely unaware of all of this when he chose to serve the president. But long before he assumed his now-abandoned post, Kent gravitated toward conspiratorial explanations of events. He alleged that the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen,” and that the FBI helped engineer the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol—and he stood by those claims in his Senate confirmation hearing.

Kent has also been partial to anti-Jewish ideologues. In 2022, he primaried and defeated Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, before losing in the general election, but not before paying a member of the Proud Boys as a consultant. According to the Associated Press, Kent had “sought support from figures associated with the white nationalist ‘Groyper Army’ movement led by Nick Fuentes” during his campaign, then disavowed such an interest when the contacts became public. Kent later appeared at a fundraiser with a far-right commentator who had claimed that Hitler was a “complicated” and “misunderstood” figure, and whom the campaign also subsequently disavowed.

Kent’s resignation letter reflects this worldview—and its fundamental flaws. In it, he blames Israel not just for somehow suborning Trump into war in Iran but also for being behind the Iraq War. The president, Kent writes, has fallen prey to “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.” The historical record, however, suggests the opposite. “The Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy—Iran is the enemy,” Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell and a vituperative Israel critic, told the anti-war reporter Gareth Porter in 2007. The Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal has recounted being told by then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2002 that Washington was set on fighting “the wrong war.” (Trump, meanwhile, initially supported the Iraq invasion.)

In his letter, Kent also blames Israel for the death of his first wife, a Navy cryptologist, writing that she was killed “in a war manufactured by Israel.” But Shannon Kent was not killed in Iran or Iraq. She was killed by the Islamic State in Syria during the Trump administration’s campaign against the group—which Kent praises elsewhere in the same letter.

None of these claims makes much sense from a logical or factual perspective. But they are perfectly coherent as part of the long tradition of conspiratorial anti-Semitism, which blames groups of Jews for being behind the world’s problems. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery considered the most influential anti-Semitic work of all time, purports to record Jewish schemers plotting to profit by keeping the world in a state of perpetual war. The Hamas charter, which cites The Protocols, similarly blames Jews for the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and World War II.

Like Kent’s letter, these works do not represent reality but rather an attempt to impose an ideology on reality. They pin crimes on a preconceived perpetrator. This fallacy is precisely the reason that movements—and countries—overtaken by anti-Semitism inevitably unravel. Societies that adopt conspiratorial explanations for political, social, and economic problems lose the ability to rationally redress them. “Why did the stock market crash?” is a good question. So is “Why did the U.S. invade Iraq?” But a person who blames a financial meltdown on the Jews or spends their time chasing phantom Israeli culprits instead of a war’s actual American instigators will never understand the calamities in question and will fail to prevent future ones.

Anti-Semitic explanations of events rob people of their agency and prevent them from acting effectively to improve their circumstances. Seen from this vantage point, Joe Kent is a cautionary tale. He advocated for and worked for a president who then launched a war that he ardently opposed, because he fundamentally misunderstood the world he lived in.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Israel said that it killed Ali Larijani, Iran’s top security official and a powerful regime insider, in an overnight strike. Iran has not officially confirmed or denied his death.
President Trump said that he could “take” Cuba as the island experiences a nationwide blackout after its power grid collapsed amid a U.S. oil blockade. Cuba faces worsening fuel shortages and growing protests over repeated outages.
Trump said that the U.S. can reopen the Strait of Hormuz without the help of allies after NATO members pushed back on his requests to help secure the waterway.

Evening Read

The author's grandmother Patricia Perry joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots in 1943. Courtesy of the Robinson/Cushing Family

The Forgotten Female Pilots of World War II

By Ellen Cushing

Recently, I stood in an airfield in Sweetwater, Texas, and looked up. I was wondering what it would have been like to take off from there in a small plane, flying into the dust of West Texas and the chaos of World War II, as my grandmother had …

During World War II, Sweetwater’s Avenger Field was the primary home of a program that trained women to fly military planes. They were called Women Airforce Service Pilots—WASPs—and they were the solution to a high-stakes problem: The war needed pilots, and men were dying quickly. From 1942 to 1944, these women volunteers engaged in just about every aspect of military flight operations except combat—ferrying aircraft, testing planes, transporting cargo, training new pilots—so that the men would be free to fight in Europe and the Pacific. More than 25,000 women applied to the program, fewer than 2,000 were accepted, and 1,074 completed training.

By the time the program ended, the WASPs had risked—and in some cases given—their lives to save male pilots a cumulative 60 million miles of flying.

Read the full article.

Netanyahu’s Very Useful War

2026-03-11T14:28:33-04:00

Benjamin Netanyahu has spent the better part of two decades perfecting the art of the political escape. Just when his career appears to be buried under the weight of indictments, or his coalition fatally fractured, he reappears, seemingly unscathed, with a new lease on power. Today, as Israel finds itself locked in a multifront war with Iran and its proxies, Netanyahu is once again attempting his favorite trick: transmuting a national existential crisis into a personal political lifeline.

Take the prime minister’s perennial quest to call off his corruption trial. Netanyahu has been in the dock for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust since 2020. During that time, he has attempted to intimidate and disempower Israel’s judiciary and pressured Isaac Herzog, the country’s president, to grant him a pardon. Last week, thanks to the Iran war, that push got some backup from none other than Donald Trump. “I don’t want anything on Bibi’s mind other than fighting against Iran,” the U.S. president told Axios, calling Herzog a “disgrace” for letting the trial continue. “Every day I talk to Bibi about the war. I want him to focus on the war and not on the fucking court case.” Trump is not known for his attention to the minutiae of the internal politics of foreign countries, but one can guess where he has been hearing repeatedly about the trial.

[Read: Netanyahu just admitted he’s unfit to lead Israel]

Netanyahu is using the war to shore up his shaky grip on Israel’s domestic politics as well. By law, the prime minister’s coalition needs to pass a budget by the end of this month in order to avert mandatory new elections. For a time, Netayahu seemed likely to miss this deadline. The reason: The ultra-Orthodox parties, which hold 18 of the coalition’s 64 seats, refused to back the budget unless the prime minister passed legislation officially exempting yeshiva students from military service.

Most Israelis are subject to a mandatory draft, but the ultra-Orthodox—or Haredi—are not. This arrangement, the result of historical horse-trading for Haredi political backing, was unpopular in peacetime. It became intolerable during wartime, as Israelis watched their sons and daughters fight and fall in armed conflicts while Haredi life continued as usual. Today, some 70 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose the ultra-Orthodox exemption, and the supreme court has ruled that the government must end it. The Haredi ultimatum has put Netanyahu in a bind. Either he can placate his ultra-Orthodox allies and infuriate most voters, or he can placate most voters and infuriate the ultra-Orthodox. The war, however, has bought him some time. “Is it possible to wage a war without a budget?” one ultra-Orthodox politician said, reportedly explaining why his faction would be supporting the measure, at least for now.

[Read: The earthquake that could shatter Netanyahu’s coalition]

Finally, Netanyahu’s allies have begun suggesting to journalists that the premier might call early elections if the military campaign against Iran ends well. Their hope is that fresh wartime gains will overshadow Netanyahu’s liabilities, such as the Haredi exemption—the prime minister is still ultimately committed to preserving it—and his government’s failure to prevent the October 7 attacks.

If all of this sounds premature, bordering on hubristic, that’s because it is. Netanyahu is a consummate tactician and excels at leveraging unforeseen circumstances to bolster his political position. But there is good reason to think that this time, his gambits may fail. To begin with, despite public pressure from Trump, President Herzog has not acquiesced to Netanyahu’s demand for a pardon. “Anyone who thinks that a gun to the head and external threats will influence the president to deviate from the proper administration of the law does not know the people involved and has no idea what he is talking about,” Michael Herzog, the president’s brother and Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, said. Last week, Israel’s Justice Ministry reportedly concluded that Netanyahu’s request for a pardon did not meet the criteria for granting one and should therefore be rejected.

The Haredi issue is also not going away. Indeed, the ultra-Orthodox exemption is likely to upset voters more than ever now that Israel is fighting a war on two fronts—against the regime in Iran and its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon. Last week, many Israelis erupted in outrage as 90 yeshiva students flew to Poland to visit the grave of a famous rabbi, while their non-Haredi counterparts were being called up to the front. Even if the ultra-Orthodox don’t capsize Netanyahu’s current coalition with their highly unpopular political demands, those demands may prevent the coalition from returning to power in the next election.

Likewise, whether the Iran war will alter the electoral map in Netanyahu’s favor is far from clear. Most Israelis back the conflict at the moment, viewing it as necessary to secure the future of their state against an eliminationist foe. But Israeli voters were not born yesterday, and their views of Netanyahu and his hard-right coalition have been remarkably stable since 2023. Most polls have consistently shown that Israelis do not trust Netanyahu and that support for his government has collapsed. These numbers have not been improved by military feats such as the decapitation of Hezbollah in 2024 and the 12-day war against Iran last year. And those conflicts at least had defined end points with decisive Israeli victories, such as the killing of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. The current war provides far less cause for Israeli optimism.

“Ending these kinds of operations is much harder than starting them,” Netanyahu wrote in his 2022 memoir. Yet today, he has embroiled his country in two such open-ended engagements—not counting the continuing skirmishes along the Gaza cease-fire line. With Trump already signaling a potential retreat in Iran, and the Islamic Republic still in power and showing that it can successfully hold the world’s energy supply hostage, the endgame for Israel remains an enigma. If Netanyahu winds up trapped in the very sort of conflict he once warned against, he will have given new meaning to the phrase self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Real Reason Trump Went to War

2026-03-04T09:37:47-05:00

Why did President Trump decide to attack Iran? It depends on what day of the week you ask. On Saturday, the president claimed in a recorded address that he acted because Iran’s rulers refused to “renounce their nuclear ambitions” and were developing long-range missiles that threatened America and its allies. On Sunday, a senior administration official told reporters that Iran and its proxies “posed an imminent threat to U.S. personnel and allies in the region.” On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that Trump acted preemptively to protect U.S. forces in advance of an unavoidable Israeli attack on Iran that would inevitably lead Iran to retaliate against America. The next day, Trump rejected this framing, telling reporters that “if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand” because he believed Iran was “going to attack if we didn’t do it.”

All of these pretexts present problems. Why would America need to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities if, as Trump previously claimed, they’d been “completely and totally obliterated” eight months ago in Operation Midnight Hammer? In 2025, the Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that Iran’s missile program was a decade away from being able to target American shores. That hardly sounds like an imminent threat. As for the Israel excuse, Trump is the senior partner in the U.S.-Israel relationship, and he sets the terms. When he wanted Israel to end its June 2025 war with Iran, he publicly forced the country to recall its fighter jets, even without avenging a closing strike that had left four Israelis dead.

[Read: Trump is successfully bullying Netanyahu]

Trump could have dissuaded the Israelis once again. Instead, the president ordered the largest U.S. air-power buildup in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq. Then, according to The New York Times, his CIA gave Israel the intelligence to locate and kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. (Axios reported instead that the intelligence was Israel’s and the CIA confirmed it.) “He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems,” Trump crowed on Truth Social, announcing Khamenei’s death. The two countries reportedly had planned the ensuing assault for weeks.

The shifting explanations for Trump’s war and the alleged imminent threat that prompted it suggest poor planning and internal confusion about the president’s motives. They are also a smoke screen. Fundamentally, a war ordered by the most powerful man in the world, commanding the most advanced military in the world, is the responsibility of the man who ordered it. Trump is a two-term president with agency, and he has long telegraphed and demonstrated his eagerness to use military force around the world—and in particular, in Iran.

In 1980, NBC interviewed a young Trump about the ongoing Iran hostage crisis. He did not hold back. “That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror, and I don’t think they’d do it with other countries,” he said. When the interviewer asked if that meant “you’re advocating that we should have gone in there with troops,” Trump replied, “I absolutely feel that, yes,” adding that had America done so, “I think right now we’d be an oil-rich nation.” (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said that he had dreamed of being able to “smite the terror regime” in Iran for 40 years; it turns out Trump had him beat.)

In 1987, the Times reported that Trump declared in a New Hampshire speech that “the United States should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran’s bullying of America.” In 1988, Trump told The Guardian that “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools.”

Trump’s instinctive hawkishness and abiding belief in military coercion as a solution to American problems extend well beyond Iran. He supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2011 intervention in Libya to topple Muammar Qaddafi, before turning against both. In his first term as president, Trump ordered the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In his second term, he has fast-tracked arms sales to the Middle East, menaced Canada, threatened to “get Greenland,” and abducted the dictator of Venezuela.

[Read: Trump’s new imperialism]

Believing that Trump was somehow a “peace president” devoted to American restraint, as some credulous commentators claimed, required ignoring everything he’d said before he was president and everything he’d done after he became president. As Andrew Kaczynski, a CNN reporter who, during the 2016 presidential campaign, exposed Trump’s early support for the Iraq War, put it: “Important context for Trump’s opposition to regime change wars or interventions is that he never actually opposed them at the time and only did so after they went bad.”

Trump’s officials and allies have fumbled around to find an “imminent threat” to justify the president’s decision to strike Iran. But the real impetus for such action was Trump’s imperial approach to American power, which was decades in the making. The president specializes in exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents; having watched Israel decimate Iran’s proxy armies and air defenses over the past few years, he sought to capitalize on the regime’s moment of maximum vulnerability. Other countries—most notably Israel and Saudi Arabia—potentially stand to benefit from Trump’s war. But the decision to start it was his alone, and no amount of spin from his surrogates should obscure this fact.

The Israel of October 6 Is Never Coming Back

2026-03-02T15:23:56-05:00

Just about the only thing that the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump have agreed on is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was too timid to pull the trigger. “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” a senior Obama official told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in 2014, explaining that the Israeli leader was “scared to launch wars.” Nine years later, Trump would tell attendees at a campaign rally that Netanyahu had initially committed to join America’s 2020 strike on Qassem Soleimani, the notorious head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but backed out at the last minute. “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” Trump told his supporters at the gathering, just days after the Hamas massacre in 2023.

That was then. Such assessments of Netanyahu sound absurd today, as Israel wages war on Iran for the second time, having dismantled the regime’s proxy armies—Hamas and Hezbollah—and assassinated its supreme leader. But in fact, Netanyahu’s American critics accurately characterized his conduct until October 7, 2023. For years, the Israeli leader spoke loudly and carried a small stick. Despite delivering numerous warnings about Iran’s nuclear ambitions—in Israel, the U.S. Congress, and the United Nations—Netanyahu never backed up his bellicose rhetoric with on-the-ground action.

That is, until 2024. The Netanyahu who is currently commanding a high-risk assault on Tehran is not the same Netanyahu who governed Israel for nearly two decades prior. And the country he leads is not the same, either.

[Eliot A. Cohen: America’s invaluable ally]

Before this seismic shift, Netanyahu’s longevity as prime minister was built on a foundation of conflict avoidance. That posture appealed to a risk-averse electorate. Under his premiership, Israeli voters who were comfortable with the status quo could rest easy knowing that their leader would be unlikely to upset it.

“Despite his image, Netanyahu is not a warmonger,” Anshel Pfeffer, one of the prime minister’s left-wing critics and his biographer, wrote in 2018. “He is the most risk-averse of Israeli leaders, averse to making war or peace.” At the time, Pfeffer correctly predicted that Israel would not go to war with Iran, despite having a sympathetic Trump administration by its side.

Netanyahu was cautious by temperament and also by experience. His older brother, Yoni, was killed in a hostage-rescue raid in 1976. As the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Netanyahu saw a ruinous war in Lebanon destroy the standing of Ehud Olmert, his center-left predecessor as prime minister. A smooth-talking master of image management, Netanyahu understood that wars are hard to predict and impossible to script. Rather than tackle Tehran head-on, he moved the fight into the shadows, championing global sanctions in public while quietly unleashing a covert campaign to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program from within.

This preference for containment over open conflict was applied not just to Iran but also to another territory next door. For years, Netanyahu resisted agitation within his own right-wing government to invade Gaza and topple its terrorist rulers. In his 2022 memoir, Netanyahu wrote proudly about rejecting these calls to arms. “Ending these kinds of operations is much harder than starting them,” he noted. “The public invariably expects the government to continue the battle and ‘flatten Gaza,’ believing that with enough punishment the Hamas regime would collapse. Yet that would only happen if we sent in the army. The casualties would mount: many hundreds on the Israeli side and many thousands on the Palestinian side. Did I really want to tie down the IDF in Gaza for years when we had to deal with Iran and a possible Syrian front? The answer was categorically no.” Instead, Netanyahu opted to degrade Hamas with limited air campaigns and then attempted to buy quiet by funneling the group millions of dollars from Qatar.

The Hamas massacre of October 7—whose atrocities were broadcast online by its perpetrators and seared into the Israeli consciousness—upended and discredited this approach. With Israel’s borderlands in ruins and hundreds of its citizens taken hostage, the country’s voters could no longer countenance their leader’s quietism, which now looked like a historic blunder. An Israeli public that had elected Netanyahu to steward its security now felt profoundly insecure and demanded dramatic action. To respond to the attack was not enough; the government needed to ensure that others like it would never happen, by confronting threats at their source.

Netanyahu had not sent Israeli ground troops into Gaza since 2014. After October 7, that hesitation was no longer viable. He initiated the very campaign in Gaza that he had warned against. The cataclysmic and often chaotic conflict cost more Israeli and Palestinian lives than any war in their history, destroyed wide swaths of the enclave, empowered Israel’s extremists who sought to settle the territory, and sharply eroded Israel’s international standing.

Still, Netanyahu at first instinctively resisted the pull toward wider hostilities. When his defense minister and other security officials pushed right after October 7 for Israel to strike not just Hamas but also Hezbollah, Netanyahu demurred. The Lebanese militia was firing rockets into Israel at the time in solidarity with Hamas, but it was arguably the most fearsome nonstate army in the entire world, and a shaken Netanyahu was not eager to take it on.

But as in Gaza, the Iranian proxy eventually forced Netanyahu’s hand. Hezbollah continued shelling Israel’s north for more than 11 months, destroying towns and forcing the evacuation of nearly 70,000 Israelis. The devastation and displacement placed tremendous strain on Israel’s internal cohesion—and applied more and more pressure to its leader. Finally, in September 2024, after months of tit-for-tat attacks, Netanyahu launched a full-fledged campaign against Hezbollah, complete with exploding beepers and bunker-busting bombs. And then, something unexpected happened: Everything went according to plan.

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated, along with nearly his entire chain of command. Hezbollah was decimated and soon compelled to sign a cease-fire agreement on Israel’s terms. Stripped of his enforcers, Syria’s pro-Iran dictator, Bashar al-Assad, soon fell as well. Total war turned into nearly total victory. And at the same time, another parallel engagement further emboldened Netanyahu. In response to Israel’s bombing of a consular annex in Syria and the subsequent killing of Nasrallah, Iran launched waves of missiles and drones at Israel by the hundreds, the largest such assaults in history. But Israel not only readily repelled nearly all of the projectiles—it also responded by easily penetrating and disabling some of Iran’s most sensitive air defenses.

[Dennis Ross: Yitzhak Rabin knew what Netanyahu doesn’t]

With each successful escalation, Netanyahu’s willingness to use force to settle Israel’s scores increased. This growing confidence culminated in the 12-day war last June, in which Israel achieved air dominance over Iran, bombed its nuclear sites, and took out much of the country’s military and intelligence leadership, all without losing a single soldier. At the outset, Israel’s military planners had projected more than 400 casualties on the home front from Iranian ballistic and drone attacks; in the end, there were only 28.

Critics of Israel often rightly point out that Palestinian radicalization is less the result of inveterate ideology than of continuous Israeli occupation, violence, and dispossession. But this logic runs both ways. Netanyahu and the Israeli people would never have countenanced such extreme military actions if they had not experienced the unspeakable horrors of October 7, and the repeated, unrelenting assaults of Hezbollah’s rockets and Iran’s missiles.

This cycle has reached its zenith in Netanyahu’s latest and greatest gamble. Casting off his cautiousness, he has bet his political future—and his country’s—on Israel’s ability to confront not only the Iranian regime but also its Hezbollah and Houthi allies, all while managing a mercurial Trump who remains liable to declare a premature victory and exit the stage at any moment. Whether this gambit will succeed is unclear, and one should distrust anyone who suggests otherwise. But what is clear is that the Israel and Netanyahu of October 6, 2023, are never coming back.

Carrie Prejean Boller Is Not Going Quietly

2026-02-12T21:01:42-05:00

“It is not a biblical mandate that I have to worship Israel,” Carrie Prejean Boller told me today. The former Miss California USA turned social-media influencer was dismissed from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission yesterday after drawing charges of anti-Semitism. But, she wanted to make clear, she regrets nothing—and has no intention of disappearing without a fight.

On Tuesday, the Religious Liberty Commission held its fifth hearing, in Washington, D.C., to discuss anti-Jewish prejudice. Meetings of blue-ribbon panels are typically sleepy, stage-managed affairs designed to serve the purposes of whatever administration put them together. But Boller had other ideas. She repeatedly interrogated the participants about their opinions on anti-Zionism, which she distinguished from anti-Semitism, and complained that other panelists had called Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, the wildly popular podcasters, anti-Semitic.

Video of Boller’s interjections went viral, sparking furious recriminations on the right. “I’m with her,” declared former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Boller took to social media in her own defense and began resharing others’ support for her conduct, including Owens’s claim that the two women were being assailed for refusing to “support the mass slaughter and rape of innocent children for occult Baal worshipers.” Boller’s performance raised her profile—her previously marginal X account increased its following 20-fold. “Be a good Goyim and give me a follow,” she posted Tuesday afternoon, inaccurately using the plural form of the colloquial Hebrew word for “non-Jew.” Yesterday, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, the chair of the Religious Liberty Commission, announced that Boller had been removed, saying in a statement that “no member of the Commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The MAGA influencers rehabilitating Hitler]

When I interviewed Boller by phone about her experience, she told me that the first attempt to oust her from the commission came back in August, when she received a phone call from a staffer at the Office of Presidential Personnel asking her to step down. Boller attributed this effort to her social-media posts about the devastation in Gaza. She alleged that Patrick and Paula White, a confidante of Trump’s whom Boller described as an “absolute evangelical demon,” had been “colluding with the White House.” (The commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Boller cited her faith when explaining her position, as she had at the hearing. “It’s anti-Christian to accuse me of anti-Semitism by being a Christian,” she said. She reiterated that Zionism is not compatible with her Catholicism, the faith to which she converted in April. The Vatican has long recognized the state of Palestine and called for a two-state solution, positions at odds with those of the current Israeli government, but it has also backed Israel’s right to exist. Indeed, as long as the subject was Israel, Boller was eager to engage. But when the conversation turned to other things that she had said at the commission hearing that pertained to anti-Semitism, not merely anti-Zionism, she suddenly became much more evasive.

“I would really appreciate it if you would stop calling Candace Owens an anti-Semite,” she told one of the witnesses at the hearing, Seth Dillon, the CEO of the conservative satire site The Babylon Bee. “I don’t know why you keep bringing her up and Tucker,” she added. “Because they’re the two most famous anti-Semites,” retorted Dillon. “Everyone’s an anti-Semite!” Boller replied. “Do you think that anything Candace has said is anti-Semitic?” Dillon later asked. “No, I don’t,” Boller responded. “I listen to her daily, and I haven’t heard one thing out of her mouth that I would say is anti-Semitic.”

As it happens, Owens has said many deranged things about Jews, plenty of which have nothing to do with Israel. So I was surprised to hear her so vigorously defended at a hearing ostensibly devoted to combatting anti-Jewish bigotry. I raised the subject with Boller, who regularly reposts content from Owens on social media, and I quoted several recent claims that the podcaster had made.

On February 2, for instance, Owens praised the decision of General Ulysses S. Grant to expel all Jews from his military district in 1862, during the Civil War. The move was soon reversed by President Abraham Lincoln, and Grant later disavowed it—but Owens did not. “Jewish supremacists,” she said, “had everything to do with the Civil War in America. They excel at creating the false dialectic, the North versus the South, the left versus the right. Ulysses S. Grant notoriously expelled Jews from his military district: Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky. You think he just—he was just, like, what? Another white supremacist? Everyone’s just a white supremacist,” she said. “Well, they would have called him a white supremacist” or said that “he was anti-Semitic.”

I read this monologue to Boller and asked her if she thought it was anti-Semitic to defend expelling American Jews. “I’m not going to get involved in any of that,” she said. “I watched her show, and I have never heard anything out of her mouth that is anti-Semitic. So I’m not gonna make a statement on something that I haven’t heard the full context of.” I offered to play Boller the audio of this remark in its full context. She declined to listen. So I moved on to another of Owens’s greatest hits: blaming American Jews for the African slave trade. This canard has been repeatedly debunked by historians and repeatedly invoked by Owens. “Jewish people were the ones that were trading us,” she said in December. “Jewish people were in control of the slave trade. They’ve buried a lot of it, but it’s there and you can find it.”

Was this anti-Semitic? “From what I’ve heard from my ears, from her mouth, I have not heard anything that is anti-Semitic,” Boller repeated. Okay, but if someone such as Owens did say such things, it would be anti-Semitic, right? “I’m not playing the ‘What if?’ game,” she said, her previous moral clarity abruptly turning into cagey ambiguity.

[Read: The second death of Charlie Kirk]

I had hoped to ask Boller for her opinion about other claims made by Owens—that “Talmudic Jews” think “that we’re animals, that they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them,” and that Israel was complicit in the 9/11 attacks and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—but she refused to engage and eventually ended the call. Rather than reckon with anti-Semitic statements from those she had defended at a hearing intended to confront anti-Semitism, she repeatedly attempted to reroute our conversation back to the safer ground of criticizing Israel. She either did not realize that she was using anti-Zionism as a pretext to launder vulgar anti-Semitism and its purveyors into the public square, or she did not care.

Although Boller may not be willing to answer such questions from a reporter, she is also not backing away from her views. Before our conversation concluded, she told me that she planned to show up at the Religious Liberty Commission’s next meeting because, she argued, only President Trump himself has the authority to fire her. “I remain on this commission until I hear from the president,” she said. “I want the president to admit: Is he ‘America First’ or ‘Israel First’?”

The Second Death of Charlie Kirk

2026-02-04T11:19:04-05:00

At the close of 2025, just a few months after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, thousands of his followers came together in Phoenix for AmericaFest, the annual convention of Turning Point USA. A casual observer might have expected this gathering to serve as an opportunity for conservatives to regroup, celebrate Kirk’s legacy, and recommit to his fight against the left. Instead, one by one, MAGA’s leading lights took the stage and began shivving one another in public.

“Today, the conservative movement is in serious danger,” warned Ben Shapiro, a co-founder of The Daily Wire. He lambasted right-wing “charlatans” who “traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” And he named names. Shapiro slammed Tucker Carlson, perhaps the most popular conservative commentator in America, for mainstreaming pro-Nazi sentiment, and dubbed the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon “a PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein,” the convicted sex criminal (fact-check: mostly true). “These people are frauds, and they are grifters, and they do not deserve your time,” Shapiro said. Awkwardly, several of those people were scheduled to speak after him.

“Ben Shapiro is like a cancer, and that cancer spreads,” retorted Bannon the next day from the same podium. “I just got here, and I feel like I missed the first part of the program,” quipped Carlson, who went on to accuse Shapiro and his allies of practicing “the style of debate where you prevent the other side from talking or being heard,” conflating the latter’s criticism of his conduct with censorship.

When Kirk was killed, conservatives believed that his death would galvanize his cause. “Millions of Charlie Kirks were created today,” declared Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado. But as it turned out, Kirk’s assassin didn’t kill just one man; he destabilized the entire Trump coalition by removing a pivotal person who had been holding it together. In doing so, the killer helped unshackle dark forces—chief among them anti-Semitism—that now threaten to overtake the conservative movement.

Before his life was ended by an assassin’s bullet, Charlie Kirk was trying to save the conservative coalition from turning on itself. To liberals, the late activist was known for debating left-wing students on college campuses. But on the right, Kirk was waging another battle, against people on his own side.

For years, Kirk was dogged by the overtly racist followers of the young white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes. An avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler, Fuentes sought to subordinate racial, religious, and sexual minorities to white Christians. “The problem is that Jews run America,” he said in a representative livestream. “And the only reason we have Muslims here is because Jews are letting them in.” His supporters, known as “Groypers,” badgered Kirk with anti-Semitic and other bigoted questions at Turning Point events. “Charlie Kirk is a fake patriot, a fake Christian, and he hates his people, he’s anti-white,” Fuentes told his online audience.

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

Kirk recognized that this crude conspiracism was poisonous to his project of popularizing the conservative cause. When a caller to The Charlie Kirk Show asked why he wouldn’t debate Fuentes and his faction, Kirk responded: “We succeed—we win; they blame the Jews.” But Kirk also saw that Fuentes had real appeal, especially among disaffected youth, and so he tried to split the difference, repeatedly rebuking the Groypers themselves while partially co-opting some of their talking points. “If you are blaming less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population for all of your problems, that is not going to be good for your soul,” Kirk said shortly before his death. “Any young person that goes into this hyper-online brain rot, you are serving yourself over to your own demise.” Before he was killed, he drafted a now-best-selling book about the benefits of observing the Jewish Sabbath. But Kirk also blamed “Jewish donors” for being “the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.”

An exchange during one of Kirk’s final campus tours illustrates the tenuous nature of this balancing act. At Illinois State University last April, a man confronted Kirk to claim that the U.S. government had been “infiltrated by the Jews.” He proceeded to blame pornography, “the transgender movement and the LGBT community,” and the 9/11 attacks on Jewish culprits. For 16 minutes, Kirk deconstructed these and other conspiracy theories, patiently demystifying complex aspects of Judaism such as the Talmud and the biblical Noahide Laws before attempting to explain his fundamental disagreement. “I actually think the people who control our government are secular leftist Marxists in the deep state,” he said. “The people actually controlling our country are not ‘the Jews’”—at this he made a mocking gesture with his hand. “It’s a combination of people that want to see the United States of America cripple and fall.” But before Kirk could finish the sentence, his questioner emphatically interjected, “The Jews.”

Kirk similarly tried to walk a tightrope when it came to Israel. Despite pushback from Zionist members of and donors to his own organization, including prominent evangelical Christians and conservative Jews, he hosted debates about the merits of American political and military support for Israel at Turning Point events. And he continued to invite Carlson to participate in them, even after the former Fox News host began airing Hitler apologetics alongside his critiques of the Israeli state. Toward the end of his life, Kirk himself became more critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership; he publicly opposed U.S. strikes on Iran and, according to his podcast producer, wanted the Gaza war to end. In this way, Kirk sought to decouple criticism of Israeli policy from anti-Semitic conspiracism, and to contain conflicts over Jews and their state within the conservative tent, rather than allow those arguments to collapse it.

But when Kirk died, so did the hope of a brokered MAGA consensus on this and other incendiary issues, because no one else had the credibility or charisma to sustain one. A frantic scramble for control of the Trump coalition commenced—and all of the tensions that Kirk had tried to tame were unleashed. Bit by bit, the conservative kingmaker’s former friends began dismantling his life’s political work.

Candace Owens, a popular far-right podcaster whom Kirk once hired and raised from obscurity, began claiming that he had been murdered not by Tyler Robinson, the man detained by authorities, but by an Israeli conspiracy that included Kirk’s own lieutenants in Turning Point USA—and possibly his wife, Erika Kirk, now the organization’s CEO. “Candace Owens Honors Charlie Kirk’s Legacy by Doing Everything in Her Power to Destroy It,” cracked The Babylon Bee, a satirical conservative publication.

[Judith Shulevitz: There were two Charlie Kirks]

In his speech at Kirk’s funeral, Carlson blamed Jews—sorry, people “eating hummus”—for killing Jesus, and insinuated that a similar cabal killed Kirk. Days later, Carlson began releasing The 9/11 Files, a five-part video series that suggests Israel had foreknowledge of the al-Qaeda attacks but withheld the information from the United States. “‘Israel did 9/11’ is a rather anti-Semitic thing to say,” Kirk had told the questioner who had suggested as much at Illinois State.

Carlson put the final nail in Kirk’s coffin seven weeks after his death by inviting Fuentes, the activist’s nemesis, onto his show—perhaps the most popular podcast on the American right—for a cordial conversation. Over the course of 138 minutes, Fuentes praised Joseph Stalin and railed against “organized Jewry,” all while his host largely failed to challenge his Nazi-adjacent views.

Carlson’s interview with Fuentes was not only a betrayal of Kirk’s memory—it precipitated the very MAGA meltdown that Kirk had worked so hard to avert. Conservative institutions quickly came under pressure to condemn Carlson for his softball sit-down with the David Duke of the digital age. This proved too difficult for Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the most influential right-wing think tank in Donald Trump’s Washington. In a video posted online, Roberts denounced Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” and defended Fuentes’s right to free speech—without using his own to substantively criticize anything that either man had said.

The reaction to the video was seismic. “No to the groypers,” Shapiro declared on X. “No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalize their trash.” Shapiro released a special 41-minute episode of his podcast detailing Fuentes’s career of calumnies against Black people, Indian Americans, Jews, and women—and called out Carlson’s refusal to confront the young white supremacist about any of it. “If this is the Republican Party, or this is what the Republican Party becomes, then I’m not part of it,” Ace of Spades, a pseudonymous pugilist who once won the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Blogger of the Year award, wrote. “I did not sign up for this bullshit. I will not become a Nazi to ‘own the libs.’”

“In the last six months, I’ve seen more anti-Semitism on the right than I have at any time in my life,” Senator Ted Cruz told the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in November. “It is growing. It is metastasizing. There are about a half-dozen vocal apostles, and it is in particular finding purchase with the young.” Soon after, the Princeton professor Robert George, once dubbed “the reigning brain of the Christian right,” resigned from the Heritage Foundation’s board. Dozens of staffers reportedly left the organization. One month later, Turning Point’s flagship conference descended into recriminations over the very controversies and conspiracies that its founder had endeavored so assiduously to suppress.

On one level, this conflict is about Jews and Israel. But on another, this debate is downstream from something much bigger: a power struggle over who will define and control the MAGA movement once Trump is gone. By painting rivals as tools of the Jews, hard-right influencers such as Carlson and Bannon hope to delegitimize the competition not by besting their ideas, but by slurring their loyalties and identity.

For years, Carlson has assailed Shapiro, the country’s most prominent Jewish conservative, casting him as a foreign subversive opposed to the national interest and “hostile toward White, Christian men”—even as Carlson himself has whitewashed anti-American authoritarians such as Russian President Vladimir Putin on his show. “I can’t imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people who claim to care about America,” Carlson said of Shapiro in 2023, “because he doesn’t, obviously.” Carlson also recently insinuated that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is controlled by Netanyahu. Bannon, similarly, regularly labels his critics as “Israel-first”—including in disputes that have nothing to do with Israel.

[Ali Breland: The firewall against Nick Fuentes is crumbling]

Kirk sought to construct a conservative populism that did not get mired in the morass of anti-Jewish conspiracism. He did not succeed. But many of those who have rushed to assume his mantle have no desire to try. They see anti-Semitism not as a weakness to be avoided but a weapon to be wielded against ideological opponents—including the president.

These far-right actors hold no love for Trump and see his iron grip on the Republican base as an impediment to their ambitions. Indeed, Carlson has privately called the president “a total piece of shit” and a “demonic force.” Bannon repeatedly derided the president in text messages to Epstein. Fuentes refused to endorse Trump in 2024. Implying that Trump is controlled by Israel or his Jewish donors is a convenient way to drive a wedge between him and his supporters. “Pushing that anti-Semitic button in far-right Republican politics is a way for some MAGA-aligned figures to try to create a version of MAGA that Trump doesn’t control,” the historian Walter Russell Mead told a Tablet magazine podcast. For Carlson and company, anti-Semitism is a means to an end, and Jews are simply collateral damage.

Men like Bannon, Carlson, and Fuentes represent a small, internally divided faction that cannot itself win national elections and repels many of the voters needed to do so. But they are able to extort the broader conservative coalition by threatening to sabotage or leave it. Politicians such as Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and any other contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination, will have to decide whether to accommodate or anathematize the coalition’s anti-Semites.

Some of those pushing anti-Jewish invective on the right are opportunists. Others are true believers. But the outcome is the same: a conservative politics that is more fractious and more overtly anti-Semitic, in which the place of Jewish people in American public life is openly up for debate.

Charlie Kirk tried to avoid exactly this. He aspired to forge a broad conservative coalition that could outlive Trump and bridge the traditional Reaganite GOP with the rising new right. As Kyle Spencer, the author of Raising Them Right, a book about Turning Point’s ascent, put it: “Charlie Kirk arrived on the scene as a kid who just graduated from high school in 2012, saying, ‘I have a vision. It is possible. This party is stodgy. It’s outdated, it’s old white men. We need to attract young people, Black people, Latinos.’” In 2024, when Kirk quarterbacked the Trump campaign’s ground game, it looked like he had finally pulled that off: The former president made major gains among nonwhite and low-propensity voters, and he finally won the popular vote.

Today, the president’s hold on his MAGA base remains ironclad, but Kirk’s dream of a broader coalition is slipping away. Last month, polling released by The New York Times found that “the major demographic shifts of the last election have snapped back.” In fact, the paper continued, “young and nonwhite voters are even likelier to disapprove of Mr. Trump than they were then, while he retains most of his support among older and white voters.” That same month, Carlson welcomed his show’s first guest of 2026, a conspiracy theorist named Ian Carroll who, after Kirk was killed, told his 1.3 million X followers that “Israel just shot themselves.” The real plot against Kirk’s legacy and work—perpetrated in part by the two men in the studio—went undiscussed.

Illustration Sources: Chip Somodevilla / Getty; Raquel Natalicchio / Houston Chronicle via Getty; Rich Graessle / Icon Sportswire / Getty; Oliver Touron / Getty; Heather Diehl / Getty; Andrew Harnik / Getty.

The Biggest Myth About Trump’s Base (And Why Many Believe It)

2026-01-13T13:24:36-05:00

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To judge by recent accounts, Donald Trump’s intervention in Venezuela has imperiled his standing among his own supporters. Traditional-media outlets have warned of a MAGA schism, as have some high-profile right-wing influencers. “President Trump seized control of the Republican Party on an anti-interventionist ‘America First’ platform,” The New York Times reported on January 4, but his removal of Venezuela’s leader “threatened to open a new rift within the political movement he has built.” The former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told the paper that the president’s messaging “on a potential occupation has the base bewildered, if not angry.” Two months before the U.S. military captured Nicolás Maduro, the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson warned against American intervention and suggested that efforts to oust the Venezuelan dictator were part of—I am not making this up—a “globohomo” conspiracy to bring gay marriage to the country.

The theory of a MAGA rupture over Venezuela has a certain surface plausibility. It’s also completely contradicted by what masses of Trump’s backers are telling pollsters. Two days after the Maduro operation, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 65 percent of Republicans supported it, compared with just 6 percent who didn’t. Another poll, by The Washington Post, pegged that support at 74 percent. And a subsequent YouGov/CBS survey recorded even more striking results: 89 percent of Republicans backed Maduro’s ouster, and for self-described “MAGA Republicans,” the number was 97 percent—a level of enthusiasm that would make even the election-rigging Maduro blush. Days after the Times quoted Bannon fretting about the GOP base’s alleged upset over Venezuela, the paper spoke to its own yearlong panel of Trump backers and reported, with characteristic understatement, that such “skepticism may not be shared by many rank-and-file Republican voters.”

This sequence of events follows a familiar pattern. For months, major media outlets have run story after story about the alleged crack-up of Trump’s MAGA base, sourced to a specific set of elite right-wing influencers. These accounts have been widely shared and celebrated by liberal readers and pundits. And yet for months, that crack-up has failed to meaningfully materialize in polls and focus groups, and the allegations of MAGA infighting have borne little resemblance to the real-world trajectory of conservative politics, where Trump still reigns supreme.

[Read: Why Venezuela?]

This same pattern—in which so-called Trump influencers asserted a MAGA split where none was actually in evidence, and various news outlets ate it up—was apparent last summer over a different foreign intervention. Before America attacked Iran’s nuclear sites in June, outlets such as Politico hyped a “MAGA civil war” over the prospect. “A strike on the Iranian nuclear sites will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths,” Carlson claimed. War with Iran, he later added, would amount to a “profound betrayal” of Trump’s supporters and “end his presidency.” Such a conflict would “tear the country apart,” warned Bannon. “MAGA Divide Over Iran Splinters Trump Allies,” declared The Hill. Curt Mills, the anti-interventionist executive director of The American Conservative, told ABC News that the president’s coalition was “revolting to show it’s disgusted with the potential of war with Iran.” That very evening, Trump bombed Iran.

Not only did Trump disregard all of these alleged MAGA thought leaders—so did MAGA voters. YouGov/CBS News found that 85 percent of Republicans backed the strikes, including 94 percent of self-described MAGA Republicans. “While all Republican factions support the airstrikes,” NBC News wrote of its similar survey results, “respondents who identify with the MAGA movement are significantly more supportive of them than those who identify as traditional Republicans.”

The obvious conclusion is this: These purportedly pro-Trump figures do not actually speak for Trump or his supporters. Trumpism is not neo-isolationist or neoconservative, pro-restraint or pro-intervention. It is not pro-worker or pro-billionaire. It is whatever Trump says it is. According to YouGov, two weeks before American forces snatched Maduro, Republican support for invading Venezuela stood at 43 percent. Today that number is 74 percent. “America First” and “Make America Great Again” are slogans, not deeply held governing philosophies. They are branding—and Trump is the brand.

Republican defectors such as the former Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene are often held up as evidence of Trump’s slackening hold on his base. But Greene’s trajectory proves just the opposite. As soon as the president turned on her, her political career became untenable and she quickly announced her departure from Congress. Influencers such as Greene, Bannon, and Carlson present themselves as fighting against out-of-touch elites on behalf of the “America First” masses, but again and again, it is they who have been exposed as elites at odds with the movement they claim to represent. No one has ever spoken for the MAGA coalition other than the man who created it.

Now, it is true that Trump’s overall popularity has been eroding, as my colleague Jonathan Chait recently wrote, but that’s not because he’s losing his base. Rather, it’s because he’s bleeding support among a very different demographic that helped elect him—namely, low-propensity swing voters, especially young men, who backed him because of their concerns about the economy or political correctness. But although the president may be losing these fair-weather friends, the much-larger MAGA movement remains firmly in his corner.

“Let me be very clear: There is no rift in the Republican Party,” said CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, last week. “Donald Trump has had an iron grip on that Republican base for a long period of time, and it is the same iron grip that he had six months ago,” he continued, pointing to polls showing Trump maintaining an 85 percent approval rating among Republicans despite headlines to the contrary. “Every so often, people are trying to say, ‘Oh, I spot these little rifts in the Republican base. Oh, oh, you know, they’re finally starting to break. They’re starting to break from Donald Trump.’ It ain’t happening.”

None of this is to say that Trump supporters are on board with everything he does. Voters often have things they dislike about their preferred candidate; those things are just not decisive. For years, most Republicans told pollsters that they thought Trump tweeted too much; that didn’t stop them from voting for him or his preferred GOP-primary candidates. Today, most Republicans don’t like how Trump has handled the Epstein files—but most Republicans are not choosing how to vote based on the Epstein files. People tend to make allowances for politicians they like, and Trump has an exceptional instinct for what his supporters actually care about and what they’re willing to overlook, which is why they have stuck with him for more than a decade.

So why do so many reports continue to argue otherwise? The zombie narrative about Trump’s supposedly splintering support has been fueled by a confluence of right-wing, left-wing, and journalistic impulses. Many reporters are drawn to stories of drama and conflict. Many liberals are desperate for signs that Trump’s stranglehold over his base is slipping. And a group of media-savvy right-wing influencers have exploited these desires to promote a story about widespread MAGA discontent that has little basis in fact but that serves their own interests.

And those interests are no longer reliably aligned with Trump’s. As hard-right populists, Bannon and Carlson initially sought to use Trump to advance their own agenda—isolationist abroad, ultranationalist at home, and more overtly anti-Semitic. But as Trump has deviated from that agenda, particularly in foreign affairs, they have begun seeking to supplant him. By weakening the president, they hope to have a say in picking his successor and directing the party after he departs the scene, reshaping the Republican Party more reliably in their image.

[Yair Rosenberg: Trump world’s Wizard of Oz problem]

To these men, Trump’s sway over the MAGA faithful is an obstacle to be overcome. They are careful not to openly disparage the president himself, in deference to his influence, but their growing animosity has become impossible to miss. In recent months, Bannon has opposed Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy; broken with him on Iran, Venezuela, and support for Israel; and repeatedly called for driving the president’s Big Tech buddies out of the MAGA tent, dubbing Elon Musk and David Sacks “sociopathic overlords in Silicon Valley.” Carlson’s disdain for the president goes way back. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he messaged his TV producer after the president lost in 2020. “I hate him passionately.”

Add to this the two men’s formidable skill at manipulating traditional and social media—Carlson long served as a source for the liberal press he publicly disdains, and both he and Bannon host popular podcasts that regularly drive online conversation—and the result has been a self-perpetuating cycle in which left-wing wishful thinking meets right-wing opportunism. Carlson and Bannon (and others like them) tell amenable liberals and media outlets what they want to hear; those groups then echo the narrative of MAGA infighting, thereby helping the Trump frenemies inflate their influence and undermine the administration—but by no means furthering the public’s understanding of the actual political dynamics at work.

Carlson, Bannon, and their allies have several more years to chip away at Trump’s standing on the right—and may yet succeed—but they have a very long way to go. Last week, Carlson welcomed James Fishback, a far-right fringe candidate for Florida governor who shares many of Carlson’s views, to his show. “Pretty soon, all winning Republican politicians will talk like this,” Carlson wrote on X when he posted the interview. The same day, a poll of the GOP gubernatorial primary in Florida found that the Trump-backed Representative Byron Donalds was leading Fishback by a healthy 47 percent to 5 percent. But that wasn’t all. “His lead leaps to 76%-6% over Fishback,” reported Florida Phoenix, “when voters are informed about the Trump endorsement.”

What J. D. Vance—And Many Others—Miss About American Anti-Semitism

2025-12-19T14:41:48-05:00

When you write on subjects that include anti-Jewish prejudice and Middle Eastern politics, you get used to people disagreeing with your work. But before this week, I’d never provoked a response from a vice president of the United States.

On Monday, I published an article unpacking how anti-Semitism in America is a youth movement. Surveys from nonpartisan, conservative, and liberal sources have found that far from being the benighted bigotry of the old, anti-Jewish prejudice is growing in popularity among the young, which is why it has been on the rise in American politics and culture. “The research collectively suggests that America is becoming more anti-Semitic because its young people are becoming more anti-Semitic,” I wrote. “This finding flies in the face of the folk wisdom that prejudice is the province of the old and will die out with them.” Rather than understanding anti-Semitism purely through partisan prisms, I argued, we ought to understand it as a generational phenomenon, and confront it accordingly.

J. D. Vance was not impressed. “Mainstream journalism is just profoundly uninteresting and lame, consumed by its own pieties,” he wrote in a series of posts on X, where he regularly engages in political sparring. “To write an article about the ‘generational divide’ in anti-semitism without discussing the demographics of the various generations is mind boggling. ‘We imported a lot of people with ethnic grievances prior generations didn’t have. We celebrated this as the fruits of multiculturalism. Now we’re super surprised that the people we imported with ethnic grievances still have those ethnic grievances.’ The most significant single thing you could do to eliminate anti-semitism and any other kind of ethnic hatred is to support our efforts to lower immigration and promote assimilation. But these guys won’t do that, because they all lack curiosity and introspection.”

In support of his claims, the vice president later appended a chart from an insightful essay by the conservative Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman about the 2024 American National Election Study—one of many surveys I had cited—which measures “warmth” felt by voters toward different groups. The chart showed the same age divide in anti-Jewish sentiment that I had described, but also that foreign-born voters were much more likely to express cold sentiments toward Jews.

[Read: Why fighting conspiracy theories is essential to fighting anti-Semitism]

Anti-Semitism among foreign-born Americans, like anti-Semitism among other Americans, is certainly real. I’ve reported on it. But the notion that it is somehow the prime driver of American anti-Semitism does not add up—literally. That’s because there are many more young people in America—and in the ANES survey—than foreign-born people. As Peter Ganong, an economist at the University of Chicago, who fact-checked Vance’s dispute with my work on X, told me, “Immigrants and their children are indeed colder towards Jews than native-born Americans, but they are only 15 percent of voters.” That’s just a small part of the picture, however. “Young voters are also colder toward Jews on a per-person basis than older voters,” Ganong continued, and “the most important thing to know is that they account for 40 percent of voters in this survey.”

The vice president wasn’t the only one who took issue with my argument about the anti-Semitic age divide. When I joined MS NOW to discuss the article’s findings, one co-panelist countered that the data they’d seen showed that younger conservatives were the chief source of the problem. The liberal polling analyst G. Elliott Morris made a similar point on X, recommending the article but arguing that “the claim that there is no partisan divide in rates of anti-Semitism is wrong.”

Now, I cited a lot of surveys in my article. Some of them, such as the Democratic pollster David Shor’s canvass of nearly 130,000 voters, found no noticeable partisan split overall. Others found some measure of partisan divide in their small subsamples of younger voters. In the case of the Yale Youth Poll, young conservatives were more anti-Semitic than young liberals. And some surveys, as Vance noted, found splits between foreign-born Americans and the rest. All of these sources of anti-Semitism deserve further study, and all of them matter. But the one thing that all the surveys agreed on was an age divide underlying anti-Semitism. My argument was simply that focusing attention on this phenomenon and figuring out why it is happening would help us better combat the prejudice.

A broader point of disagreement is worth spelling out here. It is easy to cherry-pick and train all of one’s fire and attention on an ideologically convenient source of anti-Semitism, while giving short shrift to other, less congenial vectors of the prejudice—and missing entirely any anti-Semitism that doesn’t fit a prefabricated partisan narrative. But decades of such discourse have not made a dent in the problem.

Convenient narratives have coalesced to explain contemporary anti-Semitism. For some, it’s a story about neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the far right. Others point to anti-Israel sentiment on the left that shades into anti-Jewish prejudice. Both of these origin stories contain truth. But both also allow partisans to lay the problem at the feet of their ideological opponents. This is why many liberals are more comfortable calling out conservative anti-Semitism, and Vance appears most comfortable focusing on anti-Jewish sentiments among immigrants, while sidestepping the same problem on the American right (unless I somehow missed his call to denaturalize and deport Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens).

Like many others, I’ve spilled countless words covering anti-Semitism on the right, the left, and beyond. But analysis confined to these tired ideological frames has utterly failed to impede the ascent of anti-Jewish prejudice. Uncovering the ways in which anti-Semitism operates outside them can yield better insight into how we might combat anti-Jewish ideas.

[Yair Rosenberg: ‘The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am’]

Anti-Semitism predates our present political and religious divides. Before there were capitalists, Communists, Republicans, Democrats, or even Christians or Muslims, there was anti-Jewish prejudice. Which means that although such bigotry is expressed by all of these communities, it has roots in more fundamental forces.

The effort to identify and understand these forces is what drew me to explore the age divide in American anti-Semitism—and to investigate how anti-Semitism operates as a conspiracy theory that appeals to actors across the political and religious spectrum. At their best, foundational approaches like these can offer new ways to attack an ancient prejudice that most Americans—including younger ones—abhor, but that is growing in influence and body count. They do not exclude other explanations; they complement them, while avoiding the political traps that too often turn the public conversation about anti-Semitism into a debate over who can be blamed for it, rather than a discussion of how to stop it.

Because this way of thinking scrambles people’s partisan radars, it often evokes resistance from those wedded to older approaches, who see it as a threat rather than an asset. But the opposite is the case: Those who reason backward from prior ideological commitments when analyzing anti-Semitism are less likely to arrive at correct conclusions. That may not matter very much to the most hard-core partisans, who are less interested in understanding and confronting anti-Semitism than in using it to advance a preexisting ideological agenda or settle scores. But it should matter to everyone else. After all, if that way of talking about anti-Semitism worked, the problem would not be getting worse.

‘The More I’m Around Young People, the More Panicked I Am’

2025-12-15T10:30:06-05:00

“The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am,” Tim Miller told me recently. A prominent anti-Trump commentator, Miller hosts the popular Bulwark Podcast and regularly speaks to students on university campuses. Lately, he has begun to notice something disturbing.

“I was literally arguing with a kid, like, three weeks ago, college kid, who was, like, you know, starting to think that the Jews killed Charlie Kirk,” Miller recounted on his show, amid a discussion about rising anti-Semitism on the American right. The student, he noted, was a “left kid.”

Miller had good reason to be alarmed, because the problem he observed extends well beyond anecdotes. In late 2024, the Democratic data scientist David Shor surveyed nearly 130,000 voters at the behest of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. He found that a quarter of those younger than 25—with negligible differences among Trump and Harris supporters—held an “unfavorable opinion” of “Jewish people.” (Jewish people—not Israelis or Zionists.) By contrast, the older a person was, the less likely they were to express such sentiments.

One year later, an avalanche of data has confirmed what Shor glimpsed and researchers and reporters like myself have argued for years: American anti-Semitism is not primarily a partisan phenomenon, as it is often framed in popular discourse, but a generational one. Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, but they’ve assumed much larger and more sinister proportions in the imagination of the country’s youth.

Last week, the Yale Youth Poll released its fall survey, which found that “younger voters are more likely to hold antisemitic views than older voters.” When asked to choose whether Jews have had a positive, neutral, or negative impact on the United States, just 8 percent of respondents said “negative.” But among 18-to-22-year-olds, that number was 18 percent. Twenty-seven percent of 18-to-22-year-olds strongly or somewhat agreed that “Jews in the United States have too much power,” compared with 16 percent overall and just 11 percent of those over 65.

[Read: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism]

Earlier this month, the conservative Manhattan Institute published a survey of contemporary Republicans and found a similar split. One-quarter of those under 50 reported that “they themselves openly express” anti-Semitic views, six times more than those over 50, just 4 percent of whom said the same. Here, as elsewhere, age was a key indicator of whether a person would espouse anti-Jewish attitudes. In recent years, the Anti-Defamation League, the UCLA Nationscape project, and the American National Election surveys have all found the same age curve in their data on attitudes toward Jewish people.

In other words, the research collectively suggests that America is becoming more anti-Semitic because its young people are becoming more anti-Semitic. This finding flies in the face of the folk wisdom that prejudice is the province of the old and will die out with them. That maxim may be true of some bigotries, but anti-Semitism is not one of them. Instead, in the United States, the opposite is happening: Anti-Jewish prejudice is growing precisely because it is the domain of the next generation, not the previous one. As this young cohort takes its place in American society, that society becomes more anti-Semitic, because politicians, influencers, and tastemakers are trying to reflect youth sensibilities and cater to them.

Any generational shift this dramatic has more than one cause. In the 20th century, the Holocaust and World War II profoundly and positively reshaped American attitudes toward Jews, but young people today have no first- or secondhand memory of that experience. Americans who are middle-aged or older tend to get their information from legacy media outlets, which, for all their flaws, normally have editorial processes that eschew explicitly racist material. Younger Americans, by contrast, are likely to trust and get their news from lightly moderated social-media platforms, which often advantage the extreme opinions, conspiracy theories, and conflict-stoking content that drive engagement. This bifurcation of information has consequences. Figuring out who was responsible for a national calamity, for instance, takes time and investigation. Blaming that calamity on the Jews does not. The kinds of media that reach for the latter explanation are the ones that hold sway with the younger audience.

[Read: People are underestimating America’s groyper problem]

Young people also tend to be more critical of Israel than their elders, leading a minority to excuse or even perpetrate anti-Jewish acts in America in the name of Palestine. These critics are likely to consume anti-Israel content on their social-media apps of choice. The platforms then funnel some of those users toward anti-Semitic material—a sort of algorithmic escalator that ends up radicalizing a percentage of them.

The implications of these data are undeniably depressing, but the findings actually provide grounds for pragmatic optimism as well. Survey after survey shows that anti-Semitism remains a minority prejudice even among young people, who are a minority of Americans. The Yale Youth Poll found that 43 percent of voters younger than 22 agreed with at least one statement commonly considered anti-Semitic, but that 57 percent of their same-age peers did not. Indeed, in nearly every scenario surveyed, the poll found that most young people—not just most people—rejected anti-Jewish propositions.

America may have a generational divide on anti-Semitism, but the country also has a broad consensus against it. Anti-Semitic ideologues have grown louder in the public discourse, but the upset they still evoke demonstrates that the American majority rejects the tenets of anti-Jewish ideology. This reality is just obscured by opportunistic partisans and influencers who dominate discourse and constantly shift the conversation away from the consensus views and toward the contentious ones.

Rather than falling into this trap, Americans should look for leaders—political, cultural, and religious—who cater to the consensus and seek to strengthen it, rather than empowering those who pander to extreme constituencies. Trend lines are not finish lines. The numbers are a call to action, not despair.

Netanyahu Just Admitted He’s Unfit to Lead Israel

2025-12-02T17:48:30-05:00

For the past five years, Benjamin Netanyahu has been on trial for corruption, accused of accepting lavish gifts in exchange for political favors and of using his influence to pressure media moguls into giving him more favorable coverage. On Sunday, the Israeli leader formally asked the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, to let him off the hook, requesting a pardon before the court had even reached a verdict on the allegations. The brazen gambit immediately provoked sharp responses within Israel. But one of the most shocking aspects of the prime minister’s ploy was largely overlooked.

Netanyahu’s entreaty to Herzog was carefully worded to avoid any admission of criminality or wrongdoing, aside from a vague reference to feeling responsible for the legal proceedings stoking “tensions and disputes” within Israel. “The prime minister will not admit guilt,” his aides bluntly told the media. But the official pardon request from Netanyahu’s lawyer, as well as a video message released by Netanyahu justifying it, did something just as damning: It acknowledged that Netanyahu has been incapable of fully performing the duties of his position, even as he hung on to the job anyway.

“Granting this request will allow the prime minister to devote all of his time, abilities, and energy to advancing Israel in these critical times and to dealing with the challenges and opportunities that lie before it,” wrote Amit Hadad, Netanyahu’s lawyer, implying that until now, his client had been unable to do so. “I am required to testify three times a week,” Netanyahu griped in his video posted to social media soon afterward. “This is an impossible requirement that no other citizen in Israel is subjected to.” The prime minister maintained his innocence in the clip, and insisted that he was willing to fight his charges to “full acquittal.” But in fact, the claims made by Netanyahu and his lawyer confirm the very thing that the premier’s trial fundamentally sought to prove: that he has been unfit to serve as Israel’s prime minister.

[Read: Yitzhak Rabin knew what Netanyahu doesn’t]

By Netanyahu’s own admission, at a time when Israel faced war on four fronts, its leader was preoccupied by his legal predicament. No country, let alone one facing existential threats during wartime, could be competently governed by someone so compromised. Nonetheless, Netanyahu refused to step aside, placing his personal political interest ahead of the national interest.

The consequences of this choice have been devastating for Israel’s citizens and the region. Consider the chain of events since Netanyahu’s trial began, in May 2020. After the allegations against him coalesced into a court case, many Israeli politicians—including former Netanyahu allies—declared that they could not serve someone under indictment for corruption. As a result, from 2021 to 2022, Netanyahu’s government was briefly replaced by a rainbow coalition of left and right parties opposed to his continued rule. But in 2022, Netanyahu managed to return to power, backed by the only people still willing to support him—extreme sectarian factions whose leaders shrewdly recognized that they could extort Netanyahu for their own purposes, because they held his future in their hands.

As a private citizen, Netanyahu was at the mercy of the courts. As the prime minister, he was able to slow down his trial, duck testimony dates by citing his official responsibilities, and begin browbeating the system into granting him a favorable plea deal or pardon. All he had to do was keep his radical allies happy so that they would keep him in office. The result was governance by shakedown, which turned Israel’s democracy against the preferences of the majority of its people in favor of the demands of the narrow constituencies keeping Netanyahu afloat. The man once dubbed “King of Israel” became a slave to his most unhinged subjects.

Under this dispensation, far-right anti-Arab parties secured unprecedented authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank—and near-total impunity for settler violence against Palestinians. At the same time, within Israel’s borders, a hard-right proposal to disempower the judiciary met with opposition from most Israelis and provoked the largest sustained protest movement in the country’s history, pushing the public to the brink of civil war. With its leaders and people divided and distracted, Israel was left vulnerable to the Hamas assault on October 7, 2023, resulting in the worst day of Jewish death since the Holocaust.

[Read: Can Trump contain Israel’s hard right?]

The problems didn’t end there. Two years of war on multiple fronts made clear that Israel faced a manpower shortage, but its army was nonetheless unable to draft additional recruits. The reason? Netanyahu’s government was beholden to ultra-Orthodox religious parties, whose constituents refused to serve—despite supermajorities of Israelis, including most Netanyahu voters, opposing such exemptions.

Meanwhile, the war in Gaza dragged on for many months beyond the point when polls showed that most Israelis wanted to end it, because Netanyahu’s messianic coalition partners hoped to ethnically cleanse and settle the territory. The conflict concluded only when Netanyahu was compelled by another even more powerful actor who held him over a barrel—President Donald Trump. The stark reality is that for years, Netanyahu has not been leading Israel but rather has been led by those whose support he needs to survive, and his nation has suffered for it, slowly shredding its internal cohesion, democratic legitimacy, and international freedom of action.

“My personal interest was—and remains—to continue the process until its end, until full acquittal,” Netanyahu declared in his video calling for a pardon. “But the security and political reality—the national interest—dictate otherwise.” The truth is the reverse: Netanyahu’s disastrous misrule since his return to office has demonstrated why he should have stepped aside long ago if he truly cares about the national interest. That he refuses to do so, and instead demands that the system bend to his whims, suggests that his patriotic appeals are a pretense. Netanyahu presents himself as paying a price for Israel, but in actuality, Israel’s people are paying the price for his unwillingness to cede power.

People Are Underestimating America’s Groyper Problem

2025-11-25T16:50:16-05:00

Is anti-Semitism in American political discourse actually just a carefully cultivated deception? Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s X revealed the location of every account on the site, and the results were eye-opening. Viral MAGA influencers ranting about “my tax dollars” funding foreign wars were exposed as Pakistani or Russian. Thirst traps of attractive Israeli soldiers turned out to be run by Indians. Heartbreaking stories of Gazan suffering were found to be posted from Europe. And many overtly racist accounts championing Nick Fuentes, the young white supremacist and Hitler aficionado, were revealed to be foreign-run. This discovery led some to suggest that anti-Semitism on the app was in fact an inauthentic intrusion into the American debate with little organic appeal.

[Read: Elon Musk’s worthless, poisoned hall of mirrors ]

“Groypers are in shambles right now,” crowed Eyal Yakoby, a student activist who once testified before Congress about anti-Semitism on college campuses, referring to the supporters of Fuentes. “It’s all a foreign psyop,” he added. “Liberals point to these accounts and say, ‘See, here’s the evidence that Trump’s base, the MAGA movement, is racist and anti-Semitic to its core,’” the libertarian journalist Robby Soave wrote. “Well, guess what? A substantial number of them are based in the Middle East—Pakistan in particular. They’re not MAGA or America First. They’re cosplaying as America First in order to discredit MAGA.”

The notion that American anti-Semitism is an outside influence operation rather than a homegrown menace is a comforting story. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Fuentes followers punch above their weight in American discourse because they are young and disproportionately online; some foreigners no doubt found this far-right niche useful for generating engagement and revenue. But the rise of American anti-Semitism is not a foreign phenomenon, and it is not an online illusion.

Last year, David Shor, a data scientist who did polling for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, surveyed nearly 130,000 voters and found that a quarter of young people had an “unfavorable opinion” of Jews—not Israel, Jews—far more than their elders. Today, some of the top podcasts in the country regularly feature overtly anti-Semitic conspiracy content, whether it’s Tucker Carlson rehabilitating Hitler, Candace Owens claiming that Israel had a hand in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Charlie Kirk, or Joe Rogan hosting a conspiracy theorist who fulminated about how a “giant group of Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting American politicians and business people.”

And it’s not just words. When far-right activists, including a college student named Nick Fuentes, marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” that wasn’t a foreign psyop. When a white supremacist animated by that same fear—that conniving Jews were replacing the white race through mass migration—massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, he wasn’t taking cues from abroad. Neither were the Black nationalists who shot up a Jersey City kosher supermarket in 2019, nor the anti-Israel assassins this past year who attempted to incinerate Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and murdered three people, including a young Jewish woman allegedly shot in the back in Washington, D.C., and an 82-year-old burned to death in Boulder, Colorado.

The reasons for this anti-Jewish eruption are manifold. Holocaust memory has attenuated with the passing of older generations. Outrage over Israel’s war in Gaza has led some self-styled Palestinian partisans to perpetrate or justify attacks on Jews thousands of miles away. Social-media platforms lowered the barriers to spreading anti-Semitic invective, allowing bigots to find and amplify one another more easily. Algorithms often privilege novel inflammatory content—including conspiracy theories—over careful, factual reporting. Sites such as X no longer pretend to moderate this material, not that they ever did much to impede it in the first place.

The upshot is this: Whether anti-Semitic content comes from America or abroad, the supply is simply rising to meet demand. Viral Groyper content only goes viral in the first place because it appeals to Americans who share the sentiment. Outside spending and propaganda cannot manufacture what isn’t already there.

[Read: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

Consider an analogy: In 2022, the Democratic Party spent millions to boost pro–Donald Trump primary candidates who denied the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The strategy succeeded—many of these extreme candidates won their primary, only to be defeated by Democrats in the general election. Some Republicans groused about Democrats interfering in their party’s processes to promote weaker contenders, but the complaints were copes—a way to avoid blaming their own voters. After all, the Democrats didn’t lie to Republican voters about the election deniers. They simply hyped up extreme candidates—and the GOP-primary electorate liked what it heard. Foreign Groyper accounts, like those election-denying candidates, are merely marketing lies that many people are already predisposed to accept.

To be clear, astroturfed campaigns can and do distort discourse and stoke conflict. For the online marketplace of ideas to function, users need to know what’s authentic and what’s inauthentic, what’s foreign and what’s domestic. X’s location update was a small but salutary step in that direction. But no one should fool themselves into thinking that American pathologies—including anti-Semitism—are primarily paid propaganda. Foreign actors may exploit our divisions, but they don’t create them. They can fan the flames, but they didn’t start the fire. We did that ourselves—and we will have to put it out.

Four Simple Questions for Marjorie Taylor Greene

2025-11-14T07:00:00-05:00

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s critics are starting to think they got her all wrong. “You are a very different person than I thought you were,” The View’s Sunny Hostin marveled last week, when the Georgia representative joined the show for a largely genial discussion. Recently, Greene has criticized the GOP’s shutdown strategy, lack of a plan to address health-care costs, and refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. This turnabout has excited some liberals and media outlets, sometimes to the point of credulity.

Greene sits on the potent House Oversight and Homeland Security Committees. She has openly entertained runs for higher office, including for governor and Senate, and was recently reported to be pursuing the presidency. (She denied it.) Yet watching the softball sit-downs with her on TV, one gets the sense that Greene is being treated as a curiosity rather than as one of the most powerful people in the country, seeking even more influence.

[Read: Marjorie Taylor Greene knows exactly what she’s doing]

On the few occasions when she has been confronted with her past positions and incendiary assertions, Greene has deflected or pleaded ignorance. On The View, she disavowed the QAnon conspiracy theory, saying—as she has before—that she was misled by “media lies and stuff you read on social media.” On Real Time With Bill Maher, Greene noted that she never said that any wildfires were caused by a “Jewish” space laser, as some outlets reported. She merely tied such fire-starting technology to the Rothschild banking dynasty, a Jewish family that has been subject to countless anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. “I didn’t even know the Rothschilds were Jewish,” Greene explained with an aw-shucks shrug. “Before politics, I didn’t know much of any of this stuff.”

Fair enough. Greene was but a tender 44 years old when she invoked the Rothschilds—the same age she was when she liked a social-media comment saying that “a bullet to the head would be quicker” for getting rid of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She was practically a child—43—when she mused about executing Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama. But youthful ignorance doesn’t explain every conspiracy theory that Greene has advanced, and every bigot she has embraced, since she entered politics. Because some interlocutors appear to find interrogating her challenging, I thought I’d suggest some lines of inquiry for Greene’s next media appearance. You might say I’m just asking questions.

Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election? This week, the president pardoned a group of Republican activists who had acted as fraudulent electors in an attempt to overturn his 2020 loss. Greene not only applauded this decision—she called for more. This stance is nothing new. For years, Greene has denied the 2020 election results and spread false claims about the contest and its aftermath. “Today I’ll be objecting to a stolen election,” she declared on January 6, 2021, shortly before rioters stormed the Capitol and attempted to steal the election for Trump. In 2022, Greene insisted that “antifa,” not Trump supporters, was behind that abortive insurrection. In 2023, when House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries observed that Joe Biden had won the 2020 presidential election, Greene yelled back, “No, he didn’t.” In 2024, she spread a baseless rumor that Georgia voting machines were surreptitiously altering early votes. She has not disavowed any of these assertions.

Does Greene have any ideological differences with American white nationalists? Last month, Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential voices on the American right, hosted Nick Fuentes, one of the country’s most notorious white nationalists, on his podcast. Their conversation kicked off an intra-conservative controversy over the place of anti-Semitism and Nazi apologism in the MAGA movement. But long before Fuentes joined Carlson, Greene joined Fuentes. In February 2022, she spoke at the America First Political Action Conference, an event organized by Fuentes, where she grinningly shook hands with him onstage. Later, Greene claimed to be unaware of his views and said that she was “not aligned with anything that may be controversial,” without explaining how she, a professional politician, had come to give an address at a racist-run gathering without knowing what she was walking into. Eight months later, under media pressure, Greene declared on social media, “Of course I denounce Nick Fuentes and his racists [sic] anti-semitic ideology” (she went on to blame the media for being “obsessed” with him).

More recent events suggest that Greene’s disavowal might not have been entirely genuine. “I was a friend of hers, and she spoke at my conference, and then the day after, she pretended like she didn’t know me,” Fuentes told Carlson. “She knew exactly what it was.” Days after Carlson hosted Fuentes for that amiable exchange, in which the far-right influencer also praised Joseph Stalin and railed against “organized Jewry,” Greene slammed not Fuentes, but those criticizing “my good friend Tucker Carlson.” Given that Greene had been Carlson’s guest the week before Fuentes, this defense is not surprising. But it poses a question: Does Greene agree with either Fuentes or Carlson about Hitler, Black people, women, and the rest? Undoubtedly, she believes in the two men’s right to free speech, but will she ever use hers to criticize their specific ideas? Someone should ask.

[Yair Rosenberg: The MAGA influencers rehabilitating Hitler]

Did the COVID vaccine kill “extremely high amounts” of people? In a November 2021 social-media thread, Greene approvingly cited Louis Farrakhan, the reactionary Black hate preacher known for his homophobic rhetoric and anti-Semitic rants about the “synagogue of Satan.” The reason? Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam organization are avowedly anti-vaccine—Farrakhan once claimed that the H1N1 flu vaccine was developed to kill people—and accordingly opposed the COVID-19 vaccines. “Extremely high amounts of deaths are reported on VAERS,” the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, “but there are no investigations into those deaths,” Greene claimed in that series of posts, misrepresenting the meaning of the VAERS system’s data. The merits of vaccine mandates are a matter of opinion. Whether large numbers of people were murdered by the COVID vaccine, only for their deaths to be covered up, is a question of fact—one Greene ought to be able to answer with proof, especially given her position on the House Oversight Committee.

Did Israel let the October 7, 2023, attacks happen? Many people in Congress and beyond have criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza, myself included. But Greene has gone much further. When the conflict began, she initially sided with Israel and attempted to exploit the Hamas assault to censure the Muslim representative Rashida Tlaib for “antisemitic activity” and “sympathizing with terrorist organizations.” But since then, Greene has not only reversed course but begun insinuating something far worse than anything Tlaib ever articulated: that Israel knew about the October 7 plot in advance, yet did nothing to stop the attack.

In September, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Israeli intelligence had hijacked phones in Gaza to stream his address to the United Nations. At the time, journalists on the ground reported that they found no evidence that this had actually occurred. Nonetheless, the commentator Glenn Greenwald asked: “Israel has such complete surveillance and control of Gaza’s communications networks that it can commandeer them to force their phones to broadcast Netanyahu’s speech, but Israel had no clue that Hamas was planning an operation as large as Oct 7 and it then took hours to respond?” There are very straightforward, nonconspiratorial reasons Israel failed to repel the 2023 Hamas attack, but this did not stop Greene from reposting Greenwald’s claim with an eyeballs emoji. (Greene has also repeatedly implied that Israel had a hand in assassinating President John F. Kennedy.)

A handful of recent apostasies from her party does not negate Greene’s lifetime of conspiracies. Taken together, the above positions do not suggest a stable person of sound judgment. Rather, they paint a picture of someone consistently unable to distinguish partisan fantasy from reality, who ping-pongs from conspiratorial extreme to conspiratorial extreme. “Everybody’s like, ‘Marjorie Taylor Greene has changed,’” she said of herself on The View. “Oh no, nothing has changed about me.”

People—even politicians—should be allowed to grow and not be forever reduced to the worst version of themselves. But there is a difference between an honest evolution, which entails accountability, and shallow opportunism, which offers none. Which category does Greene fall into? Given her significant following and stated political ambitions, it’s in everyone’s best interest to find out. But for that to happen, her interlocutors will have to start asking her the hard questions she’s thus far avoided.

Blaming Foreigners for American Failings Won’t Fix Them

2025-11-09T07:00:00-05:00

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If there’s one belief that unites Americans across the political spectrum, it’s that other countries are the reason we can’t have nice things. “We sent $250 billion to Ukraine,” the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk wrote on X in January. “And yet we can’t get water to fight fires in California.” In 2023, Assemblyman (and now New York City Mayor-Elect) Zohran Mamdani told an audience at a Democratic Socialists of America conference that “we have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” referring to the Israeli army. “Housing and insurance across the board are extremely high, and becoming out of reach for many,” Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted in July. “We do not want to give or sell weapons to Ukraine or be involved in any foreign wars or continue the never ending flow of foreign aid.” Some progressive activists have gone so far as to blame federal assistance to Israel for local budget cuts to New York City libraries.

For many Americans and their elected officials, foreign actors—whether Ukrainian, Israeli, or Chinese—are parasites who stand in the way of prosperity or otherwise corrupt the country. And to be fair, America’s international posture, under this administration and the previous ones, certainly leaves much to critique. But when lashing out becomes a substitute for looking inward, such criticism devolves into conspiracism: a way to pin domestic problems on outsiders so as to avoid reckoning with their real causes at home. This rhetorical move may generate applause from partisans, but it’s self-defeating, because societies that externalize their internal issues will fail to fix them.

Take the wildfires in Los Angeles earlier this year. At the time, Kirk and other conservatives implied that the failure to prevent the devastation and deal with its aftermath was partly the result of America sending aid to Ukraine. But the facts told a different story. As one of the wealthiest and highest-taxed states in the country, and the fifth-largest economy in the world, California had the resources to address the perils posed by wildfires. Local authorities just failed to adequately prepare for a sadly predictable emergency. Any effort to avert a similar catastrophe in the future needs to reckon with this reality, not divert the debate to activities overseas.

[Read: The GOP’s great betrayal]

Indeed, setting aside entirely the merits of U.S. support for Ukraine or Israel, those outlays are a rounding error in the American budget. Both countries could disappear tomorrow and America’s health-care situation, education system, law-enforcement challenges, and disaster preparedness would remain the same, because America’s predicament is the consequence of American political choices, not sinister foreigners hoodwinking the masses.

Similarly, Mamdani’s suggestion that racialized police brutality perpetrated in America (established 1776) by the NYPD (established 1845) stems from Israel (established 1948) is an offense against not just U.S. history but also basic causality. Sourcing such violence to a handful of police exchange trips to Israel for counterterrorism training isn’t just factually wrong—it ensures that the actual drivers of the violence go unaddressed and conveniently offloads a long-standing American pathology onto outsiders. When he becomes mayor in January, Mamdani may end the NYPD’s Israel trips, but he will be left with the same local problem.

That’s because most American ills are of our own making: the result of political choices, trade-offs, and citizen preferences. Many people struggle to find affordable housing because of constraining policies in New York City, California, and other blue strongholds. At this moment, many Americans are facing the loss of their SNAP benefits because of decisions made at the federal level to shut down the government, defund its services, and prevent an emergency fund from offsetting the shortfall. The country doesn’t have Medicare for All because Americans are unwilling to pay the estimated $20 trillion it would cost per decade, not because of the approximately $500 billion we’ve sent to Ukraine and Israel over the course of those countries’ entire existence.

Simply put, these situations prevail not because foreign actors defrauded America for the budgetary equivalent of pocket change, but because of policy choices made democratically here at home, for good and for ill. America’s new wave of populist politicians are right to highlight the failings of the country’s elite, both here and abroad. But if they resort to exporting blame for America’s shortfalls in housing, health care, and other areas, rather than taking a hard look within, they will have only quack cures to treat very real ailments.

J. D. Vance’s Bad Answer to an Anti-Semitic Question

2025-10-31T12:41:41-04:00

On Wednesday, Vice President J. D. Vance spoke at the University of Mississippi, as part of a tour organized by Turning Point USA, the conservative youth movement founded by the late Charlie Kirk. After his talk, in a nod to Kirk’s freewheeling campus debates, Vance fielded questions from students for nearly an hour, an impressive feat of rhetorical stamina that illustrated why he is one of the Trump right’s best communicators. But he flubbed a key question.

“I’m a Christian man, and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something or that they’re our greatest ally or that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion-dollar foreign-aid package to Israel,” asked a young man in a MAGA hat. “I’m just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.”

Although ostensibly about Israel, this question was fundamentally an attack on Jews and Judaism, segueing immediately from the Middle Eastern country to claims that the 0.2 percent of the world that is Jewish oppresses the 29 percent of the world that is Christian. The vice president was being presented with an age-old anti-Semitic inversion that remains popular among white nationalists.

Vance’s response to this query included many reasonable counterpoints. He noted that “America First” doesn’t mean abandoning alliances but leveraging them for U.S. gain, and pointed out that far from being Israel’s patsy, President Trump used his leverage over Israel to achieve a Gaza cease-fire. He argued that theological differences between Christians and Jews did not preclude collaboration on matters of common concern. But the vice president’s answer was most notable for what it did not contain: any acknowledgment that the question contained an attack on Jews, let alone a rebuke of it.

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

Politicians are often unprepared to respond to explicit anti-Semitism in the moment. In this regard, the Vance incident was reminiscent of another almost a decade ago. During the Democratic presidential primary in April 2016, Bernie Sanders hosted a town hall in Harlem’s historic Apollo Theater. He, too, was ambushed by an interlocutor who shifted seamlessly between critique of Zionism and anti-Jewish conspiracism. “As you know, the Zionist Jews—and I don’t mean to offend anybody—they run the Federal Reserve, they run Wall Street, they run every campaign,” a man wearing a Black Lives Matter pin declared. “What is your affiliation to your Jewish community?” Sanders, too, failed to meet the moment and quickly pivoted to his Israel talking points rather than forthrightly address the prejudice of his questioner.

But Vance should not have been surprised to face a baldly anti-Semitic assertion at a Turning Point gathering. At his own campus events, Kirk regularly fielded hostile questions from far-right acolytes of his archnemesis, the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes. Among other lowlights, Fuentes has denied the Holocaust, called for the execution of non-Christians and “perfidious Jews,” and labeled interracial relationships as “degenerate.” “Oh, I’m anti-Semitic?” he said in 2022 on his web show, rhetorically addressing religious Jews. “I piss on your Talmud.” Once a fringe figure, Fuentes has moved closer and closer to the center of conservative power—dining with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, shaking hands onstage with a grinning Marjorie Taylor Greene that same year, and finally being interviewed by the most influential right-wing commentator in America, Tucker Carlson, just this past week.

Carlson is a longtime ally of Vance and was reportedly influential in helping him secure the vice-presidential nod from Trump. The former Fox host spoke before the president did at the 2024 Republican National Convention, and his son now serves as a press aide in Vance’s office. Carlson has also spent years mainstreaming anti-Semitic voices and ideas. He has hosted a parade of Hitler apologists on his podcast; claimed that Israel had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks but did not share the information with the U.S.; slurred the prominent Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro and those like him as foreign anti-American subversives who “don’t care about the country at all”; and, in his speech at Kirk’s funeral, blamed a cabal of people “eating hummus” (i.e., Jews) for killing Jesus. And all that was before he sat down for a cordial conversation with Fuentes.

[Jonathan Chait: The intellectual vacuity of the national conservatives]

Surveys show that about a quarter of young people today hold anti-Semitic views, far more than among their elders. Some see these numbers as a problem to be confronted; others see them as an opportunity to be exploited. Carlson and his allies, who include the far-right conspiracy theorist Candace Owens and the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, appear to fall into the latter camp. They have grown their platforms by appealing to such sentiments and inflaming them, rather than combatting them. Their escalating conspiracist rhetoric about Jews suggests that they hope to harness anti-Semitism as part of a push to take over the MAGA movement after Trump departs the scene.

Of course, Vance also hopes to inherit that movement, so he is faced with a fateful choice: whether to accommodate the anti-Semites on the rising right or reject them. By fielding questions from all comers on a college campus, Vance sought to emulate and honor Kirk’s legacy. But in his response to his bigoted interlocutor, he fell short of Kirk’s example. A staunch supporter of Israel, Kirk had grown more critical of the Netanyahu government by the end of his life. He warned against U.S. conflict with Iran and, according to his friend and podcast producer, wanted the Gaza war to end. But Kirk sharply distinguished between such political criticism and anti-Jewish conspiracism.

“I don’t align with Jew haters, sorry,” he told a questioner who asked whether he would build a “big tent” with Fuentes and those like him. “If you are blaming less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population for all of your problems, that is not going to be good for your soul; it’s not good for your psychology; it’s not good for your future in any way, shape, or form,” he said weeks before he was killed. “Any young person that goes into this hyper-online brain rot, you are serving yourself over to your own demise. You are serving yourself into a suicide mission that will not make you happier and not make you healthier.” Kirk understood that, practically speaking, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories destroy those who embrace them because such people begin chasing imaginary Jewish culprits instead of rationally addressing the true causes of their concerns.

At times, Vance has tried to walk a similar line, supporting Jews and the Jewish state while critiquing the actions of Israel’s hard-right government—most recently when he justifiably slammed Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition for advancing a bill to annex the occupied West Bank. But although Vance has championed free speech and debate within the conservative tent, he has rarely used his own speech to debate the anti-Semitic elements of his party. The vice president is an exceptional communicator, and he is capable of formulating an approach to Israel on the American right that normalizes the country in conservative discourse and opens it to critique without declaring open season on Jews. The question is: Does he want to?

If Vance is betting on winning the Carlson lane in the 2028 Republican presidential primary, he may not wish to alienate those voters who have become animated by overt hostility to Jews. The vice president has demonstrated no personal inclination to anti-Semitism, but he wouldn’t be the first politician to attempt to take advantage of a popular prejudice that they themselves do not share. If that is not Vance’s intention, however, he’ll need better answers to the right’s rising anti-Semites than the one he gave this week, because their questions are not going away.

Why J. D. Vance Just Called an Israeli Parliament Vote ‘Stupid’ and an ‘Insult’

2025-10-24T08:49:41-04:00

J. D. Vance’s visit to Israel this week hit all of the usual beats, at least at first. The vice president met with Israeli politicians and the families of released hostages. He trumpeted the U.S.-Israel alliance and advocated for the continued implementation of President Donald Trump’s Gaza agreement. Everything went according to script—until Vance torched his hosts on the way out.

Before boarding Air Force Two, the vice president was asked by a reporter about a vote that had been held the day before in Israel’s Parliament. Hard-right lawmakers from Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition had advanced a measure calling for Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank, which Palestinians claim for their future state. The measure was a farce—it did not change Israel’s policy on the ground, and half of the Knesset’s members did not even participate in the vote. But the legislation was a symbolic slap in the face to the president of the United States. Last month, Trump’s Arab allies had made clear that annexation would risk unraveling the Abraham Accords, and so the president had promised in the Oval Office that “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank.” The message, it seemed, had not gotten through.

Asked about the Knesset vote on the tarmac, Vance acknowledged that it was symbolic, but he was not amused. “If it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it,” he said. “The policy of the Trump administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel. That will continue to be our policy.” That same day, Time published an interview with Trump in which the president was asked about annexation. “It won’t happen, because I gave my word to the Arab countries,” he replied. “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.” Netanyahu didn’t take long to shift into damage-control mode. He put out a statement that falsely attributed the parliamentary vote to the opposition, and pledged that his party, Likud, would not advance the legislation.

This dustup will not harm the U.S.-Israel relationship in the near term, but it portends more consequential conflict to come. That’s because the Israeli hard right—a crucial and dominant component of Netanyahu’s coalition—is at war with Trump’s regional agenda, and its aspirations are incompatible with the president’s ambitions. Previously, the Trump administration was divided between accordists, including the envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who were more aligned with the Gulf states, and annexationists, such as Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who were more sympathetic to the Israeli right. But in recent weeks, the president has made his decision: The accordists have won in a rout, and that outcome has implications well beyond the West Bank.

[Read: Can Trump contain Israel’s hard right?]

Simply put, the president wants more diplomatic deals and more countries to enter the Abraham Accords, not more wars and more land grabs. In his Time interview, Trump claimed that Saudi Arabia—whose crown prince will reportedly visit the White House next month—would normalize relations with Israel by the end of the year. But Saudi Arabia has demanded a path to Palestinian statehood, however limited, as its condition for such a move—and, as Wednesday’s annexation vote showed, the Israeli settler right will do all it can to block this.

“If Saudi Arabia tells us ‘normalization in exchange for a Palestinian state,’ friends, no thank you,” Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s far-right finance minister, said at a conference yesterday. “Keep riding camels in the desert in Saudi Arabia.” The remark, which Smotrich was later forced to walk back, was almost certainly not an accident. Its casual racism can be construed as an act of sabotage—an effort to derail the Middle East–normalization train.

Smotrich and his anti-Arab allies—such as his fellow lawmaker Limor Son Har-Melech, who boycotted Trump’s victory speech in the Knesset—likely see the president’s agenda as an existential threat to their project. That’s because it is. The more political and economic influence the Gulf states have over Trump and Israel, the more demands they will be able to make of both. Heading off formal annexation of the West Bank is the first ask, but it won’t be the last. Ultimately, the far right’s program of unfettered settler expansion and violence, unending war and eventual settlement in Gaza, and no negotiations with the Palestinian Authority is irreconcilable with a more regionally integrated Israel and an expanded Abraham Accords.

In practice, this means that as long as Israel’s settler right holds power over Netanyahu, it will continue to threaten the Trump administration’s agenda. This dynamic may be more of a problem for Netanyahu than for Trump, however. Polls show that most Israelis, unlike Netanyahu’s unpopular minoritarian coalition, support Trump’s goals. One September survey found that 72 percent of Israelis believe that preserving the Abraham Accords and deepening regional alliances with moderate Arab countries is in Israel’s “supreme interest.” Another survey in August found that 73 percent of Israelis would support a normalization deal that includes recognizing a Palestinian state.

Trump is astronomically popular in Israel today following his Gaza deal, far more so than Netanyahu himself. Should the president publicly make the case for his plans, he will be pushing on an open door—and might even push Netanyahu and Israel’s far right out of it.

Can Trump Contain Israel’s Hard Right?

2025-10-21T07:00:00-04:00

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When Donald Trump arrived in Israel last week to celebrate his Gaza agreement, Israelis of all stripes fell over themselves to thank him for his efforts to end the war and bring hostages home. The Knesset was lit up in red, white, and blue; its members gave the president a two-and-a-half-minute standing ovation when he arrived. A Tel Aviv beach was decorated with a giant silhouette of his face. Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, announced that Trump would be awarded the country’s Presidential Medal of Honor, its highest civilian commendation. But one notable person didn’t join the festivities. In fact, she boycotted them.

The day before, Limor Son Har-Melech, a far-right member of Parliament, had declared that she was “not interested in joining the applause” and announced that she would not attend the president’s Knesset speech. “President Trump presented the current deal as a peace agreement,” she wrote. “It is not. It is a shameful agreement.” Har-Melech’s outrage was sharp but not surprising. Since October 7, 2023, she had been one of the chief advocates for the Israeli resettlement of Gaza. Just two months after the Hamas massacre, she said she told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “the only image of victory in this war is that we will see Jewish homes in Gaza. Victory will be when we see the children of Israel playing in the streets of Gaza.”

Polls showed that most Israelis opposed this land-grabbing plan. But Netanyahu was beholden for his political future to the radical minority that supported it, and constantly catered to their whims. As the war in Gaza dragged on, and Israel plunged deeper into the Palestinian territory, the settler right appeared poised to obtain its prize. Trump called to “clean out” Gaza and relocate its population to make way for a “Riviera of the Middle East.” Nearly two dozen lawmakers in Netanyahu’s coalition signed a letter to Israel’s defense minister urging him to permit activists into Gaza itself to scout possible settlement locations.

The pieces were falling into place. That is, until Trump halted the war and imposed a peace plan that explicitly rejected any Israeli territorial designs on Gaza.

[Read: The worst-kept secret of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict]

It wasn’t supposed to go this way. When Trump was reelected, members of the Israeli right rejoiced, believing that he would happily facilitate their aspirations. Instead, he has begun to frustrate them. The first blow came on September 25, when the president categorically ruled out any attempt to extend Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank, which Palestinians claim for their future state. “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s not gonna happen.” The president’s Arab allies had made clear that annexation could shatter the Abraham Accords forged in Trump’s first term; faced with the potential unraveling of one of his signature achievements, the president acted quickly to curb the Israeli right’s ambitions.

That intervention turned out to be just a prelude. Four days later, Trump unveiled his 20-point plan for ending the Gaza war—and punted on his prior proposal to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. “Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough,” read point No. 2. “No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return,” added point 12. “We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.” Trump then proceeded to bully both Hamas and Netanyahu into accepting this agreement.

No wonder Har-Melech and her allies were angry. Just days before, they’d appeared ascendant. Now, thanks to Trump, they were the skunks at the party, watching the public celebrate peace without any thought of settling Gaza. While the war was at full tilt, Har-Melech’s minority settler faction had been able to exercise outsize influence over Netanyahu’s decision making, deepening Israel’s entanglement in Gaza. As soon as the conflict began to wind down, so did the faction’s ability to shape events.

But although Trump may have momentarily stuffed the far right into a locker, it will slink out as soon as he turns his attention elsewhere. “There will be Jewish settlements in Gaza,” vowed Bezalel Smotrich, a powerful far-right minister in Netanyahu’s government, the day after Trump’s victory speech in Israel. “We have patience,” he went on, “we have determination and faith, and with God’s help, we will continue the series of victories, and the big miracles.” On Sunday, two Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza, and the army responded with air strikes. Smotrich gleefully posted one word on X before the shaky cease-fire was reestablished: “War!” The settler movement did not get where it is by giving up; its activists excel at exploiting every opening.

Trump’s Gaza plan presents many such openings. According to the agreement, in the early stages of the current deal, Israel will remain in control of much of Gaza’s uninhabited territory until Hamas is disarmed and displaced. These are precisely the areas that the far right hopes to settle and even annex to Israel. Hamas is dragging its feet on releasing the bodies of dead Israeli hostages, publicly executing Palestinians opposed to its rule, and showing no sign that it intends to give up its weapons. The Israeli army and Hamas are still skirmishing along the cease-fire line. Even if none of this is enough to capsize the accord, it will likely delay further implementation and provide a window for the settlers and their political allies to try to insinuate themselves into those parts of Gaza.

Only Trump can stop this from happening—at least until Israel holds new elections next year that could boot Netanyahu and his partners from power. The president can pressure Hamas’s patrons in Qatar and Turkey to compel the group to disarm, and he can strong-arm Netanyahu into preventing settler spoilers from upending the fragile peace. What Netanyahu wants is not this peace deal or avaricious annexations, but to stay in power. And he will make whatever choice seems most likely to keep him there.

Like other political leaders with an exaggerated sense of their own importance, Netanyahu perceives himself as indispensable, and his leadership as the only thing standing between his country and catastrophe. Equating his personal interest with the national interest, he justifies every reversal and betrayal of past principles as necessary for Israel’s survival. Such compromised leadership is perilous for Israel, but advantageous for Trump: As Netanyahu’s only consequential friend on the international stage, the U.S. president has immense sway over the Israeli leader’s choices. Left alone, Netanyahu will act however his coalition tells him to, but countermanded by Trump, he will have different incentives.

The truth is, Israel does not and has never needed Netanyahu to survive; it needs to survive Netanyahu. How Trump chooses to treat the Israeli premier and his far-right coalition will determine not just whether the president’s peace plan will succeed, but whether Israel will succeed in outlasting its extremist minoritarian government.

Trump’s Plan to Finally End the Gaza War

2025-10-09T00:21:30-04:00

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When Donald Trump brokered the Abraham Accords in his first term, he heralded the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states as “the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region.” In truth, the Accords were a diplomatic handshake between countries that had never fought a war. They did not resolve the region’s conflicts, and were not the seismic achievement that Trump presented them to be. Last night, however, Trump finally struck his first real blow for Middle East peace—if all goes according to his plan.

“I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan,” the president announced on Truth Social. “This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace.” The declaration capped a dramatic two weeks that included the rollout of Trump’s own peace plan, presidential strong-arming of the parties, and feverish negotiations in Cairo. It was also careful in how it couched what had been achieved.

Thus far, the parties have only agreed to some form of exchange in which Hamas will release its remaining hostages in return for Palestinian prisoners, including many serving life sentences in Israeli jails for terrorism. Even if this release goes forward in the days ahead, that will only end the Gaza hostage crisis, not the Gaza war. That’s because this first phase of Trump’s peace plan does not resolve any of the underlying issues that continue to drive the conflict. Among other outstanding concerns: Hamas will still be standing, still be armed, and will not have been supplanted by an alternative Palestinian regime. Far-right members of Netanyahu’s government will still seek to vanquish the terror group and potentially resettle parts of Gaza. But Trump is counting on the force of his personality, the exhaustion of the parties, and the momentum created by the initial agreement to ultimately end the war entirely.

Toward that goal, the president is already teasing a visit to Israel, where he would potentially address the Israeli Knesset. By making himself the face of the deal and taking a victory lap to Israel itself, he would essentially be binding Netanyahu’s government to the agreement—lest it risk personally embarrassing the American president by undoing his great accomplishment. Moreover, Netanyahu himself has tied his political fortunes to Trump, campaigning on his close relationship with the president. With elections scheduled for next year, he cannot afford a public rift with Trump, and the president knows this. “He’s got to be fine with it,” he told a reporter on Saturday, referring to Netanyahu. “He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine.”

On the Palestinian side, Trump has already used his personal relationships in the region to compel Hamas to move further than it ever has in past negotiations. The group previously sought to hold on to its hostages for as long as possible, understanding them as its greatest leverage over Israel. But through intense pressure on Hamas patrons Qatar and Turkey—both longtime Trump allies—the president managed to get the terror group to agree to release all their hostages up front. “ALL PARTIES WILL BE TREATED FAIRLY,” he wrote on Truth Social when announcing the new agreement—a not-so-veiled indication to Hamas that he would not permit the Israeli side to resume the war even after it had obtained the hostages.

In that aspiration, Trump has another ally on his side: the Israeli people. Polls have shown for many months that most Israelis—like most Gazans—want to conclude the Gaza conflict. Netanyahu, beholden to a radical right-wing minority on this and other issues, ignored the popular preference until compelled by Trump. But once the hostages are home, and soldiers in Israel’s citizen’s army begin returning to their families, it will be very hard to justify a continuation of hostilities. Many thorny long-term issues will remain—including paths to Hamas disarmament and Palestinian self-government—but the guns will fall silent.

Ending the Gaza war was always going to require the president’s personal investment. Until recently, he seemed disinclined to give it. Trump did not intervene as the first cease-fire he helped broker in January fell apart. But in recent weeks, he seems to have latched on to the issue with renewed vigor—willing to insert himself into the negotiations, bully both Netanyahu and Hamas, and leverage his relationships with regional leaders to finally end the war. If he succeeds, that success will raise another question: How far is he willing to go to achieve his promised peace in the Middle East? The Gaza war is only an acute symptom of the region’s underlying malaise. If Trump has found a formula for imposing his will on the parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, why stop here?

Contrary to his claims, the president has not yet brought peace to the Middle East. But if his Gaza peace plan succeeds, he might decide he is just getting started.

Trump Is Successfully Bullying Netanyahu

2025-10-05T20:28:08-04:00

The two-year war between Israel and Hamas is at a precarious inflection point after a roller-coaster sequence of events over the past week. On Monday, President Donald Trump unveiled a 20-point plan for ending the war in Gaza, presenting it as a nonnegotiable ultimatum to Hamas. On Friday, Hamas said it would consider discussing the first 10 points, including releasing the hostages in their custody, and effectively sidestepped the rest of the points, including turning over its weapons. Trump enthusiastically accepted this lukewarm response—declaring on Truth Social that “I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE”—and dragged Benjamin Netanyahu along for the ride.

“Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly,” Trump further demanded in that post, which went up at 5:14 p.m. eastern time on Friday—past midnight in Jerusalem. Faced with this presidential directive, the Israeli prime minister promptly acquiesced. In March, after the end of the previous Gaza truce, Netanyahu promised that Israel would conduct negotiations with Hamas only “under fire”—that is, it would not cease military action prior to a diplomatic deal being struck. On Saturday, the Israeli leader abruptly reversed course. Israel began halting offensive operations in Gaza—most notably around Gaza City, the primary target of the current war effort—and made plans to dispatch negotiators to Cairo.

[Hussein Ibish: Hamas’s worst option, except for all the others]

In short, Trump successfully bullied Netanyahu—and if this latest round of talks is going to get results, he’ll need to do more of it. That’s because despite the president’s confident proclamations of peace for our time, a deal is far from assured. Hamas can easily blow up the fragile process by refusing to release all of the hostages, or otherwise reneging on its hazy commitments to Trump and the mediating states. The terrorist group is reportedly divided between its leaders abroad who want to agree to Trump’s terms and its leaders in Gaza who do not. At the same time, Netanyahu is already facing a mutiny among the far-right members of his coalition, who want to ethnically cleanse and resettle Gaza, and are threatening to bring down his government if the war ends. Today, Trump is the only actor who can provide a counterweight to these radicals and compel Netanyahu to make different choices by changing his incentives. As he showed this weekend, the president holds incredible leverage over the Israeli leader—he just needs to use it.

Contrary to the spin of Netanyahu’s boosters in Israel and the fulmination of anti-Semites in America, Trump has never been beholden to Netanyahu. The reverse is true: Netanyahu has been beholden to Trump. For years, the Israeli leader has marketed himself to voters as the Trump whisperer and presented his alliance with the mercurial American president as an electoral asset. Netanyahu even festooned buildings with photos of himself with Trump on towering campaign posters across Israel. But these boasts have now become a straitjacket. With Israeli elections scheduled for late 2026—and possibly arriving earlier—the prime minister cannot afford a public feud with the president without refuting his own electoral argument. This means Netanyahu not only has to accept Trump’s diktats; he has to spin them as his own ideas—or risk shattering the myth he has built around himself.

The president fully grasps this dynamic. “I said, ‘Bibi, this is your chance for victory,’” Trump told the Axios reporter Barak Ravid on Saturday. “He was fine with it. He’s got to be fine with it. He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine.” The president’s official rapid-response team then posted that quote on social media, in case anyone had missed the implication.

Trump has not only compelled Netanyahu’s recent about-face on Gaza. Over the past six months, he has forced Netanyahu to abort a major counterstrike in Iran; publicly declared, “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” dashing the aspirations of the Israeli settler right; negotiated the release of an American hostage from Hamas behind Netanyahu’s back; and made the Israeli leader apologize to Qatar for his recent strike there—after which the White House released a humiliating photo of Netanyahu’s phone call of contrition. This week, he signed an executive order granting NATO-level security guarantees to Qatar, the longtime hosts and patrons of the Hamas leadership abroad. Trump has also repeatedly amplified and praised the Israelis protesting against the Netanyahu government and in favor of a hostage deal.

[Yair Rosenberg: What’s missing from Trump’s Gaza peace plan]

Netanyahu has spun most of these deviations from his desires as part of his plans. Like many successful politicians, he is “a master at disguising retreat as advance,” as the biographer Robert Blake once wrote of the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. But the illusion, at this point, is wearing thin. In reality, Trump is not and has never been Netanyahu’s pawn. He is who he has always been: a transactional politician who leads a largely pro-Israel coalition but is also closely tied to an array of Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, because of both business and geopolitical considerations. Trump’s agenda is his own. The president has demonstrated time and again that when he acts in the Middle East, he is balancing the interests of his competing stakeholders, not fulfilling the Israeli right’s wish list.

Netanyahu is a similarly political operator: He is a creature of his coalition and a product of the pressures placed on him. Absent Trump’s interference, the strongest force acting on the Israeli leader’s decisions has been his far-right partners, whose influence has shaped Netanyahu’s choices throughout this conflict. Most Israelis oppose the radical right’s messianic designs on Gaza and want to bring the war to a close, but they will need the American president to change the calculus of their prime minister.

What’s Missing From Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan

2025-09-30T15:49:35-04:00

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Yesterday, President Donald Trump unveiled a 20-point proposal for ending the devastating conflict in Gaza. On paper, it’s a mostly sensible deal—and certainly better than the alternative, which is what it should be measured against. Among other elements, the plan would end the war, return the remaining hostages, surge aid into Gaza, disarm and potentially exile Hamas, and provide an eventual pathway toward Palestinian self-government. Crucially, the proposal also repudiates Trump’s prior push to “clean out” Gazans in order to build an American resort, reversing an egregious blunder that had fanned the Israeli settler right’s dream of ethnically cleansing Gaza.

In short, the Trump plan is a bunch of generally reasonable ideas that have been circulating for years but have not been implemented, because both parties to the conflict have strong reservations about some of them. The question is whether any of that has changed. Trump’s proposal has the backing of the European Union, the Palestinian Authority, key Arab states, Israeli hostage families, and the Hamas patrons Turkey and Qatar. At the White House, the plan also received qualified support from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who praised it as achieving Israel’s war aims.

[Yair Rosenberg: The real reason to recognize Palestine ]

All of that, however, was the easy part. The hard part is the follow-through. Trump, always the salesman, presented the agreement as a done deal. But the real work has only just begun. Can Trump and his Middle Eastern allies get Hamas to assent to concessions, such as demilitarization, that it has thus far refused? And can the president keep Netanyahu from flipping on the deal if and when it threatens his far-right coalition in Parliament? For this plan to work, Trump will need his friends in Qatar and Turkey, whose countries shelter Hamas leaders, to deliver the terrorist group, and he will need to babysit the Israeli prime minister to ensure he upholds the bargain.

In theory, the president is uniquely situated to accomplish these aims. Trump has enjoyed warm relations with the leaders of Qatar and Turkey, having hosted both recently in the White House. He also has leverage over Netanyahu that no recent American president has enjoyed. That’s because, although Netanyahu previously marketed himself in his own country as a bulwark against pressure from liberal American presidents such as Barack Obama, insulating him from their demands, he has presented himself as an ally of the populist Trump. The prime minister even featured the president on massive campaign posters, implying to voters that only he could manage Israel’s relationship with the mercurial American leader. With new elections looming in 2026, Netanyahu cannot afford to be at odds with the man whose support is central to his own electoral argument, which is why he had no choice but to back Trump’s plan in Washington.

That early buy-in matters, but it is no guarantee that the deal will succeed. Hamas has not yet agreed to the proposal, and may respond with a “yes, and” intended to drag out negotiations and shift blame for their eventual failure to Israel. Netanyahu, meanwhile, will face blowback from the hard-right members of his coalition—who seek to ethnically cleanse, annex, and resettle Gaza—and may try to extricate himself from the agreement if he fears it will collapse his government.

[Jon Finer: The West Bank is sliding toward a crisis]

As the Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid put it today, Netanyahu “usually says ‘yes’ in Washington, when he stands in front of cameras in the White House and feels like a groundbreaking statesman, and the ‘but’ when he returns to Israel and the base reminds him who’s boss.” In fact, Netanyahu has a long history of reneging on painstakingly negotiated agreements because of domestic political considerations. But none of those agreements had an American president on the other side. Trump has the power to compel Netanyahu; the question is whether he is capable of paying the sustained attention necessary to do it.

The bleak truth about the Gaza war is that most Palestinians and Israelis have wanted it to end for many months, but their leaders have instead privileged their own ideological interests over the popular will. As Mohammed al-Beltaji, a 47-year-old from Gaza City, told AFP after Trump announced his plan, “As always, Israel agrees, then Hamas refuses—or the other way around. It’s all a game, and we, the people, are the ones paying the price.” This latest round of diplomacy can hardly be expected to turn out differently. But it would be wrong not to hope.

The Real Reason to Recognize Palestine

2025-09-30T07:00:00-04:00

This past week, Britain, Canada, and Australia, along with several smaller countries, officially recognized the state of Palestine, in the run-up to a United Nations conference devoted to the two-state solution. Yet for all the ceremony and celebration, it’s not clear whether these pronouncements actually matter. Critics have labeled the recognition effort “empty,” “a distraction,” or “even harmful,” and it isn’t hard to see why. The diplomatic declarations do nothing to help Palestinians in Gaza or those menaced by Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. They will not arrest the gradual, de facto annexation of occupied Palestinian areas under the successive governments of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The countries recognizing Palestine have insisted that Hamas should have no role in its governance, but pious pledges do not change the fact that the terrorist group remains the dominant Palestinian power in Gaza—and still holds dozens of Israelis hostage, despite the Gazan population’s desperation for the war to end. These inconvenient complications suggest that recognizing a Palestinian state that does not actually exist, governed by people who are not currently in charge, is not a solution but rather a restatement of the problem.

A cynic might end the story here. But there is more to this moment than mere symbolism. International recognition of a theoretical Palestinian state alongside Israel does little for Palestinians today, but it sets the stage for a full-blown clash in the future between Israel’s government and the wider world. That’s because recognition is a fundamental rejection of the reality that Israel’s settler right has worked to impose on the conflict—one in which Israel has the unilateral ability to forever foreclose Palestinian sovereignty.

[Read: The worst-kept secret of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict]

For decades, Israel’s settler movement has attempted to snuff out the possibility of a two-state solution by strategically constructing small outposts that disrupt the territorial contiguity of the West Bank and slice any envisioned Palestinian state into unworkable pieces. The intention, openly espoused by far-right activists, is to pepper the land with pockets of Jewish settlers—what they call “facts on the ground”—that will prevent any cohesive Palestinian state from being established. Put another way, these communities have a small geographic footprint but are deliberately distributed so as to have an outsize political impact.

Last month, Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right minister in Netanyahu’s government, made this plan explicit when he spearheaded the preliminary approval of new settlement housing in what is known as the E1 corridor. If built, these homes would bisect the West Bank and cut off Jerusalem from a future state of Palestine. Smotrich, who has pushed to expel and disenfranchise Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, hailed the E1 move as a “significant step that practically erases the two-state delusion.”

“The Palestinian state is being erased from the table not by slogans but by deeds,” he crowed. “Every settlement, every neighborhood, every housing unit is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea.”

But the notion that the two-state solution can be prevented by this or that settlement or some Israeli declaration has always been a bluff—and those recognizing Palestine today are calling it. The two-state solution cannot be killed, because it is just a line on a map. Nothing, other than a lack of political will, is stopping the parties or the international community from drawing a border tomorrow through the Holy Land and saying, This side is Israel and this side is Palestine, and we will treat it that way. What happened at the UN was a nascent expression of that political will.

As the diplomats in New York recognized, contrary to the claims of Smotrich—and some left-wing critics who have unwittingly accepted his framing—the presence of settlers is not an existential threat to the possibility of territorial compromise. Once a border is set, any settlers remaining on the Palestinian side would become Jewish citizens of Palestine, just as Israel today has a large Arab community that makes up some 20 percent of its population. Under this scenario, which has been proposed in the past by peace negotiators and think tanks, the inhabitants of Smotrich’s prized E1 settlements would vote in Palestinian elections—or move back to Israel if they did not want to. Both states would undoubtedly experience internal tensions, discrimination and racism, even terrorism, but such a situation would be infinitely better than the one we have now.

The recent lurch toward Palestinian recognition brings this eventuality closer but is not yet enough to actualize it. American buy-in would accelerate the process. Donald Trump’s recently unveiled peace plan for Gaza does envision a “pathway” to two states, but Netanyahu has already distanced himself from that language, even as he provisionally agreed to the plan, and in any case, Hamas has not yet accepted the terms.

Still, recognition doesn’t require American or Israeli backing to be consequential. Down the line, international commitment to Palestinian statehood could lead to full-fledged boycotts of Israeli settlements and even a refusal to recognize the Israeli passports of those who live in them. If Israel’s settler right manages to cling to power after the country’s next election, it may discover that although it can declare the two-state solution dead, the world may refuse to come to the funeral.

To imagine Palestinians and Israelis living in relative peace in their own states, or under some sort of confederation, seems impossible today. But that is how the future always feels during times of cataclysmic conflict. The purpose of a political process in Israel and Palestine is to imagine something better that can take the place of perpetual war. The Israeli right has spent decades trying to prevent people from conceiving any alternatives to its ultimate victory. The countries now recognizing a Palestinian state and publicly committing themselves to the prospect are rejecting that premise and denying the settler right’s attempt at a fait accompli. By also rejecting Hamas and its repeated attempts to annihilate Israel, they are telling the region’s absolutists that extremists do not have the power to impose a zero-sum outcome on the conflict. That realization is not the end of the story. But it is necessary for any new beginning.

Have You Considered Not Polluting the Water?

2025-09-19T11:54:39-04:00

Silicon Valley wants to make you new friends—or at least program them. “The average American has fewer than three friends,” Mark Zuckerberg said on a podcast in April. “The reality is that people just don’t have as much connection as they want. They feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.” Artificial intelligence, the Meta CEO suggested, could help solve this problem, even if it can’t replace physical contact. He went further at a conference a few days later: “I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do.”

This summer, one company took Zuckerberg’s vision to its logical conclusion and began shipping a device called “Friend” to the public. An AI-powered pendant, Friend eavesdrops on its wearer’s activities and comments on them via text messages. A trailer features users speaking aloud to their disembodied confidant during meals, hikes, and gaming sessions, as though it were as real as the people around them, whom they are largely ignoring. “How’s the falafel?” the Friend messages a young woman, as she dines alone.

The company has spent aggressively to push the product—its founder said he paid $1.8 million just for the domain Friend.com. But no matter how many devices are sold, virtual technologies that supplant shared spaces and conversations will not succeed in solving America’s loneliness epidemic, because they are the same technologies fueling it in the first place.

Slowly but surely over the past two decades, in-person interactions have been swapped for poor digital simulacra of them, replacing thick social ties with thin ones. Addictive social-media platforms have become substitutes for phone calls and face-to-face exchanges. Streaming entertainment has decreased demand for movie theaters. To-go dining apps have gradually replaced restaurant and bar table service with takeout. Many people now lack friends and wish they had the skills and opportunity to make them.

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century]

Rather than help people forge these human connections, AI companions are another attempt to replace them. “I’ll binge the entire series with you,” declares one representative New York City subway ad for Friend. In this sense, Silicon Valley is trying to sell a cure to a disease that it causes—the equivalent of a cigarette company hawking cutting-edge cancer treatments. Presented with a malaise of its own making, the industry’s answer is more of the same.

This tech tendency didn’t start with the AI craze. Many flagship apps are designed to accommodate people to their isolation: Fitness services such as Peloton can be a boon for individuals without access to a gym, but for many others, they have simply replaced those spaces and communities with at-home exercise, and personal trainers with parasocial influencers. Meditation and focus apps installed on the very phones that are causing distraction and distress purport to somehow ameliorate those conditions.

Services such as Nextdoor attempt to provide a virtual substitute for the robust neighborhood interactions that the internet has steadily eroded. Elder-care apps offer AI conversations for seniors in place of the receding engagement of family and friends. Algorithmic social-media platforms such as X structurally privilege inflammatory and conspiratorial content to hold attention and provoke reactions—then roll out crowdsourced fact-checking initiatives, much like a band of arsonists distributing garden hoses to their victims.

[Yair Rosenberg: Elon Musk is no aberration]

Perhaps the best embodiment of Silicon Valley’s inability to reckon with what it has wrought is a rather adorable recent innovation: a new toy called “Grem.” Marketed as a playful “screen-free” alternative for children, the product looks like any other cuddly stuffy. But inside, it has an AI-powered voice box that allows it to engage in “endless conversations” with its young charges. In other words, Grem is a “Friend,” but for your toddler.

Many parents rightly wish to avoid entrusting their children to a smartphone or an iPad. But contrary to Grem’s marketing, the problem with those devices isn’t their screens—it’s what the tech on the other side of those screens is socializing us to be: siloed narcissists who come to expect every interaction to effortlessly reflect our own preferences. Human playmates are imperfect, sometimes annoying, even rough on the ego. Replacing them with seamless, self-flattering, simulated pals will not produce well-adjusted adolescents capable of forming real relationships, but rather more alienated ones who lack the skills to do so.

Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley know that we face a pervasive social sickness, to judge by the Facebook founder’s comments about American loneliness, and by the development of devices such as Friend. But for Zuckerberg and others in his industry to effectively address the problem would mean acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: that without malicious intent, many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs nonetheless built their fortunes on what turned out to be predatory products with net-negative effects on society. This is a bitter realization, but it also offers the only way out of our current vise. The solution to tech-fueled isolation is not more isolation-fueling tech: Instead of selling water purifiers, it’s time to consider not polluting the water in the first place.

Will Israel Destroy Trump’s Greatest Foreign-Policy Achievement?

2025-09-11T07:00:00-04:00

Donald Trump’s greatest foreign-policy achievement came out of nowhere. On August 13, 2020, with essentially no advance warning or leaks, the president announced on Twitter that Israel was establishing diplomatic and trade relations with the United Arab Emirates, a wealthy Middle Eastern country that had previously rejected the Jewish state’s right to exist. “HUGE breakthrough today!” Trump wrote. “Historic Peace Agreement between our two GREAT friends, Israel and the United Arab Emirates!” After this declaration, the diplomatic dominoes fell in rapid succession; other Arab states joined what became known as the Abraham Accords, culminating in a signing ceremony at the White House one month later.

Less remembered is what the Accords prevented: Israeli annexation of the West Bank. In exchange for Emirati recognition, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government agreed to a “suspension of Israel’s plans to extend its sovereignty.” In plain English, Israel’s conservative coalition shelved plans to formally incorporate swaths of occupied Palestinian territory into Israel, preserving a path to a two-state solution and deferring a longtime dream of the country’s settlers that had been inching closer to fruition.

Since then, the Accords have proved remarkably durable, weathering even the past two years of the Gaza war. But that may be about to change. On September 3, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, unveiled a proposal to annex 82 percent of the West Bank and called on Netanyahu to enact it. “It is time to apply Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” he said in a statement, referring to the area’s biblical names, “and remove once and for all the idea of dividing our small land and establishing a terrorist state in its heart.” The next day, top Israeli ministers were scheduled to discuss the idea of annexation—that is, until the UAE intervened.

[Yair Rosenberg: Israel’s settler right is preparing to annex Gaza]

“Annexation would be a red line for my government, and that means there can be no lasting peace,” Emirati special envoy Lana Nusseibeh told The Times of Israel in a rare public intervention in Israeli politics. “We trust that President Trump will not allow the Abraham Accords tenet of his legacy to be tarnished, threatened or derailed by extremists and radicals.” The planned cabinet discussion was abruptly called off. But the issue of annexation is far from resolved, and it threatens to upend Trump’s signature international triumph.

Critics have correctly noted that the Abraham Accords did not bring peace to the Middle East; they consisted of deals between Israel and countries with which it had never been at war. But on the campaign trail and in the White House, the president has repeatedly touted the Accords as a prized accomplishment, and shortly before the 2024 election, he promised that expanding them would be an “absolute priority.” Just a few weeks ago, he wrote on Truth Social that “it is very important to me that all Middle Eastern Countries join the Abraham Accords.” Annexation, however, could upend that entire process, undoing past agreements and making future ones impossible. Yet Israel’s government continues to press the prospect.

The reason this subject will not go away is that Netanyahu is beholden to those who don’t want it to go away. When the Israeli leader originally negotiated the Abraham Accords, he did so personally, making the decisions himself and keeping even his own foreign and defense ministers in the dark. Today, however, Netanyahu’s political position has deteriorated dramatically. His unpopular coalition received just 48.4 percent of the vote in Israel’s last election and depends on an assortment of anti-Arab ideologues and religious messianists to remain in power. The result: On core issues such as the Gaza conflict and whether the country’s ultra-Orthodox serve in its army, Netanyahu does not command his coalition; it commands him. And that coalition wants West Bank annexation. In July, days before Netanyahu last visited Trump in Washington, 15 ministers in his Likud party signed a letter calling on him to apply Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank by the end of the month.

In November 2024, I predicted that the Israeli right’s refusal to abandon annexation made a conflict over it inevitable in Trump’s second term. Today that clash has arrived, and it will play out not just between Israel and its Arab partners, but within the American administration itself, where some support annexation but others do not. The players are already moving into position. Last week, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman reportedly signaled that any Israeli advances on the West Bank would dash hopes of his country entering the Abraham Accords.

In this competition between annexationists and accordists, Trump will be the decider. Netanyahu has tied his entire political persona to the president, alienating most other international allies while telling the Israeli people that only he can manage the mercurial American leader. With elections looming next year, the prime minister cannot afford a public break with the president. Whatever Trump decides on annexation, Netanyahu will have to accept and spin as his own preferred policy.

The question, as ever, is where Trump stands. Will he rubber-stamp whatever Netanyahu’s coalition decides, or will the president side with his Arab allies and seek to protect his foreign-policy legacy from the Israeli right? To date, the administration has been noncommittal. “What you’re seeing with the West Bank and the annexation, that’s not a final thing,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters last week. “That’s something being discussed among some elements of Israeli politics. I’m not going to opine on that today.” Later this month, Rubio is scheduled to visit Israel, where these developments will undoubtedly be raised.

[Jon Finer: The West Bank is sliding toward a crisis]

Trump himself has thus far avoided tipping his hand. Back in February, the president hosted Netanyahu at the White House and detailed his plan to relocate the Gazan people and turn their territory into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” Lost amid the chaos and controversy over that proposal was something else Trump said at that fateful meeting. Asked by an Israeli reporter whether he supports “Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” the president responded, “We will be making an announcement probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.”

That was 30 weeks ago. Trump has been able to sidestep the subject of annexation until now, but if events continue to unfold as they have been, he will not be able to evade a decision much longer.

The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler

2025-09-03T07:00:00-04:00

“The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a guest told Tucker Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago. “I think that’s right,” replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion that the German dictator was unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.

Last September, Carlson interviewed a man named Darryl Cooper, whom he dubbed “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper’s conception of honest history soon became clear: He suggested that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill might have been “the chief villain of the Second World War,” with Nazi Germany at best coming in second. The day after the episode aired, Cooper further downplayed Hitler’s genocidal ambitions, writing on social media that the German leader had sought peace with Europe and merely wanted “to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” He did not explain why the Jews should have been considered a “problem” in the first place.

“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” the far-right podcaster Candace Owens asked in July 2024. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’” A repeat guest on Carlson’s show, Owens defended him after his conversation with Cooper. “Many Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as black and white as we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted from our textbooks,” she wrote on X.

These Reich rehabilitators are not fringe figures. Carlson’s show ranks among the top podcasts in America. He spoke before President Donald Trump on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention, and his son serves as a deputy press secretary to Vice President J. D. Vance, who owes his office in part to Carlson’s advocacy. Owens has millions of followers on YouTube, Instagram, and X, and over the past six months, she has been interviewed by some of the nation’s most popular podcasters, including the comedian Theo Von and the ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith. Her output has attained sufficient notoriety that she is currently being sued by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, over her repeated claims that the French first lady was actually born a man. Cooper, the would-be World War II revisionist, publishes the top-selling history newsletter on the entire Substack platform.

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

Why does a potent portion of the American right seek to rehabilitate Hitler? The Nazi apologetics are partly an attention-seeking attempt at provocation—an effort to signal iconoclasm by transgressing one of society’s few remaining taboos. But there is more to the story than that. Carlson and his fellow travelers on the far right correctly identify the Second World War as a pivot point in America’s understanding of itself and its attitude toward its Jewish citizens. The country learned hard lessons from the Nazi Holocaust about the catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice. Today, a growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.

Before World War II, the United States was a far more anti-Semitic place than it is now. Far from joining the conflict to rescue Europe’s Jews, the country was largely unsympathetic to their plight. In 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, Gallup found that 54 percent of Americans believed that “the persecution of Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault,” and that another 11 percent thought it was “entirely” their fault. In other words, as the Nazis prepared to exterminate the Jews, most Americans blamed the victims.

The same week that the Kristallnacht pogrom left thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses in ruins, 72 percent of Americans opposed allowing “a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live.” Months later, 67 percent opposed a bill aimed at accepting child refugees from Germany; the idea never made it to a congressional vote. Many Americans worried, however illogically, that fleeing Jews might be German spies, a vanishingly rare occurrence. Those with suspicions included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who suggested in 1940 that some refugees could be engaged in espionage under compulsion from the Nazis, “especially Jewish refugees.”

This climate of paranoia and hostility had deadly consequences. In 1939, the U.S. and Canada turned away the M.S. St. Louis, which carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where hundreds of the passengers were captured and killed by the Germans. Restrained by public sentiment, Roosevelt not only kept the country’s refugee caps largely in place but also rejected pleas to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp and the railway tracks that led to it. When the United States finally entered the war, it did so not out of any special sense of obligation to the Jews but to defend itself after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

That indifference to the Holocaust was immediately dispelled when the Allied Forces liberated several of the Nazi camps where millions of Jews had been murdered. Entering the gates of these sadistic sites, American service members came face-to-face with unspeakable Nazi atrocities—rotting piles of naked corpses, gas chambers, thousands of emaciated adults. Denial gave way to revulsion. “I thought of some of the stories I previously had read about Dachau and was glad of the chance to see for myself just to prove once and for all that what I had heard was propaganda,” Sergeant Horace Evers wrote to his family in May 1945. “But no it wasn’t propaganda at all … If anything some of the truth had been held back.”

[Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and future U.S. president, personally went to Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp liberated by American troops. “I made the visit deliberately,” he cabled to Washington, “in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower then requested that members of Congress and prominent journalists be brought to the camps to see and document the horrors themselves. “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” the legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow told his listeners after touring the camp. “I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”

Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. American soldiers, drafted from across the United States, returned home bearing witness to what they had encountered. “Anti-Semitism was right there, it had been carried to the ultimate, and I knew that that was something we had to get rid of because I had experienced it,” Sergeant Leon Bass, a Black veteran whose segregated unit entered Buchenwald, later testified. In this way, the American people learned firsthand where rampant anti-Jewish prejudice led—and the country was transformed.

Americans began to understand themselves as the ones who’d defeated the Nazis and saved the Jews. Slowly but surely, anti-Semitism became un-American. But today, those lessons—like the people who learned them—are passing away, and a wave of propagandists with a very different agenda has arisen to fill the void they left behind.

Over the past few years, Tucker Carlson and his co-ideologues have begun insinuating anti-Semitic ideas into the public discourse. The former Fox News host has described Ben Shapiro, perhaps the most prominent American Jewish conservative, and those like him as foreign subversives who “don’t care about the country at all.” He has also promoted a lightly sanitized version of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory that has inspired multiple anti-Semitic massacres on American soil. Candace Owens has accused Israel of involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination, and claimed that a Jewish pedophile cult controls the world. (Like many pushing such slanders, she has apparently discerned that replacing Jews with Israel or Zionists grants age-old conspiracy theories new legitimacy.) In March, an influencer named Ian Carroll—who has a combined 3.8 million social-media followers, and whose work has been shared by Elon Musk—joined Joe Rogan, arguably the most popular podcaster in America, to expound without challenge about how a “giant group of Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting American politicians and business people.”

Before America entered World War II, reactionaries such as the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and the Catholic radio firebrand Father Charles Coughlin inveighed against the country’s tiny Jewish population, accusing it of controlling America’s institutions and dragging the U.S. to war. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government,” Lindbergh declared of American Jews in 1941. “Why is there persecution in Germany today?” asked Coughlin after Kristallnacht. “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted.” For these men and their millions of supporters, behind every perceived social and political problem lay a sinister Jewish culprit.

[Read: What Tucker Carlson’s spin on World War II really says]

The 21st-century heirs of Lindbergh and Coughlin seek to turn back the clock to a time when such sentiments were seen by many as sensible rather than scandalous. These far-right figures have correctly ascertained that to change what is possible in American politics, they need to change how America talks about itself and its past. “The reason I keep focusing on this is probably the same reason you’re doing it,” Carlson told Darryl Cooper, the amateur Holocaust historian. “I think it’s central to the society we live in, the myths upon which it’s built. I think it’s also the cause of the destruction of Western civilization—these lies.”

Carlson couches his claims in layers of intellectual abstraction. Others are less coy. “Hitler burned down the trans clinics, arrested the Rothschild bankers, and gave free homes to families,” the former mixed martial artist Jake Shields told his 870,000 followers on X last week. “Does this sound like the most evil man who ever lived?” The post received 44,000 likes. (Shields has also denied that “a single Jew died in gas chambers.”) “Hitler was right about y’all,” said Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster with some 2 million followers across platforms, referring to Jews last year. “You guys come into a country, you push your pornography, you push your fuckin’ central banking, you push your degeneracy, you push the LGBT community, you push all this fuckin’ bullshit into a society, you destroy it from within.” These influencers are less respectable than Carlson, but their views are precisely the ones that more presentable propagandists like him are effectively working to mainstream. After Carlson’s guest last month suggested that the U.S. “should have sided with Hitler,” Shields reposted the clip.

Had Carlson and his cohort attempted their revisionism 20 years ago, they would have encountered a chorus of contradiction from real people who had experienced the history they sought to rewrite and know where its conspiratorial calumnies lead. But today, most of those people are dead, and a new generation is rising that never witnessed the Holocaust firsthand or heard about it from family and friends who did.

Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did. The question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far that change will go—and what the consequences will be.