The propaganda campaigns against Israel rely on an industry of manufactured “expertise.” Without the ability to appeal to the authority of s
by Seth Mandel
The propaganda campaigns against Israel rely on an industry of manufactured “expertise.” Without the ability to appeal to the authority of such “experts,” the campaigns collapse. For anyone who’s been paying attention in the past few days, the collapse is everywhere you look.
First there was the Sky News anchor hectoring Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon over Israel’s strike on a tunnel system beneath a Gaza hospital to eliminate senior Hamas officials, notably its de facto leader Muhammad Sinwar, brother of Oct. 7 architect Yahya Sinwar. The anchor insisted Israel was wrong to say there were tunnels underneath the hospital and surrounding area because “our experts”—a phrase she repeated in the vain hopes it would sound convincing—said so.
You’ll never guess what happened next. That’s right—Hamas confirmed that the targeted area was indeed the site of a tunnel system, and added more context. It was, Hamas said, destroyed by the IDF in the 2014 Gaza war and since rebuilt. It was there that Israel attempted to take out Sinwar.
Then yesterday, along with reports of another Sinwar’s elimination (Mohammad’s brother Zakaria) came reports that Muhammad Sinwar’s body was indeed found in the tunnel system targeted by the IDF.
Who are Sky News’s “experts”? One of them is Corey Scher, who was a key “expert” behind a 2023 Associated Press story that claimed “The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in history.”
Experts say! As I noted at the time, that claim is obviously false. But Scher’s research depended on radar readings that were mostly mysterious to Scher as well. As a separate article on that study noted, “the researchers said they were able to detect the number of buildings damaged, but were not able to determine how badly the buildings had been affected.”
The research also based its findings on the assumption that any change in the echoes of radar waves was from Israeli bombing.
And so by reading the actual article, one learned that this study was childish nonsense. Now its leading researcher is back to say that the IDF lied about tunnels, only to be immediately contradicted by Hamas itself.
Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and the looming Republican civil war over Jews.
Zack Beauchamp at Vox:
On October 8, two of the biggest voices in right-wing media sat down for a nearly four-hour chat. The host was Dave Smith, a libertarian Jewish comedian who has made a name for himself as a vocal critic of Israel’s war in Gaza. His guest was Nick Fuentes, a leader of the antisemitic “Groyper” movement that has become increasingly popular among the rank-and-file of the MAGA movement.
Early in the conversation, Smith addressed the elephant in the room: Why was he, a Jewish comedian, hosting someone like Fuentes on his show? Smith’s answer was that their shared policy views, most notably on Gaza, were more important to him than Fuentes’ hatred.
“I don’t actually think bigotry is the worst thing. It can be bad, but it’s not the worst thing,” Smith said. “As a Jewish person…there’s these people who hate Jews, I should probably be cool. Because it’s kind of hard for people to hate people who are cool to them.”
In response, Fuentes painted himself as a misunderstood victim of cancel culture. Leading right-wing voices like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson were, in Fuentes’ telling, unfairly persecuting him based on selective and inaccurate quotations.
“People are hanged by their words selectively,” Fuentes said. “These are tools of reputational destruction. They don’t like where you’re pointed, so they look for things that are going to hurt people’s feelings.”
Around the same time, on his own show, Fuentes did a brief monologue on the historic origins of antisemitism. In his view, the story is simple: Jews deserve it.
“What is Jew synonymous with, as a verb? It means to cheat, to lie, act in bad faith as though it’s second nature. Where do you think that comes from?” Fuentes said. “Everybody, in every nation, in all times, for thousands of years, eventually comes to the conclusion that Jews always act in bad faith.”
This was par for the course for Fuentes: a man who has described Hitler as “awesome” and suggested Jews should be forced to either leave America or convert to Christianity. He had not been selectively quoted or incidentally bigoted: blaming America’s problems on its Jews has been his cause for nearly a decade. No amount of acting “cool” on Smith’s part would make Fuentes reconsider his hatred of Jews.
But Smith’s cartoonish naïveté betrays a deeper problem: a rising antisemitism crisis on the MAGA right that is largely of the party’s own making, one that risks raising people like Fuentes to new heights of influence And the GOP’s elites are now struggling to contain it.
The leak of internal Republican group chats to Politico, including messages sent by a prominent Trump administration official named Paul Ingrassia, revealed numerous messages containing explicit bigotry and even praise for Hitler. It is not just the existence of these texts that’s notable, but the fact that they leaked at all — which indicates that someone on the right, who was in these conversations, wanted to try and push their internal enemies out.
Indeed, there is real and growing recognition — at conservatism’s highest levels — that they have an antisemitism problem.
Chris Rufo, the Trump right’s leading activist on social issues, warned in March of “influential online commentators” who were selling “diffused, right-coded conspiracy theory” in which Jews “have taken control of American media, flooded society with pornography, and organized sex-related blackmail rings to secure support for Israel.”
Shapiro offered a similar diagnosis in a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post. “There is a part of the Right that is extraordinarily conspiratorial and sees Jews as a conspiratorial force,” he said. “You get a lot more likes and clicks if you are promoting an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish agenda than if you are doing the opposite.”
These concerns typically focus on influencers and public figures: Fuentes, obviously, but also Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Kanye West, Darryl Cooper, Andrew Tate and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). The basic idea, according to people like Shapiro and Rufo, is that these figures are the source of the rot manifested in those group chats, a cancer on the GOP who need to be confronted and potentially even excised from the broader right.
Yet this raises a deeper, and more troubling, question: Why is it that they’ve been able to build such a large audience? Why do “you get a lot more clicks” nowadays if you promote right-coded antisemitism? And why is it that so many of the party’s youth operatives get seduced by neo-Nazism?
The answer, according to both publicly available research and my own conversations with prominent right-wingers, is distressingly simple: President Donald Trump has turned the right into the premier home for conspiratorial extremism.
While the left has its own struggles with antisemitism, especially as it relates to rising anti-Zionist sentiment, the right is tapping into an older and more traditional form of Jew-hatred — one with a long presence in American politics that, until recently, was seen as taboo for anyone approaching the mainstream.
But in the Trump era, attitudes like Smith’s — that bigotry isn’t “the worst thing” — have become normative, a kind of anti-anti-racism that holds the Trumpist political coalition together. This “no enemies to the right” politics — shown most starkly, perhaps, by Vice President JD Vance’s refusal to forcefully condemn the infamous Young Republicans group chat — combined with the technological revolution in streaming video and crowdfunding, unfurled a red carpet for America’s antisemites to use as they goose-stepped their way to more wealth, influence, and power.
“It’s not even ‘no guardrails’ — it’s policing to make sure there aren’t guardrails,” says Richard Hanania, an influential writer on the right (and himself a former white nationalist forum poster).
[...]
Part I: The market for antisemitism
In 2022, the scholars Eitan Hirsh and Laura Royden published a groundbreaking paper on the distribution of antisemitic attitudes across the ideological spectrum. Influential at the time, the paper now feels prescient — an anticipatory explanation of why, in 2025, promoting antisemitism has proven to be so popular with young conservative audiences.
The key finding relates to a survey, which asked 3,500 Americans whether they agreed with three statements about American Jews on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree):
Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America.
It is appropriate for opponents of Israel’s policies and actions to boycott Jewish American-owned businesses in their communities.
Jews in the United States have too much power.
The responses revealed two very obvious patterns. First, right-wing Americans were more likely to agree with these statements than those on the left. Second, young people were more likely to agree than older people.
In a follow-up paper, Hersh and Royden explored a striking racial pattern in the results. On both the left and the right, Black and Latino Americans were more likely than their white peers to agree with antisemitic statements. Today, it seems, the Americans most likely to express antisemitic attitudes are Black or Latino conservatives between the ages of 18 and 30.
In 2022, these results presented something of a puzzle. But after the 2024 election results, in which Trump shifted notable numbers of young and Latino voters into his camp, you can start to see a coherent explanation — one that also explains the surge of antisemitism on the young right.
There is substantial evidence that Trump does unusually well with voters who have low levels of social and political trust: little faith in government, experts, and even their fellow citizens. Over the course of ten years in politics, Trump has made the GOP the primary home for such low-trust voters, who used to be found more evenly across the political spectrum. In 2024, it seems likely that his gains among young and nonwhite voters came directly from their lowest-trust ranks.
Low trust is also, unsurprisingly, closely correlated with belief in conspiracy theories. And that is, at its heart, what antisemitism is: a 3,000-year-old conspiracy theory positing that everything bad in the world can be blamed on the secret and shady manipulations of a small group (i.e., the Jews).
[...]
While not every conservative approved of Trump’s policies or rhetoric, nearly all of them opposed the left’s reactive cries of “bigot!” This anti-wokeness — or anti-anti-racism — is one of the key factors keeping the many different factions of the right in the same broad team, even though they sometimes hate each other almost as much as they hate the left.
You can see this, most visibly, in Vance’s aforementioned refusal to “join the pearl clutching” after the New York Young Republicans’ offensive texts were leaked. It is not just that he falsely dismissed the adult chat participants’ pro-Hitler comments as indiscretions of young boys; it is that he framed it as part of a principled stance against cancel culture.
“I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives,” Vance said.
[...]
Part III: How the right’s anti-antisemites fight back
There are not, at this point, powerful constituencies inside the GOP dedicated to opposing harsh immigration enforcement or advancing trans rights. But there are influential members of the MAGA coalition who take issues relating to antisemitism and Israel very seriously. Such issues are among their top policy priorities, if not their singular most important one — to the point where they appear willing to go down fighting for them.
Jewish Republicans are the most obvious example. In the media, the anti-woke voices most alarmed by the rise of right-wing antisemitism are Jews like Shapiro and Bari Weiss. Both of these two run large media empires (the Daily Wire and CBS News, respectively), and dedicate real journalistic resources to attacking the Fuentes and Carlson types. like the billionaire Miriam Adelson, with obvious dogs in this fight.
Were these Jewish voices acting alone, even their positions of power in the movement would not be enough to save them. We have seen elite Republicans try to stand up against bigotry popular with the base in the past, and they have a losing record. But in this case, there is at least one real grassroots constituency likely to align with them: the millions of evangelical Christian Zionists.
The right’s debate on Jews is, inextricably, bound up with its debate over Israel. America First nationalists are not known for their concern about the suffering of foreigners, to put it mildly, but rising disapproval of Israeli crimes against Palestinians have given people like Owens and Carlson useful cover for diatribes against malign Jewish influence in America.
But while this tactic is useful for getting credulous interlocutors like Dave Smith to overlook bigotry, it does position themselves against the many Christian Zionists who make up a significant percentage of the GOP base. Their interest group, Christians United for Israel, claims to have 10 million members. This large and influential constituency is theologically opposed to any effort to degrade or sever the US-Israel alliance — and, at least in theory, deeply concerned about rising antisemitism. It’s a pretty powerful grassroots counterweight against the right’s Fuentes-pilled youth cadres.
[...]
And I do think “civil war” is the correct term for what’s brewing on the right.
Both sides of the divide over antisemitism are influential: they are backed by politically engaged supporters and have allies in powerful positions. The issues at stake here, Israel and Jewish-American inclusion, are vitally important to the various combatants — and it’s hard to see what a compromise might look like. Eventually the tension here will become unbearable. The sniping that we’re seeing now will turn into a concerted effort by one faction to push the other out of the Party’s coalitions.
This Vox article on the GOP’s antisemitism crisis is a must-read. The GOP has a serious antisemitism issue on its hands, especially with the rise of the likes of Stew Peters, Andrew Tate, and Nick Fuentes gaining influence with some parts of the far-right.
I was in Sheffield yesterday.
The city centre reminded me of Shawlands in 1984.
Run-down, with as many shops closed and shuttered as were open.
No one has said we are in a recession. The times don’t feel great. You can almost see them, like dominoes, one shop closing after another, taking more and more custom and profit and there you go, another gone.
We were in the city as my son wanted to do…
On March 13, podcast king Joe Rogan asked his guest: “When did Hitler start going after the Jews?” It was a grim turn for Rogan, who conquer
by Seth Mandel
This combination of arrogance and ignorance is a hallmark of the “just asking questions” influencer corps. At the same time, there is something telling about Gaines’s crazy statement that no one knew what a Zionist was until October 7, after which “people started looking into this conflict.” On October 7, only one side was carrying out violence, and all that violence was against innocent Israelis. There’s an echo of this same idea near the end of the Joe Rogan–Ian Carroll interview. Carroll goes on a rant about the Jewish state being essentially a criminal enterprise founded and governed by mobsters and terrorists. Then Rogan cuts in and says: “And what’s interesting is, you can talk about this now, post–October 7.” To which Carroll responds: “Exactly. It opened wide open.”
October 7 was a moment of Jewish vulnerability, and it brought a particular coalition of alienated Internet celebrities out of the woodwork: washed-up UFC fighters, wannabe pick-up artists, pseudo-historians and philosopher-bros chasing respectability, trust-fund Instagram royals seeking validation from serious-minded people, right-wing populist lay preachers with a persecution complex. These are self-styled tough guys (and gals) who can’t explain how a state made up of supposed genetic degenerates keeps coming out on top. Israel is the Jew of the nation-states; how did it field a fearsome army and a network of super-spies? It must be lying, cheating, and stealing.
Nick Fuentes, ironically, has been the most honest and forthright about the envy and frustration of the tough guys and the “master race” types. In December, a bit over a year after the war started, Israel had turned the tables on its pursuers. Fuentes, on his America First show, had a radically self-aware meltdown. “It’s time for a little self-reflection, it’s time for a little honesty,” Fuentes said smiling, palms held up as if in surrender. “Do you know how much it sucks being on the other side of Israel?” Then came a brief airing of grievances: “They killed everybody in Hezbollah. They made Hezbollah look like an absolute b—ch when they blew up all their pagers. And then they blew up all their other stuff the next day, and then they killed them all.” He concluded: “Damn, this sucks. It’s just watching this defeat in slow motion.”
The world of right-wing influencers is obsessed with conquest and superiority, and on October 7 they thought their time had finally come. Yet 18 months later, they’re back where they started. So they have taken their quest to the 21st century’s version of the wise men atop the mountain: the podcast maestros with massive audiences and an endless appetite for questioning everything. They are crowdsourcing their war on the Jews.
“More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”
Anna Merlan, Julianne McShane, and Kiera Butler at Mother Jones:
Wednesday’s fatal shooting of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was greeted with widespread grief, horror, and shock by many MAGA and right-wing figures, some of whom counted Kirk as a friend or cited him as an inspiration for their own work. But while many simply expressed their grief for Kirk and his family, and politicians on both sides of the aisle condemned the killing, some public figures used the moment to make incendiary claims.
On Wednesday evening, FBI Director Kash Patel announced on X that “[t]he subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.” (By that point, far-fetched conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death were already emerging, including claims that Kirk was assassinated by the Israeli government.) But Patel subsequently posted that the person in custody had “been released after an interrogation by law enforcement.”
This did not stop some figures from stoking outrage, particularly against “the left,” whom—despite lacking any evidence as to the shooter’s identity and motive—they blamed for the killing. Former DOGE head and Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted to his 225 million followers, “The Left is the party of murder.”
Conservative activist and Trump confidant Laura Loomer sent a barrage of posts to her 1.7 million followers. In one, she called for the Trump administration to “shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” adding, “The Left is a national security threat.” After Kirk’s death was confirmed, she wrote: “They sent a trained sniper to assassinate Charlie Kirk while he was sitting next to a table of hats that said 47.” It is unclear which “they” she was referring to.
“More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state,” Loomer added.
Former White House staffer and current podcast host Katie Miller, wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, wrote on X that liberals “have blood on your hands.” And Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) went so far as to blame the killing on the Democrats.
Sean Davis, the CEO and co-founder of the Federalist, an influential conservative publication, posted on X: “I hope that Trump also orders the extermination of the entire anarcho-terrorist network that has been terrorizing Christians in this nation unabated for more than a decade.”
In a separate post, Davis wrote, “When Democrats lose elections they couldn’t steal, they murder the people they were unable to defeat.”
[...]
Others blamed Kirk’s killing on an unnamed group of opponents. On Fox News, host Jesse Watters claimed: “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate?” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote, “They just shot Charlie Kirk.” (It was unclear whom Watters and Greene were referring to.)
[...]
Andrew Tate, the British-American masculinity influencer turned far-right culture warrior, kept his message simple: “Civil war,” he wrote. Anti-abortion activist and president of Students for Life Kristan Hawkins also invoked civil war and seemed to imply that Kirk’s killing was a result of his opposition to abortion. “We all know the work we do to protect Life comes at a cost,” Hawkins said. In another X post, she wrote: “This is a new civil war. One that we must fight with love to restore a Culture of Life.”
Chaya Raichik, the creator of the far-right Libs of TikTok Twitter account, quickly began sharing posts that were meant to show left-wing and progressive people, including many who aren’t public figures, celebrating Kirk’s killing. In her own post on X, she wrote: “THIS IS WAR.”
The right-wing media pundit class is reacting to the killing of far-right TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk as you would expect: retribution and vengeance against the left, even though both the identity and the motive of the shooter hasn’t been released.
See Also:
Wired: ‘War Is Here’: The Far-Right Responds to Charlie Kirk Shooting With Calls for Violence
Tucker Carlson has devoted much of his post-Fox News career to solidifying his influence over the GOP. He used his sway with former Preside
Matt Gertz at MMFA:
Tucker Carlson has devoted much of his post-Fox News career to solidifying his influence over the GOP.
He used his sway with former President Donald Trump to secure the vice presidential slot for his near-duplicate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, helped to line up anti-vaccine crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Trump, and addressed the Republican National Convention.
But Carlson isn’t just advising the Republican presidential nominee and serving as a GOP kingmaker. He is also hard at work shaping the future of the party by bringing the most deranged, racist, and disreputable people in American politics into the Republican tent.
Carlson is building power on the fringes. He is turning a coterie of far-right, conspiracy-minded politicians and commentators — many elevated by Trump himself — into a coherent faction that could further displace the current party establishment and reify the blood-and-soil nationalism and reactionary politics of Carlson and Vance.
[...]
Jones is part of Carlson’s network of crackpots, bigots, and kooks
Carlson is at the center of an anti-Fox, anti-establishment faction of the right-wing media and Republican Party.
Carlson’s tour booked some of the more traditional players in the alliance, including GOP politicians like Vance and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), MAGA strategists like Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Kevin Roberts, and former Fox personalities like Dan Bongino, Glenn Beck, and Megyn Kelly.
But it also incorporates figures like Jones and Kennedy Jr. who were previously consigned to the fringes of American politics. MAGA keyboard warriors, hardcore bigots, and deranged loons are welcomed on Carlson’s show for cozy interviews that allow them to reach and influence his large online audience.
Carlson’s effort to bring extremists into the mainstream right dates back to his time at Fox, when he worked to sanitize fringe figures and launder their views to his audience. But after being forced off the air and hanging out his own shingle, anything even resembling guardrails is off, as a review of his guest list shows.
Former FNC host Tucker Carlson’s far-right tent of influence spans from Alex Jones to J.D. Vance to RFK Jr.
I listed to Martyr Made "Enemies" part 1 so you don't have to
In no particular order the takeaways are:
Darryl is still uncritically and without a source claiming the Soviet elite were predominantly Jewish or parroting sources that make these claims as part of long quotes.
Do we need to be reminded at the end of every long quote from or about Hitler as a "great and patriotic soldier" that this is the guy who will have his former political allies murdered routinely and then go on to preside over the Holocaust? We probably don't need to be or at least we shouldn't, but Darryl isn't going to do it regardless.
If you listen to his other appearances, its clear that Cooper IS a fascist. He even quipped to Dan Carlin in a now deleted retort to Carlin calling him a fascist that he might be a "non-racist fascist." Unless you factor in his seeming desire to make Jews into the most unsympathetic characters in his historical narratives by selectively editing some quotes or uncritically quoting others, except when he seems to really, really get excited by the prospect of fascist Jews.
This episode will not disabuse anyone of that notion. He would no doubt defend himself by saying he was just "getting into character" by using extensive quotes from contemporary German sources to get their perspective right. And I actually agree this has value! Not because we should "sympathize" with them in the sense that we should agree with their conclusions about the nature of existence, but in the sense that these frameworks, bonkers as they may seem to people who flinch at the invocation of duty, tradition, social harmony etc. as dog whistles, are frameworks that a people used as the rational basis for wars of expansion and genocide because they convinced themselves these actions were just, prudent, and essential to their survival as a people. Not unlike ICE supporters now.
There's of course the gratuitous World War 1 suffering porn too. Got to have that. And look, I actually think that stuff has value because if you're going to glorify war, then you better understand how random and futile it so often is for the people at the sharp end. There's actually some good quotes about the dehumanizing aspect of mechanized war wherein artillery barrages are used to kill people the artillerymen will never have to look in the eye and being under sustained bombardment being its own particular kind of torture even if a person isn't wounded by shrapnel, gas etc.
But, Dan Carlin has also been there, done that. If you want the auditory gore, just pay a few bucks to get around the paywall. You're a smart person, I'm sure you can figure out what to do with an MP3 file. And his WW1 series doesn't have nearly as much effort to humanize Hitler.
What worries me as a person who has become rather alarmed at people's media literacy, is that some people's takeaways are going to be "oh, I didn't know Hitler was a dog lover" and not "Being kind to animals is not incompatible with being a mass murderer of human beings." We shouldn't need the constant reminders that this guy will become among history greatest monsters: the historically literate may find such things to be distracting and pedantic, but some people may really need this.
Remember, this entire series is an exercise that started out of Cooper on the Tucker Carlson show regurgitating mid-century Nazi apologists and trying to blame Churchill on the continuation of the war beyond the fall of France.
A couple of positives that do not outweigh the negatives:
This could have an anti-war reading. As I said, the WW1 suffering "porn" is very, very heavy. It is very difficult.
Cooper does talk a bit about German dislocation in the industrial age and the breakdown of "traditional norms." This is meant as the usual conservative claptrap about how we'd all be happier if we just went back to church and abandoned all aspiration to lead self directed lives towards self determined notions of what is good, in favor of letting traditional elites: kings, priests, fathers etc. set our goals and ideals for us.
However, it can also be read as a caution: we are, like the pre-WW1 Germans, experiencing vast societal disruption due to new technologies, physical migrations to chase work and prosperity, and the discrediting of traditional sources of authority. People like Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and Vladimir Putin all seem to very explicitly think a sufficiently big and glorious war that can make everyone feel good about themselves and their nation and re-order society around shared goals: just like Hitler. In this view, I think we can see relationships between the Nazi wars of expansion, the invasion of Ukraine, and the murder of foreign citizens at sea that seem to prelude an attempt at regime change in Venezuela.
There are other motives at play to be sure, but all are probably ex post facto rationalizations for the impulse to seek out war as a way to re-masculinize a "weak and listless" people and seek a kind of glory. Oh, and like the Kaiser, Hitler, and Putin: its a very useful way to claim a state of exception to crack down on alternative sources of authority and meaning: trade unions, dissidents, reformers, and revolutionaries.
You're probably not going to be radicalized by Martyr Made "Enemies" but you may run into people who will be. I expect someone, probably Crackpot History, Alexander Sternberg (History Impossible), or Danielle Bolelli (History on Fire) will issue some kind of fact check / debunking that won't require four hours of your time though. Just be on the lookout for "Hitler was brave" and "Hitler liked dogs" or "the Germans were sabotaged on the homefront by disloyal Jews" content being pushed into the mainstream by Tucker Carlson and the rest of the Blood and Soil / America First crowd.
