Several days ago, I wrote about the double standard regarding Jewish influence on US policy (see The Ghosts of Conquest). I noted in that article that critics on both the far left and far right invoke the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as though it were uniquely influential, while never objecting to the foreign lobbies that shape US policies.
Saudi Arabia spends vast sums cultivating defense partnerships, securing access to political elites, hiring lobbyists and public relations firms, and retaining Washington consultants. China’s influence is substantial as well, extending through business interests, corporate partnerships, supply chains, technology markets, academic collaborations, and research institutions—all of which shape political and policy decisions. I identified several other foreign lobbies.
In a pluralistic political system, influence is neither unique to nor monopolized by any single foreign interest group. Yet AIPAC is singled out for special criticism—and it is a domestic lobby. Why? It’s organized by Jews to advance the unique interests of the Jewish people.
Image by Sora
Yet another example of the double standard regarding Israel is the observation—prolific on X at present—that the international community is pretty certain (albeit this has not been officially confirmed) that the Jewish state has nuclear weapons. The objection goes up: why is Israel allowed to have nuclear weapons, but Israel and the United States are justified in preempting Iran from developing such terrible weapons?
Israel’s nuclear arsenal might be a problem if it were reasonable to believe that Israel would use nuclear weapons offensively. But since this is not a reasonable belief, why is it noteworthy? Iran is a different case. There should be no doubt in any rational person’s mind that a nuclear Iran would represent an existential threat to Israel and imperil the region and even Europe. European cities are now within reach of Iranian ballistic missiles. Such a threat also imperils the United States. US security depends on preventing dangerous countries from obtaining nuclear weapons. You have to be dangerously naïve to believe otherwise. Either that or pro-Iran—or anti-Israel.
I’m all for countries that possess nuclear weapons reducing or eliminating their arsenals, but singling out countries for criticism for possessing such weapons must concern the nature of the state in question, and whether there is a risk of offensive use. Is it reasonable to argue that Iran can have a nuclear weapon because France does? Of course not. France, for all its problems, is not (yet) an Islamic republic with designs to bring about the apocalypse. If France ever falls to Islam, those nuclear weapons become a real problem. Given the risks involved in triggering a nuclear war, it is not a problem that is easily solved. But given France as it is, it is hard to see that country using nuclear weapons offensively.
In addition to France, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and China are among the officially recognized nuclear-weapon states under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. I’m not happy with Russia and China having these weapons, but they do, and have for a long time. This makes military confrontation with these countries especially difficult—and dangerous.
That list does not exhaust the number of nuclear powers in the world. India, Pakistan, and North Korea have openly developed and tested nuclear weapons (outside the treaty framework). Why Pakistan (first nuclear test in 1998) and North Korea (first nuclear test in 2006) were allowed to acquire such weapons was an error of historic proportions. Especially in the case of North Korea, something should have been done. Entanglement with China made matters difficult. But, in the final analysis, inaction allowed it to happen. And the world is more dangerous now.
One reason belligerent countries seek terrible weapons is not only to annihilate their neighbors but also to raise the costs of military action against them. The prospect of a nuclear Iran is the strongest possible case for preemptive military intervention. Do it now before it’s too late. It’s already bad enough. The Islamic Republic has long-range ballistic missiles and has for decades organized proxy wars, especially against Israel.
Antisemites on the left and right object: “But the Ayatollah’s fatwa!” For those who don’t know about the fatwa, Ali Khamenei declared in the 1990s that the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islamic law. Then why enrich uranium to yield weapons-grade fissile material? There’s only one reason: to possess a nuclear weapon.
Iranian officials have cited that fatwa since the early 2000s as evidence that Iran’s nuclear program is intended for civilian purposes rather than for building atomic bombs. Khamenei’s fatwa was referenced in statements to the International Atomic Energy Agency and became an important part of Iran’s diplomatic position during nuclear negotiations. However, its legal status, scope, and permanence are unclear because it was not initially issued as a widely published formal legal decree and could theoretically be revised by religious authority.
But should any of that matter? The question is whether the fatwa is relevant. The fatwa is a rhetorical tool, an official statement presented by a rogue regime as a binding constraint on nuclear weapons development to prevent international action. To believe the Islamic Republic’s claims requires either a profound ignorance of the character of the regime or tacit support for Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Why would those who claim to be America First trust any fatwa or believe it mattered?
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The best arrangement for a tranquil world is a system of independent and sovereign states. However, state sovereignty depends on behavior and the capacity to use force. As for the latter, as the world’s hegemon, the United States’ military capabilities allow it to defend its sovereignty by force. However problematic the United States may become in the future, there is at the moment no other nation or coalition of nations that can bring it to heel. There’s a lesson in this: lesser states should never be allowed to possess awesome military capabilities.
States don’t have rights, but rather powers, and there must be some limiting principle on power. If this limiting principle is not internal and adequate to keep a state in line with international norms, then it must be imposed externally. Thus, as for the former, Iran is belligerent and has no internal or adequate principle to self-limit its power. It does not yet have the military capabilities to defend its sovereignty by force. It must never be allowed to develop those capabilities.
Disregarding the question of state character, those who defend Iranian behavior maintain that the United States cannot intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign state because states have a right to sovereignty. Presuming that states have an inviolable right to sovereignty, they do not subscribe to the principle of limiting state power through external force.
Christopher Hitchens cogently argued that state sovereignty is not an absolute right but a privilege that can be forfeited through certain grave actions. A state loses its claim to sovereignty when it (1) engages in persistent aggression against neighboring countries or occupies their territory, (2) violates the spirit or letter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by pursuing prohibited weapons programs, (3) commits or enables genocide in violation of the Genocide Convention, or (4) provides sanctuary or support to international terrorists and similar non-state violent actors.
In Hitchens’s view, a regime that commits these offenses places itself “outside the law” of the international community, weakening the normal protections of sovereignty and justifying outside intervention. Iran has committed one or more of these offenses and has therefore forfeited its sovereign immunity from foreign action.
Some states are sound members of the international community, and thus retain their sovereignty. Other states are anything but sound and have therefore lost theirs. Iran is a paradigm of the latter case. The argument that Iran’s nuclear program should be immune from external force is irrational.
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You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. America’s hard earned tax dollars and military is not your money or military. And America’s President and military should not be controlled by a foreign country. The American people are fed up with fighting your wars. https://t.co/sgkNovNnMQ
— Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@FmrRepMTG) May 24, 2026
Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been quite obsessed lately with Israel’s alleged nuclear weapons. Deploying a bizarre moral calculus, she uses the Israel case to suggest that preemptive war in Iran is wrong. Presuming a rational moral terrain, can one imagine Trump, the shoulders upon whom the task has fallen to protect the world from a belligerent regime, going down in history as the president who allowed Iran to obtain such terrible weapons? Sounds insane, doesn’t it? So why would these Blue Hat American Firsters criticize action preventing another nuclear state in Central Asia, especially one that chants “Death to America! Death to Israel!” and murders its own citizens? Because they are insane.
This is yet one more way antisemitism deranges people. I find it hard to believe that Greene and her ilk don’t want a nuclear-armed Iran, and the only reason I can see for this desire is that it makes the demise of the only Jewish state in the world more likely. What else explains why Greene would stand with Iran? Of all countries in the world, why would any good and decent person defend the worst regime on the planet? If Greene were genuinely American First, she would applaud Trump for finally doing something about Iran’s nuclear program.
— Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@FmrRepMTG) March 17, 2026
Instead, she walks away from America First loudly. She elevates Joe Kent, a former US Army Special Forces warrant officer, CIA paramilitary officer, and Republican political figure who served more than two decades in military and counterterrorism roles. In the Trump administration, Kent served as acting chief of staff to the outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. He was later confirmed as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. In that role, he oversaw the integration of US counterterrorism intelligence agencies and served as a principal adviser on counterterrorism matters. For the antisemitic crowd, Kent’s credentials make his position a valid one.
Kent’s wife, Navy cryptologic technician Shannon Kent, was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria in 2019, so one would think he grasps the problem of Islamic terrorism for global tranquility. Yet, when he resigned as NCTC director in March 2026, he argued that Iran poses “no imminent threat” to the United States and said he could not support what he viewed as an unnecessary war.
His resignation letter maintained that the conflict departed from the non-interventionist, “America First” foreign policy he believed Donald Trump had previously championed. But Trump never said he would not intervene militarily to protect United States interests, and his actions during his first term made that abundantly clear. Knowing that the President was not shy about asserting US military prowess, why would Kent have joined the Trump administration?
Every time Greene and Kent talk about Israel, they expose their deep-seated loathing of Jews to the world. They claim they believe in national sovereignty, but they could not possibly believe this in principle, and the signaling out of Israel betrays the pretense. They believe in sovereignty only selectively—and only then based on ideology. There’s no principle in that. It’s just rhetoric disguising Jew-hatred. For them, “America First” is code for “Fuck Israel.” Did they believe Trump hated Jews, too?
I get it. I know how these people think. Jews don’t have the right to defend themselves because Jews are sinister. For these lunatics, world Jewry is a puppetmaster pulling the strings that animate the United States. It’s the old Jewish cabal theory. It’s a sick bunch—Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candice Owens, and the rest.
The antisemites decry, “Why is Israel beyond criticism?” It’s not. All states are subject to criticism. Who doesn’t believe that? But singling out Israel for special criticism is a hallmark of antisemitism.
Antisemitism is often dressed in the rhetoric of anti-Zionism. “We’re not anti-Jewish. We’re anti-Zionist.” But what is Zionism? Zionism emerged in Europe in the 1800s as a response to widespread antisemitism and persecution of Jews. The main goal of the movement was to secure the Jewish homeland. This led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, following the attempt to exterminate the Jews in Europe. Jews needed a restored Israel to be safe from the eliminationist sentiment that surrounds them.
Israel existed long before the resurrection of the Jewish state. As I explain in Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism (see the embedded links for a deeper dive), Jewish presence in the land that the Romans later called “Palestina” goes back more than 3,000 years. Zionism is, at its core, the fight for Israel as a Jewish state in the ancestral homeland of these people.
To be sure, when people tell you that they are not antisemitic but anti-Zionist, they may be speaking from ignorance. There are many ignorant people out on the streets chanting pro-Palestinian slogans. However rooted in ignorance, what guides them to this denial is an ancient antipathy towards the Jews. This antipathy is amplified by the convergence of far-right ideology and Islamophilia on the left. Third Worldism at the United Nations has infected that body with this ancient hatred. This makes the organization useful to those who one might expect to reject transnational authority.
The threat Jews face has been continual for millennia, and today it is reaching yet another fever pitch. Preventing Iran from possessing nuclear weapons is an imperative for Israel. But the threat of Islam is not just a problem for Jews. Islam threatens Western civilization, which is grounded in Jewish law and sensibilities. Christians, whose origins lie in the Jewish faith, whose ethical system is based on that ancient religion, should be involved in the struggle against Israel and the West.
Those Christians who turn their backs on Israel turn their back on their own religion. Jews and Christians must be a united front against Islam and the reactionary politics on the left and the right. Greene and her ilk claim to be Christians, yet they cast Israel and the Jewish people in the role of historical evil. That puts this bunch outside any decent moral order.
The rational observer doesn’t need distinct lines of political thought to be working together in an explicit coalition for them to function as one. What is required is not formal coordination, but a shared concern or animating principle that anchors these otherwise separate forces. If different ideological movements are moving toward the same end, if they share an underlying antipathy towards something, they form what is effectively an implicit coalition. This is the phenomenon of convergence.
We can see this dynamic in what is often called the “red–green alliance.” Here, elements of the progressive left and Islamist movements form an affinity grouping. The red piece includes strands of anarchist, communist, and socialist thought that, at times, align tactically with jihadist movements. Here, what binds otherwise very different ideologies together is a shared hostility toward Jews. Antisemitism serves as a unifying thread.
A similar tendency appears on the right. There has been a noticeable development of antisemitic rhetoric alongside a more sympathetic stance toward Islam among some figures associated with the “America First” tendency, most notably Tucker Carlson, Meghan Kelly, and Candice Owens.
Influencers in this space have suggested that the left and right should find common ground based on shared grievances, including and especially hostility toward Jews. Many of these voices are Catholic. There is an obsession with Christian Zionism, not solely as part of Christian eschatology, but as an animal bred by the Jews. Nick Fuentes is exemplary of this tendency.
Nick Fuentes, far-right social influencer
Lately, the alignment of the far right and Islam has become more than convergence, with Christian antisemites taking to sharing on social media the postmodernist standpoint of Edward Said and critical race theory to make the case that the Jews are white settlers displacing Arabs they call “Palestinians.” (See History Matters, and On Matters of History, Israel Wins the Debate to understand the problem.)
Antisemitic sentiment has existed within segments of both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions over many centuries. With the Protestant Reformation, there emerged a shift in which aspects of what might be described as “Jewish sensibility”—a practical, this-worldly orientation—became more integrated into mainstream Christian thought in Europe. (See The Dark Heart of Antisemitism: Separating the Haters from the Critics.)
This shift helped create conditions in which capitalism could develop more broadly in Europe, no longer seen as exclusively associated with Jewish communities but as compatible with Christian ethics. Before this, the rationalism that came to prevail in Europe (interest, profit)—and then globally with world capitalism—was condemned for its Jewishness. The far right is open in its hostility to the Enlightenment. But it doesn’t realize that it is opposed to the rational foundation of capitalist relations. They would be quite comfortable standing with the monarchists on the right side of the French National Assembly. (I am not here denying the excesses on the left side of the French Revolution. But the Ancien Régime had to go.)
Karl Marx wrote about these themes in an early essay, “On the Jewish Question.” There, he developed an analysis of Judaism and economic life, where he framed “practical Judaism” in relation to “theoretical Christianity.” Later thinkers, such as Max Weber, in addition to his landmark The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, explored the idea of ancient Judaism as a bridge, or more accurately a pivot, between Eastern (Oriental) and Western (Occidental) traditions. From this perspective, the synthesis of religious and philosophical ideas that gave rise to Protestantism, in turn, contributed to the Enlightenment and liberalism—the intellectual and economic foundation of the modern West.
The ideas of liberalism, which represent a unified front against the irrationalism of communism, fascism, and Islam, emerge from this development. Before this, Christianity and Judaism were viewed as antithetical. The emerging reactionary coalition, combining elements of the left and right, pines for a return to anti-Jewish antipathy. It is atavistic in a most extreme way. Tragically, antisemitism has made significant inroads in popular culture. This nascent alliance threatens the future of freedom and reason in the West.
Nick Fuentes came out as a Democrat this week, and he's not alone. Many erstwhile Right-wing podcasters are now finding they have more in common with the Left these days, thanks to a meeting of minds on a singular issue: One's level of comfort blaming Jews for the world’s ills. pic.twitter.com/okb7oPQwGo
Batya Ungar-Sargon, who, like me, and for many of the same reasons, escaped from the left-wing warp of the twenty-first century, noted on X Saturday that Fuentes has now come out as a Democrat. He’s not alone, she observed. I, too, have noted this (a while ago, see The Woke Reich and the Enemy Within). “Many erstwhile Right-wing podcasters are now finding they have more in common with the Left these days, thanks to a meeting of minds on a singular issue: One’s level of comfort blaming Jews for the world’s ills,” she says in the clip shared above.
It is not just Fuentes switching loyalties. I am watching to see if Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene make the move next (Greene seems close to announcing her switch). They’re drawn to the left because antisemitism is manifest in Democratic Party politics.
In an interview with Maria Bartiromo over the weekend, House Democrat Ro Khanna advanced the conspiracy that Jews are the puppet masters. It’s not the rabble on the streets anymore. It’s the Democratic Party. This is an entailment of the Democrat strategy to use Muslims and other Third Worlders, whose Jew-hatred is notorious, for electoral advantage. They have to abandon Israel for their new constituency, namely the Muslims. Democrats believe there are enough self-loathing Jews to keep a toehold in that community. They’re right. Shockingly, Zohran Mamdani, the Shi’a Mayor of New York City, won the 2025 election with roughly 30 percent of the Jewish vote, according to exit polls.
Ro Khanna is advancing the conspiracy that Jews are the puppet master. It’s not the rabble on the streets anymore. It’s the Democratic Party. It’s so bad that Nick Fuentes is joining up. https://t.co/QXI5do0B5j
What amalgamates disparate political tendencies is a shared hostility toward the West itself, often characterized as decadent. In this framing, decadence is linked to perceived Jewish manipulation of Western institutions and values. More than this, modernity itself is the work of Jewish operatives seeking to enslave the goyim. This narrative draws on much older patterns of thought, in which longstanding prejudices are repurposed in contemporary political contexts.
A contemporary figure associated with the critique of the liberal West is Alexander Dugin, a Russian philosopher whose work has gained attention in far-right circles. Carlson interviewed the ideologue in Moscow in late April 2024 (Carlson also met and interviewed Vladimir Putin and traveled about Moscow, singing its praises). During the interview, Dugin—often described in Western media as “Putin’s brain”—railed against Western liberalism.
Like many on the left and the far right, Dugin argues that the modern liberal West is in a state of cultural and moral decay. It is, but not for the reasons he supposes. He positions his philosophy—sometimes called the “Fourth Political Theory”—as an alternative to communism, fascism, and liberalism. It is yet another attempt at a “Third Way.” He emphasizes a return to tradition, civilizational identity, and a multipolar world order in opposition to what he sees as Western universalism. This means he rejects human nature, seeing what people are in terms of what culture has made them. In effect, he advances a right-wing postmodernism wrapped in the language of premodern atavism.
What is the Western universalism Dugin and his followers oppose? One finds them in the founding documents of the American Republic—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in the post-WWII period (put aside the corruption of the UN and its Third Worldization for now). However much the reactionary right appeals to the ideas that founded the American Republic, they explicitly reject liberalism. Demanding the right of free speech, publishing, and assembly from this crowd is strategic, not principled. They are, in substance, illiberal.
A paradoxical feature of the illiberal attitude—the essence of authoritarianism—I am describing is the rhetorical conflation of liberalism and progressivism, a confusion engineered by the Democratic Party as part of its legitimation project. These terms are, in fact, opposites; the latter represents the ideology and practice of corporate statism.
Corporate statism is profoundly illiberal—and the goal is transnationalist. Thus, a contradiction emerges: the Red-Green alliance is organized by progressive forces. Since progressivism is diametrically opposed to liberalism, the reactionary right is pulled into the gravitational pull of the transnational project. This is paradoxical because the project is at the same time understood by the right as Jewish in character. Antisemitism deranges people.
I am opposed to the transnationalist project, too, but not because of any ethnic character. I oppose the project because of its goals: to reorganize the world as a neofeudalist global order in which the world proletariat is managed in techno-estates run by transnational corporations and financiers comprising a new aristocracy. The fact that Jews are overrepresented among elites does not signal an ethnic cabal to take over the world, but rather indicates a culture prone to material success, which reaches its zenith in Jewish practical life. Such a culture is not to be rejected, but emulated.
Dugin’s framework draws heavily on thinkers like Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, the same year he became rector of the University of Freiburg (in his rectoral address, he aligned the university with the destiny of the German Volk and National Socialism), and on geopolitical theories associated with Eurasianism, a cultural and political doctrine arguing that Russia is neither fundamentally European nor Asian, but a distinct civilization with its own historical destiny, geopolitical sphere, and values.
Synthesizing these ideas, Dugin portrays the West, particularly the United States, as a force that erodes traditional cultures and imposes a homogenizing liberal ideology worldwide. In this sense, his critique resonates with both far-right and some far-left critiques of globalization, even though their underlying values differ significantly. How is this not the sister of European fascism?
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I will return to Dugin in a moment, but I need to say something about the evolution of anti-globalization sentiment on the left—enough to make a new section. When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, the critique of political economy grasped the peril inherent in the transnationalist reorganization of the world, even if it did not appreciate its corrective, namely, economic nationalism (nationalism is a dirty word on the left). Regional and global financial and trade networks, such as the IMF, World Bank, the WTF, the EU, NAFTA, and GATT, were major targets of criticism.
Over the course of the twenty-first century, focus on these networks not only waned but street-level action came under the control of elites associated with transnational corporate power and world finance. Anti-Israel, anti-American, and anti-West sentiment came to the fore. This is in part due to postmodernist corruption, reflected in the rise of critical race theory, post-colonial studies, and queer theory, and tendencies with a substantial pro-Muslim bias (French philosopher and pedophilia advocate Michel Foucault is the exemplar). However, antisemitism was present in critical political economy circles before then, cloaked in criticisms of Israel, which was designated an apartheid and genocidal state.
Most notorious among those obsessed with the Jews and their supposed wickedness was James Petras, who taught for many years at Binghamton University and wrote extensively on imperialism, US foreign policy, and global capitalism. He became controversial for writings about pro-Israel lobbying and what he described as disproportionate Jewish influence in US politics and media, as if this were a bad thing. The work most associated with that controversy is The Power of Israel in the United States. In this book, Petras crossed from criticism of Israeli policy or lobbying networks into sweeping claims about “Jewish power” that echoed longstanding antisemitic narratives about covert ethnic control over world affairs.
Supporters, by contrast, argued Petras was analyzing organized political influence, similar to analyses of other lobbying groups. A similar rationalization is seen in the rehabilitation of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s reputations in the wake of their book The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Walt and Mearsheimer were careful in distancing themselves from ethnic essentialism, whereas Petras’ work was highly reductive. Even those otherwise sympathetic to critiques of US foreign policy or Israeli state policy were compelled to distance themselves from his work. Too much, too soon. Walt and Mearsheimer gave the antipathy intellectual cover.
However, over the intervening years, Petras’ antisemitism has been mainstreamed. This view was introduced in a major way into the Democratic Party by former president Jimmy Carter in his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, wherein he argued that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and construction of settlements constituted a system of apartheid. This sent progressives in search of other books leveling the same charge. There, they found the work of Noam Chomsky and Norm Finkelstein (who recently appears to regret what he helped start), as well as Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim, the so-called “New Historians.” They learned from them a falsehood: that Palestine was an Arab land and that Jews were interlopers—white settler colonists. The work of Edward Said provided the postcolonial theory that would lend intellectual heft to their antisemitic worldview.
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Returning to Dugin, what makes his work significant is that he provides an intellectual vocabulary for civilizational opposition to the West. His “Fourth Political Theory” is explicitly anti-West. He argues that communism, fascism, and liberalism are products of the same Western modernity and should be replaced with something rooted in cultural particularism, religion, and tradition.
This stance is to be distinguished from my own nationalism, which emphasizes the universalism of reason and science. In my worldview, liberalism is not limited by cultural frames. Other moral systems are particular. Liberalism is universal. But for Dugin, all moral systems are particular; all knowledge is rooted in cultural systems and is thus relative, hence his advocacy of multipolarism. The parallels between his theory and postmodernism are unmistakable, and it is here that the left and right find common ground.
Thus, the elements of Dugin’s thinking create what may appear to the Western universalist as strange overlaps where very different groups share a common opposition to Western liberalism. Because liberalism and its universalism are treated as the primary enemy, groups that otherwise disagree can appear aligned in their opposition.
Dugin’s belief that modern society has lost its spiritual grounding resonates across ideological lines, especially among those who see modern culture as morally decadent and, crucially, irredeemable. Dugin interprets global politics as a struggle between “Atlanticism” (the US and its allies) and “Eurasianism” (a bloc led by Russia and aligned civilizations). This framing naturally encourages alliances of convenience among those opposed to US influence. This is how Fuentes can celebrate Stalin’s birthday.
Dugin is often portrayed as an ultranationalist. But ultranationalism is a widely misunderstood political worldview. Characteristic of regimes like Nazi Germany, ultranationalism is built upon the premise that one nation—often defined in ethnic or racial terms—possesses a unique superiority and historical destiny. This worldview does not aim to integrate nations into a shared global framework, but rather to elevate one above all others, at the expense of sovereignty.
Ultranationalism thus subverts nationalism and represents a form of globalism, one that parallels corporate statism. Indeed, the political-economic arrangements underpinning fascism are corporatist. Ultranationalism appears to be an internally contradictory ideology. Whatever its contradictions, it serves the interests of those who are reordering the world.
But the contradiction is important to interrogate. It arises because such regimes, despite appealing to nationalism, pursue aggressive expansion beyond their borders. Ultranationalists reject the interstate system. Under Adolf Hitler, for instance, the idea of Lebensraum justified territorial conquest across Europe. This expansionism was not an effort to create a cooperative or interconnected global order. Instead, it sought to impose a rigid hierarchy in which conquered peoples would be displaced, eliminated, or subordinated. The goal was not global integration, but world domination.
In this light, ultranationalism does not exactly represent a paradoxical form of globalism as we understand it, namely world capitalism in its corporatocratic phase, so much as a rejection of the international principle of national sovereignty, what is known as the Peace of Westphalia. Ultranationalism opposes liberal universalism. The modern state system rests on the idea that nations coexist as formally equal actors (albeit sovereignty is conditional on behavior). Ultranationalist ideologies explicitly deny this premise.
A more precise way to understand the dynamic, then, is to see ultranationalism as combining intense inward nationalism to mobilize its population, often ideologically rooted in palinogensis, with outward imperialism. Its ambitions may be global in scope, but they are not globalist in spirit, at least not in the way globalism is understood in mainstream political economic thought (whatever the problems with that). Rather than seeking a world of interconnected equals, it envisions a world reordered under the supremacy of a single idea—one that is authoritarian and illiberal.
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Crucially, Dugin has publicly aligned himself with the traditions and symbolism of the Russian Orthodox Church and frames his political philosophy in explicitly religious and metaphysical terms. His broader ideology of “Eurasianism” draws heavily on Orthodox Christian ideas about civilization, spiritual destiny, and opposition to Western secularism. Antisemitic sentiment is inherent in this worldview.
Are readers familiar with the work of John Chrysostom (c. 347–407 CE), one of the most important figures in early Christianity, revered in Eastern Orthodoxy as a saint, theologian, and master preacher? Born in Antioch and trained in classical Greek rhetoric before turning to an ascetic Christian life, Chrysostom became a priest, gaining widespread recognition for his sermons, which emphasized moral reform and a rigorous Christian life. Later, he was appointed Archbishop of Constantinople, one of the most powerful positions in the Christian world at the time.
As archbishop, Chrysostom became known for his outspoken criticism of corruption and excess, both among the wealthy and within the Church hierarchy. This outspokenness made him powerful enemies, including members of the imperial court. His conflicts eventually led to his exile, and he died in hardship while being transported further into exile. After his death, however, his reputation grew, and he came to be honored as one of the great Church Fathers. The Divine Liturgy most commonly used in Eastern Orthodox churches today is traditionally attributed to him.
Those who follow him may admit that his legacy is complicated by a series of sermons known as Against the Jews, in which he harshly criticized Jewish religious practices and Christians who participated in them. If we are to recall Chrysostom, this ought to be our focus. These texts are widely regarded today as examples of early Christian anti-Jewish polemic and have been the subject of significant criticism.
Rationalizing Chrysostom’s antisemitism, his defenders will note that, like many figures from late antiquity, his life reflects both the theological achievements and the cultural conflicts of his time. Yet, the fact that Chrysostom stands as a towering and influential Orthodox figure, admired for his preaching and moral vision, his appeal to antisemites makes it impossible to ignore the centuries-long thread of antisemitism through time.
I note all this because the reader needs to understand that Catholicism is not the only Christian faith with a long history of antisemitism. This is not to say that all Catholics and Orthodox Christians are antisemites. It is to say: beware of Alexander Dugin and his Orthodox brethren.
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To be sure, the secular left will never embrace Christianity. At the same time, to characterize the left as secular is problematic (see Genes, God, and Gender: Why Secular Societies Invent New Religions). The left will never embrace Christianity because it is seen as a feature of the decadent West. But wokism is a new religion, and it parallels more extreme religious legalisms of the past. Hence the lure of Islam.
Strands of Catholicism and Orthodoxy also share much with Islam. At their core is a common loathing of the Jews and the view that the West and its liberal values are decadent.
It is unlikely that there could ever be an explicit coalition of the left and the far right. Gender identity doctrine is a major obstacle. But it doesn’t matter in the final analysis. It only matters that both sides work against the West and the Enlightenment. That is reason enough to oppose what constitutes an effective alliance against freedom and reason.
President Teddy Roosevelt routinely held boxing and Jiu-Jitsu matches at the White House. He even suffered a detached retina in a match at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, blinded in that eye for life. He was truly a Rough Rider. Roosevelt was hardly in a minority of fans of pugilistic sports. America has long had a love affair with the Sweet Science. At one time, boxing was America’s pastime, and young Americans have for decades learned the manly art of self-defense. It is a celebration of excellence and masculinity.
Caricature of Teddy Roosevelt, an avid fight fan
Donald Trump promised to host a UFC fight at the White House on the campaign trail. Having regained the White House in a landslide victory, he is delivering on his promise. He has incorporated a UFC night at the White House into the broader Freedom 250 platform—a spectacular, year-long celebration marking America’s 250th birthday. Can left-wingers not feign patriotism for even one year? No. They can’t. They hate America and its traditions. They hate whatever patriotic working people like.
Part of the left-wing hysteria is almost certainly a lament over the fact that Pride Month will not this June feature a White House festooned in Pride Progress colors and autogynephiles covorting about the grounds with silicone tits out. But it’s deeper than this. Indeed, the love of perversion is itself a manifestation of hatred for normality and tradition.
Trans activist Rose Montoya posted a video to social media partying with Biden at the White House Pride event
More deeply, the incessant postings on social media stem from a loathing of ordinary Americans who have long appreciated the martial arts. At the heart of progressive hysteria is a pathological aversion to masculinity and the natural fact that moral man is a physical being who affects outcomes through force and will. Long ago, Frederich Nietzsche told us what makes these people tick: ressentiment.
It is not for progressives that violence is a bad thing per se. Look at the violence on our streets. Violence for them is not merely acceptable but necessary. They call it “social justice.” Those who wish to bring down the social order believe they are the only ones who have a right to it. They abhor violence in competition under the rules of fair play—as long as it’s not men punching women in the face at the Olympics. They condemn violence that secures the national interests. They pursue violence out of envy for the successful and revulsion at the normal. They target those who believe in the good order that the American Republic promises.
Congenital snobs, progressives look at the preparations for UFC at the White House and see “white trash.” They see the rubble of the East Wing and would have you see them as incapable of grasping that building something better sometimes means tearing down something old. Yet, they themselves tear things down when it suits their fancy. Then they grow ugliness on the corpse of the once beautiful. They desecrate memorials and topple statues and stand on the ruins waving alien flags.
What is expressed here is a loathing of the spirit of the nation that those who despise it seek to overthrow. This is the way of progressivism. It takes nature and virtue and stands them on their heads to make an upside-down world that no decent person would want, then bequeath that world to the heirs of a post-rational world.
One of the more remarkable things about the Old Testament and Judaism is that it’s not so much focused on heaven as it is on the Jewish people and how they should conduct their affairs. It’s a practical religion. It’s not a religion based on salvation and transportation to an afterlife. It doesn’t promise the poor a good life in some other form. It promises the good life to everybody who is disciplined and watches out for his neighbor.
But it’s more than that. The Old Testament is the story of the establishment, conduct, and defense of the Jewish nation. The Old Testament is full of talk about nations. It isn’t an argument for converting everybody to Judaism and transforming the world. It’s about allowing people of different ethnicities to form a sovereign political state for themselves. Zionism is a political and national movement advocating for the self-determination of the Jewish people in their historic homeland. It’s rooted in Judaism. Jews are indigenous to the territory that the Romans renamed “Palestine” to punish the people for their struggle for national self-determination.
People like to tell you that their criticism is of Zionism, not the Jewish people. But Zionism is a modern-day representation of the goals that the Jews have sought going back thousands of years—and that they have a natural right to pursue. There is no substantive difference between them. Antisemites don’t get to dress up their anti-Jewish sentiment in the language of anti-Zionism and then claim they’re not anti-Jewish.
I’m an atheist. My ethics are rooted in natural history and in the tradition of natural rights that informed the American founding. I have written about this several times on this platform, and this won’t be my final word on the matter. We are celebrating this year the 250th anniversary of a nation founded on this idea. These ethics are not exclusively secular-humanist—nor do all those identifying as secular-humanist subscribe to them. Many Jews and Christians also live according to these ethics. Indeed, the authors of the Declaration of Independence were profoundly influenced by Christian ethics shaped by the rationalism and science that the Enlightenment elevated and promoted.
Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776, by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris
The authors of the Declaration appealed not merely to human preferences or secular political arrangements, but to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as the source of certain unalienable rights. Whether one interprets Nature’s God in a traditional religious sense, as a rational Creator who established the order of the universe, or as the spirit of natural history, the essential claim is the same: human rights exist independently of the state and are not granted by governments. Governments may recognize or violate those rights, but they do not create them. The rational state exists to recognize and preserve the natural rights of man.
This conception of God is not one of constant intervention or miraculous acts. Rather, it is the God of reason, order, and natural law. Such a Creator established a universe governed by intelligible principles and endowed human beings with the capacity to understand them. The uncorrupted species-being of man projects these virtues naturally. We see this in the story of Israel. And that story is the story of any moral nation. Once forced out of Eden, man makes history. He makes history through hard work and sacrifice, and he does so shoulder to shoulder with his comrades.
God’s design is thus expressed through human agency. Men and women make history and act within it courageously, exercising judgment and reason, and in solidarity. Actions that advance and protect natural rights are good because they align with the moral order embedded in creation, i.e., the natural order. Means achieving those ends are informed by an ethics rooted in a moral ontology. Actions that suppress or violate those rights are bad because they conflict with that order. The ends and the means to reach them are objectively determinable.
Thus, morality is neither arbitrary nor merely the product of social convention. It is grounded in the realities of human nature and the conditions necessary for human flourishing. Rights are not preferences elevated by consensus, nor are they permissions or privileges granted by rulers. They arise from the nature of human beings themselves and therefore impose obligations on both governments and individuals. The measure of a society is the degree to which it secures and respects those rights and assigns duties to citizens to uphold a good society and to defeat those who would undermine it, on the field of battle if necessary.
When President John F. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” he was appealing to the idea that a free society requires active participation, responsibility, and sacrifice from its citizens. The statement assumes that citizenship is not merely a claim upon benefits but a commitment to the common good.
Providence, in this (rational secular) understanding, is recognized not through supernatural signs but through the course of events after the fact. What was achieved? When justice prevails, when liberty advances, and when the rights of a people are preserved against oppression, one may see evidence of a larger moral order in his achievements.
This does not mean that every victory is divinely sanctioned or that history inevitably bends toward justice. As history shows, bad things happen when moral men fail to act or impose good on the world. Rather, it suggests that when free people act in accordance with reason and natural rights, they participate in a process that reflects the underlying order. Providence is not an interruption of nature; it is revealed through the success of human efforts that accord with the laws of nature and the rights and duties those laws imply. Man sees providence in his work—if he has the capacity to discern goodness. In this way, belief in natural rights provides a foundation for ethics that stands above both personal preference and political power. It offers a standard by which governments, institutions, and individuals may be judged.
I have written about this before, as well, but here the moral philosophy of Adam Smith must once more be noted. In his The Moral Sentiments of Man, Smith described what he called the “impartial spectator.” For Smith, inherent in human beings is the capacity to step outside their immediate passions and interests and view their conduct (and the conduct of others) through the eyes of a detached and unbiased observer. Man is not merely capable of sympathy. He is also capable of reason. Man is at once an emotional and rational animal. The impartial spectator serves as a guide to moral judgment, allowing individuals to evaluate whether their actions are just, honorable, and worthy of approval.
In a philosophy grounded in natural rights and reason, the impartial spectator is understood as the faculty by which human beings discern the moral order embedded in nature. It is through this exercise of reasoned self-examination that individuals align their conduct with justice, temper self-interest with concern for others, and contribute to a society founded upon liberty and mutual respect. For many men today, that capacity has been corrupted and deranged. In this year of America’s anniversary, we rededicate ourselves to rooting out corruption and overcoming derangement.
Whether one approaches this standard as an atheist, a Christian, a deist, a historian, or a philosopher, the central principle remains: human rights are inherent, objective, and worthy of defense because they arise from the very nature of humanity and the ordered universe we inhabit. If we are to save the American Republic and the West, we must regain this understanding of rights and obligations and commit the coming generations to it.
This is the definition of racism pushed in the academy: power + prejudice = racism. They further assume blacks have no power. It follows that blacks cannot be racist. However, the definition of racism is a belief that ranks human groups based on inherited traits and entitlements, asserting the superiority of one group over others. Those with little or no power can believe such a thing. If they do, they are racist. A black man can be just as racist as a white man.
The power + prejudice = racism formula cuts both ways. A system established by law that codifies this belief is indeed a racist society. In the past, parts of the United States imposed such laws to privilege whites, and these laws were rooted in the belief that all members of non-white racial groups were justifiably subordinated because of their inferiority. A racist social order prevailed in parts of America. No serious student of history denies this fact.
But, today, these laws are no longer present (struck down over sixty years ago)—at least with respect to blacks. However, many institutions in the United States impose policies disfavoring whites, and the logic of those policies rests on the belief that all members of the white race benefit intergenerationally from systemic racism—even though there are no laws systematically benefiting whites.
The belief that all whites are oppressors is racist, since it necessarily assumes that whites are genetically (in the broad sense of that term, as encoded in a population group) predisposed to prejudice and that all enjoy racial privilege in the absence of any law or policy privileging them. As I have noted in past writings, the claim that all whites enjoy racial privilege commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. To claim that any one person from a demographic category necessarily carries with him through life an abstraction derived from aggregated data, such as a lesser likelihood of being poor, is betrayed by the fact that there are millions of white people living in poverty. At the same time, the greater likelihood of an affluent life among certain demographic groups does indicate the presence of a culture of striving. Rather than demeaning that culture, a decent society promotes that culture for everyone. Aggregate statistics predict probable outcomes, but abstractions can never indict or convict individuals.
A society founded on formal equality and individual liberty does not structure itself to privilege any group on racial grounds. It treats all individuals as equals under the law. A black man received the same sentence as a white man for criminal homicide despite the statistical fact that black men as a group are overrepresented in murder. True antiracism requires colorblindness, not in the recognition that there are different races (there is nothing racist about observing the natural fact of grouped human variation), but in the principle that the color of one’s skin should not determine opportunity (see Colorblindness and Blindness to Color). What determines opportunity in a free society is one’s talents and tenacity, not one’s race.
Progressives decry colorblindness and the meritocratic society. Progressives don’t merely see race but organize society around it. This is why redrawing congressional maps to remove racial gerrymandering is so offensive to them—that and losing partisan political power. So they assert or imply that present-day discrimination is warranted by past discrimination. A white man can be told to go to the back of the line because black men were, in the past, oppressed by the law. The individual must suffer because of the sins of the father.
In reality, Democrats don’t really care about black people, as evidenced by the conditions progressive social policy has produced in the cities they control. Here, we might say that white racism still prevails. But that is even more reason to recommit ourselves to colorblindness—and the defeat of Democrats at the polls.
The difference between yesterday and today is that the racial hierarchy has been inverted in the operation of our institutions. There should be no racial hierarchy at all. Since they are designed to systematically privilege one racial group over another (however symbolic that privilege, however tokenized its people), policies and laws such as affirmative action, DEI, and racial gerrymandering are racist and should be abolished. They never had a place in a free society. And the same party has pushed racial identitarianism for centuries: the Democratic Party.
For this and many other reasons, progressivism is intrinsically antagonistic to the liberal foundation of the American Republic because it rejects the principle of equal treatment. Even where equity is required to achieve the goals of equality, Democrats reject the principle, as evidenced by the assault on women’s rights by transgender madness.
At least Soviet Communism, however terrible the results, officially declared that equality was the goal of the Revolution. In this way, progressivism is closer to National Socialism than Communism. It does not seek equality of any sort, but privileges based on identity. However, a free and decent people should find none of these systems acceptable.
Friedrich Hayek, in The Constitution of Liberty (1960), argues that the only kind of equality compatible with a free society is equality before the law, or formal equality. All individuals, he argued, should be treated the same under general laws, without special privileges or discrimination based on class, race, status, or wealth. Attempts to create substantive equality—equal outcomes in income, social conditions, or wealth—require governments to intervene heavily in personal life. In Hayek’s view, achieving such equality demands constant control over people’s choices, opportunities, and property, giving the state excessive power. As a result, individual freedom and spontaneous market processes are undermined.
The Constitution of Liberty is an elaboration on Hayek’s 1945 book, The Road to Serfdom (1945). There, he argues that when governments take extensive control over economic planning and individual decision-making, they inevitably threaten personal freedom and democratic institutions. Central economic planning requires authorities to decide what should be produced, who receives resources, and how people should work and live.
Because societies are complex and individuals have different goals, governments cannot achieve such planning without coercion and expanding state power. Over time, this concentration of authority weakens the rule of law, limits free expression and economic choice, and can lead to authoritarianism or tyranny. Hayek’s central warning was that even well-intentioned efforts to control the economy for social goals unintentionally create conditions that erode liberty and pave the way for oppressive government. Hayek insists that protecting liberty requires limiting the state to enforcing impartial laws rather than trying to engineer equal social or economic results.
For the record, there was a time when I accepted the progressive argument. You can read my previous take on the matter in this 2014 essay: Why Black People Can’t Be Racist…At Least Not Against Whites. I overcame embarrassment and migrated that essay from my old Blogger platform to WordPress because I believe it’s instructive for readers to see how a mind can change, as well as the influence of ideology on a man who should’ve known better. I know better now. I have penned numerous essays correcting my error (see, e.g., “Blacks Can’t Be Racist” and the So-Called “Myth of Reverse Racism”). The educator has been educated.
Antisemitism is not merely the belief that Jews influence things. There would be nothing wrong with such influence if Jewish culture were a good thing. Indeed, the influence is real, and it is a good thing. Christianity is founded on Judaism. Christianity does exist without the God of Abraham. Christian ethics is an extension of Jewish morality, which played a major role in shaping Western civilization and the emergence of individual liberty and private property.
The West is what it is because of the ideas that underpin it, and these are, in a major way, Jewish ideas, interwoven with Greco-Roman ideas that merged with the philosophical inquiries of Ancient Greece. Jewish morality and the entailments of the Greco-Roman pillar—engineering and science, practical governance, and the legal systems of the Roman Republic—explain why the West is the most affluent and technologically advanced civilization in world history. Your good life is indebted to it.
The core of antisemitism is, therefore, not the influence of Jewish ideas and Jewish practicality per se but the belief that there is something wrong with these ideas and, moreover, that there is something evil about Judaism, which is why the ideas are wrong, and why, therefore, Jewish influence must be suppressed. The condemnation of Jewish influence is a paradigm of the well-known fallacy of “poisoning the well.”
Antisemites poison the well by reducing Jewish influence and interests to a supposed essence of Jewishness, an essence rooted not in ideas but in the people themselves, which is marked as a genetic evil. Indeed, the origin of the fallacious tactic of poisoning the well is itself a medieval antisemitic libel during the Black Death that accused Jews of deliberately poisoning public wells to spread the plague. Another prominent medieval libel accusing Jews of being “baby killers” is known as the blood libel. We hear this charge leveled against the Jews today.
Crucially, antisemitism is different from that which motivates the suppression of objectively bad ideas, such as those of Islam. Islam is a political ideology like fascism. Islam is not an ethnic identity. The Islamic system has contributed nothing morally to Western civilization. The Qur’an is a bad plagiarism of Judeo-Christian ideas, which it deforms in the retelling. It is antisemitic at its core.
Christian Arabs present no problem for the West. It is the Muslims who are the problem, and this is because a Muslim is an adherent to a system of bad ideas. It is not the individual Muslim who is evil (the man can be saved), but the belief to which he subscribes that is the problem. By contrast, for antisemites, the evil of Judaism inheres in the Jewish people. Islamophobia is a propaganda term designed to stifle criticisms of Islam.
When the far-right blames Thomas Massie’s blowout loss in Kentucky to decorated war fighter and patriot Ed Gallrein on AIPAC, it is saying that Jewish citizens of the United States participating in government (AIPAC and other Jewish-American groups that supported Gallrein are US-based) is a bad thing because Jews are bad people. Why else would it be wrong for American Jews to participate in their republic?
This is the same argument Adolf Hitler made, and here it is appropriate to raise the problem of National Socialism, which is resurgent. Hitler repeatedly claimed that Jews, despite being a small minority in Germany, exercised disproportionate influence over areas such as academia, culture, finance, media, and politics. These claims were central to Nazi ideology and propaganda. They rested on Hitler’s belief—and he was hardly alone in this belief—that Jews are an existential, racial evil—not merely a disliked ethnic group, but a parasitic, destructive race fundamentally opposed to nature, Aryan humanity, and German survival. We are once more hearing the rhetoric of parasitism leveled at the Jews.
This is, by the way, the reason the whiteness of Jews is denied: they cannot possibly be part of the white race from this warped worldview. Sadly, some Jews today deny their whiteness in an attempt to escape the anti-white prejudice inherent in woke progressive ideology. I wrote about this many years ago (see Jews are White. So Are Arabs, and its many links to other essays). But woke progressive ideology is on the run, so hopefully the phenomenon of self-loathing wanes.
The far right in America today—Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens, Nick Fuentes, Ian Carroll—and their comrades-in-spirit on the left—Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, the Free Palestine crowd—are antisemitic because they believe there is something evil about Jews as a people. They no longer hide their pathological loathing of Jews. They have come out of the shadows because they see antisemitism returning to popularity. All the better, since we now see them clearly for what they are.
There is a dark convergence underway in which the elements of National Socialism are being reconstituted. This development is especially alarming in its alignment with Islam, an organically antisemitic and fascistic ideology. This convergence explains why Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie are so opposed to preemptive war to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and degrade their capacity to wage proxy war against Israel and the West. They know that if Israel falls, then Islam will be emboldened. But they are too obsessed with see Israel fall to be concerned about that.
One must have noted that the far right hysteria concerning Massie’s defeat in Kentucky says nothing about Massie’s alignment with CAIR, an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in America to subvert US domestic and foreign policies. The toleration of CAIR and the network of Islamic Centers across the country is itself an indication that the nation does not fully grasp what time it is. Would we have allowed the Nazis to set up recruitment and training camps in the United States during WWII? We are at war with Islam. Wake up, men of the West.
The resurgent antisemitism in America sees Jews and not Muslims as the problem because of this loathing of Jews as a people. It deranges them, as it deranged Germans under Hitler. The derangement during the dark days of National Socialism led to the extermination of millions of Jews. Paradoxically, antisemites deny or downplay the Judeocide, even while their rhetoric is favorable to the destruction of the Jews. They do this to weave into consciousness the presupposition that Jews are so diabolical that they—the Jews—would exaggerate the lethal hatred against them.
If we allow antisemitism to once again gain momentum, we will have forgotten what we said after the Holocaust. We said, “Never again.” I am committed to that slogan. I’m calling out antisemitism where I see it. So should you. Jew-hatred is an assault on reason and good moral order.
Good riddance to Green and Massie. Good on the Trump Administration for purging the Republican Party of antisemites. And Trump is doing more than that. He is recommitting the Party to the strengthening of Western hegemony while disentangling the United States from the transnational network that represents the true threat to the future of free peoples everywhere.
This is why Trump is so hated by the left, even if they don’t know why their hearts are so filled with hatred. The moment is flushing out the antisemites. The choice is ever clearer. Either a man stands with the Judeo-Christian West (I say this as a life-long atheist who recognizes virtue) or he stands with its enemies. If that sounds Manachean, then that’s because the situation is dark-and-light. There is no shade.
I have long been a critic of the Reductio ad Hitlerum arguments. I wrote about this fallacy during Trump’s first term as president, when his efforts to secure our borders were depicted as Hitlerian. When the left compares Trump to Hitler or MAGA to fascists, when it declares immigration detention centers to be concentration camps, and remigration as ethnic cleansing, when it compares Jews to Nazis and accuses Israel of genocide and baby killing, the fallacy is obvious. None of these claims is true. What I am describing in this essay is not an instantiation of the fallacy. It is the thing itself. And the thing itself is the evil we must vanquish.
As I have stated many times, one cannot change history, and bringing its ghosts into conversations about justice reflects a primitive ethic ill-fitted for modernity (The Ghosts of Conquest; The Matter of Collective Guilt; About Those Fifty-Nine Afrikaners). That said, history is not unimportant, and the accounts of those who appeal to it should be accurate and truthful.
Yet those who appeal to history often revise it to meet their present political ends. Revisionism is a means to ends—not always a legitimate means, of course, but a means, nonetheless. Therefore, if a debate is to proceed via historical appeal, then it is important to clear away the tangle of deceit to behold actual history. Live by the sword, die by the sword, so to speak.
The left today appeals to an epistemological framework that promotes ignorance and permits those in the know to rationalize lying. This framework is most famously articulated in the work of historians such as Howard Zinn, the author of A People’s History of the United States, which informs the teaching of history to American youth. Progressives long ago colonized Western institutions, and this is no clearer than in our education system.
Zinn argues that history is never neutral but rather is shaped by ideology—specifically, by the interests and perspectives of those in power. “Traditional history,” he contends, is a “top-down” view of the past, downplaying or ignoring the experiences of enslaved peoples, indigenous populations, farmers and workers, and other marginalized groups.
In his view, this selective emphasis (Zinn himself is highly selective in whom he counts among the marginalized) is ideological because it subtly reinforces the legitimacy of existing power structures by making them appear inevitable or universally beneficial. He wants to “reveal” a history “from below,” showing how inequality, resistance, and social conflict have shaped history.
Zinn and his lot are often understood to be Marxists of some sort. However, the epistemology that shapes Zinn’s narratives is not to be confused with Karl Marx’s materialist conception of history. Whatever you think of his conclusions or his politics, Marx proceeds on objective grounds. There is a truth, for Marx. By contrast, Zinn’s radicalism is corrosive to truth in that it asserts that what counts as “history” depends on whose interests are being served and whose stories are being told—and this is the case whatever the sides in question.
It is not that revision is a problem of historiography. New facts emerge, and good historiography accounts for these facts without rationalization. Revisionism is a problem in the work of Zinn and his ilk. They are guilty of the very thing they decry. They do not decry traditional historiography because it is ideological per se. They reduce history to ideology. They decry it because it is not the ideology they seek to advance.
This finds historians of Zinn’s type participating in the same corruption of knowledge as critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and queer theory. Like those standpoints, A People’s History of the United States is skeptical of “master narratives” that present a single, authoritative story of national progress. It emphasizes that historical accounts are constructed from particular perspectives rather than discovered as neutral facts. The emphasis on standpoint—especially the praxis of centering marginalized voices—aligns with postmodern and post-structural critiques of objectivity and power/knowledge relationships.
This essay is not about Zinn. I note Zinn because his work is illustrative, useful because he is well-known (even assigned reading), exemplary of the type of knowledge production that begins with presupposition, typically rooted in the irrationalism of unwarranted hatred, and then organizes historical materials as a means of valorizing irrationalisms to manifest in reality: the destructive and oppressive desire of activists left and right.
In this way, the progressive telling of history is not at all unlike the manner in which Nazis construct history. The Nazis revised history to support their racist ideology by manipulating facts, controlling education, and spreading propaganda. The Nazi rewrote textbooks, censored books and media, and distorted historical events to justify political goals. By controlling how history was taught and remembered, the Nazi regime sought to gain public support, strengthen loyalty to Adolf Hitler, and legitimize discrimination, violence, and eventually genocide. With eyes open, one cannot avoid the hallmarks: identitarianism, an obsession with race, and the genetic attribution of designated evil.
Today, I am going to tell the true history of a territory in terms of what the French Annales school calls the longue durée. With antisemitism once again ascendant, on the left and the right in the West, and as always with the Muslims wherever they are, with the focus on the alleged injustice suffered by the so-called Palestinians, the story of what appears on many maps as “Palestine” is the case at hand.
The Islamic standpoint on this question is not just about driving the Jews out of the Middle East (and ultimately from the world). The Islamic telling, widely adopted by Western minds, is part of the Islamic project to finally conquer the world. This ambition makes Islam useful to transnationalists, those who are denationalizing the world. Hubris convinces them that they can manage the outcome. Muslims have set their sights on the West because Western tolerance makes it vulnerable to Islamization. Transnationalists exploit tolerance to push mass migration and multiculturalism because they know these undermine the nation-state.
The Blue Hat American Firsters are keen to tell us that putting America first does not entail concern for Israel—indeed, it requires rejecting the US-Israel alliance—but the threat posed by Islam compels an alliance between the United States and Israel. Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mehgan Kelley, and others represent a faction on the populist/right-wing nationalist side of American politics that argues Trump and mainstream MAGA figures have betrayed “America First” principles by remaining strongly pro-Israel and launching a preemptive war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. I say “Blue Hat” because their politics effectively bolster the Democrats and the transnationalists the party represents. Lately, some of the Blue Hats have even taken to ingratiating themselves with Muslims.
Concern for Israel’s future and security is America First. Islam is the common enemy. This is why preemptive action against Iran is just war. Perhaps Israel is capable of defending itself. But a Middle East without Israel would only strengthen Islam. Israel represents the only modern liberal democratic state in the Orient. And the Islamic Republic represents a real threat to Israel’s existence—long-range ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, and genocidal proxies at the borders of the Jewish state. Carlson, Kelley, and their ilk are downplaying that threat, and condemning the war, going so far as to treat Muslims as if they are like Christians—and not at all like Jews, whom the Blue Hats see as the true enemy. If the US were to withdraw its support for Israel in any significant way, it would imperil Israel, and this, in effect, empowers Islam. It is not as if the Blue Hats have neutral ground on which to stand. Either one stands with Israel, or one stands with Islam.
The conservatives expressing affinity to Islam, when pressed on the issue, can be expected to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamists. But Islamism is not a wayward branch or perversion of Islam. Originally, the term Islamism meant the religion of Islam. The meaning was changed in the late twentieth century after the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution led by Ruhollah Khomeini. Western scholars and journalists revived the old word Islamism and narrowed it to mean political movements seeking to organize government or society according to Islamic principles or law. There are, thus, good Muslims and bad Muslims.
Yet, Islam is a political movement. And, so, the old term has been repurposed for subtefuge, to rhetorically differentiate between those who believe in Allah, in the way Jews do with Yahweh (setting aside the antisemites), and those who faithfully practice Islam with all its entailments, which are destructive and violent. This is a deception. Muslims are not like Jews. Judaism is a solid guide to the good life for peaceful people. Judaism, working through the rational Christianity that pushed through the Reformation, gave rise to liberal capitalism (Anticipating Weber: Revisiting Marx and the “Jewish Question”). It is the moral and practical spirit of the Enlightenment. Islam is a guide for aggressive war and totalitarianism.
It is worth noting that this differentiation came powerfully with the expansion of ecumenism beyond the tolerance developed among Christians for its many different sects. This gave rise to an interfaith project that welcomed Islam. Huge mistake. (See Defensive Intolerance: Confronting the Existential Threat of Enlightenment’s Antithesis.) The differentiation allowed Islamic propagandists and their allies to claim that Islamism is an unfair designation because it blurs the line between the faithful and the extremist.
They’ve got us coming and going, don’t they? But Islam is an extremist belief system. Islam is Islamism. The best one can hope for is that Muslims don’t take their religion to heart. But hoping for the best can be suicidal, especially in this case. An increasing proportion of Muslims take matters to heart, and their growing numbers in the West—which should terrify all good and decent people—are emboldening them.
Muslims have a great many mosques in which to pray, but you may have noticed that they pray out on the sidewalks and streets, blocking traffic, disrupting the lives of the indigenous peoples of those countries they are colonizing. They even gather and pray on church grounds. In our law and institutions, they are establishing Sharia, the rules of Islam, demanding, among other things, that their dietary restrictions and other rituals be observed everywhere. They’re harassing people for eating during the days they fast. Be respectful, progressives chastize men of the West. In our communities, Muslims blare the call to prayer five times a day through megaphones from Mosque rooftops. They’re telling women how to dress—and using “immodesty” as an excuse to rape. They’re demanding we stop walking our dogs around them. They are holding non-Muslims accountable according to the blasphemy rules of their religion.
These are displays of aggression, and they’re often accompanied by violence. Muslims are telling us that they’re taking over the spaces of the host countries that have succumbed to the pathology of misplaced empathy and a warped sense of humanitarianism that tolerates extremist ideologies. They are using the freedoms and virtues of the West, our open-mindedness and tolerance, as well as Western concern for the downtrodden, and the gullibility produced by the postmodernist notion of standpoint, to subvert the West. And they’re amplifying antisemitism to conscript people on both the left and the right in the Islamization project, which we see in the pro-Palestinian crowd and the far-right that has rejected Trump and the Red Hat America First movement. We have but a generation to turn this around—if that. Some Western countries may be beyond saving.
I appreciate the reader’s patience in allowing me to critique the progressive epistemic and note the threat of Islam (I have written several essays on the latter, which I will leave the reader to seek out if interested). I now turn to history, since if Muslims and their allies are going to appeal to it, it is important to ensure that historical truth is known—and understood.
* * *
The map progressives are keen to share but not explain
The legitimacy of the Jewish claim to the territory is well established. The Jews are not only an indigenous people of the territory, but for millennia have been the dominant ethnic group there. It is an incontrovertible fact that the territory that came under British rule following World War I, then called “Mandatory Palestine” or the “British Mandate for Palestine,” administered under a League of Nations mandate system established after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, is the ancestral homeland of the Jews. And so, it remains today. The state of Israel is an established member of the international community.
In a moment, I will get into how the territory came to be called “Palestine.” For the present, however, it is important to note the significance of other indigenous populations there—Bedouin, Samaritans, and others. If we go back further in time, we find living alongside the Israelites, groups known as the Canaanites, Philistines, and Phoenicians. Today, those calling themselves “Palestinians” are among the various groups presently identified, but there is no nation, either in ethnic or state terms, called “Palestine.” In the centuries before the establishment of the State of Israel, all the groups living in that territory were known as Palestinians, not because there were ethnic Palestinians, but because the name of the territory identified them as such. Jews were also Palestinians for this reason. If a state ever exists, called Palestine, it will not be rooted in anything organic. It will be yet another Arab state among many such constructs beyond the Arabian Peninsula.
Those identifying themselves as Palestinians today, in the sense of an alleged distinct national group, indeed speak Arabic, but they did not always. Before Arabization, which occurred around the Seventh Century AD, recent in terms of the longue durée, they spoke other Semitic languages. Arabization of Palestine is a late historical development, occurring with the spread of Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula via conquest, colonization, and slavery. This history cannot be told separately from the spread of Islam. Within the Arabic-speaking and Islamic intellectual traditions, the Qur’an is widely regarded as the supreme model of classical Arabic eloquence and style. Its language had an enormous influence on the development, preservation, and standardization of Arabic grammar, rhetoric, and literary culture.
We need to go back in time to understand the situation, especially to understand how that territory came to be called “Palestine.” Before then, it had another name: Judea, which was a Jewish nation. Like many kingdoms, its historic borders shift to-and-fro for various reasons beyond the scope of this essay. But that it was an established place of successive Jewish kingdoms is beyond dispute. I pick up the history of imperial control over Jewish territories under Rome.
In the middle of the last century BC, the Roman general Pompey conquered Judea, bringing the region under Roman influence. Initially, Rome governed indirectly through client kings rather than direct imperial administration. One of the most significant of these rulers was Herod the Great, who ruled from roughly 37 BC until 4 BC as a Roman client king.
I digress here to elaborate on a point I made in a May 2024 essay (Is the Progressive Left Flirting with Christophobia?) regarding Herod’s son Herod Antipas. Herod’s family background was not traditionally Judean-Israelite in the narrow ethnic sense. His father, Antipater, was an Idumean, or Edomite, from a neighboring Semitic people who lived south of Judea. In the Second Century BC, the Hasmonean rulers conquered Idumea, compelling, or at least encouraging, the population to adopt Judaism. As a result, Herod’s family became integrated into the Jewish political and religious world of Judea. Some historical sources also suggest that Herod’s mother may have had Nabataean ancestry. Technically, perhaps not ethnically Jewish as such things are reckoned (through the mother’s line), Herod was born a Jew culturally and religiously. He did many things for Jews, including the expansion of the Second Temple.
After a period of political instability following Herod’s death, Judea was reorganized as a directly administered Roman province governed by Roman prefects and procurators, including Pontius Pilate, mentioned in the New Testament (whom I discussed in that earlier essay). Crucially, all this was centuries before Muhammad plagiarized the Old and New Testaments in the Seventh Century AD to produce Islam. Indeed, this was centuries before the Arabic language took its classical and recognizable literary form, a process that did not begin until the Fifth Century AD.
As an aside, Muhammad claimed the archangel Gabriel dictated the scriptures to him, which he then dictated to somebody else, since Muhammad was illiterate. I note this because I find it fascinating how this parallels the story of the North American Christian cult leader Joseph Smith, who claimed that the ghost of an ancient prophet, Moroni, delivered the revelation that became the Book of Mormon to Smith, which, like Muhammad, he dictated to scribes, who wrote it down. Like Muhammad, Smith was a polygamist who included juveniles among his wives.
During the First Century AD, tensions between Rome and the Jewish population intensified, and in 66 AD, the First Jewish–Roman War erupted. The conflict culminated in 70 AD, when the Roman general Titus captured Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple, which had been rebuilt in the Sixth-Fifth Centuries BC and, as noted, later expanded by Herod (the father) in the first century BC. The area known today as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is the site where the Second Temple once stood. After the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in 638 AD, the area came under Muslim rule, and over time, major Islamic religious structures were built on the platform.
Several decades after the destruction of the Second Temple came the Bar Kokhba revolt in the Second Century AD during the reign of Emperor Hadrian. After suppressing the revolt, Hadrian undertook measures intended to diminish Jewish association with the land. This is a crucial fact of history, for among these actions was renaming the province from Judea to “Syria Palaestina,” the term “Palaestina” derived from earlier Greek terminology associated with the Philistines, an ancient people who had lived along the southern coastal region centuries earlier. This Roman renaming is the origin of the later geographic term “Palestine.” When pro-Hamas activists share older maps of the region that identify the territory as such, they do not tell of this history. They leave this part out because it affirms the territory as the Jewish homeland.
The Roman province of Syria Palaestina encompassed what is now Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, as well as portions of modern Jordan. Depending on the administrative period and how historians define provincial boundaries, it may also have extended into parts of present-day Lebanon and Syria. The region’s borders changed repeatedly under Roman and later Byzantine administration. All this is crucial to understanding the present conflict—if history matters.
Returning to the matter of Arabization, before the Islamic conquest of the Levant, the region the Romans called Syria Palestina was home to multiple Semitic-speaking populations. Languages commonly spoken included Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew (there were other regional dialects). Arabic, when it emerged centuries later, was spoken primarily in the Arabian Peninsula, though some northern Arab tribes and trading groups interacted with Levantine populations before Islam.
I noted earlier that the classical form of Arabic began emerging in the Fifth Century AD. By the Seventh Century, around the time of Muhammad, Classical Arabic had developed into a highly standardized literary language. The Qur’an was thus written in a recently codified language and itself substantially codified that language. Following the early Islamic conquests that spread outward from the Arabian Peninsula across the Levant, Mesopotamia, North Africa, and beyond, many local populations gradually adopted the Arabic language and culture.
On the way to the Nabataen Treasury in Petras
The Nabataean Kingdom, centered around Petra in present-day southern Jordan, illustrates the linguistic complexity of the ancient Near East. I have been to Petra twice and have seen the proto-Arabic scripts myself. Nabataean inscriptions include Aramaic, Greek, and early forms of Arabic script, reflecting the multicultural and multilingual character of the region under Hellenistic and Roman influence. My point here is not to deny the origins of the language and culture, but to show that it is not original to the Levant.
The process that began with the Islamic conquest occurred over centuries and did not necessarily involve large-scale population replacement. Instead, many indigenous peoples of the Levant adopted Arabic while retaining significant genetic and ancestral continuity with earlier populations of the region. Most of those who speak Arabic today in the region were not originally from the Arabian Peninsula, nor did their ancestors speak Arabic. They would have spoken other languages in ancient times and been the subjects of various Jewish kingdoms. (For perspective, ancient history ends with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the Fifth Century AD, long before the Arabization of the Levant.)
To be sure, modern populations in the Levant—including Bedouins, Druze, Jews, Samaritans, and those calling themselves Palestinians, along with various Christian communities—often show deep genetic roots connected to ancient populations of the region. However, while those identifying as Palestinians today largely speak Arabic and identify culturally as Arabs, historians and genetists describe them as descended from earlier Levantine populations who became linguistically and culturally Arabized over centuries following the Islamic conquests.
The genetics of the people in this region are often used to argue that Palestinians have a right to the territory. This typically comes with the claim that the European background of many Jews living in Israel means they are colonizers. However, most Jewish diaspora groups (Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, etc.) share ancestry with ancient Near Eastern/Levantine populations. Jewish communities remained relatively endogamous for many centuries, which preserved an identifiable shared ancestry. Ancient DNA studies comparing modern Jews with remains from the Bronze Age and Iron Age Levant show measurable genetic continuity. Are there differences? Of course, admixture affects all populations. No modern population is identical to ancient peoples.
The significance of this history is that had Jewish rule not been overthrown by Roman imperialism, all these populations, even if not Jewish by ancestry, would have been Judean subjects and citizens. Jews have historically tolerated non-Jews, and many Israeli citizens today are not Jews, yet fully participate in Israel’s political and social life. This history is apparent in geography. Major cities in Judea included Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, and Jerusalem. Under Herod, Judea included Samaria (today northern West Bank), Galilee (northern Israel), Coastal plain cities (e.g., Jaffa), and Perea, which is east of the Jordan River, in today’s Jordan. People of many ethnicities dwelt in these cities—and still do.
After the decline of Roman rule and the later Byzantine Empire, the territory once known as Syria Palaestina passed through the control of numerous dynasties and empires over more than a millennium. In the Seventh Century AD, the region was conquered by the early Islamic caliphates following the Muslim Arab expansion out of the Arabian Peninsula. Control later shifted among several Islamic powers. During the medieval period, parts of the region were seized by the Crusaders. Muslim control was later reestablished under various leaders. In 1517, the Ottoman Empire conquered the region and ruled it for roughly four centuries until World War I. After the Ottoman defeat, Britain occupied the territory, eventually leading to the establishment of the British Mandate for Palestine under the League of Nations in the early 1920s.
We can now leave the longue durée and move to recent history. After the 1948 war between Arabs and Jews, which the Arabs initiated following the establishment of the State of Israel, the West Bank came under Jordanian control. In 1950, Jordan formally annexed the territory and incorporated it into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Many Palestinian Arab residents of the West Bank were granted Jordanian citizenship as a result (although, given the terms of the kingship system, they were and are more properly identified as subjects). This is why it is often said that the so-called Palestinians, who refused to be part of Israel, already have a country, namely, Jordan. Jordan retained control of the West Bank until the 1967 Six-Day War, also initiated by the Arabs, when Israel captured the territory.
From that point onward, Jordan no longer had control over the West Bank, and Israel established military occupation there. Unfortunately, Israel did not annex and incorporate the West Bank, a mistake currently, albeit slowly, amid international opposition (shaped by Third Worldism), under rectification. In any case, in 1988, Jordan formally renounced its claims to the West Bank, ceding its administrative and legal ties to the territory and recognizing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of the Palestinian people. Founded by the Arab League, the PLO was charged with the “liberation of Palestine” through armed struggle. The PLO is not the only terrorist organization pursuing this goal. Hamas emerged in 1987 during the First Intifada, originating in the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The story of the Gaza Strip is crucial to this history. In ancient times, Gaza was a coastal city-region known as Philistia, controlled by various powers over the centuries. The Philistines were a major rival of the ancient Israelites. This was long ago, between the Eleventh and Tenth Centuries BC. The Philistines gradually disappeared as a distinct people between roughly the Seventh and Fifth Centuries BC. Those claiming to be Palestinians today have no relationship to this ancient people.
After the 1948 war, Gaza came under Egyptian military administration. Egypt governed the territory but did not annex it, and Gaza’s residents were not granted Egyptian citizenship. This arrangement lasted until 1967, when Israel captured the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War, ending Egyptian control. Unlike the Sinai Peninsula, which was later returned to Egypt under the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, Gaza was not included in any such agreement. Egypt did not formally cede Gaza in a treaty; rather, it had administered the territory until 1967 and then did not regain it afterward. Thus, it fell under Israeli administration. In 2005, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israeli civilians were evacuated. All Israeli soldiers left before the year was out. Hamas assumed control in the wake of Israeli withdrawal, which, in hindsight, was a grave error.
Taken as a whole, the historical record of the region reveals a long, continuous sequence of demographic, political, and linguistic transformations, rather than a single, stable national identity unchanged across millennia, except for the Jews. The land has been governed by successive empires, inhabited by overlapping populations, and repeatedly redefined by conquest, administration, and cultural change, but, throughout it all, the Jewish character of the land has remained.
Within the longue durée framework, and even narrower historical frames, the Jewish connection to the territory appears not as a recent political construction, but as an ancient and persistent historical reality that predates later imperial overlays. At the same time, the region’s complexity is shaped by the layering of subsequent populations and languages, particularly following the Arabization of the Levant after the Seventh Century AD. All this may be admitted. But it does not change the central claim. Israel is yet another instance of Jewish political organization on their indigenous lands.
Betraying his concern for indigenous populations, Howard Zinn was sharply critical of Israeli government actions toward Palestinians, particularly military occupations and large-scale military responses in Gaza and Lebanon. He ostensibly framed the conflict through his broader antiwar philosophy: that state violence and retaliation tend to perpetuate cycles of suffering rather than resolve them. In interviews and essays, he compared some Israeli policies to apartheid and argued that Palestinians were denied basic rights and self-determination. In these works, he accepted the historical revisionism of Islamic propagandists, which we might say is unbecoming for a professional historian, except for those operating from his epistemological frame. Still unbecoming, on second thought.
The point I wish to make is that, if modern political claims cannot be meaningfully separated from the deep historical processes that produced the present demographic and cultural landscape, then those who oppose Israel’s existence lose their appeal to history. Any serious account of justice or legitimacy in the region on these terms must engage with the full historical depth rather than selectively compressing or simplifying it. The continuity of Jewish historical presence, alongside the later regional transformations, forms the essential backdrop against which contemporary claims and political arrangements are meaningfully and validly understood.
Ironically, this exposes the pro-Palestinian crowd as genocidal in intent. When pro-Palestine activists chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” what they mean is the elimination of Jews from the territory Arabs now claim as their own, justifying their eliminationist sentiment on the false claim that the Palestinians are a people colonized by an external force, which presumes they are a people.
The land upon which Israel is established is not indigenous Arab lands. The pro-Palestine movement is, therefore, not merely a colonial movement that seeks to assume control of the territory by Arabs—it is colonialism to be sure—but a genocidal project to eradicate the Jews in the Middle East. The rhetoric of genocide used to delegitimize the Jewish state is thus a projection by those intent on continuing the Judaicide that marked the Nazi horror. Indeed, as I have shown on this platform, the Arabs not only admired Hitler’s eliminationist ambitions but also explicitly allied with him in the project to cleanse the world of Jewish presence.
Helen of Troy appears in director Christopher Nolan’s upcoming epic mythological film, The Odyssey. Academy Award-winner Lupita Nyong’o plays both Helen and her sister, Clytemnestra, in the film. For those unfamiliar with Nyong’o, she is black. Helen was white. Objections to her casting are met with various rationalizations, chief among them: actors can play any role; objecting to Nyong’o performing the role is rooted in white supremacy; and Helen was a mythological figure, euhemorized into history, so what does it matter?
The ancient Greek black-figure amphora on the left, dating to approximately 550 BCE, depicts Helen of Troy. Lupita Nyong’o is on the right
If Helen of Troy were a historical figure, given where she was purportedly from, what do you think she’d look like? Have you read descriptions of her? She’s described as especially white. It was her most remarkable feature. She would have stood out among the olive-skinned people around her. It wasn’t as if Sub-Saharan Africans were unknown to the peoples of the Mediterranean. If Helen were black, we’d have known about it.
Many of us know that Helen was fair-skinned and likely had blond or reddish-blond hair, but some people will watch this movie and walk away believing Helen was an African woman. The choice of actor distorts history—and the distortion is for political reasons. It would be the same with depictions of Jesus. If Jesus were a historical person, he would have been male and Caucasian. Depicting Jesus as a woman or an African would rightly be seen as an ideological move.
The rule is not unconditional. Black performers participated in the production of Jesus Christ Superstar. That was a rock opera where vocal performances were centered. This is not the same as producing a historically-based drama where accuracy is integral. In that case, it compels the dramaturgist to contradict the integrity of his field for the sake of diversity. It is not that non-Jews cannot play the role of Jesus, but casting a Chinese man in the role would signal an agenda.
To be sure, movie studios can cast anybody they want in their movies. But when studios use the medium to push historical revisionism for ideological purposes, they should be called out for it. The controversy over the lack of diversity in The Promised Land arose from a tense exchange during a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, rather than from broad audience criticism of the film itself. Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen and director Nikolaj Arcel were confronted with the question and responded appropriately with astonishment. The discussion largely focused on the tension between Hollywood’s diversity standards and the historical realities of European settings. But the movie is set in eighteenth-century Denmark.
Part of movie magic is the ability to suspend disbelief. Taking liberties with characters is particularly hard when the subject matter is historical and well-known. Knowing that Helen and Jesus were Caucasian would make it impossible for somebody who knew these stories to participate in the magic.
This is true for movie roles in many different ways. When Robert De Niro depicted Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, the actor bulked up to look like a middleweight and even put on 60lbs to portray the older LaMotta. Those of us who follow boxing history would have found a skinny De Niro unconvincing in the role. Suppose a black actor was cast as LaMotta? Sounds absurd, but this is where diversity rules take the industry.
Something must be said about hypocrisy here. Suppose Martin Luther King, Jr. were played by a white man? Ben Kingsley was criticized for portraying an Indian in Gandhi, specifically accused of “brown face”—even though Kingsley was of Indian ancestry on his father’s side and both the English and the Indians are Caucasian. A white man portraying King would be scandalous. I would not think to ask why it matters that King is played by a white man. I know why it matters. And knowing why something like this matters is not a matter of racism on my part. If racism is to be found here, it is to be found among those who are erasing the racial identity of historical figures for the sake of an identitarian agenda.
Far-right influencers have swarmed social media to tell us that fifth-generation farmer and decorated war fighter Ed Gallrein, who just clobbered former tech industry insider Thomas Massie in the Republican Primary for Kentucky’s 4th District, could only win because Jews bought the seat for him. We are now the “United States of Israel,” the far right declares. They also claim the election was stolen. They’re so deluded that they believe Jewish machinations defeated Massie. Since Trump endorsed Gallrein, the President is part of the conspiratorial web organized by Israel. More accurately, they depict the President as a puppet worked by the Jewish hand up his backside.
How the far right sees the world
Those of us who live in the real world know that Massie lost in Kentucky because the good people of that state want a Congressman who will advance the President’s agenda, not disrupt it. Gallrein is the man to advance the Trump agenda in Congress. Gallrein campaigned as an “America First” conservative, emphasizing border security, deregulation, and tax cuts. Crucially, he does not fixate on Jeffrey Epstein, the hustler who committed suicide in federal prison in 2019. Massie is obsessed with Epstein. This endears him to the far right, who believe that the “Epstein files” contain evidence of a Jewish pedophile ring controlling the United States. But the public has seen enough to know that Trump was not involved in Epstein’s crimes. Moreover, they’re smart enough to know that, if there was anything there, it would have dominated the 2024 campaign. And they aren’t dumb or deluded enough to believe that Jews control the scene.
Massie co-led a bipartisan push with Rep. Ro Khanna to force the Department of Justice to release the files, using a discharge petition to bypass House leadership. Why Massie decided to join the Democrats in whipping up hysteria over the “Epstein files” goes to character, and this makes the man unacceptable to the America First movement. Thomas Massie has repeatedly voted against aid packages for Israel, the bulwark of Western sensibilities in the region. He was also the only House member to vote against a 2023 resolution equating denial of Israel’s right to exist with antisemitism, arguing that it blurred legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Is denying Israel’s right to exist legitimate criticism of the only Jewish state in the world? He has often opposed or been the sole Republican “no” on various pro-Israel resolutions, including BDS-related measures and other symbolic statements supporting the US-Israel alliance. The answer to the “why” question is that Massie harbors deep-seated anti-Israel sentiments, and slapping the label “libertarian” on antisemitism cannot disguise a worldview.
Massie didn’t lose a close election on May 19. The eight-term House member was blown out. It’s not as if Massie supporters didn’t see this coming. The best polling data predicted Gallrein would win by a huge margin. And so he did. In the end, he prevailed by a whopping ten points. The election wasn’t stolen; Massie was crushed. And he is not the only Republican to destroy his political career over Israel. Marjorie Taylor Greene made a similar decision to join the hysteria over the Epstein files. She gave up her seat when she realized that turning against Trump would mean that voters would be tossed from office. Massie decided to lose his seat in a humiliating defeat. In defeat, he made sure the public knew he was an antisemite by joking about having to phone Gallrein in Tel Aviv to concede the race. It will likely be the last thing we will remember about the man.
Did AIPAC and other pro-Israel PACs contribute to Gallrein’s campaign? Yes. Like many lobbies representing the interests of other nations, pro-Israel forces are involved in US politics. However, most of Gallrein’s financial support came from other sources. But what won Gallrein the opportunity to represent Kentucky in the House, aside from the voters’ frustration with Massie, was Trump’s endorsement. Trump has had a remarkably strong run in the 2026 Republican primaries so far, especially in the highest-profile contests. His endorsed candidates won several major races this week. In addition to Kentucky, Trump-backed candidates performed well in primaries in Alabama, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. The voters are sending a clear message to the Party: no more establishment Republicans.
The power of Trump’s endorsements and the America First base will likely result in the defeat of other politicians who are more interested in pursuing their historic role as controlled opposition, prioritizing the interests of their wealthy donors over the interests of the American people. Trump’s endorsement of Ken Paxton over obstructionist John Cornyn in the Texas Senate Primary race spells doom for the four-term establishment operative. Cornyn served as Mitch McConnell’s Republican Whip from 2013 to 2019. Kentucky RINO McConnell is another creature of the donor class whose only good deed was preventing Barack Obama from putting another progressive on the Supreme Court. Cornyn ran to succeed McConnell as party leader but was ultimately defeated by John Thune, yet another establishment Republican obstructing the America First agenda. There is some suggestion that JD Vance assume his constitutional power as President of the Senate and take control of the Republican agenda. Sounds like a plan. That and continuing to drive RINOs out of the party.
Ed Gallrein, farmer and war fighter wins the Republican primary in Kentucky’s 4th District
Feigning astonishment, the far right is asking, “Who is Ed Gallrein?” They know who he is, but they want you to pretend along with them that they don’t. They need you to believe that an agriculturalist and decorated war fighter is a Trojan Horse for Israel. If they didn’t know who he is, then they aren’t very patriotic. Before entering national politics, Gallrein dedicated his life to military service as a Navy SEAL officer. He retired from service after thirty years and returned to his family farm in Kentucky. Now he leaves his Kentucky farm to serve his country again and advance America First priorities in Congress. It’s a résumé that would excite a Founding Father. Massie fades away as a nonentity. Good riddance. We need to see the fake America Firsters out the door, as well. Anti-Jewish antipathy has no place in the Republican Party. Leave that ancient hatred and loathing to the far right, the left, and Islam—and return them to history where they belong.
freedom and reason 