MAGA Civil War and the Return of the Neocons

Zionism and Trump's betrayal

Michael Kumpmann on Trump’s betrayal, Zionism, and the fracturing of the American Right.

First of all, to be clear: until fairly recently, I was actually relatively pro-Israel. (I considered Netanyahu one of the few Western politicians with a brain and liked his cooperation with Orban. I was even initially pleased about Netanyahu’s reelection.) I had even considered continuing Michael Millerman’s text about Israel as a potentially good ally for the Fourth Political Theory and adding my own perspective to it. At the same time, I had also long held sympathies for Iran, especially because of figures like Ali Shariati, Ahmad Fardid, and others whom I found fascinating. I could never stand the neocons. For a long time, they were the main reason I did not want to call myself conservative. The main reason I supported Donald Trump was also the hope of finally getting rid of the neocons, along with his promise of “no new wars.”

Well. Now things have turned out the way they have. The question is whether Trump was blackmailed by Jeffrey Epstein-related material through Benjamin Netanyahu, whether Trump betrayed us, whether Trump is still one of the good guys after all, or whether the whole thing was staged from the beginning and Trump had been coldly lying to us for more than ten years, playing the role of the anti-regime-change candidate in order to eventually hand his beloved Bibi the war with Iran. Somehow I still hope things may turn around for the better and that Trump has not been deceiving us the entire time. But I honestly do not know anymore and am more than bewildered.

One of the biggest voices opposing Trump’s “betrayal” right now is Tucker Carlson, who has effectively become the Emmanuel Goldstein figure for Republicans and Zionists alike. (Honestly, when you look at the way people like Mark Levin, James Lindsay, Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, Lindsey Graham, etc. are going after him, it genuinely feels one hundred percent like the Two Minutes Hate from Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

The neocon Zionists have also launched their disgusting “Woke Right” smear campaign against us. To begin with, the way they use the term is completely illogical. They want to insult us as “woke,” meaning they supposedly see us as left-liberal idiots who call every critic the next Hitler, while at the same time they themselves portray us as the new Hitler. The contradiction is obvious immediately. Beyond that, these neocons are precisely the people who constantly posture with a painfully artificial moralism and label everyone they dislike a Nazi. In other words, they themselves are the ones who most closely resemble the woke mentality, not us.

Their moralism is also absolutely hypocritical. When the war with Iran began, these people basically came to us and said, “Keep your mouths shut. Netanyahu is fighting for women’s rights.” They were still using that absurd argument even after a girls’ school in Iran was bombed. Apparently, according to their logic, bombing girls’ schools is also somehow an act that advances women’s rights, or what exactly is the argument supposed to be?

And the hypocrisy does not end with their attempt to turn Benjamin Netanyahu into some kind of Alice Schwarzer 2.0.¹ Another example was Nick Fuentes’s interview with Piers Morgan, where a Zionist guest argued that Nick Fuentes should be ashamed of himself and that it was unacceptable for him to say that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were somehow “cool” because of the immense suffering caused by the Holocaust and similar atrocities. Yet those very same Zionists celebrated the fact when Donald Trump threatened, during the Iran conflict, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” So, according to them, glorifying Hitler is morally unacceptable because he carried out a genocide, yet at the same time one supposedly has a moral duty to celebrate and support Trump for allegedly wanting to carry out a genocide on Israel’s behalf.

(Incidentally, the very same people who celebrate Trump’s alleged threat to commit genocide for Israel also claim it is antisemitic to say that Netanyahu is committing genocide against the Palestinians, because according to them Israel could never commit genocide. They genuinely seem willing to absorb every possible logical contradiction into their own position.)

Apparently genocide is only considered evil when Jews are the victims—is that the implication? I mean, even though Hitler’s genocide should obviously be condemned, condemning it does not bring a single dead person back to life. (On the other hand, nobody’s life would be endangered if someone simply thought Genghis Khan was “cool,” for example.) Preventing Trump from potentially carrying out a genocide, however, would actually save lives.

Aside from that, one can certainly accuse Nick Fuentes of being quite tasteless at times, yet a prominent member of the Likud is Itamar Ben-Gvir, and stylistically he has exactly the same kind of tasteless internet-troll persona as Fuentes. (I also have to admit that I actually find Ben-Gvir somewhat more sympathetic than other Zionists, because at least he does not wrap himself in that same hypocritical moralism.)

It is also deeply grotesque that Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court over accusations related to genocide, while he and his supporters still believe they are entitled to lecture opponents of the war with endless moralizing speeches. I personally also regard the ICC more as an instrument of Western neocolonial dominance and a fairly absurd organization, yet this level of moral hubris is arrogance multiplied by ten.

My impression is that this smear campaign is another attempt at a purge by the liberal conservatives. One sees similar things within the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as well. (Where people can practically get attacked just for daring to admire thinkers like Julius Evola or Martin Heidegger.) These liberal conservatives have always been obsessively concerned with maintaining “respectable bourgeois seriousness,” while Trump’s movement brought in a complete freak show—including Alt-Right furries, people who saw a right-wing manifesto in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, femboys, and countless other eccentric figures—all of whom were constantly viewed as an embarrassment by the supposedly respectable bourgeois camp. (They were probably already trying to carry out a purge after the Unite the Right rally.)

I suspect this smear campaign is yet another strike by the bourgeois conservatives against the “freaks.” Yet honestly, I would take a femboy with his heart in the right place a thousand times over people like Lindsey Graham, Mark Levin, or Friedrich Merz. Secondly, it was genuinely interesting to have a free marketplace of ideas where even the strangest occult theories could be discussed among conservatives, instead of reducing everything to shallow slogans like “The Greens want to take away our schnitzel” and similarly low-level talking points.

Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, who are both among the most prominent and successful opponents of the neocons and Zionists, are interestingly both influenced by Pat Buchanan. Buchanan was a paleoconservative who rose to prominence under Ronald Reagan and later turned against George H. W. Bush’s wars and regime-change policies. Like Buchanan, both Carlson and Fuentes want to end—or at least scale back to the American sphere—the policies of regime change, war, and foreign intervention, while also opposing globalism and free trade in favor of a more protectionist economic policy. They want to restrict migration and defend Christian values. (Fuentes, however, is more radical than Carlson and in some respects is also willing to cooperate with migrants who are already in the country.) In other words, both of them essentially advocate what Donald Trump originally promised before Netanyahu supposedly convinced him to change direction.

The difference is that Carlson, Fuentes, and Buchanan were all sharply critical of groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whereas Trump always remained tied to them. While Buchanan favored more of a liberal night-watchman state, Fuentes advocates policies that resemble European social democracies in certain respects, aiming to address problems such as the housing crisis, the impoverishment of young people, and private debt crises. In that sense, Fuentes is also something of a “Huey Long light.” He does not fully embrace the idea that “there should be every man a king in this land flowing with milk and honey instead of the lords of finance at the top and slaves and peasants at the bottom,” yet certain tendencies in that direction are clearly present.

What is positive about both Carlson and Fuentes is that they oppose the absurd anti-Islam scene, which largely seeks to defend Western left-liberal—especially sexual—hedonism against Islam, following the logic of Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Fuentes and Carlson have repeatedly pointed out, quite correctly from their perspective, that groups such as the Taliban or the Iranian state embody more conservative values than the Washington establishment, and that liberal conservatives effectively accuse Muslims of being “too conservative.” Meanwhile, those same liberal conservatives often defend openly woke excesses—such as certain Pride parades—and at times almost seem eager to prove that they themselves are the “better woke.”

At first, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes absolutely despised each other. It was a good development, however, that they eventually spoke to one another and partially reconciled. Especially because Carlson initially adopted the neocon framing that Fuentes was simply “too extreme.” There certainly were fringe figures among the American Right, such as Andrew Anglin, yet even so, one should avoid allowing oneself to be manipulated by the liberal strategy of divide and conquer. The neocons should not have the authority to decide who is excluded from public discourse. They win the moment they successfully impose their framing on everyone else.

I think the biggest losers in the current situation are the libertarians. At the beginning of Trump’s second term, the libertarians had enormous momentum, above all thanks to Elon Musk. (One can see this clearly in the interview between Musk and the leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, where both essentially converged on libertarian ideas.) Even Alexander Dugin frequently praised libertarianism because of figures like Musk and Carlson.

Then everything shifted. DOGE was shut down, the Epstein files were effectively withheld by Trump despite his pre-election promises to the contrary, and Trump fell out with Elon Musk while devoting himself entirely to what the author sarcastically calls his “one true love,” Benjamin Netanyahu. At first, Musk appeared to be a genuinely powerful counterforce against what many perceived as Trump’s betrayal, yet then came the “peace” between Musk and Trump, which in practice seemed more like a non-aggression pact designed to stop Musk from continuing his attacks against Trump. DOGE was never reinstated, and instead Trump supposedly handed “Bibi” yet another war with Iran.

(Musk also reportedly wanted to cooperate within his political movement with Curtis Yarvin, the founder of the neoreactionary movement and one of the intellectual godfathers behind the DOGE concept. Yet Yarvin has now, like Carlson and Alex Jones, landed on the Zionists’ “Woke Right” enemy list.)

The only truly visible libertarian figure right now is Thomas Massie, who is also doing a good job, though he is under enormous political pressure. Elon Musk promised to donate to him, yet that never actually happened. In a certain sense, the current situation almost resembles a repetition of the George W. Bush era, where the neocons are once again running wild and Massie, as a kind of new Ron Paul, is the only one seriously holding the line against them. The difference is that Ron Paul set the tone back then, whereas today the dominant voices are more paleoconservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, while Massie mostly reacts to events rather than shaping them himself.

Another interesting development is that, whereas at the beginning of Trump’s presidency the Left—and also parts of the Right—were heavily weakened while the libertarians experienced a renaissance, there is now a kind of cross-front alliance emerging in which anti-neocon figures on the Right, such as Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, are beginning to cooperate with elements of the more reasonable Left, such as Cenk Uygur from The Young Turks.

Ironically, during Trump’s first administration there was enormous hostility from our side toward Cenk Uygur. Now, however, he seems to be a better person than many of the people in whom we originally placed our trust—probably including Trump himself. Both Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes have argued that the divide with the Left should be repaired, which in turn enraged James Lindsay. In my view, the two of them are clearly right about that.

(Translated from the German)

1. Translator’s note: Alice Schwarzer is a German feminist journalist, publisher, and activist best known for founding the feminist magazine EMMA and for her prominent role in shaping postwar German debates on women’s rights and social issues.