The Dictatorship
How the left ought to approach the anti-Israel right
The American right is mired in a civil war over Israel.
Over the past year, a number of prominent right-wing pundits and activists have broken from President Donald Trump over his support for Israel and condemned Israeli policy in Gaza as mass murder. This dispute is reaching new heights since the anti-Israel sector of the right — led by right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson and including former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, right-wing podcaster and conspiracist Candace Owens, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, and white supremacist livestreamer Nick Fuentes — has accused Trump of betraying his own MAGA movement by, in their view, allowing Israel to drag the U.S. into the disastrous U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. “I hate this war and the direction that the U.S. government is taking,” Carlson said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published last weekend, while accusing the administration of failing to “act on behalf of its own citizens.”
Much of the pro-Palestinian left is watching with curiosity and amazement. At the peak of its energy objecting to U.S. backing for Israel’s genocide in Gazathe left-wing pro-Palestinian movement was overwhelmingly opposed by the right and sidelined by the Democratic Partyquashed by university administrators and silenced by a shameful round of cancel culture within liberal institutions. Now it watches as the right is riven by its own internal split over support for Israel, with the anti-Israel tendency spearheaded by the most powerful right-wing pundit in America and buoyed by widespread defection from a pro-Israel status quo among Republicans under age 50.
Carlson’s intensifying criticism of Israel does not stem from some kind of new, leftist-inspired commitment to universal human rights.
The pro-Palestinian left — which includes swathes of the Arab American community, movement advocates, democratic socialists, progressive students and a segment of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — is in a strange position. Some leftists are pondering whether Carlson and his faction are in fact an unlikely ally to the pro-Palestinian movement.
Online, this discussion often takes the form of debating how to respond to Carlson saying humanizing things about Palestinians that can make him sound quite a lot like a leftist when engaging with the mainstream press. Over and over again, this discussion centers on whether one must “hand it to Tucker Carlson” or one of his allies, or whether their seeming correctness on one issue deserves “credit” or should become a basis on which they are “liked.”
But these are the wrong questions. They consider the issue through the cultural lens of whether it is appropriate to applaud. Instead, the left should be asking why Carlson et al. believe what they do — and then use that understanding to form judgments about political action.
Doing this makes clear that the anti-Israel right is not committed in any meaningful sense to Palestinian liberation and is not a friend of the left. That doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities for strategic partnership across the aisle at the level of legislation in Washington. But this is a hardly a case of common cause or grounds for a conjoining of movements.
That’s because Carlson’s intensifying criticism of Israel does not stem from some kind of new, leftist-inspired commitment to universal human rights or egalitarianism. Rather, it can be traced back to the same right-wing white nationalist worldview that he’s held for years, which constantly deploys antisemitic tropes to insinuate that Jews constitute a threat to ideal Western civilization — and that the fundamental problem with Israel is its Jewishness.
Carlson is a staunch advocate of “great replacement” theorya concept that holds that shadowy Jewish financiers are behind porous borders and the replacement of “native” Americans with immigrants. He ascribes to Israel “an Eastern view” that is “totally incompatible with Christianity and Western civilization.” He holds the view that Israel has a secret plan to demolish the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and trigger a global religious war whose primary victims would be “Christian, Western, white countries.” In October he invited Fuentes — a Holocaust denier who has called Adolf Hitler “really f–––ing cool” — onto his podcast for a softball interview, during which Fuentes said “organized Jewry” undermined American cohesion. After his podcast appearance, Fuentes said in a video, “We are done with the Jewish oligarchy. We are done with the slavish surrender to Israel.”
In other words, this faction’s hostility to Israel is tied to the idea that Jews — in the U.S. and outside of it — exert an undue and corrupting influence on American life. Carlson will periodically go out of his way to condemn antisemitism and deny that he supports it, but it’s not hard to see how it animates his worldview if you examine it closely. It’s also evident when, for example, he discusses Russia and Ukraine. He describes Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as “ratlike” and a “persecutor of Christians,” and says he is “more sympathetic” to warmongering Russian President Vladimir Putin than Zelenskyy.
Carlson’s allies also exhibit an aversion to Israel that seems tied to its identity and uncanny “influence” rather than a principled opposition to its misbehavior. Owens subscribes to a whole host of antisemitic conspiracy theories about Israel. More subtly, in Kent’s resignation letter from the Trump administration, he framed the president as innocent in his decision to launch the Iran war, and argued that Israeli leaders “deceived” him into joining it. (Inexplicably, Kent also blamed Israelis for the Iraq War, contra the historical record.)
It is true that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied Trump aggressively to join the war. But the idea that Trump and his entire inner circle were duped, or that he could have been strong-armed while presiding over the most powerful country in the world, is nonsense. The U.S. and Iran have been adversaries for decades, and the U.S. launched a war alongside Israel because it perceived shared interests in hobbling Iran, as well as providing a close ally with uncontested regional hegemony in an area vital to U.S. energy interests.
There also are many other factors explaining why Trump was convinced that dominating Iran would be easier than it has been, including his own anti-intellectualism, the surprising smoothness of his Venezuela intervention and his many yes-men advisers. Kent’s cartoonish theory of the cause of the war only makes sense if one subscribes to the harmful worldview of Israelis as all-powerful puppeteers. And the entire anti-Israel right’s fixation on the country as an engine of U.S. imperialism allows it to preserve the myth of America as wholesome when it isn’t “manipulated”or made a “slave” by subversive outsiders.
The real rationales for right-wing anti-Israel positioning have nothing to do with Palestinian dignity or opposition to Israeli apartheid, genocide and its brutal style of warfare against neighbors. Rather, to the extent that the right mentions Palestinians at all, it uses them as a prop: part of an agenda to force the U.S. to break with Israel based largely on a bigoted suspicion of Jews and isolationist inclinations to withdraw from Middle East interventionism.
So what does it mean from the perspective of left-wing politics? It means the anti-Israel right is a terrible source of media information and political education, because of its noxious ideologies. It also means it’s a bad idea to invite champions of the anti-Israel right to intellectual and political organizing conferences on the left as featured speakers or as friends of the cause. That would mean importing and normalizing antisemitism — and virtually every other kind of bigotry that prevails on the American right — into spaces that are meant to counter bigotry and uphold universal human rights as core principles. The left’s opposition to domination is irreconcilable with the right-wing nationalist ambition to unleash domination within America for “heritage Americans.”
But there are a couple of opportunities here for the left. One is through an emerging opportunity to persuade and recruit people from the right to the left at the grassroots. This can be done by leveraging disenchantment with Trump’s policies on Israel and Iran, and by persuading ordinary, disillusioned right-wingers to rethink their worldview. As polarized as the country is, a nontrivial share of the public floats to different parts of the political spectrum based less on ideology than on broad sentiments about status quo policies and institutions. They can be persuaded to think differently. Consider, for example, the roughly 12% of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential primary voters who cast their general election ballot for Trump in 2016likely based on the notion that any vote against the political-economic establishment and forever wars was worth considering.
Pro-Palestinian organizations and the left more broadly have an opportunity to change the mind of people from the right who are sick of war and instinctively repelled by the carnage in Gaza and who feel betrayed by Trump. This would entail making clear and unapologetically antiracist arguments to persuadables that no group of people — Palestinians, Jews, immigrants, Black people, women, trans people or any other marginalized group — is “the problem.” The real problems are the political and economic systems and ideologies that uphold exploitation and perpetual warfare while scapegoating out-groups.
A charismatic Democratic presidential candidate who is fiercely opposed to the belligerent logic of imperialism has a lane here. Arguing that putting an end to American meddling in other countries’ business and to backing Israeli carnage in the Middle East could plausibly siphon off soft Trump voters who are sick of the wasteful and gruesome business of empire maintenance.
If the anti-Israel right eventually evolves into a significant subset of the GOP in Congress, Democratic lawmakers looking to cut off aid to Israel will have an opportunity to collaborate with those members to bind the president’s hands. (Greene tried to work with a handful of progressive Democrats to oppose Israeli military funding last year.) This kind of cross-ideological strategic partnership is how lawmakers get things done all the time, and a focus on a concrete policy position — no more aid to Israel — wouldn’t require the left to compromise its values. It may be the only way for progressive Democrats to wor k around pro-Israel holdouts in their own party establishment.
The question of how to work with people across different political camps is never a simple one. But here’s something that is straightforward: You don’t have to hand it to Carlson, nor do you have to not hand it to Carlson. You should ignore him and get on with with the real work of liberation and opposing empire.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.
The Senate Judiciary Committee postponed a vote on acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination, a spokesperson said late Wednesday, as two retiring Republicans on the panel dug in over President Donald Trump’s personal “anti-weaponization” deal with the government he runs.
Sen. Chuck Grassley’s decision to delay the committee vote that had been set for Thursday marks a setback for one of Trump’s highest-profile Cabinet nominees, at the hands of Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a pair of Republicans set to leave the chamber next year.
“Chairman Grassley works to set President Trump’s nominees up for success in committee, not failure. Senators Cornyn and Tillis want written assurances from the Department of Justice regarding the Trump-IRS settlement,” the committee spokesperson said.
Blanche’s nomination to permanently head the Department of Justice needs the support of either Cornyn or Tillis to make it out of the committee to a vote by the full Senate, assuming all Democrats remain opposed.
“Why don’t you call over the Department of Justice and tell them they have one hour and 50 minutes to get me what I asked for,” Cornyn told reporters Wednesday afternoon amid the hardening standoff over his demand that Blanche and the DOJ put in writing a commitment never to pursue the president’s prized “anti-weaponization” fund, and to clarify the terms of Trump’s personal deal with the Internal Revenue Service.
Tillis told MS NOW that the conversations were complicated by the need for the Justice Department to get “several parties” to agree on the language of the statement Cornyn and Tillis are seeking.
“What I’ve advised the chair, and I would assume Senator Cornyn said something similar, is that we’re not prepared to vote yes yet,” he added.
“The Department has been in regular communication with Committee members for weeks, and we look forward to continuing to work productively with Senators to address any concerns,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in response to the decision to postpone the committee vote.
Cornyn was set to meet with Blanche on Wednesday morning, but the meeting was called off after Blanche failed to meet the senator’s demand for written proposals to modify the controversial settlement agreement he brokered between Trump and the IRS. The Republican senator is set to leave Congress when his term ends in January after a bruising May primary loss to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Trump’s chosen candidate.
“Maybe John Cornyn’s upset with me because I didn’t endorse him,” Trump told reporters Wednesday afternoon in the Oval Office. “I don’t know what it is, but I haven’t heard that there’s a problem. I heard (Blanche) is going through quite nicely.”
Cornyn made clear to Blanche during his confirmation hearing that he will not get his support until he agrees to reopen and modify the settlement. Due to the committee’s narrow Republican majority, one GOP “no” vote is enough to sink Blanche’s nomination.
The senator has asked Blanche to provide proof that the proposed nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund established as part of the deal between Trump and the IRS is formally dead, and he has also demanded Blanche narrow the tax audit immunity provisions the settlement afforded to Trump and his family.
Blanche has publicly stated that his department has dropped the fund, but he and the DOJ have dodged requests from Cornyn and a federal judge to put that in writing.
After announcing his meeting with Blanche would not take place Wednesday morning, Cornyn told reporters that changes from Blanche “in a modified release form” would be acceptable, but that “for some reason … they simply refuse to do it,” referring to the DOJ.
Shortly after the meeting was called off, a Justice Department official told MS NOW that the department “provided a written proposal to Senator Cornyn’s staff yesterday following ongoing discussion with both the Committee and the Senator’s office.”
Cornyn said that proposal was “not responsive” to his demands because it did not address the tax audit immunity provisions in the settlement, one of his key demands.
In May, Blanche signed an addendum as part of the deal that granted Trump, his family and his businesses immunity from pending IRS tax audits. That agreement, which has been decried by former IRS officials and legal experts as unlawful self-dealing, is being contested in federal court.
Cornyn noted that Blanche testified under oath that he could meet the request during his confirmation hearing.
“Maybe they think I’m just going to give up or you know, go along, but they’re mistaken,” Cornyn said when asked why he thinks the DOJ could be slow-walking his request.
Kevin Frey contributed to this report.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter covering national politics and policy for MS NOW. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at SydneyCarruth.46 or follow her work on X and Bluesky.
Mychael Schnell is a reporter for MS NOW.
Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at BLN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived this week for his tour of Washington, he may have had a mission in mind.
Netanyahu needed to overcome his newly diminished stature and waning influence over his once close friend President Donald Trump as both leaders grapple with the unpopularity of a war they started together and is escaping their control.
His meeting at the White House with Trump on Tuesday, which was closed to the press, was the first face-to-face encounter between the two allies since the U.S. and Israel launched a joint attack against Iran on Feb. 28.
Trump gave him a muted welcome and afterwards simply described the meeting as “very good.” “Obviously, many important subjects were discussed,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
Rather than an intimate one-on-one setting, the Oval Office was full of top U.S. officials — Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, and special envoy Steve Witkoff.
But Netanyahu continued the full court press on the Trump administration.
Over the course of two days, in addition to seeing Trump and attending Sen. Lindsey Graham’s funeral at the Capitol, Netanyahu also met separately with Vance, Hegseth, and Rubio, White House and Israeli officials confirmed to MS NOW.
The Israeli prime minister’s slate of meetings with key U.S. national security officials comes at a pivotal moment in the Iran conflict as tensions escalate in the region and Americans increasingly sour on the war. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows 60% of American voters opposing U.S. military action against Iran and 74% against sending U.S. ground troops into Iran.
Not only does Trump face pressure as Republicans face an uphill battle to retain congressional control in this fall’s midterms, Netanyahu’s fate as prime minister is at stake in Israel’s upcoming September elections – and he can’t afford to lose Trump’s favor.
The talks largely focused on what to do next as Iran continues to menace shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and retaliate against American bases in the region and launch attacks on Gulf allies.
According to a senior Israeli official who was granted anonymity to describe the closed-door meeting, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu did not come to a final decision after discussing three paths forward: get a “good deal” focused on Iran’s nuclear program and enriched material, have no deal and instead continue the blockade and economic pressure, or take escalated military action.
But Netanyahu did not tell Trump what he should do – nor did he express a preference.
The senior Israeli official noted Netanyahu has not ruled out diplomacy – as long as it is coupled with “very strong pressures,” calling the push to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program “a contest of will and a contest of force.”
“There are ways of squeezing them and squeezing them and squeezing them and negotiating at the same time,” the official said.
Netanyahu did not present President Trump with new intelligence regarding the underground Iranian nuclear facility Pickaxe Mountain, per the senior Israeli official, noting the U.S. and Israel already are constantly sharing intelligence – and know where Iran’s highly enriched material is. “We don’t think it’s moved, and I think we have a pretty good grasp on that,” the official said.
During their meeting on Tuesday, Trump and Netanyahu discussed ways Israel and the U.S. can work together to stop Iran’s nuclear program and get the Strait of Hormuz open to maritime trade, the senior Israeli official said.
The two leaders also discussed a third goal: to continue to undermine the Iranian regime and “possibly create future conditions for a change in that area.” U.S. officials have backed away from pursuing paths that would overthrow the current leadership, but Netanyahu still believes that could happen.
“The chasm that has been created between the people and the regime is not about to be closed,” the senior Israeli official said of Netanyahu’s thinking.
Netanyahu advised Trump in February that Israeli intelligence indicated launching strikes against Iran would lead to the toppling of the Islamic Republic’s regime – and five months later, the slain ayatollah’s son retains power with a close circle of hardliners, calling into question the accuracy of Israel’s intelligence apparatus.
But the senior Israeli official said at the time, Netanyahu did not promise the Iranian people would take fate into their own hands following a coordinated attack. Rather, he chose his words carefully and said that an attack could create conditions to “advance the probability or the possibility that that would happen.”
The conditions needed for the Iranian regime to fall, “did not materialize,” the official told MS NOW, adding, “not for lack of insight, but for either operational failure or decisions that were made.”
Despite Netanyahu insisting Israel and the U.S. are on the same page, differences still remain: the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey and the Saudi nuclear arrangement did not come up during Wednesday’s White House meeting, according to a second Israeli official granted anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.
Meanwhile, the conflict continues to spread, with an Iranian drone attacking a U.S. gas storage tanker off the coast of Egypt on Wednesday.
Trump indicated he would not let Iran’s latest action slide, telling reporters on Wednesday that the U.S. would retaliate against Iran even as he leaves room for diplomatic talks to resume.
“It’s our turn, and we’ll see if we get there with an agreement at some point,” Trump said. “But we’re going to hit them very hard.”
As for what it would take for Israel to join the U.S. strikes, the senior Israeli official said that if Israel is attacked by Iran, “We will respond very, very forcefully and very quickly. And I think Iran would make a great mistake.”
Julia Jester covers politics for MS NOW and is based in Washington, D.C.
International rage over FIFA’s close ties to President Donald Trump has reached a fever pitch after soccer’s governing body announced a plan to sell a significant stake to an investor group led by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law.
The president and his family have all but turned the White House into their personal piggy bank. And FIFA — which has its own sordid history of corruption — seems to have made itself a party to Trump’s self-enrichment under Gianni Infantino’s leadership, such as by paying for space inside Trump Tower in New York. (The organization has defended the office rental as a World Cup outpost.)
Soccer is seen by many as a unifying game. But Trump’s incorporation of FIFA into his political dynasty is threatening that idea.
FIFA has announced plans to sell a large minority stake in a new company that will run its main events, including the World Cup and Club World Cup, as part of a plan to triple the amount of development money it dishes out to its 211 member associations.
Under the proposals — which are subject to approval by a majority of those national associations and FIFA’s 37-member council — a new entity called FIFA Forward Enterprises (FFE) will take over all commercial operations, while FIFA remains the game’s global governing body and retains a majority stake in FFE.
A press release from FIFA confirmed the plans and said Thrive Eternal, which was launched by Joshua Kushner, is expected to lead the investment group that would control FIFA Forward Enterprise. FIFA did not clarify why Thrive Eternal was selected, and Kushner was already dabbling in sports.
But Trump basically has already given son-in-law Jared Kushner carte blanche to dictate U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East while simultaneously hatching business plans in the region. (Jared Kushner has denied any conflicts of interest.)
Joshua Kushner reportedly has been a major donor to Democrats. But, predictably, the idea of another Kushner becoming financially entwined with the World Cup — the world’s most popular sporting event — and basically being dropped into a position of global significance isn’t going over well. Several other soccer governing bodies have expressed concerns, including Europe’s UEFA.
“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” UEFA said in a statement about The Athletic’s report, adding: “The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade — especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially. None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell.”
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee also rebuked the plan, writing on X: “Apparently the fake Peace Prize and giant lease with Trump Tower weren’t enough — now Infantino performs a kickback hat trick by pursuing a multibillion-dollar deal with Jared Kushner’s brother to sell ownership stakes in the World Cup to private investors.”
FIFA, Donald Trump’s favorite corrupt racketeering enterprise in world sports, is now going directly into business with the Trump family!
Apparently the fake Peace Prize and giant lease with Trump Tower weren’t enough—now Infantino performs a kickback hat trick by pursuing a… https://t.co/knSZibuMea
— House Judiciary Dems (@HouseJudiciary) July 28, 2026
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., has already launched an investigation into the FIFA leader’s relationship with the Trump administration, while dozens of European lawmakers — citing concerns about “potential breaches of political neutrality” — have called for the FIFA Ethics Committee to investigate Infantino. This new proposal seems unlikely to assuage those concerns.
But what it does seem likely to do is fuel global anger toward the U.S. — the kind that has been growing since Trump retook office.
And when you consider that, it’s truly remarkable how the same MAGA movement whose members whined for years about politics mixing with sports is now in lockstep with a president who seems dead-set on casting his shadow over every sports event he can.
This post on X basically sums up the foul stench around FIFA’s latest proposal.
Sepp Blatter was Infantino’s predecessor as FIFA president and oversaw the organization amid some of its many scandals. When heof all people, is warning about how Trump and Infantino’s relationship is “deeply damaging” soccer, it’s a sign of how far FIFA has descended into the gutter.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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