Thursday, July 31, 2025

Tucker Carlson’s Dark Turn

By James Kirkchick

Thursday, July 24, 2025

 

It’s perfectly valid to question America’s relationship with Israel . . . but I don’t think that’s the reason [Pat] Buchanan is being labeled an antisemite. It’s this kind of . . . relentless bringing up topics related to Judaism. . . . Here’s a guy who has . . . constantly attacked Israel, who’s attacked American Jews for supporting Israel unduly, who’s implied that American Jews push America into wars in which non-Jews die. . . . I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that antisemitic? Yeah.

 

 — Tucker Carlson, September 24, 1999

 

Since his firing from Fox News in 2023, Tucker Carlson has been descending deeper and deeper into the fever swamp of conspiracy theories. Guests on the enormously popular, self-produced Tucker Carlson Show have included author Naomi Wolf, who claims that certain clouds are in fact “geoengineered skies,” and Alex Jones, the vaudevillian mountebank whose most monstrous lie — that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was a “false flag” operation perpetrated by the government to confiscate guns — cost him $1 billion in civil damages. At a live taping of the show last September, during which Jones asserted that “the globalists are making aliens by mixing humans and other animals and insects and plants. . . . They gestate them and use cow uteruses to grow them,” Carlson lauded Jones for being “vindicated on everything.”

 

In recent months, Carlson has focused his skeptical eye on a more prosaic conspiracy: the machinations of the State of Israel and what Pat Buchanan infamously called its “amen corner” in the United States. On June 18, four days before President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites, Carlson aired an interview with Republican Senator Ted Cruz that addressed America’s potential involvement in such an operation. While the clip that earned the most attention featured Carlson expressing pseudo-shock at Cruz for not knowing Iran’s population, the crux of their tête-à-tête concerned Israel and the political influence of its American supporters.

 

Prefacing his interrogation with the proviso that he was acting “on behalf not simply of myself but of my many Jewish friends,” Carlson repeatedly pressed Cruz on alleged Israeli espionage in the United States (without mentioning any specific instances of it), rejected the theological basis of some Christians’ support for Israel, and demanded to know why AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has not been forced to “register as a foreign lobby.” When Cruz remarked on Carlson’s “obsession with Israel,” Carlson was indignant, denying that he was thus obsessed seven times over the course of their two-hour-long debate. Indeed, far from being “obsessed,” Carlson insisted that he would prefer not to discuss the subject at all. “I don’t even like talking about Israel,” he complained in the middle of an interview that touched on little else. As to Cruz’s observation that he had a malignant interest in “the Jews,” Carlson angrily replied that he was “just asking questions.”

 

A survey of Carlson’s programming and rhetoric over the past several years, however, makes abundantly clear that he is indeed very much “obsessed” with Israel and the Jews. Carlson has devoted more time and attention to the Jewish state, which he portrays in a uniformly negative light, than to any other country in the world. He has suggested that Israel and its agents have been behind everything from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the promotion of “white genocide” to the deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed entrapment of the world’s most powerful men via the trafficking of underage girls. To listen to Carlson’s show is to come away with the impression that Adolf Hitler was misunderstood, that Israel is a country systematically murdering Christians, and that American Jews compose a bloodthirsty fifth column bent on conscripting their Gentile countrymen to fight Israel’s wars.

 

***

 

Carlson’s obsession first manifested itself while he was still on Fox in the way he spoke about the Jewish president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. No foreign leader, with the possible exception of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been subjected to as much of Carlson’s vitriol. During Zelensky’s visit to Washington in December 2022, Carlson asserted that the wartime leader, who has worn military-style attire since the Russian invasion of his country in solidarity with the soldiers under his command, “arrived at the White House dressed like the manager of a strip club and started to demand money.” The following June, on the premiere episode of his first post-Fox show, “Tucker on Twitter,” free from the constraints imposed on him by that network, Carlson told us what he really thinks. Zelensky, he said, is “sweaty and ratlike, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock.” If the purpose of negatively associating Zelensky with an American investment firm whose CEO just happens to be Jewish wasn’t clear, Carlson also called him “shifty.” The only thing missing from this riff, which sounded like something one might have heard in the locker room of a restricted country club circa 1953, was a barb about the size of Zelensky’s nose.

 

Carlson’s slurs against Zelensky constitute his crudest public remarks about Jews. He is too clever and restrained to descend into full-blown antisemitic tirades à la Mel Gibson (of “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” fame). Carlson has not sunk to the level of his ally Candace Owens, who calls Judaism a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons” and “child sacrifice,” or Kanye West, several of whose antisemitic statements Carlson edited out of a two-hour interview he conducted with the performer while still at Fox.

 

Carlson disguises his obsession with innuendo. A major theme is the dubious loyalty of American Jews. Two and a half months after the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, the populist pundit Saagar Enjeti, a former employee of Carlson’s Daily Caller and a sort of Tucker-in-training, asked Carlson to explain why Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, and other conservative commentators have a “literal allegiance” to Ukraine and Israel, and why “so many of these people don’t seem to have the same level of actual care for American citizens.” Such interlopers, Carlson answered, “don’t care about the country at all” and are “focused on a conflict in a foreign country as their own country becomes dangerously unstable.” Carlson then contrasted Shapiro’s questionable lineage to his own, unassailable rootedness. Unlike Shapiro, “I have no choice” but to prioritize America, Carlson said. “I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. I’m shocked by how little they care about the country.”

 

Earlier this year, in an interview with Curt Mills, the executive editor of the American Conservative magazine, Carlson distinguished between “the neocons or whatever, these fervent intellectuals in Washington,” and those who would be “the foot soldiers” in a future military action, not “intellectuals” on the coasts but “normal American, patriotic, heavily Evangelical people, and the truth is, I think a lot of them are beginning to recognize that their religion does not support this at all.” In fact, “it’s really clear . . . I think it’s a huge problem for the war lobby, which has used these people as its supporters.” In June, Carlson referred in passing to Jane Harman, a former Democratic congresswoman who chaired an intelligence subcommittee, and who is Jewish, as “just a pure tool of the intel agencies . . . and of a foreign government.” On that same show, he defended the honor of former Democratic Congressman Jim Moran regarding his 2003 assertion that “if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.” (Moran, who has represented Qatar since 2017, is an actual “tool” “of a foreign government.”) He then denounced a Jewish critic of Moran as one of several “ghouls like that” who themselves “had, like, committed genocide.”

 

***

 

Since Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, Carlson has become even more brazen in questioning the ethics and loyalty of American Jews. “How did Bill Ackman get so rich?” he asked attendees during an hour-long harangue at a Turning Point USA conference in July, before invoking one of the hoariest of antisemitic defamations. “If you’re getting rich by loaning money to people at incredibly high interest rates, that’s something you’re going to have to talk to God about.” (Ackman is an investor, not a banker.) In an agitated appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast five days before Trump bombed Iran, Carlson rhetorically asked a Jewish-American commentator, “Are you even from here?,” described two Jewish-American media personalities as Israel’s “proxies in the United States,” and raged that Israel “blew up a church in Gaza with my money,” adding, “I’m a Christian, like, no, how about no?” There was more: “That is, you know, a Jewish state, so whatever that means exactly. And so it has an emotional resonance for Jewish people in America, some of whom are my close friends.” The perfect picture of WASP reserve patronizingly continued, “It’s not like, you know, when things happen in Sweden or the U.K., where my ancestors are from, people aren’t quite as emotional.” Thankfully, Sweden and the United Kingdom have not faced daily threats to their existence since they were founded as sovereign states, nor are their populations composed of the descendants of the victims and survivors of the worst mass murder in history.

 

Another way Carlson manifests his preoccupation with Jews is through the selection of his guests. The Tucker Carlson Show is a weekly confirmation of horseshoe theory, according to which the far right and far left have more in common with each other than either of them does with the center. On no other subject is this thesis clearer than Israel and the Jews. On his Fox program and now on his podcast, he has given a platform to retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, who inveighs against “rootless cosmopolitans,” a term for Jews that was coined by Soviet leaders in the Stalinist era. Last year, he hosted a Palestinian pastor from Bethlehem who, in a sermon on October 8, 2023, said of the attack the day before that he was “shocked by the strength of the Palestinian man who defied his siege.” During that interview, Carlson accused Israel — the only country in the Middle East with a growing Christian population — of “blowing up churches and killing Christians” and asked why “self-professed Christians” are “sending money to oppress Christians in the Middle East.”

 

Carlson’s most disreputable guest thus far has been a podcaster and amateur historian named Darryl Cooper. “I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States because I think that you are,” Carlson enthused at the top of the episode that aired last September, ominously titled “The True History of the Jonestown Cult, WWII, and How Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.” In a scattershot discourse that included his likening pre-state Zionists to cult leader Jim Jones and comparing Israel’s Gaza operation to Operation Barbarossa, Cooper explained his unorthodox theses about the Second World War, namely, that the “psychopath” Winston Churchill was its “chief villain,” Hitler “didn’t want to fight,” and the Holocaust was not a meticulously planned attempt at the industrial-scale extermination of the Jewish people but an inadvertent consequence of poor German military planning wherein (emphasis mine) “millions of people ended up dead.

 

World War II, Cooper explained, is a “mythologized historical event,” the honest study and discussion of which is ruthlessly thwarted by unnamed actors and European laws against Holocaust denial. (“It’s a crime to ask questions?” Carlson asked, that bit of rhetoric and “some of my best friends . . .” being frequent preludes to, respectively, ahistorical drivel and bigoted remarks.) Not to be outshone by his autodidact guest, whom he saluted for his “courage and honesty” and has elsewhere claimed “makes Herodotus look like a TikTok influencer,” Carlson expressed some of his own views about the war, denouncing “the farce of Nuremberg,” condemning Churchill for interning British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, and insisting that Austria — whose citizens welcomed German troops with “cheers and flowers,” as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum puts it — was “an invaded country.” This unedifying colloquy, which garnered 35 million views, was troubling enough that Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial center, issued a statement condemning it.

 

Another Carlson fixation is the supposed incompatibility of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. “It’s the Old Testament versus New Testament,” Carlson explained to a guest in May. “Because the New Testament is universalist. And Jesus says it again and again: I’m here for everybody. It doesn’t matter what your bloodline is. And I’m also opposed to violence. . . . There’s this effort to pretend they’re the same story, but they’re completely different stories.”

 

Counter to this Christian universalism and nonviolence, in Carlson’s telling, is Jewish clannishness and warmongering, the latter carried out by what he frequently refers to as “the secular government of Israel.” Last year, Carlson interviewed a country music singer who falsely claimed that the Rothschild banking family invented Christian Zionism, a religious and political ideology Carlson termed “a lie” that has had “massive effects on our politics that have been very, very negative and resulted in the deaths of a lot of people.” In June, discussing the conservative Jewish commentator Mark Levin, a proponent of the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites, Carlson said, “You watch Mark Levin talk about killing people and it’s really dark. And it’s certainly not something that any Christian can be comfortable with, because Christians are not for killing people, just period.”

 

Three days later, Carlson singled out Levin again in a conversation with Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. According to Greene, who last year refused to support a House resolution condemning antisemitism because it listed “claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel” as an example of it, Levin belongs to a group of people “that prioritize another country over our country.” The congresswoman averred, “I’ve read my Bible and the one thing I know is it says . . . do not murder.” Carlson concurred, stating that if “someone hits you in the face, turn the other cheek. . . . That’s from Jesus. So Christians care above all what Jesus says. . . . How do we get to a point where good people like that are making the case that Jesus wants more bombing?” Putting aside the morally twisted worldview that singles out Israel, among all the actors in the Middle East, for committing “murder,” the purpose of this discourse is to portray the Jews as having forsaken God by defying the commandments he delivered to them.

 

In recent months, a hint of menace has entered into Carlson’s rhetoric about the sins of Israel and its supporters. Discussing the Epstein cover-up with Enjeti, and Israel’s alleged role in it, Carlson said, “I don’t want a revolution, but if you wanted a revolution, this is how you would act.” In May, responding to a guest who complained about Israeli “bravado” regarding its recent battlefield successes, Carlson replied, “I just think it’s getting too out in the open. And I do, I mean, I guess I fret too much in general, but I do worry now that it’s, like, super obvious what’s going on, that things will just devolve into, like, something very ugly.” The guest, a comedian named Dave Smith, agreed, saying, “I am blown away by the fact that anybody who is out there shrieking about the rise in antisemitism is not wise enough to go, We cannot fight a war with Iran right now.” The implication is clear. All this rage, of which Carlson presents himself as a mere passive observer, might lead to violence, and if it does we will know exactly whom to blame.

 

***

 

Paranoia and crankery are comorbidities of antisemitism, and Carlson has embraced several conspiracy theories that purport to expose unspeakable acts of Jewish malfeasance. Earlier this year, Carlson interviewed Clayton Morris, a fellow former Fox host, about the USS Liberty, an American naval ship that was attacked by Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats in a tragic case of friendly fire during the 1967 Six-Day War. For decades, antisemites of various ideological bents have propagated the claim, convincingly refuted by Michael Oren in his definitive account of the war, that Israel deliberately attacked the vessel and murdered its crew. The credentials possessed by Morris — a YouTuber and real estate guru who fled the country in 2019 while facing dozens of lawsuits from investors alleging fraud — to opine on this subject are unclear, but Carlson enthusiastically agreed with his claim that the incident was an Israeli-CIA “false flag.” After Morris asserted that the attack was “intentional,” Carlson exhibited a telltale tic of the conspiracy theorist, defiantly asserting that “you’re not allowed to say it for some reason” after “it” was just said. In June, Carlson again endorsed the Liberty canard and took it a step further by claiming that “Lyndon Johnson allowed the USS Liberty to be attacked. He knew those guys were going to die. . . . He’s the president of the United States allowing, hoping for the death of U.S. troops for some other agenda.” What “agenda” Carlson doesn’t spell out, but that it involves people who observe the Sabbath on Saturday is a safe bet.

 

Featuring underage girls, a private jet, powerful men, a secret island, and Jews, the Epstein scandal has been like catnip to antisemites. Epstein, Carlson has alleged, operated “a blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services, and probably others, . . . the usual darkest forces in the world colluding to make rich and powerful people obey their agenda.” (Carlson’s outrage concerning sexual predators is highly selective: in 2023, he conducted a fawning interview with Andrew Tate, the misogynist internet influencer and creator of the “Pimping Hoes Degree” — “PhD” — program who was then under house arrest in Romania awaiting trial on charges of rape and human trafficking. Tate’s arrest, Carlson said, was “obviously a setup” and a “definition of a human-rights violation.”) Given the righteous certainty with which Carlson has so frequently expressed his confidence regarding the Epstein case, he was bound to be demoralized by anything short of official government confirmation that Epstein had entrapped the world’s most influential men in the service of Israel. Alas, no evidence has been adduced to substantiate the claim that Epstein blackmailed anyone, let alone on behalf of an intelligence agency. The day after the Justice Department announced that Epstein did not have a “client list” and confirmed his death by suicide, Carlson invited Enjeti on his show for a wide-ranging conversation about “Zionist interests” (Enjeti); “Likudnik interests” (Carlson, referring to those in Netanyahu’s party); “Israel hijacking our government” (Enjeti); and Jonathan Pollard (Carlson, referring to the American who confessed to spying for Israel in 1986). It was not until the end of this fevered, two-and-a-half-hour gripe session that Enjeti felt compelled to profess, “I’m not an antisemite.”

 

In practically every conversation about Israel or Jews, Carlson doggedly issues a rhetorical prophylactic against accusations of bigotry. Discussing the Middle East conflict with Glenn Greenwald, Carlson insisted that he’s “someone who’s really tried to avoid this topic and bears no animus towards Israel, I actually like a lot of Israelis.” He continued: “I’m not against Israel. I like Israel, I like going there. Like the Israelis, nice people. . . . I’m not anti-Israel.” To Mills: “I certainly don’t hate that country. I like it a lot, actually.” Israel, he told Representative Thomas Massie, “may be my all-time favorite place to go with my family.”

 

Just as he frequently attests to “liking” Israel, Carlson is equally adamant that he really, truly, desperately doesn’t want to talk about it. “I want to get away from the topic” of Israel, Carlson told Bannon. “As I’ve said five times, I just don’t care that much” about it, he stressed to Enjeti (before going on to accuse Jewish activists of “wrecking my country and lying constantly and encoding those lies into my laws”). Discussing the power of AIPAC with Greene, Carlson protested, “I don’t want to engage. I think it’s weird. It’s always bothered me, but I don’t want to talk about it because I don’t want to fight about it. But it’s been pushed.”

 

Carlson, you see, has no choice but to defend the interests of his country against treacherous “neocons” and “warmongers” and to prevent them from “destroying the right.” He must speak out against wars ginned up by “emotional” Jews whose claims to being American are tenuous at best. “It’s only because we’re getting drawn into a war by a tiny minority of people,” Carlson complained to Bannon, that he talks about Israel. “Why do we allow 3 percent of the participants in this conversation to define the terms?” (A stickler for population statistics like Carlson should know that Jews constitute 2.4 percent of Americans.) “Stop trying to drag my country into war.” Not our country. My country.

 

Carlson’s obsession has landed him some odd bedfellows. Though Carlson claims to “totally oppose his program,” there is one thing he admires about Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist running for mayor of New York who backs government-run supermarkets, rent freezes, and globalizing the intifada: “That guy was the only person in the New York City mayor’s debate to say he wanted to focus on New York City. All the candidates were asked if you could visit a foreign country, what would it be? . . . I think most said Israel.” Two weeks after the U.S. bombed Iran, Carlson conducted an interview that surpassed in sycophancy his 2024 conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Speaking with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Carlson took at face value his claims that it was the Islamic regime’s desire “to live in peace and tranquility with everybody,” and that “death to America” really means “death to crimes, death to killing and carnage, death to supporting killing others, death to insecurity and instability.” Pezeshkian asked Carlson whether he had “ever heard of Iranians killing Americans,” answering his own question: “No.” (The families of the 241 Marines killed in the 1982 Beirut barracks bombing and the over 600 American soldiers killed by Iranian bombs in Iraq would beg to differ.) Carlson, so credulous when it comes to avowed enemies of his country, let these awful lies slide. If only he’d been a tenth as tough on the Iranian president as he was on the junior senator from Texas.

 

***

 

Perhaps, in isolation, none of these incidents and outbursts — calling a Jewish politician “ratlike” and “shifty,” giving a respectable hearing to a Holocaust denier, imputing dual loyalty to American Jews, denouncing the Nuremberg Trials, accusing Jews of traducing the Old Testament, suggesting that Jews harbor an ancient blood lust, falsely claiming that Israel murdered American servicemen in cold blood, alleging that Israel established an international child sex ring to blackmail “rich and powerful” men, railing against usurious Jewish billionaires, conducting a softball interview with the leader of a theocratic dictatorship committed to the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state — perhaps none of these, on its own, constitutes prima facie evidence of antisemitism. In his defense, Carlson’s hostility to “warmongers” (a term of derision favored throughout history by fascists, communists, and Tulsi Gabbard) isn’t limited to Jews. “Have you noticed that, like, a huge percentage of war-crazed Republican senators are secretly gay?” Carlson asked, apropos of nothing, on a recent podcast.

 

In toto, however, Carlson’s remarks reveal, at the very least, an unhealthy interest in Jews. His is not a private obsession; he aims to rupture the moral, strategic, and religious roots of American support for Israel, and to denigrate the role of Jewish Americans in public life. That so many Christians and conservatives — indeed, Americans of all stripes — care about Israel infuriates him. “Authorizing all this killing in the name of Jesus,” Carlson muttered randomly when House Speaker Mike Johnson’s name came up during an interview with the disgraced former Republican congressman George Santos.

 

In his obsession, Carlson is the epigone of Charles Lindbergh, who similarly blamed the Jews for dragging America into a war, and Father Charles Coughlin, the Catholic priest whose antisemitic radio broadcasts reached 30–40 million Americans at the height of his popularity. To be sure, Carlson is a much subtler demagogue than these men. But with a podcast that rivals Joe Rogan’s as the most popular in the world, social media accounts boasting tens of millions of followers, sold-out speaking tours, and the ears of some of the most powerful people in the country, Carlson has an influence that at least matches or even surpasses theirs. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to say that he is the most influential figure on the American right after President Trump himself.

 

Were it not for the dark turn he has taken over the past few years, Carlson would most likely be remembered as a frequently obnoxious but amiable television personality. The juvenile contrarianism, the hysterical laughter at inappropriate moments, the smug certainty, the feigned, knitted-brow seriousness: His public persona earned him haters, yes, but their hate made him relevant. He enjoys playing the heel. Nevertheless, and I say this as a former friendly acquaintance, he had a certain charm and was an undeniably talented writer.

 

At this stage of his career, however, it is safe to say the dominating impulse throughout Carlson’s life has been a hunger for notoriety. The arc of his career attests to this craving for attention. His first foray into television — as a youthful, bow-tied, respectable conservative pundit — will always be remembered for the humiliation he received at the hands of comedian-commentator Jon Stewart, who lambasted him and his Crossfire co-host Paul Begala for “hurting America.” Then there was the ridiculous turn on Dancing with the Stars. His later successful run as a Fox News host ended abruptly for reasons that remain inscrutable but likely have something to do with his growing penchant for conspiracy theories. After years of “just asking questions,” he has reached the nadir to which such questions inevitably lead. Carlson has chosen to exploit the world’s oldest prejudice while pretending that it’s somehow edgy.

 

Ultimately, the reasons why Carlson decided to become America’s leading purveyor of antisemitic ideas matter less than what this development says about our society. Why has “needling the Jews,” the very thing Carlson condemned Pat Buchanan for a quarter century ago, been a safe career move? For the persistent acting out of his anti-Jewish obsession in the national discourse hasn’t put a dent in his popularity; on the contrary, it may have even boosted it.

 

Thirty-four years ago, William F. Buckley Jr. published a 40,000-word essay in this magazine titled “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” wherein he renounced two prominent conservative figures for comments — much like Carlson’s — revealing their anti-Israel and anti-Jewish animus. Among many other calumnies, Joseph Sobran, a senior editor at NR, had called Israel an “anti-Christian country,” and, more notoriously, Buchanan had suggested that Jews seek to aid Israel by starting wars that Gentiles have to fight. Both men, Buckley concluded, had engaged in antisemitism, and both of their reputations suffered because of Buckley’s careful but devastating reproach.

 

The evidence of Carlson’s antisemitism is far more plentiful, and damning, than that used to indict Buchanan. Today, however, there is no figure on the American right with the gravitas of Buckley, who could literally write extremists and bigots out of the conservative movement with a well-argued essay. But even more central to the rise of Carlson and others of his ilk is that the moral and political guardrails that used to protect our civic life from the pollutive emanations of illiberalism and uncivilized behavior have all but vanished. The antibodies that a healthy society develops to resist Jew-hatred are fast dissipating. Eight decades after the end of World War II, the fading memory of the Holocaust, the rise of identitarian thinking, and the ideological corruption of American higher education have contributed to making our country a place where growing numbers of citizens find it reasonable to blame humanity’s perennial scapegoat, the Jews, for what ails society. Tucker Carlson’s enduring popularity indicates that the cancer on civilization that is antisemitism metastasizes apace.

Trump Is Right to Point the Finger at Hamas for Gaza Woes

National Review Online

Thursday, July 31, 2025

 

From the start of Israel’s war against Hamas, there have been dire warnings of imminent famine in Gaza that have proven false.

 

In November 2023, just over a month after the October 7 massacres, United Nations World Food Programme director Cindy McCain told CBS that Israel’s effort to destroy Hamas had already put Gaza “on the brink of famine.” By February 2024, no famine had occurred, but the United Nations put out a statement claiming that “at least” 576,000 Gazans, or about a quarter of the population of the strip, were “one step away from famine.” A few months later, two U.N. agencies warned that “over one million people — half the population of Gaza — are expected to face death and starvation (IPC Phase 5) by mid-July [of 2024].”

 

Israel’s many enemies have a huge incentive to promote the idea that Israel is using starvation as a tool of warfare. The New York Times, along with most major media outlets throughout the world, turned a photo of a skeletal toddler in Gaza, Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, into a rallying cry against the supposed Israeli policy of starvation. But the outlets did not report that the boy was born with a muscular disorder, which helped explain his sickly appearance, and they did not print part of a photo that showed his healthy-looking brother beside him. Days after the deception was exposed, the New York Times, which ran the photo on the front page, quietly updated the story, but only after the original photo had been spread around the world.

 

All that said, it does appear the humanitarian situation has now become more serious. Amit Segal, an Israeli journalist who has been skeptical of prior claims of mass starvation, has pointed to research showing the rising price of flour in Gaza and concluded that this time, “Gaza may well be approaching a real hunger crisis.” Other credible sources have concluded the same.

 

Even facing a hostile population, Israel has gone to incredible lengths to try and help feed Gaza. In terms of sheer amount of supplies, it’s an effort on par with the Berlin airlift. The current operation, though, has faced barriers created by the United Nations and Hamas. When the U.N. and its affiliated groups were in charge of food distribution, its supplies routinely ended up in control of Hamas, which hoarded aid for its own fighters and also sold it on the black market to raise money for its war against Israel.

 

Israel, seeking a way to get aid directly to the people without inadvertently helping to fund the terrorist group, helped put together the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation along with the United States. In the face of many challenges and threats from Hamas, the group has distributed about 100 million meals since launching in May. The new system for distributing food has created a cash crunch for Hamas, which is now struggling to pay its fighters.

 

However, despite its efforts, GHF was never intended to completely replace all food distribution programs, only to supplement them. Unfortunately, because the U.N. refuses to cooperate with the GHF, it has at times allowed hundreds of truckloads’ worth of aid to pile up inside Gaza without distributing them. As David Makovsky, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has pointed out, according to its own data, when it has made deliveries in recent months, an incredible 87 percent of U.N. trucks have been “intercepted” — i.e., looted either by people seeking aid or armed gangs seeking to steal the aid. The U.N. has cited this as a reason why aid has been allowed to pile up undelivered at times, though it also has opposed the IDF protecting the routes. There have been incidents in which the IDF has fired warning shots to disperse mobs surrounding aid trucks, resulting in casualties. This has been used by Israel’s critics to make the unfounded claim that Israel is using the promise of aid as a trap to purposely kill off civilians.

 

Hamas, meanwhile, has long demonstrated that it is willing to put its own population at risk knowing that the world will always blame Israel for any suffering that occurs. It’s telling that as international criticism of Israel spiked over starvation claims, Hamas dug in further in cease-fire negotiations, rejecting a deal that would have freed the hostages and put both sides on a path to ending the war. There is no reason for Hamas to make concessions if it believes deteriorating conditions in Gaza will force Israel’s hand without the terrorist group having to do anything. The U.K., in a statement on Tuesday, threatened Israel with recognizing Palestinian statehood at the U.N. in September if things don’t change. Why would Hamas negotiate if it believes it can hold out a bit longer and advance the cause of Palestinian statehood, which its leaders have spoken about as an intermediary step in their efforts to eliminate Israel?

 

Also on Tuesday, the Arab League, for the first time, condemned the October 7 attacks and called on Hamas to give up its arms and release all the hostages, albeit with the usual poison pill of a Palestinian state and a “right of return” to Israel.

 

Trump, who is clearly growing frustrated and angry about the conditions in Gaza, has been right to forcefully speak out against moves to reward Hamas by recognizing a Palestinian state, and to point the finger where it belongs. On Thursday morning, with his envoy Steve Witkoff in Israel for talks about a cease-fire and the situation in Gaza, Trump posted on Truth Social: “The fastest way to end the Humanitarian Crises in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!!!” If the rest of the world were to echo this statement, rather than attacking Israel, there’d be a better chance for a deal to end the war and allow more aid to reach the people of Gaza.

The Truth Gets Its Shoes On

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, 30, 2025

 

Dozens of marginally curious media outlets and institutions had caught onto the lie promulgated by the New York Times long before the New York Times got around to acknowledging it.

 

Late Tuesday, the Times finally got around to clearing the caked and dried egg off its face.



This was no minor error — a modest amendment to a fleeting aside in paragraph 25 of an otherwise airtight story. No, al-Mutawaq’s image was the feature art designed to illustrate the plight endured by all of Gaza’s 2 million people. It ran on the front page, stretching almost to the fold. And the Times wasn’t alone. This stricken child’s skeletal frame was picked up by the Times of London, The Guardian, the Daily Express, and more — all to morally blackmail Israel for pursuing its security priorities in Gaza, but not to pressure Hamas into surrendering in the war it launched and lost for the betterment of the people it supposedly serves.

 

What took the Times so long? I wrote about the Times error yesterday, well before the correction was issued. So had many other outlets — at least, those still possessed of the sort of skepticism that is expected from the journalistic enterprise. As the Times and others have noted, the fact that al-Mutawaq suffers from genetic ailments does not negate the fact that there is hardship on the ground in Gaza. We can, however, deduce from the Times’ reticence that perhaps its editors and reporters did believe that admitting a mistake in this case would invalidate a broader narrative that it has sought to popularize.

 

Maybe these journalistic professionals considered in their more contemplative moments that their credulity in retailing fictions fed to them by Hamas-friendly elements in Gaza, the West Bank, and Qatar does raise questions about the broader coverage of this conflict. It does. Or, rather, it should. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from this conflict, it is that, for Israel’s critics, no allegation of Israeli perfidy and malice is too fantastical. This one was too good to check. But it was not the first, and it will not be the last.

The Fantastically Daft Meltdown over Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

 

Have you heard about the controversy that is “swirling” around American Eagle and Sydney Sweeney at present? Yes, that American Eagle and that Sydney Sweeney; the clothing outlet and the actress. Oh, you must. You see, the two of them recently teamed up for a marketing campaign, and, together, they made an ad in which Sweeney wore jeans and showed off her figure and drove a vintage car and did other Sydney Sweeney–esque things in front of the cameras. Unfortunately, though, everything “went wrong.” No sooner had the spot debuted than it had been deemed “provocative” and “offensive” and found guilty of “sparking debate.” And not about just any old thing, either. No, sir. The question that was presented by Sweeney’s new American Eagle commercial was whether or not the Nazis were Good.

 

You read that right. The National Conversation that has been bolted to this transient exhibition of denim has been about . . . eugenics, as conceived within the Third Reich. Swiftly after the ad was released, a handful of people on the internet began complaining that American Eagle had released a white supremacist commercial, and, as is often done, the self-licking ice cream cone was swung immediately into action: Some people were talking about it online, which meant that the press was able write about it as if it were a real story, which meant that the opinion outlets were able to get involved with a clear conscience, which meant that the press was able to write about it some more, which meant that other people were guaranteed to talk about it online, and, before too long, we had one of those perplexing news cycles that start with a single, mind-numbing complaint from the most ridiculous people in the country and end with daily updates on whether any of the figures who are passively involved in the circus have yet “responded to the allegations.”

 

Which, in this case, are that, during the course of one of the commercials, Sweeney says,

 

Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.

 

QED, fascists!

 

Per Amber Raiken, of The Independent, “the phrases ‘good genes’ and ‘great genes’ have historically been used in the language of eugenicists, who believe the human race can be improved genetically by selective breeding.” Which, yes, is true, but which is also as self-evidently irrelevant to this matter as the fact that, by an amazing coincidence, Sydney Sweeney’s initials happen to be “SS.” The core point here — the sole purpose of the not-especially-good genes/jeans pun, and of the campaign more broadly — is that Sydney Sweeney is attractive. That’s it. That’s the game. That’s the solitary message that American Eagle is attempting to convey. If there is anything subliminal going on, it is that, like every other company in the world that hires a popular celebrity, American Eagle wants consumers to think that, if they, too, buy the product that their featured star is wearing, they will become just like her. Beyond that, however, there is nothing of consequence to interrogate. Pretty girl. Blue jeans. That’s all, folks. Had American Eagle wanted, its commercial could just as easily have said, “Sydney Sweeney looks extremely hot in our clothes” — although, if it had, the same people who objected to this one would no doubt have become convinced that, if they squinted a little, they could detect the shadow of a disquisition on global climate change.

 

Why is this annoying? Partly because it’s dumb — and because we need less stupidity rather than more. Partly because, once again, the media have indulged the silliest people in America — rather than ignored them, as they deserve. And partly — mostly, really — because this incident illustrates the preposterous double standard that our would-be arbiters of taste routinely apply to quotidian uses of the English language. When the phrase at hand is, say, “From the river to the sea” or “Globalize the intifada” or “Defund the police,” we are treated to exquisite journeys into nuance and context, alongside detailed dissections of how words are translated from one language to another. In those cases, we are assured that nobody who says any of those things actually means them — even when their utterance is attached to a clear declaration of intent. But when American Eagle makes an advertisement for denim, all hell breaks loose. A pretty blonde girl says she has good jeans — in a commercial for jeans — and the presumptions instantly invert.

 

Which is ridiculous, isn’t it? For my sins, I have now subjected myself to a bunch of essays and conversations that promulgate the idea that American Eagle has put out a Nazi denim advertisement, and none of them have come close to answering the only question that matters here, which is, “Why?” Why would American Eagle do anything of the sort? Why would Sydney Sweeney consent to help? And who, upon watching the spot, would react to it by reaching for their copy of Mein Kampf? To believe that there is anything nefarious about the “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans” line, one has to forget everything one knows about sex, fashion, and marketing, to conclude that Sydney Sweeney is sedulously attempting to commit career suicide, and to imagine that, when this idea was merely embryonic, American Eagle’s beleaguered owners came back from lunch one sunny afternoon, sat happily around their corporate meeting table, and wondered aloud whether their favorite ad agency might just happen to have anything a bit Himmleresque lurking in its summer collection.

 

Or, to put it another way: one has to be a total bloody moron.

The Most Dangerous Branch

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

 

If you read this newsletter regularly and have somehow managed not to lose all faith in America, today’s the day to abandon ship.

 

You’re going to do it at some point before January 2029, I promise. Why delay the inevitable?

 

Today is an opportune moment because last night the Senate confirmed Emil Bove to fill an open seat on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. The way to understand that is as a proof of concept: Is the (ahem) world’s greatest deliberative body willing to corrupt the upper ranks of the federal judiciary by filling it with unabashedly ruthless toadies of Donald Trump?

 

We know that it’s willing to corrupt itself in order to serve the president and we know that it’s willing to abet his corruption of the executive branch by approving toadies to lead, say, the FBI. But the bench is different, one might argue. Federal judges hold their positions for life, not until the next time the government changes hands, and the courts are supposed to be above politics to a degree that the other branches aren’t. The same Senate that confirmed Kash Patel might plausibly have drawn the line at Bove.

 

It did not. And because it didn’t, the so-called “conservatives” of the Senate GOP have now implicitly invited the president to nominate more judges in the Bove mold—just two months after he complained that the Federalist Society didn’t recommend enough servile chumps during his first term.

 

This episode essentially answers the question of what the president’s infamous long-dead crony, former Joe McCarthy counsel Roy Cohn, might be doing right now if he had lived not during the height of American prestige but during our postliberal age of American collapse. He’d either be attorney general or a federal judge, duly approved in either case by the thoroughly rotten Republican Party.

 

Willful blindness.

 

It pays here to revisit the bill of particulars against Bove. The fact that he served as the president’s defense attorney last year isn’t itself disqualifying, although it does call his independence into question given Trump’s authoritarian obsession with fanatic loyalty. What disqualifies him is the fact that, in six months as a muckety-muck at the Justice Department, he managed to involve himself in no less than three ethical debacles.

 

Eleven days after Trump was sworn in, Bove dropped the axe on a number of federal prosecutors who had pursued January 6 defendants, and he demanded that several senior FBI executives involved in those cases either retire or be fired. The president got elected by vowing political “retribution” against those who tried to hold him accountable, and Bove was his willing executioner.

 

A few weeks later Bove triggered a wave of angry resignations in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office when he directed prosecutors to drop pending criminal charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. The White House needed Adams to cooperate with it on immigration, you see, and that cooperation would be more forthcoming if it weren’t trying to put him in prison. Once again, politics trumped diligent law enforcement for the man who is now America’s newest judge.

 

The icing on the cake came last month when a former DOJ immigration lawyer accused Bove of encouraging deputies to ignore court rulings. Erez Reuveni claimed that Bove was told at a meeting in March that deportation flights to El Salvador for suspected gang members might be halted by a judge’s order. “Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such order,” Reuveni recalled, according to a whistleblower complaint he filed last month.

 

That was one of three whistleblower complaints brought against Bove, in fact. The second alleged that he misled the Senate Judiciary Committee when he denied having enticed DOJ attorneys to dismiss criminal charges against Adams by hinting that they might become “leaders” in their department if they did so. The third was filed back in early May and offered corroborating evidence that Reuveni was telling the truth about Bove’s reaction to court orders in the El Salvador matter.

 

But—hold onto your hats—Donald Trump’s Justice Department supposedly “lost” that third complaint and “found” it only two days ago, the day before the confirmation vote.

 

The point of all this is that Senate Republicans had plenty of political cover to say that, while they’re willing to confirm nominees like Bove, they’re not willing to confirm Bove himself. Dozens of former judges and hundreds of former DOJ lawyers publicly came out against him, no small thing in a country governed by a figure as vindictive as Trump. Even normally dependable advocates of Republican judicial nominees like Ed Whelan publicly washed their hands of his nomination. We have no problem putting MAGA henchmen on the bench, a nervous Sen. John Thune might have declared, but we can and should do better than someone with this much smoke around him.

 

Instead, not only did Senate Republicans confirm Bove, they willfully blinded themselves to his deficiencies: Democrats wanted Reuveni to testify under oath, but Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, denied the request. Faced with the real possibility that it was handing lifetime tenure to a lawyer who doesn’t actually believe in the rule of law, the Senate GOP decided it would rather not know.

 

“Emil Bove has shown time and time again his disrespect for the very office he seeks to hold,” Sen. Cory Booker said recently in a floor speech. “I don’t know of another case I have seen in my 14 years in the Senate where someone so unqualified for the bench is before us.”

 

That may be true if you’re judging the nominee by traditional standards. If you’re judging him by postliberal standards, he’s ideally qualified.

 

Well-qualified.

 

The courts are the last holdout against right-wing postliberalism.

 

The presidency has been captured. Congress has debased itself in supplication. Republican voters have become amoral nihilists who might soon start making excuses for pedophilia in the name of retaining power. There are no political worlds left for America’s scummiest populists to conquer—except the judiciary.

 

Which is a problem for them. As noted previously, the chief tool in postliberalism’s demagogic toolbox can’t be used on federal judges. Because they sit for life, they can’t be threatened professionally the way “disloyal” lawmakers and bureaucrats are. They can only be threatened personally, and while many are, only the craziest MAGAs are willing to risk prison to do that.

 

Intimidation is the one neat political trick of the modern right, and it doesn’t work very well on the courts, which means that the postliberal agenda is forever running headlong into an institutional wall whose members are classically liberal by training. How does a movement of budding fascists solve that problem?

 

They’re going to have to infiltrate the judiciary, vacancy by vacancy.

 

Until now, they’ve been stuck trying to discredit it. Trump, for instance, has always encouraged Americans to view law as an arm of politics and judges as hacks who serve their partisan masters. Recall his dispute in 2018 with Chief Justice John Roberts over whether jurists can fairly be described as “Obama judges” and “Trump judges,” with the president arguing in the affirmative.

 

His pardons also tend to discredit the courts insomuch as they imply that the justice system is so corrupt and “weaponized” that he’s obliged to intervene to set things right—and not only in cases that stem from political disputes like January 6. Ditto for casually asserting that Barack Obama should be indicted for treason when he very obviously won’t be, another way to get Americans wondering if law enforcement is working properly and dispassionately.

 

Recently the Justice Department took a bold new step when it accused James Boasberg, the judge who presided in the El Salvador matter, of misconduct. Its complaint is preposterous as a matter of law, but it’s not supposed to be legally compelling, professor Steve Vladeck correctly notes. It’s politics. “Whatever the motive for the complaint,” he writes, “it seems quite clear that the government at the very least knows that its behavior will further erode public support and respect for federal district judges.”

 

That’s the point. The less respect the justice system has among Americans, the more support postliberals can expect to have if and when they eventually defy it. Trump has always justified his own corruption as a response to the supposedly greater corruption of his enemies; he’s following the same approach with the judiciary by delegitimizing it as a haven of ruthlessly political creeps.

 

By that logic, Emil Bove is the perfect nominee. If the right wants to “de-weaponize” the federal bench, it’ll need to start confirming some ruthlessly political creeps of its own. There’s no pithier insight into the character of the modern Republican Party than the fact that the hero of the Eric Adams incident earlier this year has been exiled to a think tank while the villain will be making law on the 3rd Circuit for the next 40 years, the very model of the sort of judge his party and its leader now seek to elevate.

 

Things to come.

 

And so here’s why Bove’s confirmation should persuade you to give up whatever little foolish hope in America you have left.

 

To begin with, eyewitnesses to serious government corruption now have a clear signal from the Senate that they shouldn’t bother opening their mouths. Erez Reuveni and the other whistleblowers had nothing to gain and everything to lose by placing themselves on the president’s enemies’ list, but they were willing to take that risk to try to keep a figure as unfit as Bove off the bench.

 

They did it for nothing, it turns out. After this, federal employees with knowledge of professional malfeasance by Trump nominees would need to be complete idiots to take the same risk. A willfully blind Senate isn’t interested in your testimony, so don’t make trouble.

 

Bove’s confirmation will also incentivize young right-wing lawyers to become ruthlessly political creeps themselves. I touched on that in May, but Quinta Jurecic addressed it at greater length today at The Atlantic. “The route to a plum judicial appointment may be distinguishing oneself as a bruiser willing to do anything for Trump,” she wrote about yesterday’s Senate vote. Unlike the Federalist Society all-stars of the president’s first term, Bove’s “path so far has demonstrated that total sycophancy to the president can be a fantastic career move for ambitious lawyers—especially those for whom other avenues of success might not be forthcoming.”

 

Either the smartest Republican attorneys will become Trumpist droogs or they’ll be bypassed for lesser lights whose postliberal zeal more than makes up for their lack of talent. The federal bench of the future will probably be dumber, and certainly nastier, than it is now.

 

A third reason to despair is that it isn’t just the supply of lousy right-wing jurists that’s about to increase. It’s the demand.

 

This is what I meant earlier about proof of concept: Even a narrow Senate GOP majority that contains reasonably sane figures like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski couldn’t muster the nerve to stop a clown like Bove. Conservatives like Mitch McConnell and the supposedly liberated Thom Tillis, each in their final terms, could have sunk his nomination but mindlessly supported him anyway because rubber-stamping Republican judicial nominees is the closest thing to an actual purpose this degenerate conference still serves.

 

If this is what a Senate controlled by Trump’s party is willing to approve in 2025, what might it be willing to approve in, say, 2027?

 

Consider that if McConnell and Tillis are replaced in the chamber by Republicans, those Republicans will almost certainly owe their seats to Trump’s support. They won’t just be MAGA, they’ll be diehard MAGA. Consider, too, that next year’s midterm Senate map favors the GOP, with Collins and Murkowski set to become even less relevant if the party gains seats. Republicans very well might gain enough of a cushion to ensure a majority in the chamber until the end of the decade.

 

Trump might soon have carte blanche on judicial nominees; in other words, a free hand to stack the judiciary with as many proto-fascist thirtysomethings as he can scrape together. “The republic legitimately might not survive,” data scientist David Shor said recently of that scenario. Having spent 10 years perverting their own branch of government out of fear of Trump, Senate Republicans are set to embark on a sustained project to pervert another. Not since the segregation era have we seen greater traitors to the constitutional order.

 

The last thing that’s going to flow from all this is that Democrats will inevitably react in, shall we say, unhelpful ways.

 

If you thought progressives were jonesing for court-packing circa 2020, wait until we have dozens of Emil Boves on the federal bench. Liberals can barely stand to have a judiciary led by originalists; they’re not going to stand for one led by a faction whose only jurisprudential principle is “Republicans win.” Extreme measures will be taken by Democrats to dilute the power of Bove-ish judges once they’re back in power that will further destabilize the country.

 

Leftists will also demand postliberal “Democrats win” judicial nominees of their own. “They already have them!” conservatives will reply, pointing to Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, but they can—and will—do worse than both. Liberals radicalized by the Bove-ification of the bench won’t settle for a mix of Sotomayors and Jacksons on the one hand and Elena Kagans and Stephen Breyers on the other. They’ll want nothing but flunkies and knife-fighters. And they’ll have them.

 

In the end, Trump’s vision will be realized. Americans of all stripes will come to despise the bench as not just partisan, but as the venue where partisan politics plays out most viciously, with the highest constitutional stakes. Our stooge judiciary might become the most dangerous branch. Poor Roy Cohn—he would have loved it.

How We Built the Arsenal of Democracy

By Arthur Herman

Thursday, July 24, 2025

 

The bad news is, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, our nation’s defense-industrial base is in serious crisis.

 

The good news is we’ve been here before.

 

According to a recent report from the Commission on the National Defense Strategy for the United States (an independent, bipartisan group established by Congress in 2022), the factories, facilities, plants, and shipyards of our current defense-industrial base are “grossly inadequate” for confronting the dual threats of Russia and China. The Defense Department agrees. Its first-ever Defense Industrial Strategy document highlighted “serious shortfalls” in the existing base, including manufacturing, supply chains, workforce, and production, and it concluded that “this call to action may seem a great cost, but the consequences of inaction or failure are far greater.”

 

That was under the Biden administration. The “big, beautiful bill” passed by Congress and signed by Trump at least tries to undo the damage of the past 30 years. It sets aside $29 billion for shipbuilding and other spending tied to our naval and maritime industrial base; our officials are belatedly realizing the two are intertwined and inseparable. It spends another $25 billion for munitions spread across various programs — the war in Ukraine demonstrated that our industrial base is not making enough conventional artillery shells. Another $5 billion will be invested in the critical minerals needed for building today’s weaponry, and $16 billion will go toward innovative technologies such as drones, AI, and low-cost weapons.

 

All this, however, will take time, which is in shorter supply even than money. All in all, it’s a grim situation we’re only beginning to address.

 

We’ve been here before, on the eve of World War II. The result five years later was the creation of the greatest military-industrial complex in history. But the answer then, as now, didn’t spring from Congress or the Oval Office. It came from corporate boardrooms around the country.

 

In 1940, the United States had the 18th-largest army in the world, right behind tiny Holland. While equipped with modern carriers and battleships, the Navy faced too many global commitments with meager resources; it was not prepared to face a potential invader like Hitler’s Germany. General George Marshall, Army chief of staff, warned Roosevelt that if Hitler landed five divisions on American soil, there would be nothing he could do to stop them. Meanwhile, within a year and a half, the Navy’s vaunted battleships sat at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

 

America found itself systematically unable to meet the demands of modern mechanized warfare on land, sea, or air. Neither the War nor Navy Departments had plans for how to revive a defense-industrial base that had been largely dismantled after World War I.

 

That critical summer of 1940, Roosevelt found a corporate leader willing to undertake the task: mass-production wizard and General Motors President William “Big Bill” Knudsen. Knudsen told FDR that, given 18 months’ head start, he and his colleagues could mobilize enough of American industry to trigger the single greatest outpouring of modern weaponry the world had ever seen, from planes, tanks, and machine guns to ships, submarines, and aircraft carriers.

 

Roosevelt decided to give Knudsen and his colleagues a free hand, based on three key principles.

 

The first was mobilizing America’s biggest and most productive companies to make what was needed, even if they had never made war matériel before. Knudsen turned to the automotive, steel, chemical, and electronics industries because they had the largest engineering departments — men (and sometimes women) who could figure out how to produce the decisive weapons the military needed in record numbers, from bazookas (GE) and torpedoes (Westinghouse) to entire B-24 bombers (Ford) — eventually even the plutonium for an atomic bomb (DuPont).

 

Second, Knudsen insisted that FDR clear away antibusiness tax rules and regulations, including suspending antitrust laws, so industry could focus on producing what the armed forces needed, not dodging government lawsuits. That included pushing aside the Navy and War Departments’ antiquated rules for procurement, which reflected leisurely peacetime conditions, not wartime emergency.

 

Third, Knudsen insisted on keeping the entire process voluntary, so corporate leaders would be free to decide on their own which war matériel they were best suited to contract for, and how to produce it. The point was to reduce Washington’s interference in the production process and make sure that federal dollars followed the trail of productivity and innovation, not the other way around.

 

The plan worked. By the time Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the scale of American war production was already approaching that of Nazi Germany. America was on the way to becoming what Roosevelt famously dubbed the “arsenal of democracy” (a phrase that was coined by Knudsen). By the end of 1942, America was producing more tanks, ships, planes, and guns than the entire Axis.

 

The numbers are still staggering, every time we look at them. From 1940 to 1945, the U.S. produced 141 aircraft carriers; eight battleships; 807 cruisers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts; and 208 submarines. It produced 324,000 aircraft, 88,410 tanks, 2.4 million trucks, 2.6 million machine guns, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition.

 

By 1944, American industry was producing eight aircraft carriers a month, 50 merchant ships a day, and a warplane every five minutes. Two-thirds of all the war matériel used by all the Allies in World War II came from America — as did the most powerful innovative weapon in history, the atomic bomb.

 

***

 

In one sense, the challenge this time of turning around our current defense-industrial base will be easier. In terms of talent, innovation, and basic physical facilities, we already have the best military-industrial complex on the planet. It’s true that we are no longer the manufacturing center of the world we once were. In 1945, the United States hosted one-half of the world’s industrial capacity. Today it’s less than 16 percent. Today it’s China that enjoys the edge, at just over 30 percent. The Chinese have unleashed their manufacturing base to build up their forces on land, sea, air, and space in ways that suggest they’ve learned — or at least think they’ve learned — the lessons of World War II better than we have.

 

One thing is clear. The rebuilding of our defense-industrial base can’t, and won’t, rest on the big defense contractors alone, the Boeings, the Lockheed Martins, and the Northrop Grummans. They bring a lot to the process: talent, experience, and unsurpassed skill in integrating many supply chains and subcontractors into complex workable wholes. But they are not the drivers of today’s high-tech economy the same way that Ford and GM and General Electric were the drivers of our industrial economy when they armed America for World War II. They have become too tethered to the bureaucratic workings of today’s Pentagon to be the main architects of tomorrow’s.

 

Fortunately, a new generation of patriotic business leaders — from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to the CEOs of high-tech defense companies like Palantir and Anduril and General Atomics — are waiting for the opportunity to transform their companies into powerhouses of a new arsenal of democracy. The same is true of the leaders of the “Magnificent Seven” tech companies, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. Give them the right kind of call, as Roosevelt did with Bill Knudsen and Henry Kaiser in 1940, and they will answer.

 

This raises a broader point about rebuilding our defense industries. If we are going to leap ahead of China in critical areas such as shipbuilding, space, and hypersonics, we’ll have to deploy an extremely innovative series of technologies and policies that allows us to reinvent our manufacturing base as a whole. A great place to start will be the defense-industrial base.

 

In fact, those who bemoan the shrunken state of our manufacturing economy and complain that we don’t have enough time or resources or workers to rebuild that base are looking at the problem from the wrong end. By reinventing the economic sector most vital to our national security — the defense-industrial sector — we can achieve ripple effects throughout the rest of the economy. But only if we unleash the energy and dynamism of the private sector to solve our most pressing issues in the public sector.

 

Overall, there are six steps we can take to reinvent a defense-industrial base for the 21st century.

 

First, the new administration has to sweep aside the regulations and obstacles that slow our productive defense sector. One of those obstacles is the Pentagon budget system itself, which is encrusted with rules and red tape more suited to the industrial age than the space age. Congress needs to adopt the reforms recommended by its commission on Pentagon budget reform. (Full disclosure: I helped to write that commission’s interim and final reports.)

 

Second, engage the best advanced technologies to accelerate production and innovation. Most big defense-manufacturing facilities are set up for very limited types of production, such as the F-35 or Virginia-class submarine. The future of defense production, however, lies in diversifying the manufacturing process itself, through the use of AI, robotics, and 3-D printing. The ultimate goal should be to produce multiple products at once: for example, advanced sensors with one line geared for defense and national security, the other for commercial purposes.

 

Third, make use of a host of smaller, leaner, more specialized defense companies that provide vital supply chain support and subcomponents for larger defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Anduril — all here in the United States. They will also be important laboratories for developing new approaches to manufacturing and the technologies that will support that effort — not only for our defense base but for a revived commercial base as well.

 

Fourth, incentivize a new generation of workers for defense and defense-related industries. A study by the think tank Third Way showed that in 2022 some 600,000 Americans were in registered apprenticeship programs. That’s barely 0.3 percent of the working-age population in the country. That number is five times higher in Canada, seven times higher in Germany, and twelve times higher in Switzerland.

 

Instead of focusing on apprenticeship programs for the big defense contractors, bring the programs to the smaller, more innovative players. In Germany, for example, so-called Mittelstand (small and medium-size businesses) actively engage their younger workers in fashioning the business itself: More than 80 percent offer incentives for workers to contribute new ideas. The American equivalent can be seedbeds for building a new industrial workforce that is engaged, creative, and productive.

 

Fifth, enlist the universities in developing defense-related technologies, including AI and quantum computing. University-based research and development were crucial to the military-industrial complex during the Cold War. One of its historic offshoots was Silicon Valley. Bringing university research to small- to middle-scale defense firms, not just the big contractors, can save not only our defense-industrial base but also our universities in the post-woke era.

 

Sixth, incentivize venture capitalists to fund our national security. Venture capitalists are expert at finding opportunities in commercial markets but not so good in understanding defense applications. If we rethink defense production as a step in successful commercial manufacturing, rather than the other way around, we could open the floodgates for the $1.3 trillion venture capital market to flow directly into the defense and defense-related realm. That would be a key advantage over China, as well, where new venture capital investment in 2025 will barely hit $70 billion.

 

In that regard, it’s time for the Pentagon to encourage defense producers to think about how their products can open a niche in commercial markets as well as meet military requirements. That won’t just draw in private capital investment. It’s how defense producers can make their products more innovative and cost-effective, in order to compete in the commercial marketplace.

 

The arsenal of democracy in World War II was built by companies large and small who had first made their mark as commercial companies. Defense specialists — firms with little or no commercial business — accounted for only 6 percent of the Defense Department’s major programs at the end of the Cold War. In 2024, it was 61 percent. It’s time to turn those numbers back around. By doing so, by unleashing the energy, creativity, and drive of the private sector to rebuild our defense-industrial base, we can trigger a tech-industrial revival of the American economy — one that makes us more secure and more prosperous far into the future.

The Decline of the Iranian Empire

By Elliott Abrams

Thursday, July 24, 2025

 

The story of the Middle East in the last year might be summed up by the word “poof.” That is, after a decade in which Iran’s expanding power and influence seemed irreversible, they were in fact reversed by Israel — with last-minute help from American B-2 bombers. What’s left is a much weakened Hezbollah (Iran’s key proxy), Syria free of Assad (a Russian and Iranian ally), and an Iran without air defenses or an advanced nuclear-weapons program.

 

This change was the product of three attacks: Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, and Iran’s direct missile and drone attacks in April and October 2024. The Hamas attack caught Israel by surprise because its security elite thought there was a modus vivendi with the terror group: as long as it could rule Gaza, with Qatari money flowing in, Hamas was satisfied. It was viewed almost as a status quo power, bought off and no longer serious about its murderous ideology. October 7 taught the Israelis to stop psychoanalyzing their enemies, to look at those enemies’ capabilities, and to assume that whatever capabilities exist will eventually be used to kill Jews.

 

Iran’s direct attack on Israel on April 13, 2024, changed what had been the rules of the game. Prior to that, Iran attacked Israel solely via proxies, and Israel struck Iran through assassinations and cyberattacks. For the Islamic Republic, this move turned out to be a huge error. As the Middle East scholar Robert Satloff put it, “Shifting to direct interstate attack represents a major strategic blunder for Iran, exposing its national assets and citizens to external attack for the first time since the Iran-Iraq War.”

 

The direct Israeli attacks on Iran opened the path to an American attack as well, something that had not happened since the Reagan administration. Since then, a series of presidents has tried to negotiate with Iran and avoid confrontation despite Iran’s hand in killing Americans in terrorist attacks and during the Iraq War. President Trump’s bombing of Iran, as H. R. McMaster has written, “reminded officials in Tehran that they cannot antagonize their adversaries in the region with impunity — and reminded officials in Washington that Iran’s theocratic dictatorship cannot be conciliated. ‘De-escalation’ was never a path to peace — it was an approach that perpetuated war on the Iranians’ terms.”

 

These developments change important calculations by many states. Iran and all other friends of Russia and China have seen that, at least in the Middle East, those two powers are paper tigers. Everyone has seen the apparent superiority of American to Russian military hardware. China, whose own military is completely untested, has seen that American military power is not theoretical but can be used flawlessly. The Gulf Arab states have seen that Iran is much weaker than they thought, so that, while compromises with that big and malevolent neighbor may still be needed, they need not be as painful as previously feared. By restoring its reputation for military and intelligence excellence, both badly damaged by the 10/7 Hamas attacks, Israel has made itself an appealing partner for potential Abraham Accords participants.

 

In the Middle East, there is a new balance of power that shifts against Iran. It still has its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, but they are much weaker, and the Houthis in Yemen must wonder how they will fare as Iranian power recedes. Iraq, not a proxy but in some sense a colony of Iran, will become even more important to the ayatollahs. Iraq’s development toward democracy and stability would be far advanced by now were it not for 20 years of Iranian intervention. Shiite militias might still exist but would be far less powerful without external support from Tehran. In Baghdad, Iranian officials literally sit in some ministries to guarantee that Iraq allows itself to be used to help Iran escape U.S. sanctions. Logically, Iran will now try to tighten its control over Iraq even further — something the United States and the Gulf Arab nations should push hard against. Many Iraqis — no matter their politics or attitude toward the United States — will want to resist Iran out of sheer nationalism.

 

The Trump administration has two great opportunities in the Levant, in Lebanon and Syria. Lebanon has the chance to recapture its sovereignty if leaders have the guts to act against Palestinian terrorist groups and against domestic Hezbollah terrorists. The first should be easy (because most Lebanese resent the Palestinian presence) — unless Hezbollah tries to stop Lebanese army action against armed Palestinian groups (including Hamas) under the theory that they’ll be the next target. All the more reason, then, for the United States to back the Lebanese government and Lebanese Armed Forces by demanding that the state must have a monopoly of force in the country. Aid to Lebanon should be conditioned on its continuing, forceful action against Hezbollah to disarm the terror group and make the government sovereign for the first time in decades.

 

Those efforts will be much helped by Syria’s refusal to allow, and active attempts to block, resupply of Hezbollah by Iran. President Trump’s meeting with the new Syrian leader, the ex-terrorist Ahmed al-Sharaa, and his lifting of sanctions on Syria were a calculated risk that thus far appears to be paying off. There is a lot of work ahead on Syrian-Jordanian, Syrian-Israeli, and Syrian-Turkish relations. Moreover, Syria’s internal problems are deep — as the violence against civilians and clashes among the Syrian army, Druze forces, and Bedouin militias in July showed all too clearly. Those clashes prompted Israeli intervention, and it’s easy to predict further Turkish moves against Kurdish groups. Holding Syria together, guarding its borders, and preventing internal violence will be a great challenge for Sharaa, but he will certainly try: Syria, with its battered economy, needs aid from the West and the Gulf. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem for the new Syrian leader: he won’t get the aid if he appears to be failing, but he will fail without the aid. There is at least a chance now, as President Trump grasped, to turn Syria — its links with Iran broken and those with Russia at least weakened — back into a normal country. So we should continue trying, working with Sharaa and potential donors to see the experiment through.

 

But that work requires attention and manpower in Washington. The latest developments on that front are both dismaying: the departure of Steve Witkoff’s deputy, Morgan Ortagus, who was handling Lebanon with a deft combination of charm and intense pressure, and the administration’s inability to get its nominee for assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, Joel Rayburn, to a confirmation vote in the Senate. Nothing is assured in either Lebanon or Syria, and U.S. inattention is a formula for drift, a reassertion of Hezbollah influence in the former, and a failed or terrorist state in the latter.

 

Meanwhile, Israel’s dazzling success against Iran does not end the Gaza war or bring the hostages home. It does weaken Hamas’s great sponsor, and with U.S. help that may mean a hostage deal is possible. The Iran success may give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greater political wiggle room for such a deal, as his comments during his July visit to Washington suggested. And there is a potential reward beyond the main prize of freeing the hostages: Ending the Gaza war, and with it Al Jazeera’s round-the-clock scenes of bloodshed, would quiet Arab public opinion and allow Arab governments to think again about tightening their ties with Israel and perhaps joining the Abraham Accords. Even if they do not — even if, for example, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman decides that more time must pass before he could risk normalization — interim steps are possible, such as allowing more trade, sports competitions, and public meetings of diplomats.

 

Nor does Israel’s success against Iran end the Islamic Republic’s threats to the United States and the West. It remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism, and its just-proven conventional military weakness could lead it to rely more heavily on terrorism to advance its interests. U.S. officials are wise to intensify the hunt for Iranian agents inside the country, and European governments especially should follow — given the record of Iranian terrorist attacks in Europe. Iran continues as well to hold foreigners hostage with trumped-up accusations of crime. And as its attack on the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar showed, Iran retains plenty of short-range missiles capable of hitting the Gulf Arab states and the U.S. bases in Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Bahrain.

 

But Iran remains dedicated to Israel’s destruction, and “Death to Israel” is still the regime’s central slogan. It is the only case of one U.N. member stating flatly that it wants to kill off another (or perhaps one of two cases, if we count Vladimir Putin’s comments on Ukraine). Iran is more than 75 times larger than Israel, with nine times the population, so it will remain a dangerous threat as long as the Islamic Republic regime rules the country.

 

Israel therefore cannot permit Iran’s reconstitution of its nuclear-weapons program. Nor should the United States do so, for the very reasons we struck the Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz nuclear sites: an Iranian nuclear weapon would be an unacceptable danger to our partner Israel, would strike a death blow to the nonproliferation efforts we have made since World War II, and when combined with a rebuilt ballistic-missile program would make Iran a threat to the United States as well. One nuclear North Korea is one too many.

 

So what can be done to stop it?

 

First and most simply, both Israel and the United States should reiterate that Iran will never be permitted to get a nuclear weapon. Both should make it clear that the attacks in June will be repeated as many times as is necessary to stop the Iranian program. The message to the government and people of Iran must be that all expenditures on that program are a waste, destined sooner or later to end up as dust and debris. Trump will be in office for three and half more years, which is plenty of time to strike Iran again. The success of the recent strike, the lack of any serious political blowback against the president, and the mockery that critics like Tucker Carlson made of themselves should teach Iran that Trump can and will do it again if need be.

 

Second, there should be no relaxation of sanctions on Iran unless and until it abandons its nuclear program and permits International Atomic Energy Agency inspections that prove it. The IAEA’s May 2025 report on the Iranian program was honest and insightful — and therefore damning. The IAEA under Director General Rafael Grossi does not play politics as it did during the Iraq War under his predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei. The United States should vigorously defend the IAEA’s role in Iran and demand that it get full access. In early July, Iran suspended all cooperation with the IAEA, and the Western response should be tougher sanctions.

 

The key step in restoring IAEA access and blocking sanctions relief is to get the three European nations that joined the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015 to invoke “snapback,” the mechanism of reimposing sanctions. Because the United States left that Obama-era agreement in 2018, we can’t do it — but Britain, France, and Germany can. Under the JCPOA, there can be no vetoes by Russia and China; all the old international sanctions return. Iran’s innumerable violations of the JCPOA demand snapback anyway, but it will now serve another purpose. Iran should be told that these heavy sanctions can be lifted — but only if it abandons its nuclear-weapons program and permits the IAEA to do its job. An added benefit of the snapback of U.N. sanctions: they also cover Iran’s ballistic-missile program.

 

During the first few months after President Trump’s victory in November, a lot was heard both about “pivoting to Asia” and paying less attention to the Middle East (the view of officials like Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby) and about the views of the many isolationists from groups such as Defense Priorities and the Quincy Institute who were hired for important positions at State, Defense, and the White House and in the intelligence community. This is a real concern, and both Vice President JD Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard seem to be members of this group.

 

But as the debris of Fordow shows, President Trump is not one of them. This was already evident during his Gulf trip in May. Critics may say our relations with the Gulf countries are too transactional, but the president seemed to be thinking of deep and long-term financial, commercial, and scientific relationships. Maybe he does see the governments of Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia as family offices with lots of cash to invest, but that was and will be enough to shut down the advisers who think of the Middle East as the land of “forever wars.” Trump sees it as the land of forever investments, and sees in Israel an ally worth backing. As in his January 2020 strike taking out Iran’s most powerful military commander, General Qasem Soleimani, Trump is proving that he can use U.S. military power without being drawn into endless conflicts.

 

And that is critical for our friends and our enemies in the Middle East, and for enemies elsewhere — Russia and China — to see. Unexpectedly, the Middle East turned into the place that proves Trump isn’t at all an isolationist and actually is willing to stay involved, back U.S. allies, and use U.S. power. The barbarians of Hamas and the mullahs in Tehran had something very different in mind when they started their major attacks on Israel in 2023, but their actions and the Israeli and American reactions have proved that the United States and its allies remain the dominant powers in the Middle East.