Strange New Disrespect

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

 

One of the temptations in writing about populism is trying to discern which figures are earnest chuds and which are exploiting the grassroots right’s appetite for chuddery to build clout.

 

Truthfully, it doesn’t matter. It may be that Tucker Carlson is a sincere groyper whereas Megyn Kelly is a poseur, but so what? “We are what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” The pretenders ladling out postliberal slop to grow their audiences aren’t being careful.

 

I’ve come to think it’s a false dichotomy, in fact. There may be such things as “pure cranks” and “pure clout chasers,” but my guess is that most influential chuds are a bit of both. They probably always harbored certain postliberal sympathies but suppressed them prior to the Trump era, fearing they’d be marginalized if they didn’t. As it’s become clearer since 2016 that there’s a market for the stuff, it’s become not merely safe but lucrative to release that pent-up supply.

 

I will die on this hill: For all his faults, the president hasn’t made anyone’s character worse. He simply removed the few remaining moral checkpoints to mainstream political success and left it to individuals to decide for themselves what they’re willing to condone to gain power. Nothing in my lifetime has illuminated the American character as starkly as how right-wingers reacted to that invitation. Trump is the Great Revealer.

 

Which brings us to Joe Kent.

 

Kent is the director of the National Counterterrorism Center—or was until this morning, when he published his letter of resignation at a moment when America is on alert for Iranian terrorism. “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” he wrote. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

 

He went on to blame “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” for a “misinformation campaign” that convinced Trump to attack. It was “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war,” Kent, a veteran of that conflict, continued. He even blamed the Jewish state for the death of his first wife, who was killed in a 2019 suicide bombing during another war that he claimed was “manufactured by Israel.”

 

The attack that killed Shannon Kent happened in Syria.

 

There are many things to say about Kent’s letter, which gained a phenomenal amount of traction online in just a few hours. But I find myself tempted by the familiar question: Is he an earnest postliberal or just exploiting the right’s appetite for postliberalism to build clout?

 

As usual, I think it’s a false dichotomy.

 

An earnest chud.

 

“I strongly condemn Nick Fuentes' politics, especially in regards to our ally Israel.”

 

That was Joe Kent writing in March 2022, a strange thing to say given his apparent belief that said ally bears moral responsibility for the Iraq war and his own wife’s murder. But it was less strange under the circumstances: Kent was running for Congress in Washington state that year and in hot water for his associations with white nationalists. That included a personal phone call with groyper-in-chief Fuentes, who alleged that Kent told him, “I love what you’re doing.”

 

Candidate Kent also insisted that “the 2020 election was rigged, and has rationalized the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, by claiming that an otherwise peaceful crowd was infiltrated by Deep State agents [and] provocateurs,” according to a New York Times report at the time. He was a full-spectrum chud, in other words—a decidedly mixed bag in a purplish district like the one he was running in. Hence his disavowal of Fuentes, an obvious ploy to reassure nervous normie voters that he wasn’t the crank he’d been cracked up to be.

 

He finished narrowly ahead of GOP incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who had voted to impeach Trump, in the district’s jungle primary thanks to the depravity of the Republican base. But he ended up losing the general election (narrowly) to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, then lost by a similar margin two years later when he challenged her again. He was, it seemed, just the tiniest bit too postliberal to be viable in a swing district, a tad too prone to telling far-right podcast hosts things like, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with there being a white-people special interest group.”

 

But Donald Trump loved him, naturally. Less than a year after Kent was rejected a second time by Washingtonians for being too gross for Congress, the president put him in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center. Now here he is, resigning that position with rhetorical flourishes that sound like, uh, Nick Fuentes about the Jewish state being the cause of all modern American wars.

 

That’s one of the extraordinary things about his resignation letter. Kent could have presented his objection to the war as a simple disagreement over policy; instead he went out of his way to portray Israel’s government as a U.S. puppeteer across multiple conflicts, even tossing in a reference to certain shadowy “influential members of the American media” as de facto co-conspirators. Never, I assume, has a federal official framed his departure so explicitly as a protest against Israeli influence over U.S. policy, and certainly never by scapegoating Israel in such comprehensive groyper-esque terms.

 

All that was missing was an image of an octopus emblazoned with a Star of David wrapping its tentacles around the White House and Pentagon. If you were of the opinion that Joe Kent was an earnest chud, not just a poseur pretending to be one for clout, you should feel vindicated today.

 

Another extraordinary thing about his resignation letter is that it exists at all. Despite the persistent moral sleaze that oozes through every artery of Trumpist government, it’s almost unheard of for one of the president’s aides to quit in disgust over his policies or behavior. A few staffers resigned in protest shortly before and after January 6, but I don’t believe there’s been a single high-level departure during his second term over matters like menacing Greenland, granting legal impunity to the ICE goon squad, or turning the Justice Department into one of the most corrupt, obnoxious agencies in the federal government. (There have been lower-level resignations, to be sure.)

 

And no wonder. Trump’s second administration is a kakistocracy by design, its members selected for their flair for ruthlessness and blind loyalty to the leader. Principled disagreements with the president are supposed to be impossible. And in a way, Kent’s resignation remained true to that: By laying ultimate blame for the war on Israel, not on Trump, he followed postliberal etiquette about never squarely faulting the president for his own terrible decisions. As the saying goes, “Trump cannot fail, he can only be failed”: If he screws up, he’s either gotten bad advice from an aide or been deceived by the eternal Jew.

 

Still, it’s remarkable that Joe Kent, a man ambitious enough to have run for Congress twice and who landed an important federal job against all odds, would toss that job aside and shank the president on his way out the door. I don’t think the zealous purity of his chud convictions can fully explain it; I suspect Kent believed there was something to be gained—clout, let’s call it—in doing so.

 

We may have reached the point in postliberalism's evolution at which embarrassing Donald Trump publicly is a good career move for a right-winger, provided that the thing he embarrasses the president over is his solidarity with Israel.

 

Clout and the post-Trump right.

 

“We do not share a political movement with anyone who traffics in antisemitism, promotes Liz Warren’s economic policies, or promotes Rashida Tlaib’s foreign policy,” Sen. Tom Cotton declared recently at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s symposium on antisemitism.

 

It’s a noble sentiment, but I can’t get past his choice of pronoun. As the old joke goes about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, “What do you mean ‘we,’ kemosabe?”

 

Tom Cotton might not want to share a political movement with antisemites, but he does. A guy who was recently crowned “Antisemite of the Year” by one watchdog group was a frequent honored guest of Donald Trump’s in the White House until recently. Jew-baiters like Tucker Carlson, Fuentes, and Candace Owens command a collective audience of millions online. Young Republicans in particular are prone to antisemitism, with one 2024 survey finding that 20-something Trump supporters were likelier than anyone else to confess to holding unfavorable views of Jews.

 

Note: Not unfavorable views of Israel or “Zionists” or Benjamin Netanyahu. Of Jewish people writ large.

 

To all appearances, the future of the Republican Party—and the Democratic Party, as this phenomenon is bipartisan—will be considerably more antisemitic than the past was. If Cotton means to say that he won’t remain part of the GOP if that happens, good for him. But forgive me for doubting him: Many conservatives would have said (and did say!) circa 2015 that they won’t remain part of a Trumpist GOP, yet here we are. Partisanship beats morals almost every time.

 

Joe Kent’s resignation letter can be understood as a bold but straightforward ploy to impress the sizable vanguard of young right-wingers who are skeptical of Israel and/or Jews and who’ll wield increasing influence within the party in years to come as older Republicans age out of the electorate. With one dramatic gesture he established himself as a singular figure in postliberal politics, a man so hostile to the Jewish state’s influence in America that he would rather martyr himself by relinquishing power and sacrificing Donald Trump’s favor than keep silent about it.

 

By breaking with the president, he did what more powerful dovish Trump deputies like J.D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard haven’t been able to bring themselves to do. Reached for comment by the Times about Kent’s resignation, Tucker Carlson could barely contain himself. “Joe is the bravest man I know, and he can’t be dismissed as a nut,” he told the paper. “He’s leaving a job that gave him access to highest-level relevant intelligence. The neocons will now try to destroy him for that. He understands that and did it anyway.”

 

It’s not just the Tuckerites who have made Kent’s resignation a sensation on social media, though. Strange new respect for him will pour in from the left, as that’s where most of the movement in American public opinion on Israel is. Despite the noise generated by the groyper faction, a new NBC News survey found Republicans’ views of the Jewish state have turned only slightly less positive since 2023, down from 63-12 to 54-18 today. GOP sympathies for Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians actually increased since 2013, inching up from 67 percent back then to 69 percent today.

 

Democrats and independents are where the seismic shifts are happening. Democratic views on Israel went from 34-35 favorability in 2023 to 13-57 now, while independents shifted from 40-22 to 21-48 over the same period. In 2013 both groups sympathized more with Israelis than with Palestinians; now both sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis, with Democrats breaking 67-17 on the matter.

 

Simply put, Kent’s strange new disrespect for Israel isn’t that strange as a political matter. In the same way that right-wing demand for postliberalism unlocked hidden supply among commentators during the Trump era, public demand for greater opposition to Israel is destined to unlock hidden supply among the political class as well. My guess is that Kent views his resignation as a way to get in on the ground floor of that, establishing himself as one of the boldest anti-Israel voices in America and gaining him new fans across the political spectrum.

 

Notably, he’s not the only Trump crony to have fallen out with the president over Israel this week. Remember Stewart Rhodes? He was the head of the Oath Keepers, a group founded to protect America from federal tyranny that ended up acting as foot soldiers for a right-wing tyrant’s coup plot on January 6. Rhodes did time for that before the tyrant in question commuted his prison sentence; now he’s hoping for a full pardon to wipe his record clean.

 

But there are certain things he won’t stoop to doing to earn Trump’s mercy. “We can’t shut our eyes to the obvious role of the influence of Zionism in our government, of the Israeli people, intelligence services, Mossad, and others in our government,” Rhodes said this week. “So that’s why I no longer call myself MAGA. I am an America-only patriot. I’m a Christian nationalist, an American Christian nationalist.”

 

Is Stewart Rhodes an earnest postliberal chud? Indubitably. But I think he also senses that soon there’ll be more political juice to be squeezed from the postliberal right by being anti-Israel than by being pro-Trump. The same goes for Joe Kent, who’s never had as much clout as he has now—so much so, I think, that if and when “America First-ers” start sniffing around for a candidate to challenge Vance from the right in 2028, he’ll be an obvious alternative if Carlson refuses to do it.

 

Especially if this already unpopular war goes bad. Kent is shrewdly pulling the ripcord at a moment when Trump is poised to use ground troops to end the regime’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz; deploying infantry polled terribly when it was hypothetical and will poll catastrophically if it ends with American soldiers being killed. The more dangerous this conflict gets for the United States, the more prescient and defensible Kent’s resignation will seem to many in hindsight. Even to some Republicans who are backing Trump for now.

 

And honestly, as a matter of basic political calculation, which sounds better? Sticking around as counterterrorism chief for a president whom you know will blame you if Iran manages to pull off a terror attack on U.S. soil? Or bailing out now and having endless bouquets thrown at you by Israel’s many Americans critics for demagoging the Jewish state so unapologetically?

 

In a party dominated by postliberal chuds, there’s really no downside to what Kent did. I’m sure his interview with Tucker is already booked.