By James Kirchick
Sunday, April 26, 2026
It’s springtime, and a spirit of reconciliation is in the
air. It was President Donald Trump who ushered in our new bipartisan era when
he welcomed the just-elected Zohran Mamdani to the White House last fall. “Wow,
you’re even better-looking in person than you are on TV,” Trump marveled as the
incoming New York City mayor entered the Oval Office, high praise considering
that Trump makes cabinet appointments as if he were a casting director. “The
better he does, the happier I am,” he told the press about a man whom he had
repeatedly called a “nut job” and a “Communist lunatic.” Though Mamdani had
responded in kind, labeling Trump a “fascist” and a “despot,” the two men were
all smiles as they gripped hands and pledged to make New York City Great Again.
At a time when America is so polarized, such reaching
across the partisan divide should be something to celebrate. Seeing a
Republican and a Democrat (even a Democratic Socialist) make common cause
understandably brightens our day. Which is why it’s so dispiriting that this
season of rapprochement is occurring mainly among the absolute dregs of our
political-media ecosystem.
Consider the case of former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor
Greene. Over the course of her time in public life, MTG has been a propagator
of the QAnon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories, speculated that the 9/11
attacks were a hoax, and advocated the execution of prominent Democrats from
Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama. She has claimed that the Clintons killed John
F. Kennedy Jr. to eliminate a potential threat to Hillary’s New York Senate
campaign, compared Covid-19 safety measures to the suffering of Jews during the
Holocaust, alleged that the 2018 California wildfires were caused by space
lasers financed by the Rothschild family, and, my personal favorite, said that
Bill Gates wants the government to force-feed Americans fake meat grown in a
“peach tree dish.” (To be fair to MTG, she is from Georgia.) It should
go without saying that she denies that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential
election and supported his attempts to overturn it. What first comes to mind
when surveying this curriculum vitae is a trenchant observation from the
irrepressible Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana: “Life is hard, but it’s harder
when you’re stupid.”
As you might expect, liberals once detested Greene (who
resigned from Congress in January). The onetime owner of a CrossFit franchise,
she was the target of constant derision and ridicule, an easily mockable
personification of the die-hard MAGA voter. Five years ago, congressional
Democrats voted to expel her for her previous expressions of support for
political violence. In 2024, a routine hearing of the House Oversight Committee
descended into farce when Greene alleged that Democratic Representative Jasmine
Crockett, possibly the only member of Congress as obnoxious as Greene, was
wearing “fake eyelashes.” Crockett responded by telling Greene that she had a
“bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body.”
Last summer, however, Greene’s reputation among liberals
suddenly began to change. “There was once a great president that the American
people loved,” she wrote on June 24, two days after the launch of Operation
Midnight Hammer. “He opposed Israel’s nuclear program. And then he was
assassinated. I am for peace. I oppose war, including wars Israel wages. Should
I feel that my life is in danger now too?” Greene apparently wasn’t all that
afraid of being the target of an Israeli assassination attempt, because a few
months later she was insinuating that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent.
Joining forces with Republican Representative Thomas Massie and Democratic
Representative Ro Khanna, they became the three stooges of publicity-seeking
dimwits demanding the release of the “Epstein files.” By November, she was
instructing her followers, “If something happens to me, I ask you all to find
out which foreign government or powerful people would take heinous actions to
stop the information from coming out.”
For her heresy on the Epstein files and her sudden turn
against Israel, Greene found a whole new fan base. Democratic Representative
Jamie Raskin, the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, said that his
party must have a “huge, vast tent” large enough for Greene. “We visited
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene today to thank her for becoming such a
strong anti-war voice in congress and tell her we will miss her,” said Medea
Benjamin, the den mother of Code Pink, after Greene announced her retirement.
On The View, which I sometimes think might be a deep-state psyop to
repeal the 19th Amendment, Whoopi Goldberg praised Greene as “a very surprising
voice of reason” for supporting an extension of Obamacare subsidies during the
latest government shutdown. “She’s a rabid anti-Semitic lunatic,” the thinking
on this part of the left seems to go, “but she’s our rabid anti-Semitic
lunatic.”
By far the starkest example of the budding alliance
between the far-right and the far-left is the strange new respect some
progressives express toward Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Like Greene, it
wasn’t so long ago that Carlson was a hate figure for progressives, and one of
his biggest haters was a man named Cenk Uygur. Founder of a progressive media
company called “The Young Turks,” Uygur denounced “fake” progressives who
praised Carlson as late as 2022. “Tucker Carlson doesn’t agree with us at all,”
Uygur declared. “He uses the fact that most of the country agrees with
progressives as a tool to sheep-herd them into right wing talking points.” In
2019, Uygur attacked Carlson for displaying a graphic on his Fox News show
depicting then–CNN head Jeff Zucker as a puppet master. “That is a deeply
antisemitic trope, it goes back in history a long time, of the Jews being
puppet masters,” he said.
Uygur felt similar disgust for Owens, the comically
deranged podcaster who claims that Brigitte Macron is a man and who recently
alleged that “satanic Zionists occupy the White House and Congress.” For
spreading disinformation about Covid-19 in 2021, Uygur screamed, “I said it,
Candace Owens, you’re the worst of the worst! You’re a sellout! You’re scum of
the earth!” Uygur went on, “People like Candace Owens lead pathetic lives
because they’re paid to sell their own identity out.” In 2024, Uygur accused
Owens of deploying “over-the-top antisemitic tropes.”
Fast-forward a year, and Uygur has changed his mind. “No,
I’m not going to denounce Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens!” he declares. “We
don’t have to denounce her at all. Don’t come at me about denouncing Candace
Owens until you denounce Jared Kushner.” Last year, accusing Israel of “proudly
doing a genocide”1 in Gaza, Uygur beseeched Carlson, Owens, and
Greene to join forces with him and other progressives to “stop this.” He
reached back in history to convey the gravity of the situation. “I would hope
to god that if I was around in the 1930s and 1940s that I would have said,
‘Work with any right-wing populist and any left-wing populist or anyone period
to stop that Holocaust,’ to save one more person,” he said, apparently unaware
that it was the right-wing populists who were “doing” the Holocaust. In January,
Uygur appeared on Carlson’s show, extending the hand of cooperation. “We’ve
been taught by the media to hate each other and to have a tribal brain,” he
said.
Carlson has also been gaining fans among Muslims, a
proposition that would have shocked anyone who knew him personally or listened
to his commentary over the past quarter century. “Democratic leadership has no
idea how many people are being won over by Tucker Carlson and MTG right now
over Israel,” the left-wing Substack writer Wajahat Ali tweeted, linking to a
three-and-a-half-minute video in which the editor of the Economist tried
unsuccessfully to get an answer out of Carlson on the question of whether
Israel “has a right to exist.” Addressing speculation that Carlson might run
for president, Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid wrote, “If it was
[Pennsylvania Governor Josh] Shapiro vs. Tucker, I could imagine a significant
number of progressives, young people, Arabs, and Muslims sitting it out or
actually voting for Tucker.”
What we’re witnessing in this live-action demonstration
of the horseshoe theory of politics is the convening power of anti-Semitism.
It’s hard to think of another issue that could unite such an ideologically
diverse set of characters. Progressives by and large seem to be the drivers of
the emerging alliance, so excited at the prospect of a conservative crack-up
over Israel that they’re willing to overlook many areas of disagreement to
usher it along. The January cover story in Harper’s by Andrew Cockburn
entitled “How Gaza Broke MAGA,” reveals this dynamic. Cockburn, son of the
British Stalinist journalist Claud and brother of the deceased crackpot
columnist Alexander, claims that, prior to his death, Charlie Kirk “had shown
clear signs that he was changing sides” on the matter of the Israel–Palestine
conflict, something that “made him dangerous” in the eyes of Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Cockburn’s basis for this allegation is a report
from the pro-Assad stooge Max Blumenthal about a meeting in the Hamptons where
the investor Bill Ackman browbeat Kirk over his supposed heresy.
Everyone who actually attended the meeting and has spoken
on the record about it disputes this claim. No matter. Cockburn writes that
Blumenthal’s story was “buttressed by Candace Owens,” which is like saying P.T.
Barnum corroborated something said by Pinocchio. Owens, whom Kirk cut off long
before his assassination and who has since devoted her career to tormenting his
widow, appears to have been Cockburn’s main source for his story. “Charlie’s
feelings toward Israel were changing,” she told him “in a long phone call.”
Cockburn credulously reports her assertion that Netanyahu offered Kirk “a ton
of money,” and he repeats a widely debunked claim that Israel pays social media
influencers $7,000 per post. And this is the supposedly reasonable Cockburn.
Like the rest of his Stalinist comrades at the time,
Claud Cockburn turned on a dime when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany made
peace in the fall of 1939. Overnight, they went from denouncing Hitler to
lambasting Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. “Suddenly the scum
of the earth and the blood-stained butcher of the workers (for so they had
described one another) were marching arm in arm,” George Orwell wrote of the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, whose supporters exhibited a level of cynicism and ruthlessness
that repulsed decent people. The same can be said of their latter-day epigones.
1 While constantly accusing Israel of
“genocide,” Uygur named his media company after the Turkish political movement
responsible for perpetrating (an actual) genocide (against Armenians), an irony
that, like much else, appears lost on him.
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