AOC’s Latest Dual-Loyalty Hoax Is a Doozy

By Seth Mandel

Friday, July 24, 2026

 

This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined her fellow Democrat and prospective presidential candidate Ro Khanna in elevating a dual-loyalty smear that will have longstanding consequences for American Jews.

 

While the idea didn’t originate with AOC (what idea has?), the socialist star’s endorsement of it, at a moment of increased institutionalized suspicion toward Jews and Israel, promises to amplify it and perhaps solidify its place in the mainstream narrative.

 

The concept has to do with the annual defense bill, which just passed the House and still has to go through the Senate. The bill contains language that addresses the fact that the U.S. is changing the form that its military aid to Israel will take in the future. Instead of money that Israel must use to purchase supplies from American defense manufacturers, the two allies will undertake more joint development projects. To oversee this process and to certify it is taking place properly, there will be a coordinator in charge of all affected cooperative programs.

 

Such joint-defense programs are normal, but Israel’s critics are incapable of matching that normalcy. Instead, they have created a very strange talking point that the bill would “merge” the two countries’ militaries.

 

While one is tempted to laugh, unfortunately a mark of our era is that the dumbest, least-believable conspiracies become instant ideological dogma. Khanna added to this ridiculousness the idea that the bill represented a loss of American “sovereignty,” thus placing those who support it in the category of turncoats and traitors.

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former GOP congresswoman who has been embraced by the left for her critiques of President Trump and of Israel, has said exactly that. So has left-wing commentator Cenk Uyghur. The rest of the tinfoil hat brigade stuck with slightly less bloodthirsty terminology.

 

“This amendment is an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy,” declared Ocasio-Cortez.

 

How did we get here? The lie seemed to get off the ground in late May thanks to folks at the Quincy Institute, the isolationist activist forum, though it didn’t at first use the term “merge” but rather “integrate.” That word is important, because it also appeared in one of the sentences in the defense bill. Of course, the bill doesn’t say the militaries will be integrated, but conspiracy theorists decided it was one of the few straws they had in reach, so they’re grasping it.

 

A second conspiracy theory around the bill, pushed by the folks at Dropsite, the podcasters who were last seen trying to bully Ro Khanna into approving of October 7, is that a letter sent by Benjamin Netanyahu claims the bill was his idea.

 

In fact, Netanyahu sent a letter to a congressman who had written up a resolution that just said the two countries would move toward cooperation instead of the old aid model and called for a new Memorandum of Understanding. Netanyahu has been pushing this change for years, and he wrote that he was happy the two allies would now move in that direction.

 

So when you combine the two lies, you have: Israel is dictating U.S. laws, and the council of the Elders of Zion—Sorry, the Jewish state—now runs our military. Oh, and everyone who supported the U.S. defense bill is a traitor.

 

The purpose of this conspiracist fanaticism from AOC, Greene, Khanna, and the others is twofold. First, they are trying to close off any possible iteration of U.S.-Israel cooperation. No aid, no joint projects—they just want the alliance of democracies to fail. Russian and Qatari propaganda outlets have echoed their claims because they, too, want the alliance of democracies to fail.

 

The second reason is to take advantage of what we might call the Mamdani Moment, in which it is considered acceptable in polite company to question the loyalty of American Jews and anyone who works with them.

 

You can see why America’s enemies love this so much: If the final bill passes, they can now just blame literally everything the U.S. does on the Jews.

 

As for the American Jews who will be the target of violence inspired by such manic hallucinations: They will continue to fortify their houses of worship and educational institutions, and hopefully they will remember exactly who it was that made such measures necessary.