Author: Justin Podur

Liberals have discredited themselves supporting genocide, loosening their control over the public discussion. Right-wingers have rushed in to fill the vacuum, but the America First (& Israel A Close Second), antiwar right will not lead the US out of support for genocide. Facing massive public disgust, the antiwar right have been put forward by a Zionist media establishment as a shield for conservatives. They are here to save the right-wing from deserved contempt, not lead their people to an anti-genocide struggle. Serving as a rhetorical curtain to hide authentic anti-imperialist voices from the public, ultimately, they too, serve the racist, Zionist agenda.

The controversy is fake. It isn’t the enemy of my enemy – they aren’t enemies at all.

Over the past few weeks, something called a “civil war” on the “antiwar right” unfolded online, in which far-right and farther-right influencers went on one another’s talk shows and then streamed, saying mean things about one another.

Much of it was ad hominem; a lot of it involved globally irrelevant insider US political discussion. But a portion of it was about US foreign policy. That latter portion involved these right-wingers discussing the source of their criticism of US support for Israel’s genocide and trying (and failing) to find enough common ground to work together, before crashing and burning calling one another federal agents (unusual since all are supporters of police and of federal agencies).

Let’s put some time into understanding

1. how this “antiwar”, right-wing position is manufactured;

2. how the things these figures have said might be satisfying to listen to for those fed up with Israel’s genocide and liberal support for it; and

3. why there will be nothing of any anti-genocide value coming from any of these figures – indeed, there is good reason to think that the whole thing is contrived – and to the benefit of the genociders.

1. Manufacturing the “antiwar right”: Genocide debate culture and the antigenocide bloc’s abusive relationship with Piers Morgan

Before he went on Piers Morgan’s show, George Galloway told his viewers that Piers Morgan was irrelevant and no one should go on there and give Morgan relevance. But Morgan, a right-wing TV broadcaster who, pre-2023-genocide, was known outside of the UK for his commentary on various celebrities, reinvented himself as the host of debates about Gaza.

Initially, he was famous for belligerent hounding of pro-Palestine guests with “DO YOU CONDEMN HAMAS?” (a practice he still follows like praying the rosary).

But when Egyptian-American comedian Bassam Youssef went on the show and achieved some viral moments, mainly through the use of his comedic talent of mockery, anti-genocide viewers started to join the game, watching and looking for “gotcha” moments in the debates to share. Many, including Galloway, eventually went on the show, producing more viral clips to send around.

In the process, Morgan managed to position himself, through the selection of guests and his treatment of them, as the arbiter of legitimate voices on both sides, pro- and anti-genocide. When the anti-genocide audience neared exhaustion of Morgan’s incitement and abuse of pro-Palestine guests, Morgan would throw in an adversarial interview with an Israeli official or paid agent. This is part of the abusive relationship between leftists and Morgan: these dramatic moments of confrontation with Israeli genociders keep leftists hoping Morgan will find humanity. He won’t, but his keeping up the act keeps the viewers from giving up.

The Oxford Union, and now Jubilee’s show Surrounded, have also used the debate format as engines for the production of viral video clips, with explosive success during this genocide. The debate form is itself a type of propaganda, because of what it assumes: two or more people, acknowledging one another’s humanity and a good-faith framework of rules, using argument and counter-argument to try to help the audience determine the truth, sharpening and discovering their own positions in the process.

Morgan (and Oxford and Jubilee) exploits those assumptions to hide what is actually happening: a production stage-managed by the genociders, who win regardless of whether their side wins or loses.

Morgan chooses who debates whom, and irrespective of who “wins” on that day, the person setting up the debate (Morgan in this case) who holds the power to promote or de-emphasize specific voices. In this way the debate host (or the host of a big podcast) holds the power to control the opposition*.

[*Anti-imperialists will still go to these debates because the calculation of whether to boycott or attend is a tactical one, which is probably why Galloway first boycotted and then attended. We need visibility to make our points too and have to trade that against all the benefits the genociders get from these debates. It’s a powerful propaganda system indeed if you’re willing to participate in it even knowing what it is.]

With one exception (Fuentes, whose brand is based on being excluded and supposedly leading a movement of the excluded) every one of the antiwar right voices discussed in this article has been on Morgan’s show.

A right-wing figure can be created as an antiwar voice by the simple expedient of Morgan hosting a debate and putting them in that position.

2. The temptations of the antiwar right and the creation of the mirage

Given that the right-wing is (in the US) big, richly resourced, and actually controls state power, it may give (false) hope that the rise to hegemony of an antiwar right could stop the genocide. Given that part of the right-wing presents itself as anti-establishment and wanting to overthrow the system, it might give the (false) hope of an anti-system alliance of right and left to overthrow the genocidal system.

Here’s how the antiwar right created and nurtured these false hopes, creating an antiwar mirage that leads to nowhere in the weeks leading up to this “civil war”.

Tucker Carlson. He rightly ridiculed Ted Cruz’s use of the text of the Book of Genesis (12:3) – where God told Abraham that he would bless those who blessed him – to support the 1948-created Zionist project. By interviewing Iranian President Pezeshkian, he rightly demystified the idea of an American journalist talking to a head of state designated as an enemy (Iran).

But like Bernie Sanders, AOC and others, he sees what he’s doing as ultimately looking out for Israel. “I’m not even anti-Israel,” he said. “I like Israel.” If Tucker is America First, then like the liberals he opposes, his America includes Israel (A Close Second).

Candace Owens. She rightly called Israel’s atrocities against children “demonic” and “satanic”. Full of righteous contempt for the Israel lobby’s work to silence all opposition, she has modeled the courage of not backing down in the face of name-calling and cancellation efforts. She’s been bringing details of the Epstein network of sexual violence to her large audience. And while she supported Israel for many years, she “will never support Israel again.” Unlike many online influencers she also reads. Actual books. And changes her views based on new information, which fills anti-imperialists with the (false) hope that she might be brought to that position, becoming a powerful communicator for the cause (she won’t).

But she also presents to her audience the imperialist invention of “Judeo-Bolshevism” and tells them that the Nazi holocausts were equalled or surpassed by Bolshevik atrocities. In her discussion with Nick Fuentes, she said she’s increasingly skeptical of the whole history she’s been taught (to which Fuentes’s only retort was “you sound like a leftist…”), but doesn’t recognize that anti-communist atrocity propaganda is also a huge part of the history she’s been taught (lies about Indigenous peoples genocided by the Anglo-Americans, about Haitians during their 1804 revolution against French slavers, about Indian sepoys during the failed 1857 war against Britain, about Africans resisting the Scramble for Africa…) When it comes to this genocide, this means she has no way to investigate the false atrocity propaganda about October 7. Indeed, she argues that the whole event was orchestrated by Netanyahu (on whom Candace, like liberals, hyperfocuses, and therefore, like other Zionist liberals, fails to recognize the breadth and depth of support for atrocity in Israeli society).

Dan Bilzerian. Most anti-imperialists saw Bilzerian for the first time when he took an interview with Piers Morgan and argued that mainstream Jewish religious beliefs include a belief in the innate superiority of Jewish people, mentioning references in the Talmud about Jesus burning in excrement for eternity and insults about Mary. Bilzerian challenged Morgan’s lies about October 7, pointed out that most Israeli settlers are in fact from Europe (while Palestinians are from the region and likely descendants of West Asian Jewish people), and remained unfazed in the face of Piers’s accusations of anti-semitism.

But, like Candace, Bilzerian’s opposition to Israel is connected to opposition to “Judeo-Bolshevism”, and he cites incorrect figures about Bolshevism being fundamentally a Jewish movement and a falsified history of Bolshevik massacres. He cites Winston Churchill on “Judeo-Bolshevism”, as if he does not understand that the reason Churchill (a Zionist and keen genocider himself) made this claim was to explain his support for Zionism! Like Candace, he questions imperialist and liberal talking points about Israel and is skeptical about what liberals say about Hitler, but shares liberals’ (and Hitler’s, and Churchill’s) talking points about communism and Russia. Bilzerian notes his own Armenian origin and the fact that the Young Turks (the 20th century regime, not the liberal youtube channel) committed a genocide against Armenians in 1916, but ignores the facts that a) it was Turkish and Kurdish personnel who committed that genocide b) that the current Turkish government denies that genocide, emphasizing instead that Israel joins Turkey in that denial.

Bilzerian’s main business is the sale of scammy lifestyle courses which are marketed using photo and video montages of him doing high-end tourist activities surrounded by models and expensive items. He wants nothing to do with anti-imperialists, who want nothing to do with him.

Andrew Tate. Tate was one of the early people to debate Piers Morgan on the genocide and expressed righteous anger at the atrocities committed by the Israelis.

For people who had watched Piers Morgan bullying his pro-Palestine guests, watching Piers, who was obviously physically afraid of Tate, trying and failing to take up his usual bully role, was at least different.

But Tate – like Bilzerian – is ultimately on the web to create a funnel to his business, which is also selling scammy courses about how to get rich, as is apparent from even a quick glance at his twitter feed. If you like what he says about the immorality of genocide, you have the opportunity to help make Tate richer by taking one of his courses about how to get more money. In a live stream with Nick Fuentes, Tate said that he was concerned that conservative support for genocide was discrediting the conservative movement as a whole. People may lose interest in demeaning women if the messengers are genocidal: “Stop supporting genocide! It’s a bad look for conservatives!”

These political positions are nothing more than market niches for these people, internet funnels to different businesses and different age demographics (with Tucker and Candace marketing to older, Tate and Bilzerian to younger demographics). Tucker and Candace present a conservative lifestyle, while Tate and Bilzerian follow what conservatives call a “degenerate” one.

All of these flaws and worse come together with Nick Fuentes. Fuentes leads a movement, which he calls the groypers, who self-identify as racist/racialist, white nationalists, and take the posture of being downtrodden and excluded by the establishment right (they are neither downtrodden nor excluded). He is a believer in Race/IQ, believing that the origin of inequality is the biological dysfunction of the oppressed, arguing with Candace, who believes the origin of inequality is cultural dysfunction of the oppressed*. As a racial darwinist, Fuentes isn’t motivated by solidarity, humanitarian considerations, or empathy – in the hours I watched I didn’t hear him call it a genocide or express any human lament about the atrocities. His world view is of a darwinian struggle of races, and his complaint is that a “race” other than the one he identifies with is deciding on matters of war and peace when it’s his “race” that should be making those decisions.

*Speaking of selling courses, I do have a hundreds-of-hours-long podcast which is sort of a course on all of history since 1492. Among other topics, we did an episode on scientific racism, and on social darwinism, 19th century inventions to justify the Scramble for Africa. Plenty of references there too. Cost of my course is $0.

Fuentes seeks to lead a movement of what he calls white people which he thinks need to take over all the institutions and loci of power, presenting this as if it were a novel strategy and not the history of the Anglo-American Empire from the 1750s to the 1950s. Fuentes hasn’t specified how highborn he is in this rarefied multicentury hierarchy, but self-made successes are extremely rare and most people with millions of followers are better connected than they care to admit. Regardless, Fuentes’s analysis is based on false claims about science, history, power, and ideology. He’s claimed that one reason right-wingers are flocking to his channel is because he was the first to see (in June 2025) that Trump was under Israel’s control and was going to go to war with Iran. This was a commonplace insight among anti-imperialists since the breakdown of the last ceasefire in March 2025.

3. Keeping anti-imperialism behind a thick curtain of right-wing noise

Historically Zionists have always preferred the anti-Jewish right – with whom Zionists share the same racial darwinism and the same biblical references to armageddon – to the anti-imperialist left, with its internationalist connections to the Global South.

Anti-imperialists want a stop to the plunder and genocide; when the right fight among themselves, it’s about how to divide the spoils. The left believes in equality: the right, in natural hierarchy. This is the irreconcilable difference and it makes the antiwar right a mirage.

When you search for voices that are against Israel’s genocide, you’ll see these viral debate clips and enter the right-wing marketing funnels. The internet is flooded with them for a reason: to make it much harder to find anything real. Debates where the pro-Israel side routinely gets trounced and where the anti-Israel side gets one “gotcha” moment after another – are still wins for Morgan. These successes are as valuable for the propaganda system as algorithmic suppression or banning the phrase, “I support Palestine Action.”

Right-wingers can look super-insightful saying obvious things that leftists know because unlike right wingers, actual leftists are almost entirely boycotted by the mainstream*.

*You’re thinking of exceptions. I know the exceptions. What’s important is the quantity and the pattern.

There’s a solid incentive for liberals and right-wingers alike to create and promote a very visible antiwar right: to ensure that someone that isn’t a leftist is out there saying every possible thing, so that you can hear any specific viewpoint from someone other than a leftist.

In the video where Fuentes defends himself from Tucker and Candace’s accusation that he’s working for the police, he shows a supposedly exculpatory video of himself at the January 6 protest telling the crowd to advance and disregard the police. People who have been to Palestine protests have a good idea how it would legally go for someone who did that. At least he wasn’t supporting Plasticine Action…

Another subtle note from that video, is when Fuentes is praising Trump’s 2016 term, he says “we achieved some modest reforms”. Among them? Moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “We achieved some modest reforms”, he says in his video. “He cut the corporate tax rate, moved Israel’s Embassy, did some minor stuff on the border, it was negligible.” (9:22).

Fuentes, now positioning himself as the foremost and original critic – not only of Zionism as he emphasizes, but of Jewish people racially – nonetheless calls it a modest (positive, by implication) reform for Trump to have moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a “reform” that Israel had desperately wanted for decades. Perhaps it’s a meaningless slip. Or perhaps it’s a slip that reveals that for Fuentes, like the rest of these people, anti-Israel positioning is fake, just seeking a slice of the audience to turn into revenue.

In the interview with Candace, Fuentes explains and endorses the idea that slavers didn’t believe that slavery should be abolished because Africans have low IQs. With his level of knowledge and intellectual curiosity, even if he was morally on the right side of history (he’s not), he would be a liability to whatever side he’s on. Tucker argued that he is a liability – to the anti-war right.

This is “shit-coating”: the carving off of an actual insight, mixing it with toxic and ultimately pro-establishment lies, and presenting it so that no one can recognize the unvarnished truth. The algorithm wants to distract you, and these people have, with the resources of the Anglo-American, Zionist oligarchy behind them, mastered the algorithm. The truth? They can only give you the shit-coated version.

For anti-genocide work, the supposedly anti-war right is another distraction. The same way that Bernie Sanders and AOC turned out to be pro-Israel empty suits, the so-called antiwar right is of no use to any just cause.

The Roman Empire collapsed when the city of Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410 – or did it? By the time of the sack, Rome was no longer the capital of the Western Roman Empire – other cities had played that role for over a hundred years (Milan and then Ravenna). What’s called the Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital in Constantinople, which everyone simply called the Roman Empire, continued for a thousand more years, until it fell to Turkey in 1453.

The British Empire, a going concern since the East India Company was chartered in 1600, also never collapsed. A multi-decade, somewhat friendly, struggle for primacy with the United States over primacy over the globe-spanning financial, productive, and military arrangements of the Empire began in the 20th century. After World War 2, the capital of the Empire moved from London to Washington.

There was plenty of brutal continuity to the transfer. But with the change of capital came a change in philosophy and mode of operation.

The British Empire, whose crown jewel was India, was based on mass famines, a global grain market, manipulation of gold and silver standards, naval power, a balance of power in Europe, strict racial hierarchy taught at the universities that trained the elite, and the use of subject races to fight one another.

When it moved to America, the Empire’s crown jewel was the whole American continent. The post-WW2 version was based on fossil fuels, a dollar standard, air power, the subordination of allies, a military-industrial complex that encompassed science, engineering, and industrial might, coups d’etat, and increasingly, sanctions regimes.

Racial ideology in the US-led version was full of contradictions: co-opting decolonization struggles and the ideological battle with communism required a nominal disavowal of racial hierarchy, even as racism motivated many elite actions and underpinned the system of neocolonial theft of resources from the Global South and from Indigenous lands. No longer colonies, nominally sovereign nations were led by local elites who put their lands and their peoples to work to make the rich countries richer. Those who refused would see their countries bombed, sanctioned, or both, until an overthrow could be effected and a compliant local elite installed.

The smooth functioning of the US Empire occurred through a host of multilateral institutions: the United Nations, headquartered in New York, showed that the world was united under US leadership, with the UN Security Council guaranteeing that wars could be stopped by the will of the world’s powers. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund promised development to those Global South countries that followed America’s rules. The International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and the World Trade Organization promised that international disputes could be resolved without violence.

Elections, in the US and throughout the world, let off tremendous amounts of steam when the masses got angry – no need for revolution when you can vote the bastards out.

The change of imperial capital was announced to the world in 1956 during the Suez Crisis. The story is familiar: Egypt asserted sovereignty over the Suez Canal. Britain, France, and Israel invaded. The United States ordered them to stand down, and they did. The imperial capital had moved. If the British wanted to do something, they would have to ask America first.

In the 21st century, we are living through an analogous, multi-decade, friendly struggle that has moved the imperial capital from Washington to Tel Aviv.

We are living through the Suez Crisis of our time, our own announcement that the capital has moved. At several moments during this genocide, the US announced a ceasefire – including, at one point, not even vetoing a ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council. Biden announced a ceasefire in May 2024, Witkoff announced one in January 2025. The Israelis ignored the first, rolled back the second. The message for the US: Israel will decide when the war ends, and the US will have to accept it, like the US decided that the Suez Crisis would stop and the British had to accept it.

In the new, Israel-led version of the empire, West Asia is the crown jewel. Like the wars of the East India Company to make India into British India, like the Indian Wars of US land theft and genocide, the Middle East today suffers endless wars for the goal of Greater Israel.

In the Israeli-led version of Empire, racial hierarchy is back with a vengeance: Cecil Rhodes’s most racist pronouncements can’t compete with the daily posts of the average pro-Israel twitter user. The disobedient are punished not with a coup d’etat that brings a pliant leader to power, but with genocide against the whole population. Surrender is irrelevant: the surrendered are genocided along with the defiant. Air power remains the principal hard power tool, while ground operations are basically anti-civilian terror operations on medium (assassinations, raids) or mass (gaza genocide) scale. Media and psychological operations have a growing primacy. Inducing psychological collapse is the main objective, in the hope that physical collapse will follow so that genocide can proceed. All the US-built multilateral institutions have been discredited: International courts, the security council, can issue rulings that are then ignored. The atomic energy agency passes intelligence on to Israel to help their assassination planning. Elections have been shown to make no difference, as genocide proceeds through changes of political party.

Different imperial premises, different kinds of resistance.

The Global South’s peoples fought British colonialism wielding the ideology of national sovereignty and the construction of nation-states to replace the colonies. They fought the American Empire with guerrilla warfare and resistance to military occupation.

The people of West Asia are fighting by not surrendering, enduring the assassinations, sieges, bombings, and psychological operations, defeating the ground forces, and developing missiles to retaliate for attacks made by Israel’s airpower. Those inclined to direct action in the West resort to attacking the fragile and still very important nodes of weapons production. For the Resistance, defense is based on endurance, without trying to match the empire’s specialty of assassination. Attack is based on physical attrition, without trying to match the empire’s specialty in psychological warfare.

Israel specializes in assassination; Iran in missile technology. The missiles can’t stop the assassins from killing and the assassinations can’t stop the missiles from landing. Who made the right investment?

The Roman Republic was founded around 509 BC. The capital was moved to Constantinople around 900 years later and the Empire lived on for another thousand years, until 1453. The British Empire was shorter-lived, around 345 years between 1600-1945, its American incarnation lasting around 80 years from 1945-2023. The Israeli-led iteration is burning itself out quickly. From here it doesn’t look like it will last long.

How does one join the dizzying heights of the elite? Not the 10%, the 2%, or the 1% of professional or business success, but the billionaire class, the House of Representatives, Governor of a major state or mayor of New York City? Is it by proving your merit in school, a bit of good luck, perhaps a grinding mindset as aspirants are taught to hope? Or by family connection and bloodline, as those doomed to fail may fear?

Certainly it’s the latter. But there is a missing ingredient that aspirants should know before they set out to try to join this genocidal Western club.

In the book Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, Italian political scientist Diego Gambetta talks about how in certain circumstances it is rational for subordinates (say, enforcers who are collecting extortion money from businesses) to display to their superiors how incompetent they are (at, for example, actually running a business). This is a display of loyalty: an incompetent subordinate can only survive at the boss’s whim, and is therefore going to be loyal. Taking some irreversible action can also show loyalty: the importance of tattoos to criminal organizations is an example. Getting a specific tattoo permanently affiliates a criminal with others in the group, a valuable display of loyalty.

The codes of the underworld help answer the question: why did the whole elite, Republicans and Democrats, Hollywood and Wall Street and Silicon Valley, go to the private island of convicted-then-assassinated child abuser Jeffrey Epstein?

Epstein’s activities were the proclivity of some, others were ensnared through the normal methods spies use, but for others it was probably understood as the equivalent of getting a tattoo: one must make oneself reputationally destroyable as a condition of getting into the elite. When this kind of thing blows up, with members accusing one another and people like Epstein or his mentor Robert Maxwell meeting with fatal accidents, it reveals the pattern in sufficient detail for researchers like Whitney Webb to document them (in the two-volume One Nation Under Blackmail). Neither sexual abuse nor blackmail are the point: the point is to undergo rituals that prove your subordination is absolute, and that you can therefore be trusted to exercise your power according to (genocidal) principles.

The greater the power sought, the greater the display of submission required.

For lower rungs, public words of submission could suffice.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/trending/do-you-think-israel-has-right-exist-nyc-mayoral-debate-question-sparks-backlash-over

Sometimes an elite member will survive (or be allowed to survive) a revelation with a warning.

Or the revelation will have the effect of keeping things in line.

But where scandal fails to have the desired effect, there are other, more murderous options.

As genocide subordinates all other Western goals, these messy rituals of humiliation become more public. As revealing them becomes a valid tactic for intra-elite disputes, we may all be subjected to a more comprehensive view of the mess.

We already have a picture: This is an elite that wants nothing more than to continue a genocide against children, bound together by fear of exposure of the crimes they’ve personally committed in private.

Can they be trusted to solve the problems of the world?