By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
Almost since US President Donald Trump started his second and final term, the movement that brought him to power twice has been fracturing. Now there is a full break among Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters.
Its essence is simple: There are those who continue to identify MAGA with Trump, and on the other side of a widening chasm, those who remain loyal to MAGA but believe that Trump has not. The rebels say Trump has betrayed the cause and want to save MAGA – and thus the US – from Trump.
There are no official structures yet to what the MAGA dissidents call their movement, but it does have a de facto leader – popular journalist and podcast host Tucker Carlson. It was at Tucker’s all-American place in Maine that the MAGA schism was made official. There, several key figures of the evolving MAGA-against-Trump group met, and in effect, raised the standard of rebellion.
Not literally, but in the shape of an X post by former US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (with 5.4 million followers). It featured a carefully composed picture of a merry rebel crew, including, apart from herself, Joe Kent, former counterterrorism tsar under Trump, Representative Thomas Massie, a long-term conservative Trump opponent, and Carlson, sitting at the head of the table.
Within days after the post, Carlson released a video manifesto with the title “It’s Time to Save America” on his own Tucker Carlson Network social media channel (with 5.2 million subscribers on YouTube). Within one day, it had over a million views on YouTube alone.
In a rhetorical master class for the podcast age, Carlson sketched the American present as a dead-end of extraordinary decadence and degradation, a loss of reality among the establishment, and “paralysis and looting.”
He also predicted that change is inevitable if Americans want to avoid the “end-of-everything,” either by nuclear war or uncontrolled AI. He warned that even preventing this apocalypse by timely political action could produce great violence, that is, a revolution. And finally, he presented his alternative to both the end of the world and wild upheaval in ten concise points.
Ranging from “fairness” to “unity,” his ten points were more a clarion call for national renewal than a concrete policy outline, with aims general enough to form a broad consensus, as he acknowledged.
Much of his ten points read like MAGA 2.0, that is, without Trump, as observers noted. On issues such as physical and mental health, the need for the economy to make actually useful things instead of just surveillance tech, weapons of war, and financial gimmicks, the beauty of the American landscape and architecture in need of restoration, Carlson’s impassioned pleas echoed the conservatism that is one root of the MAGA phenomenon.
Ultimately, what will be more important is where things differ: One of Carlson’s points was about sovereignty, or as he defined it, being “free from outside influence.” It is this point that provides the key to all the others. The ten points are, in essence, a declaration of independence, not just from any outside influence, but from Israel and its powerful US lobby. Carlson directly named them as forming one of America’s worst problems.
For starters, he did not simply attack a selfish upper class whose members behave as if they were kings, above the rules of law and ethics. He called it the “Epstein class,” with reference to the late convicted pedophile, alleged suicide victim, self-declared Rothschild representative, and close associate of alleged Israeli rapists and intelligence.
Carlson also correctly linked the Iran War – a “strategic disaster” worse than Vietnam, as another realistic American recently stated – to “bribery or threat or both by Israel.” Equally plausibly, he accused Israel of committing genocide – like Nazi Germany, he said – and protested against continuing US support. Finally, the activities of lobbies, with that of Israel not alone, but in the lead, “gives the lie to the idea of representative democracy,” according to Carlson, because where lobbyists make the decisions, the voters do not.
In short, Carlson made the point that America’s worst military defeat in living memory, its support for – and really, participation in – an ongoing genocide, and its loss of sovereignty and democracy are all due, either entirely or to a large extent, to the US establishment’s perverse and deeply unpatriotic relationship to Israel. Politically, this amounts to an arguably long overdue declaration of war against the Zionist state’s aggressive influence operations.
And the message has gotten through. Haaretz, Israel’s ‘liberal’ paper of record, rapidly dedicated a long opinion piece to Carlson, accusing him of – surprise, surprise – “anti-Semitism.” This is an absurd smear, but expected. Systematically misrepresenting criticism of Israel, a genocidal apartheid state, as hatred of Jews is an old, stale Zionist tactic. Carlson certainly isn’t naïve. Even in his ten points, he anticipated being called a “Nazi” and shrugged it off.
But Haaretz does get one thing right. For Carlson and his growing movement, “Israel and its American supporters also represent a central source of the [MAGA] movement’s betrayal [by Trump].” Or, put differently, Carlson represents an American conservatism that has the courage to identify, name, and attack America’s insane dependence on a tiny yet immensely subversive and violent rogue state.
There is, no doubt, much idealizing and even nostalgia in Carlson’s image of American history and the West. And those wishing to be woke about an arch-conservative will find rich pickings. But that is futile and dull, because it is not the point that matters. What matters is that US polls have consistently shown a great, unprecedented groundswell against Israel. A new book on Israel’s US lobby is about to come out and is making a massive splash. The tide is turning.
Fellow MAGA rebel Joe Kent let it slip that Tucker-for-president is an option. Third parties are a difficult proposition. Yet Haaretz for one is worried, and from a Zionist point of view, it should be. And that is very good news.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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