On the Wednesday of the last week of July, a former Florida State University employee approached a man wearing an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) shirt on campus and began berating him for his support of a state she believed was committing genocide. By the next day, she was arrested, on the basis of the person wearing the IDF t-shirt alleging (with video support) that she gave him “maybe just a push” on the shoulder and also alleging (without any support) that she “definitely just hate-crimed” him. The attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, who directs the Department of Justice, had also commented on the case. Earlier that week, Leo Terrell, Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the DOJ, retweeted a post by an unknown X user complaining that a private retailer, Sephora, was carrying the product of an anti-semitic marketer (the marketer had made comments critical of Zionism). Terrell then publicly pressured Sephora, twice, to stop carrying the product, which, a month later, Sephora did.
These were not isolated incidents. Terrell’s superior is Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, who early in her tenure “ordered employees to turn their attention to combating antisemitism,” which judging by the Department’s subsequent actions is code for anti-Zionism. A lawyer who gained a populist Republican following in the early 2020s representing conservative plaintiffs on issues of religious expression and gun rights and warning against the overreach of national security agencies, Dhillon has become a practitioner of exactly the selective “justice” she once seemingly opposed. In the early 2020s, the Justice Department prosecuted groups for what it, often blatantly falsely, called sedition or violence or incitement. Today the Justice Department is prosecuting people for expressing opinions about foreign policy—opinions now repackaged by the prosecutors into expressions of anti-semitism or “anti-Americanism” or threats to national security.
What, exactly, is going on here? How did members of a movement describing itself as America First and bent on stopping the “weaponization of lawfare”—a movement re-founded during a mass federal mobilization after January 6, 2021 that gave new meaning to the phrase “overzealous prosecution”—end up imitating their enemies to give aid to loyalists of a foreign nation? And how are they doing this without resistance from certified MAGA leaders: the most institutionally influential spokespeople of the movement who have expressed skepticism about aspects of America’s involvement with Israel?
Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton has said that Zionism succeeds on the American Right by a process of aggressive insinuation:
“Zionists [are] always rushing to get out ahead of anybody. Whatever it is that you’re about, they claim to be about that too…And then [they] say every other right wing thing that all other right wingers say about everything. And then [they] say…you’ve got to support Israel at the end.”
And, indeed, an investigation shows that roughly a score of Zionist operators have infiltrated Donald Trump’s Republican Party in just the way Horton describes. A handful have attached themselves to the most influential institutional spokespeople for MAGA, joining projects against DEI and unauthorized immigration while bringing with them an unquestioned loyalty to Zionism and the military corporate structures it relies on. The presence of these Zionist allies has effectively neutered these institutional spokespeople as critics of Zionism, outside of the occasional expression of concern over specific policies in the Middle East. It has also allowed another handful of more traditional Zionist Republican operators to aggressively push Zionist policies on the middle and top of the party without blowback from the base. The result has been ineffective resistance to pro-Israel policies coupled with a surge of anti-Muslim animus which justifies those policies and comes from the same Zionist source.
Among these Zionist operatives who have curried influence in the MAGA movement are the journalist-provocateur Laura Loomer; the journalist Ben Shapiro; the writer Dennis Prager; the talk show host Mark Levin; the policy intellectual Darren Beattie; and the lawyers Sigal Chattah and Ron Coleman.
Over the past half-decade or longer, these players have attached themselves to the various loci of the MAGA movement: Trump loyalists or Trump-supporting media outlets or powerful conservative voluntary associations who backed his third run for the White House in the name of populism. Since 2020 this orbit has included Trumpian populists like War Room’s Steve Bannon; as well as entrepreneurs-cum-activists like the late Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA; and education-focused activists like Christopher Rufo and Moms for Liberty.
Laura Loomer has, uniquely, managed her influence by leveraging her direct line to Donald Trump, but the other operators have institutionalized themselves. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro and Prager U’s Dennis Prager have worked on documentaries and education projects with TPUSA. Both have also branched into actual conservative education politics: Prager has contracted with the conservative culture warrior who heads Oklahoma’s Education Department to shape Oklahoma’s teacher selection process; and Shapiro is a longtime supporter of James Lindsay, Moms for Liberty’s resident intellectual. Mark Levin operates from Fox, where he regularly hosts (and praises) his “dear friend” Leo Terrell.
Current Undersecretary of State Darren Beattie along with current U.S. Attorney for Nevada Sigal Chattah made their names in MAGA via appearances on Steve Bannon’s War Room. Ron Coleman has since 2020 been a partner at the Dhillon Law Group, Harmeet Dhillon’s law firm, and was her one colleague at the firm picked or asked by Dhillon or Politico to comment for a report on her DOJ appointment in December 2024. Christopher Rufo has been given a platform by the Manhattan Institute, which as I have reported in the past for the Libertarian Institute is funded by the Zionist financiers Paul Singer and John Paulson, who are also bankrolling the Super PAC targeting Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). These players do not amount to a critical mass of operatives who can “drive the discourse,” but they are enough to blunt direct criticism of Zionist moves and allow Zionists to exercise influence with relative impunity.
Some of this blunting of criticism happens by what appears to be, at least functionally, sleight-of-hand. These players are building credibility with MAGA as non-Zionists or Zionist critics and then using their platform to support Israel and its actions. Ron Coleman identifies as an Israel backer who is “not a Zionist,” and he uses this self-described position as a springboard to “explain why you don’t have to be a Zionist to support Israel’s fight for survival.” (“I’m not a Zionist! It’s Just Personal” is the title of Coleman’s podcast on the topic, as if personal experience exempts him from the political implications of supporting Israel, which as a nation-state is above all a political entity.) Darren Beattie has been rebuffed by Zionists for criticizing Israel, but this nominal Israel critic has also pushed back on claims of Zionist influence in the 2024 Trump Campaign and the new administration—claims which, in retrospect, appear extremely well-founded.
Some of this blunting of criticism happens via these players’ proximity to more influential MAGA influencers. Two months ago, the late Charlie Kirk hosted a debate over America’s relationship with Israel between Shapiro ally Josh Hammer and the anti-Zionist Jewish libertarian Dave Smith. But Kirk’s main contribution to the subject at the time was arguing that rising anti-semitism is a threat to America. This is exactly the conflation between anti-Zionism and anti-semitism that justifies the crackdown headed by Terrell and Dhillon. And it was also, in the eyes of both anti-Zionist and Zionist conservatives, a boon to Israel supporters like Shapiro, who allied with Kirk on the cultural issues Kirk clearly cared about.
It was only Kirk’s horrific passing that led to public testimonials revealing that the Zionist influence on his work was probably considerably more aggressive than suggested on the surface. Namely, the release of reports from Tucker Carlson and other anti-Zionist reporters of Kirk’s unease with what he saw as Zionists’ push to affect his movement via funding offers or threats. These disclosures, in turn, came in response to Shapiro’s and his allies’ open effort to gain control of the Kirk college tour and podcast after Kirk’s assassination, combined with efforts of Israel-supporting Republicans to silence the speech of leftwing groups critical of Israel in the name of honoring Kirk’s legacy. (As Connor Freeman put it, presciently, in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s shooting: “I guess we should embrace fascism and crackdown on the left, the most significant American political faction opposing Israel.”)
And Kirk’s TPUSA is not the only example of this influence at play. A month ago, when the accused Israeli sex offender who also is a senior Israel Cyber Official, Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, skipped the country from Nevada, Bannon’s War Room joined other MAGA outlets in expressing outrage. But War Room did this seemingly without mentioning that the Acting U.S. Attorney of Nevada was Sigal Chattah, whose X posts (which she deleted after the escape but which X users had already documented) show her to be an almost fanatical Zionist. This is not a minor elision. Chattah, as recent reporting by Maureen Tkacik in The American Prospect has shown, has received backing from a sprawling network of white collar Zionists like Paul Singer as well as Zionists linked to organized crime. In other words, Chattah is an important operator for a ring of financial Zionists working intently to push Republican policy to resemble President George W. Bush’s terms in office.
On a human and a professional level, of course, this acquiescence or silence makes a great deal of sense. What normal, non-self-defeating person abandons or attacks a friend or an ally in public? It also makes sense (or seems to) on practical grounds: if, as Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said in a discussion with a skeptical Tucker Carlson about Israel over the summer, we agree on 80% of the issues, don’t foreign policy differences look “nitty-gritty” by comparison? The problem with this logic (a problem that Carlson almost alone among MAGA spokespeople explicitly articulates) is that Zionism is not just another issue. It is the tip of the spear of the military-industrial complex: the most concentrated expression of the financial and philanthropic and political networks that have taken over and twisted American government for decades in the name of endless profit and endless war. Populism in this country, since the Revolutionary period, has been a revolt against both, and continues that way. The seeds of the MAGA movement, after all, started as a revolt against too-big-to-fail banks in 2009 and grew after 2016 into a revolt against the deep state; the same deep state whose K Street political strategists are at the root of the identity politics MAGA loathes. This means that, to stand for populism, you have to oppose Zionism.
And, indeed, the result of Zionist operators narrowing the space for opposition to Zionism inside MAGA is the neutering of populism itself. Operators like Kirk or Bannon air broad-brush criticisms of American policy toward Israel which capture the feelings of his audience but without attacking networks that might implicate their allies. This, in turn, gives a free hand to those institutional, financial, and political networks of Zionists which have long taken culture issues and support for Israel as the sum total of their politics, leaving corporate and military issues out of sight and out of mind and powerful operators tied to the military corporate complex firmly in control. Zionist infiltration, in other words, is the defeat of MAGA populism, because it means leaving intact the military corporate state populists oppose and that Israel relies on.
An instructive example is Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, which runs a parallel strategy to Zionist MAGA operatives targeted to political operators in Washington and New York. Weiss, an ardent Zionist and former New York Times journalist who is an ally of Ben Shapiro’s and Dennis Prager’s, is connected to players from those organizations (the Hoover Institution, The Federalist Society, Commentary magazine) with influence in the pre-2020s Republican Party. She has used this cultural capital to her full advantage. She has marshalled longtime Zionist allies—Commentary’s Eli Lake and Matthew Continetti (the latter of whom is also William Kristol’s son-in-law); the Hoover Institution’s wedded anti-Islam warriors Niall Ferguson and Aayan Hirsi Ali—to channel conservatism into a crusade against DEI and for Israel. At the same time, she has seeded the ground with quieter, younger, financially-or-politically-connected Zionist supporters or establishment players whose alignment with The Free Press gives credence to Zionism.
These include Will Rahn, the son of Wall Street Journal columnist and prominent Reaganite Peggy Noonan; Danielle Sassoon, the former acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and newly appointed Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute whose husband was a longtime employee of Paul Singer’s; and Jed Rubenfeld, the Yale Law School professor and spouse of fellow Yale Law professor Amy Chua, famously the mentor to Usha Vance and Vice President J.D. Vance during their time there. Weiss also associates with The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, until recently the most influential judicial selector in the conservative movement and a new force in Hollywood; Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Weiss interviewee whom Leo put on the Court; and Usha Vance herself, who has granted seemingly her longest magazine interview as Second Lady to The Free Press.
Dovetailing with Weiss’ moves is the strategy of Zionists inside the White House or with direct access to Donald Trump: presidential envoy Steve Witkoff, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Senior Adviser Stephen Miller, and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. These are the people who also have connections to “the money”—like Paul Singer’s and Miriam Adelson’s and John Paulson’s and Bill Ackman’s—that helped put Trump in the White House. All of these operators appear to function in two ways.
First, they serve as “middlemen” for American commercial ventures abroad (especially in Western Asia) and for Trump’s more controversial economic policies at home. (In the middle of public turmoil over Trump’s slate of tariffs this past spring, it was Ackman and Lutnick who acted as his ambassadors or flack-catchers to Wall Street.) Second, they use their finances and connections to “flood the zone” of Republican politics with their priorities. Witness, above all, Paul Singer’s operations “pitching Wall Street’s own brand of MAGA” at the Manhattan Institute, which has amassed influence to the point where “a growing number of Republican statehouses are effectively outsourcing the job of drafting laws about race and gender to [the Institute].”
In the face of this influence from above and silence from below, the behavior of a player like Leo Terrell is pre-ordained, even though defending Zionism has not always been high on Terrell’s priority list. In the 1990s, Terrell, who is black, was an intimate and supporter of O.J. Simpson. In the 2010s, appearing on Fox News, his commentary often reflected the experience of being part of a minority that felt mis-served by a bipartisan war on crime that had immiserated the black community. This war on crime, as Terrell was surely aware, was being pushed with special vigor by the same Zionist neoconservatives and neoliberals who were also pushing the Global War on Terror.
Harmeet Dhillon, for her part, may or may not be open to the opinions of those conservatives with misgivings about Israel; she was at one point a regular guest of Tucker Carlson’s. But her own law partner, as well as the legal operators in the world in which she moves (Chua, Rubenfeld, others), as well as the people advising the president whom she serves, are firmly Zionist. What other policy will she conceivably carry out?
Zionists inside the MAGA movement have been carrying water for Weiss’ project of influence: trying to make Zionist projects of insider influence an aspiration for populists, not an anathema. As a Jewish Zionist influencer recently put it, “If you think Jews control the government…make your own lobbying group.” This, not coincidentally, is close to the words of one Christian MAGA influencer who had previously been critical of Zionists, until she underwent a “maturing realization” that “a lot of the anger against the Israel lobby…is the fact that the Christian lobby falls short so often.” Instructively, both of these approaches feature the same conflationary perspective about Jews and Israel. Equally instructive, both approaches are predicated on the dubious notion that “fall[ing] short” as a political organization means failing to “control the government”—as if exercising insider influence by co-opting a religion is an achievement that Christians, Jews, and populists should emulate rather than abhor.
But, again, the source of these conflations is fairly close at hand: the institutional Zionists operatives for whom MAGA Zionists are carrying water. Bari Weiss argues that anti-Zionism is “incontestably” anti-semitism. Weiss’s mentor, The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, has been a vocal proponent of the “secrets of Jewish genius” (“it’s about thinking different”): the idea that Jews ought to be emulated by other ethnic groups because of their success in the military-industrial complex. This “model minority” conception of Jews has always been an extremely minoritarian one within the Jewish community, but it has also always been extremely popular among Zionist elites. So has the corresponding view, pushed by these same elites for more than three decades, that those groups who don’t succeed on military corporate terms (black Americans, Muslims) have something wrong with them. It is these views that the Manhattan Institute and its Zionist allies in MAGA, especially Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire staffers, are so effective in promoting among on-the-ground Republicans—“flooding the zone” in the absence of scrutiny or pushback of any kind.
And, indeed, we hear about “ingrained problems” with the Muslim world quite a bit today in those sectors of the MAGA movement influenced by Zionist operators. A case in point is the response to a clip of New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani speaking about his view of the rights of Palestinians—a clip where commentary, from MAGA influencers to politicians and many others, insistently focused on Mamdani eating a rice dish with his hands, which in this telling bolstered his “third world” credentials. Not surprisingly, Laura Loomer put it starkest, in a tweet that identified Mamdani not as Muslim but as “Islamist”:
Honestly, being an Islamist and a Communist was enough for me to not want @ZohranKMamdani in office.
He is from Africa. And you can tell in the way he eats.
Disgusting. My dogs are cleaner and more civilized when they eat than little Muhammad. pic.twitter.com/VrEK2TgWdn
— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) June 30, 2025
But the MAGA movement has, until very recently, not set a lot of store by “good manners”; what raucous, from-the-ground rebellion against government corruption would? Nor has MAGA been inherently opposed to Islam. The movement as a whole opposes Middle East interventionism and the Global War on Terror, and earlier this decade some of its members found common cause with devout Muslims over opposing liberal social policies in the schools. The assumption underlying these MAGA attacks on Muslims—that there is something inherently wrong with or uncivilized about Islam or its adherents that must be corrected—comes from the opposite place of American populism or America First. It comes from Zionist financial networks and the intellectual and political networks they influence at the heart of imperial America.
Seven or eight years ago, as part of a work project, I attended a small dinner with prominent, mostly liberal Zionists, almost all of whom were in one way or another connected to the interlocking sets of organizations that minted the operators now influencing American policy toward Israel. At the end of the evening one of the speakers, an ex-leftist who identified as liberal, declared the need for a new Cold War, this time against Hamas. The contention of this speaker was that Hamas had inherently fascistic and totalitarian tendencies rooted in Islam, and that it was incumbent on intellectuals to unite Americans behind a civilizing struggle against Hamas that would restore our common purpose, lost since the end of the Cold War.
As startled as I was by this abstract fervor being conjured over coffee, it did not occur to me that, thanks to the efforts of some of the people in that room, we were already engaged in version of this project: a successor to the war on communism which we called the Global War on Terror, a post-1991 alliance between Zionists and weapons contractors to keep the good times rolling. Even less did it occur to me that, within a decade and again thanks to the efforts of some of the very people in that room, we would be engaged in exactly this project against Hamas on Israel’s behalf. Nor, finally, did it occur to me that we would be engaged in it thanks to the support of a president who helms a movement opposed to the deep state in the name of American populism. But, astonishingly, here we are. The only real solvent to this betrayal of democracy by powerful people in small rooms is the vigorous exercise of democracy, the reclamation by way of popular politics of both our government and the populist movement which was supposed to reclaim it.
