In the past decade of political upheaval, less than a handful of successful candidates have laid down direct challenges to America’s military-industrial complex. Thomas Massie, the U.S. Congressman from Kentucky’s 4th District, is first and foremost among them. In June, President Donald Trump announced an open season on Massie, for the perceived crimes of having voted against the deficit-busting “Big Beautiful Bill” and opposing Trump’s strikes on Iran because they occurred without authorization from Congress.
“Open season” in this case meant the formation of a MAGA Pac run by Trump’s former co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita for the sole purpose of beating Massie. LaCivita is part of a class of MAGA strategists and lobbyists who live in Washington and on airplanes but style themselves America First frontiersman. They are the 180 degree opposites of Massie, who represents a district where he’s lived for most of his life minus a four year stint at MIT and sometime after. But what these operators lack in authenticity they make up for with capital, which comes not from MAGA but from longer-standing power players who operate with a simple aim: to silence dissent against the American military-industrial complex’s most reliable client and investor, Israel.
On August 1, Congressman Massie tweeted:
The group attacking me, MAGA Kentucky, is funded entirely by three billionaires. One gave millions to trans activism & Soros-backed open borders group & even funded the Russia hoax. Another is in Epstein’s black book and did a fundraiser for Sen Schumer.https://t.co/AgJY01IWPL pic.twitter.com/bs33qBpSnm
— Thomas Massie for Congress (@MassieforKY) August 1, 2025
This is true, and it understates the case. The three billionaires are Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and John Paulson, and they are part of a group of Zionist operators who have used finance and philanthropy for distinctly political ends since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Chameleonic backing of both Democrats and Republicans is integral to their approach, but their political promiscuity flows from an underlying fidelity—to the Zionist state. The inverse of this fidelity is that their enemies are everyone, right or left or libertarian, who oppose America’s commitment to Zionism.
The roots of this group’s influence lie with the creation in New York more than thirty years ago of the Study Group. This was an informal club of a score of financiers (some with connections to Jeffrey Epstein) which had as its purpose channeling Zionist philanthropy to encourage Jewish intra-marriage and identification with Israel. What the Study Group’s co-founder Charles Bronfman and another member, Michael Steinhardt, took from their sessions and other involvements was the idea for Birthright: the foundation which beginning in 1999 funded any American Jew between eighteen and twenty-six who wanted to visit Israel to connect to Zionism.
Two years after its founding in 1999, Birthright acquired a distinctly political use. In the eyes of Israel’s longest-serving consul general in New York, 9/11 had “heightened the level of anxiety [Americans] associated with the Middle East, and Israel coupled with it.” This made Israel more reliant for “its positioning” on “the tremendous ‘Taglit [Birthright] factor’” among Jewish Americans: “the No.1 emotional agent Israel possesses.” But the “emotional agent” of Birthright was not all that Birthright’s founders thought Israel needed from America at the turn of the century.
In early 2001, Steinhardt, Bronfman, and other members of the Study Group also developed the think tank Emet—Hebrew for truth—until its name was changed to the less noticeable Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The purpose of the think tank was to increase American support for Israel’s response to the Palestinian intifada, and to advocate for a strong American military presence in the Middle East. And, in 2002, Steinhardt took an ownership stake in The New Republic, Washington’s most powerful political magazine. Steinhardt was a Democrat, and The New Republic a nominally liberal magazine—both, as I have reported elsewhere, had been key backers of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who managed the Democrats’ decisive turn to Zionism in the 1990s. But during the 2000s Steinhardt and The New Republic pushed a foreign policy line more in sync with the W. Bush White House than their purported party.
It was this solid foundation for Zionist political engagement that seeded the ground for newer players like Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and John Paulson: all of them financiers; all of them George W. Bush Republicans; and all of them united by their ties to Israel.
By the 2010s, Birthright’s top donors were the Adelsons. (Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnet, had until the turn of the century been a minor player in Zionist philanthropy; then, in the 1990s, he married Miriam Farbstein, an Israeli physician, and beginning his donations with her in earnest in the 2000s.) The Adelsons and Singer, a Zionist hedge fund manager who made his name “investing in the distressed debt of dozens of companies,” were also top donors to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. And Singer and Paulson, a Zionist hedge fund manager known for betting against mortgage-backed securities in 2008, were funding the much more venerable think tank the Manhattan Institute, which had been founded in 1977 by then-New York banker and future CIA director William J. Casey. Casey, tellingly, spent his CIA years in the 1980s participating in plays like Iran-Contra and the Bechtel Pipeline to strengthen America’s presence in the Middle East. All of these financial-political operations were tied directly and indirectly the first generation of influential American Zionists, people like Roy Cohn, Bruce Rappaport, and Maurice “Hank” Greenberg. In many ways, this was the project that occupied succeeding generations of Zionist financiers like Bronfman, Steinhardt, Singer, the Adelsons, and Paulson via think tanks and magazines in the 2000s.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and The New Republic were, in the aftermath of September 11, key movers with lines to the Bush White House and the Republican Party, helping push the initiation of the Global War on Terror and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the 2010s, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies was the signature opponent of President Barack Obama’s nuclear non-proliferation agreement with Iran. It was also arguably the most influential pusher behind the rescinding of the agreement and the imposition of new sanctions on Iran during President Donald Trump’s first term.
By this point, some of the Foundation’s main funders, the Adelsons, were along with Paulson channeling their influence directly toward Trump, a figure from an overlapping New York-Palm Beach milieu. Paulson was an early and enthusiastic backer of Trump’s; and Miriam Adelson, also a Trump donor since 2016, became one of Trump’s largest financial backers in 2020 and 2024. Singer, a Nikki Haley backer, prominently switched to Trump in 2024 and used his influence to urge others to do the same. The reward for their engagement has been the White House’s unequivocal backing for Israeli actions abroad and an unprecedented crackdown on anti-Zionism at home. And, even as the White House seems to favor their approach, these players have expanded their structural influence in Trump’s movement via the strategic use of money and institutions.
One case in point is Singer and Paulson’s aggressive mobilization of the Manhattan Institute to influence not just the White House but the Republican Party. According to Bloomberg, reporting in 2024, “business figures led by…Singer have poured nearly $200 million into a New York think tank that’s now projecting its own vision for Trump’s America.” (Paulson is the Institute’s third-largest donor.) This “vision for Trump’s America” functions to narrow Republicans’ platform to three focuses: opposing DEI and progressive culture; supporting Bush-era finance and tax policies; and supporting Israel. In this push, the Institute has seeded connections to state governments: “a growing number of Republican statehouses are effectively outsourcing the job of drafting laws about race and gender to [the Institute].” It has fired fellows who take a different line on Israel, and it has thrown its support behind a prominent MAGA-aligned operative, Chris Rufo, who made his name opposing DEI programs and whose current political project is not populist empowerment but to “win the elite” and so “win the regime.”
Another case in point is Singer’s support of the Museum of the Bible, a Washington DC nonprofit largely funded by the Green Family, owners of Hobby Lobby known for their devout Christianity. This seems on its face like an odd alliance for Singer, an outspoken proponent of gay marriage. But the Green Family is not just Christian but Christian Zionist—and, tellingly, Singer’s contributions to their museum fund trips by Christians to Israel.
Nor is this the limit of Singer’s interest in conservative cultural politics. One of the Manhattan Institute’s close allies is Leonard Leo: the former chair of The Federalist Society now invested in a $1.6 billion dollar effort to Christianize Hollywood via products like Amazon’s recently released House of David, a miniseries from the biblical story that fits comfortably within the Christian Zionist schema. Christian Zionism, tellingly, is also a primary focus of other MAGA-initiated allies of Leonard Leo’s like The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro and The Free Press’ Bari Weiss. Shapiro’s and Weiss’ unquestioning loyalty is to Zionism. Their aggressive concept of Republican politics centers on prosecuting culture wars; supporting what they call “free markets” but often government-subsidized conglomerates; and supporting Israel. Their main sources of funding are Israel supporters in Texas and Silicon Valley.
The flip side of the aggressive Zionist push for a certain version of Republicanism has been attacking those more structural Republican thinkers who believe in anti-interventionism, decentralized government, and anti-corporate politics—most prominently Thomas Massie and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). What these politicians want to talk about is not mainly culture, or race, or gender. What they want to talk about is power—and the way in which corporations tied to Washington DC have driven endless financialization of our economy and endless wars abroad to the detriment of popular sovereignty and limited government. This is, of course, the last thing that Republican Zionists want to talk about, because financialization and war backed by New York and Washington are the guarantors of the Zionist project.
How are the players and motives behind the aggressive attacks on Massie and Greene not more obvious, and not more noted? From the 1980s until today, powerful Zionist networks have managed to stay above the political fray even as they engage aggressively in it, thanks to their ties to powerful institutions that frame public narratives: media, universities, and Hollywood. In the years when Zionist networks first became political, The New York Times was under the daily management of A.M. Rosenthal, a committed Zionist and an intimate of Roy Cohn, while CBS was owned in the 1980s and 1990s by Laurence Tisch, a member of Bronfman’s Study Group. The Times’ editorial page editor in the 2000s and 2010s, Rosenthal’s son Andrew, identifies with Zionism; and CBS News has been owned for much of the last two decades by Shari Redstone, a Zionist tied via business and philanthropy to the Bronfmans. The late Bernard Marcus, the founder of Home Depot and one of the top donors to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, provided the funds for the first master’s degree program in Israel education in the United States at George Washington University. Michael Steinhardt, Charles Bronfman’s late brother Edgar Bronfman, and John Paulson have their names on buildings at New York University; and Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences bears Paulson’s name. Stephen Spielberg, arguably still Hollywood’s most prominent director-producer, was an attendee of Bronfman’s Study Group.
This quiet institutional co-option is why actions that are distinctly anti-democratic—billionaire operators connected to disastrous wars funding relentless attacks on politicians who oppose them—have acquired the status of conventionality, even respectability. But now, with Israel on the cusp of geopolitical opportunities in the Middle East and of growing marginalization among the American public, these players are making their essentially political purpose plainer—to those who care to look. What looking deeply reveals is cause for further surprise and alarm, and is the subject of a coming report. Namely, an ideological agenda is being pushed by a small number of players connected to the Study Group, the most representative of whom has been Jeffrey Epstein. These players started in finance and have worked their way into politics, culture, intellectual life, and philanthropy and corrupted those spheres on behalf of the Zionist cause—co-opting, in the process, both the Jewish tradition and the American republic.
