The War in Iran Takes Another Casualty: The Myth That the Influencers Wield Any Influence
A wave of anti-Israel sentiment has been washing through the podcast sphere. The war in Iran nuked the narrative, showing just how out of touch content creators are with the MAGA base—and reality.
If you spend too much time on Twitter or get your news from the liberal mainstream media, you may have gotten the impression that the President’s supporters are abandoning him in droves over Operation Epic Fury, his war on Iran’s nuclear program. This is Israel’s war, not ours! according to any number of podcasters, far Left and far Right. The President has been dragged into this war against his will by the nefarious Netanyahu, the podcasters claim, and he has betrayed everything he once stood for! Young people know it! They claim. It’s just the old fogies, the Boomers, the neocons, the Israel-First crowd who support Trump now.
“Younger generations are very much against this war,” former Congresswoman-turned-Twitter-personality Marjorie Taylor Greene told CNN today, supplying the network with the content they most crave—“proof” Trump voters might defect for the Democrats. “It’s 100% a betrayal to what MAGA was supposed to be.”
Alas, this narrative is complete fiction.
Far from a betrayal, poll after poll after poll has found massive, overwhelming support for the President’s war among Republican voters—and even more support among “MAGA Republicans,” who back the war by 90% in multiple polls.
Surprisingly, a poll of Americans who voted for Trump found that even 74% of libertarians approve of the campaign. In a hilarious twist, the same poll found that the vast majority of respondents who get their news from the very podcasters denouncing the war as “Israel’s war” support the war—and Israel: 78% of Trump voters who “receive information on foreign policy news” from podcasts approve of the war on Iran, while 77% support the U.S.-Israeli military partnership, as the Washington Free Beacon pointed out.
It’s not just on Iran that the podcasters are out of step. New polling from NBC found that thought Israel is hemorrhaging support among Democrats, the views of Republicans are virtually unchanged since 2013. They’ve actually moved slightly in Israel’s favor—from 67% support to 69% support. It’s higher for MAGA. In another poll, 93% of self-described “MAGA or Trump Conservatives” told pollsters they approve of the United States-Israel alliance.
Trump’s war on the Islamic Regime of Iran hasn’t just taken out the Ayatollah Khameini and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It’s nuked the anti-Israel obsession that’s taken hold of the podcaster sphere, uniting the far-Right with the Left in an Israel Derangement Syndrome that rivals TDS.
It turns out, the influencers have no influence—not with President Trump and not with his voters.
Charlie Addressed Israel Derangement in the Podcast World
Ever since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, an obsession with Israel and Jews has taken hold of the podcaster sphere. But some of it started long before. Charlie himself addressed this phenomenon in July, just two months before he was martyred, when a mom named Bonnie called into his show to talk about how disturbed she was by the pro-Hitler podcast content her son was consuming.
Bonnie’s son had started questioning a lot of things during COVID, she said, which she was happy to see. But now his skepticism had bled out into darker places. Bonnie’s father was a World War II veteran who had liberated the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald, and she was horrified to hear her son say that well, the Jews did own all the banks. “He expressed some antisemitic takes on history, that maybe Hitler’s motives for wanting to be rid of the Jews weren’t so wrong, even if how he went about it was evil,” she said. “I’d like to know where he’s getting these lies.”
Charlie’s answer is worth watching in full:
He explained that when you’re seeking to find the truth in a world that has lied to you so extensively, you end up drawn to conspiracy theories because of their claims to secret knowledge. And that secret knowledge often comes back to the Jews on social media, because of the incentives there. He said he knew which podcasters were spreading this bile, which he called straight out of hell, though he declined to name them. Instead, he told Bonnie what he would say to her son.
“You know on this program, we’ve never been an apologist for everything that the Israeli government has ever done,” Charlie said. “But anyone with a decent moral compass should reject the scapegoating of Jews. By the way, you want to talk about low IQ, just such sloppy, shallow, reprehensible behavior: blaming an entire group for all of your problems. And there is a much better way, which is you have to of course acknowledge that the Israeli government does not do everything right. Who does? You don’t have to apologize for it. But number two, they’re not to blame for all of the world’s ills either. This particular affliction blames the Jews for everything.”
“Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that need to be told to start taking responsibility for their own actions and don’t blame other people for your problems,” Charlie said. “Especially a group of people that is .02% of the world’s population. And here’s where it gets people very angry: It is fundamentally a liberal attitude to blame other people for your problems.”
Sadly, with Charlie’s death, many of the voices he was so successfully keeping at bay exploded into the mainstream, laundered by other podcasters chasing online incentives and audience share.
It’s Not an Ideological War. It’s a Turf War
This was more a media turf war than an ideological one. Content creators saw the massive hole Charlie behind. His daily podcast had a huge audience, and they wanted to capitalize. Many seem to have decided that the way to try to make off with his enormous audience was to go down the same road as Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, podcasters with big audiences whose antipathy extends beyond Israel to all Jews, in my opinion.
Of course, as Charlie pointed out, people can have legitimate concerns with Israeli policy without being antisemitic. President Trump himself, the most pro-Israel president in American history, tired of Israel’s war in Gaza and made it quite clear to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he needed to take the win and wrap it up after the joint bombing of Iran’s nuclear site in Fordow over the summer. A few months later, a ceasefire was agreed upon by both sides.
You can be legitimately critical of Israel and of American foreign policy. You can—as I do—believe that American aid to Israel has run its course. But there is an absolute obsession with Israel and Jews in the online content creator zone, as Charlie noted, that goes well beyond any legitimate complaints or concerns in its sheer volume and intensity. They are Israel First but in reverse: Every problem comes back to Israel. Scratch the surface of anything you don’t like and you’ll find Jewish wrongdoing.
If you get any of your media from the Left, you’ll be familiar with Israel Derangement Syndrome. For a long time now, anti-Zionism has been the most significant litmus test for being a Leftist in good standing. Zionism is now a slur on the Left. But many of the content creators who started going down this route recently were at least ostensibly on the Right, part of the MAGA coalition going into 2024.
And they weren’t just questioning Israel’s policy. Owens went so far as to blame Israel for Charlie’s death—and then his own widow, Erika Kirk. Others dabbled in Holocaust revision. Tucker Carlson had a podcaster on his show repeatedly who said that Hitler wasn’t the true villain of World War II; Carlson called this podcaster America’s most important historian. Carlson also had Nick Fuentes on for a cozy interview in which the two agreed about more than they disagreed.
People objecting to any of this are routinely smeared by the content creators in this arena as being “Israel First”—as if thinking that the jury is in on Hitler being the villain of World War II makes you treasonously attached to another country. As Bonnie suggested in her conversation with Charlie, Holocaust denial should offend us as Americans.
But unlike on the Left, where the anti-Israel and even antisemitic discourse of the elites has trickled down into the mainstream, the Right has resolutely refused to buy in, as Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation found out rather quickly. Roberts came out in support of Carlson’s conversation with Fuentes, whereupon he faced a huge backlash and mass exodus from his organization. Republican Senators and Members of Congress vociferously called him out, as did a host of conservative pundits and influencers in the kind of closing of ranks you would never see on the Left.
They were speaking for their constituency. Despite the constant whining about Israel, polling consistently shows that despite the rise in anti-Jewish content in the podcast sphere, conservatives—young and old—remain solidly pro-Israel.
The Polling vs. The Podcasters
A straw poll at the last Turning Point summit found that 73% of young conservatives considered themselves pro-Israel. A December poll found that 87% said Israel is an ally—with one third saying Israel is a top ally.
Even more surprising was a finding from the Washington Free Beacon and Echelon Insights, which found that young conservatives may be listening to anti-Israel influencers, but they are unpersuaded—un-influenced, if you will:
Among media personalities like Carlson and Owens, who routinely lambaste Israel and its supporters in the United States, a majority of their audience nonetheless has a favorable view of the Jewish state—58 percent of Owens’s listeners and 54 percent of Carlson’s. Even those who tune into Fuentes, who has described Israel as "the anti-Christ" and accused the Jewish state of staging the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, support Israel by a one-point margin, 38 to 37 percent.
It seems this content is going in one ear and out the other. “It is clear, meanwhile, that voices with seemingly large social media presences, like Ian Carroll, Jake Shields, and Darryl Cooper, remain largely unknown,” concluded the Beacon.
That was the status quo when the President decided to decimate Iran’s ability to nuke our kids and grandkids.
The War in Iran Nukes the Narrative
The response from the content creators to the President’s strikes on Iran was immediate: Israel drags us into war with Iran! Netanyahu’s War! Trump Forced Into War by Jewish Pedophiles! In lockstep, the podcasters decided that this was Israel’s war and that President Trump, who has been saying for 20 years that Iran cannot get a nuke, was forced by Bibi to strike Iran.
But no one bought it. The polls continue to show massive support among Republicans for the President’s war effort—and of Israel’s monumental efforts to help us. Despite the braying from the liberal media and the podcasters that Trump betrayed the base and is losing support, his approval rating among his followers is unchanged.
That’s not surprising. Israel and the United States have been fighting side by side throughout the war in Iran in a strategic and military cooperation that’s unmatched in American history. Released audio recording of Israeli and American pilots coordinating an attack really epitomized that relationship.
Of course, the Israelis have their own reasons for wanting to be free of the Islamic Regime of Iran, which has vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.
But that’s not why we in the U.S. are at war. We’re ensuring that our grandchildren don’t have to face off against a nuclear Iran. We’re relieving China of 20% of its oil supply to give the President a massive leg up in trade negotiations with Xi Jinping, and to remove the threat of China taking Taiwan. We’re revealing our adversaries, China and Russia, as paper tigers, unwilling to send more than thoughts and prayers to aid Iran. And we’re destroying the fiction of a multipolar world. We’re becoming not just energy independent but energy dominant.
It’s true gas prices are up, but they are still lower than they were under Biden, thanks to Trump’s monumental efforts which made us a net exporter of petroleum and the world’s largest exporter of natural gas. The President is bringing the U.S. back as the world’s only superpower.
You wouldn’t know that from the online discourse—but it seems to me that like the Ayatollah Khameini, the Israel Derangement Discourse has been a casualty of the war.
There’s only so long you can keep claiming to represent people who think the exact opposite of you on the issues. For a while, they could claim that they were influencing Trump. But that, too, was revealed to be a fiction when the President himself weighed in. After Carlson called the strikes on Iran “disgusting and evil,” the President was asked to react by ABC’s Jonathan Karl.
His response was telling: “Tucker has lost his way. I knew that a long time ago, and he's not MAGA. MAGA is saving our country. MAGA is making our country great again. MAGA is America first, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.”
It’s time to put to bed the “MAGA divide” narrative. The President is as popular as ever with his voters. Don’t be fooled: The podcasting class is an influencer set with no influence.
Iran has been jerking around the US and much of the world for 47 years. I have been alive for all of them and I'm sick of it. No news outlet or propaganda machine caused me to feel this way.
Thanks Batya, the best thing I have done recently is subscribe to your posts. I learn stuff. Thanks again