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Operation Divide MAGA
If one were dead set on dividing President Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition at the seams, how would one proceed? Trying to drive a wedge through the immigration issue doesn’t necessarily make sense: Tightening and securing America’s borders is so core to the nationalist-populist MAGA project that there can be little room in the coalition for much dissent. Trying to divide MAGA along economic laissez-faire or populism lines is also doomed to fail: As important as pocketbook issues are to everyday Americans, the wonky details of fiscal policy generally don’t stoke fiery passion.
One could do a lot worse, however, than focusing on Jews — and specifically, on the respective relationships between American Jews and American Christians and between the United States and Israel. I experienced this firsthand, yet again, this week.
As an observant Jew, I was offline recently for the holiday of Sukkot — also known as the Feast of Booths or the Feast of Tabernacles. Of all the Jewish holidays, it is the one most intimately affiliated with pure joy and happiness. As it says in Leviticus, “you shall rejoice before the Lord your God for a seven day period.” And so I did.
When I came back online Wednesday evening, I learned that while I was off, the unhinged conspiracy theorist Candace Owens had ludicrously accused me of foreknowledge — or perhaps complicity — in the murder of my own friend Charlie Kirk. This is appalling behavior, at best — demonic, at worst. Anything goes, it seems, to push the (utterly baseless) narrative that the Jews had something to do with a radicalized left-wing transgender-adjacent “furry” fetishist’s decision to murder Kirk in cold blood.
Owens is hardly the only prominent right-of-center voice who has embarked down this dark, well-trodden path. Tucker Carlson, the one-time cable news king now moonlighting as a dissident podcaster, has evinced an unhealthy obsession with the Jewish people and the state of Israel. From accusing Israel of “genocide” to entertaining Hitler/Nazi apologia to “just asking questions” about whether Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad asset to dismissing the Hebrew Bible itself, Carlson’s agenda has become entirely clear.
The list goes on. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and her former colleague Matt Gaetz spend an inordinate amount of time these days railing against alleged — and allegedly nefarious, at that — Jewish and Israeli influence on American culture and politics. Lower-name conspiratorial Jew-haters sometimes find their way onto the nation’s most popular podcasts.
All of this, meanwhile, while Trump, the very incarnation of MAGA, remains avowedly supportive of tight-knit U.S.-Israel relations. The Trump Justice Department and broader Trump administration, moreover, remain stalwart supporters of the health, safety, and security of the Jewish people. From his first to his second term, Trump has been the most pro-Jewish president in American history.
So, what gives?
The immediate goal of this concerted information operation is the debasement of American Jews, but the more politically salient goal is the gaslighting of American evangelical Christians — the very core of the MAGA base, and an overwhelmingly pro-Jewish, pro-Israel constituency at that. By focusing so much on the Jewish people and the Jewish state, these provocateurs have a much broader goal in mind than merely ostracizing America’s small Jewish minority. They want to alienate evangelicals too.
The goal, then, seems to be nothing less than the complete supplanting of MAGA with a new political movement — an angry, ultra-conspiratorial, unbiblical, neo-pagan movement of misfits and their hangers-on.
Given the extraordinarily ambitious (and dastardly) nature of that goal, the stakes are enormously high. Historically, political movements die when they become subsumed by paranoid Jew-hatred. So too do societies crumble and nations perish when they turn on their Jewish populations and fall prey to the world’s oldest bigotry.
And for evangelical Christian supporters of the Jewish people and the Jewish state, the entire operation is nothing less than a collective slap in the face. Jews are harmed, and Christians are insulted.
The contrast of what I experienced during Sukkot and what I discovered afterward is both stark and illuminating. While I was “rejoicing” with my family before God, as I am commanded to do, agents of destruction were fabricating the most outlandish lies imaginable in order to sow division and resentment. It is the eternal struggle of humanity going back millennia: justice versus tyranny, order versus chaos, light versus darkness.
I know which side of that eternal divide I am on. My hope is that the American Right and the MAGA coalition know which side they are on too.
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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