When President Trump ordered B-2 stealth bombers to fly 37 hours from Missouri to the Middle East and back to drop bunker busting bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities last month, he wasn’t merely backing up Israel’s war or demonstrating superpower military competency. He was also rejecting the growing clamor from a visible faction of the MAGA coalition that sees the use of American power abroad as fundamentally illegitimate and a danger to the American people.
These voices had spent months issuing hysterical warnings about “World War III” if America became involved in the war. Candace Owens took a break from musing on the validity of blood libels to urge active-duty military personnel to desert rather than “die in a foreign land,” should war break out with Iran. The libertarian comedian Dave Smith, who endorsed the president in 2024, defended Iran against Israel’s military campaign, saying Tehran’s leadership “probably don’t feel that they have the option not to respond.” He called Trump “a war criminal who should spend his life in prison,” and said the president might be “the most impotent bitch of a leader imaginable.”
But no one was more emphatic than Tucker Carlson, who warned: “The first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans. It could also collapse our economy. . . . Consider the effects of $30 gasoline. . . . Iran has powerful allies. It’s now part of a global bloc called BRICS, which represents the majority of the world’s. . . military power. Iran has extensive military ties with Russia. It sells the overwhelming majority of its oil exports to China. An attack on Iran could easily become a world war. We’d lose.”
All of this talk was aimed directly at convincing the president.
Carlson and his ilk failed. And spectacularly so.
Not only did President Trump initiate U.S. strikes against Iran, he also took aim at Carlson directly, saying to reporters, “I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.” He then posted on Truth Social: “Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that Iran can not have a nuclear weapon!”
For a moment, it felt like this wing of MAGA, self-styled as “anti-war,” had suffered a true political defeat, and that perhaps they would do what they longed for the U.S. to do in the world: retreat.
That’s not what happened.
That these MAGA influencers and pundits were out of step with the American president, the creator and standard-bearer of MAGA, and that their doomsday scenarios never materialized, did little to humble them.
Dave Smith called for Trump’s impeachment. Candace Owens said the president has “been a chronic disappointment, and I feel embarrassed that I told people to go vote for him.” And in a newsletter the day after Israel commenced Operation Rising Lion against Iran, Tucker Carlson suggested the U.S. military was being controlled by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Earlier this week, unnamed Washington sources expressed concern over Israel’s ability to fend off Iran’s retaliation, which would inevitably lead to Benjamin Netanyahu ordering the American military to step in and fight on his country’s behalf,” he wrote. As if the most powerful leader of the powerful military of the most powerful country in the history of the world does the bidding of a country in the Middle East the size of New Jersey. Sure.
Carlson’s views might seem outlandish, but he isn’t dumb. He is among the savviest operators out there. And he is well aware that anti-Israel invective and conspiracy thinking attracts attention in a culture that has lost trust in expertise and institutions—and is hunting for a scapegoat for America’s very real challenges.
MAGA influencers and pundits were out of step with the American president, the creator and standard-bearer of MAGA, and their doomsday scenarios never materialized.
In this, he is far from alone. He represents an influential segment of an emerging online movement that never encounters a conspiracy about American military power, Jewish power, or Israel that it doesn’t embrace. And it is on a collision course with the president himself.
From Online Fringe to Real-World Influence
For a time, it was possible to imagine that this cohort was a fringe or strictly online phenomenon. No longer. For evidence of its real-life power, look no further than the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) conference this past weekend.
TPUSA is technically a conservative student organization. But it’s much more than that: It is among the most influential organizations on the right—full of energy and zeal to sway the cultural right, and therefore the Republican Party.
Charlie Kirk, TPUSA’s founder and president, is popular among young conservatives, and the political arm of TPUSA, called Turning Point Action, raised tens of millions for Trump’s 2024 election. When Kevin McCarthy made his public pitch to be speaker of the House in 2018, he did it, of all places, at a Turning Point conference for high schoolers.
The point is that what happens at TPUSA matters. Trump pays attention to it. And it signifies which way the right-wing winds are blowing.
This year, at the organization’s conference of 7,000 people, Jews and Israel were main topics of discussion.
Tucker Carlson suggested that the fact that the Trump DOJ found that there is no Jeffrey Epstein client list misses the real question. “The real question is,” he said, “why was he doing this, on whose behalf, and where did the money come from?” Carlson then offered his own theory: The deceased convicted child sex trafficker was working for Israel’s Mossad. He said it is “extremely obvious” that Epstein “had direct connections to a foreign government.”
While Donald Trump reaffirms the principles that underpinned his first term, he is increasingly out of step with a critical constellation of right-wing influencers, podcasters, and contrarian intellectuals.
Carlson went on: “Now, no one’s allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel, because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty.”
He offered no evidence to support his claims while projecting maximum confidence in his theory, and then emphatically urged the audience to reject anyone who would not take this “questioning” seriously. (Candace Owens praised Carlson’s remarks, writing, “Tucker is a real one.”)
The next day, Kirk himself hosted a debate between comedian Dave Smith and conservative intellectual Josh Hammer about U.S. support for Israel. During the debate, Smith said: “The level of Israeli control over our politics is frankly pretty undeniable.”
At the close of the debate, Kirk said from the stage, “This Jew-hate stuff has no place in public discourse. Period.” The crowd cheered approvingly.
It was a welcome statement, but did little to address the cumulative effect of the conference: that Tucker Carlson’s views and Dave Smith’s views deserve center stage.
While Donald Trump reaffirms the principles that underpinned his first term—that America remains the leader of the world’s most successful military alliance (NATO), a committed supporter of the Jewish State, lead defender of the global commons, and is willing to use military force when necessary—he is increasingly out of step with a critical constellation of right-wing influencers, podcasters, and contrarian intellectuals.
For them, America’s history as a global superpower is morally suspect, if not outright criminal. Our victories become losses, our alliances sinister entanglements, and our deterrence campaigns provocations. Why? Because they must revise the past to justify and satisfy their policy preferences in the present.
Radicalized by incentives that reward sensationalism, these influencers exploit understandable distrust of elites and expertise. Their content deliberately pushes audiences toward simplistic slogans and paranoid conspiracies. It demonizes Jewish Americans by demonizing Jewish power—including the basic right of Jewish American citizens to advocate, like all Americans, for policies they prefer. Carlson in particular plays with the canard of dual loyalty, suggesting that Americans who have served in the Israel Defense Forces “should lose their citizenship.”
If this critique sounds familiar, it is because it has been the worldview of the far left since the Cold War’s outset. Only now, it is being articulated and advanced by the right.
The big question is whether they or Trump himself represent the future of the MAGA movement.
The 1939 Project
Many have tried to make sense of this emerging coalition of conspiracy theorists, cranks, and the craven. Some have called it “woke right.” Still others have rightly described it as the meeting of the horseshoe—the strange reality wherein Marjorie Taylor Greene praises Zohran Mamdani.
I believe this emerging movement can best be understood as the 1939 Project—a decentralized, right-wing, online analogue to the left’s 1619 Project. While differing in content and cultural context, both initiatives aim to radically revise Americans’ understanding of their national story, their cultural mores, and conversational guardrails in order to seize power.
The 1619 Project, launched by The New York Times, argued America’s 1776 founding was subordinate to the arrival of African slaves in 1619. Slavery was portrayed as not merely tragic but foundational to America. America, in other words, should not be celebrated for its exceptionalism in ending slavery, but condemned for being like most other countries that allowed it at all.
The 1939 Project is similar in its ambitions and revisionism. It seeks to discredit America’s role in World War II and the postwar international order it shaped, replacing it with a dark vision of America sitting atop a globalist empire run by shadowy “warmongers”—including Winston Churchill himself.
The year 1939 is fitting: It marks the start of a global war the Nazis in Germany would start and America would help win—a victory this movement resents profoundly.
The year 1939 is meant to replace the national identity marked by 1945, the year the United States, with its allies, liberated Europe from Nazi tyranny, dropped the atomic bombs to end Japanese imperialism, ended the war, stopped the genocide of the Jewish people, and saved the free world. It is the year the United States, along with its allies, declared “Never Again” to the antisemitism that was tolerated by “decent” people—until the Nazis murdered millions of Jews and others.
The Allies’ victory in that war led to the creation of NATO, a political-military alliance of democratic sovereign nations, held together by the commitment to stave off another massive world war initiated by another imperialist authoritarian nation. In this postwar era it established a consensus that nuclear weapons should not become normalized as warfighting weapons, and that it’s better for countries that do not have them to refrain from acquiring them. The United States extended a nuclear umbrella to allies to encourage nonproliferation.
The results of this post–World War II international order are astonishingly positive. There has been a dramatic drop in wartime fatalities as a percentage of the world population. Economic prosperity for Americans has steadily improved. Life expectancy has grown longer and of a higher physical quality.
But if the 1939 Project people are right, and Churchill was in fact the warmonger, and if Hitler really wanted peace and perhaps had a point about the outsize and nefarious impact of Jewish people, and if the United States was wrong to drop the atomic bombs, then NATO was a mistake, the ties to the nation of Israel is a mistake, and none of the post–World War II international order is worth maintaining today, let alone restoring or defending.
I believe this emerging movement can best be understood as the 1939 Project—a decentralized, right-wing, online analogue to the left’s 1619 Project.
The moral foundation of America’s global role since 1945 has been victory in World War II. It has shaped our modern defense strategy, and asserted our moral claim for global leadership. Thus, the 1939 Project has turned its focus toward undermining the righteousness of the U.S. and America’s participation in the war itself.
They need to retcon the past in order to loosen the affection and support Americans feel for and have for our allies in Europe and Israel. This is necessary to weaken the American people’s support for U.S. statecraft in the world, whether in the form of sanctions, military deployments, or military action in defense of its allies and stated and official interests. Their increasingly casual antisemitism is not simply evil—it is strategic. It has become the glue that binds the various strains of the insurgent ideology.
Last year, Carlson called amateur historian and podcaster Darryl Cooper “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper, appearing on Carlson’s and Joe Rogan’s podcasts, judged Winston Churchill “the chief villain of World War II,” blaming Churchill’s stubborn insistence to free Europe from Hitler—rather than the Nazis’ conquest of the continent—for the bloodshed that followed. (To this day, Carlson persists in calling Cooper “the most august historian in America.”)
In January, Carlson speculated openly to an aghast Piers Morgan whether modern Europe would have been better off under Nazi rule: “I’m not defending Nazis. I’m just saying, where is Western Civilization? What did [Churchill] preserve?”
Implicit here is the grotesque suggestion that defeating Hitler’s Germany directly led to Europe’s modern “woke” culture—in other words, that a Nazi victory might have preserved traditional, Christian civilization. Carlson suggestively raises the question, but Cooper and others on social media answer explicitly:
The Fight for the Future of MAGA
None of this means American foreign policy is beyond critique. Indeed, I have spent years writing and speaking about the significant foreign-policy misjudgments that have eroded America’s strategic position.
Among those mistakes: Policymakers from both parties assumed trade and diplomacy alone could soften adversaries like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Since the apex of American power at the end of the Cold War, policymakers turned their focus on the global war on terrorism, but rather than end its just post-9/11 military campaign in Afghanistan after destroying jihadist cells, the Bush administration grew its ambition and engaged in nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq that proved foolish—and led to an emboldened Iran.
If the liberal idealist fantasy of building liberal democracies in the Middle East wasn’t bad enough, the United States failed to maintain a defense industrial base capable of maintaining the production capacity to produce weapons at the scale necessary to deter a major power war. Today, for the first time in the nation’s history, the United States must deter not just one peer nuclear adversary like it did during the Cold War, but two: China and Russia.
GOP voters remain, like Trump himself, skeptical of directionless wars, yet supportive of strong alliances, deterrence, and decisive military action.
But the 1939 Project is not interested in such criticism. Instead, it attributes these failures not to mistakes or misjudgments but to a nefarious cabal of globalist elites who have intentionally harmed Americans at home in order to pursue adventurism abroad.
They say we should turn our attention solely to domestic problems: the homeless, expensive housing, the drug pandemic, and unemployment, as though any of those serious challenges will be easier to contend with if the United States surrenders its power and influence in the world—and as if it’s a zero-sum decision. It is, in fact, possible to fight both the scourge of fentanyl addiction at home and help our ally stop a regime that has promised “death to America.” It’s not just possible, it is our obligation.
GOP voters remain, like Trump himself, skeptical of directionless wars, yet supportive of strong alliances, deterrence, and decisive military action when necessary. Which is why following Trump’s decisive Iran strikes, Republican voters rallied behind him.
Due to our geographic blessings, Americans often experience a recurring impulse to retreat inward. But the narrative offered by the 1939 Project will not offer a safer alternative than facing the growing threat from multiple imperialist authoritarian powers. Indeed, a movement that recasts America as the villain, that depicts our history of global leadership as malevolent, and that seeks to rewrite the moral foundation of America’s postwar identity, is more than “isolationist.” It is delusional.
For now, the people behind the 1939 Project have increasing cultural power online, but on policy outcomes, they are losing. What remains entirely uncertain is whether Republican leaders will have the courage to see what’s unfolding in front of their eyes, and then the courage to publicly and loudly reject it.