A spat between two MAGA media personalities reflects the ideological split in the movement—and in the Trump administration.
By: Ruthie Blum
Tucker Carlson is a master of disingenuousness, to put it generously. That’s why the only viewers still charmed by his trademark deer-in-the-headlights act are those on the right who champion the conspiracy theorists and antisemites to whom he regularly provides a platform.
Some of his interviewees are overt Jew-haters; others covert ones who pretend that their only beef is with “Israeli policy.” You know, just like a huge swath of the Democratic Party that they loathe.
Tucker’s neat trick, no longer so tidy, is to react to critics—fellow supporters of President Donald Trump with a whole different take on foreign policy—by engaging in not-so-plausible deniability where his true feelings about Jews and the Jewish state are concerned. One method is to refer to the Tribe as “neocons.”
Never mind that the isolationists in the MAGA camp purposely abuse the term or are willfully ignorant about its origin. Neoconservatism was the name given to a movement of liberal intellectuals who opposed the tenets of the New Left—the “woke” of the 1960s and ’70s—and shifted allegiance to the Republican Party.
Ironically, they were the “Make America Great Again” crowd of that period, and instrumental in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter. Many, but by no means all, were Jews.
A key element of their patriotism had to do with American greatness, exceptionalism and power on the world stage (does “peace through strength” sound familiar?). Rejecting détente and taking a tough stand against the Soviet Union, in order to win the Cold War, were central.
That defeating one’s enemies has become a dirty concept for the likes of Tucker and his echo chamber—who use the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan to accuse backers of U.S. intervention in the Middle East of “war-mongering”—is suspicious, to say the least.
It’s one thing to conclude that spreading democracy among Islamist regimes is problematic, if not impossible. It’s something else entirely to attribute the mistake to “neocon” trigger-happiness. Unless, of course, the aim is to blame Israel for “dragging” the United States into battles on behalf of the Jews.
One indispensable figure who’s been going on the offensive against the misnomer and its motive is Mark Levin. Luckily, the host of “Life, Liberty & Levin” on Fox News never shies away from telling the truth, even when it ruffles feathers on his own side of the spectrum. Or is likely to arouse ire in West Wing corners. Like the Oval Office, for instance.
Levin, it should be noted, was appointed last month by the president to serve on the “revamped” Homeland Security Advisory Council. And though Trump himself has begun invoking the “neocon” epithet—as he did during his speech in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday—Levin is sticking to his rhetorical guns.
His latest engagement on the ideological front lines in the internecine MAGA split is with none other than the aforementioned Tucker, who’s also got allies in the White House. The tussle between the two former friends/colleagues followed a Breitbart News interview on May 9 with U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff.
Egged on by interlocutor Matthew Boyle, Witkoff said, “You’re right. The neocon element believes that war is the only way to solve things.”
Levin reacted with apt disdain.
“LOL; the envoy talks like the fifth-column isolationists,” he tweeted. “Nobody believes war is the only way. We wait with great interest to see the deal you’re negotiating with the warmonger Iranian terrorist regime. In the meantime, rather than sloganeering against patriotic Americans who love our country, use your name-calling for the terrorist regime that has murdered Americans, tried to assassinate our president, chants death to America, and has lied its way toward a nuclear bomb.”
In a subsequent post on X, he stated, “By the way, neocon is a pejorative for Jew. Unbelievable.”
And then—to paraphrase Trump in a different context—all hell broke loose. During his eponymous radio show on Tuesday, Tucker sneered, “So, you have Mark Levin calling Steve Witkoff an antisemite. We’ve reached peak crazy.”
Turning to his guest, comedian Dave Smith, he added, “I mean, I think Witkoff is Jewish, right? If Mark Levin is calling the Trump administration antisemitic, Steve Witkoff, we’re at the end of something and the beginning of something new. If you’re calling Steve Witkoff an antisemite on Twitter, like, you know you’re losing, right?”
Levin promptly fired back.
“So, schmuck picks a fight with me, doesn’t call me,” he said on his own eponymous radio program. “You see, all the neocons are gone. So why do they keep using the word ‘neoconservative’? Notice they don’t use ‘hawk’ [or] ‘interventionist.’ Neocon! Why do they keep saying ‘neocon’? Because many of the neoconservatives were old-time, left-wing, Democrat Jews!”
Clarifying further, Levin maintained that “many of the people who use that phrase don’t know what they’re talking about, but in the magazines and on the internet, they know it. So, they’re not going to say, ‘The Jews are dragging us into a war.’ They’ll say, ‘Israel is, Netanyahu is.’ They’re not going to say, ‘The Jews this and the Jews that,’ so they use ‘neocon.’”
He proceeded to point out that wanting to stop the “Islamo-Nazi regime in Iran” means being a “peacemaker,” not a “warmonger.” But, he bellowed, “I don’t have to pretend I’m Helen Keller! That I don’t see and I don’t hear, and neither do you! And neither do you. And there’s a whole pattern over there.”
Referring to Tucker, Levin argued, “Now, he’s free to do what he wants. I believe in free speech. Go ahead, buy a subscription. Do whatever you want; it’s perfectly fine by me. But don’t screw with me, you little bastard, by twisting my words. And you should have picked up the phone, because I would have cleared things up for you.”
Not that this would have persuaded Tucker to change his tune, which has grown increasingly off-key.
Renowned Middle East policy expert and former senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney David Wurmser—a Jewish conservative often falsely labeled as a “neocon”—described it to JNS in February as a deviation on Tucker’s part “to a dark place.”
Wurmser explained: “Though we say he’s inside the conservative tent, his policies are far more similar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s than to Trump’s. I mean, Tucker believes that we [Americans] are the reason that Iran hates us; that we were wrong to kill [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Maj. Gen. Qassem] Soleimani; that we triggered the hatred of America around the world.
“In other words, he’s essentially apologizing for America—a reversion to the ‘blame America first’ reflex of the left of the late 1970s that Reagan rejected and replaced with a robust sense of unapologetic national pride and American goodness. What is stunning about Tucker is that he had such a position during the Black Lives Matter riots, but adopts the opposite course in foreign policy.”
As Wurmser correctly concluded, “You can’t make America great again by making it retreat again.”
It’s this crucial MAGA message that Levin has been shouting—figurately from the rooftops and literally from his mega-media platforms. May it reverberate more loudly in the administration than the ramblings of Tucker and the rest of the “woke right.”
(JNS.org)
Ruthie Blum, a former adviser at the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is an award-winning columnist and a senior contributing editor at JNS. Co-host with Ambassador Mark Regev of the JNS-TV podcast “Israel Undiplomatic,” she writes on Israeli politics and U.S.-Israel relations. Originally from New York, she moved to Israel in 1977. She is a regular guest on national and international media outlets, including Fox, Sky News, i24News, Scripps, ILTV, WION and Newsmax.
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