The Zionist Mystery Box

Where is all this discourse going?

One of the reasons I prefer commenting on my own country’s affairs is that there’s a sordid realism and harshness to it that I have real-world experience with. I do not doubt that America has its own equivalent to the filthy mattress above a kebab shop and diversity bollard aesthetic of our “Yookay” but I’m too distant to appreciate it fully.

Instead, my experience of America happens entirely through screens of one sort or another, which means that almost everything I see is presented as entertainment, a Big Show. The show that’s running at the moment is a civil war within the Conservative movement centred on Zionist power and influence over the Trump administration and American foreign policy. That said, Zionism has been under sustained scrutiny and attack from across the political spectrum since Israel began its questionable activities in Gaza after the October 7th attacks in 2023.

Recently, the cordon sanitaire surrounding Nick Fuentes has been broken, and the Zionist camp has declared that enough is enough and come out fighting.

When I say come out fighting, however, I mean a series of speeches and podcasts that moan and adopt a Hillary Clinton frame of lambasting the rise of the deplorables. The Tucker Carlson/ Fuentes interview was the final straw; the state of Israel and its supporters cannot be allowed to receive this level of scrutiny, and battle formations have to be deployed.

Yet, it can’t be denied that the battle formations the Zionist camp has thus far deployed have been under-equipped and, well, a bit cringe. I’ve been watching this from afar in the form of people talking, and people talking about people talking, and having something of an “is this all you can conjure, Saruman?” moment.

A few weeks ago, Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks enacted an impression of the Happy Merchant meme when lambasting Jewish billionaire and Zionist Larry Ellison, complete with a sneering nasally voice and hand rubbing. From what I can tell, neither she nor the Young Turks faced any consequences for this at all. Indeed, much of the geopolitical YouTube scene centres its content portfolio on Israel corrupting America’s political institutions, and nobody is being censored.

This new trend runs against the received wisdom of online right discourse in that “they” were usually portrayed as an almost omnipotent, shadowy force that always emerged victorious, always had another lever to pull.

There’s a trope in Hollywood movies when the “system” is on the rails in the face of an insurgency. It features an establishment figure (think Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men, or Ned Beatty in Network) who angrily and reluctantly places the rebellion into a broader Machiavellian context. There is a devastating monologue in which the childish rebellion is revealed as ignorant, naive, and idealistic. It is the “you can’t handle the truth!” moment.

Mark Levin is a Boomer who seems to have modelled his persona on Hollywood tough guys and truth nukers of a bygone era. Still, he can’t justify or contextualise America’s slavish devotion to Israel either. There were insults galore, but no dramatic moments of exposition where Israel was placed as the pivotal linchpin of American power.

There are no speeches like:

The world is an integrated system, Mr Carlson. You launder your holier-than-thou morals on your piss ant little podcast, you underhandedly insult the Jews because you think it’s revealing a great truth, but you’re a child. If Israel goes, Suez goes; if Suez goes, so does the Middle East and Europe’s energy supply; if we lose Europe, we’re surrounded. Am I making things clear to you, Mr Carlson?

But nothing is forthcoming of this nature; they simply regurgitate the post-war morality as a permanent and unalterable dogma that may never be challenged.

In a sense, Zionist power looks more like a JJ Abrams mystery box, a MacGuffin used to drive the plot, with nothing much inside it.

Whatever the truth of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the rather sordid interaction between influencers and donors featuring emergency Zoom calls and meetings to ensure everyone stayed on message added to the disenchantment and the aura of corruption and swindling taking place.

Is that really all there is to it? Is it really just blackmail, bribes, and buggery all the way down? No esoteric rites of passage, no grand Machiavellian justification in the name of the greater good?

Then again, this is simply people talking on podcasts, and the reactions and counter-reactions flying back and forth. It’s like watching old galleons firing cannonballs into each other’s masts and rudders, but as podcasts. All of this talk will not have prevented a single shipment of American arms from being sent to Israel, nor the next billion in aid.

Yet, while acknowledging that, the fact remains that the future of American/Jewish/Israeli relations could very well be on the line. Reuters reports that:

U.S. law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher said Wednesday it has teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League to launch a coordinated effort to provide free legal services to victims of antisemitism.

Gibson Dunn and the ADL said the initiative includes 39,000 lawyers across 35 U.S. states, and that 40 law firms have agreed to receive client referrals or serve as co-counsel as part of the network.

How this literal army of lawyers is to be deployed remains to be seen, but it is proof that the current situation is transcending the podcast circuit and entering the realm of the real.

This takes me back to where I began: the hyperreal nature of American discourse and its abstractness. There is a scenario where what we’re witnessing is a rogue faction getting their “ducks in a row” in preparation for a Tucker Carlson presidential run. Another scenario is that all of this energy will be redirected into the Republican Party and neutralised, and another where, quite literally, nothing ever happens.

There’s a sense that the curtain has been pulled back, and not very much has been revealed, so far, and the nature of the discourse is such that we can’t help but wonder if we’re looking at just another curtain.