Israel, Epstein, and Online MAGA’s Turn Against Trump

_THE INTERVIEW_

This interview was auto-transcribed and edited for clarity.

Ari: Park, thank you so much for joining us.

Park: Thank you.

Ari: I read The Scroll every day and have been following your articles. You do one of the best jobs of seeing the headlines and who's reporting what, and cutting through it all to ask why someone might be pushing a particular story.

Looking at everything happening in Israel and America through that lens, with Israel constantly under attack from information warfare and various operations, how do you think Israel is doing?

Park: Recently, they've been doing quite poorly. I'd say they've probably been doing poorly since October 7. One of the dynamics of the war with Hamas has been Israel having battlefield successes.

That's been more obvious in Lebanon and with Iran. The Gaza war is still grinding on for many different reasons, not least the political difficulty of operating in Gaza.

But they have been subject to what you might call propaganda or information warfare campaigns run by all sorts of different actors. Some of these originate with Hamas or other Palestinian factions like the PFLP or Islamic Jihad.

Some are pushed by state actors like China, Russia, and Iran. There's been good research on Chinese botnets pushing people like Jackson Hinkle.

But they are also pushed by many people in the United States who have their own interests in promoting various narratives about the war. These are generally very detached from the reality of what may or may not be happening in Gaza.

One way I think about it is that the issue of Israel, the broader Middle East, and American foreign policy is a screen onto which Americans project their own ideological fantasies or morality plays for what are ultimately domestic reasons.

So, while there are foreign actors and states like Qatar that people are paying more attention to, a lot of this has domestic roots. It is really about American politics more than it is about Israel or the war in Gaza, even if that's what is nominally being discussed.

Ari: One of the stories I've been following, and Tablet has done a lot of writing about it, is an information operation specifically trying to divide evangelical Christians from Israel.

Recently, a bunch of these stories have been coming out of Judea and Samaria, trying to portray it as if Israelis and settlers are attacking Christians.

There have been three different fake stories propagated into conservative media here, and of course, they make their way to Al Jazeera. Can you break down what you see happening here and how a specific strategy like this even develops? Is it decentralized? How is it being spread?

Park: To the last point first, I do think it is mostly decentralized. Or maybe there are certain actors acting in a centralized way, but a lot of different actors are converging on these stories because they all had an angle in it.

Tucker Carlson's angle is different than the angle of Catholic prelates in the Middle East or Arab Christian activists who are broadly sympathetic with the Palestinian cause or Hamas' war.

But they can all unify around this "Christians" narrative. For people who aren't familiar with this, I would direct you to two articles my Tablet colleague Tony Badran wrote.

One from earlier this year called “The Right Sectarian Moment,” and then a more recent one called “The Church of Taybeh.” Taybeh was the West Bank Christian village where a church or an archaeological site that used to be a church was the subject of these claims.

What happened is basically there's a fire in a field outside this historic, not active, church. It is immediately packaged for audiences before we have any idea what happened or there's any kind of investigation by Israeli authorities.

It was packaged by Palestinian activists; there's a guy named Khalil who was one of the original people pushing this out in Catholic and Christian English-language newspapers a day after the incident.

The stories came with photos taken from suggestive angles that make it look like the church is being burned. Then there's a whole wave on social media of photos showing what later turned out to be Israeli settlers fighting the fires.

They have what essentially look like leaf blowers, which are tools used to put out a fire in these conditions. It makes sense, a lot of these people are farmers, and nobody wants their fields to burn down.

But these photos were captioned saying, Here we can see the settlers fanning the flames to burn down the historic church. This gets picked up by people within the Catholic Church hierarchy and the Orthodox Church hierarchy, connected to a separate incident from early July when a Roman Catholic Church in Gaza was unintentionally struck by IDF indirect fire.

The initial reports said it was a tank round, but it now appears it may have been a mortar, and a few parishioners were killed.

These incidents fuse within the rhetoric of local churchmen and are then broadcast into English-language social media, especially Christian and Catholic media in the United States. This pushes the narrative that Israel is systematically attacking, killing, and persecuting Christians. This is tied into a very aggressive attack on American Protestant evangelicals and Christian Zionists.

A lot of the rhetoric from Palestinian activists, but also more mainstream people like Sohrab Ahmari of UnHerd and Shadi Hamid, is basically saying that if you're a Christian Zionist, you're not a real Christian. This is bad theology, and you need to join with your Christian brothers and sisters in the Middle East and oppose the Israeli occupation.

You can see that where this thing cashes out in policy terms is an attack on the connection between Protestants, American Christian Zionists, and the Jews in Israel. This connection, more so than the support of American Jewry, is the political foundation of support for Israel in the United States due to the demographic weight of that population.

Ari: For people who work in media and think about politics this way, it’s obvious what they're trying to do. They have this angle, and they want to spread it to make sure evangelicals in this country get this information.

Do you think it's as obvious to others? Are they thinking, Why are we getting this information? Why are people who haven't talked about Israel for years suddenly obsessed with it? And second, do you think it's effective? Are evangelicals starting to move away from Israel?

Park: It’s hard to say. Gallup had some polling a few weeks ago showing that among Republicans as a whole, a large majority of evangelicals still support Israel. But you're starting to see it split out by age. Younger evangelicals are definitely more skeptical and receptive to these sorts of narratives.

I think of it kind of like the 2010s, in Obama's second term, when social media was really starting to make its influence felt among young people. That’s when you really saw the emergence of a very virulent form of social justice politics, or what we might now call wokeness.

For a very long time, there was this idea of, Don't worry about it, this is only happening on college campuses or social media, it’s not real life.

But I think we saw that even when these ideas don't have majority support among the population they're purporting to speak for, they can exercise a lot of influence through what is basically elite capture.

If they're convincing the people who are the most politically engaged, the most online, and the most active in politics, activism, and media, then that has ripple effects for policymaking, for media coverage, and in turn on how people's opinions are formed.

So I would say currently, no, it hasn't succeeded in breaking evangelical support for Israel. But I do worry that it could be the problem 10 years down the line as we face generational turnover.

Ari: We see this angle trying to target evangelicals, who are part of the larger conservative coalition. There's also a more specific one happening at the same time, which Tablet has been at the forefront of reporting.

I think you guys are calling it "Epstein Gate," and you see figures like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon leaning into the Epstein story with much more intensity, and in a way that is much more anti-Trump than anyone would have thought. Can you explain what is happening there?

Park: Yeah, this is something that my colleague and I at Tablet, Lee Smith, have been interested in. It's been remarkable to watch. I think you have to go back to the start of Trump's administration. You see figures like Tucker Carlson taking these strange stances, even before the election and through the transition.

He was basically setting himself up as a spokesman for MAGA and then saying MAGA means X, Y, Z. It means the Israelis are not our friends, and we need to cut ties. It means we need to pursue a certain policy in the Middle East that looks a lot like Obama's policy.

That's the definition of MAGA, and Trump is betraying MAGA if he doesn't follow this.

These guys, Tucker and Bannon, are probably the most important ones because they have some connection to the Trump inner circle and are taken more seriously than figures like Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes, who make similar arguments but in a dumber way for a less influential audience.

Throughout the first several months of Trump's term, they're consistently attacking his foreign policy, his policy on Israel, and his support for the Gaza war.

During the long period of Iran negotiations, it was unclear what the Trump administration was going to do. Most people came to believe that he was not willing to use military action, creating tension between him and Netanyahu.

There was a constant flood of leaks to that effect, showing up in the Washington Post, Axios, Politico, and the New York Times, basically featuring people inside or close to the administration saying Trump wants a nuclear deal with Iran.

The narrative was that the Jews are trying to drag us into another war in the Middle East that'll be another Iraq, get tens of thousands more Americans killed, and spike oil prices. Trump ignored those people. That all turned out to be completely wrong.

He started the war and ultimately destroyed Iran's foreign policy, which makes perfect sense if you look back at everything he did during his first term and what he has been saying his whole life.

I saw that someone dug up his first comment ever on foreign policy from 1979 or 1980, where he expressed anger that Jimmy Carter had not done more to punish Iran for the embassy hostage crisis. This is completely consistent with Trump. He did what he said he would do.

But it really exposed this group of influencers who had been simultaneously lobbying the president and pitching themselves to their audience. They got exposed as having no power, no insight into how Trump was thinking or how the administration worked, and no influence over his decision-making. Trump even came out and called out Tucker by name during what's now known as the 12-Day War.

That is the immediate precursor to the same group of influencers leading the freakout and rebellion against Trump with the Epstein stuff. Bannon and Tucker have both been very explicit in their belief that Epstein was a Mossad asset working for Israeli intelligence to collect blackmail on American politicians.

I think the point is to put Trump in a corner and say, You wouldn't listen to us about Iran, but now we're going to tell your supporters that you're bought and paid for by the Israelis, maybe you're blackmailed by Mossad. It's a way to box him in.

Ari: You used the phrase "the 12-Day War," and I love how Trump just put out a Truth Social post saying this is what we're calling it now. It's pretty incredible.

Park: He has a way with words.

Ari: An interesting thing you said was that Tucker was trying to define MAGA. For a long time, especially under the first Trump administration and between administrations, it seemed like he had a solid grasp on setting what the Republican party would do and believe in. He really had that strong power over the consensus.

Now it seems we have Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, even people like Charlie Kirk or other influencers, and outlets like The American Conservative, that are trying to get in there and say what Trump should be doing and what Republicans should believe.

Do you think Trump is losing a little of his ability to set the tone for the party, and are these people having an effect?

Park: I would frame it a little differently. I think during Trump's first term, it was really Trump against the "establishment," the Republican establishment, that he's now pretty decisively won over to his side.

Now, when Republican congressmen or senators defy him, it's guys like Thomas Massie who are more aligned with this internet faction.

Instead of a traditional GOP establishment, you now have this new comms and media infrastructure that's been built out on the right. It consists of media influencers, podcasters, and YouTubers who played a relatively big role in the 2024 race and are now trying to exercise their influence.

My reading is that this is really a DC infrastructure. In Trump's first term, there was a lot of discussion of how to create "Trumpism without Trump." It was considered very embarrassing to be associated with Trump among young, ambitious DC Republican types in 2017 or 2018. His victory was seen as a freak accident.

The thinking was, he raised some good points, and maybe the party really does need to moderate its stance on trade and crack down on illegal immigration. But he's going to be a one-term president.

So they thought, We're going to stay here, think about the issues he's bringing up, and prepare for the post-Trump Trump, who will be more intellectually and ideologically coherent.

They really consolidated around Ron DeSantis after 2022 and during the primary. They all viewed themselves as the ones who were going to staff and ideologically influence a DeSantis administration. That didn't happen. Then they all had to run and become, so to speak, more Catholic than the Pope.

There are all sorts of media incentives, too. If you're a podcaster talking to a MAGA audience, you have to be MAGA.

But I don't think those people have any particular loyalty to Trump himself, to what he ideologically represents, or his stated beliefs. Instead, you're seeing people trying to shoehorn a separate, very "Beltway insider" ideological project of foreign policy retrenchment into MAGA.

Bracketing people like Tucker, who I think just have a thing about the Jews and are paranoid about it, you are seeing people try to shoehorn this ideology into MAGA. They are trying to redefine MAGA to mean this, in an attempt to force Trump to adopt and implement it.

I think there's frustration that Trump hasn't done that.

Ari: Going one step deeper, why now for people like Tucker and Bannon? Tucker's argument seems to be that he's upset that any attention on issues in the Middle East, like our close alliance with Israel, takes away from failing cities and things that need to be fixed at home.

So, to solve that problem, he attacks Israel to sever that alliance.

Do you think that adds up? Do you take Tucker at his word, or is something else going on?

Park: No, I don't take Tucker's word. Bannon is less clear to me; I have a less clear sense of what he ultimately wants. With Tucker, he has been this way for a while.

At first, I was inclined to defend him against people who would say he always takes the side of America's enemies in any conflict. I would think, no, he's just asking critical questions.

But it's been a long time now that he is always seeking to explain Russia's point of view, Iran's point of view, the Assad regime's point of view, often in frankly incoherent ways.

His response to the fall of the Assad regime was to have Jeffrey Sachs on to explain that this was a CIA plot. Meanwhile, everyone could watch the Israelis in real time, freaking out in public over it.

Tucker was just saying that this is Israel, this is the Zionists, the neocons, the warmongers. None of which is true. The key to understanding some of this from Tucker is a speech he gave last month.

He's talking about Epstein and really trying to connect the dots, saying, Have you ever noticed that the same people who want to send your kids to die for Israel are also the ones charging you exorbitant interest on your credit cards?

To me, that was just giving up the game. This is just a Jewish conspiracy. Jewish bankers are trying to distract you with the Middle East while they suck you dry with credit card interest or something. So I don't take him seriously.

If you look at the focus on Israel, as opposed to what people are talking about on Twitter, the US government is not doing that much. We're putting some money into the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and continuing to supply Israel with weapons, but we're not on the ground there. It hasn't prevented Trump from acting on any of his other agenda items, like closing the border or his tariffs.

On its face, the idea that you have to cut ties with Israel doesn't make sense.

Ari: Last question. Let's say Israel is able to bring this conflict to a close in the next few months, and media coverage starts to taper off.

Do you think these people will stop talking about Israel? What do you think is in store over the next year?

Park: People will keep talking about it. There are Israel obsessives, especially on the anti-Israel side, and they're going to talk about it no matter what. I do think it's going to be the mainstream position of the Democratic Party now. Israel is basically a partisan issue.

If you look at polling, very few Democrats support Israel anymore. Half or more think there's a genocide going on. You're starting to see this reflected in their politicians.

I think this was always the implicit view of the Obama and then the Biden administrations, but they were constrained by pro-Israel public opinion. So in that sense, I think it's going to be with us for a long time because American support for Israel can no longer be taken for granted as a bipartisan consensus.

On the other hand, if the war ends eventually, and hopefully it ends with an actual Israeli victory instead of just throwing in the towel because it's gotten too difficult, then I do think that will be the end of it for the rest of Trump's administration.

He will have won that fight internally with the party. There just will not be much juice left in being a right-wing influencer posting memes about how Trump's going to make us go die for Israel.

However, if Trump is gone, then it's going to become a big question mark. It will be a question of whether a future Republican administration is going to be closer to Trump and the traditional Republican view, or if it is going to incorporate more of the Bannonite, Tuckerite politics that we've seen over the last few years.