Ben Lorber writes:

On Oct. 12, 2017, then Congressmember Matt Gaetz spoke on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to introduce a resolution condemning the United Nations for ostensible anti-Israel bias. “I rise today to support our friend and ally, Israel,” the representative from Florida announced, claiming that the UN was trying to “rewrite history, to condemn Israel and call it an occupying power in Jerusalem.” Gaetz slammed the international body’s “antisemitism” and “attempts to punish and delegitimize Israel,” and encouraged his colleagues to “show solidarity with Israel.”

His two-minute speech was boilerplate AIPAC fare, the kind we still hear today from politicians like Senator Ted Cruz, who introduced a parallel resolution with Gaetz on the Senate floor. At the time, Gaetz was less than a year into his first term and already a leading figure in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) wing of the Republican Party, with President Donald Trump at its head. But eight years later, Gaetz’s tune has changed.

“Doesn’t it feel like Israel’s seduction of U.S. foreign policy is some kind of regime-change mad lib?” he asked on June 16, 2025 during a segment for The Matt Gaetz Show, aired on the far-right One America News Network, as Trump debated joining Israel’s war on Iran. “If Israel is a Democracy,” he posted on X three days later, “when do all the Arabs who live there get to vote?” And on June 21, he discussed “Jewish supremacy” in Israel with a guest on his show, highlighting the country’s repression of Palestinian Christians.

Although no longer an elected official, Gaetz has emerged as one among many avatars of a growing strand of Israel-skepticism within the MAGA movement. Since October 7, a panoply of prominent far-right pundits, including Tucker Carlson, Jack Posobiec, and Steve Bannon, as well as MAGA politicians such as Marjorie Taylor Greene have grown increasingly critical of U.S. support for Israel. They fiercely opposed the prospect of U.S. military intervention in Israel’s 12-day war on Iran. And while some pivoted to praise the strikes once it seemed that a longer war had been averted, voices like Carlson and Greene remain wary that Trump may still be swayed to plunge the U.S. into war in the Middle East.

Carlson and others are joined by an array of popular voices across the right-leaning YouTube and podcasting ecosystem, including commentators like Joe Rogan and Theo Von and libertarian comedian Dave Smith. The more radical corners, meanwhile, have adopted increasingly hard-edged and openly antisemitic critiques of Zionism, such as popular misogynist “manosphere” voices like Andrew Tate and Jake Shields, conspiracy-mongers like Alex Jones and Candace Owens, and outright white supremacists like Nick Fuentes. Some of these figures have rejected Trump entirely, insisting he has been utterly compromised by Zionists and that an authentic nationalist movement can only arise from the ashes of Trumpism. [Continue reading…]