America needs to wake up to the fearful reality of the storm that surrounds us.
As Mark Meckler and I wrote last December, addressing the growing right-wing opposition to the war in Israel:
“Those who hide behind the ‘America First’ mantra,” we wrote, “seem to think that for as long as we bury our heads in the sand and focus only on ‘our problems,’ Iran, a key player in the rising anti-U.S. world order, to whom Hamas is one of many proxies, and the rest of their radical Islamic brethren will leave us alone.”
“That’s a lie. Even if we withdrew our support for Israel in this conflict, Iran would still seek to destroy us.”
“Israel is the canary in the coal mine for the Western world,” we continued. “If the intersectional interpretation of Israel as the ‘little oppressor’ is allowed to prevail, so, too, will the interpretation of America as the ‘great oppressor.’ If Israel is a ‘colonizer’ nation that must be destroyed, then so, too, is the United States and virtually all of the West.”
“In this conflict, it is Americans’ duty to fight for our culture and ideals and to stand by Israel as the foundation stone of Western civilization. In a fight to the death between two traditions, one evil and ruinous, the other imperfect but exceptional, Israel, the stand-in for the latter, must win. We must not underestimate the stakes. To turn our backs on Israel now is to give up on everything we hold dear.”
Talk show host and author Steve Deace recently made a similar point:
In less than 2 minutes with @ErickStakelbeck on @TBN I explain why Christians should align with Israel against Islamo-fascism, regardless of whether or not you believe this Israel is prophetically significant. You can watch the full episode here: https://t.co/jKVObxg3fm pic.twitter.com/eNgfrodNPf
— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) September 25, 2024
But days shy of the first anniversary of October 7, a date which, by all rights, will live in infamy, the new Right in America appears more divided about Israel than ever before.
But it’s not just Israel. It’s Ukraine. It’s the United States. It’s World War II and Winston Churchill. What began as a fair and legitimate debate about foreign aid quickly devolved into something else entirely — a tragic capitulation to the pervasive forces of moral relativism and ambiguity.
Something unexpected — and distinctly nonconservative — happened to right-wing media after October 7. It wasn’t our routine conversations about whether or not we should financially support our allies (post February 2022, we had been having that conversation about the Russian invasion of Ukraine already, reducing our comprehension of the topic to immature talking points about “territorial disputes”). It wasn’t even the broader debate about isolationism, neoconservatism vs. paleoconservatism, and whether “America First” excludes us from caring about other countries. It was far worse than that.
It seems to me that those who ardently oppose American interventionism crafted a false narrative from which to frame their arguments. Pushing backward in time, they began to rewrite history to justify present qualms about foreign aid. In order to “prove” that intervention is always and has always been wrong, they called into question the righteousness of the good guys and charitably “reconsidered” the bad ones. Putin became more appealing than Zelenskyy, anti-American Islamic radicals over “God’s chosen people.” Figures like Candace Owens delved into why “everything we learned about World War 2 is a lie” — yes, she really said everything — without breathing so much as a word of praise for the millions of Americans who defended their country during that awful struggle against tyranny.
This twisted new way of seeing the world spilled out into the open three weeks ago when arguably the biggest name in conservative media hosted a “Nazi apologist,” platforming outrageous, unfounded, and outright evil claims about the Second World War — namely, that Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the war and that the Nazis mistakenly killed millions (in his words, they merely “ended up” dead) because they failed to prepare enough food for their prisoners of war.
My purpose here is not to debunk such abhorrent lies but simply to ask, “To what end?”
To what end are so-called conservatives rewriting history, recasting the heroes as evil and the villains as merely misunderstood? Simply to prove that we should not give any more money to Israel?
Are we really so blind that we cannot perceive the difference between the Jewish nation-state and Ukraine defending themselves against, in the first case, annihilatory terrorists and, in the second, an aggressively expansionist regime? Must we also slander those who fought on the beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets, and hills, offering their blood, toil, tears, and sweat? What’s next? Lost Cause apologetics? The reinterpreting of Mao Zedong? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Again, I do not mind having good-faith debates about whether we can afford to fund our allies’ wars, especially when facing an economic crisis of our own. I believe we should. But I understand why others may not. Historical revisionism and military subjectivism, however, are impermissible. When will America wake up and see that flirting with evil only enfeebles us for the fight to come?
Iran is actively trying to kill Donald Trump. They have hacked his campaign multiple times. Putin lowered the threshold for making nuclear war against the West. He seeks to recreate the Soviet Union. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are aligning against us. Hamas indiscriminately slaughtered 1,200 Israeli civilians on October 7. Islamic extremists are chanting “Death to America” and burning American flags within our own country. Evil does not intend to leave us alone. It’s baring its ugly fangs — fangs stained with the blood of our more honorable ancestors — even as we play foolish games about discovering the “secret history” behind why Hitler was unfairly judged.
Maybe depraved, wicked people really do exist. Maybe black is black and white and white. Maybe not everything has to be morally complicated or gray.
In this present conflict, one thing is clear: someone means for America to collapse, and it isn’t Israel, Ukraine, or Winston Churchill. Either we ride out and meet that enemy — or we attempt to scare him off with our supposedly enlightened discourse about the nuance of right and wrong. Either way, he’s coming. Either way, he intends to destroy us. The question is if we possess the moral clarity and strength to fight back.
It’s time to wake up.
