This is from the book I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: Why The Pro-Palestine Movement Failed To Stop A Holocaust, & How It Can Still Win.”
During the first months after the Palestinian genocide reached its accelerated phase, which influencer was the most aggressive and successful in promoting the idea that October 7 had been a false flag? It wasn’t even anybody who falls under the “alt media” brand, though alt media has often echoed this rhetoric about Al Aqsa Flood; the commentator who pushed this narrative the hardest was Charlie Kirk, the neocon Zionist spokesman who has the role of running America’s astroturf right-wing campus activism network.
The “October 7 false flag” narrative as a setup for defending Zionism
It’s because of Kirk’s proximity to the Trump-Adelson Zionists that his arguments for this theory could have so much impact; when these arguments came from him, this made it seem like what he said was more credible, with the perception being that he was an insider who’d exposed forbidden knowledge. The thing Kirk said about October 7 that’s since received widespread attention for supposedly being so transgressive was from an episode of the Patrick Bet-David podcast, where less than a week after Al Aqsa Flood, Kirk provided a seemingly candid view on this development. In response to the idea that the Zionist entity’s leadership didn’t see Al Aqsa Flood coming, Kirk said:
So I’ve been in Israel many times. The whole country’s a fortress. When I first heard the story, I still had the same gut instinct that I did initially. I find this very hard to believe. I’ve been to that Gaza border. You cannot go ten feet without running into a 19-year-old with an AR-15 or an automatic machine gun. That’s an IDF soldier. The whole country is surveilled…We don’t talk about Israeli politics very often, and most Americans don’t know this. The last nine months, Israel was on the brink of civil war. It’s not an exaggeration. This judicial stuff, there were hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets, because Bibi Netanyahu is basically redefining the Israeli constitution. That’s not an exaggeration. He said the judicial branch has too much power…there were protests planned this week against Netanyahu, where they anticipated tens of thousands of people to take to the streets. That’s all gone, Patrick. Netanyahu now has an emergency government and a mandate to lead. I’m not willing to say that Netanyahu knew, or there was intelligence here, but I think some questions need to be asked.
There’s a reason why Kirk wasn’t kicked out of Trump’s closely Netanyahu-tied circle for saying this: he hadn’t said anything that actually threatened the Zionist project’s future. Instead he’d promoted an argument that was instrumental in the fortification of Zionism at that moment; this was the narrative that the resistance had played into the occupier’s hands.
Whether somebody believes this because they think October 7 was planned by Netanyahu, or because they think the resistance was duped into doing something unwise, the impact this idea has is to undermine solidarity with Palestine. To make it seem like the very goal of resisting colonization goes against the interests of the Palestinians, who according to this narrative can only see their situation improve through negotiating with the colonizers. Hamas is cast as the impediment to such negotiations, even though Hamas has gone so far as to offer stepping down from power for the sake of getting peace. No matter how good-faith Hamas shows itself to be, and no matter how many times the occupier sabotages negotiations, Hamas is portrayed as part of the problem.
The notion about Hamas being a tool of Netanyahu only reinforces the occupier’s narrative justification for continuing the genocide, because this notion comes from that lie about Hamas not being interested in reaching a resolution. It reaffirms the occupier government’s PR line about how Hamas is the only thing preventing an end to the suffering, and how the occupier therefore has no choice but to keep attacking until it’s eliminated Hamas. So when a Zionist mouthpiece like Kirk feeds the suspicions about Hamas having been used for Netanyahu’s designs, this is only a ploy to strengthen the arguments which deny or defend the genocide.
To refute the false flag theory about October 7, we only need to look at the actual, material factors that made the resistance able and willing to carry out this operation. The idea that Netanyahu let October 7 occur to advance his career would seemingly make sense, if one were to ignore the larger context behind what had driven Hamas to take an action like this one at that particular time. The operation was a response to new provocations by the occupier against Islam, and the resistance largely felt empowered to retaliate in this way because of recent gains by the world’s other anti-imperialist forces.
During the leadup to October 7, these developments were far more significant in producing Al Aqsa Flood than the protests within Zionist colonizer society, or Netanyahu’s efforts to consolidate colonial power. If the latter events had any role in bringing about October 7, it was because the resistance felt emboldened by the settler state’s accelerating internal collapse. Not because Netanyahu had hatched a plan to allow Al Aqsa Flood to happen.
The failures within the occupier’s security on October 7 were not due to any conspiracy. They happened because the occupier had truly been caught off guard by the resistance, and we have a clear explanation for why it was caught off guard: because the occupier had increasingly been coming to rely on fancy surveillance technologies, which gave the colonizers an overconfidence about their ability to detect threats. The shift away from human surveillance was what created new flaws in the occupier’s supposedly omnipotent spying system, flaws which could be exploited by a guerrilla force.
This explanation for the occupier’s security breach makes far more sense than the explanations that have been come up with by anti-resistance voices. But to divert the discourse away from national liberation, and thereby defend Zionism, these voices have needed to spin a story in which Netanyahu masterminded October 7. Or, in the case of Kirk’s argument, a story where October 7 at least served to strengthen the occupier’s power. Nothing the resistance does can be recognized as beneficial to the Palestinians; its actions must be either products of a conspiracy with “Israel,” or mistakes that have ended up helping the occupier.
The last thing that Zionism’s propagandists want anti-Zionists to do is treat the resistance as a positive force; they’ll make up whatever narratives they need to in order to make us demoralized about the liberation struggle’s prospects, and make us think that there are no good sides in this fight.
This is how the narrative managers can recapture the growing element of conservatives, including in Kirk’s own fan base, who despise “Israel.” When everyone who sees reason knows that the Zionist entity is a force for evil, the best way to protect Zionism is by turning anti-Zionists against the resistance. This tactic certainly helps Zionists defend their position, as we’ve seen Kirk do since his pivot towards aggressively pushing Gaza genocide denial. But it’s not as if this has let Kirk and the other Trump loyalists successfully bring Zionism back to its former popularity within the conservative base. So for the foreseeable future, we can expect the primary right-wing propaganda tactic to be the “Jewish question” narrative; which is functionally Zionist psyop, despite what its propagators say.
Replacing resistance & class struggle with racial obsession
The JQ is based within the Zionist premise that Jews are fundamentally a racial group, and the JQ’s role in the discourse is to isolate the pro-Palestine movement by making anti-Zionism appear synonymous with anti-Jewish bigotry. It also overlaps with Zionism in that it encourages Jews to leave “white” society and become concentrated in their own designated land, which was what formed the basis for Hitler’s collaborations with the Zionist movement. To combat the JQ psyop, though, we must do more than point out the hypocrisies of its historical or present leaders. Foremost, we need to build the working-class power which can show the masses what the true path to salvation looks like. Which can provide a real means for defeating our monopoly-controlled government, as opposed to the false opposition that the JQ’s propagators have to offer.
The bulk of the USA’s people, including the MAGA base, see that their leaders are determined to keep funding a genocide while refusing to do anything about our country’s crises. With the collapse of the narrative about Trump being anti-deep state, they’ve also seen that there is no voting our way out of the present system of government. The “solution” that the JQers have to this systemic obstacle, as explained by the white nationalist ideological leader Nick Fuentes, is to carry out a reformist effort: “My end game is that I radicalize a hundred thousand brilliant young American men, and over the next thirty years, they hide their power level, they conceal the fact that they love this show, and every single day, they work to get richer, stronger, smarter, more powerful, more influential, and one day they’re running the country. One day they’re in position to change the course of history.”
This is where the far right’s claims to having a practical solution fall apart, and where it becomes apparent just how much of an advantage the proletarian movement has over the far right. Fuentes and the other JQ proponents say that if we put an end to the alleged racialized conspiracy against “white” people, Zionism will lose its grip over our government, and the country will be freed from monopoly financial rule. Yet at the core of what these rightists are preaching, there’s a desire to prevent a revolutionary scenario, not to bring one about; whatever seemingly revolutionary aspects of what they promote are purely aesthetic, because they seek to preserve the existing social order above all else.
This is the inescapable contradiction within “rightist” politics that’s been pointed out by Haz Al-Din, the chairman of the American Communist Party:
The problem with all of today’s ‘Rightist’ politics is that, when it becomes a definite ideology and definite community - with very few exceptions - it stagnates, paralyzes and immobilizes the partisan politics it attempts to give articulation to. Rather than act as a conduit of movement, it acts as a conduit for the formation of enclosed community.
Organic populist movements are constantly ‘spawning’ ideologies, and these, spontaneously, take on a Rightist character, only because they attempt to give immediate articulation to the meaning of the very real partisan position that created the need for this articulation - with the readymade conceptual tools, prejudices, and ideals of the status quo. It is in a sense similar to the various ‘socialisms’ outlined in the Communist manifesto, which, while anti-capitalist, do not articulate their anti-capitalism in an effective way. Rightist politics will never successfully lead the MAGA movement to victory, because they are outright impossible to have.
“Rightist” politics are inherently self-defeating because they always end up reproducing the destructive liberal trends which they’re supposed to combat. The Nick Fuentes “groyper” movement, and any other “rightist” tendency, will simply be assimilated into the liberal order. It can only ever bring aesthetic change, the same way that Trump 2.0’s “anti-woke” crusade has only been a rebrand of the Biden era’s policy model.
It’s inevitable that the present policy model would continue under a U.S. government ruled by the “groypers” because imperialism is not a policy; its control over the state does not come from this state being governed by the wrong individuals. It comes from the material demands of capital, which during the monopoly era can only exist in the form that it does now. A form where core financial institutions make all capital around the globe revolve around them, and exercise truly dictatorial control over the state within the imperial center. “Rightism” is about reinforcing the established order, and therefore can only keep us tethered to this financial system.
As the extermination intensifies, and Washington expands its genocidal attacks to ever-more places, these contradictions within the “dissident” influencer sphere will become clearer. The white nationalist wing within alt media has gotten a boost because of the disillusionment over Trump, but in the long term, most of our society is going to become burned out over alt media in general. What will remain is a cultural landscape where ideas like Hitlerism can be successfully sold to large parts of the masses, while the population is kept demobilized due to seeing all the failures of organized political action. That is, if we don’t build an organizational force which functions truly independently from the State Department, and that can therefore provide an alternative radicalization path towards “groyperism.”
This will mean taking advantage of the divisions within the imperial establishment, and the wider ruling class, over how best to wage the present third world war. That’s one of the ingredients which has been missing from modern left movements: the dialectical know-how which lets revolutionaries exploit the ways that their enemies are at odds. Throughout these efforts, whatever alliances we may make with any parts of the bourgeoisie will need to be purely tactical; we must have the workers maintain their independence as a political force, and not lose sight of the class struggle. It’s only by staying on this principled path, where notions of “class peace” aren’t allowed to corrupt the movement, that we can effectively draw support away from the JQ right.
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