What does it tell us that so many prominent “progressive” and “dissident right” figures can make statements which challenge the Zionist entity, without suffering the fate Mahmoud Khalil has? How come Jackson Hinkle has needed to live in Russia for the last year to avoid persecution from his government, while plenty of “alt media” commentators haven’t faced the same kind of situation? It’s because the imperial state is carrying out a diversionary operation, where those who truly threaten the system get targeted while the system elevates controlled opposition figures.
In the case of someone like Hinkle, one of the major factors that’s made him an enemy of the state is that he isn’t just anti-Zionist. He’s also worked to combat the Ukraine psyop and the anti-China narratives, while promoting the ideology of working class revolution; all these things together make him a consistent challenger of the imperial system. With Khalil, though, the state’s motives for going after him come from how he’s an anti-Zionist who’s easy to target. All he did was help organize a campus resistance against the Gaza genocide; every argument about him having broken the law is based in lies. As a legal permanent resident of the country, all of the constitution’s protections also apply to him. But the state has decided to make him an example, because it intends to take away the First Amendment rights of all who oppose U.S. foreign policy. The Trump White House views Khalil and other non-citizens as the best people to target during this plan’s first stage; by attacking the ones who are most vulnerable, it can gain the precedent to attack anyone.
As the state raids, arrests, disappears, or even “suicides” ever more political targets, it’s going to increasingly boost the types of nominally pro-Palestine figures who actually help Zionism. The goal is to rebrand Zionism, and promote covertly pro-Zionist spokespeople who only speak out against certain aspects of the genocidal project. It’s the same strategy that the liberals within occupied Palestine use to try to rehabilitate Zionism: pretend like Netanyahu is the core problem rather than Zionism itself, and argue that if only he got replaced, the genocide would end. (That is if these liberals are even willing to recognize it as a genocide.)
One kind of fake opposition to the genocide is the Bernie Sanders social democrat crowd. They’re the political camp that J Street, the liberal Zionist PAC, has aligned itself with; and they’re the ones who are working to make the Democratic Party appear as though it actually challenges the Zionist entity. That’s the end goal of what they’re doing, even though they try to make it look like they hold the Democratic establishment accountable. Sanders, AOC, and these other “progressive” politicians will criticize AIPAC; they’ll denounce Trump’s Gaza ethnic cleansing plan; they’ll even put forth bills challenging the entity when this is convenient. But they’ll never oppose the Zionist project itself, and during the critical moments they’ll always betray the Palestinians.
Given how much scrutiny has come upon Trump now that he’s the one assisting the genocide, the strategic thing for our ruling class to do is depict the Democrats as separate from this. I believe that AIPAC is going to start exclusively investing in Republicans, and that J Street will gain a much bigger role in the Democratic Party. Then liberals will be able to say that they’re allies to the Palestinians just because they’re against AIPAC. Criticizing AIPAC does not in itself make someone an anti-Zionist; this is something we need to make more people aware of, including conservatives and others who may be attracted to alt media. Because the “dissident right” alt media figures also base their grift off of criticizing AIPAC, while functionally opposing Palestinian liberation. And at this moment, their grift is vastly more effective than that of the Sanders liberals.
“Dissident” right-wing media actually has momentum, and is able to convince significant numbers of the people that it’s something transgressive. The Sanders camp lost its perceived credibility a long time ago; Sanders wasn’t able to gain nearly as much support in 2020 compared to 2016, because the bulk of his base had realized his politics serve the establishment. The dissident right can appear credible much more easily, because it doesn’t need to be tested in the ways that Sanders and the “progressives” have. When Trump, Musk, or any other dissident right-aligned politicians fail to embody the movement’s ideals, it can distance itself from these figures, as it’s a terminally online movement at its core.
This doesn’t mean the movement itself doesn’t have fundamental hypocrisies, ones which we can expose and take advantage of. Hitlerism’s brand has always relied on the idea that it’s opposed to monopoly finance capital, even though Hitlerism was created by finance capital. This is why so many white nationalists, like Nick Fuentes, continue to align themselves with the establishment.
Fuentes praised Elon Musk for his Nazi salute; this revealed how much of a tool for capital he really is, and how fraudulent Hitlerism’s “dissident” identity is. When Musk showed his alignment with Hitlerism, he exposed Hitlerism’s nature as something totally compatible with the liberal order, which Musk has made clear he represents. Musk assists Zionism, he advances the H-1B immigration visa program, and his puppet candidate was allowed to win because the liberal technocracy views him as useful at this moment. There’s a reason why Netanyahu and the ADL defended Musk over the salute. That the dissident right largely continues backing him, even if just for the sake of memes, shows this movement and its ideas don’t genuinely challenge the centers of power.
The dissident right presents the “Jewish question” as if it’s the highest mode of analysis, and the ultimate explanation for Zionism; but the JQ isn’t just ahistorical, it’s also currently being used by the Zionists as a psyop. Elon Musk’s Twitter has so heavily boosted Hitlerites because it’s in Zionism’s interests for JQers to be the main representatives of the pro-Palestine side.
The hypocrisies of the “progressive” leaders show that when somebody is getting boosted by the imperial system, any correct things they may say are for performative purposes. And the hypocrisies of many within the broader left show that even when someone calls themselves an anti-Zionist, they can still act as a ruling class tool; they’re just a tool who’s more sneaky. The “pro-Palestine, pro-Ukraine” crowd is purely hurting the Palestinian cause. Likewise, the crowd within the right that postures against U.S. foreign policy while promoting the JQ only hurts the antiwar cause.
These figures are loyal to capital, and in the end they’ll always side with the imperial state, because those are the terms of the tacit agreement they’ve made with this state. With the crackdown on dissent, our ruling class is revealing which dissidents are real and which are fake. We need to form a united front among the authentic rebels, and bring in those who’ve been tricked by the controlled opposition forces.
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