How AIPAC spent $23 million buying primaries while Mossad bragged about creating “pretend worlds” and the MAGA base finally noticed the exception

by Ahmad Ibsais  at https://ahmadibsais.substack.com  via thefreeonline  at https://wp.me/pIJl9-HQM  on Jan 15, 2026.Telegram t.me/thefreeonline/5035

Turns Out ‘America First’ Had Fine Print That MAGA Didn’t Read

When Mossad went on 60 Minutes and described their work as creating “pretend worlds,” when their official said straight to camera that “we are a global production company,” most Americans probably didn’t think too hard about what gets produced in their own country.

Maybe they should have, because right now we’re all living in what appears to be a very expensive production where American politicians compete to see who can be more servile to a foreign government while their own voters are literally begging them to stop.

Something is breaking on the American right over Israel, and the lazy analysis calls it antisemitism because that’s what the lazy analysis always calls it, the same way “antisemitism” gets deployed every time anyone notices that maybe spending billions on another country’s military while Flint still doesn’t have clean water is a choice someone made.

But this isn’t about antisemitism, it’s about the internal logic of Trumpism finally hitting the one exception it was never supposed to question, and watching that collision in real time is genuinely fascinating if you can get past how depressing it is.

You can’t spend a decade running on “America First”, can’t build an entire political movement on ending forever wars and draining the swamp and putting American interests above everything else, can’t make that the core promise to your base, and then carve out one country that gets unconditional support no matter what it does, no matter how badly it conflicts with American interests, no matter how many children get turned into statistics, and expect that exception to hold forever.

Eventually someone in the room is going to ask why Israel gets to be different, and once that question gets asked out loud the whole edifice starts wobbling because there’s no answer that works within the framework you’ve built.

The old answers sound increasingly stupid when you’re scrolling through footage of dead kids in Gaza funded by your tax dollars while your senator says there’s no money for childcare but infinite money for this.

Tucker Carlson is out here talking about dead Palestinians on his show now, just saying it like it’s a normal thing to discuss rather than a career-ending thought crime.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who built her entire career being Trump’s most unhinged cheerleader, who seemed constitutionally incapable of disagreeing with him about anything, is calling what’s happening in Gaza a genocide and saying:

“I don’t want to pay for genocide in a foreign country against a foreign people for a foreign war that I had nothing to do with.”

She’s using the actual word genocide, which you’re not supposed to say about Israel even when Israel is doing things that look exactly like genocide, and she’s saying it anyway because apparently her read of her own base is that they’re more angry about funding this than they are scared of AIPAC.

Steve Bannon is questioning the relationship. These aren’t college professors or DSA members or people you can dismiss as the usual suspects who were always soft on terrorism or whatever this week’s talking point is.

These are people who define what the MAGA base thinks, what they’re willing to say out loud, what they’re willing to die on hills over, and they’re all suddenly questioning the one thing you weren’t supposed to question. The nationalist movement that promised to put America first is finally asking why there’s a country that comes before America in America First, and it turns out that question doesn’t have a good answer.

The polling backs this up in ways that should terrify anyone whose career depends on the old consensus holding.

Half of Republicans under fifty now have an unfavorable view of Israel. Half. That’s a fifteen-point jump in just three years, from 2022 to 2025, which is roughly the same speed at which Republican support for the Iraq War collapsed once everyone figured out we’d been lied into it by many of the same people now demanding unconditional support for Israel.

For a political movement that spent decades treating support for Israel as non-negotiable as opposing abortion or hating taxes, this is the kind of earthquake that reshapes everything.

Gaza is the obvious catalyst here, over a year of watching an entire society get demolished in real time on everyone’s phones.

Americans are seeing the bombs drop and the buildings collapse and the children die, all of it funded by American weapons and American money and defended by American politicians who keep saying Israel “has a right to defend itself” as if that phrase still means anything after this many dead civilians.

They’re watching Biden and then Trump compete to show who can debase themselves more thoroughly for Netanyahu, who can roll out a redder carpet, who can offer more unconditional support, while poll after poll shows American voters want it to stop.

The gap between what people are seeing with their own eyes and what their government is doing in their name has become impossible to ignore, and once you can’t ignore it anymore you start asking uncomfortable questions about why.

But here’s the thing, Gaza didn’t create this fracture, it just made it visible. The contradiction was always there baked into the logic of Trumpism, sitting there waiting for the right catalyst to expose it. You can’t promise to end foreign wars and then support this one.

You can’t promise to drain the swamp and then take money from AIPAC. You can’t promise America First and then put Israel first. Eventually the math stops mathing and people notice.

And speaking of AIPAC, let’s talk about AIPAC, which has spent the last few years becoming the perfect villain for this exact political moment.

They’re everything the populist right claims to hate about politics: foreign influence, billionaire control, establishment crushing outsiders, unaccountable power, the swamp in its purest form. And they’re not even subtle about it anymore, they’re just openly buying elections and bragging about it.

In 2024 AIPAC spent fourteen and a half million dollars to defeat Jamaal Bowman in New York. Fourteen and a half million dollars. For a House primary. That’s more than most Senate races cost. They spent eight and a half million against Cori Bush in St. Louis.

These are record-shattering amounts, the kind of money that makes you ask what exactly they’re buying and why it’s worth this much to them. They primaried Andy Levin in Michigan in 2022, spent over four million dollars to defeat him, and Levin is a Jewish member of Congress, president of his synagogue, from a family of famous Michigan Democrats, none of which mattered because he opposed Israeli annexation of Palestinian territory.

When AIPAC can spend four million dollars to defeat a Jewish congressman for being insufficiently pro-Israel, you’ve moved past normal lobbying into something else entirely.

They’re targeting Thomas Massie in Kentucky right now, funding primary challengers with money from Paul Singer and Miriam Adelson, because Massie is one of the few Republicans willing to vote against aid to Israel and talk about it publicly. The pattern is obvious enough that you’d have to be deliberately not looking to miss it: criticize Israel too loudly, vote the wrong way, become too prominent a voice for Palestinian rights, and the money comes to destroy you.

This is just how it works now, out in the open, documented and obvious.

Trump himself reportedly told a Republican donor “my people are starting to hate Israel,” which leaked to the Financial Times and caused the kind of minor scandal that everyone forgot about in three days because there’s too much else happening.

But that quote matters more than any policy speech Trump could give, because Trump’s political instincts are usually pretty good about where his base is heading even when his actual policies don’t reflect it. If Trump is worried that Israel is becoming a political liability with MAGA voters, if he’s saying it out loud to donors, then the shift is real and it’s accelerating.

The standard response to all of this is to scream antisemitism, to say that questioning AIPAC’s influence is trafficking in conspiracy theories about Jewish control of politics, that criticizing Israel is really just hatred of Jews dressed up in respectable policy language.

And look, Nick Fuentes exists, he’s an actual antisemite, and he’s absolutely trying to latch onto this moment for his own purposes. Tucker Carlson interviewed him and got a bunch of justified criticism for how friendly the interview seemed. Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation defended

Carlson, said Heritage wouldn’t participate in “canceling” him, and then had to walk it back after people both inside and outside Heritage lost their minds. Roberts later claimed he didn’t know much about Fuentes and that an aide wrote the script, the aide resigned, the whole thing was a mess, but it showed you how raw this debate has become.

But here’s the thing, Fuentes being a piece of shit doesn’t invalidate the underlying questions.

Should American foreign policy subordinate American interests to Israeli government preferences? Should a foreign policy lobby be able to spend unlimited money controlling American elections? Should American citizens be able to debate their own country’s foreign policy without being surveilled, blacklisted, and professionally destroyed?

These are legitimate questions about power and sovereignty and democracy, and they remain legitimate even when some of the people asking them are doing so for ugly reasons.

Because the surveillance is real, it’s happening, it’s documented, and it goes way beyond normal lobbying.

Canary Mission maintains blacklists of students and activists who support Palestinian rights, doxxing them, following them for years, making sure their activism costs them job opportunities. Organizations with documented ties to Israeli intelligence operate on American soil tracking Americans who criticize Israel, monitoring what they say and who they organize with.

The Heritage Foundation, the same Heritage Foundation whose president just defended Tucker Carlson and then had to backtrack, has connections to Betar and other groups linked to Israeli intelligence operations.

This isn’t infrastructure for lobbying, this is infrastructure for monitoring domestic opposition to a foreign government, for identifying threats and neutralizing them before they become problems.

So when Mossad goes on American television and openly brags about being a “global production company” that creates “pretend worlds,” and American foreign policy on Israel exists in what increasingly looks like a pretend world completely disconnected from American interests and American public opinion, maybe we should take them at their word about what they do. Maybe the production is exactly what they said it was.

And then there’s Epstein, who keeps coming back into the conversation because the files keep getting released and they keep pointing in the same uncomfortable direction.

Extensive documented ties to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister. Questions about whether Epstein was operating on behalf of Mossad. The possibility that the entire operation was a kompromat scheme designed to create leverage over American political figures and elites.

The evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say it definitely happened that way, but it’s substantial enough that asking the question isn’t conspiracy theory anymore, it’s just pattern recognition.

If you’re a foreign intelligence service that openly describes yourself as creating “pretend worlds” to manipulate targets, and you want leverage over American politicians, someone like Jeffrey Epstein running an elaborate blackmail operation with underage girls is pretty much exactly what you’d build.

The question isn’t whether to believe in wild conspiracies, it’s whether to believe that intelligence services do intelligence things.

But the demographics are completely against them and they know it. Support for Israel is collapsing among younger Americans across the political spectrum, including among young evangelicals, which is supposed to be impossible because evangelicals are historically the most reliably pro-Israel demographic besides Jewish Americans themselves.

The Christian Zionist base that’s propped up Republican support for Israel for decades is aging out, dying out, and their kids and grandkids don’t share the conviction that God personally demands American support for whatever Israel does.

The theology isn’t landing anymore, the prophecy isn’t compelling, and nothing’s replacing it except a vague sense that maybe we shouldn’t be funding this.

The pretend world is cracking. American support for Israel isn’t ending tomorrow, the lobby still has enormous resources and institutional power and relationships built over decades.

But the era of unconditional support, of blank checks and red carpets for war criminals, of political careers destroyed for asking basic questions about whether this serves American interests, that era is ending.

Not because antisemitism suddenly became acceptable in American politics, but because Americans across the political spectrum are tired of paying for someone else’s crimes and being told to call it an alliance.

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