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