Joe Kent Didn’t Resign. He Was Undone By His Own Anti-Zionist Rot
by Bob Goldberg in The New Zionist Times, March 17th
Media outlets are framing Joe Kent’s resignation as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center because of principled opposition to the Trump Administration’s war on Iran. Principles had nothing to do with it.
He left (more likely shoved out), accusing the administration of entering war with Iran because of “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” (that’s AIPAC in case you missed the subtlety), while insisting Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. There, in one tidy little package, was the full intellectual collapse of a part of the American right: not realism, not prudence, not restraint, but the old reflex that when events become complicated, blame the Jews.
This is how anti-interventionism curdles into something rancid. It begins with a sensible warning against quagmires and crusades. It ends with the suggestion that America has no enemies in the Middle East worth worrying about, only allies worth resenting. Iran’s aggression? Secondary. Its terror proxies? Background noise. Its imperial ambitions? Mere detail. The real culprit, we are told, is Israel, with its magical ability to make American officials forget where America’s interests lie.
That is not foreign-policy realism. It is your run-of-the-mill Blood Libel.
Kent matters because he is not your average groyper. He occupied one of the government’s top counterterrorism posts. Kent was supposed to be the serious face of “America First” discipline. Instead, on his way out the door, he sounded like a man who had absorbed too much of the Carlson catechism: every Middle East crisis is a trap, every ally a burden, every Jewish concern a manipulation.
And one cannot ignore the possibility that Kent’s departure was less an act of a lonely conscience than a politically convenient separation. Officially, he resigned over the war in Iran. Unofficially, he was not just an ally of Tucker Carlson; he was, in no small measure, a Carlson creation.
A quick public check turns up at least six Carlson appearances that are easy to verify in the public record—August 26, 2021; September 8, 2021; December 2, 2021; January 21, 2022; June 9, 2022; and April 8, 2023—and local coverage at the time described those bookings more broadly as “frequent appearances” that helped elevate Kent’s campaign.
Carlson did not treat Kent as just another guest. He showcased him as an “America First” candidate, giving him repeated prime-time exposure while Kent was running for Congress. Tucker praised his analysis so effusively that he told him, “the fact that you’re not in Congress tells you a lot about the forces you’re up against,” before wishing him “godspeed.” He later publicly grouped Kent among the candidates he was “standing behind.” (ManoWhisper)
Nor did it help Kent that he was so closely identified with Tucker Carlson, just as Carlson’s increasingly deferential posture toward Iran was coming under growing scrutiny.
Joe Kent and his J’Accuse Resignation Letter
And if that wasn't enough, Candace Owens cast Kent as the man bold enough to track down how (as Owens alleges) the Trump Family and the Mossad assassinated Charlie Kirk. Public reporting says Kent reviewed FBI files to examine possible foreign involvement, alarming FBI leadership, who feared interference with the criminal case against the accused shooter. That was enough to make him a hero to the conspiratorial right, which requires very little evidence and thrives on dark insinuation.
That is the pattern now. Every institution that resists these fantasies is corrupt. Every investigation that refuses to validate them is a cover-up. Every refusal to blame Israel is proof that Israel is to blame. This is not skepticism. It is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion-induced paranoia with a geopolitical vocabulary.
The larger issue is not Kent himself. It is what his exit exposes. There are still conservatives who believe “America First” means a disciplined ranking of interests, a dislike of foolish wars, and a sober recognition that allies and enemies are not interchangeable categories. Then there is the newer faction, for which “America First” means something rather simpler: Israel last, Israel always, Israel somehow at fault.
That faction has contributed one unoriginal idea to American politics: that every conflict involving Jews can be explained by Jewish influence. It is a marvel of economy. No need to study Tehran. No need to understand deterrence, proliferation, proxy warfare, or regional power politics. Just mutter darkly about “the lobby,” and Netanyahu being the puppet masters of the US government (along with the banks, media, etc.), the world suddenly becomes legible to the aggrieved.
We have seen this before. The vocabulary changes. The animus does not.
Kent’s departure should therefore be read as more than a resignation letter. It is a declaration that the President and the conservative movement have had it with Carlson’s cult of displacement, in which responsibility for the world’s disorders is shifted steadily, obsessively, almost liturgically onto the Jewish and the Jewish state.
And once a political movement reaches the point where its first instinct is to look at Iran’s aggression and ask what Israel did to provoke it, the lurch is complete. It is no longer merely non-interventionist. It is anti-Zionist. It is no longer merely skeptical. It is credulous toward enemies and contemptuous toward Jews.
In the end, Joe Kent’s resignation tells us less about one man than about a faction. A faction that no longer knows the difference between prudence and cowardice, between realism and resentment, between legitimate debate and the ancient pleasure of blaming the Jew.
That is not just a course correction.
It is, one hopes, a collapse.
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