The great fade out: Neocon influencers rage as they diminish

Mark Levin appears to be having a meltdown.

The veteran neoconservative talk host is repulsed by reports that President Donald Trump might be inching closer to an Iranian nuclear deal, reducing the likelihood of war. In addition to his rants on how this would hurt Israel, Levin has been howling to anyone who will listen that any deal with Iran needs approval from Congress (funny he doesn’t have the same attitude for waging war, only for making peace).

He has been lashing out, too, at conservatives who don't share his fury on the subject. Here on Eric Stakelbeck's newscast:

When the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, it took 45 seconds to blow that city off the face of the earth and 60,000 people with it. And we should have done what we needed to do then that war, given the Battle of Okinawa and how many casualties we had, that's not my point. My point is, can you imagine a death cult, a terrorist regime that says, Death to America with these kinds of weapons, I cannot, so the isolationist, the pacifist, the appeasers, the world has dealt with them before, just because they're so called, self identified influencers, bloggers, podcasters, they don't mean a damn thing to me. The fact is, reality we this generation, is being told by a death cult that they want to eliminate the United States that they're within effectively weeks of having nuclear weapons and for our generation to impose on our children and grandchildren and generations yet born this kind of a threat is a sin.

On Monday, Levin obliquely chastised the Trump administration, fresh from a Middle East trip that did not include Israel, for not giving more deference to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “(He) is the elected prime minister of the sovereign nation of Israel, unlike the assorted dictators and terrorists who run the countries surrounding Israel,” Levin wrote. “He deserves our government’s respect not the treatment of some kind of inferior bureaucrat.”

Libertarian author and podcaster Tom Woods shared Levin’s post, adding, “Levin is getting very impatient with Trump. This is interesting to watch.”

“He's trying very hard not to come right out and condemn Trump,” Woods added, “and it's making him crazy.”

In March, a poll showed that 70 percent of Israelis wanted Netanyahu to resign. Another poll found that a majority of Americans, including 64% of Republicans, prefer an Iran deal over war.

Apparently, American citizen Levin has more reverence for Israel’s leader than most of Netanyahu’s countrymen do. He wants war more than his fellow Americans too. Weird.

It’s not just Mark Levin who is frustrated. Ben Shapiro is probably the most high profile contemporary neocon critical of Trump’s diplomacy, who says things like, “actually, the world is making clear that it is happy to reward terrorism. If Hamas were a conventional army (a la Russia), Israel would be able to do whatever it wanted with U.S. approval. Hamas is an evil terrorist group, so it must be rewarded and Palestinians given a state.”

In no world does Shapiro consider what is being done to innocent civilians, women and children, in Gaza “terrorism.”

There are also Bush-era hawks like Pamela Geller and Frank Gaffney who are still kicking around and predictably aching to blow up the Middle East as opposed to finding solutions. There are others.

But if you look at the reactions to Levin or any of these other figures’ pitches for war on social media, you will find as many if not more of their own audience, as well as other MAGA-aligned conservatives, disagreeing with them, or even mocking them.

To be clear, I’m not talking about neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, Max Boot or Jennifer Rubin, all Never Trumpers with far more affinity for Democrats than the GOP these days. I’m strictly talking about pro-war conservative voices who still consider their audiences and Trump’s one and the same.

They are increasingly not the same. What’s worse for neoconservatives is there is an ever-growing army of antiwar MAGA influencers that now outshine and overshadow the old guard. These would include ultra-popular personalities like Tucker Carlson who drew a hard line in the sand just a month ago upon suggestions that the U.S. should strike Iran.

“We’d lose the war that follows. Nothing would be more destructive to our country. And yet we’re closer than ever, thanks to unrelenting pressure from neocons,” he said. “This is suicidal. Anyone advocating for conflict with Iran is not an ally of the United States, but an enemy.”

This growing army also includes Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, former GOP Congressman Matt Gaetz, Senator Rand Paul, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr. 

None of them pull punches in their ‘America First’ foreign policy messaging to their millions of followers.

Libertarian comedian Dave Smith called out what he considers Shapiro’s “hypocrisy” during his interview with Tucker Carlson this month. "Ben Shapiro built a career opposing identity politics as a proud Zionist," he said. "You're out here saying 'facts don't care about your feelings', 'identity politics is wrong', and then while you're saying that, your number one priority is manifestation of identity politics.”

Ouch.

Then there are the MAGA-adjacent influencers, MAGA friendly when the moment calls for it but who are not exactly full bore Trumpians. Former Bernie Bro Joe Rogan is the most popular podcaster on earth and fits this category, as do libertarians like the aforementioned Smith and Woods. Comedian and podcaster Theo Von has a massive audience and has strongly condemned the slaughter in Gaza, after joining Team Trump in their recent trip to Qatar. Civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald is as thoroughly antiwar as ever and probably has a larger rightwing base among his audience today more than at any other time.

These are influencers who are setting the tone for what the right now broadly thinks an “America First” foreign policy should look like, and it is the opposite vision of the shrinking number of neoconservative-friendly voices.

The average tuned-in Trump voter simply doesn’t appear to be buying what the hawks are still hawking. Neocons want war. They have wanted war with Iran in particular for the entire 21st century. They still do. Badly.

As Trump’s MAGA movement continues to define the American right more than any other faction within it, neoconservative influencers, long accustomed to establishing narratives among conservatives, are seeing their relevance diminished.

In the past they could rile up their audiences with fears about Sharia Law taking over America, the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating the Obama administration, or any of the other sensationalist tricks they used to gin up conservative support for the U.S.’s next foreign policy mistake. That’s simply not where the right is anymore.

President Trump and his non-interventionist rhetoric has had the most to do with this change. But so have the broadening collection of antiwar voices mentioned here, who are there to echo and affirm when the president, or Vice President JD Vance, or special envoy Steve Witkoff, or Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has something positive to say about realism and restraint, and critical of the neocons.

Mark Levin is pitching a fit because the neoconservative world he helped create is fading away.

Expect the flailing to get worse.