For a decade, Democratic leaders have sought to preserve control of their party. Each decision made sense in the moment. Together, they have steadily eroded the confidence of both the activist base and, increasingly, the donor class.
The first crack appeared in 2016.
Bernie Sanders inspired millions of Democrats with a vision that challenged the party’s Clinton-era consensus. Yet the Democratic establishment rallied behind Hillary Clinton. Leaked DNC emails and the resignation of Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz convinced many progressives that party insiders—not Democratic voters—were choosing the nominee.
And maybe the DNC’s action could have been excused had Hillary won. But she lost to Donald Trump.
Rather than disappear, the Sanders movement organized.
In 2017, former Sanders organizers founded Justice Democrats with a simple mission: elect a new generation of progressive Democrats and replace incumbents they believed had become too close to corporate donors. The movement was no longer asking for influence. It was organizing for control.
A year later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley, one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress and a presumed future Speaker of the House. At the same time, the Democratic Socialists of America expanded from a fringe organization into a national political force.
For years, party leaders dismissed these victories as isolated upsets. They can win in Brooklyn. They can win in Berkeley. But they cannot win statewide.
So the Democratic establishment continue to abuse its base. It lied to the country that President Joe Biden was fit for office long after it was clear he was not. The party leaders then coronated Vice President Kamala Harris to be the party nominee for president without a vote, in what many viewed as an act of treachery.
And now, Michigan has proven that the local alt-left phenomenon is much larger than the DNC pretended.
Representative Haley Stevens was exactly the kind of pragmatic, mainstream Democrat the party once expected to lead its next generation. Her defeat by Abdul El-Sayed, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, suggests the insurgency has moved beyond city councils and safe House districts. It is now capturing statewide nominations in one of America’s most important swing states, predominantly with the support of young people who are turning out to vote in record figures.
Now even the donors are beginning to revolt.
According to a recent Politico report, major Democratic donors are openly questioning the direction and competence of the Democratic National Committee. Fundraising has weakened. Confidence has faded. One longtime donor summarized the mood in four words: “It’s beyond embarrassing.”
At the same time, the party’s ideological center has moved toward jihadists.
For generations, military support for Israel during wartime against those seeking its destruction was a bipartisan assumption. During Israel’s current multi-front war against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran itself, most congressional Democrats voted to block or condition additional military assistance. A position that would have been unimaginable when Barack Obama entered office has become increasingly mainstream within today’s Democratic coalition.
Trashing Israel has even become a primary tool to get out young voters on social media.
The struggle inside the Democratic Party is no longer about one primary, one chairman, or one election cycle.
The DNC establishment that repeatedly tried to manage its succession is undergoing a hostile takeover by the far-left. The donor class got the message and is leaving. Only older lifelong Democrats seem blind to the transformation of the party, or unable or unwilling to vote Republican to turn the tide.
For most of human history, people did not belong to countries. They belonged to tribes.
Family came first. Then clan. Then religion. Then ethnicity. Your protection did not come from an impartial government but from the people who shared your blood and your history.
The modern nation-state asked humanity to do something profoundly unnatural. It asked millions of strangers to trust one another more than they trusted their tribe.
That may be civilization’s greatest political achievement.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama has argued that human beings are naturally wired for tribalism. The genius of the modern state was not that it erased those instincts, but that it redirected them. Loyalty shifted from clan to constitution, from ancestry to citizenship, from family name to the rule of law.
No nation embodied that experiment more successfully than the United States.
America was never united by blood. It became a nation because generation after generation chose to believe that citizenship mattered more than ancestry. Irish immigrants, Jewish refugees, engineers from India, scientists from Taiwan, and millions of others came from different histories but increasingly shared one future.
“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” – George Washington’s letter to the synagogue in Newport, RI in 1790
George Washington’s letter to the synagogue in Newport, RI in 1790
America never eliminated tribes. It simply made being American more important than belonging to one.
But that civic bargain rested on something deeper than patriotism. It rested on hope.
America has never been a perfect nation. It never claimed to be.
Slavery contradicted its founding ideals. Women were denied the vote. Segregation mocked the promise of equal protection. Entire groups were excluded from opportunities others took for granted.
Yet what distinguished America was not the absence of injustice. It was the belief that injustice could be corrected.
The nation repeatedly expanded the circle of citizenship. Slavery was abolished. Constitutional amendments extended the franchise. The civil rights movement dismantled legalized segregation. Immigration laws evolved. Opportunity broadened. Each generation inherited an imperfect republic and, however incompletely, tried to leave it more just than it found it.
People can tolerate inequality longer than they can tolerate hopelessness. They can accept that today’s America is imperfect if they believe tomorrow’s America will offer greater opportunity for themselves and for their children.
For much of our history, that belief proved remarkably resilient. Yet today it is under strain.
The reason is not simply that inequality has grown. It is that many Americans increasingly question whether the civic bargain still works.
Over the past two decades, extraordinary wealth has accumulated among roughly the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of American households—families whose wealth is roughly $50 million and more. Together they now control a remarkable share of the nation’s wealth, much of it held not in homes or factories but in ownership stakes in software companies, semiconductor firms, and cloud infrastructure.
The question for ordinary Americans is whether they believe they have a realistic chance of becoming tomorrow’s winners.
Yet much of the political debate on the left uses the moral vocabulary of the twentieth century to explain the economics of the twenty-first. Progressives point to slavery, segregation, redlining, and inherited privilege. They therefore demand reparations. But that’s the lexicon and proposals of a period past.
Today’s economy is not dominated by inherited railroad empires or industrial monopolies. It is dominated by technological innovation.
According to Forbes, roughly two-thirds of America’s 400 richest people built their fortunes themselves rather than inheriting them. Many of the largest fortunes were created within a single generation through software, semiconductors, venture capital, and artificial intelligence. America continues to produce extraordinary upward mobility. Immigrants account for roughly one in seven American billionaires, and more than nine in ten of those immigrant billionaires are self-made, many arriving from India, Israel, Taiwan, and China before building companies at the forefront of the technology revolution.
America is still the land of remarkable opportunity for all but it is predominantly happening inside an innovation economy that relatively few people understand—and even fewer know how to enter.
That distinction changes the political conversation. And it is magnified by the fear of artificial intelligence.
As the AI economy concentrates wealth, the identities of many of its most visible participants also become politically salient. Many of America’s leading technology founders, investors, and executives are white, Asian, or Jewish—groups often associated with educational and entrepreneurial success. That should be irrelevant in a civic republic. But in a society increasingly tempted by tribal politics, economic frustration is often translated into identity politics. The result is a dangerous feedback loop: the far left explains disparities through privilege and oppression, while the far right responds with conspiracy theories about ethnic or religious elites. Both abandon the American principle that citizens should be judged primarily as individuals rather than as members of competing tribes.
Alexandr Wang, 29, Chief AI Officer at Meta, worth an estimated $3.3 billion
And the concern is no longer merely that the rich will become richer. It is that AI will automate millions of middle-class jobs. Lawyers, accountants, software developers, analysts, designers, customer service representatives, and countless others increasingly wonder whether they are watching the economic ladder disappear beneath them. That is not just the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. It is everyone below the 0.1% – the entire lower, middle and upper middle class – becoming significantly poorer.
That anxiety helps explain proposals such as far-left Senator Bernie Sanders’ American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. Sanders argues that because artificial intelligence is trained on humanity’s collective knowledge, the extraordinary wealth it creates should not belong solely to a handful of technology companies and investors. Whether one agrees with that proposal or not, it marks a profound shift. The political debate is moving beyond redistributing wealth after it is created, toward seizing and controlling the technologies that create the wealth in the first place.
Never has the U.S. government considered inserting itself so forcefully into the leading drivers of innovation, jobs and wealth, and pitted itself against those “elites” spearheading the effort.
On one side, the far-left is organizing around tribalism focused on race, gender, and “privilege,” which produces a counter-movement on the far-right around White nationalism. Both movements are inherently anti-American and undermine the founders’ ideals of a grand civic bargain. Each tells its followers that the other tribe is responsible for the country’s decline. Both play a part.
America fractures as both right and left move towards tribalism, and no longer trust the “establishment” political class, mainstream media and failing schools. Meanwhile, the real enormous promise and fear of the future for both groups is playing out in real-time before everyone: that AI will exacerbate the inability to trust people, information and institutions, while simultaneously creating a cohort of individuals – seemingly of only a few tribes – with remarkable wealth as the middle class loses its wealth.
If AI becomes a dominant technology that only a tiny club understands, owns, and profits from, the civic bargain weakens. Citizens begin searching for smaller communities that promise protection and belonging. Race becomes more important than citizenship. Class becomes more important than opportunity. Tribe becomes more important than country.
That is a future we can, should and must avoid.
America has solved this problem before. Every great technological revolution—from the steam engine to electricity to the internet—created extraordinary fortunes for its pioneers. Yet each ultimately generated industries, professions, suppliers, entrepreneurs, investors, educators, and workers whose prosperity far exceeded that of the original inventors. The wealth did not remain confined to those who built the breakthrough. It spread through the countless derivative businesses, careers, and opportunities that followed.
Artificial intelligence should be no different. America should not punish the innovators building the future or discourage the investment and risk-taking that made these breakthroughs possible. The challenge is to ensure that the AI economy develops the same broad ecosystem that previous technological revolutions produced—new companies, new professions, new skills, new services, new capital formation, and new pathways into prosperity for millions of Americans.
Just as importantly, we must prevent the far left and the far right from hijacking this technological revolution for their own political ends. The left should resist reducing innovation to a story of privilege and oppression, while the right should resist turning successful innovators into symbols of ethnic or cultural conspiracy. Both narratives encourage Americans to see AI through the lens of tribe rather than citizenship, resentment rather than opportunity.
For 250 years, Americans repeatedly chose the civic bargain over tribalism because they believed each generation would inherit greater opportunity than the last. Artificial intelligence now puts that bargain to the test. The defining question of the AI age is not whether America can continue producing extraordinary innovators. It is whether the prosperity they create becomes the foundation for millions of new success stories.
The American experiment has never depended on preventing greatness. It has depended on ensuring that greatness inspires opportunity rather than resentment, and that every generation believes it still has a place in the nation’s future. If AI expands opportunity as dramatically as previous technological revolutions ultimately did, it will strengthen the civic bargain that has made America history’s most successful multiethnic republic.
America’s next century can be truly remarkable, if we avoid the partisan pitfalls that plague us.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will introduce a new generation to one of civilization’s oldest stories. Yet the tale of the Trojan Horse is not really about ancient Greece. It is about human nature.
For ten years, the Greeks could not breach the walls of Troy. So Odysseus abandoned force in favor of deception. The Greeks appeared to sail home, leaving behind a magnificent wooden horse as a peace offering. The Trojans admired it. They celebrated it. They pulled it through their own gates as a symbol of victory.
Only after nightfall did they discover what they had really accepted.
Clip from movie “Troy” on the Trojan horse
The lesson has survived for nearly three thousand years because it was never simply about a horse. It was about the danger of lowering one’s guard in the presence of an extraordinary gift.
Which brings us to a Boeing 747 from Qatar.
When Qatar offered President Donald Trump a 14-year old luxury aircraft for eventual use as Air Force One, the gesture was unlike almost anything in modern American history. The discussion quickly became political. Was it legal? Was it ethical? Should the United States accept such an expensive gift from a foreign government?
Those are important questions. But the first question national security professionals must ask is Can we trust it?
Air Force One is not merely an airplane. It is the President’s office, military command center, intelligence platform, and secure communications hub. Every inch of the aircraft—from its wiring and electronics to its communications systems and defensive capabilities—must be assumed vulnerable until proven otherwise.
Recent reporting highlighted the practical reality behind that principle. Secret service advised the president from flying on the Qatari aircraft as he left a NATO summit in Turkey. Heightened threats from the Islamic Republic of Iran on the president’s life, while he flew on a gifted plane from Qatar, another leading state sponsor of terrorism, as he departed from Turkey, an increasing radical Islamic country, demanded precaution.
None of this requires believing Qatar intended harm. In fact, that misses the point entirely.
The Trojan Horse was not a warning about any particular adversary. It was a warning about the responsibilities of those charged with protecting a nation. Their job is not to assume good intentions. Their job is to imagine every possibility before someone else does.
Worried about New York City Mayor Mamdani’s politics going statewide and national? You need to do a lot more than show up to a protest with placards.
New York is not simply a Democratic state. It is a Democratic supermajority state.
The governor, Governor Kathy Hochul is a Democrat. Democrats hold 41 of the State Senate’s 63 seats and 103 of the Assembly’s 150 seats—more than enough for a veto-proof supermajority in the Assembly and just one seat shy of one in the Senate. The practical result is that currently, Republicans have little ability to force negotiation or compromise. The state’s most important political debates now occur almost entirely within the Democratic Party.
That is critical at a moment like this.
When organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) succeed in electing candidates or moving Democratic primaries to the far-left, the effects are no longer confined to activist circles. Ideas that gain traction within the Democratic caucus can become state policy without needing bipartisan support. Whether the issue is criminal justice, taxation, housing, energy, education, labor regulation, or Israel policy, the decisive battle is often the Democratic primary, not the general election.
This does not mean every progressive proposal becomes law. Democratic legislators disagree on many issues. But a supermajority means there are fewer institutional checks when one faction gains influence.
For New Yorkers who want a different direction than being advanced by the DSA and NYC Mayor Mamdani, the answer is not simply to oppose legislation after it is introduced. It is to change the composition of the Legislature itself.
That is why a relatively small number of competitive districts carry outsized importance this year.
Competitive legislative races do more than elect a senator or assemblymember. They build volunteer networks, raise money, increase turnout, and strengthen candidates throughout the ticket.
Congressman Mike Lawler’s race in the Hudson Valley is a prime example. His campaign in New York’s 17th Congressional District is again expected to be one of the nation’s most competitive House races. A strong Republican legislative effort in the region can reinforce his campaign, just as a strong Lawler campaign can help Republican candidates for the State Senate and Assembly. The same dynamic applies across Long Island, Staten Island, and other competitive suburban districts.
Congressman Mike Lawler (R-NY17)
Among the key legislative opportunities Republicans will target are suburban Senate districts on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley, along with competitive Assembly districts in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, Staten Island, Monroe County, Onondaga County, and the Capital Region.
Every election cycle, voters are told that one legislative seat cannot make much difference. In New York, the opposite is true.
A handful of seats in New York’s election can determine whether the Legislature remains a near-unchecked trifecta supermajority allowing radical far-left motions to become law or becomes a body where broader consensus is once again required. Those races will shape not only who governs in Albany, but how New York is governed.
One of the more curious developments in American politics is watching mainstream Democrats increasingly tailor their positions to satisfy activists who still refuse to support them.
The answer lies in understanding the difference between a coalition and an ideology.
A coalition exists to win elections. It is broad by design. People disagree on taxes, immigration, foreign policy, and the Middle East, yet work together because they share enough common ground to govern. Coalitions ask one question: Can we work together despite our differences?
An ideological movement asks a different question: Do you believe what we believe?
That distinction changes everything.
Purity tests are not an accident of ideological movements; they are their natural consequence. If your goal is to advance a comprehensive worldview, disagreement is no longer just a different opinion but evidence that someone has failed the test.
This helps explain the relationship between the Democratic Party and organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America. The Democratic Party is trying to hold together one of the broadest electoral coalitions in America. The DSA is advancing an ideology. It has shown little hesitation about opposing Democratic incumbents who fail its litmus tests, whether on capitalism, Israel, policing, or other defining issues.
Israel illustrates the divide clearly. Within a coalition, someone can support Israel’s defensive war while criticizing particular government officials or military actions. Within an ideological movement, those distinctions may not be enough.
That is why the political response of some mainstream Democrats is so puzzling. They often behave as though they are negotiating with another coalition partner. They are not. They are seeking approval from a movement whose purpose is to distinguish believers from non-believers. Incremental concessions rarely earn lasting acceptance. They simply establish a new baseline for the next demand.
The DSA’s own long-term political vision underscores the point. It has argued that America’s two-party system should ultimately be replaced by a multi-party parliamentary democracy. That is an entirely coherent position for an ideological movement. But it also reveals why the tension is so persistent. A movement that seeks its own distinct ideological party will naturally find itself in conflict with a broad coalition whose purpose is to assemble majorities among people who disagree on fundamental questions. The friction is inevitable.
Perhaps the better response for mainstream Democrats is not to seek the DSA endorsement at all.
Every endorsement tells voters something about shared values. If an organization rejects your belief in a market economy, your support for the Jewish State’s continued existence, or your willingness to govern through compromise rather than ideological purity, why should the DSA’s endorsement be considered a prize? A politician should not be embarrassed to say, “We simply have different visions for the country.”
In fact, the willingness to disappoint ideological movements may be one of the clearest signs that a politician still understands the difference between governing and evangelizing.
There is a lesson here for the pro-Israel community as well.
Politics rewards participation, not nostalgia. Elected officials respond to the people who organize, communicate with their offices, volunteer, build local networks, and vote. If supporters of the U.S.-Israel relationship want their voices heard, they must become a consistently visible part of the political coalition—not merely assume their support will be taken for granted.
Building coalitions by attempting to contort to the demands of extremist ideologues will be a painful exercise to watch. And to live with. It has made many Democrats feel abandoned by their party as it chases the far-left which despises most of the coalition.
Coalitions are built by persuading people who disagree to work together. Ideologies are built by deciding who belongs. The Democratic Party will remain a relevant governing party only if it remembers which one it is.
When I wrote I’m Offended, You’re Dead in 2015, I argued that the West fundamentally misunderstood violent jihadism. It was routinely described as the work of a tiny fringe because Western observers were looking almost exclusively at Europe and North America. But that was never where most Muslims lived or where most of the violence occured.
The view that a few “extremists” have hijacked Islam and are attacking the freedom of press is both myopic in terms of history and geography, and hazy in terms of numbers and scope.
In the Global North, Muslims make up only about 2.6% of the population. Across the Global South, they account for roughly 28%. Excluding Latin America and China, that figure rises to about 42%. The attitudes that gave rise to violent jihadism were therefore never confined to a handful of isolated extremists. Across large parts of the Muslim world, Islamist movements and deeply illiberal religious doctrines already exercised enormous influence and persecute people attempting to live with basic human rights. The West mistook a geographic illusion for an ideological one.
Terrorist movements do not emerge in an ideological vacuum. An ideology does not need majority support to convince a determined minority that violence is both righteous and necessary.
And you no longer have to listen carefully to hear that message.
Over the past decade, migration, social media, and global communications have brought that ideological current into the daily background of Western life. Many will be alarmed and others will feel called. Either way, it has become ever-present and one no longer needs to search to find it.
The attacks increasingly follow a familiar pattern because they spring from the same worldview.
The gay patrons of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando were condemned as morally corrupt and massacred by a man with ties to al Qaeda and Hezbollah. This week, a Berlin Pride parade became the target of a man who had reportedly sought to join ISIS. Christmas markets in Germany have repeatedly been attacked by men invoking Islamist causes. Trucks and cars have been used as weapons against civilians in France, Germany, and Israel. In Manhattan, a deranged man allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” while carrying out a stabbing spree.
Moses Grunhaus after he was stabbed by a man yelling “Allahu Akbar.” He was in New York City to clear out his apartment to move to Florida because of the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani
Different countries. Different perpetrators. Different personal histories.
Official Palestinian media produced cartoons calling for Arabs to run over Jews
Yet the underlying message is strikingly similar: for the jihadists, those who offend do not merely deserve criticism – they deserve elimination.
That is the lesson many in the West still refuse to absorb. We continue to interpret these attacks through the lens of isolated extremism, mental illness, or individual grievance. Those factors may help explain why one person acts and another does not. They do not explain why the same religious slogans, the same enemies – the West, and the same methods appear again and again across continents.
The lesson of I’m Offended, You’re Dead is even more relevant today than it was a decade ago. The argument was never that every Muslim is a jihadist. It was that an ideology can become pervasive enough to inspire violence far beyond the ranks of organized terrorist groups. Even beyond “lone wolves.” It becomes the default language of the street.
Islamic radicals riot in Paris, France
The West believes it is engaged in an argument over speech and tolerance. About the quantitative size of immigration and the culture of new arrivals. Because that is the culture of the West – to debate, to find compromise, to coexist.
But violent jihadism is engaged in something else entirely. It is not trying to persuade those it finds offensive. It seeks to destroy them.
A decade ago, you had to look for that message, to parse that difference. Today, you don’t.
The call of “Allahu Akbar” is no longer confined to jihadi groups or even “lone wolf” radicals as they commit attacks. Because the anti-West lexicon has become normalized on the angry streets, hunting people perceived of as “monsters.”
Al Jazeera is the global media company funded by Qatar, governed through a board appointed by the Qatari state and used to project Qatari influence around the world. Its digital arm, AJ+, was built in 2013 specifically for younger Americans who consume news through social media rather than television. By the late 2010s, it had become one of Facebook’s largest news-video publishers, generating billions of views and millions of followers while focusing heavily on race, social justice and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a peculiar cocktail of a socialist-jihadi alliance at that time, which is now mainstreamed.
AJ+ has a long history of peddling Hamas propaganda
In September 2020, the Trump Justice Department concluded that AJ+ was acting on behalf of a foreign principal and ordered it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Registration would not have restricted its journalism, but simply would have required public disclosure of its relationship with Qatar and periodic reporting similar to that required of other foreign state-backed media organizations like those from Turkey (TRT), China (CGTN) and Russia (RT).
AJ+ refused to register. Republican lawmakers including Chuck Grassley, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Todd Young pressed DOJ to enforce its own determination.
Then, in May 2022, the Biden Justice Department withdrew the order after reviewing additional information submitted by AJ+. What changed has never been publicly explained. DOJ has not identified the decisive new facts, released its legal analysis or explained why AJ+ was treated differently from other foreign state-funded broadcasters.
“AJ+’s reporting ‘supports an inference’ that its broadcasts are ‘designed to influence the opinions and perspectives of its U.S. audience as directed by the foreign principals and for their principal benefit.’…
Given Al Jazeera’s and TikTok’s public prominence in the U.S., mounting evidence of their use to advance foreign agendas, and the Biden Administration’s own national security concerns with the two companies, the Committee is puzzled that the Department appears to have either ceased or paused enforcement of FARA registration requirements for the companies without explanation.” – February 8, 2024 letter from the Committee on Oversight and Accountability
The timing naturally raises questions.
Only months earlier, the United States had completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Qatar had become indispensable to Washington—hosting negotiations with the Taliban, assisting the evacuation from Kabul and serving as one of America’s principal diplomatic intermediaries in the region.
There is no public evidence that the FARA reversal was connected to Qatar’s diplomatic role but it is reasonable to ask whether a government relying heavily on Doha’s cooperation became less interested in forcing Qatar’s flagship media network to register as a foreign agent.
The same question now confronts the second Trump administration. Although Trump’s first Justice Department initiated the FARA action, his current administration has not publicly reopened the case. That may simply reflect DOJ’s legal judgment or competing priorities. It may also reflect Qatar’s continuing importance as a partner in addressing Iran, Gaza and other regional crises.
A final question – closer to home – may be the most consequential. During this same period, antisemitism reached levels not seen in decades while anti-Israel activism surged across American campuses and social media, principally from young people. And AJ+ was one of the most influential foreign state-funded digital news brands reaching young Americans, peddling such hatred over this time.
The unanswered question is whether Washington accepted greater Qatari influence inside the United States – including directly and indirectly promoting antisemitism – in exchange for Qatar’s assistance abroad.
Whether making Al Jazeera and AJ+ register under FARA would suddenly change these trends is unknown. But it is also unknown and curious why the government stopped asking the Qatari media powerhouse to do so.
When Iran offered condolences after the death of former Qatari emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the gesture appeared incongruous. Iran had recently been firing missiles and drones at Qatar and across the Gulf. So why the words of consolation?
Iran was not primarily attacking Qatar as a Muslim or Arab society. It was targeting the American military presence on Qatari soil. The same pattern has extended across the region: U.S. facilities and assets in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, as well as American positions in Iraq and Syria, have come under Iranian attack. Recent strikes included an early-warning installation in Qatar, Patriot systems in Kuwait, a U.S. fuel depot in Bahrain and military facilities in Jordan.
That reveals the real fault line in the Middle East.
It is not simply Sunni against Shia, Arab against Persian or even Muslim country against Muslim country. It is increasingly a divide over how to handle the United States: between governments and movements determined to expel American power and those that invite it in and then seek to shape it.
Iran represents the first model. Since 1979, its hostility has been explicit. It calls America the enemy, demands the removal of U.S. forces and uses missiles, drones and proxies against American military positions. Its war is visible. It announces its contempt and fires at the flag.
Qatar perfected a more nuanced model.
Under Sheikh Hamad, Qatar financed and expanded Al Udeid Air Base, which became central to U.S. operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and across the region. At the same time, Doha built influence inside the United States, financing American university campuses, purchased entry into American television distribution, invested in think tanks and businesses, hired lobbyists and cultivated political relationships. It also hosted anti-Western terrorist groups including Hamas leaders and Muslim Brotherhood figures, and used Al Jazeera to broadcast narratives often deeply hostile to the West and its allies.
Iran attacks American power from the outside. Qatar embraces it corrodes it from within.
anti-American Iranians
Iran seeks direct confrontation; Qatar seeks leverage.Iran’s weapons are missiles and militias. Qatar’s are money, access, prestige and indispensability.
The West is naturally more alarmed by Iran’s model. And Qatar’s model is harder to confront because it arrives as partnership.
The military base protects American interests. The university campus carries a prestigious name. The investment creates jobs. Each relationship is defensible in isolation. Together, however, they create influence on a scale no tiny monarchy could achieve through military power alone.
The broader contest is therefore not between countries that love America and countries that hate it. Iran and Qatar represent different tactics of genocidal jihadists. One strategy attacks the fortress. The other purchases rooms inside it.
Iran’s war is louder. Qatar’s may prove more insidious and enduring.
There are many ways to measure whether politicians are guided by principle or politics. One is to compare what provokes their outrage and what does not.
In April 2024, a Jewish student at UCLA tried to walk across his own campus.
Pro-Palestinian protesters physically blocked his path and decided, on their own authority, who could and could not pass. UCLA security officers stood by and did nothing. A federal judge later ruled that UCLA could not permit Jewish students to be excluded from parts of campus because of their identity or beliefs, calling such exclusion “unimaginable” and “abhorrent.”
Where were California’s Democratic members of Congress about the incident? Other “progressive” members of Congress? Where were the press conferences, the demands for investigations and the flood of social media condemnations?
Their silence was striking.
Then came Rep. Ro Khanna’s recent 7,500-mile trip to the West Bank in July 2026.
Khanna claimed that armed settlers and Israeli soldiers prevented his delegation from proceeding and that U.S. Embassy involvement helped resolve the situation. Israeli officials, the U.S. embassy, and various partiesdispute key parts of that account, saying the delegation entered a restricted security area without proper coordination and denying Khanna’s characterization of the encounter.
Yet progressive members of Congress like Ilhan Omar quickly rallied behind Khanna, condemning Israel and amplifying his account around the world.
The comparison is not between two people who were blocked. It is between two very different reasons for being blocked and the reactions that followed.
At UCLA, private protesters established their own checkpoint and allegedly decided which Americans could pass based on who they were or what they believed. A federal court concluded that a public university could not allow that to happen.
In the West Bank, the issue was about security. The area was subject to access restrictions because it was an active conflict zone. The dispute is over whether those security measures were properly applied not whether Ro Khanna had a right to unrestricted entry.
One concerns equal treatment under American law, the other concerns the exercise of security authority in a foreign conflict zone. Yet the louder political outrage came in response to the latter.
If elected officials cannot summon the same moral urgency when a Jewish American student is excluded from his own campus as they do when a colleague encounters a disputed security checkpoint overseas, the question is no longer whether they oppose injustice. It is what kinds of injustice – and for whom – they choose to notice.
We are witnessing more and more of the elected progressive wing marking American and Israeli Jews as “absolutely vile” people unworthy of basic protections and rights who “must be stopped.”
Sometimes, sudden death is simply that. But conspiracy theories rarely leave a vacuum unfilled.
The first kind of conspiracy theory follows ordinary logic. It begins with motive.
If someone believes Lindsey Graham was murdered, the obvious suspects would be the governments whose interests he spent years opposing: Russia or Iran, or some combined efforts by both. Perhaps it was an American anti-war agitator. Whether true or false, at least the theory follows a recognizable chain of reasoning.
The second kind works very differently.
It begins with a worldview that history is shaped by hidden forces operating behind governments and public events. Facts are gathered afterward to support that assumption.
For centuries, one of the most enduring versions of that worldview has been antisemitic: the claim that Jews secretly manipulate governments, wars, finance, or the media. The alleged hidden actor changes with the era, but the underlying story remains remarkably consistent.
Antisemites from Nazi Germany to Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) talk about Jews operating in the shadows
That helps explain why some recent conspiracy theories about the murder of Charlie Kirk have implicated Israel or Mossad where the alleged motive is counterintuitive. The target is chosen less because of the evidence than because it fits an existing narrative about hidden power.
One conspiracy theory asks, “Who had the motive?” The other asks, “Who do I already believe secretly runs the world?”
The first can be tested against evidence, the second is designed to survive it.
Today’s front pages will convey that a strong advocate of American allies’ defense against common American foes has died. He will be mourned by conservatives in the United States and supporters of Ukraine and Israel. In the not too distant future in our crazy conspiratorial-laden present, new distinct strains of headlines are likely to emerge.
First One Through 