The "America-First" Right Is Being Played ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, December 09, 2025

The "America-First" Right Is Being Played

Something troubling is unfolding inside the conservative movement. For the first time in decades, a loud faction of younger “America First” activists has turned not just skeptical of Israel, but openly hostile toward it, complete with parallel antisemitic messaging.

And what stands out most is how familiar their language sounds. It is not the language of traditional conservatism or even of principled nationalism. It is the rhetoric of the academic Left, the campus radicals, the DEI bureaucrats, and the post-colonial theorists who spent years constructing a vocabulary of oppression designed to delegitimize the West.

That vocabulary has now been adopted wholesale by the anti-Israel Right. They declare, as fact, that Israel is committing “genocide” and “apartheid,” that Palestinians are “victims” in a zero-sum morality play, and that the Jewish state is inherently illegitimate. None of these claims are true – and none of them are conservative ideas. They are all imported lies from the progressive movement.

None of this happened organically. It did not emerge from a sober rethinking of American strategic interests or from serious foreign-policy debate. This shift was engineered, amplified, and fed into their social-media feeds by the very forces they believe they are resisting.

The truth is uncomfortable but undeniable: today’s young conservatives are being played.

They are repeating the same progressive narratives they claim to despise, while believing themselves to be bravely rebelling against the establishment. They are being manipulated by foreign influence campaigns, shaped by malign online ecosystems, and nudged along by grifters who understand that antisemitism is the quickest path to viral engagement. And they are doing it without realizing that the ideas they treat as edgy and “based” were born in the faculty lounge and refined in the activist Left long before they ever reached a conservative timeline.

The key concepts driving this new pseudo-conservatism were hatched by the socialists they think they are fighting. These ideas were designed to attack the foundations of Western civilization. They are the language of Marxist revolutionaries, not patriotic Americans. Advocating the violent overthrow of the United States – which the quickly mainstreaming far-Right increasingly suggests – is Che Guevara, not George Washington.

The Network Contagion Research Institute recently published a report showing that Nick Fuentes’ “popularity” was not organic at all, but an algorithm-driven foreign operation. The wave of engagement for his posts – tens of thousands of “supporters” amplifying his content within minutes – came not from fans but from bot farms in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This is what made him appear influential. The media, always hungry for a sensational character, treated him as a major thinker in the movement and thus helped sustain the illusion.

Countries that seek to undermine the United States know exactly where to target their influence campaigns. Whether the fingerprints belong to China, Iran, or Russia is secondary – the point is that this is foreign manipulation masquerading as “America First.” These actors are using modern tools to convince young conservatives to turn against America’s closest democratic ally, to question the value of alliances themselves, and to reintroduce antisemitism into the bloodstream of the Right.

And the supposedly tech-savvy young conservatives are being played by the same forces that progressives have been aligned with for decades.

Foreign adversaries understand what some young Americans do not: nothing fragments a superpower more effectively than turning its factions against both each other and their allies. This is not America First – it is Divide America.

The new Right is repeating progressive talking points with only a slight tilt. “We shouldn’t spend our money on foreign causes, but instead on (insert trendy program here.)” It is an overly simplistic framing that appeals to people who have no idea how geopolitics works or how America engages with the world to strengthen its own interests. America First does not mean America Alone. It means America works with its like-minded allies to keep the world from sliding into the kind of chaos that will eventually engulf America as well. Israel is on the front line of that struggle – not a drain on American resources.

What young conservatives almost never hear is that supporting Israel is not a betrayal of America First principles – it is the fulfillment of them. Israel strengthens America’s global position by sharing intelligence that protects U.S. soldiers, by innovating technologies that safeguard American lives, by providing battlefield data that improves American defense systems, by stopping cyberattacks that would otherwise hit U.S. infrastructure, and by stabilizing a region that would eventually require a massive American military footprint. Israel is not a burden. It is a strategic asset. Funding Israel is not “throwing money away,” but one of the highest-yield security investments the United States has ever made.

And let us be clear: American soldiers are not dying for Israel. Israeli soldiers are dying for the same ideals Americans have fought for – liberty, democracy, human dignity, and resistance to tyranny. They are fighting the same Islamist threat that struck the United States on 9/11.

Abandoning Israel would not put America first. It would hand victories to Iran, Russia, and China.

The tragedy is that none of this is being explained to the young Right. The institutions that once articulated the conservative case for Israel have grown weak, been captured, or stopped speaking to younger audiences altogether. Into that silence step opportunists like Fuentes, who understand the algorithms far better than they understand geopolitics. Antisemitism spreads quickly, rewards engagement, and offers the illusion of bravery and transgression. It fills the vacuum left by the collapse of conservative intellectual confidence.

For generations, American conservatism stood for moral clarity, for alliances with democratic partners, for resistance to tyranny, for reverence for Scripture, and for the defense of the West. There is nothing conservative about cheering terrorists or adopting the frameworks of the progressive Left. There is nothing nationalist about amplifying propaganda placed into American social media by foreign adversaries. There is nothing patriotic about helping hostile regimes undermine America’s alliances and erode its civilizational identity.

If someone does not say this plainly, the damage will last a generation.

The young Right believes it is fighting the system – but it is being manipulated by a much more sophisticated system that sees them as puppets. They believe they are rejecting progressive lies, but they are mindlessly repeating them. They believe they are saving America, but they are undermining the alliances and values that make America strong. And whether they know it or not, they are allowing a new wave of antisemitism to masquerade as patriotism.

This is the moment for clarity, courage, and truth. The future of the conservative movement – and America’s strategic stability – depends on whether this generation learns the difference between real morality and the socialist version they are subconsciously adopting.