The 4 Reasons Why I Have Chosen to Retire from the Counter-Islamist Movement
I am shifting my focus this year to the Far Right. We must push back against the Russian poison promoted by Elon Musk, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes.
Since 2009 when I accepted positions as associate editor of FrontPage Magazine and managing editor of NewsReal Blog, I have worked for organizations, think tanks, and publications affiliated with the Counter-Islamist movement.
The groups have primarily focused on opposing the network of Muslim Brotherhood front groups which I detailed in this 2024 essay:
Today I am announcing that I am retiring from investigating Islamism professionally.
I’m stepping down as a senior fellow of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
Here are my four reasons undergirding this decision.
1. The fight against Islamism is functionally over. Israel has won.
The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic regime in Iran are all terminally wounded. Their defeat is now inevitable. Islamism is the Black Knight with all four limbs chopped off, bleeding out all over the ground. Victory in the Middle East for the Jewish people and their allies is on the horizon for those prepared to see it. While Islamist terrorists now threaten Africa, we can have confidence that African states will be more than capable of defeating them with American and Israeli support.
In my professional analysis, the military victories which Israel has inflicted against its Islamist enemies following the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks are decisive. They will not be able to recover.
Further, Israeli intelligence has stated earlier this month that right now, the Islamic regime in Iran is more vulnerable than at any time since 1999.
Iran is a failed state now. Look at the severe drought happening there and the talk about needing to evacuate Tehran. That is happening not because there isn’t enough water but because they lose so much of it with leaky pipes that have not been maintained and replaced. Iran spends so much money supporting terrorism and building weapons, that they have failed to provide for the basic services of their people.
America’s and Israel’s strategy of gradually wearing down Iran until its people can retake the state from within has succeeded. A free Iran is coming soon.
After Oct. 7, 2023, I shifted my “antisemitism and culture” series to a focus on what I called then the “Axis of Genocide,” meaning the alliance of Iran, Russia, and China, three authoritarian states each engaged in genocidal acts.
And I have already spoken about how the domestic Islamist movement here in America has had a lousy decade. I am not impressed by any of the Islamists in America of my generation and younger. The Muslim Brotherhood failed to pass their ideology on to the next generation, thus there is nobody to replace them now.
Islamist terrorism will likely always be a threat to one degree, but with Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood now collapsing, the groups remaining—largely congregating in Africa now according to recent reports—seem like manageable problems that governments can defeat.
So the time is now to begin focusing on the other two members of the Axis and particularly their advocates here in America…
2. The Far Right—fueled and guided by both Vladimir Putin’s Neo-Soviet Russia and the Chinese Communist Party—is now the primary threat to freedom in America.
We must remember that Russia and China remain the enemies of America and of all free societies. Let’s finally finish the Cold War this century.
The simple reality is that today Americans have much more to fear from the violence inflicted on them by their own federal government rather than by Islamist terrorists.
And I say this as one who still embraces the principles of Reagan Conservatism. What the Republican party today has become is not the Conservative Mainstream forged in the 1960s, the fusion of individualism, traditional family values, and anti-communist foreign policy formulated by National Review Senior Editor Frank S. Meyer and his wife Elsie Meyer that triumphed in the 1980s to break up the Soviet Union.
(Yes, after reading the wonderful new biography The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer by Daniel J. Flynn, I’m going to start referring to Frank and Elsie as co-authors of conservatism. Flynn unearthed the evidence that I’ve long suspected, that Frank’s wife Elsie was his secret literary weapon and they really functioned more as a team. She deserves historical credit too. More on that in an upcoming essay reviewing that book and others.)
But that was the Right of the past. It’s all gone now, retreated to The Bulwark and The Dispatch, now regarded as akin to “the Left” and welcomed onto MSNBC, or, to be accurate, what it is known as now: MS NOW:
It’s so ridiculous. I still have much the same political ideology as I did 10 years ago. Then I counted as an extreme right-winger but now I count as a leftist. That’s how much the political ground has shifted in just a decade.
In the last 10 years, men and women who reject constitutional values have taken control of the GOP and the political Right. And they are animated by reactionary bigotry and tribalism, not the vision of the founders or Biblical principles.
But as bad as the current regime is now, there’s a real strong chance that it’s about to get even worse…
3. Daily Wire Co-Founder Jeremy Boreing starting to speak out last week against Far Right hate has inspired me to get back in the fight.
Understanding the differences between Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes is so key today for grasping the nature of the threat to free societies today. And I’m going to have to build on Jeremy’s analysis to explain this further.
Those following me on Facebook, Substack Notes, or LinkedIn may have seen that I was very intentionally and deliberately melting down publicly on my birthday last week, really questioning if any of this writing and researching I’ve done on antisemitic groups has mattered at all, as it seemed like it didn’t matter to people how much pain I was in from the miscarriages our family has experienced:
By the end of the day a number of friends had reached out both over the phone, text, emails and direct messages offering encouraging words and wanting me to keep going:
I’ve been gearing up the will to try and announce this shift away from counter-Islamism and focusing on opposing the Far Right for weeks now.
But my heart has felt so shattered and writing has become so difficult that there have been times where I have felt like giving up altogether. The seventh miscarriage broke my brain. Or did it make me see things more accurately? I’m not sure still.
It seemed like the writing has not accomplished anything and really doesn’t have much of a chance of accomplishing anything. People don’t seem to care. By my analysis, the external factors exacerbating the rise of antisemitism are largely beyond your and my ability to counter them.
I’ve seriously been considering just giving it all up and going and finding some easy day job that won’t be as stressful as writing about Nazis every day.
And then I saw that Jeremy Boreing—the co-founder of The Daily Wire and creator of its new Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin miniseries, as well as one of just a handful of people in conservative media who I still trust and respect—had now started speaking out on the rise of antisemitism on the Right. He had specifically told the truth regarding his former employee Candace Owens (who he expressed deep regret for hiring) and the other prominent antisemites on the Right today, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.
The Piers Morgan interview embedded above hits the key points but the longer TriggerNometry interview below goes into greater depth and is very much worth your time:
I will unpack these interviews in a follow-up essay. The way that Jeremy explains the differences between what these three figures are doing is very important. He also has a whole lot of value to say on other topics too. Just watch both of them if you can give them the time now.
But seeing Jeremy start to speak out like this and from a place of authentic Christian conviction was inspiring. Jeremy is one of the few people I still know in right-wing media who I think genuinely believes his Christianity and follows it with intellectual sophistication. You can see it in both interviews. In the interactions we’ve had over the years he’s always struck me as very sincere and genuine. I respect him. He means what he says and you can take seriously what he says here. I do. Jeremy’s more right-wing than I am (always has been!) and more diplomatic in his rhetoric than I often choose to be but that doesn’t matter. He’s got a good heart in his chest.
And it reminded me that I have a responsibility. Stephen Miller and Candace Owens both owe the launch of their careers to David Horowitz, as do I. We’re permanently imprinted with different aspects of his ethos, mostly for worse, but in some ways for better.
And Tucker Carlson used to be someone I thought of as a friend, someone I could send pictures of my dog and we could bond together over our shared love of these wonderful creatures.
But no more. Now we have taken different paths. And it is not time yet for me to give up and stop speaking. No, I have to tell the truth about these people and the evil that they’re doing.
Now is the time more than ever to start calling out the nightmare and pure evil that we’re confronted with today…
4. The Epstein Files Release on Friday is the Revelatory Apocalypse We Have Been Waiting For and There Are STILL Tons of Files Being Illegally Held Back. Now we can see the Russian hand.
Let the research deep dive begin. And prepare to learn about the cryptocurrency criminal realms. We’ve all been putting it off but now we have to figure out this stuff.
TLDR: Jeffrey Epstein was likely a Russian asset building history’s biggest honeypot trap to catch the world’s wealthiest men in illegal sex acts.
Friends, my mind has been so fried this week that you think I can handle starting to go through the latest Epstein files dump?
I honestly did not expect that we’d ever see material as substantive and shocking as what got exposed two days ago. This is true incompetence at a cover-up that they let loose with all this material. It’s incredible.
My initial impression is that at this point we may now have enough evidence to say with some seriousness that Epstein was very likely an asset of Russian intelligence used to gather compromising information to blackmail wealthy men into doing Russian bidding. That doesn’t appear to be mere “conspiracy theory” any more. The evidence looks to be there, we just have to piece it all together now.
So yeah: this whole Epstein saga that we’ve all been dealing with for more than 15 years now, could it really be just another piece of the long Soviet, Communist, Russian war to try and defeat western freedom?
Really?
The Russians? Them again? Except now they’re basically both Nazis and communists at the same time while not really being either? And they’re messing with us in America by backing both the Far Right and the Far Left at the same time?
Yes.
These bastards. Will it never end?
It’s all too much!
For decades now America has been getting played by both Russia and China which have been actively destabilizing us from within by funding the far right, the far left, and outright criminal fraudsters. The Cold War isn’t over. It was just taking a brief vacation.
Well, I say enough. I say what I said in December, filled with rage at the hollow words of so many:
NO MORE BULLSHIT.
NO MORE LIES.
NO MORE GASLIGHTING.
And to this I add:
NO MORE COMMUNISM
NO MORE FASCISM
NO MORE NAZISM
NO MORE PUTINISM
NO MORE DICTATORS
NO MORE KINGS
NO MORE NEO-CONFEDERACY
NO MORE CONCENTRATION CAMPS
NO MORE ICE MURDERS
NO MORE IMPERIAL CONQUEST
NO MORE COVERING UP FOR PEDOPHILES
NEVER AGAIN MEANS NEVER AGAIN
I’m angry. Neo-Soviet Russia has subverted the Republican Party and installed Far Right fascists into our government who are waging war against our own citizens and building concentration camps to store brown people like cardboard boxes in Amazon warehouses.
They’ve made neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes the most prominent right-wing voice of the damned Generation Z through inauthentic amplification on social media. They turned the conservative blogosphere into a far right, Neo Nazi-filled hellscape with endless Happy Merchant memes on parade.
Agreed that the Epstein files represent our biggest opportunity to clean house. The damage that Russian intelligence has done to American society just in the last thirty years or so cannot be overstated. The Chinese have been busy, but to my eye their efforts are more "pragmatic," seeking economic and political advantage, so I don't begrudge them that (while recognizing that they are an adversary, of course). In the Heinleinian sense, I can oppose the Chinese without hating them.
The Russian efforts, by contrast, seem to be aimed at nihilistic chaos for its own sake. They want to burn down the world so they can rule the ashes. And their lickspittles—Carlson, Owens, Fuentes, and their ilk—are crawling little cockroaches, and need to be cast into the outer darkness.
(As an aside, does it affect your evaluation of Elon Musk that he very publicly pushed for the release of the Epstein files for nearly a year, refused to let up, and took significant costs for doing so?)
The point of what Russia is doing is to create a multi-polar power structure where the US is no longer a hegemony. He believes the weak point of the US is it's open and democratic nature and an advantage Russia has is that it can better control it's messaging to its own people.
The Ukraine War is proof, if the US lost as much as they have lost in Ukraine the US would have voted out the politicians that sent troops into Ukraine.
My argument would be that the Ukraine War was very dumb and a better system would have indeed kicked out the politicians and let Russia reset its foreign policy after that blunder.
I guess they don't see it that way.