Latest news with #Neocon
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Mark Levin rages at ex-Fox colleague Tucker Carlson as MAGA-on-MAGA violence breaks out: ‘You little b*stard!'
Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson, two of the top pro-Trump commentators in the right-wing media ecosystem who also happen to be former Fox News colleagues, are currently embroiled in a war of words that has now seen one call the other a 'schmuck' and a 'little b*stard.' The tête-à-tête began last week when Levin, a Fox News host whom Donald Trump recently appointed to the 'revamped' Homeland Security Advisory Council, took issue with recent comments Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff made to MAGA outlet Breitbart. 'The Neocon element believes that war is the only way to solve things,' Witkoff said in the interview. 'The president believes that his force of personality, the way he is going to respond to certain situations, can bend people to do things in a better way in the interests of the United States government.' Levin, a hawkish right-winger who still believed in the WMD rationale for war in Iraq in 2014, reacted to the interview by claiming Witkoff 'talks like the fifth column isolationists' before saying he waited with 'great interest' on the deal the envoy was negotiating with Iran. 'In the meantime, rather than sloganeering against patriotic Americans who love our country, use your name-calling for the terrorist regime that has murdered Americans, tried to assassinate our president, chants death to America, and has lied its way toward a nuclear bomb,' Levin added before tweeting: 'By the way, neocon is a pejorative for Jew. Unbelievable.' It was this claim that using the term 'neocon' is somehow antisemitic – both Levin and Witkoff are Jewish – that prompted a response from Carlson, who has become the 'king of the isolationists' in the American conservative movement. Carlson, who was fired from Fox News in 2023, said that his former employer 'basically seems to turn its programming over to advocating for a war with Iran' before ridiculing Levin for his taking offense at Witkoff's take on the 'neocon element' in the GOP. 'So you have Mark Levin calling Steve Witkoff an antisemite. We've reached peak crazy, I mean, I think Witkoff is Jewish, right?' Carlson asked his guest Dave Smith, a comedian turned foreign policy critic. 'If Mark Levin is calling the Trump administration antisemitic, Steve Witkoff, we're at the end of something and the beginning of something new,' Carlson added. 'If you're calling Steve Witkoff an anti-Semite on Twitter, like, you know you're losing, right?' Carlson, who said he didn't call Levin because he would just be 'scolded' by the 'screaming' host, likely knew that the conservative pundit was going to return fire, especially since Levin spends much of his airtime raging at his critics. And that's exactly what happened this week. Midway through his syndicated radio show on Tuesday, Levin launched into an over-the-top tirade in which he repeatedly referred to his former Fox News cohort by the nickname deceased conservative radio star Rush Limbaugh bestowed on Carlson – Chatsworth Osborne Jr. 'So schmuck picks a fight with me, doesn't call me,' Levin fumed. 'You see, all the neocons are gone. So why do they keep using the word neoconservative? Notice they don't use hawk, interventionist. Neocon! Why do they keep saying neocon? Because many of the neoconservatives were old time, left-wing, Democrat Jews!' Continuing his explanation for why the term neocon is anti-Jewish, Levin said: 'Chatsworth knows it. I know it, and many of the people that use that phrase either don't know what they're talking about, but in the magazines and on the internet, they know it. So they're not going to say the Jews are dragging us into a war, they'll say Israel is, Netanyahu is. They're not gonna say the Jews this and the Jews that, so they use neocon.' Levin proceeded to use the next few minutes to claim that wanting to stop the 'Islamo-Nazi regime in Iran' means 'you're not a warmonger' but rather 'a peacemaker, only to bring it back around to Carlson's attacks on him. 'But I don't have to pretend I'm Helen Keller! That I don't see and I don't hear, and neither do you! And neither do you. And there's a whole pattern over there, with Chatsworth Osborne Jr., a whole pattern,' he raged. 'Now he's free to do what he wants. I believe in free speech. Go ahead, buy a subscription. Do whatever you want, it's perfectly fine by me. But don't screw with me, you little bastard, by twisting my words,' Levin concluded. 'And you should have picked up the phone because I would have cleared things up for you.' This isn't the first time that there's been tension between Carlson and Levin. When they were both hosting Fox News shows, Levin took issue with the now-former primetime star for being a frequent source for mainstream journalists. At the time, Ben Smith – then a New York Times columnist – revealed that despite his self-portrayal as the sworn enemy of the media establishment, Carlson had regularly dished to reporters about Fox and Trump. 'Now, I could go further into this, I'm not going to. That is a serious misunderstanding of one's role, of loyalty, and character. Let me leave it at that,' Levin said about Carlson in 2021.
News18
12-05-2025
- Politics
- News18
India Won The War, But Lost Narrative Battle To Pakistani & Western Lies
It is time for India to up the PR ante, spend money on building presence in international media, and counter the global negative narrative more robustly India has decisively won the latest military conflict against Pakistan. If anybody had a doubt, the Indian Air Force (IAF) presser on Sunday conclusively demonstrated it with clear images and videos of the precision strikes in Pakistan Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) and deep inside Pakistan. From Muridke to Bahawalpur and from Sargodha to Jacobabad, every missile strike has been captured, as if in 4K. It is now clear that the bombing of Sargodha and a couple of other airfields could be the immediate reason for Pakistan's panicked outreach to the US, which, in turn, advised it to directly request India for a ceasefire, which Pakistan did. Apparently, the Indian missiles landed alarmingly close to its nuclear facilities and could even have triggered radiation. But despite this unprecedented aggressive response to a terror attack (the Pahalgam massacre, in this case), cheer was missing from the Indian side. It was as if we had lost. Pakistan, forever blissfully in denial, actually started claiming victory. The Western media obliged, with almost congratulatory pieces and shows about Pakistan snatching a ceasefire. advetisement There were three main narrative setbacks for India. First, some seriously irresponsible and childish mainstream media reporting. It is fine to run psy-ops on social media and rattle the enemy. But when the mainstream media outlets mirror that misinformation, it leads to loss of credibility and opens up the nation's information environment to damaging fact-checks and mocking, even when there is enough meat in its military response. Sensational stories like Lahore, Karachi or Islamabad falling did just that. It is a good occasion for the Indian media to introspect. At a time when plain-vanilla reporting is sensational enough, going overboard with spice is a recipe for self-goals which harms the nation's splendid military effort. Second, the international media coverage was grossly tilted against India. The West was especially negative. Neocon online publication The National Interest carried pieces titled 'How Chinese Missiles Routed India's Air Force Over Pakistan' and 'Why Has India's Military Performed So Poorly Against Pakistan?', both by Brandon J Weichert, a contributor to the Hong Kong-based Asia Times and author of Biohacked: China's Race To Control Life and other books. 'The Pakistanis have proven their mettle. Armed with top Chinese equipment, and with military assistance provided by the Turks, Islamabad has shown itself to be more than capable of rebuffing at least the initial wave of Indian air attacks. The Pakistanis shot down a total of five Indian Air Force (IAF) warplanes at the start of Operation Sindoor, after all," Weichert writes. A Reuters headline screamed: 'Exclusive: Pakistan's Chinese-made jet brought down two Indian fighter aircraft, US officials say'. 'At least two Indian jets appeared to have crashed during Pakistan strikes, visuals show', read a Washington Post headline. Interestingly, neither Pakistan nor the unnamed US officials whom the Western media quoted could produce any proof of a single Indian plane being shot down. Al Jazeera, the undeclared mouthpiece of Islamists worldwide, went as far as to carry the laughable Pakistani canard that Indian woman pilot Shivangi Singh has been captured. Pakistani director general of inter-Services Public Relations Ahmed Shareef Chaudhry, who is the son of UN-designated terrorist and Osama bin Laden's close aide Bashiruddin Mahmood, later denied that Pakistan has custody of any pilot and dismissed it as 'fake news from social media". It is another matter that his boss, Pakistani defence minister Khawaja Asif, told Sky News that the proof of Pakistan downing Indian planes was 'all over social media". But why did the international media lap up Pakistan's brazen lies and contradictions? Why was the Indian side so bleakly presented? Is it because China wielded its influence—built through years of lobbying, buying out journalists, and funding western media and academia? Or does Pakistan and its intelligence ISI do better PR in the West than India? Or because the West and China's planes and missile defence systems were effectively busted by India's own homegrown weapons and Russian aircraft and missile interception systems like S-400, making it a terrible advertisement to potential buyers? advetisement We may not know the precise answers, but it is time for India to up the PR ante, spend money on building presence in international media, and counter the global negative narrative more robustly. Third, US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance have re-hyphenated India and Pakistan. Trump infantilised India, which is the victim of Pakistan-sponsored terror, by his statement: 'Proud that the USA was able to help you arrive at this historic and heroic decision." Claiming credit, he said on Saturday that the US mediated talks after which the two neighbours 'agreed to a FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE". He then added insult by bringing up Kashmir and offering to mediate, which India had politely but firmly turned down in the past. 'I am going to increase trade, substantially, with both of these great Nations. Additionally, I will work with you both to see if, after a 'thousand years," a solution can be arrived at concerning Kashmir," read his statement. advetisement Could it be some ulterior reason, some kind of a negotiating chip to cut India down to size before the imminent trade deal? top videos View All Whatever the reason, India will need to disabuse the pathological narcissist in Trump and set the narrative right. It was never enough to win the war on the battlefield. The greatest nations and leaders have also won the war in the mind and popular imagination. Only then does one effectively break the enemy's morale and lift it for one's own people. The ceasefire has given us that moment of introspection. tags : donald trump Operation Sindoor Pahalgam attack pakistan United states Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: May 12, 2025, 08:50 IST News opinion Opinion | India Won The War, But Lost Narrative Battle To Pakistani & Western Lies
Middle East Eye
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Trump 2.0: A doomed strategy to reboot capitalism through bluster and bullying
There is an adage making the rounds about how to understand Donald Trump's presidency. It goes: 'Don't take Trump literally, but do take him seriously.' That reads like good advice. The US president's infantile personality, egomaniacal boasting, and scattergun insults are not the place to start, however headline-grabbing they might be; looking there would be to take Trump literally, but not seriously. It's tempting to think, conventionally, that policy might be where we'd look to take Trump seriously. But that, too, would be a mistake. Trump doesn't do conventional political policy. Neocon hawk John Bolton, a first-term Trump appointee and now disgruntled reject from the Trump camp, explained this to Channel 4 News, arguing that Trump's thought process is not a continuous landmass of connected policy, but an island chain of proximate but not logically consecutive opinions - a series of disconnected dots, liable to change as the moment requires. There is an irrationalist element to Trump, a feature of far-right leaders before him. But irrationalist political figures can be understood rationally, if you look in the right places. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters One aspect of this is to look at the nature of Trumpism as a movement, rather than at the man. By this, I do not just mean at what the widest layers of Trump voters think, although that has its own importance. There, we find a mixture of reactionary political ideas about issues such as migration, and demands that, if the left were larger and more coherent, it would be able to champion - for instance, distrust of government and anti-corporate sentiment. But more precisely, we need to look at the makeup of the leadership of Trumpism in its second incarnation. This is very different from the first-term edition, as a result of the accumulated experiences of Trumpism. Second-term zealots After his first presidency, Trump experienced defeat in 2020, followed by the failed Capitol Hill coup. In the ensuing years, the liberal establishment attempted to legalistically assassinate him, and during the 2024 campaign, he was the subject of an actual near-miss assassination attempt. He has a battle-hardened inner circle supplemented with far-right true believers, of whom Elon Musk is the richest and most high-profile. In his first administration, Trump appointed Washington insiders and quickly lost ideological supporters, such as Steve Bannon. But his second-term appointees are zealots to a far greater degree - and this reinforces the Blitzkrieg approach that Trump has adopted during his first weeks in office, immediately moving to eradicate Biden-era policies and to implement some (though not all) of his most extreme campaign promises. Trump's isolationism is designed to reassert US power by forcing enemies and, especially, allies into footing the bill and doing the heavy lifting What stands behind this - and here, we approach a fundamental understanding of Trumpism - is the necessity of reconfiguring the US government and American capitalism to deal with a multipolar world. It's not so long ago that the academic and political boosters of globalisation were telling us that there could never be a war between two countries that had McDonald's branches. And yet, Israel has been at war with Lebanon, and Ukraine is at war with Russia, despite the fact that the golden arches shine brightly in all those countries (except, even more interestingly, McDonald's closed its operations in Russia in 2022 as a result of the war, just the opposite of the globalisers' predictions). The more fundamental point is that the period of renewed US ascendancy that followed the end of the Cold War is clearly long over. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars were themselves a product of the 'Project for the New American Century' ideologues attempting to turn the post-Cold War ascendency into actual military victories. They ended up doing the opposite, ushering in a new era of global rivalries. China's economic growth powered it into the first rank of challengers to the US, while Russia's nationalistic attempts to rebuild its influence after the loss of Eastern Europe have created another irresolvable problem for the US. This has now been exacerbated by the Ukraine war. Shifting the burden What Trumpism represents is a reaction to declining US hegemony. That's why the defensive, hurt-victim tone is its characteristic call sign. This is the bully that can't believe it no longer commands automatic obedience; it is quick to anger, and easily offended. This decline is not immediately about economic growth. Indeed, the US economy is growing faster than China at the moment. But it is uneven growth: tech industries are growing, while manufacturing is not. And this growth is fuelling social and economic divisions, not overcoming them. So in domestic politics, Trumpism can play to an electorate more divided by wealth than ever before, the majority of whom are finding working life harder and less well-rewarded than ever before. They have been badly disillusioned by the Democrats' devotion to neoliberal economics, especially since the liberal centre has adapted to every lurch rightwards in establishment politics since Ronald Reagan was president. In foreign affairs - and foreign affairs are always domestic politics in the largest imperial power in the world - Trumpism is a reaction to US military and economic failures, from Iraq onwards. The fragmentation of US influence, and the emergence of China and Russia as rivals, is the crisis to which Trump claims to have new answers. Trump's first days signal support for the most extreme pro-Israel forces Read More » In the US, there is a deep sense of hurt caused by US military failures abroad, magnified by Hollywood war films that amplify the message that the politicians have let down the soldiers who fought their wars. Trump's protectionism and isolationism tap into all of this, but not in order to develop a 'peaceful' US foreign policy, as Trump claimed at his inauguration, and as the more gullible leftist commentators sometimes feign to believe. Trump's protectionism aims to reboot US capitalism, and to shift the burden of doing so onto enemies and friends alike. Similarly, Trump's isolationism is designed to reassert US power by forcing enemies and, especially, allies into footing the bill and doing the heavy lifting - hence the immediate threats issued to Panama, Greenland and Canada. Hence the demand that Europe increase its defence spending to five percent of GDP, when US spending is only 3.5 percent. Hence the demand that Europe just suck up any downside to peace with Russia in Ukraine. This represents a huge shift in ruling-class politics, as big as the shift from the welfare state consensus of the postwar boom to the neoliberalism and militarism of the Reagan-Thatcher era. The Trumpists, and their international correlates, are in one sense the descendants of the Reagan-Thatcher era. But they are the inheritors of the failure of that project, economically, socially, and internationally in the post-Cold War era of increased global market competition. Like the aging inheritors of an English aristocratic mansion, they are nostalgic for lost greatness and embittered at the nouveau riche. They are determined to regain former glory by making servants and peasants work harder, and through land grabs, bluster and bullying to humiliate their neighbours and defeat their rivals. Down below, the pitchforks must be made ready. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
