"Israel-First" Lie About DeSantis Highlights the Dishonesty of Tuckerites' Favorite False Choice

The populist set brews a moral poison strikingly similar to leftist identity politics.

American politicians’ responses to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel have been met with another round of a refrain so pervasive from the Ukraine aid debate that it’s almost become background noise: “What about us? Politicians in Washington care more about people in [Insert Country] than they do about Americans!”

Tucker Carlson dishonestly insinuated earlier this month that Ron DeSantis gets more incensed by the suffering of Israelis than that of his own countrymen. A formerly pro-DeSantis Twitter user with more than 24,000 followers recently jumped ship in part over the issue, (falsely) complaining that DeSantis supporters were “demoniz[ing] Americans for putting their foot down and saying ‘not my war, not my problem’” and declaring, “America FIRST always. Don’t care who loves Israel and who doesn’t. Who loves America? That’s all I care about.” In July, Cassandra MacDonald (a demented libertarian who works for noted liar Tim Pool) moaned, “Can we get a candidate that is America First, Last, and Only please?” in response to DeSantis vowing to “always stand with Israel.”

The talking point that supporting any kind of American action for those suffering abroad comes at the expense of domestic policy is nothing new. But the choice of target this time helpfully illustrates how dishonest and nonsensical it’s always been.

Just because DeSantis passionately expresses sympathy for victims of terrorism and support for eradicating the terrorist group responsible, we’re supposed to believe he is insufficiently-concerned for the myriad problems affecting Americans’ daily lives—as if DeSantis doesn’t have an unmatched domestic policy record from economics to immigration to crime to individual freedom to education, as if he isn’t campaigning on detailed plans to solve those problems, and as if he doesn’t primarily talk about those problems and plans at every campaign stop (to say nothing of the facts that ejecting pro-jihad noncitizens from the country and refusing terror-sympathetic refugees are good for America regardless of any implications for Israel, or that DeSantis is clear on not sending U.S. troops to Gaza, which he shouldn’t need to be because the Israelis don’t want us to anyway).

The attack is asinine on its face, but not just because DeSantis is an exceptional Republican. It’s asinine because “foreigners or Americans” has always been a false choice.

For example, Democrats and Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans would still support amnesty for illegal immigrants and oppose a real border wall, E-Verify, and limiting legal immigration even if America had never invaded Iraq or Afghanistan, if Russia had never invaded Ukraine, if Israel disappeared from the map tomorrow, and if everyone on Capitol Hill agreed the foreign aid budget should be zero.

If September 11 never happened and the War on Terror never followed it, how would that have done anything to make Democrats suddenly not interested in importing new Democrat voters, or business-beholden Republicans suddenly not desirous of cheap labor?

Simple: it wouldn’t. Conservatives’ foes in both parties take the domestic positions they do because those are the policies they want, not because they’d somehow side with us if only international conflicts weren’t distracting them, as if they’re working so hard on problems abroad that they just don’t have the mental energy left over to solve anything for the rest of us.

Indeed, 38 Senate Republicans voted down amnesty in 2007, the same year 33 Senate Republicans voted against condemning George W. Bush’s move to send 20,000 more soldiers to Iraq. By the logic of those who’ve rewritten America’s modern political history into the story of a plucky band of populists surrounded by war-hungry globalists coming from all directions, supporters of the occupation should have overwhelmingly been supporters of amnesty, as well. But the opposite was true.

Democrats in particular are not “ignoring” America’s problems; they’re actively worsening them. And they’re certainly not disinterested in domestic policy. They have an ambitious agenda for reshaping America; it just happens to be a terrible one.

Admittedly, congressional Republicans’ general fecklessness is easy to interpret as lack of concern for the welfare of their constituents. But to infer that foreigners are getting preferential treatment woefully misses the mark—the ones who simply rubber-stamp Biden’s Ukraine policy instead of articulating the ways it has prolonged the conflict are exhibiting the same low-effort, low-risk tendencies that animate them on everything else we rail against them for, doing for the Ukrainians essentially the same thing Republicans do for us in our fights: delaying complete annihilation, but not delivering real strides to true victory.

The inevitable result of the Tuckerite, populist, isolationist/neverventionist narrative can be seen dripping from nearly every one of these tirades: resentment and contempt for human beings suffering an ocean away, as if the mere act of needing help (or even just sympathy) is some grievous personal attack. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the Left conditions its various identity groups to scapegoat the white, wealthy, heteronormative “patriarchy” in much the same way.

What America’s policies should be regarding Israel, Ukraine, and other sites of international conflict is of course debatable on countless points, but before any of it can be debated intelligently or productively, it must be understood that that America taking any interest in them at all is not the reason Americans’ grievances at home are not being addressed. Lies to the contrary serve only to feed a mentality of weaponized victimhood that casts real victims as villains—and threatens to turn the Right into a mirror image of its real enemy.