Why I See A Post-Israel Future For The GOP...

Investing in the future but taking courageous stands in the present

Tucker Carlson and Yair Netanyahu in 2019

My day job is as a tech investor and entrepreneur. There you can be rewarded for predicting the future three to five years out. Arguably that’s how tech investing actually works. Or at least how it should.

Many tech investors you encounter are, in fact, not really tech investors but fronts for foreign governments or they are thieves for pensions and endowments. They raise a large fund from one of their friends at one of these institutions and then collect their fee. You’ll see these “investors” travel in packs so that they’re never wrong and alone.

But real tech investing is a bit harder. You’re alone, oftentimes with only your thoughts. You look at the trend lines, you look out into the future, and you place your bets.

I’ve done very well at this line of work so much so that I'm often asked why I bother writing my opinions on the internet at all. “Isn’t this professionally damaging to talk about the Israeli lobby and the spy world?” Maybe so but I’m also making a bet about the future — a bet that I’m more or less coming to see as correct every day. We’re increasingly entering a post-Israel American polity. This is arguably the most important thing happening.

In the writing world you’re not so quickly rewarded and more often than not your ideas wind up getting stolen and repackaged in different ways. This is called influence. When you’re a strange person living at the frontier you oftentimes experience things first, especially when you anger foreign governments or their proxies.

By now we’ve seen the tastemakers shift along with the polling on the Gaza war.

There’s Candace Owens noting the genocide against Palestinian children.

There’s Tucker Carlson interviewing a Palestinian Christian about how he’s been treated under the Israeli occupation.

There’s Mike Cernovich, once crawling with Israeli activists, talking about how the vibe has shifted toward Israel skepticism.

There’s Max Blumental notes the changes within the evangelical world away from the slavish Zionism. The reason we’re increasingly calling it The Daily Wire the “Israeli Wire” is because it’s become obvious to everyone what was first discussed on this Substack.

You even had Bret Stephens — my old boss at the Wall Street Journal who is now at the New York Times — calling for Netanyahu to go.

You could dismiss all these sorts of things as not really these influencers’ sincere feelings. Carlson is backed by Omeed Malick and Rebekah Mercer so you could see it as a sort of Emirati-Russia play. And Mike Cernovich was almost assuredly on the payroll of the UAE when he supported an anti-Qatar documentary. Blumenthal, too, is quite Russian. And Bret Stephens is awfully pro-Israel, so much so that it’s hard not to see him as an Israeli asset, albeit an anti-Netanyahu one.

A cynic might see all these people coming out against Israel as somehow a bad thing — where were they when we were getting the slings and arrows? — but whenever an opportunist joins your side it’s a sign that you’re winning so perhaps it’s wise to be grateful.

So never interrupt an opponent when they are in the middle of a mistake. And never interrupt a would-be ally from helping the cause.

So here’s a prediction I’m making now. The first serious GOP figure who publicly denounces Netanyahu’s behavior will be the leader of the Republican Party after Trump.