From Fatwa to Conspiracy: Joe Kent’s Iran Case Falls Apart

Joe Kent chose a revealing place to begin his claim that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States.

Sitting across from Tucker Carlson, Kent pointed to the Islamic Republic’s supposed “fatwa” against nuclear weapons — offering it as proof that Iran could be trusted to stop short of the bomb.

That argument collapses on contact with reality.

Setting aside that this so-called fatwa is unwritten and, by Iran’s own officials’ admission, not legally binding, no country builds deeply buried, hardened nuclear facilities under mountains — for civilian energy. No country enriches uranium to 60% for peaceful use. And once enrichment reaches that level, the remaining step to weapons-grade is short — measured at most in weeks, and in some scenarios just a few days. That is the baseline assessment across the nonproliferation community.

Iran has not hidden this trajectory. It has advanced it.

By early 2026, Iran had accumulated significant quantities of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade while making clear — publicly and in negotiations — that it would neither dismantle that stockpile nor include its ballistic missile program in any agreement. That is not restraint. It is leverage.

Kent’s claim of no “imminent” threat depends on a definition no serious military or intelligence body uses. Imminence is not measured by whether a missile has been launched, but how quickly one can be.

A regime able to move from threshold capability to a nuclear weapon on short notice — and already building delivery systems — is not a distant concern.

And Iran’s missile program was central to that threat.

Before late February 2026, Iran fielded the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, and was expanding it. Missiles are relatively fast and inexpensive to produce. Interceptors are not. Systems like Arrow, David’s Sling, and Patriot require time, precision manufacturing, and far greater cost. Over time, the imbalance becomes structural.

That is how defenses are overwhelmed — through volume.

The implications extend far beyond Israel.

A nuclear-threshold Iran positioned along the Strait of Hormuz would sit at one of the world’s most critical chokepoints, through which roughly 20% of global oil flows. Combined with nuclear latency, a large missile force, and an entrenched proxy network, an Iranian regime aligned squarely with Russia and China would gain the ability to threaten energy markets, impose itself on neighboring states, and distort the global economy without firing a shot.

Any serious “America First” analysis would start there. Kent’s does not.

Instead, to argue the US is acting “for Israel,” he defaults to a familiar trope: that Israel “duped” the United States into the 2003 Iraq war.

This is not serious history. It is a recycled narrative common to both the antisemitic far-right and far-left, serving the same purpose: removing American agency and replacing it with manipulation by Israel or “the Jews.”

The record is clear.

Before 2003, Israeli leadership warned that Iran — not Iraq — posed the greater long-term threat. The intelligence cited by the Bush administration to support attacking Iraq came primarily from American and British sources. Colin Powell’s UN presentation relied on Western intelligence, not Israeli briefings.

Reducing that war to Israeli influence is not analysis. It is conspiracy theory.

Kent did not stop there.

In his resignation letter, he blamed Israel for the death of his first wife.

But Shannon Kent was killed in Syria while serving as a US intelligence officer. The war she died in was the Syrian Civil War — triggered by Assad’s mass violence, fueled by ISIS, and sustained in large part by Iran through the IRGC and Hezbollah. Iran helped keep that war going.

Blaming Israel for that is not a misreading. It is counterfactual scapegoating.

And it follows a pattern.

Kent has been elevated in a media ecosystem built on distrust of institutions and hostility to alliances, increasingly drifting into the claim that American policy is not the product of American decisions, but of outside (Jewish) forces pulling the strings. During his Carlson interview, Kent nodded toward the worst conspiracies circulating in that space — including claims popularized by Candace Owens about Charlie Kirk and Israel — while Carlson played his familiar role of laundering them through “just asking questions.”

That ecosystem runs on repetition, not evidence.

Kent’s description to Carlson of Ali Larijani as a moderate reflects a similar disregard for facts. Larijani spent decades at the center of the Islamic Republic — serving as nuclear negotiator, parliament speaker, and senior regime figure — in a system that imprisons, tortures, and mass-murders its own citizens. There is nothing moderate about that record.

Then there is the timing of Kent’s resignation, which followed reports that he was under investigation for leaking classified information. That context matters. It makes the letter read less like principle and more like preemption.

It also exposes a deeper inconsistency.

Kent and his cohorts argue that confronting Iran plainly serves Israel’s interests more than America’s — as if that ends the analysis. The same argument was made before World War II: that aiding Britain served British, not American, interests. And Britain was certainly more immediately threatened by Nazi Germany. That did not make defeating Nazi Germany any less an American interest.

An action benefiting an ally more than it does America can still be plainly in America’s interest.

Yet in the same media space elevating Kent, figures once widely condemned — including Marjorie Taylor Greene — find new audiences when their conspiratorial instincts align with the moment. The consistency is not ideological. It is to support a narrative: America as manipulated, its institutions as compromised, and its citizens as spectators.

That has consequences.

A self-governing society depends on the belief that its policies reflect its own decisions. Convince people that unseen forces are always in control, and participation begins to erode.

If the United States can be “duped” into war by a far smaller ally, then voting, deliberation, and leadership become performative. The system is hollow.

That is not a side effect. It is the destination.

And it is why the facts about Iran matter. Iran’s nuclear program, its proximity to breakout, its expanding missile arsenal, its declared “death to America” hostility toward the United States, its role in the deaths of hundreds of American service members, and its alignment with Russia and China are not speculative. They are established facts.

Dismissing that record requires more than disagreement. It requires dismissing facts.

At that point, the argument is no longer about Iran.

It is about whether facts still matter — and whether a society that decides they do not can continue to govern itself at all.

That is the direction parts of the “woke right” and the far-left are now pushing — different rhetoric, same conclusion: America is not acting, it is being controlled; its people are not deciding, they are being managed or “duped.” Tucker Carlson says it one way. Cenk Uygur says it another. The message lands the same.

A country that internalizes that message does not remain self-governing. It hollows out from within.

And when that happens, the beneficiaries are clear: Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran — regimes that do not need to defeat the United States if Americans can be convinced to lose faith in their own capacity to govern.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.