Tremors in MAGA: Joe Kent, the Iran War and the Antisemitism Smear

Joe Kent, the now former US Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, always seemed a bit off, especially to liberals.  As a combat veteran of MAGA pedigree, he found favour with President Donald J. Trump, who rewarded him for his conspiracy blustering in a manner befitting other nominees baptised in the truth repelling River of Fox News.  But the mindless adventurism in attacking Iran in league with Israel was a step too far.

In his resignation letter, Kent asserted that he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.  Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”  Till June 2025, the President had “understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.”

Then came the machinations of “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” with their “misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.”  From there came the “echo chamber” that deceived Trump “into believing Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory.”   The same tactics had been used by Israel in drawing the US “into the disastrous Iraq War that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”

Israel comes in for a further lashing for having left its personal mark on Kent’s life.  “As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”

The portrait of Kent is an unremittingly spiky and jarring one.  Even before the resignation, he was already under investigation by the FBI’s criminal division for alleged leaks of classified information, which should commend him to the fifth estate.  (Such leaks in any administration, and most certainly one like the Trump administration, should be treasured, not abominated.)  Former deputy White House chief of staff Taylor Budowich was of the view that Kent was “often at the centre of national security leaks” and “spent all his time working to subvert the chain of command and undermine the President of the United States”.

The language of the resignation note was also bound to stir the blood of those willing to see antisemitism rearing its vast, deformed head.  This was made easier given Kent’s checkered history, a point made by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) during last year’s confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill.  In a February 2025 statement, the ADL noted his tendency to promote “multiple conspiracy theories” and forge links “with individuals who have extremist ties, including to groups such as the Proud Boys, Groypers and Three Percenters, some of which have a history of violence.”

In a June 2025 joint letter authored with the Western States Center, the SPLC similarly noted a past heavily salted with conspiracy theorising and links to right wing extremism and white supremacists.  Kent had not only “embraced discredited anti-government conspiracy theories – including that the FBI and the intelligence community were involved in the January 6, 2021 deadly attacks at the US Capitol” but had “connections with bigoted individuals, far right violent extremists, and anti-democratic movements”.  He had, for instance, discussed social media strategy with the white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes and conducted an interview with Greyson Arnold, a live streamer who thought Hitler “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand”.

The ADL and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who nakedly operate as open fronts of Israeli opinion, were bound to play the ad hominem game in attacking the man over opinion.  According to the ADL, Kent’s letter trafficked “in old-age antisemitic tropes”.  It was hardly a “surprise that he would blame Israel and the media for pushing the President into war against the Iranian regime.”  Refusing to consider the pathological lunacy underlying the pre-emptive war on Iran, Ilan Goldenberg of the liberal pro-Israel advocacy group J Street could only see “ugly stuff that plays on the worst antisemitic tropes”.

These inane airings are unsurprising.  The ADL refuses to acknowledge the sheer depth of Israeli involvement and support in the US political and religious establishment, much of it unhealthy and a good deal of it undemocratic.  Suggestions that Israel might be distorting the perspective of US strategists and policy makers are shouted down in frothing fury.  The organisation can barely stomach the term “Israel lobby”, something evidenced in the organisation’s travesty of a review of a work bearing that name by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt.  Here was, in the words of the ADL’s unlettered hatchet job, “a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control.”  Unmissable here is that Mearsheimer and Walt had, like Kent, also noted the poisonous hold Israel had exerted over the Washington establishment in encouraging the pre-emptive, illegal war waged against Iraq in 2003.  The lie of the imminent threat has some form.

Kent also had another handicap from the past that was bound to be exploited by the administration.  On that platform of handy bile and venom called Truth Social, Trump posted a tweet from January 2020 in which Kent encouraged attacking Iran.  “We should not sit and wait for the next attack, wipe Iran’s ballistic capability out and get our troops out of Iraq – they are only targets now.”  The post on what was then Twitter was made in the aftermath of Trump’s order to assassinate the Iranian commander of the Quds force, General Qassem Soleimani.  “No US WIA/KIA is a tribute to the professionalism of our military and intel professionals not Iranian restraint.”

As the letter itself indicates, Kent may have changed his mind.  He even acknowledged that Soleimani’s assassination was a decisive application “of military power without getting us drawn into never ending wars.”  (MAGA is for slaying foreign officials, as long as the operation is scrupulously limited.)  For the dogmatist followers of the Trump MAGA brand, something deeper is underfoot.  The prospects for conscientious objections to the war by service members reluctant to serve in the conflict have also improved.  Prolonging the absurd, illegal, and increasingly catastrophic war against Iran will prove telling in that regard.  And just because it is deemed such by a person as sketchy as Kent is hardly a reason to ignore the premise.

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