This article provides some back story for an expose’ just published at NXR, in which I catch Jeremy Boreing in what I think is a sticky situation, and I use it to flashback to a special milestone in Israel’s influence scheme in American politics (and religion), the gifting of a Learjet to the founder of the Moral Majority. I’ve also got a few things to say about Boreing’s attack on one of our national treasures, Sir Theo Von.
I’ve been writing for a very long time. Long enough, in fact, to know another writer’s voice when I see it. Also, long enough to recognize when two pieces of writing came from the same source, the same outline, and cooked up in the same kitchen. I have read enough propaganda in my career - and produced enough - to know that signatures aren’t only on the byline. Authorial DNA doesn’t lie. Rhetorical fingerprints do not change because the name at the top does.
We all have this ability. After 2.5 years away, my “fans” knew when I had written my first piece back at Protestia, despite it not bearing my name. Sometimes there are mistaken identities, like when my mom was convinced I was Dissenter, and I couldn’t convince her otherwise. But in that instance, it’s because Dissenter’s author cut his teeth writing for me at Pulpit & Pen, and over the years, our writing styles merged like two alloys melded into the same blade of Damascus steel. But why, once put into print, does Jeremy Boreings’ monologue castigating Israel critics read eerily similar to Joshua Hammer’s article on that topic published months earlier at Front Page Mag, the publication of Boreing’s former employer, the David Horowitz Freedom Center?
When I sat down to write a point-by-point demolition of Jeremy Boreing’s recent twenty-six-minute monologue about Israeli influence in American politics (or, according to him, the lack of it, which is only being lied about by ‘grifters’ in a vastly complicated conspiracy to besmirch the Israeli state), I stopped before I finished the first couple of paragraphs. I had a strange, creeping, unmistakable feeling. The kind you get when you walk into a room and smell something familiar you cannot immediately place. I kept reading. I kept reading. And then it hit me like a freight train carrying a full load of obvious. I’ve already read it. Heck, I’ve already responded to it.
I wrote a rebuttal to it weeks ago, when it was first published at the Horowitz org, in which Hammer accused Tucker Carlson of being the second coming of Julius Streicher for suggesting that Israel has enormous influence over American policy, and then confirmed, in that same article, with apparent pride and zero self-awareness, that Israel has enormous influence over American policy. I left that piece for dead, but dadgumit, here it was again.
HOROWITZ
The David Horowitz Freedom Center does not publish a donor list, but the documentable money trail consistently points in one direction. The Maccabee Task Force, founded and bankrolled by Sheldon Adelson specifically to combat anti-Israel sentiment on American college campuses, made direct grants to the Freedom Center. Adelson was not a disinterested philanthropist. He was a man who told interviewers he regretted serving in the American military instead of the Israeli Defense Forces, who poured over $100 million into electing Donald Trump, and whose relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu was close enough that Trump pointed at his widow from the floor of the Knesset and told the Israeli parliament she had refused to say whether she loved America or Israel more. The Freedom Center also draws from the same constellation of conservative foundations, Bradley, Scaife, and their network, that have for decades functioned as the financial backbone of the pro-Israel influence apparatus in the United States. And the organization itself lists "Defense of Israel" as a named core program in its own tax filings, runs the Israel Security Project as an internal initiative, and publishes Frontpage Magazine, which is among the most aggressively and consistently pro-Israel publications in the American conservative media ecosystem. It has an interlocking web of Jewish-American, in some cases Jewish-Israeli, philanthropic infrastructure whose ideological north star is the political interests of the State of Israel, laundered through the language of American conservatism, and directed through institutions like the Freedom Center into the editorial output of people like Josh Hammer.
Josh Hammer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Jeremy Boreing built his entire early career at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, where he served as managing editor of TruthRevolt alongside Ben Shapiro before the two of them departed to found The Daily Wire. Hammer went to work for The Daily Wire. Boreing built The Daily Wire. Two men from the same institutional family tree produce, within weeks of each other, structurally identical defenses of Israeli influence in American politics, both aimed at the same critics, both deployed at the same moment of maximum scrutiny.
The two pieces weren’t similar, nor merely derivative. But the same argument, in the same order, with the same rhetorical architecture, the same illustrative analogies, the same targets, and the same triumphant closing note about American optimism and the grifters who want to make you feel powerless. The full dissection is over at NXR right now, and you should go read it immediately after finishing this article.
Premium subscribers can access a free pdf of the article (ad and graphic free) at the bottom of this post, past the paywall.
For now, just consider the big picture, here. Of the six episodes so far in Jeremy Boreing’s new series, five carried topics like satellites all orbiting Israel at their center, with its gravitational weight pulling each topic closer and closer until they all collided with Boreing’s main point: Americans should support the Israeli state. And the latest episode carried a 26-minute monologue whose main purpose was that Israel’s influence in American politics was marginal at best. That alone is laughable when you consider Boreing’s show has thus far been nothing but an Israeli infomercial. But when you think about the likelihood that the monologue denying Israel’s influence was handed to him by an Israeli think-tank whose purpose is influencing American politics, the irony is out of this world.
But from here forward, I’m going to assume you’ve seen the NXR article, so consider this a companion piece because we need talk about where all of this started. Because this is not new. It is not even recent. The influence infrastructure that produced Boring’s monologue was built on a foundation laid forty-five years ago, and it started with a preacher and an airplane.
THE LEAR JET THAT BOUGHT THE AMERICAN CHURCH
Here is the question we have to answer before any of the rest of this makes sense. American Jews are, by every available measurement, among the most reliably liberal voters in the United States. They have been for generations. They vote for Democrats at higher numbers than blacks, Hispanics, or homosexuals. In election cycle after election cycle, through Democratic administrations they loved and Republican ones they loathed, American Jews have voted Democrat at rates hovering between 80 and 94 percent. They fund left-wing causes. They staff progressive organizations. They donate to abortion providers, open-borders advocacy groups, and every flavored variety of progressive institution you can name. They are not, by any honest accounting, a Republican constituency. They are not culturally conservative. They are not theologically aligned with the evangelical movement. They are not, in almost any meaningful sense, natural allies of the American Right.
CAVEAT: You might say to yourself, “This can’t be true. What about all the Jewish funding sources for conservative causes, the types that fund the David Horowitz Freedom Center, that you just discussed?” Here’s where it gets dark. Yes, there is HUGE Jewish funding of conservative causes. And yet, Jews vote for Democrats roughly 90% of the time. What gives? How does that make sense? The only logical answer is that the Israel lobby very wisely understands that controlling one political party is not enough. To the Israelis, every threat is existential. Placing eggs all in one basket just doens’t do. So while they vote for Democrats, they absolutely see the wisdom in funding both sides equally, which they do.
And yet, if you were to survey the landscape of American conservative politics over the last four decades and identify the single most non-negotiable, most loudly championed, most furiously defended foreign policy position in the entire Republican movement, it would be unconditional support for the State of Israel. It’s sure not the support for lower taxes, or for gun rights. It’s not opposition to abortion. The most immutable stance in Republican Party politics is support for a foreign nation whose own citizens vote, donate, and organize overwhelmingly against everything the American conservative movement claims to stand for. How did that happen? How did the most domestically liberal ethnic voting bloc in the country become the untouchable sacred cow of the party they vote against? That is one of the most remarkable political judo throws in the history of modern democratic politics, and it has a specific answer, and the answer involves a Baptist preacher from Lynchburg, Virginia, and a Learjet gifted by Israel.
FALWELL
In 1979, after a series of visits to Israel orchestrated by the Begin government, Jerry Falwell Sr. received a gift from the State of Israel. It wasn’t your regular plaque or honorary degree, and not your usual letter of commendation suitable for framing above the fireplace at Thomas Road Baptist Church. A stinking Learjet. A private airplane, specially reconfigured by an Israeli company, handed over to one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the United States at the exact moment he was organizing what would become the Moral Majority, the political organization that would mobilize millions of conservative Christians and permanently fuse the Republican coalition with the evangelical base. Falwell considered the gift from “Israeli supporters” as though it had been anointed by the engine oil of the Holy Land. The man saw the hand of Providence in his free airplane.
The timing was not a coincidence, either. Menachem Begin had just come to power, leading the Likud party, the hard-right Israeli political faction that was formed out of ties with the founders of modern terrorism, who successfully got the British to throw up their hands and give up their mandate to create a permanent two-state home for Israelis and Palestinians. Their ideological roots ran directly through Vladimir Jabotinsky, the militant Revisionist Zionist whose vision of a Jewish state stretching across both banks of the Jordan River had been considered too extreme even by many Zionists of his own era. Begin and the Likudniks understood something that the broader Zionist establishment had not yet fully grasped. The old strategy of working primarily through mainline Protestant denominations and the American Jewish community was reaching its limits. The future of American pro-Israel sentiment lay elsewhere. It lay in the fundamentalist and evangelical world, among the millions of Bible-belt Protestants whose eschatology had primed them, through decades of Dispensationalist teaching, to see the modern State of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. These were people who had been theologically marinated in Israel-first theology for half a century before Israel asked them for a single political favor. All they needed was a leader. And a jet.
What that jet bought was extraordinary. Falwell’s congregation at Thomas Road Baptist was planted in Lynchburg, Virginia, a mid-sized city tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains that was not, by geography, the natural hub of a national political movement. Without rapid, extensive travel, Falwell’s reach was limited to his television program and his immediate regional influence. With the jet, he could be in Alabama on Tuesday, Oklahoma on Thursday, and Florida by Sunday. He could pack auditoriums from one end of the Bible Belt to the other with tens of thousands of “Old Time Gospel Hour” viewers who trusted him completely and would follow his political lead without serious question. Journalists who traveled with him on that plane watched him fly directly from prayer to political organizing without pausing for breath, lifting off with a prayer in the name of Jesus and landing to rally evangelical voters behind Ronald Reagan. The jet was not a gift. It was a deployment mechanism. Falwell was the payload. And it worked with a precision that military planners would envy.
The relationship deepened fast. In 1980, Begin personally handed Falwell the Jabotinsky Centennial Medal at an elaborate dinner ceremony in New York City, making him one of roughly a hundred Americans honored that night alongside Billy Graham, senators, Nobel laureates, and cabinet secretaries. Falwell was honored to receive it, reportedly, because Jabotinsky had preached that power should be your goal, and Falwell had arrived at similar conclusions by a different route. The ideological kinship between a Jewish nationalist militant and a Baptist fundamentalist televangelist was perhaps a bit counterintuitive, but it worked.
In 1981, the relationship produced its most revealing moment. When Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, a unilateral military strike that sent shockwaves through international diplomacy and required immediate justification to the American public, Begin reached for the phone. His first call was not to Ronald Reagan, the President of the United States and the leader of Israel’s primary patron and protector. His first call was to Jerry Falwell, the Baptist preacher from Lynchburg, whom he asked to explain the bombing to the Christian public and generate evangelical support for the strike. Convince Christians that a preemptive military action on speculative grounds, while Israel was sitting on nuclear weapons with uranium stolen from a Pennsylvania nuclear facility, and as they refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty like every other civilized nuclear power on Earth? There was a time when it was a huge ask. Christians used to frown at wanton, preemptive violence. These days, convincing Christians it’s acceptable to blow stuff up without being attacked is easy. Back then, it was novel. But that shows exactly how good an investment that Learjet was for the Israeli state.
At a banquet in Jerusalem honoring then-Defense Minister Moshe Arens of Likud, Falwell was heard telling Arens directly, “I want to thank you for that jet plane you gave me.” Arens, the hard-right Likudnik, smiled. Residents back in Lynchburg who had seen the plane told visiting journalists that everyone in town knew the Israelis had given Falwell the jet as payment for what he had done for them. The arrangement was not hidden in Lynchburg. It was not exactly advertised nationally, either. Falwell himself would stand before the Rabbinical Assembly in Miami and pledge to mobilize 70 million conservative Christians for Israel. The man was not subtle about where his loyalties lay when the audience was right.
Before 1967, for the record, Falwell had said publicly that preachers should stay out of politics. He said nothing publicly about modern-day Israel. He was a soul-winner, a revivalist, a local church builder with a television program. The 1967 Six-Day War and the Begin government’s cultivation of American fundamentalist leaders that followed it over the subsequent decade transformed him into an Israel lobbyist.
THE SON ALSO FLIES
Jerry Falwell Sr. built the machine. Jerry Falwell Jr. inherited it, ran it into the ground in a different and more personally colorful fashion, and never fully escaped the gravitational field of his father’s foreign entanglements. Junior was also gifted a jet by “good friends from the Middle East,” and was able to finance Mediterranean vacations and sustain a lifestyle that sat somewhat uneasily alongside Liberty University’s stated mission of producing God-fearing, fiscally disciplined young Christian leaders. Junior moved $5 million of Liberty’s endowment into Israeli investments in 2016, calling Israel “the only democracy that’s a close ally of the United States” in a region of turmoil (this is untrue, there are several democratic allies of the United States in the Middle East, who are arguably much better and more strategic allies). The apple, it turns out, does not fall far from the Learjet.
THE SCALE OF WHAT ONE AIRPLANE PURCHASED
Step back and look at what Menachem Begin’s investment actually produced over the course of four decades, because the return on a single Lear jet is the most extraordinary ROI in the history of foreign influence operations. Falwell used that plane and that platform to fuse Israel-first theology into the genetic code of the American evangelical movement at the moment that movement was becoming a mass political force. He planted the seed during the formation of the Moral Majority. Pat Robertson watered it. John Hagee built a seven-million-member organization around it called Christians United for Israel. Ralph Reed institutionalized it inside the Republican Party apparatus. Tim LaHaye sold it to fifty million readers through the Left Behind series, which is Dispensationalist Israel-first eschatology in paperback form, complete with characters and a plot. By the time the next generation of evangelical leaders came of age, unconditional support for Israel was not a policy position that could be debated. It was a confession of faith. It was baked into what it meant to be a serious, Bible-believing, politically engaged American Christian. An entire systematic theology had been retrofitted around a foreign policy preference that was itself the downstream product of a Lear jet and a banquet in Jerusalem. And the generation that grew up inside that theology produced, eventually, people like Jeremy Boreing.
THE THEO VON PROBLEM
Which brings us to Theo Von (the most wildly disattached segment transition ever). I noticed that Boreing went out of his way in his monologue to include Theo Von among the grifters, demoralization merchants, and conspiracy peddlers he was indicting. Theo Von. If you have spent more than six minutes in the vicinity of American podcast culture, you know who Theo Von is. He is a comedian from the Louisiana bayou who tells stories about his daddy, his granny, his hometown characters, and the assorted creatures he has encountered in a life lived at a particular altitude of American experience. Some of whom, might actually be real people. He has the personality of a golden retriever who wandered onto your lawn and just wants to play. He has the haircut of a weekend assistant trailer park supervisor who lost a bet. He is, by universal consensus across ideological lines, one of the most genuinely likable human beings currently holding a microphone in the United States of America. Nobody does not like Theo Von. That is not something you can say about almost any other figure in public life right now. It is true about Theo Von. You go after Theo Von over our dead bodies. It’s like going after Hulk Hogan during the red-and-yellow years. It’s like going after Opie Taylor, if Opie Taylor were from a swamp trailer park and was admirably recovering from drug abuse. How dare you touch a national treasure.
What Theo Von did, as near as anyone can tell, was appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast and say something to the effect of “All our money goes to Israel and they use it to genocide people.” Fair. That’s fair. And we are well aware that Benjamin Netanyahu instructed American lobbyists visiting Israel (a FARA violation) to go home and wage war with anyone claiming Gaza is a genocide, and obviously Boreing (or Hammer) got the memo. And before you say, “What does that redneck know?” I’ll just throw in that this redneck has had interviews in the last twelve months with Tulsi Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, JD Vance, and Donald Trump. From both sides of the aisle, he’s sat and listened for hours to different people with different perspectives, and that’s apparently one he felt to be compelling. How dare some unlikable, stuck-up pariah like Jeremy Boreing go after the emblematic blue-collar white male with the politics of personal destruction because he has the powers of basic observation and has formed an opinion?
I’m sorry, but that’s just not acceptable. Trying to include Theo on an idealogical hit-list of people like Tucker and Candace Owens who you know darned well the Israel lobby would literally assassinate if they could get away with it (I’m not joking, and you know that), is beyond the pale. But it’s not because Theo is the funny guy we all like. It’s because it goes to show you that these people are willing to go after anybody - you and me included - all because we believe our lying eyes about what’s happening on the news. These people have no scruples, and they would string up any one of their countrymen for not kowtowing to a foreign state, and that’s disgusting.
The fact that they’re going after St. Theophilis Von tells you something essential about how this operation works. It is not calibrated to the size of the threat. It is calibrated to the existence of the noticing. Anyone who notices, regardless of their platform, ideology, credentials, or history, gets the treatment. The treatment is not refutation, but classification. You are a grifter, or you are a Nazi, or you are a demoralization merchant, or you are running a blackpill operation. The label varies. The function is identical. The goal is to make the noticing itself seem disreputable, so that people who are beginning to notice feel ashamed of their own powers of observation.
LOW CHARACTER
Let’s land the plane, dear subscribers. One can argue that Israeli influence in American politics is good. That is a coherent position. One can make a case for it. One can say the alliance serves American interests, that the intelligence sharing is valuable, that a strong Israel is a stabilizing force in a volatile region, that the relationship is worth what it costs. Someone can make that argument, and I will disagree with it, and we can have a genuine debate, and neither of us will be dishonest. They can argue that the influence is overstated. They can argue about the magnitude, the mechanisms, the degree to which American politicians act from genuine conviction versus calculated self-interest. Those are real arguments about real questions, and honest people can disagree about the answers. But what they cannot do, what no honest person can do, is deny that the influence exists in any significant form. You cannot look at money given, the things the president has said out loud, or a Lear jet handed to a televangelist in exchange for mobilizing 70 million Christians, a Daily Wire built on the institutional foundation of a pro-Israel dark money operation, and a new podcast monologue that appears to have been written by the same hand that wrote the last pro-Israel propaganda piece from the same institution, and then look a person in the eye and tell them there is nothing to see here. They cannot do that and be telling the truth. The evidence is not hidden. It is not the product of fevered imagination or coordinated grift. It is filed with the Department of Justice, archived in newspapers. These are all the facts. Denying them is just dishonesty at this point.
Denying obvious facts, as Hammer and Boreing did, is not a sign of courage, nor faith, nor a sign of serious analysis, careful thinking, or sophisticated geopolitical understanding. Denying it is a sign of low character. You can support the influence. You can celebrate the influence. You can write twenty-six-minute monologues insisting the influence is entirely normal and good and that anyone who questions it is a grifter. But the moment you stand up and tell the American public that Israel does not meaningfully impact the American political system, you have stopped being a commentator and started being a liar. And not even a good one.
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