by Stephen Soukup
A decorated patriot’s fall into conspiracism shows how even the best can be consumed by antisemitic fantasy—and why such thinking must be confronted before it spreads.
A couple of weeks ago, just after Joe Kent resigned his position in the Trump administration, Jack Posobiec, the conservative political activist and commentator and former naval intelligence officer, posted on Twitter/X about Kent’s meritorious military service. “Joe Kent,” Posobiec wrote, “has six Bronze Star Medals with five Oak Leaf Clusters across 11 combat deployments as a Green Beret in some of the biggest battles of the GWOT.” That’s impressive, to say the least. And it’s also just the tip of the sacrifices Kent has made for this country.
After serving in the Army for 20 years—as a Ranger, a Green Beret, and in Army intelligence—Kent retired and joined the CIA as a paramilitary officer. The next year, while he was stateside with his two children, his wife and the mother of those children, Shannon Smith, a Navy intelligence officer, was killed by an IED while deployed in Syria. Kent became an activist in support of ending the nation’s “forever wars” and consulted with the (first) Trump administration on how best to achieve that goal. He ran for Congress in Washington in 2022, winning the Republican nomination but losing the general election. He ran again two years later and again won the primary but lost the general. Kent served as the acting chief of staff to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and then as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
At just 45 years old, Joe Kent has done a great deal more in defense of this country than most Americans could ever even imagine. He is, in many ways, the very best of us.
Which is precisely what makes his story a tragedy and a warning to the rest of us.
In his resignation letter, Kent declared that the war in Iran was unjustified and not in the nation’s best interests. That, of course, is a perfectly defensible, if arguable, position. He went on, however, to say that the war is also not really America’s war. It’s Israel’s war. And the sneaky Jews conned us into it—just as they conned us into the Iraq War 23 years ago:
Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.
In that same letter, Kent also mentioned his late wife—and blamed Jews for her death, stating that he is “a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife, Shannon, in a war manufactured by Israel.” Israel, you see, is at the heart of everything wrong with the world, at least according to Joe Kent. In his estimation, there is almost nothing for which the Jews cannot be blamed.
After resigning, Kent made the rounds of the usual suspects in the right-leaning anti-Israel media. He appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to blame Israel for even more global perfidy, joining the chorus of radicals blaming the Jews for murdering Charlie Kirk. Kent claimed that it was his office’s responsibility to look for foreign ties to Kirk’s assassination and claimed that they “had already dug up a decent amount of leads” before the powers that be—wink, wink—told them to stop. He then went on to join Carrie Prejean (also recently departed from a Trump administration appointment for antisemitic comments) and fanatical antisemite Candace Owens at a “Catholics for Catholics” event.
All of this, it is worth noting, is in addition to the anti-Israel/antisemitic sentiments Kent exhibited before joining the Trump administration. In a short piece on Kent’s resignation, Seth Mandel, a senior editor at Commentary magazine, noted that Kent’s history should have been a huge red flag for the Trump team. They should never have even considered Kent for a position, despite his military service, because his “worldview is a conspiracy-addled montage of easily debunked rage-bait hallucinations.” Mandel’s description here is both especially accurate and especially important.
In the few weeks that he has been in the news again, Joe Kent has often been called a “conspiracy theorist.” And so, for that matter, have Carlson, Owens, Prejean, and others with whom he shares a loathing for Israel. In a recent column for Bloomberg, David M. Drucker called Kent “a conspiracy theorist of such questionable character that he lacks almost all credibility . . .” This is understandable framing, but it’s not quite right. Kent does not engage in conspiracy theories. Rather, he engages in “conspiracism.”
In his classic 1997 tome Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes, and Where It Comes From, the inimitable Daniel Pipes, the president of the Middle East Forum, draws a distinction between conspiracies, conspiracy theories, and what he calls conspiracism.
“Conspiracies,” Pipes notes, are real, and they have existed throughout history. Moreover, some of these real conspiracies have, indeed, been perpetrated in the modern Middle East and have included conspirators like states. These are facts. “Conspiracy theories,” by contrast, are a mixed bag. They propose a hypothesis—an attempt to explain events by positing a hidden coordinating group. Most such theories are wrong, but some turn out to be correct. Others, while wrong, are arrived at through reasonable inference from available evidence. “Conspiracism,” on the other hand, is simply pathological. It is (as Mandel notes) a “worldview,” a standing assumption that conspiracy is the normal mechanism by which history moves, that powerful hidden forces are always the real explanation behind surface events. True conspiracists—like Kent, Carlson, and Owens—don’t investigate incidents and then draw conclusions; they begin with the conclusion and work backward. Conspiracism is, as Pipes explains, “unfalsifiable,” meaning that no amount of evidence can disprove the theory, and, in fact, much evidence is seen merely as an attempt to cover up the conspiracy.
Pipes further writes that modern conspiracism has “two main forms”: antisemitism and fear of secret societies. As I have also suggested before in these pages, Pipes argues that the antisemitic conspiracist worldview has its roots in the Crusades and was exacerbated immeasurably by the Enlightenment and the events surrounding the French Revolution. He concludes that Jews are, in many ways, the perfect conspiracist foil. They occupy a unique position in conspiratorial thinking because they are simultaneously characterizable as weak and powerful, marginal and central, ancient and modern, tribal and cosmopolitan. Jews are, as a result, infinitely adaptable as an explanatory enemy. They can be—and often are—framed to fit almost any grievance.
Additionally, Pipes notes that conspiracism tends to have its most prominent and potent revivals during periods of social and economic upheaval. People are confused, lost, and in desperate need of an excuse, a scapegoat whom they may blame for the chaos and upheaval. This is a critical point. Not only does it provide clues as to when conspiracism might see a revival (as it does now), but it also warns of the damage conspiracism may do. In just the last century, for example, conspiracism directed at the Jews resulted in pogroms throughout Eastern Europe as well as the Holocaust itself.
It is easy, in other words, to dismiss Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens as grifters, cynical media manipulators who use antisemitic conspiracy theories to boost visibility or ratings. It is much more difficult to dismiss people like Joe Kent, people who represent the best of us but who fall prey to a warped and dangerous worldview. Joe Kent was, until recently, in a position of real power in the American government. That he no longer is should be seen as both a blessing and a warning.
Stephen Soukup
Source: https://justthenews.com/world/ukraines-zelenskyy-signs-defense-cooperation-pacts-three-gulf-states
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