Joe Kent Didn’t Resign. He Was Undone By His Own Anti-Zionist Rot
by Bob Goldberg in The New Zionist Times, March 17th
Media outlets are framing Joe Kent’s resignation as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center because of principled opposition to the Trump Administration’s war on Iran. Principles had nothing to do with it.
He left (more likely shoved out), accusing the administration of entering war with Iran because of “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” (that’s AIPAC in case you missed the subtlety), while insisting Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. There, in one tidy little package, was the full intellectual collapse of a part of the American right: not realism, not prudence, not restraint, but the old reflex that when events become complicated, blame the Jews.
This is how anti-interventionism curdles into something rancid. It begins with a sensible warning against quagmires and crusades. It ends with the suggestion that America has no enemies in the Middle East worth worrying about, only allies worth resenting. Iran’s aggression? Secondary. Its terror proxies? Background noise. Its imperial ambitions? Mere detail. The real culprit, we are told, is Israel, with its magical ability to make American officials forget where America’s interests lie.
That is not foreign-policy realism. It is your run-of-the-mill Blood Libel.
Kent matters because he is not your average groyper. He occupied one of the government’s top counterterrorism posts. Kent was supposed to be the serious face of “America First” discipline. Instead, on his way out the door, he sounded like a man who had absorbed too much of the Carlson catechism: every Middle East crisis is a trap, every ally a burden, every Jewish concern a manipulation.
And one cannot ignore the possibility that Kent’s departure was less an act of a lonely conscience than a politically convenient separation. Officially, he resigned over the war in Iran. Unofficially, he was not just an ally of Tucker Carlson; he was, in no small measure, a Carlson creation.
A quick public check turns up at least six Carlson appearances that are easy to verify in the public record—August 26, 2021; September 8, 2021; December 2, 2021; January 21, 2022; June 9, 2022; and April 8, 2023—and local coverage at the time described those bookings more broadly as “frequent appearances” that helped elevate Kent’s campaign.
Carlson did not treat Kent as just another guest. He showcased him as an “America First” candidate, giving him repeated prime-time exposure while Kent was running for Congress. Tucker praised his analysis so effusively that he told him, “the fact that you’re not in Congress tells you a lot about the forces you’re up against,” before wishing him “godspeed.” He later publicly grouped Kent among the candidates he was “standing behind.” (ManoWhisper)
Nor did it help Kent that he was so closely identified with Tucker Carlson, just as Carlson’s increasingly deferential posture toward Iran was coming under growing scrutiny.
Joe Kent and his J’Accuse Resignation Letter
And if that wasn't enough, Candace Owens cast Kent as the man bold enough to track down how (as Owens alleges) the Trump Family and the Mossad assassinated Charlie Kirk. Public reporting says Kent reviewed FBI files to examine possible foreign involvement, alarming FBI leadership, who feared interference with the criminal case against the accused shooter. That was enough to make him a hero to the conspiratorial right, which requires very little evidence and thrives on dark insinuation.
That is the pattern now. Every institution that resists these fantasies is corrupt. Every investigation that refuses to validate them is a cover-up. Every refusal to blame Israel is proof that Israel is to blame. This is not skepticism. It is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion-induced paranoia with a geopolitical vocabulary.
