On 28 February the U.S. and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran, an ongoing bombing campaign that has already seen U.S. culpability in the killing of at least 175 people, mostly young girls, at the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school.
This action met with initial denials from Donald Trump amidst a shifting set of “reasons” given for its start – and uncharacteristically low levels of public support in America at the start of a war.
Far rightists and fascists quickly staked out positions on the war, a general pattern emerging of the white-ist edge spewing antisemitism, and groups most affiliated with the Trump-aligned MAGA wing supporting the seemingly illegal attack.
Here is a snapshot of American far-right positions on the Iran war during the first few weeks of the conflict.
Tech neo-reactionaries
Alongside long-standing oil interests in the region, a force behind the U.S-British overturn of democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 when he sought to use Iranian oil resources for Iranians, casting Israel as the main actor also downplays the Trump regime’s ties to neo-reactionary-influenced tech billionaires and far right National Conservatives who have provided material and ideological support for the war.
For instance, the Trump regime’s ongoing relationship with advocates of regulation-free “exit cities” such as Palantir’s founder Peter Thiel, whose minions played an outsized roles in the misnamed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’s attack on federal branch agencies in the regime’s quest for an authoritarian “unitary executive” branch under the guidance of Christian nationalist Office of Budget and Management head Russell Vought.
Opposition to democracy
In addition to shaping DOGE, Thiel, who openly declared his opposition to democracy over 25 years ago, and to multiculturalism for even further in the past, donated to Trump’s 2016 campaign, bankrolled now Vice-President J.D. Vance’s initial U.S. Senate bid, and has built relations with the administration through meetings held with Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
Thiel’s Palantir also has contracts with the Israeli and U.S. militaries and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) , the latter including for technologies used to surveil people legally protesting against ICE depredations and Constitutional violations in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp boasts that the company’s AI technologies are giving the U.S. an edge in the war, boasting at the group’s recent conference that “What makes America special right now is our lethal capabilities, our ability to fight war.”
Palantir’s Project Maven uses satellite imagery to provide “real-time AI surveillance capability,” according to CNBC, though Karp refused to say if this is the technology being used in the war.
Colonial hunting ground
Perhaps not incidentally, Trump’s rhetoric around Gaza included echoing “exit city”-style ideas – in this case, a fantasy of turning the devastation of Gaza into building out a resort-style playground for the wealthy in Gaza.
In this direction, the Trump regime has endorsed the similar idea of “freedom cities,” while the Middle East has been a new-style-colonial hunting ground for such projects, the immigrant-labour-rights-suppressing Dubai being listed among the examples by advocates – and a place where Palantir has garnered a contract to help spread AI technologies across its industries.
Meanwhile, neo-reactionary figure Curtis Yarvin posted a link from Jack Schlossberg stating, “I’m calling for REGIME CHANGE IN THE UNITED STATES,” Yarvin responding, “Great minds think alike.”
National Conservatives
The Trump regime has also been allied with National Conservatives, whose major project through the Washington D.C.-based Edmund Burke Foundation is led by Yoram Hazony.
Early on, Hazony was inspired into politics by the far-right bigot Meir Kahane, an advocate of driving Palestinians from “greater Israel” who has also influenced figures such as Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Hazony is also the author of ‘The Virtues of Nationalism’, a screed aiming to revive the reputation of nationalism and casting world politics as a clash between nationalism and liberal capitalist imperialism, leaving no real place for internationally recognized human, labor, women’s, or indigenous rights.
Hazony’s National Conservative brand of nationalism is also rooted in religion, much like the Christian nationalist segment of the Trump coalition, key figures in Netanyahu’s political coalition, and the ruling clerics in Iran.
‘War going well’
In a special Iran War edition of the Edmund Burke Foundation’s NatCon Squad from March 3, host Inez Stepman asserted that the war “seems to be going extremely well for the United States.”
Edmund Burke Foundation Vice President for External Affairs Will Chamberlain lauded the attack as “an incredible achievement by the combined Israeli-American forces,” adding that “it’s pretty clearly justified.”
Speakers at annual Burke-sponsored National Conservative conferences have included former U.S. Senator (R-OH) and now Vice-President J.D. Vance, now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, OMB head Russel Vought, Trump “border czar” Tom Homan, racist Trump advisor Stephen Miller, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant, U.S. Senator Eric Schmidt (R-MO), U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), U.S. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), MAGA figure Steve Bannon, Heritage Foundation head and lead Project 2025 author Kevin Roberts, anti-democratic billionaire Peter Thiel, paleoconservative figure Paul Gottfried, white nationalist and Claremont Institute senior fellow Jeremy Carl, anti-immigrant leader Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, among others.
Christian Nationalists
General Mike Flynn, a former Trump national security advisor and MAGA figure currently pressing a Christian nationalist-fueled agenda to nationalize control of elections in the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, had for some time opposed Trump being pulled into a war with Iran.
When the bombing started, he shifted, declaring, “Payback must be precise, lethal, decisive, and deadly.
“America is engaged; we must now get behind the military, placing their lives on the line. Let God sort out all the other bullshit.”
Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts responded immediately, endorsing the attack and offering cautionary directions:
“Heritage has long recognized that a nuclear-armed Iran is an intolerable threat to the American people. President Trump gave Iran every chance at diplomacy – they refused.
“He’s now applying the hard lessons of Iraq, with measured restraint, to prevent a protracted conflict with Operation Epic Fury: no ground forces, extended clemency for Iranian forces, and support for the Iranian people.”
White Nationalists
On the white nationalist and national socialist end of the spectrum, antisemitism reigned supreme. White nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes (116,722 Telegram subscribers, 1,301,811 X followers), who has never been MAGA despite being portrayed as such by pundits, declared,
“This is a war of aggression for Israel. Americans will die in terrorist attacks and in missile strikes so that Israel can expand its borders in every direction. Trump, Vance, and Rubio sold us out… Trump betrayed MAGA and America First. He has lost his mandate to govern.
“I cannot and will not vote for the GOP unless they put America and Americans first.”
Ties to Trump
Fuentes also linked the war effort to internal anti-Muslim politics. Following a “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City” protest by racist Jake Lang outside New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Gracie Mansion on March 7, Fuentes lashed out at the convicted January 6 insurrectionist as a “Jewish operative”.
Lang’s “entire campaign is a psyop to instigate conflict between Whites and Muslims to gin up support for escalation against Iran,” describing him as “identical to Laura Loomer,” the onetime Fuentes ally and fan of white nationalism who has ties to Trump.
Warren Balogh, a former leader of the now-defunct national socialist National Justice Party, who maintains more than 7,600 subscribers on Telegram, declares that U.S. troops are “being used as human shields by the Jews”.
Those that die do so for “whatever ghastly pedophilia or rape which gave Epstein/Mossad the leverage over him [Trump] to make sure this happened.”
‘Jews just lie’
Balogh continued, “Only a full understanding of the racial, political, historical, cultural, economic and criminal nature of the Jews and their grip on Western governments allows you to comprehend what is happening and why.”
He adds, “The Jews just lie about everything…All you can do is physically deport them from your country, or put them in camps for protective custody where they can’t do harm.”
Nathan Damigo, the onetime head of the defunct white nationalist group, Identity Evropa, urged those in the military who “don’t want to die as a tool of the jews (sic)” to “Approach your unit’s chaplain and tell them you are a conscientious objector and would like them to advocate for you in your unit’s command.”
He also advocates approaching their base’s Judge Advocate General to inform them of your decisions, citing the war being an “international war crime committed by Donald Trump” and giving the reason of “jewish (sic) control over the United States (cite the Epstein files).
Divine mandate
The white nationalist book distribution outfit Antelope Hill Publishing (5,976 subscribers) refers to the war as “Operation Epstein’s Fury,” also declaring Ayatollah Ali Khomeini the “Master of Iran by divine mandate” and that to be “to be Iranian in such times…is to live under the most undisciplined and evil Zionist international system imaginable…
“There is no peace among the nations, only resistance and struggle.”
Racist libertarians
A style of “anti-imperialist” and anti-war argument has also come from the Mises Institute, a leader amongst older-style libertarian organizations, and one that has had its own deep connections with racism.
Among other things, the group maintained long-term relationship and continues to promote the work of racist libertarian Murray Rothbard.
According to Mises, Rothbard was engaged with the group from its 1982 founding, and the “organization became the main vehicle for the promotion of his ideas, and he served as its Academic Vice-President.”
Among other things, Rothbard has advocated ethnic separation and wrote in 1992 that “there was nothing in [neo-Nazi David] Duke’s current program or campaign that could not also be embraced by paleo-conservatives or paleo-libertarians.”
The group offers its own “the Jews did it” version of the war, with Mises Wire writer Connor O’Keefe writing that, “the true motivation for this entire decades-long conflict with Iran is to protect and expand Israeli hegemony over the Middle East.”
Permanent war economy
The article cites several reasons for opposing the war, including the difficulties of regime change, the potential for war-related violence in the U.S. and the political void created should regime change occur.
But the group emphasizes a “big picture” of the costs and consequences of the post-WWII transformation of the U.S. into “a highly-militarized global empire” that used the Federal Reserve Bank to fund a “a permanent wartime economy,” an “extremely expensive and ever-accelerating imperial project [that] is killing our country.”
The Mises writer summarized, “As Pat Buchanan put it, war is ‘how empires perish.’”
Birchers
The conspiracy-mongering John Birch Society, while not staking out a strong public position, offered, “This is a good time to revisit what the Constitution says about who has the power to declare war. Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution contains several clauses making clear that Congress decides to raise armies, and Congress alone gets to…DECLARE WAR.”
Oil and crusaders
If white nationalists quickly jumped to blame Jews for the war, too many beyond the far right were quick to cast the U.S role in the war as simply “fought for Israel”.
While the far-right nationalist Netanyahu government has certainly pressed for such a war, and may have shaped the timing of the attack, such a view overlooks the potential U.S.-centered aims, interests and influences behind such actions, not least of which are the desires for a freer hand to operate in the oil-rich region and the Christian-nationalist-crusader mentality of “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth and others in the regime.
