March 12: They Shoot Neocons, Don’t They?

German intelligence suspected lab-leak in 2020; U.S. restores aid to Ukraine; U.S. to suspend aid to Egypt?

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The Big Story

In last Friday’s Big Story, we included some speculation about the sudden, seemingly coordinated barrage of garbage on major right-leaning podcasts. To make a long story short, we suspect it’s some sort of op.

To review: Last Thursday, Joe Rogan released an interview with the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll, who waxed grandiloquent on Jeffrey Epstein’s role as a node in a supposed Zionist blackmail ring, and Theo Von (the ninth-most popular podcaster in the United States, according to Spotify), hosted Candace Owens, about whom the less said the better. On Friday, Tucker Carlson (No. 10 in the Spotify charts), fresh off his February interview with a Saudi royal, released an interview with the emir of Qatar—who, according to Carlson, is being unfairly slandered by “neocons” because he opposes their push for a “brand-new war against Iran.” Carlson followed that interview with a post about the alleged massacre of Christians in Syria, which he again blamed on the “neocons”:

A full “fact-check” would take us too far afield, but two points in brief. First, as horrible as the recent bloodletting in Syria was, it pitted government-allied forces (some of them backed by Turkey) against Alawite militias backed by Iran’s IRGC. Christians were not targeted; credible estimates of the number of Christians dead currently range from four to seven, out of hundreds or perhaps as many as a thousand killed, the vast majority of them Alawite or Sunni. The “Christian massacre” narrative appears to have originated with Iranian state media—which was likely eager to destabilize Syria ahead of the just-announced deal integrating the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces into Syria’s state institutions—and was, ironically, amplified online by hysterical Israelis. Second, it was not the “neocons,” but Carlson’s new friends the Qataris, who were the primary external sponsors of the anti-Assad rebellion during Syria’s civil war. Indeed, the Qataris directly financed the “jihadist” groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, now allegedly massacring minorities within the extended fictional universe of Assadist/Iranian propaganda.

Then, on Monday, Carlson released a “debate” with NewsNation anchor Chris Cuomo, which included time stamps for the following subjects: “Joe Rogan Changing the Media Landscape”; “Who Killed JFK?”; and “The Epstein Files.” In the JFK segment, as we noted yesterday, Carlson directly accused Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton of attempting to block the release of the JFK files, an accusation that Cotton described as “completely false.” We have no way of knowing the truth there, but, as you may remember from February, Cotton was subject to a salvo of criticism from MAGA influencers broadly aligned with Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Elon Musk—e.g., Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, and @DataRepublican—over reports that Cotton was unenthusiastic about their preferred pick for the number three role at the Pentagon, Elbridge “Bridge” Colby. Finally, on Tuesday, Carlson released a new interview with Col. Douglas Macgregor, which he teased with the following on X: “The Mexican drug cartels are a far greater threat to the United States than China, Russia or Iran, says Doug Macgregor. They’ve got Javelin missile systems on our border, and American officials on their payroll.”

That’s all necessary background for a Wednesday report in Jewish Insider that Daniel Davis, a senior fellow at the Koch think tank Defense Priorities (which also employed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael DiMino), has been tapped for the position of deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration, one of the top jobs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under DNI Tulsi Gabbard. You can read the linked report above for a rundown of Davis’ specific statements, but it’s mostly the standard set of self-proclaimed “realist” talking points that we saw from DiMino (Iran is not a threat, no military solution in Gaza, Israeli escalation with Hezbollah will go terribly, etc.), plus concern about, uh, Israel’s massacre of “Palestinian Christians.” But the problems go well beyond the Middle East; here’s Davis nodding along as Macgregor explains that China isn’t a real threat to us or Taiwan, and here’s Davis, in an X post this morning, advertising his forthcoming interview with Carlson ally and arch-globalist Jeffrey Sachs, seen earlier this week praising the Belt and Road Initiative during one of his regular appearances on Chinese state television:

Not that Sachs is only a Chinese propagandist. As The Intercept reported in 2021, he also accepted millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates for his United Nations-affiliated nonprofit to produce its “happiness index,” which, not coincidentally, regularly ranked the UAE as “happier” than nations in the West.

In other words, we’re seeing a whole lot of pro-China and pro-Iran messaging, paired with conspiracy theorizing about Israel, in a short space of time, all coordinated with a push to place people aligned with this messaging in the national security bureaucracy. We don’t know exactly who is pulling the strings or to what end, but to borrow a phrase from Tucker: “Can this be an accident? You wonder.”

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The Rest

→The German foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), concluded in early 2020 that there was an 80%-95% chance that the COVID-19 virus leaked from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), but it hid this conclusion from the public, according to reports in the German press. A recent joint investigation from Süddeutsche Zeitung and Zeit revealed that researchers in a covert BND program known as Saaremaa reached this conclusion largely from open-source analysis early in the pandemic, noting that WIV was engaged in risky “gain-of-function” research on coronaviruses and that the institute had a documented history of safety lapses. According to the report, Bruno Kahl, then the head of the BND, personally informed Angela Merkel’s office of his agency’s findings, but the chancellery decided to keep the assessment secret for unknown reasons. When Olaf Scholz replaced Merkel as chancellor in 2021, the BND again shared the assessment with the new government, which waited until December 2024 to finally arrange for a commission of “external experts” to review the BND’s findings.

→The United States announced on Tuesday that it was restoring military aid and intelligence sharing to Ukraine immediately following the announcement that Kyiv had agreed to a 30-day cease-fire. A joint U.S.-Ukrainian statement released after Tuesday’s conference in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, announced that Ukraine had accepted a U.S. proposal for an “immediate, interim 30-day ceasefire,” which will be “subject to acceptance and concurrent implementation by the Russian Federation.” “The United States will immediately lift the pause on intelligence sharing and resume security assistance to Ukraine,” the statement went on to say.

→On the other hand, the Qatari news site Al-Araby Al-Jadid reports that the United States has notified Egypt that it will be reducing military aid to Cairo beginning next year. Citing conversations with an unnamed Egyptian diplomat in Washington, the report states (Google translated from Arabic) that “the U.S. administration recently informed Cairo of its decision to reduce military aid to the Egyptian army” but that the precise size of the cut had not yet been determined. The United States currently provides Egypt with about $1.3 billion annually in military aid, and Trump has suggested that he could use the aid as leverage to force Egypt and other Arab countries to cooperate with his relocation plan for Gaza. While several other websites have picked up on the Al-Araby report, we have not yet seen independent confirmation of the proposed aid cut, nor any official statements from the United States or Egypt. So think of this one as “big, if true.”

→The U.S. Department of Education announced on Tuesday that it was firing 1,315 workers, in what Education Secretary Linda McMahon said was the first step toward closing the department altogether. As The New York Times notes, the department began the year with a little more than 4,000 employees but is now operating with about half that number; in addition to the 1,315 fired yesterday, 572 employees have accepted buyouts, and the department fired 63 probationary workers in February. In a Tuesday night interview with Fox’s Laura Ingraham, McMahon said these firings were a “first step” toward eliminating “bureaucratic bloat,” but that Trump’s directive to her was to eventually “shut down the Department of Education.” According to a “senior official” quoted in The Hill, the cuts “will not impact Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms, student aid, operations for students with disabilities, civil rights investigations and formula funding to states.”

→Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student protest leader now being subject to deportation proceedings by the Trump administration, formerly worked for the British government’s “flagship soft power policy” program and was “cleared to work on sensitive issues,” Middle East Eye reports. Khalil, according to the report, worked in the Syria office of the British Embassy in Beirut from 2018 to 2022 as a manager of the Syria Chevening Program, which, according to former British diplomat Andrew Waller, “brings the brightest students from around the world to U.K. universities.” Khalil also worked as a “local staff political officer” for the embassy. “He went through a vetting process to get the job and was cleared to work on sensitive issues for the British government,” Waller told Middle East Eye.

→Which brings us to our Post of the Day:

Tough crowd!

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