🌊 The Coming MAGA War

How Joe Rogan added kindling to a fire that could burn down the entire MAGA project.

April 03, 2025

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Since October 7th, 2023, a chasm has emerged among conservatives. While the majority of Republican politicians have sided with Israel, many of the most prominent voices in conservative media – particularly those with young audiences – have become staunchly anti-Israel, verging on, and perhaps crossing into, anti-Semitism in some cases. This newsletter will detail the split and explore how the issue could split the MAGA movement into two. 

By Max Towey

Two years ago, nobody had heard of Joe Rogan’s recent podcast guest, Ian Carroll. He was an unknown, a self-proclaimed investigative journalist. His appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience hardly illuminated his background, though it removed all doubt about this: Ian Carroll does not like Israel.

With 1.2M followers on X, Ian Carroll’s posts regularly get tens of millions of views. His feed consists mainly of theories about Israel’s control of various systems in the world. Last September, he declared, “Israel did 9/11.” This month, he accused Israel of orchestrating Jeff Epstein’s crimes: “The Epstein network was the most successful act of war ever perpetrated against America. And it was perpetrated by our ‘greatest ally.’” 

It was this conspiracy that he detailed at great length during his 2-hour, 41-minute interview on The Joe Rogan Experience, the Mount Olympus of the media world. Rogan let Carroll ramble and hardly pushed back on him, which – to be fair – is typical of Rogan: He treats pro-Israel guests the same. His platforming of Carroll nevertheless raised eyebrows, but it wasn’t until a week later that questions began to mount.

That’s when Rogan hosted Darryl Cooper, a self-proclaimed historian who catapulted to fame with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show six months prior. Tucker introduced him as the “best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” During their interview, Cooper – whose background is as mysterious as Carroll’s – declared that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War.” Cooper’s no stranger to controversy: Last summer, he tweeted a photo of the Nazi invasion of Paris alongside the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics and said that the former was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the latter. 

In his Rogan interview, Cooper made more such claims. Among them was this: “Hitler wasn’t going around and giving antisemitic addresses in public.” Of course, this was not true: In 1939, Hitler addressed the entire Reichstag – the German Empire’s Congress equivalent – and advocated for the “annihilation of the Jewish race.” 

Rogan feeding Carroll and Cooper to his audience of 35M (20M subscribers on YouTube and 15M followers on Spotify) in the span of eight days raised questions. Was Rogan sending a signal to the administration by consecutively platforming two viciously anti-Israel voices with mysterious credentials and backstories? Was he joining the ranks of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, who’ve transformed into staunch Israel critics – and two of the biggest voices in media – over the last two years? Is there a growing rift in the MAGA world between Trump’s team and the podcast sphere? Will there be war?

If there will be, we saw the start of it this month.

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Editor’s Note

Thanks for reading, all. We hope you enjoyed today’s deep-dive. Send us your thoughts! What do you make of this MAGA split? Are the divisions deep enough to topple the MAGA movement? We’d love to hear from you.

In case you missed our latest stories, here they are: 

Thanks to all who replied to yesterday’s story on the employment prospects for computer programming. We’re sharing a few of the responses below.

Benjamin from Idaho wrote:

I'm a software engineer at a relatively large company. Not a single engineer where I work is worried about AI replacing our jobs. Writing code is just one of many tasks we do, which also include reviewing code,  architecture design, fixing bugs, running build pipelines, etc. Even when it comes to writing code itself, AI can be hilariously bad. Sure, you can use it somewhat heavily to write a small program like the Roca app, but when it comes to maintaining that program long-term, or working on a codebase with millions of lines of code, AI simply doesn't have the context to do a software engineer's job. AI is simply another tool, not a replacement.

Ian agrees:

I myself am a programmer. Speaking from experience, AI is an extremely powerful tool. There are cases where it has helped me write code (especially test suites) in a fraction of the time it would normally take. Other times it can generally help answer questions I have about other people’s code. And they’re built into the development environments we use regularly. However, I also know that if you don’t know how to use AI, it’s basically useless. I have seen people make code change requests that don’t work, and the engineer who “wrote” it doesn’t know why because they primarily used AI.

You cannot (especially currently) full scale replace a single engineer with a single “AI Coder.” AI doesn’t think, it just guesses what the next best word/character is based on probabilities. Most likely the layoffs are in response to over-hiring at tech companies, return to work policies, and an uncertain economy.

But Abbey from Raleigh offers a different view:

I'd like to explain this from a younger perspective. I am a student in my last years of my Mechanical Engineering degree but several of my friends opted to go into Computer Science. Most of those who have graduated have yet to join the work force because no company will take an entry level software developer. Many of my fellow students colleagues have returned to school for a master's in Data Science or have scrapped their degree all together. They all agree that they were basically promised a job out of college but now that they are out of college no one wants them. It is hard to watch people who sunk money and worked hard in one of the toughest engineering schools in the country struggle.

That’s it for today. See you tomorrow.

–Max and Max