When enemies unite, it is worth asking what they are actually serving together — because the Enemy of your soul, whatever else he may be, is not stupid enough to war against himself.
In the days following the strikes on Iran, something remarkable happened across social media. Remarkable not for its volume — political noise is constant — but for its geometry. Tucker Carlson and Ilhan Omar. Nick Fuentes and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Candace Owens posting rhetoric that landed in the same moral universe as the progressive left she has spent years opposing. Dan Bilzerian — a man who built his brand on aggressive American machismo — publishing takes that could have been written by an activist in a university seminar.
They were not coordinating.
They were mirroring.
And while they performed their outrage for their respective audiences, something else was happening in the streets of Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz. Iranians — the actual people living under the regime that had just been struck — were reportedly celebrating. Chanting. Not the names their supposed Western advocates expected. The people with the most skin in the game were not performing the script that comfortable American commentators had written on their behalf.
That disconnect deserves serious attention. Because it tells us something not just about politics, but about the nature of the spirit driving this strange convergence.
Political scientists have long described the "horseshoe theory" — the observation that the extreme left and extreme right, despite their stated mutual contempt, bend toward each other in posture, method, and conclusion. The shape of the ideological spectrum is not a straight line. At the extremes, it curves.
What we are watching in real time is not an abstract theory. It is a live demonstration. The Iran strikes created a pressure point that revealed who people actually are beneath their stated ideologies. A significant coalition of voices, operating under wildly different flags, had arrived at the same destination by different roads.
The destination: Israel as singular villain. America as hapless puppet. The strikes as the product of manipulation rather than sovereign strategy.
Nick Fuentes declared Trump a warmonger now controlled by Israel. This narrative has gained traction because it feeds a mythology that transcends normal political categories: the hidden hand, the puppet master, the whisper behind American foreign policy. Fuentes uses explicitly nationalist language. Omar uses the language of anti-colonialism. Owens uses America-first skepticism. The vocabulary is entirely different. The underlying structural claim is identical.
They disagree on everything — except the claim of disproportionate, shadowy influence. That is not ideological diversity. That is structural convergence.
The far left has its liturgy of condemnation: settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, imperial outpost. Israel is cast as the distilled symbol of Western oppression — the ultimate oppressor state in the hierarchy of guilt. The far right has its own liturgy: globalist puppet master, foreign policy manipulator, media controller, financial influence machine. Israel becomes the hidden hand behind Western decline.
Listen carefully and the convergence becomes audible beneath the different vocabularies.
"Trump is a warmonger now — controlled by Israel. This is not America First. This is Israel First." — Widely circulated commentary, March 2026
"The U.S. Congress has become a rubber stamp for Israeli military objectives. American foreign policy is no longer our own." — Progressive commentary, same news cycle
Posts framing the strikes as proof of American subservience — implying Israel's interests are categorically and permanently opposed to American ones, with no nuance admitted.
Framing the strikes as war crimes and imperial aggression, with Israel cast as the initiating malevolent force regardless of the documented threat record of the Iranian regime.
"Devastating attack on the Iranian people. Warmongering. Innocent civilians bear the cost of American and Israeli aggression." — Composite of widely shared commentary, both extremes
Celebrations in multiple cities. Chants directed at the regime, not the strikes. Iranians distinguishing — as they have repeatedly — between the Islamic Republic and themselves as a people.
What we are watching deserves a name. The "woke right" is not a perfect term, but it captures something real: a faction of ostensibly conservative commentators who have adopted the structural logic of the progressive left — the insistence on a single axis of oppression, the reduction of complex geopolitics to moral melodrama, the reflexive suspicion of Western action — but applied it through a nationalist mythology rather than a liberationist one.
The woke left filters every conflict through the oppressor/oppressed hierarchy, with Israel permanently assigned to the oppressor position regardless of context or evidence. The woke right filters every conflict through the nationalist purity/globalist betrayal hierarchy, with Israel permanently assigned to the manipulator position regardless of context or evidence. Both are pre-loaded conclusions dressed as analysis. Both are impervious to facts that complicate the narrative.
And both, when the pressure point arrives, find themselves standing in the same place, speaking the same essential sentence in different dialects.
History has seen this before. In Weimar Germany, communists accused Jews of embodying exploitative capitalism. Nationalists accused Jews of embodying revolutionary Bolshevism. Contradictory accusations. Shared target. Jews were framed simultaneously as capitalist and communist, as elite and subversive, as weak and omnipotent. The logical contradiction did not matter. The utility did.
This is not to say that everyone making these arguments today is a fascist, or that policy criticism of Israel is antisemitic, or that normal political disagreement about foreign policy crosses any serious line. It does not — and conflating legitimate dissent with this pattern weakens rather than strengthens the argument.
What crosses the threshold is the shift from policy criticism to ontological condemnation. From "I question this action" to "this state is inherently illegitimate." That shift is not analysis. It is mythology.
Here is a simple test. How much coverage have you seen, from these same voices, about Iranian Christians being executed? About the Baha'i community facing systematic persecution? About the women imprisoned, beaten, and killed for removing their hijabs? About protesters who have simply disappeared?
The silence is instructive. A framework that generates enormous moral energy around one set of victims and near-total silence around another is not a consistent moral framework. It is a motivated one. The outrage is not produced by suffering. It is produced by the identity of the actor producing the suffering. That is a theological problem, not merely a political one.
The answer to bad mythology is not no analysis. It is better analysis. Honest engagement with geopolitical complexity is not weakness — it is the only thing that can actually serve the people these voices claim to care about.
Honest analysis acknowledges that military action has costs, and those costs fall on real human beings. It also acknowledges that inaction has costs, and those costs also fall on real human beings — including the Iranian people who have lived under a regime that has executed its own citizens for practicing their faith and exported violence across the region for decades. Honest analysis listens to what Iranians themselves say about their liberation, rather than deciding for them what it should look like.
It requires resisting the spirit that organizes strange coalitions around a shared obsession. The horseshoe is real. The convergence is visible.
And the Devil, whatever else we believe about him, does not war against himself. When enemies find themselves shoulder to shoulder, it is always worth asking what kingdom they are serving together — and whether that kingdom is the one they think it is.
"Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand."
Matthew 12:25 · The Lord Jesus Christ