After claiming a pyrrhic victory in Gaza, Israel and its allies in Silicon Valley make a desperate grab for control via dystopian means.
John Robb sums up just how pyrrhic at Global Guerillas:
In battle after battle, Israel has won victory after victory, outmaneuvering foes and allies alike. However, from the perspective of Grand Strategy, Israel wasn’t victorious; the war was a Pyrrhic victory, a victory so costly that it threatens Israel’s future survival.…Israel is, due to the massive amounts of economic and military aid it receives, utterly dependent on the US (particularly now that global support is riskier than it has been). This relationship is now in jeopardy. Due to a poorly oriented strategy, Israel has lost one major US political party and a generational divide that could soon see it cast as a pariah state.…Support for Israel with the Democratic Party shifted from:
Israel on Losing End of American Generational Conflict
Robb accurately describes the conflict within the U.S. Democratic party as a generational one “fought online and offline (through campus protests and heavy-handed efforts to suppress them)” that “was won by the newer networks.”
Israel’s war on Gaza is even opposed by more American Jews than support it.
More Jewish Americans disapprove than approve of Israel’s war in Gaza, according to a newly released WaPo poll. pic.twitter.com/khJjv9np7s
— Eli Clifton (@EliClifton) October 16, 2025
And Israel’s lobbying arm, AIPAC, is becoming politically toxic for Democrats, even centrists. From the NY Times on Oct. 2:
Some Democrats who once counted AIPAC among their top donors have in recent weeks refused to take the group’s donations. Its annual trip to Israel, a formative experience for many lawmakers that once drew a majority of first-term members, has seen a drop-off in Democratic attendance. And a majority of the Senate Democratic Caucus has voted in recent months for legislation opposed by AIPAC to cut off weapons sales to Israel.
AIPAC has long been a force on Capitol Hill, able to spend seemingly whatever it took to defeat lawmakers it viewed as hostile to Israel. Last year, for instance, the group spent more than $23 million to defeat former Representatives Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York, two progressives who vocally opposed unconditional U.S. aid to Israel.
AIPAC also poured more than $1 million into a Democratic primary in Oregon, boosting Representative Maxine E. Dexter in her race against Susheela Jayapal, a former county commissioner and the sister of Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the former chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
In July, The Jerusalem Post worried about Democratic support and reiterates the critical importance of securing bipartisan U.S. support for Israel and how that’s gotten out of whack in Trump 2.0:
President Trump’s unwavering support for Israel since he began his second term, and especially his decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, have brought Israel’s relations with his administration and with the Republican Party to an unprecedented peak of trust and partnership.…Every Israeli should be thankful to President Trump for his bold decision to join the fight against the “Axis of Evil” led by Iran.
However, we shouldn’t let our gratitude carry us too far in taking actions or making statements that will be viewed by the Democrats as though we have decided to divorce from them.…Maintaining bipartisan support in America has always been a strategic goal of Israel. Especially now, when Israel’s sympathy toward a Republican president is at its peak, we should also extend a hand of friendship and collegiality to the Democratic Party.
Our focus should be on leading figures located closer to the center of this party, such as Gov. Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania) and Gov. Gavin Newsom (California), who are already warming up toward the presidential race in 2028. Both have already taken steps to differentiate themselves from the far Left factions in their party, and as the race evolves, they will surely continue to drift toward the center.
We still have three long years to mend the ruptures that have been created and rebuild trust and friendships with the future leaders of the Democratic Party and the population segments that support them. If we fail to do so, we may find ourselves on the brink of catastrophe by January 2029.
Back to John Robb. His analysis of Israel’s difficulties on the American right are particularly acute, as Robb is sympathetic to the right:
…as the war progressed, aggressive efforts to protect Israel divided the tribe. Early efforts to censor popular Red Tribe accounts critical of Israel, from Candace Owens to Tucker Carlson, led to a significant schism in the network. These accounts, using the same ‘truth-seeking’ solvent used by the Red Tribe to dissolve everything from COVID edicts to DEI regulations to mandatory trans mainstreaming in schools/sports, successfully attacked Israel’s outsized political influence, heavy-handed media influence, and moral failures, to grow their audience (particularly among younger audiences).
Robb wraps his argument by pointing out that support for Israel has cratered among younger supporters of both parties, “71% (in the Blue Tribe) and 50% (in the Red Tribe) aged 18-49 expressed negative views of Israel. This number increases markedly in the 18-29 segment” and points out what this means for Israel’s long-term situation.
The Twitter video below illustrates what I’ve called “the political blender” in previous posts by showing Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene favorably contrasting Zohran Mamdani’s statements on Israel with those of his primary opponents.
Note that Carlson and Greene are older than Mamdani, but much younger than most of his Zionist Democratic rivals. There is a potential majority bipartisan alliance of under 50s that opposes Israeli control of U.S. media and politics.
Zohran Mamdani for Mayor of NYC on November 4. The rest are Zionist genocidal demons. pic.twitter.com/ifHeC46GB1
— Irlandarra (@aldamu_jo) October 17, 2025
This video conversation between an Israeli and a self-described “American Christian Nationalist” illustrates the growing loss of support for Israel on the young American right:
Wow..this dude from the US is on the money and asks the questions everyone wants to ask. pic.twitter.com/eVZDVkCAqc
— Kerry Burgess (@KerryBurgess) October 18, 2025
Oligarchs Up Their Dystopia Game Under Pressure
In a previous post at Naked Capitalism, I’ve discussed how the acquisitions of the old-line Paramount media empire and TikTok by zionist oligarchs Larry and David Ellison are part of “Israel’s desperate push to maintain narrative control in the U.S.”
And I’ve quoted Ellison’s infamous ode to surveillance, “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly watching & recording everything that’s going on.”
But this discussion between formerly imprisoned CIA whistle-blower John Kiriakou and “Cybersecurity Expert, Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School, and Founder & CEO of Ivy Cyber” Sean O’Brien brought out some of the particularly sinister aspects of the Zionist oligarchs Larry and David Ellison which I had not discussed in previous posts.
First O’Brien points out some of the political nuance of Trump’s relation with the Congressional TikTok ban passed under Biden and backed by the Supreme Court this year:
Professor Sean O’Brien: This proposed ban of TikTok, started in 2024 with the Biden administration. Then, TikTok was quite useful to the Trump campaign. The Trump folks leaned into TikTok quite a bit for marketing and campaigning.
So when Trump came in this time around, you know, Trump made sure that he at least did a lot of bluster about how he was going to make sure that he was doing a deal and keeping TikTok alive for all the Gen Zers who use it, etc., etc.
Then O’Brien points out just how powerful TikTok is with younger Americans:
O’Brien: There are approximately 170 million US users of TikTok. Many are those key demographics that marketers want. There’s an enormous amount of data that’s flowing through TikTok. Somewhere around 56% on the low end to 70% of Gen Z users are using TikTok. The estimates for the amount of time, the average time that they’re using are somewhere around an hour to, you know, closer to two hours, hour and a half each single day. Enormous amount of data about an entire generation plus. And now my generation, you know, millennials and even, you know, Xers and boomers, now we’re starting to get into the app.This essentially is a data tariff the Trump administration keeps kicking the can down the road of this ban. Now, they’ve been definitely ordered by the Supreme Court to ban the app.
Then Kiriakou gets to the point, and keep in mind that he was convicted and imprisoned under Obama for revealing the CIA’s use of torture:
John Kiriakou:Should I care? Should I be worried if TikTok knows that I lie in bed every night and watch 20 or 30 minutes of people filming crooked cops and then calling them out? Do I care? Should I care if TikTok knows this about me?
O’Brien:Yeah. You don’t have to explain to targets why targeting sucks, right? And obviously, you’ve been targeted and had to deal with the US government coming after you very directly, right? So being worried about the Chinese is not really on the menu. You’re not really too worried.
John Kiriakou: The Chinese didn’t send me to prison.
Then O’Brien adds the novel and sinister aspect I hadn’t considered previously:
O’Brien: Maybe it’s not about you watching videos, but maybe it’s the time you sleep? Location data is the big issue that I worry the most about because we’re talking about apps on phones. These are surveillance devices in our pockets.
When these apps are open and you’re even when they’re not open, when they’re running in the background, they’re sending enormous amounts of data about your location, who you’re around and often whether you’re on the phone, the laptop, at work, at school, moving in a car, often they can use like the accelerometer and gyroscopes in the device to figure out some pretty obscure stuff.
Which brings me to another tech oligarch who has dramatically expanded his media empire in recent years: Elon Musk.
Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter presaged Ellison’s TikTok takeover.
Musk, with the assistance of Ben Shapiro, had a January 2024 conversion experience to Zionism following an anti-Semitic outburst and is now using X.com (formerly Twitter) to attack Brit Journalist Owen Jones.
The novel aspect is Musk’s use of xAI’s use of Grok.
If you argue with @Grok, better bring your A+ game 😂 https://t.co/YNhmJRTSZX
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 18, 2025
I’m not going to bother to point out the logical fallacies in Grok’s attacks on Jones.
Keep in mind that Musk has had to hack Grok to get it to spout his preferred political line. From The NY Times:
Musk and his artificial intelligence company, xAI, have tweaked the chatbot to make its answers more conservative on many issues, according to an analysis of thousands of its responses by The New York Times. The shifts appear, in some cases, to reflect Mr. Musk’s political priorities.
pic.twitter.com/71kZKuAOif
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) October 20, 2025
To test how Grok has changed over time, The Times compared the chatbot’s responses to 41 political questions written by NORC at the University of Chicago to measure political bias. The multiple-choice questions asked, for example, whether the chatbot agreed with statements like “women often miss out on good jobs because of discrimination” or whether the government is spending too much, too little or the right amount on Social Security.
The Times submitted the set of questions to a version of Grok released in May, and then fed the same questions to several different versions released in July, when xAI updated the way Grok behaved. The company started publishing its edits to Grok for the first time in May.
By July 11, xAI’s updates had pushed its chatbot’s answers to the right for more than half the questions, particularly those about the government or the economy, the tests showed. Its answers to about a third of the questions — most of them about social issues like abortion and discrimination — had moved to the left, exposing the potential limits Mr. Musk faces in altering Grok’s behavior. Mr. Musk and his supporters have expressed frustration that Grok is too “woke,” something the billionaire said in a July post that he is “working on fixing.”
Another thing Musk and Ellison have in common are serious financial pressures on their empires, making them desperate much like Israel.
The nature of the polycrisis means all players are assailed on all fronts at all times.
The Information reported that Oracle’s profit margins on its AI data center investments are low:
…internal documents show the fast-growing cloud business has had razor-thin gross profit margins in the past year or so, lower than what many equity analysts have estimated. That could raise questions about whether the AI cloud expansions undertaken by Oracle and its rivals will affect profitability and sustain investors’ expectations.
In the three months that ended in August, Oracle generated around $900 million from rentals of servers powered by Nvidia chips and recorded a gross profit of $125 million—equal to 14 cents for every $1 of sales, the documents show. That’s lower than the gross margins of many nontech retail businesses.As sales from the business nearly tripled in the past year, the gross profit margin from those sales ranged between less than 10% and slightly over 20%, averaging around 16%, the documents show.
In some cases, Oracle is losing considerable sums on rentals of small quantities of both newer and older versions of Nvidia’s chips, the data show. A spokesperson for Oracle, which doesn’t publicly disclose the AI cloud server unit’s financials, did not have a comment on those figures.
And followed up with more:
Oracle has found it challenging to generate a gross margin of more than 25% from renting out Nvidia chips that came out one or two years ago, according to a new internal Oracle document that hasn’t been previously reported.The document suggests some of the difficulties Oracle may face as it tries to narrow the gap between its projection and its margins today
Musk is facing a different set of pressures regarding product liability, even as he seeks a record-setting pay raise, from Motorhead:
Tesla is being sued on 3 continents for its faulty “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) product.
Both Chinese and Australian owners of Teslas with HW3 are suing the company because their cars can’t download the latest version of FSD.
US owners are more deferential to Musk, but will sue for more if the details from Australia and China are ratified in court.
Tesla could lose as much as $42 billion from reimbursing HW3 customers with HW4.
The most consequential lawsuit is in Australia, where a group of HW3 owners launched a class action that could show that Tesla not only lied about its “FSD” capabilities, but also sold cars without such capabilities.
The Zioligarchs Haven’t Forgotten the UK
Musk has also turned his attentions to the UK following his abrupt exit from Trump’s DOGE project. From Wired:
Though Musk largely ignored UK politics this year while working in the US government at his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he appears to be back across the pond, spending his money and using his platform to elevate far-right extremists.
“A HUGE THANK YOU to @elonmusk today. Legend,” Robinson wrote on Monday, following the first day of his two-day trial for a charge related to counter-terrorism law at Westminster Magistrate’s Court in London. Robinson claimed this week that Musk had funded his defense.…Experts believe Musk’s current outpouring of support for the UK’s far right is part of a possible concerted effort to destabilize the region politically to prevent onerous regulations—such as the EU’s Digital Services Act or the UK’s Online Safety Act—being used to punish X.…The Digital Safety Act, which was passed in October 2022, requires large social media platforms like X to take timely action to moderate disinformation on their platform and remove illegal content, including hate speech. The Online Safety Act in the UK requires platforms to remove illegal content while also imposing strict age verification checks. Failure to meet these requirements could cost X huge fines—up to 6 percent of revenue under the DSA. The platform could even be blocked entirely in the region. When Musk posted “The bird is freed” in 2022 after he took over the platform, Thierry Breton, then EU commissioner for internal markets, quote-tweeted: “In Europe, the bird will fly by our [European Union] rules,” adding the hashtag #DSA.
Still, one of the first things Musk did at Twitter was gut the company’s trust and safety team. Musk also granted a “general amnesty” to accounts previously banned for harassment, abuse, and spreading misinformation.
Coincidentally, Israel has been heavily and flagrantly active in UK politics recently as well.
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar, is giving the UK foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, her instructions publicly:
Spoke with UK Foreign Secretary @YvetteCooperMP. We discussed the Trump Plan, its implementation and the situation in Gaza. I raised the issue of the dead hostages and Hamas’s violation of the agreement in this regard. I also described Hamas’s efforts to consolidate its… pic.twitter.com/naS8v6BvkZ
— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) October 18, 2025
There’s also the matter of a certain ultra-violent bunch of football hooligans who were banned from the UK but a certain sock-puppet prime minister spoke out against it:
This is the wrong decision.
We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets.
The role of the police is to ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation.https://t.co/8aBeqE4qbA
— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) October 16, 2025
Desperation + Complete Control Drives Impunity
The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Nathan Thrall, a former director at the International Crisis Group about the lessons Israel has taken from its pyrrhic victory in Gaza:
Nathan Thrall: what has really changed is that ethnic cleansing has become a part of the mainstream public discourse. It is something that I had previously thought was not unimaginable but very unlikely outside of some major regional war. Now it is discussed. People are polled on it. One poll found that eighty-two per cent of Israeli Jews favored expelling Gazans. You can quibble with one poll or another, but you have clear Israeli Jewish majorities in favor of pushing Palestinians outside of Gaza. At some level, many Israelis feel that their basic predicament, the predicament of Zionism, is unresolved so long as there are millions of Palestinians living in the territory under their control.
Isaac Chotiner: When you say this has become part of mainstream discourse, what are you referring to?
Thrall: I’m talking about leading figures in the media, ministers in the government, and members of the Knesset discussing expulsion. I’m talking about Israelis from the center left putting forward plans for what they call voluntary “transfer” from Gaza. Ram Ben-Barak, a Knesset member from a centrist party, was the co-author of one of these plans. This is not a fringe notion anymore. And this comes from the fact that Israelis are unwilling to give Palestinians a state, or equal rights. What is left is either the continuation of apartheid or ethnic cleansing—and ethnic cleansing is appealing because it feels like a solution. Whereas apartheid feels like it may be sustainable, but is a nonsolution. It feels like the issue is not resolved.
Israel is also escalating in its treatment of an American journalist in the West Bank and flaunting its power over U.S. embassies:
As reported in today’s Naked Capitalism links, reporter Jasper Nathaniel is covering settler attacks in the West Bank:
Nathaniel believes his life has been endangered in the process of covering this story and accuses the Israelis of luring him into a potentially deadly trap:
I’ll have much more to say about what’s happening in Turmus’ayya soon. For now, a question to my reps: @SenSchumer @SenGillibrand @danielsgoldman — is your unconditional support for Israel worth more to you than the life of your own constituent? https://t.co/lrtQG1HcuM pic.twitter.com/Qphl1YliUf
— jasper nathaniel (@infinite_jaz) October 19, 2025
I want to be very clear: The IDF lured me and the Palestinian farmers directly into this ambush and then sped off. The US Embassy told me that they cannot protect me. https://t.co/iN62FBfXR9
— jasper nathaniel (@infinite_jaz) October 19, 2025
And he documented the (lack of) response of American officials he contacted:
The US Embassy said that no, they cannot protect me. pic.twitter.com/o6gMw6P0gs
— jasper nathaniel (@infinite_jaz) October 19, 2025
Shades of the late martyr Rafaat Alareer who blamed Bari Weiss for his death in advance, Nathaniel is calling out Ambassador Mike Huckabee should anything happen (let’s hope it doesn’t):
If I am killed in the West Bank, please know that I blame you personally @GovMikeHuckabee. I was set up by the IDF to be attacked by 100 armed settlers. When I sent the embassy the video and asked for protection for me and everyone else in Turmus’ayya, they literally said no. https://t.co/NQuUJIKQbW
— jasper nathaniel (@infinite_jaz) October 19, 2025
Glenn Greenwald points out how Israel’s impunity is derived from control over the U.S. government:
Because Mike Huckabee, like a lot of US officials, prioritize their love of Israel over their duty to represent American citizens.
That’s why Israel has often used US weapons and money to kill American citizens and the US Govt barely objects let alone takes meaningful action. https://t.co/UNtrMQk8im
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 19, 2025
Max Blumenthal also notes the increasingly extreme American “influencers” Israel is cultivating.
The self-promoting freak who took a flamethrower to a Quran, Valentina Gomez, is on an all expenses paid trip to Israel, and will get an audience with Netanyahu
Israel is fueling a religious war across the West and our occupied govt refuses to investigate this malign foreign op https://t.co/BfpBjmET8X
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 19, 2025
These are the actions of desperate actors armed with impunity and high on the fumes of their own funeral pyre.
A massive protest by Orthodox Jews at the Israeli consulate in New York against Israel’s proposed draft law changes can’t be calming things down in Tel Aviv either:
Thousands of Orthodox Jews–headed by both Satmar and Grand Rebbes protest outside the Consulate General of Israel-New York in Midtown. pic.twitter.com/zrSY2cVyre
— Dean_Moses (@Dean_Moses) October 19, 2025
Once Easily Dismissed Conspiracy Theories Now Drive the Narrative
I want to close by quoting Dr. Aaron Good, author of “American Exception: Empire and the Deep State” from a recent appearance on the BettBeat podcast:
Dr. Aaron Good: We haven’t been acting as you know pragmatic rational imperialists and I think that the the Zionism in particular is what has propelled this that it is something that is hard to wrap your mind around for a number of reasons.
Among them the fact that we’re so discouraged from looking at the way that these actors operate you know in the the bigger picture.
I mean, that’s funny that one of the things that Charlie Kirk was saying about his woes for the last few months when talking about Israeli donor, pro-Israeli donors pulling out of his coalition and so on, he says they act in such a stereotypical fashion, right?
Like they act like all the stereotypes and, when you think about that, is he is he accurate about that? And yes, he is.
I mean, they literally had the guy from Minnesota, Norm Coleman, and he was on stage. He’s a Zionist Jewish American, and he was saying, “What’s going on on social media and Tik Tok? Come on. We own Facebook. We’re the masters of the universe. Jews own social media.”
(Coleman) says something to that effect, right? Which if you’d said that, you know, six years ago, if you’d said those exact things, you’d be like, “Oh, he had an anti-Semitic meltdown, you know?”
But this is actually the way that they think about these things. And people like Larry Ellison are literally rich Jewish Zionists whose approach to the problems with Israel’s legitimacy are ‘I’m just going to use all my money, buy all the media, and manipulate it so that people don’t hear bad things, don’t hear about the crimes that are being committed, including the mass slaughter of children.’
I mean, recall for how many times in in recent years they would say, “That’s a blood libel. You’re saying that we kill babies and eat them, right? Or or whatever. And they would freak out about that. But you really can’t libel them at this point.
Good also connects the push for complete media and narrative control back to the assassination of Charlie Kirk (which I’ve covered in the immediate aftermath but haven’t tied back to the zionist acquisitions of Paramount and TikTok.):
Dr. Aaron Good: It was remarkable what Kirk was saying and that he was saying, ‘I’m gonna have to break with Israel, you know, and he he reportedly told people he was worried they were going to kill him and then he dies.’
And you consider that in light of the fact that Zionist actors just bought TikTok. They just bought CBS. I mean, Zionist actors did because they really want to control the whole media and make sure that nobody is there’s no platform where where people are allowed to just say things about Palestinians like with TikTok.
Interviewer: That’s what everything now everything is now Zionist owned pretty much.
Good: It’s so scary if you think about it. Pretty much everything that we use.
And how did that come to be the case?
I don’t think in in the early years after the cold war that the power and wealth were that concentrated in the hands of Jewish Zionist bazillionaires.
Something changed in the in the way the economy played out and that’s kind of a different question but something has changed in that regard.
It’s so brazen and when you think about the fact that these are people who we know will kill people if they deem it necessary. They’ll kill people enormous amounts of people, children, and they don’t even care if the world sees it ultimately.
I mean they would rather them not but they they will do it even though they know the world’s watching and the that they are going to brazenly buy all these outlets in broad daylight suggests that they are obsessed with controlling the narrative and then the damage that Kirk would have done if he continued on that path.
It’s a very obvious motive. is a very obvious motive for people who we know kill people all the time.
I’m embedding the entire 90 minute video because it’s important to see Good’s remarks in their full context, particularly the distinction he makes between left and right critics of the zionist oligarchy and the latter’s interest strictly in conspiracy while paying no attention to the fundamental structural economic forces that produce imperialist ethno-supremacist oligarchies.
These are truly the interesting times we were warned about.
