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Philip Roth’s latest biographer wants Jews to read him again — without the guilt
It was a scandal right out of a Philip Roth novel: Days after the publication in 2021 of his long-awaited biography of Roth, author Blake Bailey was credibly accused of sexual misconduct. The publisher pulled the book, pulping all the copies.
Even before the uproar, many younger readers lumped Roth among the “great white males” of mid-20th-century literature, and throughout his career Roth was dogged by accusations that he was a misogynist, both in his fiction and his private life. The scandal seemed to confirm these accusations by proxy, conflating the author and his biographer.
Stanford historian Steven J. Zipperstein had already begun his own biography of Roth before the author died in 2018 and while Bailey’s book was under contract. “Philip Roth: Stung by Life,” part of Yale University Press’s “Jewish Lives” series, isn’t meant as a corrective to Bailey’s book or the fallout. But it does argue why Roth remains relevant and vital, especially to current Jewish discourse.
Writes Zipperstein: “He would probe nearly every aspect of contemporary Jewish life: the passions of Jewish childhood, the pleasures and anguish of postwar Jewish suburbia, Israel, diaspora, the Holocaust, circumcision, the interplay between the nice Jewish boy and the turbulent one deep inside.”
Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, whose previous books include “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History.” He first met Roth when he invited the author to speak to his colleagues and graduate students at Stanford. Roth showed up with a blonde woman in a silky blouse — not his wife at the time, actress Claire Bloom — and proceeded to spend the session flirting with her. His students were not amused.
They met again over the years under less antic circumstances and Roth gave his blessing to Zipperstein’s project. “We carried on a series of conversations, and he introduced me to his loyal entourage, and made it clear to them that they could share things with me that they otherwise might not have shared,” Zipperstein told me.
In our conversation, held over Zoom this week, Zipperstein and I spoke about how Roth scandalized the Jewish world with early works like “Goodbye, Columbus” and “Portnoy’s Complaint,” how he both resented and cherished his Jewish readers, and why so much of his prodigious output still holds up.
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
How did you come to write a biography of Philip Roth? He already had an authorized biographer, so what did you hope to bring to your book?
I’d met Roth years ago at Stanford — there’s a brief mention of it in the book. After I finished “Pogrom” there was this long pause before it came out [in 2018], and I started wondering what I might do next. I’d helped found the “Jewish Lives” series, and Roth seemed a pretty good fit.
But honestly, he’d been in my head long before that. I first read him in Partisan Review — a chapter from “Portnoy’s Complaint” called “Whacking Off” — just before I went off to the Chicago yeshiva. I was raised in an Orthodox family, wrestling with whether I could stay in that world. And Roth’s voice — it stuck with me. Not because of the masturbation, but because Portnoy has all this freedom and he’s miserable. That hit home. It told me that leaving the world I was raised in wasn’t going to be simple, and that freedom wouldn’t necessarily make me happy. That realization — about freedom and its discontents — has stayed with me my whole life as a historian.
Then, years later, I came across the recording of the Yeshiva University event in 1962 — the one Roth described as a kind of Spinoza-like excommunication. The tape told a completely different story. That was the moment I thought: there’s a book here, about the distance between Roth’s memory and reality.
Steven J. Zipperstein said his training as a historian helped him separate truth from fiction in writing his biography of Roth. (Yale University Press)
Let’s talk about that Yeshiva University event. Roth at the time was the young author of “Goodbye, Columbus,” which includes stories that some rabbis and others in the Jewish community said portrayed Jews in a negative light. Roth was invited to sit on a panel with Ralph Ellison and an Italian-American author to talk about “minority writers,” and Roth would later insist that the audience “hated” him. What did you find when you listened to the recording?
Well, Roth remembered it as this traumatic scene — the audience attacking him, shouting him down. But on the tape, the audience loves him! They’re laughing, applauding. The only confrontation comes from a few guys who come up to the stage afterward to argue.
What interested me wasn’t just that Roth misremembered it — it’s how he misremembered it. It tells you something about how he experienced the world. The people who criticize him are the ones who loom largest. That was revealing to me, both as a biographer and as someone who’s taught for decades. The people who dislike you — they’re the ones you remember.
But there is an almost literary bookend to that event: In 2014, the Jewish Theological Seminary awarded Roth an honorary doctorate. How did he react to that?
He was stunned! It was a casual decision by the institution, but a momentous decision as Philip saw it. He said in his speech, “This is the first time I’ve been applauded by Jews since my bar mitzvah.” He meant it sincerely.
Roth wasn’t a historian; he was a novelist. He remembered as he felt, not as it happened. My job was to separate those two things, not to punish him for it, but to understand the gap.
Roth once said, “The epithet ‘American Jewish writer’ has no meaning for me. If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.” As someone who insisted that he was first and foremost an American writer, as opposed to a Jewish writer, would he have liked being part of the *Jewish Lives” series?
Oh, I think so. He thought it was fair. We never talked about it directly, but I suspect he would’ve liked the company — King David, Solomon, Freud, Einstein.
There’s this anxiety about calling writers like Roth or [Saul] Bellow or [Bernard] Malamud “Jewish writers,” as though that makes them smaller. No one says Chekhov isn’t Russian enough. But say “Jewish writer” and people start to hedge.
I once said an American Jewish writer is someone who insists he’s not an American Jewish writer. Roth fit that perfectly.
There was a time when the Jewish experience was seen as a lens through which to understand modern life. Jews were central, not peripheral. Roth captured that paradox: Jews as both insiders and outsiders, too white and not white enough, privileged yet insecure. That ambivalence is his great theme.
“Portnoy’s Complaint” came out in 1969 and both delighted and scandalized readers with its descriptions of the narrator’s sexual adventures and fraught relationship with his Jewish parents. The reaction was extraordinary. I think it may be hard in our current era to imagine a literary novel selling so many copies and becoming such a part of the pop culture landscape.
[Critic] Adam Kirsch said it best — it was one of the last times a novel could set off the kind of cultural frenzy that today only Taylor Swift can provoke. The timing was perfect: Censorship had loosened, the sexual revolution was on, and “Portnoy” hit a nerve.
Roth claimed afterward that he didn’t want that kind of fame again. But of course he missed it. He hoped “Sabbath’s Theater” [his 1995 novel] would do it again. He knew it wouldn’t. He was mourning the loss of a serious readership, even as he kept writing as if it still existed.
Roth’s reputation seems tied up in how he portrayed women in his fiction and how he treated women in his personal life. You describe his serial relationships with many, many women, which often ended as soon as the sexual excitement wore off. At the same time, many of these same women remained loyal, and many gathered at his bedside as he lay dying, and some have written admiring memoirs. How did you approach that paradox?
I tried to be honest without being prurient. Roth decided very early that he was going to be a great writer — perhaps as great as Herman Melville or Kafka — and he came to conclude that there’s not a whole lot of discretionary time for relationships.
He’d fall in love hard, live with someone for two or three years, then move on. I didn’t moralize about it. Many of those women remained close to him. Others didn’t. He was loyal in his own way.
And his relationships with men, except for one significant detail, are not vastly dissimilar from those that he has with women. They’re utilitarian. Incredibly loyal friends hang on, because they’re so enamored by Roth and they feel deeply protective of Roth.
He also listened more intently than anyone I’ve ever met — though you were never sure whether it was you he was listening to, or the story he was going to write next.
Philip Roth receives an honorary doctorate at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s commencement in New York on May 22, 2014. (Ellen Dubin Photography)
Tell me about your book’s subtitle, “Stung By Life.”
It’s a phrase I found in a eulogy Roth wrote for his friend Richard Stern. He said Stern was “stung by life,” and I thought, that’s Roth.
He was perpetually shocked by existence — by what people do, by what happens to them, by what happens to him. Zuckerman, his alter ego, is defined by ambivalence — about women, about Jewishness, about America. Roth described everything well, but ambivalence best of all.
You’ve written books of history, and biographies of other Jewish literary figures, including the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am and Isaac Rosenfield, the American-Jewish writer who died in 1956 when he was only 38. What challenges did you find writing about a figure like Roth, who was still alive when you began work on the book, and what do you think you brought to it that maybe others couldn’t?
I’ve written and taught biography for years. Roth spent his entire life writing about himself, but not telling the truth about himself. That puzzle fascinated me.
Some Jewish figures — Isaiah Berlin, for example — chose biographers who didn’t quite understand the Jewish stuff. I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to understand him from the inside out.
I loved his work before I started. I love it even more now. Words were my way out of a world where answers were predetermined by Maimonides. Roth fought that battle too —against dogma, against certainty, through language.
Sometimes I think Roth’s gifts as a comedian have overshadowed other qualities of his work — for example, everyone who read “Portnoy” remembers the slapstick about masturbation, but I love his lyrical descriptions of his old Weequahic neighborhood in Newark and heading down to the park to watch “the men” play softball. Was he worried that he’d be shelved in the “humor” section of the bookstore?
He liked to say he was a comic writer in the tradition of Kafka and [Heinrich] Heine — not Shecky Greene, [the Catskills comedian].
But yes, he could be incredibly funny. In many ways, “The Ghost Writer” [1979], as beautiful and lyrical as it is, is all written in order for Philip to have that punchline about Anne Frank.
The book’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer like the young Roth, imagines that Anne has survived and that he can heal a rift with his family by bringing her home as his fianceé.
“Nathan, is she Jewish?” “Yes, she is!” “But who is she?” “Anne Frank.” In many ways, those were the lines that begat that brilliant book.
I also feel people overlook how much he wrestles with the Jewish condition — and not just Jewish mother jokes or nostalgia for the old Weequahic neighborhood. In books like “The Counterlife” and “Operation Shylock” Roth was writing about Zionism, assimilation, extremism and the tension between Israel and the diaspora when few other serious novelists were. Does he deserve to be more widely read as part of the very current Jewish debate over these topics?
Yes. I think in sort of more conservative, traditional Jewish quarters, he ended up being seen as an enemy of the Jews. But thinking about your question, it’s hard to think of any piece of extraordinary fiction that’s really made its way into the Jewish communal debate.
But Roth actually entered emphatically into the Jewish conversation. At one point in the late 1980s, Roth gives an interview to his friend Asher Milbauer. And he admits that the Jewish readership is his primary readership. He says writing as an American Jew is akin to writing for a small country where culture is paramount. As for other readers, he said, ”I have virtually no sense of my impact on the general audience.”
How would you describe that impact, and why should he still be read and admired?
Because he closes his eyes to nothing. He looks straight at the things we’d rather look away from — sex, aging, death, hypocrisy, joy. He writes about the child of good parents, the lover, the son, the dying man — all the selves we carry.
He shows how truth and illusion coexist, how clarity is always fragile. And he does it with language that’s alive. That’s what endures.
Does he still feel relevant to you?
Completely. Even among his contemporaries — [John] Updike, Bellow — Roth feels less dated. Maybe that’s because he was never comfortable. He kept interrogating everything, including himself.
That’s why he’s still with us. The rest of us are still trying to catch up.
Learn about Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” and other classics in a new course from My Jewish Learning: “Funny Story! The Best Jewish Humor Books of the Past 75 Years.” Taught by Andrew Silow-Carroll, the four-session course starts on Monday, Oct. 27 at 6 p.m. ET. Register here.
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IDF Warns of Growing West Bank Threat, Presence of Iranian Weapons Amid Major Counterterror Operations
Israeli soldiers walk during an operation in Tubas, in the West Bank, Nov. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is sounding the alarm over a growing terrorist threat from the West Bank, warning that Iranian-backed arms smuggling could spark an Oct. 7-style attack.
Concerns over the presence of significant Iranian-supplied firepower in the hands of Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank has prompted Israeli intelligence and security forces to intensify operations across the territory.
According to a new report from Israel’s Channel 14, a senior IDF official warned that the West Bank presents a growing threat to Israeli communities, with the potential to spark an attack similar to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“We have to start from the clear fact that weapons in Judea and Samaria [Israel’s preferred name for the West Bank] could upset the current stalemate,” the IDF official told Channel 14.
However, while the military has prioritized preparing for large-scale scenarios, such as an Oct. 7-style attack, the senior IDF official also warned that more attention needs to be paid to “smaller” threats — like a situation in which a small group of terrorists infiltrates a settlement home and kills an entire family — an event he described as “highly probable.”
“We shouldn’t see this scenario only as an attack on dozens of communities. A single deadly strike is enough — we must also prepare for lethal, localized attacks,” the IDF official said. “Our responsibility is to protect both individuals and the broader community.”
He warned that terrorists in the West Bank are believed to possess arms capable of breaking Israeli defenses, including what he called “standard Iranian weapons.” However, he also noted that security forces are actively working to intercept these arms and dismantle any terrorist cell in the area.
On Tuesday, the IDF uncovered a major terrorist infrastructure in the Tulkarem area in the northern West Bank, including three rockets at various stages of assembly, explosive devices, operational equipment, and materials for making bombs.
According to Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Israeli officials should be closely monitoring the West Bank as the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas regroups and rearms in the Gaza Strip after two years of war.
“Hamas and its allied factions understand that igniting violence in the territory would divert Israel’s attention during a critical time of rebuilding the group’s infrastructure in Gaza,” Truzman said last month.
“The release of convicted terrorists to the West Bank under the ceasefire agreement may be a factor in the resurgence of organized violence in the territory,” he continued.
At the time, the IDF completed a three-day, multi-branch military exercise in the West Bank called “Lion’s Roar,” designed to enhance operational coordination and joint capabilities in the region, with scenarios shaped by lessons learned from the Oct. 7 atrocities.
More than 180 Israeli Air Force aircraft supported ground troops during training for over 40 scenarios, including attacks on outposts, simultaneous terrorist infiltrations into multiple communities, urban combat, mass-casualty rescue and medical evacuation, multi-casualty response, intelligence integration, and real-time command and control.
“We have many lessons to implement from this exercise and from Oct. 7,” the IDF spokesperson said in a statement at the time.
“The IDF will continue to conduct regular exercises to ensure high readiness, strengthen cooperation among all troops, and maintain the security of residents in the area and of all Israeli civilians,” the statement read.
According to a survey released earlier this year by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 70 percent of all respondents — and 81 percent of Jewish respondents — expressed fear of an Oct. 7-style attack coming from the West Bank. In contrast, 53 percent of Arab respondents said they were not worried about such an attack.
“The stipulations of the ceasefire in Gaza, mainly the requirement for Hamas to fully disarm in future phases, should also be applied to the terrorist organization’s operatives in the West Bank,” Aaron Goren, research analyst at FDD, said at the time.
“Otherwise, Israel may face a threat from Hamas, which, unlike in Gaza, where it is relatively contained, is dispersed amongst Israeli communities in the West Bank,” he continued.
Earlier this year, the IDF arrested a Hamas and Fatah terror cell from Ramallah that was planning a bombing attack on a bus in Jerusalem, with investigators saying the group intended to remotely detonate an explosive device smuggled into Israel.
As of February, Israeli security forces had foiled nearly 1,000 terrorist plots over the past year, with senior military officials increasingly worried that the volatile situation in the West Bank could lead to a large-scale attack similar to the Oct. 7 onslaught against Israeli settlements and communities near the security barrier.
In response to these concerns, the IDF has established a special command to address potential threats in the West Bank and launched a nearly unprecedented counterterror operation in the northern part of the territory.
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Brad Lander launches run for Congress against pro-Israel Jewish incumbent Dan Goldman
(JTA) — It’s official: Brad Lander is running for Congress — and he says he won’t be “doing AIPAC’s bidding” in representing his district if he’s elected.
The line from Lander’s campaign launch video was a dig at Rep. Dan Goldman, who has represented the 10th Congressional District since 2023, that underscores the degree to which Israel is likely to play a role in the battle for the seat.
Lander’s announcement tees up a showdown between a Jewish progressive challenger and an incumbent Jewish centrist. He enters the race with support from Zohran Mamdani, following weeks of speculation over whether he or Alexa Aviles — a member of Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America who was also weighing a run against Goldman — would get the mayor-elect’s high-profile endorsement.
“I’m running for Congress because we need leaders who will fight, not fold,” Lander wrote on X. (Lander’s X account was subsequently hacked and made temporarily private.)
Lander, the outgoing city comptroller, has day-one endorsements from major progressive names including Mamdani, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, as well as the city’s Working Families Party.
Lander shared a video that touted his ability to fight back against Donald Trump, which featured footage of his ICE arrest. The video took on a gentle tone, with Lander referring to himself as “Dad Lander” and quoting the TV personality Mister Rogers. He talked about his roots in the district, which includes central Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Park Slope, where he served as a three-term City Council member.
But the video also previewed how Israel will play a role as Lander, a self-described liberal Zionist who now calls Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide” and stumped for the anti-Zionist Mamdani, takes aim at Goldman. The incumbent has been endorsed and received funding from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC; he also refused to endorse Mamdani because of Mamdani’s stances on Israel.
Goldman has become one of the primary targets of progressives looking to replace moderate Democrats with candidates more aligned with their politics in the wake of Mamdani’s victory. Challengers are also emerging against the vocally pro-Israel Rep. Ritchie Torres, with his AIPAC donations being a point of emphasis of his opponents.
Lander did not name Goldman but referred to his AIPAC ties in the video, saying the “challenges we face” can’t be solved by “doing AIPAC’s bidding in a district that knows our safety, our freedom, our thriving is bound up together.” Two photos of Lander holding signs at Gaza war ceasefire rallies appeared on-screen — one in Hebrew, the other in English.
The 10th Congressional District covers Lower Manhattan, as well as parts of western and central Brooklyn, which Lander represented on the City Council. While Lower Manhattan was more split in the mayoral general election, most of the district’s Brooklyn neighborhoods voted overwhelmingly for Mamdani. The district also includes part of Borough Park, a neighborhood with a large Orthodox Jewish population that strongly supported the centrist mayoral candidate, Andrew Cuomo.
In the video, Lander alluded to Goldman’s refusal to endorse Mamdani, saying that if he beats Goldman, “Our mayor can have an ally in Washington instead of an adversary in his own backyard.”
Mamdani told the New York Times on Wednesday that Lander is a “true leader” who has “unwavering principles, deep knowledge and sincere empathy.”
Lander has been Mamdani’s most prominent local Jewish ally since the pair cross-endorsed each other before the Democratic primary.
Critics said Lander’s efforts, including bringing Mamdani to his synagogue and reinforcing his commitment to the safety of Jewish New Yorkers, merely “kosherized” antisemitism at a time when fierce reaction to the war in Gaza led to Jews feeling unsafe and isolated, and anti-Jewish attacks rose.
Following Mamdani’s general election victory, reports emerged that Lander, who’d been angling for a top position in the new administration, was being left out in the cold without a role. Rumors suggested that Lander might have Mamdani’s support if he pivoted to a congressional run against Goldman. But that support was complicated by the presence of Aviles — Mamdani’s fellow DSA member — who was entertaining a run herself.
All that was put to rest Wednesday, when Lander officially entered the race with the support of Mamdani — who went against the DSA’s endorsement of Aviles, to the chagrin of some of the DSA’s rank-and-file — and Aviles released a statement announcing that she would not be running.
“A split field runs too great a risk of allowing him another damaging term,” she wrote about Goldman, who won his first election in 2022 by two points against a crowded field that split votes between progressive candidates.
Before running for office, Goldman, a millionaire and Levi Strauss heir, drew praise from the left when he served as lead majority counsel on the first impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump in 2019. He has co-sponsored progressive legislation like the Medicare for All Act and the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, as well as a recent bill that would protect immigrants’ right to appear in immigration court.
But progressives have soured on Goldman, who calls himself a “proud Zionist and steadfast supporter of Israel,” and is criticized for receiving funding from AIPAC — a group whose brand has become increasingly toxic in American politics.
Goldman also faced criticism after Donald Trump Jr. tweeted about a friendly interaction between the two in the Bahamas, following Trump’s Israel-Gaza peace deal.
“Thank you Congressman @danielsgoldman for your kind words today when you saw me, about the incredible job my father did delivering historic peace to the Middle East and bringing the hostages home,” the president’s son tweeted. “Safe travels back from the Bahamas.”
Speculation of a potential Lander challenge had been building since September, when a poll by Data for Progress surveyed voters in the 10th congressional district; in a two-man race between Goldman and Lander, the poll found that Lander would win 52-33.
Democratic strategist Trip Yang advised pumping the brakes in a November interview, pointing out that polls taken so far in advance of an election “don’t matter as much” and that incumbents bring an advantage.
In addition to big names like Mamdani, Sanders and Warren, local politicians have begun throwing their support behind Lander including Assemblymember Robert Carroll — who was an early endorser of Goldman in the 2022 election — and State Sen. Andrew Gounardes.
The post Brad Lander launches run for Congress against pro-Israel Jewish incumbent Dan Goldman appeared first on The Forward.
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‘America Last’: Report Reveals Suspicious Foreign Support Amplifying Nick Fuentes Online
Nick Fuentes during an interview in December 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Amid ongoing debates about the rise of antisemitic voices on the US political right, recent investigations into social media activity suggest the potential involvement of inauthentic amplification by anonymous actors in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
On Monday, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) released new research showing the techniques used by overseas operatives to promote the authoritarian ideologies of antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes, who claims he seeks to preserve the white, European identity and culture of the US.
Titled “America Last: How Fuentes’s Coordinated Raids and Foreign Fake-Speech Networks Inflate His Influence,” the 23-page report dissects how the 27-year-old influencer “consistently amasses far more retweets than any comparable figure, including Elon Musk, despite having a fraction (<1%) of the follower count.”
The report was co-drafted with the support of the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab. Previous research collaborations between NCRI and Rutgers have also explored how far-right influencers hijacked the religious phrase “Christ is King” to advance their ideology and how Tik-Tok content promotes the Chinese Communist Party’s international objectives.
The researchers reviewed Fuentes and compared him with other prominent accounts. They discovered that “within the critical first 30 minutes, Fuentes routinely outperformed accounts with 10-100× more followers.” The report explains that “in a sample of 20 recent posts, 61% of Fuentes’s first-30-minute retweets came from accounts that retweeted multiple of these 20 posts within that same ultra-short window – behavior highly suggestive of coordination or automation.”
The accounts are characterized as entirely anonymous and seemingly single-purpose for promoting Fuentes.
While Fuentes has grown most well-known for his endorsement of Adolf Hitler, Holocaust denial, and pre-Vatican II, Catholic-reactionary antisemitism, the report highlights the podcaster’s endorsements of terrorism and enthusiasm for sexual violence. He has stated that he seeks a 16-year-old wife, desiring an underage woman “when the milk is fresh.” This aligns with his support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, a nation which has now seen the return of child marriage. Fuentes also claims that rape within marriage is impossible, since he believes that a wife’s body belongs to her husband.
Fuentes also “praised Vladimir Putin for the invasion of Ukraine, expressed support for China taking Taiwan, and described the Taliban’s victory over US forces as a positive development.”
The researchers in their analysis seek not to explain Fuentes’s views but rather to “assess how synthetic engagement, real-world events, and media incentives converged to elevate a fringe figure into a central subject of national attention.”
Looking into Fuentes’s history and disclosures from former insiders within his organization support the suggestion of artificial engagement.
“Additional evidence shows that Fuentes has a prior history of coordinated digital manipulation. In 2022, two former associates described internal group chats where Fuentes directed interns and loyalists to carry out online tasks on his behalf, and a former technical aide alleged that viewer counts on his streaming platform were artificially inflated using a built-in multiplier,” the report states.
The researchers explain that “Fuentes did not deny the inflation itself. These documented practices demonstrate a willingness to orchestrate controlled teams and manipulate digital metrics — behavior entirely consistent with the coordinated amplification patterns observed on X.”
The report features images of “America First” Fuentes appearing on different foreign TV networks including the Iranian regime’s Press TV and Russia Today (RT). On the former he sided with Iran during an American attack in support of Israel, and on the latter, he claimed that support for Ukraine was based on “Russophobia.” He also reportedly stated that he would “fight on the side of China against America.”
Another picture shows Fuentes in 2022 at the America First Political Action Conference, where he stated in his introduction to US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA): “And now they’re going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin, saying he’s Hitler – they say that’s not a good thing. Can we get a round of applause for Russia?”
The analysts describe how “Fuentes’s defense of authoritarian adversaries — Russia, Iran, China — is not a minor contradiction. It represents a coherent pattern in which his anti-American worldview aligns more closely with America’s enemies than with its interests. His self-proclaimed patriotism crumbles in the face of performative contrarianism, where any regime that resists liberal democracy becomes, in his eyes, preferable to the current United States.”
According to NCRI, the Russian and Iranian media’s approval of Fuentes “underscores the broader point: the figure elevated by algorithmic manipulation and mainstream media grooming as a voice of nationalist revival is, in reality, one of the most reliable public defenders of America’s geopolitical foes.”