War Abroad, MAGA Civil War at Home
On Micropenises, Joe Kent, and the Manosphere
Nearly a month after Donald Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, war still rages in the Middle East. Perhaps just as existential for the administration is the civil war that rages on among MAGA media figures over whether the Iran war is justified.
This week…
Megyn Kelly and Mark Levin’s feud goes below the belt.
The fallout from Joe Kent’s resignation reverberates throughout MAGA.
Ben Shapiro and Piers Morgan have a new, common enemy.
Mentioned: Megyn Kelly…Mark Levin…Ryan Grim…Dave Rubin…Laura Loomer…Dan Bongino…Donald Trump…Marjorie Taylor Greene…Nick Fuentes…Alex Jones…Joe Kent…Shannon Kent…Candace Owens…Saagar Enjeti…Sneako…Tim Pool…Dave Smith…Glenn Greenwald…Myron Gaines…Michael Flynn Jr.…Shawn Ryan…Buckley Carlson…JP Sears…The Hodgetwins…Grace Chong…Jimmy Dore…Theo Von…Ben Shapiro…Cenk Uygur…Ana Kasparian…Tucker Carlson…Mark Dubowitz…Charlie Kirk…Tyler Robinson…Louis Theroux…HSTikkyTokky…Justin Waller…Piers Morgan…Benny Johnson…Hasan Piker…Ilhan Omar…Isra Hirsi…Kneecap…Jack Abramoff…Marcus Andrade…Brian Darling…Rand Paul.
WHEN THEY GO LOW…
Divisions within MAGA media over the war in Iran have ignited significant infighting — complete with a number of low blows. Nowhere has the infighting been more visceral than in the fiery debate between Megyn Kelly and Mark Levin. Former colleagues at Fox News, the warring podcasters have taken their dispute over American foreign policy to personal, even anatomical, grounds.
Levin and Kelly have been at each other’s throats for several months now, primarily over the Epstein files and the war in Iran. Their feud escalated further when Kelly reposted allegations made by Ryan Grim, co-founder of Drop Site News, that the man who launched a terrorist attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, had family members who “were killed in a recent Israeli attack” in Lebanon. Levin called Kelly “evil. Diabolical. Gone,” to which Kelly responded, “I’m sorry you have a micro penis @marklevinshow, but don’t drag the rest of us into your drama.”
The next morning, Levin returned the favor, calling Kelly “an emotionally unhinged, lewd, and petulant wreck” without “an intelligent, thoughtful, or substantive comment. Utterly toxic.”
Kelly replied:
“Micropenis Mark @marklevinshow thinks he has the monopoly on lewd. He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible. Literally more than some stalkers I’ve had arrested. He doesn’t like it when women like me fight back. Bc of his micropenis.”
Levin shot back on his radio show:
“Who are these people, these podcasters? What do you know about them?… Megyn Kelly is just a disaster, a walking disaster…They haven’t contributed anything to anybody, any community, any state…She’s gone from loving me and stalking me to her claim that I’m stalking her. And now she wants to talk about body parts.”
Rather than retreating, Kelly simply doubled down on her phallic attack, saying on her podcast, “When they go low, we go micropenis.”
Those aligned with Levin in support of the war hit back at Kelly. Dave Rubin lamented, “When they go low, we go lower now…How would she know about Mark Levin’s penis? Like, it’s just all so freaking ridiculous.”
Laura Loomer quote-posted Kelly’s post with an old clip of her on Dan Bongino’s show in May 2023 in which Kelly said, “I have this like, crush from afar on Mark Levin…I secretly from afar am like a Mark Levin stalker.” Loomer additionally called Kelly’s stalker comment “more projection from Grandma Groyper.”
As the situation escalated, President Donald Trump himself waded into the so-called “podcast wars.” He posted to Truth Social defending Levin as a “truly Great American Patriot” who “is somewhat under siege by other people with far less Intellect, Capability, and Love for our Country.” The kicker? “Those that speak ill of Mark will quickly fall by the wayside, as do people whose ideas, policies, and footings are not sound. THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM.”
Unsurprisingly, a number of America First media personalities did not take kindly to the president picking sides in this battle of the MAGA civil war:
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted, “I wholeheartedly support Megyn Kelly telling the world that Mark Levin has a micropenis. It’s the most deserved insult and I don’t care if it’s vulgar. And Trump’s gigantic defense of Levin only enraged the base more. People are DONE. MAGA destroyed by micropenis Mark Levin.”
Nick Fuentes said, “If you are MAGA, Mark Levin, Laura Loomer, Randy Fine, Miriam Adelson, Larry Fink, Ronald Lauder — they are not your peers… They are your boss… You have to defer to them. And if you don’t, you will be fired. You will be ostracized.”
Alex Jones said, “What Trump’s really doing here is attacking his critics. He doesn’t wanna say ‘don’t attack me on the Iran War.’ He wants to say ‘leave Mark Levin alone, he’s the litmus test’… Now [Mark Levin] called on daddy Trump to come and say, ‘woo…you won’t be able to sit at the cool table at lunch.’”
What began as a disagreement over U.S. foreign policy has devolved into a full-blown, extremely personal war over who controls the soul of the MAGA movement — and it seems unlikely a ceasefire will be brokered anytime soon.
JOE KENT WAGES HIS OWN WAR
The schisms within MAGA continued to intensify when Joe Kent, a former Army Green Beret and CIA paramilitary officer, resigned from his role as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center on March 17, penning a scathing resignation letter posted to X. In it, he wrote that he “cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” asserting that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation” and that the U.S. “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” The letter continued:
“Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined [Trump’s] America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.”
In his resignation letter Kent also insinuated that Israel forced the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003, claiming that his late wife, Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, who was killed in a 2019 ISIS suicide bombing in Syria, had died “in a war manufactured by Israel.”
The statement immediately went viral, garnering more than 100 million views on X. Numerous America First influencers — including Candace Owens, Saagar Enjeti, Sneako, Tim Pool, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Dave Smith, Glenn Greenwald, Myron Gaines, Michael Flynn Jr., Shawn Ryan, Buckley Carlson, MAGA satirist JP Sears, the Hodgetwins, Grace Chong, Jimmy Dore and Theo Von — applauded Kent for his principled resignation.
But not everyone sang Kent’s praises. Ben Shapiro called Kent’s resignation letter “deeply, deeply conspiratorial,” questioned why Kent was appointed to the administration in the first place and wondered who else might be “working against Trump inside the administration.” Dave Rubin called Kent a political opportunist, accusing him of laying the groundwork for a future campaign for higher office.
Former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino accused Kent of lying and called him inconsistent on Israel and Iran. Bongino also said:
“The conclusion drawn in Joe Kent’s resignation letter — this was some war for Israel and Iran is not a threat — folks, I gotta tell you something, I don’t know what intelligence he was reading to come to that conclusion. He clearly had a different opinion in the past, repeatedly in podcast appearances and tweets where he indicated it was a threat. I don’t know how you…read the intel which he had access to, especially the foreign stuff, and then come to the conclusion that Iran was not an imminent threat.”
President Trump went further, attacking Joe Kent during a press gaggle. Trump disputed Kent’s claim that there was no imminent threat to the United States, saying, “he said very strongly that Iran is not a threat. Iran’s been a threat for 47 years and there’s not a country in the world that doesn’t agree with me on that.” The president also mocked Kent’s two congressional losses and attacked his lack of loyalty to the administration, saying he gave Kent “a job in the White House, [and] this is the thanks I get.”
Stooping lower, Trump personally attacked Kent and his late wife, saying, “He was a man that I met at Dover [Air Force Base]. He came [when] his wife was killed. He remarried fairly quickly.”
Then came Joe Kent’s press tour. Less than 48 hours after resigning from the Trump administration, Kent launched a MAGA media blitz, appearing on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” “The Megyn Kelly Show,” “The Shawn Ryan Show,” and even — in a notably contentious appearance — “The Mark Levin Show.” He also joined “The Young Turks,” the left-wing YouTube show hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian.
Kent told Tucker Carlson that “the Israelis drove the decision to take this action.” He described an “ecosystem of information laundered through a lot of prominent neoconservative types” — Mark Levin, Mark Dubowitz and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, specifically — that shifted Trump’s red line on Iran from “no nuclear weapon” to “no enrichment,” effectively torpedoing negotiations and guaranteeing war.
Kent accused the Israelis, including their intelligence services and what he referred to as the pro-Israel “media echo chamber,” of lying to the U.S. government in an effort to lead them to war, saying, “I know the Israeli officials, some in intelligence, some in government, will come to U.S. government officials and they will say all kinds of things that we know from our intelligence just simply isn’t true.”
Yet perhaps Kent’s most explosive revelation was his conspiratorial insinuation that there was a link between the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Iran war:
“The last time I saw Charlie Kirk on this earth was in June, in the West Wing in the stairway…He said, ‘Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran.’…When one of President Trump’s closest advisors who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink, at least, our relationship with the Israelis, and then he’s suddenly publicly assassinated and we’re not allowed to ask any questions about that, it’s a data point — it’s a data point that we need to look into.”
He went on to say, “We’ve been told that this individual, [Tyler] Robinson, was a lone gunman and maybe he is, but the investigation that I was a part of, the National Counterterrorism Center was a part of, we were stopped from continuing to investigate.”
Kent similarly told Megyn Kelly that the FBI shut down its investigation prematurely after arresting Robinson, claiming “There were additional leads that we needed to run down and fully investigate. And that simply was not done.” He added that “there were people posting about Charlie Kirk being killed before Charlie Kirk was killed” and called it “a data point that we need to look into.”
In a testy radio interview on “The Mark Levin Show,” Levin pressed Kent on his claim that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was a “data point that we need to look into.” In response, Kent told Levin, “What I know is that there were foreign leads that we did not get a chance to look into, that we did not thoroughly investigate.”
Levin asked, “Do you have any country in mind?” to which Kent responded, “No. I think we need to fully investigate the potential of any foreign nexus.”
And he’s serious. On Tuesday, Kent told Michael Shellenberger he’d even be willing to testify in Tyler Robinson’s defense that the FBI mishandled the investigation into Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
We surely haven’t seen the end of Joe Kent — much to the administration’s chagrin.
PICKUP ARTISTS PUT DOWN
A new Netflix documentary by BBC documentarian Louis Theroux explores the “manosphere,” a growing genre of content catering to young men that promotes masculinity, misogyny and opposition to feminism. “Inside the Manosphere” (2026) follows influencers HSTikkyTokky (Harrison Sullivan), Sneako (Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy), Myron Gaines (of “The Fresh & Fit Podcast”) and Justin Waller through their lives as content creators. Despite their recent spat over the Iran war, Piers Morgan and Ben Shapiro found themselves aligned in opposition to those in the manosphere and what they view as a “scam” propagated, according to Morgan, by individuals whose “only real motivation seems to be social media clout.”
Piers Morgan invited HSTikkyTokky onto his show to discuss the documentary, but the segment soured rapidly, spiraling into a heated exchange featuring name-calling and unsubstantiated accusations that Morgan engaged in wrongdoing on Epstein’s island before Morgan cut the interview short.
HSTikkyTokky: “I don’t agree with you going to Epstein’s island and having freak-offs with Ghislaine Maxwell and the rest of them…I’m comparing you to Epstein, then, because you are in his files.”
Morgan: “You’re making yourself look an even bigger idiot than you did on the Netflix show…I think you’re a fucking idiot. I think you’re a sexist, misogynist, homophobic twerp who got exposed in a global way by Netflix… You’re a little halfwit… I don’t care about your silly insults.”
Ben Shapiro opted to “factmog” the influencers in the documentary:
On Myron Gaines… “Gaines happens to be an idiot who picks on people even dumber than he is — largely, similarly vile female influencers who are also desperate for attention. It’s a sort of never-ending cycle of loathsome garbage.”
On Sneako… “Speaking of morons, there’s also Sneako… the newly-minted Muslim who spends his days online ranting about — wait for it — the Jews…At a certain point, Sneako admits that the manosphere is basically a giant scam.”
Sneako and Gaines fired back at Morgan and Shapiro, accusing them of using accusations of bigotry and ad hominem attacks as a shield to shut down substantive debate on the merits:
Sneako: “Stupid Ben [Shapiro]… Ben, you’re losing a lot of subscribers cause people are sick of being labeled with these ‘-isms’ to prevent conversations from happening. You cannot constantly be on this moral high ground while running cover for Epstein.”
Myron Gaines: “[Piers] Morgan got a harsh reality check that reminded him that being a progressive liberal is not gonna work. You can only get the mask on for so long… He believes in feminism. He believes in multiculturalism. He believes in immigration to a degree. He doesn’t like racism. He doesn’t like bigotry. He doesn’t like Anti-Semitism. Basically, he goes against every single thing that I talk about.”
While the circular firing squad raged, Benny Johnson felt compelled to weigh in, but he trained his sights on a different target — the documentarian. He insulted Theroux, calling him a “skinny noodle arm, fat-belly, weakling, limp-wristed sniffling lib” working to “denigrate, humiliate, demoralize and ultimately replace the men who hold up Western civilization.”
While this passing battle has largely subsided, the war to win the hearts and minds of young conservative men rages on, with the manosphere’s influence over the next generation of conservative men only growing.
BEST OF THE REST
Influencers take Cuba. The antiwar group Code Pink organized a delegation to Cuba to deliver humanitarian aid and protest Trump’s oil blockade. The convoy, which visited the island last week, included a number of left-wing media figures and activists opposed to U.S. military interventionism such as streamer Hasan Piker, Rep. Ilhan Omar’s daughter Isra Hirsi, Northern Ireland rap group Kneecap and Ryan Grim.
As reported by Fox News, the group stayed at luxury hotels while the rest of the island suffered rolling blackouts, leading to accusations of gross hypocrisy by The Washington Post. The Free Press labeled the group “Cuba’s useless idiots.” Ben Shapiro called Piker and Code Pink “morons” doing “true poverty tourism.” He criticized the group for diverting power from local hospitals to run a concert, and criticized Piker for “giving sensual massages to the Cuban communist government” while “wearing $1,500 designer Cartier glasses.”
Got $500? Buy a Daily Caller article. During the first Trump administration, lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his business partner Marcus Andrade launched a new cryptocurrency called “Anti-Money Laundering BitCoin” — AML BitCoin. According to The Bulwark’s Will Sommer, “To drum up investor interest, the duo effectively purchased free, positive press by making undisclosed payments to journalists in conservative and financial media. Many of the payments were organized by Brian Darling, a former staffer for Sen. Rand Paul, who now works as a lobbyist at a firm he founded called Liberty Government Affairs.”
When Abramoff and Andrade were indicted by the Department of Justice for making “false and misleading statements to potential purchasers” about AML BitCoin, Darling’s ledger tracking payments to journalists was introduced as evidence in Andrade’s criminal trial. In total, it was revealed that Darling spent $12,800 through his lobbying shop to buy positive coverage of AML, mostly in conservative outlets such as The Daily Caller, Townhall, Newsmax, The Washington Times, RedState and The American Spectator. For just $1,000, AML BitCoin was able to land two articles in The Daily Caller, the outlet Tucker Carlson founded in 2012. Additionally, for just $250 Newsmax published a since-deleted article which “breathlessly claimed that the NFL and NBC had rejected a Super Bowl ad from AML BitCoin because it was ‘too political.’”