Right-Wing Conservatives Can Spot a Genocide in Gaza. They Still Can't Admit One Happened in America.

Populist conservatives have broken a decades-old taboo to name what Israel is doing in Gaza, while instinctively shielding the American founding from a definition that fits it just as cleanly.

In a recent Jubilee roundtable that ricocheted across social media, a leftist participant named Andrew Jackson among the three worst U.S. presidents in history. The reason: genocide against Native Americans. The host of “Mask Off,” Dennis Feitosa, better known online as Def Noodles, did not engage the charge. He pivoted, fast, to Jackson’s war on the central bank, then dismissed the comparison between Jackson’s Indian policy and Israel’s assault on Gaza as a “false equivalence.”

The moment was actually emblematic of current discourse. Feitosa’s ideological neighbors, the Tucker Carlsons and Candace Owenses and Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the new right, have spent the last two years discovering the word “genocide” and using it as a charge against Israel. Just never about us.

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The MAGA Vocabulary Has a New Word, and a Geographic Limit

This is, in fairness, a real shift. Tucker Carlson now gets labeled “Antisemite of the Year” by pro-Israel groups precisely because he describes “Israel’s genocide in Gaza” on his show. Megyn Kelly hosts guests who use the same framing and question blank-check U.S. support for the war. Candace Owens tweeted that no government has the right to commit a genocide, ever, and was promptly excommunicated from a chunk of her own movement for it. For a generation of populist conservatives raised to treat Israel as untouchable, this is a meaningful break.

The catch, of course, is that the legal definition of genocide is portable. Once you accept that bombing, starving, and displacing a population qualify, you have accepted a tool that does not stop working when you use it on your own country.

What the Word Actually Means

The UN Convention defines genocide as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, through killing, serious harm, or the deliberate infliction of life-destroying conditions. It is, notably, a definition about structure and intent, not weapons systems. Starving a population qualifies. Forcing them on death marches qualifies. Systematically erasing their ability to live on ancestral land qualifies.

Which brings us to Andrew Jackson. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 cleared the Southeast for white settlers and enslavers by forcing Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations west of the Mississippi at gunpoint. The Trail of Tears killed thousands through exposure, starvation, and disease. Jackson’s allies framed Native nations as obstructive, dangerous, and incompatible with “civilization,” language that cast them as a permanent threat to be removed. The federal government continued the removals, knowing the human cost, because the human cost was the policy.

If Gaza is a genocide because of mass death, deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, and forced displacement under the banner of fighting terror, then Jackson’s removal regime is a genocide for the same reasons. The only thing standing between conservatives and that conclusion is the patriotic conviction that America cannot, by definition, be the thing they now condemn elsewhere.

America’s First Way of War

The historian John Grenier, in his book “The First Way of War,” argues that early American military culture was built on something European theorists called petite guerre, raids on villages, destruction of crops, and the deliberate terrorizing of civilian populations. As Grenier documents, this was not a fringe practice or an embarrassed compromise. It was, in his words, America’s “first way of war,” temporally and by preference.

The Sullivan Expedition of 1779, ordered by George Washington, set out to destroy Haudenosaunee towns and crops with the explicit goal of making the land uninhabitable. Captain John Lovewell’s Rangers earned bounties of 100 pounds per scalp at a time when the average wage was sixpence a day. Andrew Jackson’s troops, by the end of the Creek War in 1814, had what Grenier calls bled the Indian peoples of the Old Southwest “literally and figuratively.” This was the blueprint for what we now dress up as counterinsurgency, treating the civilian environment itself as the enemy.

From Native “Terrorists” to My Lai to Gaza

The pattern recurs because the logic recurs. Landon Jones, writing for TIME on what he calls America’s first war on terror, points to William Clark’s 1814 expedition up the Mississippi, where Clark designated Native nations as “terrorist” targets, a word, Jones notes, already in use then. The Missouri Gazette demanded that the frontier be “JACKSONIZED.” In Vietnam, U.S. troops at My Lai killed hundreds of unarmed villagers under the same logic of collapsing civilians into enemy targets. In 1980s Guatemala, a U.S.-backed army carried out scorched-earth campaigns against Mayan communities that a UN truth commission later concluded were genocide.

Now Gaza. Hospitals, schools, apartments, and food systems get reclassified as terrorist infrastructure. Tens of thousands killed. Mass starvation. Forced displacement. The American right finally sees the pattern. They just cannot see that they were raised in the country that exported it.

The Real Mask

Return to Feitosa’s pivot. He represents a wider audience that can finally say “genocide” when Israel or the United Nations is in the frame, but instinctively shields Andrew Jackson and the American founding from the same charge.

Admitting genocide in Gaza does not threaten their Americanness. It can even reinforce it, by reframing the issue as a fight against globalists and foreign lobbies they already distrust. Admitting genocide against Native peoples would force them to recognize that the United States itself runs on the same operating system they now condemn in Gaza. The question was never whether they could recognize genocidal patterns. Gaza proves they can. The question is whether they will ever let that clarity turn inward.

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Sources

1. Grenier, John. The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

2. Grenier, John. “The First Way of War.” Lecture, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA.

3. Jones, Landon. “The Story Behind America’s First War on ‘Terror.’” TIME, July 12, 2016.

4. Jubilee. “Are Conservatives Turning on Trump? | Roundtable.” YouTube video.