Creedal Islam Will Always Breed An Insurrectionary Element

Responding to: Trump’s Mind-Boggling Dealmaking with Erdoğan — Andrew C. McCarthy · 2026-07-11

What the Piece Argues

Andrew C. McCarthy argues that the Trump administration’s consideration of selling F-35 stealth aircraft to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is fundamentally incoherent with its designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), given Erdoğan’s documented material support for Brotherhood chapters and other designated FTOs like Hamas. McCarthy frames Erdoğan as a lifelong Brotherhood operative whose entire political identity derives from sharia-supremacist mentorship, contrasting this with Trump’s killing of 210+ suspected low-level operatives on Caribbean vessels under the same FTO logic. The argument rests on McCarthy’s own 2014 book Spring Fever, which he treats as the authoritative source on Erdoğan’s Brotherhood origins and uses as the analytical anchor for the entire column.

Receipts

McCarthy sells a civilizational-collapse frame that recasts a NATO-member transactional aircraft sale as Brotherhood-enabled apocalypse, then deputizes his own prior book as the proof.

What the framing wants you to believe

• Erdoğan is a lifelong Brotherhood operative whose entire political identity is downstream of the Muslim Brotherhood’s 1928 founding project
• Arming Erdoğan with F-35s directly empowers the designated FTOs he materially supports
• Trump’s FTO designation is a serious, binding policy commitment, so the F-35 sale betrays it
• The contradiction exposes Trump as incoherent and Erdoğan as civilizational threat
• Ignoring the contradiction is itself a constitutional failure Congress is supposed to police

What’s really going on

• “Erdoğan is a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood” is McCarthy’s own product — it is the central thesis of his 2014 book, which is the sole analytical authority he cites for the framing
• Erdoğan has governed Turkey as an authoritarian-nationalist autocrat for over two decades; the Brotherhood essentialism flattens his actual rule into a 1970s Erbakan mentorship narrative
• FTO designations and foreign military sales are governed by separate statutory and executive-branch channels (Treasury/State vs. DoD political-military bureau + congressional notification); they do not formally cross-walk in the way the column implies
• The 87-senator 2010 letter on IHH and the Qaradawi-Erdoğan relationship are documented but selectively deployed; McCarthy omits that several of his named FTO-support incidents are 15–20 years old and predate the current arms-sale calculus
• The 210 Caribbean dead McCarthy opens with are used as a rhetorical trampoline — he himself flags the administration’s evidentiary gaps on those strikes and then pivots to the F-35 question without resolving the first contradiction
• The “civilizational” lexicon (sharia supremacism, Brotherhood creation, clash of civilizations) is McCarthy-fluent register that signals membership in the pre-Trump national-security-conservative apparatus and positions McCarthy as the indispensable interpreter

Anchor citation: “Erdoğan is a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood.” (McCarthy, National Review, 2026-07-11, opening the Brotherhood section.)

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: For the persuadable moderate or the good-faith family member who reads National Review and thinks this is just serious legal analysis of executive overreach.

Consider the family of one of the 210 men killed on those 63 boats in the Caribbean, waiting for a body that will never be formally identified or returned by a government that routinely dismisses cases for lack of evidence. When the executive branch claims the unilateral authority to blow up vessels and kill people based on a designation list that doesn’t even require a trial to execute, we are not talking about law enforcement. We are talking about a perpetual war economy. The real casualty here isn’t just the men on those boats off the coast of South America; it’s the democratic accountability of the United States. A nation that hands its president a blank check to kill anyone he designates a “terrorist” without due process is a nation that has quietly surrendered its own constitutional republic to the military-industrial complex. We don’t protect American liberty by blowing up people on the high seas; we protect it by demanding Congress actually exercise its power of the purse and its power to declare war.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: For the identity-protective mixed-faith actor who respects “Western values” and needs to see the hypocrisy of the “clash of civilizations” frame without being told they are complicit in it.

Andrew McCarthy writes with the authority of a former prosecutor, but the framework he is defending requires abandoning the very rule of law he claims to revere. He spends twenty paragraphs detailing the “sharia supremacist” threat to “Judeo-Christian underpinnings,” treating a 1,400-year-old civilizational caricature as a pressing policy brief. But follow the money, and the civilization talk evaporates into the ledger. The “clash of civilizations” is the preferred ghost story of the defense contracting lobby, designed to keep the Pentagon’s nearly $900 billion budget flowing while the working class foots the bill and the body bags come home. McCarthy is perfectly comfortable with the president having the unilateral, extrajudicial power to assassinate “supporters” of FTOs—he just wants that power aimed at the Muslim Brotherhood instead of Latin American drug smugglers. The hypocrisy isn’t just in who gets blown up. The hypocrisy is the premise that an American president should have the power to run a personal assassination program in the first place. We defend the West not by adopting the very tyrannical, unchecked executive power we claim to despise, but by shrinking the police state.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: For the selectively amnesiac partisan who loves “law and order” until it involves the military blowing up boats, and needs to see the absurdity of the neoconservative foreign policy frame.

The neoconservative logic is truly a thing of beauty: it is perfectly fine to blow up 210 people on 63 unmarked boats in the Caribbean because the President feels like they’re terrorists, but it’s a “mind-boggling” scandal because he’s thinking about selling F-35s to Turkey. The “clash of civilizations” is just the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for the national security state. Andrew McCarthy is out here writing a 2,000-word history lesson about the Ottoman Empire and Kemal Atatürk to explain why the military needs to bomb more Muslims, completely missing the irony that the U.S. military-industrial complex doesn’t actually care about “Judeo-Christian underpinnings.” They care about Lockheed Martin’s stock price. The Pentagon doesn’t need a 14-century theological justification to drop a JDAM; they just need a budget justification. And nothing justifies a post-9/11, eight-trillion-dollar slush fund quite like a good, old-fashioned civilizational ghost story. Keep the “sharia supremacism” seminars; the structural trace just follows the campaign contributions from the Big Five defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: For the mixed-to-bad-faith actor who actively defends the permanent war machine and needs the mirror held up to face the structural reality of the neoconservative racket.

Let us drop the “clash of civilizations” act and name the operation. Andrew McCarthy isn’t analyzing foreign policy; he is acting as the public relations wing for the assassination bureaucracy. The entire “sharia supremacist” framing—the 14 centuries of history, the “Judeo-Christian underpinnings,” the Muslim Brotherhood boogeyman—is just the ideological camouflage for a lethal, unaccountable executive fiefdom. McCarthy is completely fine with the president having the unilateral power to blow up 210 people on boats without a trial, without a conviction, and without due process. He just wants the kill-list pointed in a different direction. This is the rot at the center of the neoconservative project: the belief that American hegemony is a divine right, and that any human being on the other end of a drone strike can be reduced to a 1,400-year-old caricature so the defense budget never gets cut. You want to talk about “sharia supremacism”? Let us talk about the supremacism of a security apparatus that believes it answers to no law, no constitution, and no court, answering only to the quarterly earnings of the war profiteers.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: For the bad-faith actor or the performative troll, and also for the catharsis of allies who need to see the full, grotesque architecture of the permanent war machine exposed.

Welcome to the neoconservative thunderdome, where the President is basically the Supreme Executive World Leader, and the “War on Terror” is just a franchise reboot that never gets canceled because the ratings are so high. Andrew McCarthy is out here writing a treatise on the Ottoman Empire to justify the fact that the U.S. government can legally blow up 210 people on the high seas just because the Commander-in-Chief had a hunch about their cargo. The “clash of civilizations” is just the marketing department for the military-industrial complex, a 14-century ghost story designed to keep the conveyor belt of body bags and billion-dollar F-35 contracts rolling. They don’t care about “Judeo-Christian underpinnings”; they care that “sharia supremacism” is the only theological justification that keeps the pork-barrel spending flowing to the defense contractors who fund their think tanks. McCarthy wants the executive kill-list to target the Muslim Brotherhood instead of Latin American smugglers, which is like arguing over which minority group the mob should shake down for protection money. The whole architecture is a whitewashed tomb, polished on the outside with “Western civilization” rhetoric, but inside it’s just full of dead men’s bones and the unmarked graves of the 210 people we blew up because the President’s immunity got him a pass.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: For the reader moved by moral authority, requiring the target’s own canon and the prophetic tradition to turn the “clash of civilizations” frame back on itself.

The prophet Jeremiah diagnosed the leadership of his day with a terminal condition: “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). Andrew McCarthy and the architects of the permanent war machine are doing the exact same thing, slapping the “clash of civilizations” label on a 1,400-year-old ghost story to cover up the rotting wound of an empire that has lost its moral compass. They speak of “Judeo-Christian underpinnings” while the executive branch operates as a bloody city, executing 210 souls on the high seas without a trial, without a judge, and without the fear of God. This is the whitewashed tomb of the modern national security state: polished with the rhetoric of Western liberty, but inside it is a fucking abattoir of unmarked graves, buried beneath the brown bodies blown out of the water by unaccountable kings. The scriptures are clear on the judgment of those who shed innocent blood for the sake of empire. James warns that the wealth of the oppressor rusts, and their garments become moth-eaten, because the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord (James 5:1-4). The FTO kill-list is not a shield for the West; it is the golden cup full of abominations, and the blood of the 210 is on the hands of those who author the designations and those who fund the machine.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: For the reader who needs full catharsis, gloves all the way off, maximal-expletive release against the sheer, unadulterated arrogance of the neoconservative war racket.

Cut the fucking bullshit and call this what it is: the neoconservative foreign policy racket is a grand-scale grift, and Andrew McCarthy is just the latest suit trying to sell us the same dead horse with a new coat of paint. They’re out here writing 2,000-word essays on the Ottoman Empire to justify the fact that the U.S. President can just fucking blow up 210 people on 63 boats because he felt like they were terrorists. The “clash of civilizations” frame is pure fucking bullshit. It’s a clash of the defense contractors’ wallets against the bodies of the people we’re vaporizing on the high seas. McCarthy is perfectly fine with the President having the unilateral, extrajudicial power to run a fucking assassination program—he just wants the kill-list pointed at the Muslim Brotherhood instead of Latin American smugglers. That’s not foreign policy; that’s a fucking mafia shakedown with F-35s. They don’t give a shit about “Judeo-Christian underpinnings”; they give a shit that “sharia supremacism” is the only theological bullshit that keeps the post-9/11, eight-trillion-dollar pork-barrel flowing into the pockets of the Big Five defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics. The whole “War on Terror” is a fucking perpetual-motion scam designed to keep the Pentagon’s budget bloated while the working class gets shafted. You want to talk about “sharia supremacism”? Let us talk about the fucking supremacism of a security apparatus that thinks it can murder 210 people without a trial, without a conviction, and without a single goddamn accountability check. It’s a whitewashed tomb, and it’s filled with the fucking bones of the people we killed to justify the budget.