Leo Hohmann – Leo’s Newsletter June 22, 2026

The state of Israel is spending a record amount of money in a desperate attempt to halt the collapse of its standing among American conservatives, an Israeli media outlet reported last week.

According to a June 18 article in the Israeli news outlet Haaretz, the Israeli government is paying $40.5 million for an influence campaign aimed at Christian Republicans. This is three times the budget originally allocated to the campaign, as the Israelis seek to reverse their plummeting approval ratings among Americans from whom they typically receive their most enthusiastic support.

This is damage control on steroids.

The campaign began with the signing of a public relations contract in November 2025, but now that campaign is being expanded with a refocused message in an attempt to justify the war in Iran, Haaretz reported.

Documents filed with the U.S. Justice Department further reveal that Israel has signed a new contract with a New York production company to produce a pro-Israel digital storytelling campaign, at a cost of nearly $1 million, Haaretz reported.

The Trump administration launched the war against Iran on Feb. 28, largely on the advice of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly met with President Trump in the White House situation room on Feb. 11, two weeks before the war started and convinced Trump that Iran’s government could be toppled within days or weeks. The war lasted nearly four months and the hardline regime is still firmly in place in Tehran. Both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump himself have since admitted the decision to attack Iran was made not because it was necessarily the best thing for America but because it was thought to have benefitted Israel. Even that is now debatable.

The war did not achieve any of its initial objectives despite having cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. An estimate from Moody’s Analytics said the war has already cost U.S. consumers and taxpayers around $132 billion.

Below is an excerpt from the article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

Haaretz revealed last November that Israel had signed agreements worth millions of dollars with American content and media companies to run pro-Israel campaigns aimed at Christian conservatives on its behalf, against the backdrop of the plunge in support for Israel since the war in Gaza, including among segments of the public traditionally considered pro-Israel.

The central contract, worth $6 million, was signed with a public relations firm owned by Brad Parscale, who ran U.S. President Donald Trump’s digital election campaigns in 2016 and 2020. In February, Haaretz exposed some of the products that the firm delivered, chief among them a network of propaganda sites featuring pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian content, designed to appear neutral and factual. The sites’ central aim was to influence the answers provided by search engines and AI-based chatbots.

Since then, Israel’s standing on the American right has deteriorated even further. Polls conducted in March, at the height of the war with Iran, show this trend is especially strong among young Republicans. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, about 41 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of young Republicans (under 50) hold a negative view of Israel. Overall, about 60 percent of Americans now hold a negative view of Israel, compared with 53 percent last year and 42 percent in 2022. Americans’ trust in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also declining: Nearly 60 percent of the American public doesn’t trust Netanyahu’s decision-making on the international stage, compared with 52 percent last year and 42 percent in 2023.

Documents recently filed by Parscale’s firm under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act show that its agreement with the Israeli government has been updated and expanded, so that the state is now paying $4.5 million a month for the campaign instead of $1.5 million, bringing the total to $40.5 million for “digital advertising” over the course of a year.

The updated agreement again states that the campaign’s purpose is “combating antisemitism,” but as became clear earlier this year, in practice its engagement with antisemitism is negligible. During the war in Gaza, the campaign’s sites dealt mainly with establishing an anti-Palestinian narrative; now the emphasis appears to have shifted to attempting to justify the war in Iran. In all likelihood, this is a response to the mounting accusations in the U.S. – including on the American right – that Netanyahu and Israel dragged Trump into an unjustified war.

An analysis by Haaretz found that a new site recently went live as part of the campaign, purporting “to expose the truth about Iran,” and that in parallel, the existing sites run by the PR firm began attacking Qatar and China more aggressively.

The documents further reveal that Israel recently hired another company, a New York production house called Piro, to carry out a pro-Israel “digital storytelling” campaign whose aim is “to influence American public opinion.” Piro was founded by Hollywood producer Daniel Rosenberg and advertising figure Tim Piper, and markets a proprietary Narrative Operating System built around AI discoverability. Under the contract, a substantial portion of the campaign budget is earmarked for engaging “talent” and producing videos to be distributed on social media.

The new site put up by Parscale’s company, TheTruthAboutIran.com, continues its predecessors’ line and purports to provide readers with facts. The site presents Iran as a direct danger to the United States, and it appears to have been set up to try to justify the recent war – even as polls show a clear majority of Americans believe their country shouldn’t have participated in the military campaign. “Following the 12-day war in June 2025, Iran accelerated its nuclear program, moved facilities deep underground and used negotiations to buy time,” the site’s homepage states, even though the move underground took place more than a decade ago.

At the same time, the messaging across the other sites built for the campaign got sharper. The website Allyvia, which focuses on the U.S.-Israel security alliance, added articles explaining that Trump was not dragged into war by Netanyahu but went to war to strengthen America’s standing on the global stage. Another article claims that the war contributed to the security of U.S. citizens.

Read the entire article here.

BOTTOM LINE: This article makes you wonder how many of the conservative news sites we all relied on have sold themselves out to Israeli interests. I myself am much more skeptical about what I read in the American conservative media post war than I was a year or so ago. At the same time pro-Israel reporting is financially rewarded, any criticism of the Israeli government will earn you the label “antisemitic.” You can criticize your own government all you want. You can criticize the governments of any foreign country, except one. There is only one government on earth you are absolutely not allowed to criticize without being compared to some of the worst people in recorded history, the Nazis. This is a false narrative and a deliberate strategic ploy aimed at shutting down all rational debate of the topic but I believe it’s starting to backfire on the globalist elite who have pushed it for decades. In my opinion, those who buy into such twisted thinking suffer from a form of mental illness brought on by decades of religious and political brainwashing, and now these poor souls are going to be subjected to an even more intense form of this mind control. Pray that these captured minds will be freed from the grasp of the pro-war interests that have long controlled America’s foreign policy establishment.

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