March 17, 2026 04:58 PM UTC

Gabe Evans Says Iran War Dissenters "Can Never Be Proud To Be American"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Yesterday, Colorado freshman GOP Rep. Gabe Evans appeared on the right-wing Real America’s Voice pseudo-news channel to throw shade at anyone less than 100% ecstatic about President Donald Trump’s war on Iran, which according to public opinion polls is a majority of Americans:

EVANS: The operation is going, at least equal to or better than the plans, and unfortunately, you just have very loud voices in the United States that can never be proud to be American, they can never root for America. [Pols emphasis] We’ve seen it before, literally rallying in the streets, talking about freeing Palestine when Hamas was committing terrorist attacks. Well, Hamas has been on the State Department’s terror watch list really since that watch list was conceived. So you have a loud far left socialist group of folks that typically align with the Democrat party that are literally in our streets at times cheering for terrorist organizations like Hamas. And so of course, they’re going to do everything they can to degrade and confuse the actual good work that our military is doing in protecting American interests, both abroad and here at the United States…

But as the New York Times reports today, Trump’s unpopular war on Iran is splitting the MAGA movement down the middle:

One of the United States’ top counterterrorism officials resigned on Tuesday, citing his opposition to the war in Iran and what he said was Israel’s influence over the Trump administration’s policies, a sign of emerging divisions in the Republican coalition.

The official, Joe Kent, is the first senior member of the administration to quit over the war.

The seemingly open-ended nature of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has created strong divisions among Mr. Trump’s supporters. An anti-interventionist wing of the coalition, which supported President Trump because of his criticism of long overseas conflicts, has quickly become uneasy with the war, which has lasted 18 days with no immediate sign of ending.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Mr. Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, wrote in a letter to Mr. Trump. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

For those who don’t know Joe Kent’s bio, he is a Special Forces veteran who served a total of eleven combat tours of duty earning six Bronze Stars, and whose wife, a Navy cryptologist, was killed by ISIS in 2019 in a suicide bombing in Syria. Kent unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Washington state twice with Trump’s support before joining the second Trump administration as one of Tulsi Gabbard’s top deputies. From everything we can read, this is a guy who would set you straight with some vigor if you questioned his patriotism to his face.

Which is what Gabe Evans seems to have done just hours before Kent’s resignation. We’re not suggesting one had anything directly to do with the other.

But it would be…interesting for these two veterans to exchange these views sometime! Rep. Evans might have a different word to describe the experience.