Out of the shadows

Nick Fuentes, an avowed white nationalist and persistent critic of Jews, has lurked on the fringes of conservative circles for years. Most leaders of the movement dismissed him as radical and out of touch with true conservative values, but his videos regularly amass hundreds of thousands or millions of views, largely among young white men who call themselves “Groypers.” Then, he scored an invitation to one of the hottest podcasts in the country: The Tucker Carlson Show.

On Oct. 29, Carlson hosted Fuentes for a two-hour interview that spanned many topics, including conservative positions on Israel. Among many other outlandish statements, Fuentes said he adored Joseph Stalin and that the Holocaust was not as bad as historically reported.

Fuentes also alleged that Jewish people control the American media and that they cannot assimilate to democracies because their identity relies on the nation of Israel, no matter where they live. Carlson agreed and said conservative figures like U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Sen. Ted Cruz, and former President George W. Bush were “seized by this mind virus” of Zionism.

“Most of them are self-described Christians,” said Carlson, who went on to criticize those who describe themselves as Christian Zionists. “And I can just say for myself, I dislike them more than anybody … because it’s Christian heresy.”

Christian Zionism can refer to a wide array of beliefs. At its simplest, it encompasses those who believe the Biblical promises God made to the nation of Israel to inhabit the land in the Middle East. Some believers who subscribe to dispensational or premillennial eschatology add that God’s ultimate plan is to restore the nation of Israel in the end times.

In the days following, many in conservative circles accused Carlson of anti-Semitism himself for even giving Fuentes a platform to share his views. The debate over Carlson and Fuentes is a microcosm of the broader disagreement over Israel roiling the Republican Party.

For months, conservative leaders have downplayed instances of anti-Semitism on the right, despite mounting evidence that it’s a widespread problem. In mid-October, someone leaked chat messages sent between members of a New York Young Republicans chapter in which leaders espoused anti-­Semitic views and made hateful comments about Jews and black people. Rather than criticize members of his own party, Vice President J.D. Vance pointed to Democratic candidates who had wished violence against their opponents in other leaked text messages. But just days later, Paul Ingrassia, the White House nominee for the Office of Special Counsel withdrew after he was found to have shared anti-Semitic messages in a group chat. In early November, Trump offered Ingrassia a job in the General Services Administration.

After Fuentes aired his beliefs before Carlson’s 5 million subscribers, with little to no pushback from Carlson, an increasingly vocal bloc of conservatives say it’s no longer possible to deny the reality that anti-Semitism has broken into the Republican mainstream.

“I never thought I’d see the same rhetoric, to hear Iranian or Hamas talking points from Tucker Carlson,” said Pastor Mario Bramnick, who leads a charismatic church in Florida. “The stark reality of what we are facing is chilling to me.”

In the two years since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, views on Israel and Palestine have sharply divided Americans, most notably on college campuses. According to a May 2025 Gallup poll, American sympathy toward Israel is at an all-time low of 46% while sympathy for Palestinians is at an all-time high of 33%.

Bramnick is just one of many conservatives who view anti-Zionism and other expressions of criticism against Israel as not only anti-Semitic but also anti-Biblical. While he and other like-minded pastors are trying to steer American Christians into adopting their views, other conservatives are pushing back—saying Israel does not need to be a staple plank in the America First platform. As the fight splits the GOP along new lines, many Christians are caught in the middle.

IN 2023, Bramnick and fellow Christian Zionist Luke Moon joined forces with the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation’s top conservative think tanks, to establish the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. It resulted in a report called Project Esther, a strategy to counter left-wing anti-Zionism. But Moon and Bramnick felt the report did not go far enough, particularly in recognizing similar anti-­Semitism on the right.

Moon pointed to proof of that blindness in the response from Heritage President Kevin Roberts to the uproar over Carlson and Fuentes.

“We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” Roberts said in a video posted to social media on Oct. 30. “That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalitions attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”

In response, high-level employees at Heritage resigned, and nearly every partner with the organization’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism called on Roberts to resign. The task force itself left Heritage in November and moved to join forces with the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel. Amid the fallout, Roberts clarified that he “abhors” Fuentes’ views, but he did not walk back his support for Carlson. In a speech at Hillsdale College in early November, Roberts explained that he was only pushing back against cancel culture, not trying to support anti-Semitism.

“You have a problem with the content, you have a problem with the issues, you have a problem with the ideas, by all means go debate them,” Roberts said. He apologized to any Jewish people who felt threatened by his words. “We know that now is a particularly scary time to be Jewish. It is a time when the rise of anti-Semitism on the left, which is far more widespread and profound than it is on the right, at the same time happening on the right means that it’s very difficult.”

Bramnick and Moon have watched the trend of anti-­Semitism on the right with growing alarm. In 2024, they founded the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel to create a setting for leaders of Christian organizations to learn more about Israel and anti-Semitic tropes, take trips to the region, and start to police anti-Semitic outbreaks wherever they appear. In November, they hosted the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism in a hotel basement in Washington. After the fallout with Heritage, the task force added right-wing anti-Semitism to its portfolio.

Moon defines anti-Semitism as “an irrational hatred of the Jewish people rooted in the facts that they’re the people to whom God brought His moral revelation into this world and the world hates them for it.”

About 100 attendees signed up for the November meeting, which featured speeches from Christian advocacy leaders like Tony Perkins of the FRC and Ralph Reed, president of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. Even Huckabee sent a virtual message. He dedicated most of his remarks to arguing that Tucker Carlson’s theology is the real heresy, though he did not mention Carlson by name. “We’ve got to stand up and speak out and speak against those who are today wishing to lead America and the world down a very dangerous path of Jew hatred and of anti-Semitism, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days of the Third Reich,” Huckabee said.

But the groundswell of anti-Semitism in conservative circles may be rising faster than the group can counter. Carlson began showing tolerance for anti-Semitic views last year when he interviewed Darryl Cooper, who argued that Jews only died in World War II concentration camps because the Nazis ran out of resources to care for them. At the time, several House members who are Jewish released a statement condemning Carlson for giving the self-described historian a platform. No Republicans signed on. In March, Theo Von hosted popular conservative podcaster Candace Owens, who said that Israel has become a haven for pedophiles. Joe Rogan in March hosted a podcast ­episode with Ian Carroll, an independent researcher who has claimed that Jews masterminded 9/11 and that Jeffrey Epstein was an agent for Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad.

Moon said incidents like these contribute to anti-Semitic sentiment that jumps to blame Jewish people for a host of ­conspiracy theories. At the time, popular conservative activist Charlie Kirk was expressing public doubts about the level of conservative support for Israel. A month later, he was assassinated at a campus event in Utah.

In October, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., shared an X post by a Holocaust denier who posited, based on a Candace Owens podcast, that Kirk was assassinated by someone affiliated with the pro-Israel wing of the Republican Party. Owens shared screenshots of a group chat in which Kirk said he had lost a Jewish donor who had committed $2 million per year because TPUSA invited Tucker Carlson to speak at an event. “Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes,” Kirk wrote. “I cannot and will not be bullied like this. Leaving me no choice but to leave the pro Israel [sic] cause.”

TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet confirmed that he released the screenshots. The episode was quickly shared among Holocaust deniers, including Evan Kilgore, a social media personality who posted that he believed only 300,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust, not the conventional number of 6 million. Greene also shared his post.

“It’s terrible, and it shows what we’re up against,” Moon told me. He said that while criticism of Israel’s government and agencies is not anti-Semitic, the impulse to immediately blame Israel above other actors is. “It is specifically what I would call the anti-­Semitic right, which is isolationist, not being anti-war, being singularly obsessed with the Jews, with the Israel-America relationship as the source of all the problems in the Middle East.”

But the pastors’ efforts to change the culture and eventually politics worry others in the conservative camp. That division was clear in September at the annual National Conservatism conference in Washington, where The American Conservative magazine editor Curt Mills debated Northeastern University political science professor Max Abrahms. Mills argued that it’s time for an Israel-America divorce.

“Why are these our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities?” Mills said during a breakout session. “Why should we accept America first, asterisk Israel?”

While Bramnick and Moon believe Christian Zionism ­correctly interprets the Bible’s position on Israel and the Jews, not all evangelicals agree. Many view Christian Zionism as a novel teaching that fails to see how the promises to Old Testament Israel are fulfilled in Christ and His church.

For most of 2025, the U.S. Senate wrestled with the Antisemitism Awareness Act, a bill that would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. First introduced in February, the bill got a hearing in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions in April. The committee did not send it on due to debate among the Republican members. It is still in the committee process.

The bill defines anti-Semitism as a perception of Jews that could be expressed as hatred, including both rhetoric and physical actions. It gives 11 examples of anti-Semitic rhetoric, including calling for violence, denying the Holocaust, holding the nation of Israel to a double standard compared to other countries, and assuming that the nation of Israel is racist.

Many conservatives oppose it.

“This bill would subject to punishment speech claiming that Jews killed Jesus, an absurd and insulting insinuation if the argument is that all Jews are responsible for killing Jesus,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said during the bill’s markup. “And yet, the Gospel of John described the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. … Nobody thinks that is all Jews, but are we no longer allowed to read John 18 and 19?”

While some Christians, including Luke Moon, worry the bill’s definition could be so broad as to label pro-Israel Christians anti-Semitic, FRC President Tony Perkins supports it.

“If you have a Biblical view of the Jewish people and the nation Israel, that after 1,900 years, the nation came back into being, then to separate the people from the land would be anti-Semitic,” Perkins told me. “If you don’t recognize that they have a right to that land, that can be seen as being against the Jewish people.”

But Mills argued against that rhetoric during NatCon. The issue of a two-state solution has nothing to do with America’s interests, he said, and stifling conservatives who push back on the idea opposes the party’s own values.

“This discussion almost always descends into the mud. But the mud is where this issue emanates from and why Zionism in 2025 is at best a morally dubious project,” Mills said during his session. “After assembling and potentially generationally realigning [a] cohort of voters disgusted with woke pieties and the suffocation of dialogue with incessant accusations of racism, Republicans have all too eagerly embraced holding the whip themselves, accusing countless unbigoted critics as anti-Semites instead of engaging on the issue.”

Perkins is trying to engage on the issue by joining forces with Moon and Bramnick to launch ­education initiatives for Christians. Moon primarily focuses on youth outreach. He told me he recently took a group of Gen Z social media influencers to Israel where they met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He said Netanyahu told the group, “You guys are America First, well I’m Israel First.”

“I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be, which is 100% what I agree with. But America first is not America only,” Moon said, adding that he believes the effort to drive a wedge between Christians and Israel is funded by groups and individuals ultimately motivated by hatred for Jews.

But Moon’s critics also accuse him of being funded—by Israel. In July 2025, the Israeli Foreign Ministry launched a program to fund trips to Israel for 550 American-based social media influencers, mostly under the age of 30.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others say Israel is seeking to use American Christians for its political causes, but Moon says even this rhetorical attack borders on anti-Semitism. While he denied taking any money from the Israeli government, he noted many other countries use similar influence campaigns.

Aside from Greene’s opposition, Moon says the seed of anti-Semitism he warned about several years ago has now produced its poisonous fruit. He says Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes and the Heritage Foundation’s defense is only the latest example. And, Moon warns, that could cost the Republican Party not only its moral foundation but also the midterm elections.

“I saw this coming a long time ago, and I was warning people about it and nobody listened to me,” Moon said. He added he was encouraged to see a variety of pro-Israel groups condemn Kevin Roberts, but he said the primary goal is chipping away at the influence of people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. “There was a long time where nobody was calling out Tucker by name because everybody was afraid of him. Now it’s shifted a bit, but nevertheless it’s still a real problem.”