The conservative movement in the United States, which is exemplified by President Donald Trump’s administration these days, is being buffeted by a growing debate over the U.S.’ alliance with Israel and accusations that some of its supporters are unfriendly toward the American Jewish community.
The rift on the right between pro and anti-Israel conservatives exploded into the open following a recent interview conducted by the podcaster Tucker Carlson. His interviewee was the white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who opposes the United States’ special relationship with Israel on both anti-Jewish and nationalist grounds.
Fuentes leads the Groypers, an informal association of mostly young, disaffected men who vent their grievances by attacking minorities and women. Their chief target is often Jews.
During his appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show on October 27, Fuentes claimed that “organized Jewry in America” is blocking unity in the country. He also voiced admiration for Joseph Stalin, the late autocratic leader of the now-defunct Soviet Union.
Carlson, who campaigned for Trump last year, did not challenge Fuentes even once. He did not question him about his remarks about Jews, his Holocaust denial, or his admiration for Adolf Hitler.
This prompted The National Review, a major conservative magazine, to wonder why he treated Fuentes with kid gloves, while he hurled barbs at Senator Ted Cruz on one of his previous shows. “The obvious answer is that Fuentes is an avowed Jew-hater, while Cruz is a staunch supporter of Israel,” the magazine speculated.
Carlson, whose Fox News show was cancelled in 2023, dislikes Christian Zionists like Cruz and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Claiming they have been infected by a “brain virus,” he said, “I dislike them more than anybody.” Carlson went on to say that, as a Christian, he was offended by their support of Israel. He likened their affinity to Israel as “Christian heresy.”
In the past few months, Cruz has sharply criticized Carlson, warning that his animus toward Israel is steering him toward antisemitism, a charge he hotly denies.
Several days after Carlson’s podcast, the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, released a three-minute video in defence of him.
Roberts said that Carlson would “always be a close friend” of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He claimed that Carlson’s critics belong to a “globalist class,” a derogatory phrase usually associated with Jews. He declared that “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government.” In this instance, Roberts was presumably referring to Israel.
Roberts’ comments ignited a firestorm of criticism, with a number of members resigning and some donors threatening to withdraw funding, even after he apologized for the video and lambasted Fuentes’ “vicious antisemitic ideology.”
More importantly, the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism pulled out of the Heritage Foundation and joined the Conference of Christian Presidents of Israel, a pro-Israel coalition of Christian advocacy organizations.
In a statement, its followers wrote, “We cannot allow the conservative movement to be corrupted and destroyed by those consumed with attacking America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and values, thereby distracting us all from the real challenges facing our nation.”
The departure of the task force was a severe blow to the foundation, which founded it after Hamas’ invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Known as Project Esther, and conceived as a counterweight to the Biden administration’s strategy toward antisemitism, it focused almost exclusively on left-wing and pro-Palestinian activism. The foundation portrayed this “Hamas Support Network” as the chief instigator of antisemitism in the United States.
From the outset, Project Esther minimized right-wing antisemitism and excluded the majority of mainstream Jewish organizations from its deliberations, causing an undercurrent of criticism.
These tensions, reflected in the current debate within the Republican party, has led to calls to disavow antisemites and anti-Israel figures in its ranks.
Online influencers, such as Carlson and Candace Owens, are apparently trying to turn the party in particular and the conservative movement in general into one that is hostile to Israel and Jews.
Opposed to Trump’s pro-Israel policy on the grounds that it violates his “America First” ideology, they seek to seize control of the party’s “Make America Great Again” faction.
Carlson reportedly believes that Israel is “a strategic liability” and that the United States’ devotion to it is misplaced. As he put it recently, “Israel is not only not our most important ally in the Middle East. I’m not even sure they are an ally.”
This past June, during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran, Carlson criticized Trump for sending B-1 bombers to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Carlson told The New York Times that he has raised Israel as an issue “to force a rational public conversation about what’s in our country’s interest.”
He claims that he abhors antisemitism and has many Jewish friends who share his antipathy toward Israel. But Matthew Brooks, the chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, and Ben Shapiro, a prominent Jewish conservative ideologue, contend that Carlson is antisemitic.
Certainly, Carlson has knowingly invited guests to his podcast whose views are unpalatable. Darryl Cooper, a revisionist historian, implausibly told Carlson that Hitler mistakenly blundered into the Holocaust, and that Winston Churchill, the wartime prime minister of Britain, was a villain.
Patrick Buchanan, a U.S. presidential aspirant who has cast aspersions on the loyalty of American Jews, laid out a similar thesis in his book, Churchill, Hitler, And The Unnecessary War.
It would appear that Americans like Carlson are attempting to turn back the clock and infuse the conservative movement with a spirit of intolerance and racism.
It can be argued that they are a throwback to the Old Right, which upheld traditional values, regarded Jews as outsiders and demeaned Israel.
William Buckley Jr., the founder of The National Review, personified the Old Right. His father, William, a foe of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and an outspoken antisemite, exerted a significant influence on his son.
During its formative years, The National Review was deeply anti-Zionist, lambasting Israel as “the first racist state in modern history. During the 1960s, Buckley changed course, condemning antisemitism and softening his attitude toward Israel and Zionism. In 1990, he told The Washington Post that the magazine’s most important accomplishment was “the absolute exclusion of anything antisemitic or kooky” from American conservatism.
Today, as isolationist-minded Republicans like Carlson pummel Israel and dance around antisemitism, influential Jewish conservatives, who regard the Republicans as more supportive of Israel than the Democrats, look to Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance as counterweights to the antisemitic forces in the Grand Old Party.
So far, however, Vance has not rebuked Carlson, Fuentes or the Groypers. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported this week, he did not push back on skeptical questions about Israel, including one laced with an antisemitic conspiracy theory, at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi. And he downplayed the significance of text messages shared by Young Republicans that included snide remarks about gas chambers, racist slurs and praise of Hitler.
Vance dismissed the invective as “jokes” and advised critics to “grow up.” His abject failure to call out the bigots is a source of concern to Jewish conservatives.
Still more troubling, Trump has remained conspicuously silent. His silence likely emboldens Republicans, such as Carlson, who dislikes Israel and allows guests on his show to lambaste American Jews.