What I
Learned Discussing Israel with Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor
Greene
Inside
the push to turn MAGA against Israel.
By Ian
Ward
12/08/2025
10:00 AM EST
Ian Ward
is a reporter at POLITICO.
Not so
long ago, intra-MAGA debates over Israel were confined to subterranean meeting
rooms, where conservative conference attendees hash out internecine
disagreements.
That was
the scene, at any rate, in early September, when the intellectual vanguard of
the MAGA movement gathered at a D.C. hotel for the fifth annual National
Conservatism Conference. On the first day of the conference, two months before
the right was convulsed by a bitter public fight over criticisms of Israel and
antisemitism, I joined a hundred conference-goers in a basement room for a
panel titled “America and the Israel-Iran War: A Debate.” But everyone in the
room knew that the issue was a proxy for a deeper question that has since
consumed the right: Whether the Republican Party should end its decades-long
alliance with Israel.
First to
take the podium was Max Abrahms, a right-leaning counterterrorism expert from
Northeastern University, who defended the strikes on Iran and denounced the
“MAGA isolationist realists” eager to turn their back on the Jewish state. He
was followed by Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative. “Why are these
our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities?” Mills
asked. “Why should we accept ‘America First’ — asterisk Israel?”
Prompted
by the war in Gaza, he said, even erstwhile supporters of Israel were waking up
to the downsides of the alliance. “Something,” he said, “is in the air.”
Something,
indeed, was in the air. In the months since, the argument over the GOP’s
support for Israel and its response to the rising tide of antisemitism has
spilled out of the conference halls and enveloped the MAGA movement. The debate
has been at the center of the ongoing fracas over Tucker Carlson’s friendly
interview with the white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes; the high-profile
split between President Donald Trump and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene;
and even the contentious debate over the legacy of the late conservative
activist Charlie Kirk. Online, prominent conservative commentators are openly
at war over the issue, while at town halls and conservative conferences,
prominent Republicans are fielding pointed questions from MAGA-hat-wearing
supporters about the Trump administration’s support for Israel. With an eye
toward 2028, Republican presidential hopefuls are leveraging the debate to
position themselves in the field.
The onset
of this schism coincided with the war in Gaza, but it’s no mere accident of
history. In fact, it’s the work of a specific group of conservative critics of
Israel who have maneuvered — sometimes in unison and sometimes on their own —
to push the debate to the center of the MAGA conversation. In their own
telling, they are motivated by a desire to resolve a glaring contradiction
between Trump’s “America First” philosophy and the U.S.’s ongoing support for
Israel. In the eyes of their pro-Israel critics, these same figures are engaged
in an ugly antisemitic exercise, cynically exploiting the fallout from the war
to marginalize Jewish conservatives within MAGA. To varying degrees, the
leading anti-Israel voices claim to have the sympathy of Trump himself who,
despite repeatedly affirming his support for Israel and cracking down on
pro-Palestinian figures on the left, has permitted even the most vocal Israel
critics to remain in the MAGA fold.
A red
Tucker is not MAGA” sign was waved by college students attending the Republican
Jewish Coalition conference on Nov. 1, 2025, in protest of Tucker Carlson’s
interview with right-wing podcaster Nick Fuentes. | Thomas Beaumont/AP
In the
months after the debate over Israel at NatCon, I sat down for conversations
with key figures in this rising cohort — in some cases, for their first lengthy
interview on the subject. This group is not a monolith; its members hail from
different political traditions and distinct ideological backgrounds. Some, like
Mills of the American Conservative, come from a strain of conservative thought
that has always been skeptical of Israel and the influence of the pro-Israel
lobby. Others, like Steve Bannon, have gone from self-described Zionists to
acerbic critics of the U.S.-Israel alliance. Many of the biggest names, like
Carlson, are known primarily as media fixtures, but the group includes elected
officials, like Greene, as well as podcasters and comedians whose main
interests lie outside of politics. I learned that the lines between these
sectors are increasingly blurry: Carlson revealed to me that he had a profane
private conversation with Speaker Mike Johnson, whom he had called to lobby
against U.S. aid to Israel.
Collectively,
the various people I spent time with represent a genuinely novel force in the
21st-century American right: a bloc of anti-Israel conservatives who stand
squarely within the Republican mainstream.
During
our conversations — which took place as the Trump administration negotiated its
Gaza peace plan and continued amid fallout from Carlson’s incendiary interview
with Fuentes — many of the people I spoke with pushed back against the claim
that their criticisms were motivated by anti-Jewish animus. Still, many also
downplayed the extent of antisemitism on the right. Some maintained a firm line
against collaborating with openly bigoted figures like Fuentes, while others
left open the possibility of working with them in a unified front against the
left. At times, some of their comments to me — alluding to cult-like forces
working to undermine American sovereignty — slid into antisemitic territory or
drew on antisemitic tropes.
The
primary question facing this cohort is whether they can win over a majority of
the MAGA movement. Even now, they face serious obstacles. On Capitol Hill, the
overwhelming majority of Republicans continue to back U.S. aid to Israel, and
in the White House, Trump regularly expresses his support for the alliance. The
recent backlash directed at the conservative think tank The Heritage
Foundation, whose president, Kevin Roberts, was forced to apologize for his
defense of Carlson’s interview with Fuentes after facing fury from staff and
donors, underscores the political dangers facing conservatives who openly ally
with anti-Israel figures.
Yet as
Republicans look to a post-Trump future, and polls find that over half of young
conservatives now have an unfavorable view of Israel — a 15-point rise from
three years ago — the anti-Israel right could find itself with an opening. My
survey through the key figures of this movement shed light on how MAGA arrived
at this fraught juncture — and where it might go next.
The
Paleocon
In the
main, the energy driving the right’s turn against Israel has emanated from the
rising cohort of young, ultra-online conservatives. And in Washington’s insular
conservative circles, the face of that cohort is Mills, the editor of The
American Conservative.
Mills, a
fresh-faced 35-year-old with an impish demeanor and a wardrobe full of slim-cut
suits, looks even younger than he is. But even his brief biography captures the
older swirl of historical forces that set the stage for the right’s current
debate about Israel. As a “probably highly unusual 13-year-old” growing up in
the Washington suburbs in the early 2000s, Mills told me, he became a committed
critic of the Iraq War, like many in his age group. But in his case, he
gravitated toward the nationalist right rather than the anti-war left. He
became a committed reader of The American Conservative — TAC, as it’s known to
readers — the magazine co-founded by Patrick J. Buchanan, the long-time
Republican aide, three-time presidential candidate and conservative
commentator.
Buchanan
founded TAC as an intellectual organ for a small clique of intellectuals known
as the “paleoconservatives,” who opposed free trade, immigration, foreign
military intervention and, crucially, U.S. support for Israel. Prior to World
War II, this ideological mix had been common within the Republican Party,
including in the conservative family in which Buchanan grew up. But during the
Cold War, the isolationist, anti-trade and immigrant-skeptical faction receded,
and the GOP gradually became as pro-Israel as the Democrats. By the 1990s and
early 2000s, Buchanan was almost universally seen as an ideological apostate
within the conservative movement.
Buchanan’s
status as a political pariah was reinforced by his vociferous criticisms of
Israel, which he claimed worked with pro-Israel interests in Washington to drag
the U.S. into military conflicts abroad. To Buchanan’s critics, his escalating
attacks on Israel — culminating in his infamous allegation that Congress was
“Israeli-occupied territory” — reeked of antisemitism. In 1991, William F.
Buckley, the garrulous gatekeeper of the conservative movement, published a
long National Review essay declining to defend Buchanan against the charge. The
essay, which Buckley later expanded into a book called In Search of
Anti-Semitism, cast Buchanan and his paleoconservative brethren even further
into the political wilderness.
Yet none
of that deterred Mills, who found in Buchanan’s ideas an intellectual
architecture to buttress his anti-war views. He was drawn in by Buchanan’s
argument that Iraq was merely the latest chapter in America’s slide from a
constitutional republic into a global empire — a process that Buchanan believed
eroded the nation’s spiritual and material foundations. Mills also agreed with
Buchanan’s claim that Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. served as
primary enablers of America’s imperial ambitions.
“I can’t
remember studying the Israel-Palestine issue thinking the Israelis were, on
balance, the good guy,” Mills told me. “It just seemed like the Palestinians
were weaker, the Israelis were railroading them, and we” — meaning the U.S. —
“were constantly involved.”
As an
up-and-coming reporter in Washington’s right-of-center media in the mid-2010s,
Mills became a keeper of the Buchananite flame, committed to preserving
Buchanan’s ideas even as the man retreated from public life and the GOP moved
further away from his program. For a time, it seemed like Mills had consigned
himself to a lifetime at the ideological fringes of the Republican coalition.
And then came 2016.
Since the
emergence of Trump, the ideological history of the GOP has often been told as
the belated triumph of Buchananism. But that triumph has been conspicuously
incomplete: Even as the GOP under Trump has moved closer to Buchanan on issues
like immigration and trade, it has shunned Buchanan’s open critique of Israel.
Since
taking over TAC in 2024, Mills had worked to change that, aiming to inject
Buchananite criticisms of Israel into the MAGA mainstream. In the magazine,
whose past contributors include now-Vice President JD Vance, Mills has
published a steady stream of articles criticizing the war in Gaza, including
articles characterizing Israel’s actions as “genocide” (a charge that Israel
denies) and calls for the U.S. to recognize a Palestinian state. In June, he
emerged as a prominent voice against attacking Iran, appearing multiple times
on Bannon’s War Room podcast to lobby against joining Israel’s bombing
campaign. Mills is also friendly with Carlson, whose show he appeared on in
January to discuss the possibility of war with Iran.
Mills
frames his stance as the expression of an unsentimental realism. When we spoke,
he told me that the downsides of the U.S.-Israel relationship were clear to him
even before the war in Gaza — for instance, in Israel’s successful effort to
lobby the first Trump administration to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal —
but they became even more apparent during the war. “If Israel was just sitting
there and doing its thing — like, yeah, it’s an apartheid state, and yeah, it’s
an unpopular U.S. protectorate in the Middle East — that would be one thing,”
Mills said. “But it’s just fucking constant. They can’t wait one more week
without [asking for] new stuff.”
Foreign
policy calculations aside, though, Mills acknowledged that much of the swing
against Israel is being driven by a visceral sense that the GOP cares more
about Israeli priorities than it does about the interests of its own voters.
“There’s still no wall on the southern border. We still haven’t brought all
these factories back. They still have not deported 10 million people,” Mills
told me. “But you know what they have done? They’ve kicked people out of the
country for pro-Palestinian speech and they’ve bombed Iran.”
That view
is enough to qualify Mills as a radical within the conservative movement, but
he told me that he sometimes feels like a moderate compared to some of the
Gen-Z conservatives. “They’re hardcore,” Mills told me. “Frankly, some of them
are so radicalized that they are, like, openly sympathetic to Hamas, which
[they see as] close to pure freedom fighters.”
Yet if
Mills succeeds in turning Buchananism into the default ideology of MAGA’s young
activist class, the same question that dogged Buchanan will dog them: Can the
GOP become fully Buchananite without also becoming more hospitable to
antisemitic figures like Fuentes?
Mounting
evidence suggests that it cannot. See, for instance, the newfound prominence of
Fuentes and his “groyper” movement; or the recent revelations about Republican
operatives privately copping to having “a Nazi streak” and professing their
love for Hitler; or the tidal wave of antisemitic content that has flooded Elon
Musk’s X; or the popularity of conservative commentators like Candace Owens,
who has railed against “rings” of Jews in Hollywood and D.C. (In a brief
interview, Owens denied that she promotes antisemitic views.)
Yet Mills
maintains that it can, and he pushed back against the claim that most MAGA
critics of Israel are motivated by anti-Jewish bigotry. “People act like, ‘Ah,
you know, the millennials and the Zoomers are just insane, schizophrenic
weirdos who, like, hate Israel and hate the Jews,” he said. “And it’s like, no
— you have an insane state that has an unbelievable amount of influence in the
Republican Party and which is just constantly leveraging its ties to
effectively plunder the political capital of the [Trump] administration.” He
added: “The problem with the antisemitism thing is that it’s fucking small, and
it’s less important.”
In
November, after the flare-up with Fuentes, I called Mills back to see if the
recent events had prompted him to change his mind. He didn’t budge. “Obviously,
the amount of antisemitism in the country is not zero ... but I think it’s very
overstated,” he said. “And I think in general, it’s overstated to shut down
conversation about Israel.”
As these
younger conservatives age into the electorate, Mills believes that candidates’
stances on Israel will become a more significant litmus test — and he plans to
help make it so, beginning in 2028. “I think it’s going to be a major dynamic
in the first real open primary on the Republican side in 12 years,” he told me.
The
worst-case scenario for the Republicans in that cycle, in Mills’ view, would be
for the party to nominate a more pro-Israel hawk like Secretary of State Marco
Rubio while Democrats opted for a populist Israel critic like California Rep.
Ro Khanna. In that situation, he said, he wouldn’t rule out mass defections of
young Republicans — even if that meant voting against other conservative
priorities. “If it’s Ro Khanna versus Marco Rubio,” he added, “I think you can
guess who I’ll vote for.”
The
Nationalist
In
November 2017, Steve Bannon headlined a Zionist Organization of America dinner.
In his remarks, Bannon praised the organization’s “unapologetic” defense of
Israel, and proclaimed himself “a proud Christian Zionist,” invoking the Bible
as a basis for supporting Israel.
Eight
years and two presidential administrations later, the speech reads like
something that the present-day Bannon would devote his War Room podcast to
castigating. “I’ve definitely changed, because I’ve seen that they’re not an
ally,” Bannon told me when I called him in early October.
Yet to
say that Bannon has merely “changed” may be understating his ideological pivot.
Since 2017, Bannon has undergone a complete political reversal, from lavishly
praising Israel to denigrating it “a protectorate, a vassal state,” as he put
it to me. To critics on the right, this reversal suggests that Bannon is more
interested in stirring online controversy than he is in delineating strategy —
or, at the very least, that he’s chasing an online audience whose hostile views
of Israel don’t reflect broader Republican sentiment.
In
Bannon’s telling, his shifting views are the product of a genuine ideological
evolution — one that, in his estimation, is sweeping the MAGA grassroots.
Bannon
told me that his shift started shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on
Israel. For months, he’d been urging Congressional conservatives to oppose
military aid to Ukraine on the grounds that it didn’t serve core U.S.
interests. Now, as Republicans rushed to support Israel’s war in Gaza, he began
asking himself if support for Israel met the same standard. “I started
thinking, ‘Well, hang on for a second. ‘America First’ means ‘America First,’”
Bannon told me. “And as I started looking at the Israel situation, and I said,
‘This is actually more insane, because now we’re really getting dragged into
something that we have no interest in.”
At the
same time, Bannon told me, he was hearing chatter among younger conservative
staffers and operatives who were privately opposed to U.S. support for the war
but wouldn’t speak up because they feared the professional consequences.
Sensing that the terrain was changing, and taking an opportunity to cultivate
an emerging audience, he took to social media in November 2023 to issue an
ultimatum: “No Money for Ukraine, No Money for Israel UNTIL we STOP the
Invasion of America.”
Since
then, Bannon has embraced a more sweeping critique. He describes the Israel
alliance as a distraction from the pressing objective of instituting a
“hemispheric defense” designed to “hermetically seal the United States” from
China, and he is openly contemptuous of pro-Israel congressional Republicans
who justify their position via the same Christian Zionist ideas that he himself
once espoused. “It’s an ‘Israel First’ cult” on Capitol Hill, he said, echoing
the accusation that got Buchanan banished from the conservative mainstream. He
name-checked Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Tom Cotton of Arkansas. “They’re not
logical. Go listen when they talk. They get a glazed look on their faces.”
(Cotton and Cruz did not respond to a request for comment.)
Bannon
maintains that his position is the only one that’s consistent with the One True
MAGA Faith — which means, by extension, that anyone who disagrees has
betrayed that faith. Yet the problem for Bannon is that it’s not entirely clear that Trump, the
high priest of MAGA, is entirely on his side. Bannon, of course, is adamant
that Trump shares his skepticism. In our conversations, he made a habit of
drawing my attention to the most minute indications that Trump was distancing
himself from Israel, like a MAGA soothsayer interpreting minor shifts in the
weather. (Had I noticed, for instance, that Trump didn’t bring a color guard to
welcome Bibi to the White House in September?)
In
Bannon’s eyes, the clearest sign was the October ceasefire deal and Trump’s
subsequent peace plan, which Bannon considers a masterstroke designed to
curtail Israel’s territorial ambitions and thwart a regime-change war with
Iran. When I called him a few days after the deal went into effect, he told me
that it would almost certainly lead to a Palestinian state. “The ‘Israel First’
crowd are shattered,” he said gleefully. “All their masturbatory fantasies
about [attacking] Iran are gone.”
Yet for
every example of Trump taking a more hardline position against Israel, there is
a counterexample — like the speech in late October, when the president
literally said, “I love Israel.” Then there is the fact that Trump has staffed
his administration with pro-Israel conservatives like former Arkansas governor
and self-described “unreformed Zionist” Mike Huckabee, the current ambassador
in Jerusalem. When asked to respond to claims that the administration’s policy
toward Israel conflicts with the principles of “America First,” a White House
spokesperson praised the U.S.’s alliance with Israel as “at its strongest in
history” under Trump and said that “fostering strong alliances and enhancing
global stability protects our homeland and exemplifies America First foreign
policy.”
Bannon
waved away these displays as mere political theater. Trump’s real sympathies,
he insisted, lie with the Arab states that have agreed to invest billions of
dollars in the U.S. since Trump took office. “You know how Trump is — he’s a
business guy,” Bannon said. “If he’s got a guy writing a check, that, to him,
is a partner. And Israel doesn’t write checks.”
Of
course, none of this stops Bannon from deploying accusations of anti-Jewish
animus to attack Israel critics on the left. His favorite target is New York’s
mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, whom he described as the “convergence of the
neo-Marxists and the jihadists.” I was curious about this criticism, since at
least on the surface, Bannon and Mamdani converge on their criticisms of the
war in Gaza and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Bannon
shot back with a characteristically incendiary claim. “The problem I have with
the progressives is that a lot of progressives just are Jew haters,” he
replied. “If you look at the energy on their side, ‘the river to the sea’ and
‘the global Intifada’ — I can’t work with that, because it’s essentially
genocide on the Jewish people.”
But what
about the “Jew haters” on his own side — people like Fuentes, who has publicly
called for the execution of “perfidious Jews.” (Fuentes did not respond to a
request for comment.)
Here, the
incendiary Bannon was suddenly equivocal. “I think that all depends on how all
that evolves over time,” he said. “If these trends continue, and you literally
have almost zero support [for Israel] under 35-year-olds, that’s going to
change American politics.”
I asked
Bannon if he was comfortable being in coalition with people who explicitly
grounded their opposition to Israel in animosity toward Jews as a group. “I
didn’t say that,” Bannon said. But he wouldn’t say that he wasn’t, either.
Tucker
Carlson speaks at a memorial for Charlie Kirk
Tucker
Carlson speaks at a memorial for Charlie Kirk, Sept. 21, 2025, in Glendale,
Ariz. Since departing Fox News in 2023, the conservative commentator has become
a prominent figure in the anti-Israel right. | Ross Franklin/AP
The
Provocateur
In early
October, I drove to western Maine to pay a visit to the leader of the
conservative Israel critics, Tucker Carlson.
Since
being shown the door at Fox News in 2023, Carlson has become the most
influential member of the anti-Israel right, having used his independent
podcast — which currently sits in the top 10 of Spotify’s podcast charts — to
lay out a lengthy list of grievances about the Jewish state and its
conservative backers in America.
At the
same time, the ex-Fox News anchor has invited a parade of guests onto his show
to unwind conspiracy-tinged historical counternarratives about Israel. In July,
Carlson hosted the amateur historian Darryl Cooper — who had previously
appeared on Carlson’s show to label Winston Churchill the “chief villain of the
Second World War” and downplay the Holocaust as a consequence of the poor Nazi
logistics — to make
suggestions about Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged ties to Israeli intelligence. In August, he hosted
Owens to discuss her belief that Israel is “a demonic nation” whose founding is
rooted in the occult. And then, in late October, he released his now-infamous
interview with Fuentes, in which Carlson breezily swept past Fuentes’ Holocaust
denial and open admiration for Hitler.
To
Carlson’s critics, the Fuentes interview was just the latest evidence that he
has crossed a line into rank antisemitism. “When you look at all the things
that he talks about these days … it’s really not hard to figure out what’s
going on,” said Josh Hammer, a prominent pro-Israel conservative commentator
who has called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America.” “Clearly he
has an issue with Jewish people.”
Carlson,
who left Washington in 2020 for the village where he spent his summer vacations
growing up, had agreed to explain his views on Israel and answer his critics.
But when I arrived at his “barn” — a former municipal garage that Carlson has
transformed into his recording studio and wood-paneled man cave, decked out
with vintage muskets and taxidermied animals — he wanted to let me know that he
wasn’t excited to talk about it.
“The last
thing I wanted to think about or argue about was Israel, because I’ve always
felt it wasn’t worth it,” he said, plopping down on a leather armchair and
lighting up a cigarette. “I have a lot of friends who are very emotionally
intense about Israel, and I love them, and I don’t want to argue with people I
really like or love over some foreign country. It’s just not worth it.”
Nevertheless,
he said, he felt “forced” into the debate by the increasingly aggressive
behavior of Netanyahu’s government and Republicans’ refusal to stand up to it.
“It’s destroying the coalition. I’m not saying it could — I’m saying it is,”
Carlson said with a grave look. “I see it in the polling numbers, in the loss
of the support of young men, in the violent infighting in the party, which
unfortunately I’ve been sucked into.” He looked at me with one eyebrow cocked
and took a drag of his cigarette. “I’ll tell you this: These are the shoals
upon which the ship is sinking.”
Carlson
told me that he sees his critique of the U.S.-Israel relationship as the latest
battle in a decades-long crusade against the neoconservative foreign policy
that motivated the Iraq War, which he initially supported. In June, as the
Trump administration considered joining Israel’s bombing campaign against
Iran’s nuclear facilities, Carlson traveled to Washington to rally opposition.
While in the capital, he and Bannon made rare back-to-back appearances on each
other’s shows, and Carlson hosted Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on his own show to
brutally grill him about his pro-Israel views. Speaking with Bannon, Carlson
argued that the strikes were designed to drag the U.S. into a broader
regime-change war in Iran — a redux of the dynamics that embroiled America in
Iraq.
That
campaign ultimately failed to prevent the administration from signing onto the
bombing campaign — on June 22, U.S. forces carried out “Operation Midnight
Hammer” against three Iranian nuclear sites — and Carlson’s more dire
predictions of a regional conflagration did not come to pass. Still, Carlson
defended his effort as consistent with the principles of “America First” as he
understands them.
“I made a
principled case in public and in private against joining Netanyahu in this
attack on Iran because it didn’t seem that it was worth the risk,” Carlson told
me. He added: “That is the Trump revolution: ‘How is this good for us?’”
Yet for
Carlson, who is as astute an observer of the murky psychological undercurrents
of the MAGA movement as anyone other than Trump himself, the “America First”
argument against supporting Israel is only the tip of the iceberg. Far more
important, in Carlson’s view, is that the relationship violates the first moral
law of MAGA, which is an innate belief in hierarchy. “If you’re a country of
350 million people, you can’t get bossed around by a country of 9 million
people,” Carlson said indignantly. “That’s against nature.”
Even
worse, for Carlson, is his sense that it remains taboo on the right to
criticize Israeli influence in U.S. politics, even as the Trumpian cultural
revolution had torn down many of the existing barriers between the sayable and
the unsayable. “What you’re telling me is that a foreign country is influencing
my country, but I’m a bad person if I notice or talk about it?” Carlson said,
uncorking one of his signature falsetto cackles. “It’s like, ‘Shut up!'"
Carlson
told me that he started to chafe even more strongly against that perceived
taboo during the war in Gaza. He was troubled by Israel’s tolerance for
civilian casualties, which he came to see as a form of “collective punishment”
incompatible with his Christian faith. Then there was Israel’s operation
targeting members of Hezbollah by detonating explosive pagers. “What a cowardly
way to kill people — including bystanders — by blowing people’s balls off,” he
said.
But it
was the reports of Israel’s attacks on Christian churches and religious sites
in Gaza that turned him decisively against U.S. support for the war, Carlson
said. His anger prompted him to move off his media platform and into the world
of temporal power. In April 2024, he called Mike Johnson: “I said, ‘You’re
appropriating all this money to Israel to fund this war, but Christians are
being killed.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s our duty as Christians to support
this,’” Carlson told me. “And I said, ‘You’re telling me that Jesus commands us
to kill Christians? Is that what you’re saying?’”
The
conversation turned testy. “I used very vulgar language with him, and I yelled
at him, because I was so offended,” Carlson said. I asked if he had repaired
his relationship with Johnson since then. “No, of course not, and I don’t care
to,” he replied. “I consider Johnson, like, disgusting. Disgusting.” (Johnson’s
office declined to comment.)
Given
Carlson’s indignation at these perceived efforts to silence Israel critics on
the right, I was curious what he had thought of parallel efforts targeting the
left — specifically the Trump administration’s detention and attempted
deportation of the Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil earlier this year. Was
that not an instance of his own allies targeting someone because they had
criticized Israel? “I hated it. I hate the whole thing. Someone criticizes a
foreign country and they can’t live here?” Carlson said. “Are you kidding?”
But why
hadn’t he spoken out publicly against Khalil’s arrest when it happened — or,
for that matter, about what he termed the “collective punishment” of
Palestinians in Gaza? “From my perspective, the most important thing was to do
whatever I could to discourage a regime change war against Iran, so I just kind
of subordinated everything to that,” he said. “It could be one of many bad
calls I’ve made in my life.”
The
accusations of antisemitism leveled against Carlson tend to rely less on any
single comment than on the universe of claims — many shrouded in insinuation
and innuendo — that Carlson has made about Israel and its U.S. supporters.
Critics point, for instance, to Carlson’s repeated public criticisms of the
Jewish financier Bill Ackman; or his unproven suggestion that Epstein was
working for Israeli intelligence services; or his not-so-veiled comparison
between the people who killed Charlie Kirk and “hummus-eaters” who conspired to
kill Jesus.
When I
presented Carlson with a version of this criticism, he seemed unfazed. “I think
antisemitism is wrong, and I can explain why I think that,” he said, before
launching into a long riff about how his Christian faith precludes him from
believing in “race guilt” or collective punishment.
But
putting aside the contents of his soul, I told Carlson, there are legitimate
concerns about the overarching picture of American politics that he espouses —
a vision that pairs a belief in the shadowy omnipotence of the Jewish state
with claims that a small minority of deracinated elites use their control of
government, media, civil society and finance to oppress normal Americans.
Having taken it upon himself to inject that set of beliefs into the political
mainstream — “and I plan to continue to, until they kill me,” Carlson
interjected — did he not think that he would provoke antisemitic sentiment
among his audience?
“So
what’s my option?” Carlson responded. “To pretend that somehow Epstein had
nothing to do with Mossad? And that it’s OK to get into another regime change
war in the Middle East? And that Bill Ackman somehow earned $9 billion for
making America better?” (Ackman did not respond to a request for comment.)
But
still, I asked: Aren’t you playing with fire?
“Israel
is playing with fire by tampering in our internal politics,” he shot back. “If
you’re a tiny client state with no resources, a state that’s irrelevant except
to the extent that you can wield power using other people’s militaries, and you
start doing that — oh, man, they are playing with fire.”
Yet that
diagnosis raises another uncomfortable question for the MAGA faithful: Why is
Trump allowing Israel to “tamper” in America’s internal politics on his watch?
As Carlson knows well, Trump’s greatest political strength, at least in the
eyes of the MAGA faithful, is his mob-moss swagger — his willingness to break
any rule and stand up to any adversary in order to put “America First.” If
Israel is what Carlson says it is, then why doesn’t Trump give it his patented
mafioso treatment?
“I don’t
know,” Carlson mouthed to me with a slightly anguished look. “I don’t know.”
The
Lawmaker
Beating
up on Israel may be fashionable over a bowl of beef-tallow fries at
conservative confabs, but on Capitol Hill, the vast majority of Republicans see
things very differently. In July, when Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders
introduced a measure to block certain arms sales to Israel, not a single
Republican — not even Sen. Rand Paul, the stalwart libertarian opponent of
foreign aid — voted for it.
In the
House, though, a handful of Republican dissidents emerged — none more
significant than Marjorie Taylor Greene, the MAGA firebrand from Georgia who,
following a high-profile falling-out with Trump, shocked her party in late
November by announcing that she would resign her seat early next year.
In the
months leading up to the resignation, “MTG” has gradually broken with
Republican orthodoxy on a range of issues — including Israel. In July, she
became the first Republican in Congress to label Israel’s action in Gaza a
“genocide,” and in August, she called for AIPAC to register as a foreign
lobbying organization. Also in July, Greene moved to strip all foreign military
aid from the budget — including $500 million for Israel. The effort failed, but
not before earning the support of two of Greene’s longtime progressive foes,
Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib. (In a statement, an
AIPAC spokesperson said that all its members, donors and board members are
Americans who “will not be intimidated from participating in the political process.”)
“How
Congress votes on this issue is one-thousand percent different from where the
American people are on this issue,” Greene told me in early October. “When
people’s wallets and checking accounts are empty, they’re looking at your
government going, ‘Why? Why is the only thing my government cares about some
other country and some horrible war that they’re waging?’” She said the images
of dead and starving children ultimately prompted her to call the conflict a
“genocide.” “There are some things that you can’t unsee,” Greene said.
Throughout the summer, Greene used her celebrity status to try to sway the MAGA
base in ways that a less prominent lawmaker cannot: In the span of a few weeks,
she hit the conservative influencer circuit to broadcast her change of heart on
Israel, sitting down with Carlson, Bannon, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly,
and former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz.
“She’s
been bold,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, the libertarian-leaning Republican from
Kentucky who, before Greene spoke out, was the sole Republican in the House to
publicly oppose aid to Israel. Massie, who often appears in public with an
electronic lapel pin displaying a real-time tracker of the federal debt, told
me that he has long led with the economic case against foreign aid for Israel
because he thought it played better with Republican voters. But he said that he
was pleasantly surprised to hear Greene making the moral argument. “She’s not
just making the economic case that it’s a misallocation of tax dollars,” Massie
said. “She’s making the case that it’s inhumane and wrong.”
I asked
Greene why so few Republicans were willing to join her. She pointed to the
continued influence of Christian Zionism among evangelicals. “I think there’s
been a propaganda campaign pushed on American Christians for decades that has
basically brainwashed American Christians and politicians to believe that
there’s one country that they have to serve,” Green told me. “I’m a Christian,
and I’ve read the Bible,” she added. “The secular government of Israel is not
the Israel of the Bible.”
Yet
Greene — a former QAnon sympathizer who once mused about Rothschild-connected
laser beams causing wildfires in California and compared mask mandates to the
Holocaust — poses a distinct problem for conservatives who want to disentangle
substantive criticisms of Israel from antisemitic dog whistling. Greene
declined to answer when I asked her how she’d respond to people who dismiss her
criticisms about Israel because of her past comments, chiding me for
“continuing to tell a lie” about the laser beam controversy. Instead, I asked
her how conservative critics of Israel should relate to explicitly antisemitic
figures like Fuentes. (In 2022, Greene spoke at a conference hosted by Fuentes,
though she later said she “does not endorse” his white nationalist views.) Did
she feel any sort of moral obligation to speak out against him?
She
dodged. “I think the media, especially in Washington D.C., gives a lot more
credit to certain people that don’t deserve any, like Nick Fuentes,” she said.
“He’s not as powerful as the Washington establishment media thinks.”
But
whether coming from Fuentes or elsewhere, I said, antisemitism is a real force.
Do her criticisms of Israel risk inflaming it? Not in her telling. She
responded that it was the people accusing Israel critics of antisemitism — not
the actual antisemites — who are fueling the phenomenon. “It’s that behavior
that is increasing antisemitism,” she said. “That’s what’s actually happening.”
Greene’s
impending departure from Congress marks a blow to the anti-Israel right’s
Capitol Hill profile. Yet even before her split with Trump, Greene was
politically isolated: Except for Massie, none of her Republican colleagues have
joined her legislative efforts. And though the Epstein files appear to be the
immediate cause of her split with Trump, Greene has suggested that Israel
played a role: In her statement announcing her resignation, she alluded to her
belief that “America First should mean America first and only America First,
with no other foreign country ever being attached to American First in our
halls of government” as one of the stances that distanced her from the
president.
Yet
Greene may not be off the scene for very long. Her feud with Trump and abrupt
resignation have fueled rumors that she may run for president in 2028, which
Greene has denied. But when we spoke, she hinted at a longer-term plan. When I
asked if she had a plan for capitalizing on diminishing levels of support for
Israel among Gen Z conservatives, she said she was looking beyond the horizons
of the Republican Party.
“I don’t
know that this generation is even going to support the two-party system at this
point,” she replied. “I think I think Gen Z sees the two-party system as an
utter failure, and I think they hate both sides for a variety of different
reasons.” She added, “They are radically for America. I am one thousand percent
for them.”
Steve
Scalise wears a GOP-themed tie and a pin featuring the American and Israeli
flags during a press conference
House
Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), wears pins of American and Israeli flags
during a press conference with House Republicans and families of hostages being
held in Gaza on Nov. 7, 2023. | Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AP
The Bros
Traditional
media figures like Carlson and Mills have played a role in injecting
anti-Israel views into the mainstream right, but they’re only part of the
story. In reality, much of the audience for right-leaning critics of Israel is
coming from outside conservative media — via the podcasts, newsletters,
streaming platforms and social media feeds where young people increasingly live
their political lives.
On the
Israel issue in particular, the so-called bro podcasts — shows like The Joe
Rogan Experience (currently No. 1 on the Spotify charts) and This Past Weekend
W/ Theo Von, both of which regularly feature conversations with right-of-center
critics of Israel — have proved particularly influential. In one recent survey
by The Washington Free Beacon, 35 percent of conservatives between the ages of
18 and 34 reported getting their news about Israel from Rogan’s show, while 11
percent said they got it from Von.
One of
the most prominent Israel critics to emerge from the bro podcasting sphere is
Dave Smith, the comedian and host of the Part of the Problem podcast. Smith
first caught the eye of many conservatives in April, after he squared off
against the British neoconservative Douglas Murray in a viral three-hour-long
debate about Israel on Rogan’s show, racking up close to five million YouTube
views. Since then, he has gained traction in the conservative mainstream,
joining Charlie Kirk onstage in July and appearing multiple times on Carlson’s
show to discuss Israel.
In early
October, I called Smith on the road in Detroit, where he was preparing for a
stand-up show at a comedy club. Growing up in a liberal Jewish family in
Brooklyn in the ’90s, Smith told me, he had never encountered anything other
than a broadly pro-Israel perspective. That changed during the Iraq War, when
he started reading books by the libertarian stalwart Rep. Ron Paul, father of
Rand and a critic of Israel. “I kind of fell down the rabbit hole of reading
everything I could get my hands on about the neoconservatives and the Bush
administration, and you can only read about that for so long before you’re
like, ‘Oh, Israel’s a major player in all of this,” Smith said.
Dave
Smith speaking at an event in Kissimmee, Florida.
Dave
Smith speaks at an event in Kissimmee, Fla. | Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
In his
podcast appearances, Smith presents himself as a kind of straight-thinking
everyman challenging the expert consensus on Israel. “Like, OK, I’m a weird
guy, I tell jokes at nightclubs and then get obsessed with politics and
monetary policy,” Smith jawed during his debate on Rogan’s show, when Murray
pressed him on his qualifications to discuss the war. “I just, like,
fundamentally disagree with this idea … that there’s an expert class [who] can
have opinions on all of these things.”
In
Smith’s view, the U.S.-Israel relationship is just the latest in a long line of
issues — including the Iraq War, the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine —
that the “expert class” has bungled. During Covid, he told me, independent
podcasting emerged as one of the few media spheres where non-experts could
dissent from the consensus, and the same proved true during the early days of
the war in Gaza. “We’re having these longform conversations in completely
uncontrolled environments, and the bottom line is that there are people like me
who are simply unencumbered by these [political] forces,” Smith said. “I don’t
have to take a certain position because [I] can’t survive having a different
opinion in Washington D.C. Like, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me.”
Like many
of the bro-podcasters, Smith backed Trump in 2024, but he said he felt no
obligation to defend the president or all of his policies. In June, Smith went
on the internet show Breaking Points to call the Iran bombings “an absolute
betrayal of everything that Trump ran and campaigned on” and to urge Congress
to impeach him.
Smith has
moderated his criticisms, but neither the resolution of the Iran crisis nor the
ceasefire deal has convinced him that Trump is ready to fundamentally change
the U.S. posture toward Israel. “Even today, with how much the conversation has
changed in the media, who is the member of Donald Trump’s administration who is
an Israel critic? No one — not a single one of them,” Smith told me. “Even the
ones who are huge critics of the neocons and the Forever Wars, like Tulsi
Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy — they will never say a negative word about Israel.”
Meanwhile,
Smith has continued to sit down with some of the more radical anti-Israel
voices on the right, including Owens and Fuentes, whom Smith hosted on his
podcast just weeks before Carlson did. Smith told me that the episode with
Fuentes quickly became one of his most popular ever, with over two million
views on YouTube alone. In early November, amid the fallout from Carlson’s
interview with Fuentes, Smith also invited Carlson on his show to “respond to
the mob” in a chummy interview. It was a sign of the surprisingly influential
role that non-traditional media figures have taken on in the intra-right
debate: A self-described nightclub comedian sitting down with two of Israel’s
most dogged critics before a vast digital audience.
When I
spoke to Smith, I wondered what he saw as the value of engaging with figures
like Fuentes, who make no effort to hide the antisemitic roots of their
arguments about Israel.
“I think
that Nick Fuentes and his followers are a force, and I think people are going
to have to talk to them and talk about what their grievances are,” Smith told
me. “If censorship or hostility was going to silence Nick Fuentes, it would
have happened already.”
And
Republicans shouldn’t assume that excising figures like Fuentes will end the
debate over Israel, he said. “As long as we’re giving Israel billions of
dollars in unconditional support, and as long as we’re still vetoing
resolutions at the U.N., and we still have our politicians going over there and
kissing their wall, and they’re still trying to drag us into war with Iran — I
don’t think this is going anywhere.” At least not while he and his fellow
podcasters can still find an audience willing to hear about it.
The
Future
In late
October, Vance traveled to the University of Mississippi to hold a town hall
for Turning Point USA, the campus organization founded by Kirk. The event,
which took place the same week that Carlson released his interview with
Fuentes, had an air of intrigue around it: In the months since Kirk’s shooting,
TPUSA has become a flashpoint in the intra-right debate around Israel. Some of
Kirk’s allies had been pointing to recent comments suggesting that the late
conservative activist had come to harbor doubts about U.S. support for Israel
before his death; others were claiming that he remained staunchly pro-Israel to
the end.
Midway
through the event, those tensions burst into the open when a young,
MAGA-hat-wearing attendee stepped up to the mic to press Vance on Israel,
invoking the antisemitic claim that Judaism “openly supports the prosecution
[sic]” of Christians.” A more conventional Republican might have been shocked
by that insinuation, but Vance cooly side-stepped it. MAGA has plenty of room
for “significant theological differences,” Vance replied, and an alliance with
Israel based on shared interests is compatible with “America First.” But then,
unprompted, he added this: “When people say that Israel is somehow manipulating
or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not controlling this
president of the United States.”
It was a
revealing aside. The questioner had not explicitly said that Israel controlled
Trump, but Vance — who hails from the young and terminally online wing of the
GOP — understood the subtext and took it upon himself to pre-empt it.
The
exchange underscored an unsettling reality for 2028 Republican hopefuls: By the
next election, the anti-Israel right will be impossible to ignore. For his own
part, Trump has responded to this new reality by standing behind his support
for Israel while occasionally dropping the subtlest of hints that he senses a
conflict between unconditional alliance and “America First.” Bannon, for
instance, gleefully drew my attention to a moment from Trump’s speech at the
Knesset celebrating the ceasefire in October: While thanking the Republican
megadonor Miriam Adelson for her support, Trump offhandedly mentioned that when
he asked Adelson if she loves Israel or America more, she had refused to
answer. “That might mean Israel,” Trump said with a chuckle. Comments like
these, together with the occasional veiled dig at Netanyahu, have been enough
for the Israel skeptics to claim Trump as one of their own, despite his
pronouncements to the contrary.
Attendees
await the arrival of U.S. Vice President JD Vance at the Pavilion at Ole Miss
on the campus of the University of Mississippi on October 29, 2025 in Oxford,
Mississippi. Thousands attended the Turning Point USA event honoring the late
conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Thousands
attended the University of Mississippi’s TPUSA event honoring the late
conservative activist Charlie Kirk. | Brad Vest/Getty Images
Yet that
will be a difficult posture for Trump’s would-be successors to mimic, and the
fight to stake out the true MAGA position on Israel is already shaping the
nascent Republican field. Cruz, who is rumored to be laying the groundwork for
a bid, leapt at the opportunity to criticize Carlson for the Fuentes interview,
positioning himself as the leader of the GOP’s pro-Israel camp. Bannon, who has
refused to rule out a run of his own, has planted a flag as the champion of the
Israel skeptics, making improbable predictions like, “You’re going to see a
huge move toxifying the money put in by AIPAC” ahead of the 2028 primary, as he
put it to me. Caught in the middle is Vance, who has defended his support for
Israel on “America First” grounds while remaining close to anti-Israel figures
like Carlson and Bannon.
Regardless
of what happens in 2028, almost all the conservatives I spoke with — including
supporters of Israel — acknowledge that the rise of the anti-Israel right has
fundamentally changed the right’s political landscape. Questions that were
previously only asked in furtive whispers — about the benefits of military aid
to Israel, about AIPAC’s influence, about the strategic value of the alliance —
are now being hashed out in public. A firewall against collaboration with
openly antisemitic figures can no longer be taken for granted.
The
alternative view among some conservatives is that the rise of the anti-Israel
right might be a flash in the plan — an aftershock of the war in Gaza that will
dissipate once the memory of the war isn’t so fresh in people’s minds.
When I
called Bannon a few days after the ceasefire, I put that suggestion to him: Now
that the fighting in Gaza has stopped, I asked, would Israel critics like him
fall back in line?
He
grunted disapprovingly. “We’re never going back to the old ways,” he said.
“Never, never, never.”
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