“Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous anti-Semite in America.”

–Rep. Randy Fine (Rep.-Fl.) at the recent Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) gathering

Tucker Carlson was once a defender of American Jews. In 1999, he wrote a piece in which he described Patrick Buchanan’s constant attacks on Israel, his criticism of American Jews for supporting Israel unduly, and his repeatedly implying that American Jews push America into wars in which non-Jews die, as enough evidence to label him an anti-Semite. Yet as James Kirchik points out in “Tucker Carlson’s Dark Turn: He Can’t Stop Talking About the Jews” (National Review, Sept. 2025), Carlson has gone much further than Buchanan in all these areas.

“To listen to Carlson’s show,” writes Kirchik, “is to come away with the impression that Adolph Hitler was misunderstood, that Israel is a country systematically murdering Christians, and that American Jews compose a bloodthirsty fifth column bent on conscripting their gentile countrymen to fight Israel’s wars.”

Contrasting Ben Shapiro to himself, Carlson professes to be “shocked how little they [i.e., American Jews supportive of Israel, like Shapiro] care about the country.”

And this is from a man who has done fawning interviews with Vladimir Putin; Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, whose professed desire for Iran to live in peace with everyone Carlson accepted at face value; and the emir of Qatar, who invested heavily in setting up his podcast. He has even asked why Trump has a problem with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, who, after all, has outlawed deviancy.

“Israel is blowing up churches and killing Christians.”

The charge leveled in an interview with a Palestinian pastor from Bethlehem, Munther Isaac, who celebrated the October 7 attacks, is part of Tucker Carlson’s attempt to drive a wedge between evangelicals, whom he describes as the tools of Israel’s war lobby, and Jews.

If Carlson is aware that Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a growing Christian population or that the Christian population of Bethlehem has declined from 86 percent in 1950 to 10 percent today under Palestinian rule, he never lets on. And it is curious that he shows so much concern for imagined Christian victims of Israel, but none for the plight of Coptic Christians in Egypt or of Christians in Nigeria slaughtered and kidnapped by the jihadist Boko Haram.

Of late, Carlson has taken to contrasting Christian pacifism and universalism to Jewish bloodlust and clannishness as a means of stifling talk of a Judeo-Christian civilization. Apparently, he is not much of a history student. The intra-Christian Thirty Years War (1618–1648), claimed 4.5 million to 6 million lives, and in parts of Germany killed off 50 percent of the population. Jews could also give him some lessons in the 2,000-year history of pogroms carried out by “pacific” Christians against Jews.

“If you’re getting rich by loaning people money at incredibly high interest rates, that’s something you’re going to have to talk to G-d about.”

There is no traditional anti-Jewish canard that Carlson has not trotted out, including at a Turning Point USA conference in July, asking how Bill Ackman got so rich. Ackman took the time to explain to him how he became so rich — he is an investor, not a banker or lender of any kind — but Carlson never apologized, despite a promise to do so.

Since starting his own podcast, he has taken to platforming all manner of quacks and conspiracy theorists. Thus, he now calls Alex Jones “a prophet” for predicting 9/11 (he didn’t), despite the billion-dollar jury judgment against Jones for falsely claiming that the Sandy Hook school shootings were a false flag operation. And he has hosted the misogynist Andrew Tate, who celebrates the brutalization of women, and whose arrest by Romanian authorities on charges of human trafficking Carlson labels “an obvious setup.” He has said that Jeffrey Epstein established an international trafficking operation to entrap powerful men at the behest of the Israeli government.

And he introduced Daryl Cooper to the world as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today” Cooper is a self-proclaimed “fascist,” who argues that the “psychopathic” Churchill, not Hitler, was the chief villain of World War II, and that two million Soviet POWs died in captivity over the first winter of Operation Barbarossa only because the Nazis had not anticipated the sheer number of prisoners with which they would have to deal.

As Kirchik puts it acidly, “Paranoia and crankery are comorbidities of anti-Semitism.”

“It’s not that I think it’s fake. I just think that it’s exaggerated.”

–Viral 27-year-old anti-Semite Nick Fuentes

BUT EVEN FOR TUCKER CARLSON, a two-hour interview with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken anti-Semite, whose followers are known as Groypers, was a new low. The entire effort was designed to “normalize” Fuentes and to place his views within the realm of legitimate debate.

Fuentes says that “Hitler was really cool” and the Holocaust was “like baking cookies in the oven” and shared with Carlson that Stalin is also one of his heroes. He argued on the show that Jews are responsible for all wars, and that the bombing of Iran’s nuclear reactor was designed to protect Israel’s hegemony, not due to any threat to America from Iran, which echoes Carlson’s own view. Fuentes has asserted that when he and his followers take over, certain Jewish groups need to be given the death penalty.

Fuentes spreads his hatred widely. On other occasions, he has said that southern blacks had it better under Jim Crow laws and that women really want to be brutalized.

During their entire chat, Carlson did not dredge up any of Fuentes’s past statements to challenge him on them. Fuentes, for instance, has called Tucker’s friend J.D. Vance “a fat race-mixer, who’s married to a jeet [a derogatory term for people of Indian descent], who named his son Vivek.”

“I don’t align with Jew haters. I’m not going to put up with Jew hatred.”

Assassinated conservative leader Charlie Kirk — who was targeted by Fuentes and his Groypers — was staunchly opposed to the rising anti-Semitism. Hence his above response when asked whether there was room for Nick Fuentes in a right-wing big tent.

That didn’t stop Carlson, who was a featured speaker at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, from using the platform to imply that Jews were involved in killing Kirk just as they once killed the Christian savior. In his softball sit-down with the anti-Semite, Carlson further demonstrated his capacity for backstabbing friends by failing to challenge Fuentes on his harassment campaign against Kirk at his campus events, or his characterization of Kirk’s widow, Erika, as a political plant.

“We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

–Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president

But things got worse, lots worse, when Tucker Carlson’s bigotry received the imprimatur of a mainstay of the conservative movement. Responding to a rumor that the Heritage Foundation, considered by many the foremost conservative think tank in D.C., was about to sever ties with Tucker Carlson, the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, put out a sharp denial. (Later he would say that the statement was written by his chief of staff, who has now left the organization, and that it was inadequately vetted with the broader staff.)

Roberts’ support for Carlson included accusations that the social media star was the victim of “a venomous coalition,” consisting of the “globalist class or their mouthpieces in Washington” who were sowing division on the right.

Roberts failed to specify in what way Carlson had been slandered. And his accusations against the “globalist” class was louder than a dog whistle, and sounded a lot like the old Soviet description of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.” It was clear that he was casting blame on Israel and its American supporters when he wrote, “Conservatives should feel no pressure to reflexively support any foreign government.”

He also entirely failed to address Carlson’s amplification of Fuentes’ Jew-hatred, in the words of House Speaker Mike Johnson, or to acknowledge that there was anything questionable about it.

In a subsequent statement, Roberts expressed his abhorrence for Fuentes’s views, but continued to resist the idea that Fuentes should be canceled rather than debated — something, incidentally, Carlson completely failed to do. In a third speech, delivered at Hillsdale College, Roberts was asked point-blank whether there was anything Carlson could do that would cause Heritage to distance itself. He responded, “We don’t forsake friends.”

“They are not to my right”

But as Ben Shapiro pointed out, in an entire show devoted to Fuentes, Carlson, and the Heritage Foundation, that response was a betrayal of conservatism, in which principles take precedence over personal loyalty to bad actors and moral rot. Shapiro emphasized that there is no continuity between himself as a conservative and Fuentes and his followers. “They are not attached to me in any way.” Far from seeking to conserve society and the achievements of Western civilization, they seek only to tear down.

Princeton professor Robert George, the most prominent conservative in American academia today, echoed Shapiro’s point: “We conservatives stand for something… We have core principles that are not negotiable.” First among those is the “commitment to the inherent and equal dignity of every human being.” And he emphasized that the free-speech rights of people like Fuentes do not mean “treating them as legitimate forms of conservatism.”

“You are complicit in that evil.”

AT the RJC gathering, speaker after speaker took aim at Carlson. Senator Ted Cruz, who had a highly contentious interview with Carlson in July over Cruz’s hardline position on Iran’s nuclear program and Carlson’s “obsession” with the Jews, took dead aim at Carlson. “If you sit there and nod adoringly while someone says, ‘There’s a very good argument that America should have intervened on behalf of Nazi Germany in World War II’; if you sit there with someone who says, ‘Adolph Hitler was very, very cool,’ and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing; then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil.”

Cruz lamented that in the last six months he had seen more anti-Semitism on the right than in his entire life, and termed it an “existential crisis in our party and our country.” Scott Jennings, the token conservative commentator on CNN, said simply, “It’s time to take out the trash.”

“I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy”

Eventually, even Kevin Roberts saw the light — at least partly — after facing a near staff revolt, the resignation of board members, and the threatened withdrawal of the directors of the Foundation’s Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Anti-Semitism, neither of whom is Jewish.

One Heritage researcher posted a photo of Carlson with his arm around Fuentes, with the caption, “Enjoy your new friend.” Another post had a Norman Rockwell painting of a town meeting, under which was written, “Nazis are bad.”

Roberts tendered his resignation for the mess he had made — admitting that he still didn’t know that much about Nick Fuentes — but asked the board that he be retained to fix it. He mentioned that Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony, who is observant, had traveled to D.C. to help him quell the furor.

Roberts confessed that he should have made clear that there is a limiting principle to the refusal to cancel people: That it is not an endorsement of softball interviews or putting people on shows. And he expressed contrition over the phrase a “venomous coalition,” especially to our “Jewish friends and colleagues.”

But he still did not fully get it. At a staff meeting after Roberts’s remarks, Robert Rector, a 47-year-veteran of the Heritage Foundation, noted that William Buckley and the conservative movement he led had indeed canceled people. Buckley realized that, “You have to expunge all anti-Semitism, all of it. But that’s just part of it. You have to expel the lunatics.” And both are back today, Rector averred. And if they are in your movement, you look like clowns.

“The issue here is Tucker Carlson,” Rector concluded. “Tucker’s show is like stepping into a lunatic asylum.” And therefore, he must be canceled, just like David Duke and the John Birch Society before him. Just as Buckley read one-time associates Joe Sobran and Patrick Buchanan out of the conservative movement, and wrote an entire book about it.

“Why there’s this notion that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion dollar foreign aid package to Israel to cover this ethnic cleansing in Gaza?”

–Student to Vice President Vance at a Turning Point USA event in October

IN HIS RJC SPEECH, Ted Cruz said that it is a “time of choosing” for the conservative movement. And for no one is that more true than for Vice President J.D. Vance. Vance is personally close to Carlson, and he largely owes his current position to Carlson’s lobbying on his behalf with President Trump. Carlson’s son is a member of Vance’s staff.

Moreover, Vance appears to be sympathetic to Carlson’s isolationism, and at the very least, wary of losing Carlson’s supporters as he pursues his own presidential ambitions. On his recent visit to Israel, he took pains to keep his distance, pronouncing himself “personally insulted” when the Knesset narrowly passed a resolution to annex Judea and Samaria, despite learning that the resolution was only a means of embarrassing Netanyahu and would not become Israeli policy. He also made a point of visiting only the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, while eschewing the traditional visit to the Kosel.

But most disturbing was his response to a Christian student at a Turning Point USA event, who asked, “Why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something or that they are our greatest ally or that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion dollar foreign aid package to Israel to cover this ethnic cleansing in Gaza?” To strengthen his question, he added, “Not only does their religion not agree with ours, but openly supports the prosecution of ours.”

“When people say that Israel is somehow controlling the president of the United States, they’re not controlling this president of the United States.”

Against the soundtrack of the crowd’s applause, the vice president did not deny a single premise of the question or otherwise disagree. For instance, he did not mention that the “multi-hundred billion” figure is exponentially exaggerated. Or that virtually every penny of US military aid is spent in America and supports American jobs. Nor did he explain that Israeli military prowess and intelligence gathering allows America to project far more power in a vital region than it could without Israel.

He denied that the Trump administration is being manipulated by Israel, while implying that previous administrations might well have been. And he offered the leverage applied by the United States on Israel as the reason that President Trump was able to secure a ceasefire and return of the hostages, without mentioning that American leverage resulted primarily from the fact that Trump has provided Israel with more support than any previous administration, including, most importantly, bombing the Fordow reactor in Iran and giving Israel free rein to decimate Hamas until the latter agreed to return all the living hostages.

Rather that pointing out common Jewish and Christian moral values, he agreed with the student that there are profound theological differences and said nothing about the questioner’s assertion that Judaism supports the persecution of Christians. Despite his Yale Law School training, he did not mention that the Founding Fathers, conscious of the ruinous religious war between Protestants and Catholics in Europe, had deliberately sought to exclude theological debates from our politics, and for that reason embedded in the Constitution a provision against the establishment of any religion.

Vance offered ensuring Christians have safe access to the Church of Holy Sepulchre as an example of an issue upon which America can work with “our friends in Israel,” as if Israel has not from its inception protected access to Christian holy sites.

“The Groypers aren’t winning.”

–National Interest commentator Noah Rothman

Who will win the fight for the right? After the vice president’s disheartening performance, one hope is that the highly intelligent Vance will realize that if he continues to signal his agreement to the Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican Party, he will surely attract a primary challenge from Ted Cruz and/or Marco Rubio, and will likely prove anathema to independents and the majority of Republicans still supportive of Israel.

Some, like conservative writer Noah Rothman, see the backlash to the Carlson saga from within the GOP tent itself as heartening.

“So many of the signals the Republican political class has been sending over the last several years would lead any rational observer to conclude that the GOP welcomed unsavory elements into the coalition. When the GOP’s most toxic ‘just asking questions’ types enjoy the glow of the limelight and warm receptions across the political spectrum, we can be forgiven for concluding that they know something we don’t.”

Any such presumption would have been wrong.

Maybe because they bought into their own hype about their inevitable ascendency, even the Groypers and their allies seem taken aback by the reaction.

Jeff Jacoby headlined a piece “The right’s immune system is finally fighting back against anti-semitism. Maybe.”

The qualified optimism was based on the same signs of a pushback against the Carlson-Fuentes rot — and hedged because of the unwillingness by figures such as Vance to openly disavow anti-Semitism.

As the battle for the soul of the right rages, a worst-case scenario is all too possible: American Jews must worry that the progressive, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party will not join forces with those within the Republican Party for whom hatred of Jews and Israel has become the most salient issue.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1086)