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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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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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