Within the first few minutes of Ben Shapiro’s Nov. 3 Daily Wire show, he drew a line in the sand that then rippled across his network of supporters in the world of online conservatism. He claimed that the Republican Party was “being eaten by its radicals.” Shapiro was responding in no uncertain terms to Tucker Carlson’s recent decision to invite white nationalist Nick Fuentes onto his talk show for a softball interview. As Shapiro pointed out, the exchange between Carlson and Fuentes was so gentle, so comradely, that it might lead a viewer to believe Fuentes simply held an edgier position on relatively common Republican opinions of the day.
The problem is, that might be true. Fuentes has recently made the rounds on right-wing media, including on the Red Scare podcast and the popular YouTube show of Candace Owens, with whom he mostly agrees. Fuentes shares some of the race and IQ ideas expressed on Red Scare, and Owens may even outpace him in her beliefs about Jewish cabals. Carlson, with mock credulity, simply could not believe so many had tried to “cancel” Fuentes since his views on immigration and demographics were so reasonable, his reach so broad.
Shapiro was not the first to react with horror, though he may have been the loudest.
“I will not stand by while it is handed over to those who betray the most fundamental principles I have spent my entire life defending and advocating,” shouted Shapiro in an over hour-long episode where he played back some of the greatest hits of Fuentes’s offensive back catalogue. This included his frequent racial slurs, Holocaust denial, and Fuentes’s now widely known contention that “women want to be raped.”
But what Shapiro seemed most incensed about, what has been the set-piece of most of Fuentes’s recent conversations, was Israel. Fuentes’s position, like that of many white nationalists, is that the United States should part with Israel, a foreign power he believes exerts far too much influence over Washington through the “Israel lobby.” Fuentes takes an explicitly antisemitic tack on this argument, believing that Zionism emerges from Jewish ethnic consciousness and that Jews wield a disproportionate power over all dominant institutions and are fighting for their own interests rather than those of native-born white Americans.
Clear racism and antisemitism lie underneath this entire discourse, but Carlson is also playing on a kind of common-sense objection Americans are feeling about the course of American politics. On his Nov. 5 show, Carlson played audio of a speech that Lindsay Graham delivered before an applauding Republican Jewish Coalition meeting. “I feel good about the Republican party,” Graham said. “I feel good about where we’re going as a nation. We’re killing all the right people and we’re cutting your taxes.”
Carlson was visibly disgusted, as anyone watching along likely was. “You’re a sick fuck if you say something like that,” spat Carlson, going on to say that Graham is “truly evil” for celebrating the deaths of innocent people. This objection could have come from the left, sure, but he quickly dove down into rabbit holes about secret government conspiracies, even suggesting that Christians are among the most persecuted people. The new Republican model is a process of bait and switch, to acknowledge the horror we all see as gruesome images stream out of Gaza, and then to suggest the far right is the only political movement capable of the peace and justice millions desperately crave.
Owens and others have taken the bait as well as they have further descended into conspiracy theories about Satanic Jews and powerful elites. Yet, they have also been radicalized by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, something that rallied a massive social movement on the American left and also fueled the growth of antisemitism, mostly on the right. These changes have seen their most radical form with extremely online figures like Owens or her occasional collaborator Dan Bilzerian, who has spent the past two years offering lurid theories about the Talmud and “Jewish Supremacy,” but it has also echoed across the MAGA base they serve. This has created a larger constituency that sees “America First” as a coalition that should explicitly exclude blanket US support for Israel, something that violates some of the most sacred commitments of the modern Republican Party. Marjorie Taylor Greene has relinquished her unconditional support for the Jewish state. Congressman Thomas Massie has now voted against multiple pro-Israel House resolutions on “America First” grounds, something celebrated by Funetes’s so-called “groyper” movement.
While the majority of the party continues to stand with unquestioning allegiance, a shift has happened in the party so severe that it promises to break some of the foundational relationships that have ensured the party’s ascendency. And Shapiro, as well as many from across the same national populist world that both he and Carlson emerged from, are calling it in, and demanding that everyone in the party take sides. In doing so, he is presenting perhaps the largest break yet in what is a quickly accelerating war for the soul of the Republican Party.
Fuentes’s appearance on Carlson’s show was only the tip of the anti-Zionist iceberg since the entire run of his now two-year-old show has focused on voices critical of Israel. Carlson has included Palestinian Orthodox religious figures to talk about anti-Christian persecution in the state. He brought on any dissenters from the party, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, not to mention Candace Owens and other conspiratorial antisemites. He even invited others popular in anti-Zionist circles on the left, such as “neorealist” political scientist John Mearsheimer, author of the controversial book The Israel Lobby. In that time, Carlson has helped not just to carve out an understandable and coherent right-wing anti-Zionism — he has normalized it in ways that would have been unthinkable before the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.
One reason Carlson’s work has been possible is that opinion on Israel has shifted dramatically across every wing of the political spectrum. A Pew poll published in October found that around 42% of Americans between 18 and 29 believe the US is “providing too much military aid to Israel,” while less than a quarter of those 65 and older share that sentiment. Over the summer, a Gallup poll found that a mere 32% of Americans support the war in Gaza, the lowest number since November 2023. Meanwhile, a Brookings Institution poll from August found that support for Israel was slipping rapidly among young people. But what’s notable is that this change does not just emerge from the left as activists pull people away from the center, but on the political right as well. That Gallup poll saw negative Republican attitudes towards Israel increase by 10% to 37%, representing well over a third of the GOP electorate.
Watching what experts call a genocide roll out with US support and funding has been a globally traumatic experience, and few have remained neutral. Carlson’s politics are based on creating a break with conventional politics for those who believe the status quo simply isn’t working for them, and are now ready for radically new possibilities. Anti-Zionism may be the most profound break with Republican foreign policy yet, a kind of antidote to what they see as a disastrous recent history of foreign wars: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.
But most of these have been framed by conspiracy theorists as “wars for Israel,” a way of centralizing the critique of American interventionism by focusing on a foreign actor who is allegedly in control. The fact that much of the US involvement in Israel is explained by Israel’s strategic role in Western capitalism and American industries, such as weapons manufacturing, is largely ignored because a right-wing critique of Israel only comes from within the America First model and with more than sneaking hints of antisemitism.
There is no doubt that Israel’s genocide in Gaza certainly accelerated these shifts, but they began long ago as young Republicans began moving to an increasingly racialized, conspiratorial right as the center dropped out of American politics. While Nick Fuentes had been a feature of the alt-right as far back as 2018, he became a figurehead with his groyper movement around 2019, when they would troll the late far-right activist Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA events over Kirk’s support for Israel. TPUSA had become a vector for young conservatives disaffected from the more neocon-friendly College Republicans, but Fuentes found a fatal flaw in their politics: Unconditional support for Israel does not fit within a blunt American nationalism. Fuentes was influenced by the antisemitism of the alt-right, which restated classic white nationalist ideas about Jews using pseudoscience, race and IQ discourse, and conversations about “Jewish power.”
For Fuentes, Israel exists simply as an extension of the disproportionate strength Ashkenazi Jews supposedly hold in finance, government, and Hollywood, a way of using their tribal consciousness to exploit Gentile whites against their own racial interests. Jews are behind “mass immigration” and the “great replacement,” the alleged conspiracy to replace native-born American white people with non-white immigrants, while funneling money and resources to Israel and undermining American sovereignty.
This was the kind of edgy argument that fit well with the venomous, antagonistic style of the young right. The language of this emerging right-wing activist cadre was forged on livestreams and message boards, and they see inherent legitimacy in anyone willing to bash Republican orthodoxy with just as much zeal as they target the left. As the pro-Israel right spent years building an attack infrastructure that used accusations of antisemitism to deflect criticism of Israel, it created a predictable backlash. That pattern of denigration helped give the young right a sense of legitimacy as they embraced an emerging anti Zionism.
Today’s Republican Party is defined wholly by a previously fringe national populism. There is the MAGA movement, led by Donald Trump and typified by a conspiratorial exceptionalism, and there are the National Conservatives, a more intellectually savvy wing that has brought many of the same Trumpian ideas into the Republican institutional infrastructure. Together they have redefined the party’s priorities away from the neoconservative model of George W. Bush’s presidency and have even sacrificed the previously sacred dichotomy that William F. Buckley helped established when building the American conservative movement. They aren’t afraid of racialism and anti-immigrant vitriol, and global despots are now potential friends.
This change occurred in the media before it happened on Capitol Hill, led by figures like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, who helped change the tenor of debate and the issues that defined them. And while there was often a shared sense of values among them, this alignment has begun to fray and it has become more obvious, and more visceral, in whether or not they are willing to carry first the Republican Party’s earlier absolutism on Israel.
The shift began taking on new dimensions over the past year as major MAGA figures began publicly dissenting on Israel, but it was only after Carlson’s friendly conversation with Fuentes that a line in the sand was finally drawn.
“Republicans have considered themselves enemies of what they call ‘identity politics’ for years, yet identity drives much of their political priorities.”
US Representative Randy Fine, a Republican from Florida, is known for racist public comments about Arabs and Muslims, but he recently blasted Tucker Carlson as “the most dangerous antisemite in America,” someone leading the “modern-day Hitler Youth.” Conservative author Jamie Glazov has called Carlson’s portrayal of Israel is “a vicious and grotesque lie,” and Laura Loomer, the far-right influencer who once delivered a presentation at the race and IQ conference American Renaissance in front of neo-Nazis, says the GOP has a “Nazi problem.”
Perhaps the biggest shock came from founder of the National Conservative movement, Israeli settler Yoram Hazony, who has become disconcerted by the dissent within the MAGA base. “This tremendous hurricane of a fight that we’re seeing on the right, [is] between Jews and Zionist Christians, against an emerging faction that is hostile to Jews and Zionist Christians being part of the coalition,” said Hazony in a conversation with conservative podcaster and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He later added, “The question is whether the Republican Party is actually going to be a party that has an appropriate future for Jews. That is a very big question.”
Republicans have considered themselves enemies of what they call “identity politics” for years, yet identity drives much of their political priorities. The slippage on Israel is itself most obvious along lines of identity, with Jewish Republicans leading the charge against the Carlson-led wing. This is largely because the Jewish right in America is overwhelmingly a Zionist right: What moved these figures into the conservative camp was most often a hawkish pro-Israel position. Famously, the neoconservative movement was launched by formerly liberal Jewish intellectuals who conservatized in the wake of the 1967 Middle East War and 1972 Israel-Lebanon War — when, in Irving Kristol’s words, they were “mugged by reality.” Oct. 7 is similarly cited by a new generation of the Zionist right.
Meanwhile, Jewish Americans still overwhelmingly lean left and are amongst the loudest voices against Israel’s violence in Gaza and the West Bank. Jews are only 2.5% of the American population, and they are a much smaller demographic within the Republican coalition, so their reach is limited. Historically, it was Christian Zionists who dominated GOP discourse on Israel, driven by the evangelical eschatology that puts the Jewish return to Zion as the centerpiece of the coming Rapture and return of Christ. George W. Bush was the most obvious figure in the early 2000s, but organizations like Christians United for Israel remain the largest “Israel lobby” in the United States, and Senators like Ted Cruz are vocal in their religiously-motivated support for Israel and attempts to synthesize Jewish and Christian Zionism. Cruz, who was embarrassingly dressed down by Carlson for his lack of knowledge about Iran, recently told the Republican Jewish Coalition that Carlson was a coward who was “complicit” in evil.
Still, the dependability of American evangelicals has shifted, in no small part due to the MAGA-ification of American Christianity and the overwhelming descent into conspiracy theories that have further infected churches with antisemitism and other forms of bigotry. In a 2023 survey, the Public Religion Research Institute found that about two-thirds of white evangelicals are either Christian nationalists or sympathetic to them, and that antisemitic (among other bigoted) views are endemic of that description. A 2025 study found that evangelicals harbor extensive negative attitudes about Jews, so much so that nearly a quarter of American survey respondents suggesting Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. It also shows that more than a third polled believe that “Jews are more loyal to Israel” than the US.
The Christian Zionist political world was able to flourish because at the same time as evangelicals were being pulled into the polling booth the Republican Party was committed to a type of Judeo-Christian coalition necessitated by the cold war and by a pro-Israel jingoism as America became Israel’s primary defense benefactor. Things have changed, however, as a different political calculus now motivates the Republican base and stability is no longer the operative desire. Now that Christians are slowly leaving the Judeo-Christian alliance, right-wing Jews may end up alone in their vision of pro-Israel conservatism and foreign interventionism.
That is, unless they move back to the center. Among those voices loudly lobbing criticism at Carlson and his defenders has been at a publication whose own successful branding exercise has been built on its image as heterodox defenders of American liberalism.
“When Tucker Carlson praises Moscow and mocks Washington, it’s not just bad optics — it’s a sign that parts of the right have stopped loving this country,” wrote Israeli-American author Liel Leibovitz for The Free Press, the outlet Bari Weiss started after her exit from The New York Times in 2020. The Free Press was the culmination of Weiss’s work to build up a movement of disaffected liberals who believed that progressivism, anti-racism, and “wokeism” had gone too far and undermined the basic values that made America great. This started with her coining of “the intellectual dark web” to identify a crew of self-styled outsider intellectuals circling the Joe Rogan podcast, but then became a community of its own with a network of podcasts like The Fifth Column and websites like UnHerd. They criticized campus politics, opposed gender-affirming medical treatment for young people, and tried to make centrism the hip position again for right-thinking urbanites. The writer Aaron Huertes has used the term “reactionary centrism” to describe Weiss’s model of politics: take a far-right political position, sit it in your own moderate liberalism, and then say it was the left that pushed you right.
But while they have created their entire identity on taking “heterodox” and dissenting opinions, there is no disagreement on Israel. The Free Press has become the most uniformly pro-Israel publication in the country as they reliably defend Israel’s war in Gaza and disrobe any of the country’s critics. “If you ever find yourself defending Adolf Hitler and demonizing Winston Churchill, you should probably question the decisions you’ve made up until that point. That’s the situation between Tucker Carlson and his guests,” wrote Weiss back in 2024, even before Carlson’s recent, and more explicit, turn.
The outlet took this line at the same time it became perhaps the best example of a financially successful independent publication, gaining millions of paid subscribers and even more funding from wealthy benefactors. This was, in part, because alongside their “politically incorrect” opinions, they frequently held wealthy business elites as paragons of social commentary and community leadership. Weiss helped found The University of Austin with millions of tech dollars, and eventually sold The Free Press to Larry Ellison and Paramount Skydance for $150 million. Now, Weiss has now been named the head of CBS News, further undermining her claim to independence.
But as this new political synthesis becomes increasingly popular for a particular type of affluent former-progressive, it may also be the most reliably pro-Israel political tendency that exists. For those Jews that moved to the right, Israel was often cited as the main reason. Free markets and conservative social values increasingly seemed to match the American-Israel alliance, but it was the dependability of the Republicans that made the shift work. This is why a movement like politicized evangelisms, with many of its antisemitic beliefs about Jews and tendencies towards exclusivist Christian nationalism, seemed like an acceptable partner: At least Christian Zionists loved Israel.
Now, though, as Carlson and others shift the party, the numbers of those who are dependable, in all cases, to side with Israel are dwindling, and a new demographic must replace them. And instead of a GOP that is increasingly built on an America First ethos of nativism and Christian identitarianism, the well-funded ranks of Bari Weiss’s heterodox sphere may end up as the new formation that can carry the American Zionist cause. While pro-Israel hawks may have come to expect the Republican Party to act as a reliable agent to funnel military aid, a shift to pro-Israel liberals like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro may end up as the safe bet.
In 1992, Conservative Movement founder William F. Buckley responded with shock and horror to paleoconservative presidential candidate Pat Buchanan’s rallies around the country. Buckley said that he liked his “Republicans in Brooks Brothers, not Hells Angels jackets,” flexing his elitism in response to bikers turning out for Buchanan rallies. Today, Buckley would likely say the same about preferring his Republicans to continue a partnership with Israel, but both represent the same thing: a Republican Party rooted to tradition, hawkishness, and upper-class politics. The miracle is not that this kind of elitism no longer works on the party’s voters, it’s that it ever did.
Now both parties have a wing that is navigating a path to the demands of everyday people that takes them through anti-Zionism, such as democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s unlikely landslide in New York City or the growing appeal of figures like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, who very well may go into a media career after she retires this coming January. Both are considered outsiders for a number of economic and social reasons, and yet Zionism continues to be the place where each truly splits their own party.
For the GOP, the party is in a stalemate since support for Israel actually does not fit comfortably in its new world of conspiratorial and isolationist Christian nationalism, and party leaders know it. There is a broad acknowledgement of Nick Fuentes’s leadership of the young right, and his influence can no longer be kept at bay. “I’ll say this, Nick, that I listen to your show quite often … I think you’re one of the most talented people out there,” said then co-CEO of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boreing, in April. He was speaking to Fuentes on a livestream, during which he also said he thought Fuentes was funny. Boreing was in a difficult place along with the party itself: He helped build The Daily Wire’s brand on the kind of national populism that is now leading people to Fuentes, but Ben Shapiro, the company’s founder and a diehard Israel supporter, remained his ostensible boss remains Shapiro.
All political parties, even in the stalwart binary of the American party system, are coalitions, different factions that gather under the banner of an ideological common cause or shared economic benefit. The major political questions of today are not based on which party will deliver a stable, upwardly mobilized middle class, but who will manage the collapse or, more specially, who offers the most viable model of revolution. There has always been a dissident nationalist contingent within the GOP, and that has largely taken over as Republicans need national populist rhetoric to connect with the changing demands of their base. There is no more effective signal of breaking with the “Washington consensus” than walking away from Israel, particularly if it is to ostensibly put American workers first. Pro-Israel politics have always used ideology to hide economic self-interest, whether it is through Israel as a geopolitical center for American business interests or as an excuse to engage in unremitting military Keynesianism in the defense industry.
As Bari Weiss, for instance, centers the voices of billionaire media figures and Silicon Valley moguls in her coalition, she has more adeptly centralized the money back in the pro-Israel advocacy world and sent a message to those Zionist stalwarts on the right that they can find a community that will maintain their interests even when the Republican electorate moves on. For those Jewish Republicans who pushed the kind of aggressive nationalist politics that are now excluding them and abandoning Israel, such as Hazony, the road forward is unclear: They can either abandon their convictions once they see the logical conclusion of their politics, or hedge whenever necessary to get what they want. This is why we may ultimately see not a liberalization of their conservative position, and more an effect to pull Weiss and her centrist orbit more into an Israel-friendly version of American nationalism based on the supposedly coherent ideas of “Western civilization.” This is not altogether different from what has happened across Europe with movements like PEGIDA in Germany and the English Defence League (EDL) in England, where liberal political considerations are weaponized against Islamic immigration in ways familiar to Weiss’s anti-Muslim politics.
The question here is less about whether there will be an audience for Weiss’s position and more about whether that break will be strong enough to destabilize the party structure. As the tech industry splits its attention and funds between the MAGA movement and Weiss’s free speech bubble, it has said little about Israel. The real future depends on where Israel fits in the bottom line of Silicon Valley’s venture capital aristocracy.
If American Zionism has a future among the financial powerhouses who determine American policy, it will happen by dragging left and right into a centrist alliance. They will become new dissenters, maintaining a focus on Israel while American politics evolves to focus on the emerging importance of China, Russia, and India. And since Zionism is the only hold placed on right-wing antisemitism by the party, its abandonment could also signal the disappearance of the antisemitism taboo in Republican politics. Even as the tides turn, there are enough people who agree with Shapiro and are willing to put money behind it that the conclusions of the fight are far from known. Instead, we are simply watching the beginning of a fracture that will change more than just the party — and it will lead to an entire break in the American politics we have taken as a given for decades.
