Shane Burley
New Lines Magazine / May 4, 2026
A theological and political tradition long dominant on the right now finds itself on the defensive, as the MAGA-verse grows more critical of Israel.
“I hear people say those who bless Israel will be blessed,” Tucker Carlson said with a signature head tilt to a smiling but visibly annoyed Mike Huckabee. “I know it’s a reference to Genesis,” Carlson said in his much-discussed February 2026 interview with the U.S. ambassador to Israel. “I don’t understand the connection between that concept and modern Israel and the geopolitical world.”
“I agree with you as a Christian,” the journalist pressed on his eponymous podcast, “that God promised this land from modern-day Iraq to modern-day Egypt to this people, the Jews — to Abram’s descendants, as it says in Genesis 15.” But, he asked the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, “Who are his descendants now? And how do we know who they are?”
Huckabee, a former Baptist minister and governor of Arkansas, was a controversial pick for the diplomatic post, largely because of his aggressive Christian Zionism: He supports Israel’s total rights over the land of historic Palestine because he believes that God gave it to the Jewish people, as described in the Bible. But Carlson had questions about these views — the same questions many others had been asking.
The first time I encountered both Huckabee and Carlson was on a 2003 episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” during which Huckabee joked that he had lost more pounds than Carlson weighed, leading them both to fits of laughter.
Their February 2026 encounter was less jovial. Carlson battered Huckabee about Israel’s conduct in Gaza, but he didn’t stop there. He demanded that Huckabee answer for everything from the Epstein files to fentanyl overdoses to Trump’s economic policies. This was a peak performance for Carlson, one that garnered an astounding 3 million views within the first few days after going live.
“A nation of people, a race if you will, that is being displaced, replaced,” Carlson fulminated — and he wasn’t referring to Palestinians. He was asking why Huckabee cares so much about Jews in Israel while Americans — white Americans — are being demographically replaced in their own country. Huckabee seemed lost. He was there to debate foreign policy.
And while Carlson has made a name for himself over the past two years of his post-Fox broadcast life, discussing every arcane conspiracy theory under the sun, the true fissure he has helped to create in the Republican Party is over Israel.
For the Christian right in recent years, Israel has been crucial for its role in an eschatological vision: that the gathering of Jews into what is described as their historic homeland will lead to the second coming of Christ. Various theologies that align with this description are broadly known as Christian Zionism, which is the motivating factor for unconditional evangelical support for Israel.
And that same energy has now been poured into the joint Israeli-American war with Iran — a war that has, as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth emphasizes, an underlying religious context not unfamiliar to an evangelical base that is steeped in talk of end-time conflict from the pulpit.
Evangelical Christians are overwhelmingly the most pro-Israel group in the U.S. — even more than American Jews. Evangelicals often outdo all Jewish organizations in terms of size, financial contributions and “boots on the ground” in pro-Israel activism.
But the rise of Christian nationalism, populism and isolationism on the right poses a direct challenge to Christian Zionism. Conspiracy theories — many revolving around Jews — have become a motivating language for rank-and-file activism on the right. As the Iran war alienates much of the MAGA-verse and drives many young conservatives into the orbit of the influential far-right podcaster Nick Fuentes, a breaking point is coming in a GOP [Grand Old Party = Republican Party] already fractured over what they derisively call an “Israel-first” foreign policy. While Christian Zionism remains a major force for Republicans, its slow death seems foreshadowed by a changing party that may no longer have a reason to cling to the “Judeo-Christian” alliance.
Carlson’s shift to Christian nationalism has changed both his Christianity and his nationalism. During the Cold War, many American Jews embraced an essentially Christian-centric American mythology, whereby the two communities had overcome their differences by acknowledging their shared ethical roots. Historically, Christianity had been the greatest threat to Jews. Forced conversions, expulsions and genocides punctuated European history, culminating in the pogroms and eventually the Holocaust. But with the formation of the state of Israel, and the vertical alliance that Washington sought with the fledgling country, the perception of Jews within the predominantly Christian U.S. power structure shifted. No longer were Hebrews (as they were often called) simply the remnants of an incomplete religion who denied Christ’s divinity; now they played a key role in the self-conception of American Christians.
In the 1960s, Christianity went through a thoroughgoing liberalization, particularly with the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which drastically reformed the Catholic Church, including its teaching about Jews and whether or not they needed to convert (another form of eradicating Jewishness) to achieve salvation. In the same period, millenarian ideas — elaborate fantasies about an impending apocalypse — began to flourish in American Protestantism, whose pastors reimagined ancient prophecy in terms of modern politics and gave Jews a new purpose: They were to return to Israel and live out God’s plan for the unfolding of history.
This became the foundational logic of the right’s revival in the 1980s, when Rev. Jerry Falwell launched the Moral Majority to mobilize Christians on social issues, Pat Robertson built his Christian Broadcasting Network empire and the 25% of Americans who identified as evangelicals became a dependable voting block for the Republican Party. They may have been radicalized by the issue of abortion, which became a flashpoint in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade (1973) — but they also agreed on who America’s most important geopolitical ally was, leading the Republican Party even further into its partnership with Israel. As neoconservatism brought an even greater focus on foreign interventions into the party, Israel then also took on an outsized role in the Project for the New American Century, which advocated for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
While openly anti-Jewish beliefs were the dividing line between the mainstream of the GOP and the radicals, Christian Zionism’s alleged love for Jews often served to conceal the antisemitism of its adherents. The writer Franklin Foer was onto something when he quipped that “philo-semites are antisemites who like Jews.” In Christian Zionist churches around the country, proselytizing to Jews is encouraged. When ultraconservative evangelicals find Jews politically useful, they engage in loudly performative refutations of antisemitism. Robertson was among the most influential Christian Zionists and even railed against antisemitism in his sermons and books. But he also authored the influential 1989 conspiratorial tract “The New World Order,” in which he cited explicitly antisemitic texts to conjure an apocalyptic vision of the future in which a Jewish Antichrist will lead the nations astray. George Soros, the Rothschilds, “Judeo-Bolsheviks” and other totems of antisemitic diversion fill the political machinations of the Christian Zionists, but they never let that get in the way of their veneration of Jews, whom they need to play a role in their coming rapture.
While Christian Zionism came to dominate the GOP, there were always dissenters. In the 1980s, a group of right-wing renegades with a fondness for the Old Right — which was expressly racial, isolationist and suspicious of big government conservatism and urbanity — began to make their views known. They eventually adopted the label “paleoconservatives.” The most prominent of the “paleo-cons” was Pat Buchanan, who echoed fascist European thinkers in his fulminations about the “death of the West” and sounded the alarm on everything from homosexuality to immigration. “You’ve got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country,” he said in a 2007 appearance on Fox News.
Buchanan has described Adolf Hitler as an “individual of great courage” and “genius,” and took up the cases of multiple accused Nazis living in the U.S. Allan Ryan Jr., former head of the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, has called Buchanan “the spokesman for Nazi war criminals in America.” “If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate,” Buchanan once said, “13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2% of the population.”
Many Christian paleo-cons had an unreconstructed Christian view of the Jews, one that did not shy away from viewing them as playing a potentially pernicious role in Gentile affairs. The paleo-cons directed rage at the neocons, often highlighting prominent Jewish figures pushing foreign wars, liberalized economics or immigration.
The implicit ban on open antisemitism held for years, but started to break down as Trumpism decimated most prohibitions that had kept key aspects of the radicals’ ideas out of mainstream right-wing discussions.
By the time Trump swept onto the scene, the “alt-right” had become the loudest far-right movement in decades. “National populist” candidates in the MAGA mould no longer had to pay lip service to liberal democracy as their Republican predecessors had. The gloves were off and a new brand of authoritarian populism was in.
We thus saw the dramatic return of traditionalist Catholicism. This was a group that never accepted the precepts of the Second Vatican Council, preferred the classic Latin liturgies and refused to absolve Jews over the crucifixion of Jesus.
At the same time, splits in mainstream Protestantism were multiplying, many centered on whether churches would be gay-affirming. New hard-right denominations like the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Movement (IFBM) emerged, rejecting both formal seminaries and any reconciliation with Jews.
IFBM pastor Steven Anderson became YouTube (and later BitChute) famous for videos demanding the death penalty for gay people and for women to return to the home. He also denounced Christian Zionism, claiming modern Judaism was built on worship of the pagan god Moloch. He argued the Holocaust was largely an invention, and insisted Christians should not capitulate to “liars wearing a kippah.”
All of this swirled alongside the radicalization of what scholar Michael Barkun calls “super-conspiracies.” Conspiracy theories like QAnon reshaped the sense of reality for millions of Christian conservatives. In this mix, the partnership between Christians and Israeli Jews was no longer taken as common sense by the base, as it once had been.
And this shift is borne out by the numbers. In a 2023 study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a nonpartisan research organization that studies religion and public policy, Christian nationalists are much more likely to hold the opinion that “Jewish people hold too many positions of power” than the general public, just as they are more likely to believe that Jews “stick together more than other Americans” or that they are more loyal to Israel than the U.S. — an old antisemitic accusation of “dual loyalty.” But what’s more significant than that is the prevalence of super-conspiracies like QAnon, whose extreme antisemitism and distrust of established narratives are eradicating the old foundations of right-wing politics, such as Christian Zionism, and replacing them with a cosmic war against a cabal of foreign elites. In a 2024 poll, PRRI found that between 15% and 20% of Americans believe core claims of QAnon, a percentage similar to those who are Christian Zionists. And if we watch the trajectory of both, it is quite possible that QAnon could overtake Christian Zionism as a key motivating idea of the evangelical world.
While many assume the far right is simply disingenuous when it mirrors leftist positions on Israel, there is a long history of fascist movements making ostensibly left-wing ideas their own. Many among the isolationist far right genuinely believe that their opposition to foreign wars — while they frame it in nationalist, not humanitarian terms — will create greater peace. And this idea has projected a kind of virtue onto national identity: the idea that a strong sense of ethnic or religious nationalism actually stops wars, rather than starting them. This logic has become even more pronounced since Israel launched its assault on Gaza following the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
In the nearly two years since then, Israel has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians in what experts and nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty have called a genocide. The decades of mounting state-backed violence that culminated in this latest episode unfolded alongside the rise of a far-right Israeli fundamentalist movement rooted in the West Bank settlements. Its leaders include figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir, a disciple of the late fascist Meir Kahane, and Bezalel Smotrich, a settler attorney and activist. Both are religious Zionists and Orthodox Jews who believe God granted Jews all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, as well as parts of today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.
While Christian Zionists largely agreed with the Israeli right and the settler movement, their claims are a subject of historical and theological controversy. The movement has nonetheless provided backing to Israel’s current far-right government, dominated by the Revisionist Zionist Likud Party, over the brutal war in Gaza and ongoing settler pogroms in Palestinian villages across the West Bank — moves aimed at both annexing territories for Israel and foreclosing the possibility of a future Palestinian state.
But while aggressive anti-Palestinian racism has been a constant feature of Israel’s Orthodox far right, so has a certain baseline anti-Christianity. Previously, leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu, who were not intensely religious themselves, had been happy to partner with (and take the money of) Christian Zionists, coordinating on events with Christians United for Israel pastor John Hagee. But this new class of Israelis, particularly street-level fascists like the Hilltop Youth or the anti-intermarriage group Lehava, want Christians out of the Holy Land as well.
“Radical Jewish groups in Jerusalem spit on our clergy, attempt to burn our churches and paint graffiti telling us to get out. And they are never held accountable,” Munther Isaac, a Lutheran Pastor from Bethlehem, told Carlson on April 9, 2024. He described brutal discrimination against Christians in Israel, especially Palestinian Christians, who are erased from the narratives of American evangelicals, seemingly content to ignore their coreligionists and let them be killed.
In that conversation, Carlson focused on issues including kids being killed, religious repression by armed gangs of settlers and a lack of culpability for the vicious attacks. “Christians United for Israel and people like Ted Cruz are following a Christianity that is not the Christianity of the Holy Land. It is a heretical belief,” Agapia Stephanopoulos, an Orthodox nun, told Carlson in an August 11 episode. “Christian Zionism is a heresy. It was condemned in 381. They deny the Messiah by insisting Jesus coming the first time wasn’t enough.”
In that conversation, Carlson explored theological criticisms of the Zionist claim, moving from objections to the political ideology to a deeper criticism of Jewish beliefs and their lack of deference to Christians. In Carlson’s formulation, it’s not just Christians covering up Israeli crimes; it is Christians ignoring their own imperial mandate by allowing Jews to operate with impunity. Christ is King, not them.
This form of Christianity has become more important among a conservative rank and file that sees something inherently wrong with the system of international power. Carlson heavily criticizes the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and questions why it is operating without registering as a foreign lobby. What has spread throughout these areas of the right, but found its natural home on Carlson’s show, is the idea that a confederation of largely Jewish pro-Israel groups has hijacked American foreign policy. At its worst, the Israel lobby thesis can lend itself to a type of conspiracism, the belief that a shadowy foreign cabal has captured the U.S. government and turned it away from its previously noble mandate toward occult wickedness. The most dramatic example of this is the claim that emerged from neo-Nazi circles that the United States had become a “Zionist Occupation Government,” meaning controlled by and for Jews.
The Israel-critical right moves back and forth in how explicit it is about this claim, with figures like Dan Bilzerian and Lauren Witzke making their names by uniting this anti-Israel politics with a mix of theological and conspiratorial antisemitism. The most glaring example is Candace Owens, who was on the staff of Turning Point USA (the organization launched by the late Charlie Kirk) and developed a massive following at the Daily Wire (an outlet co-founded by Ben Shapiro). Owens shifted into the most extreme of antisemitic conspiracy theorists. She now believes that Israel is run by a Jewish satanic cult that emerged from the 17th-century splinter group known as the Sabbateans. Owens is one of the best-known figures to have descended fully into fringe conspiracy theories, but she was re-established as a figure of authority when Carlson invited her onto his show in August 2025.
“We’re told that we can’t even mention Israel or else you’re going to get labelled, you’re going to be destroyed,” Owens told a credulous Carlson. But that was only the point of entry into the conversation. She moved into a deeper analysis, suggesting that Jewish psychiatrist Sigmund Freud developed his ideas from Jewish mysticism, which led to the mass sexual assault of children by largely Jewish cabals. As she explained to Carlson, people like French President Emmanuel Macron are a part of a global cabal of paedophiles who control world governments for reasons outlined in Kabbalah — an esoteric, mystical Jewish tradition — which she believes advocated the sexual assault of children (a baseless claim). She had previously suggested that a secret Jewish sect known as Frankists engages in flagrant sin, including human sacrifice, for wicked theological reasons, and now may be in control of the Israeli state.
“Everything is a theology. These people are guided by a theology. They’re not atheists — they’re being pulled by something darker,” Owens said, referring to Jews in the cabal, including those running Israel.
Carlson responded, with absolute earnestness, that “Child molestation is the only crime for which there is no justification. So it’s got to be spiritual.” This was another way of saying that the global conspiracy they are sure is operating our worldwide system of pure evil must be doing so for occult reasons, and they know just which ethnoreligious group fits the bill.
While the Iran war has inspired sincere opposition, there is a more sinister worldview prevalent on the right today, which positions Judaism as the dark side of a Manichaean binary. Christian Zionism has, for better or worse, often been the motivating force for Christians to root out antisemitic conspiracy theorists, but as this safeguard is eroded, it’s easier for such conspiracy theories to become joined to theology.
Kirk was a Christian Zionist, but he had his own ideas about Jews. Kirk alleged that “Jewish donors have been the Number 1 funding mechanism of radical, open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies,” frequently repeated the antisemitic “great replacement theory” that a malicious cabal was trying to replace native-born whites with people of colour, and often pointed the finger at Soros’ supposed machinations. More than anything, Kirk wanted a country built on Christian nationalist principles without the pesky pluralism that Jews depend on.
Perhaps it was some shared opinions about Jews that helped bridge the divide between Carlson and Kirk, as the latter began to take a few cues from the media personality. In 2025, Kirk hosted a public conversation where Carlson inveighed against Israeli influence, claiming Israel was running psyops in the U.S. and that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad asset. After Kirk’s death, Carlson fuelled conspiracy theories suggesting that the Mossad might have assassinated him, saying Kirk had told him outright that he disliked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was horrified by what was happening in Gaza and was furious about Netanyahu’s push to have the U.S. fight Israel’s wars. After his death, several confidants confirmed that Kirk had complained about a “Jewish donor” who was suspending a donation of “$2 million a year because we won’t cancel Tucker.” Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes,” said Kirk in his WhatsApp thread, adding that their behaviour might sever his support for the “pro-Israel cause.”
Whatever shift Kirk may have made, whether at the urging of Carlson or Owens or on his own, remains speculative after his murder. But his death also means that one of the loudest pro-Israel stalwarts in their far-right coalition is no longer at the pulpit, and the floor is open for whoever is going to take Kirk’s mantle. Among the many figures who are now popping up as Kirk’s potential replacement, none of them comes with the kind of fierce Christian Zionism that motivated Kirk, and Carlson has already acted as a fill-in for Kirk’s show. This happened at the same time that Carlson publicly said that he “hates Christian Zionists,” and is enraged because their beliefs are “heresy,” reflecting an older kind of theological impulse that puts Jews back in their place as antagonists, rather than partners with, the Christian West.
In the wake of this, Carlson made headlines in October 2025 when he welcomed Fuentes onto his show, who explained that Zionism emerges directly from Jewish identity and religion, and that America’s continued support for the Jewish state comes from the immense power Jews hold and the high number of Jewish politicians and lobbyists in Washington. This went largely unchallenged, just as it was when Fuentes appeared on Owens’ show a few months earlier. In years past, even the shortest foray into such commentary would have been met with shock and derision, something Fuentes himself said happened to him less than a decade ago. Today, Fuentes has one of the largest audiences of young conservative men, a base that likely crosses over with that of Carlson, Owens and the class of political actors that will eventually replace the current GOP establishment.
The Republican Party has now fractured in ways unseen since Trump burst onto the political scene. After the Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, put out a video defending Carlson, the conservative think tank’s Antisemitism Task Force broke away and went independent, holding a conference to try and rally the shrinking alliance of pro-Israel voices in the party. Shapiro declared Carlson persona non grata, “a coward” who “acts as an ideological launderer for other people’s evils,” while figures like Bari Weiss and more traditional Republican figures like House Speaker Mike Johnson lined up behind Shapiro.
Yoram Hazony, who helped lay the groundwork for much of the nationalist politics that inspired this abandonment of Zionism among hard-line Christians, has been publicly puzzled: Who knew there was so much antisemitism on the right? “Nobody thought that antisemitism on the right was going to be one of the top three or four things that American political leaders had to think about six months ago,” Hazony told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in a much-discussed podcast episode.
Hazony’s surprise mirrors the wider pro-Israel right, who saw the implicit antisemitic super-sessionism of Christian Zionism, who witnessed the extremity of “great replacement theory” and QAnon conspiracy theories, who watched as supporters chanted “Christ is King,” and thought, “there’s nothing to see here.” For them, the word antisemitism is a proxy for questioning aid to Israel, so they have no intellectual way to digest the fact that the same underlying far-right theologies and politics that once motivated a virulently Islamophobic support of Israel’s war machine could, just as easily, be turned against Jews both at home and abroad.
Yet even as the split within the right sets in, leadership on the Zionist side is largely being provided by the Republican Jewish Coalition and Jewish politicians and pundits. In years past, the Jewish voices were a shadow of their evangelical counterparts, but increasingly they stand alone and with a shrinking coterie of committed loyalists.
By the time Carlson made it to Jerusalem to talk with Huckabee, his audience was primed to watch him go to war with the increasingly hostile Zionists who make up the old guard of the Republican Party. Because the American media has done little to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes in Gaza, some valorised Tucker’s questioning, asking why more reporters hadn’t done this. But while his questions about Christian Zionism and U.S. support for Israel’s crimes are entirely valid, that was not the whole of his performance. His criticism of Israel served as a gateway to a larger worldview filled with shadowy actors, globalists and immigrants, decadence and millenarianism.
Carlson’s debate with Huckabee was a bombshell, but was quickly pushed into the recesses when Huckabee turned his attention to Iran. Trump made no mystery of who had ordered the military action when Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that the administration “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” and so the U.S. was forced to join the strikes to defend American soldiers.
While Carlson has become a cause of division among Republicans, the party’s leaders see clearly where its future lies. “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” the Heritage Foundation’s Roberts said in the video. “[M]y loyalty as a Christian and an American is to Christ first and to America always. When it serves the interest of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so,” Roberts said in the video posted to social media. “But when it doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure comes from the globalist class.”
This framing is wholly new for Heritage, which had maintained a reflexive, unquestioned Zionism for decades. The Roberts video closed by arguing that conservatives should not “cancel” Fuentes but instead focus on challenging “the vile ideas of the left.” Roberts affirmed, along with Vice President JD Vance and other leading Republicans, that America First means America First: Israel will hold no privileged partnership with the new Republican Party.
The bigger question remains what role Christianity will have in right-wing politics going forward, and whose Christianity it will be. The impacts of the shift in opinion on gay marriage are still echoing through the church, splitting congregations, and the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the attack on trans health care and Trump’s authoritarianism all have the potential to be equally divisive. The forms of Christianity in steady revival are tied to the traditionalist turn in politics. In the world they shape, the affiliate relationship between Christian and Jewish Zionists may, ultimately, be seen as a short-lived deviation from a longer historical antagonism. If that is the case, politics will feel the change as much as theology.
Shane Burley is the author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How To End It (2017) and co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism (2024)
