Antisemitism took a giant step forward this week onto MAGA center stage.
It started on Monday when Tucker Carlson hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his show — MAGA’s biggest platform — to discuss Israel and “organized Jewry.” The fallout was immediate, as conservatives fiercely debated the admissibility of antisemites like Fuentes into the conservative big tent, the growing trend of Gen-Z anti-Zionism and more.
On Thursday, the Heritage Foundation dropped a bombshell when its president, Kevin Roberts, released a video defending Carlson and calling for Fuentes to be debated, not shunned. Roberts argued that conservatives should put loyalty to “Christ first, and America always” before reflexive support of Israel, no matter the tremendous pressure they might receive from the “globalist class.”
That dog whistle conjured up antisemitic images of a parasitic, transnational Zionist lobby arrayed against Christian nationalism. And now Fuentes is taking a victory lap, flanked by MAGA’s leading pundit on one arm and MAGA’s leading think tank on the other, his toxic brand of antisemitism poised to waltz into the conservative mainstream.
Heritage seems to have taken a sudden and dizzying turn; for more than a year the organization sought to elbow its way to the front lines of the fight against antisemitism, which it associated exclusively with the pro-Palestine left.
In October 2024, Heritage released Project Esther, an authoritarian playbook much like Project 2025 (from which it derived its namesake) calling on the Trump administration to “disrupt” and “degrade” pro-Palestine advocacy using the full force of the state. Once in office, Donald Trump moved quickly to fulfill many of its goals, locking up activists like Mahmoud Khalil, strong-arming universities like Columbia and threatening advocacy organizations with lawsuits, terrorism designations, revocation of nonprofit status and more.
When Project Esther launched, its backers dismissed any need to include the fight against right-wing antisemitism in its mandate, arguing that the left represented the only real threat to Jewish safety. Many flat-out denied the very premise that antisemitism exists within the conservative movement. “I refuse to acknowledge that [antisemitism] is part of the conservative movement and that [white supremacists] are my problem,” James Carafano, a leader of Heritage’s Task Force on Antisemitism, told Jewish Insider, “because white supremacists are not my problem, because white supremacists are not part of being conservative.”
Now, many of Project Esther’s Jewish supporters are singing a different tune. Rabbi Yaakov Menken, head of the far-right Coalition for Jewish Values, a Project Esther partner, lamented on X that “Heritage has chosen to vocally stand with an antisemite … the consequences will be far-reaching indeed.”
Christian Zionists, too, are sounding the alarm. “It’s disappointing to see, though unfortunately not surprising,” Luke Moon, head of the Christian Zionist group Philos Project and a co-chair of the Heritage Antisemitism Task Force, acknowledged in an email to supporters. Leaders like Moon are deeply concerned that their days of influence are numbered, as since the October 7 attacks in 2023, criticism of U.S. support for Israel has deepened across the MAGA movement.
For decades, the Israeli, American Jewish and Christian Right forged what seemed like an ironclad alliance. In service of defending Israel and fighting antisemitism, they tirelessly championed the supposed shared “Judeo-Christian” values of “Western civilization” undergirding the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.”
Project Esther is a latecomer in a crowded, bipartisan pro-Israel anti-antisemitism landscape, dotted by American Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League, Christian partners like Christians United for Israel, and gloves-off groups like StopAntisemitism, Canary Mission and Betar. These groups have relied on overzealous, weaponized conflations of legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, shredding free speech rights and shielding unjust Israeli policies from accountability in the process.
If conservatives truly wanted to fight this battle, they would turn first to their own camp. Antisemitism can show up on the left, to be sure, but it finds its most natural home in the ranks of the right, where it fits comfortably alongside anti-black racism, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ+ phobia and all other types of bigotry.
Data shows that radical right actors committed the majority of extremist-related murders in the last decade, while “the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right,” as a 2022 study put it. White nationalists like Fuentes imagine a Jewish conspiracy at the heart of progressivism, U.S. support for Israel, and everything else they detest. These fever dreams have been dutifully repeated by ultranationalist movements for over a century, and are a core part of the authoritarian toolkit today.
Jewish Rightists may be surprised, but the rest of us aren’t. Progressive analysts have long understood that the strategy of allying with Christian nationalists would backfire. Meanwhile, the relentless push to equate Jewish identity with defense of the indefensible actions of the Israeli state ends up feeding the very flames of antisemitism it seeks to combat. Now, the cynical underbelly of the Right’s posturing, and the Jewish establishment’s short-sighted enabling of their authoritarian agenda, is clear to all.
Israel’s right-wing defenders are flailing, on the backfoot and apoplectic. Long accustomed to looking only left for the next threat, their necks have painfully swiveled. Conservative Catholic columnist Rod Dreher recently reported that all of his right-wing Jewish friends now view Tucker Carlson as the most dangerous antisemite in America.
This isn’t a fluke; it’s here to stay. At a Turning Point USA event in Mississippi on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance was grilled by college students insisting that Israel was “controlling” Trump and Judaism was “prosecuting” Christianity. These future leaders of the right aren’t going anywhere; they’ll be taking the reins soon, and there’s little room for the “Judeo” in their vision of the Christian West.
In hindsight, the obsessive focus on uncovering and rooting out a supposed crisis of antisemitism on the left will prove to have been a drastic and myopic miscalculation. Jewish Rightists, in fact, were bedfellows with a far more substantive threat, putting not only Jews but democracy itself in greater danger in the process. With their dreams increasingly discredited, we must work to awaken from the nightmare they have helped create.
Ben Lorber is a senior researcher at Political Research Associates, a research and strategy center that helps pro-democracy campaigners understand and counter authoritarian movements. He is co-author of “Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism.”
