When the enemy of your enemy becomes your enemy

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In late October, Tucker Carlson, the right-wing podcaster, hosted the white supremacist social media figure Nick Fuentes on his show. It was only a matter of time before Carlson would reach the bottom of the gutter where Fuentes dwells. Anyone who has followed him over the last several years could see that this was the general angle of his trajectory.

Carlson has interviewed Darryl Cooper, a well-known Nazi apologist who claimed that Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was "the chief villain of the Second World War." Last August, he interviewed Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos, an American Orthodox nun living in the West Bank, who reprised centuries-old Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric and supersessionist arguments about the Jews' obstinate adherence to the law and rejection of Jesus as the messiah. Carlson nodded along, his mouth half open in a pose of fake shock, in response to each of her ever-more outrageous claims.

A former Fox News host, Carlson is a product of the very mainstream media apparatus against which he now rails. Fuentes is an entirely different creature.

His own path to white nationalism, which he mapped out phase-by-phase in the October 27 interview, began in netherworld of online libertarianism, where supporters of Ron Paul, who ran for president in 2008, debated the precepts of Austrian economics and old far-right obsessions like the correlation between race and IQ. He became famous on the internet as a rambunctious college-student supporter of Donald Trump, with whom he grew disappointed when the president failed to be adequately Hitlerian.

Banned from almost every social media platform except for Elon Musk's X and YouTube, Fuentes has exploited these sites' algorithms to enormous virality.

The eruption of an immense quantity of antisemitic content since October 7 and throughout Israel's war in Gaza provided him with an opening to reach audiences beyond his hardcore internet base. And he was not the only white nationalist to enjoy a certain right-left crossover appeal recently; Jackson Hinkle similarly pumped out antisemitic conspiracies about a global Jewish cabal that was shared and retweeted by "race realists" and self-described "anti-imperialists" alike.

Yet unlike some of the other conspiracist influencers of the new online far-right, Fuentes is also the leader of a kind of social movement whose adherents call themselves "groypers," and which has a degree of real-world influence.

n mid-October, an exposé published by Politico revealed the group chats of leaders of Young Republican groups around the U.S., which were filled with graphically racist and antisemitic content of the kind of which Fuentes is a prominent purveyor. Vice President JD Vance called the reaction to what he dismissed as "offensive jokes" to be little more than "pearl clutching." Likewise, it is something of an open secret that Fuentes counts among his fans many younger staffers working for Republican politicians.

These are not isolated incidents. The Christian right in the United States is now in the midst of a fundamental ideological transformation. "Carlson and Fuentes' statements reflect a growing trend among American Christians away from a Judeo-Christian ethic that privileges the Hebrew Bible and certain Judaic ideals, and toward more Greek and Pagan traditions that emphasize Christian power and virility and look down on Judaism and Israel," explained Eliyahu Stern, a scholar of religion at Yale University and author of the forthcoming book, "Nowhere Left to Go: Jews and the Global Right, 1977–October 7."

The immediate response by the Heritage Foundation – the flagship conservative think tank that is now driving much of the Trump administration's policies – revealed the magnitude of this shift. In a defiant, if also strange, video posted on X, Heritage president Kevin Roberts mounted a defense of Carlson and his choice to bring Fuentes on his show. And he did so not with the old Republican talking points, but in the new fighting jargon of Christian nationalism.

"My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and America always," Roberts said. "Conservatives," he continued, "should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or their mouthpieces in Washington."

As if that had not made matters clear enough, Roberts doubled down further. Carlson, he said, would "always be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation," while "cancelling" Fuentes, he added, "is not the answer." Roberts' message, in other words, was this: The Trumpist right's tent is big enough to include self-professed Hitler admirers and white supremacists.

The Republican establishment, which after being humiliated by Trump in 2016 fell in line behind him, has tried control for potential damage to the party's brand. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Rick Scott and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham all made public statements condemning Carlson's embrace of Fuentes. But these look like feeble protests of the old guard when compared to the frothing rage of the party's dedicated base.

Carlson and Fuentes unsurprisingly found much about which to agree. Fuentes is the screaming subtext to Carlson's bow-tied text. Carlson, for instance, says the neoconservatives have betrayed the interests of America by getting the country entangled in foreign wars; Fuentes says that's because the neoconservatives are Jews, and as are loyal firstly to "global Jewry," not to America. They concurred that the furor about antisemitism was simply "wokeness" in other guise, part of the progressive "mind virus" that needs to be defeated. On YouTube, the more than two-hour video has nearly five and a half million views.

It would be an understatement to say that the current reality is one that Israel is ill-equipped to meet. "It's unclear to what extent Israelis understand, let alone have strategically incorporated the fact, that American evangelicals are a protean force that are constantly changing their political profile," Stern told me.

In power for more than a decade and a half, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to forge an alliance with the Christian right even at the cost of shredding the bipartisan consensus on support for Israel that had long been an axiom of Israel's approach to domestic U.S. politics. The reasoning – infamously articulated by Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, Netanyahu's confidant and strategist – was that evangelicals were more reliable supporters of Israel than liberal American Jews.

That is no longer the case. Having lost the left long ago, Israel is losing the right, as the new white Christian nationalism supplants the last remnants of the old Christian Zionism. In March 2025, for instance, Roberts' Heritage Foundation published a policy report that called for the United States to wind down its direct military aid to Israel by 2047. Israel is still a strategic ally, the report implies, but it is time for it to pay its own way, just as the Trump administration has demanded of America's European allies.

Netanyahu and Dermer's approach, then, has backfired. The catastrophic war in Gaza reduced Israel to a U.S. protectorate. Now, Israel's fate increasingly rests in the hand of an American right that sees Israel as not as an asset but as a burden, and Jews as foreign adversaries of the West.