Podcasters Are Pushing the Right Toward Antisemitism. These Conservatives Are Fighting Back

By Melissa Langsam Braunstein

Thursday, May 21, 2026

 

As the right-wing podcast set embraces antisemitic conspiracy theorizing, a group of leading conservatives is organizing to oppose those who would use their influence to drag the American right down the path of hatred.

 

The Republican lawmakers, Trump administration officials, and religious leaders who gathered in Washington on Monday for the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism’s conference have experience fighting antisemitism across society.

 

Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), who gained national renown by dismantling Ivy League university presidents during congressional hearings, discussed her new book about campus antisemitism and what’s driving it. National Security Council Senior Director for Counter Terrorism Sebastian Gorka broached jihadist terrorism as part of the new National Strategy for Counterterrorism. Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, highlighted the importance of district attorneys who actually prosecute antisemitic hate crimes. Representative Kat Cammack (R., Fla.) raised the the internet’s detrimental “race to the top of Mount Clickmore.” Antoinette Cordova, program director of Martha’s Love, recommended posting more material that AI can draw from to help younger adults make decisions with truth and discernment. Israeli ambassador Yechiel Leiter excoriated the New York Times as “a pornographic rag.”

 

There’s good reason for the range of concern to alarm exhibited at Monday’s conference.

 

Last December, the Manhattan Institute released a poll showing 16 percent of Republicans “believe that Jews receive too much favorable treatment.” And that sentiment is disproportionately exhibited among the young. Thirty-eight percent of “recent first-time GOP presidential voters” believe “most or all” American Jews “are more loyal to a foreign country than to the United States.” Finally, 12 percent of respondents told pollsters Israel “is not an ally.”

 

Pew reported that as of late March, “57% of Republicans ages 18 to 49 have an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 50% last year.” A poll of CPAC attendees from that same timeframe found 85 percent of respondents considered Israel a “key U.S. strategic ally,” while 11 percent disagreed. These figures collectively signal a generational sea change in how the American right views American Jews and Israel.

 

The task force was founded in response to the antisemitism that surged after October 7 and initially focused on opposing left-wing and Islamist forms of antisemitism. Originally formed at the Heritage Foundation, the task force parted ways with the think tank after Heritage President Kevin Roberts defended podcaster Tucker Carlson’s decision to give a softball interview to notorious antisemite Nick Fuentes.

 

Carlson, who has a popular podcast and enjoys influence within the Trump administration, was repeatedly cited as a leading figure in the right’s turn against Israel. The Task Force’s strategy, co-chair Pastor Mario Bramnick explained, “is to unite our movement, while marginalizing those on the right who have demonized the state of Israel.” Bramnick named Carlson and Candace Owens as prominent figures who have launched “troubling . . . antisemitic attacks from within our own ranks,” before delineating some of Carlson’s perceived sins. Those included: Carlson’s sympathetic comments about “Iran, Qatar, Russia,” saying “Israel persecutes Christians” and “Netanyahu controls President Trump,” and attacking Christian Zionists as heretics with “a brain virus.”

 

Given the size of their collective audience and the fact that their listeners skew young, Carlson, Fuentes, and Owens were identified as threats to the pro-Israel and philosemitic consensus that has predominated on the American right for decades.

 

“The antisemitism promoted by Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and others who previously identified with the political right must be confronted,” so as to “ensure that antisemitism does not take root on our side, like it did on the political left,” task force co-chair Luke Moon said. Moon also announced a pledge the public can sign, joining “a firewall to counter the rise of antisemitism in America.”

 

The speakers at Monday’s conference agreed that the problem of mounting antisemitism will not go away on its own.

 

“You fight blood libels by fighting. You have to fight these people,” Leiter, the Israeli ambassador, said amidst taking on Carlson’s contention that Israel is an expansionist state and that “everybody” in Israel should have their DNA checked to “find out who Abram’s descendants are.” The latter comment arose during Carlson’s interview of U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, while discussing “who has a ‘rightful’ claim to the land of Israel.”

 

“Did we have our DNA checked in Auschwitz?” Leiter asked.

 

Conspiratorial allegations don’t require evidence, though, as a relatively recent conspiracy theory about Israel or Jews being behind Charlie Kirk’s September 2025 assassination demonstrates. Podcaster Candace Owens implied that Israel and American Jewish investor Bill Ackman were involved in Charlie Kirk’s assassination, something Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ackman both felt compelled to refute. Influencer Jackson Hinkle tweeted that Kirk “feared ‘Israel would kill him,’” also implying Israeli involvement. Meanwhile, podcaster Ian Carroll tweeted more directly that Israel “murdered him in front of his family.”

 

Missionary-turned-filmmaker Matthew Monfore recounted how conspiracists blaming Israel for Charlie Kirk’s assassination prompted him to create a documentary film “addressing all the conspiracies and all the accusations that are made against the Jewish people, Israel, etc.”

 

“I am seeing nine out of ten young people on the right that are skeptical to critical of Jews and Israel,” Monfore said. He summarized the “hogwash” narrative he’s encountered: Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent with pedophilia-related “dirt on President Donald Trump.” Monfore described his shock when conservatives he’d known “for decades” and “church ladies” shared the “most heinous conspiracy theories you can ever believe” with him.

 

Generation Zion’s Isaac Woodward described a different personal experience at Turning Point USA’s “AmFest, CPAC, and other events.” Woodward spoke as someone whose organization trains Christian and Jewish students to “defend faith through biblical values,” while supporting Israel and the Western future. He’s needed to define terms like “Judeo-Christian” and “Zionism” for attendees. However, once Woodward’s explained “Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to live somewhere in the historic Holy Land to which they’re indigenous,” he hasn’t faced much disagreement. “We had a few people that were Groypers and fans of Fuentes and others, but most people at these places, most young conservatives, I think, still can be gotten through” to.

 

New York Times best-selling author and vice president of Turning Point USA Lucas Miles, spends his days engaged in such outreach. And Miles, who works to unite Christians ranging from Charismatics to Calvinists, urged a bigger Christian tent on Israel.

 

Miles warned that what many Christians hear from “the pro-Israel camp” is they must embrace Dispensationalism, a Christian “theological system” that for some adherents includes “the idea that the church is a New Testament entity that is distinct from Israel.”

 

“Dispensationalism should not be a requirement to stand with Israel,” Miles said. “We do not need a theological purity test to say that Israel has the moral ground, and that Israel from a policy standpoint is the best ally that the United States of America has ever had, that we should stand beside Israel.”

 

“We have allowed the other side to create a divide between us over a theological purity test, and this has to be rejected.”