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Tucker Carlson thinks antisemite Nick Fuentes is the future of MAGA
The uproar over Tucker Carlson’s decision to host Nick Fuentes, a notorious Holocaust denier and white nationalist, for a friendly chat on his popular online talk show last week focused on the need to maintain a firewall between mainstream conservatives and antisemites like Fuentes.
But Carlson sat down with Fuentes — who he’d previously called a “fed” and mocked as a “weird little gay kid” — out of recognition that the firewall is collapsing and a belief that conservatives like himself need to figure out how to harness the movement Fuentes represents to achieve their many shared political goals, including shifting America’s posture toward Israel.
For years, Fuentes has held court on daily livestreams for a dedicated audience of young men, sometimes called the Groyper Army, drawn to his obsessive focus on defending white America from immigrants, minorities and Jews, and his willingness to troll and agitate mainstream Republicans.
That dynamic made him anathema to GOP leaders and even to other influencers like Charlie Kirk, who supported many of the same political positions as Fuentes, but avoided his most inflammatory rhetoric about women and minorities (“Your body, my choice,” Fuentes famously posted online after the 2024 election). And yet Fuentes grew more popular, and, in the months before his murder, Kirk had started to adopt some of his talking points.
Carlson, meanwhile, has had one foot in the political wilderness since he was pushed out of his primetime slot on Fox News two years ago. He relaunched his show on X and, unmoored from any editorial oversight, began embracing various conspiracy theories — UFOs, false flag attacks, 9/11 trutherism. But he has also maintained a close relationship with President Donald Trump, and spoke during primetime at the Republican National Convention last year.
Carlson started to turn against Israel in the past year, a shift he has framed in isolationist terms but which coincided with his willingness to interview figures like Darryl Cooper, an amateur historian and Holocaust revisionist, and Candace Owens, who shares Fuentes’s open antipathy toward Jews.
Fuentes is already aligned with mainstream Republicans on immigration, but Carlson is seeking to enlist the Groyper Army in his uphill political project of turning the MAGA movement against Israel.
“I feel like going on about ‘the Jews’ helps” Israel’s supporters, he told Fuentes at one point in their conversation. He begged Fuentes not to judge people simply for being born Jewish — an incredibly narrow understanding of antisemitism — but even that was a struggle for the 27-year-old streamer, who repeatedly reaffirmed his most extreme views.
“As far as the Jews are concerned, you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons from Jewishness,” Fuentes said. He went on to expound on the theory that Jews are rootless cosmopolitans (“They’re unassimilatable”) and obsessed with their historic persecution such that they prioritize Israel’s interests (“We don’t think like that as Americans and white people”).
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At several points, Carlson tried to push back and suggest that appeals to identity politics in the United States could only lead to division and even political violence, but this only prompted Fuentes to argue that “a big challenge” to social harmony is “organized Jewry in America.”
Crucially, Carlson never rebuked Fuentes. The disagreement over how much to blame “the Jews” was framed instead as an earnest difference of opinion between two figures working toward a shared goal of limited immigration and an isolationist foreign policy.
The pair eventually moved on to discuss pornography (“It seems like it’s making a lot of people gay,” Carlson observed) and traditional gender roles, where Carlson’s earlier insistence that you can’t treat people differently based on how they are born seemed to evaporate. There was a bit of an odd couple dynamic between the two, including a surreal digression about Joseph Stalin (“I’m a fan,” Fuentes told an incredulous Carlson, “always an admirer.”).
But the crucial thing that Carlson understands, like Kirk did before him, is that Fuentes represents the vanguard of the conservative movement and that whatever forces were once able to shape the contours of this movement by setting priorities and enforcing norms against people like Fuentes — the Mitch McConnells and Fox Newses — are losing power.
This poses a unique threat to Jews because, as a small minority, they have historically relied on one of two different strategies to maintain their safety and status in society. The first is to build a coalition with other minorities who, by joining together, have more leverage to demand equal rights. And the second model is to maintain a close relationship with those in power who can carve out special protections for Jews.
The second model has been the preferred approach to working with an increasingly authoritarian Trump administration hostile toward minority rights, and it’s found some success as, for example, the White House has demanded colleges end their diversity programs while simultaneously demanding they tailor special services to help Jewish students.
And yet as the power of conservative gatekeepers like McConnell and Rupert Murdoch erodes, this contradiction can only be maintained if MAGA leaders are able to genuinely convince their base that Jews are an important part of their coalition.
That is challenging when Carlson, Fuentes and Kirk have all accurately pointed out that Jews are overwhelmingly liberal and opposed to Trump — to say nothing of the antisemitic tropes and conspiracies that often animate these complaints.
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Of special concern to many Jewish conservatives was that the Heritage Foundation, an influential think tank that has been cranking out policy blueprints for the White House, including on antisemitism, rushed to Carlson’s defense after his conversation with Fuentes. President Kevin Roberts insisted that “Christians can critique the State of Israel.” Some staff and antisemitism task force members resigned in response this week.
Several right-wing Jewish groups associated with the Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism task force, including the Zionist Organization of America, threatened to cut ties with the organization. And Ted Cruz, who Carlson hammered over his support for Israel in a June interview, called him a “coward” who was complicit in evil during remarks at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas this past weekend.
But the politicians and organizations rushing to condemn Carlson and Fuentes mostly came onto the scene before Trump upended national politics, and their understanding of the political landscape does not seem to have caught up.
There is little indication they are capable of reclaiming control of a Republican party whose youth wing was just consumed by a scandal involving several of its leaders making explicitly antisemitic comments about Jews and praising Nazis in a leaked group chat, only to be defended by Vice President JD Vance.
Nearly 500,000 people tuned in to watch Fuentes, streaming from his basement studio Monday night, mock the Jewish leaders who were seeking to ostracize him. He was frustrated but also triumphant. The sudden outrage at his interview with Carlson seemed like a last gasp of the previous “cancel culture” that Trump’s reelection had otherwise wiped out.
Fuentes and his ilk have been unbanned from social platforms, he dined with the president at Mar-a-Lago three years ago — “This guy’s hardcore,” Fuentes claims Trump said, “I like this guy” — and Carlson went from mocking him to enlisting him as a political ally.
Carlson and Heritage seem to recognize that the wind is at Fuentes’s back, and are responding accordingly.
“People are simply catching up, they’re waking up to what has always been going on — which is that we’ve been fighting these people’s wars for generations,” Fuentes told his audience, referring to Jews. “We want our fucking country back.”
The post Tucker Carlson thinks antisemite Nick Fuentes is the future of MAGA appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention
(JTA) — Local and national Jewish Democrats say they are sympathetic after Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would skip the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention over concerns about antisemitism and harassment.
“I don’t blame AG Nessel for not wanting to go and basically put herself in situations that feel untenable in this moment of time and don’t add any value politically, personally,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
Alexander’s comment came a day after Nessel announced during a televised antisemitism roundtable that she would be skipping the convention next month, where party leaders will finalize the state’s Democratic candidate for Senate following a divisive primary that has focused in part on Israel and antisemitism.
“I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” Nessel said during the roundtable. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She said she had filed a formal complaint within the party about a party official who had called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs. “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” she asked without naming the official. Her office responded to a request for comment by referring to the recorded livestream of the antisemitism roundtable.
Nessel’s declaration comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel. El-Sayed is surging in polls despite a reported $30 million spent against him by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and its supporters, whom he has made a target of criticism from the campaign trail.
Nessel’s comments also follow turmoil at the Michigan Democratic Party’s endorsement convention in April, where Stevens was booed by attendees. A third primary candidate who later dropped out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, said a convention attendee had targeted her Jewish husband with an antisemitic slur.
The incident has fueled alarm among Jewish Democrats, according to Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“She’s not alone,” Soifer told JTA about Nessel on Friday. “We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.”
Nessel has raised the alarm about antisemitism within the party for years, alleging in 2024 that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice, had been antisemitic when criticizing charges Nessel filed against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan.
For her part, Alexander said she would be participating in the nominating convention and said she believed the chair of the state Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, had been “very accessible and very open to making sure that we, including our Jewish elected officials, feel safe in that space.” But she said she understood why Nessel was staying away.
“It would never even occur to me, but I’m not an elected official,” Alexander said. “It’s a different stake for me than it is for Dana. I understand her completely.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’
(JTA) — Every congregational rabbi in Maine has signed onto a statement calling for peace and urging the state’s political leaders to stop using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza, following a Democratic primary in which several candidates used the label for the first time.
But the rabbis also indicated that they, too, were unsatisfied with conditions in the Middle East and called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work toward a peaceful future.
“We call upon Maine’s leaders, and particularly its political leaders, to reject the irresponsible usage of the term in describing the Israel-Hamas War,” said the statement released on Friday. “We also call upon Israeli and Palestinian leaders to end the cycle of violence and to create a better world for both Palestinian and Israeli children.”
The statement, titled “A Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric,” argues that using the term as a “political slogan does not advance peace in the Middle East.” The term “erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the rabbis say.
“Compassion for Palestinians does not require the adoption of hateful and misleading language,” they continue. “Advocating for peace does not require participation in a ‘Holocaust inversion’ against the Jewish community. And political leadership does not require demonizing one community in the service of another.”
The statement comes days after Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Saturday at the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic who dropped out of the race earlier this month. Platner faced a sexual assault allegation, which he denies. Jackson now faces Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November’s general election.
Platner’s romp to the primary victory featured routine use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. And ahead of the convention to replace him, Jackson and several other Democratic hopefuls who later exited the race began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza for the first time, a shift that drew scrutiny from some Jewish leaders and voters in the state.
The use of the term has become a “currency for acquiring power and position in Maine’s Democratic party,” Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, the leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, who also signed the statement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Too many Maine Democrats are cynically willing to trade in that currency at the expense of our safety and dignity,” she said in an emailed statement. “We decided we needed to say something collectively, both about the specious and dangerous nature of the claim, and about how much damage has been done to our families and congregants.”
The statement Friday was spearheaded by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and signed by every congregational rabbi in the state, including Rabbi Bill Siemers of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor and Rabbi Erica Asch of the Reform Temple Beth El in Augusta. (Rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement in Maine did not appear on the signatory list.)
Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said the federation hoped the “unity displayed here in Maine can inspire Jewish communities across the US to also unite against the extremist rhetoric harming our community and our children.”
Rabbi Josh Stanton, the associate vice president of interfaith and intergroup initiatives for Jewish Federations of North America, also hailed the joint statement.
“Maine’s Jewish clergy are setting an important example with their call to put aside inflammatory rhetoric and look to the common good,” Stanton said in an emailed statement. “At a time of rising polarization and declining civil discourse, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s efforts to unify the community around this important message are a mark of true leadership.”
Isaacs told JTA that she hoped Jackson would “support, understand, and advocate for all of Maine’s citizens, including the totality of Maine’s diverse Jewish community.”
“Work with us to figure out how to express outrage and legitimate critique of Israel’s government without succumbing to language that you might not know is an ancient antisemitic trope, or dismissing the security needs of Israel’s citizens,” Isaacs said of her message to Jackson. “Please have the courage to forge your own path, and not follow in the footsteps of Graham Platner, a man who should have never been normalized, endorsed, or empowered.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song
(JTA) — Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel.
The 80’s pop star was scheduled to appear at London’s Palladium starting Monday as part of the production’s rotating cast playing King Herod, the Judean king who is best known by Jews for his expansion of the Second Temple and to Christians for his efforts to stave off the arrival of a challenger — the story of which is reflected in the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Boy George will be replaced by actor Richard Armitage in the London production.
In announcing the cast change, Paul Kelmsley, the singer’s manager, did not directly mention the blowback the former Culture Club frontman was receiving for releasing a pro-Israel song but alluded to it.
“George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that,” he said. ”In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”
Boy George is defending his decision to release the song, saying he believes artists should be free to express their views even when they are unpopular. In “We Will Dance Again,” the singer rejects claims of genocide against Israel and proclaims, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.”
Earlier Friday, Boy George lashed back at the vitriol he was getting online. “What is most shocking is the amount of gay folk attacking me, ” he posted on X. “If you support terrorism you can in the words of Divine ‘Take your toolkit and go f—_ a garage,’” he said, referring to a quote attributed to the taboo-breaking transgender artist.
“When I say ‘they want to kill every last one of us’ I am also talking about us queers, not just the Jewish community,” Boy George said. “When will you wake up?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song appeared first on The Forward.
