The Make America Great Again movement is splintering over its view of Israel.

For decades, radical leftists have portrayed the Jewish state as an evil colonial movement oppressing “indigenous Palestinians,” while conservatives have rejected this neo-Marxist treatment of the Jews and remained allies of Israel. But after Tucker Carlson interviewed Holocaust-denying historian Darryl Cooper in September 2024, a growing number of American conservatives have adopted the view that the United States should not support Israel.

In a subsequent interview with the Nazi apologist Nick Fuentes, Carlson said that any Christian who believes the Jews have a right to their own Promised Land has a “brain virus.” Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said America needs “regime change in Jerusalem, and we should have it immediately.” Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene became the first Republican member of Congress to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide.” Candace Owens claims Israel is an “occult nation” that secretly rules the world.

Statements like these have concerned many. At a conference on anti-Semitism in January, Israeli historian Gadi Taub warned that many conservatives today have begun preaching neo-Nazism under the guise of traditional Christianity. For the past 80 years, the Holocaust made anti-Semitism unacceptable in American Christianity. But people like Carlson and Owens are now resurrecting medieval Christianity’s ugly tradition of Jew-hatred.

They don’t realize it, but Carlson, Cooper, Fuentes, Owens and others who have turned against the Jews are actually turning against Western civilization itself. They now find themselves making apologies for men as evil as Adolf Hitler, Ali Khamenei and Vladimir Putin, while claiming that courageous men like Benjamin Netanyahu and Winston Churchill are the real villains of the past century.

They seem to have lost their sanity.

The Hebrew Bible is one of the foundations of Judeo-Christian tradition and Western culture in general, so anyone who hates the Jews and rejects this foundation ends up rejecting civilization itself.

‘Intellectual Disease’

Understanding anti-Semitism is a complex task. Let’s start with the origins of the term. In the 1800s, a movement in France claimed that the “Semitic races” (which include Arabs and Jews) were biologically inferior to Indo-European peoples. In 1879, German journalist Wilhelm Marr used antisemitismus to denote Judenhass (“Jew-hatred”). Marr hated Jews and wanted to frame his Judenhass as a racial issue rather than a religious one. He founded the League of Antisemites to promote racist views.

Jew-hatred today is often different from racism. Most racism characterizes the targeted group as primitive or subhuman. Anti-Semitism typically stereotypes the Jews as cunning, manipulative, powerful—and evil. Sometimes it blames this alleged evil on Jewish genetics, but more often it blames it on Jewish culture, religion and traditions.

“But if anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics,” Paul Johnson wrote in a 2005 article “The Anti-Semitic Disease.” “In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive.”

In other words, while some anti-Semites do view Jews as subhuman, the primary reason so many throughout history have hated Jews is not racial bigotry. In fact, Taub argued at the International Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism that even Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not as racist as many people say. “Nazism as an ideology relied on a very virulent form of social Darwinism,” he said on January 27. “It was not about the survival of the fittest, not even exactly about the survival of the strongest. It was about the survival of the most ruthless. That ideology cannot be reconciled with the religion that preached that all human life is sacred and that we are all created in the image of God. This makes it doubly heartbreaking to see that, on the right, some are now preaching neo-Nazism in the name of Christianity.”

This is a deep insight. Before God revealed the Torah to Moses, the world was a violent tribal battleground where ethnic groups and nations fought among themselves, often in the name of their gods. When one nation conquered another, the conquest was considered proof that the victor’s gods were superior. The idea that there was only one Creator who fashioned every human in His image and viewed every human life as sacred was revolutionary. No nation besides Israel believed it.

Hitler could not reconcile Jewish beliefs about the sanctity of human life with his quest to displace, enslave and exterminate races he considered subhuman, so he sought to exterminate the Jews. Influenced by philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Hitler viewed Judaism as a “slave morality” that valued traits like humility, pity and patience, while condemning traits like strength and pride. He sought to purge Christianity of Jewish influence by rejecting the Old Testament and portraying Jesus as an anti-Jewish Aryan fighter.

Not all anti-Semites share Hitler’s goals and methods. But to one degree or another, all anti-Semites reject the biblical belief that all human life is sacred and that we are all created in the image of God.

Marxist anti-Semites demonize the Jews by conflating them with the capitalist class. Islamic anti-Semites demonize the Jews by invoking apocalyptic traditions portraying them as enemies whose elimination is divinely sanctioned. Christian anti-Semites demonize the Jews by teaching that they are guilty of Jesus Christ’s death in a way that other human beings are not. All these groups embrace some sort of tribalism above the idea that all human life is sacred because that life comes from the same Creator.

Hebrew Origins

Many people accused of anti-Semitism try to justify their views by claiming that they are only anti-Zionist. This is a way of saying that they don’t hate Jews, they just don’t believe Jews should be allowed to have their own nation. When you understand the spirit that motivates anti-Semitism, you see that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are two branches of the same corrupt tree.

The same Bible that tells us that all human beings are created in God’s image tells us that all the land from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates River was given to Abraham’s descendants for “an everlasting possession” (Genesis 15:18; 17:8). Any ideology that rejects the Bible as its authority will likely reject both the brotherhood of man and the State of Israel’s right to exist.

Taub commented on this point in a February 4 interview with Trumpet Daily host Stephen Flurry.) “Those who are anti-Semite end up being anti-Western because Judaism and the Bible are the foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition and Western culture in general,” he said. “… I’m not surprised that people like Tucker Carlson end up supporting Iran or end up not knowing who the good side in World War ii is. ‘Was it Churchill or was it Hitler?’ Because once you remove the pillar, then the house, your ideological house, will crumble.”

We should all take this statement as a warning. Carlson used to be one of the most widely respected conservative commentators in America. But once he started saying that the Bible does not give the Jews a right to the Promised Land, his commentary took a dark turn. Now he is joining ranks with those who praise Hitler and Stalin, and he is defending evil men like Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His ideological house has indeed crumbled.

In The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West—and Why Only They Can Save It, author Melanie Phillips asserts that “Judaism is the West’s civilizational soul. … Judaism provided the origin of the principles that created the West’s signature coalition between individualism and community, or freedom under the rule of law, that bound people into a cohesive nation,” she writes. “The Hebrew Bible introduced to the world the idea that human beings had moral responsibility. The Mosaic laws were a set of rules and precepts designed to create a community of putting duty towards others before an individual’s own interests and to foster humility and gratitude rather than arrogance and acquisitiveness. … In the absence of such laws, there would have been moral anarchy, and endless struggle for power between individuals and groups in which the weak would be victimized by the strong in what Thomas Hobbes, in the 18th century, was to call a war of all against all.”

Radical leftists hate these Jewish precepts and adamantly oppose the State of Israel for trying to reintroduce them to the Middle East. American Christians have traditionally supported Israel due to their shared cultural heritage. Only recently has the “woke right” distanced itself from these biblical precepts by purging Jewish influence from their version of Christianity. That is why they usually invoke the name of Jesus yet claim that God’s law has been abolished. (See “What’s Wrong With American Christianity?”)

Ultimately, anti-Semitism is not about racial bigotry against Abraham’s descendants. It is about hatred for the biblical precepts upon which Western civilization was built. In The Key of David, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry writes, “We know the Jews, like all humans, have helped create some of their own problems. But we must see that there is something deeper behind anti-Semitism. Satan the devil has a great hatred for God, and he understands the plan of God. Because of that plan, the word Jew can really stir up Satan’s wrath. The Jews are a type of what all men are to become spiritually. God’s association with the Jews has turned Satan even more violently against them! Hatred for the Jews has been inspired by Satan. He knows he was never offered what God has offered mankind. He wants nothing more than to destroy God’s plan.”

While many Americans don’t want to admit it, the Jews and the nation of Israel play an important role in God’s ultimate plan for mankind.

This truth is so important that the late Herbert W. Armstrong listed the “Mystery of Israel” as one of the seven great mysteries of human existence. Reading his book Mystery of the Ages is vital to understand both how God is using Israel and why the devil hates it so passionately. This isn’t just about an arcane ideological dispute among conservatives. This is about civilization and anarchy, law and lawlessness, God and the devil.