The Tucker Carlson interview with Holocaust-denying, Hitler-admiring influencer Nick Fuentes was not just another online controversy. It was a flashing red warning light for anyone who considers themselves conservative, Christian, or both. When a figure who openly revels in Jew-hatred is treated as a provocative guest rather than a pariah, it signals that something has gone deeply wrong in parts of the right. We are no longer just arguing about tax rates or foreign policy. We are arguing about whether the movement that claims to defend “Western civilization” will remain anchored in its Judeo-Christian foundations—or surrender to a dark, pagan resentment that despises Jews, denies the legitimacy of Israel, and openly flirts with the worst ideologies of the 20th century.
For Christians, antisemitism is not just another prejudice. It is a direct insult to the God they claim to worship and to the story they proclaim as their own. The entire Christian faith rests on the revelation given to Israel. The God of the Bible explicitly identifies Himself as the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Jesus is not an abstract moral teacher; He is a Jew who prayed in synagogues, kept the feasts of Israel, read the Hebrew Scriptures, and wept over Jerusalem. The early church saw itself as grafted into Israel’s covenant, not as a Gentile replacement tribe that could discard the Jews once their theological “usefulness” had expired. To celebrate or excuse hatred of the Jewish people is to saw off the very branch on which Christianity sits. A “Christian” antisemitism isn’t a variant of Christianity; it is a denial of Christianity at its core.
For conservatives, antisemitism is equally poisonous. Authentic conservatism begins in gratitude—to God, to our forebears, and to the institutions and traditions that have made ordered liberty possible. Much of what conservatives cherish about the West—human dignity, the rule of law, the sanctity of life—emerges from the moral vision first articulated in the Hebrew Bible and preserved by the Jewish people through centuries of exile and persecution. Jews have been indispensable contributors to every free society they have inhabited, from commerce and science to philosophy and the arts. A “right wing” that mocks Jews, traffics in conspiracy theories about “globalist cabals,” or romanticizes regimes and movements that oppressed them is not conserving anything noble. It is merely weaponizing grievance. Antisemitism doesn’t refine conservatism; it rots it from within.
This is precisely why the question of Zionism—Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland—cannot be separated from the debate over antisemitism. After nearly two millennia of expulsions, blood libels, pogroms, and finally the industrialized slaughter of the Holocaust, the Jewish people insisted on what every other nation takes for granted: the right to live as a free people in their own land, capable of defending themselves. That is Zionism. You cannot honestly condemn the centuries of violence inflicted on Jews while opposing the one arrangement that has given them a fighting chance to survive. Today’s fashionable slogan, “I’m not antisemitic, I’m just anti-Zionist,” collapses under basic scrutiny. To single out the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate—while granting a presumption of legitimacy to every other nation, including brutal dictatorships—is not “principled anti-nationalism.” It is discrimination dressed up as moral concern. It functionally means: Jews may live, but only on sufferance, and never with the normal tools of sovereignty to defend themselves.
The reality is that Israel’s existence is not an abstraction; it is the concrete answer to genocidal hatred that has never fully disappeared. From the massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7 and the kidnapping of children and elderly people, to the open calls by Iran’s proxies for Israel’s annihilation, the world has been reminded—again—that Jewish vulnerability is not a relic of the past. When segments of the right respond to this by shrugging, “Israel is not our problem,” or worse, by suggesting that the Jews somehow “had it coming,” they are not speaking the language of Burke, Lincoln, or Reagan. They are echoing the language of Europe’s darkest movements. A conservatism that cannot bring itself to stand with a democratic ally under existential attack, simply because that ally is Jewish, has lost any moral authority to speak about “civilization” at all.
Christians and conservatives who take their own principles seriously should instead see support for Israel and opposition to antisemitism as a natural outgrowth of their deepest convictions. If you believe that every human being bears the image of God, you cannot be indifferent when Jews are targeted in synagogues, on campuses, or on the street. If you believe in national sovereignty and the right of self-defense, you cannot deny those rights to the world’s only Jewish state. If you believe in the rule of law, you cannot wink at mobs that terrorize Jewish students, tear down posters of kidnapped Israeli children, or cheer organizations that openly glorify murder. This does not mean endorsing every decision of an Israeli government, any more than patriotism requires endorsing every decision of our own. But it does mean rejecting the narrative that paints Israel as uniquely evil while excusing or romanticizing its sworn enemies.
The right is at a crossroads. One path leads toward a resentful, racialized pseudo-right that trades the Bible for blood-and-soil mythology, dismisses Jews as a hostile “out-group,” and dreams of a post-liberal order that looks suspiciously like the regimes conservatives once opposed. The other path leads toward a renewed Judeo-Christian conservatism that remembers its debts, defends its friends, and takes seriously the command to bless rather than curse the people through whom the moral foundations of our civilization were laid. That second path includes rejecting antisemites no matter how many clicks they draw, standing publicly with Jewish communities under pressure, and affirming—in word and policy—that the State of Israel has not only a right to exist but a right to defend itself against those who want it erased from the map.
In the end, this is not merely a debate about messaging or coalition-building. It is a question of the right’s soul. A conservative and Christian movement that abandons the Jews and turns its back on Israel is abandoning itself. Those who care about the future of the right—and about the integrity of Christian witness—should have the courage to say so, clearly and without apology.