In front of over 30,000 young Christian devotees at the Turning Point USA America Fest held last December in Phoenix, a high-profile firefight broke out among far-right MAGA influencers—including Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson – that could help shape the future of the Republican Party, the Christian Right and their hold on power in 2026.

In the first gathering of young conservatives who helped power Trump into office in 2024 since Saint Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September, battle lines were drawn over how welcoming the movement and the broader GOP should be to overtly antisemitic demagogues—as opposed to the routine acceptance of antisemitism and playing “footsie” with neo-Nazis that has marked the movement and the party over the decades.

This new tension compounds the growing rifts and disenchantment within the MAGA base over everything from the Epstein files and the faltering economy to the fallout over ICE’s execution of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the attack on 2nd Amendment rights, and Trump’s newfound interventionism. The internecine warfare also reflects jockeying over the leadership and future of MAGA and Kirk’s army, with its more than one million TPUSA members now enrolled in 4,000 chapters in high schools and colleges.

The bare-knuckled infighting came amid the ongoing furor over Carlson’s platforming of the Holocaust-denying, Hitler-loving white supremacist Nick Fuentes in late October. Fuentes is now reaching millions and getting even more media attention. This new attention to Fuentes and his “Groypers” furthered a deepening split over Israel, Jews and antisemitism in MAGA.

Meanwhile, almost no one on the right has dared to call out the Trump administration’s own extensive ties to neo-Nazis, such as FBI director Kash Patel’s regular appearances on Holocaust denier Stew Peters’s podcast before he took office, or Trump’s own notable insensitivity to antisemitism. That lengthy litany includes such provocations as welcoming Fuentes and Kanye West for Thanksgiving dinner at his home, and peddling antisemitic tropes about Jewish greed and their “dual loyalty” to Israel. (On January 11^th, 2026 The New York Times published an interview with Trump in which he said of antisemites in MAGA: “I don’t think we like them,” while declining to condemn anyone by name and pretending he did not know Fuentes. He added, “I am the least antisemitic person probably there is anywhere in the world.”)

Leaving Trump untouched at AmFest last month, Ben Shapiro, the founder of the influential, Trumpist Daily Wire, declared, “There is a reason that Charlie Kirk despised Nick Fuentes. He knew that Nick Fuentes is an evil troll, and that building him up is an act of moral imbecility – and that is precisely what Tucker Carlson did.“

Shapiro, who is Jewish, stood almost alone among speakers in denouncing antisemitism on the right at the event. Vice-President J.D Vance, representing what has seemed to be the GOP’s default position, declared, “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests.” During the AmFest conference, Erika Kirk endorsed J.D. Vance for President in 2028, no matter his open-door policy for neo-Nazis. (He later denounced Fuentes in an interview with a British publication, Unherd, largely because Fuentes had denounced him as a “race traitor” for marrying his Indian-American wife.)

While most Republican and MAGA leaders were embracing or accepting right-wing antisemites, in back of the stage there was a huge exhibition hall where the factionalism on the Christian Right was on full display. There, a bearded 28-year-old Dimas Guaico—the executive director of a group called Generation Zion that promotes a pro-Israel alliance of Jewish and Christian college students—stood at a “Prove Me Wrong”-style booth modeled after Kirk’s own approach. Guaico had recruited 20 college students from across the country to attend the AmFest conference. In his Instagram announcement before the event, he declared: “For too long, we have allowed the anti-Israel, Jewish hatred-filled scum of the earth dictate what it is our movements are going to look like, are going to be saying, are going to be talking about.” He trained his young activists in supporting Israel, including its war on Gaza, and challenging antisemitism, and featured as well an IDF soldier taking questions about the war.

They certainly had their work cut out for them. “We were one of the only pro-Israel conservative Zionist organizations with a public presence at AmFest,” he admits. But despite contending that most young people they encountered were either curious or sympathetic, he also notes, “We had some very tough conversations with people who were proud to say we’re against all Jews.” Case in point: “A kid named Riley, a self-proclaimed Groyper, he actually gave us clipped coins; he clipped his own pennies and nickels and dimes, and handed them out to us. He was like, ‘This is what you represent’ —which is crazy because those are things we saw in England in the 1400s.” It was actually an ancient English medieval charge that originated even earlier (around 1270), in which Jews were accused of hoarding silver by shaving off the edges of coins. Such accusations led eventually to mass executions.

Brazen Holocaust denial was also promoted in the exhibition hall. As The Bulwark journalist Will Sommer and others noted, the popular “manosphere” podcaster Myron Gaines [real name Amrou Fudl] with the Fresh and Fit show was wearing a Holocaust-mocking hoodie showing Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster standing behind an oven with a tray of cookies emblazoned with the slogan “Let ‘Em Cook.” This concept was originally popularized by Nick Fuentes to help debunk the Holocaust. Gaines was also caught on video calling a pregnant Jewish woman standing nearby “a fat fucking Jew!” Nevertheless, Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec, a close friend of Charlie Kirk and a Trump ally with millions of followers who was featured on CNN and CBS mourning Kirk, proudly posed with Gaines. Posobiec, despite his own ties to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, is a host of the Human Events flagship daily podcast and spoke from the stage along with other right-wing luminaries at the AMFest event. He even has been identified as “MAGA’s Next Top Influencer” by The Atlantic.

For his part, Guaico noticed another provocative garment flaunted by Gaines: a second hoodie featuring ugly caricatures of Orthodox Jews surrounded by the phrase “The Great Awakening.” As Guaico explains, “It’s pointing to that we are, quote, ‘waking up to this,’ to all these Jews ruling our lives and they are the worst of our society.” He adds, “Our students saw that, and they were very shocked by the fact that people were willing to say things like that.”

In contrast, Donald Trump’s response to hate mongers in his press comments last fall when he declined to criticize Carlson or Fuentes, or the recent speeches and interviews by Carlson and Megyn Kelly, was essentially “Welcome Aboard!” Of course, they also will occasionally give lip-service to opposing antisemitism, as Trump did in the Times interview earlier this month.

In truth, the raw antisemitism of once-fringe figures such as Nick Fuentes and Myron Gaines has been mainstreamed into the heart of the Trump administration.

Even Nazi-sympathizing nominees rejected by the Senate for higher posts still retain high-paying jobs in the administration. Take Ed Martin: His nomination for a permanent position as the US Attorney for the District of Columbia collapsed in the Senate largely due to his glowing admiration for a Hitler mustache-wearing fanatic and January 6^th insurrectionist named Tony Hale-Cusanelli; he praised Hale-Cusanelli as an “extraordinary man” and gave him an award at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster in August 2024. Ed Martin is now the chief pardon attorney for DOJ (and until this week he was also director of the department’s “Weaponization Working Group,” an Orwellian initiative that targets purported Biden-era witch hunts).

“Antisemitism permeates so many of the far-right ideas held by this administration,” observes Cassie Miller, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center. She cites, for instance, the Trumpist embrace of the “Great Replacement Theory” – initially popularized by Tucker Carlson on Fox News over 400 times—that contends “globalists” (i.e. Jews) have arranged for millions of illegal immigrants to flood the country.

Among the most overtly antisemitic proponents of the racist Great Replacement ideology and other anti-Jewish conspiracy theories in the Trump administration is Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon deputy press secretary. It’s telling that Wilson even posted a neo-Nazi canard defending the scandalous antisemitic lynching in 1915 of Leo Frank, a Georgia factory manager wrongly convicted of the murder of a 13-year-old girl who worked in the factory, an outrage that led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League.

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At this point, the only genuine conservative Christian pushback against the increasingly explicit antisemitism marking MAGA comes from Christian Zionists, who see Jewish claims to Israel as having deep Biblical roots. Indeed, many Christian Zionists hold an “instrumentalized” view of Jews, which derives from the Book of Revelation. They see Jews as essential to Jesus’s return, either because the Jews in Israel convert beforehand or die in the Battle of Armageddon. It’s a belief that Political Research Associates (a leading social justice advocacy group) calls “end times antisemitism,” which is also known in Christian circles as “dispensationalism.” The ultimate, unstated goal of these prophecies, asserts the journalist James Scaminacci, is a “Jew-free world.”

As David Haspel—a veteran observer of the Christian Right and a filmmaker who created the fund-raising video for the U.S. Holocaust Museum—points out, these manifestations of Christian Zionism have sinister overtones: “Some might say Christian Zionists love Jews the way that cattle ranchers love their cattle.”

Guaico, the son of a pastor leading a Latino congregation, doesn’t share those views. He says they don’t shape his strong support of Israel, which is reinforced by the frequent student trips to Israel he leads. But he concedes, “I will say a lot of my parents’ or grandparents’ generation of evangelical Christians maybe have some twisted view, but I’m not a dispensational Christian.”

Guaico and others hoping to rally young Christians behind Israel and oppose antisemitism face an uphill battle. Support for Israel had been dropping sharply among younger evangelicals, down to just 34 percent. At the same time, antisemitism among all young people is rising. Indeed, a public focus group (not a secret Hitler-loving group chat) with Gen Z Trump voters conducted in December by the influential conservative Manhattan Institute’s City Journal demonstrated there’s no longer any red lines against Nazism. For instance, Ashley (no last names given), said of Hitler, “I think he was a great leader, to be honest.” When asked about their views of Jewish people, Andrew responded, “I would say a force for evil.”

Unfortunately, because mainstream Jewish organizations and the Trump administration have largely conflated all legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism, the door is open for demagogic appeals to young people across the political spectrum to exploit anti-Israel sentiments in order to push antisemitism. This concern is underscored by Ben Lorber of Political Research Associates and his co-author Shane Burley in their new book Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. They point out that the main threat to Jews still comes from both the GOP’s Nazi-friendly members and Christian Nationalists, who express higher levels of antisemitism than other Americans.

Of course, there have also been outbursts of antisemitism on the left in the wake of anti-Israel, Pro-Palestinian protests. This has been ably chronicled by Franklin Foer in a major cover story for The Atlantic. His in-depth reporting was supplemented by data from the FBI (admittedly an agency now in lockstep with White House policy) that reported antisemitic hate crimes from across the political spectrum rose to an all-time high in 2024, with Jews the target of nearly 70% of religious hate. Amid the Gaza campus protests, it was widely reported that some Jewish students were left cowering inside their dorms and libraries. Meanwhile, a third of Jewish students reported feeling unsafe or fearful of displaying things that would identify them as Jewish.

Israel is now widely seen as a pariah state in the aftermath of its attacks on Gaza, as the centrist New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has observed. In fact, Israel was denounced last September for committing genocide in Gaza by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the leading academic organization in the field. As a result of all this, Israel has lost much of the support it garnered in the wake of the horrors of the October 7^th Hamas invasion. Indeed, new polling shows 75 percent of Republicans under 45 favor US spending on healthcare rather than military aid to Israel.

Yet by some measures, about 65 percent of evangelical leaders – who are among Trump’s most dedicated supporters – hold to the old-fashioned “premillennial dispensationalism” theology that animates so many Christian Zionists. But the future end times fate of Jews isn’t generally spoken aloud in mixed company, i.e., when Jews, Israeli officials or reporters are present. As Haspel dryly observes about the transactional relationship between the Israeli government and fervent American evangelicals: “Since the late 1970s, Israeli leadership thinks that the Christian Zionist movement is their useful idiots, and the Christian Zionists think the Israeli leaders who have embraced them are their useful idiots.”

Guaico’s organization is a spinoff of the Philos Project. That’s a Christian Zionist organization – a theology often allied with theocratic Christian Nationalism—whose founder, Rev. Luke Moon, was a co-chair of the Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism task force that laid the groundwork for Trump’s hypocritical antisemitism crackdown on universities and colleges launched last year.

The strategic roadmap for the Trump administration’s assault on dissent and research under the guise of fighting antisemitism was first detailed in the influential Project Esther, a policy paper issued by Heritage’s antisemitism task force, and released in the fall of 2024.

Now Heritage is in disarray. The mostly Christian members of the antisemitism task force quit the think tank in November 2025 in the wake of Heritage president Kevin Roberts’ public support for the Tucker Carlson interview with Fuentes. Roberts also denounced Carlson’s critics as part of a “globalist class,” a coded reference to Jews. Since then, dozens of staffers or associates have fled Heritage, though it remains the sole enterprise on the right that has faced any consequence from the internal GOP battles over anti-Jewish rhetoric and action. Indeed, the most prominent antisemites on the right and their MAGA allies have only gained in influence.

Yet before the task force members split from Heritage last November, the only antisemites they could find were left-wing opponents of the war on Gaza. (Borrowing on hoary antisemitic tropes, task force members in its 2024 Project Esther report even labeled George Soros a puppeteer “mastermind” of the opposition.) Heritage’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism that Moon helped found in 2023 sharpened its focus on the left in the Project Esther report with an array of recommended tactics. These included a proposed effort to stigmatize and dry up funds for the “Hamas Support Network,” an alleged left-wing cabal no more genuine than the chimerical “Antifa” organization now being targeted by the Trump administration. Major Jewish organizations spurned the chance to work on the Project Esther report before it was released in October 2024. Nevertheless, that report inspired the Trump administration to halt, endanger or cut billions in funding to over 60 universities, along with the pursuit of its immigration enforcement and deportation initiatives targeting pro-Palestinian activists on campus.

The internal battles over antisemitism inside Heritage and the broader GOP didn’t boil over until Carlson decided to turn his show into a PR agency for Holocaust deniers, with Fuentes as the final straw. In November, shortly after the Carlson-Fuentes uproar, Moon co-sponsored an embattled conference of mostly Christian evangelicals that denounced antisemitism on the right, but relatively few people in the rest of the GOP noticed.

The fallout from the Trump administration clampdown on campuses inspired by Heritage’s Project Esther report continues today. As a Harvard undergrad wrote in a New York Times op-ed late last month and explained on a new Bulwark podcast, Harvard has shut down academic programs featuring professors critical of Israel and ended all DEI programs. Meanwhile, Northwestern threatened to bar 300 students from entering college until they took sensitivity training comparing, in part, criticism of Israel and Zionism to Klansman David Duke’s neo-Nazism. However, Northwestern’s genuflection to the Trump crusade didn’t prevent it from losing $790 million in funding, leading to the loss of over 400 staff jobs.

The architect of the administration antisemitism task force is Stephen Miller, but it’s officially led by an outspoken black Christian nationalist and former Democrat, Leo Terrell. His deep concern over antisemitism, though, didn’t prevent him from retweeting approvingly in March 2025 a Nazi sympathizer’s comment that Trump had effectively revoked Sen. Chuck Schumer’s “Jew card” when Trump denounced him for “not being Jewish anymore. He’s Palestinian.”

For the Republican crusaders against leftist antisemitism, the Fuentes furor last fall brought unwelcome scrutiny of widespread and virulent antisemitism in the conservative ranks. Indeed, the Heritage task force members acted as if they were shocked to discover right-wing antisemitism for the first time – akin to Captain Renault in Casablanca learning that there was gambling in Rick’s Café. In fact, James Carafano, a leader of the Project Esther task force and a senior advisor to Heritage’s president, told The Jewish Insider last year: “I refuse to acknowledge that that [antisemitism] is part of the conservative movement…”

Moon offered yet another explanation for the Heritage task force’s long silence on right-wing antisemitism. At the November conference, he told nearly 75 pro-Israel loyalists huddled around tables in a DC hotel’s basement ballroom why the Heritage task force had only zeroed in on the left: “We chose that focus, because on the level of [antisemitic] issues it was like a hundred to one,” he claimed. “We could fight the hundred pro-Hamas activists or the one antisemite in his mom’s basement eating Hot Pockets.”

Except that now the dubious image of the supposed lone antisemite typing away on his keyboard has been replaced by the reality of a surging public force in the Republican Party and MAGA movement, encouraged or accepted by its most prominent leaders and media stars.

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It’s striking that apparently no prominent Christians at AmFest denounced antisemites from the stage. The only speakers to do so were Ben Shapiro and Hindu Vivek Ramaswamy, now a Republican candidate for Governor of Ohio. Shapiro’s Daily Wire has been attacked as a “cesspool of bigotry and hatred.” But after years of supporting the ugliest elements of the MAGA movement, and his open bigotry towards Arabs “who like to bomb crap and live in open sewage,” trans people, and blacks, he’s suddenly alarmed to discover that there are also plenty of antisemites in the MAGA movement, too. (Insert your own leopard-eating-face joke here.)

At the TPUSA event in December, Shapiro also lit into Candace Owens. He forced her out from The Daily Wire early in 2024, some months before she was dubbed “Antisemite of The Year” for her escalating anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric. (That coveted distinction was subsequently bestowed on her ally Tucker Carlson in 2025.) Among her statements: she endorsed the medieval conspiracy theory of Jews ”being drunk on Christian blood.” One of the world’s top podcasters (as measured in downloads and per-episode views across all platforms), with millions of followers (nearly six million on YouTube), Owens peddles antisemitism and crackpot conspiracy theories, including that Brigitte Macron, the wife of the French president, is both a trans man and somehow part of a Satanic-Jewish cult known as the Frankists (this led Owens to be sued by the Macron family).

Most notably, she’s offered ever-evolving theories of those likely to have been involved Kirk’s shooting, ranging from the Mossad to the French government, and she has even hinted that his widow Erika Kirk and TPUSA may have played a role. She’s gone so far off the rails on implicating Israel in the assassination that even Fuentes was prompted to declare, “We can blame Israel for a lot and they’re behind a lot, but they’re so obviously not behind this – and because I didn’t rush to judgment, I was called the shill.”

Deriding “charlatans” and “frauds”—including Fuentes—in the conservative movement, Shapiro said at AmFest, “So if Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who worked with Charlie every single day, and, yes, at Erika Kirk and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over Charlie’s murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone…then we as people with a microphone have a moral obligation to call that out by name.” He also criticized Megyn Kelly for “cowardice” in refusing to directly criticize Candace Owens. Both Kelly and Carlson laughed off Shapiro’s criticism as coming from a minor figure who doesn’t count anymore.

Owens for her part took off the gloves to pummel Shapiro with some of her crudest antisemitism yet. As the Jerusalem Post headlined, she is “mainstreaming Nazi propaganda to millions.” To confront Shapiro, on her podcast she held up a copy of an 1871 forgery, The Talmudic Jew, that supposedly instructs Jews to steal from, and even murder, Christians. It’s a document used by the Nazis to help justify the Holocaust. To her over three million viewers on YouTube for that one video, after noting that Shapiro calls himself a Talmudic Jew, she then taught her followers: “If he’s following the rules of the Talmud, they think that we’re animals: that they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them, that they have a right to lie to us…” As The Bulwark’s Will Sommer pointed out, a few hours after that video went live, Megyn Kelly took the stage to say she welcomed Owens’s questions about whether Israel was involved in killing Kirk.

Owens left TPUSA some years ago after minimizing Hitler’s barbarism, while remaining a friend of Charlie Kirk. Her conspiracy-mongering about Kirk’s assassination is so widely viewed that it forced Erika Kirk to attempt a bridge-mending personal meeting with Owens in mid-December. But that only led Owens to double down on her insinuations, including a mocking video about her meeting that began with identifiably Jewish music. Even though Owens didn’t attend AmFest, her shadow hung over the event and she remains a largely unscathed influencer shaping MAGA’s internal wars. As Sommer, a leading chronicler of extremism, noted, “Owens is now, arguably, the most influential online force on the right.”

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In contrast, the half-day conference in November called “Exposing and Countering Extremism on the Right” had the faded air of largely older evangelicals trying to get the old theocratic gang together for one last battle.

Even as younger Christians and MAGA members are turning away in droves from Israel and tuning in by the millions to antisemitic demagogues on the right, the once-powerful Christian Zionists and evangelicals who played a leading role in putting Trump back into power and shaping U.S. policy on Israel were struggling to turn back the tide at this conference. It seems like only yesterday that Ralph Reed and other evangelical leaders were crowing about their importance in Trump’s victory and were looking towards a future of unprecedented dominance of American politics—especially in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade following a 50-year crusade (see also “The Roberts Court and its Attack on Reproductive Freedom in America” by Lisa Graves in The Washington Spectator). After Trump’s election last fall, Ralph Reed boasted, “His victory was fueled in part by support from evangelical Christian and faithful Roman Catholic voters, who turned out in record numbers after Faith & Freedom [Reed’s organization] undertook the largest ground game operation outside the Republican Party in modern political history.”

The long-sought goals of the old guard are being implemented in part because Christian Nationalism has powerfully asserted itself at the highest levels of this new Trump administration.

Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has a Christian crusader symbol tattooed on his chest, is a devoted champion of the increasingly influential Christian Nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, who opposes women’s right to vote. Flaunting their dominance, even the official social media accounts of Cabinet departments and their leaders also took the unprecedented step of explicitly embracing Christ on Christmas. Hegseth, for example, proclaimed, “Today we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” At AmFest in December, the Catholic J.D. Vance openly declared, “Christianity is America’s creed…We have been and, by the grace of God, we always will be a Christian nation.”

Early on, Trump signaled by his appointments his administration’s support of extremist Christians. Last year, for instance, he selected Russell Vought for the powerful position of director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought has vowed to “rehabilitate Christian Nationalism” and says followers of other faiths are “condemned”; he was a key architect of the “biblically-based” Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 now so widely implemented that ProPublica has called him the “shadow president.”

Around the same time as he selected Vought, Trump made clear his preferences for an authoritarian Christianity by appointing Paula White-Cain as a leader of The White House Faith Office. She is an “apostle” who speaks in tongues, a televangelist with the New Apostolic Reformation (see earlier TWS articles here) that favors total Christian control of all sectors of society. She has denounced “demonic confederacies” arrayed against Trump when she joined the “Stop The Steal” campaign that led to the January 6^th insurrection.

Yet nowhere has the Trump administration’s embrace of Christian Nationalism been arguably more public than the September memorial service for Charlie Kirk, which was awash in Christian Nationalist symbolism and rhetoric.

Such triumphs weren’t relished by the evangelicals and their allies at the “Extremism on the Right” conference. For many conference speakers, the falling support for Israel and rising antisemitism was a sinister conspiracy that must be confronted. Leo Terrell, an extroverted speaker and DOJ civil rights lawyer, declared, “We’re losing the public relations war. The other side is kicking our butt!” He added, “They’re lying about the events in the Middle East.“ He proclaimed, “They have groups helping them. I don’t want to mention their names because I don’t want to embarrass them.” Then he marched across the stage, pointing downward for emphasis like he was casting out demons, “CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times – they’re all at this. They are helping them lie 100 percent.”

He also reserved some of his fire for antisemites on the right, the ostensible reason for this conference, but spoke only in generalities. “My goal is to eliminate antisemitism, period. We should not tolerate hate,“ he boldly announced. He was grateful, however, to be guided by leaders who stood with him in the war against antisemitism. “We have a president and an attorney general who are 100 percent committed. They have set the standard.”

Subdued criticism of the administration’s own antisemitism, specifically Trump’s defense of Tucker Carlson, came from only one speaker, Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America. Klein said he was “disappointed” with Trump’s response, part of his longer tirade wondering if Qatar money or other corruption was turning Republicans against Israel. Yet because he mentioned Trump in mildly critical terms, Ellie Cohanim, an Iranian-born Jew who was formerly a deputy special envoy at the State Department to combat antisemitism in Trump’s first administration, quickly leapt to her feet after Klein finished. She declared, “Sentiments that are shared by the speakers today do not necessarily represent the views of the Task Force.”

The aging lions of Christian Nationalism and Christian Zionism were wheeled out to describe Israel as God’s gift to the Jews and vital to US security. They featured Ralph Reed, still, as noted above, a fundraising and organizing powerhouse who helped launch the Moral Majority; Mike Huckabee (who had once suggested Trump drop a nuclear bomb on Iran) on tape from Israel as US ambassador; and Tony Perkins, the leader of the gay-bashing Family Research Council, defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But their nostrums of appealing to younger Christians over their shared Judeo-Christian bond with Israel seemed disconnected from present trends. When Reed proclaimed, “We learned that being a good Christian means defending Jews,” it didn’t seem likely to hold much weight with far-right Christians snapping up “Cookie Monster” hoodies.

Tony Perkins, polished and with no hint about him of the stereotypical rabble-rousing bigot, announced a plan for a promotional blitz in churches advancing Israel’s God-given dominion in the Mideast (see Anne Nelson’s piece on this campaign currently in The Washington Spectator).

With the air of a consummate salesman, Perkins announced, “I would like to show you a video clip of a project that we are working on to educate younger evangelicals in the Christian community that are being sucked in by the Tucker Carlsons on why Judea and Samaria [generally known as the West Bank] is not up for negotiation as to who owns it.”

To that end, he unveiled an early version of an ad – soon to be followed by a series of 30-minute films—that asserts a two-state solution is doomed and contrary to Biblical instruction. From the screen, there was a shot of a smiling Tony Perkins in Israel: “I’m standing on some of the most contested ground on earth, the land God pledged to Abraham and his descendants nearly 4,000 years ago.” There followed a video montage of sun-dappled historical sites, starting with Perkins at Elon Moreh in what he called Samaria where, he said, “God first spoke his pledge to Abraham,” At the end of the clip, Perkins purred, “Welcome to our journey to Judea and Samaria”—the words “West Bank” were then crossed out on screen – “the Biblical heartland.” Many in the crowd erupted in wowed applause.

What his presentation inadvertently raised is the well-documented practice of extremist Israeli settlers stealing Palestinians’ lands on the West Bank—and too often harassing or killing them—with the support of the Israeli military. This history was chronicled by a deeply reported article in The New York Times Magazine last December.

Near the end of the conference, Dimas Guaico, sporting a unified Israel silver necklace including the West Bank and Gaza, led a panel discussion with younger pro-Zionist leaders somewhat at odds with such elders as Perkins. They called for more in-person organizing with young MAGA acolytes addressing their political concerns—and less reliance on a Biblical hard-sell. As Isaac Woodward, a Philos Project leader in his early 30s, pointed out, “When they hear only the prophetic or theological things brought up in isolation, it’s almost an argument to say: The Bible says do this, so then turn off your brain and ignore a genocide in Gaza or that the Jews are controlling Hollywood.”

Yet outside of this basement, not many influential leaders on the right appear to be alarmed by rising antisemitism. And even as some journalists, including The New Republic’s Spencer Sunshine and other watchdogs have called out Trump officials’ ties to neo-Nazis and overtly antisemitic white supremacists, the administration doesn’t seem bothered by it either. Indeed, the leaders of Cabinet departments are increasingly embracing memes, ICE recruitment ads and slogans that not only appeal to MAGA bigots, but sometimes echo far-right extremists and Nazism itself.

Three days after Renee Good’s killing a few weeks ago, the Labor Department tweeted out a video using the slogan “One Homeland, One People, One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.” It was strikingly similar to Hitler’s “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer,” translated as “One Empire, One People, One leader.” A mere two days after Renee Good was shot, DHS tweeted out this ICE recruitment pitch—now with over seven million views—with a lyric taken from a pounding martial anthem favored by the Proud Boys, “We’ll have our home again.”

It’s not so surprising, then, that just a day after Renee Good was killed, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem appeared at a press conference to double down on her claim that the dead woman was a domestic terrorist – while she stood behind a lectern with the Nazi-style slogan, “One of ours, all of yours.”

The U.S. Border Patrol even posted to its official Instagram and Facebook accounts a video with lyrics that included “Jew me” and “kike me.” As Vox reported, surprisingly it drew on a clip from a controversial “Michael Jackson song ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ — specifically, the lines ‘Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, kike me.’” (This is, sadly, another black mark against the late King of Pop’s less than sterling reputation.) In fairness, Jackson later argued the song was meant as a broader protest against bigotry.

And in case any doubts remain whether Christian Zionists will succeed in turning around their fellow Trumpists’ drift towards open antisemitism, the administration’s dog-whistles (or, sometimes , bullhorns) signaling antisemitic-friendly themes continue unchecked. Earlier this month, before Trump launched his now-withdrawn assault on Greenland, The White House posted a meme with the slogan, “Which Way, Greenland Man?” This is an apparent homage to a 1978 book, Which Way, Western Man? written by a prominent American neo-Nazi, William Gayle Simpson, defending Hitler and advocating violence against Jews.

In fact, echoes of neo-Nazi or white supremacist rhetoric come almost daily from the Trump administration, as in the latest threats to invade to Springfield, Ohio and remove Haitians in a proposed sweep that the scholar on authoritarianism Timothy Snyder calls “ethnic cleansing.”

At the end of that breakaway November conference, one pastor declared, “We pray that those who are coming against the Jewish people …will see the light.” For now, those prayers are likely to remain ignored by most of the MAGA movement and prominent members of the Trump administration.

What the evangelicals gathered at the November conference haven’t been willing to face since then was the harsh new political reality. The antisemitic, white nationalist factions are simply too valuable and energetic a part of the MAGA base, as evidenced by the administration’s very online young social media teams and top officials. “For now, America is evidently condemned to government of the groypers, by the groypers, and for the groypers,” as Eric Levitz of Vox observed.

Art Levine is a prize-winning investigative reporter and contributing editor of The Washington Monthly. He is the author of “Spaceship of Fools,” his investigation for The Washington Spectator last summer on unproven claims of alien visitations, the dissemination of false information to government agencies and the eagerness of mainstream media to embrace it. He has written for Newsweek, The American Prospect, Salon, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, Truthout, In These Times, AlterNet and numerous other publications. He is also the author of Mental Health, Inc: How Corruption, Lax Oversight, and Failed Reforms Endanger Our Most Vulnerable Citizens.

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