Tucker Carlson vs. Mike Huckabee: The MAGA Rift Over Israel, Antisemitism, and Christian Zionism

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. My name is Brad Onishi, author of American Caesar: How Tech Lords and Theocrats Are Turning America Into a Monarchy, coming in September, and founder of Axis Mundi Media. Today, on this brief episode, I want to dissect an interview from last week between Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee. I think that this interview is a chance for us to get a window into some of the rifts that currently exist in the MAGA coalition.

Tucker Carlson, over the last couple of years, has taken what many would call an anti-semitic turn. He was actually given an award for Anti-Semite of the Year in 2025. At Charlie Kirk's Memorial, he talked about how the Jews were the ones who killed Jesus, or he at least alluded to that fact in his remarks. Those kinds of ideas and words and beliefs have a long history—a long anti-semitic history. The idea that the Jews killed Jesus has been used from medieval times till now to justify hatred of Jewish people.

He also infamously had Nick Fuentes on his program a couple of months ago. Nick Fuentes is an open Nazi, lover of Hitler, and somebody who has expressed Jew hatred over and over again. Carlson created a stir when he hosted Fuentes, and it really opened a rift. On one side, what I would call anti-semitic Christians in the MAGA coalition, and on the other, I would call Zionist Christians.

And that brings us to Mike Huckabee. Mike Huckabee is the man that he interviewed last week. Now, some of you are too young to know Mike Huckabee as anything other than Sarah Huckabee Sanders' dad. Sarah is the governor of Arkansas and was once a spokesperson in Trump's first term. However, Mike Huckabee was also one-time governor of Arkansas. He is now the ambassador to Israel. And when he and Tucker spoke, Huckabee really put forth what I would call a kind of classic Religious Right Christian Zionism. Huckabee was, of course, appointed to be the ambassador to Israel because he holds these views and the ways that he talks about Israel publicly and so on.

So over the next couple of minutes, I want to go over a few clips from the interview and break them down to illuminate how the two sides are forming across this divide. Again, this is, I think, Christian anti-semitism versus Christian Zionism. Now, neither of them, in my view, are good or ideal. There are ways to fight anti-semitism, to recognize the threat against Jewish people in the United States and across the globe, without resorting to a theological justification, as Huckabee does, of Israel's God-given right to dominate the Middle East in any way that it would please.

As we do on this show, there is a way to make a distinction between the State of Israel and the Jewish people. One is a government that is formed over a nation state in the Middle East, and the Jewish people are, of course, distinct from that government, even if there is an entanglement in terms of nationality and ethnicity and so on.

So let's look at a first clip where Huckabee and Carlson really discuss, and I think argue about, where Israel's right to hold power and land in the Middle East comes from.

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: You've appealed to Genesis. Genesis 15 says it's Abram—it's pre-Abraham. It's Abram receives from God the news that his descendants will inherit the land. And you tell me, as the theologian, if I'm getting this wrong, but from the Euphrates to the Nile, I think that's right. And that would include, like, basically the entire Middle East. That would be the Levant. So that would be Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon. Would also be big parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. It would be—I mean, not sure we'd go—

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: I mean, it would be a big piece of land. But here's—

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: The point would be a lot of places that are now countries.

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: This particular area that we're talking about now—Israel—is a land that God gave through Abraham to a people that He chose. It was a people, a place, and a purpose. We can look at it that way. Christian Zionism—I want to go back because that's where we started. I'm not going to let you off on—

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: This, because you have said it three times: that God gave this land to this people. And so it is entirely fair for me, with respect, to ask: what land are you talking about? Does Israel have the right to that land? Because you're appealing to Genesis, you're saying that's the original deed.

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: It would be fine if they took it all.

Brad: All right. Tucker is asking a question that I think—and I can't believe I'm saying this—but it is a fair question to ask, even if I disagree with Tucker Carlson on almost everything. He's asking: look, there is an ancient book, the book of Genesis, and that book says that God gave this land to Israel, and that land spreads from the Euphrates to the Nile. As Tucker points out, that would mean not only what is known today or recognized today as the nation of Israel, but it would be about half a dozen other countries in the Middle East.

And he's trying to press Huckabee. You're like, what's the point? Why is Carlson after this? And he's doing it to make Huckabee say what he said at the end, which is: there is somehow a theological justification for Israeli imperialism. That Israel could, with the United States' help, take over the countries that Carlson named, and that if they did that, they would be justified, according to Huckabee, a Christian Zionist, because of theology—that there is a land deeded to Israel by God 6,000 years ago, and that still holds today.

So modern-day, contemporary nation states in the Levant have to succumb to Israel's right to the land because God gave it to them. I think what we see here is an even more naked and bare kind of Manifest Destiny that you often see in the United States. Often you'll hear people in the United States say, "Well, God gave this land to the people," meaning the American founders, meaning those of European heritage, et cetera. And you know, it's often metaphorical, or it's often interpreted indirectly this way, etc.

But here we just have, right from Genesis 15: God gave Israel this land. And Huckabee is the type of Christian Zionist who will say, "Yeah, they could have everything." And Carlson wants to take him there so that we can see the absurdity of this logic—that you're saying, as a Christian Zionist, that based on a book from 6,000 years ago, you are willing to, according to U.S. foreign policy, and as an ambassador from our nation to Israel, you're willing to support Israel if it decides that it wants to overrun the autonomy of these other nations that neighbor it in its region. And he says yes.

And I think what Carlson is trying to get across there is something that I'm sure many of you listening will share, even if it's Tucker Carlson, which is the idea that this is a really dangerous theology. It's a dangerous theology that is arguing for this type of interpretation of Genesis, and it leads to a conclusion from Huckabee that's like: if Israel wants all of it, they can have all of it.

Carlson further pushes this point when he asks Huckabee about Bibi Netanyahu and his relationship to Israel in terms of ancestry and the land. What Carlson tries to do here is push Huckabee on: well, if Israel is entitled to the land, how is that so? And what about Netanyahu in the case of his family, which has ties to Eastern Europe? They kind of argue and debate about whether or not he has ancestral ties to the land of Israel.

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: If Bibi's family—we know they lived in Eastern Europe. There's no evidence they ever lived here. He's not religious. But in what sense—do you have his family tree?

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: No, we don't.

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: Do you? He doesn't. So no one does. That's the point at all. And if there has been a practice of Judaism and a connection to the language, the Bible, the land—

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: His ancestors didn't—he doesn't practice Judaism in any rigorous way. His ancestors didn't live here. They didn't speak the language, and there's no evidence they ever lived here. So on what basis does he ever—

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: He very much speaks the language. He has fought for the land. His family has fought for—

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: You're dodging the obvious question, which is: where does this right come from? And the reason it's meaningful is because there are a lot of people in the territory that Israel controls today, particularly in the West Bank, who, through genetic testing, we can know their families have been here for thousands of years. We don't know whether they practice Judaism, whether they were Samaritans pre-Islam—we don't know that. A lot of them, we know, have been Christians for 2,000 years. They have less of a right to the land than someone whose ancestors—the only thing we know about them is they lived in Latvia or Poland. They're Eastern European. How does that work? They're Jewish by what definition?

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: They're Jewish by their faith. They're Jewish by the connection to the language, Jewish by the connection to the Torah.

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: But how do we know that Bibi, specifically Bibi's ancestors, ever lived here? How do we know that?

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: I'm not sure if I understand your question.

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: How do we know if the Prime Minister of Israel's ancestors ever lived—

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: Maybe I could ask you: how do we know they didn't?

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: I mean, on the basis of the claim that they did, all kinds of things happen. People are displaced.

Brad: Now, what Carlson is really concerned with—and if you followed this show, you followed Carlson, if you followed others, you know this—but Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others have really formed what I would call the anti-semitic wing of MAGA. And whether or not they're still MAGA, we can debate that, and it's all sort of a big fight and blah, blah, blah. But here's the point: the point is that they are nationalists, they're isolationists, and they are the ones who are saying, "Look, why does the United States fight and support Israel in the way that it does? Why do we give carte blanche to Israeli defense? Why do we give carte blanche to Israeli foreign policy? Why do we, as the United States, spend so much money and resources on a nation that is not our own?"

Marjorie Taylor Greene [Clip]: This isn't about Jewish people. This is about the government of Israel. This is about their military, and this is about them demanding non-stop—demanding America pay attention to Israel, do what Israel wants, fight Israel's wars, and pay for them. And if you don't, then we're going to come after anyone and everyone that gets in the way of that. And if you're wondering why people are talking about primarying me, well, it's because I don't take any money from a PAC. I've called for AIPAC to be registered under FARA. I've introduced amendments to defund all of our American tax dollars from going to Israel every single year—billions and billions of dollars every single year. But I've also done that for a slew of other countries. It's not just Israel. It's a whole bunch of other countries—Egypt, Ukraine, you name it. I'm just like, enough of the foreign—

Brad: No, this is them, not me. Don't email me. This is them, not me. And I want to be careful here, and I'll intersperse my ideas in a minute. But you can see the logical outcome of a MAGA isolationism, a MAGA nationalism, in Carlson, Greene, and in Candace Owens. They're like, "You know what? Israel is a foreign country, like so many other foreign countries in this world, and we've spent too much time as America propping them up, so we shouldn't do that anymore." That's them. It's not me.

Now, the problem for me is not asking hard questions about the United States' support for Israel, especially in light of what's happening in Gaza. The problem for me is not asking questions about how or if or when or why we should support the State of Israel. The problem for me is that these figures allow or couple their questioning of America's foreign policy on Israel with what I would call theological anti-semitism. They want to justify this belief through the sense that the Jews are somehow not chosen by God, and in fact, they are a kind of menace or irritant to American nationalism, to American Christianity, and to white people in this country.

Candace Owens has gone so far as to kind of gesture toward—recall the ideas of blood libel and the ideas of a small cabal of elites running the world. And so those are all tried and true, millennial-old anti-semitic themes. And she is out at the Daily Wire. She was off other platforms because of her consistent comments that are, in many ways, anti-semitic. Here's one clip. If you don't want to listen, I would fast forward about a minute.

Candace Owens [Clip]: Many moons ago, before they decided to establish Israel as a country—I know you've read the short version in the classroom, and it was like, "Oh, the Holocaust happened, and then we realized that Israel needs to exist." No, that's not how it went down. That's not how it went down at all, okay? Catholics and Christians were going missing on Passover, and then they would find bodies across Europe, and they were able to trace them back to Jews. Blood libel. There weren't Jews, okay? These were Frankists. And so just like Leo Frank killed Mary Phagan on Passover back in 1913 or 1914—I can't remember the exact date—he did it during Passover for a reason. This Frankish cult, which is masquerading behind Jews, still participates in this shit to this day.

Brad: So Candace Owens—if you just have made poor life decisions like me and you cover this stuff every day and you look at it every day—this is the kind of stuff she says all the time. And you might feel like she's kind of lost it, but she remains enormously popular. If you look at the podcast rankings, she's always in the top two or three when it comes to politics and news and so on.

So this is where the Carlson-Owens-Marjorie Taylor Greene opposition to Israel is coming from. And again, I want to try to thread this needle: I think we need to ask really important questions about what's happening in Israel, particularly as it pertains to the Gaza genocide, and why the United States continues to support Israel in the ways that it does, and why Biden did. And that's a massive, huge, hours-long conversation.

My point for today is that when Carlson and Owens do this, on one hand, it's good that those questions are being asked. But on the other hand, right behind them are these anti-semitic conspiracies and theologies that lead us to another toxic path, which is anti-semitism, which is Jew hatred, which are things that have been present in Christian and European and American spaces for a long, long, long time. So that's a major point for today.

I'll come back to all of that in a minute, but I want to play another clip between Huckabee and Carlson where you can see part of the reason that Carlson is interested in pressing Huckabee on Israel is to press him on the Epstein files. And he wants to basically make Huckabee take a position on the Epstein files and the involvement with Epstein of several Israeli prime ministers and politicians.

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: Why are millions of Epstein files still classified? Why do you think that is?

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: I have no idea. I haven't kept up with that. I've never met the man. I don't know him.

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: You haven't kept up with the Epstein disclosure?

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: I mean, only from a distance. I'm 6,000 miles away from DC these days, and I'm pretty sure that there's so—

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: The current president of Israel—current president—I know, you know, President Herzog apparently was at Pedo Island. That's what it says in the disclosures. And of course, we know that the former prime minister, Ehud Barak, was living on and off at Epstein's house.

Brad: Once again, I think there's a couple things Carlson is trying to do here, but one of them is basically to flesh out another wrinkle of the support and relationship that the Trump administration has with the State of Israel, and that is the association of high-ranking Israeli officials with Jeffrey Epstein. So there's a question here of: why would you, Mike Huckabee, not know about that? And Huckabee tries to wiggle out of it. He's going to say, "I don't know. I haven't kept up on it." And Carlson goes right to the jugular, and he's like, "You're the ambassador to Israel, and the current president appears in the Epstein files. So have former leaders of Israel. Why would you not have this at the top of your mind? Why would this not be something that is plaguing you day and night?"

Well, you can see from another clip that Huckabee reveals some of his theological cards when it comes to kids and war and death.

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: Hamas operatives—how do you feel about their deaths?

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: If they participated in that, then God help them.

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: I'm telling you, I don't know that they—they were 14 years—

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: No, but I'm telling you that when someone commits acts of atrocity and then they hold hostages—if these were your children being held hostage in Gaza, what would you do to get them out?

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: I wouldn't want to kill 14-year-olds. I'll tell you that.

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: Let me ask you something: would you do whatever it took to get your kids back if they were being tortured, raped, starved?

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: And not kill children, period.

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: Well, I'm just telling you, and I would never make excuses for killing children either. And I'm not talking about targeting children. I'm talking about—

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: You just told me that 14-year-olds deserve to die because they're working for Hamas.

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: I'm telling you, my question is—

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: Can you hear yourself?

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: I do hear myself. So do you think—

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: Do you think a 14-year-old child has agency? Do you think that he deserves to die because he's being used by adults? Isn't his death a crushing tragedy?

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: He's holding a gun and he's pointing it at someone who's trying to save a hostage, and the only way to save that hostage—I'm telling you, war is a horrible thing. It's a horrible thing, and a lot of—and I think I'm the one—I think war is a horrible thing. So I think what you don't—

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: You're trying to explain how horrible it is, and you're saying that the 14-year-old deserves—

Mike Huckabee [Clip]: The 14-year-old deserved to die.

Brad: Now, I think what Carlson is up to in this clip is he's pressing him not only on war, but on children. And this is just a growing thing on the Carlson-Greene-Owens side of the MAGA rift. They are openly upset that the Epstein files have not been released. They are the side of MAGA that is saying they need to be released, and if Trump or others are in there, then they're in there.

On the other side are folks like Huckabee, who tried to wiggle out of the Epstein question, but then kind of walks into a trap when it comes to this interview as it pertains to 14-year-olds who are supposedly, hypothetically, theoretically in the service of Hamas. I don't think Carlson is totally fair here. I think he's attacking—he's not allowing the guest to speak. There are ways here that we can critique what's going on.

The larger point for me is: Carlson is trying to make it clear for his viewers, the people on his side of the MAGA rift, that he is for protecting children. He's trying to create a sense that people like Mike Huckabee, who are Christian Zionists, are somehow beholden to Israel more than they are to the United States, that they are beholden to a theology that would give Israel carte blanche to take over the entire Middle East, and that they're beholden to Jeffrey Epstein and the Israeli leaders and others who were entangled with Epstein.

He's trying to create a whole picture for the isolationist, anti-semitic American right that says: Christian Zionists like Huckabee cannot be trusted. They cannot be part of our group because of the three reasons I just outlined.

Now, I want to close with one more clip today to kind of make this point, and I want to leave you with some takeaways. The clip is Brooke Goldstein, who's a conservative lawyer, somebody who is known for her advocacy for the State of Israel and for Jewish people, but does so often on Fox News and has politics that myself and many of you listening would not agree with. Goldstein, though, outlines, I think, the ways that this rift is breaking down and kind of the demographics and the interests that are determining who is on what side.

Brooke Goldstein [Clip]: I'm quite concerned, because we have witnessed in our lifetime the capture of the Democratic Party, and we've lost them, and they've gone extreme. I wouldn't even call it extreme left. I'd call it extreme radical. And what we're witnessing now is the capture of the conservative right by the very same parties that did it to the left, and I'm talking about Qatar and its allies. And being at AMFEST, it was quite clear that there is a split, and the split is based on, frankly, people's age. Everyone over 30 was booing Tucker Carlson, was booing Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon coming on. Everybody under 30, on the other hand, were cheering them. And it was frightening. And what they're doing is basically twisting Christian theology, bringing back replacement theology in modern-day political dialogue, calling Jews—calling Ben Shapiro an "Israel firster." That's Jew hatred. Saying that Israel drags America into forever wars—that's ignorance. Saying that God breaks His covenant, that God is no longer with the Jewish people, and Israel is just some secular state that doesn't deserve our support—that's blasphemy. What Tucker Carlson represents right now is the anti-Christ.

Brad: All right. You can see clearly, or hear clearly, in this clip that the rift—and Brooke Goldstein, I think, highlights a couple of dynamics of it that I want to dissect and make sure we notice. One is: there's an age dynamic here. I've pointed this out on the show before, but a lot of the anti-semitic great replacement theory, white genocide types—Nick Fuentes types—they're under 30. I would even call them under 40. They're people that are fans of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes. They are America First. They are isolationist. They believe that white people of European descent are being replaced. Here's Tucker Carlson saying that himself:

Tucker Carlson [Clip]: Who is "them"? I mean, so clearly, there is a very well-organized, very well-funded effort to eliminate the white population of Europe. I mean, because it is being eliminated, and you're not allowed to notice it. You'll be punished by police and courts you pay for if you notice what's happening to your ancestors' homelands.

Brad: And I chronicle this in my book. I've talked about it on the show before, but I'll just say it one more time. What they veer toward, at least the Christian ones, is a version of the KKK theology—a theology that says that once Jesus came, the Jews were no longer chosen by God. They were no longer special. They were no longer elected. And the Jews now play a role as a kind of threat to the American body politic. They are a foreign element. They are an element that interjects all kinds of nefarious forces. And we've heard that today. We've heard about blood libel. We've heard about conspiracies. We've heard about the ways that they're a cabal planning things. I mean, Jewish people as the origins of evil—this is an anti-semitic set of themes and tropes and conspiracies that's been around millennia.

So what I see on one side with Carlson and Owens and Greene is not just a questioning of Israel, not just a questioning of the U.S. relationship with Israel, but behind it, an anti-semitic, conspiratorial KKK theology.

But on the other hand, with Huckabee and others who are over 40, who represent this kind of Christian Zionist worldview that really was pervasive in the Religious Right—if you grew up in the '80s or '90s, this is probably what you grew up with—they represent this sense. And you heard at the very beginning today that because Israel was promised this in Genesis 15, the State of Israel has a right to overtake half a dozen countries in its region, and the U.S. should support that.

There's a sense of Christian Zionism there that says supporting Israel is the most important thing politically because it's the most important thing theologically. And when it comes to Gaza, when it comes to Palestinians, we will always be on Israel's side because they are the good guys chosen by God. I mean, there's a theology that collapses all the dimensions of Israel—Israeli statehood, the nation state, the government, the elected officials, and the Jewish people, whether they live in Israel or they live in other places. It collapses all those dimensions into simply: God chose them. They play a special role in history. The nation of Israel, the land itself, where Israel is today—Jerusalem and the quote-unquote "Holy Land"—are places that will play an enormously important role in the End Times.

And so people who are Christian Zionists like Huckabee are totally on a kind of foreign policy bent that looks like, from afar, support for Israel no matter what, even if that means genocide, even if that means overtaking other countries.

Now, who else is with him on this? Largely New Apostolic Reformation folks. People in the Paula White-Cain crew. People in the Lance Wallnau group. Folks who you will hear about if you listen to Matt Taylor or read his work. They often fall on that side of this MAGA rift. Now, there's tons to say there. That group is often more multicultural, multi-ethnic, than, of course, the Groyper, anti-semitic Owens-Fuentes-Greene-Carlson coalition. So there's more to say here, but I think this interview with Carlson and Huckabee highlights the major rift, the major division, that is present in MAGA at the moment.

And that division is not just about Israel. It's also about Epstein. It's also about war. It's also about foreign policy. It's also about foreign aid. And all of those things come into focus once you start to see the theology behind Huckabee and the theology behind Carlson. Neither of them is good. There are problems and hatred and xenophobia built in. There are so many toxic elements. But this is one place where I think you're going to see continued division, especially along age lines, demographic lines, and also along lines of those who are wanting to, quote-unquote, "put America first," because they don't see Israel as getting an exception to that rule. But people like Huckabee and an older generation of Christian Zionist politicians and leaders—they see Israel as having a very special and different relationship with the United States than any other country.

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