The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Editorially, the Wall Street Journal recently declared that: “An old political poison is growing on the new right, led by podcasters and internet opportunists who are preoccupied with the Jews. It is spreading wider and faster than we thought, and it has even found an apologist in Kevin Roberts, president of the venerable Heritage Foundation.”   The cause of this recent furor is Nick Fuentes.

Four years ago, Nick Fuentes was unwelcome pretty much everywhere. The young far-right influencer was barred from nearly every social media platform.  A 2022 documentary by a sympathetic filmmaker called him “the most canceled man in America.”  He once called Adolf Hitler “awesome” has more than 1 million followers on Elon Musk’s X. He recently recorded a cordial interview with Tucker Carlson that more than 5 million people have watched. And he finds himself a central figure in an online battle over the future of the American conservative movement.

As Will Oremus argues, “The resurgence of the 27-year-old Fuentes, who has argued that immigrants and ‘organized Jewry’ are conspiring to extinguish the white race, has set off bitter infighting among conservative influencers over whether he should be tolerated or denounced. For President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, which has decried what they say is the overzealous policing of speech, Fuentes’s newfound prominence presents a tough question: Is there such a thing as ‘too extreme’ anymore? . . . In a March episode of his podcast, streamed on the conservative site Rumble, he boiled down some of his core views: ‘Jews are running society, women need to shut the [expletive] up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.’”

For more than five years, the dominant face of the young right in America was Charlie Kirk. His organization, Turning Point USA, staged events at college campuses around the country that doubled as fodder for viral social media clips. Since he was killed onstage at a September event in Utah, other voices have been trying to fill the void. Fuentes is one of them, despite a past that many on the right view as disqualifying.  Late in Trump’s first term, Fuentes rose to prominence among a subculture of disaffected young men by attacking Kirk as too moderate. Fuentes’s followers hounded Kirk at his events with questions that seemed designed to bait him for not taking a harder line against immigration and homosexuality. In 2020, Fuentes founded the America First Political Action Conference as an alternative to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a signature event on the Republican calendar.

With the attention came scrutiny from social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram, which were increasingly cracking down on hate speech and false claims of electoral fraud surrounding the 2020 presidential election. Fuentes joined the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement and egged on protesters during the 6 January 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol by yelling through a bullhorn. By the time President Joe Biden took office, he was either banned or suspended from almost every platform except Twitter, which barred him a few months later.  That “deplatforming” dampened Fuentes’s reach, but he persisted, eventually “finding a home alongside conspiracy theorists and antivaccine activists on the video site Rumble.”

On 27 October 2025, Fuentes appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast.  On Carlson’s show, Fuentes assailed “organized Jewry” as the obstacle to American unity and “these Zionist Jews” as the impediment to the right’s success, while calling himself a fan of Joseph Stalin. Carlson said Fuentes should make his remarks about Jewish subversion of America more “universal,” so they cannot be dismissed as easily. But mainly the two agreed. Mr. Carlson shared with the Hitler admirer that he, too, despises Israel and Christian Zionists such as Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Senator Ted Cruz. “I dislike them more than anybody,” Mr. Carlson said. They found common ground.  After the interview, Mr. Fuentes said in another broadcast that conservative Jewish commentators Josh Hammer, Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro, also frequent targets of Mr. Carlson’s ire, will never be Americans and should “get the f— out of America and go to Israel.”

Leading conservatives rushed to Carlson’s defense, including Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, who threw the Trump-aligned think tank into turmoil when he blasted the “globalist class” for criticizing the segment. Jewish groups, along with numerous Heritage staffers and conservative figures, said the phrase played on antisemitic conspiracy theories. The fallout is still resounding “as conservative media figures and influencers choose sides or try to heal a rift that they view as a threat to the cohesion of the Republican Party.”

The Heritage Foundation is erupting in open revolt against its president, Kevin Roberts, as the right-wing think tank struggles to deal with internal and external anger over his defense of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Roberts posted a video that castigated a “venomous coalition” and “the globalist class” for attacking Carlson, whom Roberts called “a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” Numerous Heritage staffers and conservative figures said the comments played on antisemitic tropes.  At least five members of Heritage’s antisemitism task force have now resigned in protest, and distinguished fellow Chris DeMuth left the organization. Senior visiting fellow Stephen Moore also announced he was resigning his position with Heritage.

“The turmoil has implications for more than Roberts’s job. Founded in 1973, the Heritage Foundation has been a pillar of the conservative movement and was the ideological and policy engine behind the Reagan administration. But as Ronald Reagan’s party transformed into Donald Trump’s, younger think tanks have gained traction with the donors and advisers closest to the president; this year, Heritage officials were mostly frozen out of senior roles. The issues at Heritage echo other battles at right-wing institutions and in the conservative movement that have been aggravated by Trump’s embrace of people and views once relegated to the fringes of Republican politics.”

So far, top Trump administration officials are staying out of the fray over Fuentes, with whom Trump dined at Mar-a-Lago in 2022. Vice President JD Vance has said that “the infighting is stupid” and called on conservatives to “work together” to defeat Democrats.

Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is certainly correct in observing that “Anti-Jewish racism is an infallible symptom of civilizational decline. It substitutes fantasies for moral foundations . . . Carlson calls Christian support for Israel a ‘brain virus’ and a ‘heresy’ and says Vladimir Putin is ‘the most popular leader in the world’ . . . Conspiracist and racist fantasies of the old right have been beyond the pale for Republicans since the 1960s . . . This embittered minority is driving a wedge into the Trump coalition and the Republican base. They are trying to split evangelical Christians from Israel, which explains Mr. Carlson’s sudden interest in theology and enthusiasm for Qatar. They believe they will succeed. Morality aside, it is in the self-interest of Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians to make sure they fail.”

As Christians, how should we think about Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson?  Is the virulent anti-Semitism promoted by or at least tolerated by these men acceptable? Is this an important biblical issue?  Should we find such views repulsive and offensive? Yes, we should! I begin with a review of certain basic assumptions, rooted in Scripture, which inform a biblical view of the Jews and Israel:

1. The Bible presents accurate and trustworthy history.  Our God is a God of history, and Scripture documents His redemptive work in history.  That redemptive story is revealed in the history of Israel, in the early church and of course most importantly in Jesus Christ.  The Old Testament historical books are authentic accounts of actual historical events, many of which have been validated by archeology.  The hundreds of prophecies about the First Advent of Messiah were fulfilled in space-time history by Jesus.
2. There are three important biblical covenants that define God’s relationship with the Jewish people:  The Abrahamic Covenant, the Davidic covenant and the New Covenant.  God promised Abraham descendants as numerous as the sand of the seashore and the stars of the sky, land and blessing—that in him “all the nations would be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-7).  Because of Genesis 15:9-21, we are to understand these covenant promises as eternal and unconditional.  God promised King David an eternal throne, dynasty and kingdom (succinctly summarized in 2 Samuel 7:16).  The Old Testament prophets (major and minor) are filled with hundreds of promises about the coming Son of David who would rule and reign.  The New Testament declares Jesus to be that King.  Finally, the New Covenant contains God’s promise of spiritual blessing and renewal energized by the coming of His Holy Spirit (see Jeremiah 31:31-33 and Ezekiel 36:24-29).
3. The Mosaic covenant was a conditional Covenant, added to the Abrahamic Promise (see Galatians 3:19-22), which defined how Israel was to walk with God.  The God of the Bible is the Sovereign Lord who chose Israel to be a vehicle to reveal His holiness and His righteous character to the nations.  As the major and minor prophets indicate, when God disciplined His people, He did so on the basis of the curses and blessings of the Mosaic Covenant (see Deuteronomy 28).  But His ongoing promise to restore them and renew them was always on the basis of His covenant commitment to Abraham.
4. I believe that God will keep His covenant promises to Israel; indeed, when His Son returns a national regeneration of Israel will occur.  With clarity, Paul declared in Romans 11:26 that there is coming a day when “all of Israel will be saved.”  This remarkable event will be preceded by the re-gathering of the Jewish people to their homeland.  God promised this re-gathering throughout the Old Testament but most clearly in Ezekiel 36-37.  In these vital chapters, God declares that He will bring His people back to their land, renew them spiritually and fulfill completely the promises He made to Abraham and David and then implement all the dimensions of the New Covenant (see especially Ezekiel 37:15-28).

The Bible is noticeably clear:  The Jewish people are in an unconditional and unilateral covenantal relationship with God. [See Genesis 12:1-7—and numerous references throughout the Bible to this Abrahamic covenant.]  God states categorically that He will bless those who bless the Jews and curse those who curse the Jews (Genesis 12:3). Anti-Semitism, whether from the right or the left, is a perilous development within American civilization. I believe strongly that God has blessed America because this nation has been a refuge and an advocate for the Jewish people. If anti-Semitism continues to raise its ugly head in America, God will remove His hand of blessing from this nation, and it will face His judgment. Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson spew virulent hatred and abject heresy. Followers of Jesus Christ should have nothing to do with them.

See Will Oremus in the Washington Post (8 November 2025); Dominic Green in The Wall Street Journal (1 November 2025); and “The New Right’s New Antisemites” in the Wall Street Journal (3 November 2025);