A troubling trend is emerging among some who cloak themselves in the MAGA mantle. The conservative movement is in peril of being overrun by extremists if prominent conservatives continue to align themselves with fringe voices such as Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Steve Bannon, who espouse antisemitic, anti-Israel views. To maintain the integrity of conservatism, we must call out those voices or risk the fabric of the conservative movement unraveling.
Ken Paxton has been a regular guest on Bannon’s War Room podcast in recent years, even as Bannon has made several controversial comments about the U.S.’s relationship with Israel. Bannon’s continued attacks on Israel include calling the Jewish state a “protectorate” of the United States, while speaking out against President Donald Trump’s decision last year to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Among Bannon’s most notable controversies: labeling Jewish conservative podcast host Ben Shapiro a “cancer” on the party after Shapiro criticized Tucker Carlson and Owens’s antisemitism at a Turning Point USA conference last year.
This should alarm conservatives across the U.S. Equally alarming was Carlson’s recent interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. Huckabee agreed to the interview to engage in a good-faith journalistic endeavor around the U.S.’s relationship with Israel. What ensued could be better characterized as Carlson’s agenda-ridden cross-examination or political theater.
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But as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said a century ago, in a free society such as ours, the antidote to bad ideas and bad speech like that of Bannon’s or Carlson’s is not forced silence. To the contrary, the antidote to bad ideas is good ideas. The antidote to bad speech is good speech. So allow me to speak plainly: Shapiro is not a cancer, and Huckabee is not one to acquiesce to any mischaracterizations of the U.S.-Israel relationship. No, it is antisemitism that is the true cancer because it seeks to dehumanize our fellow man. The history of the Jewish people is replete with opponents seeking to dehumanize them and make them out to be something less than. We simply cannot let this school of thought go unchecked within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
I joined the Senate in 2002, just months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At that time, Gallup polls showed support for Israel was similar between Republicans and Democrats, with Republicans about 10 points more supportive. But by 2003, that gap had grown to 35 points. The gap continued to widen, eventually reaching 64 points by 2018.
While some of the party divergence on Israel was due to an unfortunate yet unsurprising decline in Democratic sympathy, perhaps the greatest variable was the meteoric rise of vocal support for Israel within the Christian community.
While the U.S. is home to fewer than 8 million Jewish Americans, just shy of two-thirds of the public describes themselves as Christian. For decades now, tens of millions of American Christians have seen Israel for what it is: a brother and co-laborer in our travails against radical Islamists in the Middle East. In 2006, in my home state of Texas, a pastor named John Hagee revived a group called Christians United for Israel. By 2012, its membership had surpassed 1 million, making it the largest pro-Israel Christian organization in the U.S. Those numbers have only continued to grow.
Buoyed by tens of millions of votes delivered by people of faith in his first election in 2017, Trump delivered one of the most historic diplomatic victories the world has seen in decades in the fall of 2020 with the signing of the Abraham Accords, which began the process of normalizing diplomatic and trade relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and a now expanding number of other Middle Eastern countries. Trump and his team knew the U.S. needed to lead in this way because most of the Middle East has refused to trade or otherwise do business with Israel for decades in order to cripple the Israeli economy.
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Since Hamas’s attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. has rightly stood by its friend and ally on what was the darkest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. But many voices on the political Left and some on the Right have balked. These percolating attitudes among Republicans, if paired with the already fully metastasized anti-Israel sentiments among Democrats, pose an existential threat to the U.S.’s special relationship with Israel — a scenario that would transform the geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East, alter the lives of American Jews, and leave Israel to fend for itself for the first time in generations.
As Christians, conservatives, and Americans, we must not allow the established antisemitism of the Left to infiltrate our ranks. Paxton and other conservative leaders allowing these ideas to go unchallenged and allowing them to take root runs the risk of discrediting the Republican Party and the entire conservative movement he purports to represent.
John Cornyn represents Texas in the U.S. Senate and is seeking reelection. His campaign website is JohnCornyn.com.
