Jason Zengerle, the author of the new book, Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind, says Jewish conservatives are terrified of Tucker. Zengerle says Tucker turned against israel when he noticed that his biggest critics, and Trump’s biggest critics, were pro-Israel.
I: You write in the book that Carlson has “come a long way from the days when he described himself as a pro-Israel, Episcopalian neocon.” On his show now, he regularly promotes antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories, incessantly attacks Israel and hosts neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers for friendly interviews. Do you have insight into what sparked this openly antisemitic streak?
JZ: It’s funny, someone who’s close to him was telling me that they thought this basically started with his conclusion that all the people who were opposed to him and Trump, post-2016, were big Israel supporters. So Tucker’s like, ‘Alright, I’m just going to piss these people off by going after Israel,’ and that’s kind of where it started. I don’t know if that’s the case.
I mean, Bill Kristol looms so large in his mind and in his own story. The story that he tells people, and the story I think he tells himself, is he was misled and used and kind of exploited by the neocons, that he was this young, naive, innocent writer who got just basically used to get us into a war and support free trade deals and do all these things that hurt the white working class in America, and that what he’s doing now is his penance. And I think that’s not a true story. I don’t think that’s what happened.
Kristol is just such a huge figure in his own mythology. Even before Tucker went in this direction, he was really close to Kristol. He really looked up to him. He was his first boss, and I think he had a real impact on Tucker’s career. But now, Tucker wants that all to be a negative impact. He did an interview recently with his brother, Buckley Carlson, where he talked about how Kristol hates Christians. Bill Kristol, who hired Fred Barnes and took vacations with Gary Bauer. He’s recast all this stuff.
JI: While some Republican lawmakers have spoken out against Carlson, it seems notable that Trump and Vance have both so far refrained from explicitly distancing themselves from him.
JZ: There’s this weird thing going on where certain Jewish conservatives feel like, as long as Trump’s there, everything’s going to be fine. You know, his grandchildren are Jewish, he might say some stuff, he might do some things, but at the end of the day, the worst-case scenario will never occur. They view Tucker as this bad influence on Vance, and if they can just get rid of the bad influence, Vance will be OK. But they’re really terrified of Tucker. They’re really terrified of what comes after Trump. And they’re terrified that Tucker will have a major influence on whatever comes after Trump. They’re worried about the influence he has on Vance. They want to believe that Vance would be OK, left to his own devices. They think Tucker is leading him in a bad direction, and therefore they need to take out Tucker.
I think it goes beyond Israel. I think it’s genuine fear about what it would mean to be Jewish in the United States. I’ve been talking to some of these folks recently. I think it’s a real, deep-seated fear about, in Tucker Carlson’s America, what would it be like to be Jewish here?
ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory would say the fear some Jewish conservatives feel toward Tucker is not irrational or hysterical. It is structurally understandable, even if one disagrees with Tucker or with them.
Two alliance dynamics are colliding.
First, Tucker’s role shift.
He moved from being a mainstream conservative media node inside the pro-Israel, neocon-tinged GOP alliance to being the chief identity voice of a post-liberal, populist, anti-establishment coalition. That coalition defines its main enemies as:
The permanent national security state
Foreign policy elites
NGOs and internationalist lobbies
Prestige media
“Globalist” influence networks
Israel used to be a sacred ally inside the old conservative coalition. In the new populist coalition, it is increasingly treated as part of the same elite foreign-policy consensus that brought Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and endless intervention.
So Jewish conservatives who built their status, safety, and identity inside the old alliance map suddenly see one of the movement’s most powerful voices reclassifying a core pillar of their world as part of the enemy system.
From an alliance perspective, that is genuinely destabilizing.
Second, the “pro-Israel elites are my enemies” logic.
Zengerle’s claim that Tucker turned against Israel when he noticed that many of his fiercest critics, and Trump’s fiercest critics, were also strongly pro-Israel fits Alliance Theory almost perfectly.
Alliance Theory says rival maps are not built by abstract moral reasoning. They are built by pattern recognition in social conflict:
Who attacks me
Who defends the institutions I am attacking
Who shares enemies with me
Who shares allies with me
If the most powerful people calling you dangerous, racist, authoritarian, or “a threat to democracy” are clustered in:
Legacy media
Foreign policy think tanks
Neoconservative circles
Liberal Zionist networks
National security bureaucracy
then the brain’s alliance engine starts to merge those nodes into a single hostile bloc, even if, intellectually, they are very different groups.
The logic becomes:
“These people coordinate against me.”
“They all defend the same institutional order.”
“They all justify the same wars and censorship.”
“They all treat my movement as illegitimate.”
Once that happens, Israel is no longer seen primarily as a Jewish homeland. It becomes symbolically fused with the elite foreign-policy alliance that the populist coalition defines as its main adversary.
That does not require antisemitism.
It only requires alliance reclassification.
Why Jewish conservatives feel especially exposed.
They sit at a dangerous intersection:
They are inside the populist right.
They are emotionally and civilizationally tied to Israel.
They are historically sensitive to elite scapegoating dynamics.
So when the dominant voice of the populist coalition starts saying:
The foreign policy establishment lies
The security state manipulates
The war consensus is corrupt
Powerful lobbies distort debate
and Israel begins to be rhetorically grouped with that system, they see a classic risk pattern:
A coalition defining itself against “hidden power”
A moralized narrative of betrayal
A search for coordinating agents behind the scenes
A movement that increasingly distrusts mediating institutions
Alliance Theory says minorities embedded in mass movements always fear being reclassified from ally to explanatory variable.
Not because the leader intends persecution.
But because alliance narratives, once they harden, can slide from “this institution is powerful” to “this group is responsible.”
So are their fears valid?
Structurally, yes.
Not in the sense that Tucker is secretly planning antisemitism.
But in the sense that when a movement re-draws its rival map around:
Global elites
Foreign influence
Security state manipulation
Censorship networks
Transnational lobbies
any group strongly associated, fairly or unfairly, with one of those nodes becomes anxious. That is rational alliance risk assessment, not paranoia.
Alliance Theory’s prediction.
If the populist right continues to define itself primarily against:
The national security consensus
Interventionism
Global institutional power
Elite moral policing
then Jewish conservatives will face increasing tension between:
Their place in the populist in-group
Their attachment to Israel
Their sensitivity to historical scapegoating dynamics
Some will try to act as bridges.
Some will quietly withdraw.
Some will over-signal loyalty.
Some will be pushed out.
Not because of “hatred,” but because alliance maps are being redrawn and old sacred cows are losing protected status.
