This essay was first published by Forum Transregionale Studien on 04/16/2026. It is republished here as part of the b2o Review’s “Stop the Right” dossier with permission of the author and Forum Transregionale Studien.
Cynical Uses of Suffering: Gaza, Antisemitism, & the New Digital Right
Aya Labanieh
By the estimation of most academics, journalists, and medical experts, the Covid-19 pandemic was a mass radicalization event—one that unfolded almost entirely on the Internet.[1] As a global crisis in public health, the pandemic brought with it an equally global surge in online conspiracy theories and paranoia—resulting in a generalized mistrust of institutions and state apparatuses, ranging from schools and intellectuals to Big Pharma and high tech. In a dizzying validation of horseshoe theory, factions of the traditional Left and Right moved into overlapping conspiratorial territory around mRNA vaccines, mask mandates, lockdowns, microchips, and the “Great Reset”—a supposed plan of global elites to use the pandemic as an excuse to dismantle capitalism, depopulate the West, and enforce radical social change. Across Europe, Canada, and the U.S., far-right political groups hijacked rallies against Covid-19 measures and used anti-vax sentiment to peel large segments of the alternative left—hippies, anarchists, fitness gurus, proponents of alternative medicine—to their side, in what has come to be called the “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline.”[2]
The landscape of the Anglophone Internet itself, especially in North America, drifted rightward—rewarding influencers who churned out pandemic disinformation and conspiracy theories with high engagement, fame, and easy income. The popular term online for such a person is a “grifter”: someone who betrays their convictions, political or otherwise, for material gain, transforming what they claim to believe based on what is trending or what sells. While one can never be sure what a particular influencer truly believes, especially since many content-creators became as radicalized as their own audiences during lockdown, grifters can serve as useful indicators of where money can be made online.
A slew of “wellness” influencers, which have been called the “Disinformation Dozen,”[3] generated fame and wealth for themselves by spreading vaccine misinformation on the Internet; however, this right-ward grift also scrambled the map of distinctly political influencers and media personalities. Formerly left and liberal content-creators, such as British comedian Russell Brand, American activist Naomi Wolf, and American media network The Young Turks, boomeranged towards MAGA. Once an avowed socialist, Brand staged an elaborate conversion to Christianity in 2024 and posts constant praise of the Trump administration; TYT has pivoted away from the progressive platform that first catapulted them to fame in the 2010s towards “culture war” issues like trans identity, with key pundits now self-identifying as “politically homeless”; Wolf transformed from the feminist author of The Beauty Myth to a full-time pandemic disinformation machine. Meanwhile, content-creators who were centrist or center-right slid smoothly towards far-right or even fascist positions to catch up with their audiences. U.S. podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan, who once endorsed the progressive senator Bernie Sanders for president in 2020, now openly circulates vaccine misinformation, climate denialism, and MAGA propaganda; moreover, the guests he now invites to his podcast are almost entirely far-right and fringe figures, including Tim Walsh and Alex Jones. As with Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” the misinformation grift took advantage of real shock or trauma generated by the world-wide pandemic, harnessing the legitimate pain and paranoia widely shared among Western publics to turn a quick buck.[4]
But Covid-19 is an old story now: the first harvest of a now-routine Internet strategy. This strategy is spearheaded by a political movement I am calling the New Digital Right: it relies on social media influencers, platform affordances, and online virality to scramble political alliances and mobilize collective emotions of fear and outrage towards dark and destructive ends. The latest rupture online surrounds the topic of Israel in the wake of its full-scale invasion of Gaza after October 7th, 2023—an invasion that human rights organizations around the world, from the United Nations to B’Tselem, have declared a genocide. The case I will make in this piece is as follows: the far-right is taking advantage of global attention to the genocide in Gaza, alongside Israel’s plummetting popularity among Western publics, to radicalize and recruit new followers. The U.S.-American far-right in particular is seizing upon the media vacuum created by government censorship of anti-war and anti-Zionist voices to launder and normalize their own virulently fascist and antisemitic politics.
Israeli Propaganda & the Far-Right Pivot
Much like Covid-19, the topic of Israel and Gaza has subsumed online and offline mediaspheres worldwide. In the wake of the Israeli invasion, encampments popped up on countless university campuses, labor strikes and boycotts were called, and millions of people filled city streets across the globe. Western urban centers became the focal point of this civil unrest, shifting mainstream attitudes on the topic: by the estimation of Gallup research polls in 2026, Israel has lost popular support among the American public for the first time in its history, with mistrust of the Israeli government and sympathy for Palestinians increasing across all age groups and party affiliations.[5]
The Israeli government and Israeli cyber companies have dumped millions of dollars in online propaganda to regain control over what they call the “media war,” which even Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu admits they are losing. Numerous reports have found that Israeli companies deployed AI and bot farms to spread disinformation to Western audiences about the attacks of October 7th and their genocidal aftermath, as well as to dehumanize Palestinians and those who advocate for them.[6] They likewise commissioned a 2 million-dollar psyop to target U.S.-American lawmakers: they used hundreds of social media accounts across X, Instagram, and Facebook to pose as real U.S.-American citizens and pressure politicians (especially those who were Black or belonged to the Democratic Party) to support Israel and vote for increased military funding.[7] Speaking at a meeting of U.S. influencers at Israel’s Consulate General in New York, Netanyahu openly declared that social media is a crucial weapon in the Israeli war effort, and more pro-Israel influencers are needed to turn the rebellious tide of the younger “woke” generation.[8]
These Israeli propaganda efforts are part of what media scholar Rebecca Stein calls “visual media management”: Israel sees itself as suffering from a PR crisis, or a “crisis of injurious media,” and uses disinformation campaigns to strategically deny, sublimate, obfuscate, or repress viral documentation of the genocide.[9] Stein argues that the graphic and disturbing images emerging from Gaza are understood by the Israeli government as “injurious images” that require active management and control: through this logic of substitution, the injured Palestinian in the image is replaced by the narrative of the “injured state” that must be defended in the trenches of digital warfare. When framed this way, even the image of a dying Palestinian child is itself an attack on Israel.
Hand in hand with disinformation campaigns is the process of algorithmic censorship. In addition to the violent crackdowns on student protesters and outspoken artists and academics, the U.S.-American government has balked at the ubiquity of antiwar or pro-Palestinian content on social media, especially on platforms like TikTok. TikTok was briefly banned for reasons of “national security” and has been pressured to change its algorithm; since then, many activists report being “shadow-banned” on the app when they post political content, especially with regards to Israel and Gaza.[10] This “shadow-banning” tactic has been widely deployed by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, to limit the reach of antiwar content worldwide,[11] all the while removing fact-checking mechanisms from both platforms in an attempt to appease the Trump government.[12] The environment of Elon Musk’s X is even more extreme: since taking over the platform (known then as Twitter) in 2022, Musk has willfully destroyed the X algorithm, which periodically suspends pro-Palestinian accounts while refusing to censor neo-Nazi content,[13] and distributes blue checkmarks—which once served as stamps of authority or legitimacy—on a “Premium” pay-to-play basis.[14]
While it is evident that social media has become a major political battlefield today, what is less obvious is that the smearing and silencing of legitimate critical voices such as journalists, analysts, and activists on the issue of Israel has created a toxic ecosystem in which far-right influencers are thriving.
In the immediate wake of the invasion, neo-Nazi accounts cynically used the graphic virality of videos emerging from Gaza to recruit followers. Tech Transparency Project reported a spike in antisemitic and Islamophobic content across X emerging from Premium white nationalist accounts, which deployed a variety of strategies.[15] Some leaned on the Great Replacement Theory, claiming that the destruction of Gaza is how Jews will send more refugees to flood and destroy the Christian West. Others weaponized the legitimate public skepticism of Israeli government propaganda (such as false claims of “beheaded babies” during the October 7th attacks) to deny the Holocaust. Both of these tactics tether instances of real destruction and disinformation to false antisemitic conspiracy theories, which help the latter to garner greater attention and legitimacy. Some white nationalist accounts simply let the images of Palestinian suffering speak for themselves, without showcasing their own fringe politics too clearly—which in turn allowed them to fold many unsuspecting users into their audience base. Many consuming this content did not realize its source: by following these accounts or recirculating their posts, new followers thus allowed far-right messaging to magnify its reach into the mainstream political conversation.
As a result of this cynical pivot towards Gaza coverage after October 7th, many far-right and white-nationalist accounts have seen a steep jump in follower count, and their posts following the invasion have thousands more likes, reposts, and comments than any of their activity yielded in the years prior. Far-right X accounts like Jackson Hinkle, CensoredMen, Keith Woods, and Ryan Dawson gained massive traction for their engagement with the genocide, often by circulating content that could easily be construed as leftist, liberal, humanitarian, or anti-war. For example, Jackson Hinkle tweeted numerous images of the Nakba accompanied by anti-colonial talking points (“History didn’t start on October 7th”), videos of the killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and subsequent attacks at her funeral (taking care to state “Zionists are demonic”) and so forth, each garnering hundreds of thousands of likes.[16] As Lindsay Schubiner of the Western States Center points out, white nationalists frequently smuggle their exclusionary ideologies into mainstream discourse by attaching themselves to current events, without any real investment in said events aside from the sowing of chaos and hatred.[17] Nick Fuentes, arguably the biggest white-nationalist influencer online, admitted as much in multiple streams, claiming that his focus on Palestinian suffering was strategic for recruitment against the “liberal order,”[18] and later insisted in his 2025 interview with Piers Morgan that the “true” genocide taking place today is against the white race in the West at the hands of “organized Jewry.”[19] This notion of “white genocide” is part and parcel of the Great Replacement theory mentioned prior—a far-right conspiracy theory that implicates Jews in a grand plot to import brown and black refugees from the “Third World” to genetically “replace” white Western populations.
Nefarious Solidarity and DEI White Nationalists
Quickly, more formidable grifters began to smell the blood in the water. After all, the influencer model relies on hijacking and rerouting attention, and given the degree of global outrage over Gaza, many realized they could ride the coattails of genocide coverage and turn a high profit. Though Israel has long been an untouchable subject in the U.S.-American mediasphere, right-wing influencers are breaking with establishment media over the issue, taking advantage of the clear disconnect between publics and pundits. Figures such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are exploiting the fissures in the Republican base and turning on the organizations that first launched their careers, such as The Daily Wire, Turning Point USA, and Fox News. They have realized that they can hijack audiences from under the noses of their former bosses, while also harnessing anti-war and anti-Israel sentiment to generate mass appeal from all sides of the political spectrum.
This is part of a broader strategy that the New Digital Right is developing, which I have elsewhere termed “nefarious solidarity” (Labanieh, forthcoming). Nefarious solidarity is a strategy of conscious pandering, through which the Western, Anglophone far-right diversifies its digital audiences across ethnic and religious lines. It entails convincing individuals from a variety of backgrounds to ally with far-right political ideology against a designated Other that conveniently does not include them (undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, women, etc). This strategy functions by A) platforming influencers of diverse backgrounds to articulate far-right positions and B) focusing on viral “wedge issues” that scramble traditional political alliances. Both of these elements of nefarious solidarity also happen to have a high potential for digital virality. Diversifying the far right in this way helps prevent its adherents from being siloed and marginalized from the online public sphere: it ensures greater follower counts and thus greater revenue and reach. As such, a persistent joke online is that today’s neo-Nazis are the foremost practitioners of DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) because their largest figureheads are almost entirely self-hating minorities.
A particularly entertaining example of this is a recent media stunt that a gang of far-right influencers pulled at a Miami Beach night club on January 20th, 2026.[20] Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, Clavicular, Sneako, Myron Gaines, and Justin Waller filmed themselves dancing at the Vendôme club while blasting Kanye West’s widely banned song “Heil Hitler” and openly doing Nazi salutes in the crowd. This absurd video was hard-crafted to go viral online: in an attention economy, generating outrage through this form of “rage-bait” is a bid for relevance and exposure, and helps lead new acolytes to these influencers’ streams. What is amusing, however, is how dizzyingly diverse the Heil-Hitler gang happens to be: the avowed white supremacist, Nick Fuentes, is himself half-Mexican; the Tate brothers are half-black, with Andrew converting to Islam in 2022; Sneako is mixed-race (Haitian, Hungarian, Ashkenazi Jewish, and Filipino) and converted to Islam in 2023; and Myron Gaines is a Sudanese-American Muslim. This unlikely group of neo-Nazis is throwing up salutes to a song by an African American rapper, who has since 2016 been descending deeper and deeper into the rabbit-hole of mental illness and far-right radicalization. The ironies write themselves—and point to a distinctly new way of moving Western political culture rightward in an increasingly cosmopolitan digital environment.
To become a mass movement, the far-right recognizes that it needs to generate mass appeal. Moreover, to be commercially viable, it needs to focus more on viewer count, and less on racial purity. The nexus of far-right politics and the influencer financial model produces an odd yet inevitable appeal to U.S.-American diversity—even by those who demonize it as a value and explicitly seek to destroy it. This nexus—for which hatred and money are uniting principles—has produced a proliferation of ethnic and religious enclaves online, each designed to radicalize specific audiences with messages tailored to their particular identities and demographics. For example, the “Akh Right” (a play on “alt-Right,” that substitutes “alt” with the Arabic word akh, or “bro”) is a budding Anglophone Muslim manosphere within which far-right figures such as Myron Gaines and Mohamad Hijab actively participate, and which now includes recent converts like Tate and Sneako.[21]
Likewise, this nexus has produced prominent figures from minority backgrounds whose claims to fame are the disavowal of the political causes that their “own people” have championed in pursuit of social justice. Without a doubt, the most powerful influencer in digital media today is one such figure: the aforementioned Candace Owens, an African American influencer and political commentator whose show Candace has been consistently featured on the top charts of Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and Podscribe’s analysis confirmed that she averaged 3.6 million downloads and views per episode last fall.[22] Her YouTube account independently boasts 6 million followers, and millions regularly tune into her livestreams, which frequently outpace the viewership of traditional media outlets like Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC combined.
As many digital media journalists such as Taylor Lorenz and Matt Bernstein have noted, Candace began her career as a liberal woman, running a blog called Degree180 that championed feminism and LGBTQ rights and wrote openly against the Trump 2016 campaign.[23] After a moment of public humiliation in liberal circles for a failed anti-bullying business venture (“Social Autopsy”), Candace was recruited by the earliest far-right influencers, Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich. She built a reputation for herself in 2017 and 2018 as a Black woman who openly opposed the Black Lives Matter movement; denied the existence of structural racism, police brutality, or white supremacy; and blamed the disadvantaged position of African American communities on “Black culture” and “victim mentality.” From there, she was hired by Turning Point USA and toured the country with far-right provocateur, Charlie Kirk. In 2020, alongside a steady stream of anti-vax content, Candace went viral for disparaging George Floyd—the unarmed Black man whose murder by police officer Derek Chauvin sparked months of protest across the country. She referred to Floyd as a “horrible human being” and claimed that protests in his name were all financed by Jewish billionaire George Soros to “destabilize America.”[24] This led to her recruitment by Ben Shapiro, founder of the right-wing media company The Daily Wire, where she gained her own live show, Candace. The further right she has gone, the more her audience has boomed—and it is undeniable that a key component of her success is the diversity she is paid to represent and deride.
How Antisemites Hijack Critique
But the topic of Israel would go on to shake up the map—offering a tantalizing opportunity for someone like Candace to shake off her handlers and come fully into her own. While vaccine mandates and trans athletes are excellent examples of wedge issues in Western political culture, Israel is, in the present moment, the greatest of them. For Candace, it has catapulted her from the fringes of the right-wing ecosystem into the social media feeds of nearly everyone I know. While she had come under fire in the past for making antisemitic remarks, such as the outlandish 2019 claim that the only problem with Hitler was his designs for global domination beyond Germany,[25] Ben Shapiro had no issue bringing her aboard. However, after Israel invaded Gaza in October 2023, she began posting critically on X about unlimited U.S.-American aid to Israel, as well as Netanyahu’s atrocities against Palestinian women and children—sentiments that are widely shared by the U.S.-American mainstream. Shapiro, who is both Jewish and extremely Zionist, fired Candace shortly thereafter. Little did he realize that his protégée and her views had much more currency (or to use Internet slang, “more motion”) in the digital sphere than he did—and almost overnight, would go on to dwarf him and his media company in size.
From that point onward, it becomes difficult to disassociate Candace from criticism of Israel—and, crucially, from antisemitism more broadly. She begins to platform outright white nationalists like Nick Fuentes, flirt with Holocaust denial, and blame the Jews for just about everything. In December 2025, she reaches new heights of antisemitism in a response video to Shapiro’s speech about her at the Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference, in which he calls on other conservatives to ostracize her for her conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination (which I will return to later). After expressing seemingly cool-headed stances against the murder of innocents in the Middle East, she raises up a copy of the Talmud, claiming: “What you [Ben Shapiro] really believe in is Baal-Berith [an ancient Canaanite god]. That’s what your people believe in—you believe that you are contract lords, and people are not allowed to violate contracts or you will ruin them.” From there, she advises her audiences to all read the Talmud “so that you know what Ben thinks of you,” arguing:
Cause he doesn’t just hate me—he hates you, too, white men. He hates all black people. If he’s following the rules of Talmud, I mean when I say “hate,” that they think that we’re animals. That they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them. I challenge Black Americans to wake up to your true history, because your quarrel is not with white men—wake up to who publishes these books and keeps us warring with each other, Christians versus Christians, Christians versus Muslims. Wake up and learn the true history of slavery […] Jewish people were the ones who were trading us; Jewish people were in control of the slave trade. They’ve buried a lot of it, but it’s there, and you can find it.[26]
Screenshot of Candace Owens, “What Does Ben Shapiro Know About Erika Kirk and Fort Huachuca?” Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1oqQbR_bYs [last accessed 14.04.2026].
The levels of antisemitism—and the ways in which they are deftly woven in with antiwar and anti-Israel positions—are terrifying for a public figure of her reach and influence. While her critique begins as one about Israel, it quickly cascades towards Jew hatred and conspiracy theories about transhistoric Jewish power. Moreover, the strategy of nefarious solidarity is amply visible here: Candace addresses her diverse audience directly, attempting to fold Black Americans, white Christians, and Muslims into one political alliance against the “true” enemy that conspires to separate them—the Jews. As digital media journalist Matt Bernstein aptly states, “Candace very intentionally does not separate Jews from Zionism, and uses the very real violence of Zionism and understandable anger towards Israel as a way to do audience capture for her antisemitic conspiracy theories.”[27]
And Candace is not alone. Almost all the far-right figures listed thus far in this article have spoken up against Israel or in favor of Palestinians, which has garnered them extreme mainstream attention. This has become a hallmark of the New Digital Right, and constitutes a radical break from the philo-semitism of the older Republican generation in the United States, which had long folded Israeli dominance into its political and religious agendas, all while receiving large campaign contributions from pro-Israel lobbying groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This older generation includes many of the lawmakers in the American government today, such as South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who declared last month that he was willing to die for Israel,[28] as well as evangelical Christian Zionists who believe Israel’s dominance will usher in the end-times. Fox News, the American right-wing media conglomerate that frequently functions as a propaganda machine for the Trump government, has long catered to this evangelical contingent, frequently highlighting the Biblical implications of the US-Israeli alliance and stressing the “Judeo-Christian values” that unite Americans and Israelis against the Islamic terror of the Middle East.[29]
The New Digital Right is revealing just how thin this layer of supposed “love for Jews” really is—as well as how thoroughly the past years of racism, xenophobia, and neo-Nazi dog-whistling has primed the MAGA base to take the antisemitic plunge. The NDR has explicitly neo-Nazis commitments: as shown above, their most prominent influencers openly valorize Hitler, deny or cast doubt on the Holocaust, and find creative ways to blame global calamities on the “Jewish cabal.” They have taken “anti-wokeness” to its logical extremes, and do not hesitate to ask the two forbidden questions: A) If we are allowed to demonize all other ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, then why must the Jews have special protected status? And B) If we take “America First” seriously as a maxim, then why does the United States spend so much money arming and defending the interests of a foreign nation overseas? These two questions wed antisemitism to anti-Israeli sentiment—a conflation that is in their interest, and is wildly dangerous not just to Jews but to anyone who is invested in a nuanced academic or humanitarian critique of the actions of the Israeli state.
As such, the New Digital Right is younger, “edgier,” more visibly diverse, and has built its fame through alternative media infrastructures on the Internet, rather than relying on traditional mediaspheres of newspapers and TV. These alternative mediaspheres are both mainstream and fringe: on the one hand, many of these influencers have established large-scale popularity and even dominance on conventional platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and X while building exclusively far-right echo chambers for their base, such as Rumble, Gab, and Truth Social. They have realized that they no longer need to bend the knee to larger media conglomerates to make a living, nor adhere to those conglomerates’ orthodoxies. Another example of this is Tucker Carlson, who is presently neck and neck with Candace in breakaway popularity online. Once a conservative darling with Fox News for 14 years, then a disgraced pundit unceremoniously fired in April 2023, his new podcast The Tucker Carlson Show (launched in 2024) is surging—in large part thanks to platforming Holocaust deniers, white nationalists like Fuentes, and pivoting his coverage almost entirely to anti-Israel critique.
Nothing betrays the right-wing fissure over Israel more than the conspiracy theories that have circulated in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Kirk, a right-wing provocateur who founded Turning Point USA (TPUSA) as a means to combat “liberal brainwashing” on college campuses, was no friend of Palestinians or any other minority group. Alongside regular support for the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, fearmongering about the “threat of Islam in the West,” and disparagement of women and black people, Kirk mocked Palestinians during the height of the genocide, joking that “I used to say that, hey, if you as a gay person would go to Gaza, they’d throw you off of tall buildings, right? Well, now they don’t have any tall buildings left.”[30] He was always a staunch supporter of Israel, so much so that PM Benjamin Netanyahu was among the first to grieve him on X after his death.
And yet, the fight over Kirk’s legacy has become a fight over Israel. Conspiracy theories exploded online after his assassination, claiming that his murder was a plot by the Mossad. According to this narrative, Kirk was on the verge of turning against Israel, and taking the Republican base along with him. To be clear, there is zero evidence to back these conspiracy theories—however, what they do reveal has much less to do with Kirk as an individual and are rather indicative of an online appetite for anti-Israel content, even in the right-wing ecosystems within which these theories initially emerged and flourished. The conspiracy theories point to a clear hunger on all sides of the political spectrum for media personalities and political leaders who will “stand up to Israel”—and through his high-profile death, which has been elevated by the Trump administration to the status of martyrdom, Kirk left behind both a power vacuum and a ripe symbolic opportunity within the right-wing space.
Candace saw the opportunity, and took it. She leaned full-tilt into the conspiracy theory that her public was agitating for, linking Kirk’s death to Israel in increasingly elaborate ways, while insinuating that TPUSA itself, along with Kirk’s widowed wife Erika who was promoted to the position of CEO, were involved with the Israelis in a massive cover-up. Candace has embarked on a full YouTube docu-series provocatively titled, “Bride of Charlie,” which bills itself as investigative journalism of Erika Kirk while more closely resembling reality television. This series, which only began on February 25, 2026, and has eight installments so far, has wracked up over 5 million views, with catchy episode titles like “A Wrinkle in Time,” “Dr. Jerri and Mrs. Hyde,” and “Red Sparrow.” To quote one of the 37,000 comments on the first episode: “This is better than Netflix.” And it is—because Candace, as the consummate representative of the NDR, has now perfected her influencer business model of conspiracism, political messaging, social media, and entertainment. Through hijacking the prevalence of anti-Israel sentiment, Candace has transformed a far-right turf war into a conspiratorial TV series with popular appeal.[31]
By feeding the hunger of the conspiracy theorists, Candace has acquired money, fame, and priceless control over the symbolic meaning of Kirk’s martyrdom. She has opened the vein of a pulsating feud with TPUSA—and while it was a gamble on her part, it is one that is paying off. TPUSA has tried to claw its way out of this paranoid web, both through affective appeals to sympathy (as with Erika Kirk’s plea to Candace on CBS News, “Stop. That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Stop.”) and righteous calls for structural alienation (as with Ben Shapiro’s speech against Candace at AmericaFest).[32] And yet, it is amply clear to anyone following the feud that Candace is winning. Part of the cruelty of the influencer space is that, regardless of the dark money that changes hands in private rooms, the numbers online speak for themselves. While Candace regularly reaches millions, TPUSA is hardly in the thousands—and their social media accounts are stuck in a strange rut, posting old debate clips of Kirk “owning the libs” on college campuses. These clips only serve to drive home just how hollow the organization is without its founder.
Alongside Candace, Tucker can sense the anti-Israel direction that the populist winds are blowing. While trying to steer clear of openly antagonizing TPUSA, Tucker has been tacitly agreeing with Candace’s analysis, and, like her, linking critiques of Israel with latent antisemitism. During his eulogy of Kirk at the funeral service, he proclaimed that Kirk’s fate reminded him of the death of Jesus Christ, who was also killed by “powerful people” for telling the truth.[33] It is fairly evident which group is being referenced in such a statement: always and forever, “the Jews.” On Tucker’s website for his independent show, he has launched new merch this year: hats and shirts bearing the puppeteer-hand from The Godfather, with the caption, “AIPAC: An Offer You Can’t Refuse.” The cheeky merchandise has been making the rounds on right and left-wing digital circuits in equal measure, which is precisely what it was designed to do. This type of overt messaging against the AIPAC lobby would have been unthinkable in the Republican base only a few years ago—in fact, it hardly existed in American politics aside from progressive leftist circles who coalesced around Senator Bernie Sanders, and who were frequently unfairly smeared as antisemites by the rest of the Democratic Party.
Tucker’s merch is only one piece of a much larger game of hypocrisy, political grifting, and audience capture. He has styled himself as something of an anti-Israel hero online: he has dedicated dozens of episodes to the ongoing genocide in Gaza[34] and has vociferously denounced Zionist ethno-nationalism and the criminalization of pro-Palestinian activism in the West in high-profile interviews with The Economist and BBC Politics.[35] He has gone as far as to attack President Trump directly as a puppet (or “slave”) to Netanyahu, who he claims has forced America into the war with Iran. This caused the President to lash out against him and other critical right-wing influencers including Candace Owens, Megyn Kelley, and Alex Jones who have stood against the Iran War for similar reasons.[36]
Meanwhile, this new “humanitarian” Tucker is the same man who mainstreamed the Great Replacement conspiracy theory for years as a pundit on Fox News, and who denounces racist and ethno-nationalist policies in Israel while overtly supporting them in the United States.[37] As recently as January 2026, Tucker hosted the white nationalist and anti-immigration activist Peter Brimelow in an episode titled “The Invasion of America,” during which he agreed that white people were being systematically targeted and eliminated around the world, and that ethno-nationalism for whites has become a necessity. Speaking directly to the camera, Tucker tells his audience they are not racist or conspiratorial for believing that mass migration is a threat to the West. He goes on to promote his “documentary,” Replacing Europe (2026), that allegedly investigates the systematic replacement of white populations in Europe by Black and Arab migrants, and he urges “white solidarity” to resist the race’s engineered “extinction.”[38]
It is no measure of victory for the progressive or Palestinian cause that genuine racists and antisemites have now co-opted their salient political critique of Israel—and are exploiting it to move reasonable conversations on Israel towards the far-right. Tucker and Candace are going viral on Right and Left digital ecosystems alike, largely through clips of their videos in which they rail against the genocide and Netanyahu. I see friends, colleagues, activists, and journalists on my timeline re-sharing their content (with incredulous captions like, “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Tucker!”), while remaining completely ignorant of these figures’ broader far-right and white nationalist beliefs, and the underlying motives for their anti-Israel pivot. As a researcher of conspiracy theories and digital media, it is a phenomenon I find terrifying. The NDR’s turn against Israel is a form of political infiltration that muddies the waters of critique, and mainstreams antisemitic, white nationalist, and reactionary voices who are using humanitarianism and anti-imperialism as a disguise.
The hollowing out of the meaning of “antisemitism” by Israeli propaganda and pro-Israel advocacy groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and StopAntisemitism has fueled this fire beyond control. The most egregious example is when StopAntisemitism nominated Miss Rachel, a children’s educator who produces songs on YouTube about potty-training and the ABCs, for the 2025 award of “Antisemite of the Year”.[39] Her crime was launching a fundraising campaign that included the children of Gaza, and posting videos of herself singing with refugee children from the Strip. StopAntisemitism went as far as contacting Attorney General Pam Bondi, requesting an investigation of Miss Rachel’s ties to Hamas.[40]
The Anti-Defamation League has done the same in its focus on pro-Palestine activists. When the hashtag #BanTheADL went viral on X in September of 2023, it was spearheaded by the Irish white nationalist Keith Woods, who, in his own words, was granted “amnesty” on X by Musk’s purchase of the app after being banned for a year and a half.[41] His #BanTheADL campaign was almost entirely supported by far-right figures trafficking in the ugliest forms of antisemitic tropes and memes, and was boosted by Musk’s direct engagement and support. Musk recirculated many white nationalist posts (including Woods’) and threatened legal action against the ADL, blaming them for declining ad revenue on his platform for “false accusations of antisemitism.”[42] Despite this undeniable hatred of Jewish people, the ADL and its founder, Jonathan Greenblatt, refused to condemn Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration in 2025, claiming it was an “awkward gesture,” made in a “moment of enthusiasm.”[43] Instead, Greenblatt has focused his organization’s ire on figures like student activist Mahmoud Khalil, political commentator Hasan Piker, and NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani, insisting that their pro-Palestine stances made them virulent antisemites.[44]
If everything is antisemitic then nothing is: and that is precisely where the danger lies. The irresponsible use of “antisemite” as an accusation has emptied the term of meaning in the public sphere—and has created common cause between far-right extremists and the mainstream antiwar position. By smearing any critic of Israeli war crimes as an antisemite, these groups have allowed genuine antisemites to white-wash their reputations (no pun intended) and camouflage themselves among upstanding humanitarians and egalitarian activists, such as Miss Rachel and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. When Candace sits across from real anti-war advocates such as scholar Norman Finkelstein or comedian Bassem Youssef, she is able to act as though they are victims of the same censorial regime: she makes jokes about how she is accused of antisemitism just like they are, how she is unfairly smeared by the “Israel lobby” for daring to “speak up” about what is going on.
But what Candace thinks is going on is very different from what you or I think. In an age of (dis)information crisis, who gets to creep into your feed is also who gets to control the narrative on the news you consume. The NDR is making good use of the media vacuum that censorship has created around the topic of Israel, and duping those who have not been following them long enough to know that they are not our friends. They are here to poison the well.
Aya Labanieh is a scholar of empire, media, and memory culture. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, with a dissertation entitled “One Thousand and One Nightmares: Colonial Conspiracies and Their Afterlives in Modern Middle Eastern Media” (2025). As a scholar, writer, translator, and educator, she has a deep commitment to the public humanities. Aya served as a researcher at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art in New York City (2023-2024), and as a Public Humanities Fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities (2021-2023). In 2023, she spearheaded a project on Middle Eastern antiquity in collaboration with the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the Arab, Kurdish, and Turkish diasporas in Germany. She is presently editing a multilingual poetry collection of Middle Eastern poets, entitled Born in Babylon, forthcoming with Wesleyan University Press. She has taught at Columbia, Barnard, and UC Irvine, and has received multiple awards for her pedagogy. In the academic year 2025/26, she is a research affiliate of EUME at the Forum Transregionale Studien, as well as the Narrative Intelligence Lab at Columbia University.
[1] Radicalisation Awareness Network, “COVID-19, Violent Extremism and Anti-Government Movements,” Spotlight (2022), [Link]; Tamir Bar-On and Bàrbara Molas (eds.), Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic by the Radical Right: Scapegoating, Conspiracy Theories and New Narratives (Ibidem Press, 2021); Francesco Marone, “Hate in the Time of Coronavirus: Exploring the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Violent Extremism and Terrorism in the West,” Security Journal 35 (2021).
[2] Belew, Kathleen, “The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline,” The Atlantic, December 14, 2022.
[3] McGill, Jonathan Jerry, “A Dozen Misguided Influencers Spread Most of the Anti-Vaccination Content on Social Media” [Link] — Also, Counter Hate’s report on them: [Link]
[4] Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2007.
[5] Gallup. “Israelis No Longer Ahead in Americans’ Middle East Sympathies.” 2026. [Link]
[6] UN Special Committee, “UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war,” November 14, 2024 [Link]; Robins-Early, Nick. “OpenAI says Russian and Israeli groups used its tools to spread disinformation,” The Guardian, May 30, 2024 [Link]; Wesolowski, Kathrin. “Fact check: Israel spends vast sums on propaganda ads,” Deutsche Welle, August 9, 2025 [Link]; Scahill, Jeremy. “Netanyahu’s War on Truth.” The Intercept, February 7, 2024. [Link]
[7] Frenkel, Sheera. “Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Lawmakers with Influence Campaign on Gaza War.” New York Times, 2024. [Link]
[8] Clip from Netanyahu’s meeting of U.S. influencers at Israel’s Consulate General in New York, posted to Instagram by Middle East Eye on September 27, 2025. [Link]
[9] Stein, Rebecca. “How to unsee Gaza: Israel’s visual politics in a time of genocide,” Communication, Culture and Critique 19, (2026): 58–66.
[10] Washington, Jessica. “The TikTok Ban Is Also About Hiding Pro-Palestinian Content. Republicans Said So Themselves.” The Intercept, 2025. [Link]
[11] Luscombe, Richard, “Meta Censors Pro-Palestinian Views on a Global Scale, Report Claims.”The Guardian, 2023. [Link]; Human Rights Watch, “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook,” 2023. [Link]
[12] Liv McMahon, Zoe Kleinman, and Courtney Subramanian, “Facebook and Instagram Get Rid of Fact Checkers,” BBC News, January 7, 2025. [Link]
[13] “X, formerly Twitter, suspends hundreds of Palestinian accounts amid Israel-Gaza war,” The New Arab, October 13, 2023. [Link]
[14] Warzel, Charlie. “X Is a White-Supremacist Site.” The Atlantic, 2024 [Link]; Stroth, Steve. “Elon Musk’s X Corp. Sues Media Matters Over Report on Pro-Nazi Content,” Time, 2023 [Link]; Klepper, David. “Musk Threatens to Sue Researchers Documenting the Rise in Hateful Tweets.” PBS,2023. [Link]
[15] Tech Transparency Project, “White Supremacists on X Premium Use Israel-Hamas Conflict to Push Hate Agenda.” November 16, 2023. [Link]
[16] Jackson Hinkle (account @jacksonhinklle) is a self-proclaimed “MAGA Communist” who is prolific at spreading misinformation online. His politics are pro-authoritarian, with support for Trump and Putin in equal measure. Here are links [A, B, C] to his posts about the Nakba and other massacres against Palestinians; here [Link] is his post about the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh and the attack on her funeral.
[17] Schubiner, Lindsay. “How White Nationalists are Exploiting the Crisis in Israel and Gaza,” Medium, November 22, 2023. [Link]
[18] Clip of Nick Fuentes’ stream discussing Gaza, posted by X account of the advocacy organization Right Wing Watch. [Link]
[19] Nick Fuentes Interview with Piers Morgan, 1:20:00. [Link]
[20] Salzbank, Lena. “Miami Beach Nightclub Faces Backlash After Playing Antisemitic Anthem,” NBC Miami, January 20, 2026. [Link]
[21] Sahar Ghumkhor, Hizer Mir. “A ‘Crisis of Masculinity’?: The West’s Cultural Wars in the Emerging Muslim Manosphere.” ReOrient, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter 2022), pp. 135-157. [Link]
[22] Podscribe. “October 2025 Podcast Rankings.” November 6, 2025. [Link]
[23] Bernstein, Matt. “How Candace Owens Left Reality,” A Bit Fruity. January 9, 2026. [Link]
[24] Roose, Kevin. “Social Media Giants Support Racial Justice. Their Products Undermine It.” The New York Times. June 19, 2020. [Link]; Rogers, Katie. “Trump Says Jobs Report Made It a ‘Great Day’ for George Floyd, Stepping on Message.”The New York Times, June 5, 2020. [Link]
[25] Scott, Eugene. “One of Trump’s Most Vocal Black Supporters Seemed to Defend Hitler in a Recent Speech.” Washington Post, February 8. 2019. [Link]
[26] Owens, Candace. “What Does Ben Shapiro Know About Erika Kirk And Fort Huachuca? | Candace Ep 283” Candace Owens, December 20, 2025. 22:25. [Link]
[27] Bernstein, Matt. “How Candace Owens Left Reality,” A Bit Fruity. January 9, 2026: 1:03:00 [Link]
[28] Luciano, Michael. “Lindsey Graham Declares, ‘I Will Be With Israel Until Our Dying Day’”, Yahoo! News. March 10, 2026. [Link]
[29] Kurtzleben, Danielle. “This is how the Republican Party became so strongly pro-Israel.” NPR. October 19, 2023. [Link]
[30] Here is the link to Charlie Kirk’s speaking engagement at Generation Church, which was titled “Bold Men Unite,” and posted to the Church’s YouTube account on November 2, 2023. The joke can be found at the 36:18 mark. [Link]
[31] In a discussion on March 23, 2026, journalists Mehdi Hasan from Zeteo and Krystal Ball from Breaking Points have referred to these as the “MAGA podcast wars.” [Link]
[32] Interview between Barri Weiss and Erika Kirk on CBS News, December 11, 2025. [Link]; Speech delivered by Ben Shapiro at TPUSA’s AmericaFest, December 19. 2025. [Link]
[33] Mastrangelo, Dominick. “Tucker Carlson faces accusations of antisemitism over Kirk eulogy,” The Hill, September 22, 2025. [Link]
[34] A non-exhaustive list of episodes include: “US Green Beret Veteran Tony Aguilar Details the Shocking War Crimes He’s Witnessing in Gaza,” July 31, 2025 [Link]; “Whistleblower Exposes the Real Puppet Masters Controlling the State Department and Plans for Gaza,” September 5, 2025 [Link]; “Why Are We Defending Mass Murder in Gaza? Because Our Greatest Ally Demands It,” December 11, 2025 [Link]; “We Went to a Gaza Refugee Camp and What We Saw Was Disturbing,” December 15, 2025 [Link]; “Tucker: Israel Is Committing Terrorism in Gaza,” February 20, 2026 [Link]; “The ‘Holocaust of Our Time’ Rages on in Gaza as Israel Shuts Down the Holiest Site in Christendom,” March 30, 2026 [Link]
[35] Interview with editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, “Tucker Carlson on whether Trump betrayed America First over the Iran War,” The Economist, March 20, 2026. [Link]; Interview with Laura Kuanssberg, “Tucker Carlson splits with Trump over Iran,” BBC Politics, April 12, 2026. [Link]
[36] Murray, Isabella. “Trump blasts MAGA influencers who have split with him over Iran,” ABC News, April 10, 2026. [Link]
[37] Bond, Shannon. “How Tucker Carlson took fringe conspiracy theories to a mass audience,” NPR, April 25, 2023 [Link]; Jones, Owen. “Tucker Carlson has lost his job—but the far right has won the battle for the mainstream,” The Guardian; April 26, 2023 [Link]
[38] Carlson, Tucker. “Peter Brimelow on the Invasion of America, Who’s Behind It, and How Long Until Total Collapse.” The Tucker Carlson Show, January 19, 2026. 22:40. [Link] The full title of the “documentary” is Replacing Europe: Following the World’s Deadliest Migration Route; it can be found on Tucker Carlson’s website and can only be accessed through a members-based subscription [Link].
[39] StopAntisemitism website, April 7, 2025. [Link].
[40] Tracy, Marc. “Why Tot Celebrity Ms. Rachel Waded Into the Gaza Debate,”The New York Times. May 14, 2025. [Link]
[41] From Keith Woods’ Twitter account @KeithWoodsYT posted on January 1st, 2024. [Link]
[42] Milmo, Dan. “Elon Musk threatens to sue Anti-Defamation League over lost X revenue,” The Guardian, September 5, 2023. [Link]
[43] Harb, Ali. “ADL faces backlash for defending Elon Musk’s raised-arm gesture.” Aljazeera, January 22, 2025. [Link]
[44] Inskeep, Steve. “ADL creates new ‘Mamdani Monitor’ project to track his administration policies,” NPR, November 7, 2025 [Link]; Speri, Alice. “Antisemitism watchdog slams ADL’s ‘hyperbolic and aggressive’ response to Mamdani win,” The Guardian, November 14, 2025. [Link]; Burley, Shane. “Jewish Organizations Are Fighting Back Against Khalil Deportation,” Truthout, April 13, 2025. [Link]