(JNS) The pastor Tony Perkins offered a prayer on July 31 in a conference room at the Washington headquarters of the Family Research Council, where he has served as president since 2003.
“We pray for a greater understanding not only of the times in which we live but more of what we should do about them,” he said aloud. “I pray that we would leave here with a clearer understanding of the situation, Lord, and also equipped with potential solutions that we can carry forth, Lord, to stand against the rise of antisemitism in our day.”
A private round table, which JNS attended, followed on “confronting antisemitism on the political right,” cosponsored by the Family Research Council and the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel.
Mario Bramnick, co-founder of the conference, told JNS that it is creating a task force for “countering antisemitism on the right, specifically to call out the perpetrators of anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitism and hold accountability.” (Bramnick is also senior pastor at New Hope Ministries and president of the Latino Coalition for Israel.)
At the event, Luke Moon, executive director of the Philos Project and co-founder of the conference, told attendees that in mid-2023, his focus on Jew-hatred centered on the neo-Nazi group Goyim Defense League, which is known for trolling and harassing American Jews, spreading antisemitism and dropping materials on people’s doorsteps.
“It was causing a lot of consternation, a lot of problems,” Moon told attendees. “We were addressing it and doing what we could.”
After the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the “whole attention of the world changed focus,” Moon said at the event. He and partners fought against “what we saw as this red-green alliance, the Marxists and the Islamists coming together, taking over college campuses.”
Moon was heartened by a series of measures that the Trump administration took this year to tackle left-wing and Islamist antisemitism. “Then out from underneath the rocks came the antisemitic stuff that we’re starting to see from the right,” he said. He added that some of the Goyim Defense League’s hateful views “metastasized within elements on the right.”
A lot of that metastasization occurred in the podcasting field. Moon cited podcasters aligned with US President Donald Trump, including Theo Von, who hosted the formerly pro-Israel Candace Owens—who now regularly spreads antisemitic conspiracies—in March. That same month, Joe Rogan hosted Ian Carroll, who also peddles Jew-hatred and conspiracies, for nearly three hours. And in September, Tucker Carlson interviewed Darryl Cooper, widely denounced for Holocaust revisionism.
“We were losing people faster than we’re building, and it seemed that this poisonous tree that had gotten planted somehow on the right had taken root,” Moon told attendees. “Its first target, and the group that seems to be most caught up in this, is Gen Z men.” (The latter refers to people who tend to be between the ages of about 15 and 30.)
Moon thinks that isolation during the COVID pandemic, the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and the proliferation of diversity, equity and inclusion programs are to blame for sowing distrust among young men. He thinks Jew-haters with media platforms are taking advantage of that distrust and are telling their audiences that Jews and others make accusations of antisemitism too much.
Podcasters and others with large followings are getting “traction by saying outrageous things,” he told attendees. And when Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, rebuke the podcasters, the offensive comments also come to the attention of those who follow the Jewish groups.
“There’s this incentive now to go harder, to go further, to push that edge,” Moon said at the event.
Bramnick told attendees that “we are seeing a very troubling development arise during Trump’s second administration—antisemitic attacks coming from some MAGA movement leaders.” (MAGA refers to the movement to “make America great again.”)
Carlson, Owens, former senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.), “among other things, are demanding that groups like AIPAC and Christians United For Israel comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” Bramnick told attendees.
Bannon has said the Jewish state isn’t a US ally, while Carlson said that Americans who served in the Israeli military ought to lose their US citizenship.
“This is an antisemitic trope, falsely associating American Jews with dual loyalty,” Bramnick told attendees. “As Christian leaders, we must call out the forces on the right who have demonized the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”
Carlson has “repeatedly echoed the elements of replacement theology, expressing the view that Christianity in fact supersedes Judaism,” Bramnick said at the event. That view “led directly to centuries of Christian antisemitism, Crusades, Inquisitions, pogroms and the Holocaust,” he added.
“I often teach in church the reward that David was given for slaying Goliath. He gets to fight Goliath’s brothers,” Bramnick told attendees. “So once we have a victory, it’s time to get back in the battle and fight.”
Yehuda Kaploun, Trump’s nominee for the US State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, attended, as did the pastor and former congressman Mark Walker, Trump’s pick for the department’s ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. (Both await confirmation.)
Officials from Jewish and Christian organizations also participated, and Yair Netanyahu, son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke remotely at the off-the-record event. JNS had permission to report on certain parts of the event.
