🌊 The Coming MAGA War

How Joe Rogan added kindling to a fire that could burn down the entire MAGA project

Since October 7th, 2023, a chasm has emerged among conservatives. While the majority of Republican politicians have sided with Israel, many of the most prominent voices in conservative media – particularly those with young audiences – have become staunchly anti-Israel, verging on, and perhaps crossing into, anti-Semitism in some cases. This newsletter will detail the split and explore how the issue could split the MAGA movement into two.

Two years ago, nobody had heard of Joe Rogan’s recent podcast guest, Ian Carroll. He was an unknown, a self-proclaimed investigative journalist. His appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience hardly illuminated his background, though it removed all doubt about this: Ian Carroll does not like Israel.

With 1.2M followers on X, Ian Carroll’s posts regularly get tens of millions of views. His feed consists mainly of theories about Israel’s control of various systems in the world. Last September, he declared, “Israel did 9/11.” This month, he accused Israel of orchestrating Jeff Epstein’s crimes: “The Epstein network was the most successful act of war ever perpetrated against America. And it was perpetrated by our ‘greatest ally.’”

It was this conspiracy that he detailed at great length during his 2-hour, 41-minute interview on The Joe Rogan Experience, the Mount Olympus of the media world. Rogan let Carroll ramble and hardly pushed back on him, which – to be fair – is typical of Rogan: He treats pro-Israel guests the same. His platforming of Carroll nevertheless raised eyebrows, but it wasn’t until a week later that questions began to mount.

That’s when Rogan hosted Darryl Cooper, a self-proclaimed historian who catapulted to fame with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show six months prior. Tucker introduced him as the “best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” During their interview, Cooper – whose background is as mysterious as Carroll’s – declared that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War.” Cooper’s no stranger to controversy: Last summer, he tweeted a photo of the Nazi invasion of Paris alongside the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics and said that the former was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the latter.

In his Rogan interview, Cooper made more such claims. Among them was this: “Hitler wasn’t going around and giving antisemitic addresses in public.” Of course, this was not true: In 1939, Hitler addressed the entire Reichstag – the German Empire’s Congress equivalent – and advocated for the “annihilation of the Jewish race.”

Rogan feeding Carroll and Cooper to his audience of 35M (20M subscribers on YouTube and 15M followers on Spotify) in the span of eight days raised questions. Was Rogan sending a signal to the administration by consecutively platforming two viciously anti-Israel voices with mysterious credentials and backstories? Was he joining the ranks of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, who’ve transformed into staunch Israel critics – and two of the biggest voices in media – over the last two years? Is there a growing rift in the MAGA world between Trump’s team and the podcast sphere? Will there be war?

If there will be, we saw the start of it this month.

The same week that Rogan hosted Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson went scorched earth on Israel.

Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson reach more people per episode than Fox or MSNBC; they regularly chart on the top ten most popular podcasts on Spotify. In the last year or so, rants about Israel and Israeli influence in US politics have become staples of their shows. Candace Owens has called Israel’s assault on Gaza a “holocaust” and claims that America “is being held hostage” by Israel. Tucker, in a recent interview with Piers Morgan, struggled to answer if Israel is an ally of the US and told Piers that Israel is intentionally killing women and children.

The same day that Carroll went on Rogan, Candace went on comedian Theo Von’s podcast – also a top podcast – to discuss Israel. At one point, Theo Von asked Candace, “Why do you think there’s such a strong relationship between [the US and Israel]?”

She responded, “Blackmail. I think blackmail. And I think this is the reason we don’t get to open the Epstein files, we don’t get to open the JFK files.” Six days later, Tucker hosted the Prime Minister of Qatar. The duo mourned the treatment of Qatar and lambasted the US’ foreign policy.

Tucker and Candace weren’t always this way: Their rhetoric toward Israel took a sharp turn after they got fired from their respective pro-Israel employers – Tucker from Fox in early 2023 and Candace from Daily Wire in early 2024 – leading some to ask if they’re pursuing a vendetta.

Old clips of each discussing antisemitism have recently resurfaced, and the two sound unrecognizable. In a clip from roughly five years ago, while she was still at the conservative PragerU, Owens said of Israel’s critics, “It seems that all of the blame – they always want to blame Israel. No matter what. The strangest thing! Anything could happen… it could not rain for three days and you know it’s ‘Curse Israel! Curse the IDF!’”

Meanwhile, in an old C-SPAN clip, Tucker censured politician Pat Buchanan for being antisemitic: “I mean here’s a guy who’s… constantly attacked Israel, who’s attacked American Jews for supporting Israel unduly, who’s implied that American Jews push non-Jews into wars where Americans die. There is a pattern of Pat Buchanan needling the Jews. Is that anti-Semitic? Yeah, absolutely.”

Tucker is arguably the most influential conservative voice today. Part of both President Trump’s and VP Vance’s inner circles, in February, Tucker was seen in the Oval Office with Elon Musk and Trump. He’s walked out behind Trump at UFC events and regularly poses with him. Tucker and Don Jr. are close friends; Don Jr. sits on the board of the fund that led the financing of Tucker’s new media company.

And now Tucker is leading a cohort of highly influential MAGA voices – including Andrew Tate, Patrick Bet-David, Dave Smith, and Dan Bilzerian – who all criticize Israel.

Yet in the Trump Administration, the reality could not look more different.

While Tucker and co. have been attacking Israel, the Trump Administration has been issuing some of the strongest pro-Israel rhetoric and policies of any presidency. The week of the Rogan interviews, RFK Jr., Pam Bondi, and Dan Bongino – three MAGA darlings – announced crackdowns on antisemitism.

On March 3, RFK Jr. posted on X, “Anti-Semitism – like racism – is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues. In recent years, the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence. Making America healthy means building communities of trust and mutual respect, based on speech freedom and open debate.” (This tweet led the anti-Israel crowd to suggest he was being held hostage.)

Netanyahu was the first foreign leader Trump hosted at the White House, and he reinstated the delivery of 2,000-lb bombs to Israel that Biden had stalled. On January 30, Trump announced an executive order that threatened to deport “Hamas sympathizers” on US campuses – and in March, began that process with the detaining of Mahmoud Khalil, the student leader of pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University. Trump also floated Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

In turn, Netanyahu said, “Donald Trump is the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.”

While many of Trump’s media connections are anti-Israel, he has Jewish grandkids, a Jewish daughter, and a Jewish son-in-law who served as a senior advisor in his first term. That son-in-law, Jared Kushner, helped broker the Abraham Accords and relocate the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Despite being a leading Ukraine critic, VP Vance has routinely defended support for Israel (and has an Orthodox Jewish chief of staff), as have Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who helps frame the administration’s policies, is also Jewish and ardently pro-Israel.

Simply put, despite the mounting media pressure, Trump is unlikely to be wearing a keffiyeh anytime soon.

It’s possible that the anti-Israel rhetoric from Tucker, Rogan, and Candace Owens – perhaps the three biggest podcasters on Earth – is just noise. But if we learned one thing this last election, it’s that noise in the podcast sphere matters. It’s the new legacy media, and their messaging has infiltrated X, where anti-Israel and anti-Jewish posts go viral daily.

With both sides dialing it up, the MAGA civil war may be coming soon.