RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ted Cruz is locked in what he calls an “existential fight.”

The Republican senator, the conservative’s conservative, is not worried about his usual foes—the Democratic (or, as he says, “Democrat”) Party, the radical left—but what he sees as a dangerous, growing cohort of antisemitic right-wingers.

The battle is for control of the right, MAGA, and the Republican Party. If his side loses and the antisemites win, the Texas senator and likely 2028 presidential contender told me when we met last week in a Las Vegas hotel, “we will have lost our country.”

He had just wrapped up addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition at its convention, and we were in a conference room one floor below. It was nearly 10 at night.

Earlier that day, the internal squabbling on the right—about U.S.-Israel relations, the limits of acceptable speech, and anti-Jewish hate—had boiled over into the public square. It was uncontainable now.

It had been building for months and, really, it started to crescendo a few days earlier—when right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson posted his lob-ball interview with professional troll-slash-Groyper-in-chief Nick Fuentes, who praised Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, and droned on about his antisemitic conspiracy theories.

During his conversation with Fuentes, Carlson lashed out at “Christian Zionists”—who he accused of “heresy.” He said there was no one he disliked more. He singled out George W. Bush; former Bush adviser Karl Rove; former National Security Adviser John Bolton; Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee; and Cruz.

Then, on Thursday, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has helped staff several GOP administrations and shaped policy for decades, posted his support for Carlson, slamming the “globalist class” and those who are “policing the consciences of Christians.” He called Carlson “a close friend” of Heritage.

“Now is a time for choosing,” said Cruz in his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas. “If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat ‘global Jewry,’ and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil.”

Cruz had watched antisemitism seep into the Democratic well, and he is worried his party is repeating their opponents’ mistakes.

“Ten years ago, antisemitism began rising on the left, and too many Democrats did nothing,” Cruz said. “I think they probably viewed it as a fringe position that was not a danger, and it has all but entirely consumed today’s Democratic Party.”

He added: “The same thing is happening on the right, and if we do not act to combat it, we risk losing the Republican Party.”

Then, he said: “If we lose, if we wake up and both the Democrat and Republican Party are filled with bilious bigotry and rage, we will have lost our country.”

This is not, as far as Cruz is concerned, simply about protecting a religious minority, or supporting an important American ally. It’s about saving the nation’s soul.

We got a glimpse of the right-wing rot Wednesday, when Vice President J.D. Vance appeared at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi.

Vance was fielding questions à la Charlie Kirk—the very thing the Turning Point founder was doing when he was assassinated in September.

A student in a MAGA hat, identifying himself as “a Christian man,” said he was “confused” why the United States supports Israel’s “ethnic cleansing in Gaza,” “considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.”

The question was met with large rounds of applause from other students.

Vance replied: “When the president of the United States says, ‘America First,’ that means that he pursues the interests of Americans first.” Then, he said: “When people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not controlling this president of the United States.”

This should have been Vance’s Sister Souljah moment—reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s 1992 criticism of the rap star who celebrated black violence against white people. He could have pushed back against the excesses of his own movement and staked out a more reasonable, more ecumenical middle ground. But he flubbed it. He failed to challenge the premise of the question—that Jews secretly “manipulate or control” American presidents. He didn’t say what Cruz and other conservatives wanted him to say, which was: That’s not true. We don’t say that here. We’re better than that.

I showed the video clip of Vance to Cruz, who noted immediately: “I would have given a markedly different answer.”

He avoided dissecting Vance’s comments, saying only: “I believe America should stand unshakably with Israel. I believe the reason we had October 7 and the war that followed was because of the Biden administration’s appeasement of Iran and a constant undermining of Israel.”

Turning back to Vance’s exchange with the student, he said: “The most disturbing part of that clip is the reaction of the young people after the question, where a substantial portion of these young people cheered—and to be clear, this was not some left-wing enclave. This was at Ole Miss. That’s what I’m worried about. Young people are hearing this garbage.”

Cruz, 54, is more online than the typical Republican senator. He hosts a popular podcast—Verdict with Ted Cruz—three times a week, and is on X a lot. He saw the new zeitgeist coming, the swirling tropes and furies, the trolls, the grifters, not just Carlson and Fuentes and Candace Owens, but all the wannabe influencers glomming on to the new antisemitism. And, of course, the swarms of ignorant, malleable kids.

He is growing more worried by the day that many of his supporters and allies—including the graying pastors who lead the evangelical movement—do not understand the scale and scope of the problem.

“I believe the Christian church is asleep, that it does not realize what is happening, and pastors who love Israel don’t realize that young people in their congregations are being lied to and deceived,” Cruz told me.

Then there are those too afraid to speak up.

I asked the senator how many of his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill share his feelings about right-wing antisemitism—at least, behind closed doors. “The vast majority—almost everyone,” he replied.

So what, then, are they afraid of? “People with large megaphones who can speak to millions of people,” Cruz said.

He had in mind, first and foremost, Carlson, who has made bashing Israel and, by extension, Jews, his raison d’être—and the hordes of online mobs that a little Tucker hate could unleash.

He acknowledged that “Twitter is not real life,” but added that he worries “the online world gives you foreshadowing to where things are going.”

“Tucker Carlson also said we should apologize to Osama bin Laden’s family”—he was alluding to a video clip from one of his interviews that had gone viral—“and he said that he didn’t know that Hamas was a terrorist organization. He thought they just might be a political organization. That is profoundly ignorant and deeply anti-American,” Cruz said. “After I went on his show, where he insisted that he did not know that Iran was trying to murder President Trump, he had shortly thereafter the president of Iran on his show. You know what he didn’t ask him? ‘Why are you trying to murder the president of the United States?’ He didn’t care to ask that. [Instead] he had a love fest with a world leader who funded the death squads on October 7 and who was actively trying to murder President Donald J. Trump.”

Indeed, Cruz says he noticed antisemitism ratcheting up dramatically after the United States’ June 22 bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“Some of the vitriol by the isolationists is they are so angry President Trump did not listen to them,” Cruz said. “They’re angry because their explanation is, ‘If Trump ordered the bombing strike on Iran, he must have been deceived by the conniving Jews.’ I think that the tone and tenor of the online attacks changed after that, and I think there was a sense of betrayal, and look, Jews as invisible puppet masters is an antisemitic trope as long as history.”

In the lead-up to the bombing attack, the Texas senator had urged Trump to help Israel, he said. The Jewish state had attacked Iran earlier in June as part of its wider war against Islamic jihad in the Middle East—all of which followed Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in which Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 Israelis, raped numerous girls and women, and kidnapped 251 men, women, and children—including grandparents and babies.

Israel, like the United States, had long feared the possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb, and post–October 7 it was determined to put an end to, or greatly reduce, that threat. But it lacked the bunker buster bombs capable of eliminating Iran’s underground facilities. Only the U.S. could do that.

Now, with Israel’s war against Iran on the front burner—and the question of whether America should help the Jewish state—the isolationist debate was raging inside the White House.

“There were voices in the administration that wanted the president to be less vigorous in his support of Israel,” Cruz said. “Thankfully, Donald J. Trump did not listen to those voices.”

When I asked Cruz whether he meant Vance, he replied: “I will let him speak for himself.”

He added: “We are such a tribal society now that there is a permission structure that they’re hearing, ‘Oh, our side—we hate Israel.’ That is incredibly dangerous.”

Then, he said: “I can tell you the last conversation I had with Charlie Kirk several months ago—Charlie was a very good friend—was on exactly this topic, where both he and I were deeply concerned about rising antisemitism on the right, and we spent 30 minutes on the phone talking about how to fight this poison.” (The sentiment expressed here is backed up by Kirk’s May 2 letter to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which Kirk voiced concern about rising anti-Israeli and antisemitic feelings among young Americans.)

Four days before the U.S. bombed Iran, Cruz appeared on Carlson’s show.

It was a remarkable, nearly two-hour conversation, with Cruz arguing for the United States’ close alliance with Israel, and Carlson countering that anyone who questioned that alliance was dubbed an antisemite while challenging Cruz’s knowledge of the Old Testament. Carlson asked Cruz how many people live in Iran and accused Cruz of knowing nothing about the country after he failed to answer correctly. At one point, Cruz, exasperated, says to Carlson: “Try to be a little less condescending.”

By contrast, Carlson’s interview with Fuentes was downright chummy. So were his conversations with Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, and with Vladimir Putin.

Cruz said he had no regrets about appearing on the podcast. “I knew exactly what to expect,” Cruz said.

“I knew he would come at me with everything he has. But I think he is spreading a dangerous poison, and I went on the show to do everything I could to fight back, and to fight back against the lies with the truth.”

Which makes Cruz something of an outlier.

“Ninety-nine percent of elected Republicans are terrified of Tucker,” a veteran GOP political operative messaged me. “Half of the remaining one percent would never cross Vance.”

Indeed, the two men form one of the most powerful alliances on the American right, a conservative political analyst told me. “The war against Tucker is actually a proxy war against J.D. Vance,” Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, recently posted.

That “proxy war” is turning into a wider schism that threatens to split the MAGA movement in half—potentially upending the 2026 midterm elections and, even more so, the 2028 Republican presidential primary.

When I asked Cruz about 2028, he declined to say whether he would run for the White House again. “I am focused on this battle right now today, because I believe this battle is existential,” he said.

The question behind all the other questions was: How had the United States, in the third decade of the 21st century, become so vulnerable to the antisemites and snake-oil salesmen? How had this country that had, not so long ago, liberated Europe from the fascists, faced down Soviet totalitarianism, and helped spread democracy and capitalism across the globe, forgotten what it was supposed to be? Become so unsure of itself, so easily distracted—so unserious?

Besides the “handful of charismatic and really effective communicators,” Cruz said, “isolationism has always been a powerful strain in American politics. You go back to Father Coughlin”—the hugely influential, antisemitic radio broadcaster in the 1930s—“there is a very good chance America would not have gotten involved in World War II were it not for Pearl Harbor.”

He conceded: “I also think Republicans went astray by becoming too interventionist”—referring to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Ironically,” he went on, somewhat parenthetically, “Tucker Carlson was a bow tie–wearing, pom-pom–waving cheerleader—right?—for the entire Iraq War, and yet he will now readily call anyone who does not want to surrender to our enemies a neocon warmonger.”

That sort of flip-flop doesn’t matter much any longer—not to the media juggernauts, not as long as you turn up the volume, heap scorn on your foes, say outrageous things, and then say even more outrageous things, and paper over the recent or not-so-recent past.

“Tucker publicly predicted, if the United States bombed the Iranian nuclear weapons facilities, he said thousands of people would die,” Cruz recalled. “He said it would lead us into World War III, and he said America would lose. Iran would beat America in World War III.”

He added: “That was laughingly, bizarrely, wildly inaccurate, and that never slows them down in the slightest.”

“I am not his psychiatrist,” he said, referring to Carlson, “so I have no clue as to the origins of his animus”—for Christian Zionists like himself and, perhaps, for Jews. “But I can tell you this: Those who hate Jews hate Christians.”

He also pointed out that Trump has made it clear where he stands. “President Trump said he was a kook,” Cruz said, referring to Carlson. “He’s repeatedly referred to him as ‘kooky Tucker Carlson.’ ”

When we wrapped up our conversation, Cruz stepped out of the conference room, and he was immediately engulfed by his security detail—a reminder of the moment we live in.

We were, after all, in the middle of a struggle, a low-grade war, and he had chosen his side, and the stakes were inordinate.

“You love America, although the fact that you are Jewish means that there are idiots that will accuse you of not loving America simply because of that,” he had told the Republican Jewish Coalition an hour before. “But you love America, you love Israel, you love freedom, and we need to be engaged, engaged with a smile, engaged with a winsome spirit, engaged with young people and fighting the lies.”