Christopher Rufo warns MAGA is fracturing over antisemitism and Israel

Christopher Rufo has warned that the right is fracturing over antisemitism and Israel, naming Kanye West, Candace Owens and Andrew Tate as influential voices who helped push conspiracy theories and antisemitic content into the mainstream after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal, has cast the dispute as more than an online fight, arguing that a new form of antisemitism has taken shape in the social-media era.

In a March 12, 2025 City Journal column, Rufo compared the moment to the 1991 Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn and said antisemitic politics had been digitized. That comparison placed current online rhetoric in a broader historical frame, with Rufo arguing that what once circulated through local street politics now moves through influencers, algorithms and mass-followed accounts. His roster of examples, including West, Owens and Tate, showed how far the argument had migrated beyond traditional political actors.

Rufo widened that critique in a March 12, 2026 essay in The Spectator, where he said the war in Iran exposed fractures on the right over Israel. He described the old divide between paleoconservatives and neoconservatives, and between hawks and doves, as being reshaped into a fight centered specifically on Israel. He also said the issue had become deeply personal within his own circle, a sign that the dispute was no longer abstract ideology but a test of loyalty inside the movement.

The warnings carry unusual weight because Rufo is not a marginal commentator. He became one of the most visible figures in the anti-critical-race-theory campaign and then a central voice in broader anti-DEI activism, helping set the terms of conservative education politics. His influence has extended into the second Trump administration’s priorities, including efforts to scrutinize universities and other institutions that conservatives see as hostile to their agenda.

A National Conservatism archive lists Rufo’s recent writings on The Right’s Israel Fracture, The Right Way to Fight Anti-Semitism and How DOGE Could Take Down the Department of Education, underscoring how closely his cultural arguments are tied to institutional strategy. That combination has made him an important interpreter of the movement’s boundaries, especially as right-wing activists, donors and officials decide which ideas are policy, which are provocation and which can no longer be ignored.