MAGA: Civil War

The raging fight for the future of the American Right.

One of the most significant political battles in United States history is unfolding right now, promising to reshape the DNA of the American conservative movement in ways not seen in decades. The assassination of high-profile right-wing figure Charlie Kirk on a Utah university campus has brought a long-simmering internal feud into the open, exposing a deep schism on the right that could alter both the conservative movement and the country’s trajectory.

The temperature rose sharply after Tucker Carlson, still the most influential voice on the American right, recently aired a long interview with Nick Fuentes—the young, incendiary, sharply witty, and widely marginalised figure who has risen to prominence through what he calls a “generational run.” For years Carlson embodied a polished neoconservative line at Fox News; Fuentes, banned from nearly every mainstream platform since age nineteen, has built a following among disaffected young nationalists. The two men have traded public insults—Carlson recently dismissed Fuentes as a “basement-dwelling gay Fed,” while Fuentes has highlighted Carlson’s father’s CIA ties and his own role in sustaining neoconservative narratives. Yet they now converge on the issue dominating the debate inside the American right: Israel’s influence over the United States.

The backlash to the interview was immediate. Mark Levin, a conservative mainstay and an early influence on Fuentes himself, led a wave of attacks that echoed across the clearly defined Zionist wing of the conservative media ecosystem. An attack that was returned with vigour, and retorted by Levin in kind.

On the left, this conversation has been simmering for years. Many Democrats have grown comfortable criticising the Biden and now Trump administrations over Gaza and have begun to grasp the extent of Zionist lobbying in Washington. On the right, however, the reckoning is newer and more explosive. The MAGA movement that carried Donald Trump back to power—buoyed by Miriam Adelson’s money and a nostalgic faith in their returning champion—has watched Trump largely adopt and intensify Biden’s pro-Israel stance. Under a president who once campaigned on ending forever wars, the Gaza crisis reached unprecedented levels of horror, the Ukraine war merely simmered, an American strike on Iran materialised, and new conflicts flared across the globe. The America First base that delivered Trump’s re-election has begun to question the man they returned to the White House.

The neoconservative doctrine that has dominated Republican philosophy for decades is now under sustained challenge from a growing faction led by high-profile pundits and rising stars. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes—figures routinely branded the “woke right” by their critics—have articulated a clear distinction: America First MAGA versus what they deride as “Israel First” MIGA politics.

The phrase “America First” itself carries historic weight. It was first popularised in the 1940s by a broad isolationist coalition that ranged from Walt Disney and Charles Lindbergh to socialist Norman Thomas. Donald Trump revived it in 2016, tying the slogan to promises of bringing back jobs, rebuilding infrastructure, exiting foreign wars, and halting illegal immigration—promises that resonated with voters exhausted by neoliberal job destruction, endless military adventurism, and bipartisan corruption.

As MAGA has increasingly appeared to serve Trump family interests and Israeli territorial ambitions rather than its original populist vision, “America First” has become contested ground. A new America First movement—echoing the early Trump campaign—demands a laser focus on domestic renewal, withdrawal from forever wars, economic nationalism, and mass deportations. This tension was starkly illustrated in the December 2025 NDAA, which authorised another $500 million for U.S.–Israel missile defense programs including Iron Dome while domestic disaster relief funding—critical for hurricane-ravaged states like Florida and North Carolina—was shorted amid budget fights.

Israel’s war in Gaza has thrown the U.S.–Israel relationship into stark relief. For two years, legacy pundits and centrists of both parties—from Jake Tapper to Mark Levin—have run interference, defending every action and framing criticism as beyond the pale. On the left, activists have taken to the streets and pressured politicians to reject AIPAC money. On the right, audiences now challenge pro-Israel speakers at events and wage internal war against those seen as beholden to foreign influence. Even the once-unshakable evangelical base shows cracks: a 2024 Barna poll found support for Israel among white evangelicals under 40 dropping below 40 %, with nearly half now ambivalent or opposed to unconditional U.S. aid—a trend that has only accelerated.

Charlie Kirk encountered this shift at the coalface. While his Turning Point USA organisation was funded to advance the priorities of its donor class, Kirk increasingly faced heated confrontations from students and activists over Israel’s role in American politics. His assassination crystallized the intolerance brewing beneath the surface. Since then, many TPUSA chapters have fallen into open rebellion, with America First students and Groypers routinely hijacking events, dominating Q&A sessions, and forcing out pro-Zionist leadership.

In the new-media ecosystem, where Carlson, Owens, Shapiro, and Fuentes command audiences that dwarf those of Hannity, Maddow, or Cooper in key demographics, old orthodoxies are crumbling. Total evangelical support for Israel—the bedrock of GOP foreign policy for a generation—is no longer unquestioned. The funding asymmetry is staggering: Miriam Adelson donated over $100 million to Trump-aligned groups in 2024 alone and is reportedly preparing similar war-chests for the 2026 midterms, while the America First faction still lacks a single billionaire patron of comparable scale.

Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, once a conservative juggernaut, has bled viewers amid relentless defense of Israel’s actions and dismissal of domestic critics. Comment sections overflow with pushback from America First nationalists, Christian conservatives, and others. Shapiro’s recent forty-minute rant—complete with highlight reels of Carlson’s, Owens’s, and Fuentes’s most incendiary clips—only underscored the depth of the split.

Western legacy media struggles to comprehend the tectonic shift in the U.S. conservative movement—and the broader reconfiguration of the information landscape—clinging rigidly to its orthodoxies and invalidating dissent at all costs to protect its sacred cow: unconditional support for Israel. A widely shared CNN clip of journalist Elle Reeve confronting Candace Owens exemplifies the chasm: Reeve and her cohort dismiss Owens as an “anti-female white supremacist” (despite her being a Black woman), even as audiences praise Owens’ Gaza coverage for outshining mainstream liberal outlets in raw honesty and detail.

Australian philosopher Andrew Gleeson, like so much centrist punditry in the West, invokes Nazi Germany yet again. In his article “Why ‘Never Again’ is now: Nicholas Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and the normalisation of evil”, Gleeson decries the “normalisation” of Fuentes, Carlson, and America First voices, decrying how the Overton window has shifted to accommodate what he equates with history’s worst atrocities. But like many Western gatekeepers, he omits the elephant in the room: the true normalisation of war and genocide at the heart of the Western political center, exposing a compromised class serving Zionist interests and Israel’s state. The real driver of America First’s rise? Questioning Israel’s grip on Washington and its post-October 7 conduct in Gaza. What Gleeson and his ilk fail to grasp—or admit—is that an actual genocide dwarfs “inappropriate words” or edgelord jabs at Zionism, or any other words for that matter.

The rift extends beyond ideology into personnel. A cohort of pro-Israel activists—some former Democrats like Dave Rubin and Laura Loomer, others lifelong Zionists who migrated to Trump’s orbit expecting a more reliable partner than the Democratic Party—have fused Netanyahu’s far-right vision with MAGA’s volatile energy. Figures such as Bill Ackman and Bill Maher illustrate the broader realignment of traditionally Democratic Zionist money and influence toward the Republican side. This phenomenon is not uniquely American: post-Gaza, European nationalist parties such as Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally, and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz have all shifted sharply critical of Israel, proving the populist right worldwide is rethinking unconditional support.

Yet Trump has failed to bring his base with him on unquestioning support for Israel. Broken promises on immigration, foreign aid, and ending wars—coupled with daily criticism from Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes—have eroded his standing among the very voters who revived his presidency.

This fracture poses an immediate problem for the Trump White House—yet an even larger one for his heir-apparent, Vice President JD Vance. Despite constant pressure from the Zionist-MAGA wing and private disdain inside the administration for Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes, Trump and his inner circle have stopped short of open war against the America First dissidents. They know the base power has shifted. Vance, however, has become the primary target: Nick Fuentes and his followers relentlessly hammer him over his deep ties to Palantir and Peter Thiel, his meteoric and seemingly choreographed rise, and—most viscerally—his interracial family. Every week brings fresh, vicious attacks that frame Vance as the controlled, neocon-approved successor rather than a genuine America First leader.

In the end, no divide on the American political landscape is more consequential than this fracturing of the conservative movement. The fight over who truly speaks for “America First” will shape not only the GOP’s future but the direction of the country itself.