Zionist extremists and Christian fascists, who are united and now hold senior positions throughout the Trump administration, embody a global movement to the extreme right.
Murder the Meek – by Mr. Fish.
Christian Nationalists who form the bedrock of support for President Donald Trump — 80 percent voted for him in the last election according to a voter survey by the Associated Press — have mounted a concerted campaign calling on the White House to back Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.
This campaign includes visits to Israel by prominent leaders, including Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins and Mario Bramnick, petitioning the White House, lobbying Congress and calls for annexation at Christian conferences, including a resolution of support for Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank adopted at the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference.
The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) Convention in Dallas, in March, gathered over 200 signatures from pastors and right-wing religious leaders from across the United States calling for the annexation of “Judea and Samaria” — the purported biblical name for the West Bank — and declaring the two state solution “a failed experiment.”
American Christian Leaders for Israel, which says it represents a network of “over 3,000 organizational leaders from across the nation, including the National Religious Broadcasters,” endorsed the NRB resolution and sent it to Trump. Congresswoman Claudia Tenney and five other members of the congressional “Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus,” sent a letter to Trump asking to “recognize the right of Israel” to declare sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territories, arguing that it will advance “the Judeo-Christian heritage on which our nation was founded.”
Trump, who rescinded a Biden administration executive order that sanctioned Jewish colonists in the West Bank for human rights violations, promised, on Feb. 4, to make an announcement in the “next four weeks,” about possible annexation of the West Bank.
This follows Trump’s call for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and death threats to the Palestinians unless they release Israeli hostages. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said of Gaza while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One.
The agenda of Zionist extremists and Christian fascists, who hold senior positions throughout the Trump administration, have long converged. The language, iconography and symbolism used by the Christian and Jewish fascists is biblical. But the bonds are political, not religious.
I detail the history and ideology of our homegrown fascism and its kinship with Jewish fascism in my book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
‘No Such Thing as a Palestinian’
Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a Baptist minister, has been nominated by Trump to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee has said there is “no such thing as a Palestinian” and asserted that Palestinian identity is “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.” He proposes that any Palestinian state should be created outside of Israel in neighboring countries such as Egypt, Syria or Jordan. He dismisses the two-state solution as “irrational and unworkable.”
“I believe the scripture. Genesis 12: Those who bless Israel will be blessed; those who curse Israel will be cursed. I want to be on the blessing side, not the curse side,” Huckabee says.
John Ratcliffe, appointed by Trump to run the Central Intelligence Agency, advocates assisting Israel in what he described as its “foot-on-their-throat” approach against Iran.
Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who argues that “Zionism and Americanism are the front-lines of Western civilization and freedom in our world today” — pedals the usual absurdity that the Hebrew Bible, written 4,000 years ago, can be used to draw contemporary national borders. He told Fox News last November:
“Open up your Bible. God granted Abraham this land. The twelve tribes of Israel established a constitutional monarchy in 1000 BC. King David was their second king and established Jerusalem as the capital. Jews were fighting foreign occupiers for centuries, ultimately maintaining a presence there.
And right now, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, are trying to erase the Jewish ties to Jerusalem, as we speak. I’ve been there multiple times. They’re trying to make it look like Jews were never there. The most important aspect of this is the international community granted sovereignty to the Jews, to the Jewish state, after World War II, and Israel has had to fight defensive war after defensive war, with every country coming to crush it, ever since then just to exist.”
Hegseth at the Pentagon on Wednesday. (DOD / Alexander Kubitza)
The televangelist Paula White-Cain, a militant Christian Zionist, who says that defying Trump is akin to “fighting against the hand of God,” is a senior adviser in the newly created White House Faith Office.
Universities in the United States were slandered by Zionists as allies of Hamas immediately after the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel, weeks before there were any campus protests. These colleges and universities, in response to criticism and the creation of student encampments, banned protests and shut down free speech. They have disciplined, suspended or expelled student activists. They have also fired or placed on probation faculty and administrators who spoke against the genocide.
Campus Witch Hunt
The witch hunt saw the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT endure a McCarthyite inquisition in congressional hearings spearheaded by Rep. Elise Stefanik. The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, because they did not grovel enough, were eventually forced to step down.
Stefanik, who rejoiced in the firings of the Ivy League presidents, issued a statement promising to “continue to move forward to expose the rot in our most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions and deliver accountability to the American people.”
Stefanik is Trump’s nominee to be the ambassador to the United Nations. She believes “Israel has a biblical right to the entire West Bank.”
Stefanik with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May 2024. (Office of Representative Elise Stefanik / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)
Columbia University, four months before the protest encampment was set up on campus, banned the school’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Once an encampment was established in the center of the university, it authorized three police raids with over one hundred student arrests. Last week, it expelled four students, three from Barnard College and one from Columbia. It has forced out professors and administrators.
The Trump administration, despite the draconian measures imposed by Columbia’s administrators, canceled approximately $400 million in federal grants to the university due to what it calls the “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
The campaign mounted against colleges and universities has nothing to do with combating anti-Semitism. Columbia and other universities can never placate their critics. The campaign is about criminalizing dissent and forcing educational institutions to adhere to the ideological dictates of the far right and Christian fascists. Antisemitism is the excuse.
Christian fascists distort Christianity to sacralize white supremacy, the U.S. empire and capitalism, as well as demonizing those who oppose them as satanic. These heretics — I speak as a divinity-school graduate — deform the Gospels in the same way Jewish fascists deform the Torah.
In fact, according to the eschatology of the Christian fascists, Jews in Israel in the “End Times” will be converted to Christianity or exterminated, which exposes their deep anti-Semitic roots and open embrace of Nazi theorists such as Carl Schmidt and sympathizers such as Rousas John Rushdoony.
Israel routinely violates diplomatic and ethical norms. It ignores humanitarian law and international law, carrying out genocide in violation of the United Nations’s 1948 Genocide Convention. It mocks the concept of the open, democratic society, creating second-class citizens and a system of apartheid dominated by those of predominantly European descent. It employs indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those branded as human “contaminants,” “human animals.”
Jewish supremacy, like the supremacy of the Christian fascists, is, these fanatics claim, sanctified by God. The slaughter of the Palestinians, who Benjamin Netanyahu compared to the biblical Amalekites, are the incarnate of evil and deserve to be massacred. Euro-Americans in the American colonies used the same biblical passage to justify the genocide of Native Americans. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those inside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism or Christian nationalism speak.
Jewish fascism is what the Christian fascists seek to emulate. They too yearn to “cleanse” American society of its human “contaminants” the way Israel is ethnically cleansing itself of the Palestinians. Israel’s Basic Law: The Nation State of the Jewish People, passed by the Knesset in 2018, declares that the right to self-determination in Israel is “exclusive to the Jewish People.”
This legal discrimination is one American fascists plan to emulate on behalf of white Christians. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, people of color, undocumented workers, Muslims, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, pacifists and the poor — will, as in Israel, be targets.
The judiciary will be a tool for repressing dissidents and protecting the rich. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be persecuted, evidenced by the State Department’s AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” effort to “cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups.”
The Seizure of Mahmoud Khalil
On March 8, federal immigration authorities detained Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, who is of Palestinian descent, although he is a legal permanent resident. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said that Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”
Poster of Mahmoud Khalil during a New York City protest on March 10 calling for his release. (SWinxy, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
The seizure and possible deportation of someone who is a legal permanent resident is ominous.
Fascism has different iterations, but its core attributes are the same. This is why Christian fascists are so energetically working on Israel’s behalf. Fascism thrives off a sense of grievance. Messianic redemption will take place in Israel once the Palestinians, who are condemned as embodying evil, are expelled.
Messianic redemption will take place once America returns absolute power to a white, Christianized ethnonationalist state, one that rolls back civil rights legislation — the 1965 Voting Rights Act has already been gutted by the Supreme Court — and slashes social services that “coddle” the poor, especially poor people of color.
The tides are against us. The old alliances are giving way to worldwide authoritarianism whether in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Narendra Modi’s India or Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, all of which use laws and militarized police to silence dissidents, journalists, students and professors, including at their most elite universities such as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.
The far-right is on the rise across Europe, especially in France and Germany. The radical left and the labor movement have been broken. We have few defenses. We will not be protected by a corporate-indentured and supine Democratic Party or liberal institutions such as Columbia University.
Fascism can only be defeated with a rival militancy — a militancy communists, anarchists and socialists in the 1930s exhibited — one that offers an alternative vision and does not compromise with despotic power. This rival militancy accepts the inevitability of brutal state repression and the need for self-sacrifice. It does not seek accommodation or appeasement. We will resurrect this militancy and battle back through sustained acts of civil disobedience — including strikes — against these despotic forces, or be reduced to vassals.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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Views expressed in this interview may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Great article, Mr. Hedges! You are just about the only major journalist to give Christian Fundamentalists the attention they deserve.
It’s hard to get past the opening blurb when one feels that “Zionist Extremists and Christian Fascists” have already been in charge of the US Government for decades. Probably since 1980. Without a break.
Fascism is only the extreme form of capitalism, and even the Centrist Democrats have been supporters of extreme capitalism back when they were the DLC and before that the Reagan Democrats. Even the Democratic Socialists strongly support capitalism, even if they do weakly argue against its extremes. Bernie can be as nationalistic as Trump. And Zionism has been in charge of the US Government, with no limits put upon its extremes, since, when, Kissinger, Brezenski?
It’s not like we’ve been electing or appointing many pro-Palestinian socialists in this nation, and even the notion of limits to capitalism went out with the election of Reagan.
This is why I despise all religion. The idea that in the 21st century, human beings still believe in the existence of some supernatural “being” that watches over them, that they still “pray” to this fictional entity, and that they use this entire irrational belief system to wage bloody wars and pogroms against each other, is infantile psychosis. As long as these beliefs are allowed to continue, humanity will destroy itself.
Right Carolyn. I really have to question the intelligence and gullibility of the masses in their belief of this all-seeing, all-knowing entity. Religion is a cause of much suffering.
The Roman philosopher Seneca summed it up well long ago: Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Evangelicals of the time were furious that the Framerss refused to establish Christianity as the new nation’s official state religion and have been scheming against us ever since. It’s hard to picture a bolder slap in the face to traditional, authoritarian Christianity than the Declaration of Indendence’s powerful pledge of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the here and now as an objective of the new polity. State enforcement of prayer, obedience, and self-denial to prepare for the afterlife had heretofore long been the norm in the Old World.
I don’t believe most of these people actually believe in God. It’s more of life style and/or a way to tell who’s on the fascist/nationalist team. It would seem that the more “conservative” a Christian Nationalist is, the more likely he will be caught with his unit stuffed in a glory hole at the airport. Interestingly, since the difference between Christianity and Judaism would be this Christ fellow…they really have a woody for the violent stuff and not the actual teachings of old Hayzoos . I doubt any of them could quote anything from the sermon on the mount/ Beatitudes. too socialist, not enough violent imagery. I’m sure it’s much the same w/ a large percentage of Zionists.
“The tides are against us. The old alliances are giving way to worldwide authoritarianism whether in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China”
Terribly disappointing. Hedges gets aboard the Putin Xi Western demonization train.
Me thinks I’m done wasting time with Mr. Hedges. He’s giving serious support to one of the most delusional and dangerous talking points emanating non-stop from the Washington empire and its establishment mouthpieces this century.
Tragic. Shame on Hedges. I may as well be reading Soros type garbage.
When you’re fighting the worst scourge of mankind, western imperialism, and you try riding along on a very high horse, you’ll find yourself riding alone. And the allies you reject will rightly proclaim that you never had it in you to fight. The Soviet Union was in many respects a totalitarian hellhole. But that country was essential in defeating Nazi Germany. As a matter of fact, the U.S. at the time was a racist apartheid state with a cruel overseas empire of its own. Together they beat something even worse. Like it or not, we today are going to have to place our hopes in regimes and maybe in ideologies that aren’t exactly consonant with our “sacred values”. Or we all go under.
“The Soviet Union was in many respects a totalitarian hellhole. But that country was essential in defeating Nazi Germany.”
First, it was not a totalitarian hellhole. You’re falling for the anti-Stalinist paradigm’s propaganda. There were many positive features that are ignored throughout the West. Second, what Hedges is essentially advocating is that we don’t make alliances with Putin and Xi in fighting against the Washington militarist empire. He’s essentially lumping them together, which is dumb and incredibly manipulative. Hedges is implying he’d Soviet bash instead of joining forces with them; after all, Xi and Putin are in the same category in the eyes of the West as Stalin and USSR were in the 1930s and early ’40s.
It’s not upholding sacred values to have hope that one of the premier liberal thinkers would refrain from routinely lambasting two leaders who sometimes stand up to the Western imperialists or that he’d at least work to not put the world on the brink of nuclear war by feeding into the lies.
It appears Hedges never had it in him to fight. I’m willing to make alliances with Xi and Putin, he’s not.
I think we might not throw out the baby with the bathwater, which seems to be happening quite a lot these days. Hedges has much knowledge and can apply it to his analysis in ways that are meaningful. Then there are the times when his uber-pessimism becomes counterproductive, as does his jumping on the US-enemies bandwagon. I find it easy to ignore those part, and to concentrate where he is bringing information and attention on important aspects that others often ignore. We can pick and choose, among what’s offered, rather than walking away from the table entirely.
Hedges can no longer be forgiven for consistenly (he’s made similar comments in the past) supporting the most perilous for world humanity vilification campaigns we’ve probably ever witnessed.
Shameful conduct on his behalf, especially bc he should know better.
To the Christofascists urging us to read the Bible, I urge the same. The repeated warnings by OT prophets about the unholiness of power. The NT accounts of Jesus favoring the least among us. Why, then, have these uber right wing distorted versions become so popular?
Look at a global econ system enabled by neolib/neocon political servants of multinational corporations. Where devastation of human communities and entire ecosystems are defined away as externalities. Look at Dem, Labour, and Liberal political parties that abandoned the majority working class (and the poor) decades ago. For the many of the world, there is neither economic security nor political salvation.
Enter the TV preachers and their Gospel of Prosperity. God wants you to prosper, but you must have sufficient faith. The implication is if you’re not well off, it’s because of your own inadequacies. Structural inequities do not exist in their thinking. This blends with an extreme version of Calvinism; God is totally in control so determines who is predestined for salvation. A way to know is to see how God’s favor is shown in the rich and powerful. Thus the goal of those who need should be to emulate the haves–it’s their only hope.
Enter also the demagogues who offer the security of nationalism. It, too, with religious overtones–only if our group is pure enough, freed of the tainted, the different, the unbelievers, will we prosper.
Where in heck is the National Council of churches?
I wonder if Chris Hedges, as a former divinity student, has any light to throw on the following biblical passage . I’m using the Knox translation of Genesis 17, 20-21:
“As for Ismael, for him too I grant thy prayer; be sure that I will bless him, and make him fruitful, and grant him increase beyond all measure, so that he will be the father of twelve chieftains. From him, too, a great nation shall arise; but when I make good this promise of mine, it will be for Isaac, the son thou wilt have, at this time next year, by thy wife Sara.”
Ismael was the son of Abram, later renamed Abraham. With the consent of his wife, who was believed to be too old to conceive, Abram fathered Ismael with their maid servant Agar. Abraham found it hard to believe that the not-yet-conceived Isaac could ever be produced at his and his wife’s age, hence the Lord’s emphasis on “making good this promise” through Isaac. But that promise does not seem to me negate the promise regarding Ismael.
Without endorsing the scriptural justification claimed by Israel regarding current land rights, it does seem to me that if one invokes the promise regarding Isaac one should also allow invocation of the promise to descendants of Ismael.
We are already vassals and have been for generations. Our enslavement is done under a Potemkin Democracy that is a cynical farce. All that can be done in a dying empire is to stay alive and ride it down. All such crashes are bloody and tragic. It is what we Americans have earned and deserve.
“Zionist extremists and Christian fascists, who are united and now hold senior positions throughout the Trump administration, embody a global movement to the extreme right.”
Actually the “extreme right” has a huge chunk of members who absolutely disdain Israel and everything Zionist power in America represents. Of course, many of these members also fuse their critique of pro-Israel power with racist filthy nonsense.
That is true.
Oh they hate Jews, but the crazies among them think they need Isreal expansion to bring on the apocalypse. I’m sure some of the others see profit and control of Iran ect in the short term. but I suspect that the many on the American right just plain like the way Isreal does things-they feel a certain kinship with their genocidal friends and hope to emulate them