Soon after American and Israeli warplanes began striking Iranian targets, Conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson took aim not at the regime in Tehran, but at Chabad, the international Jewish outreach movement.
In a video posted to his online platforms on March 4, Carlson devoted a significant portion of his broadcast to insinuating that Chabad-Lubavitch was secretly orchestrating a holy war in the Middle East. The claim drew immediate, bipartisan condemnation from Jewish organizations and a number of political leaders. It also earned an enthusiastic endorsement from Candace Owens, Carlson’s fellow traveler in far-right conspiratorial media, who used the moment to amplify accusations of her own.
The episode represents a troubling escalation in a pattern of antisemitic rhetoric from two of the most-followed right-wing media personalities, and raises urgent questions about the real-world safety of Jewish communities already on high alert.
Carlson’s Podcast
Carlson’s March 4 monologue opened with a compliment and a question: “You may know people who give money to Chabad or run Chabad – super nice people, engaged in all kinds of charitable activities. But what is Chabad exactly?”
He then answered his own question with a series of insinuations. Carlson claimed that the movement had been quietly promoting the construction of the Third Temple – the structure whose rebuilding, in Jewish eschatological tradition, is associated with the arrival of the messiah. The Iran war, he suggested, was not a geopolitical conflict but a religious project, a first step toward destroying the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. “There are key players involved in this war,” Carlson told his audience, “Who believes that what we’re seeing on our television screen and on Twitter will usher in a series of events that will begin with the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, Al Aqsa Mosque, and then the rebuilding of the Third Temple.”
As evidence, Carlson displayed photographs of Israeli soldiers wearing uniform patches bearing an outline of the Temple Mount. He attributed the patches to Chabad. In fact, they originated from a different Jewish organization, according to Chabad sources.
The misattribution was not an isolated error. It was part of his recent pattern of antisemitic claims.
“I believe he’s attacking Chabad because it has become very successful in transforming secular Jews into Jews who care more about Judaism and Israel. I think that that is a big factor in his attacking Chabad, which does nothing political,” Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, told The Jewish Press. “All they do is explain to people why they should be more Jewish.”
Chabad Response
“Carlson’s claims are completely nonsensical from every angle. He alleged that we have a hidden agenda – but belief in the Third Temple is not a hidden agenda at all; it is a well-known and openly stated tenet of Jewish faith,” said a Chabad rabbi in Brooklyn who did not want to be named. “The belief is rooted in the Talmud, which teaches that the Third Temple will descend from Heaven miraculously; it is not something to be built by people. Every mitzvah performed places a divine brick in the Temple, so to speak. Acts of kindness performed by both Jews and non-Jews alike trigger a divine response in Heaven that brings the building of the Third Temple closer.”
As a result of Carlson’s false claims, the Brooklyn Chabad rabbi has already ramped up security. “Carlson blames Chabad for the Iran war, then Owens posted ‘find out where your local Chabad is’ so the threat level is raised,” he said. “My first responsibility is to keep everyone safe. I had to ask police to be outside this past Shabbos. And now I’m going to have to get video cameras and an armed guard for Shabbos, which costs up to $500 per Shabbos.”
Across the country in California, Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein of the Chabad in Poway, has a more positive view of the controversy. “My first reaction was wow, our message is reaching the world. The whole world is realizing that we have to do something to bring Moshiach. Tucker has gone nuts but it’s manifesting in a way that it’s bringing an awareness of Moshiach.”
Despite being shot by a terrorist in 2019, Rabbi Goldstein said he’s not concerned about any increase in security threats due to the Carlson attack. “I’m more concerned about Iranian sleeper cells,” he said.
“Singling out the most visible and vibrant Jewish movement is a coded way of targeting [the Jews], despite Chabad’s well-documented history of extraordinary kindness, community service, and the Rebbe’s lifelong campaign to spread goodness, light, and one more mitzvah,” said Rabbi Shlomo Litvin, the Chabad rabbi in Lexington, Kentucky.
Like most Chabad rabbis, he’s advocating for a spiritual response. “Every Jew should proudly stand with Chabad: pray together, take on an additional good deed, wrap tefillin, light Shabbos candles, donate locally, and join the Rebbe’s true revolution of uplifting the world through truth, kindness, and more light.”
Owens Piles On
Candace Owens, who received StopAntisemitism’s “Antisemite of the Year” designation in 2024 – a year before Carlson claimed the same distinction in 2025 – wasted little time in amplifying Carlson’s narrative. In a March 5 post on X, she declared, “Tucker is telling the truth about the Chabad Lubavitch,” before launching into accusations of her own.
Owens also revived the claim that Jews were behind the September 11 attacks, a baseless conspiracy theory with a long, poisonous history. She promoted a 1958 academic book exploring the relationship between Freud’s Jewish background and Kabbalistic mysticism, presenting it to her followers as evidence of a larger Chabad conspiracy – a reading scholars and lay readers alike have roundly rejected as a profound distortion of the text’s actual argument.
Owens additionally alleged that Jewish organizations had attempted to have her killed, describing the claim as a product of a coordinated campaign. The incident she appeared to reference involved a single individual from New Jersey who was arrested in 2024 for making online death threats – a serious crime, but one that bears no relationship to the collective plot she described.
The two commentators have a well-documented history of escalating anti-Jewish rhetoric. Owens has previously characterized Israel as a “demonic nation,” suggested Israel was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and described a prominent social media personality as “a satanic Zionist” – language that echoes passages from the Book of Revelation long weaponized by Christian antisemites. Carlson, for his part, was named “Antisemite of the Year” by StopAntisemitism in December 2025, in part for platforming and sympathetically interviewing Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who has questioned the Holocaust, that October.
History of Targeting
The convergence of Carlson’s and Owens’s attacks on Chabad is particularly alarming because the movement has already been the target of severe violence.
In December 2025, two men murdered fifteen people attending a Chabad Chanukah celebration in Sydney. In August 2024, a man stabbed a passerby in front of the movement’s world headquarters in Brooklyn while shouting “Free Palestine.” In January 2026, a vehicle was driven into the same building.
The Secure Community Network, a Jewish security organization, reported that the number of violent online posts targeting Jews nearly doubled in the five days following the start of the Iran campaign, rising from roughly 2,200 to more than 4,300. The organization issued a bulletin warning Jewish communities to exercise heightened caution, while noting that no specific, credible threats had been identified.
President Trump – who has maintained a close enough relationship with Carlson to receive him at the White House on multiple occasions – seems to have broken with the pundit over his characterization of the Iran campaign, which Carlson had called “absolutely disgusting and evil.” “Tucker has lost his way,” Trump told ABC News last week.
Lawsuit Explored
Mort Klein revealed to The Jewish Press that ZOA is exploring possible legal action on behalf of Chabad and other targets of Carlson and Owens. “I’ll talk to our lawyers,” he said. “We have a whole legal division that filed numerous lawsuits on behalf of Jewish students. If it’s legally appropriate, Carlson should absolutely be sued. We should go after prominent Jew haters like Carlson and Owens with everything we’ve got because they’re endangering our people in a serious way.”
“Carlson has obviously defamed Chabad,” Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told The Jewish Press. “Unfortunately, under American law, only individuals can sue for defamation – not organizations for defamation. If Chabad wants to sue, they would be able to in Canada or other countries. And I would be happy to help them.”
Silver Lining
Carlson may have inadvertently done more for Chabad fundraising than any giving-day campaign. After his March 4 broadcast, Harvard activist Shabbos Kestenbaum took to social media with an unusual form of counter-programming. Drawing on a teaching he attributed to the Lubavitcher Rebbe – that hatred is best answered not in kind but with love – Kestenbaum invited Chabad Houses to post their donation links so that he and his followers could support them directly. Within minutes, dozens of centers had responded, and Kestenbaum said he personally contributed to the first ten. “An attack on Chabad is an attack on the whole Jewish people,” he told COLlive. “Chabad does more for the Jewish people than any other organization or denomination.”
The spontaneous campaign was only the most organized expression of a broader wave of solidarity giving. A Chabad emissary in Georgia reported that a complete stranger had walked into a Chabad House in Florida and handed the rabbi an $18,000 check with the words “This is for Tucker.” A Florida-based shliach described a similar experience, telling colleagues in a WhatsApp group that a random non-Jewish woman had arrived and donated $500.
For those involved, the response was quintessentially Chabad – an organization that supporters say has long cultivated the ability to overcome challenges.
“What we have learned is we turn lemons into lemonade, tragedy into bracha, darkness into light,” said Rabbi Goldstein. “These two influencers are saying we are trying to build the third Beis HaMikdash, so let’s run with it.”