On the evening of March 5, 2026 — one week into Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran — Tucker Carlson opened his show not with analysis of ballistic missile trajectories or nuclear enrichment timelines, but with a theory about a Hasidic Jewish outreach organization.
“There are key players involved in this war,” Carlson told his audience, “who believe that what we’re seeing on our television screens 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.”
The organization allegedly behind this plot, he claimed, was Chabad-Lubavitch — a movement and an organization known globally for its work encouraging good deeds, or mitzvot in Hebrew, to bring more goodness into the world. As evidence, Carlson pointed to patches worn by some IDF soldiers depicting the ancient Temple. However, these patches have no connection to the organization, as has been confirmed by Chabad leaders.
In Jewish theology, the rebuilding of the Third Temple is a longstanding messianic aspiration — traditionally understood as occurring through divine intervention in the messianic era, not through state policy or military action. Carlson’s framing collapsed that theological belief into a geopolitical strategy. By recasting a spiritual belief as an active war agenda, such framing obscures the stated security rationale of confronting Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs and instead casts the war as a religious crusade.
The effect was immediate. Between March 5 and March 9, The Blue Square Alliance Command Center tracked over 208,000 posts mentioning Chabad across social media platforms — a 724% increase from baseline. The surge began within hours of Carlson’s broadcast and accelerated the following morning when Candace Owens, posting to nearly 8 million followers, amplified and escalated his claims. “Tucker is telling the truth about the Chabad Lubavitch,” she wrote.
“They are digging tunnels in New York and in cities all across America. They are taking over entire towns in New Jersey. You should absolutely be aware of where the Chabad is nearest your home. These people are dangerous. They are a radical sect of mystic occultists that follow the idea of a war messiah and they harm kids.” Owens’ post alone accumulated 8.6 million views.
Of the 208,000 posts tracked, 18,000 explicitly paired “Chabad” with “Third Temple” framing — the direct fingerprint of Carlson’s central claim. An additional 76,000 posts mentioned “Third Temple” in the same window, reflecting the conspiratorial discourse that Carlson’s comments plugged into. All together, these comments generated more than 52 million impressions.
This was not the first time Chabad was targeted by an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
When Owens wrote that Chabad members were “digging tunnels in New York,” she was not inventing a narrative. She was retrieving one that had already been indexed and circulating online. The claim traces back to the Brooklyn tunnel incident. In January 2024, a group of Chabad yeshiva students were arrested after excavating a tunnel beneath the movement’s world headquarters in Brooklyn. The students’ apparent motivation was mundane, stemming from frustration over a long-stalled plan to expand the synagogue. Online, however, the episode quickly mutated into something else. In the weeks following the incident, the Command Center tracked over 146,000 posts across circulating blood libel claims, linking the tunnel to child harm, secret societies, and occult practices.
By the time Owens invoked the image of Chabad members “digging tunnels,” the narrative infrastructure was already in place. These conspiracies narratives draw on some of the oldest antisemitic tropes in modern history and have led to real-world attacks directed at Chabad in the past. They frame Jews as a secretive cabal manipulating governments and wars from behind the scenes; portray Jewish religious belief as inherently extremist or apocalyptic; revive blood libel motifs by pairing accusations of ritual or occult practice with claims of child harm; and invoke imagery of tunnels and hidden networks to suggest subterranean control. By casting Chabad as orchestrators of geopolitical conflict in pursuit of a messianic agenda, the narrative echoes longstanding myths of dual loyalty, clandestine power, and malevolent religious fanaticism. It maligns a global network devoted to education, charity, and acts of kindness, transforming visible community engagement into supposed evidence of secret control. These themes are not incidental. They are structural features of antisemitic conspiracy thinking, repackaged for a contemporary political moment.
The backlash to Carlson’s claims was unusually broad, crossing political and religious lines in ways rarely seen in the current media environment. President Trump publicly rebuked Carlson’s comments, telling ABC News that “Tucker has lost his way.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called it “abhorrent antisemitism” invoking “medieval tropes and ugly conspiracies.” Billionaire Bill Ackman warned that Carlson “has reached a level of absurdity that is going to get someone killed.” Even figures on the right, including New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz, pushed back — describing Chabad as “the warmest, kindest, most welcoming organization ever that does nonstop charity work.”
Chabad’s official response emphasized not only the inaccuracy of the claims but the danger they pose. Spokesman Yaacov Behrman called the claims “dangerous blood libel.” Community leaders warned that such rhetoric has the potential to fuel harassment, vandalism, and threats directed at local Chabad centers and Jewish institutions more broadly. Analyst Joel Mowbray, whose rebuttal was distributed by Chabad leadership, identified why the organization was targeted in the first place: “Because Chabad is not known to almost anyone outside of the Jewish community, it makes for an easy target of dark conspiracy theories.”
