Netanyahu tried to court young Trump fans — here’s why it didn’t work

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on the Full Send podcast earlier this month in an attempt to reach young American men, who are increasingly opposed to Israel. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

By Arno Rosenfeld July 23, 2025

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu visited the United States earlier this month, he took a detour from the typical foreign dignitary visit to record a podcast with the Nelk Boys, a team of YouTube pranksters followed online by millions of mostly young men who President Donald Trump — Netanyahu’s close ally — successfully courted during his 2024 campaign.

But if Netanyahu was expecting an easy public relations victory, the reaction to his appearance on the Full Send podcast suggested something far different.

Support for the country is flagging among nearly every young demographic in the United States, with a recent poll finding that unfavorable views toward Israel among younger Republicans have jumped 42% since 2022. And while the loose constellation of male content creators that comprises the manosphere may be fond of Trump, their politics are increasingly aligned against Israel.

“You go up to the average American today and you think they’re going to be ‘Free Palestine,’” Aaron Steinberg, one of the Nelk Boys, said following his conversation with Netanyahu.

The brand of hostility toward Israel among the sort of young men that cheered Trump’s multiple appearances on Full Send and similar podcasts is often crude and simplistic, mixing concern over civilians in Gaza with antisemitic tropes and outright hostility toward Jews.

In response to backlash over the episode, which was released on Monday and has received 1.2 million views, Steinberg and his co-host Kyle Foregard hosted a livestream where they invited some of the biggest names in online streaming to discuss the podcast.

Instead of helping to burnish Netanyahu’s reputation, the hosts seemed eager to turn on him. “I really wish I, personally, went at him harder,” Steinberg said of the interview, in which the only significant pushback from the hosts came when Netanyahu said he preferred Burger King over McDonald’s.

“He kept referring to Hamas as doing all these terrible things — killing babies — and what I see is Netanyahu with the bombs doing similar things,” added Steinberg, who is Jewish and has spoken about his grandparents being murdered in the Holocaust.

“Someone said having Netanyahu on is like having modern-day Hitler on,” Foregard, who has interviewed Trump three times, said at one point. “It’s a good point.”

Antisemites invited to react

Perhaps the most telling aspect of their response to the controversy was that several of the guests they invited to join them, apparently at the behest of their followers who placed suggestions in the livestream chat, were notorious antisemites.

At one point Steinberg asked Nick Fuentes, one of the country’s most prominent white supremacists, for advice on dealing with rising antisemitism.

“Jews are portrayed as the biggest victims,” Fuentes replied. “But the reality is, we all know Jewish people are an extraordinary privileged group.” He went on to describe how Jews were “over-represented” in the “ownership of powerful, elite institutions” and to blame Jews for abortions in the Black community.

They also invited Amrou Fudl, who goes by Myron Gaines, and he almost immediately turned to antisemitism: “Here’s the problem: Jews run America and they use their influence to subvert our government, our culture, and get us into a bunch of foreign wars.”

He added that Jews were responsible for 9/11 and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Nicolas De Balinthazy, a streamer known as Sneako, who found himself embroiled in controversy over his repeated antisemitic remarks after meeting with New York City Mayor Eric Adams in June, told Foregard and Steinberg that Israelis “rejected Jesus” and “if you ask any Israeli what they think of Jesus Christ they’ll say he’s burning in excrement in hell,” prompting a rare rebuke from Foregard.

“There’s a lot of good people in Israel too that don’t agree with what’s going on,” Foregard said.

But the same passive interview style that may have drawn Netanyahu to the Nelk appearance also seemed to have led Foregard to repeat some of his guests’ antisemitism, even when he sought to defend Jews.

“Obviously there are rich Jews that run f—ing Hollywood,” Foregard said, echoing earlier comments by Fuentes and prompting an incredulous response from Sneako.

“I mean everyone says that!” Foregard responded, before complaining that people “box those Jews in with normal Jews” and “I don’t think that’s cool.”

Grappling with online antisemitism

The online manosphere, a loose constellation of mostly online male influencers who range from far-right figures like Nick Fuentes to the frattier and less political Nelk Boys crew, serve audiences of young men drawn together by shared interests like fitness and sports betting, who also often traffic in crass rhetoric toward women and minorities, including Jews.

Foregard complained at one point that, because Nelk didn’t get paid for interviewing Netanyahu, “I better have at least 100 Tel Aviv birds in my DMs or something,” using slang for attractive women and private messages on social media.

And while trying to defend Jews, Foregard said that one of Nelk’s Jewish employees was “lucky to pull a seven on a good night at the bar,” referring to a 1-through-10 ranking of a woman’s attractiveness, to suggest that not all Jews were powerful elites.

Steinberg, who has spoken about connecting with his Jewish heritage, expressed his pain over offensive messages he’d received as casual antisemitism has also become increasingly common among mega-popular podcasters like Joe Rogan and Theo Von who, like the Nelk Boys, have not traditionally catered to far-right audiences.

“The things I’ve received are f—ing hate-filled and pretty terrible,” Steinberg told Fuentes.

He told Gaines that there should be a differentiator “between being Israel and being an American Jew.”

Gaines repeated a popular distinction made by Elon Musk and other prominent figures who have sought to separate good Jews and bad Jews. He said that there was a difference between the Jews they were friends with, and prominent anti-Zionist Jews like Norman Finkelstein, and the supposed cabal of Zionist Jews controlling the United States, though these distinctions often seemed difficult to parse.

“It’s not about having a problem with Jews, it’s about having a problem with Zionists — it just so happens that most Zionists tend to be Jewish,” Gaines said.

During an exchange with Hasan Piker, the only left-wing streamer they invited onto the show, the audience saw Foregard grappling with the intersection of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in real time.

While trying to compare Netanyahu to Hitler, Piker asked Foregard whether he believed that the Holocaust was real. “Yeah, I mean I’d say so,” Foregard replied. But he also expressed confusion as to why many of Israel’s opponents on the far right deny the Holocaust even as they condemn Israel for committing genocide.

A series of recent studies have found that young adults on the far right express almost twice as much antisemitism as those on the extreme left, and that students who identify as “alt-right” were nearly three times as likely to say they avoided Jews because of their views on Israel as those who identified as “leftist.”

But it seemed not to occur to Foregard that figures like Fuentes — who in one breath calls for an end to the war in Gaza on “humanitarian grounds” while elsewhere denying that the Holocaust took place — might just not like Jews.

A flustered Piker responded that “Nazis who deny the Holocaust don’t like Benjamin Netanyahu because he’s Jewish and they think Israel’s a Jewish state and they’re doing this for Judaism or whatever the f—.”

Piker seemed to be describing a large chunk of the tens of thousands of Nelk followers who had tuned in to watch the conversation. If they were united in their hostility toward Israel and Netanyahu, they were also more sympathetic to Nick Fuentes and his antisemitic explanation for why the U.S. should withdraw its support for Israel (“We’re European, they’re ethnically Jewish,” he said).

“Damn,” Foregard said while reading messages from viewers. “Chat liked Nick way more than Hasan.”