A new group opposing AIPAC is backing anti-Israel candidates across party lines. Some of its endorsees have blamed Israel and Jews for 9/11 and the Charlie Kirk assassination. Its founder claims Hamas’ October 7 attack was a “false flag” operation and has referred to Jewish people as “the Synagogue of Satan.”
This is the Anti-Zionist America PAC, or AZAPAC.
With a stated aim to “de-Zionize” the American government and end military aid to Israel, AZAPAC is unlike the other PACs that have recently popped up as a counterweight to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that has poured millions of dollars into political races across the country.
Those groups - including American Priorities, PAL PAC, and Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption - are rallying their support around a brand of pro-Palestinian progressives in line with Congress’s left-wing “Squad” members. Michael Rectenwald, AZAPAC’s founder and a self-described libertarian, is taking a different approach.
“We’re not like leftist anti-Zionists, calling for ‘from the river to the sea’ and all this nonsense,” said Rectenwald in an interview. “We are not trying to say the State of Israel should not exist. That is not our concern. Our concern is the US government only, and what it’s doing.”
To that end, Rectenwald’s group, which was founded last summer, has endorsed fringe candidates across the political spectrum, from both Republican and Democratic parties, as well as independents. The primary criteria for endorsement, Rectenwald said, are that candidates will vote against aid to Israel and do not take money from pro-Israel lobbying groups.
AZAPAC’s spending has been relatively minimal (it had raised $111,556 by the end of 2025, according to FEC filings), but it taps into an ascendant set of sentiments, including a rising anti-Israel faction of Republicans, as well as the conspiracy-theory mindset increasingly occupying Americans of all stripes.
AZAPAC-endorsed candidates support antisemitic conspiracy theories
Some of the candidates it has endorsed have promoted conspiracy theories about Jews. Multiple AZAPAC-endorsed politicians believe that Jews were responsible for 9/11 and that Israel was behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Meanwhile, Rectenwald himself has taken to social media (and tried courting avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes) in an attempt to broaden the group’s reach, leaning into antisemitic tropes about Jews and Israel himself in the process.
“Don’t die for ‘israel’. Don’t die for the Syn@gogue of S@t@n,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet in March about the war in Iran.
In another tweet, he wrote that “The Synagogue of Satan refers to those who are genetically Jewish but have rejected Christ and thus utterly forfeit the heavenly Jerusalem.”
He wrote that Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel was a “false flag” operation, and suggested that 9/11 was, as well.
In the group’s launch video, Rectenwald, narrating, called pro-Israel politicians “puppets” whose “strings are pulled by donors loyal to the modern nation state of Israel.”
Rectenwald’s gripe, he says, is the control that the pro-Israel lobby has over US politicians. “Every zionist in the US government should be tried for treason,” he wrote, adding in a reply that those politicians are more loyal to Israel than to America.
But his theories about Jews controlling governments have exceeded the bounds of the United States and Israel.
“Once you study England beginning with Cromwell, you know it wasn’t the British empire to follow but the Jewish empire,” he wrote last year. “That’s not antisemitism. It’s just history.”
Rectenwald acknowledged that AZAPAC has faced accusations of antisemitism.
“Every once in a while, we get somebody coming along and saying we’re antisemites - ‘This is Hitler’s playbook,’ or something like that,” Rectenwald said. “We just answer by saying this: It’s nothing to do with antisemitism. We have Jewish supporters. Listen, if Max Blumenthal [a journalist who writes critically about Israel] wanted to join our board, we would welcome him with open arms, for example. So there’s nothing about discrimination.”
Opposition to AIPAC and US aid to Israel has become an increasingly normative position among Democrats. The bulk of AZAPAC’s candidates, however, are Republicans running on “America First” platforms against pro-Israel, AIPAC-endorsed incumbents, such as Reps. Randy Fine and Keith Self, whom the group sees as being “Israel-first.”
The challengers are part of a growing anti-Israel movement within the Republican Party, along with personalities including Tucker Carlson and Fuentes, that opposes Donald Trump’s Israel alliance and is considered by some Republicans to pose a threat to the party’s future. Like Carlson and Fuentes, candidates have espoused conspiracy theories about Jews.
Mike Wilnau, a Republican congressional candidate in Florida, was endorsed by GOP gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, as well as AZAPAC. Wilnau, who has been vocally opposed to the war in Iran, claimed that “Israel killed Charlie Kirk for war in Iran,” and wrote on X, “Don’t forget, the Jewish messiah is the Christian antichrist.”
Wilnau isn’t the only AZAPAC endorsee pushing Charlie Kirk conspiracy theories.
Michael Faris, who is running for Mitch McConnell’s Senate seat in Kentucky with AZAPAC’s support, posted a poll on X, asking his followers, “Was Charlie Kirk assassinated because of his shifting views on Jewish billionaire donors?” 79% of the 299 voters said “Yes.”
In February, Faris reposted an AI-generated video dramatizing a conspiracy theory in which a Jewish real estate mogul orchestrated 9/11. He also wrote that until “about 18 months ago, I had never even heard the word Zionist,” adding that it was time to “wake up.” And in response to billionaire Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ad about antisemitism, Faris wrote, “I will not be posting a blue square. Thanks anyway. That’s a fake, manufactured crises.”
So far in this midterm election cycle, AZAPAC has not picked winners.
Endorsee Mark Newgent lost his Texas Republican primary against Self in early March, 80.2% to 19.8%. Newgent repeatedly challenged Self to support the release of the Epstein files rather than “continue to protect pedophiles for AIPAC.”
Zeeshan Hafeez - an AZAPAC-backed Democrat - received the fourth-most votes in Texas’ 33rd district primary, with 8.5%. Colin Allred won with 44% of the vote.
Cynthia McKinney, a former Democratic congresswoman running in Georgia as a Green Party candidate, would have been an AZAPAC pick, except that she suspended her congressional campaign because it did not raise enough funds to cover the state’s filing fee. “We were asked to provide the funds, but with insufficient time in which to do so,” Rectenwald wrote in an email.
McKinney tweeted back in 2021 that “Zionists did” 9/11, and includes a complimentary quote from Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has a history of antisemitism, on her website. She is now pivoting to run for governor of Georgia, according to her website.
The group has also endorsed Republicans Tyler Dykes, who was arrested for assaulting law enforcement during the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, and Nick Hankins, whose positions include banning “Islamic followers from immigrating” because “Islam is not compatible with the Constitution or American values.”
Casey Putsch, who is running for governor of Ohio, had been endorsed by AZAPAC, but the group has since removed his name from its website. Putsch drew accusations of dog whistling to Nazis when he advertised an upcoming “beer hall rally,” which, combined with his last name, evokes the name of the “beer hall putsch,” a failed coup attempt led by Adolf Hitler.
He had also made a YouTube video in which he asked the AI tool Grok to name Hitler’s “good” qualities. AZAPAC did not provide an explanation for its withdrawal of the endorsement, referring questions to the Putsch campaign. The campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Rectenwald, who is Catholic, said he was raised in a predominantly German and Italian neighborhood in Pittsburgh, and that he “didn’t know what a Jewish person was until I was an adult, frankly.” Since then, he has lived near a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh and said his kids have made several Jewish friends at school.
Though Rectenwald denies being a purveyor of antisemitism, he has also not been one to denounce it online. Leo Terrell, the often-tweeting leader of the Justice Department’s antisemitism task force, wrote last year, “We will eliminate antisemitism!!”
Rectenwald responded, “Antisemitism is free speech.”