You’ve heard about the Trilateral Commission. You know about the Council on Foreign Relations, Davos, the Freemasons. The internet has told you all about Mossad, the CIA, and shadowy cabals pulling strings from smoke-filled rooms. But there’s a global religious network with thousands of outposts in over 100 countries, documented access to the Kremlin, the White House, and elite universities.
It’s got theological influence over millions of American evangelicals who don’t understand what they’re actually supporting, and a dead leader whose frozen instructions continue generating coordinated worldwide action three decades after his death. It’s not secret. It’s not hidden. And it’s operating in plain sight. But still, you’ve probably never heard of it. This is Chabad-Lubavitch, and it has proximity to power that would make Jeffrey Epstein jealous. It’s also got the civilizational infrastructure and global power base more sophisticated than most nations. And it’s probably somewhere in your nearest city.
When Jeffrey empire collapsed in 2019, it revealed something Americans excel at noticing: personal corruption. He was a monster with a private island, blackmail operations, and elite-level deviance. And in America, we are good at personal scandal and excel at naming villains. What we’re catastrophically bad at is recognizing patterns and systems. And sometimes we get so busy hunting for smoke-filled back rooms and secret handshakes that we fail to miss what’s right in front of us. s
Unlike most villains, Epstein’s story starts at his death, rather than ending with it. Tens of thousands of people, maybe more, are right now - as we speak - trying to unravel an influence network that included former presidents, British royalty, academic luminaries, and intelligence-adjacent fixers. A huge part of the mystery that people are trying to unpack is from where he gained his fortune. Epstein was a parasite on existing power structures, not an architect of new ones. He didn’t build anything, create anything, or as far as we can tell, sell anything. He was the Koch brothers of sex trafficking: logistically impressive, morally bankrupt, and structurally irrelevant.
People are searching for those answers because the public hasn’t been given any. And looking for answers to those big questions like who hired him, the identity of his co-conspirators, and who he worked for, is a great way to find out the answers to questions you didn’t know you had. Buried in the third tranche of DOJ document releases tied to the Epstein investigation, an FBI Confidential Human Source memo reads like a category error. The memo alleges that Chabad-Lubavitch, the global Hasidic Jewish movement, attempted to “co-opt the Trump presidency” through Jared Kushner as a vector of influence, with Russia-Israel-U.S. triangulation as the strategic objective.
The memo raises a question that most Americans don’t know to ask. Why does a religious movement appear in an FBI influence analysis at all? It’s not a lobbying firm, a defense contractor, or a political action committee. A Hasidic Jewish sect founded in 18th-century Belarus, operating thousands of outpost centers worldwide, led by the frozen authority of a rabbi who died in 1994 and whom a non-trivial percentage of adherents believe never truly died at all.
It’s called Chabad-Lubavitch. Welcome to the only global network that makes the Freemasons look like a homeowners’ association.
CHABAD-LUBAVITCH
If you’ve never heard of Chabad, you’re not alone. If you have heard of them, it’s probably because you saw one of their signature Hanukkah menorahs in a public square, or because you know someone who “went to Chabad” for a Shabbat dinner in college. Chabad specializes in being simultaneously omnipresent and invisible at the same time. They're the religious equivalent of the electrical grid: everywhere, powering everything, and completely invisible until the lights go out.
The official numbers: They’ve got 3,500-plus institutions in over 100 countries. They’ve got roughly 5,000 emissary families operating Chabad Houses from Melbourne to Mumbai, Buenos Aires to Beijing. They’ve got no pope. There’s no central budget. They’ve got no corporate headquarters issuing memos. Each Chabad House is family-run, locally funded, and ideologically synchronized not through bureaucracy but through rigorous adherence to the teachings of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (the Lubavitcher Rebbe) whose leadership from 1951 to 1994 transformed Chabad from a nearly-extinct post-Holocaust remnant into the most visible and influential Hasidic movement on the planet.
Here’s what makes that remarkable:. Before Schneerson died, he never named a successor. The Chabad movement has operated for thirty years without a living supreme leader. There is no mechanism for doctrinal updates, no synod to convene, no magisterium to interpret contemporary challenges. What Schneerson said is what Schneerson said. His recorded talks, written correspondence, and published works constitute a closed canon. It’s like if Mormons decided after Joseph Smith died that they’d just keep re-reading his stuff and hoping he’d show up again, except instead of fracturing into seventeen splinter groups arguing about polygamy, they built a global infrastructure that makes McDonald’s look geographically challenged.
This is almost unheard of in modern religious movements. When Joseph Smith died, the Mormon church fractured. When L. Ron Hubbard died, Scientology needed David Miscavige. When Sun Myung Moon died, the Unification Church splintered. Chabad? Chabad just keeps building and growing and slowly expanding all over the world.
The mechanism is elegant. Schneerson explicitly taught that the generation of the Messiah had arrived, that the final redemption was imminent, and that every Jew had a duty to hasten it through outreach and mitzvah observance. He instructed his followers to establish Chabad Houses in every corner of the globe, to meet Jews where they were, to never wait for permission or ideal conditions before taking up residency anywhere in the world, and continue to establish a global but local power-structure to influence local influence anywhere on Earth.
One of the weird doctrinal fact most people don’t know about Chabad is that a significant number of them believe that Schneerson is the Messiah. Not “was.” Is. Present tense. They believe he’s till in the game. Some believe he never died. Others believe he died but will return to complete his messianic mission, presumably after a quick pit stop to fix whatever cosmic paperwork got misplaced. These are called meshichists (messianists) and while official Chabad leadership publicly disavows them, they are tolerated, not purged. You’ll find “Long Live the Rebbe King Messiah Forever” banners hanging in Chabad synagogues over the world, and in every major U.S. city.. You’ll see his portrait in every Chabad House on earth, gazing benevolently from the wall like a theological Mona Lisa whose eyes follow you around the room.
If this sounds uncomfortably Christian to you (a dead-but-returning Messiah, a global movement awaiting his Second Coming) you’re not wrong. Jewish scholars have been screaming about this for decades. David Berger’s 2001 book The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference argues that Chabad messianism crosses the line into theology indistinguishable from Christianity.
The movement has 3,500 institutions in 100 countries, thousands of emissaries serving Jewish communities worldwide, and decades of embedded relationships with political and religious leaders. They’re running soup kitchens and campus outreach centers. The theology is bizarre but the output is a global infrastructure with tentacles everywhere. They’re like AAA for Jews: always available, surprisingly helpful, and funded by mechanisms nobody fully understands.
THE DARK SIDE OF CHABAD’S ANTI-GOYIM HATE-THEOLOGY
The Chabad’s Messiah, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, taught that Jews and non-Jews do not merely occupy different moral ranks or stages of spiritual development, but are fundamentally different kinds of beings. Schneerson explicitly used the language of “different species,” and not in a metaphorical sense. He wrote that between Jews and Gentiles, “we do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather, we have a case of…a totally different species” (Likutei Sichot, vol. 2, p. 294).
This claim is ontological. Jewish and non-Jewish people may appear similar outwardly, but Schneerson insisted that “the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world,” adding that while Jewish bodies may “look as if it were in substance similar to bodies of non-Jews,” this similarity is only superficial. The “difference of the inner quality,” he concluded, is so great that “the bodies should be considered as completely different species” (Likutei Sichot, vol. 2, p. 294). Jews are simply humans in Chabad thinking, and Gentiles are something else entirely
This essential distinction becomes even sharper when applied to the soul, who Jews and Gentiles are inwardly. Schneerson taught that “two contrary types of soul exist,” asserting that “a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness” (Tanya, ch. 1). In other formulations, he stated that “souls of non-Jews come entirely from the female part of the satanic sphere” (Tanya, ch. 1).
This is not a claim about moral inclination, ignorance, or spiritual immaturity. Schneerson asserted that Jews and Gentiles have opposite spiritual origins and incompatible metaphysical lineages. In his framework, a non-Jew does not possess the same category of soul at all. The distinction is not corruption versus purity, nor fallenness versus redemption, but source. Jews come from holiness, Gentiles come from the satanic realm (Tanya, ch. 1). They are not merely different. They are opposites by design.
From this foundation flows the Chabad teleological claim about existence itself. Schneerson described non-Jewish life as lacking intrinsic purpose, stating plainly, “A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity” (Likutei Sichot, vol. 23, p. 117). He grounded this claim in his interpretation of Isaiah, writing, “It is written, ‘And the strangers shall stand and feed your flocks’ (Isaiah 61:5). The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews” (Likutei Sichot, vol. 23, p. 117).
Jews, by contrast, are said not to exist as means for any other end. Schneerson stated that “a Jew was not created as a means for some [other] purpose; he himself is the purpose, since the substance of all [divine] emanations was created only to serve the Jews” (Likutei Sichot, vol. 23, p. 117). This is not merely spiritual favoritism. It is a reversal of universalist creation theology, replacing it with a sharply particularist hierarchy of being in which non-Jews function instrumentally within creation.
Schneerson explicitly treated Jewish life and non-Jewish life as unequal in moral weight, even at the embryonic level. He taught that “a non-Jew should be punished by death if he kills an embryo, while the Jew should not be, even if the embryo is Jewish” (Likutei Sichot, vol. 44, p. 17). The justification is revealing. Schneerson explained, “We should not destroy an important thing [Jewish life] for the sake of something subsidiary [non-Jewish]. The embryo is considered to be a subsidiary; non-Jews are considered to be subsidiaries of Jews” (Likutei Sichot, vol. 44, p. 17).
These ideas culminate in a vision of Jewish cosmic sovereignty. Schneerson asserted that “since every Jew, men and even women and children, brings about the existence of the entire creation, they become masters over the entire world” (Likutei Sichot, vol. 23, p. 118). From this premise follows the conclusion that “every single creation owes them recognition” (Likutei Sichot, vol. 23, p. 118). Authority in this system is not earned through obedience, virtue, or righteousness. It is inherent, flowing automatically from Jewish existence itself. Dominion is not political or contingent. It is metaphysical.
In sum, Schneerson’s teachings, and by extension the teachings of Chabad-Lubavitch, which regards him as the Messiah, depict a closed, hierarchical cosmology in which Jews and non-Jews are not fellow image-bearers under God but distinct orders of being. Difference is not accidental, historical, or covenantal. It is built into the structure of reality itself. The moral, legal, and cosmic conclusions Schneerson draws are not aberrations but logical consequences of that underlying metaphysical framework.
PROMINENT CHABAD LEADERS
Given how absolutely horrific Chabad theology is toward the “goyim” or Gentiles, who on Earth would hold it? One might surmise it would be a small contingent of ultra-orthodox Jews in a dusty corner of Israel somewhere, compartmentalized and pigeon holed in a Jerusalem ghetto, as far away from Gentiles as they could possibly get. Right? Actually, no. You’d be surprised.
Jared Kushner
Jared Kushner’s documented financial relationship with Chabad is deep. Between 2003 and 2013, the Kushner Family Foundation donated over $342,000 to Chabad institutions: Harvard Chabad, the Ohel (Schneerson’s gravesite), and various U.S. and Israeli centers. In 2024, Kushner donated between $1-2 million to Chabad UAE. These aren’t scandalous sums by billionaire standards because Bill Gates spends more on exotic female companions and malaria nets. But when you track where Kushner shows up, when he shows up, and what he does once he gets power, the donations tell you something about formation, not transaction. Helping Americans with generous donations? Helping Jews in the United Arab Emirates? Yes, please!
Jared Kushner was actively involved with Chabad at Harvard. He and Ivanka Trump made multiple high-profile ritual visits to the Ohel (Schneerson’s grave in Queens) immediately before the 2016 election and again before 2020. These weren’t photo ops. In Chabad theology, visiting the Ohel is a significant ritual act. You write a note requesting the Rebbe’s blessing. You place it on his grave. You’re seeking intercession from a man you believe still holds spiritual authority. It’s prayer-by-mail to a dead rabbi who might not be dead, depending on which Chabad guy you ask. The secular press covered these visits as quirky religious tourism and missed what Chabad adherents understood: you don’t visit the Ohel unless you’re acknowledging the Rebbe’s ongoing authority in your life. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of kissing the ring, except the ring is on a gravestone and the guy wearing it has been dead for three decades but his followers are still taking his calls.
Now consider what Kushner actually did in the White House: Abraham Accords, UAE normalization, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, backing Israeli settlement expansion. The guy who prayed at the Rebbe’s grave before his father-in-law’s election produced the most pro-Israel foreign policy framework in modern American history. Chabad didn’t install Kushner. Kushner had been attending their events, studying their texts, and absorbing their worldview since college. They didn’t blackmail him into policy positions; they raised him to see the world a certain way and then watched him govern accordingly.
Mark Levin
Kushner gives you executive power, but if you want to understand Chabad’s influence on the broader evangelical-conservative coalition, you need to understand Mark Levin. Levin is one of the most influential voices in American conservatism: 8 million weekly listeners, massive Fox News audience, bestselling author. And Levin is publicly, vocally aligned with Chabad. He has a personal Chabad rabbi, Chaim Cohen, who provides Torah study and spiritual mentoring. Levin participates in tefillin rituals. He’s attended the Kinnus Hashluchim (the international Chabad emissary conference in Brooklyn) and given interviews from Chabad events praising them as “the fastest-growing movement in Judaism.” For a guy who spends most of his airtime yelling about the Constitution, he’s surprisingly chill about taking theological instruction from a movement that thinks the New Testament is fan fiction.
Levin isn’t making policy in the Oval Office, but he shapes how millions of Christians understand Israel, Jewish-Christian relations, and what “Judeo-Christian values” actually means. And he does it while personally spiritually aligned with a movement that explicitly teaches Christianity is idolatrous. Chabad doctrine holds that Jesus was not the Messiah, that Trinitarian theology is idolatry for Jews, and that Christianity represents a fundamental departure from authentic monotheism. “Messianic Judaism” (the idea that you can be Jewish and believe in Jesus) is rejected by Chabad as theological fraud. There is no wiggle room here. This isn’t interfaith dialogue but doctrinal clarity delivered with a smile and a plate of challah.
Yet Chabad is extraordinarily welcoming to Christians. Why? Because of the Noahide Laws. The Noahide framework teaches that Gentiles do not need to become Jewish to be righteous before God. They must follow seven universal laws: prohibitions against idolatry, blasphemy, murder, theft, sexual immorality, eating flesh from a living animal, and a requirement to establish courts of justice. Follow those seven laws and you’re good. No Christ required. No conversion necessary. Jews have 613 commandments; Gentiles have seven. It’s the theological equivalent of everyone else having to read the entire manual while you get the quick-start guide.
Schneerson promoted this framework globally, corresponding with world leaders and advocating for Noahide ethics as a universal moral foundation. To Chabad, this is the proper relationship between Jews and Gentiles: separate covenants, separate roles, mutual respect. Jews maintain the full covenant. Gentiles maintain basic civilization. Everybody stays in their lane. Nobody needs to convert. Nobody needs to compromise. To evangelicals, it sounds like the foundations of “Judeo-Christian civilization.” It’s got commandments. It’s got biblical roots. It’s got moral clarity. They hear “universal law” and think “common ground.” What they miss is that the Noahide Laws aren’t a shared starting point for Christians and Jews to build on together. They’re the off-ramp. They’re what you follow when you’re not part of the chosen people and never will be. It’s the kosher-for-Gentiles moral system, emphasis on “for Gentiles,” because the real action is happening in the Jewish covenant and you’re not invited.
Here’s what makes this brilliant: Chabad can partner with evangelicals on political projects, attend their conferences, accept their donations, and support their Israel advocacy without ever pretending they’re on the same theological team. Evangelicals think partnership requires agreement. Chabad knows it only requires mutual interest. So when Mark Levin stands on stage at a Christian Zionist event talking about shared values, Chabad sees a well-meaning Gentile who’s doing exactly what Schneerson taught: supporting Jewish causes while following his seven laws. The Christians in the audience think they’re part of a unified biblical worldview. Chabad thinks they’re useful. Chabad isn’t lying to Christians because they’re very upfront about what they believe, if you bother to ask. The problem is evangelicals don’t ask. They assume theological agreement because they can’t imagine political alliance without it. They look at a guy like Levin (Jewish, conservative, pro-Israel) and assume he must think Jesus is great. He doesn’t. He thinks Jesus was a heretic and the Trinity is idolatry. But he’ll absolutely work with Christians on judicial appointments and Middle East policy because the Noahide framework allows for that cooperation without requiring Christians to be right about God.
Ben Shapiro
Ben Shapiro provides the third vector: mass media amplification to a younger, digitally-native conservative audience. Shapiro is one of the most influential voices in American conservatism among millennials and Gen Z, with massive reach across podcasts, YouTube, and social media. He’s got constant, documented relationships with Chabad institutions and has public promoted the Rebbe’s teaching, giving the movement access to audiences that traditional Chabad outreach would never reach.
In 2018, Shapiro spoke at JETS Yeshiva, a Chabad trade high school in Granada Hills, California. Afterward, he recommended Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s biography of Schneerson on his podcast, explaining Chabad to his millions of listeners and praising the Rebbe as one of the most influential rabbis in modern history. He’s been the keynote speaker at Chabad of the Valley’s annual banquet. He’s worked with Chabad rabbis on international trips, including visiting Auschwitz with Chabad Rabbi Menachem Margolin, who chairs the European Jewish Association. When Politico published the 2017 article alleging Chabad-Trump-Putin connections, Shapiro publicly defended Chabad on Twitter, calling the article “NUTS” and explaining that Chabad rabbis are “literally called shluchim (messengers)” and “meet with everyone.”
Most significantly, Shapiro accompanied Trump to the Ohel (the cult leader’s grave) on October 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attacks. He was photographed standing next to Trump at Schneerson’s grave. Days after Trump won the 2024 election, Shapiro went on camera claiming that Trump’s visit to the Ohel was “the turning point of the election.” His co-hosts laughed at him. He wasn’t joking. For a guy who built his brand on facts and logic, Shapiro was attributing electoral victory to a ritual visit to a dead rabbi’s grave. He was speaking Chabad’s language, not his audience’s. His audience heard political analysis. Chabad heard testimony.
Shapiro gives Chabad something Kushner and Levin can’t: credibility with young, secular-ish conservatives who would never attend a Chabad House or listen to Mark Levin. When Shapiro talks about the Rebbe, recommends books about Chabad, defends the movement against criticism, and participates in ritual visits to the Ohel, he’s not just being a nice Jewish guy supporting his community. He’s functioning as a bridge between Chabad and the single largest bloc of young conservatives in America. These are people who will never read Chabad literature, never attend a Chabad event, and never encounter Chabad theology directly. But they trust Ben Shapiro. And Ben Shapiro is telling them the Rebbe was great, Chabad is legitimate, and visiting his grave changes elections.
CHABAD AND EVANGELICALISM
Evangelicals are empowering a movement that views the very center of their faith (the deity of Christ, the necessity of the cross, salvation through Jesus alone) as categorically false. And they’re doing it enthusiastically, because they’ve been trained to see any criticism of Jewish-Christian cooperation as antisemitism. So they write the checks, attend the conferences, amplify the messaging, and never ask the uncomfortable question: What do our Jewish friends think about Jesus? You might think Christians are aware of the animosity, but only yesterday, I read someone online claim that “Jews love Jesus and believe that Jesus was a gifted prophet, but only deny his Messianic claims” (of course, Muslims believe that, but Jews certainly do not).
The typical Jew is hostile to Jesus. This is true. But Chabad take the hate to a whole new level. Chabad believers hold that Jesus was a false messiah (often, a Satanic one) and Christianity is a “system created to worship the devil and a host of evil spirits.”
American evangelicals are theologically illiterate, functionally philo-Semitic, and politically Zionist, so they never press the issue. They just keep showing up to events, waving Israeli flags, and assuming everybody’s on the same page about the End Times. But Chabad’s eschatology involves the rebuilding of the Third Temple and the revelation of the Messiah (who is definitely not Jesus and might be the Rebbe). Destroying the Islamic Dome of the Rock and conquering Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq (to take the original Promised Land boundaries) is literally on their bucket list. To them, it’s not about Israel’s “right to exist,” but their right to invade and conquer the rest of the Middle East.
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If Chabad were confined to Brooklyn and a handful of American campuses, this would be interesting but irrelevant. So what if a tiny and irrelevant contingent of Jews worship a false Messiah, think gentiles aren’t human, and want to start WWIII? Big deal. But Chabad is global, and it’s hands-down the most prominent, powerful, and influential cult of Judaism in the world.
CHABAD AND RUSSIA
Meanwhile, Chabad’s most significant political relationship isn’t in Washington but in Moscow. Berel Lazar is the Chief Rabbi of Russia. He’s also Chabad-affiliated, and he was elevated to that position with the explicit backing of Vladimir Putin. Russia has a complicated Jewish history, and post-Soviet religious life required restructuring. The Kremlin faced a choice, which was to recognize a fragmented, politically independent Jewish community, or back a centralized, predictable religious authority to be in charge. They chose Chabad.
The choice made sense, because autocrats love hierarchical religions with clear leadership and no interest in regime change. Chabad doesn’t protest. Chabad doesn’t evangelize beyond its own community. Chabad doesn’t demand liberalization. Chabad builds Chabad Houses and maintains relationships with whoever holds power. And they have a very, very cozy relationship with Putin.
Lazar has personal access to Putin and Chabad dominates post-Soviet Jewish institutional life. Chabad’s global network, ideological coherence, and willingness to engage power on pragmatic terms made them the obvious choice for a Kremlin seeking religious stability without political risk. But Chabad is also appealing to Put for one additional reason; Chabad is a Russian intelligence asset.
Chabad not only survived, but thrived inside the USSR while other Jewish groups were driven out during the Cold War (and later). While virtually every independent religious, Zionist, and Jewish cultural institution was crushed in post-Soviet Russia, Chabad was selectively tolerated, allowed to operate underground networks, and permitted to maintain foreign contacts. That level of endurance strongly suggests accommodation with Soviet security organs such as the KGB, which historically infiltrated or co-opted any group allowed to persist. According to corroborating sources, Chabad is routinely used to gather intel from whatever nation they reside, and feed it back to the SVR and FSB (the post-Soviet versions of the KGB.
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