By Christine Rosen
Sunday, November 16, 2025
How did anti-Semitism become mainstream so quickly,
especially among younger Americans? Perhaps because it has become a form of
mass entertainment.
In the wake of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on
October 7, 2023, and the significant increase in attacks on Jews and Jewish
institutions in the U.S., this is an urgent question. A squad of prominent
public figures, elected officials, and cultural arbiters has emerged to promote
ideas many thought permanently relegated to the unsavory fringes of American
life—and they are gaining an increasingly enthusiastic hearing.
Case in point: Tucker Carlson’s fawning reception of
self-proclaimed white nationalist and leader of the so-called groyper movement,
Nick Fuentes. As a guest on Carlson’s show, Fuentes, a fan of both Hitler and
Stalin, obligingly performed his predictable routine, complaining about
“organized Jewry” and the Jews “controlling the media apparatus.” Smiling and
nodding along, Carlson did remind Fuentes that “going on about the Jews helps
the neocons” but otherwise agreed with him, noting that Christians who supported
Israel have been “seized by this brain virus.” An internal conservative battle
erupted soon after, when Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage
Foundation, one of the conservative movement’s major institutions, produced a
video defending Carlson and calling him a friend.
Water finds its own level, and Roberts’s unwillingness to
denounce Carlson’s endorsement of anti-Semi-tic conspiracy theorizing places
him and, by association, his institution in the most polluted part of the
conservative movement’s pond. That this happened was entirely by design. As
Fuentes himself gleefully noted on his show after the Heritage debacle
unfolded, “We are thoroughly in the groyper war, the civil war for the GOP.”
In previous eras, anti-Semitism spread in the form of
propaganda published in largely fringe newsletters, a few newspapers (like
Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent) and books, and notoriously, on radio
broadcasts like those of the Canadian-American priest Charles E. Coughlin.
Political organizers such as America First Party founder Gerald L.K. Smith
(who, like Carlson, was fond of theories about UFOs and demons) also tried
strenuously to mainstream anti-Semitism, but the effort never achieved
widespread acceptance.
Today, by contrast, anti-Semitism lives and thrives on
the entertainment platforms of the young and very online. YouTube, streaming
sites like Rumble, and social media platforms have vastly expanded their reach
and scope while presenting no barriers to entry and providing anonymity to
millions of people who crave communities of the like-minded—often with little
regard to what they are endorsing with their time and attention. Popular
streamers like Fuentes and Carlson are the arbiters of an online culture that
now permeates real-world politics daily. Fuentes boasts more than 1 million
followers on X and hundreds of thousands of viewers of his America First
streaming show on Rumble, where he regularly, proudly, and unashamedly makes
racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and anti-American claims. Carlson is among
the most popular public-affairs podcasters on platforms such as Spotify and
Apple, where he muses about “globohomo” conspiracies and “the Antichrist’s
newest manifestation.”
Motivated toxic actors like Fuentes and Carlson and
Candace Owens, combined with streaming platforms and DIY media, have created a
massive amount of content that can be consumed by millions almost hourly. And
unlike the anti-Semitic propaganda of old, this new form allows for active,
rather than merely passive, consumption. Viewers post comments, swap memes, and
form fan chat groups. They feel connected to peers while enjoying the posture
of being skeptical renegades “just asking questions” about how the Jews control
everything. The Two Minutes Hate is available 24 hours a day.
Carlson and Fuentes and their ilk are skilled at
cultivating and nourishing these parasocial relationships—relationships that
have been incredibly lucrative for them. This is why more podcasters on the
right are embracing Carlson and promoting his noxious ideas themselves, under
the guise of their being “friends”—which was also the excuse Kevin Roberts gave
for his unwillingness to condemn Carlson’s behavior.
But these are performative and transactional
relationships; not long before Carlson hosted Fuentes on his show, he was
mocking Fuentes as a closeted homosexual. Fuentes pinballs between praising
MAGA leaders and, before the last election, vowing to vote for Kamala Harris.
The self-styled celebrity “groypers” call themselves the leaders of an army,
but watching them perform is like witnessing a demented version of Lucha Libre.
The incoherence is the point.
This posture also allows people who should know better to
try to excuse their behavior. When a group of Young Republicans was discovered
exchanging anti-Semitic and racist remarks in a group chat, Vice President JD
Vance downplayed their behavior, saying the grown men in question were just
“young boys” exchanging “edgy” jokes.
As Eli Lake noted in an insightful piece at the Free
Press, Fuentes might be joking about some things, but he consistently saves his
most vitriolic rhetoric for Jewish conservatives: “He yells into the camera and
says: ‘You’re the filth. You are traitors. You are scum. You do not belong
here. You are not American. You’re not home.’”
This is the language and demeanor of the leader at the
fascist rallies of old, yet today it is far more likely to be consumed by
someone who is literally all alone—streaming in the background of a teenager’s
bedroom while he’s supposed to be doing his homework, or listened to by a man
on his lunch break while he scrolls his social media feeds. The danger of the
message is the same, but it is being delivered in a seemingly innocuous form—on
the same screens through which we do everything else in daily life.
The flattening effect of our information ecosystem makes
it more difficult to combat the constant stream of filth. In one sense,
groypers are just another kind of influencer. This oddly gives them a familiar
feeling to many viewers, even as the noxious things they say would, until
recently, have been anathema to everyday political discourse. In a culture
where everything is content, it is volume (of viewers, followers, and likes),
not values, that matters. And it starts to seep into everyday life in alarming
ways: The bishop of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, recently had to issue an apology
to the diocese because the Halloween parade float of Saint Joseph Catholic
School in Hanover “featured a replica of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp gate,
bearing the words Arbeit Macht Frei.”
Popular culture has long been a vehicle for testing and
mainstreaming new norms. In the 1970s, The Jeffersons featured one of
the first portrayals of an interracial couple, Tom and Helen Willis, on network
television; in the 1990s, Will and Grace helped encourage acceptance of
homosexuality by featuring main characters who were openly gay. But as the
anti-Semitic turn in culture shows, normalization doesn’t require virtuousness
or perceived virtuousness to become a reality.
Marx infamously proclaimed religion the opiate of the
masses. Today, with short-form video, live-streams, and social media, we have
created not an opiate, but a stimulant—one that isn’t anesthetizing people but
supercharging their taste for an ancient hatred. Combating this scourge is a
generational challenge. It’s astoundingly difficult to overcome. To stop the
combat in its tracks, Kevin Roberts denounced as representatives of a “venomous
coalition” those who said Carlson and Fuentes should be anathematized. He
apologized for using that language when it got him into trouble. But the
adjective he and his associate Ryan Neuhaus chose was pointed and purposeful.
Venom is produced by snakes. Likening Jews and those who would defend them to
the serpent in the garden is literally an act of demonization. It was also a
clever effort to reverse the reality. The poison that threatens the American
right, the Republican Party, and the West itself is coming not from the
coalition Roberts despises but from the anti-Semites Roberts said he would not
ostracize, and from those, like Roberts, who would provide them cover.
No comments:
Post a Comment