By John Podhoretz
Sunday, November 16, 2025
The targeting of Jews in the wake of October 7 has been
the key subject of Commentary over the course of the past two years. The
sight of Israel on the back foot and under attack, with thousands dead at the
hands of genocidal maniacs, broke loose a shadowy evil that had been peeking
out intermittently from behind the curtain of civilization for the past 80
years. It is roaming freely now. In London and Toronto, Jew-haters are
literally demonstrating almost daily under the protection of the police, while
those who oppose them are arrested for disturbing the peace.
Here in America, where Jew-hatred has historically been a
minor force even when it might have proved a major annoyance, the attacks on
Jewish institutions and the installation of physical encampments designed to
invoke cowering silence and affirmative assent against the very idea of Zionism
became the defining facts of this new era.
And yet worse was still to come—and that doesn’t even
include the deliberate murders of two young Jews outside a party a mile from
the White House.
Even though the Trump administration has been fighting
the good fight against the anti-Semitism epidemic since it came into office in
January, the fruit of those two years ripened in a new way in early November
2025. We’re talking about a month after the war in Gaza itself had come to a
conditional end with the release of the living hostages and an effective
cease-fire—thus seeming to fulfill the desire of those who had been chanting
“cease-fire now” since the war began.
No matter. In New York, an explicitly anti-Israel and
anti-Zionist Democratic political candidate was easily elected mayor of the
most Jewish city in the world.
Zohran Mamdani’s ascension could be a landmark moment in
the history of American politics, in the same way that the Taliban’s
destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was a landmark moment in the history of
world culture. Some landmarks are very bad.
It is not only that a self-proclaimed “Democratic
socialist” won an important race for an executive office.
It is not only that a Muslim whose only public words that
even approach the topic of Islamic terrorism have been spent complaining about
the treatment of Muslims inside the United States won a landslide that utterly
disproves the validity of his “Islamophobia” claims—and, in victory, said
nothing to express his gratitude toward a country that allowed an immigrant to
our shores who has such contempt for America to secure a major post for which
he is patently unqualified.
No, it’s that he won while explicitly refusing to disavow
the positions he held condemning the world’s only Jewish state and denying its
right to exist. No, that isn’t quite right. He didn’t just refuse to disavow
them. They were, in fact, the accelerant he used earlier this year to raise
millions of dollars from a place of complete obscurity, gaining support from
anti-Semites across America who heard his dog whistles and knew what they might
be able to secure if they helped him win.
In 1950, some 30 percent of the population of New York
City was Jewish. Seventy-five years later, that number had dropped to 12
percent. People are used to thinking of New York as a Jewish place, defined by
cultural touchstones like pastrami sandwiches, bagels and lox, Seinfeld,
and (until he became an untouchable) Woody Allen. But when Jews constituted the
city’s largest minority, they sought nothing but relative invisibility—by which
I mean they did no special pleading on their own behalf, so happy were they to
be in a place where they could be left alone in relative peace.
The world of 1950 is no more. Now, special pleading by
minority groups is one of the key elements of American politics. And New York
is the one place (outside of South Florida) where Jews could in theory make the
demand for special treatment, given their numbers. But they have resolutely
refused to do so for many decades now. Then, suddenly, in October 2025, they
saw Mamdani coming after them, and somewhere between two-thirds and
three-fourths of them voted against him. Good. But where were they two years ago?
Where were they in February? Where have they been altogether? Fat, happy,
comfortable, believing that there was something provincial in the idea that
their largesse should go to their own people—a kind of internalized self-regard
that suggested to them true generosity meant giving to people who don’t care a
thing about them, their people, or their own people’s futures. Or were they
secretly like Bonasera the Undertaker from The Godfather—finding
paradise in America, not wanting to stir the hostility of the larger culture,
and then finding himself shocked and impotent and without resources when his
daughter, his American, is beaten and raped?
Jews are not responsible for Mamdani’s rise; as I said,
they mostly voted against him. What they are responsible for is refusing to
participate in acts of public hygiene inside the liberal tendency in America,
on the left, and inside the Democratic Party over the past 20 years, that would
have created a counterforce against the rise of the Mamdani maniacs. Just to
take one simple example: They could have fought to save the campuses at which
they threw money for decades, the campuses that midwived Mamdanism, before they
had their eyes opened on October 7. I’m glad their eyes were opened and
grateful for what they’ve done with those opened eyes, but it’s still the case
they were asleep before while many of us were screaming ourselves hoarse trying
with no good effect to wake them up.
So now we will have Mamdani as mayor, and my guess as a
New Yorker is he will take mostly symbolic measures to put Jews in their place,
all in the name of opposing Israel for its supposedly cruel acts against his
own religious brethren. And some of us will complain, and the anti-Zionist Jews
he will surround himself with to kosherize his decision-making will inform a
slavering press that he is acting in ways that comport with the Jewish
requirement to “heal the world”…and that we are the real monsters.
Just as we were told, in the same week, down in
Washington, by someone prominent on the right. The head of the think tank most
directly connected to the Republican Party defended his organization’s close
relationship with Tucker Carlson, podcast purveyor of Jew-hatred and human
megaphone for the out-and-out Nazi Nick Fuentes.
That think tank head, whose plain-vanilla name of Kevin
Roberts is banal perfection, denounced as a “venomous coalition” those who
responded to all this with jaw-dropped horror. We were, he said, “sowing
division [in an] attempt to cancel” Carlson.
Cancel? Oh, no, no, no, Mr. Roberts. That is far too
gentle a term. We are attempting to anathematize him—to excommunicate
him from the company of the civilized. Roberts believes there should be no
enemies on the right, thereby placing Carlson firmly in his camp. I reject the
idea that Tucker Carlson is on the right, and I should know. I was a
conservative in hostile territory on a college campus when Kevin Roberts was in
grade school. I was a conservative in the world of mainstream journalism when
Kevin Roberts was in high school. I am on the right, as I was then, and will be
until the day I die. And I was creating conservative institutions when Kevin
Roberts was beginning graduate school. In my role as the co-founder of the Weekly
Standard, I gave a 24-year-old kid named Tucker Carlson his first major job
in journalism—a job in which I guided him for two years and commissioned and
edited the articles that made his reputation, got him gigs in glossy magazines,
and set him on his way through an endless series of television failures at
channel after channel until he finally hit it big in Fox’s prime time lineup
once Trump made the scene in 2017.
I say this with absolute fidelity to the truth and no
small amount of shame. For what I have done to conservatism and journalism and
America, even if unknowingly, I will have to serve penance in the world to
come. I have 40 years of personal experience that lets me say plainly that
Tucker Carlson is not on the right, nor is he on the left. He is, rather, and
almost literally, on the side of the devil.
It is therefore deeply ironic to me that Roberts would
have chosen to use the word “venomous” to describe me and people like me. In a
desperate effort to clean up the mess he made, Roberts later apologized for a
“terrible choice of words.” But there’s no reason to accept his apology unless
you believe you must accept any apology. Roberts self-evidently didn’t mean
what he said, for if he had, he would no longer be head of the Heritage
Foundation—since defending Nazi apologetics would seem pretty much like the
kind of thing for which you’d have to resign once you realized you’d done it,
if only to save the institution you run, and from which you collect a
million-dollar salary, from going down the tubes.
In any case, through a series of dismissible apologies
and clean-up efforts, he keeps referring to Carlson as his friend, reminding me
of no one so much as Dickens’s hysterical Mrs. Micawber, hieing off to debtor’s
prison in slavish followership to her husband—“I never will desert Mr.
Micawber!” Only in this case, Roberts and Carlson are now entombed together in
the debtor’s prison reserved for those whose reputations should fester until
they rot.
Roberts cannot be saved from himself, though perhaps his
Lord can save him; my Lord doesn’t work that way. For us, “repentance, prayer,
and charity avert the evil decree,” as we say on Yom Kippur. Salvation is not
on the menu; we must be mindful of our evil inclinations and understand that it
is our duty as decent people to fight against them every moment of every day.
It is through the knowledge that we have led decent and meaningful lives that
we are saved by the posterity we make possible.
So Kevin Roberts, hear me. Since you are friends with a
Nazi, or are friends with someone who gives a microphone to a Nazi and chitters
like a cicada as that Nazi spews his Satanic bile, you, too, should and must be
anathematized—simply to create the condition in this country under which there
can be a public square at all.
I am under no illusions here. I do not have the power to
anathematize anyone, only to counsel it. I am part of a small people, 2 percent
of the American population, whose position and standing in this country and
around the world are growing more parlous by the day. But especially because of
that, this is no time to accept disingenuous apologies. This is no time to find
common ground with those who seek to kill us. And this is no time to sue for
peace, even though we are so gravely outnumbered.
Israel is outnumbered, too, and it has demonstrated over
the past two years that it will not lie down and die to give the Zohran
Mamdanis of the world the satisfaction of having subdued a nation that is their
superior in purpose, virtue, and meaning. And here at home, Kevin Roberts and
his ilk will not guide the right into the arms of the Nazis and the
America-haters without being stood up against.
Two months into the war, I wrote a piece called “They’re
Out to Get Us.” I followed it up with a piece about how they’re trying to drive
us underground. They’re still trying to get us. They’re still trying to drive
us underground. The Passover Haggadah says, “In every generation they rise up
against us to destroy us.” But as is true of everything in this century, time
is speeding up. “Every generation” is now “every week,” or “every day.” It’s
from the left. And it’s from the right.
But at least we can be comforted by this: Jews have
survived worse than this self-righteous twerp from Uganda and Morningside
Heights, and America has survived worse than the Nazi catamite brought to you
courtesy of the Tucker Carlson charnel house.
Tucker Carlson has millions of listeners and viewers, and
so does Nick Fuentes. And they have friends, like Kevin Roberts. Just as nuts
have aflatoxin. Their continued common presence will send the right into
anaphylactic shock.
We are the EpiPen.
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