By Yair Rosenberg
Monday, September 23, 2024
The New York Times once dubbed the
Princeton professor Robert George, who has guided Republican elites for
decades, “the reigning brain of the Christian right.” Last year, he issued a
stark warning to his ideological allies. “Each time we think the horrific virus
of anti-Semitism has been extirpated, it reappears,” he wrote in May
2023. “A plea to my fellow Catholics—especially Catholic young people: Stay a
million miles from this evil. Do not let it infect your thinking.” When I spoke
with George that summer, he likened his sense of foreboding to that of Heinrich
Heine, the 19th-century German poet who prophesied
the rise of Nazism in 1834.
Some 15 months later, the conservative commentator Tucker
Carlson welcomed a man named Darryl Cooper onto his web-based show and introduced him
to millions of followers as “the best and most honest popular historian in the
United States.” The two proceeded to discuss how Adolf Hitler might have gotten
a bad rap and why British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was “the chief
villain of the Second World War.”
Hitler tried “to broadcast a call for peace directly to
the British people” and wanted to “work with the other powers to reach an
acceptable solution to the Jewish problem,” Cooper elaborated in a
social-media post. “He was ignored.” Why the Jews should have been considered a
“problem” in the first place—and what a satisfactory “solution” to their
inconvenient existence might be—was not addressed.
Some Republican
politicians spoke out against Carlson’s conversation with Cooper, and many historians,
including conservative
ones, debunked its Holocaust revisionism. But Carlson is no fringe figure.
His show ranks as one of the top
podcasts in the United States; videos of its episodes rack up millions of
views. He has the ear of Donald Trump and spoke during prime time
at the 2024 Republican National Convention. His anti-Jewish provocations are
not a personal idiosyncrasy but the latest expression of an insurgent force on
the American right—one that began to swell when Trump first declared his
candidacy for president and that has come to challenge the identity of the
conservative movement itself.
***
Anti-Semitism has always existed on the political
extremes, but it began to migrate into the mainstream of the Republican
coalition during the Trump administration. At first, the prejudice took the
guise of protest.
In 2019, hecklers pursued the Republican congressman Dan
Crenshaw—a popular former Navy SEAL from Texas—across a tour of college
campuses, posing leading
questions to him about Jews and Israel, and insinuating
that the Jewish state was behind the 9/11 attacks. The activists called
themselves “Groypers”
and were led by a young white supremacist named Nick Fuentes, an internet
personality who had defended racial
segregation, denied
the Holocaust, and participated
in the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where marchers chanted, “Jews
will not replace us.”
The slogan referred to a far-right fantasy known as the
“Great Replacement,” according to which Jews are plotting to flood the country
with Black and brown migrants in order to displace the white race. That belief
animated Robert Bowers, who perpetrated the largest massacre of Jews on
American soil at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 after sharing
rants
about the Great Replacement on social media. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society,
the gunman wrote in his final post,
“likes to bring invaders in that kill our people … Screw your optics, I’m going
in.”
Less than three years later, Carlson sanitized that same
conspiracy theory on his top-rated cable-news show. “They’re trying to change
the population of the United States,” the Fox host declared,
“and they hate it when you say that because it’s true, but that’s exactly what
they’re doing.” Like many before
him, Carlson maintained plausible deniability by affirming an anti-Semitic
accusation without explicitly naming Jews as culprits. He could rely on members
of his audience to fill in the blanks.
Carlson and Fuentes weren’t the only ones who recognized
the rising appeal of anti-Semitism on the right. On January 6, 2021, an
influencer named Elijah Schaffer joined thousands of Trump supporters storming
the U.S. Capitol, posting
live from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. Eighteen months later, Schaffer
publicly polled
his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers: “Do you believe Jews
disproportionately control the world institutions, banks, & are waging war
on white, western society?” Social-media polls are not scientific, so the fact
that more than 70 percent of respondents said some version of “yes” matters
less than the fact that 94,000 people participated in the survey. Schaffer
correctly gauged that this subject was something that his audience wanted to
discuss, and certainly not something that would hurt his career.
With little fanfare, the tide had turned in favor of
those advancing anti-Semitic arguments. In 2019, Fuentes and his faction were
disrupting Republican politicians like Crenshaw. By 2022, Fuentes was shaking
hands onstage with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and dining
with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. In 2019, the Groyper activists were picketing
events held by Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization founded
by the activist Charlie Kirk. By 2024, Turning Point was employing—and
periodically firing and denouncing—anti-Semitic influencers who appeared
at conventions run by Fuentes. “The Zionist Jews controlling our planet are
all pedophiles who have no regard for the sanctity of human life and purity,”
one of the organization’s ambassadors posted
before she was dismissed.
In 2020, Carlson’s lead writer, Blake Neff, was compelled
to resign after he was exposed
as a regular contributor to a racist internet forum. Today, he produces Kirk’s
podcast and recently reported alongside him at the Republican National
Convention. “Why does Turning Point USA keep pushing anti-Semitism?” asked
Erick Erickson, the longtime conservative radio host and activist, last
October. The answer: Because that’s what a growing portion of the audience
wants.
“When I began my career in 2017,” Fuentes wrote in May 2023, “I was considered
radioactive in the American Right for my White Identitarian, race realist,
‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist, authoritarian, traditional Catholic views … In
2023, on almost every count, our previously radioactive views are pounding on
the door of the political mainstream.” Fuentes is a congenital liar, but a year
after this triumphalist pronouncement, his basic point is hard to dispute.
Little by little, the extreme has become mainstream—especially since October 7.
***
Last December, Tucker Carlson joined the popular
anti-establishment podcast Breaking Points to discuss the Gaza conflict
and accused
a prominent Jewish political personality of disloyalty to the nation. “They
don’t care about the country at all,” he told the host, “but I do … because I’m
from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. Like,
I’m shocked by how little they care about the country, including the person you
mentioned. And I can’t imagine how someone like that could get an audience of
people who claim to care about America, because he doesn’t, obviously.”
The twist: “He” was not some far-left activist who had
called America an irredeemably racist regime. Carlson was referring to Ben
Shapiro, arguably the most visible Jewish conservative in America, and
insinuating that despite his decades of paeans to American exceptionalism,
Shapiro was a foreign implant secretly serving Israeli interests. The podcast
host did not object to Carlson’s remarks.
The war in Gaza has placed Jews and their role in
American politics under a microscope. Much has been written about how the
conflict has divided the left and led to a spike in anti-Semitism in
progressive spaces, but less attention has been paid to the similar shake-up on
the right, where events in the Middle East have forced previously subterranean
tensions to the surface. Today, the Republican Party’s establishment says that
it stands with Israel and against anti-Semitism, but that stance is under attack
by a new wave of insurgents with a very different agenda.
Since October 7, in addition to slurring Shapiro, Carlson
has hosted a parade of anti-Jewish guests on his show. One was Candace Owens,
the far-right podcaster known for her defenses of another anti-Jewish agitator,
Kanye
“Ye” West. Owens had already clashed with her employer—the conservative
outlet The Daily Wire, co-founded by Shapiro—over her seeming
indifference to anti-Semitism. But after the Hamas assault, she began making
explicit what had previously been implicit—including liking a social-media post
that accused
a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood,” a reference to the medieval
blood libel. The Daily Wire severed ties with her soon after. But
this did not remotely curb her appeal.
Today, Owens can be found fulminating on her YouTube
channel (2.4 million subscribers) or X feed (5.6 million followers) about how a
devil-worshipping Jewish cult controls the
world, and how Israel was complicit in
the 9/11 attacks and killed President
John F. Kennedy. Owens has also jumped aboard the Reich-Rehabilitation Express.
“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” she asked in
July. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost
took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the
Germans.’”
“Many Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as
black and white as we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted
from our textbooks,” she wrote after
Carlson’s Holocaust conversation came under fire. The post received 15,000
likes.
***
Donald Trump’s entry into Republican politics intensified
several forces that have contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism on the
American right. One was populism, which pits the common people against a
corrupt elite. Populists play on discontents that reflect genuine failures of
the establishment, but their approach also readily maps onto the ancient
anti-Semitic canard that clandestine string-pulling Jews are the source of
society’s problems. Once people become convinced that the world is oppressed by
an invisible hand, they often conclude that the hand belongs to an invisible
Jew.
Another such force is isolationism, or the desire to
extricate the United States from foreign entanglements, following decades of
debacles in the Middle East. But like the original America
First Committee, which sought to keep the country out of World War II,
today’s isolationists often conceive of Jews as either rootless cosmopolitans
undermining national cohesion or dual loyalists subverting the national
interest in service of their own. In this regard, the Tucker Carlsons of 2024 resemble the
reactionary activists of the 1930s, such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who
infamously accused
Jewish leaders of acting “for reasons which are not American,” and warned of
“their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our
radio and our government.”
Populism and isolationism have legitimate expressions,
but preventing them from descending into anti-Semitism requires leaders willing
to restrain their movement’s worst instincts. Today’s right has fewer by the
day. Trump fundamentally refuses
to repudiate anyone who supports him, and by devolving power from traditional
Republican elites and institutions to a diffuse array of online influencers,
the former president has ensured that no one is in a position to corral the
right’s excesses, even if someone wanted to.
As one conservative columnist put it to me in August
2023, “What you’re actually worried about is not Trump being Hitler. What
you’re worried about is Trump incentivizing anti-Semites,” to the point where
“a generation from now, you’ve got Karl Lueger,” the anti-Jewish mayor of
Vienna who inspired Hitler, “and two generations from now, you do have
something like that.” The accelerant that is social-media discourse, together
with a war that brings Jews to the center of political attention, could shorten
that timeline.
For now, the biggest obstacle to anti-Semitism’s ascent
on the right is the Republican rank and file’s general commitment to Israel,
which causes them to recoil when people like Owens rant about how the Jewish
state is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles. Even conservatives like Trump’s
running mate, J. D. Vance, a neo-isolationist who opposes foreign aid to
Ukraine, are careful
to affirm their continued support for Israel, in deference to the party
base.
But this residual Zionism shields only Israeli Jews from
abuse, not American ones—and it certainly does not protect the large majority
of American Jews who vote for Democrats. This is why Trump suffers no
consequences in his own coalition when he rails
against “liberal Jews” who “voted to destroy America.” But such vilification
won’t end there. As hard-core anti-Israel activists who have engaged
in
anti-Semitism against American Jews have demonstrated, most people who hate
one swath of the world’s Jews eventually turn on the rest. “If I don’t win this
election,” Trump said
last week, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.”
***
More than populism and isolationism, the force that
unites the right’s anti-Semites and explains why they have been slowly winning
the war for the future of conservatism is conspiracism. To see its power in
practice, one need only examine the social-media posts of Elon Musk, which
serve as a window into the mindset of the insurgent right and its receptivity
to anti-Semitism.
Over the past year, the world’s richest man has
repeatedly shared anti-Jewish propaganda on X, only to walk it back following
criticism from more traditional conservative quarters. In November, Musk affirmed
the Great Replacement theory, replying to a white nationalist who expressed it
with these words: “You have said the actual truth.” After a furious backlash,
the magnate recanted, saying,
“It might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done.” Musk
subsequently met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and accompanied
Ben Shapiro on a trip to Auschwitz, but the lesson didn’t quite take. Earlier
this month, he shared Carlson’s discussion of Holocaust revisionism with the
approbation: “Very interesting. Worth watching.” Once again under fire, he deleted
the tweet and apologized, saying he’d
listened to only part of the interview.
But this lesson is also unlikely to stick, because like
many on the new right, Musk is in thrall to a worldview that makes him
particularly susceptible to anti-Jewish ideas. Last September, not long before
Musk declared the “actual truth” of the Great Replacement, he participated in a
public
exchange with a group of rabbis, activists, and Jewish conservatives. The
discussion was intended as an intervention to inoculate Musk against
anti-Semitism, but early on, he said something that showed why the cause was
likely lost before the conversation even began. “I think,” Musk cracked, “we’re
running out of conspiracy theories that didn’t turn out to be true.”
The popularity of such sentiments among contemporary
conservatives explains why the likes of Carlson and Owens have been gaining
ground and old-guard conservatives such as Shapiro and Erickson have been
losing it. Simply put, as Trump and his allies have coopted the conservative
movement, it has become defined by a fundamental distrust of authority and
institutions, and a concurrent embrace of conspiracy theories about elite
cabals. And the more conspiratorial thinking becomes commonplace on the right, the
more inevitable that its partisans will land on one of the oldest conspiracies
of them all.
Conspiratorial thinking is neither new to American
politics nor confined to one end of the ideological
spectrum.
But Trump has made foundational what was once marginal. Beginning with
birtherism and culminating in election denialism, he turned anti-establishment
conspiracism into a litmus test for attaining political power, compelling
Republicans to either sign on to his claims of 2020 fraud or be exiled to
irrelevance.
The fundamental fault line in the conservative coalition
became whether someone was willing to buy into ever more elaborate fantasies.
The result was to elevate those with flexible
approaches to facts, such as Carlson and Owens, who were predisposed to say
and do anything—no matter how hypocritical
or absurd—to
obtain influence. Once opened, this conspiratorial box could not be closed.
After all, a movement that legitimizes crackpot schemes about rigged voting
machines and microchipped vaccines cannot simply turn around and draw the line
at the Jews.
For mercenary opportunists like Carlson, this moment
holds incredible promise. But for Republicans with principles—those who know
who won the 2020 election, or who was the bad guy in World War II, and can’t
bring themselves to say otherwise—it’s a time of profound peril. And for Jews,
the targets of one of the world’s deadliest conspiracy theories, such
developments are even more forboding.
“It is now incumbent on all decent people, and especially
those on the right, to demand that Carlson no longer be treated as a mainstream
figure,” Jonathan Tobin, the pro-Trump conservative editor of the Jewish
News Syndicate, wrote
after Carlson’s World War II episode. “He must be put in his place, and
condemned by Trump and Vance.”
Anti-Semitism’s ultimate victory in GOP politics is not
assured. Musk did delete his tweets, Owens was fired, and some Republicans did
condemn Carlson’s Holocaust segment. But beseeching Trump and his camp to
intervene here mistakes the cause for the cure.
Three days after Carlson posted his Hitler apologetics,
Vance shrugged off the controversy and recorded
an interview with him, and this past Saturday, the two men yukked it up
onstage at a political event in Pennsylvania before an audience of thousands.
Such coziness should not surprise, given that Carlson was reportedly instrumental
in securing the VP slot for the Ohio senator. Asked earlier if he took issue
with Carlson’s decision to air the Holocaust revisionism, Vance retorted,
“The fundamental idea here is Republicans believe not in censorship; we believe
in free speech and debate.” He conveniently declined to use his own speech to
debate Carlson’s.
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