By Nick Catoggio
Monday, December 22, 2025
The Washington Post has a long feature today about
Ted
Cruz’s next ill-fated run for president. The newsiest bit comes halfway
through, when we discover that the prime minister of Israel is in denial about
right-wing antisemitism in America.
Cruz recounted a meeting he had with Benjamin Netanyahu
in July in which he warned the PM that bigotry toward Jews was rising among the
Republican base. “No, Ted,” Netanyahu allegedly corrected him. “That’s Qatar,
that’s Iran, that’s astroturf, that’s paid for.”
If it’s paid for, whoever’s paying for it is getting
their money’s worth. According to the Manhattan
Institute’s recent survey of registered Republicans
and others who voted for Donald Trump last fall, no less than 25 percent of
those under 50 admit—admit—to expressing antisemitic views. Among those
over 50, just 4 percent do.
Check the top
10 podcasts on Spotify and you’ll find that the two
most popular right-wing hosts on the platform are Tucker Carlson and Candace
Owens. Carlson has described Netanyahu as a “main
enemy” of Western civilization; Owens now promotes proto-Nazi polemics like
August Rohling’s 1871 work The Talmudic Jew.
Who’s paying their millions of listeners to tune in?
Netanyahu has obvious reasons to play dumb about reality.
Making an issue of antisemitism on the American right would place his friend
and patron, Donald Trump, in an uncomfortable position. And the last thing the
prime minister needs at the moment is to alienate the GOP, whose members remain
far
better disposed to Israel on balance despite the
influx of Jew-baiters than Democrats do.
But if he really does doubt that antisemites are a
meaningful constituency of the modern Republican Party, I’d tell him to watch
J.D. Vance’s speech this weekend at the Turning Point USA conference and ask
himself this: Why would the GOP’s presumptive 2028 nominee feel obliged to
signal to bigots that they’re welcome in his coalition?
And why is nonsense about “Heritage Americans” suddenly
in vogue among populists?
The Vance dance.
I wrote about the VP’s anti-anti-antisemitism in October
when he declined to rebuke his friend Tucker for hosting groyperfuhrer Nick
Fuentes on his show.
“Vance will … do his best not to take a side” in disputes
over whether racists should or shouldn’t be tolerated in the GOP, I
predicted. “Occasionally, he’ll be cornered on it and will tactfully affirm
that antisemitism is wrong before changing the subject. Meanwhile, he’ll
continue to seize opportunities to defend right-wing bigots whenever those opportunities present themselves to show the
Tuckerites that he has no problem with them, even if the political realities of
winning a general election prevent him from allying with them forthrightly.”
And that’s just what he did when he spoke on Sunday. He’s
opening the so-called Overton window on prejudice to show the right’s sleaziest
cohort that they have a place in his party.
Everyone is welcome in the America First movement, the
vice president assured the crowd, sounding an inclusive note. And when he said
“everyone,” it turned out he meant everyone. “I didn’t bring a list of
conservatives to denounce or to deplatform,” Vance clarified,
alluding to Ben Shapiro’s righteous attack
on Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes in his own speech at
the conference on Thursday. “The best way to honor Charlie [Kirk] is that none
of us here should be doing something after Charlie’s death that he didn’t do in
life. He invited all of us here.”
Charlie Kirk did indeed continue to invite Carlson to
Turning Point events long after Tucker became the Joker of postliberalism.
(Carlson spoke at the conference on Thursday a few hours after Shapiro did, in
fact.) No enemies to the right: The moral standard for President Vance’s GOP,
it seems, will be a clout-chasing podcaster who frequently
pandered to the worst elements of his base in order to
protect his audience share from Fuentes.
Groypers will need more aggressive vice-signaling than
that to warm up to the idea of the VP inheriting Trump’s movement, though,
seeing as how he’s married to an
Indian American—or “jeet,” in case you’re not up on
the latest “based” racist lingo. So Vance complied. At one point in his speech,
he borrowed from the president’s recent Two Minutes Hate aimed at Somali Americans by singling out Minnesota Democrat
Omar Fateh, whom Vance said was
“Ilhan Omar’s candidate for mayor of Mogadishu—I mean, Minneapolis.” (Fateh was
born and raised in the U.S.) Later, and more to the point, he declared, “In the
United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”
I don’t know what more one could want from him by way of
“showing the Tuckerites that he has no problem with them.” Vance even had the
stones to claim that “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in
politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity
tests,” a lie so brazen that it might make his own boss blush. No politician of
our lifetimes has imposed litmus tests on his own party as aggressively as
Trump has; a few months ago he tried to excommunicate
his supporters for wanting the Epstein files released, for cripes’ sake.
But Vance’s lie had a purpose. What he meant is that
Trump doesn’t impose moral tests on his voters. And that’s true: The
only moral standard in the modern Republican Party is whether you support or
oppose the president. That’s the type of nihilism the vice president is now
embracing as an excuse not to rebuke the bigots in his own ranks. If you want
the biggest possible army against the left, it seems, you need to accept people
who are both pro- and anti-Holocaust.
The closest he came this weekend to a real repudiation of
groyperism was in a print interview with UnHerd’s Sohrab
Ahmari, and even that was a lesson in moral cowardice. Asked about the
slurs aimed at his Indian American spouse, he replied, “Anyone who attacks my
wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki [the former Biden press secretary] or
Nick Fuentes, can eat sh-t. That’s my official policy as vice president of the
United States.”
Psaki didn’t attack Vance’s wife, though. She attacked Vance
himself by wondering how his wife, Usha, copes with
his racially coded fire-starting.
She certainly didn’t use any slurs about Usha Vance, as groypers routinely do,
and she didn’t say that she’d prefer it if Mrs. Vance were a Christian, as the
vice president himself has. Vance name-checked Psaki, I suspect, because he
calculated that framing his criticism in both-sides terms would make his jab at
Fuentes more tolerable to right-wing bigots. It’s a form of moral equivalence:
If Fuentes is only as offensive as a former White House press secretary, how offensive can
he really be?
These are the games a politician must play when his
chances of easily winning a national primary depend on not making guys who find
“Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts funny too angry at him.
‘Heritage’ foundations.
It’s revealing that Vance felt most emboldened to speak
out against Fuentes when the subject of his spouse was raised.
On the one hand, that’s basic manhood at work. Even the
Indian-hating dregs of Trump’s base might grudgingly respect the VP for
defending his wife.
But it’s also a common thread between the vice president
and influential right-wingers like Shapiro and Vivek
Ramaswamy who aren’t as willing as Vance to accept a
bigoted wing of the GOP as a fact of political life. All three men seemed
content with being members of the Leopards
Eating People’s Faces Party as long as it was other
people’s faces being eaten. Now that they or their families are on the menu,
suddenly it’s time for figures like Fuentes to “eat sh-t.”
Ramaswamy was another speaker at last week’s Turning
Point conference and used his remarks to condemn
prejudice on the right. He published a well-received op-ed on the same subject in the New York Times, and good for
him. But traditionally he isn’t
a guy known for telling lowbrow populists things they
might not want to hear. And so I find it hard to take his newfound moral
indignation seriously for the same reason I find it hard to cheer on Shapiro,
who employed Candace Owens at his site, The Daily Wire, right up until
she began targeting people of his own faith.
Is Ramaswamy really alarmed by right-wing prejudice, or
is he alarmed by right-wing prejudice toward Indian Americans specifically
because it’s affecting
his chances of becoming governor of Ohio? If Vance
were married to a white woman, would Nick Fuentes still need to “eat sh-t” for
calling people “jeets”? If groypers offered to steer clear of Indians and Jews
going forward and restrict their bigotry to groups whom Republicans have
traditionally found undesirable, like Muslims, would Shapiro and Ramaswamy
consider the right’s bigotry problem more or less solved?
There’s a paradox at the heart of this. Political parties
have an obvious incentive to expand their coalitions, which points them toward
being more inclusive. That’s why aspiring president J.D. Vance wants everyone
from Jews to Jew haters to feel welcome (somehow) in the GOP. But a postliberal
nationalist movement like Trump’s will be xenophobic and exclusionary by
nature, forever seeking to solve social or political problems by reducing the
population of some minority scapegoat. How does MAGA reconcile those competing
interests? How can it get bigger and smaller, winning the votes of
Jewish and Indian Americans while making clear that it considers them
second-class and their presence in this country a cause of what’s ailing it?
The answer, I think, is the “Heritage American” garbage
that Jonah
Goldberg wrote about last week.
Ramaswamy addressed the concept in his Turning Point
speech. “The idea of a ‘Heritage American’ is about as loony as anything the
woke left has actually put up,” he told
the crowd, rightly scorning the notion of a nationalist
caste system based on ancestry as a form
of identity politics. “There is no American who is more American than
somebody else. … There’s no nonbinary American. It is binary. Either you’re an
American or you’re not.”
That’s a noble idea, and a smart play politically by a
candidate who can’t afford to have nonwhites in Ohio angry at him and his party
in case the “Heritage American” nonsense breaks through into the mainstream.
But it’s no exaggeration to say that the entire point of the nationalist
movement to which Ramaswamy belongs is for the traditional governing
majority—white, Protestant, male-dominated—to reestablish its cultural
preeminence and right to rule over the nation’s other, lesser tribes. We’re all
Americans under the law, but the Republican base is keenly aware that we don’t
all hail from that white, Protestant, male-dominated cultural tradition.
“Heritage American” is a way to square that circle.
People like Ramaswamy and Shapiro who are willing to re-empower the traditional
majority by voting Republican will have their formal American-ness recognized
but they can’t be granted cultural stature equal to other right-wingers.
They’re Americans but they’re not American the way those who descend
from the 18th- and 19th-century white guys who made
America great in the first place are. Lacking that cultural inheritance, they
shouldn’t wield significant influence over the rest of us. They’re entitled as
citizens to stay, but they should know their place.
That’s how the movement gets bigger and smaller. It gets
bigger at the bottom, theoretically, by attracting new voters with anti-crime,
border-enforcing policies while getting smaller among its leadership class by
ideally limiting it to all but “Heritage Americans.” Jonah called it “DEI for
nationalists” but I’d say it’s more like DEI for white underachievers. Which,
admittedly, is probably a distinction without a difference.
The other reason that “Heritage American” appeals to so
many postliberals as a concept, I think, is that it excuses them from having to
honor their country’s civic traditions.
Numerous populists pushed back against criticism like
Jonah’s on social media this weekend by pointing out that a nation is more than
its “creed.” You might find 350 million people in Africa willing to swear
allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, they argue, but you couldn’t swap them in
for the population of the United States and expect the country to run precisely
as it did before. “America” as we understand it isn’t merely a set of legal
principles or founding ideals, it’s the product of 250 years of cultural
evolution. You can’t have one without the other.
True enough. But if creed without culture does not a
nation make, neither does culture without creed—which is precisely what
postliberalism is offering. It wasn’t Omar Fateh who proposed overturning
a national election or defying
Supreme Court rulings in order to impose his policy
vision on America, remember. It was J.D. Vance who did that because Vance, like
so much of the chud right, regards the constitutional order as an obstacle to
political and cultural domination. Nationalists don’t believe in the Founders’
vision, so go figure that a blood-and-soil concept like “Heritage” would come
to supplant fidelity to liberal democracy as their north star for what makes
someone more or less American.
As we’ve spent the past year discovering, if you take 350
“Heritage Americans” and put them in charge of the federal government, the
country also won’t run precisely as it did before.
2028.
It’s no coincidence that the question of which cohort
should rightly lead the GOP has become a hot topic among Republicans as they
watch the president decline
before their eyes and steer his party toward a midterm
disaster.
I wonder, frankly, if the “Heritage American”
argle-bargle is some sort of early nationalist push to try to narrow the range
of acceptable prospective challengers to Vance, the Great Postliberal Hope, in
2028. I doubt that Marco Rubio will take him on—but in case he does, it can
only help the VP if Republican voters broadly regard Rubio as, uh, less
“Heritage” than him.
I also expect that Usha Vance will be a great political
asset to her husband on the presidential campaign trail, assuming he ends up as
nominee. J.D. will have a bulletproof defense for casual voters when he’s
reminded that he turned a blind eye for years to the Candace-ization of his
party: Hey, one of my best friends is Indian!
As for the rest of the party come 2028, I think the
quasi-official Vance-approved Republican line on bigotry will be something like
this: It’s bad, but it sort of depends on who it’s directed at, and in any case
we shouldn’t do anything about it unless it’s coming from the left and can be
used as a cudgel against Democrats.
To which our leftist readers will say, “That’s always
been the Republican line on bigotry!” Maybe so. Although I expect the number of
groups that it’s okay to be bigoted toward will shortly be quite a bit larger
than it used to be.
If you want a little further reading on this subject
that’ll curl your hair, I recommend the focus
group of young Republicans that researcher Jesse Arm
conducted recently for City Journal. That’s a right-wing publication, so
we can safely assume that it didn’t go “nutpicking” in search of kooks whose
views would make the GOP look bad. Yet even so, some of the answers read like a
caricature of how bigoted the Gen Z right has become. Asked for his views about
Jews, for instance, the looniest guy in the bunch (a Fuentes fan) called them a
“force for evil” and, when given a chance to retract, doubled down. “This is my
country, my people have been here since the American Revolution, so I say what
I want to,” he retorted.
Now that’s a “Heritage American.”
Most of the panel is all-in on J.D. Vance as their
party’s nominee in 2028, too, of course. Remember them whenever Vance is asked
about Carlson or Fuentes or Owens and declines to call them bad influences to
whom Republicans shouldn’t be listening, which he’ll do many, many times
between now and the next election. Aside from his boss, no one on the right has
as much say as the vice president does over how wide the moral Overton window
for his party should be—and, for his own selfish sake, he’s decided he wants it
open as far as possible. No matter how much brain-poisoning results.
