The Right Slouching Toward Wrong

Democrats rejoice! Republicans are on the path toward crashing and burning, and then toppling off a cliff. The origins of their undoing should be familiar to you, however. They’re using your own misguided playbook in how to seduce the altogether wrong political bedfellows.

Progressive lunatics and Islamist apologists have called the shots in the Democratic Party ever since Joe Biden was given the keys to the White House. What appeared to be an illiberal, anti-intellectual and un-American fringe suddenly went mainstream.

At the center of this makeover was a policy plank—gleefully adopted by Bernie Sanders, the Squad, and a host of hard-left mayors in major metropolitan cities—that turned against the State of Israel and American Jews who self-identified as Zionists.

The Democratic Party was remade without a political or moral center. America was no longer a force for good. White supremacy was the country’s rotten past and inescapable destiny. Terrorists were our friends and the police our outlaws. Screaming about “racism” and “genocide” replaced democratic debate. The enormous racial progress America had made was discounted; and a war Israel did not start became one which it was not allowed to win.

American Jews who had long solidified their home within the party of FDR and JFK suddenly found themselves alienated by the party’s embrace of DEI.

Now Republicans have very publicly signaled that they, too, have a Jew-hating fringe. Talk about squandering whatever political capital Donald Trump achieved in the first year of his second term. He should put an end to the party’s unsightly antisemitism before it engulfs his presidency.

Meanwhile, his Vice President, J.D. Vance, is making things worse and revealing the Appalachian side of his American persona—a bitter, anti-globalist, anti-cosmopolitan political strain that is elevating America First into an isolationist religion reminiscent of the 1930s.

Vance recently minimized rising antisemitism within the Republican Party, calling it a mere distraction “from the necessary conversation we need to have about the U.S.-Israel relationship.” Really? Obviously, he’s spending too much time with his close friend, Tucker Carlson, who said he didn’t know “anyone in the United States in the last 24 years who’s been killed by radical Islam.”

Unless you count the Jews murdered outside a museum in Washington, D.C.; or the ones set on fire in a mall in Boulder, Colorado; killed in Thousand Oaks, California and assaulted in Times Square and the Diamond District in New York City; and the pipe bombs circulating among protesters outside synagogues in Los Angeles and Manhattan. These were most assuredly not friendly, respectful disputes over America’s support for Israel.

Vance went to Yale and is not obtuse. Something else aligns him with the newly unabashed Jew-hating wing of the MAGA movement. Their very existence is irrational. Why reject the one democratic ally in the Middle East that possesses the technical and military capacity to keep America safe and shares the same enemies list? And what’s the appeal of antisemitic conspiracists and Holocaust deniers?

Social media influencer Myron Gaines, a Carlson acolyte, wears a sweater with the phrase “Let Em Cook,” which is a popular antisemitic meme justifying the ovens at Auschwitz. Vance is cool with that?

Carlson pinned the murder of Turning Point’s Charlie Kirk on Israel. Here’s the scene he set: Jews “sitting around eating hummus” and rejecting Christianity by ordering up the assassination of another messiah. Carlson has been doling out antisemitic falsehoods liberally: lever-pulling bankers and American Jews with dual loyalties to a genocidal state.

He has also platformed the ravings of white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Fuentes has attacked “organized Jewry in America,” praised Adolf Hitler as “awesome and cool,” and openly called for the “annihilation” of “perfidious Jews . . . when we take power.” Carlson listened passively, offering no rebuttal. He has also hosted “historians” who blame World War II on Winston Churchill.

The vice president has had many opportunities to denounce what these podcasters have been peddling—revamped blood libels and nefarious cabals that reflect poorly on MAGA’s intellectual honesty. The brainy neoconservatives who once led the Republican Party have seemingly been replaced by numbskulls wearing dunce caps.

Rather than reject Carlson and his cadre of Jew-hating sycophants, Vance told the audience at last week’s Turning Point USA’s inaugural AmericaFest that he didn’t want to “impose any purity tests.” But by not taking a moral stand against open displays of antisemitism, he has sanctioned its pernicious return to civilized life.

Vance is not alone in defending Carlson. The president of the Heritage Foundation validated the platforming of Fuentes and then shuffled the deck of canards by referring to some “venomous coalition” that sought to cancel the podcaster. Megyn Kelly, Carlson’s former colleague at Fox News, defended him, too.

Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro, speaking at AmericaFest, as well, called Carlson, Candace Owens, and Steve Bannon “frauds and grifters . . . charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

Shapiro got the attention of many—but not all were in agreement. American Jews should take note. If the Republican Party doesn’t change course, it will foreclose the possibility of a new political home for moderates and Jews. Jews are begrudgingly beginning to see that they are on the verge of homelessness on the American left.

 If Trump was a better student of history, he would realize that festering antisemitism always leads to national annihilation. Social upheaval and cultural decline always seem to have antisemitism at its source.

Jew-hatred has proven to be an Olympic sport where nearly every country gets a medal. Throughout history, nations that passionately hated Jews did not fare well—whether in Ancient Greece, Rome, Spain, England, Germany, and today’s France.

Every Arab and Islamic nation in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and North Africa that once had a significant Jewish presence also had thriving mercantile economies and more enlightened lives. Now most have neither. The successful adoption of the Abraham Accords manifests that truism.

The Republican Party in post-World War II America had the worldly and cultivated men—William F. Buckley Jr., and his National Review, and the recently deceased Norman Podhoretz, with Commentary—as solid bulwarks against antisemitism within the John Birch Society in the 1960s and Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign in 1992.

It may be true that today’s Democratic Socialists are far more dangerous to the security of Israel and safety of American Jewry than any threats presented on the far right—notwithstanding the millions of followers who view Carlson and Owens as oracles. The far left, after all, has broad influence over American universities, mass media, publishing, museums and other cultural institutions.

The woke right has no equivalent propaganda delivery services. Moreover, they have no Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdanis in power or waiting in the wings. Fox News and Newsmax are not likely to endorse Nick Fuentes for Congress.

But antisemitism among young Republicans is inexplicably rising, apart from what was imported to America by way of illegal immigration. Homegrown hatred is worrisome. So, too, are recent findings by the Manhattan Institute where Gen Z conservatives alarmingly harbor antisemitic attitudes.

A few years ago, the story was Kanye West and Kyrie Irving. Today, the next wave of country music artists, NASCAR drivers, and any of the Yellowstone TV drama offshoots may portend where Jews stand among conservatives.