The Anti-Semitic Revolution on the American Right
12 min read
The New York Timesonce 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.
