Why Is Right-Wing Antisemitism Back?

The Enduring Appeal of Idiocy

Left to right: Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. Source: Dr. Seuss/UC San Diego Library

I admit to being surprised by the resurgence of right-wing antisemitism in the US. Among the reasons:

1. President Donald Trump in America, and populists elsewhere in the West, have achieved electoral success without Jew-baiting. Opposition to mass migration, wokeness, and globalization is popular enough on its own. What’s to be gained from blaming the Elders of Zion?

2. On the contrary, successful right-wing populists have crafted an image opposed to Nazism. In France, Marine Le Pen ejected her own pro-Vichy father from the National Rally party. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni sacked a candidate who praised Hitler. Trump is a New York businessman with Jewish friends and family who won the 2024 election with significant non-white support.

3. The left is increasingly defined by an oppressor/oppressed binary that views Jews as guilty of “settler colonialism” in Israel and “white privilege” in the West. Polarization should therefore bring non-leftist Jews and Gentiles closer together, since the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

4. While the majority of American Jews voted Democrat, about a third supported Trump. There are a number of prominent MAGA Jews, notably Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s deportation policy. Israel’s Likud government has also forged close ties with the European right, including Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Therefore, the notion that Jews march in lockstep for the left is increasingly untenable.

5. Moreover, because of intermarriage, assimilation, and DEI purges, Jews are a declining force in American life anyway. That makes them less than convincing as conspiratorial masterminds. If the right needs upwardly mobile scapegoats, then Indians are the more au courant target. After all, “Asians are the new Jews.”

All of the above remains true, and yet an increasingly popular fascio of right-wing influencers—including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes—view Jews as their enemies. Why?

We could sanewash the antisemitic right by arguing that it’s all about Israel. MAGA wants “America First,” whereas Zionists seek to preserve America’s special relationship with the Jewish state. The war in Gaza has brought this tension to the fore. Were America to reduce its ties with Israel, then Carlson and co would happily welcome Jews into the fold. But does anyone seriously believe that? At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Carlson compared the slain activist to Christ, who was killed by “a bunch of (((guys))) sitting around eating hummus thinking about, ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us?’” Owens claims that a Jewish cult murdered Christian children on Passover and “still participates in this shit to this day.” Fuentes explicitly says that “you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness: ethnicity, religion, identity. . . . They hate the Romans because the Romans destroyed the Temple. We don’t think that, as Americans and white people.”¹ But sure, absent Israel, they’d have no problem with the Jews.

You can certainly make a non-antisemitic argument for recalibrating America’s relationship with Israel. Zionist Jews have made the case for ending American aid to Israel, since “American payouts undermine Israel’s domestic defense industry, weaken its economy, and compromise the country’s autonomy—giving Washington veto power over everything from Israeli weapons sales to diplomatic and military strategy.” Israel is a regional power, not a charity case, and its alliance with America should be seen in that light. From an “America First” perspective, Israel provides value to the US through weapons development (such as the Iron Dome missile defense system), intelligence sharing (against mutual enemies like the Soviets in the Cold War and Islamists today), and economic innovation (including joint R&D programs in the tech sector). It does so without a costly American troop presence, unlike other military aid recipients such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea. On the other hand, Americans are understandably sick of being diplomatically and economically entangled in Middle Eastern conflicts, even though Israel (absent the occasional US bunker buster) fights its own wars. Thus, the American push for Israel’s regional integration and concomitant pivot to East Asia.

There’s a good conversation to be had here, but it’s clearly not the discussion that the antisemitic right is interested in. More typical is the Christian student who questioned Vice President JD Vance over America’s support for Israel, since “Not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.” (Israel guarantees freedom of religion and is the only Middle Eastern country with a growing population of Christian citizens.) Clearly, identity politics, not realpolitik, is the underlying anti-Israel motivation. The same student also brought up “ethnic cleansing in Gaza,” and there’s no doubt that the recent war has damaged Israel’s reputation. But it’s also hard to take humanitarian concerns from the likes of Carlson (who once said of Iraqis that they’re “semiliterate primitive monkeys” for whom he has “zero sympathy”) and Fuentes (who’s called for the execution of non-Christians) very seriously. If the Jewish state of Israel were replaced by a Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem engaged in an open crusade, it’s pretty clear where their sympathies would lie.

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So why then, the resurgence of right-wing antisemitism? Zack Beauchamp argues that the right is now the primary home for low-trust voters, who have little faith in government, experts, and even their fellow Americans. Low trust is correlated with conspiracy theories, while conspiracy theories almost invariably devolve into antisemitism.² If the Joe Rogan guest list already includes ancient alien theorists and vaccine skeptics, it’s only a matter of time before he welcomes Holocaust deniers.³ Beauchamp also notes that young black and Latino conservatives are the Americans most likely to express antisemitic attitudes. The Christian-nationalist gloss of populist antisemitism thus serves a unifying function. Owens may be black, but at least she’s Christian, so she can align with a (quarter-Mexican) white racist like Fuentes against their common enemy. As a counter-strategy, you’d think that Jews could ally with Christian whites on the basis of shared whiteness. But as David Badiel observed, Jews are “Schrödinger’s whites”: white only depending on the politics of the viewer. Jews are white for progressives, for whom it’s a negative, and Semitic (or Khazar or whatever) for white nationalists, for whom it’s a positive. There’s no winning. The game is rigged.

Another factor is the right’s overreaction to woke, which involves purposefully transgressing every possible taboo and refusing the bare minimum of “gatekeeping.” If the leaders of Young Republican groups are going to refer to blacks as monkeys and “watermelon people,” do you really expect them to tread sensitively around Jews and the Holocaust? For Vance, any criticism of the Young Republicans is just “pearl clutching,” because “I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke is cause to ruin their lives.” The takeaway is that “kids” (men and women in their 20s and 30s) should be free to expand the Overton window to any extreme as long as they do so with an emoji. Richard Spencer, the would-be Führer of the alt-right, sank into obscurity because he was so painfully earnest about his Nazism, adopting a Hitler haircut and giving the Sieg Heil without winkingly denying it. By contrast, the younger and cooler⁴ Fuentes knows that, as long as you can claim you’re (half) kidding, openly praising Hitler is no obstacle to mainstream conservative acceptance.

So that’s why the retards⁵ and edgelords embrace antisemitism. But we shouldn’t overlook a more sophisticated ideological motivation. As revisionist history opportunist (“historian” would be an overstatement) Darryl Cooper told Carlson, “The post–World War II order is really defined by the fact that, you know, after Nuremberg, it really became effectively illegal in the West to be, like, genuinely right-wing, like the things we call right-wing.” Accordingly, to be genuinely right-wing again, we have to rehabilitate Hitler’s reputation and bring back antisemitism as a core element of the right. Here, it’s worth recalling that the original “America First” movement was a pressure group opposed to American entry into World War II. Its leaders included famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who blamed Jewish groups for “agitating for war” and claimed that “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” Another prominent spokesman was radio demagogue Charles “Tucker” Coughlin, who promoted a fascist dictatorship in the US and circulated excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

“Genuinely right-wing” is a highly debatable term. Winston Churchill, the British leader so indispensable to the defeat of Nazism, was a political conservative. Even Benito Mussolini’s Fascism wasn’t originally antisemitic or racially driven.⁶ The Cooper/Carlson agenda seems to be to bring the most destructive—including self-destructive—elements of the radical right to the fore. History does not remember Hitler, or his American supporters, fondly. That’s not because historians are lying to us and World War II was really the fault of the Jews. It’s because the Nazis started the worst war in human history, murdered millions, and brought a continent—including their own country—to ruin. We can debate America’s relationship with Israel. We can have a frank conversation about the complex relationship between Judaism and Christianity. We can even discuss Jewish influence in the West. But despite claiming that they’re “just asking questions,” the antisemitic right aren’t looking for answers. They won’t even acknowledge the clearest evidence that Jewish influence is limited: namely, that Jews were unable to prevent their own genocide. Per Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” Mass idiocy never ends well, not least for the idiots.

1. This weird take is apparently based on Eric Weinstein giving the middle finger to the Arch of Titus. Judaism actually blames the destruction of the Temple on Israel’s own sin of sinat chinam, or “baseless hatred.”

2. A corollary is that the left can also draw on antisemitism (masked as anti-Zionism) to win back low-trust Americans. In true conspiratorial fashion, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has said that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”

3. The progression isn’t inevitable, but it follows a certain algorithm-assisted logic. Consider online-porn addicts, who need to watch increasingly hardcore or bizarre sex in order to get off. Analogously, antisemites are the gooners of conspiracy theorists.

4. Relatively.

5. I’m barely 40, so still just a kid. Stop the pearl clutching.

6. A number of undoubtedly “genuine” pre-war right-wingers criticized Nazism on conservative grounds. For example, Ernst Jünger, a German nationalist, wrote that “blood legitimates itself more by achievements than by purity” and “We do not want to hear about chemical reactions, of blood infusions, of skull shapes and Aryan profiles. This must all degenerate into nonsense and hair-splitting.” Cooper et al aren’t interested in reviving the aristocratic pre-war right, just the vulgar barbarism that the best of them warned against.