The GOP’s antisemitism crisis |
On October 8, two of the biggest voices in right-wing media sat down for a nearly four-hour chat. The host was Dave Smith, a libertarian Jewish comedian who has made a name for himself as a vocal critic of Israel’s war in Gaza. His guest was Nick Fuentes, a leader of the antisemitic “Groyper” movement that has become increasingly popular among the rank-and-file of the MAGA movement.
Early in the conversation, Smith addressed the elephant in the room: Why was he, a Jewish comedian, hosting someone like Fuentes on his show? Smith’s answer was that their shared policy views, most notably on Gaza, were more important to him than Fuentes’ hatred.
“I don’t actually think bigotry is the worst thing. It can be bad, but it’s not the worst thing,” Smith said. “As a Jewish person…there’s these people who hate Jews, I should probably be cool. Because it’s kind of hard for people to hate people who are cool to them.”
In response, Fuentes painted himself as a misunderstood victim of cancel culture. Leading right-wing voices like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson were, in Fuentes’ telling, unfairly persecuting him based on selective and inaccurate quotations.
“People are hanged by their words selectively,” Fuentes said. “These are tools of reputational destruction. They don’t like where you’re pointed, so they look for things that are going to hurt people’s feelings.”
Around the same time, on his own show, Fuentes did a brief monologue on the historic origins of antisemitism. In his view, the story is simple: Jews deserve it.
“What is Jew synonymous with, as a verb? It means to cheat, to lie, act in bad faith as though it’s second nature. Where do you think that comes from?” Fuentes said. “Everybody, in every nation, in all times, for thousands of years, eventually comes to the conclusion that Jews always act in bad faith.”
This was par for the course for Fuentes: a man who has described Hitler as “awesome” and suggested Jews should be forced to either leave America or convert to Christianity. He had not been selectively quoted or incidentally bigoted: blaming America’s problems on its Jews has been his cause for nearly a decade. No amount of acting “cool” on Smith’s part would make Fuentes reconsider his hatred of Jews.
But Smith’s cartoonish naïveté betrays a deeper problem: a rising antisemitism crisis on the MAGA right that is largely of the party’s own making, one that risks raising people like Fuentes to new heights of influence And the GOP’s elites are now struggling to contain it.
The leak of internal Republican group chats to Politico, including messages sent by a prominent Trump administration official named Paul Ingrassia, revealed numerous messages containing explicit bigotry and even praise for Hitler. It is not just the existence of these texts that’s notable, but the fact that they leaked at all — which indicates that someone on the right, who was in these conversations, wanted to try and push their internal enemies out.
Indeed, there is real and growing recognition — at conservatism’s highest levels — that they have an antisemitism problem.
Chris Rufo, the Trump right’s leading activist on social issues, warned in March of “influential online commentators” who were selling “diffused, right-coded conspiracy theory” in which Jews “have taken control of American media, flooded society with pornography, and organized sex-related blackmail rings to secure support for Israel.”
Shapiro offered a similar diagnosis in a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post. “There is a part of the Right that is extraordinarily conspiratorial and sees Jews as a conspiratorial force,” he said. “You get a lot more likes and clicks if you are promoting an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish agenda than if you are doing the opposite.”
These concerns typically focus on influencers and public figures: Fuentes, obviously, but also Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Kanye West, Darryl Cooper, Andrew Tate and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA). The basic idea, according to people like Shapiro and Rufo, is that these figures are the source of the rot manifested in those group chats, a cancer on the GOP who need to be confronted and potentially even excised from the broader right.
Yet this raises a deeper, and more troubling, question: Why is it that they’ve been able to build such a large audience? Why do “you get a lot more clicks” nowadays if you promote right-coded antisemitism? And why is it that so many of the party’s youth operatives get seduced by neo-Nazism?
The answer, according to both publicly available research and my own conversations with prominent right-wingers, is distressingly simple: President Donald Trump has turned the right into the premier home for conspiratorial extremism.
While the left has its own struggles with antisemitism, especially as it relates to rising anti-Zionist sentiment, the right is tapping into an older and more traditional form of Jew-hatred — one with a long........