The New Antisemitism
If the presence of leftwing antisemitism is explained in part by identity politics, what explains the return of its cruder rightwing cousin — or at least its appearance on high-profile podcasts?
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NOTE: Israel is a marvel, not least because of the free market revolution brought about by its current Prime Minister, but also because it provides greater liberty to people of all races and creeds than any other nation in the entire Middle East. For those reasons, it is a target for all those who wish to destroy Western Civilization; and make no mistake: the absurd claim that Israel is an illegitimate “occupier” in its own land is actually directed at America, most often by people who’ve made a ritual of so-called “land acknowledgements”.
Israel and America share the same enemies, within and without, and for the same reasons. That’s why we’re allies. And that’s why that alliance is now under attack. — RDM
by Victor Davis Hanson
November 12, 2025
Until recently, centuries-long, right-wing antisemitism seemed vestigial in America. The Republican Party, and conservative leaders like William F. Buckley Jr., had mostly marginalized antisemites and their fellow travelers. According to recent polls, such as the March 2025 Gallup survey, Republicans as a group still express overwhelmingly positive views of Israel (83 percent) — in sharp contrast to Democrats’ nearly nonexistent support (33 percent).
Left-wing antisemitism, especially commonplace on campuses and entrenched within the base of the Democrat Party, has cloaked itself in idealistic social justice causes. It is embedded into DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) identity politics, and “humanitarian” outrage over supposed Israeli “settler-colonialism,” “genocide,” and “apartheid.” After all, who in 2025 could not be against “settler-colonialists” who practice “genocide”?
When it was revealed that a recent Democrat Senate candidate in Maine, Graham Platner — an outspoken critic of Israel — had tattooed on his chest the Totenkopf (“Death’s head”) emblem of the Nazi SS Third Panzer Division, there was only mild response from Democrat elected officials. And despite Platner’s inconsistent and contradictory explanations for the Nazi insignia, which he has now covered up, almost no calls for him to exit the race followed.
If the presence of left-wing antisemitism is explained in part by identity politics, what explains the return of its even cruder right-wing cousin — or at least its appearance on high-profile conservative podcasts and social media?
Blogger Darryl Cooper — implausibly proclaimed by Tucker Carlson as perhaps “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States” — claimed on a Carlson podcast that Adolf Hitler’s armies in 1941 did not really intend either to starve or murder hundreds of thousands of Jews, Ukrainians, and Russian prisoners, even though there is a trove of documents that show premeditated Nazi assumptions of and plans for precisely such mass death. Why would Nick Fuentes, who at times in the past has praised both Hitler and Joseph Stalin, called for a holy war against Jews, and denied the Holocaust, remain unchallenged by Carlson on the same venue?
A variety of reasons can explain this recent surge of antisemitic vitriol on the right.
First, antisemitism in the last two decades has been mainstreamed by the left on college campuses. Indeed, the once-unthinkable in America has now become commonplace: chasing Jews into libraries, barring them from areas of campus, physically assaulting them, and calling for the extermination of Israel.
As right-wing antisemites sensed that such flagrant attacks and bullying went largely unpunished by authorities, they apparently reasoned such exemptions would likely be extended to themselves as well.
Second, the epidemic of diversity, equity, and inclusion victimhood has spread well beyond higher education to the workplace and popular culture. The DEI creed postulates that those on the victimized side of the Marxist oppressed-oppressors binary should be assumed to be incapable of oppressing anyone — even, or especially, when they overtly demonize Israel-supporting Jews.
Some on the right apparently felt they could freely voice suppressed venom against Jews because they now assumed that some on the left might welcome their views and many on the right would either keep mum in the interests of “no-enemies-on-the-right” ideological unity, feel antisemitism was a mere passing distraction, or be reluctant to endanger past friendships and associations.
Third, melting-pot assimilation and the veritable end of Jewish immigration means that for all the talk of the “Jewish lobby,” it is likely, at least demographically, going the way of the once-influential “Greek lobby” that is now rarely mentioned.
In sharp contrast, the Arab and Muslim populations of more than 3.7 million are not just increasing rapidly, but are already projected in the next decade to surpass the current number of about 7.5 million American Jews. More importantly, many Arabs, in the fashion of past immigrant and minority communities, are concentrated in swing and electorally important states such as Michigan, New Jersey, and Virginia. Demography, then, also expands the parameters of the permissible.
There is a final and most important catalyst that now fuels new rightist antisemitism, one that will eventually involve a war for the hearts and minds of the Make America Great Again movement. The infighting is reminiscent of the America First efforts of Father Charles Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh to keep America out of World War II, and to blunt the purported efforts of powerful American Jews to “drag” us in.
Among Trump’s MAGA base there has been a growing rivalry between Jacksonians like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, and the neo-isolationists such as Steve Bannon, Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The latter for now have largely lost out politically, as Donald Trump has become not just the most pro-Israel president in history, but the most effective in weakening the Middle East enemies of both the U.S. and Israel. He has systematically neutered the Iranian nuclear program, hit the Houthis hard, retaliated against terrorists in Syria, destroyed ISIS and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, and green-lighted Israeli retaliations — all without crossing the MAGA red line of fighting on the ground in so-called optional “forever wars” abroad.
Rather than concede Trump was always a “Don’t tread on me” Jacksonian (“No better friend, no worse enemy”), the neo-isolationists blame Israel, inferring that the Jewish lobby, and “Christian Zionists” are culpable for confusing and manipulating Trump, and dragging us into quagmires to protect Israel.
They vent their frustration that Trump’s calibrated interventions have been both successful and mostly popular, especially concerning Israel. Apparently they cannot convincingly fault the results on grounds either that they are unpopular or have hurt America’s own interests. Instead, they argue America has acted mostly on the prompt of Jewish donors, their Christian Zionist sympathizers, or perhaps high-profile Jews in the Trump cabinet and inner circle, such as top White House adviser Stephen Miller, special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Environmental Protection Agency director Lee Zeldin.
How does the current right-wing antisemitism now manifest itself? Ironically, in the form of America Firsters who fault both America, past and present, and much of Trump’s America First movement.
There are attempts to claim historical and even scholarly precedents for our current, allegedly wrongheaded support for Israel, and by extension vulnerability to undue Jewish influence. Occasionally, rightists cite World War II to find a thinly disguised parallel that we once again are fighting the wrong enemies on behalf of the wrong people at the wrong time — comparable to the tragic mistakes of 1941. Then, the U.S. purportedly had foolishly allied with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, supposedly due to the undue influence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Jewish advisers and donors.
In this incoherent narrative, just as we have backed the wrong (Israeli) horse, and alienated hundreds of millions of Middle East Muslims — replete with vast oil wealth, and who, when aggrieved, conduct anti-Westernism terrorist attacks — so, too, we misunderstood and unduly demonized Hitler’s Germany. Foolishly, America was persuaded by Jews at home, and British pro-Zionists and imperialists abroad, to empower our real enemy, Stalin.
The conclusion to this storyline was a 50-year, post-World War II Cold War with the Soviets, near nuclear Armageddon, and the counterproductive destruction of a misunderstood European Nazi Germany. For all of the Third Reich’s “excesses,” it was really trying, as Joseph Goebbels had insisted, merely to defend Europe and its white Western civilization from the marauding Bolshevik-Jewish-driven Mongols of the eastern steppes.
To concoct such a fable, Winston Churchill — whose Great Britain alone fought the Nazis and fascists from June 22, 1940 to June 22, 1941 — must be reduced to a “terrorist” who unfairly bombed German cities. That the British resorted to firebombing after initially costly but anemic retaliation to the Blitz, were later joined by the U.S. Army Air Forces, and fought for a cause of consensual government against dictatorships are passed over.
Similarly ignored are the routine Nazi and imperial Japanese slaughter of prisoners, the meticulously planned Holocaust, and the starvation or murder of some 30 million Chinese and Russian civilians. As a natural result of such politically driven revisionism, the brilliance and courage of a 12 million-person American liberation military in defeating all its enemies in less than four years becomes transmogrified into the naivete of near-useful idiots, ultimately dying for a terrible cause.
A second paradox is the right-wing, antisemitic ideological alignment with both the enemies of the U.S., and the left-wing opponents of conservative Republicans. Abroad, the views of the anti-Israel right have become near indistinguishable from the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, while Jew-hatred and generic racism are manifested domestically in Fuentes’s past attacks on the late conservative hero Charlie Kirk and his current derision of the ethnicity of the wife and children of Vice President J.D. Vance.
Dislike of Israel and demonization of the Jews also appear as spiritual twins to radical Islam, whose followers have killed more Americans than any nation or cabal since Vietnam. It is no accident that anti-Western Islamic terrorists who murder in Europe and the U.S. consider Israel its most proximate Western surrogate, given it is the only Western consensual government and free society in the entire Middle East — and by far the most pro-American.
Most conservatives are also deeply and understandably suspicious of the United Nations for reasons that transcend its hatred of Israel. But the views of right-wing antisemites dovetail closely with those of the General Assembly and its UN Human Rights Council that currently include the likes of China, Cuba, and Sudan.
It would also be hard to distinguish much of the rhetoric of radically left campus groups who attack the Trump administration and its “Christian Zionists” from the new right-wing antisemites. When Zohran Mamdani brags he will supersede federal law and arrest on sight a visiting Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, his view seems akin to views now commonly expressed by some on the right.
A third manifestation of conservative antisemitism is a growing insistence that Israel has done little for the U.S., and does not share many, if any, of the same enemies. Yet both the U.S. and Europe have their own reasons to prevent the Iranian theocracy from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Ensuring that it did not was made far easier for the U.S. once the Israeli air forces destroyed Tehran’s air defenses and took out its top generals and physicists.
Hezbollah has slaughtered Americans for decades in Lebanon and bombed both our embassy and Marine barracks there. That it is now crippled is largely thanks to Israel — and done without the presence of American troops on the ground in Lebanon. America’s security is greatly enhanced by the Israeli diminishment of both the Houthis and Hamas.
Fourth, to form any coherent antisemitic or anti-Israel narrative, omission, disingenuousness, and selectivity are essential. When Carlson interviewed Pastor Munther Isaac, an Arab Christian cleric from Bethlehem (who justified the October 7, 2023 attacks), Isaac offered a preposterous story of Israeli-inspired expulsions of Christians from his historic city. Yet even the simplest of questions were never demanded of Isaac: Why did the Christian share of the city suddenly drop to just 10 percent of the population after the Palestinian Authority took over governance of the city? Why are Christian populations in the Muslim world shrinking, but growing in Israel? Why are there far more Arab Christians living now in Israel than in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip combined?
We hear from such commentators on the right that Israel practiced “genocide” against the people of Gaza. But how exactly can a military respond to the peacetime, premeditated slaughter of 1,200 of its citizens when the perpetrators flee underground with hostages into a vast labyrinth of tunnels, with entries and exits disguised beneath hospitals, mosques, and schools?
In the 2004 fashion of the American block-by-block near leveling of Fallujah, Iraq? Was that also “genocide”?
Or the often tragically inaccurate 1944 bombing of Nazi forces embedded inside occupied France that killed tens of thousands of French civilians?
Or the Marines’ 1945 costly systematic incineration of imperial Japanese troops hunkered down in the multitude of subterranean caverns of Okinawa, along with thousands of Okinawan civilians the Japanese deliberately used as “human shields”?
Of course, it is natural for anyone to audit the policies and conduct of an ally of the United States. But to do so requires context and some easy comparisons of Israel’s conduct with the behaviors of the rest of the world’s conflicts. How about occupations? Why is Israel singled out as the sole occupier on the anti-Jewish right’s radar, when its critics stay silent about Turkey’s long-ago ethnic cleansing of the Greek population of northern Cyprus and current half-century-long occupation?
Muslims, led principally by Boko Haram, have ethnically cleansed millions of Nigerian Christians. They have slaughtered tens of thousands of African Christian civilians — yet to general quiet here and abroad. In 2023, Azerbaijan permanently expelled over 100,000 ethnic Armenian Christians from their ancestral homes in Nagorno-Karabakh — to mostly global indifference. Unlike Pastor Isaac’s mythologies about Bethlehem, these atrocities and others are of a magnitude and certitude that dwarfs anything found on the West Bank or in Gaza.
Finally, what are the proper protocols about offering platforms to those who, by intent, distort the historical record to advance intolerance and extremism, and seek popular audiences for their often unapologetic, racist views?
Causing considerable controversy among conservatives, Buckley, on his Firing Line show, sometimes gave interview opportunities to, or appeared with, the likes of serial rapist, prison convict, shooter of police, and racial demagogue Eldridge Cleaver, multiple felon and Black Panther founder Huey Newton, segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace, and racialist and eugenicist William Shockley. But the purpose of such interviews was not to allow such extremists a golden opportunity to present their uncontested views to propagandize a wider audience. Instead, conservatives who choose such edgy forums might emulate Buckley’s practice of cross-examining and refuting them, as he did relentlessly and publicly.
His controversial Firing Line episodes sought to remind Americans, mostly successfully so, that in a free society those who foment violence, warp history and science, and mainstream their support for extremist views must be questioned, debated, and, if possible, publicly refuted and exposed.
In a recent debate with Senator Cruz, who in the not-so-distant past would have been seen as a kindred conservative to Carlson, the host appeared eager, and fully prepared with facts and data, to confute Cruz. But was that because Cruz really posed an apparent greater menace to the country and conservatism than did a Darryl Cooper or Nick Fuentes?
In the Cruz interview, Carlson demonstrated his accustomed intelligence, skill, and knowledge to cross-examine people and agendas he now apparently opposes, including many conservatives whom, until recently, he vigorously and effectively supported. That he did not do so with the likes of firebrands Cooper and Fuentes was not due to any inability, but suggests he was either unwilling or perhaps found himself in agreement with some or many of their views.
Recently, the conservative movement has lost many of its most effective voices, such as those of Rush Limbaugh and Kirk. Republicans in 2016 were splintered by the Never Trumpers. And regrettably, they may be again by an emerging but already virulent antisemitism on the right. In the era of a 50/50 America, with the future of a constitutional republic and free-market economy in the balance, and given the dangers posed by the radical progressive project, its socialist trajectories, and its considerable financial, media, and institutional resources, it is only natural to call for unity. But there can be little harmony with those who allege without evidence that patriotic Jews are conspiratorial, conflicted in their loyalties, and thus not fully American — and a strong, pro-American and democratic Israel is supposedly a treacherous and evil enemy.
The supporters of the MAGA movement are not seeking limitless fealty from conservatives, but simply expect that race remains incidental — not essential — to our common identities as Americans. To expect anything less would be to wound fatally the revitalized conservative movement even as it is poised for even more remarkable successes.
— This essay originally appeared at The Free Press.
This isn't going to work. We need someone who can actually bring the sides together. It's very basic to draw lines and rely on institutional support and pretend you're doing politics. You risk giving the dialogue to others.