Melanie Phillips,a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, is published by Wicked Son. Access her work at: melaniephillips.substack.com.
(JNS) Astonishingly, it looks as if “the Jewish question”-that perennial antisemitic canard-is becoming the hinge issue that will determine the course of American politics.
The Democratic Party and the left, in general, now promote an increasingly virulent hostility toward Israel and a corresponding embrace of Islamist and black extremism, leading to rising attacks on American Jews.
But now, the right is following suit in an obsession with Israel and the Jewish people. Alarmingly, this consists of a large and growing number of mainly young white men, including a significant proportion of conservative professionals.
Earlier this month, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) predicted that within five years, the Republicans will be hostile to Israel. Cruz has been repeatedly warning that antisemitism on the right is rising to a level he has never seen before.
American conservatives are currently convulsing over the antisemitism of the immensely influential faction comprising former Fox News host and current podcaster Tucker Carlson; the white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes; and the unhinged conspiracist and political commentator Candace Owens.
Concern over Carlson’s repeated platforming and promotion of vicious antisemites, Israel-haters and Holocaust revisionists exploded when he hosted Fuentes on his podcast for a mutual love-in. Fuentes is an eye-watering antisemite who has attacked “organized Jewry in America,” has said that Adolf Hitler was “awesome and cool,” and has called for the “annihilation” of “perfidious Jews” and others “when we take power.”
Bad as all this is, the really shocking thing has been the refusal by certain mainstream conservatives to denounce it and shut it down, appearing instead to nod along to it.
At the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think-tank, its president, Kevin Roberts, not only failed to criticize his friend Carlson for staging this grotesque carnival of defamation and incitement against Israel and the Jews, but he shockingly called out Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” sowing division.
At last week’s Turning Point USA conference, the podcaster Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish, tore into those who had failed to crush Carlson, Fuentes and Owens. Their views, he said, had no place in the conservative movement, and the failure by so many influential conservatives to say so meant that conservatism was now in serious danger.
One of those influential conservatives, however, is none other than U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who is another of Carlson’s friends. Vance closed the conference by decrying “purity tests” and said: “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform.”
In a subsequent interview on the website UnHerd, he made some even more troubling remarks. Although he said that antisemitism and all forms of ethnic hatred “have no place in the conservative movement,” he also said the idea that Carlson’s views “are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement” was “frankly absurd.”
But Carlson is mainstreaming bigotry against Jews, normalizing grotesque antisemitic tropes, and spreading hatred of Israel and those who support it.
He is also leading the attempt to peel away Israel’s principal source of support in America: evangelical Christians. In an attack on Christian Zionists such as Cruz and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, Carlson claimed that they had been seized by a “brain virus” because they support Israel, even though they aren’t Jews.
But it was Christian Zionists-who are faithful to Hebrew scripture and believe that Israel and the Jews are blessed by God-who placed Hebrew and Jewish references at the very heart of the U.S. constitutional settlement when they helped found America.
Surely, therefore, it is Carlson, who thus trashes America’s foundational values along with the Christians and Jews who provided them, for whom there’s no place in America’s conservative movement. Yet America’s conservative vice president-and likely presidential candidate in three years’ time-thinks that’s “absurd.” Shockingly, it follows that he thinks there is a place for those ideas in the conservative movement.
Worse still, Vance also said: “Those raising the alarm about rising antisemitism on the right are trying to distract you from the necessary conversation we need to have about the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
This was a deeply shocking thing for him to say. What exactly was this “necessary conversation” about Israel that was being avoided? Vance added: “There is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy.”
That “consensus view” is America’s support for Israel and commitment to its security as the one dependable ally in the Middle East, and therefore, essential to U.S. defense.
Yet according to Vance, the Jews are using the Fuentes row to manipulate America into continuing with this policy.
This echoed Roberts when he stated, in his defense of Carlson: “Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”
He was suggesting that the Jews were the puppet-masters pulling Washington’s strings. And now, Vance has voiced the same ancient canard of manipulative Jewish power.
Heritage is on the way to being destroyed by Roberts’s antisemitism. Some of its most senior officials have now jumped ship for a rival think tank, Advancing American Freedom, run by former Vice President Mike Pence and viewed as upholding decent, traditional Republicanism.
The belief in sinister Jewish power, however, is nothing new on the apparently respectable right. In 2006, the well-regarded academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt set out-first in an article in the London Review of Books and then in their book, The Israel Lobby, the following year-the unhinged and paranoid falsehoods about Israel and the Jews that are now causing such commotion.
Starting from the premise that Israel was to blame for everything in the Middle East conflict, the two constructed their utterly specious conspiracy theory that a loose assortment of pro-Israel organizations had skewed U.S. foreign policy to favor Israel at America’s expense, in particular by pushing the United States into the war in Iraq.
This Israel lobby, they claimed, actively worked to control public debate in both academia and the media, often misusing the charge of Jew-hatred to silence Israel’s critics, and had also prevented the appointment of government officials who were critical of Israel.
This was all a farrago of utter nonsense. It ignored the non-Jews in the Bush administration who were actually responsible for the Iraq war. It ignored the fact that Israel had advised against it. It ignored the Israel-haters in that administration. It ignored the media’s anti-Israel bias. It ignored the murderous rejectionism of the Palestinian Arabs. It ignored the immense lobbying power of Saudi Arabia.
It was simply a reworking of the unhinged fantasy of a secretive Jewish cabal controlling the world. Yet far from being ridiculed and shunned, Mearsheimer and Walt continued to be treated with respect, and now, their views have become mainstream in certain conservative circles.
Young men who lap up the rantings of Fuentes and Carlson are fueled by resentment over the Iraq war for sacrificing American lives for what they consider to have been an abject failure to stem radical Islam.
They look at the left-wing ideology that trashes men, has torn up Western culture and opened the borders to mass immigration, and they only see the left-wing Jews who were involved in those causes.
They don’t see the non-Jews who implemented them. They don’t see the prominent Jews who have been on the right in public life. And they don’t see that Jews and Judaism have been absolutely central to the development of the Western civilization they fear is under such grave threat.
It’s a bitter irony that while left-wingers regard Jews as evil because they are viewed as the source of capitalism, right-wingers regard Jews as evil because they are viewed as the source of communism.
The “groypers” and the keffiyeh-clad classes are joined at the hip by their mutual hatred of Jews.
The battle lines over the soul of the Republican Party and American conservatism are now clear. Remarkably, this war to define American values is being fought principally over the Jews.
But abandoning Israel and turning on the Jews will be the death of the Republican Party-and will signal also the death of America.