The Mainstreaming of Antisemitism on the Right
Conservatives have justly criticized left-wing antisemitism in recent years—but should look to their own side, too.
THIS NOVEMBER, THE REPUBLICAN SENATE CANDIDATE in Minnesota will almost certainly be a guy who has railed against the “Jewish lobby” and “Jewish elite” and defended Jew-bashing rapper Kanye West. While Royce White, the former pro basketball player who has evolved from Black Lives Matter to MAGA, still faces a primary vote in August, he got the Minnesota GOP’s endorsement earlier this month, with two-thirds of the delegate vote at the state party convention (where he was introduced by top MAGA strategist Steve Bannon). A few days later, White faced some major blowback over a resurfaced clip from an appearance on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast last July in which he decried “mouthy” women and suggested that a globalist cabal may have engineered World War II with a view to getting women into the workforce. But the flap over White’s sexist comments overshadowed his troubling record of antisemitic rhetoric, which includes the claim on his own podcast—because of course he has his own podcast—that Jews use the Holocaust “to provide a victimhood cover for their own corrupt practices.”
Remarkably, this was one of two ‘come for the misogyny, stay for the antisemitism’ episodes on the right this month. Remember Harrison Butker, the football kicker who ruffled feathers with a commencement speech at a small Catholic college in Kansas in which he not only suggested that homemaking was women’s true vocation but also asserted that women who look forward to careers and promotions have been lured by “diabolical lies”? Well, there was also a little-noticed part where Butker, decrying the supposed persecution of the Catholic faith in modern-day America, claimed that “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.” In case you didn’t get it, that means “the Jews,” and the reference is to the Antisemitism Awareness Act passed by the House on May 1—which does not seek to put anyone in jail but to expand the tools for college administrators to combat antisemitic harassment on campus. The bill endorses the use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, which includes “claims of Jews killing Jesus” among codes “associated with classic antisemitism.”
The Antisemitism Awareness Act raises legitimate concerns about the potential chilling of controversial and even offensive but non-harassing speech. But it also seems to have brought a number of fans of the “Christ-killers” trope out of the woodwork. Among them is at least one Republican member of Congress, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor “Jewish space lasers” Greene. Rep. Greene tweeted that she would not vote for the bill because it “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” Nope: The bill doesn’t say that. And while Greene’s grammar leaves some ambiguity about her meaning, it’s worth emphasizing that the Bible doesn’t say Jesus was “crucified by the Jews.”
The chorus was also joined by right-wing agitator Candace Owens, who was cut loose from Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire media empire in late March over her increasingly overt antisemitism. This time, Owens, who has over five million followers on Twitter, urged Christians to “wake up” and warned that “the true story of Christ’s death is deemed antisemitic” under the bill; her tweet has had over 32,000 likes and has been retweeted more than 8,000 times.
Lately, Owens has also been preoccupied with the idea that the real Holocaust of the twentieth century was the one inflicted on Christians by Bolsheviks—or rather, make that Judeo-Bolsheviks. (“Utterly bonkers that you are denying Jew involvement and orchestration of the gulags,” she tweeted at one critic.) Owens’s Twitter rant on Judeo-Bolshevism, elegantly debunked by the author of the Mischling Review Substack blog, went so far as to claim that Stalin may have been of Jewish ancestry. After years of dipping her toes in antisemitic waters, Owens has plunged in with both feet.
OWENS HAS RECEIVED a fair amount of condemnation on the right for her forays into antisemitism, including a broadside from anti-woke crusader Christopher Rufo (though it’s worth noting that these critiques came almost entirely after her parting with the Daily Wire). On the other hand, former GOP presidential contender and prominent Donald Trump supporter Vivek Ramaswamy has just suggested that BuzzFeed, which is mired in financial difficulties, should have mass layoffs and hire Owens and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has been trailed by antisemitism controversies on his own. (Yes, Ramaswamy is trolling, but he’s taking a swipe at BuzzFeed, not at Owens or Carlson.) And when conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager, who is Jewish and who has long been an enabler of Owens, was asked to discuss Owens and right-wing antisemitism last month, he offered only brief, tepid criticism and deflected the conversation toward critiquing anti-Zionism.
Generally, the recent response to right-wing antisemitism in conservative circles has been fairly muted, particularly amid vocal and justified alarm about the growth of antisemitism on the left in the cloak of “anti-Zionism.” On Wednesday, for instance, a Manhattan Institute panel discussion on the current rise in antisemitism was concerned almost entirely with the campus protests and progressive anti-Zionism; only toward the end was there a brief discussion of the right-wing variety of antisemitism, including figures like Carlson and neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. (Bizarrely, one panelist suggested that many right-wing antisemites were motivated by a lingering desire to be seen as “cool” by progressives.) There was no mention of Donald Trump’s dinner with Fuentes and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022. There was, however, talk of Jewish Democrats reluctantly embracing Trump because of anti-Zionism in the Democratic party and because of Joe Biden’s supposed “political warfare campaign” against Israel.
The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s publication, which has extensively covered the campus protests and the rise in antisemitism on the left and has recently promoted the idea of formerly anti-Trump Israel supporters turning “Never Biden,” has occasionally criticized antisemitic currents on the right—such as a Tucker Carlson segment platforming a pro-Hamas evangelical Christian pastor from Bethlehem. But the Free Press piece ridiculing the Harrison Butker controversy as a progressive freakout about a Catholic athlete expressing Catholic views at a Catholic college joked away the antisemitic innuendo with, “there was some stuff in there too about the identity of the guys who killed Jesus.” (Incidentally, “the Jews killed Jesus” is not standard Catholic doctrine and was formally disavowed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011.) It’s hard to imagine the site taking a similarly dismissive tone toward a progressive athlete spouting comparable antisemitic bile.
While the debate about Israel’s war in Gaza and the extent to which the United States should support specific Israeli actions in that war is painfully complicated, there is no question that the anti-Zionist animus on the progressive left is toxic—and that it often manifests itself it hostility toward the majority of American Jews who broadly support Israel. But to ignore the toxicity of antisemitism on the right is bad for both moral and pragmatic reasons. For one thing, right-wing antisemitism, too, is often entangled with anti-Israel hate. Royce White, for instance, has denounced the Republican party’s pro-Israel position, touted a tiny fringe group of ultra-orthodox anti-Zionist Jews as “real” Jews, and called Israel the “linchpin of the New World Order.” Owens has taken an overtly anti-Israel stance, complete with accusations of “genocide,” since October 7. And even aside from attitudes toward Israel, the increasing visibility on the right of more old-fashioned forms of anti-Jewish bigotry—such as narratives of the Jews as Christ-killers, or of “Judeo-Bolsheviks” exterminating Christians—should worry everyone.
It’s worth recalling that when Trump first ran for the White House in 2016, the presence of his antisemitic fans in MAGA circles—and Trump’s reluctance to disavow them—was widely discussed as alarming. At the time, however, these antisemites were mainly anonymous alt-right Twitter accounts, and Trump did finally denounce prominent Jew-haters who had endorsed him, such as David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. In 2024, at least some of the right-wing antisemitism is coming, so to speak, from inside the House. It has also made inroads into the MAGA mainstream that would have seemed inconceivable in 2016: Carlson is a case in point.
And Owens? In mid-June, she’s in the lineup at a MAGA “People’s Convention” in downtown Detroit that will also double as a Trump 78th birthday bash—and will feature Trump himself as the star speaker.