Jonathan S. Tobin
As Democrats embraced Zohran Mamdani, the Heritage Foundation stood by Tucker Carlson and his platforming of Jew-hatred. There’s a crisis on both sides of the aisle.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, speaks during a news conference with members of the House Freedom Caucus outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., n Sept. 12, 2023. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.
If the history of the last century taught us anything, it’s that there is one issue that can bring extremists from both the left and the right together: the Jews and the State of Israel. The question that Americans should be pondering right now, however, is not so much the way Jew-hatred has surged on the margins of society since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Rather, it is the way that animus—not just for the Jewish state, but also for its American supporters and Jews in general—has gone mainstream.
What seems to be the end of the post-Oct. 7 war might have signaled an ebbing of the tide of antisemitism. But it hasn’t. In fact, the weeks since the ceasefire in Gaza have demonstrated that the surge of antisemitism is not only going strong but has firmly established itself within both major political parties in a virtually unprecedented way.
Among Democrats, that was made clear by the way that their leadership has not only failed to stop or isolate Zohran Mamdani, an openly antisemitic candidate running for mayor of New York City. Perhaps even more shocking is the way mainstream institutions on the right and leading Republicans have not only declined to disassociate themselves from former Fox News host and current political commentator Tucker Carlson but have now rallied to his defense. They also seem ready to defend the platforming of the anti-Jewish rhetoric of Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi hate-monger whom Carlson had on his podcast.
In both cases, what we are witnessing is a betrayal not merely of American Jewry and the pro-Israel community, but of basic American values of decency. What makes it worse is that there appear to be few people of stature or power in either party who seem interested in confronting these despicable men. That makes it a near-certainty that this problem is only going to grow worse in both parties.
The intersectional antisemitic left
For most of the past two years, this was most obvious on the political left as Democrats like former President Joe Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris, kowtowed to their party’s intersectional left-wing that hates Israel. Congressional Democrats succumbed to the same pressure, with a majority of them supporting cutting off necessary aid to Israel in the middle of its war against Hamas. What’s more, the nation witnessed the spectacle of mobs of “progressives” taking over college campuses and targeting Jewish students for intimidation and violence while chanting for Israel’s destruction and Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”), and terrorism against Jews around the world (“globalize the intifada”).
But it took Zohran Mamdani—a heretofore obscure New York state assemblyman who identified as a Democratic Socialist—to make clear just how strong the pull of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment was within his party.
The loadstone of the 34-year-old Mamdani’s career has been his ideological commitment to Israel’s destruction, starting from his student days as founder of a chapter of the antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College in Maine. As late as 2023, he was stating that Israel was somehow the explanation for the alleged oppression of minorities by the New York City Police Department, a classic antisemitic trope in which Jews are always the reason for all the ills of the world. And it continues to this day, when, during the recent mayoral candidate debates, he recycled Hamas propaganda, including blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” in Gaza.
Yet rather than seek to stop him, with few exceptions, mainstream Democrats have rallied around him, believing that the Jew-hatred he has spread is as popular with young voters as the Socialist patent nostrums about bringing them cheaper housing and groceries, in addition to free bus rides.
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Bill Kristol speaking at the Art Museum at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., March 3, 2017. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
From Never Trump to pro-Mamdani
The icing on the cake was provided this week by William Kristol, the Never Trump former Republican strategist and publisher who has since joined the Democratic Party. In a statement that made it quite clear that he has largely abandoned most of the positions and principles he stood for most of his life, he told an interviewer that he supported Mamdani.
Perhaps it’s not so surprising that he would say such a thing. He went from treating Obama’s appeasement of Iran as an “emergency” and a mortal threat to Israel that needed to be stopped at all costs to supporting it because Trump was on the other side of the issue.
For someone who was not only among the country’s most prominent Jewish conservatives but also a key player in the pro-Israel community, to now regard those alarmed by the prospect of an antisemitic mayor of New York as experiencing “hysteria” is something of a betrayal to those who once admired him. When Kristol explains that any concerns about his stands are less important than the boost it would give his party nationally, it shows not only the depths of his cynical partisanship but how politically savvy players on the left—even turncoats like the former Weekly Standard publisher—have simply acclimated themselves to the fashionable Jew-hatred that has taken root there.
The Jewish establishment was slow in realizing that so-called progressives indoctrinated in the toxic ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that had conquered academia and most other sectors of American life was the engine of 21st-century Jew-hatred. For too long, they had focused on the antisemitism that existed on the far right, which didn’t have the clout or influence of their counterparts on the left.
It is the sort of thing that has enabled conservatives to argue in recent years that while the left has become a sinkhole of antisemitic Israel-bashing, the political right—led by President Donald Trump—is a bastion of pro-Israel sentiment.
But it’s time to acknowledge that this dismissal of right-wing antisemitism is no longer valid. And the person who made this necessary is Carlson.
Since he was fired from Fox News in April 2023, Carlson has allowed his hatred for Israel and its supporters to be open and unfiltered. Still, it wasn’t until he hosted Holocaust denier and antisemite Daryl Cooper on his podcast that removed any doubt about his views. Even after he publicly opposed Trump’s pro-Israel and anti-Iran policies, he continued to be a member of the presidential family’s inner circle. And leading conservatives, including the late Charlie Kirk, Megyn Kelly and Matt Walsh, refused to disassociate themselves from him.
The fact that he received a prominent speaking slot at Kirk’s memorial service on Sept. 21, where he employed a crude antisemitic trope centered on the deicide myth, also demonstrated that he remained a mainstream player in conservative and Republican circles.
Heritage embraces Tucker
He reached a new low this week when he welcomed neo-Nazi Holocaust denier and vicious Jew-hater Nick Fuentes onto his podcast. That raised the question as to whether Carlson was going to be able to mainstream antisemitism on the political right in much the same way that woke progressives have done to the left.
We didn’t have long to find out the answer to that question. And it came from a surprising source—the Heritage Foundation Washington think tank that has been one of the intellectual hubs of conservative thought and activism. In a video posted on X, Kevin Roberts, a historian and president of Heritage, made it clear that not only was he refusing to distance himself and his organization from Carlson, but that he was doubling down on this stand.
In a brief speech, Roberts denounced those who have criticized Carlson’s platforming of antisemitism and his vicious attacks on Israel and Christian Zionists, whom the podcaster described as heretics who had a “brain virus.” Roberts said Heritage didn’t believe in “canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians” and depicted those appalled by Carlson as a “venomous coalition” who engage in “slander” that “serves someone else’s agenda.”
Roberts said Heritage supported cooperation with Israel when it served U.S. interests—something no one disputes. But the Heritage president seemed to echo some of the dark rhetoric of the far left and far right when he spoke of those who “reflexively support” the Jewish state as “loud” sinister, globalist” forces who are somehow harming America, and that must be resisted.
He made clear that he would stick with Carlson, no matter what he did, and his only interest was in attacking the left. He said that he “disagreed with and even abhorred things that Fuentes had said,” but wouldn’t cancel him either. He treated his hatred of Jews as merely an idea that should be debated.
He did some damage control on that aspect of his statement a day later by detailing on X his profound disagreement with Fuentes’s vile bigotry. Still, he stopped short of drawing the obvious conclusion that those who normalize and seek to mainstream neo-Nazi beliefs need to be held responsible for doing that.
The point being, it doesn’t matter if you are appalled by Fuentes if you treat those who promote him and treat him as legitimate as allies, and smear those who oppose such abhorrent behavior as somehow unpatriotic or guilty of dual loyalty.
This is a startling turnabout for an organization with not only an honorable record of support for Israel but whose “Esther Project” to combat antisemitism has served as a blueprint for the Trump administration’s efforts to root out left-wing ideologies that are enabling Jew-hatred on college campuses. Roberts’ seeming neutrality about his friend’s prejudiced behavior directly contradicts what his organization has been trying to do in academia.
It’s especially discouraging since the real “globalist” forces in the international community are the ones whose arguments are echoed by Carlson and Fuentes, in which they promote blood libels against Israel, and seek to isolate and destroy it. Supporters of the Jewish state are Heritage’s natural allies and are to be found among its staff and donors because they support the same vision of national conservatism—both in the United States and Israel— that Roberts has championed.
JD Vance mimics Kamala Harris
Roberts’s profession of loyalty to Carlson came in the same week as a troubling response of Vice President JD Vance to questions from an Israel-hating student at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi. When given an opportunity to slap down anti-Israel conspiracy theories, he let them go unanswered. He responded with what could only be described as an equivocal statement about the U.S.-Israel relationship in which he boasted of pressuring Jerusalem during the recent ceasefire negotiations and professed his Christian faith.
While Trump and Vance have strong pro-Israel records, Vance’s answer was little different from the way Harris responded to smears of Israel from left-wing activists when campaigning last year, when she was primarily interested in signaling her sympathy for them. Like her, Vance seemed to be signaling that he, too, was more concerned with demonstrating his solidarity with extremists on his end of the spectrum than in distancing himself from them. When you consider that Vance is the likely frontrunner to succeed Trump, it calls into question whether Trump’s historic pro-Israel policies will be maintained if he wins in 2028.
Both battles must be fought
Taken together, all these events present an ugly picture of the current state of political debate in the United States.
There is no doubt that most of those who are supporting the U.S.-Israel alliance and fighting antisemitism can be found among Republicans and on the political right, while all the energy and most of the young stars in the Democratic Party are to be found among its anti-Israel and antisemitic left-wing. And unlike the crickets to be heard among most prominent Democrats about Mamdani, the pushback against Heritage and Carlson from prominent Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is a sign that the conservative base of the GOP is still firmly pro-Israel and ready to fight Jew-hatred wherever it is to be found.
But what we heard from the Heritage Foundation and Vance this week indicates that the antisemites have not only gotten a foothold within the conservative mainstream. Some of the most important players in it would prefer to embrace them rather than to drive them back to the fever swamps where they belong.
This is a sobering revelation for those who have long taken comfort from the way that the two major American political parties had more or less exchanged identities in the last half-century when it came to Israel and opposition to antisemitism. This shouldn’t diminish the effort to call the political left to account for its role in normalizing hatred for Israel. But it is a discouraging reminder that the same battle must now also be fought on the political right.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
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