If there’s a silver lining in the recent intra-conservative dustup over anti-Semitism, it’s that a significant portion of the movement can walk and chew gum at the same time.
A minority of right-leaning pundits have been grumbling that internecine fighting over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes somehow impedes the Republican Party’s ability to use its majority to pass legislation, but this is obviously untrue: First, the conservative movement isn’t the same thing as the Republican Party, and second, the government is shut down. But most important, any political movement worth its salt can multitask.
Conservatives who oppose white nationalists’ inclusion in politics should certainly keep up the fight.
And they are, thankfully. Ben Shapiro dedicate his latest show to explaining Carlson and Fuentes’s anti-everything: anti-Americanism, anti-constitutionalism, anti-Semitism, and various manifestations of racism. It is a good rundown of just how many reasons there are to take a moral stand here.
Which is why this Associated Press story on this past weekend’s Republican Jewish Coalition conference is so important as the pro-America majority attempts to fight off the Carlson-Fuentes insurgency:
“Concerns that antisemitism is on the rise among Republicans burst to the surface this weekend, turning a conference of the nation’s leading Jewish Republicans from jubilation over a tenuous ceasefire in the Middle East into a clarion call to stem the spread of anti-Jewish voices within the party.”
The RJC convention managed to handle the curveball just fine. It ended up being a showcase of Republican politicians’ readiness to take on the haters in its own party. As the AP noted, “the voices speaking from the podium Friday and Saturday were united in their condemnation of antisemitism.”
Among them was Sen. Ted Cruz, who has been steadfast on this issue and one of the most prominent conservative figures willing to take on Carlson directly. In his speech, he referenced Carlson and some of his guests: “Now is the time for choosing. Now is the time for courage. If you sit there and nod adoringly while someone tells you that Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II; if you sit there and nod while someone says, there’s a very good argument, America should have intervened on behalf of Nazi Germany in World War II; if you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry; and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil.”
Lindsay Graham and others took their shots, and Trump addressed the conference via video in which he reiterated his opposition to anti-Semitism.
It was part of what our own Abe Greenwald calls in today’s newsletter the right’s immune system kicking in.
And that is nothing to take for granted. After all, the Democrats’ anti-Semitic nominee for New York mayor, who has been embraced by his own party, had two notable figures encouraging him this weekend. One was former President Barack Obama, who called Mamdani to praise his campaign and offer help once he’s in office—though he would not endorse Mamdani’s candidacy or back him publicly. The other was Jeremy Corbyn, the star of a Democratic Socialists of America phone banking event for Mamdani. Corbyn used his time as UK Labour leader to turn the party against British Jewry and has done more than anyone to fan the flames of Britain’s anti-Semitism wildfire.
The reason this reaction is important is because the fight against anti-Semitism is a long one. (It’s not called “the world’s oldest hatred” for nothing.) The Labour Party learned the hard way that it could rid itself of Jeremy Corbyn but that would not cure its Corbynism—and it now has no serious internal mechanism to do so.
The Democrats risk falling into a similar trap. The RJC is part of the Republican Party’s immune system. But the Democratic Party was for so long able to take Jewish support for granted that its own partisan Jewish infrastructure atrophied. It had completely let down its guard. Republicans, meanwhile, are benefiting from the fact that they had to build something—arguably beginning in the 1980s—that would be a specifically Jewish part of the party’s organizational world and could withstand resistance from existing groups. Once it had a foothold, it would have the energy of a start-up not a legacy institution.
Start-ups, of course, have their own weaknesses. But at the moment, that start-up energy enables the wider conservative world to multitask. And it’s why those who claim that fighting anti-Semitism is a “distraction” are, for the moment, losing that argument.
