The two sides of the anti-Semitism debate currently roiling the right can be boiled down to the following: those who warn that Jews are the canary in the coal mine for wider society vs. those who treat anti-Semitism complaints as the manifestation of just another interest group seeking its own piece of the identity-politics pie. They believe conservatives should only be concerned with fighting “the left.”
Obviously the former are correct and the latter are wrong. But there’s another element to this: Anti-Semitism isn’t merely a category of traditional discrimination; in addition to being dangerous it also makes a society deeply stupid.
That is not a comment made lightly or dismissively. What anti-Semitism does to the public debate stunts the intellectual growth of any political movement in which it is legitimized. Those who are arguing that the anti-Semitism being whipped up by Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and other professional new-media trolls is a distraction from conservative policy pursuits are dead wrong. Anti-Semitism is a parasite that hijacks its host and drains it. Want to get back to “the important stuff?” So, too, do the Jews in the movement. But at the moment the groypers are clogging the pipes.
This was on display yesterday when the president of the Heritage Foundation, once arguably the most important think tank in Washington on either side of the aisle, recorded a video pledging fealty to the Tucker wing of the movement and telling his organization’s members and donors to pound sand. Kevin Roberts, as I wrote yesterday, denounced those who denounced anti-Semitism as “venomous” disloyal “globalists” in defense of Vice President JD Vance’s own comments on the subject the night before.
Heritage still employs many actual issue experts who are now in the tough position of doing real scholarship while the organization’s president seeks to sabotage their work and replace serious intellectual pursuit with frog memes and performative pseudo-fascist pageantry. These patriots have my deepest sympathy, and I sincerely hope their Heritage affiliation does not make people think they are like Roberts. May they prevail in this organizational tug-of-war.
The intellectual rot of which I am warning is one that conservatives have no trouble decrying when its practitioners are on the left. Prior to the Vance-sparked news cycle, the political story of the week was a video of Zohran Mamdani, the progressive frontrunner for the New York mayoralty, explaining to left-wingers how to blame all problems on the Jews.
“We are in a country where those connections abound,” he told socialist activists in 2023. “Especially in New York City, you have so many opportunities to make clear the ways in which that struggle over there is tied to capitalist interests over here.”
For example, he said, “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”
That particular anti-Semitic trope, by the way, reportedly helped inspire the 2019 Jersey City massacre at Jewish establishments. It is also occasionally used by Democrats (including some in Congress) to try to provoke black-Jewish racial tensions and to inflame pro-Hamas sentiment among progressives. So Mamdani’s anti-Semitism is a bloody brand of Jew-baiting.
But it is also classic paranoiac anti-intellectualism. Mamdani was openly admitting that he does not seek to solve problems but to whip up public rage at his chosen scapegoat—the Jews—no matter what the issue is. Many have noted that Mamdani’s policy proposals are laughably unserious. Why do you suppose that is? Because anti-Semitism has robbed him of any semblance of critical thinking skills. As a result, Mamdani’s supporters have embraced a psychotic obsession with Israel and Jews. This is what you get.
Michael Brendan Dougherty made a similar point in an excellent piece at National Review, writing that “antisemitism continues to spread like a brain disease in the people who give in to it. You start a conversation about anything at all, the price of a carton of eggs, and they respond with a criticism of Bibi Netanyahu. It’s nuts.”
Point is, you can’t have a serious conversation with these people. They won’t let you. So a political movement of ideas must stop the spread of this nonsense or it will be harder for everyone to have serious conversations.
Is that the most important thing about anti-Semitism? Maybe not. But it is impeding American politics, so there ought to be a broad coalition ready to sweep it out of the way and into the dustbin of history.
