Two Hatreds Empower Anti-Semitism on the Right

When a movement loses its moral voice and its moral will

The sheer amount of gross, blatant anti-Semitism on the right (including from some of America’s most prominent public officials) has reached a level I never thought I’d see in the United States of America in the year 2022, or ever.

Yesterday, in his invaluable morning newsletter, my friend Charlie Sykes recounted some of the worst incidents. There’s nothing subtle about them, no “dog whistles” here. Just in the past week, Donald Trump “truthed” this message to his loyal fans:

No President has done more for Israel than I have. Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S. Those living in Israel, though, are a different story—Highest approval rating in the World, could easily be P.M.! U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel—Before it is too late!

Days before Trump’s post, Ye (formerly Kanye West) tweeted this evil nonsense:

I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.

As The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro stated on his podcast, “What he is spouting is Der Stürmer-type anti-Semitism, and that is about as ugly as it gets, and nobody should be defending that.” Shapiro was on the receiving end of an avalanche of right-wing anti-Semitic hatred in 2016 when he opposed Donald Trump. Indeed, an immense number of anti-Semitic messages were aimed at Jewish Trump critics throughout Trump’s first campaign.

And yet, oddly enough, days after Ye’s reprehensible statement, Ye attended a star-studded premiere of a new documentary by The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens. The Daily Wire promoted the documentary and Ye’s appearance at the premiere.

Owens isn’t the only right-wing infotainment personality to stand proudly beside Ye. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson broadcast an interview with Ye that conveniently edited out additional anti-Semitic rants.

This is hardly the first time that powerful conservatives have linked arms with open anti-Semites. As Sykes notes, the Republican fundraising queen Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at a conference hosted by one of the most vicious and notorious anti-Semites in America, a young man named Nick Fuentes. Just this week, Fuentes demanded that Jews leave America and said, “I piss on your Talmud.”

What is going on? Two hatreds are combining to empower anti-Semitism on the right. The first is obvious enough: It’s the hatred of Jews plain in the messages themselves. It’s the ancient evil that has plagued the Jewish people for millennia.

A second hatred, however, enables the first. Parts of the right simply loathe the left. They hate progressives, and they will never react to any progressive criticism by taking concrete action against anyone on “their” side. They might say they’re opposing cancel culture, but this same quarter of the right delights in censorship when it controls the levers of power.

This hatred of the left means that the far right will rally around virtually any right-wing personality who says just about anything—so long as criticism of that person’s egregious behavior comes from the left. In 2018, for example, parts of the right were furious when ABC canceled Roseanne Barr’s sitcom after she attacked the former Barack Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett by tweeting, “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”.

In my newsletter last Friday, I wrote about the immediate, reflexive defense of Alex Jones after he was ordered to pay almost $1 billion in damages to the families of eight Sandy Hook victims. Right-wing personalities such as Greene, Charlie Kirk, and others claimed to be defending free speech, but defamation has never been a category of protected speech. (And again, many of these same people are strong supporters of state censorship for opponents and seek to ban what they deem to be “bad ideas.”)

There is such a thing as truly problematic cancel culture. My friend Yascha Mounk’s powerful June 2020 Atlantic piece “Stop Firing the Innocent” detailed how the combination of ideological zeal and extreme intolerance has victimized innocent people who were either misunderstood or engaged in good-faith discussion of serious American issues, including racial justice. In 2021, the National Religious Broadcasters, an international association of Christian communicators, fired my friend Daniel Darling after he wrote an op-ed in USA Today urging Christians to get the COVID vaccine and after he spoke about the op-ed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

But moral standards are still necessary. Although some on the right try to conflate maintaining basic standards of decency and upholding the rule of law with “wokeness” or intolerance, they’re distorting the concept of cancel culture to defend some of the worst people in American life.

The best definition of true cancel culture comes from the Yale professor Nicholas Christakis: “1) forming a mob, to 2) seek to get someone fired (or disproportionately punished), for 3) statements within [the] Overton window.” The “Overton window” refers to the range of mainstream American discourse and ideas.

Blatant anti-Semitism is not within any proper understanding of mainstream discourse. Any movement that refuses to exercise its own free-speech rights to unequivocally condemn anti-Semitism when it arises (even if it’s from a former president) is a movement that’s lost its moral voice.

Any movement that refuses to exercise its own rights of freedom of association to purge anti-Semitism from its ranks is a movement that’s lost its moral will.

More than one form of hatred can harm America’s Jews. Anti-Semitism is the frontal attack. It's the hatred that causes direct damage. But when any American community hates its opponents enough to protect and promote even its most vile allies, it becomes an essential enabler of hatred. It helps keep anti-Semitism alive. And when a movement continues to promote even the worst of bigots, we know it has lost its way.