The Right’s Antisemitism Is Too Flagrant to Ignore
Right-wing influencers give Nazi salutes in limousines and peddle conspiracy theories about Jews to audiences of millions, while “moderate” Republicans dog-whistle about “authentic” American heritage. The GOP’s antisemitism problem is no longer fringe.
The Trump administration smears protesters of Israel’s assault on Gaza as antisemites while actual antisemitism — Hitler salutes, conspiracy theories, slurs about “the Jews” — surges in its own coalition. (Dominic Gwinn / Getty Images)
Earlier this month, the official X account of the US Department of Labor posted a black-and-white video combining a collage of patriotic imagery with a soundtrack that seemed to be designed to evoke dystopian science fiction. The text accompanying the video read:
One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.
Remember who you are, American.
The day before, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted the recruitment website for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) along with an image of a cowboy riding under a drone and the slogan, “We’ll have our home again.” This is a phrase that’s unlikely to mean much to most Americans, but it’s the title of a white supremacist anthem sung to the tune of a nineteenth-century sea shanty.
The administration’s winks at the furthest edges of the Right have lost their subtlety, if they ever had any. Last year, the DHS put out an ICE recruitment post with the slogan, “Defend your culture.”
It’s obvious enough who this vision of the American “culture,” “heritage,” and “home” is meant to exclude. If rounding up unauthorized immigrants from Latin America is a way of not just enforcing laws but defending American culture, then any American with cultural roots in Latin America is pretty clearly being positioned as an outsider. But who’s on the inside, with the singularly correct “one heritage” all true Americans are supposed to have in common? Do only people with prerevolutionary American roots count? Or maybe anyone whose ancestors came over before the waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
One subset of Americans who would mostly be excluded by even this more generous cutoff is American Jews.
When it comes to leftists protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Trump administration has frequently claimed to be concerned about antisemitism — so concerned, in fact, that it’s willing to trample basic free-speech principles in order to stamp it out. Yet the administration’s own exclusivist rhetoric about America’s cultural heritage has far more obviously antisemitic implications than any objection to the policies of a nation-state ever could.
Last year, for example, Vice President J. D. Vance railed at journalist Jesse Singal for justifying the “mass invasion of the country my ancestors built with their bare hands.” When people use the term “ancestor,” they’re usually gesturing further back than the last few generations. Unless he’s using the word in an unusual way, it’s unclear whether someone whose great-grandparents, for example, fled from poverty and antisemitism in Tsarist Russia in the early twentieth century (as some of mine did) can share the special claim on Americanness that Vance asserts for his own family.
As journalist James Pogue has pointed out, the concept of a group of “heritage Americans” is rapidly being popularized on the new Right, including by Vance. In Pogue’s account, the concept centers on the descendants of early, overwhelmingly white settler stock, especially Scots‑Irish and other Anglo‑American frontier families — and is often formulated in explicit contrast to Jews.
The administration itself is unwilling to explicitly draw the obvious conclusion from its attempted redefinition of American identity. But plenty of figures within the broader American right have been far less inhibited.
The Fringes and the Staffers
Widely viewed videos shot over the last week show a slew of right-wing influencers descending on a Miami Beach nightclub. Self-identified fascist commentator Nick Fuentes, red pill brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate (currently under investigation in multiple countries for sexual assault and human trafficking), and several second-tier manosphere figures enthusiastically sing along to Kanye West’s song “Heil Hitler” as they travel by limousine. At the club, they appear to have gotten management to play the song for them as members of the group bob their heads and do a relaxed version of the Hitler salute.
The club (Vendôme) has come in for heavy criticism as a result, and the club has claimed it had no prior knowledge of the event and that none of the figures in the video are welcome back. Perhaps they’re telling the truth and are so accommodating that they’ll play a song called “Heil Hitler” for any random group of guys who walk in off the street. Or perhaps they knew exactly who these guys were and hoped a little notoriety would give the club an aura of edginess even as they did the inevitable damage control.
Either way, what’s most striking is that these are sufficiently well-known figures that it’s plausible a nightclub manager on South Beach might have known exactly who they were. In past generations, openly antisemitic and pro-fascist loudmouths mostly peddled their message in well-deserved obscurity.
Now we have Fuentes being interviewed by Tucker Carlson — who pushed back mildly here and there about whether all Jews were bad, but mostly conveyed the impression that Fuentes was an ally in good standing who sometimes goes a bit too far. The interview has caused a miniature civil war in right-wing media and think-tank worlds, which prompted Vance to warn against “purity tests” in the movement, claiming there was room for all.
Fuentes himself had dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022. The Trump camp’s official excuse for the dinner is that the former and future president thought he was only having dinner with Kanye West and didn’t know which guests “Ye” would bring. In other words, Trump thought he was only going to have dinner with one notorious antisemite and conspiracy theorist that night.
We have Candace Owens, who just a few years ago interviewed Donald Trump and only recently parted ways with Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, spouting a version of the Passover blood libel and describing Joseph Stalin’s purges as a “holocaust” of Russian Christians perpetrated by Jews. Owens rests this claim on the fact that Genrikh Yagoda, head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB) for a couple of years in the 1930s, was Jewish. It doesn’t seem to give her pause that neither Yagoda’s predecessor nor his successor were Jewish, or that a great many of Stalin’s victims were.
Owens has also stated that the only problem with Adolf Hitler’s policy was his imperial ambition, suggesting she had little quibble with his domestic policy, which rested on the extermination of Germany’s Jewish population. “If Hitler had just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine,” Owens said. “The problem is that . . . he had dreams outside of Germany.” On another occasion, Owens asserted that a tweet from Ye saying he wanted to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” was not antisemitic.
We might comfort ourselves with the thought that some of these figures are relatively marginal. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests otherwise. Not only do many of them have huge audiences, but they seem to be particularly influential among young conservatives close to the levers of power. Recently leaked group chats from prominent Young Republican operatives include a torrent of derogatory references to “the Jews.” Conservative blogger Rod Dreher made waves recently for claiming that people in a position to know told him that thirty to forty percent of Republican staffers in Washington, DC, were “groypers,” or fans of Nick Fuentes.
Emily Jashinsky, one of the resident conservatives at the talk show Breaking Points, informally polled a group of well-connected conservatives about whether they thought Dreher’s estimate was right, and they all told her it was an overestimate. One anonymous Trump administration source told her it’s “not double-digits.” Let’s hope so — but 8 or 9 percent is still an alarming problem.
The Core of the Problem
What explains the rise of antisemitism on the Right?
Part of the answer may be that some young Trumpists are far more consistent than the administration itself about “America First” opposition to foreign entanglements and thus aren’t reflexive defenders of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. While left-wing critics of Israel are generally motivated by universalist ideals about democracy and human rights, right-wingers accustomed to dividing the world into ethnic collectivities like “heritage Americans” or “third-world invaders” may interpret atrocities committed by the state of Israel as having been committed by Jews in general. If the Israeli military drops a bomb on a hospital, anyone who interprets events through an ethnocentric worldview will be inclined to say that “the Jews” bombed it.
A bigger part of the story, though, may be simpler. Historically, one of the best things about the United States is that we’ve managed to detach national identity from ethnic background to a remarkable degree. No one talks about being a “quarter American” — it would sound like a category mistake. Especially since the civil rights movement undermined a residual connection between Americanness and white identity, American belonging has been defined broadly, associated more with loyalty to core civic institutions than having the “right” ancestry. This meant American Jews, like many other ethnic minorities, were able within a few generations to feel like Americans in good standing rather than guests of the dominant cultural group. The Trumpist right has been campaigning to undo this, instead associating Americanness with the “one heritage” we’re all supposed to share. The administration’s shocking attempt to abolish birthright citizenship is a brazen example. Given this broader picture, no one should be surprised that many young conservatives hear their movement saying that the only Americans who count are those with a particular “heritage” — and apply the principle consistently.
The unabashed antisemites on the Right spend a lot of time talking about “noticing.” Observe them on social media, and you’ll see posts pointing out that this or that hated political or cultural enemy is Jewish, paired with an image of a juice box (juice = “Jews”) and words like “notice,” “noticing,” or “noticer.”
In turn, it’s remarkable how hard the administration works not to notice antisemitism within their own coalition even as they throw around accusations of antisemitism to smear anyone who stands up for human rights in Palestine. Last year, for example, the Justice Department tasked its civil rights division with investigating antisemitism in the University of California system. One Justice Department lawyer who quit last May bluntly told the New York Times that cases “didn’t move forward” unless they “involved perceived political enemies of the administration” — there was “no interest in antisemitism unless it involved protests of Israel or the war in Gaza.”
None of this should be shocking. If you want a country that isn’t a breeding ground for this particular bigotry, you’re better advised to cast your lot with people who believe in egalitarian, cosmopolitan universalism than to hope that peddlers of an ever-narrower notion of American identity will forever leave a special carve-out for your group. If only “one heritage” is allowed in the tent, sooner or later any such movement will draw the obvious conclusion about American Jews.