As a young man, I was invited to dinner at the home of a senior professor at a respected liberal arts college. A man of conservative views and polished manners, he was cordial and witty. After dinner, he took me into his well-appointed library filled with the volumes that represented glories of Western art and literature from several hundred years. He sat me down for a serious conversation about culture—or, perhaps better put, Culture. Here were the plays of Racine, the Memoirs of General Lafayette, essays by Jacques Barzun, tomes on art history, and gilded 19th century editions of classic works.
The professor was European by birth, spoke a variety of languages, and was well published in history and literature. But as he warmed to conversation, he suddenly became confidential. This started with questions about how I, as an anthropologist, could explain the fall of once flourishing nations and empires. They really were just the precipice from which he was about to launch his own explanation:
Because of the Jews. It was the Jews who ruined Spain in revenge for Ferdinand and Isabella expelling them in 1492. Contrariwise, England rose to its status as a world power because Cromwell in 1655 readmitted Jews after a 400-year ban. The Jews everywhere pulled the strings, punishing their persecutors and rewarding their benefactors. But even the benefactors eventually suffered from Jewish duplicity.
I listened, in astonishment for more than an hour of this before excusing myself. It was the first time I encountered such a frank—and highly intellectualized—expression of antisemitism. And for many years, it stood out to me as a singular experience.
In the 1950s, William F. Buckley, Jr. rose to prominence in a newly-refurbished conservative movement. One of his most important steps was to expel the antisemitic conservatives, which is why my conversation with the professor in his library struck me as a strange aberration. Late in his life, Buckley drew the same line again when he rebuked Patrick Buchanan for calling American Jews a “fifth column” for Israel and other such Jew-baiting pronouncements.
That was then. Today, the conservative movement has become a tree with many branches. There is no Buckley figure ready to saw off the diseased limbs. So, we find ourselves with figures such as Tucker Carlson, who currently inhabits a space similar to Buchanan’s. Five or six years ago, Carlson was best known for his Fox News show, where he opposed the Black Lives Matter movement, criticized U.S. interventions abroad, and supported Trump. He was seen as a mainstream conservative, at least by other conservatives, and as an “extreme right-wing figure” by the left-wing press. But he was not seen as antisemitic by either group. What changed this, cementing his new reputation as an antisemite was his two-hour interview on September 2, 2024 with Daryl Cooper, a Hitler apologist and Holocaust revisionist. Carlson was unctuously complimentary to Cooper, calling him “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper, in fact, is an amateur history writer and podcaster who indulges in strange theories and has never published a book.
Carlson, led by his eagerness to take up contrarian ideas, has waded into the swamp of pseudo-history and pernicious representations that is the vestibule of full-blown antisemitism. He has been hanging out there at least since his October 6, 2022 interview with Kanye (“Ye”) West. The performer indulged in some outlandish fantasies to the effect that:
Black people are the descendants of ancient Israelites and are therefore the true Jews. But the Jews that everyone else calls Jews are a manipulative lot who seek unlimited power and money.
Carlson cut much of West’s unhinged rant from the interview broadcast, but the rant soon found its way into circulation. The Washington Post commented that Carlson sought to present, “a very specific version of Ye to his viewers, a Ye that mirrored Carlson’s rhetoric on race and politics and didn’t go much further.”
Carlson responded to the ensuing controversy by inviting Candace Owens to his show to discuss the “White Lives Matter” shirts that both West and she wear. As Philip Bump put in The Washington Post:
[Carlson] wants his viewers to hear that their sense of victimization is valid and that Black Lives Matter is about their own subjugation, not the systemic constraints of race. He wants to present Candace Owens and Ye, Black celebrities, as the faces of such messages.
Somehow, one step led to another. Beginning as an opponent of unrestricted immigration and national policies, by 2024 Carlson was criticizing Israel’s actions against Hamas and attacking Christians who supported Israel’s actions in Gaza. In addition, he disparages American aid to Israel and apparently attributes no value to the vast intelligence and technological partnerships that the United States gains from its relationship with Israel.
Perhaps Carlson’s worst obvious offence is giving a platform to figures such as Cooper, West, and Owens. The most damning thing about Carlson’s verbal maneuvers is that they map out a space where antisemitism can flourish, seen but unseen, hidden in the pronouncements of evident cranks.
Candace Owens may be the most problematic of antisemitic cranks. Pastor Dumisani Washington, the Founder and CEO of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI), addressed the dangerous impact of Owens’ public Jew-hatred last year in a JNS Top Story interview with Jonathan Tobin:
The danger of someone like a Candace Owens, who has such a large following, who is not careful with her words, who has not disavowed things like her friend Kanye West, what it does is that it normalizes more and more that type of Jew-hatred, especially coming now again from the right and coming from self-proclaimed Christians.
On March 22, 2024 CNN ran Oliver Darcy’s hard-hitting headline “Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire severs ties with Candace Owens after her embrace of antisemitic rhetoric.” Darcy pointed out that:
Since the 10/7 Hamas terror attack on Israel, Owens has repeatedly waded into antisemitic waters as she fiercely criticized Israel, suggesting the Jewish government was committing “genocide” in Gaza and claiming there is a sinister “small ring” of Jewish people in Hollywood and Washington, DC involved in something “quite sinister.”
Tucker Carlson continues to praise his friend Candace Owens as one of the kindest persons he knows.
A similar double game appears in Joe Rogan’s podcasts. Rogan was a professional comedian and actor before turning in 2009 to his hugely successful venture of long-form interviewing. Like Carlson, he chose to interview an antisemitic conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll, who seems to be known only for promoting absurdities. On Rogan’s podcast, Carroll argued that “the Jews did 9/11” and he explained to Rogan that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent whose mission was to trap prominent Americans in blackmail-ready deeds.
Because Rogan gets about 14 million monthly listeners, it behooves us to know what they are hearing. Antisemitism isn’t a ubiquitous feature of Rogan’s commentary, but it isn’t hard to find either. Most notoriously, he defended Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s characterization of Jews, “It’s all about the Benjamins,” by declaring:
That’s not an antisemitic statement; I don’t think that is. Benjamins are money. The idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous. That’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza, It’s f*cking stupid. It’s f*cking stupid.
Rogan played to the age-old stereotype of Jews as exceptionally greedy, unprincipled, and materialistic, and he normalized this as just commonsense. This isn’t the antisemitism of the professor, or the cultural critic. It is rough-and-tumble street talk projected on a truly mass scale.
Carlson and Rogan are well-known media figures. If one goes searching for antisemitism on the political right, the path gets slippery and the figures stranger. One figure who stands out as especially bizarre is Nick Fuentes. He actively promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories, denies the Holocaust, and seeks a “holy war” against the Jews—and has assembled a cult following who call themselves the Groypers or the Groyper Army. The name refers to a green cartoon toad that the movement uses as an insignia. The movement is usually characterized as “alt right” and it bundles together with antisemitism other fringe causes. Fuentes is a self-proclaimed “incel” who calls on young men to avoid heterosexual relations. He presents himself as a “Christian nationalist” and a “white nationalist” who favors an “integralist” approach that would impose the Catholic faith on all aspects of society. And he is the leader of an organization called the America First Political Action Conference (AFAPC).
It can be a bit difficult to say what AFAPC stands for, as its agenda shifts with Fuentes’ fluid crazes, but the Anti-Defamation League offers this summary:
Fuentes and his America First adherents vocally support the closure of the U.S. borders to immigrants, while opposing ‘liberal’ values such as feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. Fuentes views these societal changes as the ‘bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed.
Fuentes tries hard to gain traction among other conservatives by attending mainstream events and inviting prominent figures to attend his own events. He also picks fights with public figures such as Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, for failing to espouse his particular causes.
A clever opportunist, Fuentes has found a political and social niche by appealing to lonely, alienated young men by giving them an imaginary world in which they can feel powerful and united to a cause–berating anyone Fuentes designates as an enemy of the Groypers. This movement of social misfits would be easy to set aside as merely sad, but doing so would underestimate both the damage the movement inflicts on young men and the currency it gives to virulent antisemitism.
Fuentes has found that antisemitism plays well for him. At a 2024 event in Detroit he warmed up the crowd with the declaration, “Everybody’s making a hard turn for ‘Fuck off Jew.’ It’s a hard right turn.” The crowd ate it up, chanting back “Fuck off Jew, fuck off Jew.” Fuentes shook his head, grinning. “No, but that’s only a joke!” He went on to explain that his real goal is a version of “America First” that demonizes Israel.
Despite their boldness, Fuentes and his crew have since then come under withering criticism. Substack essayist Christopher Brunet posted a “33,000-word exposé” that:
draws on leaks, public records, and interviews with ex-girlfriends, ex-employees, streamers, FBI informants, catboys, police chiefs, and a Catholic priest, to uncover 50 interconnected Groyper scandals ranging from grooming, child pornography, revenge pornography, and pedophilia to swatting, doxxing, drug trafficking, crypto scams, tax fraud, rape, brainwashing, mental illness, mass shootings, election interference, foreign interference, and domestic terrorism.
Verdict: Fuentes is a menace, albeit not likely one who will grow much beyond the nasty alcoves of the Internet where he currently resides.
Another figure in the world of “social influencers” who dislikes and degrades women, attracts a cult following of confused young men, and has found a place in his repertoire of crudities for antisemitism, is the British-American kickboxer Andrew Tate. He appeals to much the same audience as Fuentes, but on a vastly larger scale. He is said to have some 10 million followers. (The number of Fuentes’s followers is obscure but perhaps resides in the range of a few tens of thousands.) Whereas the part-Mexican Fuentes parades as a white supremacist, the bi-racial Tate focuses most of his rhetorical fury on women. He is an apostle of rape—and a practitioner. In Romania, he is under several criminal investigations, including human trafficking, trafficking of minors, rape, and sexual intercourse with a minor. In the United Kingdom, Tate is facing charges of sex crimes and sexual misconduct.
How this led him to antisemitism is unclear. In October 2022, Tate claimed to have converted to Islam. After October 7, 2023, Tate came out as a supporter of Hamas, especially its “masculine spirit of resistance.” He also expressed his doubts about the Holocaust: “If they lied to us about Gaza and Israel… Do you think they lied about [the Second World War?”
Calling Tate a “conservative” stretches beyond my bounds of how that word should be defined, but he plainly belongs to the universe of the “alt-right.” Or perhaps better, the alt-alt-right. The alt-right itself focuses on white identity, but in a looser sense it is a cluster of extremist beliefs centered on group identity and rejecting traditional standards of law and morality. The alt-right has no use for the concepts of ordered liberty and respect for the rights of others. Tate’s alt-alt-right carries this to an outright embrace of barbarian sensibility. Fuentes and Tate exist in a world far from mainstream conservatism but not all that far from figures who have a more mainstream presence.
The public figure who most reminds me of the professor in his book-lined study some fifty years ago is Ron Unz. Unz is a wealthy technology entrepreneur, a one-time candidate for governor of California, former editor of The American Conservative (2007-2013), and current publisher of The Unz Review. While born to a Ukrainian family of Jewish descent, he is as ardent a supporter of antisemitic causes can be found anywhere in American arts and letters short of Kanye West.
Not surprisingly, Rod Unz is a Holocaust denier. As reported by MEMRI:
American writer Ron Unz said in an interview aired on Channel 4 (Iran) on January 18, 2023, that “Holocaust worship,” which he said is also known as “Holocaustianity,” has replaced traditional religion in American society. He said that “Jewish-dominated” Hollywood is partly responsible for this, and when asked by show host Arash Darya-Bandari (also known as Blake Archer Williams) about how many Jews “actually” died in the Holocaust, Unz replied that the number was no more than a “couple hundred thousand.” He also said that once the American people start to doubt the Holocaust, they will start to doubt other things that were “suppressed” by the media, such as the JFK assassination or the events of 9/11.
Unz is a ready publisher of the view that Israel orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, and a proponent of such views himself:
The vast weight of the evidence clearly points in a single direction, implicating Israel and its Mossad intelligence service, with the case being overwhelmingly strong in motive, means, and opportunity.
He also denies the mass murders committed by Hamas in Israel, suggesting instead:
As few as 100-200 unarmed Israeli civilians may have been killed by the Hamas fighters, in many cases inadvertently, while all the rest died at the hands of Israel’s own trigger-happy military.
In his view, Orthodox Judaism takes the position that “Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications.”
Unz is a prolific writer on topics other than Judaism, but his pronouncements on Judaism are especially bitter and very frequent. But I suppose the most important points are that he writes well, he controls his own well-financed press and has gathered a stable of other quite capable antisemitic writers to amplify his themes. He lacks the mass audiences of Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan and the cult followings of Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. He lacks the weird appeal of goofball politicians such as Ilhan Omar and Marjorie Taylor Greene. But he brings something far more insidious: a cogent form of antisemitism that presents itself as the product of reason and skeptical examination of the evidence.
Only someone willing to go deep into the details can mount the arguments needed to refute Unz’s rationalistic antisemitism, which he presents as a defense of Western civilization. Though his audience may be relatively small, I would not want to underestimate the power of his narratives to seduce intellectuals and academics. Some of what he writes is framed as faux sympathy for the Jewish people:
European Jews have been prone to paranoia, perhaps the inevitable outcome of having spent more than a thousand years living as small, often highly exploitative minorities among generally hostile host populations.
These sorts of deeply-rooted paranoid tendencies can quietly simmer beneath the surface, then suddenly erupt into uncontrollable spasms of terror and rage, ignited by a large or small spark. Many of these agitated individuals may be completely unaware of the true facts of the situation that had provoked them, let alone the underlying historical circumstances.
This becomes in the course of six further paragraphs a full-on attack on Zionism:
And given their apparently wholehearted support for Israel and the cause of Zionism, I think that’s a good place to start.
It is an absolutely undeniable historical reality that without the crucial patronage of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, the Zionist enterprise probably would have failed. The Nazi-Zionist economic partnership of the 1930s was vital for Israel’s creation, and even after World War II began, one of the smaller right-wing Zionist factions led by a future prime minister of Israel repeatedly sought to enlist in the Axis Powers, seeking to join the military alliance led by Hitler and Mussolini.
This is the antisemitism that has taken root in in some quarters of American conservatism that are perfectly content with the left’s pro-Palestinian symphony of Jew-hatred.
Antisemitism in present day America is largely an enterprise of the radical left and is conjoined with its hatred of the West. But the right has its own antisemites, and they shape their hatred to fit a variety of psychological and moral frailties.
Antisemitism is a social pathology that takes many forms and has been subject to a great deal of analysis. Robert Spencer’s recent Antisemitism: History and Myth, offers the latest overview of “the world’s longest hatred.” My concern in this essay has been to put only a small piece of it on the table for inspection, but even that small piece shows considerable variety. There is the antisemitism of the professor and. the antisemitism of professional entertainers, pundits, politicians, and ideologues all of whom claim some kind of identity as conservatives. The common thread, if there is one, is their need for scapegoats. Jews are often more a target of convenience: a category on whom it is “safe” to project fury. Certainly, that seems to be the case with the legions of “anti-Zionist” college students post-October 7. The mere thrill of being part of mass movement that revels in self-righteous hatred of the “other” is enough to turn blithely ignorant undergraduates into a violent mob. All these other forms of antisemitism are mere tributaries, since the fury of these mobs is more directly a leftist efflorescence.
Most American conservatives recognize Israel as a vital ally of the United States and would never think of abandoning it. But it is important to realize that antisemitism is a seed that can take root almost anywhere. Parts of the contemporary conservative world in the U.S. have proved fertile soil for it.
Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars, a network of scholars and citizens with a commitment to academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and excellence in American higher education. He previously served as provost of The Kings’s College College and a tenured member of the Anthropology Department at Boston University, where he also held a variety of administrative positions, including associate provost and president’s chief of staff. He is the author of Wrath: America Enraged (Encounter Books, 2021), 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (Encounter Books, 2020); Diversity Rules (Encounter Books, 2019); A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter Books, 2007) and Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books, 2003), which won the Caldwell Award for Leadership in Higher Education from the John Locke Foundation. These books extend his anthropological interest in examining emergent themes in modern American culture. In addition to his scholarly work, Wood has published several hundred articles in print and online journals, such as the Wall Street Journal, Claremont Review of Books, Spectator USA, American Greatness, Partisan Review, National Review Online, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He lives and works in New York City.