Confronting Conservative Antisemitism

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been a lot of controversy recently about antisemitism and the threat that it poses to the United States at large.

And it’s been very controversial because, this time, it’s not the well-acknowledged and well-known left-wing antisemitism, what we see on campuses where people are yelling, “River to the sea,” or they’re chasing Jews into a library, or they’re tearing down pictures of the Israeli hostages—what we’ve seen for the last two years. It’s on the right.

And it came to the fore this week, when Tucker Carlson, on his platform, gave an interview or had an interview with the known antisemite and at one time pro-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Very young man. Never written much. He is not an activist with anywhere near the audience of Charlie Kirk. But he’s well-known. He’s glib. And Tucker had him on.

Now, that caused an enormous controversy because of the things that Fuentes has said in the past. He’s supported going after Jews, suggesting that they’re behind many of the nefarious cabals or conspiracies that take place, that they’re not really white people. He’s attacked Vice President JD Vance and his wife because she’s Indian and they named their children with Indian first names. I could go on and on. That record is well documented.

Tucker chose, nevertheless, to interview him.

Now, the problem was that this was not in isolation. He had the World War II revisionist Darryl Cooper. He wasn’t a historian. Tucker said he was the most prominent in historian writing today in America. That was not true. He has never written an article or a book about World War II.

But he is known for suggesting that a cabal in the United States—and you know who that is—had unduly influenced the Roosevelt administration to ally with Russia over, either keeping neutral or allying, as a later guest, David Collum, suggested, allying with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Many of the things that Cooper said, as I have addressed in writing and in podcasts, were demonstrably untrue. So, there was a backstory there.

So, when Tucker had Nick Fuentes have this wide platform—he has a big audience—the question was, why are you doing this? And if you wanna have an edgy guest, you have to be very careful, radical Left or radical Right. They get prominence because they’re usually rhetoricians, they’re orators, they’re demagogues, and they’re adept at speaking.

And when William F. Buckley on his famous “Firing Line” had such people, he took a great risk. Eldridge Cleaver, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, a convicted felon, a serial rapist. Ditto, Huey Newton, who shot and killed someone, on the show. William Shockley, the eugenicist Buckley had on. George Wallace, the at one time segregationist.

But Buckley did something different than Tucker did. The point was not to give them an unfiltered platform, without disagreement or counter examination or rebuttal, but to show everybody that these ideas were not only dangerous but could be easily refuted. So, Buckley constantly cross-examined them—something Tucker didn’t do, which poses another question.

He had an interview in the same format with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a fellow conservative. At one time, they were very close. And yet, Tucker used all of his knowledge, his wit, his repartee and cross-examined Cruz unmercifully. And he came with data. He drilled him on the population of Iran. “Don’t you know that?”

What I’m getting at is, why would you give an interview with a conservative senator who agrees 90% with what you do, and yet, try to cross-examine him and interrupt him and make him look foolish? If that’s what you want, that’s a free country. But why not use that same technique on someone who is well beyond the limits of acceptable discourse, somebody who’s called openly for racist punishment and for ostracism of blacks and Jews? And why not just show the world what Nick Fuentes was and is? But he didn’t do that.

Why is this happening? Why are we having Candace Owens saying there’s a ring of Jews in Hollywood? Why are we having Nick Fuentes get this sudden prominence? Why these World War II revisionist historians?

I think part of it is the Left has so mainstreamed antisemitism, as we see on college campuses, and really said, you know, that if you’re Jewish, you’re for Israel, and if you’re for Israel, you’re for genocide, and demonize and threaten the safety of Jews that people on the right felt, well, the Left has sort of taken down the restrictions on what we can say and do. And we’re gonna take advantage of it and do what they’re doing. We, antisemites on the right, are going to join the freedom—allow the antisemitism on the left.

There’s demography too. The Jewish population is not as big as it is. It’s only about 7 million. And a lot of Jews are nonobservant or they’re part of the melting pot, natural process of assimilation and acculturation. In contrast, the Arab and Muslim population is approaching 3.5 or 4 million, and it’s scheduled to take over from Jews. And they are located—these populations—in key electoral, swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey.

And a lot of people think: You know what? We have to give a certain leeway to antisemitic ideas expressed by this particular Muslim or Arab group because the Jewish so-called lobby is not as strong as it was. It’s going the way of the Greek lobby. In other words, a really important group of Greek Americans used to ensure that Greece was treated fairly. And now they’re intermarried. And immigration has stopped from Greece. Maybe that’s a reason as well.

But there’s one other key reason why we’re seeing this really dangerous antisemitism emerge on the right. I wanna say, first of all, there is a right-wing antisemitism different than the left-wing.

Left-wing antisemitism is usually found among elites. It’s in the university. It has a lot to do with the Middle East in its current manifestations. And usually, it’s Marxist. In other words, that the Jews are sneaky middlemen that control the economy comes right out of the mouth of Karl Marx. And this was what the Soviets were. Josef Stalin was an antisemite. And so, we know what that is, that they are settler colonialists, that they’re white victimizers on this Marxist binary the Left has established.

The right wing is a little bit different. It persecutes and demonizes Jews on the grounds that, well, these are Christ killers. They’re responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. Or they are not completely white, they’re of a different race. It’s a little bit more virulent, a lot more virulent. Therefore, it’s more easily identifiable. The Left is more insidious because it’s practiced in a creed of the elite and the educated, supposedly.

But there’s this one key thing that’s going on that is allowing these people to come forward. And when they come forward and they’re mainstream, then elected officials like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., or former advisers like Steve Bannon, Candace Owens—people get into the mix.

And I think the reason for the rise of antisemitism is an element, the isolationist base of the MAGA movement, felt that it was the driving force, and that it was going to be isolationist and we were not going to get involved in the Middle East. And they were very suspicious of what they call neocons and what they call Christian Zionists. As Tucker said, he hates Christian Zionists over any other people. Even Osama bin Laden? Al-Qaeda? ISIS? I don’t know.

But they were losing influence. President Donald Trump proved that he is not a neoisolation. He’s a Jacksonian. Targeted strikes to preserve and enhance U.S. deterrents. Take out Qasem Soleimani, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Take out the nuclear facilities in Iran. But one-shot deals, where we’re not involved in a forever war.

And they felt that he was being unduly influenced, the way, in the past, maybe Roosevelt or Truman had been unduly influenced by Jews, either to ally with Russia or to help found the state of Israel. And therefore, our relationship with Israel showed the influence of Jewish advisers.

But when you look at the Jewish advisers, they’re some of the most prominent, important, brilliant people in the MAGA movement. Stephen Miller, special adviser to the president. Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff were the architects of the Gaza ceasefire. Howard Lutnick was very prominent, the campaign’s secretary of commerce. I don’t think we’ve ever had a better EPA director than Lee Zeldin.

So, there’s not a secret cabal of Jews that is pulling strings. They’re open, transparent, they’re part of the MAGA movement.

And let me just finish with Israel. This demonization that Israel is driving U.S. foreign policy—it’s not. And they always talk about the neocons and the Iraq War. Dick Cheney and George Bush and Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice—this was the inner circle of the Bush team. And they made the argument, and went before Congress, that we should take out Saddam Hussein preemptively. There was not any Jewish people that had authority to make that decision.

Richard Perle, David Frum, Max Boot—maybe they were advisers, but there was no neocon cabal.

And then when you look at Israel, Israel opposed the Iraq War. They felt that it was a misdirection in Western resources. The real enemy, if you were going to do something—and they weren’t going to advise that—would be Iran, rather than Iraq.

If we look at Israel, in conclusion, it’s a constitutional consensual society in a sea of 500 Muslims that live under autocracy. There’s 2 million Arab citizens inside Israel and they have the same rights as Israeli citizens. There’s 180,000 Christians. There’s more Christians inside Israel than anywhere in the West Bank and probably more than anywhere in the Arab world. And they have full rights.

Everybody says—these people on the Tucker program saying, “Jewish state, it’s a Jewish state.” What do you think that the 50-plus nations surrounding them are? They’re Islamic states. But the difference is they’re autocratic and unfree. Israel is a liberal society. It’s our best friend.

We would not have been able to take out the Iranian nuclear threat to the West—and by the way, it wasn’t just Israel’s idea, the Europeans were terrified of it, we were too—if the Israel Defense Forces’ air force had not first neutralized the air defenses of Iran.

And when you look at the people who have killed Americans—hundreds of them—it was Hezbollah blowing up the Marine barracks in 1983, blowing up the U.S. Embassy. The Israelis took out and nullified and made inert Hezbollah. We were attacking the Houthis independently. Israel has done more damage to them—the common enemy—than we have.

So, the alliance with Israel is not anti-U.S. interest. It’s in our interest, whether you’re idealistic, and you should be, that we support fellow free nations that have constitutional government, and treat their citizens equitably and fairly, and protect their civil rights, or you believe, strategically, that we have a small number of very important allies. Allies that are muscular, strong, and they have the similar interests as we do, both in Europe, Japan, South Korea. In that small number of allied nations, Israel is preeminent.

Let me just conclude, then. Empirically, there is no evidence that World War II—we should have allied with the Germans or that we did something wrong in World War II. It was a heroic effort. We defeated fascism. We defeated Japanese militarism. We defeated Nazism. The Axis killed over 30 million Russians, Chinese, Jews, Eastern Europeans, civilians, well aside the military lives that they were responsible for taking.

So, there’s no need for World War II revisionism. There’s no need to say that the wars that we’ve been in in the past were prompted by Jews or secret cabals. There’s no need to demonize Jews by having Nick Fuentes on a program without cross-examination.

And what do we as conservatives on the right do? I think we have to speak out, according to our station, anytime we see this recrudescence of antisemitism and say, it’s not founded on history, it’s not founded on logic. And some of the most valuable citizens in the conservative movement, as well as the United States at large, are Jewish Americans. And we’re very lucky to have such people.

And the worst thing that the conservative movement and Republicans in particular could do would be to allow this antisemitic virus—that’s a term that they often use. But it’s a virus. It’s a disease. It’s a morbidity. We cannot let it spread. And it’s past time to stop it.

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