In a famous scene from the World War II-era classic “Casablanca,” the corrupt police captain Louis Renault orders the closing of Rick’s Café Américain on the pretext that it has effectively been functioning as a casino. Renault — who has been doing his own gambling in the cafe — loudly declares himself to be “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here,” moments before a croupier hands him his winnings, which Renault gratefully accepts.
Last month, following a cozy, long-winded chat between the far-right commentator Tucker Carlson and the pro-Hitler influencer Nick Fuentes, a whole team of Louis Renaults fanned out across conservative media and gatherings to express outrage at the apparent sudden appearance of antisemitism within their ranks. Almost as soon as the interview aired, a number of conservatives began pressuring the Heritage Foundation — the Trump-aligned think tank behind the authoritarian blueprint Project 2025 and its anti-antisemitism spin-off, Project Esther — to cut its long-standing close association with Carlson.
The critique was at least in part due to the fact that Carlson’s platforming of antisemitism was not accompanied by the usual pro-Israel sentiment that the American (and global) far right often relies on to deflect from its bigotry against Jews. In fact, a sizable portion of Carlson’s interview with Fuentes was dedicated to criticizing Israel, its reliance on U.S. support, and Christian Zionists.
After a few days of pressure, Heritage president Kevin Roberts shared a video on social media in which he slammed the “venomous coalition” attacking Carlson and, in case that dog whistle wasn’t loud enough, smugly rebuked “the globalist class … [and] their mouthpieces in Washington.”
Further chaos ensued: Members of the coalition working on Project Esther threatened to resign or quit outright; Heritage staffers were shuffled around; Roberts apologized; a video of an internal clear-the-air meeting leaked to the press; long-time, senior Heritage members resigned; the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism that had produced Project Esther split from the foundation; and Republicans from Ted Cruz to Josh Hawley to Mitch McConnell sounded the alarm about antisemitism within their political tent.
Suddenly, the party that has sought to claim a monopoly on defending Jews — largely through the pro-Israel plank of its agenda — and a think tank that positioned itself as leading the charge against antisemitism are scrambling to grapple with a very public fallout over the anti-Jewish bigotry in their own backyard.
Like Renault trying to shut down a gambling operation he had personally profited from, much of this collective right-wing “J’accuse!” is coming from members of the Republican Party and the broader MAGA-aligned establishment who have spent the best part of a decade betting on, and abetting, an antisemitism-infused political movement in order to boost their careers. Leaving aside the more on-the-nose aspects of the “Casablanca” comparison (Renault, after all, was following the orders of a Nazi officer), it is hard to imagine a more apt representation of the far right’s audacious hypocrisy on antisemitism.
Indeed, consider the more muted response in 2022, when then-former-President Donald Trump dined with Fuentes and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago; Trump claimed not to know who Fuentes was and said he had simply tagged along with West, whom Trump had invited. Although some GOP senators criticized the incident, others downplayed it and still others chose to remain silent. Trump declined to repudiate Fuentes’ views then, and again failed to do so when asked about the Carlson-Fuentes interview, which he defended.
Yet given the immense amounts of time, effort, and money the U.S. right has spent in trying to convince us of their genuine commitment to combating antisemitism, it is worth, in the wake of this debacle, spelling out why this supposed moral reckoning is as dangerous as it is dishonest. Republicans and their allies have mainstreamed far-right antisemitism while systematically downplaying it; at the same time, they have portrayed anti-Jewish prejudice as a uniquely left-wing problem to fuel a persecutory, authoritarian agenda.
The GOP’s antisemitism reckoning
It is no secret that throughout most of the past Trump-MAGA decade, the Republican Party has mainstreamed a fairly transparent brand of antisemitism. There isn’t enough space to do a full accounting of this process here, but a partial list includes advancing conspiracy theories about George Soros and “global elites”; campaigning on antisemitic imagery; bringing committed white nationalists into the federal government; and a public flirtation with the straight-armed salute.
At the center of all this is, of course, Trump himself, who has a long history of making antisemitic statements and has consistently encouraged the fascist elements of his base and administration. That Trump’s antisemitism is not itself a matter of a committed political ideology (as the writer M. Gessen put it, Trump simply views Jews as “alien beings whom he associates with the state of Israel … [and who are] at once distasteful and worthy of a sort of admiration”) is, functionally, besides the point. His style of politics has brought every conceivable prejudice back into fashion, antisemitism included, and his party has — with very few exceptions that prove the rule — allowed it to happen.
When a leading Republican like Senator Ted Cruz claims, as he did in the wake of the Carlson-Fuentes uproar, that he has “seen more antisemitism on the right” in the past six months than at any other time, he may well be right: Right-wing antisemitism has been getting worse over the past decade and continues to do so. But such statements betray how much he and the rest of his party have ignored the ways in which Trump and his political movement have energized and enabled the antisemitic far right. (It bears mentioning that Cruz’s repudiation of Carlson was also personal: He himself had been on the end of a grilling by Carlson over the summer, the kind that Carlson declined to subject Fuentes to.)
This is the same Cruz who appointed anti-abortion activist Troy Newman, who wrote about Jewish “bloodguilt associated with murdering Jesus,” to his 2016 presidential campaign; there was speculation, which Cruz denied, that he again worked with Newman for his 2024 Senate reelection campaign. And it is the same Josh Hawley who declared in November that there is “no place” within the conservative movement for “antisemitic hatred, tropes, any of that stuff,” even as he rails against “cosmopolitan elites” and, in 2024, publicly touted his friendship with a football player under fire for an incendiary, bigoted commencement speech that included the antisemitic trope of deicide.
Now, the very public nature of the fracture over Tucker Carlson — who has himself been antisemitism-curious for some time, and who spoke at a major Republican Party rally in New York before the 2024 election — has forced the GOP and its wider ecosystem to finally say something about antisemitism on the right. But this is no mea culpa: The Republican Party made a devil’s bargain aimed at consolidating long-term power, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
The authoritarian push
The Republican Party’s mainstreaming of right-wing antisemitism over the past decade has been accompanied by its pivotal role in constructing a legal and rhetorical apparatus designed to present anti-Jewish bigotry as almost exclusively a problem on the left — and one that is invariably about criticisms of Israel and Zionism.
This process, it must be said, long predates Trump: We have had more than half a century of efforts to redefine antisemitism to shield Israel from criticism and suppress Palestinian advocacy. And this campaign has not been confined to the right, with centrist actors playing a key role as well, including significant chunks of the Democratic Party.
Still, the far right — from the GOP to the dense constellation of Christian and Jewish lawfare, policy, and political advocacy groups — has spearheaded the acceleration of this push over the past decade. Making the fight against antisemitism predominantly about defending Israel has proven an incredibly effective way to advance various parts of the right-wing agenda: from attacking higher education, to targeting immigration and immigrants, to attempting to criminalize swaths of the left as terrorist sympathizers.
This campaign escalated dramatically in the wake of October 7 and the ensuing Israeli genocide in Gaza, culminating in Project Esther, an anti-democratic blueprint published in October 2024 that is the clearest expression yet of the right’s attempt to exploit an ersatz fight against antisemitism in order to advance authoritarianism. The blueprint is also effectively positioning Jews as the face of that authoritarianism — perhaps not the best way to combat anti-Jewish prejudice.
As Project Esther was being drafted, its architects explicitly chose not to address right-wing antisemitism. But now that there is a significant enough wedge of the right whose antisemitism is accompanied by anti-Israel politics, the same task force has opted, after a string of resignations tied to the Carlson-Fuentes fallout, to break off from the Heritage Foundation — potentially only temporarily — and committed itself to tackling antisemitism on the right as well.
The task force kicked off this new pledge with a mid-November conference in Washington, D.C., which was heavy on Christianity, light on accountability and solutions, and featured at least one attendee peddling antisemitism-coded theories about a “left-wing … cabal.” There is no word yet on whether it will recommend applying the levers of anti-terrorism laws and deportations to right-wing antisemites, as they proposed doing with alleged members of the “Hamas Support Network” in the original blueprint.
For all their sudden consternation over antisemitism on the right, the specter of a Jewish community besieged primarily by the left is a drum that Republicans and their allies continue to beat. Even as Senators Cruz, Hawley, and others denounce the likes of Fuentes and Carlson, they continue to portray the Democratic Party as “the party of antisemitism,” warning Republicans not to end up the same way.
As with much of their politics, Republicans are describing an alternate reality in which up is down, left is right, and the political party habitually backed by more than 70 percent of American Jews is the real hotbed of antisemitism. This framing speaks to how deeply contested and confused the general conversations about antisemitism and anti-Zionism have become, primarily — but not only — because of the long-running effort to make them synonymous and indistinguishable.
Prioritizing Israel over Jewish safety
In all of this, the role of American-Jewish legacy institutions cannot be overlooked. Their deep investment in defending Israel, especially in the wake of October 7, has brought them to a watershed moment. Even after two years of destruction and starvation in Gaza, and even as the U.S. far right reaches new heights of cruelty and authoritarian overreach, these organizations have failed to consistently and forcefully oppose the latter, in large part to try and spare the perpetrators of the former.
Mainstream Jewish organizations have effectively thrown in their lot with the far right (which, until very recently, had been almost uniformly pro-Israel). This has produced bizarre and unsettling snapshots, where groups that claim to be concerned with Jewish safety are also evidently unsure how to mount a coherent, let alone courageous, response to the 1930s-style antisemitism that Trumpism and its acolytes have revived.
No organization exemplifies this more than the Anti-Defamation League. Founded to combat antisemitism, the ADL now thrashes about in a Procrustean bed of its own making — from its bumbling take on Elon Musk’s straight-armed salute in January, and its recent removals of its “glossary of extremism” database and the “Protect Civil Rights” section on its website following right-wing criticism, to the longer-term trend of shutting down certain programs, such as a major flank of its anti-bias education work, to appease the right.
The ADL’s inconsistent and often (although not always) mealy-mouthed tut-tutting of antisemitism in the GOP ecosystem tends to pale in comparison to its hair-trigger reactions to progressive politicians who denounce Israel’s abuses. Its aggressive response to the victory of New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, is a case in point: The morning after the election, the ADL announced the launch of its “Mamdani Monitor” — a project to track the policies and hires of an incoming mayor who has repeatedly condemned and vowed to fight antisemitism.
Unlike his main rival, Mamdani did not reportedly refer to Jews celebrating a major religious holiday as “these people and their fucking treehouses,” nor did he smoke cigars with an antisemitic streamer and associate of Fuentes and Ye, as his soon-to-be predecessor did. It is because Mamdani has forcefully spoken out about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians — and, realistically, that he has done so as a Muslim — that he finds himself in the ADL’s crosshairs.
As far-right antisemitism continues to spill into public view, it is worth remembering how much effort the Republican universe has poured into denying, downplaying, and dismissing it, and directing our gaze elsewhere in order to try and advance their repressive agenda — and how readily American-Jewish legacy groups have played along.
The end of plausible deniability
The fiasco surrounding the Carlson-Fuentes interview and its fallout is, ultimately, about much more than antisemitism and American Jews. It fundamentally reveals what kind of entity the Republican Party is and spotlights the dark forces it has marshalled and encouraged over the past decade. That, as much as anything else, tells us all we need to know about the contemporary GOP: Any commitment from its members and supporters to confront antisemitism in their own tent, at the same time as they advance a Christian-nationalist attack on other minority group rights, should not be taken seriously.
Indeed, the public figures on the right who have condemned Carlson, Fuentes, and the Heritage Foundation have a thorough track record of brazen invective against Muslims, trans people, immigrants, and the left, and of pushing policies and talking points fueled by anti-Black racism, misogyny, ableism, and contempt for the working poor. At the same time, they are integral parts of a larger project to capture or dismantle democracy, culture, education, and the law.
Under normal circumstances, the Heritage-Carlson-Fuentes affair would definitively put to rest the misbegotten idea that Jewish safety lies in the arms of the right. It should also reaffirm the premise, increasingly unfashionable among American-Jewish legacy groups, that such safety is to be found in social justice alliances that combat other forms of racism alongside antisemitism.
To date, however, mainstream American-Jewish organizations have resolutely ignored, demeaned, and decried those of us who have been sounding the alarm for years about the right’s antisemitism problem, and the threat it poses to Jews as well as those the right persecutes in the name of protecting Jews — even as doing so has put them in coalition with a malevolent political camp whose commitment to associating authoritarian policies with Jewish safety is a threat to Jews everywhere.
Most read on +972
Perhaps, now that the American-Jewish establishment’s chosen partners for confronting antisemitism are acknowledging (even if disingenuously) that significant parts of their tent are laced with Judeophobia, these legacy groups will finally listen. Or perhaps they will remain content to be the occasional carve-outs from the Republican Party’s all-out war on minority groups — especially given the current opportunity to stay on familiar territory and coalesce around the idea of Mamdani as an “enemy” of the Jewish people.
Either way, the era of plausible deniability or wishful thinking over the mainstream U.S. right’s antisemitism problem has been brought to a decisive close. As it turns out, being governed by authoritarians and white nationalists isn’t good for the Jews, nor for anyone else.
