A dispatch from a right-wing conference aiming to confront antisemitism
among compatriots.
|
| View in browser |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
The Zionist Right Has a MAGA Problem
Dispatch · Ben Lorber and Jess Schwalb |
| A conference aiming to confront antisemitism on the right offers a portrait
of an old guard left twisting in the wind. |
|
|
|
MAGA’s crusaders against right-wing antisemitism couldn’t seem to agree on the
problem they had gathered to solve. Huddled in a basement conference room last
Tuesday, attendees of “Exposing and Countering Extremism and Antisemitism on
the Political Right” had been called to Washington, DC, by the National Task
Force to Combat Antisemitism, authors of Project Esther, the Trump
administration’s blueprint for attacking the left via its commitments on
Palestine. The Task Force was in disarray. Just a few days earlier, it had
split from the Heritage Foundation after the powerful conservative think tank
defended Tucker Carlson when Carlson gave a friendly interview to Nazi
apologist Nick Fuentes. The group was ostensibly gathered to counter the
mainstreaming of nakedly antisemitic figures like Fuentes within the MAGA
movement and to chart a path forward. But hours into the half-day event,
speakers ping-ponged between trivializing the online antics of “stupid
20-year-olds in their grandma’s basement,” in the words of Task Force co-chair
Ellie Cohanim, and warning against an “explosion” of antisemitism on the right
whose “dimensions are enormous and incomprehensible,” per fellow co-chair Mario
Bramnick. While some, like Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America
(ZOA), expressed fear that “mindless, vicious hatred, is becoming mainstream,”
others tried to downplay the impact of Fuentes, Carlson, and their followers:
“They want us to get angry and offended, and there’s really no reason to. I
mean, these are a bunch of freaks,” said Gen Z MAGA Jewish influencer Justine
Brooke Murray.
The conference came after several weeks of right-wing meltdown. Incited by
Fuentes’s October 27th appearance on Carlson’s show, the controversy engulfed
the right when Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended
the organization’s “close friend” Carlson and railed against the “globalist
class” and “venomous coalition” attacking him. The Task Force—which had been
housed at Heritage from its inception and had collaborated with the think tank
to author Project Esther—soon had a serious problem. At least nine member
organizations and individuals publicly announced their withdrawal from the Task
Force following Roberts’s statement, and its credibility was sinking by the
day. At the conference, Luke Moon, Task Force co-chair and executive director
of the Christian Zionist Philos Project, described spending countless hours on
the phone trying to mend the fraying coalition. But eventually he and some of
the other co-chairs felt they had no choice but to sever ties with Heritage,
“at least for a season,” to stave off an exodus of the remaining members.
Pulling together the conference in DC was like “herding cats while building an
airplane in the sky,” Moon told the audience of 50 or so, composed mostly of
End Times Christian Zionists, anti-LGBT ideologues, and Jewish MAGA
influencers. Joined by an anti-DEI activist with a Tikvah Fund luggage tag and
a German Shepherd bomb-sniffer-in-training wearing a vest with an Israeli flag
patch, this motley crew had urgent business to discuss: The
Carlson-Fuentes-Heritage episode was only the latest evidence that right-wing
support for Israel was eroding. Polls indicate that younger conservatives
increasingly view Israel in a negative light. Even leading MAGA figures—not
just Carlson, but influencers like Candace Owens and politicians like Marjorie
Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie—have criticized Israel’s crimes in Gaza and
called US support into question under the banner of “America First.” The
challenges ahead were clear enough: How could the Task Force, along with the
broader pro-Israeli right, counter this growing dissent? And how best to
respond to the rise of overt MAGA antisemitism?
When he and three others started the Task Force in November 2023, Moon
explained to the room, they made a conscious decision to target opponents on
the left. “We did see in the corner of our eye the rise of antisemitism on the
right,” he acknowledged, but they chose to stay focused on Palestine solidarity
movements because, in their view, “it was 100 pro-Hamas people to one
[right-wing] antisemite in his mom’s basement eating Hot Pockets.” As Bramnick,
a prominent Christian nationalist and pastor, said, the sentiment was that “our
real problem is the Islamists and the progressive leftists that have already
sold out our nation.” Trump’s presidential victory in 2024, said Bramnick, was
seen by the MAGA coalition as “a mandate to combat woke socialism, globalism,
[and the] anti-Christian, antisemitic, and anti-Israel agenda.”
In recent months, however, as right-wing skepticism of US support for Israel
has moved toward the mainstream, even figures like freshman Florida Rep. Randy
Fine, who has built his brand from vitriolic attacks against Israel critics on
the left, were now telling the conference that “Tucker Carlson is the most
dangerous antisemite in America.” And while charges of antisemitism lobbed at
left-wing critics of Israel are frequently spurious, on the right they often
carry more substance: For open white nationalists like Fuentes, the problem
with Israel is not imperialism or apartheid but an all-powerful global cabal of
subversive, disloyal Jewish interlopers who are assailing Christianity and
undermining America from within.
Confronting their fellow right-wingers also presents a particularly tricky
problem, because after years of heated crusades against DEI and “wokeness,”
much of the MAGA movement is in no mood to launch any kind of sustained inquiry
into accusations of bias within its ranks. Doing so would mean mimicking “BLM,
MeToo, left wing moral panic behavior,” tweeted Rachel Bovard, vice president
at the Conservative Partnership Institute, an institution that the New York
Times called a “nerve center for the right wing.” Responding to criticism of
Roberts, Carlson, and others, Curt Mills, executive director of The American
Conservative, a non-interventionist journal, posted on X that “the Israel First
censoriousness mirrors the late 2010s-early 2020s woke left speech crackdown.”
Trump has long seemed a reliable ally for the pro-Israel right, from his move
of the US embassy to Jerusalem during his first term to his staunch backing of
Netanyahu’s genocide and crackdown against protesters more recently. But the
White House now seems hesitant to take a stand against Carlson, the most
influential pundit in the MAGA-verse. The weekend before the conference, the
president told a reporter “you can’t tell [Tucker Carlson] who to interview . .
. If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he
wants to do it, get the word out.” Vice President J.D. Vance, meanwhile,
castigated pro-Israel activist Sloan Rachmuth on X for speculating that
Carlson’s son, Buckley, who serves as Vance’s deputy press secretary, may be a
“vile bigot” like his father, since “racism and antisemitism is a family
trait.” “Sloan describes herself as a defender of ‘Judeo-Christian Values.’”
Vance tweeted. “Is it a ‘Judeo-Christian value’ to lie about someone you don’t
know? Not in any church I ever spent time in!” The day after Vance’s tweets,
Rachmuth appeared at the Task Force conference.
In the face of this right-wing infighting—some of it intergenerational—the
mostly older Task Force members and supporters gathered in DC to reaffirm their
commitment to fighting what Bramnick called a “spiritual war” against
antisemitism. But that, as it turned out, was about all they could agree on.
From divides over how, and whether, to publicly criticize Trump for his
countenancing of Carlson and Fuentes, or Carlson and Fuentes themselves, to the
lack of a clear definition of what constitutes antisemitism in the first place,
the conference ultimately clarified only one thing: The pro-Israel MAGA
coalition is twisting in the wind.
|
|
|
| Read the rest of this article here |
|
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#39505): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39505
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116493088/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
