J. D. Vance Cozies Up to Anti-Semitism

On Sunday, J. D. Vance was presented with the simplest moral test: denounce commentators who traffic in medieval blood libels, who deny the Holocaust, and who endlessly harp on evil Jewish cabals.

The test was forced on the vice president. By the time he addressed the Turning Point USA conference this past weekend, it had turned into a referendum on latter-day Father Coughlins who have acquired substantial and growing audiences on the right. Among them is Candace Owens, whose YouTube channel has 5.7 million followers. She argues that there is a powerful, secret sect within Judaism practicing pedophilia. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, who has 16.8 million followers on X, has shared his microphone with an unabashed fan of Adolf Hitler and with historians who minimize the Nazi dictator’s evil.

[Yair Rosenberg: What J. D. Vance—and many others—miss about American anti-Semitism]

Their noxious theories about Jews became the defining question of the Turning Point confab. The podcaster Ben Shapiro denounced the anti-Semites. That prompted Steve Bannon, the former adviser to President Donald Trump, to cast Shapiro as a “cancer.” By conducting their argument in public, the two sides—those who criticize anti-Semitism and those who tolerate it—were essentially begging Vance, the headliner of the event, to render a verdict.

When presented with the simplest moral test, Vance failed. “We have far more important work to do than canceling each other,” he said, as if anti-Semitism were just one more woke fixation.

Strains of anti-Semitism have long festered on the American right. But in the second half of the 20th century, leaders of the Republican Party and the intellectual guardians of the conservative movement attempted to keep bigotry out of the mainstream. That’s one reason William F. Buckley Jr. used his magazine, National Review, to foil the rise of the John Birch Society in the 1960s; it’s why the GOP establishment rallied to stop Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign—and instructed elected officials to denounce the neo-Nazi David Duke. Even in Trump’s first term as president, the party eventually stripped the Iowa congressman Steve King of his committee assignments after he defended the terms white nationalist and white supremacist. This wasn’t an unblemished record of containing far-right views, but it was an effective one.

[Read: The talented Mr. Vance]

Trump has always struggled to denounce anti-Semitism, whether asked to comment on Kanye West or the tiki-torch carriers in Charlottesville. But that always seemed a product of his vanity; he couldn’t stand to speak ill of acolytes. Vance’s refusal or inability to denounce anti-Semitism is more craven—and therefore more disturbing. He’s clearly made the calculation that anti-Semites are part of the Republican Party’s base, and he can’t afford to shunt them to the side as he plots his own presidential bid. So he’s welcomed them into the mainstream of the coalition.

Not that long ago, the right dabbled in imagery that reeked of anti-Semitism but refrained from fully indulging it. Populists such as Bannon railed against “globalists” and cast the financier George Soros, who is Jewish, as the shadowy force behind the demise of white Christian civilization. This was vile stuff, but it was also coded—and it gave Republican politicians and commentators, at least those who would rather avoid anti-Semitism, enough latitude to ignore or dismiss it.

But hatred for Israel is now firmly planted on both sides of the political spectrum, and it has provided the anti-Semites on the right with cover to recycle dark theories about the Jews. Angry rants about Israel have curdled into broad conspiracies about powerful cabals that control American life—and theories about the maladies of the Jewish religion.

Through heavy-handed intimation, Owens and Carlson have blamed Israel for the murder of the Turning Point leader Charlie Kirk. According to this delusional version of events, Kirk upset Jewish donors with his questions about Israel’s conduct of its war in Gaza. To tamp down his powerful voice, people “sitting around eating hummus,” in Carlson’s telling, ordered his assassination. In this story, all of the classical hallmarks of anti-Semitism converge: big-money bankers with dual loyalties to a bloodthirsty state, making a martyr of a Christian saint.

[Yair Rosenberg: ‘The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am’]

The fervor with which Owens pursues this theory doesn’t just indicate a febrile mind. It likely suggests that she’s struck algorithmic gold. As she has taken her anti-Semitic turn, her audience has grown, which suggests that it likes what it is hearing, so she keeps feeding it, transforming an ancient hatred into start-up success.

Over the past few months, arguments that would have once been roundly denounced have found traction within the movement. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts backed Tucker Carlson after he hosted the unabashed anti-Semite Nick Fuentes on his podcast; Roberts attacked Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition.” (Ultimately, he apologized for a video he released supporting Carlson.) Megyn Kelly, once the face of Fox News, has resolutely refused to say a negative word about Owens and Carlson. At the Turning Point conference, she accused Shapiro of trying to “excommunicate” heretics. This is the way the culture operates: Ideas travel from the fringe to the acceptable because gatekeepers give their winking assent to views they lack the courage to espouse themselves.

A dark chapter of American history is repeating itself. In the late 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest from Michigan, used his radio broadcasts to blame Jews for the plight of the American worker. His sermons inspired organized gangs that roamed the New York City subways shouting “Kill the kikes” at elderly Jews and barged into synagogue services in Washington Heights.

By failing to denounce anti-Semitism, Vance has emboldened its adherents to flaunt their prejudices more openly, to dehumanize Jews with greater abandon. He told the Turning Point audience that he doesn’t want to “impose any purity tests” when, in reality, he was granting license to those who celebrate the most murderous purity test of all time.