Pity the Jewish Intellectuals of MAGA

At a Turning Point USA conference in December, the podcaster Ben Shapiro delivered a speech that was hailed as the sort of moral stand one rarely encounters in the age of polarization. Confronting the right’s surging anti-Semitism, he denounced two of its most popular peddlers—Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens—by name. Speaking at a Heritage Foundation event the day before, Shapiro had called for “ideological border control,” a purge of the haters from the movement.

It was a brave foray into intramural politics, but also a damning self-indictment. Not so many years ago, Shapiro was guilty of the very thing he now decries. The Daily Wire, of which he is a co-founder and part owner, hired Owens in 2020. Even before she arrived, there were signs of where she was headed: “If Hitler had just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine,” she had told a crowd in London in 2018. Shapiro’s company ignored that and subsequent warnings. When Kanye West went on an anti-Semitic tear in 2022, Owens rushed to his defense: “It’s like you cannot even say the word ‘Jewish’ without people getting upset.”

That incident was the moment for border control. Shapiro refused. “We allow disagreement at The Daily Wire,” he said, “even when I think that some of my colleagues are wrong.” No wonder anti-Semitism crept toward the movement’s mainstream.

For a time, it was possible for the Jewish intellectuals of MAGA—a small but influential set of podcasters, columnists, and theorists—to minimize anti-Semitism in the movement. But it’s now so ubiquitous and so noxious that even they can’t ignore it. Joel Pollak, the former editor in chief of Breitbart News, wrote on X in December that, until a few months before, he would have happily sent his children to a Turning Point USA event. Not anymore. “Now: why would I send them to one more place where Jewish kids have to defend who they are and what they believe?”  

[From the April 2024 issue: The Golden Age of American Jews is ending]

But Pollak, Shapiro, and others were delusional in denying the problem for so long. They built careers inside a movement animated by fantasies about “globalists,” suspicions of hidden hands, and a yearning for national purity—an ideological combination that has never been particularly healthy for Jews. They lent their prestige to it anyway, certain that the hateful rhetoric was meant for someone else. Now that it has landed directly on them, they want credit for noticing the stench.

No case is sadder than the Israeli American political theorist Yoram Hazony—a Princeton and Rutgers graduate who ran a conservative think tank in Jerusalem, but saw Trump and the American right’s bubbling hostility toward classical liberalism as his chance to break out on a larger stage. In 2018, he published The Virtue of Nationalism, not a flame-throwing manifesto so much as a homely defense of nationalism as the natural way to organize a polity—an argument he traced back to biblical times.

Hazony didn’t just write about the revolt against liberalism; he became one of its leading impresarios. He convened regular gatherings of what he called the “National Conservatives,” a melange of theocrats and populists, and grasped for a new coalition that might provide the bedrock ideology of right-wing political parties throughout the Western world. Rising Republican politicians including J. D. Vance and Josh Hawley headlined these conferences, which, for several years, were the hottest tickets on the right.

Under the National Conservative banner, the right was swerving from classical liberalism to nationalism, away from the most American of American ideas: that the United States is held together by a creed rather than a bloodline. Hazony’s movement didn’t merely sneer at “wokeness”; it sneered at the pluralist project, articulated movingly by George Washington himself, that enabled Jews to flourish in the U.S. in the first place. Say what you will about the Enlightenment; at least it emancipated Jews.

While Hazony projected a mild image, his conferences were bombastic. When my colleague David Brooks attended one in 2021, he walked away gobsmacked by the “callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.” His dispatch from the conference was titled “The Terrifying Future of the American Right.”

Jewish history supplied a pretty good preview of what that terrifying future might look like. Four years after Brooks attended Hazony’s conference, it has unmistakably arrived. Each week brings a new instance of anti-Semitism moving from the internet’s febrile periphery into the conservative movement’s mainstream. A leaked text chain from the New York Young Republicans included the line “Great. I love Hitler.” Tucker Carlson, arguably the movement’s most popular personality, hosted Holocaust deniers on his show. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, rose to Carlson’s defense by dismissing the host’s critics as a “venomous coalition”—language that echoed old insinuations about a Jewish cabal pulling the strings. (Roberts eventually apologized.)

When Hazony convened the National Conservatives in September, he felt obliged to address the matter of surging anti-Semitism. He told the crowd that he’d been “pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people” online. Then he made what would surely count as one of the most naive statements ever offered at a political conference, at least if it could be judged sincere. “I didn’t think it would happen on the right,” he said. “I was mistaken.”

But contained in his speech were clues that perhaps he wasn’t as surprised as he claimed to be. For years, he said, he had defended his comrades against accusations of anti-Semitism. “It makes you really popular,” he said. “Everybody is really grateful: I’m the guy who defended them against absolutely false, ridiculous accusations of anti-Semitism.”

What did this long history of loyalty buy MAGA’s Jewish intellectuals? Several days after Shapiro addressed the Turning Point USA conference, Vance took the same stage. Because of all the attention Shapiro’s speech had received, Vance was compelled to address his concerns. But when the time came to evict Holocaust deniers and conspiracists from the movement, Vance chose a different path. He rejected “purity tests,” telling the crowd, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.” Vance spectacularly failed Shapiro’s moral test. And yet, Shapiro said nothing critical in response. He stayed silent, and evidently chose to preserve his relationship with the Republican Party’s heir apparent. In other words, Shapiro failed the moral test he himself wrote.

[Yair Rosenberg: J. D. Vance’s bad answer to an anti-Semitic question]

Despite all their bellyaching, the Jewish intellectuals of MAGA still hesitate to wage civil war or break ranks. After wringing his hands about anti-Semitism on the right, Hazony turned around and defended Roberts as he was besieged by accusations of anti-Semitism: “I’ll never forget how the jackals circled, sniveling for blood,” Hazony said. Sniveling is an interesting choice of words, given all the feeble excuses that Hazony has made for his allies.