In moments of political stress, the most revealing test of leadership is not rhetoric but refusal: what a leader will not tolerate, what he or she will not excuse, and what they will not leave unnamed.

That is why Vice President J.D. Vance’s persistent failure to confront antisemitism on the populist right must be treated as a primary concern, not a side issue.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly spoke approvingly of Nick Fuentes — an openly antisemitic extremist who has praised Hitler, embraced totalitarianism, and argued that Jews should be excluded from American civic life.

Kelly described Fuentes as “very smart” and suggested his ideas had value for the country. Carlson appeared to agree. Within 24 hours of that exchange, Candace Owens reposted Kanye West’s infamous “Death Con 3 on Jewish people” tweet and called it a “vibe.”

This is not fringe behavior leaking into the mainstream. It is the mainstream.

And it is happening inside the political ecosystem that Vice President Vance now helps lead.

Vance’s ties to Carlson are not incidental. Carlson is not merely adjacent to Vance’s politics; he is a close ally, and Vance even employs Carlson’s son. Carlson’s reach — tens of millions of people each week across podcasts, clips, and social platforms — is enormous. That influence now includes the normalization of figures and ideas that were once considered politically radioactive.

That is the context in which Vance’s silence must be judged.

A growing cohort of influential right-wing pundits has adopted a conspiratorial style long associated with antisemitic politics. With Candace Owens as a notable exception, most avoid naming “the Jews” directly, relying instead on euphemisms — “globalists,” shadowy elites, cultural engineers, disloyal insiders. The vocabulary is coded; the architecture is unmistakable.

Carlson has popularized this conspiratorial worldview for millions. Owens has given it its most explicit voice — recycling classic antisemitic libels about Jewish control of finance and media, falsely blaming Jews for the slave trade, attacking Jewish identity itself, and even defending Kanye West’s call for violence against Jews.

Kelly has moved from accommodation to outright normalization, publicly praising Fuentes and treating an admirer of Hitler as a legitimate political voice.

Together, these figures reach tens of millions of Americans across television, YouTube, X, podcasts, and livestreams. Fuentes himself commands a large online following through his “Groyper” network. This is not marginal radicalism. It is mass politics. 

Yet from the highest levels of Republican leadership — including the vice presidency — there has been no sustained, unequivocal rejection of these figures or the ideology they propagate. 

When asked about antisemitism on the right, Vance has insisted that figures like Tucker Carlson are unfairly maligned and that the Republican “big tent” does not have an antisemitism problem. His framing reduces antisemitism to a vague subset of “extremism,” effectively sidestepping the ideology and its consequences. 

The only clear break in Vance’s pattern of evasion proves the rule. When Fuentes grotesquely attacked Vance’s wife on racist grounds, Vance responded clearly and immediately.

But when Jews are targeted, when antisemitic narratives are normalized, and when eliminationist rhetoric spreads through the very coalition that sustains him, the response is silence or deflection. That distinction matters.

Silence Is a Choice and Antisemitism Is Not a Side Issue

No serious political actor is unaware of what is happening. This antisemitism is not subtle. It is rhetorically patterned and widely documented.

We have already seen where this pattern leads. Democratic leaders long ignored antisemitism on the progressive left, laundering it as “anti-Zionism” and activism. It produced exclusion, purity tests, and the quiet normalization of treating mainstream Jewish identity as a problem.

The Democratic Party’s antisemitism problem was not an accident. It was the result of leaders who refused to draw lines early. Some notable Republicans have shown that it is possible to confront this threat directly. Vance, however, appears to be repeating the Democrats’ failure from the right.

Antisemitism does not behave like a policy disagreement that can be managed. It behaves like fire. Once given oxygen, it spreads — from insinuation to justification, from justification to action. Once permitted, it does not remain contained.

And the problem doesn’t just concern Jewish Americans. Antisemitism has always been the earliest warning sign of democratic decay.

Societies do not begin by persecuting everyone. They begin by deciding that one group does not fully belong. Jews have been assigned that role with grim consistency across history.

When antisemitism is normalized — explained, contextualized, ignored — violence follows. Moral barriers erode. Victims are abstracted. 

American Jews are seeing those patterns again: campus exclusions, ideological tests, street violence explained away as “context,” and political leaders unwilling to draw lines. This is why antisemitism is not just another culture-war issue. It is a stress test for liberal democracy itself.

Leaders draw boundaries. Through what they name, condemn, or ignore, they signal which ideas corrode civic life and which are allowed to spread.

Vance’s refusal to confront antisemitism — while some figures in his political orbit praise Fuentes and his coalition gives space to rhetoric that threatens Jews — sends a clear message: some forms of hatred are acceptable if they arrive wrapped in populist grievance. There is no neutral ground here. To refuse to draw the line is to move it.

A Moment of Decision

This is not a demand for ideological purity. It is a demand for moral clarity.

Criticizing elites is legitimate. Questioning institutions is healthy. Good-faith debate about America’s relationship with Israel is perfectly valid in a democracy. None of that requires trafficking in conspiratorial antisemitism, excusing it, or pretending not to see it when it appears.

History is unforgiving on this point. Leaders who believed they could harness antisemitism without being consumed by it were always wrong.

J.D. Vance is not a spectator in this moment. He is Vice President of the United States, with power and choice.

If antisemitism continues to metastasize inside the political coalition Vance is helping to build, he will not merely have failed to stop it. He will own part of the cost.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.