As the political right navigates Tucker Carlson’s recent decision to host the white supremacist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his podcast, one thing has become clear: There are some people in this country who are eager to pretend that antisemitism on the political right is a new issue.

This is untrue. And understanding the contours of that warped perception are essential to accurately identifying and pushing back on antisemitism in the United States today.

For a long time, much of the political right has held that to be pro-Israel is to be good for the Jews, and to be too critical of Israel is to be an antisemitic security threat.

This has meant that President Donald Trump can be excused for ranting about “globalists” and pushing conspiracy theories about Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros, because he is such a friend to Israel. For many right-wing American Jews, that friendship was enough.

There is a cost to this calculus. Those who believed conservative support for Israel would keep antisemitism on the right at a level they deemed comfortable are now, perhaps, beginning to see that they have made a devil’s bargain.

The most obvious proof of that is the decision of Kevin Roberts, president of the influential Heritage Foundation, to publicly stand by Carlson. (Nearly a week after his initial statement, Roberts apologized to staff amid profound internal criticism, claiming he didn’t know much about Fuentes. He also issued another video statement proclaiming that even “even when my friend Tucker Carlson needs challenging,” he and Heritage will speak up).

The Heritage Foundation is behind the Trump White House’s antisemitism policy: It developed Project Esther, a plan to instrumentalize antisemitism to crack down on civil society. The group has been enormously influential in turning a purported battle against antisemitism into a trademark effort of Trump’s second term. For Roberts to say that to “cancel” Fuentes — who has compared Jews in death camps to cookies in an oven and deemed Jews “unassimilable” — would be a mistake suggests that the significant sector of the right that they represent sees antisemitism more as an opportunity than as an actual problem.

Because for all the stories about Republicans racing to condemn the antisemites in their ranks in the wake of Carlson’s interview with Fuentes — who for a long time was considered too extremist for more mainstream right-wing figures to touch — the Republican party has been comfortable using antisemitism for years.

They’ve built the modern right on conspiracy theories about Soros, transparent hints at charges of Jewish “dual loyalty,” suggestions that Jews are to blame for electoral losses, and winks and nudges at hateful tropes about Jews and money. The reason that the pro-Israel right is now, suddenly, deeply concerned about these tropes is that Fuentes has a vitriolic hatred of Israel, in violation of longstanding conservative norms.

Which raises the question of why they, or anyone, thought that antisemitism was acceptable or could be contained so long as it came with support for a nation state — or so long as it was only directed against liberal Jews, or was couched in suitably coded language.

Those who practiced that kind of cultivated looking-away overlooked an essential fact: Antisemitism that simmers at a certain level does not check itself. It just makes society as a whole more comfortable with antisemitism.

The idea that antisemitism is a new problem for the right in this country — one that must be condemned now, but was fine before Carlson invited Fuentes on his platform — is contradicted by the reality of the last decade of American political life.

The Republican Jewish Coalition condemned Roberts for standing by Carlson. That’s good. However, the same group was proud to endorse Trump, whom it called “the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history,” in 2024, two years after he had dinner with Fuentes and the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, now known for his exceptionally vocal and vicious antisemitism. (Trump claimed he did not know who Fuentes was at the time of the meeting, but also proved unwilling to openly criticize him after details of his past statements were made clear.)

The right-wing Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro is accusing Carlson of helping to sabotage the U.S. by hosting Fuentes. I agree that Carlson’s prominence and widespread influence on the right is bad for the U.S., but I also thought that was true when he repeatedly used his platform to push the so-called “replacement theory,” a conspiracy theory that Jewish-coded shadowy elites are trying to flood the country with non-white migrants.

Several Jews who are affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and Project Esther reportedly threatened to quit over Roberts’ response to the Carlson scandal. But why were these individuals content to be associated with a plan to ostensibly fight antisemitism that did not bother to meaningfully engage with white supremacy — the root of Fuentes’ antisemitism — in the first place?

And still others are apparently hoping that we can go back to playing nice with those who deal in antisemitism, so long as they are sufficiently subtle about it and keep supporting Israel. Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, which recently dropped “protect civil rights” from its online mission, thanked Roberts for clarifying after his initial statement that he finds Fuentes’s views abhorrent. Ideally, one does not need to clarify that they abhor Holocaust denial.

The truth is that when you decide to look past antisemitism for political purposes, you can’t be shocked when that antisemitism eventually goes too far.

And so when pundits now talk about a “civil war” on the American political right over antisemitism, we should remember is that this is the result of years and years of tacit approval of subtle antisemitism. It may have come with support for Israel, and it may not have actually used the word “Jew,” but it has been a core part of the political movement that is currently ruling the country.

We are not going to be able to put this genie back in the bottle if we pretend it only emerged when Fuentes came onto Carlson’s show.

The post The fundamental miscalculation behind the GOP’s antisemitism crisis appeared first on The Forward.