The federal government has cracked down on antisemitism from the left, while ignoring or justifying antisemitism on the right. That’s a cold, hard and very uncomfortable fact.

After anti-Israel protests swept campuses amid Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Congressional panels subjected university administrators to withering public cross-examinations over antisemitism. President Donald Trump’s administration levied millions in fines, and withheld or threatened to cancel billions in federal funding, including to university medical research.

It was a quick and harsh reaction to protests that, in some cases, veered into antisemitism and singled out Jewish students. “Nobody gets the right to harass their fellow students,” Vice President J.D. Vance said at the peak of the student protests. “Nobody gets a right to set up 10 encampments and turn their college campuses into garbage dumps. And nobody gets the right to block their fellow students from attending class.”

Contrast that to Vance’s reaction earlier this month, when the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson hosted the far-right activist Nick Fuentes on his popular podcast, kicking off a massive debate about the mainstreaming of extremist views on the right.

Fuentes, who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and called for the execution of “perfidious Jews,” told Carlson that the great challenge to American social harmony is “organized Jewry.” Carlson didn’t push back. And when asked for comment, Vance said he didn’t want to take part in Republican “infighting.”

Trump, too, declined to join the Carlson critics.“I mean, 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. Let them,” Trump told reporters.

Get the word out? What, exactly, is going on?

Ignoring horseshoe theory, at our peril

Defenders of this lopsided response might argue that the administration actually has leverage over universities in the form of billions of taxpayer dollars. The government has legal recourse to hold colleges and individual students accountable.

Carlson’s choice to play nice with Nazis, on the other hand, is a matter of free speech — even if it is ominous, incendiary speech. What action could the government take against a privately-funded podcaster?

The obvious answer is: At least condemn it. But that has not happened at any level of this administration.

Carlson himself, in a long new interview with a New York Times reporter, downplayed Fuentes’ overt antisemitic statements and positioned himself as someone who, like Fuentes, merely questions U.S. policy toward Israel.

“Mr. Carlson said he abhors antisemitism and that he has numerous Jewish friends who share his qualms with the Israeli government,” wrote the Times reporter.

If that sounds awfully familiar, it’s because anti-Israel protesters at the other extreme say much the same things. Some of their best friends are Jewish, and they too hate what Israel’s leaders are doing.

American Jews are witnessing the horseshoe theory of politics in real time — the idea that the far-left and the far-right bend more toward each other than to the center. The ideology that the extremes are converging on is that Jews are the problem.

Both extremes, beginning with outrage at Israel, have a propensity to slide into overtly anitsemitic conspiracy theories that blame Israel for the Iraq War, 9/11, NYPD violence, manipulating Congress, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

Meanwhile, the political leaders who can confront both these extremes through words and policy, only seem to be hammering away at one side: the left.

A virus among young conservatives

The organized Jewish community, too, is highly attuned to instances on the left when anti-Israel attitudes bend toward outright Jew hatred. The most vocal critics of New York’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani accused him of just that — fomenting antisemitism and supporting antisemites in opposing Israel.

Immediately after Mamdani’s election, the ADL announced it was debuting a special program to monitor his administration for antisemitism.

But the ample evidence that a growing segment of the right is slipping back into the well-worn alliance that characterized the United States in the 1930s, when isolationists and antisemites made common cause against the Jews, doesn’t raise the same institutional alarms.

Trump has engaged with the extremist right, where antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment have both flourished for years, since the beginning of his first presidential run. Yet his Jewish supporters have given him far more leeway than they would ever think of giving Mamdani.

Meanwhile, that antisemitic segment of the conservative movement has quietly expanded, and found increasing tolerance in mainstream conservative spaces. The conservative analyst Ron Dreher wrote recently that he estimates some 30 to 40% of the Republican Gen Z’ers who work in official Washington are Fuentes fans.

Antisemitism “is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation,” he wrote.

Antisemitism for me, but not for thee

That boom might explain the disparity between Trump and Vance’s stance on college protesters and on Carlson and Fuentes.

Like so much else in our polarized society, antisemitism itself has become politicized. Your Jew-hatred is abhorrent, the thinking goes, but mine is free speech. Yours must be prosecuted. But I’m just asking questions.

The best hope American Jews have is that enough brave souls from across the political spectrum will step up and speak out, even against their own political tribe, knowing the dark fate of societies that go down this path.

Dreher, in a private meeting with Vance earlier this month, told the vice president that standing up to Nazis and their publicists like Tucker Carlson is not “infighting,” but a fight for the soul of the Republican Party, and of the U.S.

No word on how Vance responded. But can I suggest the ADL monitor him, too?

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