OPINION:
Antisemitism on the right is an obscenity and something I take personally.
I have been a conservative since the 1964 Goldwater campaign, decades before anyone had heard of podcaster Tucker Carlson, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts or Hitler fanboy Nick Fuentes.
During the 1960s, I started chapters of Young Americans for Freedom at colleges throughout the Greater Boston area. YAF was the main opposition to the new left on campus.
I led a statewide taxpayers group, a national gun owners group and several pro-family organizations. I have been expounding conservative values in the media for decades.
I came to see my conservatism as a natural expression of my Jewishness, just as I saw left-wing antisemitism as predictable.
The rise of antisemitism on the right caught me off guard.
The obscenity is fed by knee-jerk isolationism, the charge that Jews and Christian Zionists are Israel First-ers and various conspiracy theories that see Jews as evil and bent on world domination. The leaders of this pogrom are Mr. Fuentes and former Fox News personality Mr. Carlson. Each is said to have a huge online following. Stupidity is never in short supply.
Mr. Carlson recently interviewed Mr. Fuentes, who claimed, “Everybody, in every nation for thousands of years, eventually comes to the conclusion that Jews always act in bad faith.”
During the interview, Mr. Carlson, who says Israel deliberately bombed churches in the Gaza Strip, allowed all the man’s repulsive views to go unchallenged. Mr. Carlson also provides a forum to Holocaust deniers such as commentator Candace Owens.
In the face of outrage from real conservatives, Mr. Roberts rushed to defend his friend, Mr. Carlson. He attacked the talk show host’s critics as “globalists” who were part of a “venomous coalition.”
He must mean me.
Ironically, I once spoke at The Heritage Foundation, under very different leadership, on “Making Sense of Jewish Liberalism.” I doubt I’ll be invited back. If I was, I could speak on “Making Sense of Kevin Roberts.”
After an internal revolt at Heritage, Mr. Roberts modified his position slightly, saying he had made a “mistake” when he declared that he would refuse to distance America’s foremost conservative think tank from Mr. Carlson, the right’s foremost nut job.
He also said that although he abhorred Mr. Fuentes’ antisemitism, the proper response was to debate him, not to cancel him.
How would Mr. Carlson, who is a loyal Catholic, feel about having a dialogue with someone who says Catholicism is a force for evil in the world? Not providing a hater with a forum isn’t the same as cancelling him.
Conservative leaders and publications — including Sen. Ted Cruz, The Wall Street Journal and the National Review — have come forward to disavow Messrs. Carlson and Roberts. At a Heritage staff meeting, a number of Mr. Roberts’ colleagues called on him to resign.
Antisemitism on the right is a gross distortion of conservative principles.
In a July Gallup Poll, 71% of Republicans said they approved of Israel’s actions in Gaza, compared with 8% of Democrats. President Trump’s daughter Ivanka says that when she told him she was converting to Judaism to marry Jared Kushner, he said he fully supported her decision. The president has moved swiftly to combat campus antisemitism.
Compare this with the deafening silence in the Democratic Party over the antisemitism of New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mandami.
The Roberts/Carlson controversy is not about supporting Israel or standing up to the cancel culture. The fight against antisemitism on the right is a battle for the soul of the conservative movement.
America was founded by Bible-believing Christians as part of a tradition stretching back to Sinai. The Judeo-Christian ethic is the bricks and mortar of our republic. That’s why the secular left has spent decades attacking it.
Today, Christians and Jews are threatened by the same fanaticism. Nigerian Christians are being slaughtered by the thousands by Muslim terrorists. Although Mr. Carlson denies that this is happening, the president says he will go in with guns blazing if it doesn’t stop.
Conservatives are often asked what we want to conserve. The short answer is our biblical heritage. Other conservative values — the free market, equality before the law and public safety — flow naturally from this wellspring.
Authentic conservatism and antisemitism are antithetical to each other. One is based on reason, the other on paranoid delusions. One stands for civilization, the other an ancient evil whose consequences may be seen in the Holocaust, the Oct. 7 massacre and the ravings of Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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