If lately you have been feeling as if the world is not quite spinning on its axis the way it used to, you’re not the only one. The shift in the political wind with respect to how antisemitism is treated is no longer merely a matter of hateful calls for genocide or violence against Jews uttered on college campuses or protests in the streets of U.S. cities. The main front where the battle against Jew-hatred is being fought these days is on popular podcasts. What is most disconcerting—and a sign of how much the world is changing—is that some of the bastions of the liberal establishment are doing their best to put their fingers on the scale in favor of the hate-mongers.
Simply put, we’re now living in a world where The New York Times is lending its considerable weight to boost one side in an increasingly bitter civil war on the political right. And the side that they are helping is the one championing the sort of antisemitism that even the newspaper acknowledges seems taken straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
‘Strange new respect’ for right-wing antisemites
The New York Times Magazine’s lengthy and astonishingly friendly profile of former Fox News host and current podcaster Tucker Carlson was a watershed moment. In the 1980s, the late Tom Bethell coined the term “strange new respect” to describe the way liberal media would shower a conservative with praise for “evolving” and adopting positions that they favored. Back then, it was usually reserved for Republicans who opposed President Ronald Reagan and accused him of being a radical. In recent years, the same phenomenon could be observed when it came to those in the GOP establishment or former Republicans who opposed President Donald Trump.
The latest instance of “strange new respect” is reserved for those who share the newspaper’s antipathy for Israel and its willingness to mainstream antisemitic tropes about the Jewish state and its supporters. Interviews like the one with Carlson are examples of what journalist Mark Helprin described as the Times’ embrace of “new heroes” who oppose Trump.
As the Manhattan Institute’s Jesse Arm noted, the newspaper “runs polished, quasi-glamorous profiles” of people like Carlson, Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, rather than mainstream conservatives or administration officials, to portray the right as a pack of “cartoonishly bigoted” fringe figures. But what all those people have in common is that they’ve parted company with Trump largely because of his support of Israel, as well as having all headed down the rabbit hole of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
What we’re observing is one more piece of evidence that illustrates how the nation’s political alignment is being altered by the surge of global Jew-hatred post-Oct. 7, 2023. During the last 31 months, the widespread demonization of Israel has fractured old assumptions about the limits of acceptable discourse, as well as what were once thought to be immutable differences between the right and the left.
Even before Oct. 7, it was already obvious that a bizarre red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists was having an impact on European politics and culture, and starting to be felt in America. Left-wingers who had little in common with Muslim immigrants who brought with them reactionary attitudes about social issues bonded with them over their antipathy for Israel and the Jews.
Corbynizing Democrats and Republicans
A decade ago, Britain’s Labour Party was captured by the far left in the form of a faction headed by Jeremy Corbyn, who led it to two electoral defeats in 2017 and 2020. The “Corbynization” of Labour was theoretically undone by the election of Keir Starmer as prime minister in 2024. Still, the impact of the normalization of the far left lingers as the main parties splinter, and the Greens, which epitomize the alliance of left-wingers and Islamists, seem poised to topple Labour in the foreseeable future.
The “Corbynization” of the Democratic Party has been proceeding slowly and surely since the election of the first four members of the far-left congressional “Squad”—Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). Eight years ago, such people were marginal in the Democratic Party. Today, they are among its leaders and most popular figures, with the older, nominally pro-Israel establishment kowtowing to them. The party’s leaders are now even ready to support Israel-bashing extremists like Graham Platner or Abdul El-Sayed.
What we’re seeing in the United States goes beyond the hijacking of the Democrats by its intersectional left-wing anti-Israel base. Here, the promotion of blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” against Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip has spread from the left to the right. Young people have been disproportionately influenced by the algorithms of social-media platforms that favor anti-Israel talking points and lies, in addition to skewed news coverage. As a result, polls show young people are far more likely to be opposed to the Jewish state or to believe the Hamas propaganda about alleged Israeli crimes. And that seems to apply to young people, especially males, who otherwise describe themselves as conservative, as well as to those on the left.
That is apparently the core audience of Carlson’s podcast and that of others on the far right, such as those of openly antisemite Candace Owens or neo-Nazi groyper Fuentes.
Muslims like the antisemitic right
These purveyors of hate are also getting a boost from the growing Muslim population. As Kelly, who was once a mainstream pro-Israel conservative but actively defended Carlson and Owens in the last year, said this past week, all three are getting a major boost in Internet clicks and YouTube views from Muslims. And so, they have adjusted their views to suit their new fans.
Like Carlson, Kelly is now also professing that Jews and the pro-Israel community have been spreading negative ideas about Islam that should be refuted. Only in January, she was correctly stating that Islamism was a threat to Western freedoms and that accusations of Islamophobia were merely an attempt to shut down those who told the truth about hate emanating from the Muslim world.
Now, she says that she and Tucker are rejecting pro-Israel influence and “standing up for Islam.” By shedding their support for the Jewish state while also floating vile antisemitic conspiracy theories about Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, such as dragging Trump into war with Iran, or being behind the Jeffrey Epstein sexual scandal, they are being rewarded with an enthusiastic audience of listeners and viewers.
In part, this flip-flop is connected to Kelly’s all-consuming quest for the clicks and views extremism and Jew-hatred draw, monetized in ways that pad her bank account.
Yet their podcasts must be understood as more than an internet kerfuffle or marketing ploy. Rather, it is the soundtrack of a civil war being fought within the Republican Party that will determine whether it, too, will follow the Democrats down the path of the abandonment of Israel and the normalization of antisemitism.
One of the two sides in this battle consists of conservatives who are loyal to Trump and believe in the U.S.-Israel alliance. Their opponents are right-wingers who are essentially mimicking the pro-Hamas propaganda and blood libels about Israel that are part of the basic script of the political left these days.
Mainstreaming antisemitic tropes
Carlson and Kelly are determined to mainstream the notion that Trump and the United States are acting as the “slaves” of Israel and Netanyahu—a vicious trope of Jew-hatred that seems taken straight out of 1930s Nazis propaganda, as well as the anti-Zionist script written for the left by the Soviets in the 1960s and ’70s. In doing so, they have largely dropped the distinction between their programs and the supposedly more marginal and extreme ones of Owens and Fuentes, which nonetheless also number in the millions.
The question is whether they are capable of helping to turn GOP voters against Trump.
The Times seems to think so. In a subsequent article published this week, it sought to depict conservative pro-Israel influencer and former Republican congressional candidate Lara Loomer as waging a losing battle against Carlson and his allies. To buttress this claim, they point to the attention that anti-Israel Fishback has gotten in his underdog campaign for governor. They cite the willingness of someone like veteran conservative campaign operative and former Trump ally Roger Stone not merely to attack Loomer, but to claim that supporters of Israel are traitors betraying both the president and America. The article also quotes pessimistic statements made by Loomer in which she says she told Trump that he would be the last pro-Israel president and that his party is slipping into the hands of those who hate the Jewish state.
To date, the evidence for such a development is nonexistent; polls show both Republicans and, especially, those who identify as members of Trump’s MAGA base, as still supportive of Israel. For one thing, pro-Israel evangelicals vastly outnumber Muslim Americans.
The fight for the conservative future
Yet the decline of support for Israel among young conservatives does raise the question about the future and whether a post-Trump GOP will, like the Democrats, fall into the hands of those who are hostile to Israel. Carlson, and other Israel-bashers and antisemites on the right, are still hoping that Vice President JD Vance—still considered the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination—will champion their cause. Their main worry is that he might be tainted by association with the Iran war.
While progressives speak of Israel and Jews in the jargon of the intersectional left as “white” oppressors, the antisemitic right talks of them as manipulating hapless non-Jews into waging wars against American interests. The practical effect of both is to isolate Jews and the Jewish state. And just as Islamists have successfully aligned themselves with progressives—the coalition that elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is an obvious example—Carlson’s and Kelly’s boasts of their growing Muslim audience is evidence that they’d like this to be repeated on the right.
But there is a basic problem with the belief that the right is doomed to undergo its own version of Corbynization, at least as far as Israel and antisemitism are concerned. A conservative movement that rejects, as Carlson advocates, the idea of a Judeo-Christian heritage is rejecting core conservative values about liberty. To “speak up for Islam” and deny the threat that the theocratic terror regime in Iran poses to the West and America is not so much a blow against Israel, but one against a Western civilization that is being assaulted by woke progressives as well as Islamists. Should the views of Carlson and Kelly prevail in a post-Trump era, it will not be so much the U.S.-Israel alliance that will suffer but traditional American beliefs that give substance to the conservative critique of the left.
Antisemitism would be enabled by such a development, but so would the woke push to erase American exceptionalism that Carlson once opposed so articulately before he became obsessed with Israel. The ideas that fueled the backlash against the left on family values and national security that sent Trump back to the White House in 2024 would be negated.
A political alignment in which the far-right joins forces with the far left is a nightmare scenario for Jewish Democrats as well as Republicans. But more than that, it is a fifth column effort that would sink American conservatism. That movement traces its roots back to the writings of William F. Buckley, the triumphs of President Ronald Reagan, and now, the efforts of Trump to roll back the woke tide that has taken possession of the education system, pop culture, the fine arts and much of journalism in recent years.
Successfully resisting this antisemitic alliance won’t just save the Republican Party, but also any hope of preserving America and the West from the worldview of the ayatollahs, AOC and Mamdani.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
