Vice President JD Vance last week presented the Republican Party and the conservative movement with a fork in the road. They could either denounce the increasing examples of racist, antisemitic and extremist rhetoric in their ranks, or they could whatabout them away.
Vance suggested the latter course. Responding to newly published vile text messages from Republican officials and staff, he pointed to violent texts from Democratic Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones.
“I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence,” Vance said.
The approach made political sense. The Trump administration is in the process of misleadingly painting the political left as more violent and extreme than the right – this despite years of data to the contrary and court rulings rejecting its characterizations.
But increasingly, prominent conservatives are rejecting Vance’s tack.
They’re arguing that those texts and other revelations betray a very real and growing problem in their ranks, and that looking the other way just isn’t an option. They’ve cast it as a moral, political and even a quite literal hazard.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas offered some of the most significant comments to date this week. He cited a “growing cancer” and “poison” of antisemitism on the right.
“I’m here to tell you in the last six months, I have seen antisemitism rising on the right in a way I have never seen it in my entire life,” Cruz said Tuesday at the 45th Annual Night to Honor Israel in San Antonio, adding that “the church is asleep right now.”
While he argued the problem has been worse on the left, he said it was foolish to ignore it on the right. He cited the oodles of antisemitic responses he gets on social media and said it wasn’t just bots funded by foreign governments.
“I am telling you this is real, it is organic, these are real human beings, and it is spreading,” he said.
Plenty of other conservative influencers have made similar arguments over the past week, in some cases explicitly rejecting calls like Vance’s to stay focused on the left, even if they didn’t specifically call out the vice president.
Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro appeared with an advocate of Vance’s approach and warned that the right was “sort of whistling past the graveyard.”
Shapiro, who is Jewish, said threats he’s received from the right have become “more common.”
“If somebody tries to kill me, it’s a fricking Agatha Christie novel,” Shapiro said. “I just don’t know which direction the bullet is coming from at this point, given the sort of various and sundry radical extremes that exist.”
Those fears about extremism leading to violence became more real this week. The state of Florida arrested a man for allegedly threatening to kill Dillon and other Jewish conservatives. Dillon and others who were allegedly targeted by the man linked the threats to a baseless conspiracy theory promoted by far-right influencers that Israel was behind Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
“Some on the right are spreading these ideas,” Dillon said. “Others, to their shame, are either afraid or unwilling to confront them.”
Indeed, that particular conspiracy theory – about Israel supposedly being involved in Kirk’s assassination – crystallizes the GOP’s political dilemma.
Former Daily Wire host Candace Owens has played a massive role in spreading it via her hugely popular podcast. Some on the right have accused Tucker Carlson of flirting with it. That includes in his eulogy for Kirk when he compared his assassination to those who plotted to kill Jesus – whom Carlson called “guys sitting around eating hummus” in Jerusalem. (Carlson said on his show this month that claims that he was being antisemitic in the eulogy are “insane,” adding, “All I did was recount the gospel.”)
But despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly denouncing the theory early on, the American right has been slow to address it. Some on the right have criticized former Fox News host Megyn Kelly for declining to call out Owens and Carlson, whose broader commentary about Jews and Israel has also raised alarm bells among Republicans like Cruz.
Kelly has offered a Vance-ian defense for her posture, saying she’s not interested in rocking the boat.
Republicans have largely ignored the Owens situation, but there seems to be a growing recognition on the right that not calling out this kind of rhetoric is also politically fraught.
Yes, Democrats have their problems here, including Jones’ texts and the recent controversy over popular Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner having a tattoo that resembled Nazi imagery. (Platner has said he didn’t understand the image was tied to Nazism.)
But the evidence of this problem on the right – and perhaps most notably, its penetration of official circles – is also building.
It’s not just the vile text messages shared by a group of young Republicans on a group chat. Trump nominee Paul Ingrassia, who, in his own private messages, allegedly said he had “a Nazi streak” and made racist comments, was recently withdrawn after some GOP senators pushed back.
There have been other Trump appointees and nominees with extreme and inflammatory social media histories, as often documented by CNN’s KFile. And Trump appointees and GOP members of Congress who appeared at gatherings of white nationalists. A Ron DeSantis presidential campaign aide in 2023 shared a video with a neo-Nazi symbol.
And that’s to say nothing of Trump’s history here. That includes his downplaying of a racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, his frequent use of antisemitic tropes, and his comment, according to his former chief of staff John Kelly, that Adolf Hitler did some “good things.” (A Trump spokesman has denied this comment.)
Conservative New York Times opinion columnist David French in a 2023 column highlighted a number of other examples of this phenomenon and warned the right of this sleeping giant of an issue.
“We should expect more bigotry and more revelations,” French wrote. “Dark words spoken in secret will spill out into the public square. The lost boys of the American right corrupt our culture.”
That’s proven rather prescient. And the right is now being forced to reckon with it more out in the open, even as the administration would prefer to avert its gaze and focus on more politically advantageous matters.
