Vice President JD Vance, asked about the rise of antisemitism in the conservative movement, said “all forms of ethnic hatred” must be rejected and emphasized that the U.S. is rooted in “Christian principles.”

In an interview released Tuesday, CNN commentator Scott Jennings, on his eponymous podcast, asked the vice president about “certain kinds of views that have been espoused by certain kinds of people” in the conservative movement who “try to drag you into this conversation all the time.”

“Just for the record, does the conservative movement need to warehouse anybody out there espousing antisemitism in any way?” Jennings asked.

“No it doesn’t, Scott,” Vance answered. “I think that we need to reject all forms of ethnic hatred, whether it’s antisemitism, anti-Black hatred, anti-white hatred. I think that’s one of the great things about the conservative coalition, is that we are, I think, fundamentally rooted in the Christian principles that founded the United States of America and one of those very important principles is that we judge people as individuals.”

The vice president continued, “Every person is made in the image of God. You judge them by what they do, not by what ethnic group they belong to and I think that principle is important. It’s something we gotta hold onto in the conservative movement because, God knows, the left abandoned it a long time ago.”

The kids aren’t alright.

That’s the unmistakable takeaway from a weekend filled with shocking developments surrounding the views of young conservatives, punctuated by a Turning Point USA conference that turned into a proxy war between mainstream voices led by Ben Shapiro, looking to create guardrails against antisemites and conspiracy theorists within the MAGA movement, against a growing cadre of bad-faith right-wing influencers leading the charge to embrace extremist voices into the conservative coalition.

The conference concluded with Vice President JD Vance all but taking the side of the extremists, while offering fulsome praise to his friend, Tucker Carlson, as an essential part of the Republican Party coalition.

The last several days also featured news of an eye-opening Manhattan Institute focus group of Gen Z Nashville-area conservatives reluctant to offer any negative reaction toward Adolf Hitler and sharing numerous antisemitic stereotypes about Jews. (One 29-year-old woman offered this representative reaction about Hitler: “I think he was a great leader, to be honest. I think what he was going for was terrible, but I think he showed very strong leadership values.”)

The weekend ended with a Jewish Insider scoop that a Trump administration nominee for a senior position at the State Department has a long track record of making derogatory comments about the Jewish community, characterizing Jews as religiously incorrect and in need of conversion.

This moment was further underscored by the hideously antisemitic tirade that Candace Owens went on over the last few days, barely eliciting any serious pushback from conservative movement leaders. Meanwhile, former journalist Megyn Kelly, during her own speech Friday at the TPUSA conference, chose to go after Shapiro and CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss even as Kelly has publicly steered clear of criticizing Owens, citing the fact that she’s a young mother and a personal friend. (Shapiro, she said, is no longer a friend after he criticized her in his speech Thursday night.)

Shapiro, long one of the leading voices on the right, opened the conference with a warning that the conservative movement is in danger from “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair.”  

He called out Tucker Carlson, Owens and Kelly by name. “We must not let fear of audience anger deter us from telling the truth; we must not let fear of other hosts deter us from telling the truth,” Shapiro warned. “The fact that Candace has been vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years on end while others fly cover for her is … cowardly.”

Shapiro received a characteristically warm reception for calling out the crazy, but the fact that he was outnumbered by voices whose extreme views would have long been marginalized by the conservative movement but are now tolerated, if not embraced, is a sign of our times — and a warning of where the MAGA movement could be headed without more leaders speaking up. 

Outside of Shapiro, there weren’t many leaders following suit. 

Vance, the favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2028, sided with the extremists during his Sunday address to close out the conference. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeated purity tests,” Vance said to applause. 

In an interview with Unherd’s Sohrab Ahmari, he offered fulsome praise to Carlson: “The idea that Tucker Carlson, who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it.”

He also appeared to defend both anti-Israel Democrats and Republicans for their antipathy towards the Jewish state, saying nearly of the critics were not motivated by antisemitism. “99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy.”

Culture is typically a leading indicator of where our politics is headed. The developments of the past week offer numerous real-life examples that back up the polling that shows that younger Americans hold overwhelmingly more critical views of the Jewish people than other generations, with antisemitic beliefs strongest among the most conservative cohort. One characteristic example: A recently-conducted Manhattan Institute poll found that over half of Republican men under 50 “believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.”

We’re seeing a preview of where our country could be headed without a change in direction. And while that may sound pessimistic, the reality is there’s a lot more that can be done to deal with the growing Gen Z radicalism — like scrutinizing the social media platforms that incentivize hateful content and singlehandedly create a marketplace for such extremism. 

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) warned on Monday against the mainstreaming of antisemitic figures within the conservative movement in response to Tucker Carlson’s platforming of neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes.

Hawley, an ally of the national conservative movement who has advocated for the Trump administration to take an aggressive approach to combating campus antisemitism, made the comments while speaking to Jewish Insider about the controversy surrounding Fuentes’ appearance on Carlson’s podcast late last week. 

“I just think on the substance of what he says, I mean, it’s antisemitic. Let’s just call it for what it is, let’s not sugarcoat it,” Hawley said of Fuentes. 

“That’s not who we are as Republicans, as conservatives. Listen, this is America. He can have whatever views he wants. But the question for us as conservatives is: Are those views going to define who we are? And I think we need to say, ‘No, they’re not. No. Just no, no, no,’” he continued. “We need to be really clear, and I say that not only as a conservative, but also as a Christian. There is no place for antisemitic hatred, tropes, any of that stuff. I just think we’ve gotta say that stuff.”

The Missouri senator drew a parallel between the antisemitism seen at universities across the country since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel and Fuentes’ views. 

“Do we really want to be part of what we’ve seen happen on college campuses, for instance, in this country in the last two or three years? Conservatives have been decrying that,” Hawley said. “Are we now to believe that, oh, actually, we have no problem with that? And that all of the things they were saying about Jews and Jewish Americans, that was fine? That’s not my view. I wasn’t fine with it then, I’m not fine with it now.”

“I thought it was morally repulsive then, I think it’s morally repulsive now. I’m not going to change my opinion on that. I want to be really clear: that’s above all a moral issue,” he added. 

Hawley was not the only Republican senator to voice their objections to a GOP embrace of Fuentes or the avowed antisemite’s appearance on Carlson’s program.

The fallout now involves the Heritage Foundation, the result of its president, Kevin Roberts, coming to Carlson’s defense in a video last Thursday that called out the “venomous coalition attacking” Carlson and warned that “their attempt to cancel him will fail.” Roberts has since clarified that he and Heritage do not support Fuentes’ antisemitic views, though he refused to disavow him, and is facing growing calls to walk back his comments. 

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), the co-chair of the Senate antisemitism task force, told JI that he was “a little surprised that Heritage jumped out in support of [Carlson] and Nick Fuentes to say, ‘Hey, we want them in our camp’ after the statements that were made.”

“Heritage could have just sat back and not said anything, but instead, they chose to jump out on their side,” Lankford continued. “I don’t get that.”

He, like Hawley and other Republican lawmakers, warned that the right faces a similar crisis of antisemitism as is roiling the left if conservatives do not proactively confront and shun antisemites in their midst.

“The left has seen an implosion of their party based on antisemitism rising in their party. I don’t want to see the same thing on the right,” Lankford said. “To say the least, I want to make it very, very clear we are not the party of antisemitism. We’re not the party that believes Hitler was a good guy and that Winston Churchill was the bad guy. We’re not the party that blames media issues on the Jews and all these weird tropes that are out there. That’s not who we are, that’s not what we stand for, nor what we should stand for.”

He said that he does not understand the impulse to “allow it to be a big tent and allow antisemitism in our party. If there are [antisemites] that are there, we should call it out and say that’s wrong.”

“What I’ve tried to be very clear on is [that] the ‘New Right’ is now quoting an old wrong. It’s wrong,” Lankford continued.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) offered a similar message.

“The Democrat Party — we already have a party that’s for antisemitism [and] is against Israel,” Scott told JI. “The Republican Party [is going to] stand for Israel and we’re going to stand against antisemitism. I don’t think there’s any question.”

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, the executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told JI that Roberts’ message “was the most tone-deaf comment, in both its content and its timing, that I’ve ever heard from a major Washington organization on any political side.” 

Menken resigned from Heritage’s Project Esther, the group’s antisemitism initiative, last week in response to Roberts’ video message defending Carlson. Along with Menken and CJV, several other groups have also publicly disaffiliated from Heritage’s antisemitism task force, including the National Jewish Advocacy Center, the Zionist Organization of America and Young Jewish Conservatives.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) criticized Republicans who refuse to disavow prominent antisemites in the conservative movement as “cowards” after the Heritage Foundation and its president, Kevin Roberts, defended Tucker Carlson and his friendly interview with neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes. 

Cruz warned during a half hour address at the opening of the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit in Las Vegas on Thursday evening that young Christians were turning away from supporting Israel, something he argued was the result of pro-Israel Christians being maligned by leading voices in the America First movement. 

The Texas Republican senator did not mention the Heritage Foundation, Roberts, Carlson or Fuentes by name, though he accused anyone who uncritically promotes Adolf Hitler of being “complicit” in spreading virulent antisemitism.

Fuentes has praised Hitler on multiple occasions; in his statement, Roberts said he “disagree[s] with” some of Fuentes’ views, “but canceling him is not the answer.” 

“The last year, we’ve seen three prominent people on the right publicly muse, ‘Gosh, maybe Hitler’s not all that bad.’ No. He is the embodiment of evil, a grotesque bigot. And if you’re confused by that, you’re an imbecile,” Cruz said on Thursday. “Too many people are scared to confront them. I want to ask you, how many elected Republicans do you see standing up and calling this out? How many do you see willing to take on the voices in the anti-Israel right?”

“More than a few of my Republican officeholders are terrified of upsetting people with really big megaphones,” he explained.

Cruz warned that antisemitic ideas are spreading among young Americans through social media and argued that rising support for isolationism and the pro-Israel community’s failure to adequately explain the benefits of the U.S.-Israel relationship accounted for the broad ideological shifts on the issue — but he noted that there “is also a theological argument” being made on the Christian right against Jews. 

“We are seeing young Christians and young evangelicals turning against Israel, and they are being pitched lies,” Cruz said. “One particular lie is something called replacement theology, and replacement theology is a twisted view that the Jews are no longer God’s chosen people, that the promises in the Old Testament no longer apply and that Christians have replaced Jews. Now in my Bible, I believe every word of it is true, and I believe every promise that God made to the people of Israel remains a promise that is made to the chosen people.”

After noting that he was “proud to be a Christian Zionist,” Cruz noted Carlson’s recent comments expressing his disdain for people who identify as such while appearing to note his protected status in the Trump administration. Carlson attacked Cruz and other pro-Israel conservatives, including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, by name in his podcast conversation with Fuentes, where Carlson claimed that those who identify as Christian Zionists have been infected by a “brain virus.”

“There are some people who are embraced at the highest level of government who said there is no one they hate more than Christian Zionists,” Cruz said. “Well, I’ll tell you what, there’s no one I hate more than communists and jihadists who want to murder us. Now is the time for choosing. Now is the time for courage.”

“If you sit there and nod adoringly while someone tells you that Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II, if you sit there and nod while someone says, ‘Well, there’s a very good argument that America should have intervened on behalf of Nazi Germany in World War II.’ If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil,” he added.

Omri Ceren, Cruz’s legislative director and longtime advisor, criticized Heritage directly in a post on X on Friday morning, writing that: “I mean, if Republican Jews don’t have a place at @Heritage that’s a choice its current leadership is institutionally empowered to make, but it sits uncomfortably with the organization’s history.”

Cruz’s comments were met with praise from Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s special antisemitism envoy during the Biden administration, who posted a message on X commending the Texas Republican.