There is substantial evidence that Donald Trump does unusually well with voters who have low levels of social and political trust: little faith in government, experts, and even their fellow citizens. Trump has made the GOP the primary home for such low-trust voters, who used to be found more evenly across the political spectrum. In 2024, it seems likely that his gains among young and nonwhite voters came directly from their lowest-trust ranks.
Low trust is also, unsurprisingly, closely correlated with belief in conspiracy theories. And that is, at its heart, what antisemitism is: a 3,000-year-old conspiracy theory positing that everything bad in the world can be blamed on the secret and shady manipulations of a small group (i.e., the Jews).
When you put all of this together, you get a complete theory of why young conservatives — and especially young, nonwhite conservatives — have become America’s most antisemitic demographics.
Part of what it means to be a young conservative now is to have deep and profound distrust for established authorities and official narratives, to believe that the truth is what “they” don’t want you to know.
Since young people are disproportionate consumers of online content and influencers, that makes their world the natural habitat for right-wing antisemites looking to build a mass audience. People like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson are all able to build an audience on these platforms because they can connect directly with an audience that’s interested in a distinctly right-wing variant of antisemitism — conspiratorial and ethno-nationalist. Hence why Fuentes’s show is titled "America First."
A climate of malign tolerance
None of this is meant to absolve the American left of antisemitism. After October 7, 2023, that would be absurd. But there is a fact-pattern in need of explanation. It is on the right where explicit antisemites like Fuentes flourish, where more conspiratorial figures like Carlson get to speak at the party’s national convention, and where young operatives are texting each other about how much they love Hitler. For all of the left’s very real problems, there is nothing like the institutional architecture for left-coded antisemitism as what exists for its right-wing variants.
That is, I think, partly a function of demographic demand. While Democrats are turning on Israel after the Gaza war, Democrats are generally more likely to trust expert sources of knowledge rather than podcasters peddling the “real truth” that “they” are hiding from you.
But this is also a function of elite control over supply. For all its faults, the Democratic Party has built a coalition that ruthlessly enforces anti-bigotry norms within its ranks. One of the biggest knocks on the American left in the past few years, in fact, is that it enforces these norms too aggressively; hence the entire debate around “wokeness.” This is not, to put it mildly, an environment likely to produce major figures who talk like Fuentes.
The Trump-era Republican Party, by contrast, has defined itself by hostility to those norms. Trump’s entire political career has been an exercise in pushing policy and political boundaries into territories that were, at first, widely considered beyond the pale.
You can see this, most visibly, in Vice President JD Vance’s refusal to “join the pearl clutching” after the New York Young Republicans’ offensive texts were leaked. It is not just that he falsely dismissed the adult chat participants’ pro-Hitler comments as indiscretions of young boys; it is that he framed them as part of a principled stance against cancel culture.
"I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives," Vance said.
Among the many, often off-record conversations I have had with elite conservatives, their side’s hostility to policing bigotry came up again and again as a central factor in the rise of right-wing antisemitism. The right’s abandonment of self-policing is part of why the many, many signs of a rising antisemitism problem among young conservatives did not prompt soul-searching any sooner.
The right is so mistrustful of gatekeeping that it could not see it had created a permission structure for some of its own elite talent to begin diving into antisemitic waters. Only now, when the scope of the problem has become undeniable, is a reckoning at hand.
How the right’s anti-antisemites fight back
A liberal observer might be inclined to think that, when it comes to antisemitism, the GOP is already lost. This line of thinking reflects a misunderstanding not only of the way the right thinks about itself, but of the balance of forces inside the party.
There are not, at this point, powerful constituencies inside the GOP dedicated to opposing harsh immigration enforcement or advancing trans rights. But there are influential members of the MAGA coalition who take issues relating to antisemitism and Israel very seriously. Such issues are among their top policy priorities, if not their singular most important one — to the point where they appear willing to go down fighting for them.
Jewish Republicans are the most obvious example, but were these Jewish voices acting alone, even their positions of power in the movement would not be enough to save them. We have seen elite Republicans try to stand up against bigotry popular with the base in the past, and they have a losing record. But in this case, there is at least one real grassroots constituency likely to align with them: the millions of evangelical Christian Zionists.
The right’s debate on Jews is, inextricably, bound up with its debate over Israel. And Christian Zionists make up a significant percentage of the GOP base. Their interest group, Christians United for Israel, claims to have 10 million members. This large and influential constituency is theologically opposed to any effort to degrade or sever the US-Israel alliance — and, at least in theory, is deeply concerned about rising antisemitism. It’s a pretty powerful grassroots counterweight against the right’s Fuentes-pilled youth cadres.
But it’s not just the balance of forces that differentiates the right’s fight over antisemitism from other bigotries; it’s the role of Trump himself.
Specifically, an effort to police antisemitism will not necessarily run afoul of Trump. While he has a long record of antisemitic comments, Trump finds positioning himself against antisemitism quite useful: it is one of the central pretexts in his campaign to impose political controls on higher education. So there are good reasons to doubt he will personally intervene in a right-wing civil war to defend Tucker Carlson.
American Jews cannot be secure and stable in a country where an open Hitler-admirer like Nick Fuentes holds a position of influence in one of two major political parties. His triumph would be a sign that even a country where Jews have lived as securely as anywhere in our long history could turn violently dangerous.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
You can read Zack’s full story, which was published before the Heritage Foundation blowup, on the Vox website here.
