The Right and Its Growing Cancer

Peloni:  One of the most troubling aspects of the rising antisemitism among the MAGA talking heads is that both the administration and MAGA faithful continue to appear on the Carlson’s show, for example, while also offering no distancing for the promotion of antisemitic tropes such as Jews having dual loyalty.  Importantly, the attempt to inject an antisemitic bias into the discussion of the war in Gaza and Iran, among other instances, have gone completely unnoticed by Trump and many of his close associates who should be eschewing the biased talking heads, rather than interacting with them.

By Paul Schnee – on October 25, 2025

If one listens carefully in our own conservative circles one can sometimes hear anti-Jewish sentiments at the end of sentences, but this week we heard the vice-president of the United States utter a complete sentence the content of which, if thoroughly implemented, would endanger the very survival of the state he ostensibly champions.

Responding to a preliminary vote taken in the Knesset to reclaim sovereignty over Judea and Samaria Vice-President Vance stated: “If it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it…….the West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel.”

Why should he take “some insult” to Israel attempting to rectify the horrendous mistake it made in 1993 with the Oslo Accords? Judea and Samaria were part of ancient and historical Israel. Not one square foot should have been ceded to the newly created Palestinian Authority.

To say one is insulted or offended is an attempt to prioritize one’s own feelings. It is not an argument but a call to end the discussion. It is an admission of intellectual impotence.

President Trump, to whom we have so much to be grateful, gets an A++ for his efforts, but his 20-point Peace Plan is tragically flawed. Its main flaw, you may have spotted it, is that it allows Hamas to survive when eliminating this threat was the whole point of the Gaza War. This is the salient point missed by Steve Witkoff, a graduate of the Instagram School of Diplomacy, and Jared Kushner during their self-serving interview on 60 MINUTES last Sunday.

To make matters worse President Trump reinforced Vance’s statement about Judea & Samaria when he declared, “It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.” Why? Does he plan to create a state for Arab Palestinians out of the original homeland of the Jewish people? All of the land belongs to tiny Israel. This has been the case for over 3,000 years. Besides, In 2006/07 the Arab Palestinians voted for Hamas to govern their affairs in Gaza and we can see how well that turned out.

One can’t help the sinking feeling that some aspects of Trump’s peace plan resemble the disastrous Munich Agreement of 1938 concluded between Great Britain, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy when Czechoslovakia, the country whose fate it concerned, was excluded from the discussions. Making guarantees about the fate of Judea & Samaria is far beyond President Trump’s scope of responsibility and he has made them to countries that have been violently opposing and undermining the security of the West for centuries. This is not only strategically unsound it is also obscene.

The total number of Arabs living in the Arab nations is estimated at 366 million. The number of Arabs in countries outside the Arab League is estimated at 17.5 million, yielding a total of close to 384 million. The Arab world stretches around 5,000,000 square miles from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east and from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean in the southeast. Israel is 8,500 square miles with a population of about 9 million Jews and around 2 million Arabs who are Israeli citizens.

President Trump and Vice-President Vance having tumbled the numbers and surveyed the landscape have concluded that what the region needs is yet another Arab/Muslim state devoted to the hatreds of Islam and its ferocious doctrines sitting right beside Israel, the world’s only Jewish-nation-state and an embattled outpost of western values.

Their deliberations, I suspect, have been strongly influenced by the growing contingent of whispering and more vocal anti-Semites on the right whose pied piper is Tucker Carlson. Instead of granting them the slightest credence Trump and Vance should be purging their party of this filth in much the same way as William F. Buckley purged it of the detestable John Birch Society and several years later of the anti-Semitically inclined Pat Buchanan.

” What stronger breast-plate than a heart untainted!
Thrice is he arm’d, that hath his quarrel just;
And he but naked, though lock’d up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.”

‘A growing cancer’: The right’s growing acknowledgment of its own antisemitism

By: Aaron Blake, Oct 23, 2025

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.
The growing calls for an internal reckoning

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.

• Author James Lindsay called the young Republican group chat exposed by Politico “the tip of a very nasty iceberg.”
• GOP strategist David Reaboi said that “most of the Right’s loudest voices have no problem at all with Nazis.”
• Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza on Wednesday cited hateful anti-Indian messages he was receiving, saying, “The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?”
• Seth Dillon, the CEO of the conservative satire website the Babylon Bee, said the right should be “treating our cancer and killing it before it kills us.”

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.”
The GOP’s dilemma

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.

A problem that’s getting harder to ignore

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.