Barbarians from both political extremes are at the gates – and they share a hatred of Jews and Israel

On November 3, our old mate Jeremy Corbyn popped up, raising money on a Mamdani telethon. Moral bankruptcy is a primer for the real thing – and that, under Mamdani, is where New York City will go.

Meanwhile, in another claustrophobic island of unreason, the online world, the long-simmering struggle for control over the MAGA movement has broken out into civil war. Not over the runaway federal deficit, the criminal cost of healthcare, a faltering economy, a failing education system or even the rise of China. For the radical right too, it’s all about the Jews – and there’s no right kind of Jew for them.

Tucker Carlson was the ringmaster of the Republican revels on Fox News for years. He left in April 2023 under a mutually agreed cloud. He retreated to his native Maine, exchanged his preppy striped tie and blazer for the traditional rural costume of plaid shirt and puce-faced grievance, and relaunched himself online as one of America’s top podcasters.

Not all of the guests who have made the pilgrimage to Tucker’s podcast cabin are racist cranks. But all the racist cranks want to “go on Tucker”. And Tucker gets crankishly excited as they go on about the racist right’s crankish obsessions.

Tucker has sought enlightenment from Darryl Cooper, the podcaster who thinks Churchill was the villain of the Second World War. He has dog-whistled about Israeli connections to the 9/11 attacks and why, as a study claimed, Ashkenazim might be more immune to Covid-19 than Sephardim or Mizrachim. He has claimed that Benjamin Netanyahu openly tells Israelis: “I control Donald Trump. I control the US Congress. I control the United States.”

You know you’ve lost the plot when Donald Trump calls you “kooky”. That’s how Trump dismissed Tucker in June, after Carlson led the chorus who claimed that if America backed Israel against Iran, World War Three would break out and Americans would die for Israel.

It’s funny how the people who say they’re “Just asking questions” already know the answer. The Jews, the Jews, the Jews.

On October 27, Tucker dropped the big one by casting his pod with America’s leading racist. This being America, there’s stiff competition for what, despite all appeals to reason, remains a sought-after and lucrative position. Today, the king of the losers is Nick Fuentes.

Fuentes is a Holocaust denier. He opposes interracial marriage and seeks “total Aryan victory”. He calls for “the death penalty” for an “occult element at the high levels of society, specifically among the Jews” that is “suppressing” Christianity.

Tucker nodded along as Fuentes explained why “organised Jewry in America” has to go. Fuentes loved it while Tucker said Christian backers of Israel are heretics with a “brain virus”.

Mainstream conservatives, Republican centrists and the mentally stable pushed back. But Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation (the biggest conservative think tank in DC), backed his “friend” Tucker and failed to condemn Fuentes.

Heritage has many smart scholars, including the ones working on Project Esther, its new anti-antisemitism initiative. Roberts has written a pretty good book about the bipartisan foul-ups and the failures of liberalism that have brought America to its current pass. But a major conservative institution failed a basic test of judgment.

Roberts walked back the Fuentes part after a further wave of push-back. But he still stuck with Tucker, and still struggled to explain why a big-tent party should admit an arsonist like Fuentes who, in a typically thoughtful contribution to the post-podcast broiges, thinks Jews should “get the f**k out of America”.

Here we come to a difference that will be critical for America’s future, and especially critical for those Jews who choose not to follow Fuentes’ advice.

In 2020, the Democratic Party and the left’s institutions (the news media, social media and the universities) welcomed the race-mongers with open arms. The result was anarchy in the party and, as Mamdani shows, extremism on the ticket.

The Republicans and the right’s institutions (think tanks especially, but also X in the age of Elon Musk) now face a similar challenge.

A “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” youth insurgency has breached the gates of what only yesterday was the party of golf clubs and George Dubya. Repel the barbarians, and America will be better, and maybe even made great again. Surrender, and America’s unravelling will differ only in its speed and violence.

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Historian Dominic Green is joining the JC as a regular columnist