Let’s get something straight about the civil war breaking out on the right: it’s not primarily about Tucker Carlson “platforming” or “normalizing” Nick Fuentes, or about Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ decision to defend Carlson, or even about the rise of antisemitism on the right.
The primary target here isn’t Carlson or Roberts, but Vice President J.D. Vance. And the people targeting him are Never Trump foreign policy interventionists who hope to destroy the MAGA movement and take back control of the Republican Party after Trump is gone.
Genuine concern about Carlson interviewing Fuentes, and about the kind of antisemitism that Fuentes and his followers espouse, is being hijacked to wage a proxy war on Vance because of his America First noninterventionist foreign policy views. The idea is to smear Vance as a dangerous antisemite and someone who can’t be trusted in the White House.
There is of course room for good-faith disagreement on the right about whether Carlson should have interviewed Fuentes, or the timing and wisdom of Roberts’ statement. There’s also room for vigorous discussion about how best to persuade young people like Fuentes to abandon their most odious, antisemitic views. Those are important debates, and conservatives of good will should by all means have them. Concern about antisemitism on the right is legitimate and warranted.
But what’s happening now is something else entirely. It’s a political op, and the target is Vance. The collective struggle session that has unfolded on the right in recent days — ritual denunciations of Carlson and Roberts, performative virtue-signaling on X — has been carried out by the people most opposed to an America First noninterventionist foreign policy after Trump.
Among these are of course the editors of the Wall Street Journal, who first misrepresented the Carlson-Fuentes interview and then accused Roberts of “Jew-baiting” and being an “apologist” for antisemitism. Anyone who knows Roberts or is familiar with his work will recognize how outlandish this accusation is. The only possible reason to make it is to discredit the substance of his statement, which had directly to do with foreign policy and freedom of conscience: “Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class,” Roberts said, reflecting a commonplace view on the MAGA right.
Erick Erickson was more direct. He took to the pages of The Free Press to bemoan the “moral rot eating the American right,” first slamming Fuentes and Carlson and Roberts — but then quickly pivoting to Vance, who “has avoided disavowing these figures.” Later, Erickson equates antisemitism with criticism of U.S. foreign policy toward Israel, again focusing on Vance. “When confronted by a young man in a MAGA cap questioning why the U.S. is supporting Israel’s ‘ethnic cleansing in Gaza,’ Vance did not dispute the presupposition. Instead, he said, Israel is ‘not controlling this president.’ Left unaddressed was the implication that the Jewish state had been allowed to control past presidents.”
Erickson calls this “moral cowardice” — as if that settles it. But of course it doesn’t. There’s plenty of room for legitimate debate about Israeli influence over American foreign policy in the past, and about whether that influence serves the interests of the American people. Chalking it up to racism and antisemitism is a way to shut down debate — and more importantly, to smear Vance as a closeted antisemite.
All of this is part of a larger anti-Vance strategy of the interventionist GOP establishment. Simply put, the people who lost control of the Republican Party in 2016 want it back, either by ensuring Vance is not the 2028 nominee or that he has to go through a bruising GOP primary before the general election. If they can’t control Vance, they would rather he lose to a Democrat than carry Trump’s MAGA movement and America First policies forward.
This, and not concerns about antisemitism, is what much of the recent outrage and barely-disguised calls for violence from unreconstructed neocons like John Podhoretz are really about. Anyone who actually watched the Carlson-Fuentes interview could see that it was clearly an attempt by Carlson to offer Fuentes some fatherly correction and redirection, specifically on the matter of Jews and collective guilt. Maybe Carlson’s interview style isn’t to everyone’s liking, and reasonable people can disagree about the prudence of interviewing Fuentes, but the idea that Carlson was amplifying Fuentes without challenging him is simply not true.
Which makes the focus on Vance all the more conspicuous. It’s no secret that Vance’s foreign policy views are largely shared by Carlson — as well as a growing element on the American right. For years now, Carlson has been opposed to almost all U.S. foreign intervention overseas — even when they were popular. He spoke out against the drone strike that took out Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020 during the first Trump term, and at least initially opposed the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities earlier this year. He’s been a staunch critic of U.S. funding for Ukraine in its ongoing war against Russia — so much so that when he was fired from Fox News in 2023, Republican lawmakers anonymously praised the decision, telling corporate media outlets that with Carlson off the air it would make it easier to send funding to Ukraine.
So when Carlson criticizes U.S. funding for Israel, it’s part of a larger critique of U.S. foreign policy — namely, that intervention in overseas conflicts might be good for war-hawks in Washington but it’s not good for the American people, who are increasingly and understandably tired of American involvement in foreign wars, directly or indirectly.
It’s a critique shared by Trump. Arguably, it was Trump’s noninterventionist foreign policy in 2016 that set the entire Republican establishment against him. Recall on the GOP primary debate stage in February 2016, Trump denounced George W. Bush and the Iraq War, calling it a “big, fat mistake.” No other candidate was willing to do that in 2016, even though Republican voters broadly agreed with Trump. He forced a reckoning with the neocon element in the GOP and defeated it by taking over the party and winning the White House.
It was Trump’s rejection of failed Bush-era interventionism that made him an enemy of the establishment GOP and neocon interventionists like Liz Cheney and Mitch McConnell. That’s why so many of them joined in on the Russia collusion hoax, the Ukraine impeachment hoax, the Jan. 6 hoax, and quietly cheered on Biden’s lawfare.
Vance of course shares these noninterventionist views. That’s why many of the most notorious neocons campaigned hard against Vance in the summer of 2024. As my colleague Sean Davis noted last week, arguably the first assassination attempt against Trump, just before his formal nomination, “was timed to prevent him from picking J.D. as his vice president. Lindsey Graham spent the weekend before the convention demanding that Trump pick someone, anyone, other than J.D. And foreign policy was the primary reason.”
That obviously didn’t work, but the neocons haven’t given up their campaign against Vance. Their new tactic is to go after people like Carlson and Roberts and anyone else who dares to criticize U.S. support for Israel, smearing them as antisemites. The goal is simple: to connect noninterventionism with antisemitism. Back in February, Sen. Lindsey Graham criticized what he called a “growing isolationist movement” in the GOP. “It’s beginning to include Israel,” said Graham. “In the past it really hasn’t, but now it’s more open, and so there is an element of our party that’s saying, we don’t want to get sucked into endless war because of Israel.”
Neocons like Graham are starting to figure out that America First Republican voters aren’t going to accept funding endless foreign conflicts, or even funding Israel’s wars. They know that foreign entanglements and inventions overseas are unpopular with voters on the right, and that if Trump’s MAGA movement continues after Trump leaves office they won’t be able to bring back their interventionist foreign policy. So they’re running a psy-op labeling everyone who criticizes interventionism as an antisemite, preparing the rhetorical ground to smear Vance as a “Jew-baiter.”
And if you think that’s outrageous or unplausible, consider that’s what they just did to Kevin Roberts, of all people.
Make no mistake, there is a very active fight going on within conservative circles right now about the future of the MAGA movement and the GOP. Anti-Trump establishment elites are scheming about how to regain control of the party. They will do or say almost anything to achieve that goal.
In that context, understand that genuine concern over antisemitism on the right, and much of the outrage you see online, is being hijacked and used as a proxy to wage political warfare. Its object is not antisemitism but U.S. foreign policy, J.D. Vance, and the future of the GOP after Trump.
