Transcript

Arielle Angel 00:00

Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I’ll be your host for today. Last week, there were two major podcast episodes—YouTube episodes, I don’t know what they call them on the rights, because it seems like they’re on every single platform at once. Tucker Carlson sat down with Nick Fuentes, and also, Candace Owens sat down with Norm Finkelstein, and I think we really got a glimpse as to what anti-Zionism on the right looks like right now. We’ve seen, over the last year—maybe more, but at least in terms of how long I’ve been not able to ignore this trend on the right—we’ve seen that there has really become a break between kind of old school, neocon interventionists in Trump’s coalition and, essentially, noninterventionists, basically making an “America First” argument for nonintervention, for stopping support for Israel, and sometimes even a moral argument that one would consider to be more associated with the left. And so, to talk about this today, I have Daniel May, publisher of Jewish Currents.

Daniel May 01:27

Hi, good to be here.

AA 01:29

Ben Lorber, who works as a senior research analyst at the social justice think tank Political Research Associates researching antisemitism and white nationalism. Ben is also the co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. Welcome back, Ben.

Ben Lorber 01:45

Thanks for having me.

AA 01:46

And for the first time on the pod, we have Andrew Marantz, staff writer at the New Yorker, the author of the 2019 book Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, and, for our purposes, the author of a profile of Tucker Carlson that came out almost exactly a year ago called “The Tucker Carlson Roadshow,” which we will put in the show notes. So, first of all, Ben, I know you watch this stuff all the time. I don’t know how you do it because I honestly wasn’t even able to sleep last night. It was intense.

BL 02:20

Yeah, you just gotta disassociate. That’s my only advice.

AA 02:23

But I will say that watching this, I immediately felt plugged into all the interpersonal drama that’s been going on. I don’t really follow—I guess maybe needless to say, I don’t really follow Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes that closely. I only know them by reputation and through clips, and there was clearly something that they were both doing here. There was something that they both wanted out of this interview. Andrew, I’m going to start with you to talk about what was going on here.

Andrew Marantz 02:52

So there’s a long version and a short version. But basically, anyone who looks at the conservative movement in America knows that this has been a fissure point, a cleavage point, for a long time. Basically, ever since neoconservatism became a thing, there have been the isolationist and interventionist wings of the party. And as anyone who studies the neoconservative movement knows, the Jewishness of neoconservatism has been a thing for a long time, and Israel has been a thing within neoconservatism ever since its inception. And so, the standard self mythology within the conservative movement is basically like: While we were fighting the Cold War, it was all good because we could unite around a common enemy, and then the wall falls, and then we all start fighting each other. And so, you have these figures that keep popping up—Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, these hard-right political figures who want to have this conversation about Zionist occupied government, or like: Why are we fighting all these wars in the Middle East that don’t benefit American nationalists? And this is even discounting the Charles Lindbergh kind of Father Coughlin iteration of it.

AA 04:04

The earlier generation more openly associated with American Nazi party-aligned nationalism.

AM 04:10

Exactly. And that was where “America First” first became a slogan. And then, you have Tucker Carlson in his earlier days when he was a Beltway darling—the version of him that people think of with the bow tie and stuff— disavowing people like Pat Buchanan for asking these questions.

Tucker Carlson 04:27

When attacked, he can always fall back on the line: Well, the tiny cabal that controls American politics doesn’t like me because I speak truth to power; that I offend the plutocracy.

AM 04:40

Like when William F. Buckley is writing his book In Search of Antisemitism and going after Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobrin—his former friends and compatriots and kind of slightly throwing them under the bus for asking these questions—Tucker Carlson is very much in that tradition as well. Tucker Carlson, who has both a brother and a son named Buckley, very much sees himself in that tradition.

Tucker Carlson 05:00

And now, I’m pissed at the neocons—very pissed. I’ve said that a million times. I’ve been mad since December of 2003.

AM 05:07

He’s now the Pat Buchanan in this equation. So basically, Tucker has a series of revelations which, in his telling, begin with Iraq and the failure there and the failure of interventionism. He realizes we actually shouldn’t do all this neocon stuff: I’m actually a nationalist. I’m actually a Trumpist. He has this whole kind of revision of his entire worldview, and now he’s kind of the central pillar, in a way, of that school. And then, Nick Fuentes comes out and is a total troll, a total shitposter, a total Holocaust denier.

Nick Fuentes 05:37

Honestly, I don’t share this histrionic Jewish view that Hitler is this exceptionally boogeyman evil figure.

AM 05:45

And then Tucker has to deal with: Okay, now this guy is the edgy one in the room, and I’m the stodgy old guard. And that is a challenge to his market position, among many other things.

Tucker Carlson 05:55

Nick Fuentes. Thank you for doing this.

Nick Fuentes 05:57

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Tucker Carlson 05:58

I wanted to meet you. I want to understand what you believe. Not what you’re pivoting against—which are a lot of the same thing. You know, I agree with you on some of the things you’re pivoting against, for sure. But what do you affirmatively believe? So I just want to stand back.

AA 06:11

It’s so interesting that you’re talking about their brands. I wasn’t even thinking, as I was watching this, about their brands. I was trying to take them both at face value because I don’t have a lot of backstory here. And part of what I also saw Tucker saying is, he’s accusing Fuentes of being a fed.

Nick Fuentes 06:28

We had a contentious dialogue.

Tucker Carlson 06:30

Well, I thought you were a fed.

Nick Fuentes 06:31

And I thought you were a fed.

Tucker Carlson 06:33

I was a fed? [laughs] I’m not a fed.

AA 06:36

He’s basically like: It’s so hard to go against American support for Israel, and when you’re bringing all this Holocaust denial and all this antisemitism into it, you’re making the rest of us look bad. Like, why would you do that? Seemingly, something that both of them are trying to do with this interview is mainstream themselves; offer themselves as a more adult, more acceptable version of the troll version of both of them that we’ve seen over the last couple years.

BL 07:05

Yeah, I really agree with that. Just to put one more data point in the timeline that Andrew laid out, I think it was about 1991 or 1992 when William F. Buckley was trying to excommunicate people like Pat Buchanan from the conservative consensus. At the same time, David Duke, a hardline white nationalist, won, I think, 55% of the white vote in the governor runoff for Louisiana. And Pat Buchanan took a look at David Duke—Pat Buchanan, he told the GOP: Take a hard look at David Duke’s ideology and see what you can take from it, and take that stuff. Discard David Duke—don’t let David Duke himself into the conservative tent—but we have to use David Duke’s appeals to hardline white identity politics, his racism, and we have to build that into the conservative brand. So I agree with you. That’s what Tucker is doing, and Nick Fuentes has been at the rightward edge of the MAGA movement since 2019, trying to pull it, kicking and screaming, more in his direction, saying: We need to be more racist, more antisemitic, more anti-LBGTQ, more hardline Christian nationalist.

AA 08:12

I just want to add anti-woman here because the most shocking thing to me about their entire conversation was the misogyny.

Nick Fuentes 08:21

All women naturally want strong men.

Tucker Carlson 08:25

Of course. Naturally.

Nick Fuentes 08:26

They naturally want a chad. They want a tall, buff guy. None of them want to work either. None of them. None of them actually want to work.

Tucker Carlson 08:32

That’s what I’m saying. Of course. That’s obviously true. It’s always been—work outside the home? They don’t have enough work at home. You know, there’s a lot…

BL 08:40

Yeah. It’s funny how desensitized I am. What I heard during their conversation didn’t even strike me as that bad based on what I’ve heard from Fuentes and others.

AM 00:00

It’s also their biggest point of like, avuncular, bro-ing down toward the end, where he’s like: You should really consider getting married, young man, and having a dominion household and stuff. That’s what they bond over.

BL 08:59

Yeah. The main difference is just that now they can’t keep Nick Fuentes from the conversation any longer.

AM 09:05

Totally. And this is exactly the thing, Ben, that you’re talking about—that the gatekeepers being gone is the great challenge. That was what my book was about, and there’s no solution to it. You can’t just censor these people away because it doesn’t work, but if they become more and more mainstream, you have to reckon with it somehow, and I don’t think, clearly, Tucker is doing any reckoning here.

AA 09:26

I mean, Fuentes is saying, in this whole conversation: Everybody’s moved toward me, but I’m still being kept outside the tent. A lot of this is his personal grievance around Marjorie Taylor Greene and Joe Kent: All these people are taking up my view of a more “America First,” a whiter America, blah, blah, blah, and also, this kind of “no-money-for-Israel” position, essentially, but I’m still not being allowed in.

Nick Fuentes 09:53

I’ve been talking about this issue for 10 years.

Tucker Carlson 09:55

Right, okay, all right, you win.

Nick Fuentes 09:58

But no, it’s not like that, it’s just, I got treated like I didn’t exist.

Tucker Carlson 10:02

Right. I get it.

Nick Fuentes 10:03

I got canceled for 10 years for saying these things, and that’s really where all this drama comes from.

AA 10:08

And so, it did seem a little bit like Tucker basically being like: Yeah, maybe it’s time to reconsider that.

BL 10:14

Yeah. I mean, that’s partly Nick trying to protect his brand, like you were saying, because he’s built his following by saying: I am the consummate outsider. I’ve been banned from every platform. Nobody wants to talk to me. So he has to portray himself as this rebel outside the gates, but the reality is, he is outside the gates in one sense, but in another sense, he is the mainstream because he has a large following on the internet. He’s clearly bending discourse in his direction, or MAGA discourse is just bending in his direction, and he’s lucky to be there, but either way, his views are increasingly mainstream. I mean, last week, you saw JD Vance speaking at a Turning Point USA event in Mississippi, and many students came to the mic and asked him: Why is Israel controlling Trump? Why are we supporting Israel when Judaism is persecuting Christianity?

Audience Member 11:04

I’m just confused, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.

BL 11:14

And the whole crowd was applauding. He’s arrived, and I think this whole blowup over Kevin Roberts and the Heritage Foundation just shows this desperate attempt to put him back outside the gate when really, he’s arrived.

AA 11:27

Yeah. Just to explain to the audience, if you haven’t seen it, the Heritage Foundation, after this conversation, was pressured to distance themselves from Tucker, and they basically said: We don’t cancel people. People can criticize Israel.

Kevin Roberts 11:41

Today, I want to be clear about one thing. Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic. And, of course, antisemitism should be condemned.

AA 11:51

And they themselves took a more “America First” position.

Kevin Roberts 11:55

When it serves the interest of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so. But when it doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.

AA 12:12

Daniel, I want to bring you into the conversation. One of the things that is really uncomfortable about watching the Fuentes-Tucker conversation is actually—I mean, I’m gonna regret saying this—but how much of the conversation actually felt familiar from our podcast? There were parts of it that I really couldn’t substantively disagree with. Again, taking it on face value, not bringing in all the things that they’ve said before and whatever, but just like, you know—

Tucker Carlson 12:42

One of the reasons that I’m mad about Gaza is because the Israeli position is: Everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born, including the women and the children. They say: We’re the defenders of Western civilization. Not with that attitude, you’re not. Collective punishment is the enemy of Western civilization.

Nick Fuentes 12:58

Yeah.

Tucker Carlson 12:58

So I hate that attitude. It’s genocidal.

AA 13:02

But even Fuentes has almost a fairly sophisticated understanding of the way that Jewish ethnic identity plays into Zionist identity and the ways that it’s marshaled in American politics.

Nick Fuentes 13:13

You cannot actually divorce Israel, and the neocons, and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness. Israel is unlike every other country in the sense that, because the Jewish people are in a diaspora all over the world, and because of their unique heritage and story, which is that they’re a stateless people—they’re unassimilable, they resist assimilation for thousands of years, and I think that’s a good thing—and now, they have this territory in Israel. There’s a deep religious affection for the state. It’s bound up in their identity. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the promise of.

DM 13:50

Yeah. In listening to the Tucker and Fuentes interview, for much of the first, I don’t know, hour and a half, the thing that was most disturbing was how reasonable so much of it sounded. Now, part of this is Tucker’s whole vibe, which is like: That’s a curiosity, isn’t it? Tell me a little bit more about that. He has this gentlemanly, almost grandfatherly curiosity, and in a way, it’s remarkable how gentle he is with Fuentes. He doesn’t, at any point, lift up any of his prior quotes that are like, his Holocaust denialism, any of that. He totally gives a complete pass, but if you’re in the communities that we’re in, it is pretty disturbing to hear Nick Fuentes tell his political origin story and have him put at the center of that story—Obama, at the end of his term, abstaining at the UN Security Council from a vote that would condemn Israeli settlement construction, where, in the past the US had consistently vetoed it, and Obama instead abstains, and Obama is criticized for being antisemitic. And Nick Fuentes says that this is the first moment when he saw the way in which people were unfairly attacked if they questioned the Zionist consensus.

Nick Fuentes 15:10

All Obama did was uphold US policy on the West Bank that we’ve had since 1967, which is: We don’t support the settlements. I said: How is it antisemitic to just be consistent on our US foreign policy? Like I said, which is a Republican-Democrat consensus. And I got attacked for this.

AA 15:29

And then what he says is he read Walt and Mearsheimer: The Israel Lobby.

DM 15:33

Right. There’s a lot that sounds extremely familiar, and there were times in listening to it where I felt like: Oh, I’m behind this car, and I know this road, and then suddenly, it’s like one wheel is off in the ditch, and you’re like: Oh, my God, how did we end up here? To me, the moment—and I think it is worth naming—the moment in the conversation that reveals Fuentes’ antisemitism so blatantly, and the way that Tucker reacts. It’s a moment where Fuentes is describing coming around to Trump’s candidacy and how he became so supportive of the Trump revolution, and he says that: We need to rally the base against the establishment and then take the fight to the left as the true alternative, and if you can win that, you can win the country. That was Trump’s model. And Tucker says:

Tucker Carlson 16:24

What did you see as the most important gatekeepers that needed to be overturned, pushed aside, in order to do this?

Nick Fuentes 16:32

It was the Zionist Jews, like Dave Rubin, like Ben Shapiro, like Dennis Prager. The guys that were really controlling the media apparatus. That seemed, to me, to be the biggest impediment.

DM 16:44

And then Tucker responds:

Tucker Carlson 16:45

Fox is not a Jewish business, though.

Nick Fuentes 16:47

Well, Rupert Murdoch is an ally of Netanyahu, so he’s aligned.

DM 16:52

You know, it’s hard to find a more distilled articulation of contemporary antisemitism. The idea that it’s Zionist Jews that have controlled the Republican Party for the last however many decades is patently absurd, and it’s very destabilizing, disturbing, and, I think, challenging to figure out: What do you do with the possibility of an emerging anti-Zionism on the far right? What does it mean to be someone who is broadly trying to find ways of building support for American pressure on Israel if these are the quarters from which that politics is emerging?

BL 17:30

Yeah, I mean, I think we encounter this on the far right around other issues, too. I mean, Trump ran on a message of economic populism. People like Steve Bannon often rail against neoliberalism. You had outright fascists who showed up in some Occupy Wall Street encampments, not to mention during the anti-globalization movement in the early 2000s. I think the way that the radical right has worked for a long time is they crib some ideas from the left. They tap into an adjacent insurgent anti-establishment energy, and they have some of the same talking points, and they take that, and they put it into nativism, and ultranationalism, and scapegoating. And they do that at crisis moments. This is why the far right took off after the 2008 market crash. So we’re in a moment of crisis where the pro-Israel establishment, on both sides of the aisle, is no longer tenable, and millions of Americans see it. And those Americans can either go left or go right, and people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson see that opening, and they’re trying to use this issue to pull people over to their side. I think it’s up to us—to the broad progressive anti-war movement—to really build as broad a movement as possible, and find ways to speak to everyday folks around these issues, and tap into their real needs, and combine that with the critique of imperialism to bring folks over to our side. Because people like Nick Fuentes, they see that they’re battling with us for the direction of this conversation.

AA 18:58

There are actually several moments where Tucker Carlson pushes back on Fuentes, and it’s very soft, but he does repeat, multiple times: Yo, the antisemitism isn’t cool, bro. We can’t hold Jews responsible for this. There are other people involved in this. He really says: You can’t be born into anything. We’re the right. We are the ones saying that there isn’t any race essentialism, and that it’s not Christian to hold everybody responsible. And Fuentes gives a very sophisticated answer.

Nick Fuentes 19:28

As a Catholic, I could not agree more with you. I love all people, even the ones that don’t like us, we have to love them all. And especially, Aquinas says the Jews are a witness people, and so they actually have special protections under the law, according to Catholic philosophy. But I guess my substantive disagreement is the idea that neoconservatism and Israel has nothing to do with Jewishness, Jewish identity, the Jewish religion, because clearly, the state of Israel and the neocons are deeply motivated by that ethnic identity, and their allegiance to Israel proceeds from that. Let’s say in the United States, for example, somebody like a Sheldon Adelson—he’s not Israeli. Is he an ideological neocon? Does he believe in the promise of democratic globalism? I don’t think necessarily. His heart is in Israel, and it’s because he is a proud Jewish person.

AA 20:21

Which, I would say Mari Cohen makes that argument very often, as someone who reports on Jewish communal life and what is motivating these Jewish communal groups. So I just want to hear from you, Andrew: What do we make of that? Can we trust that? Or is that a performance?

AM 20:35

I mean, first of all, I think it’s all a performance. I don’t think it makes me a post-structuralist theorist to say that I think it’s all a performance. They’re literally performing for cameras. But I also think that there can be real ideology mixed in all through it. And to Ben’s point about using the language of populism, this is another version of it that you see all the time, where there’s real ideology infusing it, but then it also, like Daniel said, kind veers into a ditch. Like, this was my experience when I did, for that Tucker piece you mentioned, follow him around the country a little bit and go see him perform in city after city. There would be times when I would sit there for long stretches and be liklike: Okay, where’s the lie? Globalism, and the Koch brothers, and the WTO gave us all this cheap plastic stuff that filled up our garages, but it’s not making us happy, and we need community. And I would just kind of sit there going: I don’t disagree with that, I don’t disagree with that. I don’t disagree with that. And then, it’d be like: And that’s why we need to kick all the Muslims out of the country. And I’d be like: Whoa, whoa, how did we get here?

AM 21:38

I think that is both because of ideology and performance, in a way. It’s a rhetorical performance that is trying to normalize certain kinds of radicalism in ways that don’t, to the 20,000 people in the Kansas City auditorium, feel radical. Last year, he went on a roadshow around the country, kind of as a Trump campaign thing but kind of as a “I’ve been off TV for a while, let me get my name out there” kind of thing. He had a special guest every time, and one of the shows I saw, his special guest was Charlie Kirk. And they did this whole kind of post-neoliberal thing. They were really like: If you want neoliberalism and wars of choice, you should vote for Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney. If you want to turn the page on that, you should vote for Trump and Vance. And I was like: That’s a really good pitch. Like, that’s a compelling political pitch. And then, at one point, Charlie Kirk could, I think, sense that the audience was getting a little restless with the neoliberalism stuff, and he was like: Also, we should talk about how Springfield, Ohio, has been filled with Haitians, and they’re eating the cats and dogs.

Charlie Kirk 22:39

I don’t know how much more the heartland of the country can stand the abuse. And can I just talk about Springfield, Ohio, really quick? With the Haitian cat eaters that are coming in.

AM 22:50

And then the whole vibe in the room changed, almost in a scary way. Like, being in that room, I was like: Oh, the racist scapegoating thing can get turned on in a second. And I guess the one other thing I would just throw in is that we’re talking about: Will Tucker normalize Fuentes’ insane, crude, egregious racial essentialism? But the amount of racial essentialism that Tucker has already laundered into the conservative mainstream is almost an afterthought because that’s like a fait accompli.

BL 23:20

Yeah. There was a moment where Tucker said:

Tucker Carlson 23:21

I would tell you if I was racist. I’m a little sexist, but I’m not racist.

AA 23:24

Biological essentialism is totally okay. It’s just the racial essentialism that they can’t fully cop to in some kind of way.

DM 23:31

Yeah. Two things that are on my mind through the conversation. One is that it’s very clear, listening to these conversations, what the central problem is for these folks with Zionism and American support for Israel, which is Zionism, in the American context, for Fuentes, represents a threat to American ethnonationalism. For Fuentes, the central fact of Jews is their racial identity: Of course, it follows from that racial identity that they would care about Israel. Of course, it follows from their care for Israel that they are not able to be good members of the American nation—good American nationalists. It’s a view that takes, as the central defining feature of political life, racial identity and everything follows from that. And Tucker wants to say: I don’t subscribe to that.

Tucker Carlson 24:21

This is just BLM, the new version. This is identity politics. They’re engaging in identity politics.

DM 24:28

But Tucker frames his entire argument on the supremacy of Christian values.

Tucker Carlson 24:21

Just that principle—that we’re all judged as individuals by what we do, our faith, the decisions that we make, the way we live our lives, and God will judge every one of us in that way. And that’s how we’re supposed to judge.

DM 24:43

And at times, it felt like I was listening to a conversation between a Christian nationalist and a white nationalist.

AM 24:50

And actually, the Christian turn—I mean I don’t want to get too Tuckerologist on all of us—but the Christian turn was a change for him. A lot of this was cultural nationalism up to this point, and the reason he originally, according to his own account, turned away from the neocons in the first place was that this worldbuilding project couldn’t work because Americans didn’t have enough cultural integrity to finish the job of democratizing the world. Because, unlike the British Empire, which knew its place as a superior civilizing society, the Americans were too cucked and decadent basically. So they couldn’t finish the job.

DM 25:27

I mean, the other thing that’s worth noting is just how similar Fuentes’ argument is to someone like Rabbi Cosgrove’s, which, Arielle, you and others talked about just a week ago on the podcast. The idea that Zionism—support for Israel, American support for Israel—simply follows from the most basic fact of Jewish identity.

AA 25:46

That’s what really scared me about this, is that like you could read his comment as like, he’s really listening to the way that Zionists are talking about their own identities. One of the moments, actually, where like I felt that feeling where the wheel is in the ditch, is he’s talking about this fight with Ben Shapiro when he’s an 18-year-old kid, and Shapiro goes after him for going after Israel.

Nick Fuentes 26:10

I tweeted to Ben Shapiro, I said: I’ve never seen anything on the Daily Wire that’s actually critical of Israel. And he quote-tweets me. And at this time, I have 1,000 followers on Twitter, and I don’t know, I probably got 100 likes on this tweet. Wasn’t a viral tweet. He quote-tweets me and says: To accuse a Jew of dual loyalty is the surest sign of antisemitism.

AA 26:35

And it does really sound like Ben Shapiro is trying to crush him. Then he says:

Nick Fuentes 26:40

And by the way, that was on Christmas Eve.

AA 26:42

And it didn’t just mean like: By the way, it happened to be Christmas Eve. There was something that was being said there between the two of them that I was like: Oh, shit. To complete the othering and the indication of how outside someone like Ben Shapiro must be to the American Project by deciding to take this feud public on Christmas Eve, when Americans are doing this other thing.

BL 27:10

Yeah, I think in many ways, it does resonate with the racial logic of early 20th-century political Zionism. In many ways, it exposes the hypocrisy of liberal Zionism, in some ways, that wants to have it both ways—that wants to say, “Jews can have this fealty to an ethnonationalist project halfway around the world,” and also, “There’s no contradiction there with no liberal pluralist values in America.” Of course there are. I guess the one thing I would add: Obviously, Fuentes is an astute observer of some of these dynamics, but where he goes off the rails is in then turning this into a much more powerful force than it is and saying that the Ben Shapiros of the world have this overarching control of the media, of the government, of the world system. And of course, that erases the role of empire. It erases the role of the far right, of Christian nationalism. It’s the kind of classic antisemitic move that Daniel was talking about earlier that really makes it very different from our left analysis, which recognizes the role of American Jewish Zionism and puts it in a broader context of empire and the far right.

AA 28:18

And capitalism, and the military industrial complex.

DM 28:21

Yeah, I mean, it’s all of that, but also, just to say, it’s quite clear: I think Fuentes would have zero problem with apartheid in Israel, with Jewish supremacy, Jewish domination in Palestine, so long as Jews did not have any power in the United States. So there were no Jews in the United States.

BL 28:39

We’re familiar with this because the Christian right has long expressed moral outrage over antisemitism, but it’s obviously selective and instrumental. So some of that moral outrage might be genuine. There’s plenty of Christian rightists who really feel it in their heart when they oppose what they call antisemitism, but it’s also part of their larger project, and so I think we can see that here too.

AM 29:00

Back when the alt right was called the alt right, and back when I was deep in reporting that stuff, people used to not believe me when I said how central the Jews and the so-called Jewish question were to that project. It just seemed so old-fashioned. Really, these are 21st-century internet Nazis, and they’re using the internet to pass around literal Mein Kampf. Why don’t they move on and find something new to do? There’s many ways to answer that, but I think part of what that gets us here is that—and again, I don’t have an answer to this, but I kept turning over the question of: If nobody is even attempting to answer the so-called Jewish question, it does leave open a discursive space for bad guys to fill. And in this version of the Jewish question, I just mean things like: Are there Jews controlling the media? Or whatever, these things that Fuentes gets to toss around as these antisemitic accusations.

AA 29:54

Well, and let’s look at what’s just happened. You have this Skydance, Paramount, whatever merger with Shari Redstone and Ellison, basically saying that their goal here is to make Zionist content, on some level. They put out all this October 7th content. Bari Weiss being installed as the head of CBS News. They brought up Bari Weiss, and Candace Owens, and Norm Finkelstein, but they also brought up Netanyahu talking about the TikTok acquisition and how that’s going to be good for Israel, and talking about all the influencers that the Israeli government is paying. This kind of thing, the information war. And like again, all of that is true. That’s just news.

BL 30:38

Yeah, the activities of the Jewish right definitely play a role in allowing space for antisemites to use that narrative. And people like Trump saying, in a CNN interview last night, that: I’m glad Bari Weiss is there. She’s going to be very good for me, essentially. They’re one among many actors. We can’t avoid naming the destructive role they play simply because we’re afraid it’s going to trigger antisemitism; we have to oppose it and build our own anti-Zionist Jewish voices, among other reasons, particularly, to try to head off this rise in antisemitism that the Jewish right is helping to accelerate.

AA 31:11

Okay, we need to move on because we have to talk about the Candace Owens-Norm Finkelstein conversation, because literally, it was the worst thing I ever heard. And Norm Finkelstein, if you’re listening to this: You done fucked up, bro. I don’t know what you were thinking. I have some respect for Norm, and he’s really clearly been put through the wringer. I mean, a whole other conversation is the role that grievance plays in all of this, for all of them—the sense of marginalization, of having been fired. That’s something that Norm Finkelstein, who is on the left, who has long been a Jewish voice for Palestine, has in common with the rest of these figures. They’ve all lost their platforms, in some kind of way, only to find bigger ones on the internet. But I think that this is a very, very interesting object for us, a very interesting text, because what I’ve been hearing a lot, kind of whispered, is like: Yeah, the right is terrible, but can we work with them on Palestine stuff? Usually not from the sharpest crayons in the box, but sometimes people say it, and you do see people online—I mean, I saw a lot of Palestine accounts that I know promoting the Candace Owens-Norm Finkelstein conversation. So here we have someone who took seriously the prospect of sitting down with one of these right figures, who’s seen the light on Palestine, and what we get is truly, truly astounding. I’m just gonna very quickly run through just some of the conspiracy theories that I managed to hear listening on 1.6x time—because, again, it’s three hours long. We’re talking about Epstein and the Mossad. We’re talking about Freud, like, something having to do with Freud and the psychiatry movement.

BL 32:57

And that Bolsheviks literally impersonated Holocaust survivors.

Candace Owens 33:03

You had these psychopaths, like true Bolshevik psychopaths, who were like, “Well, we can’t just walk in and be like, ‘Well, I was just kind of running the Bolshevik camp over here, mass murdering Christians.’” So what better way to reintroduce yourself into society than to be like, “I’m the ultimate victim. I survived the Auschwitz camp.” I think that’s what happened. I’d say Elie Wiesel is one of them

AA 33:21

But some of what was happening here is that her and Norm were not having the same conversation, but he seemed completely unaware of that. So for example, he’s saying things like: Van Jones, when he wears the hostage symbol—

Norman Finkelstein 33:36

Why does he do this? He’s just advertising: I’m a slave. That’s what he’s saying.

Candace Owens 33:43

They useused to brand slaves.

Norman Finkelstein 33:43

And he’s just a slave.

AA 33:44

And then they both go back and forth for a while, talking about being a slave. And when he says it, he’s talking about capitalism, essentially.

Norman Finkelstein 33:53

If there were any, what you call truth in advertising, you would wear a dollar sign here because it’s just money. It’s such a revolting sight.

AA 34:01

And when she says it, she’s talking about the fact—and this is like something that I’ve heard, even with my little knowledge of this corner of the right—that Jews want to enslave the goyim. And when he’s talking about the Jewish supremacist billionaire class, he’s, in a very impolitic way, basically talking about Sheldon Adelson and whatever, Bill Ackman, these few people, and she is talking about the cabal.

Candace Owens 34:28

What it feels like to me when these—and now I recognize Jewish supremacists—supported me and platformed me when I was attacking BLM, because I recognized this, this altogether Marxist strand, and I stood up to my own people: You’re amazing, Candace. Let me get you this platform, that platform, fly you here. And then when I was like: Oh yeah, and I know this is going to be hard for you, but you guys are now going to have to stand up to the Jew. Get out of here. Get out of here. You are gone. You are banned from Australia.

AA 35:02

He pushes back, ever so lightly, over and over again. At one point, he goes on an extended tangent about like how you have to keep your mind open, but you don’t want to become a flat earther or whatever. And yet, if you were listening to this and you’re one of Candace Owens’ regular listeners, you would believe that some of the things that she said had the imprimatur of this Jewish academic who’s too hot for liberal life. I mean, what do we do with this?

BL 35:30

Yeah, it was really cynical and sad, and I think the grossest part was how he kind of marshaled the memory of his parents, who were Holocaust survivors, to, on the one hand, push back against Holocaust denial, but on the other hand, to validate or leave unchallenged so many of Candace’s bizarre theories. As you were saying, it’s evidence that any strategy of having an amicable conversation with, at least, the people at the top of the MAGA punditry class about this stuff, because you think you can kind of find some kind of common ground or win portions of their base over„ or it’s better for the higher purpose of building like an anti-Zionist mass movement in this country, is just doomed to failure because you’re only going to boost their side.

DM 36:20

I was not expecting Candace Owens to be so much more crazy sounding to me than Nick Fuentes.

AA 36:330

A thousand percent.

DM 36:32

I was pretty shocked by it.

AM 36:04

Yeah, I also think, again, that that’s part of where they are on their branding arcs. But I think you’re right, Ben, that there’s no way to talk to Candace Owens, at least in this context, without legitimizing her project.

DM 36:46

I mean, I’m not sure that, as such, any appearance by Norm Ficklestein on Candace Owens necessarily is in the service of her platform and her political project. I think the problem is Norm Finkelstein did not operate in that interview like he was talking to somebody from his political opposition, and it was maddening.

AA 37:05

I mean he says a million times, by the way, he’s like: I’ll debate Bill Maher, I’ll debate Van Jones, but he wasn’t debating Camden Owens.

DM 37:12

No, he started the conversation from the basic premise of: We may disagree about all these things, but we agree about this, and so that’s what we’re going to talk about, and I’m going to have a chance to talk to your 4 million followers. But in ways that were somewhat similar to Fuentes and Carlson, you see, when you listen to these folks for hours, the way in which their opposition to Zionism and their opposition to Israel is part of a profoundly reactionary, right-wing, nationalist project. I mean, Candace Owens, her own politics, I foundfound it harder to get a hold of in listening to this for two and a half hours. And like the other two, this was the first time I’ve ever listened to Candace Owens. But if you were going to summarize it into one takeaway, or if I was going to summarize it into one takeaway, it’s: Destroy the left. And the spaces of left power, for her, are media and academia. Over and over, she talks about the indoctrination of American academic institutions, and she uses Finkelstein’s story as an example of the way that, basically, there’s this—what does she call it?

AA 39:14

It’s Soviet.

Candace Owens 28:15

These schools are Soviet indoctrination camps. I implore people to read Thomas Sowell’s book about inside the American education system.

DM 28:21

And he just lets that slide. It’s maddening to listen to, because it’s like, don’t you see that this person that you’re talking to is trying to destroy all the political commitments that you hold most dear? And you’re just letting it go by in the conversation and saying: Oh, Candace, we don’t know each other so well, so let me just say, I guess I would put that slightly differently. And it’s like, man, you showed up to this knife fight with baked goods.

AA 38:53

This, to me, is a real cautionary tale. I think I’ve already said that. But there’s not just that there are moments where he’s letting the rest of her politics slide, like the stuff that’s not just the straight Israel/Palestine stuff. There are also moments where he agrees with her in ways that are extremely damaging. There’s a part where he’s talking about campus antisemitism and the Harvard Antisemitism Task Force, and he’s talking about how they define antisemitism as ostracization, for the purposes of the report—students being ostracized by other students for being Zionists. And even though most of the students that they would be talking about are American Jewish students, he immediately jumps to Israeli students at Harvard who have served in the IDF. And so, he says:

Normal Finkelstein 39:41

You are commanded, now, by Harvard, in the name of what they call inclusiveness and pluralism, you have to pal around with them. And if you don’t pal around with them, you’re an antisemite.

AA 39:53

And she says:

Candace Owens 39:54

So if you don’t want to be friends with murderers.

Normal Finkelstein 39:56

Exactly.

Candace Owens 39:57

You’re an antisemite. Well, maybe if that’s the new definition, I’ve been an antisemite my whole life.

Normal Finkelstein 40:00

If you don’t want to hang around with child killers.

AA 40:06

So suddenly, we’ve gone from this slippage of American Jewish students on campus to Israeli students who have served in the IDF. And then, she brings up Epstein.

Candace Owens 40:15

I mean, if you don’t like Jeffrey Epstein, you’re an antisemite. I feel like you abuse children, also, I get what we’re doing.

AA 40:21

Because before she was talking about Epstein having an office on Harvard’s campus. And so suddenly, we’re in Epstein territory. And this happens again and again, actually, where Epstein becomes part of the story, for example, when she’s talking about how Elie Wiesel is a fake Holocaust survivor.

Candace Owens 40:38

Well, it turns out that Elie Wiesel was a cousin to Robert Maxwell. Right? Fascinating, right? Absolutely fascinating. Robert Maxwell wrote about it in his own book.

AA 40:47

And again, this repetition of the affiliation with Epstein, and with pedophilia, and with abuse of children, which is such a trope on the right. Obviously, we remember the Pizzagate scandal. And Norm’s response to the Elie Wiesel conspiracy, suddenly he’s like: Well, Elie Wiesel did actually have some factual inaccuracies in Night. Which, fair enough, but that is not the conversation that Candace Owens is having. There was even a moment where he was talking about Mahmoud Khalil, and he was like: Who do you think did that? And she said: Trump. And he said: No, it wasn’t Trump; it was the Jewish supremacist billionaire class. It’s like, he’s so angry. He’s so angry at the community for what they’ve done to him. He doesn’t recognize who he’s talking to and how they hear what he’s saying in a completely different way. I know that this is something that we get accused of all the time as well, and I’m sensitive to it, but I just feel like when you’re on Candace Owens, when you know that there are people who are listening who are Holocaust deniers, who think that everything is run by a Jewish cabal, who think that they’re all child molesters, and who have guns and go do this kind of violence—I mean, it chilled me.

AM 42:00

Yeah. Listening to you talk about this, doesn’t he know that he’s talking to someone who’s opposed to all of his political commitments? And I’m like, I don’t know his stuff well enough to know if that’s the case. Maybe he only has one political commitment, and it is calling out the Jewish supremacist billionaire class or whatever, and maybe he’s so monocausal in his theory of the world that that’s all he cares about.

AA 42:23

He doesn’t only care about one thing. He was a college activist, an anti-war activist, he has broad leftist commitments. Although he has Boomer brain. I think this is actually very Boomer brain, just to be like: I talk to everybody, free speech, et cetera, et cetera.

DM 42:40

Yeah. But I think the conversations reveals one of the central challenges that the whole phenomenon of MAGA anti-Zionism presents to folks on the left, like a Norman Finkelstein, which is that Finkelstein has spent years and years, decades, making the case that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and then when he’s confronted with an anti-Zionism that is quite clearly deeply immersed in an antisemitic worldview, he has no capacity to respond to it, and challenge it, and call it out. One of the things that I’m taking away from these conversations is like: Yeah, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. And also, there are, more and more, going to be moments and figures in which the links are quite clear.

AA 43:30

I mean, I just want to say I’ve been on the left for a while, and I’ve never heard anything like this. I’ve never heard anything like this.

BL 43:40

Yeah, I think the irony is that Jewish rightists and centrists, so-called liberal centrists like Jonathan Greenblatt, they’ve spent so much time saying that antisemitic anti-Zionism is a creature of the left that they’ve been blind to how much it’s risen among the folks they’re bedfellows with. I agree, obviously, there are some lighter shades of antisemitism that we might encounter in left spaces, online or in person, but most of the time, a really good metric to identify is this antisemitic is: How closely does it resemble their rhetoric of Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens? How comfortable would they be with this stuff? It just goes to show that antisemitic anti-Zionism is most comfortable in this kind of “America First” frame, of: The reason that US support for Israel is bad is because it subverts American nationalism. It humiliates us. You know, we have to throw off the Zionist cabal to restore American greatness. That’s miles away from the kind of “Free Palestine” that’s grounded in universal justice and solidarity with Palestinians.

AA 44:43

But what’s amazing about what Candace Owens is saying is she’s almost not even going full on in that direction. A lot of what she’s saying is: These people are evil.

Candace Owens 44:51

And you had Jewish psychopaths, okay, who were mass murdering Christians. The same thing is happening right now, okay? You have literal psychopaths—and I would describe them as Zionists, okay—Zionist psychopaths who are happy to oversee the slaughter of children. Some people, I think, actually look happy when you talk about it. It’s so disturbing, spiritually.

AA 45:13

And at the end, when she’s like: I believe truth is winning. And he’s like: Yeah, truth is winning. I agree with you, and this is really bringing people together from other sides. And then she looks right at the camera, and she says:

Candace Owens 45:24

We need to start allying ourselves and recognize whether you view yourself on the left or the right, doesn’t matter: Do you follow goodness, or do you follow evil at your core?

AA 45:32

That sent a chill down my spine. She’s really talking about human evil. These people are human evil. And look, it’s hard not to look at all these dead children, torn limb from limb, and not think this is evil. But there’s a way that she talks about it that I’ve never heard. I really have not ever heard. And there’s a way in which Finkelstein, in his anger, validates it. And that, to me, feels like the seed of stochastic violence, which Tucker and Fuentes dismiss completely. They just have a nice laugh about it. But it does really seem that someone who just listened to this could go out and shoot up a Chabad house or something, and that scared me.

BL 46:18

Yeah, I hear you. I think from my time being immersed in this kind of radical right discourse, I’ve had a similar thought process, of realizing that in the hands of Christian nationalists, good and evil rhetoric could very quickly rationalize a crusade. I’ve come away also thinking that we, on the left, should be very wary of—I hate to say it because Zionists say it so often—but demonization. You are playing with fire there. It’s hard to strike a balance. Empire does corrupt people’s morality, obviously. You know, imperialism, apartheid, colonialism—these structures drive people to do terrible things and, in a sense, do turn people, turn entire societies, into monsters. But as much as we can, blame systems, not people. To keep that in mind, too, I think is important.

AA 47:07

Yeah, I think it’s also just important to remember that this is not unique to Jews. I mean, it may be Jews’ turn to be the perpetrators in this moment, but many other peoples, throughout history, have been in the position to commit mass murder, to commit genocide. And while it finds justification within the Jewish religion, and while it finds footholds within Jewish culture, this is not unique. I mean, that’s just opportunistic. That’s just the way that people use what’s there to justify their worldview. That’s not something that is inherent. I think most of the time, when I’m seeing antisemitism anywhere, it’s through the suggestion that there’s something unique about Judaism and Jewish people that allows for this, as opposed to: This is part of human nature that needs to be fought and part of a system of colonialism, and imperialism, and capitalism.

AM 48:11

And ethnonationalism.

AA 48:12

And ethnonationalism, chief among them ethnonationalism.

BL 48:15

Yeah. It’s a classic displacement, for people like Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson to say, “Oh, look at those horrible Zionists over there massacring children” while ICE is rounding up children here, et cetera, et cetera. So, they can condemn Jewish ethnonationalism, and sometimes, they are technically correct, but they give Christian ethnonationalism a pass, and that’s just—it’s kind of classic on their part.

AA 48:38

I just wish that Norm had said that. There’s something that I want to put a last word on or a final point on, which is just that: If there’s anything that’s clear from these two conversations last week—and also from Zohran Mamdani’s win—it’s that anti-Zionism is now a part of our politics, and we are in a competition with the right for what kind of anti-Zionism we’re going to practice, what it’s going to look like, and what, at core, its values are. That has really been made clear to me from listening to these conversations over the last week. Thank you for listening. Thank you to our guests. This has been another episode of On the Nose, edited by the great Jesse Brenneman, who’s had to wade through a lot of terrible stuff to bring you the clips that were in this episode. If you like this episode, share it and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. Thanks a lot. See you next time.