Antisemitism on right is nothing new; nor tolerable

The good news from the recent donnybrook over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, the Hitler fanboy with a sizable social-media following, is that it has at last forced conservatives to reckon with the sewer pipe of antisemitism bursting through their walls.

Better news: Many have risen to the occasion. That includes Sen. Ted Cruz, who called out his fellow Republicans for being too timid to condemn Carlson; The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which denounced “this poison in their own ranks”; and Heritage Foundation staffers who resigned in disgust after Kevin Roberts, the organization’s president, offered a lickspittle apologia for Carlson. Even Roberts felt compelled to disavow his own performance, though he persisted in describing Carlson as “my friend.”

The bad news is that none of this is going away anytime soon. If ever.

Antisemitism was supposedly banished twice from the conservative universe: first in the 1950s, when William F. Buckley Jr. decreed that nobody on the masthead of the antisemitic American Mercury would appear in the pages of his own National Review; second in the 1990s, when he said it was “impossible to defend” Pat Buchanan from charges of antisemitism. Such was Buckley’s prestige on the right that none other than Carlson issued his own denunciation of Buchanan: “I’m not hysterical on the subject,” he said on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” in 1999, “but I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews.”

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/stephens-antisemitism-on-right-is-nothing-new-nor-tolerable/