On Wednesday, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, sat onstage with three other members of the executive team at the conservative think tank’s headquarters for an all-hands meeting. Only six days earlier, he had posted a short video defending Tucker Carlson after the former Fox News host conducted a lengthy and friendly interview with a prominent online neo-Nazi, Nick Fuentes.
Roberts was there to explain himself and hear from staffers who were angry and hurt by their leader’s embrace of Carlson. In the Fuentes interview, Carlson had elevated the most vile sort of bigotry, described Christian public figures who support the state of Israel as detestable people infected with a “brain virus,” and said he “dislikes more than anybody” people he called “Christian Zionists.”
There are eras and epochs of antisemitism, with various styles that blend and compound in the antisemitic heart. Redneckery, surely, will not be the final form. Antisemitism of a kind existed in the classical era, as the Zionist essayist Ahad Ha’am noted in 1897:
“History teaches us that in the days of the Herodian house Palestine was indeed a Jewish State, but the national culture was despised and persecuted, and the ruling house did everything in its power to implant Roman culture in the country.”
The theme of Jewish separateness, distinctiveness, and immunity to assimilation—already present in the ancient world—would form the basis of most antisemitism throughout history. The Christian era added a new religious dimension to antisemitism, which was closely intertwined with cultural prejudices in the minds of Catholic thinkers such as Belloc, for whom “the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith.”
In the disenchanted modern world, antisemitism became a matter of pseudoscience, a subgenre of biological racism.
Our current president isn’t antisemitic—not in the way Fuentes is, anyway—but he is as amoral a creature as ever crawled from the sea, caring little for classical liberalism as an ideology or an American political tradition. The idea of banishing anyone, including Tucker Carlson, from Donald Trump’s party for being “offensive” is comically ridiculous.
It is no longer the Buckleyites who supply the right’s intellectual energy, such as it is. Instead, it’s postliberals like Adrian Vermeule, Curtis Yarvin, and Patrick Deneen. Carl Schmitt—not Antonin Scalia—is in vogue among new right legal thinkers.
That’s what I meant when I said Roberts’ quote is preposterous for more than one reason: when he calls on the conservative movement to have hard conversations about its direction, he’s implying that a “conservative” movement still meaningfully exists and that it retains the power to cancel postliberals if it so chooses.
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/weekly/supreme-court-tariffs-antisemitism-heritage-foundation/