You have a conservative movement that has embraced, as you said before, an extremely provocative tone, a tone of open bigotry in certain cases. And basically, the deal that the pro-Israel right thought it could make is we can engage in a good deal of racist demagogy, we’re OK with it, especially maybe directed at Muslims, Islam. But the line that we draw is when it happens to Jews, when it turns into antisemitism. That is not a consistent position. That is an extremely self-defeating position. So I just am also extremely angry and frustrated with the pro-Israel and neoconservative right for looking the other way when it came to the racist takeover of the right. Zohran Mamdani: Perfect example of this. What has happened in the wake of the giant controversies that exploded about Fuentes going on Tucker, the leaks of the chats. You have major figures on the right who are trying to redirect the conversation about antisemitism back to Zohran Mamdani. They’re trying to make him the hate figure and — -Can’t we all come together. -Yeah. Yes. And so Ben Shapiro says: When has Tucker really criticized Zohran Mamdani? Right? “The number of times that Tucker Carlson has mentioned Zohran Mamdani since Oct. 5 on his show is once. And it was in the context of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson talking about the appeal of Zohran Mamdani.” And then Steve Bannon goes, he attacks Mark Levin. He says, these guys aren’t really MAGA. And he has a point because they weren’t back then, they weren’t with Trump from the beginning. And then he attacks Mamdani. “Mark Levin, he’s just nothing but hot air. Mark Levin, instead of running your mouth, what are you doing in New York City? I’ll tell you what we’re doing. We’re going to denaturalize Mamdani.” So it directs this energy, this energy of racial hate, really, that seeks to expel a racial other against the safer target. That strategy is not working anymore. That ability to keep the coalition by being like: Look, just be as racist as you want, be as hateful as you want, but it’s against — it’s designated enemies that are OK. You know, people ask a rational question, well, why are these people off the table? And then the answer comes back. It’s like, well, because of Christianity or because Israel represents Western civilization or some kind of rationalization like that. And the antisemites say: That makes no sense to us. And in a certain sense, yeah. Why not? If the world is divided into these racial groups and this is the way you are, and we practice a politics that’s based on that, why make an exception? I mean, as you say, these guys started as opponents of Trump in 2016. Shapiro said Trumpism breeds conspiracism, conspiracism breeds antisemitism. Trump is happy to channel the support of antisemites to his own ends. He — OK, so Ben Shapiro, not a dumb guy at that time.
