Politics

WASHINGTON — The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, a conservative-led initiative previously housed at the Heritage Foundation, met Tuesday to confront what members say can no longer be ignored: antisemitism within the conservative coalition.

The shift in priorities follows the task force’s break from Heritage after its president, Kevin Roberts, declined to condemn Tucker Carlson for hosting Nick Fuentes — a far-right livestreamer, who has publicly praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust — on his podcast. Roberts defended the interview, saying Fuentes’ several million followers “ideologically, philosophically, are on our side.”

Scholars who study the New Right say the dispute exposed a deeper tension within the conservative movement, where pro-Israel groups have been operating alongside nationalist factions historically associated with antisemitic ideas. The task force’s split from Heritage, they note, now forces a reckoning over how that arrangement held together for so long — and whether it is approaching a breaking point.

“You need to be able to call balls and strikes on both sides,” said Mark Goldfeder, a Jewish civil rights attorney who resigned from the task force following the Heritage controversy. “If you can’t recognize antisemitism when it happens, quote, ‘on your team,’ that’s a problem.”

According to co-founder Pastor Luke Moon, the task force did consider addressing right-wing antisemitism when it was launched after Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, but members believed the far greater threat at the time came from campus protests and street demonstrations on the left.

“In terms of the magnitude, it was not even close. It was like 100 to one. So are you going to focus on the one or are you going to focus on the 100?” Moon asked, explaining the task force’s decision to target left-wing antisemitism. 

Historically, however, the American far right has been the more “typical home of ideologically committed antisemites,” said Benjamin Balthaser, a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Advisory Council. From white nationalist movements that argued Jews don’t belong in a Christian or white America to neo-Nazi groups that cast Jews as “globalist” enemies, explicit antisemitism has long existed on the fringes of the Republican coalition, he said.

Over the last two decades, pro-Israel conservatives and these nationalist factions have been pulled into closer alignment for strategic and ideological reasons, Balthaser said. Israel occupies a central place in evangelical Christian theology, while nationalist groups — some of which have long propagated antisemitic beliefs — have viewed it as a frontline ally in a broader civilizational struggle.

“It’s always been a maybe inevitable but dangerous coalition,” Balthaser said. “There’s this kind of marriage of convenience between Zionism and the far right.”

Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said this coalition held together even as overt antisemitism surfaced on the right — from the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us,” to January 6, when a rioter wore a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt.

As extremist rhetoric persisted on its fringes, the mainstream Republican Party increasingly positioned support for Israel as a core part of its platform. While this may have appealed to some Jewish Zionists, Rosenthal said the right’s pro-Israel stance stemmed from evangelical theology and geopolitical priorities rather than Jewish well-being, enabling factions with neutral or even favorable views of Jews to share space with others whose views were openly antisemitic.

“Trumpism has, throughout the last 10 years, had astonishing success at making contradictions like this go away,” Rosenthal said. “There are a lot of contradictions, but one thing that’s agreed upon is the general principle that the USA has been under the domination of liberal elites, and that takes place in universities.”

The GOP casting itself as strongly pro-Israel — whether or not that stance was rooted in concern for Jews — has “proven very useful” for the Trump administration, he said, which has leveraged antisemitism as a “pretext for attacking liberal civil society.”

Inside the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, different conservative organizations brought their own initiatives to the table in a “potluck” style, according to Moon. The Heritage Foundation — known for its “Project 2025” and widely regarded as the most influential conservative think tank — contributed its own proposal, “Project Esther.”

Moon emphasized that Project Esther was conceived and driven by Heritage and will remain with the think tank following the split.

“The idea of Project Esther was to figure out a way to implement Project 2025 in a unique way,” said Kevin Rachlin of the Nexus Project, an organization dedicated to bolstering democracy as a means of fighting antisemitism. “What they did was create a plan that, under the auspices of protecting American Jewry, in reality provides a blueprint to enact an authoritarian regime here in the United States.”

Project Esther was written with very little Jewish input, Rachlin said, and takes advantage of legitimate Jewish trauma as a “means to an end.” It proposes a range of punitive measures, including cutting public funds to universities that allow activity by what it labelled the “Hamas Support Network,” revoking visas, and deporting foreign leaders and members of those groups.

The document makes no mention of contemporary right-wing antisemitism, instead attributing the persistence of antisemitism in part to the “American Jewish community’s complacency.” It suggests Jews may be “blind or deaf” to the threat, or more likely, “simply do not know what to do and are waiting for leadership to guide them.”

The Jewish community at large does not support punitive approaches like those outlined in Project Esther, Rachlin said, noting that American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal. According to CNN’s 2024 presidential election exit poll, 78 percent of Jewish voters cast their ballots for Kamala Harris. 

“Trump is still not popular among American Jews and I think Trump is actually, genuinely, on some level surprised at this,” Balthaser said. “He thinks he is doing what the institutional Jewish community wants, which is to use this antisemitism discourse to punish anybody who might be not only critical of Israel, but critical of a human rights framework or a liberal framework that might be critical of Israel.”

Whatever their opinions on Zionism might be, Balthaser said, most American Jews value free speech, open debate, civil society and the role of universities. When actions taken “in the name of protecting Jews” result in defunding things like cancer research, he added, it risks generating backlash against Jewish communities — and may ultimately increase antisemitism rather than reduce it.

That dynamic has helped to fuel a resurgence of overt right-wing antisemitism, like the kind propagated by Fuentes, Balthaser said. When conservatives see political leaders willing to “shut down universities” and “back a state committing war crimes” to support the Jews, he said, it can reinforce longstanding conspiratorial narratives that Jews secretly “run the world.”

“What I had been fighting on the right with the neo-Nazis in early ’23 had metastasized and become mainstream,” Moon said. “It comes from a very different spot — antisemitism on the left is coming out of a pro-Palestinian orientation, but antisemitism on the right, they don’t really care about Arabs or Palestinians generally. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they’re against American involvement, American money. It’s very rooted in this kind of reaction to the institutional stuff of American foreign policy.”

As the New Right has distanced itself from Israel, Moon said, its growing influence has put pressure on older conservative institutions like Heritage to avoid alienating a faction that is increasingly shaping the movement’s political identity.

While Fuentes is a “proper antisemite,” Moon said, he does not believe Roberts is one. Instead, he thinks Roberts made a political miscalculation in refusing to criticize Carlson’s interview. Very few people have been willing to go against New Right figures such as Carlson, Fuentes and Candace Owens, he said, noting that many GOP leaders depend on the same pool of followers to support their campaigns.

But the normalization of antisemitism on the right, Moon warned, also threatens the GOP’s electoral coalition. While the New Right seems to think they can win elections with just white men, “you need Jews and you need Hispanics and African Americans and Chinese,” he said.

The task force met at The LINE Hotel DC Tuesday for an event titled “Exposing and Countering Extremism and Antisemitism on the Political Right.” Throughout the afternoon, speakers emphasized a refusal to let antisemitism — and the New Right figures associated with it — define the Republican Party’s identity.

“We have the opportunity to really, once again, gather the forces, strategize how we take this on,” Moon told the roughly 100 members who traveled from across the country. “It’s the early days of this war. I don’t feel like we did win the last battle, but we didn’t lose anything yet. And so I would welcome you to the fight.”

Several speakers invoked biblical imagery, casting the effort as part of a broader struggle to defend Christian, American and Western values.

Co-founder Pastor Mario Bramnick said the normalization of antisemitism has left America standing “on the eve of World War II,” and described the task force as united in its commitment to declare zero tolerance for antisemitism “wherever it arises” — on the left or right. He said the group severed ties with Heritage because the think tank failed to adequately address the damage caused by Roberts’ defense of the Carlson-Fuentes interview.

“Heritage has been a beacon of conservatism. We appreciate all the space that they gave us and all the support to the task force,” Bramnick said. “The conservative movement, MAGA and the Republican Party cannot flirt with antisemitism. We need to hold proper accountability, which is what the left did not do.”