It's time for frum Jews to leave the Republican Party

Fascism is rising.

I cannot believe I would ever have to write this post, but I do. It is time for frum Jews to leave the Republican Party.

I was, and still am, a political conservative (mostly.) I have almost never voted for a Democrat (Simcha Felder and co being the exceptions) and only voted against Trump when he ran for reelection.

The Republican Party was once a bastion of pro-Israel freedom. But that’s changed. Increasingly, nearly all of the gen-Z conservative superstars play with antisemitism. It’s “based”. From Candace Owens to Steven Crowder, from Nick Fuentes to Tim Pool, from Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson, nearly all the young new right use antisemitic dog whistles or are straight up antisemitic.

From Michelle Goldberg in the NYT:

Several examples from just the last two months show a similar sort of thinking percolating among some of today’s young conservative revolutionaries. Last week, Media Matters for America reported that Matteo Cina, a Fox News staff member and former writer for Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, wrote on TikTok that it’s “hard to talk about the Holocaust and rising antisemitism without discussing Jewish presence in banking.”

Both Breitbart and, on Monday, the right-wing Washington Free Beacon have reported on the unabashed antisemitism of the high-profile pro-DeSantis influencer Pedro Gonzalez. In private chats, Gonzalez described his growing radicalization against “subversive” Jews and his admiration for the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who is perhaps best known for shepherding Kanye West into his pro-Hitler era. (Gonzalez has since renounced his former “performative bigotry,” and blamed the internecine feud between Trump loyalists and DeSantis supporters for the Breitbart story.)

Two weeks ago, a 26-year-old anti-feminist TikTok star named Hannah Pearl Davis released an acoustic song titled, “Why Can’t We Talk About the Jews?” (She deleted it after a backlash.) College Republicans United, a hard-right college Republican faction, was scheduled to have Fuentes headline its national convention last weekend, though Fuentes pulled out because of security concerns.

On Monday, Aaron Sibarium, a Free Beacon reporter, tweeted that when giving career advice to young conservatives, “I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry,” lest they become public. That young conservatives need this advice tells you a lot about the world Hochman was operating in.

Even mainstream conservatives like Tucker Carlson espouse extreme nationalistic conspiracy theories that can easily lead to outright antisemitism. While Tucker isn’t stupid enough to say outright antisemitic stuff himself, he has no problem interviewing people like Kanye West and Andrew Tate and covering for them.

Whenever Tucker and co discusses how “the elite” are out to get you, while he doesn’t say “Jews” and while he personally may not even mean “Jews”, once the belief is out there that there is an elite out to get you, it inevitably becomes the Jews.

It’s not just Tucker. Anyone who has spent time online on relatively mainstream right-wing spaces dominated by young people will find that antisemitism is growing there by leaps and bounds.

What’s the reason for this? There are three main reasons:

1. Trump. Trump has turned an entire conservative movement back into reactionary populism. He has switched the classic ideal of raising oneself up by their bootstraps to the populist ideal that their is an elite out to get you. He also has mainstreamed ridiculous garbage conspiracies into the mainstream, elevating idiots like Alex Jones and Michael Flynn (and himself). While Trump himself is not antisemitic, he certainly has no problem associating himself with antisemites as long as they praise him (heck, he likes Kim Jung Un). Trump has also stretched the proverbial Overton Window of acceptability. If “grabbing a women by the *****” is acceptable dialogue, so is “it’s the jews”. This is by far the biggest driver.

2. The rising popularity of leftism. Colleges are now bastions of liberality and secularism, which means the right-wingers left on campus are the more extreme view-holders. Unfortunately, today, with a lack of real religious dedication among most youth, the primary driver for right wing beliefs isn’t traditional religion but good old fashioned bigotry.

   

   
   

3. The woke movement, particularly the trans-rights movement. (Sorry left-wingers, Here’s where we part ways). What started out as a movement supposedly for equal rights ended up devolving into a movement that requires pretending that sex and genders aren’t real and not calling a man a women somehow makes you a bigot. This movement has made a lot of people angry, many of whom would not have considered themselves bigoted:

   

   
   

   Unfortunately (or fortunately), one of the most common reasons people aren’t racist or antisemitic is not due to the kindness in their hearts but because they want to be acceptable to society and don’t give society’s values much thought. Society has a range of acceptable values and punishes those who do not accept them. It is simply easier to accept society’s values. For a long time, thankfully, antisemitism was anathema. However, now that people think that even simply believing that biology is real (or that marriage should be traditional) places them outside of society’s values, they begin to wonder, what else isn’t real. They have nothing more to lose by adopting more and more bigoted beliefs. When there is no practical difference between believing a man is a man and that Jews run the world in that both have equal damage cost, many more people will begin the spiral into extremism that they otherwise would not have started.

What can be done? I do not know. I do not plan on voting for the party of Ilhan Omar either. Hopefully the GOP can restore some sanity - they did it with William Buckley sidelining the John Birch Society. But I doubt it will happen. But what we definitely need to stop doing is having the Trump worship continue. (Especially Turx and Yossi Gestetner and the Yated and the Shopper etc etc).