MAGA’s Civil War Over Antisemitism

The GOP has a Groyper problem, and it’s not going away

LEFT: Nick Fuentes. Photo Credit: Tucker Carlson YouTube. RIGHT: Kevin Roberts. Photo Credit: Heritage X.

For years, Republicans have really been committed to the bit that antisemitism is the exclusive province of the left. This is quite a flex, considering it flies in the face of all clear evidence to the contrary. Their beloved Republican President, in particular, has a long history of exploiting deep right-wing antisemitic sentiment among his base.

The Unite the Right rally, a march of the most virulent right-wing antisemitic white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups in 2017, ostensibly in response to the tearing down of Confederate statues, stands as a stark example. The attendees’ chants included “Jews will not replace us,” among others. Trump later claimed there were “fine people on both sides” at the Charlottesville, Virginia rally.

This “great replacement” conspiracy, which posits that Jews are somehow committing a literal genocide against whites, is in fact what motivated the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre the following year, which CNN called “the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the U.S.”

In 2020, when Trump was asked during a debate to denounce The Proud Boys—one of the groups that had marched in Charlottesville—he told them to “stand back and stand by,” which the group took as a clear call to arms. And in November 2022, Trump dined at Mar-a-Lago with renowned white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, along with rapper Ye, who just a month earlier had tweeted “I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”

When anti-Israel protests, particularly at universities, increased in the wake of Israel’s overwhelming response to Hamas’ deadly October 7, 2023 attack, the right decided to spin a new narrative. They asserted that antisemitism was actually a left-wing problem. Trump then used that claim to threaten and punish universities he didn’t like.

Now, that narrative has fallen apart spectacularly over the past ten days. It all started on October 27, when Tucker Carlson posted a 2-hour interview with Fuentes to his YouTube page. While Carlson likes to pride himself on platforming people with a variety of points of view—not all of which he necessarily agrees with—the non-confrontational nature of the interview with a figure who holds objectively abhorrent beliefs led many conservatives to call for Tucker to be, as Megyn Kelly put it on her recent podcast, “excommunicated from the right.”

This blew up even further into what is now widely described as the “MAGA civil war” after The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, stood up for Carlson in the interview’s wake.

So, what exactly is going on with this rift on the right? What divisions does it expose? And is this the sign of a larger reckoning among Republicans over who truly comprises the MAGA base?

The Fuentes Fallout

In the aftermath of Tucker Carlson’s platforming of Fuentes on his show, many on the right expressed shock that a right-wing stalwart like Carlson would give oxygen to Fuentes and provide him the opportunity to sanitize his own hateful views. Many had apparently bought into the notion that the Republican Party was the “pro-Jewish” party, just as they had believed they were the “anti-pedophile” party. On both counts, 2025 has been a bitter wake-up call.

As The New York Times reported,

“I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said over the weekend at the R.J.C. event. “Here’s what I do know: You can sit in a basement with weird people and say weird things. It’s a free country.”

But, Mr. Graham added: “I want the world to know antisemitism, anti-Israel rhetoric, anti-Israel thought is not the road to being elected as a Republican. You will lose.”

Representative Byron Donalds, Republican of Florida, told Breitbart News that antisemitism was: “a cancer, it will be a cancer to Republicans as it is a cancer to America. We have to exhibit moral clarity.”

Others took Carlson to task specifically.

Representative Randy Fine, Republican of Florida, went further, calling Mr. Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America.” He is leading a “modern-day Hitler Youth,” Mr. Fine said.

And Ben Shapiro, a popular right-wing podcaster and social media influencer who is Jewish himself, called Carlson “an intellectual coward, a dishonest interlocutor, and a terrible friend” who has become “the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America.”

The Heritage Meltdown

Remarkably, in the midst of these attacks on Carlson, The Heritage Foundation—arguably the most influential think tank of the conservative movement—actually came to Carlson’s defense. Its president, Kevin Roberts, a key architect of Project 2025, posted a video on X just days after Carlson’s Fuentes interview, excoriating those who would try to “cancel” Carlson, calling him “a friend” of the foundation.

In the video, Roberts said:

“The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the backbone of the conservative movement by canceling its own people, or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now.”

Notably, Roberts also called those who were aligning against Carlson in the wake of the interview, “a venomous coalition” whose “slander” against Carlson was that “of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

Heritage staffers did not take well to the video and were soon in open revolt, with many retweeting criticism of it and with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) directly slamming Roberts.

That led Roberts to issue a clarification the next day, insisting that he and Heritage “abhorred the views expressed by Nick Fuentes” and went on to list them.

But the damage had already been done.

Roberts’ chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, whom Roberts had credited as the author of the video’s script, and who had attacked those at Heritage criticizing Roberts, resigned the day after the video went live. As The New Republic put it:

Neuhaus’s critical error was in resharing a number of social media posts backing his boss’s defense of Carlson, including one that appeared to attack his Heritage Foundation co-workers by arguing that those “virtue signaling” over the Fuentes interview should “resign if so outraged” and that it would be an “addition by subtraction for the institution.”

Things got worse for Roberts as Ben Shapiro weighed in, pointing to the real problem with Roberts’ dismissal of the platforming of Fuentes.

“The issue here isn’t that Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on his show last night. He has every right to do that, of course. The issue here is that Tucker Carlson decided to normalize and fluff Nick Fuentes, and that the Heritage Foundation then decided to robustly defend that performance. Those who criticize both Tucker and Heritage aren’t ‘canceling,’ they are quite properly drawing a moral line.”

The backlash continued early this week, as several prominent Jewish groups exited Heritage’s “Project Esther” antisemitism task force, whose primary communications directive was to frame the left as the true haven of antisemites. How ironic that it was Heritage itself that exposed that lie.

As The Times of Israel reported,

The first public resignation from the task force came Sunday with an announcement from Mark Goldfeder, an Orthodox rabbi and the CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, that he was quitting in protest of Roberts’s defense of Carlson.

“Elevating him and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog whistles, no less, is not the protection of free speech. It is a moral collapse disguised as courage,” Goldfeder wrote in a letter posted to X.

Then on Monday, David Bernstein, author of “Woke Antisemitism” and founder of the North American Values Institute, resigned as well.

Bernstein said Roberts’s language felt like “a real attack against Jewish political agency on the American scene.”

“The phrase ‘venomous coalition aligned against him [Carlson]’— that’s me and any Jewish person who cares about condemning antisemitism,” Bernstein said. “It allows you to justify almost anything said in the name of political conservatism, and that empties it of all meaning.”

Roberts then launched an apology tour, appearing at conservative Christian Hillsdale College on Monday, per The Times of Israel:

​​Calling his initial video defending Carlson “a mistake made with the best of intentions,” he apologized, “especially to any friends, particularly Jewish friends,” and said, “The Heritage Foundation will never, ever, ever stop fighting against antisemitism in all its forms.”

And on Wednesday, Roberts convened an all-staff meeting of The Heritage Foundation at which he apologized further, saying, “I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full Stop.” Roberts even offered to resign but insisted it was his “moral obligation” to fix the mess he caused.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, Roberts

…went on to apologize for the use of the term “venomous coalition,” describing it as a “terrible choice of words, especially for our Jewish colleagues and friends,” adding that his friend, the Israeli-American scholar Yoram Hazony, the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, traveled to Washington, D.C., to help him stem the self-inflicted crisis.

Roberts also took questions from Heritage staffers during the meeting, which…did not go well for him.

As documented by Elliot Kaufman on X, even Heritage senior fellow Amy Swearer went off on Roberts during the meeting.

On the same day, Roberts released a video trying to change the conversation, which was posted with the tone-deaf caption:

Leadership requires owning the moments where we fall short, then using them to reset, refocus, and recommit.

Here is what we are focused on moving forward. Join us.

And so, how’s that damage control been going for him? Well…

A Groyper Haven

Carlson’s platforming of Fuentes is not anything new for the American right. MAGA’s antisemitism was exposed recently in the leaked Telegram messages among leaders of the Young Republicans, as reported by Politico.

According to Politico’s reporting, the Telegram chat involved young conservatives speaking openly about, among other things,

“the love of Nazis within their party’s right wing.”

Politico also pointed to exactly how we got here, noting that the chats

“reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.”

And while the New York Young Republicans chapter was disbanded immediately after these chats came to light and many involved apologized and even were fired from their jobs, JD Vance’s subsequent dismissal of the messages by grown adults as “kids [doing] stupid things, especially young boys,” speaks to the tolerance that exists for such beliefs, even at the highest levels of the movement.

Michael Edison Hayden, an expert on far-right extremism in the U.S., wrote in a piece appropriately titled “Nick Fuentes started a MAGA civil war—and it looks like he’s winning,” that those who are fighting back against the antisemitism among the right “are fighting a battle they have already lost.”

As Hayden makes clear, there is a larger issue for the right at hand here, which Carlson’s kid-gloves treatment of Fuentes exposed:

…the younger, pro-Hitler wing of the MAGA movement that grew up alongside the political ascendancy of Donald Trump will neither grow out of their rhetoric nor fade away. They are, in fact, rapidly defining what MAGA will mean in the years after the nearly octogenarian Trump leaves the stage.

“For us, he was like the savior of Western civilization,” Fuentes told Carlson of Trump’s rise in 2016 during that interview, referring to how his generation of reactionaries grew up.

In a post on X yesterday, Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) revealed his own seeming surprise at the support Fuentes had among his constituents at a recent town hall.

But Bacon’s constituent was absolutely right. Fuentes has been driving young conservatives into the Republican Party. Tucker Carlson is very aware of this, which is why he didn’t bash his guest’s policies during the Fuentes interview.

For Carlson, platforming Fuentes was a way of building his own base, abhorrent views be damned.

As Edison put it, the modern conservative movement is a far cry from eight years ago, when conservative leaders were among those who were shocked by the sight of right-wing antisemitism on full display in Charlottesville:

The MAGA movement that once sought to distance itself from those white supremacists at the deadly Unite the Right event who chanted “Jews will not replace us!” has started to age out. It is both losing ground and becoming inured to a younger group of activists. Some of these activists view Trump not as a savior but as a stepping stone toward Hitlerism.

That movement of young white nationalists, which was spearheaded by Fuentes, is called the “Groyper Army.” It was defined in this 2022 profile as

a collection of white nationalists who often use online trolling tactics against people they don’t like. Their goals broadly include normalizing their extreme and racist views by aligning them with Christianity and so-called “traditional” values.

Since 2020, the group has been organizing at the CPAC alternative America First Political Action Conference, with Arizona MAGA Rep. Paul Gosar’s attendance at their 2021 meeting giving them the first taste of mainstream GOP clout.

But now, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Groyper Army has grown even more powerful. As The Chicago Sun Times reported:

Since the death of Kirk, another suburban Chicago native, Fuentes, 27, has gained more than 100,000 followers on X and Rumble, and his podcast reached the No. 1 trending spot on Spotify before it was removed from the platform in mid-October for violating its hate speech policies. His first “America First” show that aired after Kirk’s death collected more than 2.5 million views on Rumble.

As Carlson told Fuentes during the interview that started all this:

“You’re clearly ascendant, you’re enormously talented. You’re more talented than I am, for sure, as a talker. There have been a lot of attempts to silence you and it hasn’t worked.”

He went on,

“I don’t think Fuentes is going away. Ben Shapiro tried to strangle him in the crib in college, and now he’s bigger than ever.”

That makes him a massive problem for the Republican Party, which the Groypers view as the target of their radicalization campaign. But it’s also a problem for us all. It portends a time in the future when we might look back upon the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and wonder how things grew even so much worse from there.