The #NeverTrump Right’s Fake Antisemitism Panic
DeSantis supporters' desperate attempts to tar JD Vance ahead of 2028.
The Antisemitism Moral Panic
The American right has entered its own moral panic.
Not over satanic lyrics this time (old-timers will remember that was led by a Democrat, Tipper Gore) but over antisemitism.
The strange thing is, the targets of this new panic aren’t on the left. They’re Tucker Carlson and, improbably, a 27-year-old live-streamer named Nick Fuentes.
In the last week, a chorus of conservative pundits and operatives has tried to convince voters that Fuentes is a literal Nazi and that Carlson, by interviewing him and by writing a thoughtful essay defending Jewish voters from slander, has crossed into antisemitic territory himself. The hysteria has less to do with defending Jews than with defending a Republican faction—one still bitter about Donald Trump’s dominance and alarmed by the rise of J.D. Vance as his likely successor.
The Manufactured Panic
Joel Berry of The Babylon Bee was among the most strident to declare that “Nick Fuentes is a Nazi”.
Then came David Reaboi, accusing Carlson of redefining antisemitism itself:
“ ‘Jews for Mamdani’ is today’s commentary from Tucker Carlson — and it’s the most illuminating he’s ever been on this subject (and the fact that, very conveniently for everyone involved, his definition of antisemitism doesn’t include wanting to murder and genocide Jews).”
Within hours, the pile-on was joined by Will Chamberlain and others clustered around the DeSantis 2024 orbit, treating Carlson’s essay as proof that Tucker, Fuentes, and Vance all belong to a single dangerous current.
The language was familiar: “literal Nazi,” “pro-Hamas,” “redefining genocide.” What was new was that this time, the accusations were coming not from MSNBC but from inside the right itself.
What Tucker Actually Wrote
Carlson’s post—titled “Jews for Mamdani”—wasn’t an antisemitic screed. It was a defense of New York voters who refused to believe accusations that the incoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani, intended to persecute New York’s Jews.
“We’ve never seen anything to suggest he falls into that ugly camp. Because he doesn’t,” Carlson wrote, quoting Mamdani’s own words pledging to stand “steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers in the fight against antisemitism.”
The essay’s real target was what Carlson called America’s Israel-First caucus—the politicians and pundits who brand any criticism of Israeli policy as bigotry. His argument was that the constant inflation of “antisemitism” cheapens the term and serves as cover for a failed foreign-policy consensus.
That’s not Holocaust denial. It’s political analysis.
An Orthodox Counterpoint
The most level-headed response came not from the DeSantis camp but from an Orthodox Jew, Eric Fenster:
“As an Orthodox Jew, I have no problem with most of what Carlson wrote. Mamdani probably suffers from some passive antisemitism but there’s no indication that he’ll directly endanger NY Jews any more than they already are by soft-on-crime policies everywhere.”
When I asked Fenster if he’d voted for Trump, he said yes, and pointed me to data showing that nearly three-quarters of Orthodox Jews did the same. In another post he added,
“Have to be able to distinguish between legitimate criticism of the State of Israel and antisemitism. They are not one and the same.”
That distinction used to be uncontroversial. Now it’s heresy in certain conservative circles.
The Real Divide: DeSantis vs. Trump-Vance
Look closely at who’s fanning the outrage.
Many of them are familiar from DeSantis’s failed campaign for President in 2024. David Reaboi and Will Chamberlain, for example, were both DeSantis supporters. Chamberlain actually worked on the DeSantis campaign before being let go, and Reaboi publicly championed DeSantis as a “once-in-a-generation leader.”
Their attacks on Tucker are about 2028 positioning.
If you can frame Fuentes as a Nazi, and then frame Tucker as a Fuentes sympathizer, you can make J.D. Vance—the man Carlson has championed—politically radioactive.
It’s guilt by concentric association, a tactic familiar from the left.
Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen put it bluntly:
“And at last they reveal themselves… Nick → Tucker → Heritage → Vance. It’s a coup.”
Nick Fuentes: The Convenient Straw Man
Fuentes is not a Nazi. He’s a talented entertainer who engages in transgressive trolling.
In the past year alone he’s praised Stalin, praised Jews, and endorsed Kamala Harris. That’s not ideology; it’s performance art.
He commands no movement. His threats to rally supporters against Trump last year fizzled instantly. But he makes excellent raw material for political theater.
When DeSantis-aligned commentators pretend Fuentes is the second coming of Goebbels, they get to posture as moral guardians while painting Trump and Vance as extremists by association. It’s the same trick the left used in 2016—just inverted.
And it’s transparently cynical. If these people truly feared neo-Nazism, they’d be screaming about Ukraine’s Azov Regiment, an actual neo-Nazi formation that’s been folded into the Ukrainian army and is being expanded into a corps. Instead, they cheer it on because it serves their Russophobia. Their outrage is selective by design.
The Hollow Moralism of the #NeverTrump Right
The neoconservative establishment once wielded “antisemitism” as a cudgel to silence critics of endless wars. Today, the same tactic has migrated inward, used to police dissent on the right itself.
It’s a loyalty test: denounce Fuentes loudly enough, denounce Tucker next, and you prove your reliability to donors and think-tank patrons still nostalgic for the “invade the world-invite the world” GOP of 2003. Fail to denounce them, and you risk being labeled an “antisemite” or “pro-Hamas.”
Meanwhile, genuine antisemitism—the kind that shows up in street attacks in Brooklyn or chants on college campuses—barely rates a mention. The word has become a factional weapon, not a moral principle.
A Lesson from Sydney Sweeney
This latest hysteria is less about Jews than power.
Nick Fuentes is not building a Fourth Reich.
Tucker Carlson is not redefining antisemitism to excuse genocide.
And J.D. Vance is not leading a Nazi coup.
They’re simply inconvenient to a camp of operatives who once expected to inherit the post-Trump GOP.
There’s a lesson here for anyone caught in one of these performative inquisitions. When an interviewer tried to get actress Sydney Sweeney to denounce “white supremacy” over a jeans ad—based on the claim that its “Good Jeans” pun was somehow racist because she’s pretty and white—she didn’t take the bait. Smiling, she said, “I think that when I have an issue I want to speak about, people will hear.”
That’s the right answer. You don’t play along with hysteria. You outlast it.
When words like “Nazi” and “antisemite” are deployed as campaign tools, they lose their meaning — and the people doing it reveal what they really fear: not hatred, but irrelevance.
A note to subscribers: we’ll be back to finance later today, with asymmetric trade set-ups on crypto, reindustrialization, and med-tech names.