Sloan sat down with policy analyst and social commentator Karys Rhea with Middle East Forum to discuss what happens when a political movement stops policing its own. Karys is producer of The Epoch Times’ flagship show, “American Thought Leaders,” and past producer of “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel and “Fallout” with Robert Malone.
Political movements tend to pursue what is easiest rather than what is right. This is not because they lack principles, though sometimes they do, but because enforcing standards on the compliant is always simpler than confronting the unruly.
The law-abiding are convenient. They show up on time.
They answer emails. They follow the rules.
So it is with antisemitism on the American right.
Enforcing standards on the compliant is always simpler than confronting the unruly.
For decades, conservatives could plausibly claim that antisemitism was a feature of the left—an institutionalized prejudice embedded in universities, NGOs, and activist culture, where hostility to Jews was laundered through the language of “anti-Zionism.”
That claim was not wrong.
It is simply no longer sufficient.
What has emerged on the right is not an institutional antisemitism but something, in some ways, more dangerous: a politics of exclusion that treats Jews not as ideological opponents but as intruders.
On the left, Jews are tolerated conditionally.
On parts of the right, they are resented categorically.
The distinction matters.
A progressive activist may insist that Israel must not exist while assuring Jews that they are welcome, provided they agree.
The dissident right is less interested in persuasion.
Its message is simpler: you do not belong here.
And unlike the left, which hides behind institutions, the right’s antisemitism tends to manifest in personal harassment, stalking, intimidation, and, occasionally, lawfare. Not because it is braver, but because it lacks access to the commanding heights and therefore lashes out at those within reach.
Criminals are harder to catch than law-abiding people. Bullies prefer the compliant.
Respectable Extremism
The real problem is not the fringe. Fringe figures announce themselves. They shout. They self-select into irrelevance. The danger comes from the middlemen who make radical ideas digestible to polite company.
In today’s Republican coalition, that role is increasingly played by a cluster of “post-liberal” thinkers and media figures who reject classical liberalism while affecting its vocabulary.
They speak not of bigotry but of “civilizational decline,” not of exclusion but of “national cohesion.” Jews, when mentioned at all, appear as abstractions: symbols of globalism, avatars of elite power, or stand-ins for everything modern society has gotten wrong.
This is not accidental. It is rhetorical laundering.
The result is a politics in which openly antisemitic actors are disavowed even as their assumptions are indulged, their grievances echoed, and their audiences courted.
One need not endorse the ‘groyper’ to profit from him; one need only decline to confront him.
Figures like Tucker Carlson function less as ideologues than as validators. They normalize. They signal. They provide permission structures. And when permission is granted, others follow.
One need not endorse the ‘groyper’ to profit from him; one need only decline to confront him.
This is why J.D. Vance unsettles so many Jewish conservatives. His politics are not crude; they are managerial.
He does not rail against Jews; he singles them out, one by one, with a lawyer’s precision and a moral indifference that is, in its way, more revealing than rage.
The problem is not that he has declared hostility. It is that he has shown no interest in restraint.
Apathy, when paired with power, is not neutrality. It is complicity.
Fear as Strategy
What keeps this ecosystem intact is not persuasion but fear. Republican institutions, donors, and operatives who privately understand the danger prefer silence to confrontation.
They worry about online mobs, donor revolts, and internal fracture. So they choose quiet.
They choose access. They choose peace.
This is not strategy. It is surrender disguised as prudence.
Movements that refuse to discipline their extremists do not remain coalitions; they become hostages. The loudest factions dictate terms. The most aggressive personalities define boundaries.
And those least willing to accept humiliation quietly—Jews, women, evangelicals, dissenters—are told, implicitly, to lower their voices for the good of the cause.
History offers little comfort to those who believe this ends well.
The Trump coalition once succeeded because of its ‘big tent’ feel. Trump’s MAGA movement was confident enough to include groups with divergent interests bound by a shared sense of national purpose.
That confidence is now eroding, replaced by a brittle politics of grievance and intimidation.
The question is not whether this trend exists. It does.
The question is whether the Republican Party intends to confront it. Will its leaders, in the name of unity, continue doing what institutions so often do: enforcing order on the compliant while surrendering the field to those who fear it least?
Time will tell.
