Apparently, their goal is to frame the battle as one between the 41-year-old man who is currently a heartbeat away from the presidency and the former discredited GOP establishment. By that, they refer to those who used to run Washington along with the Democrats before President Donald Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015 and into the country’s political life.

An unwelcome discussion

They are also claiming that those who have noticed the rise of antisemitism inside the Republican Party and the conservative movement in the past year are doing so only to discredit Vance. That was the argument of a recent column in The Spectator by Daniel McCarthy, the editor of the paleoconservative journal Modern Age. It was more or less the same argument made by John Henry Davidson in The Federalist last November as a way to dismiss the criticism of Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, for his defense of far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson. It also seemed to be the vice president’s explanation for the controversy with comments that he has made about the trouble revolving around whether some people “don’t like Israel.”

That Vance realizes the importance of the issue was made clear last month in his much-anticipated address to the Turning Point USA AmericaFest. There, he declared that the entire discussion about antisemitism among conservatives was not merely unwelcome, but something that was being used to create unnecessary divisions and to distract the right from its main job of defeating the political left.

In his speech, he made it clear that he saw the issue as one of freedom of expression. In this way, he depicted those who are angry about the surge of Jew-hatred around the globe and in the United States as trying to “cancel” conservatives. Following the lead of Carlson and others on the far right, he opposes the backlash against the former Fox News host’s platforming of antisemitism and Holocaust denial. Vance seems to view anger about this as no different from the deplorable manner in which leftists silenced dissent against their toxic doctrines during the moral panic about race following the death of George Floyd over the course of the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020.

The problem with this is more than the fact that this is an utterly disingenuous evaluation of the controversy that has divided the right in the months since the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Since then, Carlson hosted neo-Nazi “groyper” leader Nick Fuentes in a chummy interview on his podcast. In the past year since hosting faux historian and Holocaust denier Daryl Cooper, Carlson’s show has been largely devoted to platforming virtually anyone who will bash Israel and promote the idea that Jews are controlling American foreign policy and the media, all classic tropes of Jew-hatred. He has also become an uncompromising defender of Qatar, the country that is funding Islamist propaganda and terrorism.

Candace Owens, another popular though thoroughly unhinged right-wing podcaster, has gone even further down the rabbit hole of antisemitism and conspiracy theories. She alleges that the Jews and Israelis are guilty of Kirk’s murder on the Utah Valley University campus and various other crimes while also seeking to promote age-old hard-core tropes about the Jews, such as depicting the Talmud as a hate tract.

Vance thinks that he ought not to be asked to condemn these lunatics or even to distance himself from Carlson, a friend who did a lot to foster his political career. Indeed, he remains close to him, reportedly having lunch with the podcaster in the White House on Jan. 9, after which Carlson was allowed to sit in on a meeting between Trump, Vance and oil executives when Venezuela was being discussed.

Megyn Kelly’s temper tantrum

He’s not alone. Megyn Kelly, another heretofore responsible conservative voice who has condemned antisemitism and supported Israel, now believes that it is unreasonable to ask her to do the same when it comes to her friends Carlson and Owens. Indeed, she is so angered by these requests that she has turned on both Jews and Israel.

In what can only be described as a childish tantrum aired in an appearance on Carlson’s show this week, she has declared that she would “rather die” than condemn the anti-Jewish hate flowing from that program or that of Owens. Furthermore, she says she now believes that the media is controlled by Jews “who are not telling the truth about Israel,” as if the overwhelming majority of corporate legacy media hasn’t been mainstreaming Hamas propaganda ever since the terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Echoing Carlson, she repeats that the issue isn’t Muslim antisemitism and support for Islamist terror, but that Jews and friends of Israel are responsible for promoting hatred of Muslims in America.

It’s important to remember that Carlson and Kelly are not insignificant figures on the far right but influential media personalities with vast followings on social media, as well as millions of viewers and listeners of their shows. Though Owens and Fuentes don’t have the veneer of respectability that Carlson and Kelly acquired during their stints as prime-time Fox News hosts, they have audiences that number in the millions. More to the point, among them are a sizable percentage of the many young Republicans and conservatives currently working in official Washington.

While Kirk was a strong believer in debate with anyone on anything, he labored to keep his organization free of the influence of Fuentes and the groypers. Now that he’s gone, there is no one to guard the gates of conservatism. Indeed, Vance and others on the right seem to be taking the position that in the post-BLM era, any sort of gatekeeping, even to keep out the most vicious hate-mongers, is wrong.

Is Trump a ‘neoconservative’?

For Vance and his media cheerleaders, any efforts to get him to take a side in the debate about whether there is room in the conservative movement for antisemites are not merely a distraction from the right’s main task of taking on the left. They feel that it’s all just a trick by neoconservatives to win back control of the Republican Party by thwarting the ambitions of Vance.

This is ludicrous for a number of reasons.

Neoconservatism, per se, was a movement that was deeply important and indeed crucial to moving on from the dominant liberalism of the mid-20th century and to winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Since then, it has become identified with the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But to the extent that it actually means anything in 2026, it is merely a way for some on the right to refer to what they think are Jews and others who support Israel. It is a boogeyman with which they can link to any cause they don’t like. It’s also the way they refer to opposition to the kind of extreme isolationism promoted by the likes of Carlson, who more often than not can be found speaking up for any opponent of the United States, whether in Moscow, Tehran or Caracas. That includes not merely Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Qataris and the Iranians (who have started broadcasting Carlson on the Islamic Republic’s state propaganda network). It also includes former Venezuelan president and narco-terrorist Nicolás Maduro, whom Carlson praised for his opposition to gay marriage.

What makes all this even crazier is that there is no differentiation between what these defenders of Vance label as neoconservatism or Bush-era Republican establishmentarians and the actual foreign policy of the Trump administration in which he is serving. As Trump has repeatedly made clear, there is no real daylight between the positions of the United States and Israel on the key issues of Gaza and Iran, which is completely at odds with what Carlson, Kelly and their groyper fans are supporting. Trump’s definition of “America First” is nothing like the “America Only” doctrine that Carlson backs.

Moreover, the administration has prioritized the battle against antisemitism, as was illustrated by the tough tactics that the president has employed against elite universities that tolerated and encouraged the pro-Hamas mobs that targeted Jewish students since Oct. 7.

Moral obfuscation

Yet when asked by CNN’s Scott Jennings to declare that the conservative movement has no room for antisemitism on his radio show, as with every previous opportunity he has been given to put himself on the right side of the issue, Vance prevaricated. While condemning Jew-hatred, he did it in the same manner that many on the left do so—by coupling it to other issues, thereby denying the very real and growing problem.

As writer Liel Liebovitz noted, his response was “malicious moral obfuscation” and not the kind of moral clarity that Americans have a right to expect from a vice president, let alone someone who aspires to the presidency.

Bringing this up is inconvenient for those who see Vance as the future of the Republican Party, as well as the man who can shift the GOP away from the stalwart pro-Israel policies and implacable opposition to anti-Jewish positions that Trump has brought it.

But doing so is not part of a plot to derail Vance’s 2028 candidacy. To the contrary, as the current frontrunner to succeed Trump, conservatives of all stripes want Vance to take stands that are not just moral but also popular, and thus likely to help Republicans hold onto the White House.

Carlson and now Kelly may think a neo-Nazi like Fuentes is smart and represents views that everyone should listen to. But those individuals who think being soft on antisemitism is smart politics don’t really know anything about the American people. Mimicking the left’s hatred for Israel and alliance with Islamists that has been evident since Oct. 7 is not a winning formula for a party, the vast majority of whose voters are supporters of the Jewish state.

It’s not unfair to ask Vance to take a stand on what is clearly one of the great moral issues of our time, as well as one linked to the defense of Western civilization, against those on the left who wish to tear it down. His failure to do so—and his determination to stick with his buddy Carlson—isn’t a distraction or an attempt to force him into a struggle session in which he does the bidding of a mythical all-powerful Israel lobby. It’s a test of his character. Unfortunately, much like Megyn Kelly, he’s currently failing it.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.