The regrettable rise of right-wing antisemitism

This is the environment in which antisemitism has seeped into conservative spaces. It is not the product of true conservative ideas, but rather the product of losing them. When a movement discards the intellectual inheritance that once structured it, something will fill the void. When the principle of judging people by their character is abandoned, group identity takes its place. When individual responsibility is dethroned, collective blame rushes in. Antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine. It signals that the foundations protecting everyone are cracking. The oldest hatred returns whenever a civilization becomes too young to remember itself. Young people on the Right grew up inside a vacuum where they watched the most basic conservative beliefs pushed outside acceptable discourse. They saw their parents’ principles treated as relics. They heard that equal dignity was bigotry wrapped in courtesy. As institutional life turned hostile, even basic and inoffensive ideas began to seem transgressive. So they became inoculated against transgression, and even developed a hunger for it. Provocation started to feel like courage. Shock began to imitate truth. At first, this was how someone like Tucker Carlson became popular. He said what others avoided. But once shock becomes the measure of success, it stops being a tool and becomes the point. Shock is thrilling, and it works like a drug. Over time, the desire for shock becomes a craving. The craving grows stronger as old first principles fade. To paraphrase Chesterton, the problem with disbelieving in first principles is not that a man ends up believing nothing. It is much worse. He ends up believing in anything. A movement no longer anchored by the ideals that created freedom, safety, and order begins seeking ever larger doses of the forbidden. Evil is shocking, and eventually even evil begins to look like honesty. That is how a trajectory that began in understandable frustration ends with Carlson sitting opposite Nick Fuentes. This is the soil in which antisemitism blossoms. It supplies an ancient, simplistic story for a world that has been unmoored from the sun. It gives shape to discontent. It offers a villain when institutions offer no meaning. And it flourishes fastest in movements that have forgotten the ideas that once kept such ugliness out. Fuentes exposes the cultural wreckage that follows the loss of first principles, but the damage is not confined to antisemitism. The same vacuum is warping how many on the Right think about all manner of things, from the role of the state to the value of institutions, leading them away from restraint and towards a new progressive frontier. For a long time, it was progressives who longed for an expansive state to shape our culture and society. They believed society should be reengineered through policy, curriculum, and coercion. Conservatives bristled at this, understanding that any government powerful enough to sculpt culture would soon sculpt us. Yet some on the “New Right” have taken up the same poisoned chalice. They imagine a stronger state will enact their vision. They assume it will be their hands on the levers. They are mistaken. It is important to reject this progressive claim outright. The state can pick a flag and an anthem, but it cannot write the stories that enthrall us. It cannot invent the sports that unite us or the music that moves us. It cannot command reverence for law or loyalty to country. True culture grows out of the habits and choices of free people. But when the state puts its hands on the levers of culture, it inevitably ends up rewarding some identities and punishing others. That is exactly what we see in Canada. Diaspora politics now shape national decisions. Ottawa flirts with unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood not because it serves Canadian interests, but because it pleases a particular coalition. Collective identity and collective grievance are adopted by large voting blocs, and craven politicians fear losing them. Those of us who grimaced as equality was abandoned at the altar of equity understood that equality before the law is the linchpin of order. By elevating equity as the paramount principle, we unknowingly create space for collective guilt. And where collective guilt is permitted to stand as an idea, slowly but surely antisemitism begins to seep into policy. It becomes embedded in incentives and public signals. It becomes institutional. We already see the consequences. Police in Toronto forcibly silenced O Canada at an inexplicable Palestinian flag-raising last week. The same police allow weekly intimidation marches through Jewish neighbourhoods, complete with masked agitators and expletives that would bring charges if directed at any other group. The collective guilt permitted by equity pushes the rule of law to bend for some and bear down on others. Equality before the law becomes optional. This is not drift. It is direction. The answer is not to build a stronger state that fights cultural battles for us. The answer is to restore the principles that once held our civic life together. You fight antisemitism by defending the rule of law. You fight it by insisting that the state treat every citizen as an individual moral agent, with all the rights and responsibilities that entails. You fight it by refusing to let governments reward one tribal faction while punishing another. The most ancient hatred begins with Jews, but it never stops with them. It grows wherever first principles disappear. Classical liberalism always anchored itself to the first principles that form the bedrock of our peaceful inheritance: freedom; equality before the law; the inherent value of every individual. A conservative movement that remembers its first principles is one that beats back antisemitism decisively. One that forgets them risks building a vacuum that permits the oldest and most dangerous hatred. For conservatives, that is the choice: whether to stand on our principles or abandon them to the passions of the moment. That choice will determine whether the darkness creeps further or is pushed back.