Why Antisemitism Is 'Moral Pornography'

The rising tide of right-wing antisemitism hit a new high-water mark this week. Nick Fuentes—an antisemitic white supremacist—appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. Carlson did not challenge Fuentes’s many noxious views. Instead, he offered softball questions to the self-described “fan” of Stalin who says he thinks Hitler is “cool.” Carlson himself lambasted “Christian Zionists,” saying he “dislike[s] them more than anybody.”

Then, on Thursday, Kevin Roberts—president of the Heritage Foundation, arguably the most important conservative think tank in the country—released a video backing Carlson and denouncing a “venomous coalition” for attacking him.

We have been reporting on the alarming rise of noxious ideas on the American right for some time now. After this week, the problem is harder to deny than ever. For more on what it all means for the future of conservatism, read talk-radio host Erick Erickson in our pages. He argues that by excusing Tucker Carlson, Roberts and Vice President J.D. Vance aren’t defending the conservative movement—they’re burning it to the ground.

For Liel Leibovitz, the rise of illiberal ideas on the right risks undermining the entire Trump project. Liel says that he saw Trump’s win last year as a “profound affirmation of American values” but is now, a year later, alarmed to see many on the right turning not just on Trump but America itself, “which they see as riddled with terrible defects and controlled by evil forces.” Read Liel on the “false patriots” who masquerade as conservative but are anything but.

But this is not just a political crisis—it’s a spiritual one, too. In today’s Big Read, the Catholic writer and cultural critic Mary Eberstadt marks 60 years since Vatican II’s landmark declaration of solidarity between Christians and Jews by asking: Why is antisemitism circulating once again, and what should be done about it? Mary finds an answer in a surprising parallel. Read her essay on why antisemitism is the new pornography. —The Editors

It has been 60 years since Vatican II clarified the relationship between the Catholic Church and non-Christian religions in Nostra Aetate (literally “In Our Time”), which included among its signature affirmations an unprecedented emphasis on the deep bond shared by Christians and Jews. Repudiating the idea that Jews bore collective guilt for the death of Jesus, Nostra Aetate—issued by Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965—declared that “the Church of Christ acknowledges that. . . the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets,” and that the Church “cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in his inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant.”

Honoring this uncompromising statement of solidarity between Catholics and Jews amid a surge of antisemitism across the West, I find myself thinking back to another anniversary, a mere two years ago, that seems to me now both a tribute to the success of Nostra Aetate, as well as a reminder that not all who call themselves Christian hear—or choose to hear—what the Church emphatically teaches. In 2023, I was part of a historical conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, where a new organization, the Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism (CCAA), was launched by the Philos Project.

Even as I helped draft the CCAA’s mission statement that September, in preparation for the October gathering, I confess to having doubted the need for such an outfit. After all, didn’t every Catholic know that antisemitism was and remains a grave sin? Hadn’t the Holocaust alone shown the world where antisemitism leads? Isn’t there a commandment to love one another? And hadn’t Nostra Aetate not only set the record straight, but been emphasized by some of the most cherished leaders in the modern church?