There is no desire for a MAGA or conservative "purity test."
I am grateful for those who put comments after my articles. Some are very kind, while others are quite critical. And that is a good thing. People can certainly disagree with anything I write, and sometimes I learn something of value from comments in either direction.
One thing I have noted over the past few writings is that people conclude from my criticisms of Tucker Carlson and his friends on the new "woke Right" that MAGA and/or the conservative movement requires some type of purity test. You may only think A, B, and C; otherwise, we will throw you to the wolves. That is how the Democrats actually work today. Do you think that some potential candidate with a "D" after her name could suggest abortions limited to the first trimester, or no gun control whatsoever, or a strict immigration regime that includes a hermetically-sealed border? The party would not support such a candidate or provide any funding. "Go to the Republicans. You sound like one."
Many moons ago, Ray Kroc had an opportunity to speak at the Wharton School of Business. After his seminar, he went out with faculty and students for drinks. He asked them, "What business do you think I am in?" Everyone laughed. "Ray, you're in the hamburger business!" He smiled and said, "No. I am in the real estate business, and the hamburgers make my properties more valuable." Elon Musk is an outstanding and visionary engineer and business leader. But each of his companies started with an idea: a great electric car that would eventually drive itself, getting to Mars, restoring brain function, etc. Ideas still count. And just as the F-35 has a very advanced sensor suite, so Jews have sensors for Jew hate. It has been refined over a couple of thousand years. And the Jews' sensors are going off with recent attacks from Carlson, Owens, Gaetz, Bannon, and others.
It is not hard to find old clips of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, or Steve Bannon speaking highly of Israel or possibly Jews. These videos are not 50 years old but rather go back five years max. But today, Tucker cannot go through an interview without mentioning Israel in a negative light a dozen times, and Candace just whipped out an old—and highly discredited—book about the "Talmud" and how bad Jews are. Megyn Kelly refused to condemn her two aforementioned friends and, with Ben Shapiro's recent salvo in her direction, has made it clear that reevaluating America's relationship with Israel is the order of the day.
Jews know from the days of Weimar and Nazi Germany that the mass murder of millions of Jews throughout Europe (the Nazis sank boats with Greek Jews when they realized that the camps were too far away) started with ideas. Hitler made clear in "Mein Kampf" that had 10,000 Jews been gassed during the war, then the humiliating German loss would have been acceptable. Ideas can spread like wildfire. And if they are unchecked or unchallenged, their ability to infect others is only that much easier. The complaints being made against Tucker Carlson for claiming that Israel is a lousy "ally" and letting a guy who says that Hitler is cool dominate his channel are not for purposes of ideological purity. It's an act of survival. Look how quickly a mass murder of Jews in southern Israel was used by Muslims and their friends on the Left to make Israel—and the Jews—the bad guys. Only one day after numerous women were raped and murdered, and families were killed wholesale, 33 Harvard-recognized groups said that the death, torture, destruction, and mass kidnappings were solely the fault of Israel. When 10 thousand people marched over the Thames River with signs demanding "intifada revolution" (translation: let's kill Jews everywhere, like say Bondi Beach) and "from the river to the sea" (translation: let's kill all the Jews in Israel and leave the land for the local Arabs), I saw many regular folks. How did they get caught up in a demand to kill all Jews, some of whom might work at the same office or even be neighbors? It started with ideas.
Maybe in their hearts they didn't like Jews too much. But they never did anything about it beyond complaining at the dinner table. But then they were convinced that Israel had stolen land that it had either purchased or won in defensive wars. They were told that Israeli "settlers" were controlling Gaza, when there had not been a Jew there in two decades. Every idea sold to them by the Muslim Brotherhood and its short-term partners on the Left went in one ear and then stayed put and never exited the other ear. They bought the Jew libels hook, line, and sinker. Jews became marginalized. It became okay to scream at Jews, or push them around or threaten them—or stab them or shoot at them. It all started with ideas. And those ideas created a monster in the West, not seen in 80 years. Jews did not feel safe. Jews were harassed on the way to synagogue. Graffiti went up, demanding the death of all Jews in a new global intifada.
The Founding Fathers knew the importance of ideas. Heck, the entire "American Project" is one big idea in the way people organize themselves and the relationship between government and the governed. Mark Steyn pointed out that only America claims that rights are God-given and thus cannot be taken away. In all other Western countries, the rights are given by the state, the same state that, under the guise of an emergency such as a pandemic, can simply choose to take those rights away. The U.S. Left would love to be like Canada and England. They tried to have a "Disinformation Board" to counter Elon Musk's freeing up X to let people express their opinions. Ideas are the foundation for everything on top of them. If the foundation is broken or crooked, what gets layered on top will be no better.
And that brings us to the new woke Right. Tucker is an American and can say whatever he wants and associate with whomever he so chooses. Nobody is trying to deplatform him or his associates. That said, one has to look to the Republican leadership and ask, "Are you okay with him accusing Israel of killing children or intentionally attacking Christian sites, when there is no data to support such contentions?" Megyn Kelly and others staying quiet may seem to them to be the smart play in order to remain friends with Tucker and Candace. But those Jew sensors keep going off: if the leadership of the conservative/MAGA movement will not call out antisemitic tropes masquerading behind "Israel did this...Israel did that", then the cattle cars are not out of the question for the future. In 1986, I took a course at Harvard on modern Jewish history. The professor asked early in the semester, "How many of you think that IT could happen here?" Someone asked to define "IT"; the professor refused. Every hand went up. This was 40 years after World War II, and there was not a smidgeon of antisemitism at Harvard. Germany was also a great country for the Jews, and I have one of the two Iron Crosses given to my grandfathers for their patriotic service during World War I. It did not help them. Both fled, one to the U.S. and the other to Australia.
So, dear reader, I am not asking for purity tests. I am requesting that we nip bad ideas in the bud before they metastasize and become out of control. Jews have seen this movie before, and we don't want to see it again.
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