Peter Himmelman
At long last, the masks are off.
Well before, and especially since the pogrom of October 7, 2023, public figures on the left have insisted that their issue was merely with “Zionism” or “the Netanyahu government.” They hid behind the language of critique, behind the idea that their grievances were purely political. But we all knew that “From The River To The Sea” wasn’t a chant against a particular government, but against the very idea of a Jewish State—specifically, one with the will and the capacity to defend itself. We all knew that “Globalize the Intifada” wasn’t a benign comment on policy. It is a clear call to commit violence against Jews and their supporters. But wouldn’t you know it. It took the far right to bring an end to that game.
Now, thanks to Tuck, Candy, and Nick, there is no need to beat around the bush. They have, from the right, made it possible for everyone to withdraw the pernicious poison from the medicine cabinet of history and inject it directly into the cultural and political bloodstream of America. No need to whisper. I hear it spoken brazenly, almost with a sigh of relief. Recently, I overheard a guy in the locker room at my local YMCA whispering to someone about the Rothschilds. “Jewish money, man. That’s the whole problem.”
So yes. Thank you, Tucker. Thank you, Candace. Thank you, Nick.
You have finally said the quiet parts loudly enough that no one can pretend not to hear them.
Tucker Carlson—who has regularly elevated guests immersed in conspiratorial thinking about Jews—now responds to questions about antisemitism not with clarity, but with simpering, wounded indignation. In one 2024 exchange, when pressed about his role in amplifying such rhetoric, he snapped, “I don’t even like talking about Israel because no matter what I say, I’ll be called an antisemite.” It is an old trick: make oneself the victim of the accusation rather than the source of the atmosphere that prompts it.
Carlson’s largest interview audience, across platforms, now exceeds 20 million weekly viewers—which makes what he says, and who he platforms, matter. During his interview with British commentator David Clews—a man who has called the Holocaust a “hoax” and endorsed the idea that Jews “invented” the numbers—Carlson’s response was breathtakingly benign: “Well, I don’t know anything about that, but I’m always open to hearing other views.” No pushback. No recoil. Just the easy permissiveness of someone willing to let the oldest hatred air itself out in his living room.
Candace Owens, who once claimed she “never talks about Jews,” now talks about little else. Her shift after October 7 was swift, almost revelatory in its bluntness. Among her statements, one stands out for its clarity: “There is a very small ring of specific people who use the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism.” When Jews objected, she answered not with reflection but escalation, describing them as “people who scream antisemitism because they’re actually the real racial supremacists.”
Owens now commands an audience of 12 million followers across platforms—a number large enough to turn slander into cultural consensus. In two short sentences, she revived medieval blood-libel logic and Klan-era mythology while congratulating herself for “saying what no one else will.”
And then there is Nick Fuentes, who dispenses with pretense altogether. He does not hint or suggest. He states plainly: “Jews are running the country. That’s just a fact.” In another recording, he went further: “When we take power, the people responsible for what’s happened—most of them Jewish—should face the death penalty.”
Fuentes speaks with pride to a young and fervent audience that—across Telegram, Rumble, Gab, and his livestreams—numbers over 500,000 dedicated followers, many of whom treat his every utterance as prophecy. It is difficult to find language so nakedly violent outside of 20th-century Europe. Yet here it is, as casual as a summer stroll.
What makes this moment uniquely dangerous is not merely the antisemitism itself, but the convergence. The far right and the far left—groups who despise one another on every other point—are suddenly meeting in a single place: their certainty that Jewish identity, Jewish continuity, and Jewish self-defense are unacceptable. On the left, Jews are cast as colonialists. On the right, Jews are cast as conspirators. Different vocabulary, same target. And in the middle stand millions of Jewish men, women, and children who refuse to relinquish their heritage or abandon their connection to Israel, their ancestral homeland and the world’s only Jewish State.
These are people who, since 10/7, find themselves politically homeless—as if the ground beneath them has shifted, leaving them no safe place to stand. One needn’t use too much imagination to see the parallels to 1930s Germany: a divided and demoralized country on the lookout for someone to blame. Who better than the Jews? The Christ-killers, the wealthy, the poverty-stricken, the stateless, the powerful, the damned.
This dislocation might have been softened by a moment of moral clarity after October 7. But moral clarity, always a rarity, was not to be found, even then, as protests began on streets and campuses worldwide only days after the pogrom. The greatest irony—the deepest and cruelest inversion—is that the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Shoah did not produce solidarity. It became an invitation for history’s oldest, most unrelenting hatred to step forward, unmasked, and claim the stage once again.
In this environment, the language of Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes is not incidental. It normalizes what was once unspeakable. It shifts the Overton window until ancient slander becomes contemporary insight. And suddenly, what would have been recognized five years ago as fringe rhetoric is now part of the national—and international—conversation.
And when hatred reaches this stage—when it is unembarrassed, unmasked, unafraid—violence is no longer unthinkable. It is simply the next step in a progression that history knows all too well.
In Jewish thought—from the Zohar to the commentaries on the Tree of Knowledge—the mingling of good and evil is described as the most dangerous spiritual condition. Separation, not blending, is what restores clarity.
Thank you Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes for your honesty—your bold, clear, unvarnished ugliness. Because by speaking plainly, you have done us a dark favor. You have shown us that the old hatred was not gone; it was merely waiting for permission. And now, in your hands, and in this moment, permission has been granted.
And of course, we must also thank our president as well for his “diplomatic” comments pertaining to Mr. Carlson: “You can’t tell him who to interview. If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out. People have to decide..."
For Jews everywhere—for those who support Israel, and for those who simply wish to live without succumbing to a groundswell of moral insanity—this is the warning:
It isn’t coming. It is here.
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WHY MAMDANI’S ELECTION RATTLES ME
“Why are you so concerned with Mamdani becoming mayor? He’s not gonna start hunting Jews down in the street!”
I’ve heard that line more times than I can count—before the election, and now after his win. My answer is simple, and it’s the same one I give whenever I’m asked what I’m afraid of.
His election alarms me not because of what he will or won’t do in New York City, but because it normalizes vitriol toward the world’s only Jewish state—and by doing so, endangers the vast majority of Jews who proudly support Israel.
It has become dangerous, in certain circles, to call oneself a Zionist—now akin to calling oneself a Nazi. Of course, that inversion is immoral, insane, baseless, and idiotic. But so has Jew-hatred always been—immoral, insane, baseless, and idiotic.
People say, “But being against the State of Israel isn’t being against Jews.”
If I respond to this now-common refrain, it’s not because I imagine I’ll change anyone’s mind—least of all those who’ve built elaborate rhetorical shields to protect themselves from being called antisemitic—but because the time is coming, if it’s not already here, when many will no longer even bother to deny the charge.
There are seven million Jews living in Israel—more than anywhere else on earth. That fact alone makes being “against” (not merely critical) of the State of Israel being against the Jews.
Here’s a painful historical truth: over the millennia, Jews have been hated for every imaginable reason.
Too clannish, too assimilated.
Too rich, too poor.
Too weak, too powerful.
The reasons shift. The hatred remains.
Today the Jew is accused of being a genocidist—capable of the very atrocities once committed against them. It’s an obscene reversal. The seven million Jews of Israel simply want to feed their children, feel safe in their homes, and to continue inventing and innovating in ways that have transformed the world, just as Judaism itself has done over its multi-millennial history.
But here’s the secret that few will admit: to many, the Jews are a natural irritant. A mystery too hard to bear. A success story—a tale of constant rebirth—that fits no one’s frame of logic. Fifteen million souls who, despite every rational prediction, are still here. They haven’t disappeared, haven’t blended in, haven’t conformed. Small in number, yet stubbornly alive.
There is incredulity around this reality. I’ve heard it. I’ve felt it. It is an inability to comprehend the very existence of this ancient peoplehood—and worse, its success in creating a strong, vibrant state in its ancestral homeland is like a needle in the eye of millions.
There are 2.3 billion Christians, 2.1 billion Muslims, countless Hindus and Buddhists. How is this tiny, paltry people still so visible, so resilient, so catalytic? Why have they not joined the rest of the world’s spiritual clubs? Why have they refused to surrender their distinctiveness?
Because they’ve had reason to say no. Why should they assimilate? They were given the Torah—a living document that serves as the basis for two of the world’s largest religions. A document whose contents form the foundation of justice and morality itself. They were given eternal commandments and statutes. And they have remained loyal to that covenant, against all odds, to this very day.
They are a tribe of non-acceptance, of dogged refusal.
A nation of no’s.
No to Baal Peor. No to Jesus.
No to Mohammed.
No to assimilation.
No to the abandonment of God.
No to being slaughtered.
And that no has driven the world mad.
The Torah said more than 3,300 years ago that Israel would be “a nation that dwells alone.” It sounds tragic, even cruel. I see it differently. It is a testament to uniqueness—to an unmatched singularity. After all that has befallen us, here we are: still dwelling alone, still accused of crimes we did not commit; still blamed for sins that were never ours.
Among my many blessings is the friendship I’ve forged with Judea Pearl, the brilliant Israeli-born computer scientist and father of Daniel Pearl—the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded in Karachi in 2001 after saying, “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”
When Judea and I sat together one recent Shabbat evening, we spoke of Israel—of the rising tide of animus toward Jews.
“You must feel this on another level,” I said.
After an extended silence, he spoke. “The thing that happened with Danny—it was an isolated event. Now it’s coming from every direction. It’s global.”
That line sits on my chest like a stone.
“It’s global…”
That is why I fear Mamdani’s election—not because he is powerful (he is not), but because he is a symbol. A vessel for something darker. A clarion call to those anxious for someone—anyone—to blame. Why look too hard when the prototypical, all-purpose scapegoat stands right before you?
Mamdani declared, “Zionism is a settler-colonial ideology.” He has called Israel “an apartheid state” and compared it to South Africa. (Excuse me, sir—did South Africa have Black jurists on its Supreme Court? In its government? Equal voting rights for Black citizens, as Israel has for its Arab citizens?) These words, echoing renowned Israel-hater Edward Said—his father’s mentor—are not original, but they are effective. They have made Jew-hatred sound righteous, even enlightened.
Said wrote that “the Jewish state rests on the negation of the Palestinian people.” A lie. A canard. In fact, the Jewish state rests not on the negation of anyone, but on living peaceful lives behind secure borders, without fear of their families being massacred, as we’ve just witnessed. Mamdani inherited Said’s worldview wholesale. And like so many in his generation, he has repackaged it in the language of moral progress.
He has repeatedly accused Israel of “genocide.” The new blood libel. To accuse the Jewish state of genocide! Do you know what that means? It means the soon-to-be mayor of the world’s second most Jewish city has placed a target on every Jew. And not only the ones who support Israel. (Let that be a warning to our young college students who have taken uncertain shelter in the eye of a darkening storm.)
Until he was forced to—likely by his political handlers—Mr. Mamdani refused to condemn the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” a call no less dangerous than shouting, “Murder the infidels and the Jews.” His soft-pedaled, word-salad retraction should be an embarrassment to anyone who values the English language:
“That is not language that I use. The language that I use and the language that I will continue to use to lead this city is that which speaks clearly to my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights. I don’t believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech in that manner.”
It’s not brilliance that drives him. It’s something closer to zeal. He’s less an ideologue than a performer—a man lifted by the winds of history, a puppet of the forces that have seized this moment of cultural unraveling. In the vacuum left by the retreat of “normal people” from public life, demagogues have rushed in: Mamdani on the left; Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and countless others on the right.
The new dynamic they bring isn’t just about housing or economics. It’s about moral inversion. About truth turned inside out. About the end of Western liberalism as we know it. And once again, as history insists, the Jews become the targets.
There are voices of reason still—people who warn, who analyze, who see the danger in ideological excess without surrendering to it. Center-right columnist George F. Will said recently, “We need a left-wing administration every few decades to remind people what happens when utopians take power.” I understand what he means, but my worry isn’t practical—it isn’t about New York politics. New York will survive—it always does. What’s at stake is morality, common sense.
The signal this election sends is that Israel is a pariah, that Jews who call themselves Zionists or Israel supporters are racist, genocidal colonizers who must be shunned—or worse.
Somewhere in the depths of hell, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7th, must be smiling. Even with Gaza in ruins, his plan—to massacre Jews, provoke a response, and then watch the world condemn Israel—has worked brilliantly. Almost.
For all his cleverness, Sinwar misunderstood something fundamental: Israel isn’t going anywhere. It grows stronger, wealthier, more steadfast, more joyous. Its people still rank among the happiest on earth. Its birthrate—one of the highest in the democratic world—suggests hope, not despair.
Am Yisrael Chai.
The people of Israel live.
And as long as we live, we will not bow to this latest moral contortion—the one that calls the defense of our survival a crime.
