Just as anti-Semitism thrived on the Left when Corbyn was Labour leader, it is now prospering dangerously among American conservatives

Tucker looks on: It would be tragic if the American Right reshaped in his image

Charles Moore

08 December, 2025

The Groypers are not yet a popular movement in Britain, but given the way cultural trends spread from America, they may be spread here soon. It was not so long ago, after all, that we stared in horror at films of fentanyl addicts, rigid and bent double by the drug down-town in American cities. Now we see them in British streets.

Taking their name from a fat internet meme which is a variant of Pepe the Frog, the Groypers are young, overwhelmingly male, ultra-Right keyboard warriors who promote white nationalism, sometimes in the name of Christianity. They are 100 per cent devoted to destroying, not building. Anti-Semitism is at their core. They are fantastically unattractive, but that market is nowadays not as niche as it should be.

At any one time in a free country, there are always such pitiful groupuscles around, but it is part of the unforeseen consequences of the online age that they can sometimes hit the big time. This seems to have happened among young Maga Republicans. The conservative cultural commentator, Rod Dreher, recently wrote that 30 to 40 per cent of Washington conservative “Zoomers” are Groypers.

So they start to have political salience. As I wrote about recently, Nick Fuentes, top Groyper, big fan of both Stalin and Hitler and enemy of what he calls “organised Jewry”, was warmly hosted for more than an hour on Tucker Carlson’s television show. Carlson now has a record as long as his programme of offering hospitality to detesters of democracy, including Vladimir Putin and a “historian” who blames the Second World War on Winston Churchill.

Carlson is now buying a house in Hamas-friendly Qatar. Yet he remains a major influencer in Republican circles. He is given the chief credit for persuading Donald Trump to choose J.D. Vance as his running mate in last year’s presidential election.

Vice-president Vance is almost literally speechless with gratitude. Although usually the most loquacious Vice-president in American history, in the row which broke out following Carlson’s Fuentes interview, he said almost nothing.

When confronted on television last week with some of this, Vance readily condemned anti-Semitism in general (“anti-American and anti-Christian”) but repudiated the suggestion from mainstream Republicans that this was a growing problem in his party: “When I talk to young conservatives, I don’t see some simmering anti-Semitism that’s exploding,” he said. It was positively “slanderous”, he added, to call the conservative movement “extremely anti-Semitic”.

Perhaps it is, but Vance has had many chances to condemn the most important person who gives prominent airtime to it – Tucker Carlson – and has not done so. He is preparing to seek the Republican nomination when Donald Trump steps down, and he seems to feel he needs the support of his good friend Tucker to win it. Which suggests that it is not slanderous to suggest that elements in the conservative movement – and therefore in the Republican Party – are at least prepared to go along with anti-Semitism if it helps at the ballot box.

All this reminds me of what happened on the Left in Britain not so long ago. As leader of the Labour Party from 2015-20, Jeremy Corbyn gave free rein to anti-Semites. No one ever established that he was personally anti-Semitic, but his extreme ideology put blinkers on his capacity to see what was surrounding him.

In the old phrase, there were, for him, “no enemies on the Left” (and there were Muslim votes for the asking). Since Israel was and is, in the eyes of the Left, the tool of capitalist America and white imperialism, Corbyn thought they must be good socialists. So they simply couldn’t be Jew-haters, could they?

At the time, it may be recalled, Sir Keir Starmer kept pretty quiet about all of this from inside Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, only assailing the anti-Semites when he had won the leadership. Possibly J.D.Vance admires his tactics. “No enemies on the Right”, may be a useful rule for his electoral prospects.

Possibly, too, the Right is jealous of the success of the implicitly anti-Semitic Zohran Mamdani in winning the New York mayoralty. The militant American Right often seems to imitate the militant American Left. Why, the Groypers may be thinking, should their enemies hog all the best hate tunes for themselves?

Without wishing to labour the point, I think it is worth stating that anti-Semitism is the prime, indeed primordial example of all evil political lunacy, for at least two reasons. The first is that its account of world history for more than two thousand years is based on race hatred. The second is that it sits at the heart of conspiracy theory – the idea, comforting to people who feel bitter and lost, that a semi-secret group of incredibly clever people run the whole world for their selfish advantage.

Once this thought takes a grip on politically active people, you can be certain that they will hate democracy, hate the rule of law, suspect all institutions and bring down destruction upon any society over which they gain control. The Nazi phrase “the final solution” proves the point. Their madness had invented a “problem”, and its logic meant that the “problem” could be “solved” only by mass murder.

Of course that is not what J.D.Vance thinks. But he has laid claim to thought-leadership on the Right throughout the Anglosphere, so when he chooses not to give that lead, one is bound to ask why.