Going into the second half of 2023 the road was wide open for another yearly examination of the steady increase of not very subtle antisemitism in the institutional Republican Party – as in words and actions by politicians, candidates, and campaigns – that had been collected in the November 2021 piece “The Road is Open Again” and then again in the lengthier and maybe less well-executed December 2022 follow-up “The Road is Open Again II: The New Colossus.” I believe at one point in August or September that I had even taken a few hours to collect the instances in anticipation of a November or December post for “The Road is Open Again III” with some clever subtitle.
Then October 7th happened.
There are many reasons why the first two pieces (“The Road is Open Again” refers to the opening theme from the 2020 HBO miniseries The Plot Against America, an adaptation and expansion of Philip Roth’s alternate history tale of a 1940 US becoming allied with Nazi Germany after Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin D Roosevelt) didn’t go too much into Israel-related issues.
For one, it’s a LOT fucking easier to rattle off moments like this one where Georgia MAGA Congressman Mike Collins may or may not have an explanation for why he agreed so enthusiastically with a prolifically antisemitic Twitter account about an unstated “is” about a Washington Post reporter’s (stupid) defense of rampant shoplifting at a CVS location in DC:
Never was a second thought.
— Rep. Mike Collins (@RepMikeCollins) March 3, 2024
Is it that Collins – currently “praying on” whether or not to jump into the Republican primary to take on Jewish Dem Senator Jon Ossoff in 2026 – could’ve thought the Post’s Maura Judkis is a lesbian?
Maybe. He does not currently follow @GarbageHuman24 so it’s possible he was unaware of the account’s nature. You know who would know what @GarbageHuman24 was talking about? Utah Senator Mike Lee and wireless entrepreneur Donald Trump Jr. They follow him – as does Nick Fuentes – and it’s unmistakeable that the account is antisemitic (and fucking racist).
Far less mistakable was MAGA Congressman Tim Burchett calling George Soros a “money-changer” in an October 2024 Fox News hit bitching about Soros’s investment in radio stations (also unironic how he mentions Soros being a foreigner born in Hungary on a network owned by an Australian):
“Money-changer” says it all, even if the connotation draws on later periods in history outside of ancient Palestine. In medieval Europe, Ashkenazi Jews went into commerce because they often banned by law from owning arable land, so they peddled goods instead – which over centuries led them into mercantile trades which then led to banking. Back in Jesus’s era however, money-changing at the Temple in Jerusalem was simply a service provided to pilgrims from other places across the Levant and the Mediterranean. Obviously it was not so extraordinarily specialized of a trade nor was there anything uniquely “Jewish” about it, but because it maps on to the whole “greedy Jew” stereotype pretty easily – and the “Christ killer” epithet because Jesus’s rampage against the Temple’s money-changers angered Jewish authorities and is this seen as the final straw for his arrest and execution – it’s pretty obvious what Burchett is saying here.
Even less oblique was their Orange Allah’s July 3rd invocation of “Shylocks” to refer to bankers:
Of course that “clarification” was horseshit. Trump might as well have been calling unscrupulous dry cleaners “Fu Manchus.” He knew what he was saying. So did Jewish GOP Congressman David Kustoff, who the next day told CNN he “was not offended” and feigned surprise other people were.
“Well, and until you said that people were offended – I was not offended. And until you said that, I wouldn’t – we’ve got to condemn antisemitism. We see it rampant across the nation,” said Kustoff.
He then kept going: “We’ve certainly seen it accentuated since October the 7th of 2023 across the country and in Washington. We’ll call it out wherever we see it,” meaning he’ll call out an opportunity to invoke October 7th when he sees it, even when it’s his own president using antisemitic slurs.
Opportunity is a funny word here…
Like when the then-RNC Chairwoman Ronna Not-Romney, about 12 hours after Hamas terrorists stormed from Gaza into Southern Israel that day, killing more than 1,200 people, many of them in their homes, called it a “great opportunity for our candidates to contrast where our candidates, where our Republicans have stood with Israel time and time again, and Joe Biden has been weak.”
It was that day and the weeks that followed when I realized that “The Road is Open Again III” wasn’t happening that year. Sure, I could’ve done it and collected a bunch of tweets and clips like the ones of Mike Collins, Tim Burchett, and Donald Fat Tits above but it would’ve rung hollow if I had simply ignored the attack and the early stages of the horrifically destructive campaign against the people of Gaza. My opportunity window closed and the one seized upon by Trump and his minions opened.
Very widely. To this day Ronna’s successor is milking that opportunity:
“They are an open-border, inflationary-spending, anti-Semitic, weak-America party”: RNC @ChairmanWhatley sounds off on the Democratic party pic.twitter.com/IzrhEfwnXr
— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) July 12, 2025
Like he’s just going to casually, robotically call the Democratic Party antisemitic and get zero pushback from anyone because this is the world that October 7th created. Nobody takes it for granted anymore that in a vacuum, within the United States and at a remove from the Israel shitshow – and their dictator Benjamin Netanyahu’s intentional prolonging of the state of war – the right is now, then, and will always be unequivocally more hostile to Jews than Democrats are.
Jonathan Chait, a guy smarter but also more of a dick than me, captured it pretty brilliantly the next month while remarking on the silence from heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s ill-fated presidential campaign on his then-endorser, Ketamine-brained billionaire Elon Musk, replying “You are exactly right,” to a MAGA white nationalist Twitter account that posted “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that [they] support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.” Wrote Chait:
The upsurge of left-wing protests against the Biden administration’s Israel policy has inspired conservatives to publish columns with headlines like “Democrats Have an Anti-Semitism Problem” (The Wall Street Journal) and “I’m a Proud Democrat. My Party Has an Antisemitism Problem” (Fox News).
It is certainly true that there is antisemitism on the left, frequently presenting itself as criticism of Israel. (The usual trick is to make an antisemitic statement and replace “Jews” with “Zionists.”) But it is overwhelmingly directed in opposition to the Democratic Party. The most antisemitic activists on the right tend to be pro-Trump, which is why the ranks of J6ers were overrepresented with white nationalists. The most antisemitic activists of the left despise Joe Biden and generally oppose the Democratic Party.
When conservatives claim the Democratic Party is enabling antisemitism, sometimes they point to Democrats denouncing bias against Muslims or Arabs. Other times they highlight statements by the most progressive Democrats, like Rashida Tlaib, calling for a cease-fire or a one-state solution. Tlaib has made a lot of statements I consider reckless, or blinkered, and I certainly wish Democrats would nominate a more responsible candidate to represent the 13th district in Michigan, but she has never actually uttered anything a reasonable person would deem antisemitic. “From the river to the sea” is an inflammatory and irresponsible slogan that implicitly creates solidarity with terrorism precisely because it is ambiguous and open to multiple definitions, but it is not per se antisemitic.
Yeah that would’ve taken me a while to articulate. Or I just wouldn’t have been able to articulate it.
Luckily for Republicans they’re dishonest and the vast majority of their voters are fucking stupid so they didn’t have to articulate it beyond “Supporting Israel is patriotic and everyone who doesn’t support them is a Nazi” and then also scam Michigan Muslims on ending the genocide in Gaza…
A Message to President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance From the Abandon Harris Movement
"Let us be clear: if this administration leads the U.S. into this war, we will respond with the full strength of our movement." pic.twitter.com/r6bWt3ATzP
— Abandon Harris (@Abandonbiden24) June 17, 2025
…which worked out so great for them.
What’s interesting about that impotent threat – and what this is really about – is the amount of overlap there with one from Trump’s more longtime supporters. Now don’t get me wrong, these people were definitely always there, but I feel like they were starting to get more, um, vocal last month when the IDF and then the US military conducted their strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Because this guy sure as shit isn’t a Harris voter:
Jews love war. pic.twitter.com/9IX71E0HUg
— Chad (@Not_ADemocracy) June 20, 2025
This is not Ilhan Omar:
Then why did he bomb Iran on behalf of Israel?
This shit is tiresome. He can talk as tough as he wants but we all know who’s in charge of him.
— Frankie Stockes (@realStockes) June 24, 2025
This isn’t Zohran Mamdani:
Sorry goys, Donald Trump wants you to fight for Israel. pic.twitter.com/sq0qrCKukF
— 𝐆𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐝𝐮𝐬 (@ImperiumFirst) June 23, 2025
It’s that Trump with a bigger nose meme – from a right winger – that got me thinking that maaaaaaaaybe, just maybe, the tide’s starting to turn if just a little bit. Now the splits within the institutional Republican Party/media establishment over Israel, with all that shitposting going on between Tucker Carlson, Majorie Taylor Greene, and others on the anti-war side vs Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mark Levin on the other during the weeks leading up to the US strike on Iran were obviously a sign too, but their shifts are going to be more careful and gradual.
They say Trump stands for nothing, that he’s anti-war until Israel wants it, that he’s for deporting every illegal immigrant until farmers complain they can’t get enough workers, that he’s pro-tariff until the stock market goes to shit, and so on. He’s weak and impressionable enough to shift his bedrock policy stances – and then back when the base rages out over it. The one constant however, possibly due to his weakness and impressionability (venality too), is that he’s pro-Israel. He’s definitely pro-Israel enough to take the enormous risk of bombing them and angering his base. Then he flirted with “regime change” and the fanboys lost their shit enough for him to back off.
But that’s not the end of it. Tehran’s nuclear program is not obliterated, it will be rebuilt and Israel is going to attack again. Thus one of two things is going to happen first (1) Trump leaves the White House on way or another (2) The US military attacks Iran again. It might be as limited as last month’s strike and the news cycles move on elsewhere, letting Trump largely skate yet again like he always does. If not then you’ll see another preview of what a post-Israel MAGA base will look like.
“Will look like” because it will happen. Much in the same way that Russia went from being the greatest threat to the US during the Cold War to a “friend” after 2016 and Saudi Arabia went from being the petrostate home of the 9/11 hijackers to a great place to find crypto investment cash it’s only going in one direction for Israel. Sure, there’s still a large pro-Ukraine contingent in the institutional GOP, but they’re always reacting (notwithstanding the Orange God Emperor’s recent “anger” with Putin, itself just him throwing a fit over not being able to declare he “brokered peace”).
It’s going to happen to Israel.
It could look like this scene from last night with Tucker Carlson getting not a small amount of cheers from saying that Jeffrey Epstein was conducting an Israeli intel operation on American soil:
Wonder if Mark Levin died of a heart attack after watching that. For Tucker to be saying that Israel was behind the most infamous sex trafficking operation in US history – and a cancer steadily metastasizing on the Trump 2.0 presidency – is a bigger fucking deal than you think in this moment of all other sorts of rapid and almost universally bad disruption to American politics.
It would also seem a few shades more “antisemitic” than anything Zohran Mamdani – who won an estimated 20 percent of Jewish voters in last month’s NYC Democratic mayoral primary and will probably improve on that pretty significantly in November – ever said, going by GOP standards.
The right wing’s pretenses about being the holy defenders of Israel and thus Jews are bullshit and not a little bit infuriating to Dems just through the sheer brazenness of the lies. But what happens when Trump is gone and the next leader of the GOP isn’t so much of a simp to the Netanyahu Regime or its successor? What’s it going to be like when an attack on a synagogue isn’t the “opportunity” for Republicans politically that it used to be? What if “antisemitism” ceases to be less useful as a pretext for undermining Harvard University than antisemitism sans quotation marks becomes useful as a means of getting rural, working class votes? It’s not like Republicans have paid a price for being anti-Muslim and anti-Latino. What’s one more ethno-religious minority to them?
“The most important part about Epstein was the money.”
Double-checking the folks that financed Epstein…
Leon Black- Jew ✡️
Bear Stearns- Jewish bank
Les Wexner- Jew ✡️
Ehud Barak- Jew ✡️
Robert Maxwell- Jew ✡️
Donald Barr- Jew ✡️Even Jeffrey and Ghislaine themselves …… pic.twitter.com/n8g6zyn0iX
— Uncommon Sense (@Uncommonsince76) July 11, 2025
None other than “Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸” follows this account. It didn’t have to be her in the AI-generated top pic. Just imagine the face of JD Vance or whoever else you think is going to be the leader of the post-Trump, post-Israel Republican party, marching forth down the open road.