General

JTA: Ben Shapiro is mounting a last stand against right-wing antisemitism. It’s not going well.

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Very encouraging to see Shapiro flailing away futilely at Tucker, Candace and Fuentes. For all their faults, the tide seems to be turning. People can’t unsee what happened and is happening in Gaza. Even the NYTimes asks, “The Truce Is 2 Months Old. So Why Have Hundreds of Gazans Been Killed?” The answer of course is that the Israelis never intended to honor the truce.

The cease-fire in Gaza is more than two months old. But the killing of Palestinians has not yet stopped for more than a day or two at a time.

Death can come from straying across the Yellow Line, the poorly demarcated border between eastern Gaza, where the Israeli military has entrenched itself, and the western half, where Hamas is seeking to reestablish control over Gaza’s two million-plus residents.

Dozens of times since the truce went into effect on Oct. 10, Palestinians have been killed for crossing east, knowingly or not.

Ben Shapiro is mounting a last stand against right-wing antisemitism. It’s not going well.

Megyn Kelly said Shapiro, not Tucker Carlson, is inflaming antisemitism.

Ben Shapiro gives a speech at Turning Point USA
US conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro speaks during Turning Point’s annual AmericaFest conference in remembrance of late right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona on Dec. 18, 2025. (Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty Images)

On the first day of AmericaFest, Turning Point USA’s convention in Phoenix, Ben Shapiro lit into a host of conservatives that he said were “frauds and grifters.”

He listed Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon as “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” Together, he said on Thursday, they presented a danger to the conservative movement.

Shapiro was extending an assault that he began earlier in the week during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a heart of conservatism that has been thrown into turmoil by its president’s backing of Carlson after Carlson hosted the Holocaust denier and avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes on his podcast.

An Orthodox Jew and avowed supporter of Israel, the conservative pundit has been mounting a public effort to repudiate antisemitism and similarly aligned forces within his own party. His campaign comes as the GOP’s younger flank have become increasingly disillusioned with American support for Israel in the aftermath of its war in Gaza.

Conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel have proliferated in young right-wing spaces, to the point where Shapiro — who has long preferred to focus on conservative culture-war issues — is now staking his future on rooting them out.

“If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes,” Shapiro told the AmericaFest crowd, “if you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.” Shapiro used a Gen Z slang term for flattery to allude to Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, elsewhere blasting other rivals for promoting conspiracy theories linking Jeffrey Epstein to the Mossad.

Tucker Carlson at Turning Point USA

Conservative political commentator and podcast host Tucker Carlson speaks at Turning Point’s annual AmericaFest conference, in remembrance of late right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona on Dec. 18, 2025. (Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty Images)

But Shapiro’s address did not go over well with everybody. Much of the energy at AmericaFest, which TPUSA staged in the shadow of the shocking murder by the group’s founder Charlie Kirk earlier this year, appeared to be lining up behind the figures he targeted — several of whom, like Carlson, also took the stage.

“To hear calls for deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, what? That’s hilarious,” Carlson said in his own speech. Yet he also took the time to defend his thoughts about Jews. “I’m not an antisemite for a very specific reason. Not because it’s unpopular or my donors don’t like it. I’m not an antisemite because antisemitism is immoral in my religion.”

Carlson wasn’t alone in his disdain for the Daily Wire CEO who, for years, had been considered a tastemaker for the young right. Steve Bannon, as part of a speech in which he also called to “re-Christianize America” and mocked the recent murder of Jewish director and Trump critic Rob Reiner, called Shapiro a “cancer” to conservatism.

And Owens, Shapiro’s own former protege, said, “Fuck you, Ben Shapiro.” She made the comment on her YouTube page, where she has been promoting conspiracy theories that Israel had some involvement in Kirk’s murder.

And in remarks to Vanity Fair while at the conference, Kelly, too, countered Shapiro. The former Fox News host blasted him as overly concerned with Israel and said that he and Bari Weiss, the Jewish CBS News editor-in-chief recently in hot water after she pulled a “60 Minutes” story that reflected badly on the Trump administration, are themselves fueling antisemitism.

“Tucker is not making antisemites. They are,” Kelly, a friend of Carlson’s, told Vanity Fair.

She went on to describe Shapiro and Weiss as part of “this very loud group of pro-Israel activists that is trying to make this the litmus test about whether you get to call yourself a conservative, and they lack standing to do that.”

Other conference attendees Vanity Fair spoke to said they were siding with Shapiro’s opponents, and some were happy to debate Hitler’s merits in-between sessions.

Shapiro’s effort to hold a line in the sand is reverberating through the highest levels of government. Vice President JD Vance, who also spoke at the conference and is himself close with Carlson, pointedly did not denounce antisemitism during his own address. Instead, Vance seemed to discourage the idea that conservatives should be excommunicating anyone based on their views.

The showdown at AmericaFest was the latest visible sign of how the next generation of conservatives are increasingly turning against Israel while embracing antisemitic talking points.

Openly antisemitic influencers like Fuentes and Myron Gaines are enjoying a rise in popularity on the right, and Gaines attended AmericaFest himself. The podcaster wore a sweater with a picture of Cookie Monster over an oven and the phrase “Let Em Cook” — a right-wing meme mocking Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.

Donald Trump Jr. and Megyn Kelly speak onstage at Smart Financial Centre on October 23, 2025 in Sugar Land, Texas. (Marcus Ingram/Getty Images)

A recent focus group of Gen Z conservatives, conducted by conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute, also found that several of them espoused antisemitic and pro-Hitler views. One declared that Jews are “a force for evil,” adding, “I don’t see why we support Israel. I think Israel’s a very evil state. The genocide in Gaza, killing all these poor people. And the only reason we really support them is because they are the biggest donors. We have AIPAC, and these are all Jewish-run organizations.”

Asked what they thought of Hitler, one respondent said, “I think he was a great leader, to be honest.” Another, who called himself “Jewish by blood,” said he had read “Mein Kampf” and concluded, “I strangely understood where he was coming from as far as wanting to improve the national state of Germany.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a pro-Israel MAGA firebrand who had taken on campus antisemitism as a central cause, announced on Friday she was dropping her bid for New York Governor. Stefanik will also not seek reelection to Congress, leaving conservative (and many centrist) Jews with one less ally on the right who seemed to have a fast track to Trump.

A right-wing schism, with Jews and Israel at the center of the divide, is increasingly taking shape. More conservative intellectuals continue to exit the Heritage Foundation, the influential think tank, over its founder’s defense of Carlson. Several are migrating over to a new venture started by former Vice President Mike Pence, a pro-Israel Evangelical who has come out in opposition to Trump since his work in the first Trump administration.

It’s all building up to what Andrew Kolvet, a close friend and associate of Kirk who has taken over many TPUSA duties including hosting Kirk’s eponymous show since the founder’s murder, says are the conservative movement’s new flashpoints: Israel and antisemitism.

“Charlie would go to some campuses, and like 50 to 60% of the questions were about Israel,” Kolvet recently told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat. “For two years that was true.” Young conservatives have been questioning not only the influence of pro-Israel lobbyists like AIPAC, but also the entire US-Israel relationship, Kolvet said.

Kolvet added, “I think Israel has become a symbolic battle about: What does ‘America First’ really mean?”

Come All Ye Fake Christians

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My handy guide to spotting them.

In honor of Christmas, this week we’ll discuss the worst advertisement for my religion: Christians. Sometimes it seems as if there are more fake, phony, fraud Christians than real Christians, but that’s because I read The New York Times (my North Star, which I believe implicitly).

While not dispositive, it’s at least a red flag when the Times writes respectfully about a person’s Christianity.

We’ll begin with Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla.

Last year, Lankford negotiated a secret deal with the Democrats that would have formalized our country’s surrender to open borders. The so-called “bipartisan border security bill” — Lankford is not only allegedly a “Christian,” but, also allegedly, a “Republican” — codified Joe Biden’s illegal and treasonous border policies, requiring all future presidents to continue admitting millions of illegal aliens every year, just like Biden did, in violation of existing law.

(What’s the matter with you, Oklahoma? How could a state like yours end up with a senator like this?)

Naturally, the February 2024 Times article on this wonderful bipartisan border bill stressed Lankford’s Christianity, noting that he “previously ran the largest Christian youth camp in the country and has spoken often about how his faith guides his policy positions.” In this one case, the Times did not refer to Christians’ authoritarianism, homophobia, fear of “the other,” etc.

The photo that ran with the article showed Lankford piously praying with his family, eyes closed and heads bowed, in front of an audience. It’s the gayest photo I’ve ever seen. (At the Times, that’s a plus.)

In a May 2024 article about Christian parents nonplussed when their sons start wearing skirts and calling themselves “Tulip,” there could be no mistaking the good guys for the bad guys.

The appalled parents, according to the Times, are “afraid of change,” expressing “anti-trans fear and zeal,” holding “deeply ingrained notions of masculinity and femininity,” who have “mocked, kicked out and denied communion” to transgenders. (Editor’s note: The “deeply ingrained notions” are also known as “reality.”) These people leveled “vociferous opposition to everything from drag shows to hormone treatments.” (What squares.)

By contrast, the pro-trans Christian counselors are “expert voices,” trying to create “a space of curiosity as opposed to judgment,” who say things like, “we have to allow for questions” and instruct parents of trans kids to use their preferred pronouns “as a form of hospitality.”

(They’d also appreciate it you’d all stop “dead naming” Jesus’ parents. All hail the Blessed Virgin Harry and their life partner Josephine.)

Pretending a boy is a girl and a girl is a boy isn’t nuts, it’s a “celebratory embrace of new identities.” Just sign right here, and we’ll celebrate by whisking your son off for his penilectomy.

Notwithstanding the happy face the Times tried to put on teenage mental illness, the Goebbels-like fad of poisoning and mutilating kids seems to be falling out of favor. If so, one line from the article is looking pretty good: “In many ways, conservative Christians have become the face of the American anti-trans movement.”

I know about Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt’s peculiar version of Christianity not from the Times’ extravagant praise, but from his burbling on about what a big Christian he is whenever he’s about to ignore the cries of crime victims.

When commuting the death sentence of Julius Jones, who committed the minor infraction of murdering businessman Paul Howell in front of his family, then stealing his car, Stitt said, “I grew up in the Christian faith since attending church in my mother’s womb. I memorized the books of the Bible when I was 8 years old. … I served as the song leader for my hometown congregation …,” and on and on.

Earlier that same year, in January 2021, Stitt had released multiple felon Lawrence Paul Anderson from prison, cutting a 20-year sentence down to three years. A month after being sprung, Anderson killed his neighbor, cut out her heart, cooked it and served it to his family with potatoes. Then he killed most of them, too. (You don’t serve potatoes with a human heart; you serve rice.)

Again: What gives, Oklahoma?

Only God knows what is in a person’s heart, blah, blah, blah, but these people are ridiculous.

No, Sen. Lankford, Christianity does not call on us to destroy the last Christian country on Earth. And no, Gov. Stitt, the loftiest Christian goal is not to release Black men from prison. (Or White men, but that’s not what gives fake Christians their self-righteous glow.)

As for those Christians who are “the face of the American anti-trans movement,” perhaps you’ve heard of the last 2,000 years of human history? Christians have always stood apart from the bien-pensant, opposing accepted practices like polygamy, gladiatorial contests, sacrificial offerings to the gods, slavery, abandonment of widows, ostentatious displays of wealth, sexual degeneracy, etc.

Understandably, this imperviousness to popular opinion is upsetting to the Times, the mouthpiece of organized liberal hectoring.

The prophet Isaiah says, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil.” That ought to be the Times’ motto, “Calling evil good, and good evil.” Praise from these degenerates is as good as the mark of the devil.

Merry Christmas!

COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER

Tucker interviews Matt Gaetz: Anti-Semitism is what Jews don’t like

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Matt Gaetz: Ted Cruz’s Delusional 2028 Bid, the ADL, and Identity Politics Taking Over the Right

Surprisingly good interview with Matt Gaetz. Tucker  does his usual schtick on the need for universalism and disavowals against anti-Semitism. He says he’ll donate to Jewish organizations if they  agree to stop the anti-White hate; good luck with that. Gaetz defines anti-Semitism as what Jews don’t like. The untranscribed clip at 00’37” from Rabbi Yehuda Kaplan who was just appointed by Trump (!!) to be special envoy on anti-Semitism  is scary. Kosher food in all the embassies and total propaganda, whether it’s getting Muslims to use textbooks approved by Kaplan to changing algorithms on social media to censor posts they don’t like with the aid of Jews in social media companies. Gaetz’s very cynical view of Congress, etc.

Matt Gaetz: And obviously, ethnonationalism is the object in Israel. It’s the organizing principle of the country. But oftentimes, people are pursuing the policies here in the United States that benefit Israel, and our own interests and the interests of our people and the plight you describe that so many young people have endured is not a priority.

Tucker [00:07:46] White young people that’s why they’re mad why do you think they’re mad because they’ve been told that the country they were born in like officially discriminates against them that’s ongoing

Matt Gaetz [00:07:56] I don’t think it’s just even white people. I think it, it’s also non-white people who see the attack on white culture, not as an attack on like colonialism, but as an attacking success and progress in order. I know a lot of non- white people, they’re like, actually, uh, this, this anti white activity that’s going on is going to make me less prosperous and less safe. And I’m kind of here like for all the criticisms we as whites have taken. We did an okay job setting up an orderly world and we’ve made some mistakes along the way and you’ve got to reconcile those. But at the end, what society would you replace with like what we’ve set up in the Western world? Is there some like vision of the way civilizations were built in Africa or the Far East that we would gleefully adopt?

Jews not happy with TPUSA — Tucker Carlson named “anti-Semite of the year” (despite disavowals)

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A Jewish take: Not happy with TPUSA

A QUICK WORD WITH Jewish Insider’s JOSH KRAUSHAAR
The kids aren’t alright. —

That’s the unmistakable takeaway from a weekend filled with shocking developments surrounding the views of young conservatives, punctuated by a Turning Point USA conference that turned into a proxy war between mainstream voices led by Ben Shapiro, looking to create guardrails against antisemites and conspiracy theorists within the MAGA movement, against a growing cadre of bad-faith right-wing influencers leading the charge to embrace extremist voices into the conservative coalition.

The conference concluded with Vice President JD Vance all but taking the side of the extremists, while offering fulsome praise to his friend Tucker Carlson as an essential part of the Republican Party coalition.

The last several days also featured news of an eye-opening Manhattan Institute focus group of Gen Z Nashville-area conservatives reluctant to offer any negative reaction toward Adolf Hitler and sharing numerous antisemitic stereotypes about Jews. (One 29-year-old woman offered this representative reaction about Hitler: “I think he was a great leader, to be honest. I think what he was going for was terrible, but I think he showed very strong leadership values.”)

The weekend ended with a Jewish Insider scoop that a Trump administration nominee for a senior position at the State Department has a long track record of making derogatory comments about the Jewish community, characterizing Jews as religiously incorrect and in need of conversion.

This moment was further underscored by the hideously antisemitic tirade that Candace Owens went on over the last few days, barely eliciting any serious pushback from conservative movement leaders. Meanwhile, former journalist Megyn Kelly, during her own speech Friday at the TPUSA conference, chose to go after Shapiro and CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss even as Kelly has publicly steered clear of criticizing Owens, citing the fact that she’s a young mother and a personal friend. (Shapiro, she said, is no longer a friend after he criticized her in his speech Thursday night.)

Shapiro, long one of the leading voices on the right, opened the conference with a warning that the conservative movement is in danger from “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair.”

He called out Tucker Carlson, Owens and Kelly by name. “We must not let fear of audience anger deter us from telling the truth; we must not let fear of other hosts deter us from telling the truth,” Shapiro warned. “The fact that Candace has been vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years on end while others fly cover for her is … cowardly.”

JTA: StopAntisemitism names Tucker Carlson ‘Antisemite of the Year’ as 2024 winner Candace Owens ramps up anti-Jewish rhetoric

The ignominious award came as Carlson said antisemitism was un-Christian at the Turning Point USA convention.

The activist group StopAntisemitism has awarded the conservative personality Tucker Carlson its ignominious honor of “Antisemite of the Year,” citing his frequent invocation of classic antisemitic stereotypes.

The announcement comes as Carlson sits at the center of controversy on the American right about whether extremists should be welcomed in the Republican Party. It also marks the second year in a row that StopAntisemitism has selected a right-wing figure for its accolade, after years of awarding the mantle to mostly left-wing figures.

“Carlson mainstreams antisemitism by platforming and praising Holocaust revisionists and Nazi apologists, while hiding behind irony and plausible deniability,” the group said in a statement. “By legitimizing extremist voices and weaponizing conspiratorial imagery at massive scale, he has helped drag antisemitic ideas back into the mainstream.”

A watchdog presence with more than 300,000 followers on X, StopAntisemitism regularly mobilizes against activists and social media posts. The group has faced criticism for what some perceive as an inordinate focus on Muslim personalities, pro-Palestinian actions and non-prominent individuals. Its defenders deny that, pointing out that StopAntisemitism also regularly spotlights neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers on the right.

Its finalists for Antisemite of the Year included pro-Palestinian celebrities Ms. Rachel, Cynthia Nixon and Marcia Cross; mixed-martial-arts athlete and Holocaust denier Bryce Mitchell; two personalities associated with left-wing network The Young Turks; and social media personalities on both the far left (Guy Christensen) and far right (Stew Peters).

Carlson received the accolade on Sunday night, at the end of a weekend in which he was a keynote speaker at the convention of Turning Point USA, the young-conservatives group founded by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated this fall. In its announcement, StopAntisemitism noted Carlson’s speech at Kirk’s memorial service, in which he described the murder of Jesus in a way that both his critics and fans interpreted as implying that Jews or Israelis had been behind Kirk’s assassination.

At the convention, the Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro continued his campaign against Carlson and Carlson declared himself to free of the anti-Jewish animus that he has long been criticized as propagating.

“Let me just affirm one final time. Not only am I not an antisemite — and I would say so if I was — I’m not an antisemite for a very specific reason,” Carlson said in his speech. “Not because it’s unpopular or my donors don’t like it. I don’t have any donors. I’m not an antisemite because anti-semitism is immoral in my religion. It is immoral to hate people for how they were born.”

It was the same explanation that Vice President JD Vance offered earlier this month when he said in an NBC News interview that he believed antisemitism is wrong.

In his own speech to Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, Vance again refrained from criticizing extremists in the Republican Party, saying that he opposes “purity tests” for inclusion in the conservative movement. He also said he believed that antisemitism in the United States was being fueled by “a real backlash” against U.S. aid to Israel..

As the convention was underway, last year’s “Antisemite of the Year,” the right-wing streamer Candace Owens, embarked on a four-hour broadcast eviscerating Shapiro; amplifying antisemitic theories, including that Jews controlled the slave trade; and promoting a classic work of antisemitism by August Rohling, a German Catholic who believed in the blood libel and argued that the Talmud is a secret guide used by Jews for nefarious purposes. Rohling died in 1931.

Daily Caller article”

Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a fiery speech Sunday, closing down AmericaFest by commenting on the growing rift inside the conservative movement.

Vance proclaimed that “every American is invited” to the America First movement, adding that “we have far more important work to do than canceling each other.” While the VP didn’t call anyone out by name, he offered a direct repudiation of Ben Shapiro’s speech Thursday calling Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson, right-wing podcaster Candace Owens, Steve Bannon and others “frauds and grifters.”

“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” Vance remarked. “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform,” he said. “Let me just say the best way to honor Charlie is that none of us here should be doing something after Charlie’s death that he himself refused to do in life.” (RELATED: Megyn Kelly Updates AmericaFest As To Whether She And Ben Shapiro Are Still Friends)

Vance went on to say that “we build by adding, by growing, not by tearing down.” Vance then added that Charlie Kirk “understood that any family can have its disagreements, its tough conversations, we can learn and improve and treat one another better, we can love each other despite the disagreements. But winning demands teamwork.”

Carlson dismissed Shapiro’s attacks, calling it akin to “watching your dog do your taxes, while Kelly responded Friday, saying Shapiro “had the nerve to call me a friend right before he called me a despicable coward.”

Erika Kirk endorsed Vance for president in 2028. The conference drew over 30,000 attendees.

Vance Refuses to Take Sides in G.O.P. Fight Over Bigotry

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Vance Refuses to Take Sides in G.O.P. Fight Over Bigotry

The vice president’s plea for a big-tent coalition at an annual conservative gathering belied the cracks in his party over antisemitism, racism and conspiracy theories.

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Vice President JD Vance speaking during Turning Point’s America Fest in Phoenix on Sunday. This year, the event showcased the intense jostling over the direction of President Trump’s movement and who it would platform.Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York Times

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Zolan Kanno-Youngs covers the White House.

The bitter infighting over antisemitism, free speech and bigotry during Turning Point USA’s annual national conference not only exposed fissures in President Trump’s movement but also laid bare a challenge for his potential successor.

How would his likely heir apparent handle an explosive debate among Republicans over whether extremists and conspiracy theorists should be embraced or excluded from the conservative coalition?

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance gave an answer, suggesting he was more than willing to forgo imposing any moral red lines.

“When I say that I’m going to fight alongside of you, I mean all of you — each and every one,” Mr. Vance said at Turning Point USA’s annual gathering, AmericaFest, where prominent conservative leaders called on their peers to stop promoting conspiracies and hate. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests.”

The vice president’s plea for a big-tent coalition, however, belied the cracks visible in the past week in his party. The annual conservative gathering was just a year ago a platform united under Mr. Trump and elevated by its co-founder, Charlie Kirk, a young rising figure on the right. Mr. Kirk’s assassination in September galvanized Republicans and fueled conspiracy theories among them, and it prompted Mr. Vance to call on Americans to coalesce around criticizing what he called the far left.

This year, the event showcased the intense jostling over the direction of Mr. Trump’s movement and whom it would platform.

Last week, Ben Shapiro, a conservative commentator, warned that the “conservative movement was in serious danger” by those willing to amplify conspiracies, including Candace Owens, the podcaster widely accused of antisemitism. She has also spread unfounded theories about Mr. Kirk’s death. Mr. Shapiro’s warning also targeted Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who recently held a softball interview with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and avowed antisemite. Mr. Carlson later accused Mr. Shapiro of trying to censor him.

On Friday, Vivek Ramaswamy, an Indian American who is running for governor of Ohio as a Republican, also criticized a faction of the party. He went after those who have embraced the idea that so-called “heritage Americans” — a predominantly white group whose families have been in the country for multiple generations — have a greater claim to the nation than more recent arrivals.

Those comments appeared to put Mr. Ramaswamy at odds with Mr. Vance, who has spoken out against “importing millions and millions of low-wage serfs” and argued that mass migration was the “theft of the American dream.”

Mr. Ramaswamy also took on those who have issued derogatory attacks against Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha Vance. And he said Mr. Fuentes and others promoting hateful views had “no place in the future of the conservative movement.”

Image

JD Vance gestures with one hand while speaking behind a lectern in a darkened auditorium. Red stage lighting casts a hazy glow over the bottom of the frame.
As vice president, Mr. Vance has on multiple occasions refused to pick a side over interparty fights over bigotry.Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York Times

Mr. Vance, however, left open the possibility that they did.

“I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce and deplatform,” Mr. Vance said, arguing that Mr. Kirk had welcomed debate. “We have far more important work to do than canceling each other.” [Explicitly rejecting Ben Shapiro’s calls for deplatforming people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes.]

Mr. Vance’s team did not respond on Sunday to requests for comment.

Mr. Vance in the past has disavowed Mr. Fuentes, calling him in an interview with CBS News a “total loser” who had no place in Mr. Trump’s coalition during the 2024 campaign. And he played down Mr. Fuentes’s influence in a blog interview published on Sunday, while bluntly criticizing antisemitism, “ethnic hatred” and attacks on his wife.

But as vice president, Mr. Vance has on multiple occasions refused to pick a side in interparty fights over bigotry.

When the emergence of a Telegram group chat showed Republican elected leaders and young party activists routinely using racist and homophobic language, as well as invoking Hitler, Mr. Vance compared them to “anything said in a college group chat.” He also embraced false claims about Haitian Americans in the 2024 race, declining to condemn those who spread racist conspiracy theories.

And on Sunday, Mr. Vance declined to issue warnings of extremist figures like other speakers at the conference, instead arguing that the coalition was open to all as long as they “love America.”

After receiving the endorsement for president of Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, Mr. Vance encouraged supporters to unite around Mr. Trump’s immigration policies and the targeting of diversity initiatives. The White House has argued that they have unfairly led to the disenfranchisement of white men.

“We don’t treat anybody different because of their race or their sex, so we have relegated D.E.I. to the dustbin of history, which is exactly where it had belonged,” Mr. Vance said, using the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion. “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

He received some of the loudest applause from the crowd when he told attendees that “by the grace of God we will always be a Christian nation.”

Mr. Vance also continued to target Somali Americans after weeks of Mr. Trump’s insulting the immigrant community from the White House. Mr. Vance said Omar Fateh, a Minnesota state senator of Somali descent, had previously run for mayor of “Mogadishu.”

“I mean Minneapolis,” Mr. Vance said of the city with a large Somali American population. “Little Freudian slip there.”

Mr. Fateh said on social media after the speech that he was born in Washington, D.C., and that his father “came to America on a scholarship” in the early 1960s. He added that he was “proud to represent MPLS.”

While Mr. Vance has not announced plans to run for president, he showed signs on Sunday that he had his eyes on the future. He said Democrats were “already talking about 2028” and criticized the party’s potential leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. He said that Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Black Democrat in Texas running for Senate, had a “street girl persona” that “is about as real as her nails.”

Ms. Crockett said in a text message that the vice president was seeking to distract. “Republicans like JD Vance attack my nails and lashes because they can’t keep up with me when it comes to debating the issues,” she said. “While JD Vance is talking about my looks, I’m talking about legislation. I’m talking about lowering the costs for groceries, utilities and health care.”

Mr. Vance’s lack of similar condemnation for fringe G.O.P. figures was met with rebukes from some in his party.

“I’ll never vote for someone who is ambiguous in their stance against antisemitism or who can’t see that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a threat to our long-range strategic interests,” Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, said.

Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser, praised Mr. Vance’s speech, calling it a “fantastic unifying message heading into the 2026 midterms.” Mr. Miller added: “When the time comes, I think the vice president will be ready to pick up the baton from President Trump.”

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

Land Grab: Israel’s Escalating Campaign for Control of the West Bank

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The moral of this is that you don’t want to be under Jewish control where control is enforced militarily, as in the early decades of the USSR. And now the Palestinians. This article has several embedded videos that don’t show up well here and illustrate the gradual process of dispossession. This link works to get access to the article:

NYTimes: Land Grab: Israel’s Escalating Campaign for Control of the West Bank

Every Saturday, sheep owned by Jewish settlers march through the olive groves that Rezeq Abu Naim and his family have tended for generations, crushing tree limbs and damaging roots. The extremist settlers, armed and sometimes masked, lead their herds to drink from the family’s scant water supplies while Mr. Abu Naim watches from the ramshackle tents of Al Mughayir, where he lives above the valley.

“I beg you, I beg you. God, just let us be,’” Mr. Abu Naim recalled telling settlers during a recent confrontation. “Just go away. We don’t want any problems.”

Vast stretches of his family’s farm and wheat have been seized by Israeli settlers who have set up outposts, illegal encampments that can eventually grow to become large settlements, on the nearby hills.

New roads cut through the land on which his own flock of sheep graze — and settlers routinely steal the animals, he said. Six months ago, a masked settler armed with a gun broke into his family home at 3 a.m., he recalled. He described raiders tearing through his son’s nearby home at night last December, slashing tents and stealing solar panels.

The family takes turns at night guarding their sheep against attacks from settlers. On a recent day, we found Mr. Abu Naim resting on pillows, a portable radio pressed to his ear listening for regional news.

Go away. Go away from here. Leave, Mr. Abu Naim said the settlers have told him repeatedly.

“I’m 70 years old, and I’ve been here all my life,” he replies. “But you came yesterday, and you want me now to leave, to go home.”

“This is my home.”

The fate of a farmer trying to wrest a livelihood out of a landscape dotted since biblical times by sheep and gnarled olive trees may seem distant from a modern world of clashing superpowers.

But these remote hilltops and hamlets sit at the leading edge of an intractable geopolitical conflict.

Even as the war in Gaza commanded the world’s attention over the past two years, the facts on the ground were shifting in the West Bank, intensifying the battle for control of the lands of Bethlehem and Jericho, Ramallah and Hebron.

For many Palestinians, they are the foundation of a future state of their own — and a future peace. But for many Jews, they are a rightful homeland.

Extremist Jewish settlers and Palestinian farmers are the foot soldiers in this endless conflict, an extension of the war in 1948 that accompanied the establishment of Israel. And since the Oct. 7., 2023, attack on Israel by Palestinian militants from Gaza, Israel’s far-right government has embraced a playbook of expanding settlements across the West Bank, transforming the region, piece by piece, from a patchwork of connected Palestinian villages into a collection of Israeli neighborhoods.

The unrelenting violent campaign by these settlers, that critics say is largely tolerated by the Israeli military, consists of brutal harassment, beatings, even killings, as well as high-impact roadblocks and village closures. These are coupled with a drastic increase in land seizures by the state and the demolition of villages to force Palestinians to abandon their land.

Many of the settlers are young extremists whose views go beyond even the far-right ideology of the government. They are not generally operating on direct orders from Israel’s military leadership. But they know the military frequently looks the other way and facilitates their actions.

In many cases, it is the military that forces Palestinians to evacuate or orders the destruction of their homes once settlers drive them to flee.

Continues…

 

‘Earliest black Briton’ was actually a white local from Sussex

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‘Earliest black Briton’ was actually a white local from Sussex

A Roman-era skeleton known as Beachy Head Woman, once thought to have African origins, is much more likely to have been from Eastbourne, new DNA evidence shows

Rhys Blakely

, Science Editor
The Times
Reconstructions of a light-skinned woman with blue eyes and a dark-skinned woman with brown eyes.
The reconstruction of Beachy Head Woman’s skull before, right, and after the latest DNA results, left

For a time she was hailed by historians as the earliest known black Briton, a woman who lived and died on these islands during the Roman occupation but whose ancestry was thought to lie in sub-Saharan Africa.

New DNA evidence tells a different story. The skeleton known as Beachy Head Woman was not a long-distance immigrant. Instead, it seems most likely that she was a local, with roots closer to Eastbourne than Eritrea.

Her remains came to light in 2012 when they were found in the collections of Eastbourne Town Hall. A label suggested that the skeleton had been recovered from Beachy Head in the 1950s, but no excavation records have been found. Radiocarbon dating later placed her death between AD129 and 311. An initial analysis of the shape of her skull suggested links with populations from sub-Saharan Africa.

Later DNA analysis seemed to hint instead at Mediterranean origins, possibly in Cyprus, but the data was too thin to be reliable.

Researchers at the Natural History Museum in London have now completed the first full genetic study, using techniques unavailable when the bones were first examined more than a decade ago. High-quality DNA sequencing has shown that her ancestry is similar to other individuals living in Roman-era Britain. The revision reflects the limits of the earlier research techniques that misled experts and inspired facial reconstructions depicting a black woman.

In 2016 a plaque was put up to mark her significance. The sign, erected in East Dean, East Sussex and now taken down, read: “The remains of ‘Beachy Head Woman’ were found near this site. Of African origin, she lived in East Sussex 2nd-3rd Century AD.”
Belle Tout lighthouse and Beachy Head cliffs in England.
Beachy Head, East Sussex
GETTY IMAGES

In the same year, the historian David Olusoga described her being of African descent in his BBC series Black and British: A Forgotten History.

Dr William Marsh of the Natural History Museum, who co-led the latest genetic analysis, said the results had finally solved the mystery. “By using state-of-the-art DNA techniques we were able to resolve the origins of this individual. We show she carries genetic ancestry that is most similar to other individuals from the local population of Roman-era Britain,” he said.

Dr Selina Brace, also of the Natural History Museum and senior author of the study, said the findings illustrated the need to revisit old conclusions as scientific techniques improve. “Our scientific knowledge and understanding is constantly evolving and as scientists it’s our job to keep pushing for answers,” she said.“Thanks to the advancement of technology that has occurred in the past decade since Beachy Head Woman first came to light, we are excited to report these new comprehensive data and share more about this individual.”

Researchers can tell that she was a young woman, aged between 18 and 25, and relatively short by today’s standards, standing just over 4ft 9in. A healed injury on her leg indicates a serious but non-fatal wound earlier in life. Chemical analysis of her bones suggests a diet rich in seafood, consistent with a coastal upbringing.

Much earlier Britons are thought to have had darker skin. Genetic evidence suggests that Cheddar Man, who lived about 10,000 years ago and whose remains were found in Somerset in 1903, had a dark complexion and blue eyes. Lighter skin pigmentation became more common in western and northern Europe later, particularly after the arrival of farming populations, as an adaptation that improved vitamin D production in places with lower levels of sunlight.

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Leftist historian David Olusoga OBE(lol)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Olusoga