The scent of opportunity
The gallery of fools, morons and haters we have to contend with aren’t as dumb as they make themselves out to be.
JNS
Aug 22, 2025
Over the years, I must have read tens of thousands of pages devoted to the topic of antisemitism, and I’ve yet to find a better explanation for its persistence across the centuries than this one: “Everything seems impossible or terribly difficult without the providential appearance of antisemitism. It enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over and simplified. If one were not an antisemite through patriotism, one would become one through a simple sense of opportunity.”
The author of those words was himself an antisemite—Charles Maurras, a 19th- and early 20th-century French Catholic monarchist. Maurras founded the Action Française movement and became one of the more visible tormentors of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish army officer falsely convicted of espionage in 1894, following a trial driven by the burning antisemitism inside the courtroom and on the streets outside.
Maurras’s legacy is deeply relevant to the character of antisemitism today. For one thing, we live in an age that distrusts complexity and nuance, reaching for utopian solutions because “compromise” is a dirty word. The profound shift from traditional media to an endless stream of personality-driven, no-holds-barred posts, videos and talk shows has rewarded the loudly ignorant.
As is always the case in the early stages of a cultural transformation, the participants revel in their ability to finally say what was previously unsayable. When it comes to Jews, nothing escapes their vengeful scrutiny—not Israel’s right to exist, not the Holocaust, not the emotional and political support for Israel among Jewish communities outside the Jewish state.
Then there is Maurras’s well-observed and cynical point about opportunity. The gallery of fools and morons we have to contend with—among them political commentator Candace Owens, for Fox News cable-TV host Tucker Carlson, English broadcaster Piers Morgan and their ludicrous guests—aren’t so dumb as to have not sniffed out an opportunity here. The receptiveness to antisemitism that remains stubbornly embedded within non-Jewish societies has been skillfully exploited by this crowd for commercial gain and brand exposure, now reaching the point where we need to stop seeing them as critics to respond to and start seeing them as enemies to defeat.
Most importantly of all, Maurras functions as a precursor to the antisemitism we are confronting today. It doesn’t really matter that none of these people will have heard of him. Even if they don’t realize it, they have picked up on the trend he pioneered.
While Maurras was a supporter of the collaborationist Vichy regime who was imprisoned in France after World War II, his antisemitism was not the Nazi kind, obsessed with pseudoscientific “racial” categories. Rather, Maurras was a political antisemite. For him, post-revolutionary France had abandoned the noble moorings of French governance in favor of an alien republic serving Protestants, Freemasons and, above all, Jews. An early advocate of the “dual-loyalty” conspiracy theory, Maurras regarded French and Jewish interests as diametrically opposed, making the Jew the natural enemy of France.
This trope, which flies in the face of the empirical evidence of Jewish soldiers, Jewish diplomats and Jewish politicians loyally serving the countries of which they are citizens, has been eagerly grasped by parts of today’s American right, as well as most of the left. Which brings me, unfortunately, to the subject of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
Megyn Kelly (R) interviews Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
Her interview last week with the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly was a truly grotesque spectacle. Kelly, who made sure to refer to her “Jewish friends” as often as possible as she delivered her dog-whistle questions, cooed sympathetically as the simpleton seated across from her delivered answers in a language approximating English.
Whether Taylor Greene really believes the nonsense she spouts or whether she consciously lies is not a question that can be answered. Either way, her potpourri of falsehoods, stereotypes and innuendos went unchallenged—not because Kelly can’t afford a researcher, but because she wants to promote Taylor Greene’s campaign to tar American Jews as disloyal to their republic through the medium of an interview.
All the predictable topics came into the spotlight. On aid to Israel, Taylor Greene whined that the $3.8 billion provided annually by the United States was robbing ordinary Americans. Since, as is widely known, the terms of the package require the overwhelming amount of the money to be spent with American contractors, that argument is easily dispensed with. So, she attempted to deal with that point as well, claiming that Israel has been granted an exception that enables it to spend dollars provided by America on Israeli contractors.
“Oh, wow,” Kelly murmured, instead of asking Taylor Greene, as any serious journalist would have done, to back up her assertion. She could have pointed out that under the current regime, Israel can spend about a quarter of that money on Israeli contractors, but that measure will be entirely phased out by 2028, when all the money will need to be spent in the States.
Parts of the interview were laughable. Taylor Greene presented AIPAC—a law-abiding American organization with Jewish and non-Jewish supporters—as a cross between an extra-terrestrial invading force and the Church of Scientology, cajoling lawmakers into joining its visits to Israel and ensuring they return home suitably brainwashed. “I don’t know how to explain it,” said the congresswoman (the only honest words to come out of her mouth during the entire interview), but Kelly joined in enthusiastically nevertheless, complaining about the amount of “outreach” to her from Israel’s supporters.
Then the conversation took a sinister turn, with Taylor Greene expressing horror that her congressional colleagues donned kippahs while visiting Jewish holy sites in Israel. “They wear a, uhhh, a kippuh,” she said, patting the top of her head, “even though they’re Christians! They’re not Jewish, but yet they’re adorning Jewish attire, and they’re at these Jewish religious sites.” Throughout, Kelly nodded sympathetically, never once asking whether a non-Christian who removed their hat in a church or a non-Muslim who removed their shoes at a mosque could be considered as similarly disloyal.
While the snooty Maurras probably would not have had Taylor Greene as a guest at his dinner table, he would have been delighted by the substance of what she said, if a little dismayed at her lack of eloquence. Because for those in our society who cannot cope with complex explanations for why wars start or why economies collapse or why health care is such a struggle, someone like Taylor Greene is a gift.
As Maurras would have said, she, along with her growing cadre of co-thinkers, “enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over and simplified.”
We can only ask, then, who is more dangerous: someone who articulates these positions as part of a coldly planned strategy, or someone who genuinely believes they speak the truth? Right now, we are dealing with both.
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