Joyce No Restraint Podcast Ep. 327 Who is the Republican party going to be in the future?

This is the Joyce Kaufman podcast, honest, straight and unapologelic, with your host, Joyce Kaufman. Welcome to this edition of the No Restraint Podcast. I'm your host, Joyce Kaufman, and I know that for many people during this holiday season, you'd really love to have some good news and maybe some commentary that lifted your spirits, but it's pretty tough finding stories these days that will do just that. And in fact, the rise of anti-Semitism, particularly now in the conservative movement, is so disturbing to me. that I have to kind of wrap up the year by addressing it, as Ben Shapiro did at TPUSA America first, because moral clarity and moral courage is always what's required when things start to go haywire, and they have certainly gone haywire in this regard. I mean, just take the Heritage Foundation, for example, a conservative organization that people like me have been relying on. for years to bring us some of the best data, not just data, but also some of the best commentary. And people who were able to bring a real clear message that anyone could understand. And all of a sudden, we got people bolting from heritage as though, you know, somebody was in there coughing and claiming to have COVID. When Hans von Spakovsky leaves, you know, there's a problem. And the conservative scholars are jumping from Heritage over to Mike Pence's new policy shop. And the debate over the direction of the post-Trump right is underway. And one of the first casualties, of course, is the Heritage Foundation and some of its most important conservative scholars and their policy departments. They're leaving. They're leaving heritage, and that's something. I don't think any. any of us really were prepared for. Some 15 or more heritage employees, including the leaders of three prominent policy departments, are jumping to the American Freedom Foundation that the former Vice President Mike Pence established back in 2021. The defectors include the leaders of important policy shops. You got the Edwin Meese, the Third Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, the Center for Data Analysis, and the Center for Economic Policy Studies. The move by John Malcolm and his colleagues at the Meese Center is particularly concerning, especially notable. We're told it is endorsed by Reagan-era Attorney General, Edward Meese, who is now 94 years old and has been a fixture at Heritage. Of course, Mark Levin, my colleague in Talk Radio, was the chief of staff for Edwin Meese during the Trump, rather the Reagan administration, and certainly understood the mentality better than anyone. The Roe Institute is a very important place for conservatives to gather information. It was before Heritage embraced the Trumpian industrial policy. One data project stifled at Heritage.

is taking a look at district by district the impact of Trump's tariffs. Apparently, that became taboo at the Heritage Foundation, much to the chagrin of some pretty bright scholars who we've always trusted. They called us first, says Mr. Mike Pence, about the defectors. They see us as being a consistent, reliable home for Reagan era, simple. conservatism, which of course the Heritage Foundation was founded to promote and did it for decades. But that changed with the new president, Mr. John Roberts, Kevin Roberts, very dramatically. And we have seen his inability to show some moral clarity when it came to the interviews that Tucker Carlson was conducting with Nick Fuentes. This really shouldn't be such a complicated issue, but it has turned into one, and I think everybody's getting to see the real heart of some of the so-called conservatives in the movement. You know, the think tank is usually pretty traditional, but it has ceased to be even moderately traditional. Heritage once supported free trade. Now it's a protectionist organization. It once supported a robust American foreign policy. Now it's a lot of defense hawks that came on board about two years ago. Heritage used to be a supporter of the originalist judicial revolution and, you know, the rule of law. Now, because of Donald Trump's expansion of executive power, whether or not you agree with it, and in many cases I do, you have to be willing to debate the constitutional basis. And Heritage Foundation doesn't seem willing to do that anymore. The Heritage Turn has been the work of Mr. John Roberts and the young... Tucker Carlson admirers that he brought on board. Mr. John Roberts like to say, hey, you know what time it is? Because he thinks that conservatives got locked into old think. Well, the heritage turn is not working out very well because some of the most brilliant minds in there have fled. And without them... There is no Heritage Foundation. Tension's been building inside the building and the organization for a long time. According to Kate O'Dell, she first reported it back in 2023. And then it broke into the open. And it was when... All of a sudden, Mr. John Roberts said there should be no enemies to the right, and he went around defending Tucker Carlson's softball interview with Nazi fanboy Nick Fuentes. Several Heritage Board members have resigned, as has Trump Economic Advisor Stephen Moore.

Monday's departure, though, was the largest, and it really does underscore how far heritage has wandered under Mr. John Roberts. Mr. Mike Pence and his board have set a target to at least raise from donors enough money to finance the defecting analysts for a period of a minimum of three years, and as of Friday, they had set out... to, I believe they had wanted to get $15 million, they're already at $13 million. So obviously, they're not alone in their thinking. When Cully Stimson and Hans von Spakowski resign, you have trouble. And when you have trouble, there will be repercussions that will be felt throughout the conservative movement. Readers know those names, and they... trust, you know, a guy like Hans von Spakowski. Mr. Trump's agenda has been dominating for almost a decade now, but the presidential race of 2028 is going to go a long way defining who the Republican Party is going to be in the future, especially its conservative wing. What is it going to stand for in the future? Heritage might still play a role under new leadership, but its board has been very slow to appreciate the internal dissatisfaction, and it's fundamentally now a collection of people and donors who believe in some things, certain things, and ideas and principles. Heritage has long since abandoned a lot of its... principles on which it was founded and soon there might not be that much left of the old conservative heritage So think about this. You know, Ben Shapiro showed great moral courage with his stand at TPUSA's America First. In standing up to Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro deserves support. And he's going to get it from me. And I don't always agree with Ben. As a matter of fact, I would say we're 50-50. He's not... One of my favorite conservative thinkers, I think he's bright, I think he's thoughtful, but sometimes I think he is just hung up in areas that I'm not. And this past weekend at the Turning Point USA, he took the stage and did what apparently not many people were willing to do. He told the truth, and he drew a line in the sand against anti-Semitism in the conservative movement. And in mince words, he called out Nick Fuentes as exactly what he is, a pro-Hitler racist, whose venom extends far beyond Jews. He's a misogynist. He hates women, including the vice president's wife. He don't like black Americans and Asian Americans and countless others. And so Ben Shapiro confronted the troubling reality that figures like Tucker Carlson have given Nick Fuentes a platform.

They're trying to mainstream this toxic ideology. So Ben Shapiro challenged Tucker Carlson's increasingly anti-Israel rhetoric and, of course, Candace Owens' transformation from someone who built her career with support from Israeli venture capitalists to a voice that demonizes the Jewish people. Turning Point USA draws thousands of young, impressionable conservatives. And recent studies, including some work that was highlighted by Yaya Rosenberg in the Atlantic of all places, show that anti-Semitism among young people is rising at an alarming rate. And despite attempts by some politicians to blame immigration, the data tells a different story. Immigration plays a large part, but you have to look at all the data. I'm one of these people who say, even when it's inconvenient data, I've got to tell the story. And the story is this hatred, this anti-Semitism, is homegrown, and it's spreading. We can't allow ourselves to be used as political pawns in the conservative movement. Too many politicians are now cynically positioning themselves as anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. I don't know. I guess they believe it will win them votes. They see a path to power and take it, regardless of the danger or the damage that they inflict. You know, the past three and a half years should have taught us a very important lesson. You cannot separate the Jews from Israel. The BDS movement understood this from the beginning. Overt anti-Semitism faced resistance. So activists cloak their hatred in anti-Zionism instead. It's the same poison in a different bottle. And what's particularly disturbing is the response from some quarters. Megyn Kelly's defense of people like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, oh, but they're my friends, reveals a stunning moral blindness. Friendship cannot excuse hateful content. Personal relationships cannot override our responsibility to stand against bigotry in all its forms. Josh Shapiro Ben Shapiro joined a small but vital group of truth tellers who have refused to stay silent, unlike JD Vance, who effectively chose silence. Telling you, my eye is on JD Vance, but he does not have my support. You know, Erika Kirk can say what she wants and support who she wants, but I have a very jaded view right now of Mr. JD Vance, our vice president. Personal relationships should never override the responsibility of our leaders to stand against bigotry in all its forms.

So we'll see. History has shown us repeatedly that what begins with the Jews, it never ends with the Jews. And the left has embraced a particularly visible and aggressive form of anti-Semitism that's evident across college campuses and all these progressive movements and this intersectionality. One thing has nothing to do with another. When I see signs in San Francisco where I was recently that show me like rainbow flags in support of LGBTQ LMNOP, and then right next to it is a support of the PLO or Palestinian call. I think to myself, do you not understand that what happens to rainbow-wearing LGBT people in places that are dominated by these Islamists is they are killed? So which part of you're signing your own suicide warrant? It makes no sense to me. So what Ben Shapiro confronted this weekend was an attempt to align an entire conservative movement with anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitic tropes. And if we don't stop this now, it's only going to get worse. And he took real risks by speaking out, saying things that could affect his livelihood and his standing. He did it because he believed the people on the other side. were fundamentally wrong. That's what moral courage looks like. In a room full of young conservatives, Ben Shapiro delivered a message that they needed to hear. Know your values and stand by them. If you want a traffic in hate, then own it. But don't wrap it in conservatism. Don't pretend it's something noble or principled. People like Ben Shapiro who stand in the trenches fighting this battle deserve our support. They're defending all of us, not just the Jewish community, because when hatred is normalized, when bigotry finds mainstream acceptance, everyone ultimately suffers. So the battle at Turning Point USA this past weekend was a microcosm of a bigger struggle. Are you going to allow anti-Semitism to infect political movements from all sides, from the left we expect it, but now from the right? Or are you going to demand better from our leaders and from the media figures and from ourselves? Rejecting hatred in all its forms, even when it comes dressed in political expediency, is not just good for the Jews. It's good for America.

The leading lights of the conservative movement were out there in Phoenix over the weekend for America Fest and Turning Point USA's signature annual convention. You know, it's like a rah-rah cheering party for young conservatives. But what was meant to be a celebration of the slain founder Charlie Kirk ended up dissolving into recriminations between all of his former friends. Things started to go south, and Erika Kirk, his widow, joked that the conference was starting to feel like a Thanksgiving dinner where your family's hashing out the family business. Who doesn't love that? But judging by the cutting speeches that I saw at the event, this feels a bit more like a Christmas dinner in The Bear. And Ben Shapiro kicked it off on Thursday by responding to the wave of anti-Semitism and conspiracyism that has been swamping the right for months. His targets included Candace Owens for suggesting Erika Kirk murdered her husband, baseless trash, and personalities like Megyn Kelly for condoning it. That's cowardice. And in the case of Steve Bannon, Josh Shapiro asked, why was he doing PR work for a billionaire pedophile? He encouraged the audience members to look it up. But Josh Shapiro saved his harshest remarks for Tucker Carlson, whose friendly interview with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist, almost two months ago now, continues to just irritate, royal the right today. There is a reason that Charlie Kirk despised Nick Fuentes, and indeed even chided Dinesh DeSuzza for debating him, Josh Shapiro said. He knew that Nick Fuentes was an evil troll, and that building him up is an act of moral imbecility. And that is precisely what Tucker Carlson did. He built Nick Fuentes up, and he ought to take responsibility for that. And Josh Shapiro's remarks were a honestly remarkable, a frank, and it was a salvo against one-time fellow travelers in the conservative movement. But he suffered from the fact that he was booked on the earlier side of the speaker's list. Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon all were slated to speak after Josh Shapiro, and they didn't take the jabs lightly. Reaching back nearly a decade to the incident that prompted Josh Shapiro to quit Breitbart under Steve Bannon's leadership, Steve Bannon warned the audience that Josh Shapiro is like a cancer and that cancer spreads. He claimed that Josh Shapiro's ultimate goal was to acquire TPSA for himself. There was still a pro-Josh Shapiro faction at the gathering who used their speeches to defend him, and that included Vivek Ramaswamy, the Ohio gubernatorial hopeful. It included talk radio host Steve Dees, who said it was important for Gen X conservatives like himself to go hard to help stop young conservatives from becoming incels. But there's a third faction at play here.

The group that would really not like to talk about any of this ahead of the midterms. Extremely online Justice Department official Harmeet Dillon using exactly the kind of language you want to hear from the head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, she declared on X that she was bored AF. I don't have to tell you what that stands for with the squabbling. Benny Johnson said he was sick of the division and was calling it out to its face. And on Sunday, Vice President JD Vance, without saying Josh Shapiro's name, effectively told Josh Shapiro to stop talking about the growing fissures on the right. president trump he said did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests JD Vance said But by urging everyone to just look past these issues, that third group is essentially siding with Owens and Nick Fuentes. The question of whether racists and anti-Semites are welcome in the MAGA movement isn't just influencer drama. It's a serious thing. So the question of whether it is acceptable for members of that movement to speculate that Erika Kirk may have been involved in the death of her husband whose brutal assassination was witnessed by the entire world? There's only one moral side here, Erika Kirk's side. And that's what Ben Shapiro made perfectly clear. You know, the side of the widow with two children whose husband was shot live on camera in front of all of us. Friendship with the person accusing T.P. USA of a cover-up of Charlie's murder is no excuse for cowardice. Whatever truce Erika Kirk and Owens agreed to last week was shredded by Thursday, when Owens put out a video with a so-called witness who claimed to have seen Erika Kirk at a military intelligence base the day before her husband's murder. We guess, in Owen's view, to plot his death? A day later, Owens weighed in again with a staggeringly anti-Semitic video, where she called Josh Shapiro and his father, belly creatures who slither on and urged her audience to read the Talmudic Jew, a 19th century anti-Jewish tract that became popular with the Nazis. Owens is now arguably the most influential online force on the right with a pod.

ranking among the top in the country and the merit of her ideas being debated at the right wing's most important convention. And to get a sense of how truly hateful her worldview has become, just take a look at what she said as she held up a book and addressed Josh Shapiro. You have absolutely no values that exist outside of the Talmud. You describe yourself as a Talmudic Jew, and I've learned what's in that Talmud, and I encourage other people at home to learn what is in that Talmud so that you know what Ben thinks is. you because he doesn't just hate me. He hates you, too, white men. He hates all black people, okay? If he's following the rules of the Talmud, I mean, when I say hate, they think that we're animals, that they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them, that they have a right to lie to us, that they have a right to sue us and take everything that we have and that they have a right to deceive us. That's some sick stuff that would have been utterly disqualifying not too long ago. Yet only a few hours after that episode went live, Kelly said from the Amfest stage, Megyn Kelly said that she welcomed Owen's questions about whether Israel was involved in Charlie Kirk's murder. i don't think israel has anything to do with it she said but why did i have an obligation to stop candace from asking those questions i didn't and i didn't call her out because i favored her asking them You know, the anti-Semitism controversy didn't just hover over Amfest. It erupted within the crowd. Armour Fadu, a dating podcaster for the popular fresh and fit YouTube show, wore a sweatshirt featuring Sesame Street's cookie monster with a tray of cookies and the message, Let Them Cook. While that might seem innocuous, it appears to be a reference to a Holocaust denial analogy popularized by Nick Fuentes, who during a live stream with his Groyper followers read and rift on a viewer's comment comparing Cookie Monster to Adolf Hitler and murdered Jews to cookies baked in an oven. and as further proof of his intention fattel had called the holocaust the cookie monster event and used the cookie monster analogy himself and rather than being shun though

He was a celebrity amid the Amfess crowd, even wearing the hoodie for a picture with right-wing personality Jack Posobiac, who frequently spoke during the conference. With stuff like that going on, the deck seemed stacked against Josh Shapiro. It also made his speech that much more important. And perhaps at a different moment in time, the headlines about Vice President JD Vance's concluding speech at the Turning Point USA America Fest conference last weekend would have centered on his avowal that we have been and by the grace of God we always will be a Christian nation. But that wasn't the case. Not even the most critical liberal outlets like the New York Times or the Washington Post, both of which could be expected to trash anything, he said, led their coverage with reporting about that aspect of his remarks. Perhaps readers were outraged about him using the phrase Christian nation. Still, however off-putting it may be for many Jews, I don't feel that's a threat to minority religious groups. Either way, the media outlets were right to highlight something else. That's because the truly significant aspect of the vice president's address wasn't about elements of its core in which he spoke about his beliefs on conservative, religious, and family values, and the flawed, amoral vision of the political left that he opposes. Important though that was, the headlines got it right. The most newsworthy aspect concerned his belief that the conservative coalition that he and President Donald Trump lead is one that should draw no lines in the sand about anti-Semitism or any other form of pathological extremism. And that is something that should worry not just Jewish Republicans or conservatives, but everyone who cares about the future of America. context was crucial. Until JD Vance's remarks closed out the conference, the TPSA event was, as columnist Jim Stacey Garrity put it, WrestleMania with podcasters. Thank you for listening. I hope you will pass this along to some friends, and of course the new one will be coming along soon. In the meantime, may God bless you, may God bless Israel, and may God bless the USA. See you next time.

This has been the Joyce Kaufman podcast, available everywhere you get your podcasts.