Dan Wen: This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Dan Wen, an editor in New York Times Opinion. My colleague, columnist Michelle Goldberg, recently wrote a profile of 31-year-old James Fishbach, a Republican candidate for Florida governor. Fishbach's become a sensation among some young Florida Republicans with his commitment to affordability and his fierce opposition to immigration and US support for Israel. He also embraces a kind of trollish racism and anti-semitism. Given Fishbach's views, I wanted to ask Michelle, what is it about Fishbach that resonates so much with young Republican voters? Michelle, thanks for being here.

Michelle Goldberg: Hey, thanks for having me.

Dan Wen: So, first things first, this column of yours really connected with audiences. It was one of the most widely read pieces of the year in the New York Times so far. Thousands of people have left comments. But for those who are unfamiliar, give us some background on James Fishbach.

Michelle Goldberg: Sure. And I should say, I mean, to me, James Fishbach as a person is almost less interesting than the movement around him. But so James Fishbach is somebody who's been trying to make it in Republican politics or conservative politics for a long time. Was sort of on the outskirts of the MAGA movement. He was in the news a bit years ago when he wrote a piece for the Free Press about his anti-woke high school debate league. Later he started an anti-woke exchange traded fund that he launched at Mara Lago. These projects ended in scandal and disgrace. And recently, as he's decided to run for governor, he's shifted and he's sort of adopted the positions of Nick Fuentes, who some listeners might know as this kind of famous young like neo-Nazisque troll and very influential young conservative pundant. And so it's this combination of, you know, extreme nationalism. I mean, he's in Florida arguing that Florida's gun laws are too strict and that Florida's abortion laws are too lax, right? This is a place where abortion is banned after 6 weeks where they have, you know, stand your ground laws. He's extremely anti-immigrant, although he is the son of an immigrant himself. His mother is Colombian. But I think what really sets him apart is this insistent focus on Israel and this kind of wink wink attitude towards anti-semitism. I mean and being in the crowds that came to see him, it was often when he brought up Israel that you could sort of feel the energy pick up in the audience that people would start cheering and applauding. I think that is kind of at the core of his connection to some of these audiences.

Dan Wen: That deep appreciation, let's say, of his anti-Israel views. How connected is that to anti-semitism per se?

Michelle Goldberg: So, in some ways, I find these things anti-semitism and anti-Israel attitudes or anti-ionism in general can be hard to tease apart, right? Because I don't think it's anti-semitic to say that, you know, I think that Palestinians deserve equal rights and representation in the land in which they live, all of which at this moment is controlled by Israel. On the right, or at least among the part of the right that takes this kind of America First isolationism very seriously, there is a significant amount of resentment about Israel's role in dragging America to war and again I don't think that's anti-semitic. I mean you had Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, was giving a speech recently where he was saying that that it's anti-semitic to blame Israel for this before. And I just feel like that's a kind of an unsustainable position when you have Marco Rubio out there saying that America had to strike when it did because they knew Israel was going to hit and then Iran was going to hit back. You know, he's since tried to temper that, but people who heard it, I think, were not crazy to hear that Israel was the one driving the bus here, especially in a situation where the administration has had so many shifting ration and has never really made a coherent case for why they've started this war. I don't think you have to be an anti-semite to look askance at the role of Israel in American foreign policy right now. I mean, James Fishbach at some moments is openly anti-Semitic in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with Israel. You know, for example, he was visiting a university and was talking about the junk food served in cafeterias and how it's sort of like anervating and he called it slop. And go slop, if you don't know, I mean, maybe you can figure it out from the context, is a sort of like far-right anti-semitic term for basically, you know, kind of junk food that Jews like forced on non-Jews in order to, I don't know, sap their vitality or something.

Dan Wen: Is this a thing? Is this a thing? This the slapping of vitality through bad food.

Michelle Goldberg: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's sort of where anti-semitism and the Maha movement it's like in the middle of that Venn diagram. I mean no it's not a thing that happens.

Dan Wen: No. I mean not literally, but I mean is it a thing that people actually believe?

Michelle Goldberg: Yeah, it's I think I mean how widely spread this conspiracy theory is I cannot say that it is a conspiracy theory is is true and it's a conspiracy theory that you know again James Fishbach is like very happy to indulge in has nothing to do with Israel you know. Similarly, the way he speaks about Israel is basically being the reason that kind of his audiences don't have any of the things that they want, right? The the monocaus behind all of Florida and the United States's problems, again, I think is obviously he's he's tapping into anti-semitic animists. And although some people in the crowds will tell you or told me, you know, "I don't have anything against Jews. I'm a Christian. and I love everyone," which by the way is also what Tucker Carlson often says. You know, not all of them are that savvy or sort of that well-versed in the distinctions. And so you will also talk to people who will just tell you that, you know, they've recently learned about how Jews run the banking industry.

Dan Wen: Getting back to Fishbach, you noted that his polling in in Florida for the governorship is like 5 to 6% of the vote. So, it's a tiny tiny amount of actual support according to polls. Why do you think it was important to go and cover him to go to Florida and really dig in deeply if he's got such a tiny sliver of potential support?

Michelle Goldberg: Well, because those same polls show him leading among Republicans under 35. And so, I was sort of less interested in writing about where I think the Republican party is today than where it's going. And we've all seen stories about, say, you know, kind of viciously anti-Semitic, viciously racist group chats among young Republicans, polling about far-right attitudes among young Republicans. The conservative writer Rod Dreer has written about the presence of groperism. The followers of Nick Fuentes are called gripers and he's written about how pervasive that is among young Republicans around the administration. And so it just seemed like a way to see that movement, you know, not online, which is where I usually encounter it, but in person.

Dan Wen: Are you concerned that this surge of groperism, as you say, among young Republicans represents the danger that this could be the future of the Republican party? Because these young people are going to get older and will continue to vote Republican presumably.

Michelle Goldberg: 100%. And you know, whether or not they continue to vote Republican, there's going to be a future where my kids are going to live in a world in which anti-semitism is pervasive in a way in which it really wasn't when I was growing up. And you know, I just I was looking around at some of these events and thinking if in 20 or 30 years a real anti-semitic party contends for power in the United States. This is a glimpse of where it's starting.

Dan Wen: So in a way, I guess you could say anti-semitism is becoming politically normalized. Would that be accurate?

Michelle Goldberg: Well, I think absolutely. And we can talk about anti-semitism on the left. I disagree with a lot of people, including a lot of people who write to me that it's an equal phenomenon to anti-semitism on the right, but it certainly exists and it exists in a way that again feels somewhat new and novel. It wasn't there in the same way I think a decade ago, but I think that there's a real effort to try to marginalize it. There's people sort of trying to frantically put the lid on it, but you sort of can't put the lid on mass opinion. And so, like just recently, a Young Republicans chapter at the University of Florida, couple of days after they hosted a big Fishbach event was disbanded over images of some of their leaders giving Nazi salutes. And so, you know, you can disband the chapter, but the people are still there, you know, and you can take Tucker Carlson off of Fox News, but he still has one of the most popular podcasts in the United States. And I should say, you know, we have a president who kind of regularly engages in anti-semitic tropes, even though he's extremely pro-Israel and almost phosmetic in some of his approaches to politics. But, you know, he regularly traffics in conspiracy theories and sort of like anti-semitic adjacent conspiracy theories about the globalists who are running the world. And he's also part of a movement that, you know, treats it as liberatory to be able to engage in ethnic slurs and demonization. And then, you know, and somehow some of the people in this movement thought that you could, you know, demonize Somali and demonize Haitians and demonize Muslims and then hold the line at Jews. And it's just sort of preposterous when you treat taboos as kind of fundamentally oppressive. Of course, the next generation is going to wonder, okay, but why are these taboos the only ones that we're supposed to respect?

Dan Wen: Michelle, I I want to go back to something you said a little while ago that you don't see anti-semitism on the left as equal to the kind of anti-semitism you see on the right. How are they different?

Michelle Goldberg: Again, I don't want to deny that it's there and it's certainly been there in, you know, parts of the pro Palestinian movement. Obviously, not all of it or not even the majority of it. I guess here's where I disagree, I think, with a lot of Jewish writers and thinkers is again that I don't believe that anti-ionism is anti-semitism. If you do, then of course you will see anti-semitism everywhere because there are many people on the left, maybe even most people on the left, who don't believe that kind of the necessity of maintaining Israel as a Jewish state is more important than the necessity of giving equal rights to all of the people who live between the river and the sea. And so there's a lot of kind of left-wing opinion that I think often gets dismissed by Israel supporters as under the rubric of anti-semitism. Some of which I agree with, some of which I don't agree with, but still feel is legitimate. You know, I I do not believe that our mayors or Mandani is an anti-semite. I also draw a distinction between people who are extremely committed to multi-racial democracy and criticize Israel for that reason. I think that that is a stance that is protective of Jews in the United States. To me multi-racial kind of pluralistic democracy the aspiration towards that which has always been somewhat kind of taken for granted in America until quite recently is to me why Jews have been uniquely safe and why they've thrived in the United States and so I just think very differently about the people who are trying to protect that than the people who are trying to destroy it.

Dan Wen: How have anti-Zionism and anti-semitism become so closely associated in our time. What has created the entrenchment of that equation?

Michelle Goldberg: I mean, frankly, a lot of the Jewish establishment has worked extremely hard to treat those two terms as synonymously. And I I don't even mean rhetorically. I mean legally. You know, there's something called the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-semitism, the IHRA definition of anti-semitism. And like forgive me if this sounds kind of like reckendite or obscure but it's actually sort of important for understanding a lot of these policies a lot of Donald Trump's crackdowns on universities etc. So this definition of anti-semitism holds that many many criticisms of Israel not all criticisms of Israel but substantial numbers of criticisms of Israel are a form of anti-semitism. This has been written into law in many places including Florida that this is how we define anti-semitic bigotry. You see college campuses adopting this definition sometimes under duress and it does a number of things. It one it sort of like you know reifies this idea that anti-semitism and anti-ionism are the same thing which ironically is also kind of a conflation that you see a lot among actual anti-semites right who kind of treat Jews and the Israeli government as a single entity but it also ends up creating a lot of infringements on free speech. And I think what I saw in Florida is that these are conservative kids who have grown up among this like ferocious backlash to wokeness. Being told that sort of any policy that's telling you what you can or can't say in the name of being sensitive or protecting a minority group is a kind of woke tyranny. And now they're being told by their leaders, except when it comes to Israel, right? And so, not only does it create this sort of oppositional, defiant desire to say the things that they're not supposed to say, but it also creates this sort of question of like why I have an understanding of sort of how pro-Israel lobbying works and you know, when it's less this sort of like, you know, mysterious string pulling power than it is just like a very organized American political movement. But these kids don't know that. And they both kind of want to flout the rules, but they also are like, why does Israel have all this power? And it just reinforces a lot of their paranoia and suspicions.

Dan Wen: So, how does this all tie into Fishbach support in Florida? I mean, you you pointed out these young Republicans have grown up fighting the woke tyranny. So, does that translate into political support for a candidate?

Michelle Goldberg: Well, yeah. I mean, it is here. And again, one of the things that I think was interesting, one of the reasons I wanted to go to Florida was because it was not a given to me that online discourse would translate into showing up and volunteering for a candidate, especially since, you know, one of the things we sort of know about Gen Z or worry about about Gen Z is that they don't go out, right? Like, they don't get involved in the real world. But, you know, one kid was saying, you know, he had his political awakening listening to Nick Fuentes and now he was volunteering to be James Fishbach's county chair. And so, yeah, what he has done is kind of presented himself as like the only trutht teller, which is something that is helped when you're sort of trying to put a lid on widely held ideas. "I'm the only one kind of brave enough to stand up to the Zionists." And then at the same time is speaking to kids who not all as maybe we'll talk about are you know kind of conservative grew up they voted for Trump but now they're disappointed in Trump a little bit disillusioned the cost of living is crushing for them I mean I don't think I think James Fishbach's solutions to the cost of living crisis are mostly ridiculous and it's certainly not going to be solved by divesting from Israel. But he basically is talking about real crises and giving people someone to blame.

Dan Wen: A classic part of the authoritarian playbook.

Michelle Goldberg: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you asked before, why write about this guy when he's at like 5% in the vote? And you know, he's in some ways a ridiculous figure. Like I said, he has this like trail of failure and scandal behind him, but he wouldn't be the first. He wouldn't be the first demagogue who at first glance is extremely hard to take seriously who ends up tapping into something quite dangerous.

Dan Wen: Yeah. In fact, many losers become demagogues.

Michelle Goldberg: Yeah. Absolutely.

Dan Wen: So let's talk a bit about the war in Iran and how that has had an impact on Fishbach and his supporters and anti-Israel views.

Michelle Goldberg: Sure. Well, I mean look, I think it was, you know, Donald Trump's anti-war bonafites have been extremely exaggerated and there's been a sort of willful misunderstanding of what he did in his first term where he radically increased the number of drone strikes being launched and things like that. Nevertheless, there was this idea among a lot of the young men who voted for him that was, you know, pushed by people like Joe Rogan that this was an anti-war candidate. JD Vance said, you know, in this Wall Street Journal oped that Donald Trump's best policy was not starting any more foreign wars. So to some of these people who supported him, there was no intimation that Donald Trump would do something like this. And then the war seemed to come out of nowhere. You know, Donald Trump never really felt the need to make the case at all. It all felt kind of weird and mysterious. And again, if you just think of, as I do, think of Donald Trump as like an egoomaniac who has people whispering in his ear about how he can be the one to remake the map of the world and take down all of these American enemies, I think it makes a fair amount of sense. But if you don't see Donald Trump that way or if you're kind of inclined to conspiratorial thinking or not, you don't even have to be that inclined to conspiratorial thinking. I mean, again, Marco Rubio basically came out and said, "Israel dragged us into this war and he's tried to rewrite that, but the words were indelible." And everybody who ever had suspicions about Israel's role in American foreign policy, including James Fishbach, who talks about that Rubio quote on the stump repeatedly, you know, sort of took that as proof that that ideas that had previously been dismissed as conspiracy theories have now been confirmed by the Secretary of State. And so the more this war goes bad, the more Americans are asked to make any sort of sacrifice. So even though the casualty count has been thankfully relatively low by the standards of major American war, there are at least a dozen American service members who've been killed. There have been more than 200 wounded. There are all of these economic repercussions and a broader sense that the world is spiraling out of control and people don't know why. And if you're inclined to believe that there is some dark force pulling the strings and then somebody says that "I'm the only one brave enough to tell you who it is," you can sort of see why that is an enticing message.

Dan Wen: Let's take a look at the Trump administration and the universe of right-wing influencers that give it fuel. What role have they played in connecting anti-Israel sentiment and anti-semitism?

Michelle Goldberg: Um, well, that's I mean that's a sort of complicated question because you have such a civil war in that influencer sphere right now and it really predated this war. I mean, you really saw it break out after the murder of Charlie Kirk where you saw an increasing number of conspiracy theories that there was some sort of Zionist plot to murder him. The idea was that Charlie Kirk and again there there are grains of truth here as there are to many conspiracy theories, right? Charlie Kirk really was frustrated with pro-Israel donors who were trying to get him to kind of cast aside Tucker Carlson and he felt a certain amount of conflict between some of his donors and his own misgivings about Israel's war in Gaza. And so, you know, that has turned in the imagination of some very influential propagandists into evidence that there was a kind of massive Zionist plot to have him killed. It sounds crazy, but this idea has real purchase on the right. I mean, it even has purchase within Charlie Kirk's organization, Turning Point, in which you recently saw someone fired because they believed these things, right? So, if people within the organization believe these things, imagine how many other people believe them. Candace Owens, who like Tucker Carlson is one of the most successful, widely listened to, widely viewed podcasters in the United States. You know, this has become the center of her cosmology. And when I would talk to people at these events, the boys usually listen to Nick Fuentes and the girls usually listen to Candace Owens, if I can boil it down like that, you know, but it's not just them. This has kind of spiraled out into a broader war over Israel and American foreign policy. I don't think it's that pervasive within the the MAGA movement at large. Right. Most Trump supporters are still with Trump on the war, but there's a huge rift among MAGA influencers who are the people who sort of help drive right-wing propaganda, create right-wing echo chambers, perpetuate narratives that then often get recycled by people in Donald Trump's orbit. They are fighting bitterly, not just over this war, but over American support for Israel and even more about what you can and can't say about Israel.

Dan Wen: So, let's go back to your column and some of the somewhat amazing poll figures in there on public opinion among Republicans. I think the numbers are 31% of Republicans under 50 identified their own views as racist.

Michelle Goldberg: This is from the Manhattan Institute, which is a conservative organization.

Dan Wen: And 25% said they see their own views as anti-Semitic. Which is kind of incredible that people would just admit that and acknowledge it.

Michelle Goldberg: Right? And so I think that that probably understates the real number of those views, right? That's only people who are self-identified. And even a lot of people at these events I was going to, including one person who said his political consciousness was formed by Nick Fuentes, would also deny up and down that they're anti-semites.

Dan Wen: So to end, I want to ask about someone that you mentioned specifically in your reporting. One of the supporters of Fishbach that you met down there, Lacy Gaou, she seems so interesting politically and her situation seems so representative of the people you spoke to.

Michelle Goldberg: Well, her situation, I don't think her politics are. I mean, I think her situation is is representative in that she has a job. She's a social worker working with foster kids. She's very young. She's engaged to be married and they live with roommates and sort of have very little hope of being able to move out and start an independent life just because things are so expensive. What was so striking about her was that, you know, when I approached her and this was outside of a Waffle House, right? Like James Fishbach at the time he was on what he called this Waffle House tour. So he would have an event like the event I went to at this country club and then afterwards he would go to a Waffle House. And so we get to this Waffle House and I got there a little bit after him because I was still doing interviews at the previous event and it is just absolutely mobbed, you know. So he's inside doing meet and greets. I can't get anywhere near inside, you you know, I try sort of tried to push through the door and I just then gave up and was hanging around with this crowd outside and, you know, spoke to this young woman and she said, "The last time I came out for something, it was for Black Lives Matter." And that really struck me because that was obviously a very different sort of political event. And you know, she was someone who she told me she was a big fan of Mum Donnie and her views sort of seesawed I think between left and right. You know, she had also been, I think, shaken by Charlie Kirk's murder. She listens to a lot of Candace Owens. She thinks some things Nick Fuentes says make sense. She really appreciated Fishbach saying that he wouldn't take money from Apac, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. And she actually she's a registered Democrat who told me she was thinking of changing her registration so that she could vote for Fishbach in the primary. I mean Fishbach had told me before this that he's getting Democrats at his events that he is talking to people who say that they're going to change their registration. I don't know that I actually believed him until I saw it for myself.

Dan Wen: That's so interesting. And Lacy herself acknowledged that her views seem somewhat contradictory.

Dan Wen: Who are the voices out there that can speak to young Republicans or young people in general who feel that they're searching for what the path is?

Michelle Goldberg: Yeah. Well, look, I'm not sure that there are who it is that can speak to young Republicans because right, if you've been sort of radicalized into into bigotry, you know, kind of how you dradicalize people is maybe another conversation. But given that there are people who are like not how we think of as swing voters but maybe are swing voters or at least you know are kind of attracted to these extreme versions of populism but that can maybe be won over by a more inclusive version of populism. I mean to that extent figures like Mumani who know how to communicate online because that's where these kids are getting all their information. That's how they know about James Fishbach. That's how they started following James Fishbach. And Manny really knows how to reach people there. He talks about affordability which is again very top of mind for these people. He knows how to stand up to Apac which whatever you actually believe about Apac there is tremendous resentment on the right and the left about the role that they're playing in our politics. But he does all these things with a positive inclusive vision. He's not the answer to all of our prayers, but a sort of young charismatic politicians who know how to talk about the very real economic struggles and sort of despair that a lot of young people are experiencing. Who can instead of putting all that into a rubric of like white nationalism are able to weave all that into a narrative of inclusive multi-racial democracy and populism I think are the way forward in in terms of sort of reaching this generation.

Dan Wen: Michelle, is there any hope for somehow counteracting this kind of reflexive bigotry, acceptance of taboos like anti-semitism and racism? Is there is there any antidote to that out there in our society?

Michelle Goldberg: I mean again I would hope that you know a sort of more positive vision of multi-racial democracy can be an antidote but I would say that the antidotes that people have settled on so far I mean what you see I think among an older generation is this very understandable panic you know a panic that to some degree I share and they have been motivated by that panic to try to crack down on this speech more and more right to try to put these speech codes in places at universities to try to write off politicians like say California Congressman Roana as anti-Semitic, you know, to delegitimize this kind of discourse. And it it's not only that it doesn't work, it's that it's really counterproductive because all it does is create this sort of like gnostic glamour around anti-Israel speech in which it seems to be this secret forbidden knowledge and like the unspoken key to everything that's happening in your life. And at a time when people feel understandably confused and desparing, that is really an accelerant anti-semitism.

Dan Wen: Michelle, it's been so great talking to you. Thanks so much.

Michelle Goldberg: Thank you so much for having me.