The New Racism Emerging in the 21st Century

Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, founded the party on an uncompromising moral principle: racism is evil, and no human being should be judged or enslaved because of the group into which he or she was born. With the Emancipation Proclamation and victory in the Civil War, Lincoln and the early Republicans shattered the chains of chattel slavery and declared that the color of one’s skin must never determine the content of one’s rights.

That was the Republican Party’s original promise—radical, revolutionary, and rooted in the belief that every individual possesses equal moral worth under God and the law. Today that promise is threatened by a new racism: antisemitism, the oldest hatred, now re-emerging in modern garb. It has already taken root in corners of the Democratic Party, where criticism of Israel too often slides into classic tropes of Jewish power, money, and disloyalty.

But alarmingly, it is also beginning to appear on the populist fringes of the Republican Party, carried forward by influential voices who should know better.

The most prominent carrier of this new racism on the right is Tucker Carlson. What once passed as edgy foreign-policy skepticism has, in recent months, crossed unmistakable lines. Hosting white nationalist Nick Fuentes for an unchallenged two-hour interview, joking about shadowy rooms of men “eating hummus” plotting against Christians, and repeatedly leaning on conspiratorial language about “neocons,” “globalists,”  - these are not accidental dog-whistles.

They are the updated vocabulary of an ancient prejudice. Candace Owens has gone further still, flirting with Holocaust minimization and bizarre blood libels that would have been unthinkable in mainstream conservative circles only a few years ago.This is the new racism: antisemitism repackaged as “anti-elitism,” “America First” isolationism, or skepticism of foreign entanglements. It borrows the same poisonous myths that once animated the Know-Nothings, the Klan, and the America First Committee of the 1930s—myths the Republican Party has historically rejected.

The danger is not that these voices yet dominate the GOP; they do not.

The danger is that silence, equivocation, or fear of alienating a loud online minority will allow this fringe to grow the way antisemitism was allowed to grow on the progressive left. The Democratic Party’s failure to police its own members—its reluctance to condemn outright the dual-loyalty smears and blood-libel rhetoric that have emanated from parts of “the Squad” and campus radicals—offers a cautionary tale.

Republicans must not repeat that mistake. This is why Russ McAlmond, the Marine veteran and financial expert now running for U.S. Senate in Oregon, has made “Zero Tolerance for Antisemitism” a cornerstone of his campaign. McAlmond refuses to share stages with, endorse, or excuse figures who traffic in this new racism, no matter how large their audiences.

Antisemitism, he insists, is racism—nothing more, nothing less—and a party that claims to stand against identity politics cannot make exceptions for the oldest identity politics of all. More than a policy position, McAlmond offers the Republican Party a philosophical path forward: Ethical Individualism. This framework, which he lays out in his book of the same name, calls on Americans to see one another first and foremost as unique individuals—not as avatars of a race, religion, or tribe to be praised or feared en masse.

It is Lincoln’s vision brought into the 21st century: judge each person by the content of his or her character and the merit of his or her ideas, never by immutable group identity.The Republican Party must return to its nobler past. It must once again become the unequivocal enemy of group judgmentalism in all its forms—whether directed at African Americans in 1865 or at Jewish Americans in 2025.

By embracing Ethical Individualism as its guiding human-relations philosophy, the GOP can reclaim the moral clarity that freed a people and saved a nation. And perhaps, in time, Democrats will see the same light—recognizing that true equality demands the rejection of every form of racial and ethnic collectivism, including the new racism that now threatens Jews from both the left and the right.

Until that day comes, the party of Lincoln has a duty to lead. Russ McAlmond is showing the way. The rest of the Republican Party must follow.