The real fight in America isn't Republicans vs. Democrats. It's between people who believe in the values enshrined in our Constitution (free speech, free exercise of religion, equal protection, due process, limited government) and people who see that Constitution as something to be torn down and rebuilt.

I'm going to be honest about where I stand. I'm a conservative, and it's my conviction that the left has the bigger radical problem right now. But I'm also convinced the right has a growing radical problem of its own, and if conservatives don't fight it now, we'll lose the very thing we say we're defending. Let me explain both.

Why do I think the left's problem is bigger? Mostly because of institutional power. On the left, radical ideas aren't just shouted from the fringes. They're written in our most prestigious newspapers and spoken by people who now hold real power. In 2022, law professors at Harvard and Yale wrote in the New York Times that "the real need is not to reclaim the Constitution… but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism." Think about that. Not reform it, but get free of it. And I'm not talking about socialism here. Plenty of my friends on the left see socialism as Scandinavian health care, and I'll argue that point with them another day. I'm talking about communism, the ideology behind the most murderous regimes of the last century, and it's no longer a dirty word. In 2021, Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York City, told a Young Democratic Socialists of America conference that "we have to continue to elect more socialists," and named "the end goal of seizing the means of production" among the things "we firmly believe in," even if the public wasn't ready yet. That is the core language of Marxism. To be fair, Mamdani says he is not a communist, and his campaign said that phrase appears nowhere in his platform. But consider who he chose to protect New York's tenants: Cea Weaver, who had posted "Elect more communists" in 2017 and "Seize private property!" in 2018. Mamdani stood by her. And this isn't just a New York story. In a 2025 Cato/YouGov survey, 34% of Americans aged 18 to 29 said they have a favorable view of communism. One in three young adults is warm toward the system that gave us the gulag, the Cultural Revolution, and the killing fields. When the ideology of Lenin and Mao can find a home in a major party's rising generation and its newest big-city mayor's administration, I believe that's a sign of how far the radical left has moved into the mainstream.

The clearest test case is antisemitism, the oldest hatred, which always signals that something deeper is rotting. ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in 2024, the highest in the 46 years it has been tracking. Incidents on college campuses jumped 84% in a single year, to 1,694. ADL also found that out of more than 5,000 anti-Israel rallies it tracked, 2,596 involved antisemitic messaging. In an August 2025 Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, 60% of young voters aged 18 to 24, across all parties, said they sided with Hamas over Israel. Hamas! The group that massacred families on October 7. I believe this is the fruit of what our universities have been sowing, and Jewish Americans feel it: in AJC's 2025 survey, 55% of American Jews said they had changed their behavior in the past year out of fear of antisemitism.

But here's where conservatives need to listen. The same poison is spreading on the right, especially among younger conservatives. This isn't about one loud personality on the internet. It shows up in the polling of ordinary Republican voters, and that should alarm us far more than any single provocateur.

The data are just as sobering. A Manhattan Institute survey of Republican voters in October 2025 found that 37% believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe. Among Republicans under 50, 25% say they themselves openly express antisemitic views, compared with 4% of those over 50. And the same survey found that "consistent church attendance is one of the strongest predictors of rejecting these attitudes." That's a word to the church: the young people drifting toward these ideas aren't in our pews. We need to go get them.

Let me say this plainly, because the data are clear: on antisemitism, the right's problem is roughly as big as the left's. The same survey found that 20% of Democrats and 17% of Republicans either say the Holocaust is exaggerated or didn't happen while also calling themselves antisemitic or calling Israel a colonial state, or else hold both of those views outright. That's a near tie. And no amount of campus chanting excuses 37% of GOP voters saying the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated. That is exactly my point. The right has a serious, growing radicalism problem, and conservatives can't keep pointing across the aisle while it grows in our own house.

So what do we do? Moderates in both parties need to see the radicals in their own party as a bigger threat than the other party. The radicals across the aisle can't take over your party. Only you can let that happen. For conservatives, that means refusing to make excuses for antisemitism just because it comes from people who also oppose the left. I don't want anyone silenced. Let Holocaust deniers make their case, and then let's answer it with the evidence. But we can't nod along. It also means being willing to stand with moderate Democrats who are fighting the same antisemitism on their side. That's why I cheer for Bill Maher, a lifelong liberal I disagree with on plenty. He calls out the radicals in his own camp and pays for it. It's also why I see Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr. as former moderate Democrats pushed out as the radical left took over their old party.

On immigration, we should screen for what our naturalization oath already requires: allegiance to the Constitution. Federal law already bars naturalization for people who advocate the violent overthrow of our government, and non-citizens who preach violence shouldn't be here. Citizens keep their rights, including the right to be wrong. We beat them with arguments and votes.

Someone will ask, "Isn't this just a call to purge people you disagree with?" No. Disagreement is the lifeblood of a republic. The line isn't left or right. It's whether you accept the constitutional rules, and the equal dignity of your Jewish neighbor, that everyone else lives by.

John Adams wrote, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." I believe Christ is our nation's real hope, because he forms people who can keep a republic, and because he was a Jew who taught us to love our neighbor. But renewal starts at home, with each side cleaning its own house.

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