A senior White House reporter for MS NOW argued Friday that much of the antisemitism and Islamophobia surfacing in American communities traces back to a quarter-century of U.S. foreign policy decisions, pointing to Washington’s role in arming, funding and intervening in conflicts abroad.
Vaughn Hillyard made the remarks during an appearance on MS NOW’s “Way Too Early,” according to a clip flagged by Breitbart News. Hillyard was discussing a speech Vice President JD Vance delivered at the Republican Convention, in which Vance paid tribute to the late Charlie Kirk on the one-year anniversary of his death before turning to the question of U.S. military engagement overseas.
According to Hillyard’s account, Vance highlighted Kirk’s opposition to wars and American interventionism, then told the audience that Americans remain free to disagree with the administration on a policy question or two — an apparent nod to the war in Iran — while urging them not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” and to keep debating such matters openly.
Hillyard’s argument on domestic tension
Hillyard used the moment to press a broader point about where domestic hostility comes from. He said much of the vitriol inside American communities — whether expressed as antisemitism or Islamophobia — has been “largely derived in our communities over the last 25 years in the aftermath of policy decisions coming out of Washington,” specifically those involving the extent to which the United States arms, supports and intervenes in countries other than its own.
In his framing, the causal chain runs from policy to public sentiment: decisions made in the capital about overseas military involvement ripple back into how Americans treat one another at home. Hillyard did not offer statistics or name specific incidents in the clip, presenting the claim as his own assessment of the past 25 years rather than as the finding of a particular study.
His comments arrive at a moment when both antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents have drawn sustained national attention, and when arguments over the roots of that hostility have become their own political battleground. Critics on the right have generally traced rising antisemitism to ideological currents on the left and in academia, while critics on the left have pointed to Islamophobia fueled by the post-9/11 security apparatus and by U.S. wars in the Middle East. Hillyard’s remarks situate him closer to the latter explanation, tying both phenomena to a common source in Washington’s foreign policy.
Vance’s convention message
The immediate context for Hillyard’s segment was Vance’s convention address, which Hillyard described as an effort to hold two ideas together: honoring Kirk’s anti-interventionist stance while defending the administration’s own foreign policy choices. Vance’s appeal to the audience — that disagreement on a policy issue or two should not lead Americans to reject everything else — was, in Hillyard’s telling, a recognition that debates over Iran and military intervention are live inside the coalition rather than settled.
That tension between an anti-war base and an administration conducting military action abroad has been one of the defining internal arguments on the right in recent years, and Vance’s remarks appeared calibrated to keep that argument contained.
Hillyard’s response suggested the consequences of those decisions extend well beyond the coalition. If domestic bigotry is downstream of overseas military policy, as he argued, then the debates Vance wants to keep civil may be inseparable from the foreign policy questions the administration is answering.
The segment aired on MS NOW, the network formerly known as MSNBC. Breitbart News published the clip and a transcript of Hillyard’s comments.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2026/09/12/ms-nows-hillyard-a-lot-of-antisemitism-islamophobia-in-u-s-derived-from-u-s-policy/