Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
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I take no pleasure in the subject of this column. But it is an important one.
It’s important to us as Americans, as conservatives, as Christians, and as Jews. It’s especially important to those of us who call ourselves Christian Zionists, as I proudly do.
I have known Tucker Carlson for well over twenty years – not intimately, certainly. Not as a close friend. But as a like-minded colleague whose tremendous media savvy and marketing skills propelled him into the stratosphere of broadcast journalism.
I think we first met when he was co-hosting CNN’s Crossfire, and he invited me on to discuss my 2002 book,
We both worked at NBC in the mid-2000s, and Tucker interviewed me when he was an anchor on MSNBC (before it, too, went off the deep end) just after I had returned from Israel covering the 2006 war with Hezbollah for Newsmax and NBC News.
Later, he graciously platformed some of my columns on his new website, the Daily Caller, and in 2011, we were both honored on the same podium with journalism prizes from Accuracy in Media.
I also appeared many times on a weekly radio show hosted by his father, Ambassador Dick Carlson, in Bethesda, Maryland. Dick was a noted “Christian Zionist,” and a vice-chair of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, a pro-Israel group. The sound engineer was Tucker’s brother, Buckley.
All this to say, I like Tucker Carlson.
But something happened to Tucker Carlson in early 2023 that profoundly changed him.
In his own words, he was “physically mauled by a demon or something unseen that left claw marks on my sides. Then I was seized with this very intense desire to read the Bible.”
The demon attacked him during his sleep, with his wife at his side and four dogs in the bed. In the interview he gave the Blaze 18 months later, he said he still bore the marks and woke up in the morning to find blood in the sheets.
So what about that intense desire to read the Bible? Tucker says he purchased a Bible, but one without commentary, because he did not trust Christian preachers; in fact, he disdained most of them.
And in reading that Bible, he discovered the anti-Semitic narrative that he put on display in his speech at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, when he spouted the age-old blood libel that the Jews killed Christ, the Messiah.
In Tucker’s account, which was not just heretical but inaccurate, he said that Jesus was a revolutionary who challenged the Jewish ruling class, so of course they wanted to get rid of him.
But as we learn from the Gospels, the truth is just the opposite. Jews had been expecting a Messiah who would liberate them from the Romans, and, in their view, Jesus was not it.
Jesus told those who followed his Way to respect the rulers, not rebel against them, because his Kingdom was elsewhere, not of this earth.
For centuries, the Catholic Church as well as the Reformation under Martin Luther, continued to embrace the blood libel that the Jews were “Christ-killers.” It was a great stain on Christian believers everywhere and for all times.
It wasn’t until the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany that the Christian Pope – Pius XI – officially denounced anti-Semitism, saying in 1938, “Spiritually, we are all Semites.” He later issued several encyclicals condemning racial hatred and Nazi ideology.
Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI made the Church’s rejection of anti-Semitism even more explicit. But of course, if you reject Christian preachers, you might have missed that.
Tucker has welcomed onto his podcast a host of Jew-hating personalities, some who openly professed an admiration of Adolf Hitler, denied the Holocaust, and who called for killing Jews. Many have falsely accused Israel of committing “genocide” against Gazans.
Tucker himself has denounced “Christian Zionists” as people infected with a “brain virus,” and has repeatedly attacked conservatives such as Ted Cruz who he calls supporters of an “Israel First” mentality.
Earlier this year, Tucker blasted what he called the “utterly pointless bombing of Iran” by the US and Israel, saying that the Islamic regime was “not even in the top 25 threats to us.”
He has called Hamas and the Iranians “peacemakers,” and promoted guests who call Sharia law a perfectly benign legal system.
You can find the litany of Tucker’s own brain virus all over the Internet, especially since the disastrous brief speech recently by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who whitewashed Tucker’s anti-Semitism and reaffirmed his place within the conservative movement.
Let me be clear. There is no place within the conservative movement for someone espousing anti-Semitic views, as Tucker Carlson has been doing at every occasion in recent months.
There is no mainstreaming Jew-hatred. There is no tolerance of a “difference of opinion” when that opinion has been shown by history and by current events (October 7) as an invitation to genocide.
Stop watching Tucker’s podcasts. Stop funding the Heritage Foundation. And don’t vote for phony conservatives (such as Marjorie Taylor Greene) who think Tucker is right in condemning the “Israel-Firsters.” I am a proud supporter of Israel, and a proud American.
In attacking the “Israel-Firsters” Tucker is attacking the entire America First movement.
Many Americans have a special place in their heart for Israel because they understand that American values come from the Bible. You don’t become a Christian without first adopting the Jewish Bible. That’s why we call it, our Judeo-Christian heritage. Jesus was, after all, a Rabbi, and never abandoned the Law.
I wrote a book in 2003, called Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America, that describes how Muslim Jew-hatred, enshrined in the Koran, was used by al-Qaeda as an excuse to attack America.
This is no different. Tucker Carlson’s pernicious — and evil — interpretation of the Christian Bible as an anti-Semitic text should be familiar to any student of history. It has led to centuries of anti-Jewish pogroms, and ultimately the Holocaust.
As America First conservatives we must denounce this interpretation openly, repeatedly, and vigorously. As Jesus said, Get thee behind me, Satan.
Timmerman is a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute. His latest work of non-fiction, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, was recently published by Bombardier Books.
