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What is there to say about Tucker Carlson’s rather diabolical post-Fox News career trajectory that hasn’t already been said? I’m not even sure what there is to say that I haven’t already said myself.
From filming Soviet-style propaganda in Moscow to saying he would have consoled Osama bin Laden’s family to calling Deitrich Bonhoeffer a bad Christian to blaming Winston Churchill for causing World War II to praising Nicolas Maduro’s alleged “social conservatism” to blasting the Hebrew Bible as “genocidal” and so very much else in-between, the nauseating carnival ride that is “The Tucker Carlson Show” takes the viewer so far through the looking-glass that he risks popping out of Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani’s sphincter on the other side.
Is Carlson, the leading arsonist of America’s fifth column “retard right,” a clear psychopath? Surely. Is the Doha Shill a veritable lunatic? Certainly. Is he a grotesque liar? Undoubtedly. Has he lost touch with reality? Absolutely. Is he pocketing money from enemy Islamic regimes? Probably. Has he converted, or does he intend to convert, to Islam? Maybe!
We can spend all the time in the world debating Carlson’s peculiar motives for declaring jihad on the very nation he risibly purports to support and the civilizational inheritance to which he unpersuasively professes allegiance. But more important than Carlson’s subjective intentions—whatever they may or may not be—are the cancerous effects of his treacherous actions.
On Monday, three days following the publication of a cartoonish and scandalous conversation with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee that was less earnest “interview” than unhinged assault, President Donald Trump met with Carlson at the White House. The meeting came after the past weekend’s revelation, courtesy of the Israeli “national conservative” thinker Yoram Hazony, that Trump had already directed Carlson at a Jan. 11 meeting to end his intractable fighting with Jews, Israelis, and their Christian Zionist allies.
Earlier on Monday, Eli Lake had scooped for The Free Press that GOP fundraisers and campaign hands have become increasingly voluble in sounding the alarm about Carlson to Trump and his inner circle of advisers. The reason for sounding that alarm, as I have been doing on my own show for some considerable time now, is simple: Tucker Carlson increasingly talks and sounds like a Nazi. And Nazis, it turns out, are not popular. Most “normie” Americans—those who do not dwell in certain fetid online fever swamps—have little to no interest in making common political cause with Nazis. Some are even the descendants of those who fought, and perhaps died fighting against, the Nazis. Carlson would have been more likely to man artillery for the Wehrmacht, firing down on those storming the beaches of Normandy.
The post-Huckabee podcast interview timing of Monday’s White House rendezvous with Tucker Carlson the Doha Shill is clear. For the second month in a row, the most important man in the world has taken time out of his busy day to rebuke Carlson and demand a course correction. The online betting markets, after all, currently show Democrats poised to recapture the House this November; they’re set to make a real play at recapturing the Senate as well. Presumably, the Trumpian logic goes as follows: It would be helpful if Carlson, who asserts fealty to Trump even as he knifes him and his agenda at every opportunity, were to focus on the economy, crime, and immigration—not DNA-testing Israeli Jews to see if they are actually the Children of Abraham.
Um, you think?
Unfortunately for Trump and the GOP, that it isn’t going to happen. Carlson didn’t budge off his pet obsession by even a millimeter after the first Trump request, and this time won’t be any different. Perhaps if Carlson faced meaningful repercussion from those whose good graces he covets—such as Vice President JD Vance or the late Charlie Kirk’s outfit, Turning Point USA—then he might change course. Maybe. But maybe not. Because at this point, having traveled as far down this hellish road and having spat on his late pro-Israel father’s legacy as much as he has, it’s clear that Carlson is not acting in a rational manner. Rather, he is guided by dogma. Carlson’s is a jihad not of convenience, but of zealotry.
True, Carlson told Nick Fuentes, the leading neo-Nazi of his generation, that he hates Christian Zionists “more than anyone.” And I don’t doubt that Carlson means what he says. But he hates these Christians—most of whom are probably more religious than Carlson, who I’m reliably informed doesn’t even attend church—because of their affinity for the Jewish people and/or the Jewish state of Israel. And it is Carlson’s unhealthy and unshakeable fixation with the original People of the Book—and their biblical homeland—that drives so much of his show’s painfully stupid, brain rot-inducing content these days.
Many good-faith observers of the demon-scratching freak show that is Tucker Carlson confess genuine befuddlement as to the podcaster’s undeniable obsession with the Jews. As my friend and fellow podcaster Steve Deace put it toward the end of an insightful X thread about the Carlson-Huckabee dust-up, “I have absolutely no idea what Tucker’s wants to result from the questions/tropes/narratives he’s raising.”
Well, I think I do.
It’s obvious that Carlson thinks Jews in America—“organized Jewry,” as Fuentes put it during their chummy on-air bromance—have far too much power. It’s equally obvious that he thinks Jews in America act in subversive fashion, prioritizing parochial and/or foreign interests over America’s own national interest. Carlson wants to remake the American Right and the Republican Party coalition as judenrein—and purged of those pesky philo-Semitic Christians and Christian Zionists as well. He wants an end to the current iteration of the Right as a political coalition downstream of the ecumenical Judeo-Christian biblical inheritance. In its stead, he wants something more pagan, more pro-Islam, and more anti-Western.
It’s ugly stuff. One shudders at the thought. And yet I think Carlson’s desired end goal for the Jews, specifically, is even darker than that.
Tucker Carlson filmed his interview with Huckabee on Wednesday, February 18—which was Rosh Chodesh Adar, or the first day of the month of Adar, on the Hebrew calendar. It famously says in the Talmud that, “When the month of Adar enters, [Jews] increase in joy.” The reason for that joy is simple: Next week, on the 14th of Adar, Jews worldwide will celebrate the holiday of Purim—a commemoration of the great ancient victory achieved by the Jews in Persian exile, as recorded in the Book of Esther. For well over two millennia, the holiday has been a testament to Jewish endurance and survival.
Carlson, much like the villain Haman from the Book of Esther, harbors a seething hatred for the Jewish people and seeks to leverage his proximity to power to destroy them. For Haman, this desire takes the form of a pronounced decree of annihilation. For Carlson, I believe it includes an eagerness to incite anti-Semitic violence—maybe outright pogroms—and perhaps even a longing for a King Ferdinand- and Queen Isabella-style edict of expulsion to kick the Jews out of America. (As long as the Jews don’t go to Israel and further solidify Israel as a distinctly Jewish state, apparently—God-forbid!)
This isn’t an exaggeration. If it walks like a Nazi and talks like a Nazi, consider the possibility that it may well just be a Nazi. So, Tucker Carlson wants the Jews to just go away—by any means necessary.
Thankfully, the Purim story, as any reader of the Hebrew Bible knows, has a happy ending for the Jews. It is instead Haman who is ultimately hung from his own gallows (Esther 7:10); for the Jews, by contrast, there was a military victory over the Persian would-be oppressors and “light and joy, and gladness and honor” (Esther 8:16).
Throughout human history, this has been something of a repeating pattern: Those who turn on the Jews are themselves in turn cursed, much as it was first prophesied early in the Book of Genesis. There are no exceptions to this rule. It is as ironclad as gravity itself. Accordingly, Tucker Carlson, who in a properly functioning country would have been checked into the loony bin a long time ago, will at some point get his comeuppance. He will slink back to the sewer whence he came.
The only question is whether Carlson will take down the American Right—and thus, America itself—with him.
