by Jonathan S. Tobin
If the White House and conservative thought leaders don’t condemn the former “Fox News” host’s platforming of Jew-hatred, a tipping point may soon be reached.
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| Conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson speaks during the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA who was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., on Sept. 21, 2025. Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images. |
Extremists always pose a dilemma for mainstream politicians and journalists. Ideally, the best way of dealing with them is to ignore them. Hate-mongers thrive when they are able to seize the spotlight and hold onto it. Deprived of attention, they wither on the vine when they are confined to the fever swamps of the far right or left, where most people don’t seem to notice or care about them.
However, if their audiences are sufficiently large and they are treated by people who matter, whether national figures or opinion leaders, as falling within the proverbial Overton Window of acceptable discourse, ignoring them isn’t really an option.
And that is the problem with Tucker Carlson.
The former Fox News host turned podcaster doesn’t just have a massive audience of viewers of his program and followers on social media. He’s also still treated as someone who not only matters but is acceptable company to keep for the president and vice president of the United States, as well as lesser figures in the conservative ecosphere of politicians, pundits, podcasters and journalists.
That is how the ideas he promotes—whether in his own voice or by platforming them on his podcast—are, by extension, also treated as something that normal people should consider as worth debating, if not acceptable in their own right.
Platforming hate
So, when Carlson hosts an open antisemite like Nick Fuentes, who speaks of his desire to drive “Zionist Jews” out of American public life, in the course of what can only be described as a friendly conversation in which they debate how far to go in their opposition to Israel and its Jewish supporters, it’s not only deplorable. It’s an obvious sign of how antisemitism on the right is not a problem that can be dismissed as unimportant or uncommon. Rather, it’s a moment when a tipping point may be about to be reached, when it will no longer be possible to describe conservative Jew-hatred as insignificant.
That’s long been the position of most Jewish conservatives, and they weren’t wrong to think that way. In recent decades, antisemitism has been mainstreamed on the political left while remaining marginal on the right.
The intersectional left-wing base of the Democratic Party has largely adopted the mindset of fashionable academic ideology that conceives of Israel and Jews as “white” oppressors of people of color. They falsely view Israel as a product of “settler-colonialism,” instead of an expression of self-determination of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland, where they are indigenous.
That is the basis for the willingness of so many on the political left to accept the blood libels about the Jewish state committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip that have flooded the liberal media since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. And it’s why Democrats are now overwhelmingly an anti-Israel party, as polls now show and as has been demonstrated in congressional votes, where most of the members of their caucuses have supported banning weapons sales to Israel. Even those Democrats who long claimed to be strong backers of the Jewish state, like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), have started to largely abandon it.
Extremists are going mainstream
The most prominent manifestation of the rising tide of Jew-hatred that has swept the globe in the last two years has emanated from the red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists. The best American example of this is the way that New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a veteran Israel-hater and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is on the verge of becoming the next mayor of New York City with support from mainstream Democrats.
This has stood in strong contrast to Republicans, who have become largely a lockstep pro-Israel party in the last few decades. Conservative Christians and others on the right have been ardent supporters of Israel, even eclipsing most Jewish groups in their willingness to stick with it in the face of the vilification that has rained down on it since the terrorist atrocities of Oct. 7. While the left and its leading publications have continued to mainstream and normalized antisemitism as well as the demonization of Israel, the right has stood firm with few exceptions, backing President Donald Trump’s historic pro-Israel policies.
In this way, critics of the left could argue that while antisemitism remained alive on the far right, it was marginal and contradicted by the stands of anyone who counted in the Republican Party and mainstream conservative thought.
But the tsunami of post-Oct. 7 Jew-hatred, driven by animus for Israel, has also made itself felt on the right.
Various figures who might have been characterized as part of the lunatic fringe have in recent years been gaining a toehold in the public square. Fuentes and Daryl Cooper are two such examples. And the person who is giving them a leg up is Carlson, who had them on his podcast.
Cooper is the amateur historian, Holocaust denier and antisemite hosted by Carlson last fall. Carlson praised him as the “most important popular historian of our time” and allowed him to float his bizarre theories about Winston Churchill being the villain of the Second World War, as opposed to Adolf Hitler, and that the deaths of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were the result of logistical problems caused by the war rather than a deliberate campaign of extermination by the Nazis and their collaborators.
He was widely criticized after that episode for platforming and endorsing lies about history. Though this was far from the first time that Carlson had made clear his animus for Israel and the Jews—something that had become a staple of his program since Oct. 7—he continued to be treated as a member of the Trump family inner circle and a friend of Vice President JD Vance, as well as embraced by most of the mainstream conservative pundits as a legitimate public figure.
Demonizing Jews
But his latest show with Fuentes, in which he plays the same “I’m just asking questions” role while giving a boost to a hate-monger, makes his comfort with open antisemitism even more obvious.
The 27-year-old Fuentes is a notorious white nationalist, antisemite and Holocaust denier who has a wide following on the far right. He and his supporters are known as groypers and, as is typical of such extremists, have long been more focused on opposing mainstream and even deeply conservative Republicans because they are supporters of Israel than in opposing the left.
His opinions are unvarnished neo-Nazism, replete with dark warnings about slaughtering Jewish “devil-worshippers” once he and his followers take power. He has said “I love Hitler” and attacked “Talmudic Jews” (i.e., Jews of all denominations who practice post-biblical Judaism) as a threat to the world. He blames the Jews for everything, even alleging that Israel was responsible for the fact that he accidentally live-streamed LGBTQ pornography on his website.
He was an avowed opponent of the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk because he was a Christian Zionist. Kirk, who has taken on the reputation of a secular saint since his assassination last month, went so far as to deride the hate-monger as “vermin” and vowed never to have anything to do with him. But in an odd twist, Fuentes has seemed to gain prominence since Kirk was murdered. And that was apparently the cue for Carlson to invite him onto his program, where the two engaged in an amicable exchange for more than two hours during the course of which Fuentes vented his hate for Jews.
It is true that at one point in the conversation, Carlson contrasted his own brand of hate with that of Fuentes, saying that he liked Jews who shared his opposition to Israel, like journalist Glenn Greenwald. He claimed that his Christian beliefs led him not to seek to target Jews per se, though he regarded Israel and its supporters as a threat to America and claimed that he hated Christian Zionists like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, “more than anybody” because they are practitioners of “Christian heresy.”
That’s an astonishing confession for someone who was allowed to speak at the Kirk memorial service, where he engaged in traditional tropes of antisemitism without rebuke from the organizers or other speakers.
That is also a position that he often mentions in his newsletter, claiming that Israel and AIPAC control U.S. foreign policy while defending Qatar’s far more extensive information and influencing buying operations as exemplary—something that has fed suspicions that his efforts are being financed, either directly or indirectly, by Doha.
By treating Fuentes as a legitimate figure whose opinions ought to be known, Carlson did exactly what he attempted to do with Cooper. In platforming Fuente’s rants, replete with standard antisemitic tropes about Jews being a “stateless people and unassimilable,” as well as a unique threat to the United States that must be ended, Carlson was going beyond his previous dalliances with Jew-hatred that were mostly focused on bashing the State of Israel.
The far left and far right agree
Listen closely to their exchanges, and it becomes clear that there is little difference between that and the positions of Mamdani. While the New York mayoral candidate’s opposition to Israel and the Jews is dressed up in different language, Fuentes, Carlson and Mamdani all believe that Israel is at the center of a conspiracy against their vision of justice.
Jew-hatred isn’t just being unkind to Jews or prejudiced against them. It’s an idea rooted in politics which alleges that the Jews are the obstacle to all that is good, in much the same way that some religions depict Satan.
For Mamdani and others among the intersectional left, Israel is the lynchpin of international settler-colonialism and racism, such as when—in the course of supporting the defunding of police in 2023—he said “that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”
For Carlson and Fuentes, Israel is the obstacle to a true “America First,” or rather, “America only” foreign policy in which the United States will achieve freedom from the foreign influences that they think are dragging it under and suborning white Christian dominance.
Whether you lean left or right, if your guiding principle is that all of the evil in the world always leads back to Jews and/or Israel, then you are a textbook example of antisemitism.
Barring a turnabout in the next few days, Mamdani is about to become mayor of New York, and his allies are entrenched as the leaders of the Democratic Party with a real chance of attaining power in the coming years, while Carlson, Fuentes and fellow antisemite Candace Owens are merely prattling away on podcasts.
But that is no reason for conservatives to dismiss Carlson as insignificant.
Just as the intersectional left slowly gained traction during the “progressives” long march through educational, cultural and political institutions, so, too, could right-wing antisemites do the same—or at least make major inroads among conservatives if left unchecked.
A line must be drawn
More to the point, so long as Carlson is welcome at the White House and other conservative pundits like Megyn Kelly not only won’t condemn him, but take umbrage at the suggestion that they are morally obligated to do so, his attitude toward antisemitism will become normalized on the right.
Trump blundered back in 2022 when he publicly dined with rapper/antisemite Kanye West and Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. He subsequently disavowed the former’s hate and said he had no idea who Fuentes was. And he characteristically refused to apologize.
Since then, he’s stayed away from that pair, but he also set an example by which others on the right have been able to continue associating with people like Carlson. In opposing calls to isolate or condemn him, some conservatives have said that they are supporting free speech and don’t want to mimic the left’s attempts to “cancel” people whose views they don’t like.
Nevertheless, unless a line in the sand is drawn between the Trump administration and other leading conservatives and such open antisemites, it isn’t going to be possible to go on pretending that there is a tangible difference between the attitudes of the right and the left when it comes to antisemitism. Anyone who isn’t willing to do that, no matter where they are on the political spectrum, must stand accused of complicity in the normalization of Jew-hatred.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek
and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American
political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle
East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think
Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin
Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and
YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor
and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.
He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other
writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and
foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia
University.
Source: https://www.jns.org/is-tucker-carlson-normalizing-antisemitism-on-the-right/
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