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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