MAGA Icon — and Ex-Tucker Carlson Favorite — Denounces His Old Ally and ‘The New Antisemitism’

Victor Davis Hanson, the longtime conservative commentator and former frequent Tucker Carlson Tonight guest, denounced his old ally in a long essay about “The New Antisemitism” for The Free Press.

While Hanson had submitted that Fox News wouldn’t be able to “replace” Tucker Carlson after the network ousted him back in 2023, he did not mince words about the far-right commentator in his latest essay.

“Blogger Darryl Cooper—implausibly proclaimed by Tucker Carlson as perhaps ‘the best and most honest popular historian in the United States’—claimed on a Carlson podcast that Adolf Hitler’s armies in 1941 did not really intend either to starve or murder hundreds of thousands of Jews, Ukrainians, and Russian prisoners, even though there is a trove of documents that show premeditated Nazi assumptions of and plans for precisely such mass death,” observed Hanson. “Why would Nick Fuentes, who at times in the past has praised both Hitler and Joseph Stalin, call for a holy war against Jews, and denied the Holocaust, remain unchallenged by Carlson on the same venue?”

After outlining what he perceives as the causes of the “recent surge of antisemitic vitriol on the right,” Hanson argued that right-wing antisemitism “manifest[s] itself” in “the form of America Firsters who fault both America, past and present, and much of Trump’s America First movement.”

“To form any coherent antisemitic, or anti-Israel narrative, omission, disingenuousness, and selectivity are essential,” he continued. “When Carlson interviewed Pastor Munther Isaac, an Arab Christian cleric from Bethlehem (who justified the October 7, 2023 attacks), Isaac offered a preposterous story of Israeli-inspired expulsions of Christians from his historic city. Yet even the simplest of clarifications were never demanded from Isaac: Why did the Christian share of the city suddenly drop to 10 percent of the population while mostly under Palestinian governance of the West Bank? Why are Christian populations in the Muslim world shrinking, but growing in Israel? Why are there far more Arab Christians living now in Israel than in the West Bank and Gaza strip combined?”

“In a recent debate with Senator [Ted] Cruz, who in the not-so-distant past would have been seen as a kindred conservative to Carlson, the host appeared eager, and fully prepared with facts and data, to confute Cruz,” But was that because Cruz really posed an apparent greater menace to the country and conservatism than did a Darryl Cooper or Nick Fuentes?” wondered Hanson before offering an answer:

In the Cruz interview, Carlson demonstrated his accustomed intelligence, skill, and knowledge to cross-examine people and agendas he now apparently opposes, including many conservatives whom, until recently, he vigorously and effectively had supported. That he did not do so with the likes of firebrands Cooper and Fuentes was not due to any inability, but suggests he was either unwilling or perhaps found himself in agreement with some or many of their views.

“The supporters of the MAGA movement are not seeking limitless fealty from conservatives, but simply expect that religion and race remain incidental—not essential—to our common identities as Americans,” he concluded. “To expect anything less would be to wound fatally the revitalized conservative movement even as it is posed for even more remarkable successes.”

Hanson is a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, whom Carlson turned to often during his days at Fox, and appeared on Carlson’s independent program as recently as March 2024. In an earlier episode, Carlson had deemed him “the incomparable Victor Davis Hanson.”