Sprawling National Review Feature Deems Tucker Carlson ‘America’s Leading Purveyor of Antisemitic Ideas’

A sprawling new feature article in National Review magazine deems Tucker Carlson “America’s leading purveyor of antisemitic ideas.”

Under the headline “Tucker Carlson’s Dark Turn,” James Kirchick laid out the evidence for Carlson having an unhealthy preoccupation with Jews in excruciating detail before eventually remarking that “Perhaps, in isolation, none of these incidents and outbursts — calling a Jewish politician ‘ratlike’ and ‘shifty,’ giving a respectable hearing to a Holocaust denier, imputing dual loyalty to American Jews, denouncing the Nuremberg Trials, accusing Jews of traducing the Old Testament, suggesting that Jews harbor an ancient blood lust, falsely claiming that Israel murdered American servicemen in cold blood, alleging that Israel established an international child sex ring to blackmail ‘rich and powerful’ men, railing against usurious Jewish billionaires, conducting a softball interview with the leader of a theocratic dictatorship committed to the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state — perhaps none of these, on its own, constitutes prima facie evidence of antisemitism.”

“In toto, however, Carlson’s remarks reveal, at the very least, an unhealthy interest in Jews. His is not a private obsession; he aims to rupture the moral, strategic, and religious roots of American support for Israel, and to denigrate the role of Jewish Americans in public life,” submitted Kirchick, who concluded:

Thirty-four years ago, William F. Buckley Jr. published a 40,000-word essay in this magazine titled “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” wherein he renounced two prominent conservative figures for comments — much like Carlson’s — revealing their anti-Israel and anti-Jewish animus. Among many other calumnies, Joseph Sobran, a senior editor at NR, had called Israel an “anti-Christian country,” and, more notoriously, [Pat] Buchanan had suggested that Jews seek to aid Israel by starting wars that Gentiles have to fight. Both men, Buckley concluded, had engaged in antisemitism, and both of their reputations suffered because of Buckley’s careful but devastating reproach.

The evidence of Carlson’s antisemitism is far more plentiful, and damning, than that used to indict Buchanan. Today, however, there is no figure on the American right with the gravitas of Buckley, who could literally write extremists and bigots out of the conservative movement with a well-argued essay. But even more central to the rise of Carlson and others of his ilk is that the moral and political guardrails that used to protect our civic life from the pollutive emanations of illiberalism and uncivilized behavior have all but vanished. The antibodies that a healthy society develops to resist Jew-hatred are fast dissipating. Eight decades after the end of World War II, the fading memory of the Holocaust, the rise of identitarian thinking, and the ideological corruption of American higher education have contributed to making our country a place where growing numbers of citizens find it reasonable to blame humanity’s perennial scapegoat, the Jews, for what ails society. Tucker Carlson’s enduring popularity indicates that the cancer on civilization that is antisemitism metastasizes apace.

Notably, Carlson once denounced Buchanan for exactly what Buckley had accused him of.

While Carlson argued that it was “perfectly fair to question America’s relationship with Israel” during an appearance on C-SPAN back in 1999, he identified Buchanan’s problem as being “this kind of, as I’ve said this, this relentless bringing up topics related to, Judaism. I mean, famously, Pat, you know, always beats up on Goldman Sachs but never Morgan Stanley.”

“I think, and it took me years to come to this position. I mean, I’m not throwing the term anti-Semite around, but you reach a point when you say, ‘Well, gee, you know, here’s a guy who has gone out of his way to, to defend [John] Demjanjuk and other accused Nazi war criminals, who’s constantly attacked Israel, who’s attacked American Jews for supporting Israel unduly, who’s implied that American Jews push America into wars in which non-Jews die,’” he continued. “There really is, and again, I’m not hysterical on the subject, but I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that anti-Semitic? Yeah!”