Tucker Carlson’s Dark Turn

By James Kirkchick

Thursday, July 24, 2025

 

It’s perfectly valid to question America’s relationship with Israel . . . but I don’t think that’s the reason [Pat] Buchanan is being labeled an antisemite. It’s this kind of . . . relentless bringing up topics related to Judaism. . . . Here’s a guy who has . . . 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. . . . I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that antisemitic? Yeah.

 

 — Tucker Carlson, September 24, 1999

 

Since his firing from Fox News in 2023, Tucker Carlson has been descending deeper and deeper into the fever swamp of conspiracy theories. Guests on the enormously popular, self-produced Tucker Carlson Show have included author Naomi Wolf, who claims that certain clouds are in fact “geoengineered skies,” and Alex Jones, the vaudevillian mountebank whose most monstrous lie — that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was a “false flag” operation perpetrated by the government to confiscate guns — cost him $1 billion in civil damages. At a live taping of the show last September, during which Jones asserted that “the globalists are making aliens by mixing humans and other animals and insects and plants. . . . They gestate them and use cow uteruses to grow them,” Carlson lauded Jones for being “vindicated on everything.”

 

In recent months, Carlson has focused his skeptical eye on a more prosaic conspiracy: the machinations of the State of Israel and what Pat Buchanan infamously called its “amen corner” in the United States. On June 18, four days before President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites, Carlson aired an interview with Republican Senator Ted Cruz that addressed America’s potential involvement in such an operation. While the clip that earned the most attention featured Carlson expressing pseudo-shock at Cruz for not knowing Iran’s population, the crux of their tête-à-tête concerned Israel and the political influence of its American supporters.

 

Prefacing his interrogation with the proviso that he was acting “on behalf not simply of myself but of my many Jewish friends,” Carlson repeatedly pressed Cruz on alleged Israeli espionage in the United States (without mentioning any specific instances of it), rejected the theological basis of some Christians’ support for Israel, and demanded to know why AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has not been forced to “register as a foreign lobby.” When Cruz remarked on Carlson’s “obsession with Israel,” Carlson was indignant, denying that he was thus obsessed seven times over the course of their two-hour-long debate. Indeed, far from being “obsessed,” Carlson insisted that he would prefer not to discuss the subject at all. “I don’t even like talking about Israel,” he complained in the middle of an interview that touched on little else. As to Cruz’s observation that he had a malignant interest in “the Jews,” Carlson angrily replied that he was “just asking questions.”

 

A survey of Carlson’s programming and rhetoric over the past several years, however, makes abundantly clear that he is indeed very much “obsessed” with Israel and the Jews. Carlson has devoted more time and attention to the Jewish state, which he portrays in a uniformly negative light, than to any other country in the world. He has suggested that Israel and its agents have been behind everything from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the promotion of “white genocide” to the deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed entrapment of the world’s most powerful men via the trafficking of underage girls. To listen to Carlson’s show is to come away with the impression that Adolf Hitler was misunderstood, that Israel is a country systematically murdering Christians, and that American Jews compose a bloodthirsty fifth column bent on conscripting their Gentile countrymen to fight Israel’s wars.

 

***

 

Carlson’s obsession first manifested itself while he was still on Fox in the way he spoke about the Jewish president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. No foreign leader, with the possible exception of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been subjected to as much of Carlson’s vitriol. During Zelensky’s visit to Washington in December 2022, Carlson asserted that the wartime leader, who has worn military-style attire since the Russian invasion of his country in solidarity with the soldiers under his command, “arrived at the White House dressed like the manager of a strip club and started to demand money.” The following June, on the premiere episode of his first post-Fox show, “Tucker on Twitter,” free from the constraints imposed on him by that network, Carlson told us what he really thinks. Zelensky, he said, is “sweaty and ratlike, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock.” If the purpose of negatively associating Zelensky with an American investment firm whose CEO just happens to be Jewish wasn’t clear, Carlson also called him “shifty.” The only thing missing from this riff, which sounded like something one might have heard in the locker room of a restricted country club circa 1953, was a barb about the size of Zelensky’s nose.

 

Carlson’s slurs against Zelensky constitute his crudest public remarks about Jews. He is too clever and restrained to descend into full-blown antisemitic tirades à la Mel Gibson (of “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” fame). Carlson has not sunk to the level of his ally Candace Owens, who calls Judaism a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons” and “child sacrifice,” or Kanye West, several of whose antisemitic statements Carlson edited out of a two-hour interview he conducted with the performer while still at Fox.

 

Carlson disguises his obsession with innuendo. A major theme is the dubious loyalty of American Jews. Two and a half months after the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, the populist pundit Saagar Enjeti, a former employee of Carlson’s Daily Caller and a sort of Tucker-in-training, asked Carlson to explain why Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, and other conservative commentators have a “literal allegiance” to Ukraine and Israel, and why “so many of these people don’t seem to have the same level of actual care for American citizens.” Such interlopers, Carlson answered, “don’t care about the country at all” and are “focused on a conflict in a foreign country as their own country becomes dangerously unstable.” Carlson then contrasted Shapiro’s questionable lineage to his own, unassailable rootedness. Unlike Shapiro, “I have no choice” but to prioritize America, Carlson said. “I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. I’m shocked by how little they care about the country.”

 

Earlier this year, in an interview with Curt Mills, the executive editor of the American Conservative magazine, Carlson distinguished between “the neocons or whatever, these fervent intellectuals in Washington,” and those who would be “the foot soldiers” in a future military action, not “intellectuals” on the coasts but “normal American, patriotic, heavily Evangelical people, and the truth is, I think a lot of them are beginning to recognize that their religion does not support this at all.” In fact, “it’s really clear . . . I think it’s a huge problem for the war lobby, which has used these people as its supporters.” In June, Carlson referred in passing to Jane Harman, a former Democratic congresswoman who chaired an intelligence subcommittee, and who is Jewish, as “just a pure tool of the intel agencies . . . and of a foreign government.” On that same show, he defended the honor of former Democratic Congressman Jim Moran regarding his 2003 assertion that “if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.” (Moran, who has represented Qatar since 2017, is an actual “tool” “of a foreign government.”) He then denounced a Jewish critic of Moran as one of several “ghouls like that” who themselves “had, like, committed genocide.”

 

***

 

Since Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, Carlson has become even more brazen in questioning the ethics and loyalty of American Jews. “How did Bill Ackman get so rich?” he asked attendees during an hour-long harangue at a Turning Point USA conference in July, before invoking one of the hoariest of antisemitic defamations. “If you’re getting rich by loaning money to people at incredibly high interest rates, that’s something you’re going to have to talk to God about.” (Ackman is an investor, not a banker.) In an agitated appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast five days before Trump bombed Iran, Carlson rhetorically asked a Jewish-American commentator, “Are you even from here?,” described two Jewish-American media personalities as Israel’s “proxies in the United States,” and raged that Israel “blew up a church in Gaza with my money,” adding, “I’m a Christian, like, no, how about no?” There was more: “That is, you know, a Jewish state, so whatever that means exactly. And so it has an emotional resonance for Jewish people in America, some of whom are my close friends.” The perfect picture of WASP reserve patronizingly continued, “It’s not like, you know, when things happen in Sweden or the U.K., where my ancestors are from, people aren’t quite as emotional.” Thankfully, Sweden and the United Kingdom have not faced daily threats to their existence since they were founded as sovereign states, nor are their populations composed of the descendants of the victims and survivors of the worst mass murder in history.

 

Another way Carlson manifests his preoccupation with Jews is through the selection of his guests. The Tucker Carlson Show is a weekly confirmation of horseshoe theory, according to which the far right and far left have more in common with each other than either of them does with the center. On no other subject is this thesis clearer than Israel and the Jews. On his Fox program and now on his podcast, he has given a platform to retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, who inveighs against “rootless cosmopolitans,” a term for Jews that was coined by Soviet leaders in the Stalinist era. Last year, he hosted a Palestinian pastor from Bethlehem who, in a sermon on October 8, 2023, said of the attack the day before that he was “shocked by the strength of the Palestinian man who defied his siege.” During that interview, Carlson accused Israel — the only country in the Middle East with a growing Christian population — of “blowing up churches and killing Christians” and asked why “self-professed Christians” are “sending money to oppress Christians in the Middle East.”

 

Carlson’s most disreputable guest thus far has been a podcaster and amateur historian named Darryl Cooper. “I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States because I think that you are,” Carlson enthused at the top of the episode that aired last September, ominously titled “The True History of the Jonestown Cult, WWII, and How Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.” In a scattershot discourse that included his likening pre-state Zionists to cult leader Jim Jones and comparing Israel’s Gaza operation to Operation Barbarossa, Cooper explained his unorthodox theses about the Second World War, namely, that the “psychopath” Winston Churchill was its “chief villain,” Hitler “didn’t want to fight,” and the Holocaust was not a meticulously planned attempt at the industrial-scale extermination of the Jewish people but an inadvertent consequence of poor German military planning wherein (emphasis mine) “millions of people ended up dead.”

 

World War II, Cooper explained, is a “mythologized historical event,” the honest study and discussion of which is ruthlessly thwarted by unnamed actors and European laws against Holocaust denial. (“It’s a crime to ask questions?” Carlson asked, that bit of rhetoric and “some of my best friends . . .” being frequent preludes to, respectively, ahistorical drivel and bigoted remarks.) Not to be outshone by his autodidact guest, whom he saluted for his “courage and honesty” and has elsewhere claimed “makes Herodotus look like a TikTok influencer,” Carlson expressed some of his own views about the war, denouncing “the farce of Nuremberg,” condemning Churchill for interning British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, and insisting that Austria — whose citizens welcomed German troops with “cheers and flowers,” as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum puts it — was “an invaded country.” This unedifying colloquy, which garnered 35 million views, was troubling enough that Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial center, issued a statement condemning it.

 

Another Carlson fixation is the supposed incompatibility of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. “It’s the Old Testament versus New Testament,” Carlson explained to a guest in May. “Because the New Testament is universalist. And Jesus says it again and again: I’m here for everybody. It doesn’t matter what your bloodline is. And I’m also opposed to violence. . . . There’s this effort to pretend they’re the same story, but they’re completely different stories.”

 

Counter to this Christian universalism and nonviolence, in Carlson’s telling, is Jewish clannishness and warmongering, the latter carried out by what he frequently refers to as “the secular government of Israel.” Last year, Carlson interviewed a country music singer who falsely claimed that the Rothschild banking family invented Christian Zionism, a religious and political ideology Carlson termed “a lie” that has had “massive effects on our politics that have been very, very negative and resulted in the deaths of a lot of people.” In June, discussing the conservative Jewish commentator Mark Levin, a proponent of the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites, Carlson said, “You watch Mark Levin talk about killing people and it’s really dark. And it’s certainly not something that any Christian can be comfortable with, because Christians are not for killing people, just period.”

 

Three days later, Carlson singled out Levin again in a conversation with Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. According to Greene, who last year refused to support a House resolution condemning antisemitism because it listed “claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel” as an example of it, Levin belongs to a group of people “that prioritize another country over our country.” The congresswoman averred, “I’ve read my Bible and the one thing I know is it says . . . do not murder.” Carlson concurred, stating that if “someone hits you in the face, turn the other cheek. . . . That’s from Jesus. So Christians care above all what Jesus says. . . . How do we get to a point where good people like that are making the case that Jesus wants more bombing?” Putting aside the morally twisted worldview that singles out Israel, among all the actors in the Middle East, for committing “murder,” the purpose of this discourse is to portray the Jews as having forsaken God by defying the commandments he delivered to them.

 

In recent months, a hint of menace has entered into Carlson’s rhetoric about the sins of Israel and its supporters. Discussing the Epstein cover-up with Enjeti, and Israel’s alleged role in it, Carlson said, “I don’t want a revolution, but if you wanted a revolution, this is how you would act.” In May, responding to a guest who complained about Israeli “bravado” regarding its recent battlefield successes, Carlson replied, “I just think it’s getting too out in the open. And I do, I mean, I guess I fret too much in general, but I do worry now that it’s, like, super obvious what’s going on, that things will just devolve into, like, something very ugly.” The guest, a comedian named Dave Smith, agreed, saying, “I am blown away by the fact that anybody who is out there shrieking about the rise in antisemitism is not wise enough to go, We cannot fight a war with Iran right now.” The implication is clear. All this rage, of which Carlson presents himself as a mere passive observer, might lead to violence, and if it does we will know exactly whom to blame.

 

***

 

Paranoia and crankery are comorbidities of antisemitism, and Carlson has embraced several conspiracy theories that purport to expose unspeakable acts of Jewish malfeasance. Earlier this year, Carlson interviewed Clayton Morris, a fellow former Fox host, about the USS Liberty, an American naval ship that was attacked by Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats in a tragic case of friendly fire during the 1967 Six-Day War. For decades, antisemites of various ideological bents have propagated the claim, convincingly refuted by Michael Oren in his definitive account of the war, that Israel deliberately attacked the vessel and murdered its crew. The credentials possessed by Morris — a YouTuber and real estate guru who fled the country in 2019 while facing dozens of lawsuits from investors alleging fraud — to opine on this subject are unclear, but Carlson enthusiastically agreed with his claim that the incident was an Israeli-CIA “false flag.” After Morris asserted that the attack was “intentional,” Carlson exhibited a telltale tic of the conspiracy theorist, defiantly asserting that “you’re not allowed to say it for some reason” after “it” was just said. In June, Carlson again endorsed the Liberty canard and took it a step further by claiming that “Lyndon Johnson allowed the USS Liberty to be attacked. He knew those guys were going to die. . . . He’s the president of the United States allowing, hoping for the death of U.S. troops for some other agenda.” What “agenda” Carlson doesn’t spell out, but that it involves people who observe the Sabbath on Saturday is a safe bet.

 

Featuring underage girls, a private jet, powerful men, a secret island, and Jews, the Epstein scandal has been like catnip to antisemites. Epstein, Carlson has alleged, operated “a blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services, and probably others, . . . the usual darkest forces in the world colluding to make rich and powerful people obey their agenda.” (Carlson’s outrage concerning sexual predators is highly selective: in 2023, he conducted a fawning interview with Andrew Tate, the misogynist internet influencer and creator of the “Pimping Hoes Degree” — “PhD” — program who was then under house arrest in Romania awaiting trial on charges of rape and human trafficking. Tate’s arrest, Carlson said, was “obviously a setup” and a “definition of a human-rights violation.”) Given the righteous certainty with which Carlson has so frequently expressed his confidence regarding the Epstein case, he was bound to be demoralized by anything short of official government confirmation that Epstein had entrapped the world’s most influential men in the service of Israel. Alas, no evidence has been adduced to substantiate the claim that Epstein blackmailed anyone, let alone on behalf of an intelligence agency. The day after the Justice Department announced that Epstein did not have a “client list” and confirmed his death by suicide, Carlson invited Enjeti on his show for a wide-ranging conversation about “Zionist interests” (Enjeti); “Likudnik interests” (Carlson, referring to those in Netanyahu’s party); “Israel hijacking our government” (Enjeti); and Jonathan Pollard (Carlson, referring to the American who confessed to spying for Israel in 1986). It was not until the end of this fevered, two-and-a-half-hour gripe session that Enjeti felt compelled to profess, “I’m not an antisemite.”

 

In practically every conversation about Israel or Jews, Carlson doggedly issues a rhetorical prophylactic against accusations of bigotry. Discussing the Middle East conflict with Glenn Greenwald, Carlson insisted that he’s “someone who’s really tried to avoid this topic and bears no animus towards Israel, I actually like a lot of Israelis.” He continued: “I’m not against Israel. I like Israel, I like going there. Like the Israelis, nice people. . . . I’m not anti-Israel.” To Mills: “I certainly don’t hate that country. I like it a lot, actually.” Israel, he told Representative Thomas Massie, “may be my all-time favorite place to go with my family.”

 

Just as he frequently attests to “liking” Israel, Carlson is equally adamant that he really, truly, desperately doesn’t want to talk about it. “I want to get away from the topic” of Israel, Carlson told Bannon. “As I’ve said five times, I just don’t care that much” about it, he stressed to Enjeti (before going on to accuse Jewish activists of “wrecking my country and lying constantly and encoding those lies into my laws”). Discussing the power of AIPAC with Greene, Carlson protested, “I don’t want to engage. I think it’s weird. It’s always bothered me, but I don’t want to talk about it because I don’t want to fight about it. But it’s been pushed.”

 

Carlson, you see, has no choice but to defend the interests of his country against treacherous “neocons” and “warmongers” and to prevent them from “destroying the right.” He must speak out against wars ginned up by “emotional” Jews whose claims to being American are tenuous at best. “It’s only because we’re getting drawn into a war by a tiny minority of people,” Carlson complained to Bannon, that he talks about Israel. “Why do we allow 3 percent of the participants in this conversation to define the terms?” (A stickler for population statistics like Carlson should know that Jews constitute 2.4 percent of Americans.) “Stop trying to drag my country into war.” Not our country. My country.

 

Carlson’s obsession has landed him some odd bedfellows. Though Carlson claims to “totally oppose his program,” there is one thing he admires about Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist running for mayor of New York who backs government-run supermarkets, rent freezes, and globalizing the intifada: “That guy was the only person in the New York City mayor’s debate to say he wanted to focus on New York City. All the candidates were asked if you could visit a foreign country, what would it be? . . . I think most said Israel.” Two weeks after the U.S. bombed Iran, Carlson conducted an interview that surpassed in sycophancy his 2024 conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Speaking with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Carlson took at face value his claims that it was the Islamic regime’s desire “to live in peace and tranquility with everybody,” and that “death to America” really means “death to crimes, death to killing and carnage, death to supporting killing others, death to insecurity and instability.” Pezeshkian asked Carlson whether he had “ever heard of Iranians killing Americans,” answering his own question: “No.” (The families of the 241 Marines killed in the 1982 Beirut barracks bombing and the over 600 American soldiers killed by Iranian bombs in Iraq would beg to differ.) Carlson, so credulous when it comes to avowed enemies of his country, let these awful lies slide. If only he’d been a tenth as tough on the Iranian president as he was on the junior senator from Texas.

 

***

 

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 his defense, Carlson’s hostility to “warmongers” (a term of derision favored throughout history by fascists, communists, and Tulsi Gabbard) isn’t limited to Jews. “Have you noticed that, like, a huge percentage of war-crazed Republican senators are secretly gay?” Carlson asked, apropos of nothing, on a recent podcast.

 

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. That so many Christians and conservatives — indeed, Americans of all stripes — care about Israel infuriates him. “Authorizing all this killing in the name of Jesus,” Carlson muttered randomly when House Speaker Mike Johnson’s name came up during an interview with the disgraced former Republican congressman George Santos.

 

In his obsession, Carlson is the epigone of Charles Lindbergh, who similarly blamed the Jews for dragging America into a war, and Father Charles Coughlin, the Catholic priest whose antisemitic radio broadcasts reached 30–40 million Americans at the height of his popularity. To be sure, Carlson is a much subtler demagogue than these men. But with a podcast that rivals Joe Rogan’s as the most popular in the world, social media accounts boasting tens of millions of followers, sold-out speaking tours, and the ears of some of the most powerful people in the country, Carlson has an influence that at least matches or even surpasses theirs. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to say that he is the most influential figure on the American right after President Trump himself.

 

Were it not for the dark turn he has taken over the past few years, Carlson would most likely be remembered as a frequently obnoxious but amiable television personality. The juvenile contrarianism, the hysterical laughter at inappropriate moments, the smug certainty, the feigned, knitted-brow seriousness: His public persona earned him haters, yes, but their hate made him relevant. He enjoys playing the heel. Nevertheless, and I say this as a former friendly acquaintance, he had a certain charm and was an undeniably talented writer.

 

At this stage of his career, however, it is safe to say the dominating impulse throughout Carlson’s life has been a hunger for notoriety. The arc of his career attests to this craving for attention. His first foray into television — as a youthful, bow-tied, respectable conservative pundit — will always be remembered for the humiliation he received at the hands of comedian-commentator Jon Stewart, who lambasted him and his Crossfire co-host Paul Begala for “hurting America.” Then there was the ridiculous turn on Dancing with the Stars. His later successful run as a Fox News host ended abruptly for reasons that remain inscrutable but likely have something to do with his growing penchant for conspiracy theories. After years of “just asking questions,” he has reached the nadir to which such questions inevitably lead. Carlson has chosen to exploit the world’s oldest prejudice while pretending that it’s somehow edgy.

 

Ultimately, the reasons why Carlson decided to become America’s leading purveyor of antisemitic ideas matter less than what this development says about our society. Why has “needling the Jews,” the very thing Carlson condemned Pat Buchanan for a quarter century ago, been a safe career move? For the persistent acting out of his anti-Jewish obsession in the national discourse hasn’t put a dent in his popularity; on the contrary, it may have even boosted it.

 

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, 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.