What Tucker Carlson means when he talks about Israel
Tucker Carlson can read the room. In November 2016, just days after President Trump’s first election victory, he launched a prime-time show on Fox News largely devoted to the proposition that liberal elites were replacing white Americans and Europeans with Black and brown immigrants.
Now, as many Americans sour on Israel, he’s in the vanguard once again. Over the last year or so, he’s become a leading champion on the right for abandoning America’s long-held support for the Jewish state. “Hopefully the first thing we do when and if this war is resolved is detach from Israel,” he told his audience in early April.
Mr. Carlson’s worldview hasn’t fundamentally changed. Like other prominent figures on the anti-Israel right, he still sees the West as menaced by alien civilizations bent on its destruction. He has just turned his attention to what he sees as the alien civilization that populates the Jewish state. And he’s done so with the same penchant for conspiracy theories that has long marked his public commentary. Now he is using a destructive, ill-defined and unpopular war to give those theories even greater reach.
Consider a monologue Mr. Carlson delivered in March, in which he offered a bizarre theory as to why Israel attacked Iran: The strike was, he said, part of a stealth plan to demolish the Al Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, which would then incite a global religious war. The real victims of that religious war, Mr. Carlson claimed, would be “Christian, Western, white countries.” Israel’s “real target,” he suggested, “is not the mullahs in Iran. It’s us, as it always has been.”
Mr. Carlson’s theory is preposterous, but it reflects a perspective growing on the American right. He is at the forefront of a cohort of right-wing commentators who don’t merely condemn Israel’s manifold crimes against the Palestinians and others in the Middle East. They also suggest something far more troubling: that Israel’s crimes stem from its Jewishness, which they claim threatens the Christian West. [Continue reading…]