Tucker Carlson’s influence on American politics has always been hotly debated. When Carlson was still at Fox News, former UK prime minister Boris Johnson reportedly complained of Carlson’s sway over Republicans in Congress regarding support for Ukraine. “I’ve been amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson,” Johnson said at the Atlantic Council last year. “Has anybody heard of Tucker Carlson? What is it with this guy?”

What is it with this guy? is a good summation of the frustrating experience of continually watching people fall for Tucker’s carnival act. And while his exit from Fox undoubtedly reduces the amount of nonsense that Republican lawmakers are fed from the fever swamps, it likely has made Carlson’s Jew-baiting into even more of a problem.

There are two aspects of anti-Semitism in particular that make Carlson’s Internet show so poisonous to the discourse.

The first is that there is no statute of limitations on Jewish-related conspiracy theories. Take, for example, the classic blood libel. It posits that Jews kill non-Jews (especially children) and use their blood for consumption or religious ritual. In Europe, the blood libel traces its roots back to 12th century England, and it never really went away.

And I mean never. A modern proponent of the blood libel was recently invited to speak at the prestigious Oxford Union, where he was treated to a warm welcome. If the public can’t get tired of listening to the same story of Jewish devilry for literally a thousand years, they never will.

That’s just one example of a well that never runs dry. Indeed, Jew-baiters are particularly exhausting in part because there’s never a need for new material, so we find ourselves on the defensive against the same hallucinatory incitement every few years.

Which brings us to an episode of The Tucker Carlson Show this week. Tucker, who revels in the kinds of anti-Zionist conspiracy theories that animate online politics on both ends of the political spectrum—he is a walking, talking Horseshoe Effect—had as his guest Jeffrey Sachs.

Sachs was a respected and mainstream academic for many years but has devolved into a ludicrous buffoon who relishes feeding conspiracy theories to the alligators in the fever swamps. He is, it almost goes without saying, a professor at Columbia University.

Carlson begins his interview of Sachs by asking about the big news of the day: the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s monstrous dictator. The crimes of Assad and his father, who ruled Syria before Bashar, pockmark the earth: mass graves and torture prisons dot the face of the Levant. A rebellion against Assad that began during the Arab Spring finally succeeded. The story is gruesome but simple: A butcher was overthrown by his subjects.

In the clip that opens the show, Sachs has another explanation: the Jews. “It’s part of a 30-year effort. This is [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s war to remake the Middle East.”

Just after Sept. 11, 2001, Sachs preaches, Gen. Wesley Clark was brought in to the Pentagon and “told that the neocons and the Israelis are going to remake the Middle East.” It would require war with seven countries, and “we’ve been at war in six of them now. And I mean we, the United States on behalf of Israel… So what happened in Syria last week was the culmination of a long-term effort by Israel to reshape the Middle East in its image.”

Sachs refers to the “Israel lobby” as the agents of nefarious foreign interests in America, and he describes Jewish control as so airtight that it “doesn’t really matter who’s president. This is long-term deep-state policy.” Indeed, says Sachs, “Obama ordered the CIA to overthrow Assad.”

Why would Obama do that, asks Carlson. “Because Israel has run American foreign policy in the Middle East for 30 years,” Sachs responds. “That’s how it works.”

Sachs gives us a ballpark figure of the human cost of this supposed Jewish control: 1 million people are dead today who would otherwise have been alive if not for Israel’s supposed bloodlust. That places a lot of blood on Jewish hands. But as noted earlier, that’s a story that never gets old.

The second characteristic of anti-Semitism that keeps it so potent is the way information moves. It travels on a populist current because “the powers that be” are compromised and cannot be trusted. Tucker Carlson has an audience primed to imbibe all the information “They” supposedly don’t want you to know. Carlson can’t just repeat it all himself every single night because that would get boring, so he brings on guests to help out.

People like Carlson and Sachs rely on the network-contagion effect, in which information moves through social networks after being introduced by a trusted source, to spread their poison. Typical followers of Jeffrey Sachs aren’t relying on Tucker Carlson for their information. So Carlson hands it off to Sachs, who is essentially playing the role of ideological drug mule.

Elon Musk, the owner of X/Twitter and an adviser to president-elect Trump, reposted the interview himself online. Musk didn’t say anything specifically about the Israel portion, but a Musk post gives a superboost to anything looking for more networks to spread to.

So, yes, Carlson matters here. He is a superspreader of the brain mold that makes our politics and culture sicker, gloomier, angrier, and more extreme at a time when there is an eager market for it.

+ A A -
You may also like
41 Shares
Share via
Copy link