What Tucker offered instead was the oldest form of the country club antisemite: smug detachment from Jewish history, denial of Jewish pain and a quiet insinuation that maybe the Jews are dragging America into something it shouldn’t be part of. This is not neutrality. This is ideology with a gun holstered under the desk.
He tries to draw a line—I’m not antisemitic, I question Israel’s role. He talks about “legitimate criticism,” about how you can be “anti-Zionist without being anti-Jewish.” But when your critiques of Israel come off like an obsession, when you never seem this fired up about China, Venezuela or Qatar, it’s not analysis. It’s pathology. It’s the same ancient disease dressed in tailored contrarianism.
And worse, he’s a revisionist—not just of Jewish history, but of Western history. The man cherry-picks Churchill quotes like a motivational speaker with amnesia. He doesn’t invoke the man who stood against fascism—he invokes the colonial aristocrat, the cigar-smoking specter of empire. Because Tucker doesn’t want to teach history, he wants to rewrite it, one tweet and smirk at a time.
The irony, of course, is that Carlson claims to support Israel. But his support ends the moment Israel demands more than lip service. The moment we call Iran a genocidal regime. The moment we ask America to recognize that the missiles falling on our cities are often bankrolled by the Islamic Republic. The moment we tell the truth: If Iran falls, the Middle East stabilizes. If Iran rises, the world burns.
That’s where Carlson and his crowd back away—because they’ve decided the Jewish state is applicable only as a rhetorical shield, not as a real actor with real threats. Anything beyond that? It’s “complicated.” Or “foreign entanglements.” Or the shadowy insinuation that someone else—someone with names that end in –berg—is pulling the strings.
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Antisemitic flyer by the National White Workers Party found in Portland, targeting Israel
(Photo: ADL)
Let’s stop pretending the far-right is immune to antisemitism. It’s not. It just uses a different vocabulary. And when its influencers start asking why America should stand with Israel, or why we’re so focused on Iran, we shouldn’t argue policy—we should name the pattern.
Because what we’re witnessing is the rise of the Power Libel—the 21st-century mutation of the oldest antisemitic accusation. It’s not about blood anymore. It’s about influence. It’s about power. It’s about blaming Jews—individually or collectively, through the symbol of Israel—for the political, cultural and even spiritual decline of a nation. It’s the slander that says, “Israel is dragging us into war,” “Zionists control our politicians,” “Jewish interests corrupted our foreign policy.” It’s not screamed anymore. It’s performed. By pundits with Yale degrees and clean hands.
Carlson doesn’t just criticize Israel—he builds the stage for suspicion. He frames support for Israel as weakness. He suggests that the American public is being manipulated by shadowy forces that are never quite named, but always understood. And most dangerously, he wraps that message in a patriotic aesthetic that makes it palatable to millions of well-meaning people who don’t even know what they’re absorbing. And that’s what makes this moment so dangerous.
Unlike the past, most Americans don’t even recognize this as antisemitism. They think it’s just “questioning foreign policy.” Or “standing against the elites.” But they’re parroting the exact structure of accusation that once claimed Jews started World War I, caused the Weimar collapse and corrupted Germany from the inside. In Weimar Germany, the Jews were blamed both for foreign betrayal and internal collapse. This is no different.
What we’re witnessing now is the rise of a new blood libel — not shouted from pulpits or pamphlets, but whispered in podcasts, televised in primetime and framed in policy briefs. It’s more polished, more plausible and far more dangerous. It appears in three forms: the diplomatic libel, which accuses Israel of manipulating nations into war; the political libel, which blames Zionists for internal moral and institutional decay; and the power libel, which paints Jews and their institutions as the invisible architects of global control.
In the medieval era, we were accused of killing Christian children. Today, we are charged with dragging nations into catastrophic wars, hijacking governments and threatening the future of civilization itself. This is no longer a fringe delusion — it’s the globalized blood libel, repackaged for an age of populism and paranoia. It is not just antisemitism. It is the political weaponization of survival. And it always ends the same way — with everyone claiming they didn’t see it coming.
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'Death to Zionists' graffiti found on building at San Francisco State University campus
(Photo: ADL)
And this is the greatest danger: not just Tucker Carlson himself, but what he reveals about the ideological convergence of America’s extremes. The far-right and far-left, though supposedly opposites, are beginning to speak the same language when it comes to Jews, Zionism and the State of Israel. Whether it’s isolationist nationalists crying “America First” or hyper-progressive activists obsessed with decolonization and identity hierarchies, both camps now find common cause in a single, unifying target: the Jewish people, the Jewish state and the Jewish story.
This isn’t just political drift — it’s the birth of a new antisemitic alliance, one where polished dog whistles and weaponized theory fuse into something far more dangerous. And as that coalition hardens, it threatens to upend the place of Jews in American life — not just politically or spiritually, but existentially. This is how it always begins. And we will look back on this moment — the attacks on Israel, the defense of Iran, the rise of influencers like Carlson — and mark it as the turning point. The moment when antisemitism stopped hiding. The moment the ground began to shift beneath us.
We’ve seen this before. We know how it ends. We will not bow. We will not ask for understanding. And we will not let a former Fox News false messiah rewrite our history.
