For the past few years, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been plagued by accusations of antisemitism.
In December 2019, the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt had this to say about him:
He frequently denigrates Soros as well, casting subtle aspersions such as his recent assertion that Soros “used his wealth to remake our society, American society,” as if Soros was not a true citizen. And last week, Carlson ran a segment lionizing Henry Ford— a pioneering businessman but also a known anti-Semite who inspired Adolf Hitler and published the anti-Semitic screed, The International Jew. Carlson praised Ford as the ideal philanthropic member of the “ruling class,” juxtaposing him with the Jewish hedge fund investor Paul Singer, whom Carlson depicted as “feeding off the carcass of a dying nation.”
Then in April of last year, Greenblatt called for Carlson’s firing after he seemed to be defending the “Great Replacement” theory, an idea popular among white supremacists that has inspired multiple antisemitic and extremist attacks:
As Carlson continued with similar rhetoric, the ADL continued to call for his ouster. But Carlson would have none of it:
“Oh, f— them,” he told Kelly of ADL. “The ADL was such a noble organization that had a very specific goal, which was to fight anti-Semitism. That’s a virtuous goal. I think they were pretty successful over the years. Now it’s operated by a guy who’s… just an apparatchik of the Democratic Party.”
He went on: “The source of our strength is non-White DNA? I mean, how could you say something like that? Really? So, people’s value to the country is determined by their genes and their skin color? That’s like Nazi stuff.
Last week, Carlson was again attacked for consorting with antisemites, this time one Douglas Macgregor:
Douglas Macgregor is a retired U.S. Army colonel who has become Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s go-to foreign policy expert. In recent appearances on the channel, he has argued that the U.S. should not sanction Russia and that Vladimir Putin should be allowed to annex as much of Ukraine as he wants, which is why many today consider Macgregor to be less a neutral observer than a Russia apologist. What they may not know is that he’s also a longtime purveyor of anti-Semitic ideas.
“We have a huge problem with a class of so-called elites, the people who are wealthy, very wealthy in many cases and they are, as the Russians used to call certain individuals many, many years ago, rootless cosmopolitans,” he told the Serbian American Voters Alliance in an October 2021 speech uncovered by Matt Gertz at MediaMatters.
For those understandably unfamiliar with this terminology, “rootless cosmopolitans” is an anti-Semitic euphemism for Jews that was popularized under Stalin in the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler also repeatedly referred to Jews as disloyal cosmopolitans, lamenting in his manifesto Mein Kampf that “it is no longer princes or their courtesans who contend and bargain about state frontiers, but the inexorable cosmopolitan Jew who is fighting for his own dominion over the nations.” In other words, there is exactly one type of person who uses this sort of language in everyday conversation.
In case his audience missed the point, though, Macgregor added: “They live above all of this, they have no connection to the country. There is nothing there that holds them in place, and they are largely responsible, in my judgment, for the condition that we are in today.”
—
Macgregor isn’t just some talking head, and this rhetoric isn’t some sort of aberration. In 2020, he was nominated by President Trump to be the American ambassador to—and I am not making this up—Germany. The Republican-controlled Senate blocked his appointment after reporters surfaced many of his past remarks. Among an array of conspiratorial claims, including some about Jewish financier George Soros, Macgregor alleged that American support for Israel stemmed from “Israeli lobby” money and that U.S. officials had gotten “very, very rich” from their support for the Jewish state. (In reality, most American politicians support Israel because most American voters support Israel.) These claims were strikingly similar to anti-Semitic tweets made by Representative Ilhan Omar, who later apologized for them. Macgregor did not apologize, and was subsequently appointed by Trump as a senior adviser to the Pentagon, and later to the board of West Point, from which he was removed by President Biden.
If this all wasn’t enough to convince you that Carlson, we have a problem, he now seems to be trolling us Jews with his admiration of antisemite Roger Waters:
It is not so often I am agreeing with the ADL these days. But here I have to agree that Tucker is encouraging me to use rhyming slang with his name.
Hat tip: Martin
