It’s no doubt a revealing confession about the failure of my empathetic imagination, but I can’t for the life of me understand what motivates Tucker Carlson to do what he’s done over the past decade.
But that’s not actually true. Allow me to rephrase it.
I can understand what he’s doing. What I can’t understand is why anyone would make such a choice.
But even that isn’t quite right. Let me try one more time.
I can understand why Carlson would make such a choice. I just can’t imagine making that choice myself.
What has he done that I find it impossible to imagine for myself? Made a decision to turn himself into the most dangerous man to Americans Jews by becoming a one-man conduit for pumping far-right anti-Semitism into the political mainstream of the United States.
Carlson and Fuentes, Nazis and Nihilists
For those blissfully unaware of the events of last week: Despite a history of mutual animosity between them, Carlson invited Nick Fuentes, the leader of the online far-right Groyper movement, onto his Twitter/X-based talk show and conducted a lengthy interview with him.
How to summarize who Fuentes is and what he stands for? It’s too simplistic to call him a neo-Nazi, though he’s frequently praised Adolf Hitler. He also praises and professes to admire Joseph Stalin. He’s also a racist who loves to make fun of black (and, really, all non-white) people. He’s also a misogynist who sometimes says things that make it sound like he’s gay. But then, he also says that having sex with women is “gay.”
And, yes, he also despises Jews, and Israel.
What does it all add up to? The answer, I believe, is nothing. Like Steve Bannon but in a way seemingly tailor-made to appeal to a Gen Z audience, Fuentes practices the politics of bullshit. Which means he’s a nihilist. Which means he’s not even a Nazi. As Walter Sobchak aptly puts it in The Big Lebowski, “say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.” Nihilism isn’t even an ethos. It’s a pose struck on a foundation of nothingness. Which means the pose doesn’t refer to anything deeper. It’s pure pose, all the way down.
In more concrete terms, this means that Fuentes will say anything, and will choose what to say in any given moment, on the basis of no other criterion than what he suspects will cause the greatest offense, the greatest outrage, the greatest stir, the greatest scandal. The thrill of transgression is what he and his listeners live for. Can you believe he said that? I didn’t know you could say that! That’s it. That’s all. It takes the moral aspiration of woke politics—to police the boundaries of acceptable speech for conformity to rigid progressive moralism—and inverts it. Anything that will provoke the most intense reaction by defenders of The System is worth saying, and saying again, and saying yet again, until The System is overrun by the transgressors relishing their liberation from the constraints of society and civilization.
And what causes a more intense reaction than right-wing Jew hatred?
Tucker Carlson Against the System
But why focus on Carlson rather than Fuentes himself, or perhaps Candace Owens, the conspiracy-peddling Jew-hating podcaster who is another major contributor to spreading anti-Semitism among the right-wing young? Because Carlson came from the journalistic mainstream and has used that status to grant legitimacy to people and views that would be marginalized in a healthy political culture. It’s not good that Owens and Fuentes have legions of followers. But the vast majority of Americans have never heard of them. Ideally, it would remain that way.
But Carlson’s two-hour interview with Fuentes, as of Sunday, has been viewed over 17 million times. Have I mentioned that it’s also a softball interview that makes Fuentes sound far more level-headed and reasonable than he nearly ever does? What’s all this fuss about?, many of Carlson’s regular viewers will no doubt wonder as they begin to stream the conversation.
And by the time they get to the point in the interview where Carlson asks Fuentes what he really believes, and Fuentes answers, for once, by skipping the bullshit and carefully talking about how diaspora Jews are unassimilable and almost invariably have dual loyalties that pit them against the countries in which they live, while Carlson frowns his trademark frown and nods gravely while mostly agreeing with everything Fuentes says, often punctuating it with “well, that’s just true”—by that point it’s likely that a good number of those 17 million people are thinking, You know, this just sounds like common sense. Why have I never thought about it this way? Why are conversations like this so rare? Maybe that has something to do with the Jews, too….
Carlson, back in January 2016, was one of the very first mainstream conservatives to pronounce, in the headline of an essay in Politico magazine, that “Donald Trump is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.” The ease and speed with which Carlson was willing to separate himself from the positions to which he’d committed himself for decades told us something about him: Since the gamble could easily have blown up in his face, it showed that he was willing to take big risks with his career. It also showed a certain ideological flexibility. As someone who’s moved around a bit ideologically in my career, I understand how that can happen.
But here’s the thing: Carlson moved right, joining Trump on immigration, crime, and wokeness, but he also embraced Elizabeth Warren’s pre-Senate left-populist positions on economics, as if he wanted to be a one-man exemplification of the horseshoe political spectrum. And then he became the loudest voice on Fox News to oppose aiding Ukraine to help with its defense against Russia’s war of aggression, just as he personally talked Trump out of bombing Iran during his first presidency. Then, after he’d been fired from Fox and launched his Twitter/X-based talk show, he turned sharply against Israel and began interviewing and promoting any anti-Semitic crackpot he could find who was articulate enough to defend his views in an extended interview. Oh, and he also talked about being mauled by a demon in his bedroom.
And now the Fuentes invite.
The trajectory goes, in just under a single decade, from mainstream conservative journalist to active crackpottery. Which tells me that Carlson has decided to distrust every single official source of information and knowledge in favor of… whatever sounds or feels right to him at any given moment. No authority can be trusted. No institution deserves respect and deference. Social life itself—civilized life itself—is governed by a conspiracy of lies. The only way out of the conspiracy of lies is to doubt whatever “they” tell you is true and to affirm whatever you personally believe to be true in its place. Even if it’s a different conspiracy. Even if it’s demonology. Even if it’s anti-Semitism.
A Jew Stares Down the American Future
In a recent Substack post, my old friend Rod Dreher writes the following:
I was talking today with a Christian I know who is a big player in conservative politics … He tells me that what normie outsiders like me don’t know is that something like 30 to 40 percent of the Republican staff in Washington under the age of 30 are Groypers—that is, followers of Nick Fuentes.
Could Fuentes (or someone like him) be our political future? It’s pretty far-fetched to suggest that he could run and win a contest for that top spot. But JD Vance is right there in office, the vice president of the United States, the presumptive frontrunner to be the next Republican nominee. What probably matters more is whether Vance (or some other Trumpy Republican politician) makes a run for the presidency by opposing or welcoming the Groypers with open arms.
With that in mind, Dreher also tells us about a recent conversation with (Jewish) right-wing-media superstar Ben Shapiro in which they both agreed that “our friend J.D. Vance, who we both want to be POTUS one day, at some rapidly approaching point, has to take a firm, clear public stand against the Groypers…. This evil is not going to burn out on its own; it must be stopped … if it can be, at this point.”
Is this likely? From a man who jettisoned his political commitments and turned on a dime to become one of the country’s most fervent and obsequious supporters of a man he once described as an aspiring dictator who had no business getting close to the Oval Office again? That man is going to say to those throngs of young voters on his political right, this far and no further?
Excuse me for finding that a pretty thin reed on which to hang my secular Jewish hopes.
But hey, as Walter Cronkite used to say, that’s the way it is. In the fall of 2025, it might be that we have little choice but to pin our hopes for the future of democracy in America, along with the fate of its Jewish population, on the fortitude and moral integrity of JD Vance.
Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.
A version of this piece originally appeared in Notes from the Middleground.
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The malinformation industry, and Fuentes and Carlson are members, makes a boatload of money by being hateful, mean, divisive and wrong. Democracy and poorly-informed voters cannot coexist. Full stop.
It is essential to continue reporting on the craziness of the Woke Right. Carlson is an evil man, and he relishes that.