Tucker Carlson’s Manifesto

What is Tucker Carlson up to? That’s the question in the wake of a weekend summit at his Maine estate followed by the promulgation of a ten-point manifesto shared in a 98-minute podcast episode. Mr. Carlson was joined in the roll out by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Congressman Thomas Massie, and the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent. The troika style themselves at the van of the post-Trump GOP. It’s hard to think of a less logical standard bearer for the Republicans than Mr. Carlson and his camarilla. Politico reports that he is mulling “a possible independent presidential campaign focused on unwinding U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts.” Mr. Carlson vowed last month to “help build a third party,” and now he is trying his hand at gathering a breakaway faction to shape the new political order — or, as he puts it, “whatever comes next.”Mr. Carlson’s ten points are unobjectionable enough — “fairness, sovereignty, productivity, beauty, health, honesty, optimism, wisdom, decency, and unity.” Dig deeper, though, and the paranoia percolates. Jeffrey Epstein was “clearly involved with Mossad” and that “everybody knows” that America is “under bribery or threat or both by Israel.” He reckons that “Israel’s not the only country that’s committed genocide and neither is Nazi Germany.” Mr. Carlson may offer ten points, but it appears that he is mostly preoccupied with one point — the nefarious influence of Jews and Israel on America. At Charlie Kirk’s funeral he invoked “a bunch of guys who are sitting around eating hummus,” insinuating the mad notion that Israel was behind the activist’s murder. So fleetly did that falsehood spread that Prime Minister Netanyahu took the trouble to publicly refute it. The Iran war appears to have been a breaking point for Mr. Carlson’s crowd. He describes Mr. Trump as a “hostage” under Mr. Netanyahu’s “total control” and called the president’s relationship with the Israeli prime minister akin to “slavery.” Ms. Taylor Greene declared earlier this week that Mr. Trump “betrayed us all” by engaging in “foreign wars.” Mr. Kent blames “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” for the attack on the mullahs.Mr. Massie, not to be outdone, blamed his primary loss in May on the Jewish state. He declared in his concession speech that “I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.” This week Mr. Kent appeared on a leftist talk show, “Young Turks” — paranoia to the Jews makes strange bedfellows — to express the wish that he “wakes up one day and Tucker says he’s going to run.”Mr. Carlson’s anti-Jewish shtick and enormous audience have drawn comparisons to the Reverend Charles Coughlin, known as Father Coughlin, the “radio priest,” who pushed fascism in the 1930s. Now, though, Mr. Carlson appears to be contemplating going from demagoguery to elected politics. That could put him in the company of, say, William Henry Ford, who ran for the presidency on an antisemitic platform.Mr. Carlson’s manifesto also echoes William Jennings Bryan. In his “Cross of Gold” speech at Chicago in 1896 Bryan denounced “finance” and “real estate speculation.” Bryan ended by hanging his head and stretching out his arms to an ovation echoing with catcalls of “down with the hook-nosed Shylocks of Wall Street,” the Sun reported. A German antisemite, Hermann Ahlwardt, campaigned for Bryan and endorsed him in his newspaper, Der Anti-Semit. Bryan lost anyhow.The question of who — or what — succeeds Mr. Trump, though, is in the air. The Washington Post reports, and Mr. Trump denies, that the president is insisting that “we need to elect J.D.” The vice president maintains ties to Mr. Carlson. The Democrats are lurching farther to the left, and appear increasingly unable to restrain the antisemitic and radical faction in their own midst. All the more reason to reject Mr. Carlson’s manifesto.

Tucker Carlson’s Manifesto

Tucker Carlson’s Manifesto

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