The American right is involved in a bloody civil war of identity over the issue of America’s support for Israel. One side is a fierce supporter of Israel, the other a critic of U.S. diplomatic, military and economic support for Israel. It’s a bloody battle that takes no prisoners, and as the American right splits over the Israel issue, Tucker Carlson has found himself at the centre of a character assassination for interviewing right-wing polemicist Nick Fuentes. The accusation against Tucker? By interviewing Fuentes he is endorsing radical views and failing to exhibit the right amount of moral indignation.
Tucker’s decision to interview Fuentes did not spark the civil war on the right; it only revealed it. But this kind of revelation is an intriguing one because of the fact that, at least in principle, conservatives genrally agree on more than they disagree on. Broadly speaking, most conservatives agree on: individualism, limited government, free markets, nationalism, strong border security and lower taxes.
As with any political ideology, there will always be a hierarchy of ideals, policies and values which hold greater weight than others.But disagreements over America’s support for Israel have made both opposing sides of the right define themselves by either that support or opposition. The very notion of what “America first” means is also being placed under the microscope. When push comes to shove in this debate, for pro-Israel conservatives, criticism of Israeli foreign policy is labelled as anti-semitic and for the opposing camp on the right, ongoing economic and diplomatic support for Israel and its prosceutation of the war in Gaza is anti-America first and inhumane.
At the center of this identity clash: the issue of foreign aid to Israel, the morality of Israel’s war in Gaza and the ‘influence’ of the Israel lobby within the U.S. The pro-Israel right believes that Israel, as a democratic ally, deserves the moral and economic support of the West and the U.S. It also believes that Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza was justified. The other side of the right believes that support for Israel is not in America’s strategic interest and that Israel is not a trusted ally. It also frequently criticizes the morality of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Some pro-Israel conservatives like Douglas Murray would be happier if those like Nick Fuentes were never given platforms at all. And, this time, Douglas Murray thinks that Tucker Carlson’s decision to interview Nick Fuentes was morally reprehensible.
Murray wrote of the interview:
‘’ He invited onto his show an avowed Holocaust denier and racist, Nick Fuentes.“
We don’t need to linger here over all the horrifying bile that Fuentes has spewed out to his online followers. It is enough to say that he is so toxic, he could almost have been invented by the radical left as a way to delegitimise the political right in this country.
Any normal person would want to keep a million miles away from such a snarling, ugly actor. But if anyone was to sit down and give Fuentes one of the largest audiences of his career, you would have thought that there would be some hostile questions. The kind of relentlessly hostile questioning Carlson can do — such as in his recent astoundingly hostile interview with Ted Cruz.”
The pressing question for the right is: should large platforms be given to figures who have distasteful views? De-platforming has become a kind of go-to reaction for the left in past years and the proliferation of cancel culture, the phenomenon where one wrong view, comment, remark or behaviour in an unforgiving world set on moral perfection, has become the dominant norm.
Now it threatens to infect the right as it caves in to the demands of the past decade: if someone has views you don’t agree with, just cancel or deplatform them.
Free speech is free, but it does come at a cost, and while Fuentes’ views may be misguided, his voice deserves to be heard on the basis that all voices ought to be heard (as long as there is no call to violent action against any group).
But Douglas Murray saw anti-Semitic ghosts in Tucker where there were none.
“No — Carlson chose to use the occasion to deflect attention from the perpetrator seized by the FBI and return to his pet obsession: the Jews.”
Murray appeared to hear Tucker say things he never expounded on. At several points in the interview, Carlson appeared uncomfortable with Fuentes’s characterisation of “Jewish people” as the ‘Jews’. Tucker said, “Anytime you say a whole group is entirely responsible for the sins of some of its members, I’m out.”
Fuentes went on to say, “As far as the Jews are concerned, like I said, you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neo-cons from Jewishness.”
But Carlson rejected Fuentes’ argument:
It was Fuentes, not Carlson, who expounded on what appears to be a ‘pet obsession’ with ‘the Jews’. Tucker pressed Fuentes on this characterisation, and Carlson has always made the important point that criticizing the government of Israel is to criticise its policies and actions in the war on Gaza in addition to criticising the U.S. government for providing billions in foreign aid.
When Tucker pressed Fuentes on his views, Fuentes responded :
“ As far as the Jews are concerned, you cannot really divorce the neo-cons from Jewishness, ethnicity, religion, identity… but Israel is unlike every other country in the sense that significant numbers of Jews are around the world and because they are a ‘stateless people’ and now because they have a state in Israel… if you are Jewish person in America, it is a rational self interest politically to say Im a religious ethnic minority, this (America is not really home) and for the international Jewish community across borders, that is putting the interest of themselves before the interests of their own country.”
Tucker retorted with a counterargument, “It is important to remind everybody, there are people who strongly disagree, and in the case of Israel, there are a tonne of Orthodox Jews who oppose the state of Israel, Jeff Sachs, who is the most wonderful man and critic of Israel, that’s just meaningful, if everything is inherited, there is no hope for the continuation of America.”
It is a matter of public record that Tucker Carlson rejected the kind of collectivist characterization of Jewish people which Fuentes sought to forward as an explanation of Israel’s ‘influence’.
Tucker insisted that not every Jewish person has this unique ‘affinity or loyalty’ to Israel that Fuentes insisted on. So where exactly was Tucker being antisemitic?
The moral disgust for having Fuentes on as a guest has seemingly overshadowed Douglas Murray’s recollection of how exactly the interview unfolded. Even if it did, conflating the selection of the interviewee with the tacit endorsement of the interviewer’s views is wrong.
Anti-Semitism is real and alive but definitions matter. The term refers to a disdain, hostility or prejudice against people of Semitic origin. But Tucker Carlson, despite many attempting to scapegoat him, is not anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism is wrong, but false accusations of anti-Semitism are equally wrong.
People who have downright ridiculous, fringe or reprehensible views should be platformed so that the weaknesses of their arguments and views can be made bare.
But this civil war on the right takes no prisoners. Matthew Brooks, Executive Director of the Jewish Coalition, said, “We are at this point in what I consider sort of the early stages of an undeclared civil war within the Republican Party, as it relates to Israel, antisemitism and the Jewish community,” said Matthew Brooks.
Innocent victims are a part of most civil wars and Tucker’s decision to platform Fuentes, along with Tucker’s criticism of the actions of the Israeli government, morphed into the erroneous view that Tucker Carlson is antisemitic.
At the Republican Jewish Convention national leadership summit just days ago, Republican Randy Fine stated, “ He (Tucker Carlson) has chosen to take on the mantle of leader of a modern-day Hitler Youth, to broadcast and feature those who celebrate the Nazis, to defend Hamas, to criticize Israel.. Friends make no mistake, Tucker is not MAGA.”
Fine went too far, and to suggest that Tucker Carlson has taken on the ‘mantle of a modern day Hitler Youth’ is intellectually dishonest and libellous, and what’s more, it’s designed to marginalise someone who disagrees with his own worldview.
Tucker has found himself in the crosshairs of a bloody right-wing civil war between opposing factions on the right. While Tucker admittedly has been a critic of the actions of the Israeli government and of the U.S.’s ongoing support for Israel, Fine’s and Murray’s were most irritated by Carlson’s decision to host figures like Nick Fuentes.
Interviewing someone does not mean you endorse all of their views, and the bloody civil war on the right may get a lot messier. Tucker did the right thing and those with views we vehemently disagree with should be platformed so that those views, if half-baked or erroneous, can be challenged before the public and publicly dismantled.
