The verbal diarrhea that is Tucker Carlson

Here we go again, with a vengeance. As in the Peter Allen song from the 1979 movie, “All That Jazz,” it would seem that to the far-right provocateur Tucker Carlson, “everything old is new again.”

The “new” in this case is Carlson blaming Jews, specifically the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement, for the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. The “old” is that he is recirculating antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories that we have heard many times before.

In last Thursday’s episode of “The Tucker Carlson Show” the podcaster proclaimed that the Iran war is not being waged primarily for geopolitical reasons but is “a global religious war” instigated at least “in part” by Chabad. He contends that Chabad’s goal in doing so is a messianic “building of the Third Temple” following the destruction of the Muslim holy sites of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Moreover, he considers the war to be “between Muslims and Christians” rather than between Muslims and Jews. “The Europeans,” he bloviates unctuously, “are the enemies, the mortal enemies of the Israelis. That’s the Israeli perspective, obviously. Look at the effects. And so if that were to happen in this conflict, it’s not the Israelis who would bear the brunt of it. It’s the Europeans, it’s the Canadians, it’s the Australians, and it’s us. And it’s the Russians. 20% of Russia is Muslim. All of those countries would be in for serious turmoil and bloodshed.”

And then, Carlson asks, “What happens in all those countries — those Christian western white countries — what happens there? If there’s the religious war that , , , clearly the Israeli government and some in our government are hoping for, what happens? Oh, those countries suffer more than they have suffered. And so it’s possible that the real target here — it’s just possible, throwing this out there — is not the mullahs in Iran. It’s us, as it always has been.”

The crux of his conspiracy theory is his claim that Christians are the true victims of a war that was brought about by the ubiquitous Jews “Of course,” he said, “when the smoke clears, ultimately, we will find out, just a guess, that Christians suffer disproportionately in this, as they do in all wars, from the Iraq war to the bombing of Nagasaki, the seat of Christian church [sic] in Japan, etc., etc. Christians have a way of dying disproportionately in these wars, which tells you something about their real motive.” Carlson is careful not to identify who “they” are, but it’s clear to whom he is referring.

Carlson’s screed is in the time-honoured tradition of a series of notorious American antisemites whom I feature prominently in my classes at Cornell on antisemitism in the courts and in jurisprudence.

The sinister tone was set in the early 1920s by the industrialist and automobile manufacturer Henry Ford who leaned heavily on a notorious Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, in his weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent and in a four-volume collection entitled The International Jew.

In 1920, Henry Ford said in an interview with the New York World that “The international financiers are behind all war. They are what is called the International Jew– German Jews, French Jews, English Jews, American Jews. I believe that in all these countries except our own the Jewish financier is supreme… Here the Jew is a threat.” Three years later, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that he told a group of journalists in Montreal that the only way to achieve world peace would be to “get the fifty leading Jewish financiers of the world together and render their manipulations of money impossible. In no other way can peace be established. As soon as the world awakes and finds them out and acts, then we will have peace. It is such financiers that cause war. They operate for profit and gain for themselves.”

“Must the entire world go to war for 600,000 Jews in Germany who are neither American, nor French, nor English citizens, but citizens of Germany?” the hate-spewing Father Charles Coughlin asked during one of his Sunday radio broadcasts in January of 1939.

In a similar vein, the America Firster Charles Lindbergh declared in a speech in Des Moines on September 11, 1941, that “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” The “greatest danger” posed by Jews “to this country,” he went on, “lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. . . . I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.”

It’s worth noting here that Coughlin and Lindbergh were hardly outliers in the 1930s and 1940s in accusing “the Jews” of inciting or fomenting war. Addressing the Reichstag, the German parliament, on January 30, 1939, Hitler threatened ominously that “if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

Fast forward to August 26, 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when the reactionary columnist and political commentator Patrick Buchanan, a former official in the Nixon and Reagan administration, said on an NBC television talk show that “There are only two groups that are beating the drums right now for war in the Middle East, and that is the Israeli Defence Ministry and its ‘Amen corner’ in the United States.” On the same program, he added that “the Israelis want this war desperately, because they want the United States to destroy the Iraqi war machine. They want us to finish them off. They don’t care about our relations with the Arab world.”

Buchanan subsequently singled out then New York Times Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal, former Assistant Secretary of Defence Richard Perle, columnist Charles Krauthammer, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, all Jews, as promoters of a U.S.-Iraqi war while pointedly writing in one of his columns that the Americans who would die in such a war were “kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzalez and Leroy Brown.”

In other words, there is nothing original whatsoever about Carlson’s latest antisemitic diatribe. By regurgitating tired and long-discredited conspiracy theories, he has merely confirmed why the grassroots watchdog organisation StopAntisemitism designated him as the  “Antisemite of the Year” for 2025.

In Memoirs v. Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court held that in order to be proscribed as legally obscene, a work had to be “utterly without redeeming social value.” On balance, this characterisation fits Tucker Carlson to a T.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).