In a world in which the sitting president of the United States is first declared to be functioning at the height of his powers and then abruptly replaced on the Democratic ticket by an unseen hand because he is senile—raising the question of who is actually running the most powerful nation on earth—it’s hard to dismiss the idea that conspiracies are real, and that mainstream accounts of events are pap. In this new landscape of ops and counter-ops, perhaps our two most successful conspiracists are Tucker Carlson and his fellow MAGA affiliate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Both men speak of plots that are hidden from view but propel large events, and of motivations that are different from those regularly proclaimed by officials and the mainstream press. Both have had their own claims repeatedly “fact-checked” and “debunked” by mainstream propaganda outlets, though it is curious that the venom with which Kennedy’s theories are greeted has been almost entirely lacking in treatment of Carlson, whom the press often treats as a kind of unruly preppy younger brother. Perhaps this is because RFK Jr. is seen as a traitor to the Democratic Party of his father and uncles, and must therefore be publicly whipped.
It may also have something to do with the very different directions in which their theorizing takes their followers. Kennedy’s theorizing—whether about childhood vaccines, or plastics, or environmental waste, or the assassination of his uncle and his father—make his followers aware of specific exercises of power by real people, which it is conceivably possible for them to fight. If the ever-multiplying number of childhood vaccines isn’t causing a massive upsurge in autism over the past 40 years, something clearly is—and that cause is likely, at least in part, environmental. The same is true of Kennedy’s theorizing about his uncle’s assassination, which points to the role of our intelligence agencies in destroying our liberties, which again is real, even if this or that attempt to connect the dots in a specific way might be debunked—which is itself a word that now suggests not an objective truth-seeking exercise but an attempt to define reality in terms favorable to the speaker, or whatever forces they represent.
One of the things that RFK Jr.’s critics generally miss about his theories is that they are based on evidence which he regularly submits to courts of law. Moreover, many of his lawsuits have been successful, returning billions of dollars to victims of wrongdoing that he has successfully proved in court. The idea that powerful corporations and agencies are polluting our food, water and air, along with our domestic politics, are real concerns with potential real solutions which can be effected through individual and collective action—unless, of course, you believe it’s all the fault of the space aliens or the all-powerful Jewish conspiracy, in which case there’s probably not much you or I can do about it. Which brings us to Tucker Carlson.
Unlike RFK Jr.—who grew up by the side of his father and his uncles, both devoted readers of Camus—Tucker Carlson grew up in Washington as the son of Dick Carlson, who served as chief propagandist for the United States government at the height of the Cold War. Whatever myths were spread about the United States and its role in the world during and after World War II, which Tucker Carlson presents himself as fervently opposing, his father was a key figure in spreading those lies.
So who exactly was Dick Carlson, and where did he come from?
Neither Tucker nor his father knows for sure. Dick Carlson was a bastard, whose mother, then a junior in high school, starved herself in the hopes of keeping her pregnancy a secret. She then abandoned her child, who was crippled with rickets, to the mercies of the foster care system, whereupon the child’s ostensible father, whose name was Boynton, shot and killed himself. The boy was then eventually adopted by a wool merchant named Carlson, who died when the boy was 12. The point being that motherless orphans are the stuff out of which state propagandists are classically made.
In Dick Carlson’s case, he became a state propagandist after his first career as a journalist went sideways. A story he wrote accusing San Francisco Mayor Joe Alioto of imaginary ties to the Mafia spawned a massive lawsuit, and wound up bankrupting Look magazine, one of the journalistic icons of the 1960s. Following that debacle, Carlson became an officer of a politically corrupt savings and loan in Southern California, which held a sweetheart mortgage on the home of U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese while bankrupting thousands of ordinary Californians. His appointment as director of the Voice of America duly followed.
Like his father, Tucker Carlson is a propagandist. His talent is different than his father’s though. Where Dick Carlson channeled the official voice of Cold War America, Tucker Carlson’s ability to mix different types of conspiracy theorizing allows him to position himself on the side of his audience, offering them solace—while actually making them miserable. His aims can best be judged by the mix of conspiracy theories that he advances: There is the outlandish Weekly World News-style stuff about aliens and pyramids, which undermines his listeners attachment to reality by suggesting that the foundations of our common history are fake; there is the “debunking” of America’s history as a nation, in which unifying causes like World War II are transformed into devices to corrode his followers’ sense of the good in their ancestors; there is the invocation of shadowy, all-powerful forces like “the deep state,” whose power is so great that it is impossible to even name them, let alone fight them.
Above all, there is the reflexive inversion of good and evil, whether in the case of World War II, or Vladimir Putin, or Israel’s war against Hamas, which puts his listeners on the side of people (Nazis, Russian dictators, Muslim terrorists) they have formerly and rightfully regarded as America’s enemies, and nudges them toward accepting current Democratic Party establishment wisdom (Israel is bad; Iran is good; there is no such thing as terrorism; good and evil don’t exist) under the guise of being “free-thinkers” and “questioning authority.”
The conspiracies Carlson embraces and advances are hardly intended to empower his listeners. Did aliens build the pyramids? Do “Zionists” control Congress by assigning “minders” to each individual member of Congress? Were Adolf Hitler’s intentions mostly or entirely peaceable, until he got suckered into World War II by Winston Churchill? Is the “deep state” pumping money into Ukraine in order to fund its fentanyl business through Goldman Sachs? Do nephilim from the Bible walk among us here on earth?
The theses behind these statements, which are phrased as questions—the answer in every case being “yes”—range from the demonstrably false to the absurd. But is it wrong to ask these questions? The answer is yes—not because they violate social taboos, or exacerbate hatreds, but because they are demonstrably nonsense. And being nonsense, they can only lead followers deeper into a maze of further falsehoods that darken rather than illuminate the forces that impact their lives. By neutralizing people who are potentially ripe to actually do something about the forces that are destroying their communities and their lives, his pose as a skeptic of official explanations and an opponent of power in fact serves the interests of those who rule.
It is a certainty that Americans have committed all the sins of the Bible in spades, and will no doubt continue to do so. America has elevated some inhabitants of its soil over others, while poisoning the earth, the air, and the water and funding unjust and destructive wars that have ruined entire countries and blighted the lives of future generations. To say that all nations have committed similar or worse crimes, and that our intentions were mostly good, hardly lets America off the hook. But none of that goes to the core of what it means to be an American, which is a simple, life-changing act of allegiance: It means accepting the promise of freedom that is written in the country’s founding documents and has been renewed in every generation by the creativity and sacrifice of brave men and women. It means being the recipient of an incredible world-shaping act of collective generosity begun by our country’s Founding Fathers and carried through successive generations. It means privileging the future over the injuries and disappointments of the past. Being an American requires us to believe in freedom’s promise, which is founded on hope.
That said, it is certainly possible to technically be an American citizen or an official of the American state and to believe in none of the above. That’s because it is a sad fact of human nature that the majority of human beings in all times and places would prefer being slaves to being free. Some people choose to be slaves to money, others to food, alcohol or drugs, others to pornography or base hatreds, or to financial and spiritual frauds. Freedom can be a terrible drag. As Bob Dylan once concluded, in one of his less successful artistic incarnations, “you gotta serve somebody.”
Maybe—or maybe not. After all, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature, which has been routinely denied to truly great American writers, from Gertrude Stein to Fitzgerald and Ralph Ellison to Pynchon and DeLillo, and Robert Stone and Philip Roth. That’s because the Nobel Prize is more likely to be awarded to writers who think and write the way that the rest of the world does, which means subscribing to beliefs such as the idea that people are born into unchanging fates; that the needs of the collective should take precedence over the needs of the individual; that the sky is falling; that blood ties are destiny; that the world is naturally divided into the categories of oppressed and oppressors; that historical grievances are holy; that “rights” are a thing permitted individuals by the state; and that the future will always be worse than the past.
This uniquely non-American way of thinking was on display in the interview Tucker aired this month with podcaster Darryl Cooper, who—judging by his personal hatred of the police, rabid support for Palestine, and belief that mass migration should be embraced by all right-thinking Americans—seems like a pretty conventional leftist. He also has various offbeat feelings about Churchill, Hitler and World War II, and displays Nazi memorabilia on his social media account. For Cooper’s host, whose own tweet about the conversation is up to 34 million views, it was a solid day’s work.
Whether Tucker Carlson is himself an antisemite is as uninteresting as the question of whether he suffers from other degenerative mental or physical diseases. What’s interesting is the way he plays the game, which in turn sheds light on the nature of the game that he is playing. He positions himself as a skeptic, who is generously open to revisionist theories and questioning, and lets his guests like Cooper, Congressman Thomas Massie, heretic harpy Candace Owens, and a former artillery colonel named Douglas Macgregor (“colonel of the artillery” being a synonym in the literature of many nations for “dumb as a rock”), do the dirty work of talking about “Zionist minders” or the virtues of Hitler or Israel’s deliberate targeting of Christian churches and holy sites in Gaza. The point of all of these is to mainstream conspiratorial antisemitic poison on the American right while protesting that he, Tucker Carlson, is simply asking questions of people with heterodox views, as is his solemn duty as an opponent of “cancel culture”—and that he is in no way responsible for the views of his guests or the deranged responses of his followers on social media, which are in fact the point of the exercise.
The reason Carlson is determined to keep a raised finger’s width of distance between himself and the antisemites he regularly platforms is that antisemitism was never part of the American DNA. Rather, it stinks of the madness of Old Europe, whose social hierarchies it was fashioned to uphold. It’s also a mainstay of the official state propaganda of the rotten postcolonial societies whose politics Carlson wants his viewers to adopt.
Tucker Carlson can’t be an antisemite, not openly, because being an American is part of his brand—even as he works to undermine the connection of Americans to their own past and to destroy their confidence in their ability to change their country for the better. And no matter how prevalent antisemitism has historically been within the D.C. elite circles in which Carlson was raised, it is also naturally repugnant to most Americans—meaning, Americans by choice, whether or not they were born here.
The American instinct to recoil from antisemitism as a particularly toxic form of lunacy is a deeply rooted one. That’s because America from its beginning was founded on an idea of exceptionalism that supposed not only a historical parallel but an active spiritual connection between the new people that would come into being here and Israel’s God. Our forefathers saw themselves as the builders of a New Jerusalem and imagined their community as a covenantal entity chosen by the God of Israel—which is why they taught their children to read and speak Hebrew at places like Harvard and Yale, where students are more likely these days to wear keffiyehs.
Zionism is also likewise an organic American belief. Large numbers of 19th-century American Christians were devoted Zionists before most Jews in Europe ever thought of returning to their historical homeland. 19th-century American Christians were Zionists not due to the influence of an evil Jewish cabal that controlled Congress 150 years ago, but because their own understanding of Christianity demanded it. They saw Christianity as the historical and spiritual child of Judaism, which offered gentiles a chance to become participants in the story of God’s chosen people. They understood their Christianity to be dependent on the prior historical and spiritual truths of Judaism in order to give meaning to its own promise of salvation, as St. Augustine powerfully reminded his flock—which in theory includes every actual, believing Christian on earth. To say otherwise, in the name of Christianity, as Carlson and his fellow revisionists make a point of doing, is not an expression of faith. It is an anti-Christian heresy that also serves to cut off the American story at its root.
Contrary to what Carlson and his fellows might wish, there is no easy way to decouple the story of the Jewish people, which stretches from the Bible to the establishment of the present-day State of Israel, from either Christianity or the covenantal doctrine on which America was founded. The only way to do so is through a wholesale rejection of the idea of American exceptionalism, which is the secular version of the Biblical idea of chosenness—which means rejecting the foundations on which America and its freedoms were established. Once these foundations are rejected and negated, one is left with the conclusion that American history is no better, and in many cases probably worse, than the history of other nations, and that the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights are merely political propaganda from a bygone era.
Tellingly, the leading voice on the political left for the anti-exceptionalist argument over the past two decades has been Barack Obama, who in many ways is Carlson’s political doppelgänger. Obama began his political career by denouncing “neocons”—a political cult, whose influence is vastly overstated but which serves as a convenient metonym for “Jews”—and then began his presidency by stating “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism”—meaning, he doesn’t.
The similarities between Obama’s politics and Tucker Carlson’s hardly stop at America’s shores. Both men are suspicious of U.S. ties to Israel, and seek to position the U.S. as sympathetic to Muslim terrorists who kill Americans. Both men feel entirely comfortable doing business with tyrants like Vladimir Putin and with Holocaust-denying theocracies like Iran. Both men share a common dislike for Winston Churchill, whose bust was removed from the White House under Obama, and whom Carlson has recently painted as the chief villain of World War II. Both men use polite euphemisms like “Likudnik” and “Zionist” to license overt antisemitism among their followers. The main difference between them is that Obama was elected president of the United States twice, and continues to live in Washington, D.C., and run the Democratic Party, which is the most powerful entity in the country, having formed something like a state-within-a-state that is attempting to control what we see, hear and read both from within and from outside our Constitutional form of government. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson lives in Maine and seems unlikely to ever be elected president of anything—though not for lack of interest on his part.
If you truly believed that America’s fate was about to be decided by the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the holographic representative of the Democratic Party machine, what would be the last thing you would do less than three months before the election?
Somewhere high up on the list would be relitigating World War II and implying that American heroes who fought and died in that war sacrificed their lives for nothing, due to the malignant deceptions of their puppet masters and the evil Winston Churchill, who was controlled by Zionists. Then there would be directly associating the Republican Party, and its leader, Donald Trump, with Nazis, or else with Russia and Vladimir Putin, thereby validating the most common Democratic Party attack lines against Trump over the past decade. One might associate Donald Trump’s chief surrogates with people who promote Nazis. One might also argue that Joe Biden’s recklessly pro-Israel foreign policy endangers America, and that the masked demonstrators who celebrate foreign terrorist organizations while driving Jews off college campuses are important campaigners for human rights. One might platform antisemites, and inject their poison into the bloodstream of the Republican Party, making it clear to Jews—and to most normal Americans—that conspiratorial antisemitism is equally if not more at home on the right as it is on the left. One could launch one’s own cross-country political tent-show tour to compete with Trump and steal his thunder less than two months before election day.
Tucker Carlson has done all of the above. The question is why.
The conspiratorial explanation—which like all proper conspiracy theories these days is an attempt to make sense of an incomplete public record through logical induction, backed by whatever degree of off-the-record sourcing—goes something like this. In April of last year, Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox. According to Carlson in a book he published last year, his firing was part of Fox’s $787.5 million settlement of the defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network for its allegations of voter fraud during the 2020 election.
So why is Carlson using his platform and his following to hold Trump and the Republican Party hostage to antisemitism?
I have no reason to doubt that Carlson is telling the truth about a matter of public record in which he played a key role. What’s odd about his explanation in the wider scheme of things, though, is that text messages leaked to reporters following the settlement made it clear that, in the moment, Carlson had vehemently opposed the network’s decision to air allegations against Dominion, openly declaring them to be nonsense. So why would Dominion Voting Systems, which had Carlson’s texts in its possession as the result of pretrial discovery, demand that he alone, out of everyone who worked at Fox, be fired?
The answer is that Fox’s decision to fork over the better part of a billion dollars to Dominion was most likely not motivated by the strength of the company’s lawsuit, which could have been easily defended on First Amendment grounds, and at a much smaller cost. Rather, it was propelled by Fox’s fear of the federal government, which was controlled by the political party that Murdoch has spent his life opposing.
The dangers that Murdoch faced from the Dominion lawsuit, apart from the merits of the suit itself, were twofold. The first danger was that the U.S. Justice Department, which was busy putting over a thousand civilian trespassers in jail for taking part in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, would influence or join the Dominion lawsuit, or file a lawsuit of its own against Fox, on much the same grounds as it prosecuted the rioters. In a worst-case scenario, Fox might win the Dominion lawsuit, only to have the Justice Department decide that Fox executives, including Murdoch, belonged in jail for their role in broadcasting the “disinformation,” which in turn led to a mob storming the Capitol. Given the existing legal context, prior to the Supreme Court’s recent Jan. 6 decision, any lawyer that Fox hired would have had to raise the possibility of future or concurrent Justice Department action in the event that the Dominion lawsuit went to trial—and even if Fox won.
The Dominion settlement was also likely motivated by fear of what the lawsuit could mean for Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to pass on his empire to his eldest son, Lachlan. As The Wall Street Journal has recently reported in detail, and as Succession fans can easily imagine, this remains no simple task. The Murdoch family has been involved for the past few years in an interfamily dispute over the disposition of a trust that mandates that each of the four children that Rupert Murdoch had with his first two wives, Patricia Booker and Anna Murdoch Mann, receive equal shares in the trust that controls Fox. Passing on Fox in its entirety to Lachlan therefore requires amending, i.e. breaking the terms of that trust, which in turn requires Rupert Murdoch to either engage in oppositional legal proceedings with his children Prudence, Elizabeth, and James—all of whom are politically to the left of Lachlan—or to reach a financial settlement with them, which until lately seemed to be slow in coming. Either solution might open the door for intervention, whether direct or indirect, by one arm or another of the federal government.
In order to be achieve settlements in both cases, and preserve and pass on the empire he spent his life building, Rupert Murdoch, one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet, was therefore in dire need of some reasonable form of assurance from the Democratic Party, which was then in power. In April 2023, Murdoch therefore had little choice but to cut a deal with whomever could safely promise him, on behalf of the Democratic Party, that whatever legal settlements he reached, both with Dominion and with his children, would not be subject to undue federal interference. The fact that Rupert Murdoch indeed reached a settlement with Dominion, no further charges were filed against Fox, and he is now reportedly in the process of reaching a settlement with his children that will leave Lachlan in charge of Fox strongly suggests that such a deal was cut. It is within that context that Tucker Carlson’s version of his departure from Fox makes sense—with the caveat that Fox’s settlement of the Dominion lawsuit involved not just Dominion but also the Democrats.
Which raises a second question: Who leaked Carlson’s exculpatory texts? The answer is that I have no idea. However, it is a basic principle of crime reporting, which is a subject I have some direct acquaintance with, that leaks that exonerate a person who is never charged with any crime are generally a prelude to a cooperation offer from the leaker.
Enter Omeed Malik. Now Tucker Carlson’s main financial backer, Malik was a New York-based investment banker and money manager who was described by the Daily Caller—the conservative website in which he abruptly decided to invest a large chunk of money in 2020—as a “lifelong Democrat” and a donor to left-wing political candidates and causes. While it is possible to imagine that at the height of anti-Trump feeling in 2020 Malik decided to abandon his lifelong political allegiance to the Democratic Party and become a Republican instead, that would make him a rather unusual—even unique—figure, especially among wealthy Muslim Democrats living in New York City. But again, anything is possible.
Malik’s day job is running Farvahar Partners, a boutique investment bank he founded. While boutique Wall Street investment banks have no obligation to be transparent about their investors—and are often valued for doing the opposite—a possible clue as to the source of at least some of the money Malik manages, might be found in the name he chose for his enterprise. The farvahar is a symbol of the soul and of the idea of life after death that is common among peoples of Persian ancestry. Post-1979, it became a favorite national symbol among the Iranian diaspora.
Or perhaps the coincidence of that symbolism has nothing to do with this story at all. Perhaps Malik and Carlson simply met one night at a bar by chance and found they agreed about more than they disagreed on, including the idea that Zionists are bad, America’s involvement in World War II was bad, Adolf Hitler is misunderstood, and Winston Churchill is a villain, and the lifelong Democrat Malik then handed over a large chunk of his own personal savings on the spot so that Tucker Carlson could found a new right-wing media empire centered around himself. I.e., both men are morons.
I doubt that, though. A more likely possibility, at least to my eyes, is that Omeed Malik is backing Tucker Carlson at the behest of whatever power it is that does stuff like gather the signatures of 51 high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials on a letter declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a Russian op on the eve of an election. At the very least, the collision of American domestic politics, the US intelligence community and the Pynchonesque aesthetic is too enticing to ignore completely, especially when one tosses in the pervasive social media and spatial presence of however many thousands of FBI agents and subcontractors performing the outward behaviors of “being neo-Nazis.”
That’s not a conspiracy theory, by the way: “Protecting the United States from terrorist attacks” is the FBI’s No. 1 priority, with domestic terrorism being on par with foreign-inspired terrorism—and “white supremacists” being among the bureau’s chief domestic terror targets. As the FBI explains on its public website: “The approach taken by the FBI in counterterrorism investigations is based on the need both to prevent incidents where possible and to react effectively after incidents occur. Our investigations focus on the unlawful activity of the group, not the ideological orientation of its members. When conducting investigations, the FBI collects information that not only serves as the basis for prosecution but also builds an intelligence base to help prevent terrorist acts.”
Anyone familiar with COINTELPRO and other FBI radical infiltration programs in the 1960s knows exactly how this stuff works. Suffice it to say that a good friend in the U.S. intelligence community once estimated to me that by the time the Berlin Wall came down, a majority of the members of the CPUSA and its various front organizations were FBI agents. It is reasonable to surmise that much the same type of thing is happening now, with a key difference being that it is much easier to pose as a neo-Nazi or an antisemite on social media than it is to attend in-person meetings in someone’s basement. It is all but certain, then, that the U.S. government is spending an enormous amount of money, time, and effort pumping out antisemitic and neo-Nazi propaganda into the social media space, in the hope of identifying actual antisemites and neo-Nazis.
Future historians will tell us whether the cure is actually worse than the disease, if there remain such things as “historians.” But either way, the justification for the current wave of domestic antisemitic propaganda echoing the propaganda lines of foreign enemies of America and being paid for in part by the FBI will be simple: Namely, that the U.S. intelligence community has been tasked with protecting the domestic information space, and that the free play of 350 million individual human atoms is simply too dangerous to be allowed to continue unsupervised. In addition to amplifying antisemites, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists, it is also reasonable to assume that “protecting the domestic information space” also means creating or shaping buckets like the QAnon conspiracy, the massive multiplayer role-playing game that more or less miraculously disappeared after Joe Biden was inaugurated. Whoever is in charge of this work would also be remiss in their duties if they did not consider the explosive potential inherent in Donald Trump losing another election, and take measures to ensure that the reactions of his supporters are safely contained. At the very least, it seems like the natural background for the plot of a Robert Stone novel.
Do you follow me so far? If so, here’s another clue worth clocking. Sept. 4 was the kickoff date for Carlson’s first ever 16-city live tour, which was set to feature all of Donald Trump’s surrogates for onstage appearances, including JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kennedy’s former running mate, Nicole Shanahan. According to a source, Tucker had taped a conversation with Vance in August. But the interview he chose to open the curtains on his tour—which he dropped on Sept. 2, two days before the tour began—was with Darryl Cooper. This choice in turn forced Trump and his surrogates into a bind: Either authenticate Cooper’s antisemitic message by keeping silent while sitting chummily onstage with its messenger, or to draw even more attention by refusing to get on stage with him.
They chose to keep silent, and to go through with their appearances. A few days after the Cooper interview ran, Trump, who had Tucker sitting in the box with him at the opening of the Republican National Convention so that tens of millions of viewers would see it, released a video proclaiming himself to be the most pro-Israel president in history. RFK Jr. tweeted a photograph of his father with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Vance tweeted about meeting an Auschwitz survivor. I suppose these men did what they imagined they could to signal rejection of Carlson’s poison. But their responses came off like hostage notes.
So why is Carlson using his platform and his following to hold Trump and the Republican Party hostage to antisemitism? There are three plausible explanations, beginning with the idea that Carlson himself is an antisemite. Even if that’s true, it’s too boring to be the whole story. The second is that Carlson wants to be president of the United States, and believes that Trump will lose—and he sees antisemitism as a useful wedge with which to break off a large chunk of the despondent MAGA base for himself while denying that fraction to potential rivals. The third explanation is that he’s a Fed. In all three cases, his aim would be for Donald Trump to lose in November.
D.S.
