Tucker Carlson has evolved. Once a staunch Israel supporter who excoriated Rep. Ilhan Omar for claiming that support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins,” he now interviews Holocaust deniers, self-declared neo-Nazis, and conspiracy theorists obsessed with the Jews. He owns property in Qatar. Ejected from his $20 million-a-year perch at Fox News in 2023, Carlson has battled back to wealth and prominence.  His various media ventures may now generate more annual revenue than he ever made on Fox.

What’s most breathtaking is neither the cynical pivot nor the paying audience. It’s the overtness. There are no dog whistles or elliptical hints. Tucker Carlson platforms hate as a sustainable business model. In an era of exquisite sensitivity to any whiff of bigotry, there is one bigotry that makes you rich instead of ensuring your obscurity.

When there was both a marketplace for hate and a social ban on its crude expression, those peddling antisemitism always had a convenient speakeasy to sidestep the prohibition. “I’m not talking about all Jews, all people of the Jewish faith, I’m talking about Zionists,” explained the antisemitic preacher Jeremiah Wright after blaming his rift with then-President Barack Obama on the Jews.

The fact that a line could be drawn, however tenuously or unconvincingly, between Jews and the political entity called Israel has long served as a get-out-of-jail-free card for Jew haters. It’s this line that is disappearing.

Back in 1992, Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan called for a “new nationalism” that would “put America first.” He all but blamed the gulf war on Israel and its Jewish “amen corner” in the US, lamenting that the fighting would be done by kids with names like “McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown.” That was too much for his ideological inspiration William F. Buckley, who accused him of antisemitism. George H.W. Bush easily crushed Buchanan’s insurgent bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

That was then. Tucker Carlson’s persistent attacks on Israel and its supporters, as well as innuendo against Jews themselves as deicides, far exceed Pat Buchanan’s coarse remarks in intensity and frequency.........

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