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. Neither the president nor the vice president, leaders of the Republican Party, have challenged him. His brand is too strong. He has too many youthful, devoted followers.

Why? Because over the last decade, antisemitic attitudes have spiked among young Americans. Until recently, their elders were more likely to hold antisemitic views.  That trend has completely flipped. Sales pros always prize the young demographic because they buy, they influence, and they lead. On the left, the market is already saturated with festivals of Jew-hatred: the city marches, the college encampments and “Zionist-free zones,” the solidarity keffiyehs in seemingly every public space.  Tucker Carlson sensed an untapped hate market on the youthful right. He has cornered that market and expanded it.

Other entrepreneurs have followed his lead. James Fishback, an ambitious 31-year-old running for governor in Florida, used to espouse conventional Republican positions including support for Israel. Now he decries the “sexual, sadistic” pleasure that pro-Israel donors get in forcing America to “bend over” for a foreign country.  Gen Z fanboys swarm his events. Tucker Carlson has endorsed him.

A December 2025 study by the Manhattan Institute identified a specific segment they termed “Anti-Jewish Republicans,” making up roughly 17% of the GOP electorate. This group is disproportionately younger, male, and new to the party by way of Donald Trump. Relative to mainstream Republicans, they are significantly more likely to believe that the Holocaust was exaggerated or that Israel is a “settler-colonial state” that drags the US into “unnecessary wars.”

Wait … a settler-colonial state? That sounds more like the fulminations of US Rep. Rashida Tlaib than something a Republican would say. But the so-called political “horseshoe” has pinched closed, far right and far left united in demonizing a state full of Jews.

Of course, fairly or not, Israel’s reputation has suffered across virtually all American voting blocs since it began dismantling Hamas following the October 7, 2023 massacre. But increasingly, the word “Zionist” has become a transparent linguistic substitute for “Jew.” This is well documented by agencies such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Community Security Trust (UK), and EU Fundamental Rights Agency. These organizations note how, in social media posts, the term “Zionist” (or the slur “zio”) is used in contexts unrelated to Israel, or as an insult even when the target’s views are unknown. Users switch from “Jew” to “Zionist” after moderation warnings.

Antisemitism has been on the rise over the past decade independent of negative views regarding Israel. In 2024, the percentage of Americans who agreed with classic antisemitic tropes (e.g., Jews have too much power) rose to 24%, up from 20% in 2022 and just 11% in 2014. Well before October 7, “hardcore” antisemitic sentiment in the US had nearly doubled in less than a decade.

For antisemites, political criticism of Israel is irrelevant as politics. Instead, it confers permission to express hatred without social sanction – the more widespread and intense the criticism, and the more that criticism echoes antisemitic tropes, the more the inhibition falls. Israel could surrender Jerusalem to Hamas and it would make no difference to a new generation of Jew haters; the politics serve as no more than cover, and besides, weakness is another antisemitic trope.

It is for this reason that the present moment seems especially fraught. On the left, the belief that Israel is an “apartheid” state that has committed “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza is not merely widely held; its acknowledgement is becoming table stakes for Democrats with national political aspirations. Yet these accusations are so divorced from reality, the distance between the dictionary and the actual facts so stark, that their widespread acceptance amounts to a blood libel that would impress Goebbles. It so far exceeds legitimate criticism as to be definitionally antisemitic, since the loaded terms have never been so stretched and distorted just to damn a targeted country. A country full of Jews.

On the right, the relative rarity of antisemites is not especially reassuring. Antisemitism thrives to the point of monetizability among the young, the politically energetic, the rising leaders. Here the political dimension is especially salient.  While the left’s obsession with settler colonialism is ponderously academic and historically diffuse, the right has rediscovered Pat Buchanan’s voice. It sees, in the current Iran war, proof that the malign Jew can strike at America’s vital interests, manipulating the US president into fighting its wars.

This is an appeal to patriotism, not fashionable theory or sympathy for faraway suffering. For Trump supporters already skeptical or at least uncertain of his motivations in bombing Iran and disrupting trade with arbitrary tariffs, blaming “outside influencers” or “shadowy lobbies” may be easier emotionally than blaming the president.

The pronounced and ever-increasing political tribalism in America, driven by social media herding and the increasing dependence of political campaigns on plutocrat donors with extreme views, politicize every important issue while, ironically, insulating opinions from actual politics. We blame more and more of the world’s problems and our own personal disappointments on the other side’s political preferences, but seek retribution rather than political solutions. Punishment becomes the point. It’s satisfyingly easier to slam than to think.

Reasoned argument will not convince a groyper or the Goyim Defense League that Iran’s intercontinental missiles and threshold nuclear status threaten America and its (increasingly marginalized) allies. They aren’t listening. Israel’s efforts at public relations have been criticized for generations, and they could certainly benefit from improvement. But against a tidal trend of outsourced thinking and politics as combat entertainment, better PR can accomplish only so much.

Israel’s reputation cannot be rehabilitated politically. While telling Israel’s side of the story is important, energy is best focused on confronting the haters for their hate. The Overton window must be shut against expressions of antisemitism as it is against racism. To be sure, it’s an uphill battle – there are no legions of woke virtue signalers ready to amplify the message and shame the shameless. But the alternative is to watch helplessly as antisemitism from right and left coalesces to seize the discussion and set the political agenda.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)