When an author stops being an interlocutor and becomes a machine for manufacturing insinuation, the proper response is not to litigate each claim, but to halt the procedure in public: to state plainly that there is no argument here to debate, only a mechanism for distributing dirt.

Antisemitic Paparazzi

Tucker Carlson is not a journalist who sometimes gets things wrong. He is an antisemitic paparazzo of insinuation: he hunts for the cheapest possible scandal-shot, attaches a Jewish name or Israel as a high-recognition trigger, and then sells the audience the thrill of “forbidden truth.” This is not a debate about views. It is a description of method.

In the Times of Israel report, the word antisemitism is not a decorative accusation. It appears because, in this style of messaging, Israel stops functioning as a real polity with real policy and starts functioning as a lever inside an American culture war: a sign meant to activate suspicion, the suggestion of hidden power, taboo enforcement, and capture. You do not need to say “Jews” to activate the architecture. You only need Israel, a recognizable Jewish name, and a conspiratorial mood.

The core of the latest episode is simple. Carlson publicly pushed a false claim that Israel’s president Isaac Herzog visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island, and reporting indicates the claim drew fuel from a fake image circulating online, apparently synthetic. That is not a minor slip. It is a stress test of a new norm: can a synthetic image plus confident cadence upgrade a rumor into a “fact” that behaves like a document.

To understand why this matters, you have to look at the procedure, because the procedure is the product.

Input: low-grade material from the conspiracy supply chain. A rumor, a meme, a “file,” an image designed to look like evidence.

Validation: platform, reach, certainty-performance. Not proof, but posture.

Laundering: pull the material into a conversation with someone “respectable” or place it in an official-looking frame. Even if the interlocutor does not affirm the claim, their presence functions as a credibility filter for the audience.

Self-sealing: close the interpretive loop. Denial becomes “defensiveness.” Requests for evidence become “naivety.” Lack of evidence becomes “proof of how good they are at hiding it.” In this format, absence of proof does not defeat the claim. It hardens it.

Outcome: threshold shift. This is the decisive point. It is not only about whether a viewer remembers a later correction. It is about lowering the cost of saying anything. Insinuation is rewarded immediately; retraction, if it comes at all, is always late, quiet, and slower. Smear travels faster than correction, which is exactly why the business model works.

A small clarification matters here. Not everyone who questions US aid to Israel or the influence of AIPAC automatically triggers this mechanism. One can argue, in a procedural and evidence-based way, about an “endless blank check” or about the role of lobbying in foreign policy without invoking Epstein, Mossad, or “hidden networks.” But when someone chooses precisely that package (Herzog plus pedo-island plus “you’re not allowed to talk about this”), it stops being an accident. It is the same template that has functioned for decades, now upgraded with new tools: synthetic AI material and algorithmic distribution.

This is why “it’s just criticism of Israel” is category error. Criticism has a minimal procedural standard: sources, evidence, a willingness to correct, and a cost of error paid by the speaker. Defamation is the reverse: no evidence, but reach; no correction, but the next insinuation; no cost for the speaker, but a cost imposed on targets and on the public sphere.

In the Times of Israel reporting, the pattern is not confined to the Herzog lie. The piece describes a broader bundle: claims about his family being “targeted,” rhetoric portraying Israel as uniquely brutal, and religious-historical references deployed for moral disgust rather than understanding. Each item can be argued in isolation, but the bundle functions differently: it is not argumentation. It is the production of a single emotional weather system that can be steered at will.

This is also why antisemitism is the correct analytic category, not merely misinformation. The Epstein frame is never neutral. It is a solvent: it dissolves the boundary between evidence and rumor and automatically conjures “secret networks,” “protected elites,” and “you are not allowed to talk about this.” Add Israel and Jewish names and you activate a familiar structure of suspicion about hidden control without needing explicit slogans. That is platform-era antisemitism: it operates through tropes, insinuation, and repetition, not necessarily through manifestos.

Notice how this rhymes with the airport melodrama. One is the persecution vignette: passports seized, humiliation, an “operation.” The other is the secrecy vignette: files exist, names are there, truth is suppressed. Together they form a self-driving loop: persecution authorizes suspicion; suspicion authorizes defamation; defamation produces more persecution. Truth is not required. Tempo is.

Someone will say: he is “just asking questions.” No. A question can be a delivery system for a smear when its premise is false and the speaker has no intention of verifying it. “Just asking” is not humility here. It is liability avoidance: a way to put dirt into circulation while pretending it is merely skepticism.

If you want a clean test, it is banal. When a claim collapses, does Carlson retract clearly, specifically, and with comparable reach to the original allegation. Or does he move on to the next “file,” the next “bombshell,” the next insinuation, counting on the asymmetry of attention: the audience remembers the dirt, not the correction. This test does not read minds. It reads procedure. Procedure is enough.

An antisemitic paparazzo does not need a coherent ideology of hatred. He needs a profitable mechanism that uses Israel and Jewish names as accelerants in an economy of suspicion. In the era of synthetic media and platform distribution, this is exceptionally effective, because the boundary between evidence and visual garbage is easy to blur if you have reach and no shame.

That is why it is worth naming the method bluntly. Not to “win” an argument with Carlson, but to defend the threshold: the threshold at which we still require evidence, rather than emotion, as the price of accusation.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)