Tucker Carlson outdoes himself

Nick Fuentes hit the jackpot. The white-nationalist influencer made it on the "Tucker Carlson Show," the nation's foremost vehicle for laundering noxious ideas into the conservative mainstream. Fuentes is a Holocaust-denier and self-avowed racist whose goal is to remake the right in his image. Carlson, who prides himself on asking the supposedly telling questions when it comes to promoting any number of conspiracy theories, couldn't really bring himself to ask any of Fuentes. Instead, he gave the 27-year-old Nazi-sympathizer a tongue bath and said at one point of the Fuentes ideological project, "I guess you won." This was just another day in the office for Carlson. The former Fox News host has made it his business to promote antisemitic tropes and conspiracies. What Stephen A. Smith is to sports talk, Tucker Carlson is to obsessive anti-Zionism. There is almost no anti-Jewish theme — dual loyalty, usury, sinister plotting — that he doesn't elevate, although he occasionally stipulates that he likes Israel and has no interest in talking about it. When Carlson interviewed Ted Cruz before Trump launched his strikes on Iran nuclear sites earlier this year, he bristled with hostility for the hawkish Republican senator from Texas. When Cruz noted that Carlson seemed fixated on Israel, the podcaster retreated to his favorite dodge that he was just asking questions. Obviously, though, if your questions all tend toward one set of insinuations — casting aspersions on one country and suspicion on one group of people — you aren't engaged in genuine inquiry but pursuing an agenda while trying to maintain a modicum of plausible deniability. A while ago, Carlson welcomed on his podcast a crank historian with revisionist views on World War II, Darryl Cooper, and enthusiastically endorsed him as "the most important historian in the United States" (move over Gordon Wood, Niall Ferguson and Allen Guelzo, among others). While Carlson served as his caddy, Cooper explained that Winston Churchill was "the chief villain" of World War II, while Hitler "didn't want to fight." According to Cooper, the Holocaust was just a product of inept military planning. With Fuentes, Carlson was like a broadcast morning-show host fluffing a celebrity out on a publicity tour for his or her latest movie — except the interview subject, in this case, was a poisonous toad. Carlson lobbed softballs while Fuentes inveighed against "organized Jewry" and expressed admiration for Joseph Stalin. It was such a dismal performance that it created an instant backlash and alarm that an ancient hatred — once thought vanquished — has gotten a notable footing on the right. The good news is that MAGA is not antisemitic. The movement is almost wholly defined by Donald Trump, who has a Jewish son-in-law, likes Jews and is the most pro-Israel president the country has ever had. His vision of a new "golden age" for America doesn't involve kicking Israel to the curb or marginalizing the Jews, and never will. Yet Carlson and his allies — most prominently, the conspiracy-mongering podcaster Candace Owens — are playing a long game to make anti-Zionism and hostility to Judaism part of right-wing orthodoxy. If they succeed, they will poison conservatism, morally and electorally. They will make it turn its back on a significant element of the Western heritage, and on the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, who admired ancient Israel for its contributions of monotheism and the idea of the law. For a long time, the fever swamp on the right was limited to mimeographed newsletters or lurid email chains. No more. We have returned to a version of the 1930s, when such figures as Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh had huge megaphones and celebrity to use to assail the alleged malign influence of the Jews. Just because none of this is visible on broadcast news or — for the most part — among elected politicians doesn't mean it isn't insidious and gaining traction. Tucker Carlson knows what he's doing, and he's made it clear that a Nick Fuentes is his ideological compatriot and friend.