Op Nation | peckford42

Why Tucker Carlson became America’s conspiracist-in-chief

BY

DAVID SAMUELS

SEPTEMBER 24, 2024

CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

What should Americans make of the fact that of the seven rappers who own private jets, including Jay-Z, Drake, and Lil’ Wayne, all have links to Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, who is currently being held without bail by the Feds? It’s a fact that Puffy’s plane was routinely filled with cases of Ciroq vodka, which Puffy promoted, and which to the naked eye is indistinguishable from liquid cocaine. The value of a jumbo jetliner filled with liquid cocaine is well over $100 million. Now multiply that number by seven, and you can see why Puff Daddy was of interest to the Feds, and how his unsavory deeds, which including so-called “freak-offs” where he would pay sex workers to have sex with each other and with his girlfriend, recording artist Cassie Ventura, evaded scrutiny for so long.

That’s only the beginning, though. Combs was known to be friendly with Jeffrey Epstein, who like Combs was accused of drugging young women and trafficking them across state lines for sex, including at parties they hosted for some of the richest, most famous, and most powerful people in the world. As a result, both men are said to have compiled recordings of some of the world’s richest, most famous and most powerful people in compromising positions, including the Clintons, the Obamas, and Donald Trump. Epstein is also said to have committed suicide while awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, at the precise moment when the security cameras focused on his cell failed, and despite not having left a suicide note or any other indication that he was planning to kill himself.

Given the proven historical involvement of the FBI in the rap industry and the drug business, and the involvement of wealthy Jews in politics and the music industry, it’s only fair to ask whether Puffy has proof that Michelle Obama is a man and Jay and Bey are illuminati—and who has that proof in their hands now that Puffy is in jail? Answer that question, and I will tell you exactly who is controlling the information that you get from your phone (the answer is Google).

It’s lucky for us, I guess, that Americans are a friendly, easygoing, even-tempered people who have generally proved over time to be immune to the ideological contagions that have plagued Europe. At the same time, however, it is also true that Americans are natural-born conspiracists who are always on the lookout for the key to the hidden secrets of the illuminati, the Freemasons, and the British royal family. The American Revolution, which led to the founding of the American nation, was rooted in imaginings of secret plots by the British crown against traditional English liberties by colonials whose interpretations of events were—according to Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and other leading historians of the prevailing ideological currents of 18th-century North America—clouded by heavy doses of 17th-century English political theory, or alternatively, as other historians have suggested, by eating grains contaminated with ergot, a fungus whose effects are similar to those of LSD.

Either way, while both the day-to-day rule of the English and the inherent structure of crown rule might both have been reasonably experienced as annoying, and even oppressive, a plot by the English crown to replace freedom with tyranny existed only in the minds of colonials. Their response was to throw off English rule and enshrine protection of the traditional liberties of Englishmen in the Bill of Rights, which was appended to the founding document of the new American nation—thereby institutionalizing popular conspiracism as a foundational condition for the exercise of American state power.

Some conspiracists authentically seek to illuminate reality, albeit using language some may find off-putting. Others aim to confuse, demoralize or discredit others, especially their enemies, by reframing reality and turning their attention toward dead ends.

Conspiracy theories and the American state are therefore inexorably bound up with each other; the more the state expands its role in the life of its citizens, the more central the language of conspiracism inevitably becomes. Deadly viruses that may or may not have originated from labs in China; Islamist terror plots; pedophile rings; foreign hackers; school shooters; networks of communist spies stealing atomic secrets; Jewish and Italian anarchists from Europe plotting to assassinate the president of the United States and leading industrialists; Northern abolitionists; Southern secessionists; Freemasons; papists; Tories lurking just over the northern border and waiting to invade and sack Washington, D.C., in concert with the British army—all of these refer to phenomena that were at once and the same time entirely real and also used as excuses to abridge or abrogate the individual rights and freedoms guaranteed to every American as a condition for any government existing here at all. In this way, conspiracism can be the mark of healthy resistance to unwelcome government control, just as it is also the natural language of forces that wish to get Americans to embrace centralized power at the expense of their liberties.

And yet, negotiating a landscape in which conspiracism is the lingua franca doesn’t mean simply believing in whatever “conspiracy theories” come down the pike; rather, it requires a far greater degree of intellectual rigor and torque than reading a newspaper did, back in the days when publishers and editors could credibly promise to tell the truth to their readers. It requires being a good reader, which presupposes the ability to see the language and forms of conspiracism as separate from the content of a “conspiracy theory,” which like any other theory can be empirically shown to be either true or false.

Take the obsession with Jews who control the world. As a conspiracy theory, antisemitism is inherently different than social prejudices against outsiders, including social prejudices against Jews (“Jews/Pakistanis smell bad,” “I think most Jews/Pakistanis are thieves/liars,” “I wouldn’t want a Jew/Pakistani marrying my daughter”), which can presumably be disproved. No one imagines that because outsiders smell bad, or are habitual thieves and liars, that they also control the world, and that a wide range of everyday phenomena can be explained with reference to their unique, world-shaping evil.

But while anti-Jewish prejudice, or resentment of Jewish success, is by itself as normal as any other kind of social prejudice or resentment, it is also an easy gateway to antisemitism of the totalizing, conspiratorial variety—which is an operating theory that is based on a false premise about the nature of reality, and thereby envelops its victims in a world of interlocking illusions, which eventually leaves them unable to identify the powers that are actually impacting their lives.

One easy way to tell whether a “conspiracy theory” is potentially constructive or dangerous therefore is by evaluating its effects on believers. An obsession with the poisons in your water may be very constructive—and indeed, of enormous social benefit—if the old battery factory next to your house is leaching carcinogens into the regional water supply. An obsession with the aliens who built the pyramids, or a focus on people who change into wolves at night and steal your chi, is unlikely to tell you much of anything about the forces that actually impact your life, though it may deepen your suspicion of authority. Absent any ability to demonstrate causes and effects related to real-world phenomena, however, these “theories” or fixations are simply kooky.

By the time one gets to the hidden hand of the illuminati in fixing global energy prices, or the role of the Federal Reserve bank in systematically devaluing gold, one is more likely to find oneself a prisoner of a “conspiracy theory” of the repetitive, totalizing, self-validating sort that causes its believers to wind up angry, alienated, and depressed. The totalizing thrust of these beliefs progressively separates believers from the world of observable causes and effects, causing them to lose their hold on reality.

In short, “good” conspiracy theories are those that have the potential to produce greater amounts of truth (who shot JFK, did COVID come from a lab in China), and make it more likely for adherents (or simply, readers) to discover who is doing what to them and why. “Bad” conspiracy theories (evil Jews control the world, aliens armed with space-age weapons are coming to kill us) have the opposite effect, directing attention away from real causes and effects and toward phantoms. Some conspiracists authentically seek to illuminate reality, albeit using language some may find off-putting. Others aim to confuse, demoralize or discredit others, especially their enemies, by reframing reality and turning their attention toward dead ends. America has always had both types of conspiracists in spades. But that doesn’t fully explain the moment we are living through, in which the safest assumption about the reality we are presented with is to assume that it is part of an op.

Where does the term “conspiracy theory” come from? With its nearly perfect balance of pseudo-academic mockery laced with implications of dire lunacy, the phrase appears to have been launched into public discourse by the Central Intelligence Agency to defend the Warren Commission report, which followed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by a gunman identified as Lee Harvey Oswald—an ex-Marine who had worked at a sensitive U.S. military site in Japan where films from the secret overflights of the Soviet Union by the U-2 spy plane were received and analyzed. After defecting to the Soviet Union and living there for several years, he returned to America with a Russian wife and embedded himself in a milieu rife with Castro-ites, anti-Castro Cubans, and mobsters involved in the CIA’s attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. On Nov. 22, 1963, he made his way to the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas with a rifle, and was subsequently charged with the crime of murdering President John F. Kennedy, before himself being assassinated less than 48 hours later by a mob-linked Jewish nightclub owner named Jack Ruby.

Immediately after Oswald’s death, and for decades afterward, the serial oddities and disjunctions of his story have naturally given rise to suspicions that his crime, assuming he indeed fired the fatal shot that killed President Kennedy, was part of a larger plot by the CIA, the Soviet Union, the Mafia, or elements of each, whether acting separately or in concert. The Warren Commission, which was the official body appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the murder of his predecessor, uncovered no overarching plot against President Kennedy’s life, though; instead, it concluded that Oswald had acted alone. In response to doubts about the veracity of the conclusions of the Warren Commission report, the CIA appears to have advanced, if not coined, the term “conspiracy theory” to cast doubt on doubters of the report’s “lone gunman theory,” whose theorizing no doubt suggested an unhealthy distrust toward government officials and agencies who, as it later turned out, routinely lied to the American public on nearly every subject under the sun, from the chemicals in their air and water to the health effects of above-ground nuclear testing to the progress of the war in Vietnam to the involvement of the CIA and FBI in manipulating public opinion and routinely violating the civil rights of political dissenters, all of which would be revealed over the course of the following decade, which culminated in the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon, Kennedy’s 1960 Republican opponent, from the presidency in disgrace.

So were the “conspiracy theorists” right or wrong? Sixty years after Kennedy was shot, and despite the efforts of many top-rate historians, novelists, filmmakers, ballistics experts and others to conclusively unravel the Oswald-Kennedy plot, it seems fair to say that reasonable doubt continues to exist about the circumstances and motives surrounding the murder of the young president—who wasn’t exactly who he appeared to be, either. Maybe JFK was shot by the mob. Maybe “the mob” was an extension of the CIA, which tasked its killers with eliminating Castro. Or maybe Oswald was in fact a lone gunman who was dissatisfied with his lot in life, which he hoped to overcome by killing America’s golden-boy president. As any historian knows, history itself never stops changing—not only because of the accumulation of new evidence, but also because the types of evidence, modes of explanation and types of stories that are convincing to readers and knowledge-makers in every generation keep changing, in tune with the temper of the times.

One reason that the “lone gunman” theory remained dominant for as long as it did, despite its elements of obvious implausibility, was that it fit neatly into a central concern of the philosophy, social theory, and literature of the 1950s and 1960s, namely the fate of the individual in an impersonal society run according to the maddening illogic of a machine-driven bureaucracy. This vision informed works of imported popular existentialist philosophy by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus; classics of midcentury American sociology like David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd; the homegrown school of literary absurdism that grew out of the U.S. wars in Europe and Korea that was perhaps best epitomized in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the poetry of Randall Jarrell and his fellow war veterans; Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; as well as later works of literary nonfiction like Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.

For at least the latter half of the 20th century, both before and after Kennedy’s murder, American intellectuals and writers occupied themselves in a remarkably coherent collective imagining of how life was supposed to go once the sacred mysteries of life and death had been stripped of any possible higher meaning. The voice they came up with was a kind of studied blankness laced with deadpan absurdist humor, which neither accepted nor denied the possibilities raised by the conspiracy theorists, but rather suggested that absurdity—not conspiracy—was the root of the human condition. In fact, all possibilities—from the darkly conspiratorial to the banalities of official-speak—were equally absurd and ultimately meaningless. This distinguishing deadpan affect served as the school uniform of mainstream American literature and the arts up until somewhere around the year 2001, when it lost out to the more colorful costuming of “multiculturalism,” i.e., foundation-sponsored social realist art that promoted varieties of identity politics favored by the Democratic Party.

There was an in-house alternative to the deadpan affect of the existentialist-absurdists, though, which was widely propagated throughout the popular culture of the late 1980s through the late 1990s in the form of late-night television and sketch comedy, the routines of stand-up comedians like Steven Wright, popular Gen X entertainments like Reality Bites, the films of Richard Linklater, and pretty much the entire corpus of indie rock. That alternative was straight-up conspiracism.

Where the absurdist affect was flat, conspiracists were paranoid and excitable. They painted their canvases in vibrating DayGlo colors, which they insisted were in fact the colors of reality once the blinders imposed by social conditioning were removed. If Joan Didion was an existentialist-absurdist who became the doyenne of a certain type of snobbish and pinched New York Review of Books-type intellectual propriety, writers like Ken Kesey and finally Don DeLillo were pulled in a direction that can be best described as Pynchonesque—the “strong horse” of their aesthetic being Thomas Pynchon, the American novelist whose greatness has been obvious for at least a half-century to any capable reader, and whose work arguably did more to define the landscape of American fiction more than any other single author since World War II. Yet Pynchon’s work is still a comparative rarity in university English departments, in large part because it remains maddeningly immune to critical analysis and description grounded in either the existentialist-absurdist or multicultural/social realist aesthetics. 

Pynchon was a literary outlier, neither an absurdist, exactly, nor a realist. His characters are types, often verging on caricatures; their “inner lives” were of little interest to the author, and resisted any deeper analysis. Within Pynchon’s sprawling, conspiracy-driven landscapes, they served the purposes of the larger narrative, like characters in 17th- and 18th-century English novels. What mattered was not self-referential authorial play, or the childhood traumas or disappointments suffered by the characters, but rather the larger social patterns and networks in which they moved and functioned, and the ways that those patterns diverged from the language of official description; those divergences, illustrating the author’s notions of cause and effect, and forming a kind of action-critique of rationalist-sociological American notions of causality, being more or less the point of the work.

It is debatable when American reality itself took a hard swerve from absurdist to Pynchonesque. Pynchon published his masterwork, Gravity’s Rainbow, over a half-century ago, in 1973, which was a year after what proved to be the last Apollo moon landing and the year before Richard Nixon left the White House. 1973 is therefore as good a starting point as any. 

Fifteen years later, in 1988, Don DeLillo, author of the acclaimed absurdist-realist novel White Noise, attempted to tell a version of the Lee Harvey Oswald story in his novel Libra, a carefully researched existential thriller that attempted to bring the “lone gunman theory” to life. Yet even a mildly attentive reader could feel the author’s conviction in the lone gunman thesis disintegrate by the last one-third of the book, leaving behind an unmistakable dankness—a literary effect that DeLillo, despite his world-making talent, clearly did not fully intend as his final takeaway. DeLillo’s subsequent novels, including Mao II and Underworld, departed even further from the lonely crowd aesthetic, to embrace a milder, more realist version of Pynchon’s distinctive paranoid-stoner logic.

The rest of America followed much the same path. Today, 65% of Americans believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted as part of a larger plot, while only 29% believe that the conclusions of the Warren Commission were substantially correct. 

In part, widespread incredulity toward official denials of “conspiracy theories” is the product of another large-scale public event which was very openly and publicly the result of a conspiracy—namely the terror attacks orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. One result of Bin Laden’s successful conspiracy was the birth of U.S. counterterrorism doctrine, which since George Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq has become perhaps the most consequential and long-lived official philosophy employed by the American state to explain its way of seeing and justifying its own actions. American counterterrorism doctrine rejects the idea of “lone gunmen” almost as an article of faith, focusing instead on the operational, logistical, and financial networks, backed by state-level actors, that sponsor bombings, assassinations, and other acts of terror. It is therefore sensible to say that after 2002 or thereabouts, conspiracism became not simply an adjunct to but the official philosophy-in-action of the American state.

For readers whose primary interest is politics, however, there is a simpler answer to the question of when conspiracism took over that doesn’t require rereading the Warren Commission report and old Thomas Pynchon novels, or even looking back to 9/11. That answer is “Russiagate.” 

The Russiagate plot, as it unfolded on the front page of every newspaper and by every establishment media outlet in the country, was clearly a “conspiracy theory,” in the old-fashioned paranoid-absurdist sense: It held that the 2016 election had supposedly been swayed not by a sour public mood, or sweeping social and economic changes brought on by the spread of digital technology, or by Hillary Clinton’s obvious deficiencies as a campaigner, or by the fact that eight years of Obama had not brought the kinds of change that many American voters in both parties had fantasized about, but by the “butterfly effect” of $100,000 worth of Russian-bought Facebook ads. Trump was absurdly “linked” to Vladimir Putin, his supposed paymaster, through intermediaries such as the Russian Mafia or the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect. It was easy to imagine Pynchon out in Mendocino County, or Manhattan, chortling with glee over his morning paper.

Once these foundations are 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.

As the details of the Russiagate plot became increasingly phantasmagoric and absurd, the American media abandoned its former role as a truth-telling apparatus and explicitly joined what it called “the resistance,” awarding itself Pulitzer Prizes for “uncovering” stories that in reality were invented and fed to them by Democratic Party operatives. The fact that the stories were often outright fakes made no difference. The role of the press, as its leading lights announced in public, had changed; objective reporting of facts was out. Righteous political engagement—i.e., acting as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party and its operatives—was in, not just contra Trump, who was regularly portrayed as a would-be dictator rather than a buffoon with ADHD, but on a wide range of social issues advanced by the Democratic Party, on which normal reportorial skepticism—i.e., reporting—was no longer licit. As a result, public trust in the press, which had hovered around 50% for a half-century or so, plummeted to barely above 20%, meaning that no one outside the party faithful believed a word they wrote.

By itself, the Trump-Russiagate coverage would have been an epochal disaster for the American press, involving the destruction of relationships with readers that had taken a century to build. Then it got worse. The promotion of the Russiagate conspiracy narrative was followed by the embrace by the press of a quasi-official role in which contrary opinions were to be actively censored by large technology companies and the government, an effort which blossomed in the attempt to use the rationale of “public health” to repress reporting on the origins of COVID-19, and the efficacy of public health measures like “social distancing,” lockdowns and masking schoolchildren in classrooms. Evidence that ran contrary to the preferred narratives of the party’s public health wing was labeled “disinformation,” implying that naysayers were themselves part of a conspiracy to mislead the public. Conversely, party-sanctioned protests over the death of George Floyd were presented as a moment of “racial reckoning” that would help free the nation from Donald Trump, in the service of which the press propagated inflammatory falsehoods about the frequency with which Black men were shot by white police officers. 

The attempts to use technology to game a new officially sanctioned reality that would rid the nation of Trump reached new heights during the presidential election campaign in October 2020, at the height of the presidential campaign, which saw wall-to-wall press coverage of a public statement by 51 former high intelligence officials who testified in careful legalese that Hunter Biden’s laptop—which contained reams of evidence of the involvement of both Bidens in foreign bribery and lobbying schemes while Joe Biden was vice president—was a fake, and itself most likely the product of a Russian plot. In reality, it was Hunter Biden’s laptop. Trump lost the election, while public confidence in intelligence agencies and the press alike achieved new lows, in what might be described as a raging bonfire of social trust.

When whatever equivalent of the Church Committee investigates the insanity that we are living through these days, which is itself a hopeful thought, they will surely bring to light a large complex of official or semi-official “information threat” programs run by U.S. intelligence agencies whose goal is ostensibly to protect America from foreign propaganda aimed at causing exactly the kind of social disintegration that the machine and its servants have themselves inflicted at home.

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.

Tucker Carlson, at left, sits with Donald Trump and JD Vance during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee on July 15, 2024

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. Rather, they are what cynics in the TV business used to call “boob bait.” 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, or to the fantasy of God’s final justice being brought down to earth. 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.

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.

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.

Do I know any of this for sure? Nah. I’m just asking the hard questions everyone else is too scared to ask. P. Diddy is guilty as fuck, though.

David Samuels is the editor of County Highway, a new American magazine in the form of a 19th-century newspaper. He is Tablet’s literary editor.

Source: Tablet Magazine