Podcasts Filled with Straw

Mark Zuckerberg thinks I’m an antisemite. Or at least his algorithm does.

First Facebook reel: Tucker Carlson is in his rustic cabin discussing Kabbalah with a surfer dude whose grandfather was Robert Conrad, star of the 1960s steampunk action show Wild, Wild West, a favorite rerun of my childhood. Tucker furrows his brow as Conrad explains that kabbalistic notions are key to understanding how blockchain technology will soon fulfill the famous prophecy in Revelation that says that when the Antichrist arrives “no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” (Rev. 13:17) Both men stipulate that they are not theologians.

Next comes Candace Owens ranting about how she has come to realize that she and the late Charlie Kirk had been assigned nefarious “handlers.” So now she gets what Kanye was talking about. Kanye, in case you’ve forgotten, was talking about Jews. Incidentally, Owens has also suggested that Louis Brandeis, Sigmund Freud and Jeffrey Epstein, among many, many others, were members of a century-spanning secret Kabbalistic cult of evil elites.

Then I get a stern lecture from a Long Beach pastor, who definitely is a theologian. He demonstrates that present-day Jews are not the chosen people because (a) God rejected us (see, he says, Romans 9), and (b) our Judaism is the concoction of nefarious Pharisees, not the religion of the Old Testament (cue a presumably AI-generated image of an angry rabbi in tallis and tefillin). Briefly I wonder whether he realizes that his argument goes back to Peter the Venerable and eventually led to the burning of the Talmud, but the clip is over and I am reeling back to Tucker.

Now he’s talking with ex–Navy Seal Shawn Ryan in his cool man cave about why he’s gotten so much flack for interviewing the white supremacist streamer Nick Fuentes, leader of the lol-Nazis known as Groypers. After all, Ryan says, “he’s been on other stuff.” Tucker pauses, looks thoughtful and replies that it’s precisely because he’s not an antisemite that the show has raised such controversy. However, he just wanted to discuss the many things Fuentes gets right, especially that America is “controlled by a country of nine million people.” He then goes on to describe how Fuentes was just an articulate BU freshman when podcaster Ben Shapiro tried to assign a handler (another Jew) to him, and when that didn’t work, tried to “strangle him in the crib” with a negative quote-tweet when he was just asking questions about Israel. But, Tucker says, “you can’t kill an idea.”

To illustrate this important principle, Tucker quickly segues to the crucifixion of Jesus—which didn’t work either. A little later in the conversation, he declares that Benjamin Netanyahu is, “of course,” an enemy of Western Civilization, “literally its main enemy,” which makes Bibi a pretty good candidate for the Antichrist. Elsewhere Tucker has endorsed Candace Owens’s suspicion that Charlie Kirk was actually murdered by an Israeli hit squad rather than the recently indicted Tyler Robinson. In Carlson’s now infamous eulogy of Kirk he retold his “favorite story” in which some nefarious Middle Easterners sit around “eating hummus” and planning the murder of God’s only son for telling the truth.

So, the algorithm is trying to tell me something, and if I could just figure out where I lost my kabbalistic decoder ring, I could probably figure it out.

Actually, Carlson has an explanation for why he had such a friendly, empathetic conversation with a Nazi and then declared the prime minister of Israel the enemy of Western Civilization, if not the Antichrist. It’s again—Weren’t you paying attention?—precisely because he is not an antisemite. The Christian idea, which is also the Western idea (which those hummus eaters tried to kill) is that the individual, not the group, has God-given rights, and is always redeemable. Yet Netanyahu killed Gazans for the same evil reason that Hitler killed the Jews: pure group hatred. To sum up: Carlson cozied up to Fuentes in front of an audience of twenty million to teach him that he’s right about Netanyahu but wrong about Hitler (though perhaps not entirely wrong since Carlson also thinks Holocaust revisionists have a point.)

Carlson is so good at being “Tucker,” at talking to the camera with seemingly unfeigned expressions of moral outrage, that I am almost tempted to respond: But it was Hamas—who you somehow didn’t mention—not Israel who systematically defiled and ignored the human rights of both Israelis and its own Gazan subjects out of pure group hatred. And the ideal of individual rights is as eloquently expressed in tractate Sanhedrin as it is in Galatians. But of course, Tucker’s moral outrage is feigned, and his arguments are just associative trains of insinuation. In another monologue in defense of his chat with America’s leading Nazi fanboy, he managed to accuse Jewish critics like Ben Shapiro of . . . promoting usury. The poisoned well runs deep.

Of course, Carlson didn’t bring Fuentes on this show to instruct him on the groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, he did it because he wants to reach Fuentes’s audience as much as Fuentes wants to reach his. Plus, they both enjoy a good Jew-baiting. The fact that Jew-baiting is so popular with their audiences, and that these audiences are so large, is worrying. It certainly worried Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts—he was worried that he might lose them. So he tweeted out a video in which he rejected “the venomous coalition” of globalists, their “mouthpieces in Washington,” and bullying donors—at least he didn’t mention kabbalists—who dared to police the consciences of good Christians and Americans like Tucker Carlson. As I write, Roberts has been backing away from this Two Minutes of Idiocy with all the usual Washington weasel words, his populist anti-elitism notwithstanding.

Yoram Hazony, the prominent religious Zionist who is at the center of the international national conservatism movement, flew in from Jerusalem to help Roberts do the DC shuffle (which apparently doesn’t make either of them a globalist). Hazony told the Times’s Ross Douthat that his friend just “didn’t completely understand what he was stepping into,” after all “most of the players didn’t know until a few weeks ago that there was such a crisis.” What is troubling about Hazony’s spin is not that it is, in the precise Frankfurtian sense, bullshit, it is its lack of Jewish self-respect. (The same can be said of progressive Jewish apologists for their antisemitic colleagues.)

Just this past summer Kevin Roberts was working hard to rehabilitate Pat Buchanan by getting him a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Although Buchanan had been unfairly dismissed as an isolationist antisemite, Roberts wrote, “his speeches read like prophecy.”

Pat Buchanan, a literate man, as some antisemites are, used to like to end his stump speech by shouting “Headpiece filled with straw!” identifying the corrupt DC elitists he was running against with T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” though most of his audience probably missed the allusion. It might also have been a subtle reply to William F. Buckley Jr. who once described Buchanan as “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men,” while trying to dismiss him from the conservative movement. Buckley’s famous excommunication only sort of worked then. For better, and for worse, it is inconceivable now, as we reel through a social media landscape that has made cultural gatekeepers largely irrelevant.

Unlike Pat Buchanan, Nick Fuentes doesn’t quote high modernists, even antisemitic ones—he’s more of a Julius Streicher than a T. S. Eliot guy—but he is inspired by Buchanan in other ways: “He ran in 1992. He didn’t see his [America First] vision realized until 2016 . . . Are you ready to go until 2040, until 2050?” he asked his Groyper Army.

One hopes not, but it will take more than hope, though, less than shadowy handlers and hit squads. As Tucker Carlson said to Fuentes, “you’re more talented than I am, for sure, as a talker.”

Fuentes recently denounced Carlson as a nefarious handler. But Carlson has moved on; he just bought a house in Qatar.