On Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson used to be a journalist who just wanted to ask some questions. But then, something changed.

One of the data points leading up to my radicalization was watching Tucker Carlson interview Glenn Greenwald, a reliably left-leaning voice, well to the left of mainstream American journalism, circa 2020. At the time, I did not have a coherent explanation for why Tucker Carlson, an America-first, isolationist, paleoconservative scion of an established American industrialist family enterprise, would even be interested in having a conversation with Glenn Greenwald, a traditional left-liberal, pre-woke ACLU-supporting, principled but perennially disappointed, kvetchy gay Jew. I watched in suspended disbelief, trying to recompile my internal programming in real-time for understanding American politics which had served me well until that moment when I was utterly and completely dumbfounded.

The value of any scientific model is determined by its explanatory power. If model I can explain phenomenon A and B, but fails to account for phenomenon C, while model II can explain all three, model II is a better model than model I. Here I was trying to explain Tucker and Glenn having a nice chat using model I and coming up short.

This was because I was not yet familiar with model II.

In model I, American politics is divided between the left and the right. Broadly speaking, the left is institutionalized through the Democratic Party, and the right is institutionalized through the Republican Party. The left and the right compete for power and influence by making arguments that appeal to potential voters through candidates who are elected via primaries. Sometimes the right wins a majority in national elections, and American policy shifts in the direction of lower taxes for businesses, an emphasis on law and order, and whatever token issue is roiling religious conservatives during that particular election cycle to get them to the polls. Sometimes the left wins a majority, and American policy tilts in favor of expanding welfare, addressing issues of criminal justice, and the equivalent token issue championed by the left at the time. In model I, journalists ask questions and hold power to account, making sure elected officials keep their campaign promises once they’re in power. Tune in to Fox News or read the Wall Street Journal while Democrats are running things, then switch over to CNN and the New York Times after midterm elections flip the House to get that fair and balanced coverage.

Using model I, a conversation between Tucker and Glenn doesn’t make any sense. Why are they talking about the CIA spying on Americans? Why do they keep bringing up Edward Snowden? Why does Tucker care about free speech so much? And most importantly, why do they seem to be in complete agreement? Why aren’t they arguing about taxes, or public smoking, or acid rain?

The short answer is that it’s not the nineties any more.

The long answer is, well, longer.

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The baseline narrative undergirding model I is that the United States is a representative democracy in which elected officials rule in accordance with popular will, and minority opinions are protected by Constitutional rights. Whether the left or the right is in power, an intricate system of checks and balances keeps the system chugging along while preventing it from overstepping its boundaries, and everyone is equally dissatisfied with the outcome.

Model II, on the other hand, starts from a completely different set of assumptions.

In model II, The United States — or more specifically, Washington, D.C. — is the metropole of a global empire¹. Left and right are relegated to the sidelines as anachronistic labels from olden days in favor of a much broader and deeper distinction between center, geographically located along the Eastern seaboard and Pacific coasts, and periphery, which is the rest of the world, from Georgia (the state) to Georgia (the country). According to model II, American voters voluntarily and regularly consume infotainment, which they mistake for news, out of boredom, habit, or an inculcated albeit misguided sense of civic duty. In the simplest terms, the purpose of American media is to shape public opinion such that it coincides with the interests of the metropole. As for foreign policy, the official narrative is something about how America is a force for good in the world, which the median American voter doesn’t know or care to know anything about beyond how the good and righteous United States fights to defend democracy in the face of evil authoritarianism. As with all media campaigns², prolonged and continuous exposure is necessary to uphold narrative legitimacy in much the same way as, say, the Church enforced doctrinal orthodoxy through a hierarchical and coordinated system of information dissemination in a prior era.

Within the bounds of the moral order enumerated in model I, asking questions about how our taxes are collected and spent, or whether minority rights are being sufficiently upheld, or whether it’s racist to wear certain Halloween costumes, is permissible, even encouraged. In model II, the scope and breadth of permissible questions expands dramatically, but not indefinitely, to questioning the very legitimacy of the moral and political order of the state. Ought the government be permitted to tax its citizens to fund foreign wars? Are minority rights a legitimate concern? Should the United States promote and export its system of governance abroad?

In sum, model II takes a much more skeptical approach to understanding what this entity called United States is and does. Model II is for more sophisticated minds, unlike the model I, which is for simpletons.

Some people stumble upon some iteration of model II through the left by reading the works of ideologues like Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn; others come across it by watching Tucker Carlson. Regardless of the origin point, the process looks roughly the same: something happens in the world that you can’t quite provide an account for, so you start to do your own research. You come across an alternative explanation for why things are happening they way they are that doesn’t conform to what they taught you in school. Over the course of several weeks or months as you read the things they don’t want you to know about, a sense of gnostic superiority overtakes you like the zeal of a religious convert. Congratulations, now you know the truth, whereas all you had access to before were lies. The ensuing sense of moral superiority can take years to subside. For some personality types, it never does.

The important thing to remember in all of this is that model I and model II are approximations. Like all models, they are tools for apprehending the world out there. They correspond to the truth with varying degrees of accuracy and precision, but they are not the truth. All models contain error, but some models exhibit greater explanatory power than others, which is what makes them better. Like any tool, models are to be evaluated on the basis of their utility with regard to explaining observable phenomena. If model I can’t make sense of a conversation between Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald in which they agree on almost everything, perhaps model II can. Like the lens on a DSLR camera, though, it’s important to know when to switch from one to another when things aren’t quite turning out the way they should. Unfortunately, some models are so sophisticated that it becomes irresistible to use it to explain everything, up to and including the failure of the model itself. Non-falsifiability is a hallmark of all conspiracy theories. It is the fault line that divides scientific thought from hermetic mumbo-jumbo. It took Western civilization centuries to form this distinction, and now it’s fading into the sunset with predictable results. Hoorah!

Tucker Carlson and the Jews

Much attention has been paid to the fact that Tucker Carlson spends a disproportionate amount of time discussing members of a particular minority that is disproportionately represented in influential positions of power and influence in the United States, usually in a negative light. For some, it might be tempting to simply write off Tucker Carlson as an antisemite, a particular kind of conspiracy theorist, and call it a day.

I think that’s a cop out.

As a model, if you can even call it that, antisemitism is rather dull. To be an antisemite means that you think there is a monocausal reason for why anything bad happens in the world, and that that monocausal reason is Jews. As with most monocausal models, this one is simple to grasp. It also has a fatal bug feature that makes it irresistible: it is non-falsifiable. If someone comes along and tries to disprove it by demonstrating, for example, something bad that happens with verifiably zero Jewish involvement, the antisemite can and usually does retort, “Aha! That’s what the Jews want you to think. They’re just good at covering their tracks so you can’t see them performing their mischief. Don’t be fooled!”

As Non-Zionism laid out in a series of essays, antisemitism is a special case of the cognitive bias known as anthropomorphism. Cognitively, humans are wired to assume that when things happen, especially bad things, other humans or human-like entities (gnomes, elves, gods, demons etc.) must have had something to do with it. It’s much easier and simpler to explain economic inflation, for example, by blaming other humans for being evil and greedy, than it is to explain that inflation is an emergent phenomenon resulting from a complex interaction of factors involving the production and consumption of economic goods, monetary policy, and interest rates. Couple anthropomorphic bias together with ascribing uniquely evil motivations to Jews as a group to describe some undesirable social or political phenomenon, and mazel tov, you’ve got antisemitism in a nutshell. It’s just a particular instance of the unfortunately common phenomenon of cognitively deficient³ people trying to explain complicated things that go way over their heads. As competence and complexity continue to follow inverse trendlines as time progresses, we should expect this sort of thing, sadly, to go on for a while.

Tucker Carlson seems like a smart, affable guy. Having worked in media for decades, I find it extremely unlikely that he hasn’t come across a lot of Jews, some of whom probably share some of his opinions (although they’d never publicly admit it), and thought to himself, every single time, they must be in on it. I could be wrong, of course, but it seems much more likely that Tucker flirts with antisemitic theories, even going so far as to host openly antisemitic guests on his show as a kind of elaborate trolling scheme, knowing that it will elicit exactly the kind of response from exactly the kind of people he finds despicable — notably, writers at The Atlantic, the broadly neoconservative foreign policy establishment, and defenders of the American-led Liberal International Order™.

Tucker Carlson, like the old-school journalist he’s always been at heart, gets really irate when powerful, influential people abuse their power for personal gain, or worse, use their influential positions to further an agenda which he considers harmful to the national interest. He even wrote a whole book making exactly that point. And if he can make his isolationist, America-first points to his millions of viewers by platforming actual antisemites while simultaneously trolling his adversaries, adraba⁴. At the very least, it keeps them busy writing about him, which means they’re less busy writing about anything else. It’s also very good for business.

So what’s a Jew supposed to do?

Eccentric descendent of Hungarian anti-Communists Charles Haywood recently published a short but sweet revisionist history of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution⁵ in which he explains, among other things, the outsized role Jews played in the political history of 20th century Hungary and the inevitable result:

But hatred arose in 1919, when the Red Terror swept over Hungary. The vast majority of the leaders, and almost all the most notorious killers, were Jewish. Completely understandably, this caused great resentment among many Hungarians, and some innocent Jews were attacked (along with the guilty being punished) after the defeat of the Terror, thus further poisoning the well. … While the Arrow Cross did not make anti-Semitism as central to their ideology as the National Socialists, they assuredly fed off it, being extreme nationalists, and when Hitler placed them in power, the National Socialists expected the Arrow Cross to follow through on a program of deportation to extermination or forced labor, which they did … . And quite a few Jews then returned the favor, eagerly cooperating with the victorious Russians to hunt down and kill anyone associated with the Horthy regime. So it goes with ethnic blood feuds.

When I visited the Terror Háza museum in Budapest a couple of years ago, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the names of the officials responsible for the atrocities committed by the Communist regime were unmistakably, undeniably Jewish. Were the museum curators consciously trying to make a point? Or were they simply conveying the fact, as Haywood does in his essay, that Jews were, for whatever reason, employed by the regime in numbers disproportionate to their percentage of the general population? Given that there was a memorial for fallen Arrow Cross soldiers a little up the street, I couldn’t be entirely sure, but the question left me feeling uneasy.

The unease rushed back into my mind lately as horrific images of Assad’s prisons flood OSINT channels. Here was another totalitarian one-party state, cut from the same Marxist-Leninist cloth, very obviously identified with a specific ethnic group, in the process of a spectacularly rapid disintegration. Were the guards and torturers of Sednaya prison disproportionately Alawites? Are Alawites now going to be accused, as a group, of collective evil for all eternity? Probably not, because a) unless you possess specialized knowledge of Middle Eastern ethnic minorities, you’ve probably never heard of the Alawites before, and b) Alawites haven’t been enshrined in the holy texts of two major world religions as a divinely condemned abomination of a people⁶. If Alawites are going to be hunted down in the streets of Aleppo for the next forty years, is it going to be because they are Alawites, or because they were associated with a murderous, totalitarian regime? Doesn’t make it right, but one can understand why such a thing would happen.

The perennial question regarding accusations of antisemitism is whether the accused is complaining generally about particularism, or whether he is complaining specifically about the Jews. There are people who don’t like Jews because they exhibit behavior exhibited by every other ethnic group on the planet except for one: in-group preference. But if one declines to extend the courtesy to all other ethnic groups that exhibit in-group preference, one is liable to draw suspicion. Tucker Carlson makes no secret of his misgivings about special interest lobbying groups, particularly ones with foreign policy interests, pestering the American government for special treatment and attention. I have not done this, but it would not be too difficult to add up all the air time Tucker Carlson spends railing against AIPAC, for example, and compare it with the air time he spends complaining about the lobbying efforts of CAIR, or Ukraine, or State Department officials working for the Islamic Republic of Iran. If it turns out that Tucker Carlson spends a disproportionate amount of time complaining specifically about Jewish- and Israel-related group interests, then I think it would be reasonable to conclude that Tucker Carlson does, in fact, have a special bone to pick with the Jews in particular.

But even if our experiment did confirm the hypothesis, I don’t think the proper response is to tune Tucker out entirely. Even true, blue, dyed-in-the-wool antisemites can be right about some things, and even sometimes in their protestations about specific misdeeds of specific Jews. It would behoove us to listen, at the very least so that we may respond intelligently to the accusations, however unintelligently they are made, that the Jews run everything. It is not antisemitic to notice that Jews are disproportionately represented in positions of power and influence in American life⁷; it is antisemitic to conclude that this must be due to some nefarious Jewish plot of world domination rather than, for example, noticing that Jewish culture has for centuries iteratively selected for individuals of high cognitive ability and achievement, creating a selection pressure biased in favor of professions with high intellectual demands, such as law, politics, and medicine. To think otherwise would lead one to conclude instead that any and all disparity in ethnic composition of various professions is due to some sort of systemic discrimination, a bedrock principle of American civil rights law that has torn the country apart by selecting for incompetence over merit in every facet of public life for the better part of the last fifty years⁸. This is exactly the sort of thing against which competent people everywhere should be fighting. If that means making common cause with influential journalists who are less than amicable towards the Jews, so be it.

1. Not in the strictly classical sense of the term, but “free trade expansionist autonomous transnational borderless multi-ethnic economic zone” is a bit of a mouthful.

2. It is noteworthy that the word campaign is of military origin.

3. By “cognitively deficient” I don’t simply mean unintelligent; there are plenty of examples of very smart antisemites. But all of them, without exception, have some major personality flaw or psychological condition that manifests as irrational Judenhass.

4. אדרבא Used to mean “on the contrary” in the context of Talmudic debates, but has somehow morphed into meaning “moreover” in modern Hebrew. An interesting example of semantic evolution. https://hebrew-academy.org.il/2013/12/29/%D7%90%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%94/

5. https://theworthyhouse.com/2024/11/19/on-the-1956-hungarian-revolution/

6. According to some interpretations, to be fair.

7. Much to the enjoyment of antisemites everywhere, this is changing: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing

8. For more on this, read Christopher Caldwell’s “Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties”.