The American right is at odds with itself in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk, with the ‘groypers,’ who Kirk hated and discredited, attempting to co-opt his legacy and influential figures attempting to fill the vacuum he left with hatred and resentment.
The most prominent of these figures is former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who once again crossed the line with his softball interview of groyper extraordinaire and Hitler-lover Nick Fuentes. Carlson never even pushed back against Fuentes’s admiration for Communist mass murderer Joseph Stalin.
This fits into the larger pattern of Carlson going out of his way to spread the ideas of people who defend the Nazis or hate Jews. In September 2024, he hosted crank historian Darryl Cooper, who idiotically blamed Winston Churchill for World War Two instead of Adolf Hitler and claimed that the Holocaust was a tragic accident because the Nazis were unprepared for the number of prisoners of war they took on the eastern front. This is the man Carlson claimed “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States."
It is hardly surprising that a year later, Carlson would host and spread the ideas of a man who says that Jews are demonic and need to be “given the death penalty” and that women want to be raped.
Carlson’s actions have led to a justifiable pushback from people who do not want the right to be the pro-Hitler party. But simply calling him an antisemite, no matter how justified, will only rally people to his side. Right-wingers like Megyn Kelley and Brett Cooper are so desensitized to accusations of Naziism from the left that they can no longer even recognize people who praise Hitler as problematic.
The very term Nazi has been stripped of its meaning by antisemites who accuse Israel of being the modern-day Nazis while defending and championing Hamas’s attempts to finish the job Hitler started. He wants to be labelled an antisemite, to be seen as the man who bravely stands up to the “Jewish establishment.”
The way to fight back against Tucker Carlson’s attempts to make the Right safe for Nazis and deadly for Jews is with another label, a label that reveals the heart of his character and the reason for his flirtation with antisemites, Nazis, and dictators - Tucker Carlson is a coward.
I’ve called out Carlson’s cowardice before, but it bears repeating, and it explains the totality of his behavior.
Look at who else Carlson refuses to criticize, who he treats to softball interviews, defends, and glazes. He has spent years defending Vladimir Putin - the Russian dictator who launched a war against Ukraine for his own ego, going as far as to give Putin an interview that was so pathetic that Putin himself mocked it. People who oppose or criticize Putin have a tendency to end up dead. Look at Alexander Litvinenko, the Putin critic who coined the term “mafia state” to describe what Russia had become and who died of poisoning from the radioactive element polonium. Litvinenko was living in England, in the free west, when he was assassinated.
Carlson does not want to end up like him or like the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, political leader Sergei Yushenkov, human rights activist Natalya Estemirova, or any other of the long list of Putin critics who have turned up dead over the years.
Putin himself criticized Carlson for his pathetic interview, saying that he could not even get “much pleasure” from the butt-kissing Carlson gave him.
Russia’s leader, a former KGB agent, knows a coward when he sees one, and even he was disgusted by Calrson’s cowardice.
Carlson gave a similar softball interview with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Carlson has emerged as one of Iran’s biggest supporters in the US, taking the side of the government that calls for the destruction of America, the “Great Satan,” over his own country. This may be surprising, until you remember that Carlson is a coward, and Iran, like Putin, has a habit of killing people who oppose it.
Just two weeks ago, two men were sentenced for an Iranian plot to assassinate Iranian journalist and regime critic Masih Alinejad, a plot that was to be carried out on American soil. Iran has been implicated in plots to assassinate current and former Trump Administration officials, including plots to assassinate President Trump himself. Iran put out a Fatwa on author Salman Rushdie, not even for criticizing it, but for writing a book it did not like about Mohommed. This Fatwa resulted in an assassination attempt against Rushdie in which the author lost the use of his eye.
Carlson’s defense of people and nations which murder their critics extends to Jihadist ideologies as well. He has been accused of being paid off by Qatar to turn against his own country. Whether that is true or not, he similarly glazes Qatar, the modern slave state which spends millions to spread Islamist ideology throughout the West, and has attempted to make the absurd claim that Hamas is not a Jihadist terrorist organization.
Islamists murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for making a documentary about the rights of women in Islamist societies. Islamists murdered 12 employees of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for publishing cartoons about Mohammed. Followers of this deadly ideology have no compunctions about killing journalists who criticize them. Years ago, Carlson was once willing to criticize Jihadist ideology, but as his cowardice has grown, his tolerance for Jihad has grown with it.
His latest act of cowardice is to spread the ideas of neo-Nazis, an ideology that continues to inspire murder to this day.
Carlson’s consistent pattern of refusing to criticize people, nations, and ideologies that murder those they disagree with is completely in line with his response to the murder of Charlie Kirk. Rather than address the actual assassin and his actual motivation, Carlson has sought to shift the blame people who have nothing to do with either. Rather than risk the wrath of the extremists from an ideology that inspired one political murder, he has targeted a group who do not represent a threat to him at all.
By not-so-subtly blaming the Jews and the Zionists, by claiming conspiracies where none exist, Carlson inadvertently disproves the very conspiracies he attempts to spread. As we have seen, he refuses to criticize and even defends those who actually assassinate their critics. If the conspiracy theories about the Jews and Zionists were real, if he even thought they were real, he would act the same with regard to the Jews and Israel as he does with Putin, Iran, and Qatar.
He knows that Jews and Zionists don’t assassinate their critics the way Iran does, that he and his fellow conspiracy theorists are perfectly safe as long as they attack Jews. Israel haters like Zohran Mamdani and Francesca Albanese do not have to live in fear for their lives because they know with absolute certainty that Israel and its supporters will do nothing to harm them. The only attacks they will receive in response are the critical words people say about them.
There is a safety in blaming the Jews that makes antisemitism attractive to cowards who do not have the courage to oppose people who murder their opponents. It allows cowards like Tucker Carlson to pretend to be brave while avoiding having to face reality.
It is time to defeat Tucker Carlson, expose his cowardice for the world to see. When he is seen for what he is, that his hatred stems not from the brave willingness to say what others will not, but from fear of those who murder the truly courageous, his influence will shatter.
America is “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Those who would betray allies and turn on the innocent out of cowardice betray everything America stands for.
Gary Willig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.