I distrusted Tucker Carlson before distrusting him was cool.  Still, I tolerated his subtle antisemitism as what could be called “patrician” antisemitism.  With his permanent adolescent boarding-school incredulity about what the grownups are doing, I thought Tucker’s aroma was the legacy antisemitism of the gentleman’s agreement variety, the  condescending, mildly indignant view of Jewish Americans that my childhood was steeped in.  When my parents married in 1947, my father’s bachelor brother and only sibling, Sherwood, did not attend the wedding because my father was marrying a lady he lightheartedly referred to as a “beautiful dark-eyed Jewess.”  (No wonder I’m a psychologist.)

My parents could not have come from more dissimilar socioeconomic backgrounds.  My father and uncle were descendants of one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Westchester County, New York.  The family’s pre-revolutionary homestead, Sherwood House, is a registered national historic monument.  And these dudes were pure-blooded Episcopalian WASPs.  With the pasty skin, high foreheads, and hooded eyelids, they looked like Alistair Cooke.  My mother was a Jewish-American archetype, growing up in poverty in a cramped tenement on the Lower East Side.  Her family had five children, four girls and a boy.  The boy died of diphtheria in infancy.

Prior to the turn of the century, my father’s class occupied the unquestioned pinnacle of American culture, wealth, and privilege, without a rival in sight.  Then catastrophe befell: Along came boatloads of Jews.  With the Jews equivalent in intelligence, and outstripping the WASPs in creative and entrepreneurial energy, the patricians were knocked off their perch forever, and as human nature will, they resented it deeply and chronically.  There is a striking difference between my mother’s and aunt’s practical acceptance and success in overcoming actual antisemitism and the left’s unending jonesing for a scrap — anything, a sombrero — to call racism. 

Heirloom antisemitism cannot be granted to Tucker.  When I became aware of his backdoor apologia for Hitler, his breezy accommodation of the destruction of the Jewish state, his deployment of air quotes when saying “the Jews,” adding “whatever that means,” as if Jews are not human beings, but a vague political construct, I felt ill.  Not because of disillusionment with Tucker, but by being reminded that Jew-hating is the herpes of the body human — always there, gnawing its way through weak skin, waiting to break out into a suppurating infection.

Here’s a 15-minute Google psychoanalysis of Tucker.  His mother abandoned him when he was six, never to see him again.  He was then moved to the country-club hoity-toity milieu of La Jolla, California, until his father married an heiress and he was shipped to a boarding school in Switzerland.  An oldest son with broken and fragile relationships with parents might well be unconsciously brittle in defending the family position, including legacy antisemitism.  But I’m contradicting my own edict never to ask why a Jew-hater hates.

Tucker’s early print and broadcast journalism before settling at Fox News (The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, Politico, CNN, PBS, MSNBC, and many more) smacks of heady careerism rather than deep political convictions.  In discussing the MSNBC termination, he described himself as “hav[ing] a lot of problems with authority and being told what to do.  I don’t react well to it.  I become really aggressive.”  There’s a setup right there, because the Jewish religion has been telling Western civilization how to behave since God gave Moses the Ten Commandments.

Since his dramatic dismissal from Fox News, Tucker unchained has been playing conspiracy hopscotch: 9/11, BLM riots, Obama’s love life, occultism, UFOs, and many times breathlessly asking, “What’s so bad if the Jewish state is annihilated?”  The question epitomizes the truism, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Speaking at the national memorial service for Charlie Kirk, Tucker compared the assassination of Charlie to the Crucifixion by conjuring up of a group of hummus-munching Jews in a dark room agreeing to murder Christ to shut Him up from bad-mouthing them — a repackaging of the so-called blood libel.  But it’s sadder than that.  Tucker perverts the message of divine love for all by turning the God-man into a Jew-hater who enraged the Jews by “telling the truth” about them, then bursts into his famous punctuation mark of shrill self-amusement.  Tucker overestimates the impact of mere words.  Charlie Kirk was assassinated not for the words he spoke.  Many speak the same words.  To suggest that Christ was publicly executed because He spoke the truth about the evil Jews is a horrific perversion of the glory of His advent.  Christ was crucified not because he spoke truth, but because He is Truth Personified.  Christ cast off the illusion of death in this perfect Truth.

Spirituality is God’s problem; God is humanity’s problem.  Spirituality is God’s wrapping paper for the world.  Sophisticated people seeking transcendence adore the word “spiritual” and love to chitchat about spirituality because it is difficult for mere intellection and opinion to face God.  (And that’s what I think!)

In a recent podcast, Tucker’s guest Conrad Flynn explains why we care about Jews as the God-based connection between the United States and Israel: “In the Bible it says salvation is of the Jews, which people forget.  And a lot of people that don’t like Jews, they forget that the Bible is almost exclusively written by Jewish men.” Simply put, without Judaism, there is no Christianity, and without Christianity, there is no America.

It’s interesting how Conrad Flynn offhandedly mentions people not liking Jews, which Tucker accepts as a matter of course.  Imagine if Conrad had said a lot of people don’t like blacks, or a lot of people don’t like Hispanics.  Would that bigotry evoke pause?

The conversation focuses on occultism, and especially the weaving of demonic arts into Hollywood, rock music, and A.I.  Conrad is sweet-talking a bit when he asks Tucker if there is a story that he covered in the past that he now takes a more spiritual view of.  Tucker says, “Every story, especially war,” and goes on to say nuclear weapons are demonic.  Nuclear weapons are no more inherently demonic than gunpowder, which was invented in the ninth century and has killed tens of millions of more people than nuclear weapons.

Perhaps Maya Angelou’s edict to believe people when they tell you who they are, explains Tucker’s collapse.  At the 58:10 minute mark of the interview, Tucker says “I’m very shallow.”  That’s the key: He’s not evil.  He’s shallow.

Shallow people are often impressed by the scale of things.  They think big destructive events involve demon possession, whereas the same destruction on a smaller scale does not.  But if war involved demonic forces, every human civilization and numerous subhuman species including monkeys, apes, and many animal and insect species are demonic.  (Satanic termites with teeny tiny termite pentagrams?)  War is the most unreasonable and the cruelest of human enterprises, but it also calls forth the nobility of courage and self-sacrifice.  Furthermore, for us, the Old Humanity, it is a necessary evil that sometimes works to save life and enable peace.  This is being dramatically illustrated at this moment.  The peace plan for the Middle East happened because of the magnificent courage and operational brilliance of the IDF and the Israeli people.

These words have focused on the religious indivisibility of Judaism and Christianity.  Regarding Tucker’s proclivity to ask why not let Israel perish: By its sheer survival, the Jewish state, as the sole democracy with equal rights for all and better election integrity than in America, is carrying and dragging the surrounding Islamic theocracies on her back into modernity. 

Image: Tucker Carlson.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.