Indifferent to Racist Hate in America, Indifferent to Genocidal Hate in Ukraine

Disappointed in Tucker Carlson, But Alas, Not Surprised

Dec 28, 2022

This post is the sixteenth in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here:

These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything through a Zionist perspective. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.

The PTSD symptoms have been among their very worst the last 72 hours - making this the most painful and disappointing of all Christmases. I couldn’t even bring myself to follow the yearly ritual of watching beloved “It’s a Wonderful Life” because its themes of a suicidal man struggling to live during the holidays just hit way too close to home.

I’m still feeling pretty lousy tonight but I came across something that so disappointed me I figured I’d try and push through to write. Yesterday Claire Berlinski’s Substack

The Cosmopolitan Globalist

began with a quote I couldn’t ignore in her piece “Global Eyes: ‘Go to hell, Tucker Carlson’ edition.” She made the statement a pull quote and I’ll follow her lead, though add a bit more:

Carlson has moved from advocating for Putin to endorsing Russia’s genocide in Ukraine. I don’t know why Murdoch is allowing this on his network, or why advertisers support it, but I will not appear on Fox News again while Carlson is there. Carlson's attacks on Ukraine and Zelensky personally are designed to dehumanize and to justify Russian atrocities, which are already ongoing, documented, and publicly known. It’s like still backing the Nazis after Auschwitz was uncovered.—Garry Kasparov

Read the whole tweet thread here for more from the legendary chess master and human rights advocate. I’ve been a fan of Kasparaov for some time now given his strident criticisms of the imperial war criminal authoritarian Vladimir Putin, the KGB-trained murderer whose killing I advocated last week.

Now, I’ll be honest about something I’m not all that proud of: I’ve made a point not to criticize Carlson the past few years as he’s grown worse and worse in the positions he’s advocated on his Fox show. The reason for that is three-fold.

First, now that I’m no longer paid to watch Fox News all day, I don’t very often anymore. We did the cord-cutting thing years ago so the only time I see a bit of Fox News is when we’re traveling and happen to come across it in the hotel room after a long day’s travel. So I haven’t watched Carlson enough to really get pissed off by his seemingly opportunistic turn to the race-baiting, paleo-conservative far right.

Second, more important though, has been a more personally biased reason: Carlson’s been friendly to me over the years. I’ve only talked with him on the phone once - to warn him about someone I’d over uncovered who was actually a pedophile and had recently started writing for his site the Daily Caller. Carlson responded to that in a reasonable, moral fashion once he understood I wasn’t attacking him but trying to help him, and he promptly deleted the contributor’s posts and banned him from writing for them any further. Then over the years I’d occasionally blog about him when agreeing with some statement he’d make on TV and I’d sent him pictures of our dog Maura which he complimented, being the dog person he is.

Third, in 2017, his site was even kind enough to publish a feature on research I’d done into nonprofit foundations funding Islamist groups, and quote me about it.

So given his kindness to me I was inclined to tolerate some of his more recent stated positions and more recent Fox News persona which annoyed me. There were just more important targets for me to focus on attacking. After all, his more prominent issue of illegal immigration just isn’t something I regard myself as all that equipped to argue, even though I embrace a generally libertarian position there, heavily influenced by the Cato Institute’s immigration expert

Alex Nowrasteh

who personally explained his approach to me when dropping by my office 12 years ago.

However, now no more. It’s time to speak out and explain why Carlson’s recent advocacy of Putin’s genocidal imperial war against Ukraine does not surprise me - even though it does deeply sadden me - given what I know about his ideological history. I’ll also explain what it symbolizes on a civilization scale.

In particular, one aspect of Carlson’s views which has most diminished my respect for him since we spoke all those years ago, was his support for two of my most detested political figures warmly embraced by too many of my former right-wing colleagues: the racist and antisemitic far right ideological leaders Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul.

Carlson has previously stated his admiration for both. In 2005 he introduced Buchanan as “the great Pat Buchanan” on his show and in 2016 praised him with, “No one is smarter than Pat Buchanan.” Here’s a summary of Buchanan’s racism and antisemitism for those not in the know, and a more recent outburst of it.

In 2008, Carlson advocated for Paul for president, noting he’d also supported Paul for congress in 1988. The former Texas congressman’s history of racism and antisemitism I’ve known too deeply for years. Here’s an article by God of the Desert contributor P. David Hornik I commissioned from him in 2014, naming Paul the fifth worst purveyor of antisemitism in America. Here’s a piece from me in 2011 naming “3 Impolite Facts About Ron Paul I Hope Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter Mention Next Time.”

I had argued with the paleo-libertarian congressman’s supporters face to face one of the years I attended the CPAC conference. Standing at a booth trying to help my Freedom Center colleagues recruit conservative students to join a pro-Israel campus activism campaign we were deluged with Paul supporters challenging what we were doing and spouting the most absurd anti-Israel rhetoric. But by then I was familiar with the far left-style foreign policy positions advocated by Paul’s ultra-loyal, cult-like devotees - a group I sometimes mocked as “Paulestinians.” I’d found myself in arguments with them for years when they’d lave a horde of comments anytime we criticized their dear leader for making millions publishing racist conspiracy theories in his newsletter and his contemporary extreme demonization of Jews and the Jewish state.

It should also be noted along these previous points that this year Carlson actively worked to hide the antisemitic views of Kanye West - a figure this publication refuses to indulge by calling “Ye.” He interviewed the neo-Nazi rapper a few months back and chose to cut the parts of the interview where the racist son of a bitch made his antisemitism known.

And you can just read for yourself the history of the racist views which managed to be published in Carlson’s publication. It makes me embarrassed to have had my research published there.

grayscale photo of man and woman statue — Photo by Paulette Vautour on Unsplash

I’m still working on my installment in this series laying out the key reasons why I as a non-Jew am so energized at raising awareness to antisemitism. It’s primarily another autobiographical essay explaining the key personal and professional experiences which shaped me, so I suppose I’ll lay out a more general reason here:

Where someone stands on antisemitism is a moral signal for where they’re likely to stand on damn near everything.

If someone can look the other way and be in denial about the great evils of history like antisemitism and racism, which other great evils will they choose to deny?

So I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop with Carlson. When would he go so over the top that I now had to drop him in the flaming dumpster of right-wing voices I could no longer respect in the slightest?

And now we’re there.

Usually I am very opposed to Nazi and Hitler comparisons to contemporary history, and especially domestic political opponents. But I’ve always make a clear exception: individuals and governments which engage in or advocate genocide against another people should entirely reasonably be compared to modern day nazis. “Never Again” applies to all peoples, not just the Jews.

And what is happening now in Ukraine is a genocide. Need proof? Here you go:

On each occasion, retreating Russian troops have left behind a vast crime scene of mass graves, torture chambers, sexual violence, and deeply traumatized communities. Specific accounts of civilian suffering are strikingly similar from region to region, indicating that these crimes are the result of deliberate Kremlin policy rather than the rogue actions of individual Russian army units.
[…]
The atrocities committed by Russian troops in occupied regions of Ukraine are only one part of a wider genocidal agenda that defines the invasion unleashed by Vladimir Putin on February 24. In areas of Ukraine occupied by the Kremlin, all symbols of Ukrainian statehood have been methodically removed and a new Russian imperial identity imposed on the civilian population. Teachers have been brought in from Russia to indoctrinate Ukrainian schoolchildren, while access to the Ukrainian media has been blocked and the Ukrainian language suppressed.
Putin’s intention to extinguish Ukrainian statehood and eradicate Ukrainian national identity was evident long before Russian tanks crossed the border in early 2022. His menacing statements have since been matched by the criminal actions of his army. Apologists had earlier been able to dismiss the Russian dictator’s genocidal rhetoric as mere political hyperbole, but that is no longer possible.
For years prior to the current invasion, Putin publicly denied Ukraine’s right to exist and insisted Ukrainians were actually Russians (“one people”) who had been artificially and unjustly separated from the motherland. In summer 2021, he took the highly unusual and revealing step of publishing a 5000-word treatise arguing the illegitimacy of Ukrainian statehood.
[…]
Other senior Kremlin officials and regime propagandists have been even more explicit in terms of the genocidal language they have employed to champion the invasion. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently described Ukrainians as “cockroaches” while dismissing the Ukrainian nation as “mythical.” Meanwhile, on Russia’s carefully curated state TV political talk shows, calls for genocide against Ukrainians have become completely normalized. Pundits dehumanize and demonize Ukrainians while routinely questioning the existence of a separate Ukrainian nation and casually discussing the necessity of destroying the Ukrainian state.

It is entirely legitimate and moral to compare Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. That “Adolf Putin” image illustrating this piece above I anticipate running fairly regularly moving forward until that KGB bastard dies one way or another. (Given Russia now allying with Iran and getting drones from them might I encourage the Mossad to do the job? It would certainly send a message to Iran’s mullahs, wouldn’t it? I believe “FAFO” is the acronym?)

Part of why I’ve found antisemitism advocacy and Zionism such important causes is because I’ve come to regard both as moral barometers. Depending on where someone stands on each, I can get an immediate reading of their moral character. If someone is indifferent to the threat of antisemitic violence against Jews in America and they don’t especially care that Hamas is firing rockets on Israeli civilians, then, well, why should I trust their opinion on anything? If someone will look the other way on the hateful characters of Ron Paul because they like what he has to say on economics or Pat Buchanan because they agree with him on immigration restrictionism or “traditional moral values” how can I trust their moral judgment when it comes to anyone?

So, as I’ve grown in the habit of now ending some of these essays, a bit of profanity seems appropriate. To those indifferent to the genocidal violence being waged against the Jewish state by Islamist terrorists and the Islamic Republic of Iran: fuck you, you’re a fucking evil human being. To those indifferent to Vladimir Putin’s genocide to slaughter the Ukrainian people and eradicate their culture: fuck you, you’re a fucking evil human being. To Rupert Murdoch who makes millions broadcasting Carlson’s justifications for Putin’s genocide: fuck you, you’re a fucking evil human being. To companies like Salem Media that have made money promoting the views of Buchanan and Paul, popularizing their evil bigotry on the Right: fuck you, the people running your company and working for you are evil human beings.

And if you have some squeamish moral objection to my using the dreaded “f-word” to denounce genocide, racism, antisemitism, and making money off of promoting them then please, enlighten us in the comments below regarding what level of moral revulsion is justifiable before this expletive should be utilized. Because as the late great poet Tupac Shakur once said,

Indifferent to Racist Hate in America, Indifferent to Genocidal Hate in Ukraine

Disappointed in Tucker Carlson, But Alas, Not Surprised

Where someone stands on antisemitism is a moral signal for where they’re likely to stand on damn near everything.

"I'm sorry if my language offends you, but it can't offend you any more than the world your generation has left me to deal with"

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