David Samuels takes up the case of Tucker Carlson in his overlong Tablet essay “Op nation.” Circling around the subject of conspiracy theories, Samuels makes some arguable and some compelling points. When he comes to Tucker Carlson, he is over the target:
If you truly believed that America’s fate was about to be decided by the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the holographic representative of the Democratic Party machine, what would be the last thing you would do less than three months before the election?
Somewhere high up on the list would be relitigating World War II and implying that American heroes who fought and died in that war sacrificed their lives for nothing, due to the malignant deceptions of their puppet masters and the evil Winston Churchill, who was controlled by Zionists. Then there would be directly associating the Republican Party, and its leader, Donald Trump, with Nazis, or else with Russia and Vladimir Putin, thereby validating the most common Democratic Party attack lines against Trump over the past decade. One might associate Donald Trump’s chief surrogates with people who promote Nazis….One might platform antisemites, and inject their poison into the bloodstream of the Republican Party, making it clear to Jews—and to most normal Americans—that conspiratorial antisemitism is equally if not more at home on the right as it is on the left. One could launch one’s own cross-country political tent-show tour to compete with Trump and steal his thunder less than two months before election day.
Tucker Carlson has done all of the above. The question is why.
I can’t say why. I can only observe that, whatever his past contributions to the conservative movement, Carlson now seems to me a viper at its heart.
