If you have little talent and few prospects, the quickest way to turn things around these days is to go on social media and accuse the Jews of starting the Vietnam War or blame them for replacing beef tallow with seed oil. Call yourself a “historian” or “researcher,” and wait. You’ll be a guest on Tucker Carlson’s podcast in no time.
Indeed, in the past couple of weeks, two of the most unhinged antisemitic “influencers” have been guests on two of the most popular podcasts in the country.
Joe Rogan has 14.5 million followers on Spotify. About 11 million people reportedly download each episode. To put that into context, Fox News, which dominates cable news, averaged about 2.38 million viewers during prime time in 2024. Rogan, as we witnessed during the 2024 presidential race, is now a media power broker.
How does he normalize antisemites? On March 1, Rogan’s guest was the legendary comic actor Bill Murray. On March 4, he interviewed guitarist and lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan. Then, on March 5, he slipped in “independent researcher” Ian Carroll, an unhinged antisemitic activist, who went from obscurity to over 1 million followers on X in a short time.
As bigoted cranks go, Carroll is extraordinarily boring. This isn’t Gore Vidal we’re dealing with. Carroll contends Israel was responsible for 9/11. He’s “researching” whether sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was working for Israeli intelligence to blackmail the entire U.S. government. He’s in on the Pizzagate conspiracy, which is too stupid to merit an explanation. In the days before social media Idiocracy, Carroll would be handing out xeroxed flowcharts of Jewish power for Lyndon Larouche at the regional airport.
Rogan gravitates toward unconventional topics and hosts offbeat guests who are passionate about esoteric beliefs, some of them conspiracy theorists. And a free society should make room for people who push back against conventional wisdom. The problem is that no matter what bizarrely insane things his guests propose, Rogan is going to give them a hearing without real pushback — basically personifying Carl Sagan’s warning that you shouldn’t keep your mind so open that your brains fall out. And that’s fine, I guess, unless the person you’re interviewing is a wanna-be Julius Streicher.
The same week that Carroll was on Rogan, podcaster Theo Von, whose show This Past Weekend likely gets about a million downloads per episode, hosted one of the most contemptible antisemitic nitwits in the country. There’s no political or moral crisis in the world — today or ever — that Candace Owens doesn’t blame on the Jews. The authors of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would probably tell her to cool it.
Owens, who has nearly 7 million followers on X, is the model of a quasi-educated bigot who grabs strands of history and extrapolates to create alternative realities that are plausible to her credulous audience. During a recent interview with an accused sex trafficker Tristan Tate, she suggested that communist dictator Joseph Stalin was secretly Jewish and used the Soviet Union as a tool against Christians. “I found a friend who,” she explains, “understands Georgian, and they were like, everybody knows that Stalin was Jewish, and I am like, Americans don’t know this.”
No, we don’t. Not if we’ve read a book. Then again, Owens accuses rabbis who disagree with her of being “drunk on Christian blood,” an old-school blood libel, and says Zionists are engaged in a “holocaust,” a new-school blood libel. Unsurprisingly, she is skeptical of the actual Holocaust. She’s a 9/11 truther. She peddles the debunked Khazar theory (the fiction that Ashkenazi Jewish people have no historic roots in Israel.) Israel, contends Owens, is “a safe haven for pedophiles” where “they practice incest and pedophilia as a sacramental right.”
In any event, this seems like a person who should not be platformed by any decent human being. And yet, Von barely bothered challenging any of this perfidious woman’s quackery.
Much of the normalization of these types of people can be traced back to Tucker Carlson, a top 10 podcaster. Carlson, who worked at the three major cable news networks, earned fame through decades of insightful commentary, not for trying to be the modern-day Father Coughlin. But you could see coming in the waning days of Fox News when Carlson, later fired by the network, hosted Hitler fanboy Kanye West. He cut many of the rapper’s egregious statements to make him palatable to the audience. Owens, a friend of West, was a Carlson regular back then, and now.
Whereas many of the new social media stars are intellectual clods desperate for attention, Carlson knows what he’s doing. One of his recent guests was Darryl Cooper, “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” who contends that the “chief villain of the Second World War” was not Adolf Hitler but Winston Churchill who forced the former into the Holocaust (34 million X views on that one.)
Cooper was Joe Rogan’s guest last week. The “historian” made the absurd claim that Hitler, who he believes is in heaven, hid his antisemitism from the German public.
Carlson is far more sophisticated than most deranged X influencers, relying on euphemisms and proxies to spread his ugly anti-historical message. A few days ago, for example, Carlson blamed “neocons” — wink, wink — for the destruction of “ancient Christian communities, from Iraq to Gaza and in many places in between. Can this be an accident? You wonder.”
Is he contending that former President George W. Bush, probably under the influence of rootless “neocons,” invaded Iraq specifically to destroy the Christian community of the Middle East? Because that sounds like a big story.
Now, a rational person might not think that it’s amazing that neocons have been hoodwinking Muslims for centuries, from Turkey to Africa, into massacring and driving out Christians. Not long ago, Carlson featured the Palestine Liberation Organization’s favorite “pastor,” Munther Isaac, who blamed the Jews for the destruction of the Christian community in Bethlehem — even though the Christian population in that city plummeted exactly when the Israelis handed the place to the Palestinian Authority. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a consistently growing Christian population. Only a person without even a rudimentary grasp of the situation could possibly believe Israel would rather have Islamist neighbors than Christians. But that fact doesn’t help Carlson build animosity.
The very day Carlson was blaming neocons for the Syrian mess, he released an interview with an “emir” of Qatar, a top patron of the al Qaeda spinoffs that took down the Assad regime and now threaten Christians. You won’t be surprised to learn that Carlson didn’t bring it up. Qatar, says Carlson, is just being smeared by warmongering “neocons.”
Carlson fashions himself a free-thinking truth-teller, but cloying interviews with dictators like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Middle Eastern theocrats tell a different story. Carlson spreads Islamist propaganda. Maybe it’s a lucrative endeavor? I don’t know, but he seems to spend a lot of time in theocratic petrostates.
“One of the symptoms of a collapsing civilization is that they start blaming stuff on Jews,” Rogan said not long ago. Antisemitism is now rampant in political discourse. I’ve long been critical of those who recklessly use the accusation against those merely critical, say, of George Soros. These days, though, it’s coming from all sides. It’s worse than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime, and it’s not particularly close.
People often say that more speech is the only way to stop bad speech. Theoretically, that sounds great. The problem is that too many conservatives are now under the impression that free expression means you have some duty to platform every psycho who demands it. Not everyone deserves to be debated.
Moreover, you can’t always fact-check or debunk contentions that are concocted by unfalsifiable fiction. Now, sometimes the conspiracists slip up and expose how ignorant they really are. Even then, debunking them only leads to an entirely new set of “questions.”
For example, the other day, Carroll dug up an old quote from Benjamin Netanyahu in which the Israeli prime minister notes that Islamists might destroy the World Trade Center, six years before 9/11. “I’m not saying this proves anything. I’m just saying it’s an … oddly specific thing to write in 1995.” As of this writing, over 43,000 have liked the tweet, and 10,000 have retweeted it. The “independent researcher” was unaware that Ramzi Yousef had attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, two years before Netanyahu was talking about it. Sure, his fans told me, but the Israelis used Yousef’s attack to cover up their own.
Are these the types of people conservatives hope to attract? The GOP won in 2024 by appealing to normies. One imagines most social conservatives, not to mention the new influx of Jewish and independent voters, would find most of this stuff abominable. Yet, most conservatives with big platforms, with some big expectations, say nothing about the trend. Maybe they are sympathetic or apathetic (and non-Jews may not care, either way.) Others surely don’t want to get on the wrong side of the online mob.
Others assure me the “woke Right,” a term coined by James Lindsay, are saboteurs trying to divide Republicans. It’s not worth engaging with them, they say. But if they’re so irrelevant, why would it divide conservatives to condemn them?
The pundit Noah Smith recently noted that “antisemitism is now mainstream on both the American right and the American left, but worse on the right.” The anti-West, pro-Hamas professors and “protesters” infesting higher education aren’t right-wingers. It is not conservatives who are smashing the heads of Jews in Brooklyn or targeting students at Columbia University. The Left has elected antisemites in Congress. And they have many popular online personalities who wade into the same swampy conspiracies about Jews.
To this point, President Donald Trump has been a significant supporter of Israel and Jews. It’s the new president who cut Columbia University’s taxpayer subsidies. It’s Democrats who sent out a tweet, “Free Mahmoud Khalil,” but never one demanding Hamas free American hostages in Gaza.
For now, right-wing antisemitism is largely an online phenomenon. How long, though, before Republicans start feeling compelled to mollify this faction in the same way Democrats felt the need to mollify the progressive Hamas fans? The red-pilled Groyper movement threatens the Right. It’s about time people started saying so.
