Mick Hartley

Melanie Phillips in the Times looks at the malign influence of Tucker Carlson – Maga’s favourite podcaster platforms antisemitism and refuses to say if Israel has a right to exist.

Carlson is no mere crank. He has enormous influence over millions of Americans — mainly men under the age of about 40 — who treat his poisonous opinions as near holy writ. This faction forms a very significant chunk of Donald Trump’s core Maga constituency. Carlson’s enormous following helped propel Trump into power. Carlson’s son works for the vice-president, JD Vance….

Seeking explanation for bad things that frighten them, this faction is blaming the Jews. Perceiving a disproportionate number of Jews prominently involved in progressive politics, they see only the Jews — ignoring the entire cultural establishment that has been unravelling western identity over the past half century.

Right on cue, from today’s JC:

Controversial US podcaster Tucker Carlson has described Oswald Mosley, the pro-Hitler leader of Britain’s short-lived fascist party during the Second World War, as one of the country’s “great war heroes”.

Carlson further claimed this week that Mosley’s “only crime was being the opposition” to Winston Churchill, and that was why he was arrested.

Churchill, according to Carlson, was a person we are “required to deify”, but in fact was a figure who “presided over the imprisonment of his opposition party during the entire length of the war, and their families, and their wives.”

About Mosley and his party, he continued: “Their crime was being the opposition party and being disloyal and unpatriotic, they weren’t.”

The British Union of Fascists was not the opposition party, of course, They were never more than a minor faction, sent packing at Cable Street. The actual opposition party, Labour, joined Churchill and the Tories in a wartime coalition.