The Most Dangerous Man in America (to Jews)
I’m talking, of course, about Tucker Carlson (or maybe Nick Fuentes)
It’s no doubt a revealing confession about the failure of my empathetic imagination, but the fact of the matter is that I can’t for the life of me understand what motivates Tucker Carlson to do what he’s done over the past decade.
But that’s not actually true. Allow me to rephrase it.
I can understand what he’s doing. What I can’t understand is why anyone would make such a choice.
But even that isn’t quite right. Let me try one more time.
I can understand why Carlson would make such a choice. I just can’t imagine making that choice myself.
What has he done that I find it impossible to imagine for myself? Made a decision to turn himself into the most dangerous man to Americans Jews by turning himself into a one-man conduit for pumping far-right anti-Semitism into the political mainstream of the United States.
Rod Dreher and Me
That line about Carlson being the most dangerous man in America to Jews, which I’ve also used for my headline, is adapted from a quote in a Substack post from my old friend Rod Dreher.
Those who’ve been here from the start know about my history with Rod. We became friends in 2002, when I was a Catholic convert working unhappily for First Things magazine and he was a Catholic convert working unhappily for National Review. I resolved my unhappiness by quitting my job, writing a critical book about the people I used to work for, moving ideologically to the center left, and eventually leaving the Catholic Church and institutional religion behind, while also reaffirming the secular Judaism in which I raised. Rod resolved his unhappiness by setting out on his own political and spiritual journey, one I won’t attempt to summarize. I’ll just say that he’s now an Eastern Orthodox Christian, lives in Budapest, and is far more right-wing than I ever was.
We remained friends through a good part of these very different journeys, but we had a falling out a few years ago over some things he wrote about race and immigration to Europe. You can read my side of it in some old posts if you search my archives. Neither of us cut each other off in any kind of formal way. But we haven’t directly communicated since then, though we continue to follow each other on Twitter/X and occasionally like or retweet each other’s tweets.
But that changed a few weeks ago, at least on my end. A very conservative friend of mine on Facebook plugged Rod’s Substack post about the Charlie Kirk memorial event. I clicked through to read and found it familiar in a good way: The nuanced judgments, moral earnestness, and intellectual curiosity and passion I always enjoyed about his writing were there. I found myself missing his voice. So I subscribed, and then started reading his lengthy, daily posts.
I’ve found it a real mixed bag. I don’t know how Rod manages to write so much day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, when so much of it is written in a spirit of acute anxiety verging on panic about pending civilizational collapse, civil war, and other looming catastrophes. On the other hand, many of his posts display the same qualities I’ve always loved about his writing. What can I say? He has an interesting mind. I’m glad to be back in its presence, even if more than half the time I end up rolling my eyes about what’s preoccupying it.
I also very much appreciate that he continues to recognize and refuse to cross certain bright moral and epistemological lines. One of those lines is anti-Semitism. I’ve never seen or heard Rod so much as gesture in its direction. On the contrary, I’ve seen him denounce it repeatedly down through the years, even when doing so does him reputational harm in the right-wing circles in which he’s long traveled.
This very much includes what he’s written in two recent posts about his formerly good friend Tucker Carlson.
