Joel Engel is a multifaceted author whose latest book is Scorched Worth: A True Story of Destruction, Deceit, and Government Corruption. It is published by Encounter Books, which I take as a virtual guarantee of high quality. He is also the author of the Wall Street Journal op-ed column “Can It Happen Here? Ask Tucker Carlson.”
In this column Engel takes up the (alleged) connection of, well, you know who with the Epstein affair. I took this up in “Tucker Carlson’s dark turn.” Engel likens Carlson to Charles Lindbergh, which I have been doing for a while. I have come to think Carlson is a more calculating and cynical character than Lindbergh was. Engel’s column nevertheless seems to me a worthy contribution to an understanding of Carlson’s expansion of the Overton Window for old-fashioned anti-Semitism.
Engel quotes Carlson speaking at the Turning Point USA jamboree on July 11. “It’s extremely obvious,” he said, “to anyone who watches that this guy”—Epstein—“had direct connections to a foreign government, and no one’s allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel, because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty. There is nothing wrong with saying that.”
Engel puts this in the context of Carlson’s anti-Semitic effusions preceding that one and asks readers:
[F]ast-forward to early June and Mr. Carlson’s warning that a U.S. attack would lead Iran to unleash its “fearsome arsenal of ballistic missiles. . . . The first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans.” He added that because of its alliance with the so-called Brics bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), “Iran isn’t alone. An attack on Iran could very easily lead to a world war. We’d lose.”
At the time he wrote that, Mr. Carlson had 16.3 million followers on X (where his podcast is seen). On June 13, when Israel began its attacks on Iran, he urged President Trump to “drop Israel” and “let them fight their own wars”—and moved up to 16.4 million followers. Which is to say that one of the most public faces of the America-first movement expanded his audience even as he had been proven spectacularly, hilariously, wrong.
This is Engel’s conclusion:
* * * * *
After the U.S. attack [on Iran’s nuclear sites], [Carlson] conducted softball interviews with both the prime minister of Qatar, which harbors Hamas’s leaders, and Iran’s president, whom he didn’t bother to ask about Tehran’s declared role in trying to assassinate Mr. Trump, while accusing Sen. Ted Cruz of having “an obsession with Israel.” [Sinclair Lewis’s] Buzz Windrip would be proud.
That Jews were Windrip’s primary enemy in the [Sinclair Lewis] novel, as they were in Hitler’s oratory at the same time—Germany’s Nuremberg Laws were passed five weeks before “It Can’t Happen Here” was published—was at odds with how America had historically treated Jews. Never had this country harbored widespread antisemitism of the kind always evident, to one degree or another, in Europe. It was the one country in world history where Jews felt safe.
Oct. 7 changed that. The explosion of antisemitism on both the right and left has been terrifying. People who two years ago wouldn’t have dared declare their hatred for Jews now do so proudly on social media, and have plenty of company.
That’s what’s so insidiously damaging about the claim Mr. Carlson purveyed to his audience [about the alleged Mossad connection to Epstein at the Turning Point USA conference] that night. These were young people, primarily college-age, and they cheered, suggesting he confirmed what they already believe about Israel and, by extension, Jews. With Epstein as a proxy for Jews, he cunningly changed the subject from his Iran doomsday embarrassment.
Because of the fixation on Israel, the Epstein files will remain a cause célèbre, and for as long as they do, Jews hiding behind a metaphorical grassy knoll will be blamed for what’s unseen. It’s also a good bet that when these files are someday released and dispositively absolve Israel, the truth will be dismissed as one more clever trick of those people.
Whole thing here.
