Tucker Carlson is many things but stupid is not one of them. So when he describes Ukraine’s Jewish president (‘a man called Zelensky’) as ‘sweaty and rat-like’, ‘a persecutor of Christians’ and ‘our shifty, dead-eyed Ukrainian friend’, I suspect he knows exactly what he’s doing.
Carlson made the remarks in a monologue on his new show, Tucker on Twitter. Elon Musk’s social media platform signed up the populist broadcaster after his ousting at Fox News. The first episode of Tucker on Twitter has been viewed 111 million times. (Twitter counts a view as a video playing for two or more seconds while 50 per cent or more of the video element is on-screen.)
It is likely that Carlson dropped these tropes into his monologue because he knew it would scandalise his progressive and liberal critics
Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t look like a rat but comparing Jews to rats has a long, ugly pedigree. Rats and rat imagery were pivotal to antisemitic propaganda in the Third Reich. The most notorious example comes in Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) a 1940 pseudo-documentary directed by Fritz Hippler, head of film production at Joseph Goebbels‘s ministry of propaganda. Over images of rodents flooding the streets and then of Jews in the ghetto, the narrator says:
Parallel to these Jewish wanderings throughout the world is the migration of a similarly restless animal, the rat… Wherever rats turn up, they carry destruction to the land by destroying mankind’s goods and nourishment, by spreading diseases and plagues such as cholera, dysentery, leprosy and typhoid fever. They’re cunning, cowardly and cruel, and usually turn up in massive hordes. They represent the elements of sneakiness and subterranean destruction among animals, just as the Jews do among mankind.
As for Zelensky persecuting Christians, it’s not the first time Carlson has made this charge. In December, he told his Fox viewers: ‘You are funding the destruction of Christianity in Ukraine.’ This came after Zelensky signed an order proscribing religious organisations ‘affiliated with centres of influence’ in Russia. Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, wrote a scathing op-ed attacking the order at the time. Whether banning a church affiliated to an invading aggressor constitutes religious persecution – even if it doesn’t, it’s plainly illiberal – the Jew as threat to Christianity is one of the oldest canards of antisemitism.
The deicide myth, which blames the Jews rather than the Romans for the crucifixion of Christ, is as old as Christianity itself. From early church apologias to the blood libel, expulsions to pogroms, the caricature of the Jews as ‘Christ-killers’ has been a potent incitement to antisemitic discrimination and violence. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabrication invented by the Tsarist secret police, purports to outline a Jewish plot for world domination. Crucial to the fraud are supposed Jewish plans to ‘forbid Christ’, ‘destroy the clergy’ and bring about ‘the complete wrecking of that Christian religion’.
Inverting the dynamics of persecution to cast Jews as the persecutors of the majority isn’t new either. Henry Ford’s The International Jew, a notorious antisemitic tract that inspired Hitler, asserts of Jews: ‘They are persecutors in Poland. They are persecutors in Russia. They are persecutors in Palestine. They were the arch religious persecutors of history, as the best historians testify. They will be persecutors here as soon as they think they can start it.’
So when Carlson describes Zelensky as a ‘persecutor of Christians’, it is a debatable assertion in the context of the Ukrainian government’s suppression of the Russian Orthodox Church. More troublingly, though, it is an echo of ancient prejudices upon which Jewish oppression has routinely been predicated.
Another echo comes in his characterisation of Zelensky as ‘shifty’. The 12th century French theologian Peter of Blois introduces the stereotype of ‘the shifty Jew’, who ‘after the manner of his father the Devil often changes into monstrous shapes’. The superstition that Jews are deceitful, concealing their true agenda, endures to this day. Donald Trump, for example, took to calling Jewish congressman Adam Schiff ‘shifty Schiff’ and raised the possibility he had committed treason.
It’s hard to believe Carlson is a victim of ignorance or coincidence. It is more likely that he dropped these tropes into his monologue because he knew it would scandalise his progressive and liberal critics. A little thumb in the eye, just because he can. This is part of his schtick, alongside the smug chuckle, the caricature voices, and the goofy mugging for the camera.
Carlson is a troll, but he is a troll with significant standing across the various strands of the American right, including the less pleasant ones. As Tamara Berens observes in a thoughtful essay for Mosaic: ‘Antisemitism is not only the glue holding disparate parts of the far right together. It’s also the building block of a wall being constructed to define who is and isn’t part of this loose constellation of movements.’
Not all of the people watching Carlson will pick up on these tropes but some will be only too familiar because they’re looking for them. For these people, talk of dead-eyed rats and shifty persecutors of Christians is more than obvious bait for Media Matters and the New York Times. To them it is a nod and a wink, a subtle salute to the fringe from the mainstream right. They will have come away from Tucker Carlson’s first Twitter monologue emboldened and hungry for more.
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