There is a point at which provocation ceases to be inquiry and becomes incitement; a point at which skepticism curdles into something far more corrosive. Tucker Carlson crossed that point long ago. His recent performance in an interview with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee was not merely embarrassing in tone or deficient in factual grounding; it was a moral failure. It revealed, with unsettling clarity, a pattern of rhetoric and insinuation that traffics in classic antisemitic tropes and a visceral hostility toward Israel that no longer hides behind plausible deniability. This is not the posture of a heterodox commentator probing uncomfortable questions. It is the posture of a man who has made grievance, insinuation, and delegitimization of the Jewish state into a vocation.

Carlson’s style is by now familiar. He masks hostility in the language of “just asking questions,” a rhetorical device that has long been used to launder prejudice into the public sphere. When challenged, he retreats behind the claim of curiosity, as though the mere form of a question absolves the substance of what is being insinuated. But this is not intellectual inquiry; it is a technique for seeding suspicion without accountability. In Carlson’s hands, the question becomes a blade: sharp enough to wound, slippery enough to evade responsibility. That he deploys this tactic so relentlessly against Jews and Israel is not coincidence. It is pattern.

The interview with Ambassador Huckabee laid bare this pattern in all its ugly coherence. Carlson’s obsessive fixation on Israel—its right to exist, its moral standing, its internal laws, even the ancestry and identity of its leaders—reveals an animus that he does not direct with comparable fervor at any other nation. Israel, in his telling, is uniquely malign: a “police state,” a perpetrator of “genocide,” a country that “murders children” on the American taxpayer’s dime.

These accusations are not framed with the sobriety of moral critique but with the hyperbolic certainty of indictment. They echo the language of demonization that has historically been used to portray Jews as uniquely malevolent, uniquely conspiratorial, uniquely deserving of censure. When one nation is singled out for such obsessive moral condemnation—while others engaged in far more egregious abuses escape his ire—the prejudice is no longer subtle.

Carlson’s rhetoric also traffics in conspiracy and slander. He has floated insinuations about Israeli leaders’ alleged ties to notorious criminals, only to retract them later when confronted with facts. But the retraction never repairs the damage; the lie has already done its work. This is how modern antisemitism often operates—not through explicit declarations of hatred, but through suggestive narratives that cast Jews and Jewish institutions as uniquely corrupt, shadowy, or manipulative. The damage is cumulative. Each insinuation leaves a residue of suspicion in the minds of listeners predisposed to believe that something is rotten at the core of Jewish power.

Equally troubling is Carlson’s moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. To place a democratic state—however imperfect—on the same moral plane as a genocidal terrorist organization is not merely intellectually lazy; it is morally grotesque. It collapses the distinction between those who target civilians as a matter of ideology and those who defend their population against such targeting.

This flattening of moral categories is a hallmark of radical anti-Israel rhetoric, one that deprives Jews of the moral right to self-defense while laundering the brutality of their enemies through the language of “both sides.” In Carlson’s world, the murderer and the murdered are morally interchangeable. That is not pacifism; it is abdication of moral judgment.

Carlson’s hostility is not limited to Israel as a state; it bleeds into a broader contempt for Jewish identity itself. His flirtation with pseudo-scholarly arguments about who “really” counts as a Jew, his casual dismissal of Jewish historical and religious claims to peoplehood, and his invocation of long-discredited notions that Jews are somehow impostors to their own history are all staples of antisemitic ideology.

These ideas did not originate with Carlson, but his willingness to recycle them for a mass audience places him squarely within a tradition of thought that has long sought to delegitimize Jewish existence—first in the diaspora, now in the Jewish state.

What makes Carlson’s posture particularly dangerous is not merely the content of his views but the platform from which he broadcasts them. He commands a vast audience, many of whom may not possess the historical literacy to recognize antisemitic tropes when they are repackaged in contemporary language. When he cloaks prejudice in the garb of contrarian “truth-telling,” he grants it a veneer of intellectual respectability. The result is not robust debate but the normalization of ideas that corrode the moral fabric of public discourse.

It is worth emphasizing that criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic. Democracies invite scrutiny; policies merit debate. But Carlson’s rhetoric does not resemble principled critique. It is animated by contempt, structured by double standards, and suffused with insinuations that echo the darkest traditions of anti-Jewish thought. To pretend otherwise is to engage in willful blindness.