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Conservative historian and commentator Victor Davis Hanson has issued a sharp rebuke of former ally Tucker Carlson, accusing the popular broadcaster of turning a blind eye to antisemitism within segments of the “America First” movement. Hanson’s essay, “The New Antisemitism,” published this week in The Free Press, marks a serious rupture between two of the populist right’s most prominent voices.
Hanson, once a regular guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight and a vocal defender of Carlson after his 2023 departure from Fox News, now charges that Carlson has enabled “a disturbing resurgence of antisemitic vitriol on the right.”
He specifically called out Carlson for offering uncritical platforms to figures like blogger Darryl Cooper and white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Cooper, who Carlson once called “perhaps the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” claimed on a Carlson podcast that Hitler’s armies didn’t truly intend to starve or murder Jews — a statement Hanson correctly denounced as both historically false and morally indefensible.
Hanson also criticized Carlson for failing to challenge Fuentes, who has openly praised Adolf Hitler as “really f*cking cool,” mocked the Holocaust, and spread antisemitic rhetoric about “organized Jewry.”
“That he did not [cross-examine] the likes of firebrands Cooper and Fuentes was not due to any inability,” Hanson wrote. “But suggests he was either unwilling or perhaps found himself in agreement with some or many of their views.”
Fuentes has a history of inflammatory remarks. He once said, “Women need to shut the f*ck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise; it’s that simple.” He also dismissed Jim Crow segregation laws, saying, “Oh, they had to drink out of a different water fountain. Big f*cking deal … grow up … it’s water.”
In 2017, Fuentes claimed the First Amendment “was not written for Muslims or immigrants.”
More recently, he directed racist remarks at Sen. JD Vance’s wife, Usha, who is Indian American, questioning, “What kind of man marries somebody named Usha? … Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”
Hanson argues this is not the old brand of fringe white-supremacist antisemitism, but a more insidious form — cloaked in anti-Israel rhetoric and revisionist history — now surfacing in corners of the America First movement.
He contrasted Carlson’s famously aggressive interviews with establishment conservatives like Sen. Ted Cruz with his soft treatment of extremist voices, suggesting a troubling double standard that risks legitimizing conspiratorial or antisemitic narratives.
In closing, Hanson called on conservatives to reject racial and religious essentialism in favor of shared civic identity:
“Supporters of the MAGA movement are not seeking limitless fealty from conservatives,” he wrote, “but simply expect that religion and race remain incidental — not essential — to our common identities as Americans.”
Anything less, Hanson warned, threatens to fatally undermine the conservative movement’s moral foundation.
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thank you. I had no idea Tucker has lost his way.