As double acts go, the name Carlson and Brand trips easily off the tongue. It’s one we may have to get used to. On Monday, US podcaster Tucker Carlson announced he is becoming a book publisher, and his first title will be How to Become a Christian in Seven Days by the comedian-turned-rape-defendant, Russell Brand.
The jokes tell themselves. According to Carlson, his new imprint is “just looking for books that nobody else will publish”. Brand is currently facing charges of three counts of rape, three of sexual assault and one of indecent assault in the UK.
He has pleaded not guilty to all of them. So yes, I see what Carlson means about books that nobody else will publish.
But Carlson, who used to be a mainstream Republican with a hugely successful show on Fox News, has form when it comes to giving a platform to people few others would tolerate.
Since he left Fox to set up his own media company, he has become one of the most influential and popular podcasters in the world. His shows have millions of viewers and listeners, with some reaching over 3 million views. He has 2.6 million YouTube subscribers, 13.3 million followers on X, and 3.9 million on Instagram.
He knows how to grab an audience. The problem is that Carlson’s formula is to invite extremists – genuine neo-Nazis on occasion, with that label used not as an insult but as an accurate description – to push their warped brands of conspiracy theories, authoritarianism and obsequiousness to foreign dictators.
Carlson is a de facto stooge of Putin, for example, regularly broadcasting the Kremlin’s talking points and flying to Moscow to record what can only misleadingly be called an interview with the Russian dictator. It was, rather, a propaganda bulletin.
He has guests such as Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper, described by Carlson as "the most important popular historian working in the United States today" – who argues that "the chief villain" of World War II was Winston Churchill. Carlson has hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes, another Holocaust denier.
Carlson has a penchant for guests who are open antisemites – perhaps unsurprising given his own view, which he regularly states, that the Jews, in the form of Israel, are behind that the Jews, in the form of Israel, are behind pretty much everything bad about the world today.
Tucker Carlson has just given Jews another reason to hate the BBC - Stephen Pollard
|BBC
In one of his recent morning ‘newsletters’, for example, Carlson describes President Trump as “a slave to Israel. Reporting that uncomfortable fact brings us great pain, but it is the tragic truth.
Every unbiased analyst can clearly see that something very strange is happening between the president and Washington's "special ally".
He presents himself as a strongman when dealing with Europe, South and Central America, Democrats, the legal system, and essentially everybody in the world except for Israel. We are unsure why he is so submissive to the Israelis, but we suspect the reason is serious and dark. There is no other way to explain the bizarre dynamic.”
On Sunday, the BBC, which has been under fire for months over its anti-Israel and sometimes antisemitic stance, with a memo from its own broadcasting standards supremo lambasting its bias against Israel (and Trump), decided that Carlson was exactly the man who should be invited to be a guest on its flagship news programme, the Laura Kuenssberg show on BBC1.
Kuenssberg was away, so Carlson was interviewed by Victoria Derbyshire. As is his wont, Carlson used the interview to push his obsession, repeating his view that Trump is a “slave” to Israel, repeating one of the most blatant and historic antisemitic themes, that the Jews hold the rest of the world in their thrall.
It was a painful watch. Derbyshire tried to push back, but she is not as good an interviewer as Carlson is an interviewee, and she barely had any impact. And to make matters worse, two of the three guest panellists on the programme said they agreed with Carlson.
Sir Alex Younger, the former Head of MI6, said Carlson’s interview was “amazing” and he is “basically right” that the US went to war in Iran because Trump is a “slave” to Israel.
And historian Mary Beard said that “it was really surprising to find oneself agreeing with some things that Tucker Carlson said.” Sir Alex nodded.
The BBC has become a national embarrassment. Not content with its own biased reporting and its decision to broadcast chants of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ from last year’s Glastonbury, it has sought out one of the world’s most notorious conspiracy theorists, whose conspiracies revolve around Jewish control, and offered him its prime interview slot.
And we, the licence fee payer, have to fund this or face prison
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