In a Sept. 1, 2026, article titled “Vance offers olive branch to pro-Israel Republicans in closed-door speech,” Politico’s Samuel Benson describes media personality Tucker Carlson as merely an “Israel-skeptical pundit.” The inadequate and misleading description whitewashes the extent and nature of Carlson’s radical, and often unhinged, positions.
Describing Carlson as an “Israel-skeptic” ignores his long record of hate and conspiratorial thinking aimed not only at Jews and Israel, but toward other groups as well, including immigrants, LGBTQ people, and African Americans. Such a description of Carlson is tantamount to describing Henry Ford as a “Jew-skeptic” for spreading antisemitic propaganda, or calling Richard Spencer an “immigration-skeptic” and “African American-skeptic” for promoting extremist, white supremacist ideas.
Consider several examples of Carlson’s hideous rhetoric:
On his The Tucker Carlson Show, Carlson regularly legitimizes and platforms individuals “who have espoused antisemitism, anti-Israel conspiracy theories, Holocaust revisionism, white supremacism, and xenophobia.” These figures include extremists such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.
Carlson himself has spread antisemitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories that “portrayed Jewish influence in the U.S. as a hidden, malevolent force driving the country toward war through deception and ‘demonic’ control.” In addition, Carlson claimed that the Orthodox Jewish group Chabad was behind the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, as part of a Jewish plot to destroy holy Muslim sites in Jerusalem and build the third Jewish temple.
Carlson also promotes the “Great Replacement” theory, which asserts demographic changes in the U.S. are part of a conspiracy “to take power from white Americans.”
In 2019, Time reported Carlson was recorded calling Iraqis “primitive monkeys” who “don’t use toilet paper or forks.” Reportedly, he also said that immigrants arriving in the U.S. should be “hot,” “really smart,” and that civilization was created by white men.
Carlson has also described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, as “sweaty and rat-like” and “a persecutor of Christians,” echoing both Nazi propaganda and old antisemitic tropes.
This is but a partial list of examples. To describe someone with these views as merely an “Israel-skeptic” is to substantively mislead Politico’s audience. His record of spewing racism, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories unmoored from reality demands acknowledgement from responsible journalists.