In the northwest corner of London’s Hyde Park, near the Marble Arch, is an area long known as Speaker’s Corner. Tradition holds that anyone is free to speak there on any subject for as much time as he pleases, “as long as the police consider their speeches lawful.” Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin would sometimes peddle their poisonous rhetoric there and yet go unmolested by the authorities, though in recent times the police seem to have drawn the “unlawful” line at anything uttered by a native Briton that offends the delicate sensibilities of Muhammadan immigrants.
Before this turn to sectarian division, passersby in Speaker’s Corner might have been drawn to any number of orators holding forth on any number of subjects. In his 1922 short story “Comrade Bingo,” P.G. Wodehouse described Speaker’s Corner as a place “where weird birds of every description collect on Sunday afternoons and stand on soap-boxes and make speeches.” Sometimes one of those birds may have spoken so compellingly as to draw a crowd, at least for a time, with the truly mesmerized drawing ever closer while others, less captivated by the delivery, remained on the fringes.
Encouraged by his enveloping circle of admirers, a speaker might begin to test the limits of credibility, making claims that, to those most devoted to him sound plausible, but to others ring as lunacy. To the speaker’s eye, surrounded as he is by ardent followers clapping and nodding and amen-ing along, the crowd remains as large and committed as ever, as the cheers and applause generated by the inner circle conceals the fact that people beyond are drifting away while commenting that the speaker is a very weird bird indeed.
And so it is in the world of “conservative” commentary today, where two of its most popular figures, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, are in the process of shedding their audiences along with whatever might remain of their credibility. Yes, they have their devoted followers and no doubt generate a healthy income from their clicks and page views, but judging from conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues, they are losing followers at a rapid clip.
And they deserve to.
Consider first Tucker Carlson, who first came to my attention as a writer for the now-defunct Weekly Standard. He was a talented writer, one whose columns offered the reader no hint of what was to come. I don’t watch television, but of course I am aware that he built a large following as a host on Fox News before the network handed him his pink slip and told him to clean out his desk. Just as I didn’t watch him on television, I don’t listen to his podcast, but if one is online and following other conservatives on X, one cannot help but be exposed to some of his opinions. I heard portions of his interview with Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson described as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”
I’m a history lover, so I thought it odd I had never heard of Cooper. Now, having read up on the opinions of this “most important popular historian,” I wish I still hadn’t. I have only contempt for Holocaust deniers, especially one who claims, as Cooper has, that the real villain of the Second World War was not Adolf Hitler but rather Winston Churchill. This is imbecility, and Carlson’s apparent embrace of these crackpot views is further evidence of his descent into irrelevance. When it comes to history, I prefer to learn from people who have actually written history books, like Andrew Roberts and Victor Davis Hanson, each of whom has answered Cooper’s nonsense with well-established facts.
Carlson gave a similarly friendly welcome to another Holocaust denier, the cretinous pest Nick Fuentes, who makes even Darryl Cooper seem relatively sane. Like Cooper, I hadn’t heard of Fuentes until the recent dustup, and he warrants no further commentary here, except to say he is like some tiny flying insect that flits about your television screen in an otherwise darkened room: utterly insignificant but for his outsized capacity to cause annoyance.
Worse still, Carlson recently made the moronic claim that he didn’t “know anyone in the United States in the last 24 years who’s been killed by radical Islam.” So consumed with revisionist history must he have been that a number of events escaped his attention. It was only last May that Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, were shot and killed at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. The alleged killer, Elias Rodriguez, is reported to have shouted “Free Palestine” after gunning the couple down.
On last New Year’s Day, an ISIS sympathizer is alleged to have driven a pickup truck into a crowd of revelers in New Orleans, killing 14 and injuring 35 others. And the list goes on and on, to include the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting that killed 49 and injured 58, the 2015 attack in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed 14 and injured 22, and the 2009 Fort Hood shooting that killed 14 and injured 32. I could go on, but you get the point (even if Carlson does not).
As for Candace Owens, I was a fan of hers as well when she came onto the scene as an ostensibly reasonable conservative commentator, but no longer. Her conspiracy-mongering regarding the murder of Charlie Kirk is beyond tasteless. If I’ve followed her theories correctly, she believes Kirk was killed by a shadowy band comprised of operatives from the Israeli, Egyptian, and French governments, as well as a mutinous cabal within Turning Point USA itself, all of whom recruited a deranged homosexual college student to commit the deed. This is lunacy.
What Carlson and Owens have in common, besides their loosening grip on reality, is their antipathy for Israel. On this subject I must offer some personal history before continuing. I am a cradle Catholic who still practices the faith. As a child, everyone I knew was a Christian, almost all of them Catholic. In my Los Angeles neighborhood there were many Orthodox Jews who I would see dressed in their distinctive clothing while walking to services on Saturday, but they remained strangers to me, cocooned as I was in my Catholic world.
But my father served in the Navy in World War II, and virtually all of my friends’ fathers served in the military as well. My first education on Jews and Judaism came in the context of learning about the war and the Holocaust, the reality of which my young mind could scarcely grasp. I was a grade-schooler when the Six-Day War broke out in a part of the world I had little knowledge of beyond the Bible stories I learned in my parochial school. Unlike the Vietnam war raging at the time, news of which led the television news every night, and whose moral distinctions were clear to me even at a young age, I was uncertain about which side I should wish to see win. I put the question to my father. “The Jews,” he said. “They’re the good guys in this one.”
His pronouncement was sufficient, and for me, an aviation buff, it was bolstered by the fact that the Israelis were flying French Mirage jets while their foes were flying Migs supplied by the evil Commies.
I’m now in my late sixties and have Jewish friends and colleagues, but nothing I’ve learned since my youth – and I’ve read a great deal about Israel and its enemies – has altered my opinion. I have made every effort to have an open mind when listening to debates between supporters of Israel and those advocating for the Palestinians, but I can’t recall even one in which the Palestinian side did not resort to distortions of history, half-truths, or outright lies, the most risible yet commonly invoked being the claim that the Jews have no historical connection to what since 1948 has been the sovereign country of Israel. One need only point out that the Al-Aqsa Mosque sits atop the remains of King Herod’s Second Temple, and that its continued existence in Israeli-controlled territory is evidence of Israel’s tolerance and restraint.
Whenever I log into X, I most often see among the top posts in my timeline some from the Auschwitz Memorial honoring victims of the Holocaust, and some from people remembering victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre carried out by Hamas. Following that massacre, I added an Israeli flag to my X profile in much the same way that many Israelis and others around the world flew American flags in solidarity with us after the 9/11 terror attacks, and my pinned post honors the Bibas family, the four members of which were kidnapped from the Nir Oz kibbutz on Oct. 7. The father, Yarden Bibas, was held captive apart from his family for 484 days before being released as part of the ceasefire agreement, but his wife Shiri and his two sons, Ariel, age 4, and Kfir, 9 months, were murdered by their captors.
For me, the moral case cannot be more clear. One can choose the side of the murderers or that of their victims. So, yes, I stand with Israel, and proudly so. I am indeed one of those “Christian Zionists” of whom Tucker Carlson expressed such disdain. (He later apologized, unconvincingly in my opinion.) And just as I decline to learn history from the likes of Darryl Cooper, I don’t look to Carlson for lessons on proper Christian conduct. The Catholic Church teaches that anti-Semitism is a “grave sin,” and that the Church “reject[s] . . . every persecution against any man . . . mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”
This is not to say that a Christian cannot be critical of this or that policy of the Israeli government or of any individual Jew. Indeed, for several months during my LAPD career, I took part in an investigation into an Israeli organized crime ring, the members of which were outwardly observant – attending services and sending their children to Hebrew schools – all the while spending their days concocting new and innovative ways to steal.
My conservative bona fides are well established through more that 25 years of writing for various right-leaning outlets. My support for Israel in no way diminishes my American patriotism, as some will surely claim. It only means that I recognize the conflict between modern Western civilization, which arose from the great minds of Rome, Athens, and, yes, Jerusalem, and the barbarians who are not the least bit shy about their desire to destroy it.
Stark divisions are forming on the political right, with support for Israel being the line that separates us. I know which side of that line I stand on. When the time comes to choose, as it surely will, with whom will you stand?
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