The red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists is fueling hatred for Jews and Israel among young people, while giving Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly a new audience.
If lately you have been feeling as if the world is not quite spinning on its axis the way it used to, you’re not the only one. The shift in the political wind with respect to how antisemitism is treated is no longer merely a matter of hateful calls for genocide or violence against Jews uttered on college campuses or protests in the streets of U.S. cities. The main front where the battle against Jew-hatred is being fought these days is on popular podcasts. What is most disconcerting—and a sign of how much the world is changing—is that some of the bastions of the liberal establishment are doing their best to put their fingers on the scale in favor of the hate-mongers.
Simply put, we’re now living in a world where The New York Times is lending its considerable weight to boost one side in an increasingly bitter civil war on the political right. And the side that they are helping is the one championing the sort of antisemitism that even the newspaper acknowledges seems taken straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
‘Strange new respect’ for right-wing antisemites
The New York Times Magazine’s lengthy and astonishingly friendly profile of former Fox News host and current podcaster Tucker Carlson was a watershed moment. In the 1980s, the late Tom Bethell coined the term “strange new respect” to describe the way liberal media would shower a conservative with praise for “evolving” and adopting positions that they favored. Back then, it was usually reserved for Republicans who opposed President Ronald Reagan and accused him of being a radical. In recent years, the same phenomenon could be observed when it came to those in the GOP establishment or former Republicans who opposed President Donald Trump.
The latest instance of “strange new respect” is reserved for those who share the newspaper’s antipathy for Israel and its willingness to mainstream antisemitic tropes about the Jewish state and its supporters. Interviews like the one with Carlson are examples of what journalist Mark Helprin described as the Times’ embrace of “new heroes” who oppose Trump.