Can It Happen Here? Ask Tucker Carlson - Joel Engle WSJ oped

Sinclair Lewis published “It Can’t Happen Here” 90 years ago, when fascism ruled Italy and was overtaking Germany. He believed it could happen here and told the story of a demagogic senator, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, whose platform—inspired by Louisiana’s Gov. Huey Long—promises prosperity to “traditional” Americans if they unite against what one character calls “the Jew Communists and Jew financiers plotting together to control the country.”

On July 11, after a day when many of those who identify as “America first” or MAGA were angry over the Trump administration’s failure to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, Tucker Carlson offered an explanation to an enthusiastic gathering at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit. “It’s extremely obvious,” he said, “to anyone who watches that this guy”—Epstein—“had direct connections to a foreign government, and no one’s allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel, because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty. There is nothing wrong with saying that.”

Well, ignoring that everyone who claims “no one’s allowed to say that” seems to say nothing but that—or, as columnist Karol Markowicz posted on X, that “the Mossad is blackmailing everyone but the podcasters”—there is something wrong with saying that: There’s no evidence for it.

Popular culture was once awash with books and movies about the Central Intelligence Agency’s omnipotence and omniscience. Those fantasies are now about the Mossad—which delivers in ways even fiction writers hadn’t imagined: exploding Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies, Iranian politicians and scientists wiped out with little harm to civilians.

Whatever else you think of those ops, the Epstein theory—that Mossad would choose as an American asset a man who’d been convicted of pimping an underage girl and was supposedly pimping many more underage girls to powerful men to make them susceptible to blackmail—requires a preposterous belief in some of history’s oldest antisemitic tropes about the deviously clever puppet-master Jew.

More..

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/can-it-happen-here-ask-tucker-carlson-politics-maga-antisemitism-6c907a0a?st=YWM5Zi&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Free

Mr. Engel is author, most recently, of “Scorched Worth: A True Story of Destruction, Deceit, and Government Corruption.”