TUCKER CARLSON'S NEW PARTY LOOKS LIKE A COLLECTION OF ANTI-SEMITIC D-LISTERS

People are taking Tucker Carlson's talk about a new political party very, very seriously. MS NOW's Zeeshan Aleem writes:

Right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson announced in June that he was leaving the Republican Party because he was incensed at President Donald Trump for launching a war against Iran. Surprisingly, what began as a theatrical (and possibly temporary) exit from the GOP has led to a more adversarial and organized opposition. The former Fox News personality appears to be trying to help launch — or encourage the launch of — a right-wing third party. If it comes to fruition, that could be a terrible thorn in the side of Republicans.

This is published under the headline

How Tucker Carlson is creating a lane for a third party to take on the GOP

Signs that the right-wing pundit and his allies want to launch an antiwar third party are mounting.

In addition to portraying the possible new party as "antiwar," the story tells us this:

In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review published in July, Carlson said he was “going to help build a third party” as part of his “good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country.” In his explanation he leaned into the same isolationism he cited when he said he was leaving the GOP.

“Your life expectancy has gone down, and the promise of your children’s lives is likely gone. No one seems to care,” he said to CJR. “It’s not even a factor. ‘What about Hamas?’ I officially don’t care about Hamas. The US government should have, as its first priority, the welfare of its own people.”

The Hamas line hints at what's really going on here. This isn't about isolationism in the abstract, or an "America First" focus on domestic needs. It's about Israel. The principals appear to be not only Israel skeptics but anti-Semites.

Here's a list of the people Carlson has assembled in pursuit of a new party:

Carlson recently hosted some allies on his Maine compound: former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene; former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent; and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who made an issue of the Trump administration’s mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein files and, in May, lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger.

Greene you know about, or you certainly know about her past speculations on a California wildfire:

... Greene is a proponent of the Camp Fire laser beam conspiracy theory. She wrote a November 17, 2018, Facebook post -- which is no longer available online -- in which she said that ... “oddly there are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires.” She also speculated that a vice chairman at “Rothschild Inc, international investment banking firm” was somehow involved, and suggested the fire was caused by a beam from “space solar generators.”

Greene also "shared a video in 2018 repeating the antisemitic claim that 'Zionist supremacists' are conspiring to flood Europe with migrants in order to replace the white populations there."

When Kent resigned as head of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of Donald Trump's Iran war, he blamed not just this war but George W. Bush's Iraq War on Israel -- as if dumbass Republican presidents and their subordinates didn't make these catastrophic foreign policy miscalculations all on their own. Kent wrote, "it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby," telling Trump,

This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that you should strike now, there was a clear path to victory. That was a lie and the same tactic that the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of men and women.

(I know that Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied Trump in order to get him to start the war, but he's lobbied previous presidents, and Trump was the only one stupid enough to take the idea seriously. Bibi was pushing on an open door.)

Massie is a longtime opponent of U.S. military aid to Israel, which would seem like a principled stand if other actions of his didn't suggest a strain of anti-Semitism. His was the only no vote on a 2022 House resolution condemning anti-Semitism -- a resolution on which Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib voted yes. He's said that he's the only Republican in Congress who doesn't have an "AIPAC babysitter."

"When they come to DC, you have to go to lunch with them, and they've got your cell number and you have conversations with them," he said....

When he lost his primary earlier this year, he told the crowd at his concession speech that he'd had trouble contacting his AIPAC-backed opponent to congratulate him: "I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv."

And Carlson, of course, has interviewed not only Nick Fuentes but Darryl Cooper, who used Carlson's podcast to argue that "the United States was on the ‘wrong side’ in the Second World War, and falsely [claim] that millions of Jews in concentration camps 'ended up dead' only because the Nazis did not have the resources to care for them," as Congressman Jamie Raskin noted.

I don't know what Carlson's plan is, but I wonder if there's really a place for a paleoconservative third party, especially one spearheaded by four losers -- three Republicans who've been driven out of D.C. politics and a podcast host who lost his major-media gig a few years ago. It's obvious that a right-leaning third party could dilute the right-wing vote and help Democrats, just as left-leaning third parties helped Republicans in the 2000 and 2016 presidential races. I assume Carlson knows that, and I wonder if he's hoping to shake down the GOP by threatening a divisive presidential campaign (though he says he won't personally run) and agreeing to back off in return for money.

Or maybe he sincerely thinks the GOP will coalesce around a pro-Israel candidate (Marco Rubio?) in 2028, and he wants to provide an alternative. (I think the party will coalesce around J.D. Vance, who's anti-Semitism-curious, and who used to employ Carlson's son Buckley as a deputy press secretary before Buckley resigned to join the private sector. Last year, Vance defended Buckley Carlson against accusations of anti-Semitism, calling the accusers "scumbags.")

My guess: Carlson's party will be vaporware -- it won't run candidates, and it may never exist in any form. But he got people's attention for a news cycle or two.