The Political Right Took Down My Article About Tucker Carlson’s Socialist Views and Support for Antisemites
On April 22, editors at the American Institute for Economic Research posted my article about Tucker Carlson’s socialist views and support for antisemites.
About an hour later, others at AIER ordered that the link be taken down.
AIER’s stated mission is to promote “the value of personal freedom, free enterprise, property rights, limited government and sound money.”
Why would it not want to spotlight Carlson’s anti-free enterprise views and support for bigots?
The article reviews Carlson’s support for four antisemites: Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene; investigative reporter Lara Logan; Hungary’s pro-Putin prime minister, Viktor Orbán; and the pro-Putin retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor.
Greene’s (one, two, and three) and Logan’s virulently antisemitic expressions are of the flamboyant variety.
Orbán’s antisemitism is more nuanced. Notwithstanding his support for Israel, he has rehabilitated the reputation and made a national hero of Hungary’s self-described antisemitic and pro-Nazi leader Miklós Horthy.
Macgregor’s antisemitism, displayed in an October 2021 speech, echoes communist and Nazi antisemitism. He blamed Jews for America’s problems using a phrase that is the same as the phrase that Stalin used to attack Jews and very similar to one that Hitler employed for the same purpose.
The article suggests that Carlson’s soft spot for antisemites may be related to his array of socialist views.
George Gilder’s 2009 book, “The Israel Test,” makes the case that antisemitism grows out of socialism’s misconception of a free market, capitalist economy as a zero-sum game, in which those who become wealthy do so at the expense of others and business owners are parasites that prey on workers. A capitalist economy, Gilder explains, instead is a “positive-sum game, based on an upward spiral of gains,” in which “the achievements of one group provide markets and opportunities for others.”
One of Carlson’s most prominent socialist views is his nativist, anti-immigration conception of the American economy based on the zero-sum game fallacy about how immigration impacts jobs and wages. Decades of data and careful economic analyses have debunked this view.
Another is his apparent support for some kind of industrial policy, a classically socialist prescription, based on his attacks against retailing giant Walmart. Carlson rails against the company – which creates so many U.S. jobs and provides Americans with so many more affordable goods and services – for supposedly destroying the U.S. economy, particularly through its reliance on lower-cost imported Chinese products.
And then there is Carlson’s support for residential zoning. These laws authorize cities to deprive property owners of their rights to use their land as they choose, a core socialist position.
These views, the article explains, are socialist notwithstanding that Carlson is on the political right. Friedrich Hayek dedicated his great book, “The Road to Serfdom” – that famously connects socialism, through which government usurps the economic rights of individuals, to tyranny – “to the socialists of all parties,” because both those on the right and the left are prone to adopt socialist policies.
Carlson admirably and powerfully defends freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but opponents of antisemitism and other bigotry and supporters of individual freedom and free markets nevertheless should challenge his support for antisemites and advocacy of socialist policies that push America down the road to serfdom.
AIER’s decision to take down the article sadly shows that we are farther down that road than I had thought. When even those who claim to support personal freedom, property rights, and limited government turn their backs on these values, America is in trouble.
David M. Simon is a lawyer in Chicago. For more, please see www.dmswritings.com.