Soul Corruption: Tucker, Candace & Steve

Drop the hatred for the Jewish New Year

I didn’t want to write about this. Oh, how I didn’t want to write about this. I was hoping it would just go away, like the worst of bad dreams.

But it kept recurring. And growing worse, almost to the point of metastasizing into an incurable tumor, a pancreatic cancer of the soul.

Would they soon be accusing us of murdering gentile children to obtain blood for our matzoh as they did in Norwich, England, 1144? Or would they burn the Talmud as was done in Paris when all books were hand written by scribes, 1242?

After all, we were now being accused of being behind the murder of Charlie Kirk with no more evidence than that deranged blood libel from the Middle Ages.

And, yes, I know the Democrats are a hundred times worse. The execrable Jimmy Kimmel was just pulled off the air by ABC for telling the most obvious lie about the Charlie Kirk assassination and he’s far from the worst of them, not even close to the Mamdani “globalize the intifada” crew.

Even so I didn’t want to write about it. I had promised myself, following the advice of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and others, that the best, most effective road forward was always to stay positive.

Speaking of which, it was that half-Jewish, half-gentile songwriting team of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer who wrote "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” based on a sermon by a black man, Charles Manuel "Sweet Daddy" Grace , that became a big hit for Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters in the middle of World War II (1944).

So positivity can come from all quarters in the worst of times. You just have to pay attention to life and the right path.

Nevertheless—and sorry it took so long to get here—sometimes you’ve just gotta say ya basta, enough already.

So roll back with me roughly three years ago this coming winter. My wife and I were sitting in a small bistro on a posh island on the Gulf side of Florida with Tucker Carlson. I had texted Tucker, who spent the cold months on the island, that we were going to be there and hoped to have lunch.

We had a nearly three-hour meal together, gabbing and having a fine time, in agreement about everything under the sun. Tucker was great fun and I thought we were becoming better friends. In fact, we texted every week or so thereafter and he quite graciously gave me a stellar blurb for my then new book, American Refugees, that became the name of this Substack. Because of his fame, the publisher put that blurb on the front cover of the book, rather than the back where they usually appear. It remains there to this day, faute de mieux.

And then the roof fell in.

First it was Tucker’s interview with the “greatest internet historian,” or something like that, who deemed Churchill the real villain of World War II, not Hitler. (“Final solution”—what’s that? Holocaust—over-rated or over-counted). Tucker nodded his approval as this “historian” blithely inverted good and evil in the 20th Century.

I was quite shaken by this, as I know others were. I took it personally. After many decades of writing novels and screenplays, flattering myself that I knew something of human behavior to create characters, I started to question my abilities. I had never misjudged someone as I had misjudged Tucker. The world’s oldest calumny—how could he?

More important than my personal reaction, did he not realize the degree to which he was wounding his many Jewish supporters across the country and the globe? Was he so naive as not to realize we disdained the George Soroses and the Adam Schiffs more than he could because they were our landsmen? What kind of man was Tucker? Where was his empathy?

I texted him, trying to be tactful for a better result. I wrote, semi-offhandedly, that if an “internet historian” wanted to be noticed the last thing he would say would be that Hitler was evil and Churchill heroic. Libraries were filled with books that already did that to a fare-thee-well. Maybe the guy was twisting things to get attention.

Tucker texted back that I wasn’t alone. He’d been getting more flack than he expected for the interview and decided to ignore WWII for now.

He lied. He brought the “historian” back eventually for another round. But there was more.

He put on a prelate from Bethlehem who accused the Israelis of being anti-Christian. Now I suppose there are some Israelis and Jews who are anti-Christian but I have never in my life met a single one—and I’ve talked with a whole lot of Jews, especially in the more than four decades I lived in Los Angeles. Usually it’s the reverse.

But I was struck by something else. Because Tucker was born in 1969, it is unlikely he visited Bethlehem before the Oslo Accords when the small village was still under Israeli control. Because I was born in 1943, I had, twice, during the 1980s.

Back then, when Bethlehem was under the Israelis, it was filled with tons of Christian prelates from all over the world in various costumes, all worshipping as they wished. It was fascinating to guess which countries they were from. If I had a criticism, and it was tiny, it was that the village had become overly touristic, more or less inevitable, given its provenance.

The opposite was true when I returned after Oslo and Bethlehem was under the control of the Palestinian Authority and its militant wing Fatah. It was practically empty. Seemingly ninety percent of the Christian prelates had fled, into Israel proper or back to home countries, except for one or two who had made accommodation with Fatah, in other words kowtowed to the terrorists. The place had become ominous and I left quickly myself.

The prelate Tucker interviewed was one of those who had made precisely that accommodation. His job was to slander Israel and he did it. Tucker had given him a platform for the ugliest propaganda. This was obvious to many people, including me, at the time, and should have been to Tucker. Why not?

Well, fade out and fade in and now we are learning that, according to Tucker, Charlie Kirk had secret concerns with Israel despite all Charlie’s public praise for the Jewish state we have seen and can see now on YouTube. We have to take Tucker’s word as evidence. It’s hard to do. Meanwhile, he seems to be positioning himself as the posthumous spokesperson for Kirk who most agree is already well-represented by his wife Erika.

The whole thing is at once creepy and ineffably sad. The best we can say for the new Tucker is that he is not as whacked-out as Candace Owens. Candace has become the poster woman for something we might call ICI or “Internet-Caused Insanity,” the lust for more and more online notoriety until your brains explode. Every day it’s something new. Brigitte Macron is a man. Stalin is Jewish. Now it’s the Jews who killed or coerced Charlie (hard to tell with Candace who appears to be dodging another defamation suit in her phrasing—one’s enough). Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is in some kind of lead position in manipulating Kirk, she claims to have been told. Charlie’s own producer, Andrew Kolvet, has debunked the whole thing, but it’s nonsense on its face.

I’m pretty much a free speech absolutist but if there’s one person I’d block from online it would be Candace Owens because she appeals to much the same folks the alleged assassin Tyler Robinson appears to have hung with—the paranoid, schizoid, sexually ambiguous violent wierdo crowd in chat rooms you never heard of. She’s actually dangerous.

One person who is not really dangerous but is also infected by some of this Jew Derangement Syndrome is Stephen K. Bannon. I wish he weren’t because on many matters he makes a lot of sense. But for some time Steve has been yammering on on his War Room that Israel is not an ally, but a “protectorate.”

Really? It may be that Steve does not believe in “peace through strength,” the essence of President Trump’s foreign policy because there is no genuine ally that gives the U. S. more strength than Israel for two reasons.

One, vastly more than any other country it works with the U. S. to develop the weapons systems of the future. Just today Israel announced it is the first country in the world to achieve what has been sought by all the major military powers—China, Russia, the U. S.—an operational laser weapon (“Iron Beam”) capable of shooting missiles, not just drones, from thousands of miles away for minimal cost. If it really works, it’s revolutionary. No doubt, as with the “Iron Dome,” the U. S., not its adversaries, will profit first from this Israeli technology. And these are far from the only advances in high tech weaponry coming from the Jewish state in conjunction with the U.S., not to mention myriad advances in other areas from medicine to desalination. Most cellphone advances, love it or not, including the original cellphone from Motorola, began in Israel.

I could go on at length but the point is simple.

Secondly, the Israeli armed forces, the IAF and the IDF, have been by far the best operational testing grounds for American weaponry probably ever. The IAF has flown more serious sorties with the F-35 than any force and have made many modifications of benefit to our allies and our military. Moreover, the vast percentage of money given to Israel by Congress is recycled to the USA through the purchase of weaponry from our companies. In other words, it’s all in the service of “peace through strength.”

Even the war in Iran that Bannon so feared lasted for but 12 days with the US involved only for 36 hours. Hamas, alas, is another matter. But if you don’t believe the forces of Islamism intend to come for the Sunday people after the Saturday people, either I don’t know what to tell you or you haven’t been to London or Birmingham lately. What do you think is going on?

So Steve Bannon, you smart guy you, look inside your soul because you have a Jew problem that you don’t want to examine. You aren’t the first. This has been going on for more or less 3500 years.

I’d like to say we’re used to it, but we’re not. Anyway, I’m not. It hurts, but it’s there. I have to call it out.

Steve and Tucker, you are salvageable. Your souls are fine, according to the Jewish tradition that we are all basically good if we would only find our true selves. It’s accessible to all if they try.

It’s that time of year for us coming up, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Join us, listen to your good soul and abandon the hatred. Bibi Netanyahu isn’t the devil. He’s just a politician trying to help his people survive. You’d probably do the same in his shoes.

That’s what I’m trying to do here too in my own little, not very powerful, way. Good luck to all of us. Am Yisrael chai.