The latest episode of Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox Nation, titled “Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization,” is maybe the most straightforwardly white nationalist piece of television he’s ever produced — an alarming accomplishment considering his recent oeuvre.
The 27-minute “documentary” opens with a sweeping aerial view of the Danube River in Budapest, then cuts to two white Hungarian parents playing with their child in a park, the sound of laughter layered over the angelic voices of a church choir. The music suddenly turns loud and ominous as the viewer is presented footage of desperate, bloodied migrants at the Hungarian border.
The camera then slowly zooms in on a black-and-white photo of an old man sitting at a desk: George Soros.
“The influence of George Soros here in Europe is more powerful than in the United States,” Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, tells Carlson in a sit-down interview. “This is his main hunting area.”
Soros, a Jewish Hungarian-American billionaire investor and philanthropist who survived the Holocaust, has been the subject of vile anti-Semitic propaganda for over a decade. The far right — and Orban, in particular — would have you believe Soros is an omnipotent puppet master, using his liberal nonprofit, the Open Society Foundations, to hasten the end of the Christian West via open borders and nonwhite immigration. It’s a conspiracy theory that hews closely to classic anti-Semitic tropes about malevolent Jewish influence in politics and media.
Soros, Carlson says, “is waging a kind of war — political, social and demographic war — on the West.” In a recent interview about the episode, Carlson added that Soros’ aim is to make society “more dangerous, dirtier, less democratic, more disorganized, more at war with themselves, less cohesive — in other words, it’s a program of destruction aimed at the West.”
Demographic war.”
“Dirtier.”
You could be forgiven for mistaking Carlson’s words for those written in the manifestos or social media screeds of white supremacist mass shooters. Robert Bowers, who in 2018 massacred 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, routinely posted similar conspiracy theories about Soros and Jews.
Carlson’s demonization of Soros is in stark contrast to his slobbering admiration of Orban, whose cruel and draconian anti-immigration policies have harmed asylum-seekers and frightened human rights observers across the globe. At one point in the episode, Carlson flies in a helicopter, a smile crawling across his face as he admires the sprawling, electrified, and razor-wired fence Orban erected below on Hungary’s southern border.
“Pretty great,” he says.
This isn’t Carlson’s first flirtation with Orban’s Hungary — he filmed his prime-time Fox News show in the country over the summer. Nor is it the first time he and other Fox News personalities have pushed anti-Soros messaging on air. But Carlson’s latest episode for Fox Nation, the network’s digital streaming service, marks one of the most significant and sinister invocations of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory by an American news outlet.
To better understand the implications of Carlson, one of the most powerful figures in American politics, targeting Soros in this way, HuffPost talked with Emily Tamkin, a senior editor at The New Statesman who authored the book “The Influence of Soros” and the forthcoming book “Bad Jews.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your initial gut reaction, your feeling, after watching Carlson’s trip to Hungary?
I had three main impressions. The first was how staid it was, right? How old these conspiracies that it pushes are, how old the sort of angle that it takes, how unoriginal and uninspired. This has just been around for a long time and so it’s been repackaged, and sort of Tucker-fied, but I was just really struck by how we’ve seen all this before.
The second thing that I would say is … I was struck by the callousness with which he speaks of immigrants. There’s a part at which he is, like, lovingly looking at this part of Hungary that, you know, these forests and vast spaces and “so there’s no migrants here, there’s no immigrants here, and isn’t that great that there’s no violence” and “with no people, there’s no humanitarian crisis,” which is, of course, not true, right? The fact that people aren’t there does not mean that they’re not elsewhere and suffering. It’s just a full-throated, xenophobic attack for 25 minutes.
And then the third thing is the level of the historical revisionism and particularly with respect to anti-Semitism, and the positioning of Jewishness in all of this. Can I give you one example that really jumped out at me?
You can give me many.
OK, great. So toward the beginning, they’re doing like Hungarian history 101, and talk about how Hungary after World War I lost all of this territory in the Treaty of Trianon, and then there’s World War II, and then, you know, then the Cold War and thus Hungary really knows what it’s like to lose to foreigners or, you know, this is sort of their line.
And it’s true that Hungary lost territory to the Treaty of Trianon, and it’s true that this was a traumatic thing for Hungarians, and I’m not trying to downplay that, but what they do not say is that as a result of the Treaty of Trianon, Jewish Hungarians who, up until this point had been some of the most assimilated Jews in Europe, and who had really seen themselves by and large, as part of the Hungarian national project, are scapegoated. This is the period at which you start to see anti-Jewish laws. It was in this period that the Soros family changed their name from Schwartz to Soros. So there’s this whole narrative of victimization that leaves out Hungary’s own, perhaps past agency, that leaves out the historic anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews and Jewishness that are an inherent part of the story. So to watch that and then, later in the special, to hear anti-Semitism dismissed as a media line … aside from being insulting it was extremely striking, because he is writing anti-Semitism out of the past and at the same time dismissing it in the present.
