You Knew Tucker Carlson Would Blood Libel Jewish Ukraine President Zelenskyy Eventually!

Hard to tell if Tucker Carlson hates Jews or loves Putin, just kidding, it's all of them.

The right wing has been soaking in a raging spittle shower over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy daring to come to Washington to ask Congress to help him stop Russia from wiping his country off the face of the Earth. And no wingnut has so thoroughly wetted himself in that shower than human club tie Tucker Carlson, who has never met a mound of bigoted bullshit he wouldn’t gleefully shovel into our faces.

In this case, the bullshit is a mound of good old-fashioned antisemitism.

Following Zelensky’s speech to Congress on Wednesday night, Carlson, the walking personification of a “No Jews Allowed” country club right out of a Philip Roth novel, spent precious minutes of his nightly show "Tucker Carlson's White Power Glower Hour" accusing Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, of “ waging a war ” on Christianity:

 www.youtube.com 

The comparisons of Tucker to Father Coughlin simply don’t cut it. He’s more like Julius Streicher, if Streicher had a thing for a crisply pressed pair of Dockers.

What was this rotting possum corpse who anchors Fox’s primetime lineup going on about? Does he have a mound of wet cardboard and rat poison where his brain should be?

Well, yes. But also, he’s doing the usual wingnut dosido of taking a piece of news and twisting it beyond anything with even a passing resemblance to accuracy.

What has actually been happening in Ukraine is that the nation’s government has been trying to put some limits on the operations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The UOC has long been affiliated with Moscow and the Russian government, to the point where Ukraine has considered it a security threat.

This fear predates the current war, but it fits in with Putin’s view that Ukraine moving out of Russia’s orbit was unacceptable, if not a downright existential threat to Russians as a polity :

 [Ukraine] has instead promoted the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which in 2019 was granted “autocephaly” or independence by the Patriarch of Constantinople, the symbolic “first among equals” of the world’s Orthodox churches. […] 

 It meant that for Constantinople, which adheres to a strict “one country, one church” principle, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine – loyal to Kyiv – was now the only canonical Ukrainian Orthodox church.    

 Splitters !

The consequences of this move for the UOC – again, not to be confused with the OCU – were mostly a loss of parishes and adherents in Ukraine. But it was even more of a stick in the eye for Vladimir Putin and his brand of imperialism. The church’s declaration was a huge boost to Ukraine’s general efforts to move away from the political, social and economic influences of Russia and become a more independent nation.

Putin and the rest of the Russian nationalists hate that.

Unsurprisingly, subtle distinctions between different branches of the Orthodox Church are apparently too much for the wingnut mind. Instead, the Right has been screaming that Zelenskyy declared war on all of Christianity.

Now here comes their obergruppenführer Tucker Carlson to promote and validate that belief by falsely claiming the Jewish Zelenskyy has banned an entire Christian denomination and thrown its priests into jail. Right in the midst of a wide resurgence of antisemitism in America.

For good measure, Carlson aimed some spite at elected Republicans by accusing them of throwing their churchgoing constituents under the bus:

 Especially if you were, say, Mitch McConnell or John Cornyn and a lot of your own voters go to church on Sunday. They might care about that issue. […]According to Mitch McConnell — who apparently hasn't left his office since the mid 80s — anti-Christian despotism is what most Republicans want, above all. They don't get enough. They're just begging for it. 

If Tucker is trying to bring back the old days of Jews fleeing their shtetls, he should do his show while wearing a fur hat and a tunic to give us the full effect.

[ Media Matters / Emerging Europe ]

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