Tucker Carlson is many things but stupid is not one of them. So when he describes Ukraine’s Jewish president (‘a man called Zelensky’) as ‘sweaty and rat-like’, ‘a persecutor of Christians’ and ‘our shifty, dead-eyed Ukrainian friend’, I suspect he knows exactly what he’s doing.
Carlson made the remarks in a monologue on his new show, Tucker on Twitter. Elon Musk’s social media platform signed up the populist broadcaster after his ousting at Fox News. The first episode of Tucker on Twitter has been viewed 111 million times. (Twitter counts a view as a video playing for two or more seconds while 50 per cent or more of the video element is on-screen.)
It is likely that Carlson dropped these tropes into his monologue because he knew it would scandalise his progressive and liberal critics
Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t look like a rat but comparing Jews to rats has a long, ugly pedigree. Rats and rat imagery were pivotal to antisemitic propaganda in the Third Reich.
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