Last week, I wrote about Yoram Hazony's speech at the International Conference on Anti-Semitism. Hazony argued that critics simply have not made the case against Tucker Carlson. Hazony made a very unusual reference to the lack of a fifteen-minute video to make that case. I quote him in full to ensure that readers get the full context:
A third possibility is that Jews and Zionist Christians have plenty of connections in the Republican party, but that the case against Tucker over the last six months just wasn't presented in a way that was professional, serious, and competent enough to be persuasive.
Sure, many of you think that Tucker is a leading promoter of anti-Semitism, and that the Trump movement should just ditch him.
But that's obviously not what President Trump thinks about Tucker, who did extraordinary work building up the Trump movement over seven years as a host on Fox News. On top of that, Tucker is a very smart, passionate, and very likeable man when you meet him in person. I had lunch with him once, years ago, and I thought he was great. I invited him to NatCon 1 and he gave one of the best speeches we have ever hosted.
And Tucker has been saying—as clear as the day—that he is not an anti-Semite.
Now, if you think otherwise, you are going to have to convince people. You will have to make your case, in a persuasive way, to people who don't spend a lot of time watching podcasts.
Have Tucker's critics done that? Well, if they have, where is the 15-minute explainer video, that I can show my friends on the political right, which proves that this very serious accusation against Tucker is true? Where is the carefully assembled research, with links and dates and timestamps, that could convince an impartial public figure who is open to being convinced?
The answer is: There is no such 15-minute explainer video. There is no such serious research. They don't exist because, for some reason, there are no Jews or Zionist Christians, who think it's their job to produce such things. Or if there are people who think it's their job, they haven't circulated anything of the sort—to me or to anyone else in Washington who's in a position to do anything with it.
This is an extremely high level of incompetence by the entire anti-Semitism-industrial complex, some of whose representatives are sitting right here in this room. Maybe some of you think you were persuasively "fighting anti-Semitism" over the last six months. But the unfortunate truth is that you weren't.
When I first read this, I wondered whether a fifteen minute video is some sort of necessary condition. Is this the standard length of opposition research needed to take someone down? I didn't give this passage much attention, as there were so many other problematic aspects of the speech.
