No one really knows what triggers obsessions. Tucker Carlson’s obsession with Jews and Israel is no exception.
March 22, 2026
Image: ElisaRiva via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
When I was about 12 or 13, I had a friend who was fun to be with. When we were in my house or hers, we’d talk endlessly about our schoolmates, our teachers, her mother’s illness, and boys, boys, boys. But whenever we went outside, she would start counting.
“What are you doing?” I would ask.
“Counting my steps,” she responded.
“Why?”
She stopped walking to answer me, so she wouldn’t lose count.
“I just have to count them,” she said. “I can’t stop counting them.”
At that age, I had never even heard the word obsession, much less understood that my friend was in the grip of an irresistible compulsion to count every step she took.
One time I asked her, “What if you stopped counting? What would happen?”
“No, no, no, no, no,” she said. “You just don’t understand.”
And I didn’t, until decades later, when I became a psychotherapist and studied this vicious, life-altering malady. Before that, I had no idea that there were at least 12 types of obsessions, ranging from uncontrollable thoughts about contamination, sex, religion, illness, hoarding, on and on and on.
Some obsessions come on with no warning — for instance, the woman who is accustomed to getting things in her home in tip-top shape when spring cleaning rolls around, but who one year finds herself unable to dispose of anything, including old tattered magazines, leftover paper plates from entertaining her grandchildren, a frayed sweater…and then it escalates until she — and the few people who continue to visit her — has to push open her front door and step over piles of junk and debris just to get into her own home.
Or the highly-skilled ICU nurse who, like her colleagues, sported an Apple watch but all of a sudden found herself checking her pulse and EKG readouts and oxygen levels so often — and calling her doctor with anything she thought was suspicious — that she had to quit her job and consult a psychotherapist three times a week.
Or the successful hedge fund manager who read an article about artificial intelligence that scared him so much that he became paranoid, thinking every article he read and every graphic he saw and every song lyric he heard were “created” by A.I. and that every streetlight or iPhone or uniformed officer he saw was tracking him, which forced him to stop commuting to his job and sequester himself in his basement to do business, which ultimately forced his employer to terminate him.
Oh…did I leave out politics?
Where Tucker Comes In
One type of obsession is called Aggressive Obsession, which involves violent or angry thoughts and actions about hurting others — in Tucker Carlson’s case, toward Jews and Israel and Zionism.
Personally, I have no doubt that this bias was always inside Mr. Objective Conservative Commentator, possibly inculcated with mother’s milk and reinforced by the career racists he has chosen to interview like Nazi-fetishist Nick Fuentes, et al., but hidden successfully for decades in order to further his ambition to be accepted as a credible talkathon commentator.
But there comes a time, like my counting-footsteps friend, when an obsession erupts, and the person so afflicted no longer has the ability to suppress or ignore it. There it is, every day, every night, every weekend, persistent and impossible to control. In fact, if the obsessed person turns his thoughts on other things, it triggers the kind of anxiety that compels him to return to the soothing remedy of his obsession.
This, in fact, is the definition of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
What now comes out of Tucker’s mouth is the exact same turgid tripe that emanates from the execrable Candace Owens and that once flowed like lava from the mouths of Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright…to name but three out of a history of antisemites that goes back thousands of years.
It is fascinating to watch Tucker devolve — to abandon a respected broadcasting profession for a reputation as a career racist, to lose a wide mainstream audience for a cheering section of equally obsessed fanatical haters, and at one time to be mentioned among the leaders in mass media but now lumped in with the clickbait cabal of wild-eyed flamethrowers.
This is not to omit the nodding and enthusiastic approval of both Carlson’s and Owens’s racist vomit by podcaster Megyn Kelly, whom writer Micha Danzig accused of “moral confusion,” whom journalist Elie Mischel indicted for “making antisemitism respectable again,” and whom Abe Greenwald, executive editor of Commentary, condemned for being “Carlson’s gutter-mouthed yes-woman.”
A Coveted Invitation?
Carlson has consistently bashed not only Jews and Israel and Zionists, but also President Trump’s war on Iran, calling it “an absolutely disgusting evil war.” And yet, strangely, it seems, the president invited him to lunch at the White House.
Really? Well, according to close Trump ally Laura Loomer, that information/rumor was spread by Tucker’s business partner, Neil Patel, and thoroughly debunked by President Trump. Loomer accused Patel of “sabotaging the president” and covering up the person who actually invited Carlson.
Who could that be? Could it be Carlson’s close friend and the employer of his son, Buckley Carlson, who is deputy press secretary to none other than V.P. J.D. Vance?
And is it too impolitic to ask why, after over a year of non-stop vilification of Israel on the part of Tucker Carlson — who has called Israel “one of the ugliest countries in the world,” that Mr. Vice President finds it impossible to condemn this florid racist, this hater, this obsessed madman?
He certainly wasted not a millisecond in slamming white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who made insulting racist remarks about Vance’s wife, Usha, who is of Indian descent. But not Carlson?
Is this the reason why President Trump threw Tucker out of Club MAGA and now, it appears, prefers secretary of State Marco Rubio to Vance as his successor?
It Never Ends
Meanwhile, and in keeping with the uncontrollable repetitive nature of obsessions, Carlson — who was named Anti-Semite of the Year by StopAntisemitism.org — is now interviewing Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who resigned because he claimed — practically quoting Carlson verbatim — that the Iran war was started “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” Currently, Kent is being investigated by the FBI for allegations of leaking classified information.
But according to prolific writer Amil Imani on The Geller Report, “Joe Kent didn’t resign — he imploded.” His was not a protest, but rather
a confession of moral and strategic bankruptcy. While the United States and Israel finally move to cauterize the nuclear cancer growing in Tehran, Kent has chosen to retreat into the fever dreams of the antisemitic fringe, trading his duty to the nation for the hollow rhetoric of the “Jew-hating” cabal. … On one side stands the cold, hard reality of Iranian enrichment; on the other, a disgraced official spewing the same bile as Candace Owens and Nicholas Fuentes … and “fully embracing the antisemitic tropes popularized by the likes of Tucker Carlson and his ilk.”
You can bet that Carlson’s unrelenting assault on all things Jewish and Israel will go on and on and on and on and on. That’s how obsession works. It clenches on to the part of the brain that is beyond human control, and it doesn’t let go. It’s very similar to drug addiction. All the bromides and encouraging words and treatment programs mostly don’t work because obsession is stronger than all of them.
No one really knows what triggers obsessions. In Carlson’s case, it might have been the injury of being fired from Fox News. But it might have gone another way. He might have become inflamed and subsequently obsessed with the massive, too-huge-to-count, possibly nine-billion-dollar financial fraud among Minnesota’s Somali population, which is largely Muslim…and which was aided and abetted by its governor, Tim Walz.
He might have been inflamed and subsequently obsessed with the case in New Orleans that claimed the settlements for widespread sexual abuse — which saw a pedophile Catholic priest in every city parish — were indefensibly late or nonexistent.
But Muslim or Catholic — or even Protestant or Buddhist or other religions with raging scandals — were not at all interesting to Tucker. It was Jews who inflamed him and turned him from a legitimate political commentator into a raving racist.
Usually, when people are stricken with a negative personality change — from nice to not nice, from charitable to cheap, from warm to cold — the sentiment is to say, “More to be pitied than scorned.” But in Tucker’s case of malevolent racism, he is far more to be scorned than pitied.
Here’s a warning to Tucker and his ilk from the Canadian author and philosopher Matshona Dhliwayo: “If you kick a lion when it is down, God help you when it gets up.”
Joan Swirsky is a New York–based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.