Peloni: Joan Swirskey‘s rotting fruit analogy is so well deserved by Carlson and his ilk. It is a sad and terrible reality that the hatred of Jews being promoted by the fake Right Carlson, Owens, Kelly etc, contrasts sharply with great favor which the American Founding Fathers held for the Jewish people. While the American Left have cast off these ties to the past, it was the American Right, ie the conservative MAGA movement, which saw its past as something worth savoring and restoring, which again contrasts sharply with the Jew Hatred inherent in so much of the Fake Right’s rhetoric, giving rise to the fact that these pro-Islamist, Iran-supporting, Jew haters have far more in common with Obama and his ilk than with Trump’s philosemitic MAGA movement. Hence the truth is not so much that the fruit is rotten, but that it is laced with the same toxic focus inherent in what should be understood to divide the American Left from the American Right. Indeed, the rotting fruit in Joan’s analogy represents the Obama-lyte faction which should be cut out of Trump’s party, very much like you would cast aside a rotting apple to define the limit of what is acceptable to a conservative pallet. Or so I would suggest.
Plus what they will teach us about those who are still with us.
Am Thinker | March 5, 2026
Photo by form PxHere
When I was growing up in New Haven, Conn., my parents subscribed not only to our local newspaper — The New Haven Register, still extant — but also to The New York Times and the now defunct (since 1966) New York Herald Tribune. I think I was about eight or nine years old when I was idly flipping through the Times and came across the obituary section. From that very moment, I was hooked.
In fact, I cannot remember any classes in elementary or junior high or even senior high school that taught me as much about people and life and destiny and justice and injustice and courage and cowardice and virtue and vice and motivation and laziness and the way people cope with illness and face and fear and sometimes celebrate death.
From the famous to the infamous, from regular unsung heroes in everyday life to larger-than-life egomaniacs, from actual giants like Winston Churchill to saints like Mother Teresa to villains like Joseph Stalin, from fabulous glamor girls like Bridget Bardot to sanctimonious feminists like Betty Friedan — there was nothing more compelling and interesting to me.
As I got older, reading obituaries was like acquiring advanced degrees in history, psychology, political science, and philosophy.
No wonder I was a chronic truant!
Real Change
One of the more interesting things I learned was that over their lifetimes, many of the people I read about changed, sometimes significantly — not just in their interests or careers or marriages, but in their thinking. Here is just a tiny sample of how a number of prominent celebrities went politically from left to right and from right to left. And here, for pure inspiration, is how some prominent people — among them Steve Jobs, Ulysses S. Grant, and Mark Twain — hit rock bottom but came back stronger.
Bad Fruit
Of course, most of us have never met the people we read about in obituaries, compelling as their death notices may be. But what is even more interesting is watching — in real time — the living history being made by the people who have immense influence over our own lives, be they in politics or the media.
And then it hit me: I’ve been watching rotting fruit in the political arena that we all observe every day. This is the very, very, very short list:
- Three conservative Supreme Court justices — one of them appointed by President Trump — voted down the president’s tariff initiative, a vote that law professor Jonathan Turley says will not stop the president from using many other measures to continue his policy.
- Republican senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky blocked the SAVE Act — requiring proof of U.S. citizenship and voter ID — from being brought to a vote in the Senate, although a majority of Americans and 90 percent of his own constituents approve of the law.
- Democrat senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut, during his 2010 campaign, frequently — and shamefully — led audiences to believe he had served in Vietnam. He actually served in the Marine Corps Reserve, a stateside position.
- Democrat senator Bob Menendez from New Jersey was convicted in 2024 on 16 counts, including bribery and acting as an illegal foreign agent.
- Democrat congressman Anthony Weiner from New York resigned in 2011 and later served prison time for sending sexually explicit images to a minor.
- Republican former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich from Georgia paid a $300,000 penalty in 1997 for providing inaccurate information to the Ethics Committee.
- Republican congressman George Santos from New York pleaded guilty to felony charges of identity theft and wire fraud after being expelled from Congress following a report by the House Ethics Committee (2024).
That’s a lot of rotten fruit, the taint of which reached much farther than their own compromised lives. But for the most part, they will be remembered, if at all — in spite of their legitimate and sometimes formidable accomplishments — as fools or common criminals.
And the Goebbels Award Goes To…
But the most rotten fruit of all, the fruit that has been contaminated with and entranced by the oldest racist virus in the world — antisemitism — is of course the former conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. As it turns out, if he had been in my fruit bowl, I could not have washed away the possible contagion of those he touched, because it appears that all of them have revealed that they too are polluted by the same pathogen.
Not to omit his cozy relationship with Qatar, his stated desire to buy a home there, and suspicions that his (practically) daily wild-eyed rants against Jews, Israel, and Zionism are fueled by mountainous payments from that tiny but mega-wealthy country, accusations that have been consistently denied.
As writer Vanessa Berg explains,
Carlson insists he has never accepted money from Qatar. Taken literally, that may well be true. But the modern influence-economy rarely operates through crude transactions. Direct payments are unsophisticated and easily exposed. Far more effective are networks of access, prestige, hospitality, and mutual benefit. Invitations to exclusive forums, extended interviews with heads of state, sustained proximity to power, and the validation that comes with being treated as a global statesman … None of these require envelopes of cash. … Payment is only the crudest form of influence.
Not Really a Mystery
Here is a fact that even the world’s biggest skeptics cannot disagree about, which is that in the history of the world, there has never been a baby born with hate in his heart. Never.
As a former delivery room nurse, I can tell you that no matter the circumstances of a baby’s birth, no matter the difficulty of the labor, no matter the relationship — or lack thereof — of the baby’s parents, every baby’s birth is greeted as the stupendous miracle it is and with joy all around, even if it’s only from the delivering doctor and nurses present. And in my experience, by the amazed and also immensely relieved mother!
What comes after the delivery — even if the baby makes its debut in a field or a rainforest or in a taxi or at home or in a hospital — is logistical: feeding, burping, bathing, changing diapers, figuring out how to get everything done, including the mother’s rest time, taking a shower, eating, juggling a million things like the needs and schedules and feelings of other children and the all-important role and feelings of half the creator of this miracle, the father!
So, with all this joy and amazement and gratitude to God for this miracle of all miracles, where does the hate come from?
Hate is taught. Usually early in life and from people who are hugely credible and influential in the young child’s life. Is it the mother who, in spite of her nurturing instincts, has hate in her heart? The father? The teachers or religious leaders or coaches or friends?
As a Jesuit maxim goes, “Give me a child for his first seven years, and I’ll give you the man.”
The Manic Ambition of a Hater
As syndicated columnist and author Josh Hammer explains,
Carlson, much like the villain Haman from the Book of Esther, harbors a seething hatred for the Jewish people and seeks to leverage his proximity to power to destroy them. For Haman, this desire takes the form of a pronounced decree of annihilation. For Carlson, I believe it includes an eagerness to incite antisemitic violence — maybe outright pogroms — and perhaps even a longing for a King Ferdinand– and Queen Isabella–style edict of expulsion to kick the Jews out of America. (As long as the Jews don’t go to Israel and further solidify Israel as a distinctly Jewish state, apparently — God-forbid!)
At 56, Carlson is too old for a midlife crisis. The bottom line is that for all his egomaniacal rants, he will be remembered as just another racist like David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, Father Charles Coughlin, all of them agonizingly long on verbiage, totally absent on empirical facts, astoundingly deficient on moral clarity.
The only positive obituary Carlson will ever get is one that he himself writes and then pays for his outlet of choice to publish.
But seasoned obituary readers like me will detect the colossal fakery in a minute!
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.
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