Tucker Carlson slams ‘repulsive’ campaign against country club that barred Jewish toddler

JTA — Catherine Rampell, the economist and pundit, likes telling the story about how her father once launched a public campaign against a Palm Beach country club when it wouldn’t allow his 4-year-old son to attend a birthday party there because he was Jewish.

Now, Tucker Carlson has turned the anecdote into a sinister and “repulsive” tale of a crusade against folks who just want to hang out together.

Carlson substantially misrepresented Rampell’s anecdote, turning it into what Rampell on Wednesday said was “a coded story in defense of antisemitic and racist country clubs.”

Carlson — the far-right firebrand and harsh critic of Israel who has drawn accusations of antisemitism and sits at the center of the Republican Party’s schism over discrimination against Jews — on Tuesday interviewed his brother Buckley on his streaming show about their shared disaffection for US President Donald Trump over launching the Iran war. Tucker Carlson was until recently close to Trump, and Buckley Carlson was a former Trump speechwriter. (Tucker Carlson’s son is also named Buckley, and until recently worked for US Vice President JD Vance.)

In the podcast, the brothers discussed Trump’s purported distaste for WASPs, shorthand for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who are descended from immigrants who arrived in the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. Trump’s grandfather was German-born, and his mother was Scottish.

“He’s very fixated on the WASP thing, and does talk about it a lot,” Tucker Carlson said.

“There’s another group in America that’s kind of fixated on the WASPs too,” his brother responded.

“I’ve noticed that,” Tucker said. And his brother continued: “With equal fervor and hostility.”

That led into a discussion of “status anxiety” driving social change, which Tucker Carlson said “everyone lies about.” That’s when Carlson recalled meeting Rampell at Fox News about a decade ago, when he was a host at the network and she was a guest commentator.

Referring to Rampell, who graduated with honors from Princeton University and who was then about 30, as a “girl” and a “liberal neocon person” who was “not smart,” he recalled asking her about her upbringing. She told him she grew up in Palm Beach, the wealthy Florida enclave where Carlson has also spent a lot of time.

“And she’s like, ‘Yeah, we moved there, and my dad sued the Bath and Tennis club for discrimination because they wouldn’t let him in,’” Tucker Carlson recounted.

“Like, that’s repulsive to me,” he continued. “A club should have, you should have the right to hang out with whoever you want to hang out, on whatever basis you want to make that decision. She was, like, bragging about it, and I was like, the hatred behind that, the desire to destroy something is so evident. This girl’s a hater.”

Rampell, who could only vaguely recall the encounter, set the record straight on Wednesday on the Bulwark podcast. Rampell works for the Bulwark, a centrist political outlet, as well as for the liberal cable news channel MSNOW.

“My father didn’t sue country clubs,” she said. “Tucker is actually right that freedom of association is allowed under the law.”

Instead, Rampell’s father, Richard, a CPA, was moved in 1990 to launch a publicity campaign against clubs in the area that excluded on the basis of race, religion or gender, after his toddler son was told he would not be invited to a preschool classmate’s birthday party.

“We learned this, or my family learned this, because my brother was in preschool at the time, and he was not invited to a birthday party, and it was subsequently found out that the reason he was not invited is that the country club that Tucker is referring to, the Bath and Tennis club, did not allow Jews in its doors, even 4-year-old Jews, as it turns out,” Rampell said.

“When your own child becomes a victim, it awakens emotions you never knew you had,” Richard Rampell told the Palm Beach Daily News on May 16, 1993.

Carlson did not say “Jews” when he discussed the topic on his livestream. But Rampell said she detected plenty of codes, including his exchange with his brother about a group “fixated” on WASPs, and the ostensible oxymoron he uses to describe Rampell as a “liberal neocon.” The neoconservative movement is an ideology strongly associated with parts of the Republican Party.

“You’ll understand what that’s a euphemism for,” Rampell said.

“Neoconservative” or “neocon” are sometimes used as anti-Jewish pejoratives, on the left and the right. Rampell’s writing and commentary do not reflect the views of actual neoconservatives, who champion shrinking the welfare state as well as a robustly interventionist foreign policy.

Rampell noted that Carlson is no stranger to euphemisms for Jews, recalling that in his eulogy for the slain conservative leader Charlie Kirk last year, Tucker referred to the killers of Jesus as “a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus.”

Trump in 1993 sought assistance in turning the Palm Beach estate he had purchased, Mar-a-Lago, into a country club. One lawyer he consulted with advised Trump to emphasize that the new club would be open to all comers — it would not ban Jews or Blacks or others.

“You’ve got an island with a lot of Jewish residents who have no club to go to,” said the lawyer, Paul Rampell — Catherine’s uncle, and her father’s partner in campaigning against country club bigotry.

Trump agreed and hired the lawyer, who helped him secure permission to launch the club.