French far-right pundit Éric Zemmour recently launched his presidential campaign with a rally that descended into brutal violence between his supporters and anti-racist protesters. Zemmour has become the star of French nationalism by courting controversy. In his books and TV commentaries, he has defended the Vichy regime, supported the death penalty, advocated for strict limits on immigration, and suggested that only "French" first names should be legal.

Unsurprisingly, Zemmour has been called a "French Tucker Carlson" by U.S. media. The two do have a lot in common. They are both influential nationalist pundits and fierce culture warriors. But it might be more accurate to see Tucker Carlson as an American Zemmour.

Long before Zemmour announced his run for president this fall, he was an influential voice among U.S. nationalists. His books and essays have been discussed on far-right websites, such as Counter-Currents, VDARE, and American Renaissance, over the past decade. His ideas have changed both the rhetoric and substance of nationalism in the U.S. [...]

In America, these ideas were initially popular with fringe paleoconservatives like Patrick Buchanan and Paul Gottfried, but now they are commonly heard among the ascendant "anti-globalist" wing of the Republican Party, led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who recently published the book The Tyranny of Big Tech. From their point of view, big business is cynically and superficially linked with left-wing activism, based not on genuine conviction, but greed and self-interest. They believe that corporations have joined anti-racist and pro-immigrant campaigns because they want access to cheap labor, and that they share feminist and pro-LGBTQ messages because they hope to attract more consumers.

Zemmour's cocktail of neo-reactionary ideas also consists of a radical attempt to rewrite history. He stridently defends the French Vichy government for protecting Jews during World War II, despite the fact that authoritarian, anti-Semitic Vichy rulers collaborated with the Nazis and shipped thousands of French Jews to Nazi death camps. The idea that any inconvenient truths should be banished from the official history of the nation has clearly permeated the thinking of American conservatives as well--see the frenzy over "critical race theory."