System Update - Glenn Greenwald - The Right's Crusade to Cancel Tucker

Nov. 4, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald

01:30:24

The Right's Crusade to Cancel Tucker

Glenn breaks down the right's all-out smear campaign against Tucker Carlson after Tucker's interview with Nick Fuentes. ----------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook

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	Good evening.
	It's Monday, November 3rd.
	Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
	Tonight, anyone who watches this show or actually watches American politics in general already knows that anyone who meaningfully criticizes Israel or who especially questions or objects to the American financing, arming, and protection of that country will instantly stand accused of being an anti-Semite without any other cause.
	Having supported Israel in the past or having been indifferent to Israel is not a shield to those accusations, nor is even being Jewish.
	Take it from me and a lot of other people.
	It's barely an exaggeration to say that at this point, the operational definition of anti-Semitism in the United States, not just used online, but even by formal organizations like the ADL, is the definition is now those who oppose Israel or U.S. devotion to it.
	One of the most influential voices in conservative politics for at least the last decade in the Trump era has been Tucker Carlson.
	Until a couple years ago, he barely even spoke about Israel throughout his whole career.
	And on the few occasions he did, it was to express admiration and even support, basically just mouthing the standard DC partisan line about Israel.
	But ever since the U.S. under two presidents paid for and then armed Israel's destruction of Gaza, which most people around the world view as a genocide, quite rightly, and the extreme influences of pro-Israel groups that our politics became unavoidably visible, Carlson has been increasingly questioning why all of this is, and he's been denouncing much of it.
	There's been a predictable, yet up until recently, a gradual attempt to destroy his reputation by branding him, you'll never guess, an anti-Semite.
	But that effort has now exploded within geopolitical and media circles over the last two weeks.
	And not just Tucker Carlson, but a lot of other people like him who had a lot of status in conservative media up until about two years ago.
	And understanding why all of this is happening and what's happening and why is really crucial for understanding so much about Washington and our foreign policy and the behaviors of the two political parties.
	Before we get to all of that, a couple of quick program notes.
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	For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
	I don't really even think he has a close competitor for second place.
	From 2016 until 2023, basically all of the Trump era until just a couple of years ago, he occupied the 8 o'clock spot, which is the start of prime time on Fox News, the most watched cable network still.
	And in that spot at the 8 o'clock hour, Tucker's audience was larger, not just than any other person on cable news, but also larger than anyone had ever assembled in cable news.
	He really broke this mold where cable news is a dying medium, where it's almost entirely, it's not an exaggeration, people who are over the age of 54 or even 65 and increasingly 75 who now watch cable news, he had a significant portion of his audience that was much younger than that, very rare for cable.
	The show was a remarkable success, really historic in comparison to what cable news had done in the past, but especially with the disintegration of cable news, the rise of the independent media, what cable news had been doing over the last few years.
	It was a huge platform.
	Tucker has been around, of course, media forever, has been working in television for decades, at CNN, at MSNBC, at Fox.
	But this was really the moment when his influence really consolidated and grew as a sort of spokesperson, a media spokesperson at least for the Trump movement, for a lot of its grievances, certainly didn't agree with all of the views, but Tucker became not just extremely popular among conservatives, but really universally admired.
	If you go and look from 2016, 2017 when his show began, really putting up extremely significant ratings when he grew the Fox audience, attracted people who really didn't watch cable news, younger people and the like, to his show because of how he was doing it and what he was saying.
	If you look at how he was talked about in conservative politics, you will be hard-pressed to find very many people publicly criticizing Tucker Carlson in conservative politics who had any sort of platform.
	I'm not saying you can't ever find a conservative saying, oh, Tucker Carlson said this the other night, I disagree with his views on that.
	He was a very outspoken, vehement opponent of Biden financing the war in Ukraine.
	There were a lot of Republicans who supported that, including ones in Congress.
	People certainly had no problem saying they disagreed with Tucker on that.
	Although opposition to that war in Ukraine became a very predominant conservative principle because it so clearly aligns with the America First ideology, namely that we shouldn't be spending our money anymore on fueling foreign wars, on helping foreign countries.
	We need to be spending it helping our own citizens and spending it within our crumbling community.
	So it was a very consistent view of that war in Ukraine that he was vocally advocating from the start.
	And it aligned very well with America First.
	And even though a lot of people in DC wanted to support that war, including the Republican Party, the base of the Republican Party, a large contingent of it, started to turn against the war in Ukraine as well.
	Basically, until he was fired by Fox, and by all accounts, it had a lot to do with the fact that he was an opponent of not just financing the war in Ukraine, but the entire interventionist, endless war, neocon conservative policy that it represented, something that people like Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, has been an advocate of and continues to be for a long time.
	That was certainly a big reason Tucker got fired.
	He had the largest ratings of anybody on TV when he got fired.
	So when that happens, because ratings are usually the business, the bigger your ratings, the more money you make, if somebody gets fired when they're the top-rated show, you know almost certainly it's about something else.
	And this something else was the substance of his views.
	But up until that time, nobody really had a bad word to say about Tucker in conservative circles.
	Maybe it's because they had bad thoughts about him, but didn't want to express it given how well-liked and admired he was.
	Or maybe people just viewed him as kind of a consensus figure that took all the different strains of the MAGA world and kind of united it for one hour at the start of Fox News' prime time.
	But whatever it was, there was certainly nothing controversial about Tucker within conservative politics.
	And now all of that has very radically changed.
	And what's so amazing about this radical change is usually when somebody's been around for as long as Tucker has, he's now in his mid to late 50s, been on television, as I said, for 30, 35 years.
	It's not really that usual for somebody to just instantly overnight become so polarizing in the political faction to which they have belonged their entire life.
	That's exactly what happened.
	And while we've seen this gradually happening, because after October 7th, the topic of Israel, which Tucker had almost always avoided, like a lot of people who work in media, who work in politics, people really had no reason to talk about Israel.
	It hadn't been on the front burner since at least 2014, which is the last time the United States massively bombed Gaza, nowhere near what they did over the last two years, but maybe back then, maybe a couple other occasions, but nowhere near what it's been for two years.
	So people had the luxury of just avoiding it.
	And people knew it was a thankless story to talk about.
	And most people you would see avoided it.
	And if they ever did talk about it, it was very much in passing just to recite the sort of pieties about Israel that you had to affirm if you wanted to work in major media.
	And Tucker, that was true of him, barely ever talked about Israel, barely ever did any work on Israel.
	I think visited Israel a couple times for a family vacation just because of its historic and religious features, but had no interest in Israel at all.
	And after October 7th, he felt like he had to.
	It was so central to our politics, not just the war, but everything happening in the United States as a result of October 7th and U.S. support for it.
	Protest and censorship as a result of declining U.S. support, massive amounts of money leaving the United States to go to Israel, the deployment of troops in that region to protect Israel, the bombing of Iran.
	Israel became absolutely massive, not just in terms of foreign policy, but domestic policy as well.
	So much of the Trump administration has been about punishing colleges for having professors too critical of Israel, for allowing students to be critical of Israel, expelling and deporting students who criticize Israel.
	Sometimes, yes, they were deported or expelled for protesting Israel, but not always.
	Members of Congress constantly go to Israel.
	They're constantly in Jerusalem, constantly at APAC, constantly tweeting about Israel.
	And of course, if you're somebody who believed in the American First Movement, if you spent the last many years talking about it, you're at some point going to say, wait a minute, I thought this movement that I supported, that I was excited by, that I participated in, and I remember Tucker campaigned for Donald Trump throughout 2024.
	I thought this movement was about America first.
	And yet it seems like a huge part of our political class and our foreign policy is obsessed with Israel, focused on Israel, devoted to Israel.
	And he began raising questions that had been pretty common on the left and even in liberalism for a long time.
	These are things I've been talking about forever.
	But on the right, it was very rare for someone to do so, especially as somebody as with as a mainstream platform as Tucker.
	And you could see this coming.
	He was starting to become attacked by conservatives, prominent conservatives, and not just criticizing him or disagreeing with him, but denouncing him as an anti-Semite.
	And we're all big boys and girls who work in this profession.
	This is something you expect.
	You know, it's going to happen.
	You can handle it.
	But over the last couple of weeks, it has really intensified.
	And it's worth looking at, not because Tucker Carlson's not going to be fine.
	He's going to be absolutely fine.
	If there's anyone who's going to be fine, it's Tucker Carlson, but because it says so much about the priorities of our discourse, how our debates about Israel function, the efforts being made to destroy people who try and raise debates, to clamp down on the ability to speak freely, the purchasing of media outlets by people who are fanatically pro-Israel, that this is something that you cannot avoid.
	And it's everywhere.
	All throughout the Sunday news shows, for example, members of Congress went on the network news stations, on cable news stations, and they were asked about Tucker's interview with Nick Fuentes.
	And you had multiple Republican members of Congress and the Senate denouncing Tucker Carlson as somebody who should be expelled from the conservative movement.
	So I just want to show you what precipitated this, but really as a way of understanding what the mindset is and just how pervasive this still is in our politics.
	than ever.
	I would argue that as people's eyes have opened up, as people have been more critical of Israel than ever, expressing more criticism of Israel, the backlash and the crackdown and the attempt to destroy his people's reputation has become far more, not just transparent, but far more extreme as well, because there's kind of a panic on the part of Israel supporters who have been able to maintain a real lockdown on bipartisan opinion to Washington that is now all crumbling and they don't know what to do.
	So about a week ago or so on October 27th, Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes.
	Nick has been on a lot of other shows prior to Tucker interviewing him.
	He was on our show, I guess, about six weeks ago, was on Patrick Bett David's show, that podcast that I just did when I was in Florida.
	He's been around because he has a very large following, principally of young men, of young disaffected men, young right-wing men, young conservative men.
	The show that he does, the American First Show, is huge, everywhere online.
	Everything he does is viral.
	You ask people under 30 and they will know Nick Fuentes a lot more readily than what a lot of people would consider famous people in politics or media who are above the age of, say, 50, who nobody under 30 knows.
	You cannot deny his influence no matter what you think about him.
	And if someone is influential, the job of a journalist is to understand what their thought is, to understand their worldview, to challenge it in the places they think need challenging.
	And that's exactly what Tucker proceeded to do.
	So we had Nick Fuentes on the Tucker Carlson show, and here you see a thumbnail of it.
	This is from October 27th.
	And obviously, Tucker shows, Shucker show is watched by a lot of people.
	It's the number two podcast in the country after Joe Rogan.
	But I want you to take a look at the number of people who watched Tucker's interview with Nick Fuentes.
	And this is just on YouTube.
	This interview appeared on multiple platforms.
	I'm not even sure that YouTube is their most watched platform.
	It might be, but I know there's others like Spotify, Apple, X, and other places where these interviews appear that are watched by huge numbers of people as well.
	So just on YouTube alone, this was this interview with Nick Fuentes had 5.1 million views.
	And that's just in less than a week, nearly 5.2 million views in a week.
	There aren't many interviews, certainly political interviews, that get anywhere near that level, those kind of ratings, that level of attention.
	People are watching because they're interested.
	And they're interested because these topics matter to them.
	And they matter to them.
	And they're interested in this because Nick Fuentes has become an influential voice no matter what your views are.
	And Tucker did what journalists should do.
	We put him on our show as well.
	And there was a huge amount of interest in that as well.
	Now, one of the things that happened once Tucker put Nick Fuentes on his show is there were a lot of people who have been really resentful of Tucker's influence in conservative politics, not just out of jealousy or not just out of personal spite because he attacked them, though there is a lot of that, but also ideologically.
	When, I know, I started off by saying that Tucker was almost never criticized in conservative political circles until he was fired by Fox.
	And even after that, it was really only once he started criticizing Israel and people started publicly criticizing Tucker to the point that when Tucker was fired by Fox News, numerous Republican legislators in the Congress and the House of Representatives and in the Senate went to Politico to declare that they were so happy Tucker had been fired by Politico and their reason was that he had made it more difficult to finance the war in Ukraine because his repeated continuous critiques of that policy
	from Joe Biden made it harder for Republicans to keep funding the war in Ukraine because they had all their base.
	They would go to their constituents in town hall meetings and they would say, I thought we were America first.
	Why are we sending hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine?
	We need that here.
	And they felt a lot of pressure and a lot of impediment to do what Republicans, not all but most, wanted to do, which was support Joe Biden's policy of financing the war in Ukraine.
	But when they went to Politico to say how happy they were Tucker Carlson was fired and that things would be better now that he would no longer be on the air, they all did it anonymously.
	Not one had the courage to use their own name when saying that.
	Talking here about members of the House of Representatives and the Senate who are such cowards, they wouldn't criticize Tucker by name, even though they wanted to celebrate his firing from Fox because they wanted to fund wars and he made it harder.
	And that gives you the sense that I was talking about at the start, which is that criticizing Tucker in conservative media and political circles until he started talking about Israel basically wasn't done, not even by the people who are most powerful.
	After Tucker interviewed Nick Fuentes, a lot of people who Tucker had been very critical of, people like Ted Cruz, you probably remember that very aggressive and for Ted Cruz extremely embarrassing interview where Tucker interviewed Ted Cruz.
	A few months ago, Ted Cruz hasn't stopped talking about Tucker, attacking Tucker since.
	People like Dan Crenshaw, mostly like the pro-establishment, pro-war wing of the Republican Party that really believes in the traditional pre-Trump ideology of the Republican Party, but because you can't survive in Republican politics unless you pretend that you support Trump, they all pretend they like Trump, but they hate Trump's foreign policy instincts to the extent it's not interventionist.
	They hate his anti-free market economic policies like tariffs, but they can't really say it.
	But a lot of those people were the ones who hated Tucker, and they've been, Tucker has been very critical of them for supporting an ideology that it seemed like Republican voters wanted to dispense with.
	And they used Tucker's interview of Nick Fuentes as what they see as their opportunity to finally destroy Tucker.
	That's when this campaign exploded.
	Tucker is flirting with Nazism.
	He hates Jews.
	These are the kinds of things that conservatives have always expelled from their movement.
	William Buckley did it.
	This whole line that he's become a hate monger.
	He's become somebody beyond the pale of decency.
	This person who until two years ago was the consensus pick for probably the most, certainly the most influential, maybe the most respected media voice for conservative politics and the MAGA movement has now become beyond the pale after questioning U.S. support for Israel for two years.
	Now, as a result, what happened was after this interview with Nick Fuentes, after a lot of establishment Republican politicians started attacking Tucker and demanding that he be, that people disassociate with him, there was a rumor online that was spread that the Heritage Foundation, which has long been probably the most influential conservative think tank, scrubbed its site of all pages of its donation page that mentioned Tucker Carlson.
	And here was what was passed around, kind of had a before and after showing that it had previously mentioned Tucker in its page, and then someone tried to show that it had been removed.
	I'm not really sure if this ended up being accurate or not.
	There are a couple of different versions of claims about whether this really did happen, but the Heritage Foundation felt compelled because Tucker still has a gigantic following within the conservative movement, certainly more than people attacking him like Ted Cruz or Ben Shapiro do at this point.
	And the Heritage Foundation ended up in the middle of this and they felt compelled to come out and say what it is that they think about all this.
	And the reason why this was not easy was because the Heritage Foundation has forever been fanatically pro-Israel.
	Basically every influential mainstream group in Washington has been fanatically pro-Israel.
	And that includes the Heritage Foundation.
	But just like Megan Kelly said about Charlie Kirk, where she said it became untenable for him to be so extremely and uncritically pro-Israel, given how much public opinion within younger conservative circles has changed.
	He couldn't have this huge breach between himself and the people Turning Point was purporting to represent.
	That's true for the Heritage Foundation as well.
	That's true for most people in conservative politics.
	They see the tide turning.
	And some of them are going to stick to that pro-Israel ship until it sinks, and others are trying to jump off of it.
	The Heritage Foundation's led by Kevin Roberts, who was a controversial pick, but he has been leading the Heritage Foundation.
	And he had to speak on what Heritage thinks about all this, about Tucker's criticisms of Israel, about his hosting Nick Fuentes, the allegations that his interview of Nick Fuentes wasn't nearly adversarial enough, that it was more friendly.
	And Kevin Roberts posted this statement on behalf of the Heritage Foundation about all this that added nations' worth of fuel to what had already been the spreading fire.
	Here's what he said.
	We will always defend truth.
	We will always defend America.
	And we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda.
	That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.
	The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division.
	Their attempt to cancel him will fail.
	Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.
	I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says.
	But canceling him is not the answer either.
	When we disagree with a person's thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas and debate.
	And we have seen success in this approach as we continue to dismantle the vile ideas of the left.
	As my friend Vice President Vance said last night, what I am not okay with is any country coming before the interest of American citizens.
	And it is important for all of us, assuming we are American citizens, to put the interest of our own country first.
	That's where our allegiance lies, and that's where it is.
	All right, so that is a remarkable statement, even though it's scripted, even though it's, of course, somewhat carefully worded.
	And the quoting of J.D. Vance, that J.D. Vance quote, is also remarkable.
	The fact that in the middle of controversy about U.S. support for Israel, major politicians like J.D. Vance, the Vice President of the United States, and also the Heritage Foundation, a major conservative mainstream think tank, will stand up and affirm very loudly this view that our duty as Americans is not to put other countries before ours, but to put ours first.
	And to be saying that with reference to Israel, I know it seems unremarkable, maybe even seems obvious and benign, but that is not how American discourse relating to Israel has functioned.
	Saying that, even hinting that some people seem to have an eagerness to prioritize Israel about the United States was long considered completely taboo, anti-Semitic, and now people just can't avoid it any longer.
	Too many people see the reality that that's what's happening.
	And not only did the Heritage Foundation affirm that and quote J.D. Vance from doing so, he very clearly vehemently defended Tucker, a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation, who always will be, defended his interview of Nick Fuentes, saying, look, we don't like certain views that Nick Fuentes has.
	We even abhor some, but the solution is not to do what the left does and deplatform people or cancel, but to have an open debate.
	And essentially really strongly supported the primary objection that a lot of people on the right and the left have to this devotion to Israel, which is it seems like for whatever reasons, a lot of people put that country on the other side of this world, the world, this tiny little country above our own.
	To say that this statement by the Heritage Foundation didn't go over well in a lot of establishment Republican circles is to understate the case quite a bit.
	It probably is the biggest scandal or crisis in the history of the Heritage Foundation.
	Huge numbers of people, conservatives, again, the mainstream types of conservatives, pro-Israel conservatives, it's important to remember and to always keep in mind in this context how large the anti-Israel faction has become within conservative circles.
	There's no way to marginalize people any longer who have that view because the number of people who hold that view is way too large to marginalize anybody who has it.
	But the Heritage Foundation got so attacked that they did a couple of things, including as the Hill reported on November 3rd, top Heritage Foundation staffer departs after Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes controversy.
	Quote, Ryan Newhouse, who until Friday was chief of staff to Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, left the conservative think tank in the wake of an uproar over a statement from Roberts last week defending Tucker Carlson after he interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
	Quote, Ryan was not fired.
	He offered his resignation, which was accepted, a Heritage spokesperson told The Hill on Monday.
	Not only that, from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 3rd, remember, this is all about that statement we just played.
	Jewish lawyer quits Heritage Foundation's anti-Semitism task force over Tucker Carlson defense.
	Quote, Mark Goldfeder, Puppeter's public resignation comes amid a broad backlash to comments by Heritage President Kevin Roberts.
	Now, just this part alone is so fascinating.
	Remember, a major grievance of the American right over the last decade, a major principle that they upheld was that canceling people, deplatforming people, trying to silence people because of their views, especially when those views are representative of a lot of people's views, is a left-wing tactic of debate repression.
	And all the Heritage Foundation really did is affirm it in the context of Israel, of Nick Funtes saying, look, we don't agree with Nick Funtes in a lot of what he says.
	In fact, we abhor a lot of what he says.
	But of course, Tucker did nothing wrong in interviewing somebody with his influence.
	And this is so basic.
	I mean, journalists interview bad people all the time, if you think Nick Funtes is qualified as that.
	They interview foreign leaders who are charged with war crimes, like Benjamin Netanyahu or whoever, take your pick.
	Journalists interviewed al-Qaeda leaders.
	Journalists interview all sorts of people.
	That's part of the job.
	And you ask them questions so that the public can make decisions about it.
	So all the Heritage Foundation did here is say Tucker was absolutely within his rights to talk to somebody like Dick Funtes and ask him questions about his worldview given his influence.
	Number two, everybody has the right to question a foreign country, any foreign country.
	We even have the right to question our own government.
	If we have the right to question our own government, of course we have the right to question Israel.
	That was it.
	And for those two previously uncontroversial points, but extremely controversial when applied to the case of Israel and people who question support for Israel in the United States, that not only becomes controversial, but radioactive to the point people are quitting and losing their jobs.
	And it's absolutely driving a massive wedge inside the conservative movement.
	We're going to look at all of that and the implications of it and some other important aspects to it right after this quick word from our sponsor.
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	I think it's important to give some voice to the people who are expressing all the ideas I just got done describing.
	Not just the view that Tucker Carlson is wrong and that people who think like Tucker Carlson are wrong, but that Tucker Carlson is somebody who is so beyond the pale that no one in the conservative movement should begin should be able or should continue to associate with him at all.
	That they should not, nobody should consider him or Nick Fuentes.
	Basically, anybody who is very critical of Israel should not consider them welcome in decent society within the conservative movement.
	And it's completely unsurprising where this came from, but it came from people with a platform.
	As I said, senators and members of Congress were on Sunday news shows saying this.
	One of the condemnations, one of the decrees on behalf of Israel that was issued today that got a lot of attention, among the most attention online, was issued by Benjamin Shapiro, the founder of Daily News, a how can we say this without understating the case, a obsessive, lifelong devotee of Israel.
	I think that's fair.
	Here is what he tweeted earlier today: quote, no to the groipers, no to cowards like Tucker Carlson who normalize their trash, no to those who champion them, no to demoralization, no to bigotry and anti-meritocratic horseshit, no to anti-Americanism, no.
	Isn't it just, by the way, a bit amazing and ironic that this exact sector of the right, the Ben Shapiro right, that dressed up as free speech crusaders for all those years, only to now cheer Trump's punishment of people who criticize Israel,
	their main grievance, even beyond censorship, was the fact that racism and bigotry accusations are constantly weaponized by the left to destroy the reputations of conservatives, to intimidate people from expressing opinions that are different than the ones the Democratic Party holds.
	And one of the dominant features of conservative discourse now is to just scream racist and bigot and anti-Semite at everybody who disagrees with the Ben Shapiro view about Israel, which had been the bipartisan view in Washington.
	And so now you hear people like Ben Shapiro who are mocking racism claims and bigotry claims from every other group to which he doesn't belong.
	Oh, that's snowflake behavior.
	It's just self-victimization.
	These people just want to have excuses for their own failures.
	And now suddenly, in so much of what Ben Shapiro and people like him say, you will always inevitably find racism accusations against people who are critical of Israel.
	And that's, of course, an accusation he applied not just to Nick Fuentes, but also Tucker Carlson in decreeing that Tucker should no longer be welcomed in the conservative movement as a result of his views on Israel.
	Here's what he said.
	Hey, folks, I want to do something different on today's show.
	We're going to cover one topic in depth.
	That topic is, I think, the most important thing happening in the country.
	It was a hot topic last week, but I wanted to take some time to really gather my thoughts and speak on it in coherent fashion, holistic fashion.
	That topic is the fragmentation of the political right.
	That fragmentation is being caused purposefully by a splinter faction of people led by a young man named Nick Fuentes.
	They call themselves the Groipers.
	They are white supremacists.
	They hate women, Jews, Hindus, many types of Christians, brown people of a wide variety of backgrounds, blacks, America's foreign policy, and America's Constitution.
	They admire Hitler and Stalin.
	And that splinter faction is now being facilitated and normalized within the mainstream Republican Party.
	The main agent in that normalization is Tucker Carlson, who is an intellectual coward, a dishonest interlocutor, and a terrible friend.
	And Tucker Carlson last week was aided, abetted, celebrated for normalizing Nazism within the Republican Party by the mainstay organization of the traditional right, the Heritage Foundation.
	Is there anyone who actually believes that it's some kind of unrelated coincidence that, again, nobody like Ben Shapiro would have ever spoken of Tucker Carlson in those terms for decades until he started criticizing Israel?
	And are we really supposed to be amenable to the argument that the reason all these people are turning on Tucker and trying to destroy him and expel him from the conservative movement isn't because he criticizes Israel?
	Could the alignment be any more obvious?
	Speaking of which, another outlet that tried to condemn Tucker in similar terms is the Free Press, owned by one Barry Weiss, who is now the editor-in-chief of CBS, as a role of the Ellison family purchasing that.
	And Free Press is part of CBS as well.
	Here is the, from October 31st, the title of that article, MAGA's False Patriots.
	When Tucker Carlson praises Moscow and mocks Washington, it's not just bad optics.
	It is a sign that parts of the right have stopped loving this country.
	This rhetoric should be very familiar.
	You can go back and find, as a matter of fact, in National Review, which is the next outlet of conservative thought that is denouncing Tucker that we want to show you.
	And in 2002, it published an article by David Frum entitled Unpatriotic Conservatives.
	And it was about all the conservatives who opposed the invasion of Iraq, like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, and it pronounced them all unpatriotic conservatives.
	If you disagree with the government, you don't love your country.
	If you question why the United States supports Israel, it means you don't love your country.
	Isn't that bizarre that Tucker has his criticism, like a lot of people, aimed at a foreign country called Israel.
	And as a result, the free press accuses him of not loving America as the requirement for being an American patriot is to love Israel as much as Barry Weiss does.
	So much of this is embedded in the discourse.
	It's just been so implicit there for so long because people have never been permitted to question it without having their careers completely destroyed in the way they're trying to do with Tucker.
	But there's so many bizarre premises in our discourse that are designed to put those off a limit.
	Here's the National Review, kind of the outlet of archaic Republican establishment thinking, always had been never Trump because of his criticisms or challenges to the Republican establishment from the editorial board of the National Review, a time for choosing on anti-Semitism.
	And there you see a picture of not just Nick Fuentes, but also Tucker Carlson.
	So these factions of the Republican Party, the pro-establishment, pro-Israel faction, they're just now involved in a massive smear campaign.
	Tucker isn't just in error.
	He's not just expressing dangerous views.
	He himself is a racist.
	He's an anti-Semite, something that apparently got revealed in his late 50s after spending decades giving his opinions on all sorts of issues.
	Here's the Wall Street Journal speaking of mouthpieces for Republican establishment thought November 2nd, the new rights, new anti-Semites.
	Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation flounders in the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes fever swap.
	Probably the most pro-Israel Republican senator by his own reckoning is Ted Cruz.
	You may remember in that interview that he did with Tucker Carlson that made him so obsessed with attacking Tucker ever since for months.
	One of the things Ted Cruz said to Tucker Carlson was that when I ran for the Senate, I vowed that I would be, that I would wake up every day and be the leading defender of Israel.
	He said, really, when I ran for the United States Senate, I vowed that I would wake up every day and I would be the leading defender, not of Texas, not of the people struggling economically in his state or in the United States.
	He said, I vowed that I would wake up every day and be the leading defender of Israel.
	And he said to Tucker, and that's exactly what I have done.
	Do you see where all this is coming from?
	Is there any plausible grounds that it isn't simply because Tucker is criticizing Israel and therefore this massive tsunami of anti-Semitism accusations is being launched, unleashed against him and people who have similar views as he?
	He's being held up as the example.
	It's directed at him, but not because they think they're going to destroy Tucker.
	As I said, everyone knows Tucker is going to be fine.
	It's to set an example for people far less protected, far less established and prominent as Tucker, that if they start taking these views, they're going to suffer the same fate.
	Again, from Barry Weiss's The Free Press.
	The headline is, Ted Cruz, the fight against anti-Semitism is, quote, existential.
	The combative Texas senator talks to the free press about Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and the rise of, quote, bilious bigotry and rage on the right.
	Again, is it not amazing that it's Republican senators who now go around constantly accusing the American right of harboring racists and white nationalists, something that liberals had done for a decade, mocked by every conservative I know?
	Speaking of Israel fanatics and putting Israel first, here's Congressman Randy Fine, who I should note has a primary challenger in the Republican Party.
	He was just elected.
	He filled, I forget either Matt Gates' seat or Mike Waltz's seat.
	When Trump chose Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, Matt Gaetz left Congress.
	Mike Waltz was national security advisor.
	Those opened up two seats in Congress.
	Randy Fine ran in the special election for one and won, but now he has a regular election.
	And next year's midterms, he has a primary challenger to his, let's call it to his right, a kind of America first populist.
	And President Trump, despite how single-mindedly fixated Randy Fine is on Israel, is not only endorsing Trump, but is raising money for him at the same time that he's trying to remove Thomas Massey from the Congress.
	Randy Fine spoke at the Republican Jewish Coalition a couple of days ago, and he also talked about Tucker, and this is what he had to say about him.
	Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous anti-Semite in America.
	He has chosen, he has chosen to take on the mantle of leader of a modern-day Hitler youth to broadcast and feature those who celebrate the Nazis, those who call for the extermination of Israel, to defend Hamas, to even criticize President Trump for stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions.
	Friends, make no mistake, Tucker is not MAGA.
	I mean, when you see how many people high up in the conservative movement in Washington politics are united and assembled to destroy Tucker as an anti-Semite, you understand the magnitude of it.
	It's why we're covering it so extensively.
	In addition to the fact that I think it says a lot about our politics.
	And it's just bizarre that someone who arrived in Congress about three seconds ago says Tucker Carlson is not MAGA.
	I guess it's worth remembering that MAGA stands for make America first again.
	And Randy Fine has devoted his whole adult life to Israel, has a gigantic flag of Israel in his office.
	I don't ever recall Tucker devoting himself to a foreign country or even close to that the way that Randy Fine is.
	And yet, again, it's not just that in order to be an American patriot, you have to love Israel, but apparently in order to be America first, you not only have to love Israel but want the U.S. to finance and arm and deploy military assets to protect Israel, to enable their wars.
	That to me sounds like a pretty direct antithesis of America First, but according to Randy Fine, you cannot be in MAGA.
	Carlson is no longer in MAGA unless you love Israel.
	I think we have one more from somebody who, speaking of devoting his whole life to Israel, was also speaking at this Republican Jewish convention.
	This is Mark Levin, who is a colleague of Tucker's at Fox News.
	And here's what he had to say.
	For six months, I've been fighting these bastards, whether it's Tucker Carlson or whether it's Nick Fuentes.
	And I've been looking over my shoulder looking for help.
	And you know what I found?
	Nothing.
	Nothing.
	We're here today to do something about this.
	What do you mean we don't cancel people?
	We canceled David Duke.
	Donald Trump canceled David Duke.
	We canceled Pat Buchanan.
	We canceled the John Birch Society.
	We canceled Joseph Sobran.
	We canceled pornography on TV.
	We cancel stuff all the damn time.
	Hitler admires, Stalin admires, Jew haters, American haters, Churchill haters.
	You're damn right we're going to cancel them and deplatform them.
	It's called the market system.
	They don't have a lifetime job like a bureaucrat who we're going to protect.
	And if they're your friend, there's something wrong with you.
	No Hitler admirer, Holocaust denier platformer should be anybody's friend, as a matter of fact.
	So now this part of the right actually does believe very firmly in cancel culture, thinks it's absolutely crucial that it be applied to deny people a platform who have views that in their view are so far beyond the pale.
	Good to know.
	I wish we had heard that over the last decade when cancel culture was something they were claiming only the American left does.
	I think it's worth looking at this a little bit from a historical context politically inside the United States, which is it has been quite a while since anyone prominent or influential on the American right has questioned U.S. steadfast support for and financing of Israel.
	It has been a while, but this is not the first time.
	There has been debates of these kinds before within American politics broadly, but also within the American right.
	And the reason why that doesn't happen anymore is because the people who tried to raise it basically came very close to having their whole lives destroyed.
	Again, made examples of.
	So if you're a young person, you have a career path that takes you into politics or adjacent to it, you have all these examples you saw in your life of people saying, wait a minute, it seems like what Israel is doing in that region is destructive.
	And it also doesn't make sense that we're supporting it.
	What they're doing harms our interests.
	Why are we financing something that harms our interests?
	Why are we so captive to this country?
	And those people, you can pretty much have thrived on the left and said that.
	There are a lot of people very popular on the left.
	No, Machomsky has been saying things like that for decades.
	But if you were on the right, it would basically ensure your destruction as an anti-Semite.
	The last time an American president really tried to tell Israel that what it was doing was destructive of American interests and that if they don't stop, they would lose or risk American funding.
	This is the last time an American president really did this, was in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s when George Bush 41 very much had a realist foreign policy, ran the CIA, thought that the United States interests had to dictate all foreign policy.
	And he had advisors like Secretary of State Jim Baker and his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft who very much thought the same.
	And this was at a time when Israel was wildly expanding settlements of the West Bank.
	On Friday night, we talked to Jasper Nathaniel, who had been in the West Bank about the explosion of settlements in the West Bank and how that's preventing a two-state solution.
	This started really at a high pace in the late 1980s.
	And the George Bush administration and James Baker, Secretary of State, told Israel, what you're doing is harming our interests because if we can't get a two-state solution, there's going to be tons of anti-American sentiment in this region and it impedes what we need to do.
	It impedes our relationship with other countries who have oil, who have other important interests that we want to be able to do business with, but we can't do business with them if you don't have a two-state solution and settlement expansion prevents that.
	And they told the Israeli government, if you don't stop settlement expansions, this was the Bush 41 view, we're not going to continue to give you loan guarantees.
	We're not going to subsidize and finance your behavior that harms our country and our interests.
	That was it.
	Something we do all the time as a country.
	We tell other countries, what you're doing is harming us.
	We're going to withdraw support if you continue.
	But when it came to Israel, everything was different.
	And it was a massive bipartisan scandal.
	James Baker, George W. Bush's Secretary of State, had been around Washington forever, kind of an elder statesman.
	Overnight, like Tucker, he became an anti-Semite.
	Every media went, is James Baker an anti-Semite?
	Simply for telling Israel, this policy is contrary to our policy and our interests, and we're not going to subsidize you if you continue.
	Bill Clinton ran for president and won against George H.W. Bush, Bush 41, when he ran for re-election in 1992.
	And one of the arguments Bill Clinton led with was that the Bush 41 administration was anti-Semitic or was fostering anti-Semitism because they stood up to Israel.
	James Baker's reputation developed over decades, was basically ruined overnight.
	The Democrats ran against the Bush administration, calling them anti-Semites.
	And that was the last time an American president really stood up to Israel because people saw what would happen.
	Now, there are a couple people who inside Republican Party politics actually ran for president and did quite well, notably well, despite or perhaps because not caring about those attacks and exercising their rights as Americans.
	I would even say their obligation as Americans to question why we're so captive to Israel, even though it harms our interests.
	One of those people was Pat Buchanan, who had worked for the Nixon administration, the Ford administration, the Reagan administration.
	Very well-known Republican in Washington, and he ran for president in 1992 in the primary against George H.W. Bush, and again, 1996 and 2000.
	And he often talked about his view that it was utterly not in our interest to continue to support Israel and everything that it was doing.
	And that there were people inside the United States, organizations who prioritized Israel and caused us to do this.
	This was decades ago.
	And here's the kind of thing that happened.
	From the New York Times is an article that was written by Nathaniel Glazer entitled The Enemy Within.
	And it's basically a condemnation and destruction of people who raise those questions as being not just anti-Semites, but enemies within.
	Here's what it says: quote, on December 31st, 1991, the entire issue of National Review, which William F. Buckley Jr.
	had founded and edited for 35 years and had made into the chief journal of opinion of American conservatism, was devoted to a long article by Mr. Buckley titled, quote, In Search of Anti-Semitism, What Christians Provoke, What Christians Provoke What Jews?
	Why?
	By doing what?
	And vice versa.
	A huge response to Mr. Buckley's article followed, primarily because much of it dealt with the question, is Pat Buchanan an anti-Semite?
	Just as the December 30th issue hit the stands, Patrick J. Buchanan announced that he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, and there was already great concern in the Jewish community about his attitudes toward Israel and American Jews.
	Mr. Buckley's article was not a consideration of the anti-Semitism in general or in the United States.
	It was rather a consideration of charges of anti-Semitism against some writers and commentators on the right, namely people who questioned and criticized Israel.
	But of course, the main issue was Mr. Buchanan, who in his opposition to the war with Iraq had asserted that only Israel and its American Jewish supporters were for it.
	Quote, I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism.
	Whatever it was that drove him to say and do it, most probably an iconoclastic temperament.
	Buckley asks us to consider seriously the advocacy of American politics that could result in the destruction of the Jewish state.
	Mr. Buckley argues that anti-Semitism morally disqualifies a person from seeking office.
	So why do these people in conservative politics want to be the new Buckley and say, if you question Israel, if you criticize Israel, we're going to draw the line and call you a racist and an anti-Semite and say you have no business in decent society.
	Now, what's interesting is that Pat Buchanan actually did remarkably well when running for president in 1992 against the sitting president.
	Obviously, the entire Republican Party was behind the incumbent president, Bush 41.
	And yet Buchanan carried that primary through multiple states, got embarrassingly large amounts of votes from the Republican Party, was bringing this kind of message deep into the United States and red districts.
	It was really kind of a precursor to the Trump critique of Republican Orthodoxy.
	And part of it was his very aggressive critique of U.S. foreign policy and warmongering.
	Pat Buchanan ended up being one of the loudest, earliest, and most prescient opponents of the invasion of Iraq, even though he's a conservative and on the right, and it was the Republican administration doing it.
	Here is what happened when Pat Buchanan, and again, he was around Washington politics forever until he started criticizing Israel.
	No one ever called him an anti-Semite or suggested he had racism in his character.
	But here's Poppy Cannon in Manchester in 1995.
	All right, that was at his campaign launch.
	You see a bunch of signs there from Israel supporters holding it up.
	There's a person with the Yanuka.
	Buchanan is a racist.
	Now, we have a video of the kinds of things Buchanan was saying about Israel, but also Ron Paul was saying about Israel.
	And when they were running for president, Paul, in 2008, 2012, and at the time it was shocking for a lot of people to hear it.
	That's why they got destroyed as anti-Semites as well.
	Even though it won't, to the current date ear sound remarkable, because now so many people openly say it.
	And that is the change that has really alarmed the Israel supporters.
	This is why they have to destroy Tucker Carlson.
	They need to create an example the way that people used to automatically know they would get destroyed if they questioned Israel.
	Here's a video.
	This is at different times.
	This is Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan when they were basically political candidates or speaking in the media about how they viewed Israel.
	Republican Congressman Ron Paul recently called the onslaught in Gaza an atrocious massacre.
	It's our money and our weapons.
	But I think we encouraged it.
	Certainly the president has said nothing to diminish it.
	Matter of fact, he justifies it on moral grounds that, oh, they have a right to this without ever mentioning the tragedy of Gaza.
	You know, the real problems are there.
	To me, I look at it like a concentration camp and people are making homemade bombs and like they're the aggressors.
	The Israelis have been hit for six months with these little rockets, which didn't kill anybody.
	It was outrageous, cruel, and stupid.
	And they triggered a blitzkrieg against the Palestinians in Gaza, which in my judgment is an Israeli concentration camp where a million and a half people are locked up, cannot come out or go in.
	They've been controlling food, electricity, fuel, and the innocent people in Gaza are the ones suffering.
	Concentration camp, Pat, doesn't that diminish the significance of the real concentration camp?
	I'm not talking about a death camp.
	I'm talking about what the British had in concentration camps in South Africa and what the Spanish had in Cuba and what others have had where they bring all these people, lock them in there, and treat them with great cruelty and a humanitarian disaster despite what Zippy Livny says.
	And there was a lot more of that.
	That was Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan arguing what at the time were extremely controversial and very rarely expressed in mainstream circles, criticisms of Israel, U.S. support for it.
	And it is, to a current day ear, remarkable that that was considered to be so off note to what everyone in mainstream politics was supposed to say that both of them, Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, were very widely branded anti-Semites, the way Jim Baker was.
	The way anybody who has expressed what are now widely held views about Israel.
	One of the pioneering works about the influence that Israel wields in American politics and how they do it, and particularly the impact and power of the pro-Israel group, what has been now called the Israel lobby, was by this book by one of our most frequent guests, Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and his colleague, Harvard Stephen Walt.
	They first wrote a essay that they could not get published in the United States.
	You're talking here about two of the most prestigious international relations scholars, one at the University of Chicago, one at Harvard.
	They wrote a very long, well-researched article.
	Mearsheimer has talked about this on our show before, basically dissecting and analyzing and reporting on what is this pro-Israel lobby?
	How do they exercise this power?
	Who is it?
	Talked about APAC and all the different sectors of support for Israel, including the evangelical movement.
	And it was one of the, it was really pioneering work.
	It was one of the very first times somebody with serious credentials and a big platform examined openly the Israel lobby, but they could not get it published in the United States.
	There was an American journal that had said they would publish it and at the last minute said they wouldn't, didn't really give them a reason.
	It might have been the Atlantic, but don't quote me on that.
	And they ended up having to publish it in the London Review of Books.
	It could not get published in the United States, despite their credentials.
	And then after that, they turned it the next year into a book, The Israel Lobby, which I highly recommend.
	It's as relevant as ever.
	And that's right at the time that I started writing about politics.
	I remember so vividly the onslaught of attempts to destroy them as anti-Semites.
	Just one example from the Washington Post, April 5th, 2006, by the Washington Post columnist Elliott Cohen.
	The headline is, Yes, it's anti-Semitic about the Israel Lobby paper.
	Quote: Academic papers posted on our Harvard website don't normally attract enthusiastic praise from prominent white supremacists.
	But John Mearsheimer and Stephen Waltz, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy has won David Duke's endorsement as a, quote, modern declaration of American independence and a vindication of the ex-Klansman's earlier work, presumably including his path-breaking book, Jewish Supremacism.
	So they tried to instantly link Mearsheimer and Walt, who wrote a huge essay filled to the brim with academic citations and evidence and documentation.
	They just said, oh, David Duke likes the book.
	They're basically like white supremacists in the Washington Post.
	Here's The Guardian: U.S. professors accused of being liars and bigots over essay on pro-Israel lobby.
	Professor Walt's fellow Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, criticized in the article as a quote, apologist for Israel, denounced the authors as quote, liars and bigots in the university newspaper The Harvard Crimson and compared their arguments to neo-Nazi literature.
	Quote, accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism, wrote two fellow academics, Jeffrey Herf and Andre Markovitz, in a letter to the London Review of Books.
	This is why I've always tried to explain to conservatives when they say, okay, maybe sometimes we do use cancel culture, we do sometimes endorse censorship, but we're only just reacting to the left's use of it over the last decade.
	And I always point out that actually the issue that has most frequently provoked cancel culture and censorship is criticism of Israel.
	People have been fired from academia from it.
	There's huge numbers of cases of being people punished in all sorts of ways.
	And this really laid the groundwork for that, including the weaponization of racism accusations as a way of shutting down debate.
	I started off the show by saying it's inevitable that if you criticize Israel, you'll stand accused of anti-Semitism.
	That has been true in the United States for decades.
	It's just that the views have spread so widely now, so many people could be accused of that and probably are that it's lost its sting because of overuse.
	Here was Ron Paul in the 2012 debate.
	And like Tucker Carlson, like Pat Buchanan, his questioning of why we fund wars in Israel, why we pay for the military is part of a broader foreign policy critique, one that Donald Trump in 2016 ran on, which is we're just way too involved in wars and that don't have anything to do with our country's security or interests.
	And it was in that famous, this was a debate held on CNN, a national security debate where Ron Paul expressed these views.
	Why does Israel need our help?
	We need to get out of their way.
	I mean, we interfere with them.
	We interfere with them when they deal with their borders, when they want to have peace treaties.
	We tell them what they can do because we buy their allegiance and they sacrifice their sovereignty to us.
	And then they decide they want to bomb something.
	That's their business, but they should, you know, suffer the consequences.
	When they bombed the Iraqi missile site, a nuclear site back in the 80s, I was one of the few in Congress that said it's none of our business.
	And Israel should take care of themselves.
	Israel has 200, 300 nuclear missiles, and they can take care of themselves.
	Why should we commit?
	We don't even have a treaty with Israel.
	Why do we have this automatic commitment that we're going to send our kids and send our money endlessly to Israel?
	So I think they're quite capable of taking care of themselves.
	I think we do detriment.
	Just think of all the money we gave to Egypt over 30 or 40 years.
	Now, look, we were buying friendship.
	Now there's a civil war.
	They're less friendly to Israel.
	That whole thing is going to backfire once we go bankrupt and we remove our troops.
	So I think we should be very cautious in our willingness to go to war.
	So I think Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul deserve credit for being pioneers.
	When they were saying this, there weren't many people with them, especially on the American right.
	And just like Pat Buchanan and Mir Sheim Renwalt and Jim Baker, you'll never guess what was said and still is said because of this about Ron Paul.
	Here from Herritz, December 28th, 2011, because of that debate, Ron Paul tells Herritz, I am not an anti-Semite.
	U.S. Presidential Hopeful opposes foreign aid and believes that American support for Israel was a main cause of 9-11 terror attacks, but gives a quote green light to an Israeli attack on Iran.
	Quote, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who is leading the polls in advance of next Tuesday's Republican caucuses in Iowa, denied allegations that he has promoted anti-Semitism, saying that this would be a betrayal of my own intellectual heritage.
	Any kind of racism or anti-Semitism is incompatible with my philosophy, Paul said in an interview conducted by email.
	Paul also said he was disappointed and surprised at being left out of the debate sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition, but they had not asked or expected the other candidates to insist on his inclusion.
	I think it's so worth watching because, as I said, these views now, I mean, this is, you hear this all the time.
	In fact, on mainstream media outlets now, people constantly argue what Nick Funt, what Pat Buchanan and Rand Paul have said all the time.
	But back then, if you said anything like that, you weren't just called an anti-Semite online, especially if you were someone prominent like Buchanan or Ron Paul.
	There was a massive organized campaign in the media to destroy your reputation permanently.
	Hear from David Horowitz, who long-time activist in Republican Party circles.
	This was in February of 2011.
	He wrote an article entitled Ron Paul is a vicious anti-Semite and anti-American, and conservatives need to wash their hands of him.
	Isn't it amazing when you just look a little bit back in history, what you think seems like a long time ago?
	So often these trends are extremely visible.
	They've been going on for years.
	This has been building for years.
	This is why, especially older people, are petrified to criticize Israel, why they just rewind them up and they support Israel.
	They've lived through watching huge numbers of people get not just attacked, but attacked from every angle in a way that's designed to destroy them and their character forever, simply for the mildest and most carefully expressed criticism of Israel and U.S. support for it.
	All right, now let's look at a little bit of this Tucker Carlson interview with Nick Fuentes.
	I thought one of the things that was really interesting here, and I think I was traveling when this happened, so we weren't able to do a whole show.
	It would have been worth really breaking it down.
	Maybe we'll do it at some point, but I just want to highlight a couple aspects of it in light of the controversy that this provoked followed by the Heritage Foundation's escalation of the controversy.
	Nobody will deny that a journalist or anyone in media should speak to somebody who's influential.
	People will say, oh, yeah, okay, you have to do that.
	The problem they'll say that they had with Tucker was not that he put Nick Funtos on the show, but that he failed to question Nick Fuentes adversarily.
	And I don't know if you watched the interview.
	If you didn't, it's really worth doing, especially if you didn't see our interview with Nick or someone else's interview with Nick.
	Fuentes and have strong views of him, but have never really listened to him himself.
	It's worth listening to for that reason, but also because of the views that Tucker has and where they diverge.
	And that's the point is they diverge in many cases.
	And Tucker was very, most of the interview was driven by Tucker saying, what's your view on this?
	And then when listening to it, saying, I can't get on board with this at all.
	I think this is a destructive way of doing it.
	And the differences were very obvious.
	He didn't pound the table and spit and say, you're a Nazi and punch him in the face.
	But the whole thing had a kind of dialectic to it.
	It was very obvious the areas in which Tucker and Nick Fuentes disagreed, and it's one of the reasons why both of them had publicly condemned each other before.
	So they pretend the problem isn't that Tucker quote unquote platformed Nick Fuentes and many, many, many millions of people watched it and got to hear Nick Fuentes in his own words for two hours plus and Tucker.
	No one will say, oh yeah, you shouldn't even talk to Nick Fuentes.
	Maybe some people will say that, but it's too discredit of an argument.
	Everyone knows that journalists should talk to people of influence.
	So the fake critique is, oh, Tucker didn't challenge Nick Fuentes, when in fact he did quite a bit.
	And one of the things that was really interesting was the whole thing began with Nick Fuentes talking about how he got his start in politics and basically he entered conservative politics.
	He had no views about Israel.
	He never thought about Israel before.
	Israel wasn't relevant to his upbringing or to his politics.
	And it was only once he started looking a little bit into it and saying a few things that were really just good faith questions that he realized what a taboo topic this is in conservative politics.
	And even though he was almost entirely unknown, he was 18, he was a college freshman, simply for saying something on Twitter that questioned U.S. support for Israel, Ben Shapiro condemned him as an anti-Semite, went to Twitter above Nick Fuentes' tweet.
	Barely anyone knew who Nick Fuentes was.
	It was so important to Ben Shapiro to destroy before it could even grow any inkling of a notion that in conservative politics, especially now that it's branded America First, you question why the United States is so devoted to Israel.
	And it is ironic that that's what made Nick Fuentes then start questioning even more because when you're told sometimes that you can't question things, that's exactly when you want to demand the right to do so.
	I also think it's worth noting that there's all this talk about censorship on the right, cancellation on the right.
	Again, with everything in Nick Fuentes, whatever think his views, nobody got more canceled.
	Nobody got more censored over the last 10 years than Nick Fuentes.
	Maybe you could find someone as canceled, but very few people more canceled.
	And the reason, obviously, it's not because people think he's a racist.
	There are plenty of people who express views that are widely considered racist that have big platforms.
	It was because of his views on Israel.
	That's what gets you banned.
	Here from the forward February 2020, this is really before the huge trend of big tech censorship really got unleashed in a meaningful way.
	White nationalist Nick Fuentes' YouTube channel is banned for hate speech.
	Wasn't violating the rules, wasn't showing pornography, wasn't stealing copyright, wasn't even cursing.
	Hate speech was what Meta slapped on his speech about Israel, maybe about other issues as well, including race, but clearly that was a major reason for it.
	Then Nick Fuentes went to Telegram, one of the very few platforms where he could speak that was built by people who really believed in privacy and decentralization.
	The founder of Telegram, Pavlovdurov, who was a Russian national, left Russia when they tried to demand that he give them data.
	He's now fighting the entire EU, including France, where he got arrested and almost imprisoned for his refusal to ban people.
	They're telling him to ban it.
	It was built as a free speech platform, as a platform to combat corporate control of the internet.
	And yet, December 2022, Nick Fuentes says on Telegram, just got banned from another bank.
	Oh, sorry, this is about the bank.
	He got banned from a bank.
	That's the fifth one.
	That's five banks, two airlines, Airbnb, every payment processor, every major social media platform.
	He was banned from Twitter.
	He was banned from YouTube, from Facebook, from Instagram.
	You can talk a lot about how it's conservative views about mainstream conservative views that get you banned.
	But again, Nick Fuentes got banned essentially everywhere.
	And the thing that made him most controversial, especially in right-wing circles, were his views on Israel.
	It is remarkable that he couldn't open a bank account in the United States.
	He would go to a bank, Bank of America, wherever Citibank, just wanted to open a savings account, wanted to open a checking account.
	And either they denied him the right to do so, or once he opened it up, he got noticed that they closed it simply because his political views were so radioactive because he was talking so much about Israel.
	Here from the Atlantic, October of 2025, mainstream media admits it openly posed Tucker.
	The firewall against Nick Fuentes is crumbling.
	I think this is really what people are.
	This is not new.
	Nick Fuentes' influence has been growing rapidly.
	And I think the reason it's been going rapidly isn't because people agree with every last pronouncement of his, or nobody finds some of his statements excessive.
	In fact, when he was on my show, he even talked about how he has a propensity for trolling, for saying very extreme things that produce a shock value that he may not even necessarily mean.
	A lot of the clips are from when he's 22, 23 doing that.
	Not saying he doesn't say things that are offensive, validly so to a lot of people.
	I pressed him on some of those things as to what the rationale was.
	But a lot of it is just the fact that it's not because people like every one of his pronouncements, because for a long time, nobody was asking these questions in Republican or conservative circles about Israel and the wars and the censorship inside the United States.
	And he attracted an audience because he was unafraid of this taboo, this taboo that had destroyed so many people's reputations previously.
	All right, here's just a, I think we have two instances, and there were so many.
	I mean, I listened to this entire discussion.
	Again, it was about two hours when I was traveling.
	I was listening, I think, on the plane.
	And to say that Tucker didn't push back on his views, including his central views, is so false.
	Again, Tucker didn't do it in some sort of histrionic or melodramatic way, the way maybe some people would have wanted.
	Although, who conducts themselves that way if you're dignified?
	Why would you?
	But he certainly, they had clashes of ideas about world views and beliefs central to Nick Fuentes' politics.
	Here's just one example.
	This was very early on.
	This is four minutes into the interview.
	We live in a world of Jews and Christians, of whites and blacks.
	These identities mean something to us and they mean things to each other and we can't sort of wish them away.
	And it feels like white people and Christians are the only ones that do that.
	There's no question about that, your last point, for sure.
	One of the reasons they do that is because they've been taught to hate themselves, of course, since the Second World War.
	Another reason is, however, the reality of a multi-ethnic country requires you to sort of set aside community or group interests in favor of corporate interests, universal interests, national interests.
	And you have to do that or else it doesn't work.
	And so, you know, I agree those attitudes.
	I mean, certainly in other parts of the world, people think this way, but you can't have that here.
	And so it's just important to remind everybody that, yeah, you know, things may be generally true, but like, again, they're not always true.
	And there are people who just strongly disagree.
	And by the way, in the specific case of Israel, there are a ton of Orthodox who I know who are opposed to the state of Israel.
	They're just Jewish.
	They're more Jewish than Dave Rubin, a lot more.
	And yet they oppose it.
	Jeff Sachs is like the most wonderful man, the most Jewish, the most articulate kind of critic of the state of Israel that I'm aware of.
	So like, I don't know, that's just meaningful.
	You can't, if it's, if everything is inherited, then there's no hope for the continuation of America.
	And this, there were a lot of instances like that where Nick Funtes would express views that are central to his program and his worldview that are attracting huge numbers of people about how to understand racial groups, how to understand the relationship between them, about how Jews, and Tucker never expressed those views in his life and has often expressed views contrary to them.
	And they had those debates out in very clear, straightforward, and frank ways.
	And millions of people watched it.
	So if you're actually somebody who is worried about the influence Nick Fuentes is gathering, wouldn't you want millions of people to watch his views being expressed in an interview as what happened here, where somebody who has credibility with that audience, Tucker Carlson, is contesting a lot of his premises, debating them, explaining why he thinks they have to be rejected, sometimes even labeling them dangerous.
	Isn't that a positive?
	This isn't about platforming Nick Fuentes.
	It's not about anything that Tucker is doing or saying.
	This is about the fact that there are a lot of people in full-on panic mode that the most popular, the most watched shows are ones that typically feature the kind of Israel criticism that previously for decades had been successfully banished.
	The three most popular podcasts in the United States, the three most popular podcasts, varies a little, but this is the most recent Spotify chart is, actually, let's look at the most four.
	You have number one is Joe Rogan.
	The second most popular podcast in all of the United States is Tucker Carlson.
	So it's really worth remembering people like Ted Cruz, Dan Crenshaw, even Men Shapiro.
	These people have no poll.
	They can create scandals and little dramas within media, online in their little bubbles.
	Who cares about Republican Party dogma on foreign policy?
	The number of people who think somebody's character is indicted or they're a bad person because they question Israel or question U.S. support for Israel is rapidly decreasing.
	And here's the proof.
	So the number one show is Joe Rogan.
	I'm not saying he's a critic of Israel.
	He certainly expressed criticism before, but he certainly put a lot of people on his program who are highly critical of Israel.
	Put people on there too who are supportive of Israel.
	But he's allowed millions of people to hear, again, what used to be very successfully suppressed.
	And the number two most popular podcast in the country, millions and millions of people, is Tucker Carlson.
	And that's what I was saying before, that 5 million number, the 5 million people who watched Nick Funtes and Tucker Carlson on YouTube.
	I'm not even sure that's the majority of people because on Spotify and other charts, Tucker's podcast is extremely popular.
	A lot of millions of people listen there.
	And then number three is the Wall Street Journal, the voice of the Republican establishment.
	And then number four is the past weekend with Theo Vaughn, Theoba'n show.
	Theobahn has become relentlessly and very, in a very committed way, deeply critical of Israel's destruction of Gaza.
	So that's three of the four most popular podcasts in the United States, and you have only the Wall Street Journal clinging on.
	That is what this panic is about.
	That is what has rejuvenated the need to try and destroy people who challenge Israel and they don't think they can do it with Nick Fuentes.
	They just want to relegate him to the sidelines.
	This is about trying to destroy Tucker, who has been in the mainstream of American media his whole life and is now importing very aggressive criticism of Israel in a very enduring way.
	All right, here's just one other part.
	I think we have one or maybe two short other excerpts of this interview that I want to show you.
	Here's one.
	What I do think is bad is the all Jews are guilty or all anybody is guilty of anything because that's just like not true.
	God created every person as an individual, not as a group.
	Like we hate that kind of thinking, right?
	That's identity politics.
	As a Catholic, I could not agree more with you.
	I love all people, even the ones that don't like us.
	We have to love them all and we have to recognize that.
	We're required to.
	Yes.
	But I guess my substantive disagreement is the idea that neoconservatism and Israel has nothing to do with Jewishness, Jewish identity, the Jewish religion, because clearly the state of Israel and the neocons are deeply motivated by that ethnic identity and their allegiance to Israel proceeds from that.
	Well, this is, you know, just BLM.
	They're engaging in identity politics.
	But the problem in your response is it does not apply to every individual.
	No, and I would never say that.
	Okay.
	Well, I just think it's important to say that because just that principle that we're all judged as individuals by what we do and God will judge every one of us in that way and that's how we're supposed to judge.
	I mean, there was a lot of that.
	I just picked a couple segments, a couple excerpts.
	Just so the next time you hear, which is probably going to be very shortly tonight or tomorrow, people accusing Tucker.
	The problem is he didn't challenge Nick Funtes.
	The book, basically, especially the first half of the interview, was nothing but Tucker explaining why he's uncomfortable or doesn't agree with central part of Nick Funtes' worldview, agrees with him a lot, very much does not agree with him on other parts, and was very clear and assertive in explaining to him what his view was that made that way of thinking wrong.
	And Nick was able to respond.
	And I think that's the sort of thing that we're supposed to at least pretend that we want.
	Remember, that's the idea is we don't suppress ideas.
	We don't try and prevent American adults from hearing them.
	The solution to bad ideas, conservatives told liberals for a decade when they said, oh, this is racist, it can't be heard, this is transphobic, it can't be heard, is no, you don't ban it, you debate it freely.
	That's the essence of our country.
	And that's what Tucker did with Nick.
	It's just that like so many principles conservatives claim to have, there's a big, glaring, gigantic Israel exception lying right on the heart of it.
	All right, let me show you this one last clip, which I find so interesting.
	So just to give you a sense for how things have changed so much.
	Now, Marjorie Tellegreen is another person who a lot of people, these kind of Republican establishment types, are trying to expel from decent company and Republican politics.
	She was never quite comfortably welcomed there in the first place because Marjorie Tellegreen is so interesting to me because she's just not, she's the type of person who the founders envision would be in Congress.
	She's not a professional politician.
	She doesn't have a career in politics.
	She didn't work her way up from running for city council and then the state legislature and then being an aide to a member of Congress and then running for Congress, being in politics her whole life.
	She was an ordinary citizen living in a upper middle class Georgia suburb who got inspired by Trump's America First campaign in 2016 and decided to get involved and ran for Congress.
	And what I think is so interesting about Marjorie Haley Green, besides that, is that she works very hard to make sure not to become a creature of Washington by spending as much time as she can in her home district in Georgia.
	And just one example is when Trump was bombing, restarted Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen against the Houthis, despite Trump having criticized Biden for bombing Yemen throughout the 2024 campaign, only to do it himself in the early part of his administration.
	Most Republicans said nothing, but Marjorie Taylor Green stood up and said, why are we spending all this time and money bombing the Houthis?
	People in my district don't even know what a Houthi is.
	The Houthis aren't a threat to the people in my district.
	And that kind of way of thinking, although considered kind of primitive and crude, not very sophisticated in most professionalized political and media circles, is, I think, something that our Washington politics needs way more of.
	Speaking for the people you were sent to represent.
	One of the things that she has done over the last year is also started questioning foreign aid in general.
	She was an outspoken opponent of financing the war in Ukraine on the same grounds Tucker was, namely that, again, we have all these crumbling communities, all these problems in the United States.
	Why are we sending tens of hundreds of billions of dollars to foreign wars?
	And one of the things that's so interesting about Tucker and this attempt now to destroy him as an anti-Semite, and I make this argument myself all the time when I'm similarly attacked, is it's not like Tucker has a set of beliefs that he doesn't apply to any country or issue other than Israel.
	It's a consistent extension of his worldview in general that has nothing to do with Israel.
	And the proof of that is that Tucker, from the time Biden announced that he would have the United States finance Ukraine's war with Russia, Tucker went on the air despite most people in Congress who were Republicans supporting Biden's policy and was a vocal opponent of the U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine on the same grounds that he's now arguing against U.S. involvement with Israel.
	That's when I started, I was on his show so many times to talk about Ukraine.
	It was always this America First argument.
	Wait, wait, I thought this was America First.
	Why are we spending billions and billions in risk war with Russia over who governs various provinces in eastern Ukraine, something that has no effect on the United States?
	And all Tucker did was take that rationale that he applied to Ukraine consistently night after night, as I was doing on this show when we were talking about Ukraine all the time, and then just applied it to Israel.
	And now suddenly he's an anti-Semite, even though it's consistent with his worldview.
	Marjorie Taylor Greene is also somebody who was extremely opposed to the war in Ukraine.
	She gave a great speech once in Congress saying, mothers of the United States can't get baby formula.
	There's no baby formula, and yet we're sending all our money to Ukraine.
	Very much of an America first opposition to Biden's policy in Ukraine.
	And she really never talked about Israel previously.
	And the destruction of Marjorie Taylor Greene was an anti-Semite is only because this year she finally talked about Israel.
	Just the last point I want to make about that, about Marjorie Taylor Green, is, and this indicates so much to see change.
	I had people on my show for a year or two years before October 7th.
	So during a time when very few people were focused on Israel, a lot of people had never looked at it, had never thought about it, had never talked about it.
	And they would come on and I would ask them, you say you oppose the war in Ukraine.
	Why?
	And they would give all these convincing reasons.
	The ones I just said, we have to stop sending all our money to foreign countries.
	They need to fight their own wars.
	It's ruining our country.
	And every one of these people, people on MAGA, it was true for Matt Gates, it was true for Marjorie Taylor Green, it was true for RFK Jr.
	I would always ask them the same question after they gave this stirring speech about why we shouldn't be financing the war in Ukraine, which is, does that same logic, do those principles also lead you to oppose sending billions of dollars to Israel?
	After all, we could use those billions of dollars here at home.
	I mean, if we shouldn't be funding Ukraine with billions of dollars, why are we funding Israel with billions of dollars?
	But back then, this is just, you know, two, two and a half years ago, people weren't comfortable talking about Israel then.
	And they would kind of stumble around or try and evade the topic.
	RK Jr.
	said, no, I'm against funding Israel, but I'm against funding Ukraine, but I'm totally in favor of funding Israel.
	And I tried to get him to reconcile those two, and he had difficulty doing so.
	Here's what happened when Marjorie Carroll Green was on my show.
	This is February 2023, obviously like six, seven months before October 7th.
	She wasn't talking about Israel, wasn't thinking about it.
	She came on my show to talk about many things, including Ukraine.
	Here's what happened.
	Could definitely be the case.
	Let me just probe a little bit more on that.
	Because you did mention Nillian Omar's views with respect to Israel.
	Regardless of one's views on Israel, Israel is a foreign country.
	It's not part of the United States.
	It's actually a foreign country.
	A lot of Israelis have better quality of life than a lot of our fellow citizens of the United States.
	Israel is a major recipient of enormous amounts of U.S. aid in the billions and billions and billions of dollars range that Obama signed with Prime Minister Netanyahu.
	Even if you support U.S. aid to Israel and can reconcile that with an America-first ideology, which I want to talk about in a second, what that means, surely it has to be the prerogative of a member of Congress to be able to question whether that policy is the right one or even to oppose it without being punished.
	Isn't that something that we want to foster in Congress and our country generally, which is the ability to express views that others disagree with without being punished for them?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	But I don't think it should be views expressed through hatred or any type of negative feeling towards a country based on their identity.
	And that's the problem with Omar.
	You know, it's one thing for her to say, we shouldn't be sending foreign aid or something like that, but that's not her views.
	Her views are negative.
	Her views are more anti-Israel because it's Israel, because of Palestine and the situation that lies there.
	But it's not one of more freedom of speech with policy.
	So that's the clear difference.
	Ilhan Omar is also someone that supported bailing out criminal rioters, antifa BLM rioters that were burning down American cities during the summer of 2020.
	And her daughter was involved with those riots on the ground.
	So I mean, we can go further.
	We can talk about the fact that she married her brother, broke immigration laws, and that's something I think we should look into.
	So in my opinion, Glenn, there's a lot more we should be doing with Ilhan Omar than just removing him, removing her from foreign affairs.
	No, again, that's 2023.
	I don't have, I don't blame Marjorie Taylor Green for having said that then, and now she's somebody who's accused of anti-Semitism for criticizing Israel, because as I said, a lot of people just didn't pay attention to Israel.
	Israel, the idea that we send billions of dollars there, that we go to wars, that we deploy our troops in wars to protect them, that we enact laws censoring citizens in so many ways in order to limit or camp down on the ability of Americans to criticize Israel or engage in activism against it.
	This was all done very quietly.
	A lot of people who didn't pay close attention really didn't know about it or didn't think about it.
	And they just kind of instinctively knew it was a topic they should avoid, which is why Marjorie Hill Green was willing to say, when I asked her, yeah, I think we probably should censor Ileano Murray of her comments over Israel.
	That's what the House wanted to do, because she's saying it with hatred.
	And now, Marjorie Teller Greene, just two years later, is a very outspoken and vocal critic of Israel and U.S. support for it.
	And this is the kind of thing that has happened.
	This is what worries, this is what is driving so much of this, of these censorship laws, of the acquisition of American media outlets by pro-Israel fanatics, of the hiring of a former IDF soldier to be the chief censor at TikTok, which is consumed by young Americans.
	And they're the chief censor, this former IDF soldier, on questions of Israel and anti-Semitism.
	The sea change cannot be overstated.
	And what you're seeing now is just the culmination of this panic.
	And Tucker Carlson is kind of the big fish where this is concerned.
	Somebody who's been a mainstream figure in American media, arguably a leader, one of the most influential voices in American conservative politics, who is now relentlessly pro-Israel.
	If they can destroy Tucker and expel him from the conservative movement, in a lot of ways, it will be similar to the victories they scored against people like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, Jim Baker, tried to do against Mearsheimer and Walt.
	I think the big difference, though, is that everything in our politics has changed.
	People's eyes have been opened about Israel, way too many people to reverse it.
	People aren't going to side with Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell and Ben Shapiro over Israel.
	They're absolutely going to side with Tucker.
	And I think by extent, even to some extent, Nick Fuentes.
	And how do you go on, you know, Ted Cruz went on one of those Sunday morning shows.
	Dan Crenshaw went on Face the Nation.
	You can go on Face the Nation.
	You can go on Meet the Press.
	Those used to be huge deals.
	That would shape the political discourse and agenda for the next several weeks.
	That's where orthodoxy was formed.
	Nobody watches those shows anymore.
	Ted Cruz and inside Washington operatives don't have anywhere near the influence that people like Tucker Carlson have, or Theo Vaughn, or Joe Rogan, who's willing to have these debates, or Theo Vaughn, who's on this list of most watched as well.
	The tide has already turned.
	This is really shutting the barn door before after everything has run out.
	And I think that in one way, looking at all this really is most illustrative about how things have always worked when it comes to Israel in this country.
	The reason there was such a lockdown on bipartisan support, virtually unanimous, why the few people who dissented got destroyed.
	That world doesn't exist anymore.
	And that is something that I think we really need to celebrate, not just on the grounds that we now have the freedom to question U.S. policy that has been so consequential, but because so many people have the eyes been open to the truth, despite the efforts of very powerful people to keep those eyes shut.
	All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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