Dan and Jordan of Knowledge Fight dissect Tucker Carlson's hypocritical pivot to "Israelism," critiquing his bad-faith use of scripture to label Trump the Antichrist while ignoring his past promotion of Trump's religious claims. They expose how Carlson conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, misinterprets the IHRA definition, and dangerously equates Gaza to the Holocaust despite acknowledging genocide there. Ultimately, the hosts argue Carlson's rhetoric serves as scaffolding for future Holocaust denial, reflecting a shift from Western civic values to ethnic nationalism that normalizes Nazi-adjacent views. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
Participants
Main
d
dan friesen
01:13:27
j
jordan holmes
33:09
t
tucker carlson
dailycaller38:57
Appearances
s
sean hannity
fox00:41
s
seth dillon
00:32
Clips
a
alex jones
infowars00:28
l
lindsey graham
sen/r00:18
p
pastor james david manning
00:02
p
patrick bet-david
00:06
s
steve quayle
00:02
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Speaker
Time
Text
Knowledge Fight Dan and Jordan00:03:45
unidentified
Knowledge fight Dan and Jordan.
I am sweating knowledge fight.com.
It's time to pray.
I have great respect for knowledge fight knowledge fight.
I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys knowledge fight Dan and Jordan knowledge fight I Need money Andy and Kansas and the and Kansas stop it and the and Kansas and it's time To pray.
I don't know if you recall the last time that I saw my family, but my brother's children, this time back to the beginning, did not acknowledge me whatsoever.
Whoa.
One of them staunchly refused.
I was yelling at her, like directly in her face about how I existed.
I was trying to get her to look at me in some form.
I just said, man, and I realized that the next thing I was about to say was that me and Angela Lampsbury were trying to watch Rob Schneider's The Hot Chick.
Trump has completely burned him, and Alex's response was the weakest shit that he could have possibly done.
He pretended not to be mad about it, allowed Roger to condescend to him on the next day's show, and then he tried to save face by threatening to destroy Trump if he says one more thing.
On Friday morning, Trump got on Truth Social and posted, It's easy.
Tucker's a low IQ person, always easy to beat and highly overrated.
So are Megyn Kelly, in quotes, Candace, and then in parentheses, really dumb and mentally ill, and bankrupt Alex Jones, who is completely, quote, fried.
There are others also.
Then we have some that are very good, true maga all the way and smart.
I should do a list of the good, bad, and somewhere in the middle.
Tucker is sitting in a slightly different position than Alex in terms of how this affects his brand.
In the lead up to and right after the 2024 election, Tucker was one of the most embarrassing Trump cheerleaders in the media.
He pretended to be attacked by a demon in his bed, and he famously did a speech where he called Trump daddy and said he was home and he was going to spank his unruly children.
Trump's son was one of Tucker's guests, as was JD Vance, along with future Trump appointees Dan Bongino, RFK Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and the grand finale was with Trump himself.
But I think that Tucker was savvy enough to understand that he needed to change gears a little bit once Trump got back in office.
He was sitting pretty if Trump overthrew our democracy and went full dictator, but Trump was basically setting up a situation where Tucker was going to be broke and a joke.
If the public ever really turned on Trump while the public's opinion still mattered, Tucker would be just taken out with the rest.
And in the past year, I think that Tucker's done a decent job of making sure that his career doesn't rely solely on Trump, mostly by making his white supremacist undertones far more explicit and by masking his underlying anti Semitism with a zealous hatred for Israel.
So I was a little curious what Tucker was going to be up to now that Trump has burned him.
To give you a little sense of where he's going, the title of this episode that he put out is, quote, Tucker on the new religion of Trump's America and his mockery of Jesus Christ.
Donald Trump is a famously irreligious man, just not that interested, basically secular, a product of his time and place.
If you doubt that, some of the funniest clips ever of Donald Trump, and it's not a criticism, they're legit funny, are him being interviewed during the 2016 campaign and asked basic questions like, What's your favorite book of the Bible?
To which he says, With some confusion, well, the Bible, maybe unaware there are component books to it.
So Donald Trump is not someone who traditionally or ever really has weighed in on questions of faith or theology.
It's gotta feel really freeing to be in Tucker's position, where you finally just get to speak truths that were plainly evident to everyone this whole time, but you had to pretend weren't true.
All of us were saying that Trump was using the illusion of religion to fool people into supporting him, but back then, Tucker was invested in maintaining the kayfabe.
The great rubbing your face in how I conned you is the next couple of years is just going to be nonstop people being like, I can't believe you suckers believed the things that somebody else totally said to you.
But in the space of one week, Donald Trump, the same famously irreligious Donald Trump, has weighed in in pretty specific ways on matters of faith and theology and religion publicly in ways that are disruptive and sort of hard to understand, but worth trying to understand.
So all of this began about 10 days ago on Easter Sunday, early on Easter Sunday, before 9 a.m. on Easter Sunday, when Trump tweeted that he was planning on destroying civilian infrastructure in Iran.
It was going to be bridge and power plant day, basically promising war crimes, crimes against civilians, against the population of the country.
And then in that same tweet or truth, he used the F word on Easter Sunday.
And then he seemed to make fun of Islam.
Praise Allah, he said.
So in one short statement of about 110 words, he seemed to give the finger to the world's two largest religions, Christianity and Islam.
And then exactly one week later, also on Sunday, the Christian holy day, he attacked the Pope, the leader of the world's largest religion and largest Christian denomination.
And attacked him personally and said basically he's only Pope because of me.
Tucker does not give a shit about Trump attacking the Pope.
He likes a lot of Catholics because there's a strong segment of the Christian nationalist community who are Catholics, but there's no fucking chance he cares about the Pope.
For most of my life, the Pope has been a figure that the right wing hates because he's been marginally tolerant.
Or at least that's the public image that they like to keep up.
On its face, the idea that he gives a shit about the Pope based upon what his previous beliefs are and his current beliefs and probably all of his beliefs in the future.
That's absurd.
But even if he was sincere about it, it would be almost more absurd because the Pope.
Like, are you mad that he's mad at the Pope or Catholicism?
Now, the image on the left of your screen is the original image, and it was floating around the internet.
Who knows exactly where it came from?
But it's been there for quite some time.
The one on the right is the one the president sent out, White House communications officer, whoever does this.
Sent out, and you'll notice that it's been changed.
The American soldier over the president's head, the president as Jesus's head, has been changed and is now, if you look very carefully, a demon, some kind of winged creature of hell.
So it goes from an image that suggests, you know, healing and light to an image that suggests, I don't know, a scene from Revelation, John's vision on the Isle of Cosmos, the end times, the apocalypse.
Whether or not some tiny part of this image is a demon is missing the forest for the trees, where the big story is that Trump depicted himself very clearly as Jesus.
That if you give somebody nigh infinite power, regardless of whatever rules you may or may not have in place for them, that those people tend to go megalomaniacally insane.
And then, to make it even further confusing, Mysterious sent out this meme on Truth Social retweeting somebody else, and it's him, Donald Trump, being I don't know how would you describe that?
I was wondering, like, I was genuinely sitting there thinking and just being like, there must have been a true moment where Pontius Pilate was like, what a dope decision I made to not give a shit.
If you expect anyone to believe that Trump tweeted a picture of himself as Jesus with a demon in the background, and then he sneakily deleted that post, yep, said, Hey, I did that, yep, uh, I don't know how the demon got in there, what's up, and then later said, I didn't do that, I had nothing to do with that, and then posted another meme of himself with Jesus, yeah.
When Stalin did the thing, and he's like, ah, that's a deer or whatever, you know, whatever story it is, it's a goat, and he says it's a deer, and everybody who doesn't say, they die or whatever, right?
So, this was kind of dismissed after an online kerfuffle for a few hours, and people were outraged, and then they weren't.
And we've got other things to worry about.
They moved on.
But for sincere religious people, for Christians who care about Jesus and what's true and what's not, a lot of them went to their Bibles to try and figure out what are we watching here.
And a lot of them came up with.
A couple of verses that seem to fit what we're watching.
And if you are a sincere Christian or know some, maybe you got these texted to you, but we'll read them just so you know how a lot of people of faith were interpreting this.
I agree that this isn't something that sincere religious people can let slide or forget about, but they also shouldn't forget that Trump is in power thanks in large part to Tucker.
Tucker pretended that he got attacked by a demon so he could rile his audience up about how the 2024 election was a battle between good and evil and spiritual forces.
It's cute and fun to see him distance himself now, but if Tucker's going to play this game, he needs to accept his part in it.
If Trump is the Antichrist, then he's the false prophet, and there's no way around that.
If he apologized for misleading people for the last 10 years or, you know, whatever, and, like, recognized how fooled he was and how he translated that to the audience.
Chapter two, a very well known verse in which he's describing what's going to happen when Jesus comes back.
And he says, You're going to hear that Jesus is coming back.
Don't believe what you hear.
A bunch of things have to happen before he returns to earth, redeems the world, history ends.
And you'll know that he's coming by these events.
And among them will be the rise of a figure he describes as the man of lawlessness, sometimes described as the Antichrist.
But the man of lawlessness is the phrase from his second letter to the Thessalonians.
And he says this.
There will be a great rebellion against God led by that man of lawlessness.
This man, quote, will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped so that he sets himself up in God's temple, proclaiming himself to be God.
He will pose as God.
He will mock other gods and put himself in their place.
If that's true, then Tucker was either aggressively campaigning for the Antichrist, knowing he was the Antichrist, or he's the biggest sucker in the world.
He's either willfully and knowingly evil, or the biggest idiot who got conned by the most obvious con ever.
There isn't a scenario where Tucker should think his perspective or opinion on anything matters, and he should be retiring from public life in shame.
But.
If we're to believe the best possible option that he was conned by the Antichrist, then we'd have to believe that he's never realized before that Trump was mocking religion in any previous instance of something happening.
And this clip from 2023, where Tucker is interviewing the head of the Babylon B, seems to make that impossible.
Three years ago, Tucker was fine laughing about the idea that Trump would say he's done more for religion than anyone before.
Which is mocking Jesus?
Tucker didn't care back then because the liberal tears business was booming.
And that's where the next verses from 2 Thessalonians become important.
Just after the passage that Tucker reads is this The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works.
He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing.
They perish because they refuse to love the truth and so be saved.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie, and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.
Tucker's career was building up and defending that powerful illusion that made his audience believe the lie.
He's led them to their own condemnation, and he uses all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders.
How else would you describe his bullshit about being attacked by a demon or his insistence that Alex Jones has psychic visions?
So I guess I'm fine if Tucker wants to play this game where he pretends that Trump's the Antichrist, but I'm going to need him to take his part in it a little more seriously if he's going to start quoting scripture.
That's from the second letter to the Thessalonians.
But it That's not the first place in the Bible, Old and New Testaments, where something like this is described.
Variations of this are in a number of prophecies in what Christians call the Old Testament, including those contained in the book of Daniel.
The prophet Daniel describes something very much like this at the end of history.
And he's describing this period, really, as is so often described in the prophets, as punishment.
Punishment for faithlessness and sin.
God's people are being punished for not following God.
He describes in part in chapter 11 from the book of Daniel, predicts the coming of a king, and we're quoting now a king who will do as he pleases.
He will exalt and magnify himself above every god, and will say unheard of things against the God of gods.
He will be successful until the time of wrath is completed, for what has been determined must take place.
It's all ordained, in other words, preordained.
He will show no regard for the gods of his ancestors, nor will he regard any god, but will exalt himself above them all.
So, to a lot of Christians or people who know the Bible well and believe in it, these predictions in both the Old and the New Testament, and there are others, seem to fit what we were watching.
Here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods, and exalting himself above them.
I love that this is where Tucker's game has devolved to.
He has to get on his show, put on a straight face, and deliver a monologue about how very reasonable people are asking the question if Trump is the Antichrist.
We're also told repeatedly in the New Testament that you're not going to know that Jesus will return like a thief in the night, and you better be ready because you can't predict it.
But we're also told there are signs, and is this one of them?
This, by the way, fits the behavior of other leaders throughout history who saw themselves in a kind of rivalry with the gods of their people and sought to put themselves over those gods, exalt themselves above God.
And as for his attacks on the Pope, Republican leader after Republican leader, including just hours ago, the Speaker of the House, the self described Christian, fervent Christian, Bible scholar, joined in attacking the Pope.
So, you gotta have to wonder is this the behavior of a Christian nation?
Is the United States a Christian nation?
Well, that depends how you look at it.
The United States is the nation with the most Christians, over 200 million.
There are more Christians in the United States than any other country on planet Earth.
So, it is by that definition a Christian nation.
Of course, it's not officially Christian.
Our Constitution forbids the US government from creating a state religion in the First Amendment, in the Bill of Rights.
So, no, it's not officially Christian, but it is fundamentally.
Materially Christian because it's majority Christian still.
And once again, it's the country with the most Christians.
But it's not a Christian country.
And in fact, if you take three steps back, it's a nation or it's a government anyway that has for a long time really acted in opposition, explicit opposition to the interests of Christians, not just in the United States, but around the world.
Our foreign policy, for example, seems to target Christians.
And this has happened consistently enough that.
It's probably not an accidental byproduct of the policy.
It may be the point of the policy.
Who knows what the intent is, but certainly the effect of every foreign policy adventure, at least since Vietnam, which in the end, this is often forgotten, left the Catholics, and there were many of them in Vietnam, in concentration camps.
Also, Tucker may have a point that Catholics in Vietnam weren't in a great position during or after the war, but history didn't begin when that war started.
He should explore how Catholicism mingled with the colonial history there if he's actually interested in any of this, or else we're just going to have to assume he's cherry picking stuff to serve his narrative, which is that U.S. foreign policy objectives have been designed to attack Christianity.
But I was always told, fuck the Pope, fuck the Pope, and fuck Catholicism because they're the ones who say that you need an intermediary between you and that big guy over there.
And once you get rid of that, then you have to say that those people are actively blocking you from having a relationship with God.
If I'm understanding correctly, and I'm going to draw these lines as best as I can, not knowing the exact crazy here, but if you're not actively expanding, then what is the point of you?
I know one other very specific thing that Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massey had in common, which is that they wouldn't shut up about Epstein when Trump told them to.
It's great that Tucker has decided that he solved the great mystery and that Trump's religion is Israel, but this doesn't really work.
There are way stronger and more popular critics of Israel than the people that Trump tweeted about, like Nick Fuentes or Andrew Tate.
If the unifying thread between all of the people Trump's attacks are that they're hostile to Israel, then it doesn't make sense that those folks weren't included.
And it's weird that he did include a lukewarm Israel critic like Alex on that list.
If it's the foreign policy choice to be allies with Israel, then that doesn't seem like a religion.
It just seems like a government decision that Tucker opposes.
If you want to use a term like civic religion, you need to define it because it just sounds like a bullshit term that he's using to obscure the fact that he's saying that the Jews control the government.
I refuse to accept that anybody gives a shit about the Pope.
In this whole region, and not anybody gives a shit about the Pope, but in these people, like in Tuckerson, in Trump, in all of these people, in the people who are having a comment publicly about the Pope, none of them give a shit about the Pope.
But while not anti Israel, he's not a Zionist because Catholicism doesn't recognize Zionism as part of its catechism.
There are plenty of Catholics who love Israel, and there are some who don't love Israel, maybe some who hate Israel, but it doesn't really have anything to do with.
With the core tenets of Catholicism.
And unlike so many other newer versions of Christianity, Catholicism has been around for thousands of years and has a very clearly articulated catechism.
And what it tells its members, its parishioners, its Catholics, communicants to believe.
It's all written down.
And unwavering support for the state of Israel is just not on the list at all.
At best, it's a faith that's agnostic toward the political fortunes of the Netanyahu government.
And that's not going to change because, again, there's a structure and there is a list of beliefs, a creed written down.
So it's pretty hard to force a church like that to change its views because those views are effectively set in stone and have been for a very long time.
But I want to talk about how Tucker's being a weasel here by using Catholicism as a comparison to the United States, because the Vatican is technically a state, but it's also the seat of a religion.
The Pope is the head of Catholicism first, and the head of state second.
He can't make any political decision that's not also a religious one, because he's the head of a theocracy.
It's a literal impossibility for a non Catholic to ever be the head of state in the Vatican, so for them, religion and government are the same.
You can compare the Pope and the President as both being leaders and public figures, but you can't compare how they interact with the world because one's part of a democracy and the other isn't.
And so, in order to make these things analogous, Tucker has to come up with this idea of civic religion in order to turn our government into a papacy.
If you believe in Catholicism, then you accept that God chose the Pope as his representative.
If you don't believe in Catholicism, you can think he's a good or bad leader for a major world religion, but he doesn't have any power over you.
The U.S. president's power doesn't come from belief.
Their right to lead is supposedly based on the consent of the governed.
Until pretty recently, it was understood that we chose our leader.
It wasn't a matter of God selecting someone to rule.
Tucker was an instrumental part of pushing the narrative that Trump was chosen by God to be president and that God saved Trump from the assassination attempt in Butler.
So if you take a step back, it starts to look like what's going on here is that Trump and his media surrogates were a zealous force in making our secular government into a religious entity.
And it turns out that the guy that they all thought hated the people that they also hated, he hates you too.
This should be a moment for introspection where someone like Tucker reflects on how carried away this stupid show has gotten and how his bow tie was way less embarrassing than this.
But I don't think he can, and I think Alex told us why.
Tucker's audience is just Nazis, white identity adherents who insist they aren't Nazis, and maybe some well meaning people who are hooked on the excitement of the spiritual battle between good and evil story that he's telling.
He knows that he can't hold on to the Nazis if he doesn't ditch Trump.
And he can hold on to the good versus evil storyline, people, if he just makes Trump a villain who's been working for the Jews all along.
This is the path that satisfies the audiences that Tucker's created for himself that he's able to sell products to.
The religion is Israelism, it's the support of Israel.
That's why the president is.
Totally comfortable surrounding himself with evangelical preachers, every one of whom has one thing in common, whether they're word of faith preachers or charismatic preachers.
All of them are welcome as long as their faith includes unwavering support.
For Israel.
That's the common denominator.
That's the only thing that matters.
And because that's the only thing that matters, the coalition, the ever shrinking, day by day shrinking coalition that supports this president, is now out in force explaining that actually the Pope and Catholics, the Catholic Church itself, which about 20 minutes ago most people thought was conservative in that it's pro life, for example, that used to be a tenet of conservatism before this president, it wasn't for abortion.
That the Catholic Church is somehow liberal and not just liberal, anti Semitic.
I obviously disagree with the perspective that Lindsey Graham is taking here, but that clip is selectively edited in order to make it sound like he's saying that the Catholics are Nazis.
So I think Lindsey Graham is, you know, he's advocating for war with Iran, and I disagree with him, but he's right about the Vatican's relationship with Nazis, and that seems to be the part that Tucker is trying to mock.
That was a continuation of the relationship between the Vatican and fascism that existed with Pius XI, who worked closely with Mussolini, which makes sense because they were both sort of in Italy.
You can't say with certainty that if these people acted differently, they could have stopped the rise of fascism, but you can definitely look back and say that the fact that they had such a mild stance on it helped normalize fascism among people who believed themselves to be religious and wouldn't have had that excuse otherwise.
Lindsey Graham's argument is bad and he sucks, but the history of the Catholic Church isn't the part he got wrong.
Tucker seems to be reacting as if Graham is lying about the Vatican during World War II, which seems strange.
But it's not really that strange.
All of the Catholics that Tucker likes are Catholic fascists who think that Pope Pius XII was the last real Pope and that everything since has been Vatican II.
It's always interesting whenever you read some of the stuff from, like, a guy who.
Demonstrate like what we are seeing now is regardless of how much power you think you have, the amount of power you can take is a lot more than you could ever imagine.
Uh, most people are going to roll over to the point where you see it happening from the Pope.
He rolled over before, like, the Pope could have rallied an unimaginable number of people to give a shit.
It's interesting because a year ago, no Republican member of Congress would have dared say anything like that.
First of all, that's insane.
It's a slander against Catholics saying this is a birthright lifelong Protestant, but it's just not true.
It's a horrible thing to say about anybody.
But as a political matter, it would have been crazy to say that because Catholics, sincere church going Catholics, vote Republican.
In fact, the more often you go to Mass, the more likely you are to vote Republican.
And that's true across races, by the way.
So you see all these, you know, his weird thing to say.
And he got more Hispanics to vote for him.
It is true in 2024 than any Republican, maybe ever.
More than Jeb Bush speaking Spanish, married to a Mexican lady.
How did he do that?
Well, one of the reasons he did that is because a lot of Hispanics are very Catholic.
They're Christian.
They're religious.
They go to mass a lot.
And because they do, because their faith, for some of them, is at the center of their lives, they voted for the candidate who seemed Most predisposed to their religious views.
Maybe he's not a Christian or a fervent Christian, but he seemed like a man who would protect Christians, Catholic Christians included.
According to the show Tucker is doing right now, these Hispanic Catholics were wrong to vote for Trump, and they were misled to believe that he was Christian or would protect Christians.
If that's true, you have to ask where they got that idea from.
So Tucker is on his show saying that these Hispanic Catholics voted for Trump because he and his media surrogates successfully tricked them into thinking that he was aligned with their religious beliefs.
But then the idea that there are Hispanic Catholics really hurts Tucker's point from earlier about how migration is meant to hurt the Catholic Church or the Christian Church in general.
It is so funny whenever you just hear some fact that is unrelated, or at least not directly related, but is emblematic of everything that is the reason we're here, which is Lindsey Graham was there during the first time we went over and murdered a bunch of people.
So a year ago, no, and every Republican knows this because there's lots of polling on it because politicians think in terms of coalitions and who's going to vote for me and why.
So a year ago, no Republican would ever get up on TV and say, you know, the thing about Catholics is they're kind of Nazis.
But there's Lindsey Graham doing it right there.
This is a profound break, and it's a very clear window into what the actual faith is.
Israel is the deal killer.
Anyone who doesn't support the military aims of the modern Israeli government cannot be part of the MAGA coalition, and Lindsey Graham has just told us, can't be a Christian.
It's very easy to take what Lindsey Graham said and disagree with it, but still Tucker feels the need to lie.
Graham didn't call Catholics Nazis.
He was calling the Iranian regime Nazis, which he did to argue that the Vatican is not recognizing the danger Iran presents in the same way that they didn't recognize the danger of Hitler.
Instead of arguing against the point Graham actually made, Tucker is pretending that he called Catholics Nazis and said that you can't be a Christian unless you blindly support the state of Israel.
I have no interest in defending Lindsey Graham because he sucks, but Tucker made a good point earlier about how you got to stand up for the truth.
I think one of the things, like I said, one of the reasons that Tucker's show has to be this constant, like, back and forth, I didn't say that, oh, I'm really this guy, that kind of stuff, is because he lies all the time, but also because he just doesn't focus on stuff that matters.
See, the problem here is that Patrick Bet David's an idiot.
They only care about him because he made a bunch of money in a multi level marketing scam and has created this network that has the appearance of viewership.
If Tucker's argument that everyone is turning on Catholics begins with lying about Lindsey Graham and then complaining about PBD, I think he should go pray for better content because this stinks.
Now, again, Trump is someone who, you know, has a lot of problems showing respect to.
Other powerful figures, and this is it's not just Trump, most men like Trump are that way, they get along well with women because awful threatened by women.
Woman's probably not trying to like kill you and become king, they're kind of loyal.
And but other men, every other man to a certain male personality type is a potential threat.
That's why kings kill their sons.
Every man is a potential threat.
And so Trump is not, on a gut level, instinctively respectful of anything or anybody.
And that's one of the reasons he was a much needed transformative political figure for so long in the United States, because he was willing to ask questions that most people in Washington had never even thought of out of deference to the existing system.
Like, why do we have NATO?
Is it really a good idea to offshore manufacturing?
What?
Our system helping the United States or hurting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
All famously the questions that Trump asked about the way we were doing things were made possible.
He was able to ask those things because he doesn't have reflective respect for anybody.
I mean, we could say that this is exactly the type of relationship with one's father that would lead to you being a bad human being later on in life, but who could tell?
So then the second thought is that Trump was a much needed change in politics because he asked questions that no one else would.
It feels like the second thought flows from the first one because it's kind of like Trump doesn't reflexively respect ideas in the same way that he doesn't respect.
People, but that doesn't work.
Tucker is trying to take Trump's psychopathic bullying and antisocial tendencies and rewrite them as some kind of instinctual distrust of things around you that might be a threat.
He has this dynamic with people, and that same inherent contrarian nature makes him have to rethink our government's policies starting from first principles.
But that's not true.
Trump entered office both times with extreme agendas.
Both times, people told him various things he wanted to do wouldn't work.
And then he got mad and did them anyway, which then serves as a fun real life example for why many of these policies we used to have were there to begin with.
And those things that Tucker lists as ideas that Trump has are bullshit.
We know why NATO exists, we know why manufacturing jobs moved out of the country, we know whether or not immigration is a net positive.
None of these are real questions, they're all complicated issues that Tucker wants to provide an easy answer for.
NATO exists because the world order that came into being after World War II is not stable, and the best plan that we could come up with to make all out war less likely in the future was to create a network of alliances that would theoretically defend the existing borders of countries from encroachment.
It obviously hasn't worked, but saying it hasn't worked isn't a solution or even an idea, it's just a complaint.
Manufacturing jobs left the country because companies were allowed to make more money doing it that way.
American labor was too expensive, and unions had gained just enough power that the owners saw sending those jobs overseas as the best way to maximize profits.
Manufacturing could come back if we made foreign manufacturing more expensive, or if the organizing power of labor is crushed, then that would bring it back too.
I find it interesting when men are very dumb about something that should be very obvious.
Like, for instance, If one of the fundamental tenets of fascism is controlling every aspect of women's behavior, it is not because you are not afraid of women that you are trying to control every aspect of their behavior.
And I also think there's something really fascinating about this because Tucker, like, he's describing Trump like some kind of a caveman kind of like, you're a threat to my dominance.
And so when you got to neg the Pope, Jesus and the Pope and Christians and tweets out the F word on Easter morning, kind of like, well, this is awful, but it's also kind of consistent with the Trump we know.
This is just Trump turned up to 11.
But what's interesting is there are certain circumstances where Trump shows sincere reverence.
There are the outlines of an actual religious faith here.
And they're not what you would expect.
So, here, for example, is Donald Trump the month before the last election.
This is October 2024.
Visiting the grave of a man called Rebbe Schneerson, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who is, he's since passed away, the leader of a large Orthodox sect.
It looks like maybe Ben Shapiro there, Howard Lutnick, wearing a kippah on his head.
As you look at that, ask Is it possible to imagine Donald Trump ever mocking Rebbe Schneerson, who, by the way, and this is kind of the point, is considered by some of his followers to be the Messiah?
It's just impossible to humor this because around the time that Trump was visiting that guy's grave, Tucker was doing speeches about how daddy was home and he was going to spank us.
A civic religion, by the way, is not a conventional religion.
Civic religion is a series of customs, some enshrined in law, not all, that a society, civilization, and its government observe.
And it doesn't necessarily mean there's a God at the center of it.
That's why it's a civic religion rather than a conventional religion.
But our civic religion is if you, again, take three steps back and just assess the country with the eyes of a visitor, a modern Tocqueville, you can see it really clearly.
I'm glad that Tucker is defining his terms now, but unfortunately, that definition is so vague as to be rendered meaningless.
It's kind of everything and nothing.
But, bigger picture, I don't think that it's ever wise to imagine that Trump's behavior is reflective of us as a population.
I get that he posted a meme that was disrespectful to Jesus, and two years ago he looked solemn at a rabbi's grave, but I wouldn't read too much into that.
He's an asshole, so whatever he's doing to anyone at any given time doesn't reveal some kind of grander truth.
This doesn't show that you can make fun of Jesus, but you can't make fun of Jews or Israel.
That's just the image that Tucker's selling the audience now to hopefully distract them from the whole daddy's home thing.
Also, he's saying you can't make fun of Israel and stuff, but like, you don't mess with the Zohan came out in 2008.
I'm not sure exactly what it is that Tucker wants here, but he's just rephrasing an old line he probably saw in a meme To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
Those are the questions you ask if you are trying to understand what our operative religion is.
What's the religion of our leaders?
Again, it's not a conventional religion necessarily, it's not Torah Judaism or Rabbinic Judaism or Evangelical Christianity or Catholic Christianity.
It's the actual religion, the real religion, the set of beliefs that we treat with reverence.
Well, it just so happens there was a religious ceremony ongoing today in the United States Capitol, complete with very recognizable religious iconography and symbolism.
You may not even have known this was happening, but it was happening today as part of an eight day celebration of remembrance of the Holocaust.
The period in the 1930s and 40s, where the German government, the Nazi government, murdered, in addition to a lot of other people, a whole bunch of Jews.
Formed U.S. military member from the old guard, the third infantry regiment, which is ever present at our public events in Washington, saying, Lighting a candle at the menorah and saying, I remember.
No explanation of I remember.
I remember what?
What are we remembering here?
And we do have a sense that we're not remembering.
The American soldiers who liberated Dachau, for example.
The dispute was over Poland and Czechoslovakia, and they sacrificed their lives to defeat the Nazi government that was murdering Jews and a lot of other people, Poles and Russians and Gypsies and Czechs and lots of people, a lot of Jews as well.
That we also have, that's also enshrined in American law in January.
So there's a total of nine days of remembrance of one group of victims in a war that killed tens of millions of people globally, tens and tens and tens of millions.
The numbers are actually not even clear.
So many people died.
We're not exactly sure how many died, but many tens of millions died, including close to a half million Americans, over a quarter million in Europe.
So I was listening to that, and the reason that I needed to play it a longer version of it was I legitimately wasn't sure what point he was trying to make for most of that.
Does he think that Jewish people are hogging all the attention around World War II and that the good old boy American soldiers don't get enough credit?
If you hear an American soldier say, I remember about World War II, and you're upset that he isn't being more specific, you're fucked up.
What could that soldier have said that would have satisfied Tucker?
He's mad about what he imagines is happening at a solemn moment.
And also, if Tucker actually cared about any of this, he could look a little more into it and find that the days of remembrance involve speeches about all the victims of the Holocaust, as well as liberating armies.
That his whole act about how no one remembers anyone but Jewish people is complete bullshit that he's making up to serve his own purposes.
And, like, yeah, I don't know, I wasn't able to find every single year's text transcript of speeches, sure, but I found ones going back to Bush and Obama, yeah, and they didn't only talk about Jewish victims of the Holocaust, it's nonsense.
Further, Tucker is pretending that we got into World War II as some kind of benevolent act just to save the Jews from Hitler.
He is conveniently leaving out Pearl Harbor, as well as tons of treaties and alliances we formed after World War I that were threatened by the idea of Hitler invading all of our allies in Europe.
We were directly attacked, and we had massive geopolitical reasons to not want Hitler to win that war, even beyond the moral obligation to stop a genocide if you can.
Those American soldiers who went to fight in World War II weren't doing it just to stop Hitler from killing Jews.
They were doing it because of that day that lives in infamy, because our national interests and economic partners were threatened by Hitler, and because it was the right thing to do.
If Tucker wants to re litigate World War II, then I guess that's his prerogative, but I know where this stuff goes.
I've read enough books that sound just like this to know that he's gearing up to just ask some questions about the Holocaust.
When he says that Israelism is the civic religion, what he actually means is this he's arguing that the civic religion in the United States is a myth that was built around the Holocaust.
Which probably wasn't as bad as everyone says it was.
And it almost seems like there's a kind of guilt implied in this, which is a little weird.
There are countries where you know that might be appropriate.
This is not one of them because, again, this was the country that helped liberate people from those camps and fought the government that built those camps.
We all instinctually understand that this guy isn't saying what he's saying because he needs to correct the record or make sure everyone has the facts.
They want you to take some of the lessons that we learned from the horrors of the past that we can't change and try to apply them to the present, which maybe we can change.
To cut through the bullshit, Tucker experiences this kind of thing like guilt because, on some level, he knows that his white identity beliefs require racial and ethnic violence.
And Holocaust Remembrance Days feel like someone reminding him of what it's going to look like if he gets his way.
Again, these are just old neo Nazi talking points.
He's riffing off Kevin Alfred Strom's quote and complaining about how anti Semitism is the blasphemy of our civic religion, and it's all just the same shit.
Also, I feel like Tucker is taking Trump's memes way too seriously.
I respect that he's offended, and I think that's fine, but pretending that Trump's memes reflect underlying truths about who controls society is really dumb.
Plus, Trump had to take that meme down.
So, if we're using Tucker's logic, he literally wasn't allowed to make fun of Jesus.
He did that and then had to lie and pretend that he didn't.
It's one of those crimes that's a true crime in the United States, and actual anti Semitism, hating people because of their blood, is a crime.
Certainly, in Christianity, that is a crime.
That is wrong.
You're not allowed to do that.
But that is a universal crime.
It applies to all people whites, blacks, Asians, Jews, everybody.
Has a right to be treated as an individual because everyone was created by God as an individual.
That's the Christian understanding.
It's a universalist understanding of rights.
And that's the old civic religion we had the civic religion of civil rights.
Now, there was a civil rights movement, which was fraudulent, maybe at its core, maybe its aims were not advertised honestly.
Maybe there was another point to that.
Just possible.
But conceptually, It's kind of hard to argue with the fact that the assumptions behind civil rights are Christian assumptions.
They're Western assumptions.
They're the assumptions upon which our whole civilization is built.
And the core assumption is that standards, rules, apply to everyone because every human being possesses a soul given to him by God at creation, which is not an act that men brought about, but that only God can bring about.
God creates life.
He endows each human being with a soul.
That soul is eternal.
Therefore, Each individual possesses rights granted him by God not government.
And a good government protects those rights and in so doing upholds God's law.
That's Western civilization right there.
And in a kind of diluted, silly way, the civil rights movement was upholding those ideas.
So if I'm following Tucker, the current civic religion is Israelism, which seems to be a form of white guilt that's been foisted upon the Western man because of the Holocaust.
Tucker is against this and is nostalgic for the past when civil rights were the civic religion, but not the civil rights movement.
That was a silly communist conspiracy.
The old civic religion of civil rights meant that all people were created equal with a soul from God, which is why black people couldn't vote and women couldn't get a job without their husband's permission.
There's only one way to describe this content, which is reassurance.
Tucker is saying some horrible shit and regurgitating straight up Nazi talking points from way back, and he's trying to soften how it sounds to his audience by doing this dumb act about how he loves civil rights.
He's feeding the audience Nazi shit, then trying to reassure them that they're not Nazis.
They're actually the only people who care about civil rights, unlike those civil rights activists.
Also, being anti Semitic in the United States isn't a crime.
Holocaust denial is a pastime.
It's illegal in some other countries, but based on the fact that all of Tucker's friends not being in jail, he should realize that it's totally cool here.
So Tucker might not realize it, but he's doing the exact same thing he's complaining about everyone doing, which is making the Holocaust all about the Jewish victims.
He's explaining why the Nazis are bad, and he's saying it's because they chose one specific group and tried to exterminate them.
This whole show has been complaining about Jewish people claiming some status as singular victims in the Holocaust, but he just casually affirmed that this is the case because he's not really confident with this material yet.
He's really upset, but his complaints seem kind of petty.
And sure, it sucks that Trump is buddied up with the Palantir people who are supplying technology and weapons to Israel to commit genocide against the Palestinians, but that's not something that just happened after the 2024 election.
Trump's been connected to Peter Thiel for years, and the only reason JD Vance is the vice president is because of Thiel.
The first Trump administration openly used Palantir to aid ICE with deportations and shit, and Tucker didn't care at all.
I mean, I don't know, but like if you're denying the Holocaust, you know, you're soft denying it by saying a whole bunch, but that's not full on denying it.
You know, that's him trying to be like, oh, well, some people are 250,000 and some people, you know, like he's doing that a lot.
It's like he's well versed in being slippery and smooth when it comes to white identity, yeah, yeah, kind of talking points and racism and yeah, but I don't think that he really has sea legs when it comes to like.
All right, fuck it.
I'm going to do the thing that there's probably no return from.
And that civic religion, once again, is called Israelism.
And it means that any criticism of Israel is by definition bad, and any praise of Israel is by definition virtuous, because the only truly good thing is Israel.
And we know that by the actual definition, and there is one, of anti Semitism.
So, what is anti Semitism?
And if you've been called it or if someone's ever implied it, you have a problem with the Jews.
You're kind of obsessed with the Jews, say people who are completely obsessed with the Jews.
You probably wonder, like, what are they accusing me of?
Well, here it is.
This is the IHRA, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA.
You may hear this.
The IHRA definition of anti Semitism.
Do you know what it is?
It's on their website, it's worth looking at.
Spent the morning reading it.
Fascinating.
So here's the actual definition of anti Semitism.
And by the way, this is a now globally recognized definition enshrined in law around the world in more than 40 countries.
This is the definition.
And I'm quoting Anti Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.
You're free to have whatever feelings you want, but people are also free to describe them.
There are a lot of different definitions of what constitutes anti Semitism, and Tucker's choosing the IHRA version intentionally because it includes this in the list denying the Jewish people their right to self determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor.
It also includes this, quote, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
I think that these are both understandable and definitely can be tools of anti Semitism, but because of how they're worded, many valid criticisms of the Israeli government could fall under these headings.
The U.S. approved it in 2019 during Trump's first term, and it isn't legally binding.
But you'd think that if Tucker's so upset about this and how it changes the civic religion of the United States, he wouldn't work so hard to reelect the guy who adopted this definition during his first term.
That answers the question for those of us who don't hate Jews at all.
How could you be anti Semitic if you don't hate Jews?
Well, you can be, according to the official definition of it.
Continuing the quote, rhetorical, meaning talking, words, speech, formerly protected, no longer, rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non Jewish individuals andor their property toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
Wait a second.
So, anti Semitism is not necessarily hatred of Jews.
And it can be expressed toward non Jews.
So you don't have to hate Jews and you don't have to express or have these perceptions, these feelings toward Jews.
All of this is very simple to understand and explain, and if he's actually confused by this definition, then he's just revealing he's super dumb.
Let's say you carve a Star of David onto a guy's garage door.
He's not Jewish, but you know that he just signed a deal with some business people who are.
Maybe you don't actually hate Jewish people.
Maybe you were in the running for that deal and you're just mad that you didn't get it.
That's a very simple scenario where a person who doesn't hate Jewish people can carry out an act that is super anti Semitic against the property of someone who isn't Jewish.
The important thing to understand about a clip like this is that Tucker fully understands this.
He's just pretending like he's reading a foreign language because the alternative is to take this conversation seriously and that would start to indict him and make him feel bad about how he's getting ready to deny the Holocaust.
So this just isn't true, but it's more complicated than saying that it's false.
For example, I brought up that example from the IHRA definition earlier denying the Jewish people their right to self determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor.
This is one of the 11 bullet points on the IHRA definition, and it's a situation where things could be in a gray area.
Which is a great name for a podcast.
Someone could use that standard to call a lot of criticism of the Israeli government anti Semitic, when the criticism may not be rooted in anti Semitism at all.
At the same time, what that bullet point is describing definitely could be an anti Semite saying anti Semitic shit.
It's not so much that this is calling all criticism of Israel anti Semitism, it's more that it's not precise in a way that makes the definition easy to exploit by both ends of that spectrum.
Anytime I have ever had a conversation with somebody in good faith and they have a valid criticism and I have a valid criticism, neither of us go, oh, you're anti.
We go like, oh, shit, yeah.
It's only when there's an invalid criticism that somebody goes, fuck you.
That's kind of tough because I can kind of see all the sides here.
On the one hand, Tucker is making the point that the Holocaust was a genocide and the world agrees that Gaza is too.
If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. That's how it works.
It's clear cut math.
On the other hand, I get the point that a group like the IHRA is making, and I get that there are meaningful differences that make the logical formula not fit, but it's also messy.
I generally try to avoid these kinds of comparisons because they're fraught with meaning and pain that I have the luxury to not be personally connected to.
But I can also see how some would say that it can't be bigoted just to make a comparison.
Have you read the conflicts, the wars that the Israeli people were empowered by God to defeat their enemies?
Did you ever hear the story about David slaying Goliath through the power of God with a slingshot against this massive giant, or the conflicts and the wars of King Saul and so on and so forth?
And frankly, all throughout Israel's history, they've been surrounded by enemies.
But as God's chosen people, they against all odds keep winning.
So to be clear, Hannity is not splitting with the Pope because the Pope criticized Israel.
Hannity is splitting with the Pope because the Pope and Trump got into a Twitter fight.
Incidentally, the day after.
After Tucker did this episode, Hannity got on his show and said he was no longer a Catholic and that it totally wasn't because of the Twitter fight that Trump got into with the Pope and that actually happened a long time ago, and he's not a loser.
Tucker can try his best to make this all a big Israel or Jewish conspiracy, but the truth of the matter is this is about Trump.
Hannity sided with Trump over his lifelong religion because that's what people around Trump are expected to do.
He's a blowhard who thinks way too highly of himself, but I think he at least understands the game that he's playing.
The game all of these people decided to enter into was one that was scripted well in advance, and Trump wins.
In order to become a Trump media surrogate, you have to debase yourself because the thing you're doing is preposterous.
It's Donald Trump, and you want him to be president.
Sure, Trump is crazy, but you're the guy who tried to sincerely argue that the crazy guy should be president, so maybe you're the crazy one.
It comes with money and a lively, mean audience and a proximity to power, but the price is that you've lost from the jump.
Hannity gets it.
He's playing to lose and he doesn't care how stupid he looks because he's got an audience of one.
All of these other Trump people are kidding themselves, thinking that somehow they're going to be the one person who enters into a shady deal with Trump and comes out ahead.
But listen to the content, which is actually more interesting and less funny and a little meatier than it seems at first.
So, the Pope is saying, Look, I'm a Christian leader, the Christian gospel, which I represent, however imperfectly this pope may represent it, from my perspective, imperfectly, but whatever.
All Christian leaders have a duty to consult the gospel as they think about their positions on things.
That's the whole point, is the gospel.
And as a Christian leader, the leader of the biggest Christian denomination, I'm not for war.
And maybe some wars are possibly defensible under just war theory, which no one ever really explains.
But You can imagine a war of self defense that most Christians would feel comfortable with.
Being a Christian probably doesn't necessarily mean you oppose all violence in all circumstances.
Maybe it should, but in practice it doesn't.
But this pope is just saying something pretty conventional like that.
Nothing crazy, actually.
No name calling.
No great departure from Christian theology or ethics as people have understood it for thousands of years.
And the response is hey, you haven't read the Bible?
There's a ton of killing in the Bible.
Israel is constantly under attack by its neighbors, the Amalekites, the Philistines, you name it.
And they fight back with God's blessing and they kill.
And that's what they're supposed to be doing, which is true, by the way.
It is all in there.
But it's not in the New Testament.
And for Christians, that's the difference.
It's not a matter of the Old Testament being irrelevant.
It's certainly not.
And Christians understand it as one long story.
And as Jesus famously said, I came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.
To bring it to its intended conclusion.
I'm here so the law will have its desired effect on you.
But Jesus never offers a single order to kill or hurt anybody.
And there's no place in the entire New Testament, the four Gospels, the letters that follow, mostly from Paul, and the vision at the end by St. John called Revelation.
There's not one page or sentence in the entire New Testament in which Jesus is recorded saying, They're very annoying, or they're a threat, or they disagree with us, or they're of another faith, kill them.
Not once.
In fact, it's the opposite of that.
In fact, it's so clearly the opposite of that that you have to wonder who's reading the Bible and who isn't.
So, after Trump threatened to end Iranian civilization in one day, the Pope made a little comment that was begging both sides to calm down and saying that this wasn't good for anyone.
In response, Trump tweeted at the Pope, saying that the Pope was, quote, weak on crime and took credit for him being chosen as Pope because.
The bishops were all trying to suck up to Trump by picking an American.
With the whole history of appeasing fascists, it's probably not a great sign that Trump is bragging that he thinks that the Vatican chose a new pope based on their fears of what he might do to them.
So that day, Trump continued to talk shit about Pope Leo and then posted a picture of himself as Jesus.
The next day, Trump kept on talking shit and saying that the Pope should stay out of politics.
Then the president of Iran tweeted a message of support to the Pope.
The day after that, the Pope responded, saying, The things that I say are certainly not meant as attacks on anyone, and the message of the gospel is very clear.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the gospel.
Which is what I believe I'm here to do, what the church is here to do.
We're not politicians.
We don't deal with foreign policy with the same perspective.
He might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the gospel as a peacemaker.
In response, Trump tweeted Will someone please tell Pope Leo that Iran has killed at least 42,000 innocent, completely unarmed protesters in the last two months and that for Iran to have a nuclear bomb is absolutely unacceptable?
So then the Pope subtweeted Trump saying, Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.
Quote, Much of what has been written since then has been more commentary upon commentary, trying to interpret what has been said.
The talk that I gave at the prayer meeting for peace a couple days ago was prepared two weeks ago, well before the president ever commented on myself and on the message of peace that I'm promoting.
And yet, as it happens, it was looked at as if I was trying to debate, again, the president, which is not my interest at all.
And that gave everyone kind of an off ramp, so everything cooled down after that, because the Pope was like, I don't want to debate, bro.
Also, a major point about Tucker's clip, what he said he and Alex Jones have a fundamental disagreement about the New Testament.
Alex believes that Jesus is not a pacifist at all, and he encourages righteous violence, and says that people who preach that Jesus wants us to turn the other cheek are globalists trying to pacify the Christian patriots.
These two cannot be.
Possibly have compatible religious views, and yet they pretend to be so in sync with each other.
Almost like neither of them actually cares about this shit at all, and it's all for show.
So we got one last clip here, and I'll say that the reason there was another hour left is because Tucker interviews some celebrity online Orthodox pastor, which I find to be difficult to understand because I feel like that's prideful.
In Jesus' very first sermon in the very first gospel.
Matthew, Matthew 5, the famous Sermon on the Mount, he addresses this really clearly.
And I think anybody reading it for the first or hundredth time comes away thinking, well, a lot of things, but among them would be Jesus is really down on violence and he's really down on greed.
Very much opposed to both because he says it really, really clearly.
And not just down on violence and greed, but taking the prescriptions against those things in the Old Testament and accelerating them to a point that.
Shocking, really, to modern ears, to ancient ears, to any human being.
The demands that Jesus makes on people are shocking.
He says, for example, all in Matthew 5, worth reading, amazing, really radical, not really of this world at all, which is kind of the whole point.
He says, You've been told not to kill, don't commit murder.
Moses told you that.
I'm telling you, don't be angry.
If you curse somebody, you risk going to hell.
That's what he says.
So, you can debate what that means.
Is it possible to apply that standard?
Can you actually live up to that?
Pretty hard.
But what you can't conclude is that Jesus is in favor of dropping bombs on kids, blowing up entire apartment buildings, raping people in prisons.
You can't conclude that because it's the opposite of that.
And so, if you have concluded that by reference to Old Testament texts, the book of Ruth, You're espousing the tenets of religion, but it's not Christianity.
Stop playing this head trip on us and telling us that something that's clearly anti Christian is, in fact, the real Christianity, because that's just not true.
And this kind of deception is making everybody crazy.
Spring is the most refreshing time of year.
Nothing compliments it better than Black Rifle Coffee.
And if he's going to come out with a show like this that is transparently anti Semitic, Nazi talking point garbage, and he's going to be like, oh, maybe Trump's the Antichrist, all this shit, and he's not.
Pulling out blackmail that he has on Trump, then he doesn't have anything.